The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Dominika took a breath. “CIA case officers trained in denied-area operations are resourceful. This man coming tomorrow could elude our coverage and foil our plans. He could use disguises. He could distract our surveillance units while an unknown second confederate accomplishes their mission. He could have some infernal technical device—we all know how the Americans rely on their little black boxes—that could allow him to make contact with CHALICE under our noses, without ever approaching him. And worst of all, the CIA officer could detect coverage, abort his mission, and escape in the stealth aircraft MAGNIT reported was part of the plan, leaving us looking like fools, and worse off than before. Admittedly, gentlemen, these are all remote possibilities, but they are possibilities. Can we afford to risk coming up empty-handed?”

That is why I’m trying to persuade you tarakany you cockroaches, to arrest the man I love with all my heart, and allow me to be present when you beat him, and watch him thrown in prison to rot until he dies or is broken and ruined, because there’s nothing else I can do.

To the annoyance of Gorelikov and Bortnikov, Patrushev nodded. “I agree with Egorova,” he said. “Immediate arrest and interrogation. That is the only way to mitigate the risk. Are we all agreed? Or should we consult with the president?” No one wanted that—not in Putin’s current frame of mind—so it was agreed: the CIA officer would be arrested immediately. Dominika breathed a sigh of relief as her heart went cold and died.

Nate and Agnes flew on LOT, the Polish airline, from Warsaw to Bucharest, and then to Odessa. Three hungover apprentice art-restoration students from Warsaw were on the same flight. Bored officials at Customs and Immigration stamped Nate’s alias Polish passport without looking at it. Another hour flight on a Ukraine International Embraer 170 had them standing at the front portico of Gelendzhik Airport, waiting for the van that ferried staff and workers to Cape Idokopas. The soft subtropical breeze stirred Agnes’s skirt, and they smelled the salt air from the sea. Nate wore wire-rimmed glasses, jeans, and a T-shirt with “Warszawa” in letters across his chest, and they both carried small duffels. A surly Russian driver appeared in a wheezing UAZ minivan, and took them all careering down the M4 to Svetly, where they turned off the highway and got onto a meandering two-lane blacktop that wound its way downhill through pine-forested valleys scarred by limestone cliffs, steeply down toward the water past paltry villages at lonely crossroads—Divnomorskoye, Dzhankhot, Praskoveevka—and finally through the compound gate with a militsiya car on the side of the road, and more slowly now, past guardhouses and military jeeps parked in the trees, to stop at the front steps of a large dormitory-type building amid the pines. In the distance, the roof of the massive main palace loomed above the treetops. Agnes was calm and collected, Nate marveled; she was cooler than he was.

They lined up in front of a table to register, surrender their passports, and received security badges on lanyards for access to the compound and the work sites inside the mansion. A militiaman told a Polish student to put out his cigarette, and the young man pretended not to understand, blowing smoke in his general direction. The militiaman stepped toward the student to knock the cigarette and some teeth out of his mouth, but the subaltern barked at him in Russian to step back and “take his position.” Nate’s scalp moved as he saw other militiamen standing attentively, edging in, and looking specifically at him. Nate made an instant calculation about knocking a guard over and dashing for a door or window. But where would he go? There were hundreds of protective militia and Special Forces troops, plus two hundred SBP (Presidential Security Service) agents on the seventy-four-hectare compound. And God knew where Dominika was. He couldn’t sprint for her dacha and hide under her bed.

The Russians’ efficiency was chilling. How had his cover been undermined so quickly? Did this mean there was another mole inside Langley who knew about his mission? That could only mean Forsyth, Westfall, or that cue-ball maniac from maritime branch. Impossible. There was nothing that the Russians could have picked up from his alias documents, nothing about his Polish Art Academy cover story. Was it possible he was recognized from his first tour in Moscow? Some misstep at Customs in Odessa? No, not even the FSB were that good. Whatever the reason, he understood what was going to happen.

He leaned close to Agnes and whispered. “Something’s wrong, I think I’m blown. Stay away from me and stick with the students.”