The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

He gently pushed Egorova onto the bed on her back, and knee-walked on the mattress closer. He grabbed her ankles and spread them to either side, like haggling drumsticks apart on a roast goose. He saw her face was swollen with desire, her breasts heavy, her nipples distended. No one could fake those responses, not even a Sparrow. He mashed his hands on her breasts, then planted them on either side of her head, and loomed over her, looking at her face. Putin had bedded plenty of women since his divorce from Lyudmila Putina after thirty years of marriage—the gymnast Kabaeva, the skater Butyrskaya, the boxer Ragosina. All of them blond, all of them champion superathletes, but this Egorova was different, somehow more continental, less a Slav broodmare. She was also his new SVR Director, a cool operator who started as a Sparrow, had exposed the traitor Korchnoi, and had killed opponents in the field. She kept her counsel, knew operations, appeared discreet and loyal, and Gorelikov approved of her. Other lovers would appreciate the blue eyes, or the smile, or the charitable spirit, or even the exuberant libidinousness, but Vladimir valued other attributes. He wedged his knees between her legs.

Putin liked to plunge straight in, right away, feeling the pinch of the dry spots, looking for the sharp intake of breath, the wince at the initial plunging penetration. He liked when they gasped like that. Then when the woman had finally wetly flowered open, he favored a measured metronome pace—no jackrabbit sprints for him, not with his judo-damaged disc—pounding his pubic bone hard against the woman’s sex to elicit huffing grunts of pleasure at each wet slap. He liked that too, their animal huffs of pleasure. He was in control. Egorova’s breasts oscillated with each shock, her head was back, mouth slightly open, breathing through her nose. Vladimir felt he was really giving her a workout—her eyes were clenched closed.

Keep your eyes closed so you won’t have to look at his blond moon-pie face or his doughy eunuch’s chest she thought; there must be at least one albino—a cousin or nephew—in his family, the genes are there. At least there was no slobbering into her mouth. In bed with Nate, groaning into each other’s mouth while she came was ecstasy, but thank God she didn’t have to “Suck on Putin’s Tongue,” which should be the title of a song by the dissident Russian girl band Pussy Riot. And she knew Russian men of his generation did not do the other, put their mouths down there, and he had been too impatient to ask her to put him in her mouth. Thank God for Russian priggishness.

Putin had put his legs over her spread thighs, pinning her like some animal on the veldt, showing his teeth. And Nate is on a plane to Moscow, by my own hand, and Agnes is in the closet looking at me through the louvers, fucking this man, watching his khuy splitting me apart, and I know she loves Nate too. Will she understand what is happening?

The wrecking-ball stroke of the tsar of all the Russians never changed, just a steady rhythm devoid of all the heady variations of positions, or pillow talk, without the ecstasies of edging or beads, or what she had seen in Hong Kong with those crazy chakras. The president’s blue eyes never left her face, looking for the slightest trace of feigned reaction, which, she was sure, would equate in his mind as deception, and the equivalent of disloyalty. Fake an orgasm with Vlad, baby, and you’re off his favorites’ list. Not even Benford would have calculated that bit of tradecraft.

At Sparrow School they intensely studied (and filmed hundreds of women experiencing) sexual climax, including the physical rhythmic contractions, the psychosomatic euphoria, and the chemical release of endorphins during the refractory period. Sparrows faking orgasm, therefore, were trained to avoid the novice’s display of histrionic screaming, head thrashing, hair tossing, and the clawing of the partner’s back. A pro Sparrow instead knew the orgasmic subtleties of a change in respiration, a stiffening of the limbs, the brief, racking shudder(s) through the body, followed by the frantic levitating off the bed if the man touched overly sensitive plumbing sooner than five minutes after. Dominika put on her Sparrow mask of pleasure-pain, as if waiting for salvation, for ecstasy, at the hands of her blue tsar. Then the impossible happened.