The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Like all of Benford’s personal spaces, the conference table was messy, cluttered with paper, coffee mugs, and a doughnut box. Rolled-up maps were stacked in a corner, and a projection screen was torn down the center and patched with duct tape. Two shattered flat-screen monitors were discarded in the far corner of the room, along with the shards of a US Navy coffee mug, which almost certainly had been the projectile that had destroyed at least one of the monitors. Benford, Gable, Forsyth, and Nash were at one end. Hearsey, the tall ectomorph tech chief, came in with two notebooks and sat at the far end. Rugged, rangy, and leather tough, Hearsey looked like someone who should be on the prairie mending barbed-wire fence or using a Burdizzo Emasculatome on bull calves, instead of spending a year in a lab concocting a chemical acid fog—sprayed at night by stealth drone—to embrittle North Korean missile gantries, or developing wrist-worn fitness monitors molded out of Semtex that could be detonated in Dubai from a laboratory in Maryland. An engineer by training, Hearsey knew about railguns, plus he didn’t take guff from Benford, and Gable liked him, so he was read into everything, including the DIVA case.

He was known in the Agency simply as Hearsey—only the mavens in personnel knew his given name was Gayle, and they never revealed anything. Hearsey looked around Benford’s squalid conference room, ran a finger across the crumb-covered table, and contemplated the surrounding detritus.

“I thought the Hindenburg crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey,” said Hearsey, who could get away with being a wiseass. Benford blinked once.

Sitting at the other end of the table taking notes was Benford’s new assistant, Lucius Westfall, a WMD analyst transferred from the Directorate of Intelligence to the Directorate of Operations, one of scores of CIA Director-mandated sabbaticals designed to forcefully integrate DI analysts with DO operators, which was in most cases like partnering the pastor’s daughters with bargees at a barn dance.

Westfall was blond, thin faced, with wire-rimmed glasses that tended to fog when he spoke publicly or talked to pretty women. It was demanding enough to work for Simon Benford, but Westfall constantly had to decode the aboriginal patois of the Operations Directorate. These ops officers were unintelligible when incessantly talking about bumps, dangles, peddlers, old whores, burn notices, drops, caches, headhunters, scalps, dry cleaning, rabbits, chicken feed, barium enemas, 201s, PRQs, natural reverses, flipping, fluffing, fluttering, and a million other mysteries. As terrifying, Westfall had to weather the depredations of the hulking Marty Gable, who Westfall was convinced had once been a serial killer from Kansas.

“Make sure you take good notes, Luscious,” said Gable, mispronouncing his name with a fake French accent. Gable’s particular style of mentoring a newbie colleague fell somewhere between drill instructor and a chariot driver in the hippodrome. Gable ironically had himself also been dragooned from his rough-and-tumble Africa Division to be Benford’s unlikely deputy. CID was a spooky counterintelligence shop typically staffed with brilliant, quirky introverts who worked in the dark with the shades drawn. Outsiders called it the Island of Broken Toys. Benford wanted Gable less as a substantive deputy, and more as someone who could solve unstable, delicate foreign crises wherever they developed, a function Marty demurely characterized as “breaking the dishes.” DIVA also idolized Gable—he could talk her down out of the tree when she went into her increasingly more frequent conniptions about commo, risk taking, and security.

Benford gaveled the meeting to order with the solemnity for which he was known in Washington, London, Ottawa, Canberra, Bonn, Paris, Rome, and Tel Aviv, by slamming a file folder on the table, with his trademark invocation.

“Jesus Fucking Christ. If DIVA’s intel is right, we have a fucking fuckwad selling fucking secrets on the rail-fucking-gun to North Korea.”

Just back from Athens, Nash read off a paper. “DIVA just reported by SRAC this morning. The SVR has encrypted this North Korean Professor Ri Sou-yong PECHKA, which means ‘furnace’ in Russian,” he said.

Gable grunted. “Furnace, huh? A dictionary would take up less space and wouldn’t eat all the doughnuts,” he said.

Nate slid the box of glazed doughnuts across the conference table. “You’re welcome,” said Nate. “I bought the doughnuts for everyone, thought it would be okay to eat one.”

Gable lifted the lid of the box. “You buy doughnuts and you don’t even bring an assortment? No chocolate? No jelly?”

Benford stirred in his chair. “Can we concentrate on what appears to be the transfer of US Navy electromagnetic railgun technology to the North Korean nuclear program?”