The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Dominika had done a little research on Iosip Blokhin. He had served five years in Afghanistan, where in his twenties he led the Spetsnaz Storm 333 assault in 1979 on the Tajbeg Palace to depose Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, killing more than two hundred presidential bodyguards. Unofficial reports documented that he had hung the naked body of the president’s mistress from the balustrade of the palace balcony as a message to the people of Kabul: the Soviets were now in town. Blokhin then reportedly swung the president’s five-year-old son by the heels against the wall, resolving any questions regarding primogeniture.

But Blokhin was neither a hallucinating veteran nor a psychotic executioner. Dominika was surprised to read that after the war, Blokhin completed noncommissioned officer’s command school, trained with fraternal Special Forces units abroad, learned Vietnamese, and wrote a well-received article on small-unit tactics that had been accepted and included in a classified edition of the newsletter of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Frunze Military Academy. And he showed black bat wings of evil. Savage or savant? She’d have to take care.

Blokhin and Gorelikov, two ends of the spectrum. Dominika looked out the curtained window over the crenellations onto Red Square and the onion domes of St. Basil’s cathedral and the just-visible roof of Lenin’s mausoleum, hard against the Kremlin wall. The wax mummy of V. I. Lenin under glass in that flowered bier no longer influenced events in Novorossiya, Putin’s New Russia, but she wondered whether Gorelikov stood at this window and telepathically communed with Lenin and the other visionaries in repose just below in the Kremlin necropolis—Suslov, Dzerzhinsky, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Stalin, the Vozhd

, the Master of Mayhem. Did they speak to him from the grave? Did they coach him in the tenets of deceit and betrayal? Gorelikov found the folder, and came around his desk to sit beside Dominika in a matching armchair.

They spent the next two hours discussing the mission, which Dominika did not need—she could put together an ops plan in her sleep. No, this was Gorelikov co-opting her, drawing her close, offering his affinity and support, she knew. She remembered what Benford had once told her about Kremlin allegiances: Soviet officials used to say that the beginning of one’s ruin was the day one became Stalin’s favorite. Gorelikov gazed up in thought at the chandelier above his head as Dominika spoke. Like every chandelier in the Kremlin, it was wired with a tiny 24-bit/48 kHz digital microphone in the bobeche, the fluted glass cup from which the crystal pendants hung, so she was speaking to the president at the same time.

She would fly from Paris to Toronto and travel by rail on the Maple Leaf down the Hudson River Valley. US Immigration controls were not as stringent at train stations as at airports. The next matter of business: communications.

Dominika’s primary mission was to pass two special, 256-bit encrypted EKHO phones to SUSAN designed by Line T to synchronize only with each other, and to defy geolocation by frequency hopping simultaneously between cell towers. SUSAN would give one of the phones to MAGNIT during a personal meet, and the secure commo link would be established. With the delivery of the EKHO phones, MAGNIT, henceforth, would communicate only with SUSAN, an untraceable person, an anonymous American citizen, unknown to the FBI or CIA. Even if personal meetings occasionally were necessary, security would be preserved.

During her time in the United States, Dominika would have no way securely to communicate with the Kremlin from an official installation—the rezident

in New York City at the Russian Consulate on East Ninety-First Street was not briefed and would be unaware of Dominika’s presence in the city. She would be on her own, a point that displeased Shlykov and moved him to insist that Blokhin stay close. Not likely, she thought.

Gorelikov handed Dominika an envelope with a description of a meeting site located on an island off the coast of New York City called Staten. “An island?” asked Dominika. “How do I get there to meet SUSAN?”