The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel полностью

The temperature was mild, the sky was clear, the sunlight was bright. The ornamental gate to the Moravian Cemetery was open, flanked by lush orange trumpet vines. As if she had visited this graveyard every weekend, Dominika unerringly took the left-hand path, walked past the placid lake, its surface stirred by the drooping branchlets of willows. She continued along the paved drive flanked on either side by acres of tombstones. Some of the stone markers were extravagant: twenty-foot obelisks or ziggurats topped by ecstatic angels. She passed rows of small ornate mausoleums protruding out of grassy tumuli, family names carved on the lintels. These were nothing like the outlandish headstones of assassinated gangsters, or murdered journalists, or martyred dissidents in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, with startlingly realistic images of the departed carved into the marble. Where would President Putin be laid to rest in Moscow? she wondered. Would the monsters resting in the Kremlin wall scoot over to make room for him? Or would he prefer a twenty-story porphyry obelisk on the Moscow Hills so he could gaze down on the Rodina he so energetically defended?

At Dominika’s thought of Putin, the warming sun went behind a cloud and she felt a cold shiver. The cemetery was utterly still now, no birds, no traffic noise, as if the spirits knew what was happening. The grass around the gravestones stirred; she heard whispers around her, or was that the breeze? But there was no breeze. Get a hold of yourself, she thought as she walked, keep your head, meet this bitch, and let’s complicate Vladimir Putin’s life. Dominika kept left, and followed the footpath into a dark forested section with very little sunlight. It smelled cold here, and she pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head. Her hand drifted into her purse and around the shaft of the tactical steel pen in the side pocket. She looked left and right into the trees, her Russian imagination conjuring up wolves weaving through the coppice, keeping pace with her.

She rounded a bend in the path and saw the massive wrought-iron lych-gate, the entrance to the private cemetery grounds of the Vanderbilt family. The gate was secured with a heavy-duty chain, but Dominika followed the boundary wall ten meters to the right, and was able to hitch up her dress and boost herself over. The path curved left, and the woods opened up to a grassy clearing ringed by a low-curved curb. The white-stone mausoleum at one end dominated the space. It resembled the front of a Romanesque church, with three arched doors, a tall central gable, and two conical cupolas on the roof. The crypt itself extended from the ornate façade into the earthen hill behind.

It was deathly quiet, the sun behind the clouds. Dominika stood still and watched the woods, listened to the air around her. There would have been no way for Gable to set up on this spot without spooking SUSAN. The veteran illegal knew what she was doing picking this site. Dominika checked her watch; it was time. She walked up the five curving steps to the entrance, and pushed on the central steel door with matching ornate handles. Dominika knew the crypt doors normally would be locked and probably chained, but mechanical locks posed no problems, ever. The door swung in easily, soundlessly, and a fetid breath of cold stone hit her, a coffin smell, a whiff of endless time. The dim vaulted room was flanked by wall crypts with stone coffins, and a massive tomb with a curved top and adorned with intricate carved decorations—presumably the sarcophagus of the paterfamilias—dominated the center of the chamber.

“Dobriy den tovarishch, good afternoon, comrade,” said a silky voice in Russian. Dominika willed herself not to jump. Gripping the fighting spike in her purse, she turned slowly toward the voice and saw a dark silhouette in the corner of the crypt, completely in shadow. No halo was visible in this darkness. The only illumination came from the milky bar of light through the cracked central door, keeping most of the room in darkness. “You are precisely on time, but that is to be expected from the famous Colonel Egorova.” Moscow accent, educated, but originally from the south, with a trace of yakanye, the broad vowels of the lower Volga, thought Dominika.

“Good afternoon. I am glad we could meet,” said Dominika, holding out her hand. Will you come closer to shake? The woman didn’t move, and Dominika lowered her hand.

“How much time do you have? I presume we both have to return to Manhattan tonight,” said Dominika. She had a mild goal of getting the woman to talk a little, to see what she could learn. But carefully. “This Staten Island is a strange place.” The silhouette shrugged.