The Children's Game

by Max Karpov

  Roger shrugged. “I’m saying it’s not as important as a dozen other stories you could tell about Turov. I’m saying what he did with his life, and who he did it for, is the bigger story. I just think we need to weigh all of that carefully.”

  “Okay.”

  Roger went on, but Jon only heard pieces of it. He was thinking about Michael Ketchler. And about Andrei Turov’s unusual daughter: her dark, probing eyes and animated hand gestures. Wondering if he would ever see her again.

  Afterward, he walked down the corridor to his tiny office and closed the door, wanting to avoid Liz Foster. At 5:15, he turned up the sound on CNN to watch Anna Carpenter’s live interview. She looked nice, in a dark suit and light blue shirt, her blond hair pulled back; for a moment Jon felt a flash of envy that she was his brother’s girlfriend.

  “There is now undeniable evidence,” she told the interviewer, Wolf Blitzer, “that last Friday’s attack originated from within Russia, and that the governments of Ukraine and Estonia were not involved in any way. We have also authenticated what is being called the ‘Delkoff document,’ which anyone can now access online.”

  Wolf Blitzer interjected: “One of the allegations in that document, Senator, is that Russia’s president knew of the attack beforehand and may have even been involved in its planning. Is that something you can verify for us here today?”

  “We’re not commenting on that specific allegation yet, Wolf, other than to say that we believe in the veracity of the document.”

  “It’s a remarkable development,” Wolf said. “Although we should point out that Russia is claiming this document is a fabrication, a fake.”

  “It’s not. And I think that will become increasingly clear as more is known about it.”

  “The other question people are asking tonight is, of course, will any of this be enough to prevent a war in the Baltics? There are new reports coming in this afternoon of troops mobilizing on the borders with Ukraine and Estonia—”

  “That’s true,” she said. “And obviously of great concern. We’re doing all we can diplomatically to prevent military action. The UN ambassador, as we’ve seen, has brought the matter before the General Assembly. And NATO is meeting tomorrow in special session in Brussels.”

  Wolf was nodding. “Senator, this entire standoff has been characterized by some as a new kind of warfare. A war of information, if you will—or disinformation. Is the United States underestimating the power of disinformation in the world these days?”

  “I think it’s possible we are,” Anna said. “Disinformation is a weapons system the Russians are more invested in than we are. Frankly, I don’t think it’s an arms race we want to escalate, if we can help it—but at the same time, it’s not something we can ignore. We need to look at ways of policing it, for instance.” She seemed to shift seamlessly into another gear, then, running on the same fuel that had powered the president this morning: “You know, my office on Capitol Hill is just a couple of blocks from the National Mall. When you go out on the Mall, what you see is a collection of stories, which, together, tell our national story. It’s not just a story of triumph or liberty or sacrifice or individual greatness, although those are the things we most often hear about. It’s also a story of deep and prolonged suffering, profound error and painful growth.

  “We are an imperfect nation, as other countries sometimes enjoy telling us. But one of the remarkable things about this country is that we have a Constitution that allows us, and expects us, to correct ourselves. And it is in that desire to improve that we find our greatness. Real greatness, as the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy said, comes from humility and generosity more than from power. I think we need to summon some of that greatness right now to fight this disinformation war that you mention. Our best weapon is the truth. And it’s our responsibility, all of us, not just as a country but as individuals, to be aware of that and become guardians and defenders of the truth.”

  Jon sensed right away that the reaction to Anna Carpenter’s interview was going to be off the charts. He could hear it in the awed voices of the pundits who tried to follow the interview with commentary. It wasn’t only the words she’d used, but the inspired cadence of her tone, which, like the president’s, seemed to carry the timbre of a country waking up. Two days ago, Anna had told him that the US was culturally fragmented, hungry for a big story to draw people together. August 13, he sensed, could become that story.

  Jon clicked off the television. He powered on his computer and began to draft a column about Anna Carpenter’s interview. He titled it “On the Meaning of Greatness.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  Bethesda, Maryland.

  Christopher had been planning this evening since before he left Moscow. He’d visualized himself walking into the food market on River Road and picking out the ingredients for his Maryland gumbo—onions, green peppers, tomatoes, hot pepper sauce, scallops, crab meat, shrimp. Then driving to the florist to buy Anna a bouquet of roses. And making one more stop before returning home.

  He was stirring the gumbo on a low heat, watching Anna’s CNN interview for the second time, when car headlights turned up the drive. He cued up one of her favorite pieces of music—the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana—and went to greet her at the door.

  Anna smiled, hearing the Intermezzo, smelling his gumbo and the French bread, as the dachshunds scampered at her feet for attention. “Mmm mmm,” she said.

  They kissed and hugged hello and then she kneeled down to greet Zoey and Mr. Smith.

  “You were great,” he said. “I’ve just watched it again.”

  “We still have a ways to go,” she said, standing. “Although I hear there’s been a little shift of opinion since the president’s speech . . .”

  “A little, yes.” Chris had felt it all afternoon, watching the reaction to the president’s speech on television. The change in the winds of opinion could become a problem for Russia, maybe even a big one. In a war of stories, you lost when the public stopped believing you.

  “Let me change,” Anna said.

  Chris finished preparing dinner as she did, taking salads and bread onto the porch, along with the bottle of 2007 Sauvignon Blanc that Martin Lindgren had shipped to them during a vacation in France. He’d set the table with a linen cloth, dinner candles, her good china and silverware. The air had freshened with evening, the woods behind the house growing dark.

  Anna slid open the door to the deck and came out. She was dressed in slacks, a light sweater, and sandals. “What’s all this?” she said, displaying her lovely smile, seeing the flowers and the tablecloth. She wasn’t really surprised, but the emotion in her eyes was real. Anna could be touched by simple kindnesses. It was one her gifts.

  “I just thought it might be a nice evening to have that conversation we started last week.”

  Anna walked to him and they kissed, then stood by the rail, breathing the night air, watching fireflies blinking in the woods. “It is funny,” she said, “we went all the way to Greece to have it—”

  “And then never did.”

  “Thanks to Martin Lindgren.”

  “No, thanks to Andrei Turov.”

  “Okay,” she said, studying his face. “So. Shall we have it now?”

  “Yes. Let me start,” Christopher said. He reached into his pocket and brought out the small square box he had picked up that afternoon. He opened it to show her the engagement ring. “Will you marry me, Anna?”

  “Oh my.” This time, her surprise was genuine. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, Chris, of course.”

  His phone rang moments later. Chris ignored it, and they kissed again. Then Anna’s phone rang. It was Jon.

  They sat at the table and Christopher poured them each a glass of chilled wine. Anna held out her hand again to admire the engagement ring. She was beautiful, her green eyes rising to meet his across the table in the candlelight. “Your brother contacted me today,” she said as Chris spooned a helping of Maryland gumbo. “Twice.”

&nb
sp; “Really.”

  “The first time he texted me to say that he had a question. About Andrei Turov. What really happened to him. That’s how he put it.”

  “I see.”

  “But then he called back and told me he realized that he was asking the wrong question. Many of the world’s problems begin with someone asking the wrong question, he said. Something like that. He said he’d call you later.”

  Chris was smiling. “All right,” he said. He didn’t really want to talk about his brother, though. Not now. Not for another day or two.

  Anna sipped her wine, watching him, the breeze swishing through the leaves high above. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you any of that, of course.”

  “Of course,” Chris said. He tried—just for a moment—to figure out his brother again. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m pretty good, actually, at keeping secrets.”

  EPILOGUE

  In the weeks after Andrei Turov died, Christopher Niles would sometimes catch glimpses of his face in the expressions of men on the street, and feel his presence in class as he spoke to his students about Russian espionage in the twenty-first century. It was the ordinariness of Turov that haunted him, the idea that he could be anyone, anywhere, living anonymously. The deceptions that played out unnoticed, that we failed to imagine, that we accepted without questioning: those were the real enemies, not the ones we spent billions of dollars arming ourselves against.

  The Russian state buried Andrei Turov at his country property southwest of Moscow on August 23. The burial was arranged through the Kremlin by Olga Sheversky and Turov’s daughter Svetlana. Svetlana wanted her father to rest in the meadow beside the dacha where he’d found peace in the final months of his life, and Russia’s president granted her that.

  Moscow continued to blame the United States for the attack on the president’s plane. But the tenor of its accusations grew more tempered as world opinion began to shift against Russia. Turov’s role in the August 13 conspiracy dominated the news that fall, and the public found his personal story almost as intriguing as what he’d done. Turov became the symbol for a Russia that most Americans didn’t know, a charmingly deceptive businessman who had operated successfully for many years outside the traditional bounds of law, ethics, and morality.

  If there was a hero to the August 13 story, it was Ivan Delkoff, despite his role as the attack’s ringleader. Delkoff’s “Declaration” provided the only reliable account of what actually happened that day, and became the basis for a US counter-strategy. Courage was one of the human qualities Christopher most admired, and Delkoff certainly had that.

  Some of the best reporting in those weeks came from Jonathan Niles, the only journalist granted an interview with Turov’s older daughter Sonya. Most of Jon’s stories were not about Sonya Turov, though, or her father, but about a network of Russian influence operations monitored by an elusive, Moscow-born attorney named Michael Ketchler. Jon’s stories traced a series of phony loans, donations, and debt agreements that had steered hundreds of millions of dollars out of Russia through banks in Cyprus and Latvia to organizations in the United States overseen by Ketchler. Jon shone as a journalist reporting those stories, becoming a minor Washington celebrity in the process, with his sometimes offbeat interviews on cable news shows. But to his older half brother, Jon remained a mysterious and remote presence.

  Among the other news stories to play out that fall was the sudden death in early October of Harland Strickland. The veteran intelligence official was found dead in the bedroom of his Falls Church home, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But some in Washington suspected that Strickland, who had been leading an investigation of Turov and Ketchler’s US network, might have died from something else. A few called his death a case of “Russian suicide.”

  The leaves changed early that year in Washington. Chris and Anna spent most evenings on the back deck of their house in the suburbs, watching the flames of color in the woods as the air cooled and the sun went down. In mid-October, Anna organized a small dinner party for the members of their “team.” Chris was skeptical at first if Jon or Anna’s son David would accept the invitation, but both of them did, along with Marty Lindgren and his wife Heidi. Only Jake Briggs declined. Jon brought his new girlfriend Liz Foster, a personable fellow journalist he had dated years before, who ended up talking with Chris and Martin for much of the evening.

  It was after the others had left, and Chris was ready to turn in, that Martin tugged on his sleeve and pulled him outside, a glass of scotch in his left hand. It was after eleven by then.

  “I thought I should tell you, before I go,” Martin said, his tone deceptively casual. “We did find something else. From Turov. It was on one of the USB drives that you retrieved in Moscow. It took us several weeks to break the encryption.”

  For a moment, Christopher wondered if Martin was going to try to recruit him again. He had hoped he’d be safe now at least for a couple of semesters.

  “It contains what you described when you returned,” he said. “The timeline, Turov’s layout of the operation. It’s what he must’ve given the Kremlin. The proposal for an alliance between our countries. Much of it’s as you said.”

  “So. His intentions were good, then.”

  “No. Bad,” Martin said. “From the way it’s laid out, the alliance would’ve just been a further step in Russia’s infiltration. The objective, according to this, appears something akin to a total infiltration, with Turov running—and here I quote—the ‘US liaison operation’ from within our borders. It’s possible the US was going to be Turov’s final retirement destination.”

  “Oh,” Christopher said.

  “For all Turov told you, he never did give up Putin, did he?”

  “So maybe that was the real fourth move. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Martin said. “War and Peace being his idea of a little joke.”

  Christopher listened to the leaves blowing. “Any chance I could get a copy of that file?”

  Martin, as often happened, was already ahead of him, pulling a copy from his jacket. Chris skimmed the document in the light through the back windows. Had this been Turov’s real objective, then, with “the children’s game”? Operating undetected from inside the States, influencing its politics and policies, monitoring electronic communications, turning the generous but gullible United States into a giant, unwitting satellite of Russia? If so, did the game really end with Turov’s death? Could there still be a spy—or spies—in the house?

  He slipped the document back into the envelope, thinking he would pass it on to his little brother. “I guess it’s a good thing we cut things off when we did,” he said.

  Martin closed and opened his eyes, acknowledging only that he had spoken. “Who knows what other monsters are going to crawl out of the sea,” he said, “while we’re busy with our political jousts and televised distractions . . .” He paused to finish his drink.

  Forget about crawling from the sea, Christopher thought. What about the ones already here?

  Just then the back door slid open and they both turned to look: it was Martin’s wife Heidi, saying it was time to go. They had a forty-five-minute drive back home to northern Virginia, she reminded him.

  Anna and Christopher walked them outside for a long goodbye in the driveway. They waved from the street as the Lindgrens finally pulled away, watching their taillights disappear over the rise in the road. Chris felt Anna’s hand close around his as they began to walk back through the mist.

  “So. Here we are,” she said. Chris felt a tug of gratitude. A gust of cold wind shuffled through the dead leaves in the side yard.

  By the time they reached the house, though, he was thinking again about Russia. He looked up at the clouds sliding past the moon and thought of his country’s enemies, those real and those imagined. And he thought about stories, the kind that people tell, with beginnings, middles, and ends. And the real kind, which were never so tidy.

&nbs
p;