The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Peel and deseed cucumber and slice paper-thin, preferably on a mandolin. Put cucumber slices in a colander, sprinkle with salt, and let drain, squeezing out excess water. In a bowl, mix rice vinegar, lime juice, thin slices of garlic, lots of finely diced Thai bird’s-eye chilies, nam pla (fish sauce), chopped cilantro, a dash of sesame oil, sugar, finely diced scallions, and thinly sliced red onion (soak onions in ice water briefly beforehand). Toss cucumbers in dressing and sprinkle with either dried shrimp powder or finely ground peanuts. Serve immediately.

3

You Are Mine

Dominika uncapped the lipstick tube and wrote Ti Moy on Nathaniel Nash’s naked chest as she lay on top of him in bed in CIA’s safe house: a sun-blasted, white stucco cottage at the end of a dusty road at the top of a rocky cactus hill in Vouliagmeni, fifteen kilometers south of Athens, with a hazy view of the island of Aegina across the dead-calm turquoise Saronic Gulf. White island ferries heading into the Port of Piraeus left intersecting foaming wakes as they passed. Outside the window, hummingbirds flitted around the blossoms on the wisteria vines that grew up the outside walls of the one-room villa. Dominika hitched herself a little higher and kissed him on the lips.

“I hope that wasn’t one of your lipstick guns,” said Nate. Two years earlier, SVR’s Line T (technical) had given Dominika two electrically fired, single-shot weapons disguised as lipstick tubes that she had used in Paris to separate the skullcap from the brainpan of her diminutive and psychotic chief Zyuganov, who at the time was raking her ribs with a stiletto, trying to shiver the tip of the blade between her ribs and into her heart. He had divined that Dominika was working for CIA, and when the exploding dumdum bullets from the lipstick guns aerosolized the poison dwarf’s brain into the river Seine, she was safe, again, for the time being, until the next crisis.

That had been five years after her first overseas tour in Helsinki. Finland had been a dream. Gingerbread-trim houses, and sizzling venison cutlets, and the excitement and ecstasy of a real operational mission: to find CIA officer Nathaniel Nash of the American Embassy, meet, befriend, and, if necessary, seduce him to elicit the name of a high-ranking Russian the SVR knew, just knew, Nash was handling, but could never catch. Nash and Dominika started working on each other—dinners by the light of candle-wax-covered wine bottles, walks in leafy city parks, coffees along the breezy harbor promenade, the girls’ summer skirts billowing above their hips. Elicitation, bone throwing, verbal snares, and assessment traps. They both knew all the developmental tricks, and banged heads for three months, trying to recruit each other. She noted that his crimson halo—passion, devotion, constancy—never wavered or rippled. He told the truth and she could see his interest deepening by the day.

Then the impossible happened. Nate’s easy, honest nature; his mild—but accurate—criticism of the current mess in Russia; the earnest, flirty attention he paid to her made her question what she was doing, for whom she was doing it, and why. When her friend in the Russian Embassy disappeared (Dominika was positive she had been assassinated over a minor infraction of security), it pushed her over the edge. On a rainy Helsinki night, she accepted Nate’s recruitment pitch to spy for CIA, and she was encrypted DIVA. How better could she do maximum damage to the tsar and his bandits? What more could she do to feed the otvrashcheniye, the loathing for them she felt? By spying for CIA, Dominika was helping the Rodina, not betraying it.

Bozhe, God, they were a different breed, these CIA men who gathered around to train her, and coach her, and support her like family, beneficence unheard of and impossible in her own SVR. A small group of them had come into her life. Chief of Europe Division, Tom Forsyth, the salt-and-pepper-haired legend in the DO, the Directorate of Operations, and beneficent mentor to Nate Nash. The urbane Forsyth had recruited prime ministers, Emirati princes, and, once, the pampered mistress of a Red Fleet admiral by taking her to an orphanage in Paris to watch children gambol in the playroom (Forsyth knew the admiral had refused to marry her and give her children). Recruitment was all about human needs, vulnerabilities, and motivations. Deeply affected by his solicitude, she started stealing Soviet naval secrets for Forsyth the next day.