The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Nate started moving his head and groaning, and Dominika went to a sink at the far end of the room to wet a cloth to wipe his face, and she turned to see Blokhin standing in front of Nate with a swagger, and Nate was saying something through parched lips and swollen tongue, and Blokhin stiffened, then straightened, and raised the steel bar above his head, and Dominika saw Bortnikov leap out of his chair and scream No, but Blokhin brought the rebar down on the right side of Nate’s neck with an overhand chop, breaking his right clavicle in a compound fracture—the visible broken tip of the bone punctured the skin—and collapsing the vagus nerve inside the brachial plexus, causing global brain ischemia, a catastrophic interruption of blood to the brain, which resulted in Nate passing out again and slumping forward in his chair, and Bortnikov and the guard both grabbed Blokhin’s arms as he raised the bar to strike Nate again, and Dominika walked behind the guard, pulled the Berdysh automatic pistol from the holster, racked the slide, and pointed it at Blokhin, whose eyes went wide. His exceptional reflexes turned his head almost out of the line of fire, but Dominika was too close, and she shot him twice in his shiny, scarred forehead, splattering both the prison guard and the horrified Director of FSB with gray brain matter. Blokhin collapsed face forward onto the floor. His head bounced twice on the tiles, his blood flowing out of his head neatly in two different directions into the two nearest drains, as his legs twitched involuntarily, because the frog’s brain was dead but his legs didn’t know it, and Dominika watched as Bortnikov and the guard reeled unsteadily out the door, wiping the gore from their eyes, and Dominika wiped Nate’s bloodied face and, mindful of the cameras in the ceiling, limited herself to attending to the prisoner, and the cold cloth revived him and he opened one eye, then the other, but the pupils were two different sizes, and a small trickle of blood was coming out of his right nostril, and all Dominika could do was wipe his face and say to him, “American, are you all right?” and Nate’s irises wobbled erratically in little circles. “You’re safe now,” he whispered to her. She heard the edge in her voice as she screamed “Medic!” down the corridor, telling herself to control her panic, and the blood kept coming out of his nostril even though Dominika kept wiping it, and his breath was labored and Dominika loosened the chest strap so he could breathe, but by the sound of his breaths, she guessed he was aspirating blood, and all she could do was wipe his cheek and say, “Medical attention is coming,” but somehow knowing it wouldn’t make a difference, and Nate’s uneven eyes locked on hers and there was a faint smile that passed over his lips and his halo grew brilliant and radiated, and she felt the minute caress of one shattered finger touching her hand, a light touch, brushing the top of her hand, just for an instant, unseen by the cameras, more intimate than a kiss, and he took two more deep breaths and went still, and his purple halo dissolved, and Dominika fought her tears, then heard footsteps pounding down the corridor even as Blokhin’s legs on the pinkish tiles wouldn’t stop twitching.

Dominika felt the nearly undetectable puff of air from the air-vortex nozzle on her desk lamp sitting on the corner of the desk in the Director’s office of SVR headquarters in the pine forest of Yasenevo. It indicated that a message from Benford had just come in. She positioned the flexible display, engaged the system by moving her eye in line with the integral optical reader that biometrically authenticated the pattern of her iris, and began projecting the short message on the flat base of the lamp in a directional hologram. The scrolling letters were invisible to anyone not positioned exactly in line with the lamp, and could be turned off with a casual wave of her hand. Though previously skeptical of the contraption, Dominika now marveled at the efficiency of the covcom device. Just this morning she had undetectably used the digital lens in the lamp to photograph and transmit to Washington a top-secret read-and-return bulletin from the Security Council as the Kremlin courier respectfully waited three feet from her desk for her signature. There was even a self-destruct feature that would fuse the components in case of emergency. The SVR headquarters building, as Hearsey predicted, was proving to be an efficient, massive antenna.

The multiparagraph message was not from Benford, but rather from Forsyth. Strange.

1. FYI, MAGNIT sentenced life imprisonment at Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado.

2. Request advise current status Nash, including when feasible diplomatic initiative to bring home. Pls advise possibility of swap.

3. Be advised Counterintelligence Chief Simon Benford retired. Forward his deep thanks and regards.