The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Dominika stepped slightly right as Number One reached out to grab her. He smelled sour—urine, beer, tobacco, and pigsty. She covered the top of his right hand with her left hand and bent his wrist down and back. He howled as Dominika pivoted with him to the left, blocking Number Two, then continued pivoting to swing Number One, on his toes with pain, into Number Three in a tangle of legs and arms. She held on to Number One’s wrist and turned him again into Number Two, foreheads cracking together. Number Three was coming in fast, his arm raised above his head. Knife. Leaning back, Dominika turned Number One into the line of the downward slash. The blade flensed down the side of Number One’s shaved head and cut his ear off at the root. Dominika let the bellowing Number One drop to the ground holding his head, his neck black with spurting blood. She instantly stepped forward with a corkscrew punch, driving the three keys clamped between her right knuckles into the right eye of Number Three, feeling ocular fluid spurt over the back of her hand. She raked the keys out of the eye socket, across his nose, and into his left eye, a glancing blow. Maybe he’d still be able to see out of that eye later. Number Three collapsed shrieking Suka, covering his bloody face with trembling hands.

It had taken three seconds, and two of them were on the pavement writhing amid gouts of spattered blood, but Number Two was almost on her, and she knew if he knocked her down, all three would swarm her, maddened by their pain, and slam her skull against the concrete until they saw gray brains in the streetlight. Without thinking, Dominika dipped her shoulder as she grabbed the leather handles of her purse, and swung it in a flat arc into the left temple of Number Two. The four pounds of steel-bodied SRAC components sewn into the bottom of the tote bag hit skull bone with a flat metallic sound. Number Two wobbled, and sat down with a thump, cross-eyed.

Breathing hard, Dominika looked at them on the sidewalk, one facedown and unconscious, the other curled up and whimpering, the third still sitting up, staring but not seeing. These three roaches had come close to ruining everything, to exposing her, to sending her to the basement room in Butyrka Prison with the pine-log wall designed to catch ricochets, and the drains in the sloping, brown-stained cement floor placed to sluice away the fluids of the executed prisoners. Five years of unimaginable risks, of narrow escapes, of precious intelligence—measured in linear feet—passed to the Americans, of countless meetings in countless safe houses, only to be nearly unseated by three besotted gopniki

two blocks from her apartment. This was another charming part of her Russia too, these louts who were as indolent, and cruel, and predatory as Putin’s inner circle sitting in the jeweled halls of the Kremlin. They were the same cancer. She risked her life, and tonight they had almost ended it. She could be in a freezing cell awash with sewage, or dead and staring out of a cardboard coffin with a cloth tied under her jaw to keep her mouth closed, these animals . . .

In a rage, Dominika stepped up to the dazed punk, set her feet, and swung her stiffened arm under his chin and into his throat—a Spetsnaz killing stroke—fracturing the hyoid bone and rupturing the larynx. He fell backward and began gasping, eyes staring at the top of the trees.

“Ublyudok, bastard,” said Dominika, watching his legs jerk.

She was still shaking so badly three minutes later that the sticky apartment key skittered over the lock before she could open the door with two hands. She left the lights off except for a small lamp near the front door. Her skirt was spotted with something dark and wet. The SRAC message downloaded to her laptop blinked once, flashed green for two seconds—she read the word “Istanbul”—then it went black, with the words “error 5788” appearing on the screen. Chyort

, damn it! The gopnik’s head apparently was harder than the components. Now she would have to trigger a cringingly dangerous personal meeting with an officer from Moscow Station—Why couldn’t Nate come to meet her?—to exchange the damaged equipment for a new SRAC set.

She left her clothes in a pile on the floor, kicked off her shoes, and looked at herself in the mirror. The skin between her knuckles had been torn by the keys, and her hand throbbed. The little lamp cast a shadow over the curves of her body. Five years was a long time. Her figure was softer now, her rib cage didn’t show, and her breasts were fuller. Thank God her stomach was still flat, and her hips had not spread to all points of the compass. The French bikini wax had been a silly impulse, but she was getting used to it. She was satisfied that her legs and ankles were slim.