“Do these chiefs know about the MAGNIT and Academician Ri cases?” Dominika asked Gorelikov when they were alone. She would meet Ri in ten days. Ioana was already in Vienna, preparing the Danube cottage. Dominika reminded Gorelikov that they’d have to prioritize cases, hoping to elicit a name for MAGNIT, but Anton was cautious.
“No one knows about MAGNIT, besides GRU, and we won’t disseminate it, not yet, especially not after recent developments. In time, a few members of the Security Council will be briefed, but not all of them.”
“What developments?”
“We received a report from SUSAN last night. MAGNIT is being looked at by the US president to become part of his administration. Nothing specific, but it is unprecedented—the
“Will you brief me eventually on MAGNIT? Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“Of course, once the case stabilizes,” said Gorelikov, tickled at her pluck. “The president agrees completely. MAGNIT is a political case now, a Director’s case, one he wants handled only by an illegals officer. Not you. Not me. Only SUSAN. Period.”
Gorelikov had just given her the lead to the extra pages she would have to prepare for tomorrow’s personal meeting with a Moscow Station officer:
Dominika was unsettled; this was too much. Putin was like a raging Siberian blizzard boiling across the steppes, headed for the little cabin, a blizzard whose icy fingers would work their way under the eaves, pry up the roof, splinter the bolted door, and collapse the walls to devour the huddled beings inside.
PUTIN’S CRAB IMPERIAL
Combine diced red bell pepper, minced parsley, lemon juice, raw egg, mustard powder, paprika, celery salt, bay leaf, black pepper, red pepper flakes, Worcestershire sauce, mayonnaise, and melted butter in a bowl and whisk until smooth. Gently fold in lump crabmeat, spoon into ramekins, and bake in a medium-high oven until bubbly. In a separate bowl, make Imperial sauce by whisking mayonnaise, light cream, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce. Top each ramekin with Imperial sauce, butter-moistened bread crumbs, and paprika, and place under broiler until golden brown. Serve with a green salad.
13
Natural Enemies
Ricky Walters hated climbing into the trunk of a car, swaddled in a crinkly silver space blanket, knees bent to fit inside the space, his butt hard against the spare tire. The sweat would start almost immediately, partly nerves, and partly from trapped body heat. Three years ago, a defector told his CIA debriefers that the FSB, in lookout apartments across the street, scanned cars of US diplomats leaving the Moscow Embassy compound from above with infrared scopes to determine if there was a glowing heat source in the trunk, which would indicate a hiding CIA officer (Who else? The knife-and-fork set in the Department of State wouldn’t be caught dead playing these cops-and-robbers games) was trying a “trunk escape” to get black to meet a Russian agent and steal national secrets (of which there were as many in Putinstan as there had been in the cave bear days of the Soviet Union). The space blanket trapped the body heat, and through an IR scope the trunk looked cold and empty.
In midafternoon, Walters was driven out of the underground garage in the trunk of the Honda sedan of the junior consular officer (a Station colleague) by that officer’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Helen (who had herself received months of training in surveillance detection). The couple’s two-year-old twins were chattering away in rear car seats as Helen watched her mirrors through multiple turns as she headed for Smolensky Passage Mall in the Arbat, a glitzy collection of shops affordable only to the lithe wives of oligarchs and the less lithe, thick-ankled wives of government ministers and heads of industries who found their positions provided gratifying amounts of disposable income skimmed from the official coffers of the State.
