The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Gable and Forsyth disagreed with Nate, but provisionally understood, having themselves extracted blown agents before. But Benford was furious that Nate was rocking the boat and distracting the asset with his mewling arguments. Simon was old school: run your assets and gather the intel until the bitter end, then extract them, if possible. If the agent got the chop, it was the hard reality of operations. Benford’s operational catechism was codified in an age when an agent could climb over the Berlin Wall, or wait for a rubber raft on a Baltic beach to escape the Iron Curtain. Now moles were caught in cyberstings and by drone surveillance and facial-recognition software. The tenets of espionage were immutable—go forth and steal secrets—but technology was changing the Game.

It didn’t help that Nate, despite an unreal gift for denied-area ops and surveillance detection, was the junior officer in the quartet of officers who oversaw the DIVA case, and thus, despite the tradition of civilian informality in CIA that belied its wartime military OSS roots, should have known to speak only when spoken to. They all knew Nate was spoony over Dominika and dreamed of settling down with her behind a white-picket fence. But the DIVA case was too valuable to consider pulling the plug. Gable advised Nate with characteristic candor.

“Listen up, rookie,” he said. “You recruited her cuz she had access. Now her access may reach all the way to the top. You pitched her and put her in harness. Now you’re her handler, and it’s all on you. You use everything in your limited bag of tricks to keep her alive and productive. Everything. Anything. But she’s an asset and you run her like a pro, got it? Now go put on your big-boy pants and shut the fuck up.”

Dominika took the dishes in, came back out, and sat on his lap. “I don’t want you to worry,” she said. “There will be hundreds of people in Moscow who will read the same reports I give you, providing plenty of cover. And I’ll be the one investigating any leaks; I will be the Russian Benford!”

Nate shook his head like a dog. “You’re saying that I’m sleeping with the Russian Benford? Better get off my lap. The image will stay with me for months, maybe years.”

Dominika laughed and ignored him. “I will travel quarterly to Vienna to debrief Academician Ri. My Sparrow Ioana is relocating there to be close to him, to keep him calm, and to rent a place nearby where we can meet. We can discuss the case and you can lecture me, and I will continue to, how do you say it, straighten you out? Vypravlyat?”

“You’re going to straighten me out?” said Nate, pulling her close. “I’m the handler here. I’m sure you remember.”

“In some circumstances I become the handler,” said Dominika, lifting his T-shirt over his head. “And yes, I will straighten you out.” She deftly pulled the drawstring of his trousers, lifted her skirt, and sat back on his lap, wiggling to seat herself more deeply on him. “Are you straightened out?” she whispered. She rocked back and forth, moaning softly, Nate’s face buried in her bosom. Then the dried-out, flimsy wicker chair fell apart, dumping them on the still-warm marble of the warped little balcony. Farther north, the gods on Mount Olympus looking down from above the alluvial pans of Thessaly might have said this was a portent of things to come.

They moved onto the bed, laughing, Nate holding a bruised elbow. Dominika rested her head on his shoulder. It had been a short time together, yet she was full of bien-être, a contentment, a tender proximity with Nate that she had not felt during other hurried and dangerous meetings. Perhaps it was the brassy Aegean sun, the salt air, and lying in bed with him, smelling his body and the wisterias and watching the hummingbirds. Nate laughed as Dominika scolded them in Russian, showing the little birds the correct technique for drawing nectar from a stamen; halfway through her demonstration he had stopped laughing and was bucking his hips off the mattress. The bullfrog horn of the night ferry from Rhodes bellowed congratulations from the sea.

Dusk. Surcease. The kerosene lantern attracted a giant emperor moth, silver wings printed with spots as luminous as owls’ eyes, and it dive-bombed around the flame, casting shadows as big as bats on the walls. Dominika propped herself on one arm and Nate made her repeat the next contact skeds for Vienna in a month, with preliminary and secondary meeting sites, recognition paroles and countersigns, alternates and safety signals, including brush passes with Ioana, who would be a cutout. This would be an important follow-up debrief to hear more about the Noko nuke program, and see if they could develop any identifiable information on the US source of the technology leak.

“I wish you would let someone else meet the Korean in Vienna,” said Nate, worrying the bone one last time. “Surely you can designate another officer, someone who speaks Korean or someone who knows weapons design.”