The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel полностью

Zhen Gao was the daughter of a minor State-school teacher from Anxin, in Hebei Province, on the reed-choked shores of Lake Baiyangdian. Already a stunning beauty at age sixteen, Zhen caught the eye of a provincial administrator who appraised the woman’s body under the schoolgirl’s smock. He used his influence to install the young girl as a housekeeper in a State-controlled villa, took her virginity, and occasionally shared her with other municipal jacks-in-the-office to curry favor. When Zhen was eighteen, the administrator was caught taking bribes and was tried, convicted, and executed for corruption. With no patron, and an undeserved reputation as a “pleasure girl,” she was sent to Tianjin, a teeming city of fifteen million on the northeastern coast two hours south of Beijing, and enrolled in State School 2112, a training academy run by the MSS that, the file obliquely explained, trained young women in “intelligence techniques,” which included seduction, elicitation, recruitment, and blackmail. Graduates were known as Yèyīng, Nightingales.

Based on academics, performance, and an assessment of ideological aptitude, a handful of Nightingales were chosen for continued study at Institute 48 in Beijing, a classified facility in the northeastern Shangjialou District where students were trained in the use of firearms, exotic weapons, and poisons. At age twenty, Zhen was sponsored by a storefront Sino-Anglo friendship society controlled by MSS for study in the United Kingdom, both to master English and to be exposed to Western ways. Four years later, she graduated as a full-fledged seductress-assassin of the State, known as a Zhènniǎo, the poison-feather bird. Because of her excellent English and British manner, Zhen was quietly placed in a cover position as assistant general manager at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, available for assignments as required.

Bozhe, thought Dominika, reading the file, a young girl defiled by a swine, passed around the pigsty, then forced into the Chinese version of Sparrow School. Her pulse raced as she read Zhen’s life history—it was like her own. But Russian Sparrows don’t kill people, Dominika told herself, but you have, haven’t you?

Throughout the second volume of the file, Zhen now was referred to as Zhènniǎo. Dominika asked Rainy what a poison-feather bird was, and he haltingly described the mythological bird, with coal-black plumage, that fed exclusively on serpents, and whose feathers as a result were highly poisonous. One could stir a glass of wine with a single such feather to make it mortally toxic, he said. Only in China, thought Dominika.

The file documented fourteen assassinations credited to Zhènniǎo—the most recent being a drug-dealing Burmese police chief who had been poisoned with a distillate of the monkshood bloom. There had been no witnesses and no blowback connection to Beijing. Dominika turned to a pharmacological annex in the file that listed monkshood as a poisonous plant that produces aconitine, a lethal tetrodotoxin readily absorbed through the skin. Even slight contact with the delicate, purple bell-shaped flower would, between two and eight hours later, induce cardiac arrhythmia, ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation leading to respiratory paralysis or cardiac arrest. Zhènniǎo had applied the poison on the skin of the police chief blended with ylang-ylang, a fragrant essential oil used in aromatherapy.

As she watched Zhen’s Kundalini demonstration on the surveillance monitor—the entire apartment was covered by cameras and microphones in the fixtures, woodwork, and ceilings—Dominika’s heart stopped when she heard Zhen tell Nate her perfume was called ylang-ylang. That’s how they would do him. Zhen would dab him with fragrant oil spiked with the monkshood toxin during some yoga tryst, which would kill him by the next morning.

Would Nate sense the danger? Why would he? He was an operations officer on the hunt, intent on recruiting a beautiful Chinese girl. Benford and CIA had no idea of the threat; they couldn’t warn him. Dominika herself was in a screamingly perilous position. She couldn’t call CIA; she was in China. She couldn’t throw a package over the wall of the US Consulate as it was surrounded by MSS lookouts. She was constantly accompanied by MSS escorts, and the diminutive Rainy Chonghuan was always at her side. They had put her in a luxurious guest apartment one floor up, directly above this one, which Dominika had no doubt, was also humming with multiple digital microphones and lenses, making it exceedingly risky to try to leave the building and somehow make street contact on the fly with Nate who, she also assumed, was under MSS surveillance.