The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Two good pieces of news greeted them the next morning: A Moscow Station case officer had successfully delivered DIVA’s communications desk lamp without a problem (a Russian support asset passed the package to DIVA as she retrieved her coat from the cloak room of a fancy restaurant by actually giving it to one of her bodyguards to carry to the office) and Counterintelligence Division had already received a test covcom message from DIVA, indicating that the equipment was in place and working perfectly. A second message (from the Pentagon) informed CIA that the body of an unidentified Russian citizen had been buried at sea; his weighted canvas body bag had slid into the Black Sea from under an American flag, while being saluted by an honor guard of US sailors. Benford forwarded the snippet to DIVA in Moscow, with grim satisfaction.

The initial tranche of intel reports from DIVA’s covcom lamp were astounding in their unique perspective and extreme sensitivity. Security Council minutes, weekly meetings with Bortnikov of the FSB concerning counterintelligence cases against foreign embassies, President Putin’s executive-committee meetings, the agendas of which indicated he was already worried about an increasingly dissatisfied working-class, and the upcoming Russian elections, Defense Council minutes regarding solid-fuel missile technology shared with Iran and North Korea; the latest statistics from the Central Bank of the Russian Federation noting endemic economic dysfunction, warning of imminent financial stagnation; and Kremlin reaction to enhanced cooperation among North Asian allies with Washington against Chinese expansionism in the Pacific, and against chronic North Korean misbehavior. Plus, of course, DIVA’s usual fare—a weekly executive summary of SVR operational activity worldwide. “A hundred case officers working for ten years couldn’t collect this kind of intel,” crowed Benford. He ordered four separate reporting compartments established, so that the bulk of DIVA’s intel would appear to have originated from multiple sources.

In Moscow things were less jolly. Putin had convened a small meeting in his private conference room with Bortnikov, Patrushev, and Dominika after more specific stories about the arrest of a US Navy admiral for espionage broke in the US press. Dominika expected to be the main focus of President Putin’s ire, given that it was she who had argued for a looser counterintelligence net to identify CHALICE, with the unhappy result that the presumed real mole (Gorelikov) had escaped and defected. Now with the arrest of MAGNIT, the opportunity to destroy CIA was lost. But Putin raved at the three of them equally, his blue halo luminous with emotion. During most meetings, he rarely raised his voice when berating the incompetents who ran his State industries, or who mismanaged sectors of his economy, or who siphoned off billions from companies at the cost of efficiency and productivity. But he was yelling tonight.

This evening the president told Patrushev, “Negó kak ot kozlá moloká,”

that he was as useless as tits on a bull. He told a scandalized Bortnikov, “Mne nasrát’, chto ty dúmaesh,” that he didn’t give a fuck what he thought, and turning to Dominika, said her work was “porót chush,”

literally dog shit. He glared at them as they sat silently around the mahogany conference table with the inlaid Soviet star, telling themselves these blasphemies could not compare with the disciplinary actions that would have been meted out in the thirties by the black Vozhd, the Master, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Comrade Stalin.

Sitting at the table with her hands folded in front of her, Dominika took it as a positive note that she was receiving the president’s scorn in equal measure with the other two. This suggested that Putin considered her a full and equal member of the Big Three on the Council. If so, this would be an important indicator to pass along to Benford regarding her elevated status. Perhaps Putin calculated that, with Gorelikov defected to the West and presumably advising CIA in all things, he needed Egorova’s cosmopolitan outlook to counter continued American depredations. No one on either side of the old Iron Curtain ever forgot that British traitor Kim Philby, apart from his epic betrayal of MI6, had for the subsequent twenty-five years after his defection to Moscow in 1963 frequently briefed KGB audiences to explain the national idiosyncrasies and cultural vulnerabilities of Britons and the British Secret Service. The really good defectors keep talking for decades, and the men all assumed Gorelikov would do the same.