The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Anton even advised her to eschew battery-operated boyfriends at home because she was assigned a live-in navy steward and cook in the gabled Victorian Quarters B on Admiral’s Row at the Washington Naval Yard in SE Washington. He sternly told her that her snow-white image as a laudably asexual professional would be sullied if her staff found any sex toys, and rumors would quickly circulate about the wild-haired, three-star stoker in the attic at midnight with a 220 V massager making the lights flicker and scaring the mice. The same applied when Audrey one year discovered spicy Thai cucumber salad while on a temple tour in northern Thailand, and announced she would have her cook in Washington prepare it often. During their meeting in the swanky Anantara Resort in provincial Chiang Mai, Anton sternly told her to leave the contents of the reefer crisper alone; the household staff would be bound to notice missing cucumbers. Audrey laughed at the image. After so many years, Uncle Anton could talk to her about such things freely.

Between her sustaining foreign meetings with Uncle Anton, MAGNIT met once a month in Washington with GRU handlers who were military intel officers from the Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue. Covered as run-of-the-mill military attachés, GRU spooks rarely ran true clandestine sources, inhabiting instead the margins of classic intelligence of elicitation, open-source collection, and technology transfer. The meetings were held in suburban parks and along nature trails and greenswards in Washington and suburban Maryland and Virginia. These meetings were little more than five-minute brief encounters during which Audrey would pass her intel and send messages to Uncle Anton. Audrey’s quantitative mind took to the challenge of finding imaginative meeting sites, ones that she could surveil from a distance to ensure the GRU dolt-of-the-month hadn’t dragged FBI surveillance with him. Audrey had discussed the fine points of site casing with Anton—her tutor in so many things—and had become quite adept. Audrey had lost count of the endless discs, thumb drives, digital cameras, hard drives, and, occasionally, sheaves of physical documents, bound volumes, and printouts on every aspect of naval-weapons research, antisubmarine warfare, ship design and radar, stealth technology, and encrypted communications she dumped in the laps of her handlers. After twelve years in harness, she couldn’t have accurately listed the sum total of the secrets she had passed the Russians. She really didn’t care. The three stripes on her uniform coat were reason enough to continue.

A source such as MAGNIT unquestionably was the jewel in the GRU crown, as well as a constant burden on the collective abilities of GRU Headquarters, commonly known as the Aquarium. From the beginning, Anton Gorelikov had been secretly assigned by Putin to monitor the MAGNIT case, and observe the quality and durability of GRU tradecraft. When MAGNIT received her third star, Gorelikov none-too-gently began prying the case away from the military, eventually to be assigned to an illegals officer in New York who would be anonymous, invisible, and inviolate. At that time, the MAGNIT cryptonym would be changed and the files tightly restricted. Gorelikov also had his eye on SVR Chief of Counterintelligence Colonel Egorova, who he thought eventually could share MAGNIT handling duties abroad, based on her previous experience in street operations and counterintelligence.

President Putin had for years been on a low simmer for his counterintelligence chief, the former busty ballerina, since the night he had visited Dominika’s room in the Constantine Palace at midnight and casually fondled the lace bodice of her nightgown while ordering her to fly to Paris and eradicate her chief, the psychopath Zyuganov, who had gotten on Putin’s bad side. The president had not forgotten how Egorova’s nipples had responded to his touch, could not forget the faint scratching of the dockyard rivets swelling beneath the lace, and how her lashes fluttered in coy arousal. He would own her eventually, it was inevitable. He had intentions of promoting Egorova in the near future, but not yet. And handling MAGNIT could wait: the mole’s continued production was critical. Gorelikov assured Putin this was just the beginning: as the US Navy would founder and disintegrate, so would the United States. “Chto bylo, to proshlo I bylyom poroslo, what used to be will be gone and overgrown with grass,” said Gorelikov to Vladimir.

MAGNIT’S SPICY THAI CUCUMBER SALAD