The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel

Gorelikov flipped through the pages. “There apparently is a ferryboat to this Staten Island from Manhattan. The illegal knows how to operate in the city. I’m sure the site is secure.” He handed Dominika a small black-and-white ID photo of SUSAN, and Dominika was surprised to see an attractive blond woman with reading glasses. “This officer has been in the United States since the late nineties, she is a top pro, our best illegal. Her legend is impenetrable,” said Gorelikov, reading from the folder. “She has a position of influence—she is an editor at one of the top liberal magazines in Manhattan, widely known and respected in her profession. Her colleagues are totally unsuspecting. They have no idea they have been working beside an SVR officer all these years. It is perfect cover.

“If necessary, you may initiate contact by calling SUSAN’s sterile number from your nonattributable cell phone, but only in an emergency. Conversely, if I want to send you a message via SUSAN, she in turn can trigger a meeting by calling you. Here are the numbers, recognition paroles, and meeting schedules. Simple, straightforward.” Dominika tried to palm the photo—Benford would sell his firstborn to get his hands on SUSAN—but Gorelikov took it back.

“You’ll receive a full trip report,” said Dominika. After I brief Gable and Benford. With her SRAC transmitter damaged by the gopnik’s skull, Dominika would have to wait until she arrived in New York to rendezvous with her handlers and tell them these details.

“I have every confidence in you,” said Gorelikov, looking at his watch, an elegant, wafer-thin Audemars Piguet Millenary Quadriennium with an openwork face, the intricate movement visible, like Gorelikov’s mind, minutely whirring, oscillating, and pendulating.

New York, New York. It was a dream. Dominika—in French alias Sybille Clinard—flew from Paris to Toronto, then rode the slow Maple Leaf train down the scenic Hudson Valley, stirring the American gothic ghosts of Sleepy Hollow, and drowsy Dutchmen. Dominika had researched the city and was excited to see it all. On the train, US border agents didn’t look twice at her, and she had felt no fear. Pulling her suitcase across the concourse at Penn Station felt like home, but there were more people on the Moscow metro and the stations were grander. This rather grubby underground terminal couldn’t compare with the magnificent Kiyevskaya Station on the Arbat line, with its mosaics and chandeliers. There were shops and music here, a man with a hat was dancing for tips, and an old woman stopped and started dancing with him. Americans. Russians were more reserved, more serious, and they dressed up to go out in the city. These New Yorkers were half-naked. Dominika trudged up the stairs, pushed through the doors, came out onto the street, and stopped, frozen.

The roar of the city enveloped her like a wave, the traffic on Seventh Avenue like a river in flood, the sun blotted out by the buildings—towering, majestic, glass canyons filling the sky in all directions, an impossible concentration of them, and their mass pressed down on her. Dominika craned her neck to look up at them like a derevenshchina, a hayseed from the country, not caring. To be sure, Moscow was a city, so too Paris, Rome, London, Athens, but nothing like this. This was someplace without equal, electric and buzzing, a polestar of humanity. Dominika was like a mouse inside a violin, claws gripping tight, stunned by noise and surrounded by vibration. She shook her head. She knew the name and address of her hotel, had memorized the walking route there, and she needed to find a secure telephone to call Bratok

, but first she wanted to walk, to see everything. This great city was America, this energy, this industry, this overarching freedom. This is what she aspired to for Russia. This is why she was spying for CIA and this defined her nutro, the impossible-to-explain Russian concept of a person’s inner being.