The Children's Game

by Max Karpov

  Patience. Already patience had served him well, he reminded himself. Overnight, Martin Lindgren had sent new images by encrypted email: Delkoff at the Riga airport, and in Paris, ID’d by facial-recognition programs. Exactly what Briggs needed. But then eight o’clock came and there was no call. 8:10. 8:15. 8:25. Briggs redialed the number from the night before, and got a Russian voice recording. He walked back to the beach, to the old fishing boats lined up by the water. Morning light glowed in the dew; the sea rippled, scuffing the sand, breeze tipping the masts of anchored boats. He breathed deeply the briny air and imagined coming back here with his family someday.

  Briggs went for another run, down to the end of the pebbly beach. That’s when, finally, his phone rang: 8:44. It wasn’t Delkoff, as promised, but the gruff-sounding cousin again, Dmitri.

  “He’ll see you at 10:15,” he said, speaking French.

  Briggs sighed. “Where?”

  “Be on the road driving north, we’ll call with directions.”

  Briggs argued for earlier. But Delkoff had made up his mind. It was shortly after 10:00 when Briggs said goodbye to Celeste and set off in his rental car back up the coast into the bright morning.

  At 10:18, Dmitri called with instructions. Drive past the creek to the south of the village. There’s an old fortified church—St. Mark—and an abandoned-looking farmhouse in a valley. There’s a small wooden cottage behind it. We’ll meet you there.

  Briggs followed the instructions, watching his mirrors. He found the cottage and parked behind it, surveying the hillsides. As meeting places go, it wasn’t one he’d have chosen. Out of the way, but with wide-open sight lines. Good setting for an ambush. “Go inside,” Dmitri told him on his cell phone. “Sit at the table, and wait for us. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Jake Briggs walked into the little cottage holding the 9mm Glock that Martin Lindgren had arranged for him. The air inside felt stuffy. There was a fuzzy dust on the windowsills and counters. Briggs thought of his family in Virginia, the basket of apples in the laundry room, new schoolbooks, his children watching The Croods.

  Fourteen minutes later, they arrived: a black SUV pulled up in front of the cottage and parked beside his car. Briggs watched: two big men came out. One the driver, a bodyguard in a leather jacket, the other Delkoff. Then a smaller man emerged from the passenger side. They looked like Russian gangsters to Briggs, all three of them, like Moscow hit men from the 1990s.

  The bodyguard came in first with his gun raised. Briggs set his on the table and stood. He held out his arms for a frisk. The man took Briggs’s gun and stepped back.

  The screen door opened again, and Ivan Delkoff walked in, his cousin right behind: one man huge, the other small. Delkoff was dressed in military fatigues, old boots. Briggs immediately recognized the long, too-serious face.

  “You remembered Antalya Kebab,” Delkoff said in French, showing a thin smile, his mouth flattening and becoming lipless.

  “I do.” Briggs reached for his handshake. Delkoff clasped his hand with both of his. He pointed a pistol-finger at the table, and they sat, Delkoff swinging the chair out with two fingers. His face looked to Briggs as if it hadn’t fully unfolded from sleep.

  It was 10:38 now. Briggs wanted to do this quickly, and get Delkoff out of there. They’d lost three hours already, time enough to have driven to Paris. “Nous allons en parler et parvenir à un accord,” he said. We’re going to talk and make an agreement.

  Little Dmitri stood in the doorway, his mouth open, rectangular like a slot. The other man went outside. He waited behind the SUV, smoking a cigarette.

  Briggs passed his phone to Delkoff, showing him one of the images that Lindgren had sent via encrypted email from Belarus intelligence: Delkoff walking on the platform at the Minsk railway station.

  Delkoff seemed momentarily stunned. “Turov has it too,” Briggs said.

  “How do you know?” He looked up. His eyes were watery and red-veined.

  “They know you’re here,” Briggs said, taking back the phone. “They know what plane you took from Riga. They can figure the rest of it. We need to get you out. We’ll offer immunity. But we need to go right away.”

  It was mostly bluff, but Delkoff didn’t know that. Briggs showed him the other images on his phone, letting him slide through them. The psychological parameters were set by then. It was the same principle Briggs had honed in grade school, when kids would tease him about his height. As soon as you’re able to assert yourself, size no longer matters.

  “They followed you to Minsk,” Briggs said. “Even with the false trail you left, they’ll be here by afternoon.”

  Delkoff turned to his cousin, giving him a look Dmitri couldn’t seem to read. Delkoff is hung over, Briggs suddenly realized. Jesus Christ!

  “So what do you want?” he said.

  “I want to get you out of here. In exchange for your story.” Delkoff looked over his shoulder at Dmitri again. Dmitri’s face registered nothing. “We drive to Paris, leave from there. Fly out this afternoon. We have a corporate plane set to go.”

  “To where?”

  “Washington,” Briggs said. “After that, it’s not my business. You go to a safe house and work through all the details. Give them your terms. Whatever you want. Candidly? You can probably write your own ticket at this point.”

  Delkoff folded his hands. He squinted out the window. A faint aroma of alcohol rose to Briggs’s nostrils. Delkoff was a weird guy with a lot of rough edges, he knew. A patriot, who was fighting a war in his head that no one else could see. But right now, he was also a worried man. “How do I know it isn’t a trick?”

  “Because I’m telling you it isn’t,” Briggs said. He put away the phone, acting impatient. “And because you don’t have a choice. You need our help as much as we need yours.”

  Briggs reminded himself that Delkoff was carrying precious cargo in his head. If they got out of here, this guy’s story was going to be on 60 Minutes, the front page of the New York Times, the whole deal. “We know what you did, okay?” Briggs said, trying to nudge him. “We know about Turov. This is your chance to make up for it. You’re hearing me?”

  Delkoff looked over his shoulder at his cousin again. Something about him reminded Briggs of a dictator trying to keep his composure as his regime fell apart. Delkoff nodded. “All right. We can go this afternoon.”

  “No,” Briggs said. “We go this morning—right now. You’ve been lucky so far. But luck is always a temporary condition. You hear me?”

  Delkoff’s thick chest rose and fell in the fatigues. He was silent.

  “Someday,” Briggs said, glancing out at the driver, “who knows, maybe you’ll return to Russia a hero. But right now, we need to go.” He was bluffing again, but Briggs could feel that he was connecting; Delkoff liked this sort of talk.

  “Give us an hour, then,” Delkoff said. He scooted back his chair.

  “No. Not an hour,” Briggs said.

  Delkoff scowled as both men stood, facing across the table. “I need to get my things,” he said. “Give us thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll drive with you back to the house if you have to. But we leave from there.” Delkoff wasn’t going to fight it, he knew. He might have used his physical size to intimidate Briggs or to crowd his space, but he didn’t. Briggs’s authority had a sobering effect on him. Delkoff walked outside to discuss it with his cousin. Briggs could hear them speaking in Russian. The screen door squeaked as he came back in. Delkoff handed Briggs back his gun.

  “All right,” he said. “Follow right behind.”

  That was how they did it—Jake Briggs following the SUV back down the coast to the winding gravel roads that ended at the house. It was a lovely morning, turning warm and nearly clear, just a slight breeze; a nice day for a drive to Paris.

  Except something about it didn’t feel right to Briggs. He just had a feeling, a sense that there was going to be a problem.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Briggs went through a m
ental checklist as he followed Delkoff back to the house: the rental car was filled with gas; he had a microcassette recorder, four bottles of water, his cell phone, and a mobile Wi-Fi device; his personal belongings sat on the back seat in a carry-on. Briggs planned to record his conversation with Delkoff as he drove him to Paris. It was two-and-a-half hours to the airport. Plenty of time—more than enough—to get what Christopher needed.

  The wild card, Briggs figured, was that Delkoff had been drinking. From his dossier, he knew that Ivan Delkoff had once had a debilitating drinking problem. Drinking made him unreliable, paranoid, self-destructive. It was the reason they’d lost three hours.

  The vehicles spread out through the open expanse of country, tall wild grasses on either side of the road for a while. Briggs watched the sea and the red roofs of the little village to his left. He knew this road well, knew where it dipped and where it branched away. He’d driven it the night before with his lights out, several times, stopping to survey the house through his binoculars.

  They turned due east again, toward the stone farmhouse. Two minutes later he saw the SUV slowing down. Brakes pumping. He thought at first they were just waiting for him to catch up. But then the brakes stayed lit and the SUV stopped.

  Briggs pumped his brakes, reaching for the gun as he slowed. Why the fuck are you stopping? The house was still almost a quarter mile away.

  As he eased to a stop behind the SUV he saw the security man talking with Dmitri in front. And Dmitri turning to Delkoff in back. Something was going on.

  After a long interval, Delkoff came out of the passenger side. Then Dmitri. Both glanced toward the house, at something Briggs couldn’t see. They walked around the vehicle and stood talking, the engine still running, Delkoff a foot and a half taller than his cousin.

  Dmitri got back in the car and Delkoff began to walk down the road to Briggs, crunching in his heavy rhythm on the gravel. What the fuck? So maybe this was some kind of trick, after all.

  He lowered his window as Delkoff approached.

  “What’s going on?” Briggs lifted his gun so Delkoff could see it. Delkoff held up the palm of his left hand as if to push it away. His other hand was a fist.

  Delkoff leaned closer, his eyes moist. “I’m going to the house to try to work things out,” he said, in a measured tone. “You need to drive back toward the village.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re going to meet you in the clearing at the end of the road.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  But he saw something new in Delkoff’s face, and suddenly understood. Delkoff pushed something into Briggs’s shirt pocket, a small, rectangular object, and withdrew his hand. “I need to make sure everyone’s been taken care of before we go,” he said. “All right? I don’t want you coming to the house. I don’t want you coming any closer than this. You understand?”

  Briggs studied his face. “What’s this?” he said, touching his pocket.

  “That’s what I want you to have,” he said. “It’s my Declaration. All right? Go ahead, get out of here.”

  Delkoff stepped back. He began to walk to the SUV. Briggs’s first thought was to go after him. But his instincts stopped him: do as Delkoff instructed. There was a warning in his face and in his manner, the way an animal communicates an urgency. Briggs got that.

  Delkoff looked back only once: he stopped and said something to Briggs in Russian. Smiling.

  Briggs backed up his rental car and turned around; he drove to the rise in the road, where he stopped and parked, then pulled his binoculars from their case. Twice he scanned the hills, but saw nothing unusual. Then he focused on the SUV, continuing down the road to the house. Stopping by the front doors.

  Briggs watched the security man step out from the driver’s side with a Glock in his right hand. Then the cousin, Dmitri, getting out in front.

  And finally Delkoff, his six-and-a-half-foot frame unfolding from the passenger side. Walking around the car with that now-familiar sense of purpose, following the other two men.

  It was maybe thirteen steps from the car to the front of the house. Delkoff made it six. Briggs watched the dip in his stride, the look of confusion slackening his face.

  The other two turned and saw Delkoff stagger briefly, then topple forward like a felled tree. And then both of their bodies began to jerk savagely from what Briggs knew was a barrage of gunfire. Moments later, the two killers emerged calmly from the side of the house, emptying their automatic weapons into the three men.

  Briggs shifted gears. He felt the pump of adrenaline in his chest as he sped past the small private cemetery and cluster of cottages toward the coast, monitoring the undulating road behind him in the rearview mirror. Falling back on his training: he had to shut down his emotions now and think his way out of this. He couldn’t fight it. Not here. Briggs was in a one-man op. And the op had just been compromised.

  It wasn’t until he’d tucked into the stream of traffic on the two-lane coast road past the village, headed south, that he allowed himself to consider what had happened. And it was then that he first realized Ivan Delkoff had just saved his life.

  He drove through the coastal towns for twenty minutes before feeling comfortable enough to pull off at a rest stop. What Delkoff had left in his shirt pocket was a flash drive. Maybe it contained the information he would’ve given him on the drive to Paris. Maybe not. He parked beside a restroom and activated his mobile Wi-Fi device. Protocol was to contact Martin Lindgren first. Then Christopher. It was still the middle of the night in Washington, one hour later than France in Moscow.

  Briggs typed an encrypted message to Lindgren. Mission aborted, he wrote. Then he plugged in the device, downloaded the files on the flash drive, and transmitted them.

  He called Christopher later, from the outskirts of Paris, on his scrambled mobile device. “I’ve got good news and bad,” he told him. “The bad news is that I fucked up.”

  But Christopher, as he should have expected, didn’t want to hear about it.

  “Come to Moscow,” he said, before Briggs could explain. “ASAP.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Tuesday afternoon, August 17. Outskirts of Moscow.

  People give too little thought to the way things end,” Andrei Turov said as Anton drove them through the midday birch shadows on Rublyovka highway, nearing the presidential dacha. “The Greeks understood that: regardless of what a man achieves in his life, the way it ends can cancel out everything that came before.”

  Anton hummed his acknowledgement, focused on the road. He knew that Turov was talking about Russia’s president now, not the ancient Greeks. Anton played various roles for Turov—corporate manager, head of security, confidante. Listening was part of his job, and he was used to the peculiar turns of his boss’s thought process. He preferred when they spoke of Russia’s future or poked fun at people. But he could be a receptive audience, as well, when Turov turned philosopher.

  The news that Anton’s men had located Ivan Delkoff added a certain octane to Turov’s thinking this afternoon. There was no confirmation yet that he was dead, but they would have it by the end of day. And he didn’t need proof for his meeting with the president. Just knowing was enough. Turov was thinking of bigger things now. He was thinking of legacies. It was four days since the plane had been shot down over Ukraine. The news that the Americans had carried out the attack was spreading quicker than he dreamed, taking on a life of its own. Much of the world now believed the story that Russia was telling. Journalists were dutifully repeating the phrases that Turov had sent through the pipeline—“preemptive strike,” “assassination committee.” Even many respected American pundits now believed the United States had been involved. It presented Russia with a great opportunity.

  An opportunity to change his legacy. Turov was offering Putin the elusive quality that his old friend could never achieve through force of will or political maneuvering: global respect.

  He read Anton the draft of the speech as
they drove, and Anton responded predictably. Turov shared nearly everything with Anton, although there was one aspect of “the children’s game” he had decided to keep to himself—at least until after his meeting with the president.

  Anton was curious, naturally, about his own future. Turov understood that. Anton had a girlfriend now, a German who spoke Russian and lived in Zurich, and he had moved his three children to Switzerland. But Anton also understood the requirements of loyalty.

  “Your speech will give him the ending he deserves,” he said, trying to sound encouraging. “No one else can do that.”

  “Thank you, Anton. Let’s just hope he is receptive.”

  Anton glanced at his boss. “You think he won’t be?”

  “I think he should be,” Turov said. “It will be a great opportunity for him. So long as he doesn’t listen to the wrong people.”

  Seeing the twenty-foot brick walls around the president’s property, Turov was struck—as he always was on this approach—by how far they had come: from the scrappy streets of Leningrad, where he and Volodya had grown up, to the heights of Russian power. Through it all, Putin had kept his earthy humor and his uncompromising values, which many of the intellectuals disliked but the common people loved. “He has the potential now to be a man for the ages,” Turov said. “So long as he continues to look at the long view, rather than his day-to-day survival.”

  “Yes,” Anton said. “He’s a better tactician than strategist.”

  “That is correct.” Turov smiled. Anton often repeated things Turov said, sometimes weeks or months later. He had an outstanding memory. And he was right: sometimes the president reminded Turov of Scheherazade, needing to invent a new story every day just to survive.

  When Turov was alone with the president, the two of them came up with remarkable plans for their country; they sent idea balloons into the sky and marveled at how exquisitely they rose. But in between, the president consulted with his other advisers, men who tugged him in strange directions, and he was never quite as receptive to Turov the next time they met.