The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel полностью

Using a kitchen towel to grasp the handle, Nate took the pan out of the oven and put it on a hot pad on the table. He laid out two bowls, silverware, and napkins. Dominika looked at him after the first bowl and nodded. “It is very good,” she said. “You cannot taste the garlic.” Without thinking, she reached for the still-oven-hot handle of the pan to spoon some more into her bowl and whipped her hand off with a cry of pain, holding it against her chest. Nate took her hand—there was a crimson burn on her fingertips—and held them against his earlobe. She looked at him in amazement.

“The earlobes are filled with blood, which draws the heat, like a diffuser,” he said.

“Where did you learn this?” said Dominika. “Who are you?” Nate smiled and kept her hand against his ear.

“It feels better,” said Dominika. “But it still hurts. I burned my palm too.”

Nate led her to the sink and ran cool water over her hand, then switched to warm after a minute, to encourage circulation, he explained. He held her hand under the water, their faces inches apart, shoulders and hips touching. A single tear ran down her cheek and her bottom lip quivered. Their eyes met, and Nate’s hand closed gently over hers. “I’ll always protect you,” he whispered. Dominika put her good arm around his neck, pulling his head closer, his purple aura enveloping her.

“Dushka, dearest,” she said. “I will always love you.” She moved her mouth to his, but stopped an inch away, waiting. He brought his mouth onto hers. She held him tightly and sighed.

A burned hand did it. The fractured levee of their resolve having collapsed under the floodwater of their passion, Dominika grasped Nate’s wrist as if she feared he would escape, and led him up the marble staircase to one of the peacock-blue bedrooms. She stood stock-still, her eyes closed, and felt him undress her. Dominika gently pushed Nate onto the bed and showed him No. 47, “Ships passing in the night.” Her breath was hot on his thigh as she finally quivered and whispered da, and rolled off him, groaning.

Nate lost count of how many times Dominika stuttered da, da, da that golden afternoon, her wild hair spread on the pillow, her breasts heaving, her arms hugging herself to stop the convulsions. They dozed, but woke up hungry and Dominika rummaged around in the massive armoire in the corner of the bedroom for something to wear and emerged wearing a fitted nightshirt (courtesy of Blanche Goldberg of Hollywood) that apparently had been fashioned out of a seine net. Nate said it was fine—everything was visible beneath the fine mesh—and they tiptoed downstairs in the dark, the shadowy salon lighted only indirectly by the automatic lanterns on the pier outside. The central fountain splashed quietly. They ate cold chicken stew in the dark, sharing a fork, and she wiped his mouth with her thumb and kissed him, and they drank out of the same wineglass, and finished the bottle. Dominika looked at him with luminous eyes.

In the living room, Nate found a cabinet with an old-fashioned turntable and a stack of LPs and Dominika said, “that one”—Schubert piano waltzes—and Nate sat in the dark while Dominika stood in the moonlight, pinned her hair up, and pulled the shirt over her head. She was moon-bright naked, eyes closed, and motionless in profile, something Minoan on an amphora, listening to the music, seeing the capering stepladders of colors in the air. She started dancing, slowly at first, then with strength, up on the balls of her feet, her calf muscles bunching, hands allongé and delicate, following the colors. He watched her rib cage expand, the scars crisscrossed silver in the moonlight, marking with an X the position of her heart. The cords of her neck stood out when she bent her neck.

Distracted by her private ecstasies, Dominika did not notice that Nate’s aura in the darkened living room was agitated and unsettled. It was typical of him that, as he watched her glistening form, he began thinking of Gable. As he watched his music-box ballerina twirl in the middle of the room, he told himself he had once again betrayed Gable’s trust, only it was worse now that he was gone. Not even the latest intel and DIVA’s growing status in the Kremlin justified his debility.

And there would be increased danger for Dominika. The initiative with the Chinese would have analysts buzzing for months, and they would have to exercise relentless source protection: CIA would soon begin receiving details about the SVR-MSS liaison that could only come from her—immensely dangerous. The initiative with the MSS had the familiar Soviet whiff of an unknown plot about to be hatched, like the undefinable smell of dead possum under the bed.

And there was the matter of the mole in Headquarters. If MAGNIT read a list of the premier Russian agents currently working in Moscow, DIVA would be lost the minute Line S received the report.