The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel полностью

At forty-nine years old, VADM Aubrey Rowland was the modern empowered woman of the twenty-first-century US Navy: brilliant, an able administrator, and decorous. She had never married—the inevitable gossip occasionally floated around, mainly among envious male peers who were still lowly captains commanding destroyer groups out of Yokosuka—but VADM Rowland otherwise was discreetly considered a benign maiden, totally dedicated to the navy and its mission. When the call went out for prospective nominees for DCIA, Rowland’s name was immediately proposed by the Chief of Naval Operations, the Secretary of the Navy, and seconded by POTUS.

There was precedent: an admiral had helmed CIA in the midseventies; it was too long ago to remember the lasting damage caused by that dour interloper’s so-called Halloween Massacre in 1977 when two hundred operations officers were fired as nonessential, followed by another eight hundred case officers through 1979, uprooting in one stroke an entire generation of experienced street veterans, most with near-native language skills, a priceless commodity. But that was thirty years ago, and today the navy would be tickled to have one of its own again running CIA, none of whose ops officers ever showed much respect to naval intelligence or NCIS, the criminal investigative service. Benford studied the admiral’s long mannish face, jutting chin, and salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a braided bun in back, but with a poufy prairie-wife curl in front that, even to Benford’s blind fashion eye, was bizarre. Rowland noticed Benford looking at her, nodded across the table, and smiled pleasantly, flashing a protruding left incisor. Okay, maybe physicist admirals don’t have to be lovely looking, especially not the brainy ones, he thought. As DCIA, she predictably would focus on the science and technology side of the house, but with luck she’d at least support a clandestine service in dire need of resuscitation.

At the far curve of the table, clearly mystified by at least two-thirds of what had been briefed so far, sat the third nominee for DCIA, Ambassador Thomas “Tommy” Vano, who had starred as a B-film actor in the 1980s (Space Rage, Maniac Brainiac), and was voted sexiest man alive in 1985, but started fading and got out of Hollywood before he permanently crashed and burned. Using modest earnings from the movies, he began buying strip malls in Florida, together with an entrepreneur brother-in-law, at the start of the nineties real-estate boom. More lucky than prescient, Vano made millions, then formed a company, a consortium of investors buying global commodities, including rare and precious metals. Over the next two decades, he followed his partners’ leads and made additional millions, several of which he donated to the right campaign, and in 2008 was named ambassador to Spain. He stayed for four years in a perpetual, if pleasant, state of mild bewilderment, where he first encountered and was transported by the wines of Rioja and caparrones, the earthy Riojan stew of white beans and smoky pimentón pepper.

Inexplicably retained by the State Department after his return from Madrid, he became Ambassador at Large for Intelligence, which meant he had a shabby office in an interior corridor at Main State, with a two-person staff, and attended countless meetings. The position had been unfilled for eighteen months, primarily because no senior State Department diplomat wanted to wet his shoes in the squishy peat bog of the spy world. But Ambassador Vano found liaison meetings with various intelligence agencies around town tolerably interesting, if not particularly demanding and as the State Department rep he was rarely asked to participate (the leper at the square dance, one NSA wit had muttered). He’d had intel briefs as Chief of Mission in Madrid, and found them thrilling, sort of like movie scripts.

However, one day Tommy Vano interrupted a discussion about strategic metals being purchased and hoarded by Moscow and Beijing, and casually mentioned that his consortium was familiar with the global commodities markets, government ministers, commercial buyers, extraction mines, and stockpiles. All of it. From that day, he had a seat at the table and, despite being more affable than discerning, was accepted as a subject-matter expert.