The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

He approached Nate’s chair and leaned close so that their faces were inches apart. Blokhin inexplicably smelled of kerosene—sharp and crisp, not altogether unpleasant. “It is sudba meeting again, American. How do you say it in English?” said Blokhin, in his gravely croak.

“Fate,” said Nash in English. “Been back to Turkey since we last spoke?”

“Not just fate, Yankee,” said Blokhin. “Sudba also means ‘doom.’ ”

Nate looked him in the face. “Yours or mine? Or Major Shlykov’s?”

Blokhin signaled to the guards standing behind Nate’s chair to pick him up and put him into the antique, chipped high chair and wheel it into the center of the room, under a big surgical light. The guards cinched Nate’s wrists to the flat arms of that chair and his ankles to the fronts of the legs with clear plastic cable ties, which Blokhin strained tight. Nate’s felt slippers were yanked off his feet. A sweat-stained leather strap was passed around his chest and buckled in back. It was tight, but Nate could breathe okay. It dawned on him that this might be worse than he’d anticipated: these restraints suggested they were going to try extreme techniques that would make him fall out of this chair if he weren’t tied in. Perhaps he’d be the first CIA officer in the history of the Cold War to actually be tortured in the Butyrka basement. Maybe they’d give him a Trailblazer Award when he got home.

He tested the ties and rocked in his chair, sending it slowly rolling across the uneven floor, just as the door opened and four people walked in, three men and a woman, all senior bigwigs judging by the way the guards snapped to attention. Nate craned his head to see. The woman was Dominika, dressed in a dark suit and dark stockings, a prison-visitor’s badge was around her neck, and it swung as she walked, her heels clicking unevenly against the white floor tiles because of her slight limp. It was like a dream seeing her now, here, like this. Her hair was up as always, and their eyes met for an instant. It would have been the most natural thing for her to walk up to his chair, kiss him on the lips, order his bonds cut, and walk him out of this basement and through the front gates while holding his hand. She’d give him some khren, some grief, like “Dushka, you cannot manage even this without my help?” He smelled a faint whiff of her Calèche perfume in the room over the stench of carbolic disinfectant. He heard the scrapes of chairs behind them as Blokhin pulled Nate’s chair back into the middle of the room, so he couldn’t see the visitors—Nate had also immediately recognized Bortnikov and Patrushev, former and current Directors of FSB. Dominika completed the trifecta as Director of SVR. These officials were here to observe his interrogation? Unheard of. Maybe the Kremlin was panicking, or maybe Benford had bagged MAGNIT, and they didn’t know how and were desperate to identify the American mole. Nate told himself he had to be extra careful—the mole was sitting in this very room, the one with the pretty legs. He had to protect her at all costs.

Nate couldn’t know it was more serious than that. After being berated by Putin and informed that Gorelikov was not the mole, the three Service Chiefs had been escorted to their official cars and had separately driven to Butyrka to observe the interrogation of the American case officer. They instinctively stayed apart to avoid contamination, and they did not speak to one another. Dominika’s head was in a fog; she did not remember the drive to the prison through Moscow streets, did not remember the tea served in the protocol room by the prison director, did not remember the clacking footsteps echoing down endless corridors and littered stairwells. Her head cleared when she entered the white-tiled room and saw Nate in the chair, his purple halo shining brightly. Her stomach flipped when she saw Blokhin and his black wings, waiting to begin. This was another Putin touch, using Blokhin: he hated Nate for what had happened to Shlykov and, most of all, for the towering insult of pitching him in the Turkish jailhouse. He would put greater energies into Nash’s interrogation. The haloes of her colleagues were bleached out with fear. This exercise was like some throwback to the Great Purges of the thirties: all were suspected and accused; one trusted adviser would be destroyed and the others exonerated.