The Kremlin's Candidate

by Jason Matthews

  Shlykov returned to Istanbul, and the transmissions ceased in Ankara and again followed him. And when he traveled to Moscow, for consultations regarding his covert-action operation, the transmissions stopped altogether, only to start up again on his return to Turkey, when he touched down at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. The SIGINT log of these encrypted signals grew and the FSB counterintelligence file got fatter. It was not long until signals analysis matched the transmissions with Shlykov’s movements.

  This delighted Gorelikov, whose refined, gracious exterior concealed an inexhaustible capacity for subterfuge and plotting. When Dominika had quietly brought home news of the murder of her North Korean asset, Gorelikov had listened implacably to Shlykov’s dismissive explanation that the North Koreans almost certainly had detected Ri’s treachery through some tradecraft error of Egorova’s and had eliminated the scientist themselves. And as for the missing Sparrow, either the North Koreans had dealt with her, or she had run off with a ski instructor from the Tyrol. Gorelikov later listened to the recording of Blokhin’s voice in the cottage, and had, incongruously, smiled. Additional evidence to hang this GRU apostate, but never a thought for Ioana, Dominika bitterly noted.

  Gorelikov took Dominika aside and for a day briefed her on the developments in Istanbul. Shlykov’s operation had imploded, the munitions had been captured, the Turks were apoplectic, and Russia would be embarrassed on the international stage. The president no longer numbered Valeriy Shlykov as one of his favorites. They began choreographing a discreet counterintelligence investigation—SVR would have the lead role in the foreign field—meticulously led by a dutiful Colonel Egorova. “It’s a shame you have to fly all the way to Istanbul; the findings of the investigation are already drafted,” said Gorelikov. “Shlykov is responsible for the OBVAL disaster, for which he must answer, but it is now more serious. He is suspected of espionage. But there it is, appearances matter, and you must play the part.” But then came the sly question Benford had warned her about. “What do you think is going on in Istanbul with these transmissions? Did the Americans suspect something? Why did they focus on Shlykov?”

  “In Turkey it could be any of a dozen things; that’s why this covert action was ill-advised,” said Dominika, matter-of-factly. “The Turks certainly have informers inside PKK; perhaps a tradecraft problem with the delivery of weapons; US SIGINT might be listening to chatter.” Gorelikov polished his wire-framed eyeglasses.

  “Or we could have a mole in the Kremlin,” he said, softly. Dominika willed her scalp not to creep.

  “Always a possibility, but unlikely,” she said. “Everyone in the Council approved the plan.”

  “Except for you, Bortnikov, and me,” said Gorelikov.

  “I can hardly credit the Chief of FSB working for the opposition, and I know I am not a mole . . .”

  “Which leaves me,” said Gorelikov, amused.

  “A dangerous counterrevolutionary of the criminal Trotsky gang. Line KR will have to keep an eye on you,” said Dominika, and the moment passed. Is this a ghastly game to tell me he thinks I’m a spy? Take care. Gorelikov was a serpent, tongue flicking, constantly testing the air. That night, she wrote up the details and dead dropped them to Ricky Walters to pass to Benford. She would have to be very careful.

  * * *

  * * *

  In Istanbul, CIA officers, in addition to sending burst transmissions, had begun marking signals—chalk marks on stone walls, tape on light poles, thumbtacks in trees—along Shlykov’s walking route between his temporary Istanbul apartment and the Russian Consulate. Because Shlykov wasn’t looking for them, he didn’t notice them. Very discreet surveillance of the major, done from the front and in phases, soon determined which cafés and restaurants he favored for solitary lunches and dinners. One of these was in Cicek Pasaji, a covered street arcade with a nineteenth-century Beaux Arts latticework and glass roof. Whenever Shlykov ate there—he habitually ordered kadinbudu köfte, ladies’ thighs köfte, plump lamb and beef meat fingers, fried crispy on the outside and succulent on the inside—one of half a dozen CIA officers sat close by, always facing him, always with a folded newspaper, or a book, or an eyeglass case on the table in plain sight. No contact was ever attempted.

  A steady stream of local commercial brochures, advertisements, and flyers were mailed to Shlykov’s address announcing Bosphorus tours, condos for sale in Esentepe, bus excursions to Bulgaria. The junk mail was collected and delivered by his toothless concierge. Shlykov thought nothing of the brochures and threw most of them away, but one or two of them were tossed in desk drawers and forgotten. They all had been lightly sprayed with household insecticide, a chemical component of which is phenolphthalein, a telltale of secret writing developer. There were no messages on this junk mail, all of it stiff and glossy with the dried aerosol patina.

  * * *

  * * *

  Nathaniel Nash sat in a nondescript Fiat Scudo van parked on a narrow side street in Istanbul with three technical officers from Langley. It was dusk and the final call to prayer had finished minutes ago; the steep Beyoǧlu neighborhood of grimy apartment buildings and first-floor shops was quiet and dark. There were intermittent rainstorms scudding across the city, and the alleyways, stairways, and gutters were periodically awash in a brown chyme, the composition unchanged since the Byzantine Empire. A cat sat under the eaves of a ground-floor apartment window shaking its paw. The van was parked three doors down from a brick-and-stone apartment building with a fabric canopy over double glass doors in front. They were waiting for the crone who was the concierge in the building to leave her little desk in the entrance foyer and walk down to her basement apartment to start dinner for her husband. Instead, she stuck her head out of the door and poked the underside of the bulging canopy with a mop handle to empty it of accumulated rainwater.

  Nate and the three entry techs were waiting to break into the personal apartment of Valeriy Shlykov. The van was filled with the collective fragrances of the tool satchels each of them held in their laps: the bitter stench of electric motor oil; the pungency of wood putty and quick-dry paint; the gritty whiff of graphite powder, the sweetness of talcum. The techs, veterans all, sat silently, looking straight ahead; three good ol’ boys, two from the Deep South, who didn’t use aftershave because it could linger on doorknobs and drawer pulls, and who didn’t smoke because they sometimes had to lie on their stomachs in an attic for seventy-two hours straight.

  The books had them down as surreptitious-entry techs, but it was less formal than that: these men had jimmied, shimmied, and picked their way into embassies, boudoirs, code rooms, and missile bunkers around the world. They called themselves “rum dubbers” or steel-bolt hackers; their Harley-Davidson and Jack Daniel’s belt buckles had squeezed past laths and joists, under electrified wire, around cable runs, over roof slates covered in snow. Older now, in their fifties and sixties, they traveled less. A new breed—cuticle chewers with laptops—was needed to get past infrared cameras and biometric electronic locks. And the Golden Age of Surreptitious Entry had passed. No modern ops manager in the intelligence community today wanted to authorize a delicate physical-entry operation with career-ending risk written all over it.

  But there were exceptions. In Shlykov’s case, the object of this clambake was not to emplace microphones or cameras, nor was it to open safes and quick-copy classified materials with a roll-over camera. Rather, the object of this surreptitious entry was to leave things behind.

  KADINBUDU KÖFTE—LADIES’ THIGHS MEATBALLS

  Divide ground lamb and beef into thirds. Sauté two-thirds of the ground lamb and beef with chopped onion until meat is cooked and onions are soft. Mix with remaining one-third raw meat, egg, parsley, salt, and pepper. Knead mixture to incorporate and refrigerate until firm. Form thick finger-sized köfte, roll in flour, dip in egg wash, and fry in oil until köfte are crispy on the outside. Serve with a tomato salad and garlic-yogurt dressing.

  19

  Checkmate

  Nat
e and the three technical officers stood in the darkened hallway in front of Shlykov’s apartment. The old concierge finally had left her post for the evening and the CIA men had silently walked up four flights of stairs, each stepping in the slipstream of the others’ tension. Last in line, Nate saw that even though the staircase was well-washed marble, the good ol’ boys by habit walked on the outside of the treads to avoid squeaks; each step likewise was taken supinating on the outside of their cowboy-boot soles, eliminating the sound of footfalls in the stairwell.

  This had all been Nate’s plan, the ghost transmissions, the signals, the surveillance. For the final act he had blithely suggested an entry to Shlykov’s Beyoǧlu apartment. But Nate had never before gone in with a veteran surreptitious-entry team; he was nervous as the whole show revolved around this break-in. Thank Christ these old boys were unflappable. The lead tech, a fifty-five-year-old peckerwood from Alabama named Gaylord, knelt in front of Shlykov’s door. He had a potbelly and knuckly hands; his white hair was wavy. His teammates had told Nate that he could pick any lock. Gaylord looked at the lock, turned to the others, and whispered “We got a Russian, in an apartment in Turkey, and the door’s got a Yale lock.” Nate was unsure whether the discovery of a Yale lock in Turkey was in effect good or bad, but concluded it must be good. With bird-like fingers on those beefsteak hands, Gaylord inserted a brass bump key into the keyway, feeling the pins through the tips of his fingers. He seated the key firmly, applied slight pressure on the cylinder, and sharply rapped the bow of the key with the rubber handle of a screwdriver. The pins jumped with the shock transmitted through the bump key, the cylinder rotated, and they were in. No emotion out of any of them; they just straightened and quietly entered the darkened apartment.

  Shlykov’s apartment smelled neutral, like an intensive-care unit, hot and sanitized. It was neither messy nor neat; he didn’t have many possessions. The great repositories of a man’s secrets—the bedside table drawers—were empty: no books; no porn; no pics, empty. The second window into a man’s life, the fridge: no beer; no veg; no spice; no ice. The box was cold and sour. Most of all, Nate could not identify in the apartment where Shlykov’s personal spot was. No armchair with reading lamp; no ass-worn couch in front of the television; no canvas chair on the grimy little balcony. Did this guy hang by his heels from the closet rod until dusk?

  Nate checked his watch. They had an hour-long window. Shlykov was propping up a wall at a dip party, watching fellow Russians, not working the crowd. He was too important to bother with dip targets. He had the covert action to propel him to his colonelcy. Three base officers in a loose circle around the Russian, eating, drinking, laughing, and handing off the eye, would punch Nate’s number when the major started moving. The techs were moving separately in the apartment, in a smooth, practiced choreography, dividing the rooms into cylindrical search sectors—high, low, middle—looking for the telltale wires of bugs or cameras, though it was unlikely that arrogant Major Shlykov would take such security precautions. No touching, no talking, their eyes moving in the dim light; Nate stood in the middle of the living room and waited.

  The Mississippi boy named Lee, baby of the group at age fifty-two, moved to Shlykov’s bedroom and in thirty seconds had found a well-worn, hard-sided suitcase under the bed. He weighed it in his hand and nodded. He dipped into the small bag slung over his shoulder, no rummaging around, no sound, and came out with a pair of pincer pliers that looked as though they had first been used in 1415 at Agincourt. Nate kneeled beside him as Lee gently pulled off the aluminum flashing around the upper lid and using a long, thin spatula carefully pried apart the two sandwich layers of molded plastic. He snapped his fingers softly to attract Nate’s attention. From his own bag Nate took out the glassine envelope and carefully slid two secret writing carbons—specialized, essential, and incriminating—between the layers of the lid. Lee then squeezed the layers together, applied a dot of adhesive, and fitted the flashing back around the edge of the lid. He crimped the aluminum tight and pointed with his finger. Nate saw that Lee’s crimping tool had purposely left tiny teeth marks in the aluminum. Lee slid the suitcase back under the bed.

  Nate again checked his watch through sweat-stung eyes and moved back to the living room. Gaylord and the third tech—a jolly Falstaff from upstate New York named Ginsburg—meanwhile had spread a tack cloth on the floor and were feeling with artisans’ hands the grain of a large wooden chessboard standing on its edge. Where had they found it? All Russians love chess, thought Nate. Was this Shlykov’s defining hobby? It was his bad luck, whatever it was. Ginsburg took an instrument of the Inquisition out of his bag, black handle, guide rails, battery pack. The tool itself made only a faint crunching termite sound as he plunged a three-inch-deep mortise into the wood along the end; Gaylord sucked up the sawdust with a silent handheld vacuum as it came off the bit, and cleaned out the hole. They both looked at Nate, who stepped forward and inserted a tiny two-inch square notepad with gummed edges—a onetime pad, called an OTP—into the cavity. This was a block of tiny pages of printed numbers in random sequences used to provide an ever-changing (and therefore unbreakable) key to encrypt messages. Onetime pads had been used forever—in the Great War, inside the Bastille dungeons, and on the Roman roads of Judea.

  Gaylord meanwhile had taken the collected sawdust and mixed it in a shallow beaker with an odorless chemical from a squeeze bottle to create a thick batter. Fitting a plastic plug into the cavity to protect the OTP, he smeared the paste over the mortise hole and troweled it even along the edge of the board, like a pastry chef smoothing frosting on a cake. He blew on the spot, tested it with the tips of ridiculously sensitive fingers, and in a few minutes, lightly sanded it smooth. Nate shined the penlight as Gaylord held a color wheel to the chessboard, then painted the area; it disappeared into the exact shade of the wood. “You sure they’ll find this?” whispered Nate.

  Ginsburg looked him up and down. “If they’re looking for it, guaranteed. The cavity’ll light up on a fluoroscope like a polyp on your colonoscopy.” Nate looked at Ginsburg and nodded thoughtfully; given his age, the grizzled tech perhaps was speaking from recent experience. Whatever Ginsburg intended to say, there was a certain anatomical irony: when the chessboard and suitcase were discovered by Russian counterintelligence officers, Shlykov figuratively would be bent over and would experience the long arm of Kremlin justice.

  * * *

  * * *

  As it turned out, they did, and he was. After a month of burst communications heating up Russian SIGINT antennas in Turkey, followed by the shootouts, the Kremlin had enough. Colonel Egorova traveled unannounced to Istanbul to observe the situation in the consulate, accompanied by two FSB heavies collegially lent by FSB Chief Bortnikov, who expected Egorova would discredit Shlykov and prove to the president that the Security Council members who opposed the rash OBVAL operation had been correct.

  Intermittent rain squalls blown in from the Sea of Marmara were slashing across the runway when Dominika’s Aeroflot flight from Moscow arrived at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. As the plane taxied to the gate, the rain pattering against the smudged windows, she could feel the thready pulse under her jaw; she was about to initiate a konspiratsia against a dangerous adversary and, she presumed, his Spetsnaz bullmastiff, though Blokhin had not been seen in the city at all. She was in a foreign country now and the Turks were shrewd and aggressive. This was hostile territory, and she was here to conduct a mock counterintelligence investigation, the result of which had to be the arrest of Valeriy Shlykov for treason. She had a delicate role to play; a too-facile conclusion to her investigation might raise suspicions. She would have to “discover” the evidence against this ambitious officer plausibly and convincingly. The role-playing starts now, she thought as the plane jerked to a stop.

  As she entered the modern arrivals hall with its soaring vaulted ceiling, the burnt-nut aroma of Turkish coffee in the air enveloped her, and reminded her she was now in the mysterious Orient, among the sma
ll dark men who watched all yabanci, foreigners, with distrust and uncertainty. She walked past a small take-out cantina, the steam table laden with appetizers—roasted peppers and garlic, flat köfte sprinkled with sumac, a tray of kabak graten, golden zucchini gratin. Past Customs, two nervous officers from the Russian Consulate rushed up to greet her, bobbing their heads. An SVR colonel was an important visitor. Chin up, Dominika walked with them to the waiting car, saying nothing.

  Istanbul was this morning a mass of blocked roads, snarled traffic, and emergency vehicles. The police action of last night had resulted in the capture of lethal munitions of Russian manufacture. Endless television news reported the killing of scores of PKK separatists in as many firefights. The Grand National Assembly met in emergency session. The TNP put the captured land mines and rocket tubes on display. In the Russian Consulate, an apoplectic Valeriy Shlykov cursed. He suspected perfidy and betrayal from some quarter. As Shlykov raved, the junior officers in the rezidentura cowered, clueless. This ambitious GRU major had lorded it over everyone, and had not briefed them on the covert action, to ensure compartmentation and security, but really so he could hog the credit.