The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel полностью

They didn’t even let her get through Customs at Sheremetyevo Airport. A small man in a suit that didn’t button straight stepped up to her in the arrivals line. A uniformed police officer stood behind him, heels together, watching Dominika’s face. A nanosecond of icy dread, then normalcy. The little man bowed and said he was from Protocol, and that a car was outside, code for “come at once to the Kremlin, the president is waiting.” On another day, the reception could easily be as cordial, until she was escorted into a reception room where young blond men—a dozen Valeriy Shlykovs—would push her down onto a straight-backed chair, an arm around her neck, and undress her while holding her arms and legs so she couldn’t swallow anything. And then take her to Butyrka Prison. Another day.

The familiar drumming of the Kremlin cobblestones filled the cloying rosewater-scented Mercedes as it sped through the crenelated tower of the Borovitskaya Gate. How many times would she hear the tires moan over these stones, the harmonic preparation before Putin’s next symphony? The car careered around the Ivan the Great Bell Tower, and past the Tsarsky Kolokol, the two-hundred-ton cracked Tsar’s Bell, never rung, never pealed, a metaphor for Putin’s regime. They traversed Ivanovskaya Square, the paved maidan guarded by the Tsarsky Pushka, the Tsar’s Imperial Cannon, an immense cast-bronze bombard never fired in war, and through the narrow Senate building gate. In the circular courtyard, dark-suited attendants waited on the front steps. In another age, they would have been dressed in strawberry pink imperial livery with pinchbeck buttons and powdered wigs.

Bathed in the pale yellow of sycophancy, the three aides—this many factotums was a notable indication of her status—led Dominika through the circular domed Catherine Hall, its colonnade rich with gilt Corinthian capitals, along endless corridors with the reflected light of a hundred crystal chandeliers, and down a final hallway with a frescoed vaulted ceiling alive with angels, cherubs, and seraphs. (What must they have seen and heard since 1917? The private apartments of both Lenin and Stalin were on this third floor.) They stopped at an inconspicuous and unadorned wooden alcove. An aide knocked softly once, opened the door, and minutely inclined his head toward Dominika. Putin’s office was wood paneled and narrow, an unprepossessing desk against the far wall. The president was standing behind the desk turning the pages of a file. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, white shirt, and red necktie. He looked up when Dominika came into the room, and wordlessly gestured that she should sit at the small table in front of the desk. She sat with her hands in her lap. The simple travel dress she had worn on the plane was barely appropriate for the Kremlin, but Dominika resolved not to care. Gorelikov was not present—that was strange—and her spine tingled. Without speaking, he sat opposite her and rested his hands on the table. His blue aura—intelligence, guile, calculation—was strong and bright.

Did he expect her to speak first? Did her performance as CI sleuth in Istanbul somehow raise suspicions? This is what Stalin used to do: summon terrified subordinates and stare at them. At least it wasn’t three a.m. in a superheated dacha.

“What happened in Istanbul?” Putin said, without preamble. I met with my CIA handler and besides dictating fourteen intelligence reports on current compartmented SVR operations, alerted Langley to the Turkish active-measures initiative designed to neuter a Western ally and abet your unholy regime. My CIA handler and I also made love after I danced naked for him in the grand salon of a Bosphorus mansion.

“Major Shlykov is a galloping egotist, whom the Americans suborned with emoluments that have yet to be determined,” said Dominika without inflection. “Line KR investigators will extract the truth soon.” She held Putin’s gaze.

“Leave it,” said Putin, waving a hand in the air. “Shlykov committed suicide in his cell last night.” Suicide? Not likely; he loved himself too much, thought Dominika. Sleep tight you bastard, you were going to blow up children in Istanbul.