The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

“Then perhaps you’ll have the courtesy to tell me exactly what it is you have on your mind.” Gorelikov noted that she already could give orders like an admiral.

“Gladly,” he said. “Enough of hypotheticals. I have an exceptional offer. I would like to propose a discreet relationship between you and a sympathetic Russia to work together for a year toward peaceful global parity, a relationship that would be beneficial to both countries, and to all nations. A twelve-month collaboration. I ask you to consider: after all, even military research has the avoidance of war as its defining goal, does it not?”

She did not move, but he knew she was listening. Audrey assessed his words. He was, in a sense, right. Audrey’s long-suffering mother had lived under the callous weight of her regnant husband for thirty years. She was a kind soul and, well, a love child of the sixties who danced at Woodstock and believed in global peace, in a world devoid of strife, cruelty, and hate. Audrey’s analytical mind knew that such things as railguns did not exist in her mother’s Elysian world, but she never forgot her placid words, in the quiet months before the tumult when her father came home after sea duty.

“But no one can live on world peace alone, can they?” said Uncle Anton, breaking into her thoughts. A discreet relationship would bring other tangible, less abstract benefits, such as a consultant’s fee, including a monthly “stipend,” an alias offshore bank account into which significant deposits would be made regularly and, most important, opekunskiy, tutorials for her prepared by Russian military experts, the North American Institute, and Kremlin staffers on strategic naval doctrine, weapons design, global forecasts, international political priorities, and economic trends. (Never mind that all intelligence services use the fiction of “tutorials” for their assets as elicitation sessions to extract even more information from their agents while giving nothing important away.)

With such a start, Audrey Rowland would become the US Navy’s rising star in military research, assuring promotion, management of entire R&D programs, and plum Pentagon billets. These kinds of assignments often led to national politics after a military career—the Senate, the cabinet, even higher. Audrey flicked ash onto the floor. She knew what was happening, yet the rewards were exactly the emoluments she coveted.

Gorelikov analyzed her in layers, like turning a baluster on a wood lathe. She was a social narcissist with an inflated sense of herself, a compensating careerist with a deep need for admiration and yet a lack of empathy for others, like her father. She was in a system that made her by definition a sexual misfit. She had been a brilliant PhD student with an orderly mind, now impressing superiors at NRL. She was not by nature reckless or impulsive, and yet she was picking up women in a Moscow hotel bar, clearly ignoring ironclad security practices stipulated for criteria countries, high-security-threat nations. Odarennost and sobstvennoye, genius clouded by ego, with the albatross of conflicted sexuality heavy around her neck. Indeed, a potent profile in a recruitment candidate. Based on his assessment of her, he doubted she would refuse his pitch and choose to face the consequences.

Audrey blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling, winding up her indignation. “Thanks for the offer, Anton, but go fuck yourself,” she said flatly, not looking at him. Gorelikov was delighted: it was just the response he’d been waiting for.

PECHENIYA—RUSSIAN TEA CAKES

Mix butter, sugar, baking powder, and vanilla. Incorporate flour, salt, and chopped almonds until dough holds together. Roll one-inch balls, place on ungreased sheet, and bake in a medium oven, but not till brown. Roll still-hot balls in powdered sugar. Let cool, then roll in the sugar again.

1

A Mole in Their Midst

Present day. Colonel Dominika Egorova, Chief of Line KR, the counterintelligence section in the SVR, sat in a chair in the office of the Athens rezident, Pavel Bondarchuk, and bounced her foot, a sign of nettled impatience to those who knew her. Bondarchuk, also an SVR Colonel, was Chief of the rezidentura and responsible for the management of all Russian intelligence operations in Greece. He technically outranked Egorova, but she had acquired patrons in the Kremlin during her career, and a professional reputation that was whispered about over the porcelain telegraph at SVR headquarters (gossip only repeated in the headquarters toilets): recruitments, spy swaps, gunfights; this Juno had even blown the top of a supervisor’s head off with a lipstick gun on an island in the Seine in Paris on Putin’s orders. Who was going to pull rank on this fire-breathing drakon? thought Bondarchuk, who was a nervous scarecrow with a big forehead and sunken cheeks.