In Moscow things were less jolly. Putin had convened a small meeting in his private conference room with Bortnikov, Patrushev, and Dominika after more specific stories about the arrest of a US Navy admiral for espionage broke in the US press. Dominika expected to be the main focus of President Putin’s ire, given that it was she who had argued for a looser counterintelligence net to identify CHALICE, with the unhappy result that the presumed real mole (Gorelikov) had escaped and defected. Now with the arrest of MAGNIT, the opportunity to destroy CIA was lost. But Putin raved at the three of them equally, his blue halo luminous with emotion. During most meetings, he rarely raised his voice when berating the incompetents who ran his State industries, or who mismanaged sectors of his economy, or who siphoned off billions from companies at the cost of efficiency and productivity. But he was yelling tonight.
This evening the president told Patrushev, “Negó kak ot kozlá moloká,” that he was as useless as tits on a bull. He told a scandalized Bortnikov, “Mne nasrát’, chto ty dúmaesh,” that he didn’t give a fuck what he thought, and turning to Dominika, said her work was “porót chush,” literally dog shit. He glared at them as they sat silently around the mahogany conference table with the inlaid Soviet star, telling themselves these blasphemies could not compare with the disciplinary actions that would have been meted out in the thirties by the black Vozhd, the Master, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Comrade Stalin.
Sitting at the table with her hands folded in front of her, Dominika took it as a positive note that she was receiving the president’s scorn in equal measure with the other two. This suggested that Putin considered her a full and equal member of the Big Three on the Council. If so, this would be an important indicator to pass along to Benford regarding her elevated status. Perhaps Putin calculated that, with Gorelikov defected to the West and presumably advising CIA in all things, he needed Egorova’s cosmopolitan outlook to counter continued American depredations. No one on either side of the old Iron Curtain ever forgot that British traitor Kim Philby, apart from his epic betrayal of MI6, had for the subsequent twenty-five years after his defection to Moscow in 1963 frequently briefed KGB audiences to explain the national idiosyncrasies and cultural vulnerabilities of Britons and the British Secret Service. The really good defectors keep talking for decades, and the men all assumed Gorelikov would do the same.
Putin noticed Dominika wore the pearl necklace he had given her—she wondered if Gorelikov’s DNA still lingered between the pearls—his previously thunderous expression cleared slightly, and he half smiled at her, which did not escape Bortnikov’s or Patrushev’s notice. Not good, especially if word got around that Director SVR was wearing the chemise cagoule for the president. In Sparrow School that meant they were intimate, referring to the medieval woman’s long nightgown with the demure single embroidered hole for copulation, the Middle Age precursor to crotchless lingerie. That would not do.
* * *
* * *
The night before, after their return from Cape Idokopas, the president had called on Dominika at her new apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, coming up via the underground garage elevator. He ostensibly wanted to discuss counterintelligence, but obviously the president was looking for a return bout with her. Putin was on the boil that evening—it was the day of MAGNIT’s arrest, and four days after Gorelikov’s disappearance—but his worries did not minutely affect his carpenter-like performance in bed: the presidential wood saw was again wielded steadily but without inspiration, leaving Dominika to daydream about Nate, and to wonder if she could risk visiting him in jail. He was in Butyrka Prison, but in the wing for political prisoners where inmates were treated more mildly. It did not at all mean he was out of danger; dissident attorney Sergei Magnitsky died in the same cell block in Butyrka after being beaten, then denied medical care. Dominika stilled the impulse to raise the matter of a Nash spy swap while still in bed with Putin, chiefly because the president was not susceptible to postcoital euphoria.
After sex, the evening wasn’t over, for the president uncharacteristically lingered to chat, so Dominika padded around her spacious new kitchen in a black V-neck, knee-length cotton slip with one spaghetti strap carelessly hanging off the shoulder and her hair tied with a ribbon. She didn’t wear a black satin thong underneath, in case Volodya fancied kitchen-counter sex (No. 81, “Béchamel thickens only with stirring”) before he left.
Sitting on a modern bar stool in Dominika’s deluxe kitchen of stone and wood, Vladimir Putin was content. The headlines about Audrey Rowland’s arrest did not overly concern him, as grievous a loss as it was. Lurid news like this was good for Russia’s image, was good for his image as muzhestvennyy, the virile leader who ran spies around the world. The world would know that the secret services of Russia were omniscient apex predators that could penetrate the governments of his enemies, discover their secrets, and exert his will over them. Of course, spies could suffer reverses, but Putin enjoyed seeing foreigners—governments, or companies, or individuals—moderate their behaviors in fear of his wrath. His active measures were creating lasting discord in the West, at minimal cost, and if he wanted to unseat an American politician, he had only to release an embarrassing, unencrypted email through WikiLeaks run by that languid dupe hiding in that exiguous Latin embassy in London. Partisan political hysteria now gripping American society would do the rest.
And he was having his bullish way with Egorova, a delectable bonus. He looked at Dominika’s legs as she reached for an upper cabinet and saw how the ballet dancer’s calf muscles flexed when she was on tiptoe. He did not at all mind the whispered gossip in the Kremlin already swirling in the hallways that the two of them were bedmates. No one would dare utter such gossip aloud, and it simply validated that the SVR belonged to him, just as the FSB belonged to him, just as the siloviki belonged to him.
To go with the Georgian champagne she had opened, Dominika assembled a quick Mediterranean appetizer with ingredients available only at the special government commissary on the ground floor of her building: marinated artichoke hearts with capers and olives on bruschetta under the broiler, a contorno she first tasted in Rome while meeting with Nate. They were newly in love then, and had fed each other with their fingers, giggling and drinking Asti. It occurred to her that her thoughts always returned to her Neyt. Take care lest the tsar sees it in your face.
She bent to take the tray out of the oven, feeling his eyes on her haunches. Time for her pitch. She was better at this than he was, but she had to be careful. She reverted to more formal address. “Mr. President, given the events of the last four days, I have a suggestion I would like you to consider,” said Dominika. Putin sipped a glass of champagne she had poured for him.
“I recommend that the American be moved from Butyrka to a special safe house, where he could be kept under close supervision, and where low-level interrogation by a team of minders could continue without interruption.”
Putin looked sideways at her. “Why would we spare the American the discomfort of prison?” he asked.