The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

“Matthews’s latest is an extraordinarily commanding, acidly relevant, and unrelentingly suspenseful tale of espionage, brutality, and conscience.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“Matthews’s vast experience working in the shadowy world of espionage and spycraft lends an authenticity to his story that few can equal. And it doesn’t hurt that he can write. . . . This is another must-read for fans of the spy genre.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Jason Matthews has an amazing feel for the insider lingo and relentless intrigue of the spy’s life. Palace of Treason is a harrowing look into the lives of spies. . . . This is stay-up-all-night reading, and we’re pummeled by hair-trigger actions on every page.”

—BookPage

“His real-life experiences in the shadowy world of spying make the story fresh, timely, and nearly authentic. . . . A sophisticated, behind-the-scenes, powerful story . . . Well written, creative.”

—Missourian

“The world of a spy is unique and claustrophobic, but this bold tale captures its every nuance with expert precision. A tantalizing premise and a heroine who’s an alpha female forge a piece of thrilling entertainment that does not disappoint.”

—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Patriot Threat

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To Zsu Zsa,

for pressing all the buttons

The jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies, and the neighbors of Russia, if they do not wish to be one, must reconcile themselves to being the other.

No matter how big and powerful, Russia always feels threatened. Even when they are feeling weak, they bluster and bully to hide their vulnerability. In this sense, Putin’s policies and beliefs are largely consistent with Russian history and the legacy of the Russian Tzars.

—George Kennan

PROLOGUE

The Metropol

September 2005: Despite the velvet-flocked, gold-leaf splendor of the Metropol Hotel, the enduring fetor of Moscow clung to the drapes and lay thick on the carpet, an incense of fusel oil, boiled cabbage, and ruined pussy.

Twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Dominika Egorova of Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the SVR, the external Russian foreign intelligence service, stood in her underwear (black lace from Wolford in Vienna) and looked down at the naked woman on the bed, snoring on her back, a feral, protruding incisor visible in her open mouth. The American woman—her name was Audrey—had been a biter. Dominika looked in the smoky gilt mirror at the purple half-moon bite mark on her shoulder, the irregular notch from Audrey’s snaggletooth clearly visible.

The nineteenth-century bed, formerly from the Pavlovsk Palace in Saint Petersburg, had a soaring rococo canopy framed in falls of musty satin and faded silk ropes. The twisted sheets under Audrey’s tall, bony body were darkly wet in a wide circle. Besides the biting, there had been the throaty grunts more characteristically heard from boars in the thickets of the Smolensk hunting preserve. Audrey was what they called a khryuknut in Sparrow School: a screamer in bed.

Loud, but nothing to faze a Vorobey, a Sparrow, a State-trained courtesan sent to the gabled mansion on the Volga River that was the secret State School Four, sent to learn the art of sexpionage—sexual entrapment, carnal blackmail, moral compromise—all with the aim of recruiting susceptible human targets as clandestine intelligence sources, targets who had been maneuvered into an intricate polovaya zapadnya, an SVR honey trap.

Dominika looked at the horse bite on her shoulder again. Suka, bitch. How she loathed being a Sparrow, how low she had sunk. Two years ago, the world had been hers for the taking. She had been destined for the Bolshoi as a future prima ballerina, until a rival had broken Dominika’s foot, resulting in the abrupt end of a nearly twenty-year ballet career and a permanent slight hitch in her gait. The following year had been a nightmare descent into wanton indenture. To keep her ailing, widowed mother in their State-provided apartment, she let her uncle—then Deputy Director of SVR—coerce her to sleep with a man, a repugnant oligarch whom President Putin wanted eliminated.