The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel полностью

Nate’s flight to Hong Kong required an overnight stay in Los Angeles. Since the advent of commercial air, all US government employees assigned overseas were required by regulation to “fly American” to better support domestic airline companies, unfortunately at the cost of US taxpayers. This invariably resulted in not only more expensive tickets, but also inconvenient schedules, routes, and connections. But the rule was ironclad. Nate’s morning flight from Washington, DC, would arrive in Los Angeles before noon, and he would have the entire day rattling around the city. Then he thought of Agnes Krawcyk, and the white streak in her hair.

Since the mission to Sevastopol, they had stayed in touch via email and two or three uncomfortable phone calls. Agnes had wanted to visit Nate in Washington, but ops meetings with Dominika were imminent, so Nate put her off. They had spoken more frequently recently, and they’d made vague plans to see each other. Then the Hong Kong clambake came up.

Agnes had settled in coastal Palos Verdes south of Los Angeles, a semirural suburb of undulating hills and craggy oceanside bluffs covered with eucalyptus, cinnamon, and pepper trees, and populated by artists, aging flower children from the sixties, and one thousand feral India Blue peacocks. She lived in a comfortable two-bedroom Craftsman-style house, with fieldstone columns supporting a front porch and flowerpots in the windows. With art-restoration experience from her native Poland, Agnes had been hired by the Getty Museum in Brentwood as a conservator—her specialty was sixteenth-century Italian altar panels.

When Nate called Agnes to tell her he’d be in Los Angeles for the day, and to invite her to lunch, she told him to stop talking nonsense. She would pick him up at the airport, she would give him lunch at her house, where he would stay the night, and she would bring him back to the airport the next morning in time for his onward flight. That was the plan, no arguments. Ever the pro, she didn’t ask where he was going or why.

Nate struggled with competing emotions. He knew the career reprieve bestowed by Benford was dependent on his continued good behavior, and on the successful recruitment of the profligate General Tan Furen in Macao. Stopping in Los Angeles and seeing Agnes did not seem to Nate to constitute unacceptable behavior, but he was unsure if Benford would view it as recidivism. He likewise struggled with the situation with Dominika: With Benford breathing fire, and Dominika’s refusal to contemplate retirement before the unspeakable happened and she was caught, were they finished? Would they ever even see each other again, much less be together? Nate knew he loved her, that had not changed, but he faced the possibility that she might truly be out of his life as permanently as if she had been caught putting down a drop in Moscow, tried, and executed in the basement of Butyrka Prison. Mortification over his recent professional missteps had morphed into loneliness and a desire to be able to talk to a friend. Gable was gone; Benford was unapproachable; and Forsyth had his own problems as a division chief.

Seeing Agnes perhaps would be a salve to his screwed-up emotions. She was smart, brave, earthy, and, even pushing fifty, impossibly sexy. She knew the work, she knew the life, she understood. And judging by the response to his call, she still liked him. He looked forward to being with her, as a friend.

Agnes was in the brightly colored Mazatlán Mayan woven hammock hung from the overhanging eaves of her little house in her small moonlit backyard. Bamboo tiki torches, guttering and stinking of kerosene, cast jumpy shadows on the flagstone patio, and on the ferns, cacti, and flowering bushes that filled the garden. It would have been a more bucolic scene had Agnes not been lying naked across the width of the hammock with her toes hooked onto the ropes, her legs extended out in a vee, swinging the thing back and forth, each upswing bringing her mons into contact with an equally naked Nate, standing a foot away on the flagstones, braced for each collision while desperately calculating trajectory and windage for the next kinetic docking. Agnes’s head hung over the other side of the hammock as she moaned mocniej, which Nate only later found out meant “harder” in Polish, which was just as well because any harder would have knocked him backward into the ornamental fish pond.

Later, in a short belted kimono, Agnes showed Nate a wooden panel, part of a 1534 altar from a chapel in Florence that may or may not have been painted by a student of Michelangelo. She had a deadline and had been given permission to bring it home to work on it. “I’m keeping you from your work,” said Nate. Agnes smiled, shook her hair, and put her hands on his shoulders.