The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

To keep her quiet after the assassination, Uncle Vanya had magnanimously admitted her into the Andropov Institute, “The Forest,” the SVR’s foreign spy academy, where Dominika found to her astonishment that she had a natural aptitude for spook work and, consequently she hoped, a new future serving the Rodina, her Motherland, as an intelligence officer. Her fluent French and strong English learned at home in a house full of books and music were attributes. She had the skills, the ideas, the imagination, and great expectations for operations in the foreign field.

Ah, what a prostodushnyy, a guileless naïf, she had been! The Service, and the Kremlin, and Novorossiya, Putin’s New Russia, were still the preserve of men, namely, the siloviki, the myrmidons around the blue-eyed new tsar, Vladimir Vladimirovich. These weasels purloined the patrimony of Russia, and spread a blanket of corruption so completely over the land that if you were not a billionaire running the energy monopoly Gazprom out of your pocket, then you were a Muscovite who could not afford meat more than three days a week. The siloviki were the inheritors of the Gray Cardinals, the sclerotic members of the old Soviet politburo, who had starved Soviet Russians for seventy years with their ineptitude as implacably as this new crowd had been starving modern Russians for the last twenty years with their avarice.

After graduating with top marks, Dominika Egorova had basked in the signal achievement that she was now an operuolnomochoperuenny, one of a few women SVR operations officers. But the sweet Dead Sea fruit of success turned to ashes in her mouth when Uncle Vanya sent her packing to State School Four, the Kon Institute in Kazan on the banks of the Volga, otherwise known as Sparrow School, where women were taught the unceasing, inexorable, inescapable indignities of learning how to be one of Putin’s Prostitutes. Part of Dominika’s soul died in Sparrow School—other women literally died, suicide among the forlorn was not uncommon. The dead parts inside Dominika were replaced by beshenstvo, an enduring white fury against the system, and a simmering hatred for the podkhalimi, the toadeaters surrounding their taciturn sovereign.

She was determined to succeed. After Sparrow School and back in Moscow, she did her homework and identified a seduction target on her own: a mild French diplomat whose wife was absent and whose adult daughter in Paris worked in a department of the French Ministry of Defense, which oversaw France’s nuclear weapons. Dominika knew the man was falling in love with her, and that he would ask his daughter to whisper to Papa any French atom secrets that Dominika wanted to know. It was an easy seduction—and not altogether unpleasant, because he was a lonely, decent man. The difference was that this was a genuine operation. The potential intelligence harvest for the SVR was unparalleled.

But the seduction went too well, and Dominika’s potbellied chiefs were envious, so they willfully and with malice ruined the pitch and spooked the Frenchman. He reported his dalliance to his embassy and was sent home. The case was lost and Egorova, the blue-eyed upstart Academy graduate, was put in her place. Solicitous Uncle Vanya commiserated with her and announced he was going to offer her something that was a real operation, something substantial, something even more desirable because it included being posted abroad—in glamorous Finland, he said. This is more like it, thought Dominika. A real operational mission. But one small assignment first; it would take three hours, said her uncle, smiling: seduce an American in the Metropol Hotel. Do this final honey trap for the Service, and then pack for your assignment in Helsinki. One last time, she had thought.

US Navy Lieutenant Junior Grade Audrey Rowland had been in Moscow for a week with a group of senior students from the National War College on a junket to observe Russian “bilateral geopolitics,” whatever that meant. As was customary with any official visitors to Russia, on receipt of the students’ visa applications months before, SVR targeteers began their research, combed through open-source databanks, and asked clandestine sources in the Pentagon for bios and assessments of the dozen War College students who would arrive in Moscow six weeks hence. Running traces was standard procedure: SVR targeteers were like patient wolves on the hillside, watching the horse-drawn troika filled with drunken kulaks, waiting to see if someone would fall out of the sled insensate into a snowbank and provide fresh meat.