The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel полностью

These were important intelligence tidbits, but she could not report them to Langley for lack of functioning SRAC equipment. Last weekend, she had buried the SRAC gear damaged in the fight with the street toughs in a hole in Vorontsovsky Park, ten kilometers outside the ring road southeast of Moscow, on the forested grounds of the abandoned eighteenth-century neo-Renaissance Vorontsov-Dashkov Manor. It would be decades before the excavations for the high-rise developments inexorably spreading out from Moscow would reach this far, and by then the city might well be renamed Putingrad, with homeless zombies roaming the dystopian suburbs. By then she hoped she would be lying on a sun-drenched veranda somewhere tropical, sipping rum while Nate painted her toenails Island Pink and, maybe, she dreamed, with a little girl at their feet chattering to her dolls in Russian and English. Would my children be synesthetes? What would Nate say after all these years of keeping the secret? Would we be happy together? Will it ever happen?

Dominika instead minutely printed her report in pencil on both sides of two sheets of water-soluble paper—it would dissolve to mush instantly on contact with liquid—and rolled the sheets into a tight tube. She unscrewed the bottom of a clunky Russian Pukat-brand thermos bottle and slid the paper into the narrow space between the interior glass vacuum chamber and the plastic outer case. In an emergency, throwing or whacking the thermos against a hard surface would shatter the inner-glass chamber, flooding the space between the outer shell, rendering the paper the consistency of ovsyanaya kasha, Russian oatmeal. If you had to use this prehistoric destruction device (Nate had showed it to her in Finland), you already were probably stopped at the roadblock about to be carted off, but it was effective. The personal meet was in two days, and pray God they’re sending someone smart. She fantasized it would be Nate coming out of the shadows to wrap her up and kiss her forever in the fog-shrouded woods.

Then the inevitable courtly call from Gorelikov, welcome back, congratulations on the meet with SUSAN, and the president would see them this afternoon at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow in the Odintsovo District on the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway. The yellow mansion, nestled among pines, with its classical peaked façade and four Corinthian columns, seemed small and modest when compared with the regal apartments of the Kremlin. They were shown into a living room of pale blue with peach-colored satin curtains, sat at a small antique table, and listened to a clock ticking from a corner bookcase across the room. Anton Gorelikov was stylish as usual, in a tailored dark suit and starched tape-stripe shirt. Delicate ceramic cuff links in blue and green showed at his sleeves. The blue halo about his head and shoulders was like a diadem, and glowed in exultation.

They were served tea in elegant podstakanniki glasses emblazoned with the double-headed eagle of the new Russian Federation, ironically similar to the bygone imperial eagle of the Romanovs and the tsar. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, thought Dominika, The more things change, the more they stay the same. A young aide in a light-blue suit stood against the wall near the door, eerily blending into the blue paneling like some color-adaptive rain forest lizard, so that only his face was visible and seemed to be floating in the air. Dominika reflected that disembodied heads floating in the air seemed normal in a Putin residence.

The little gold and ormolu clock chimed eleven, and at that instant the door opened and the president walked in. How does he do that? thought Dominika. Was he outside the door, hand on the knob, waiting for that infernal clock to chime? Or was the clock connected to an unseen power source and made to chime as the president entered?

Vladimir Putin was, as ever, dressed in a navy suit, white shirt, and trademark aquamarine tie. His blue halo likewise was pulsing with energy. Why shouldn’t it be? He had consolidated his hold on Crimea and secured his Black Sea naval base; the rearguard action in Eastern Ukraine kept Kiev off balance; alliances with Damascus and Tehran were paying dividends politically, and he was a major player once again in the Great Game. Oil. Munitions. Uranium (ROSATOM even owned 20 percent of America’s mined uranium). And there was more.