The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

LTJG Rowland’s unique profile especially caught their sharp-eyed attention. The targeting study noted that Rowland had graduated with a PhD in advanced particle physics from Caltech, had enlisted in the US Navy, and had breezed through Officer Candidate School, already marked as a fast riser and a sure bet for eventual selection to flag rank. After OCS, Audrey had been assigned to the Electromagnetics Division in NRL, the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC.

From a purloined classified technical NRL newsletter, the Russians read that in the first three months of her assignment, Audrey Rowland had impressed senior scientists with a monograph on heat diffusion in the MJ64 experimental naval railgun. This tidbit stirred considerable interest among Russian intelligence circles: US railgun technology was a prime collection requirement of the Russian Navy. The threat of an electrically propelled, powderless projectile with a velocity of 2,200 meters per second and unerringly accurate at ranges beyond 150 kilometers, was a concern to Russian naval command. The US Navy had put it another way: a railgun projectile fired from New York City would score a direct hit on a target in Philadelphia in less than thirty-seven seconds.

Because Rowland was a potentially attractive target, an extra effort was made to collect what the spook world called lifestyle-and-personal bio. There was more gleaned from a Russian illegal buried in the administrative staff of the University of California, Irvine, who had access to certain restricted databases in the UC and local law-enforcement systems. Posing as an employment investigator, the illegal also interviewed neighbors, landlords, and one former roommate at Caltech. The results were interesting: Rowland was solitary, remote, with a weakness for margaritas, after two of which she tended to pass out. Beneath what appeared as a shy exterior was a highly competitive nature. There were unflattering stories about obsessive behavior in the classroom and laboratory. Then the jackpot: She’d had an abusive father—himself a navy pilot—there were possible sexual overtones, and a complete absence of men during her university years, culminating in an unspecified date-rape incident about which no official record existed. Vestal virgin, physics androgyne, or a woman who prefers vacations on the Aegean island of Lesbos? If the last, there could be an opening for a bit of lesbionage during her visit to Moscow. Targeteers noted that Rowland would not have been admitted into OCS or the War College, regardless of recent liberalization policies in the US Navy, if her predilections were known. A secret vulnerability.

LTJG Rowland was to tour in Moscow for the week, staying at the Metropol with twelve classmates and a professor/chaperone. Word went up the line—to the SVR’s America Department; then to the FSB, Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii, the internal security service; then to the GRU, Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the military foreign intelligence service of the General Staff of the Russian Federation. The usual puerile squabbling among these agencies for primacy to target Rowland was stilled when the Kremlin ordained that every organization would have a role: The FSB would control the other students and chaperone; an SVR asset would be used for the honey trap; and the GRU would exploit the take. As for the actual recruitment pitch, a Kremlin specialist known as “Doctor Anton” would be introduced. Big trouble, Doctor Anton.

During the students’ week in Moscow, FSB watchers noted with interest that LTJG Rowland seemed to enjoy more than a single after-dinner vodka in the Metropol’s ornate Chaliapin Bar, invariably saying good night, then sneaking back and drinking long after her fellow classmates retired for the evening. Sergei, a handsome SVR-trained Voronoy (a Raven, the male version of a Sparrow), was assigned the task of meeting, charming, and eventually bedding the angular beanpole who wore cardigans buttoned to the neck, opaque panty hose, and sensible flats, in sharp contrast to the hotel’s usual sea of cantaloupe busts, see-through tops, and Jimmy Choo glitter pumps. When after two nights of Sergei’s musky blandishments it became obvious that Rowland preferred to swim facedown in Veronica Lake rather than be with a man, the targeteers ordered an urgent change. Time was short, and the SVR and GRU were frantic that Rowland not slip through their fingers.