The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Concurrent with Farbissen’s scandalous interview, an article in the Business Standard financial newspaper in New Delhi reported a new mineral-supply contract signed with Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko and IPL, Indian Potash Limited. The article described the chaotic practices of Belarus’s state-owned fertilizer group Belaruskali, which in 2013 caused global prices to collapse, as they had in 2008 and 2009. A sidebar—drafted by Gorelikov and obligingly run by a Business Standard editor on Kremlin retainer—mentioned that American businessman and former US ambassador to Spain, the Honorable Thomas Vano, had been a member of an international commodities consortium that had benefitted from insider tips from the Belarus government to invest in and then short volatile mineral futures. The sidebar piece finished by estimating that the insider trading had netted Ambassador Vano’s group $1.5 billion in 2013 alone, profits realized while he was a US government employee, a serious ethics violation. The facts were fudged: no insider tips were given (who in Minsk would confirm that?) and the figure of $1.5 billion was a fabrication, but uncheckable, giving the further impression of currency sheltering and tax evasion. Though Vano blithely did not withdraw his name as a candidate for DCIA, the ambassador’s nomination was quickly characterized as “implausible” by the Wall Street Journal, and vozmutitelnyy, scandalous, by Channel One Russia in Moscow.

In two deft moves, Gorelikov had eliminated the other candidates as realistic contenders. He knew that this theoretically helped the mole hunters at Langley—they’d now be free to concentrate on vetting Admiral Rowland—but he was not worried. The admiral had no detectable flaws in her cover, and the final decision to confirm was imminent. For all CIA knew, one of the failed candidates could be the mole; the Kremlin would swallow its disappointment, and would direct their asset to an equally sensitive position elsewhere in Washington.

In Headquarters, Benford likewise recognized that the obvious hatchet jobs on Feigenbaum and Vano put the spotlight on Admiral Rowland, but that was exactly the problem. In the world of counterintelligence, especially with the Russians, nothing was ever as it seemed. Feigenbaum’s and Vano’s apparent disqualification might actually be an insidious red herring to divert attention—like fake defector Yurchenko sent to protect Ames. The goal would be that while Benford wasted time looking under Rowland’s bed, the real mole would be free to burrow somewhere else: the NSC; the Pentagon; the West Wing. One hope remained. The Center didn’t know about Benford’s final trap.

Admiral Rowland did not have an adventure vacation scheduled for at least six months. Next spring, it was going to be Argentina: she planned to hike in Patagonia, because she had discreetly done research on a nonattributable Homeland Security library computer downtown—it was already brimming with downloaded porn—and had read about Crocodilo Club in Barrio Norte in Buenos Aires that catered to girls. She wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but it sounded interesting. She’d meet Anton in BA and have fun.

Then she read about Argentine wine. And the food. There was an Argentine food truck in downtown DC that served delicious choripanes, mini grilled-chorizo sandwiches with onions and chimichurri sauce. If the little girls in Buenos Aires were as tasty as the street food, she would enjoy herself. But the heady prospect of meeting an exotic Latina lover was overlaid by the shock of this afternoon’s CIA briefing.

This was trouble, bad trouble, and she needed to talk to Uncle Anton. Not to the Center. Not to the Kremlin. Not to Moscow. She needed Anton. If that unkempt troll Benford at CIA was telling the truth, in a couple of days a CIA case officer would be talking to someone named CHALICE who, somehow, knew that Audrey Rowland, vice admiral, US Navy, was spying for the Russians, and had been spying for more than a decade. She had to tell Anton, which meant she had to call SUSAN to pass the message. That evening, she dug her clunky Line T encrypted phone out of the hinged concealment compartment in the arm of a couch in her bedroom—a crappy piece of furniture delivered by the GRU years ago. Big as a brick, it was a location-spoofing FIPS140-2 encrypted secure phone whose software obfuscated phone position by canceling the device’s connection to the nearest cell towers while permitting the call to go through using more-distant towers. A call, therefore, from Audrey in Washington to SUSAN in New York caromed first to Las Vegas, then bounced through Traverse City, Michigan, to SUSAN’s New York City phone, which would use similar circuitous routing through Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Tarpon Springs, Florida, and back to Audrey in DC.