“No one knows about MAGNIT, besides GRU, and we won’t disseminate it, not yet, especially not after recent developments. In time, a few members of the Security Council will be briefed, but not all of them.”
“What developments?”
“We received a report from SUSAN last night. MAGNIT is being looked at by the US president to become part of his administration. Nothing specific, but it is unprecedented—the Kandidat Kremlevskogo, the Kremlin’s Candidate in Washington. MAGNIT may be offered something important. We will wait patiently and see what our harvest will be.”
“Will you brief me eventually on MAGNIT? Or shouldn’t I ask?” Be direct, confidential, a little piquant; that’s what he likes.
“Of course, once the case stabilizes,” said Gorelikov, tickled at her pluck. “The president agrees completely. MAGNIT is a political case now, a Director’s case, one he wants handled only by an illegals officer. Not you. Not me. Only SUSAN. Period.”
Gorelikov had just given her the lead to the extra pages she would have to prepare for tomorrow’s personal meeting with a Moscow Station officer: MAGNIT, the Kremlin’s Candidate. Dominika mentally drafted the additional inteclass="underline" Vienna meeting with Ri; her new Black Sea dacha; the Repina assassination; Shlykov’s urban terror plot in Istanbul; Gorelikov’s prediction that she would be given the Directorship of SVR. She was going to need a bigger thermos bottle.
Dominika was unsettled; this was too much. Putin was like a raging Siberian blizzard boiling across the steppes, headed for the little cabin, a blizzard whose icy fingers would work their way under the eaves, pry up the roof, splinter the bolted door, and collapse the walls to devour the huddled beings inside. Beregites, beware Benford, the blizzard is approaching.
PUTIN’S CRAB IMPERIAL
Combine diced red bell pepper, minced parsley, lemon juice, raw egg, mustard powder, paprika, celery salt, bay leaf, black pepper, red pepper flakes, Worcestershire sauce, mayonnaise, and melted butter in a bowl and whisk until smooth. Gently fold in lump crabmeat, spoon into ramekins, and bake in a medium-high oven until bubbly. In a separate bowl, make Imperial sauce by whisking mayonnaise, light cream, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce. Top each ramekin with Imperial sauce, butter-moistened bread crumbs, and paprika, and place under broiler until golden brown. Serve with a green salad.
13
Natural Enemies
Ricky Walters hated climbing into the trunk of a car, swaddled in a crinkly silver space blanket, knees bent to fit inside the space, his butt hard against the spare tire. The sweat would start almost immediately, partly nerves, and partly from trapped body heat. Three years ago, a defector told his CIA debriefers that the FSB, in lookout apartments across the street, scanned cars of US diplomats leaving the Moscow Embassy compound from above with infrared scopes to determine if there was a glowing heat source in the trunk, which would indicate a hiding CIA officer (Who else? The knife-and-fork set in the Department of State wouldn’t be caught dead playing these cops-and-robbers games) was trying a “trunk escape” to get black to meet a Russian agent and steal national secrets (of which there were as many in Putinstan as there had been in the cave bear days of the Soviet Union). The space blanket trapped the body heat, and through an IR scope the trunk looked cold and empty.
In midafternoon, Walters was driven out of the underground garage in the trunk of the Honda sedan of the junior consular officer (a Station colleague) by that officer’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Helen (who had herself received months of training in surveillance detection). The couple’s two-year-old twins were chattering away in rear car seats as Helen watched her mirrors through multiple turns as she headed for Smolensky Passage Mall in the Arbat, a glitzy collection of shops affordable only to the lithe wives of oligarchs and the less lithe, thick-ankled wives of government ministers and heads of industries who found their positions provided gratifying amounts of disposable income skimmed from the official coffers of the State.
A last check for the telltale trailing LADA two blocks back—negative, she was totally clear of ticks this afternoon—and Helen entered the ramp to the underground parking garage, punching in the twins’ favorite music disc—Raffi singing about the wheels on the bus going round and round to which the twins resoundingly joined in (the more noise for the FSB-planted microphone in the car the better), and which was also the “ready” signal to Ricky listening from the trunk. Helen rounded the corner of the ramp, totally screened in the gap, ejected the disc (“go” signal) to howls from the twins, popped the trunk, and pulled on the emergency-brake handle to slow the car without showing brake lights. Ricky shed the blanket, rolled over the lip of the trunk, slammed the lid, and darted through a service door up a short staircase, and out into the street. Elapsed time: four seconds. Helen smoothly continued down to park and browse the stores, pushing a two-seat stroller. On the street, Ricky wore a Soviet-style cloth cap, dirty whipcord trousers, a padded light jacket torn at the shoulder, and a pair of scuffed Duolang “acid-resistant safety shoes” imported from China.
As he walked, head down, he wedged silicone spacers between his gums and cheeks, and slipped on clear-lens eyeglasses, making himself look older and heavier. He cleared the ritzy Arbat neighborhood, entered Khamovniki District, and walked slowly along Ostozhenka Ulitsa, a broad commercial street. Halfway down the boulevard, Walters loitered at a bright-red public-phone sidewalk kiosk and checked his watch. The standard four-minute window was just opening, and Walters saw the little dusty navy Skoda hatchback approach and pull over to the curb, a box of tissues on the dash. All clear. Ricky lifted the red phone off the cradle and put it back. Clear here. He scooted to the car and got into the passenger seat, scrunching down just enough to mask his profile, and the car moved off. He felt the plastic cover on the seat, a precaution against spy dust, though his Russkie disguise clothes had been kept in the Station and were unlikely to be contaminated.
This was an agent car pickup, substantially dangerous because a recognizable CIA officer was in the agent’s vehicle, the license plates of which were as good as her name being printed in block letters on the side of the car. The reverse procedure—a case-officer car pickup—was generally preferred but there was still risk: now you had a sensitive source in a US diplomatic-plated vehicle. “Pick your poison,” Gable once told Nash and Dominika during tradecraft practice. “Doesn’t matter who drives and who gets picked up. Just fucking get there black, both of you. That’s all there is to it.”
Walters looked over at DIVA, who, his chief had told him last night, was the absolute “gold standard,” so don’t make any mistakes, not one, because if he screwed this one through a tradecraft error, he’d be muscling a floor buffer in the Headquarters front lobby, making sure the Great Seal of CIA on the terrazzo marble was nice and shiny for when his replacement reported for duty. No pressure, mind you, and have fun out there.
Walters didn’t know what to expect: a mousy librarian or a rotund administrator, but not this Venus driving the car, not the classic Hellenic profile, flower-petal lips, luminous chestnut hair piled on top of her head, concentrating on traffic, electric-blue eyes darting constantly between her mirrors. Her elegant hands held the steering wheel professionally at the ten-and-two position, and she moved through traffic aggressively, shifting smoothly out of the district, east onto the third ring road, weaving through the belching blue traffic, then suddenly off again at Lyusinovskaya Ulitsa south to the 390-hectare Kolomenskoye Park on the river. DIVA parked and they quickly walked through crowds of tourists—no one paid them any attention—past the bone-white Church of the Ascension and the fanciful seventeenth-century wooden palace of Tsar Aleksey, bristling with gables, onion domes, and bell towers. DIVA led Ricky down a steep wooded slope to a small streambed, mossy paths following the water, surrounded by thick woods. It was suddenly dark and cold—and utterly silent. A slight mist hung over the trickle of water, and Walters looked around for three hags stirring a bubbling witches’ cauldron. Ricky knew they could spend more than the requisite four minutes in this creepy wooded glen for the meeting. Good screening.