by Max Karpov
“The president loved it,” Chief of Staff Corey Fishman called to tell her. “He wants to know why you’re not doing more.”
“I guess because I have this job as a US Senator,” Anna said.
“He also wants to know if you’ll meet with him for five minutes this afternoon. At 2:45. Can you manage that?”
“Yes, certainly.” There was something slightly ominous about the request, but Anna was able to put that feeling away. She hadn’t been to the Oval Office in months, and she recognized that this could be her chance to find out why the administration’s response to the August 13 attack still seemed so tepid. And, maybe, even to learn what was really going on with the US and Russia.
TWENTY-FIVE
Tuesday, August 17. Suburban Maryland.
Surfing the newscasts and talk-radio shows in his old Mustang, Jon Niles began to feel as if he were driving through an unfamiliar country, where people really believed this: that some secret group within the intelligence community had hatched a plot to assassinate Russia’s president, and then—in the manner of recent American blunders abroad—failed spectacularly in carrying it out.
Jon’s attempts to get closer to the truth over the past three days had mostly fizzled. He’d talked with more than a dozen people, but the sources he most wanted to reach—those who’d spoken about the “secret” Russia meetings—were no longer taking his calls. Finally, he decided to track them down where they lived. Literally. Beginning with Congressman Craig Kettles, who’d been the first to confirm to him what 9:15 had said about the “preemptive” strike talks. Kettles was also known as one of the strongest Russia “hawks” in Congress.
Something about the story of US involvement still felt inherently wrong to Jon, but as new details came out—and pundits argued over them, always along partisan lines—the story also became more confusing. Russia blogs had introduced the phrase “assassination committee” over the weekend and the American media were making it part of the national dialogue.
Driving the Beltway through the Maryland suburbs, Jon punched on the Rolling Stones to give his thoughts a break. He turned it up: the drum intro to “Honky Tonk Women” carried him into the fast lane, and he stayed there through “Paint It Black” and “Gimme Shelter,” speeding by the slower rush-hour traffic for miles before his thoughts about August 13 began to steer him back into the middle lane. He finally slowed down, realizing that he ought to be looking for his exit.
Kettles owned a townhouse in a tony section of Potomac. Jon had found him through a county property records search. Kettles was an ambitious, canny second-term Democrat from Mississippi, who had managed to build surprisingly strong alliances in the defense and intel communities during his four years in Washington. He was an educated man, with two master’s degrees, but could talk like a country bumpkin when he wanted.
Jon parked in front of his house and turned off the engine. The front door of the townhouse was open and Jon saw what he thought at first was a child peering out through the storm door glass. Then he realized it was Kettles.
Kettles stepped onto the porch, his arms wide like a gunslinger’s. Jon got out and went to meet him. “Mr. Kettles? Jonathan Niles. Sorry, I’ve been trying to—”
“This is not convenient, okay?” The congressman’s tie and collar buttons were undone; he must’ve been dressing. “If you want an interview, you have to go through my office.”
“I did, actually,” Jon said. “I’ve been trying to reach you for several days. Since Saturday. I’ll make this quick. I just have a follow-up question on something you told me about this Russia committee . . .”
Kettles held up a hand to stop him. He had the manner of a large man although he was actually quite short, five foot three or four. Many who’d only seen him on television didn’t know that. “Come on around,” he said and turned abruptly, leading Jon into a tiny walled yard beside the townhouse. He closed the wrought-iron gate. The lawn furniture was wet with dew, so they stood. Kettles crossed his arms as Jon began to explain why he was there.
“When we first talked about this,” he said, “you told me—off the record, of course—that you’d heard there was a group within the administration, a committee—” Kettles was making a low “mmm mmm” sound to hurry him along. He had dark, intense eyes but otherwise the face of a poker player. “—and you confirmed that they’d discussed, among other things, a proposal to take some sort of covert action against Russia in response—”
“No.” Kettles raised a hand to stop him. “First of all: I’d never’ve used the word proposal. Okay?” Kettles’s Mississippi accent curled around the word proposal.
“Okay.” Jon glanced at his notes. “But it was discussed—?”
“No.”
“Okay, let me see . . .” Jon flipped back several pages, found the word proposal underlined. “Here we go . . . you confirmed to me that there was a small group within the administration that met several times to discuss Russia. Five people—”
“I heard.”
“You heard, right. And you also heard that this group may have opened channels with anti-Putin interests in Ukraine?” Jon took a breath. “Would that be Hordiyenko, the arms dealer?”
Kettles flashed a smile. “No, look. Let me tell you what’s going on. Or what I hear is going on. Jonathan. Off the record, okay? I’m sure you know that one of the generals was forced to resign the other week for telling the president things he didn’t want to hear. Right?”
“No. I’m not sure I do.”
“Okay? Now. You didn’t get that from me, by the way.” He blinked twice and continued, his assertiveness still several times larger than he was, it seemed. “But here’s a question: Is it possible there are forces within this administration that have a Russia policy we don’t know about? That are more concerned about Russia than we think?”
“Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, it’s what I’m asking.” He tilted his head, smiling momentarily. “It is sort of funny, isn’t it, that we haven’t heard an official denial yet from the White House. Why is that, do you think?”
“I don’t know. Respect for the loss of life, maybe?” Jon said. “What do you think?”
“No idea. But I will say this—and I’m not the only one, as I’m sure you know, who’s saying it. But it wouldn’t surprise me if someone in the administration knew about this. Or was involved.”
“In shooting down the plane?”
“I didn’t say that. But, I mean, there’s a kind of logic to it, isn’t there? Considering what’s been going on. All the talk about Russia. If we could somehow eliminate all that in a single afternoon, replace their leader with someone more stable. If there was some guarantee that it’d never be tied back to us—‘no fingerprints’? I mean, sure, there are some people who’d want to at least take a look at that. Don’t you think?” Jon wasn’t so sure, but he said nothing. “I’m not saying they did. But, I mean, bottom line, Geopolitics 101: when we show weakness, our enemies grow stronger. And over the past decade, we’ve in effect helped create a monster. Right?”
“The United States has.”
“The West has, sure. We let Russia get away with Chechnya. Let them get away with Georgia. Crimea. Ukraine. We let them go into Syria, Afghanistan. We let them develop cyber capabilities that are a threat to democracies around the world. And what’s happened? They’ve only become a bigger threat. Now, I know some people in power don’t like to see it that way.”
“But some do.”
“They should.”
“But not to the point of plotting to assassinate the Russian president?”
“Well. You tell me.” He smiled and turned, nodding toward the gate. Kettles was good at talking elliptically, making his points indirectly. Jon closed his notepad. “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” Kettles said, walking to the gate. “As background. And then I need to go in and finish my Cheerios. I’m told this meeting in Kiev did happen. Okay? With the CIA man? And that could prove very damaging to
the administration. If the details are ever known.”
“The meeting between Hordiyenko, the Ukrainian arms dealer, and the CIA?”
“Very damaging. That’s where the deal was made, I’m told. If there was a deal. I don’t know if there was. But if there was. So I’m told. You’d have to source that elsewhere.”
“Any suggestions?”
“Well. Have you tried to contact any of the five people who were supposedly in those meetings?”
“I’ve tried Gregory Dial, who won’t talk to the media,” Jon said. “You indicated one or more of the generals was in the room. Rickenbach? Of course, he doesn’t talk either.”
Kettles waited until they were standing outside the gate, surveying his street. He squinted at the sky, as if thinking very hard, and then said, in a softer voice, “You might ask Maya Coles if she was there. Okay? I’m told she may’ve been.”
“Really.”
“Mmm. I’m told. She might’ve been in Kiev, too.” He suddenly began to blink. “But. Of course, that can’t ever be tied back to me.”
Coles, the undersecretary of defense for national security, had been one of Jon’s sources. But she’d told him she wasn’t involved in discussions about Russia and didn’t know anything about a “Russia committee.” Jon wondered if she was hiding behind semantics, as she often did.
“This whole thing is drawing denials from the NSC, of course,” Jon said. “And DNI Julia Greystone says the preemptive strike talk is fiction.”
“Well. Of course.” He squinted irritably. “It’s her job to say that.” He disliked Greystone, as did many in the military, for being too close to the president and at odds with the Pentagon. There was also the fact that she disliked him, or didn’t take him seriously. Kettles kept political scorecards; he had his own standings of dozens, maybe hundreds, of people in Washington.
“I know you reporters are all tripping over one another right now to find out what happened.” Kettles suddenly flashed a warm, surprising smile, and extended his hand. “Let me finish my breakfast. And I’d appreciate it if you don’t ever come to my home again.”
“Sorry,” Jon said. Here’s hoping I won’t need to, he thought. “Appreciate your time,” he said. Jon sat in his car for several minutes, scribbling notes about what Kettles had just told him. The sun was bright now, flaring above the townhouse roofs, burning moisture from the air. Craig Kettles was cunning, pushing an agenda, and at the same time looking out for his own political fortunes. Jon could picture him one day testifying against the president in some special-committee ethics investigation or FBI criminal probe.
On talk radio, a longtime Republican senator was chastising the Democrats for the “conditions” that had led to the August 13 attack. Internationally, the story didn’t carry such distinctions. This was the United States again, a single entity. It angered Jon that the media had reduced the attack story to politics when the real issue ought to be national security.
While he’d been talking with Kettles, Jon saw, he’d received a call from US Senator Anna Carpenter, of all people. Christopher’s girlfriend. That was sort of interesting.
Something about his brother’s attitude in recent weeks bothered Jon a little. He hadn’t returned Christopher’s last couple of phone calls. It wasn’t anything specific, just that his brother seemed a little above-it-all lately, ever since he’d taken the job as a university lecturer. It made Jon sad. But Anna Carpenter he liked. She had a pluck and an intensity that he admired. Not to mention an interesting smile. Before he set off back to the Beltway—and wherever this story took him next—Jon returned Anna’s call.
TWENTY-SIX
Southwest of Moscow.
Andrei Turov had spent much of Monday refining the draft of the president’s speech that he would present to him at the dacha outside of Moscow. But the enthusiasm that Turov felt all weekend had been dampened by the news Anton had brought him that morning.
The dispatch he expected confirming Ivan Delkoff’s death had instead confirmed the opposite: Delkoff was alive. There were surveillance images of him at the train station in Minsk over the weekend, wearing what looked like a paste-on beard and a stocking cap, and also at the airport in Riga Monday afternoon, without the hat. Anton had begun piecing together Delkoff’s route of escape, a slow trail that seemed to lead to northern France.
Fortunately, the president trusted Turov, and did not want to be bothered by the details of August 13. He would not be aware of Delkoff’s flight. Not yet. But the escape seemed like a bad sign, and it gnawed away at Turov’s concentration as he polished the speech.
The afternoon turned unseasonably warm. Heat pooled in the meadows, and the leaves outside his office window stood perfectly still. Turov felt the vacuum of what was missing—Svetlana, the grandchildren, Olga, Svetlana’s cat Boris. With Olga and his family here, these last four months had been the happiest time of Turov’s adult life. There were mornings when he had looked back at the long valley of his working days and seen clearly what he could never see then: how cluttered and unrewarding his life had been. The consolation was that Turov could try now to make up for those years. The shame was that it had taken this long to get the right desires into his head.
But today he worried about something else: the unexpectedly terse replies from the Kremlin over his planned travel to Switzerland. He’d have to take that up with the president tomorrow.
With sunset approaching, he forced himself to think like the president and train his thoughts on the speech again. The attack on the president’s plane showed Russian vulnerability, something Putin normally did not like to acknowledge. But Turov saw in this weakness a strength. The president would go before the Duma on Friday and the world would see a face of Putin it didn’t know, and they would feel empathy. And some would feel anger. He would talk about the families of the twenty-six men and women who had been murdered aboard the plane. He would talk about the forces working clandestinely to undermine Russia. And he would cite the words of the great Russian general Anton Denikin, who had said, more than a hundred years ago, that his country was “one and indivisible.”
He would talk of the “war” on terror—a war the United States had bungled colossally after 9/11, even to the point of invading the wrong country. He would talk of Russia’s moral leadership in a new world order, describing the essential human values that separated Russia from the West. Those in the West no longer even took their lives seriously anymore, creating false excitements about inconsequential events, celebrities, and awards shows to fill their time. The president would talk about the dangerous waters of the West, whose surface glittered like rare jewels but which no longer contained any depth of purpose or moral responsibility.
It was a speech that would change Russia. And for that, his old friend would give him a reprieve to spend some time with his family. All the same, it was good practice in Russia to be in more than one game at a time. And if the president was not receptive to Turov’s ideas and tried to outmaneuver him, Turov would have to outplay the president. He could still do that. The president’s weakness was that he was a tactician, not a strategist. Turov could be both.
As the late sun narrowed to sword-like shards of red and gold in the trees, Anton finally arrived with an update. He opened his computer on Turov’s desk and showed him the latest: a new surveillance video from de Gaulle airport. A satellite image of two men walking to a car park. “That’s him,” Anton said. “The other man is his cousin.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes, no question. Dmitri Porchak is the cousin. Little Dmitri. I have a team headed to Paris right now. They will be at his house by morning.”
“This won’t just be another trick by Delkoff?”
“No. He was lucky before, he won’t be this time.” It was hard to tell much from the images, but Turov could hear the conviction in Anton’s voice. “He will be dead before noon.”
“You are sure.”
“I am certain.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
>
Suburban Maryland.
Work from my place if you want,” Carole Katz said. It was a standing invitation, which Jon Niles made use of too often. He associated Carole’s little wooden house in the country with his own bad habits: drinking beer, tweeting, watching the “news,” or staring at the cornfields. And she had made it easy, telling him early on to “keep the key,” their version of commitment.
Jon had awakened that day with the crazy idea that he might even have a chance again with his old girlfriend Liz Foster. He got that occasionally, usually for no discernible reason. Part of it was just the Niles stubbornness, a desire to get right what had gone wrong the first time. It still felt strange sitting with her in staff meetings, this beautiful, knotty woman he’d put on a pedestal for months, now just an agreeable coworker.
Jon drove down the country lanes for a while, listening to some middle-period Beatles, before finally circling back to Carole’s house. He needed to pick up a few clothes there anyway. Plus, it’d be quiet. Sitting in the kitchen, he placed calls to Gregory Dial and Maya Coles. He knew that Dial, the CIA officer named in the online “preemptive strike” stories, would never call him back. But he was pretty sure Coles, one of the president’s national security advisers, would. Particularly if he left a slightly provocative message, which he did.
He watched the news for a few minutes as he waited, becoming angry at how the newcasters all repeated the buzz-phrases “assassination committee,” “no fingerprints,” and “preemptive strike,” which only seemed to reinforce Russia’s version of what happened.
