The Kremlin's Candidate (Red Sparrow Trilogy #3)

Director Alexander Larson owned a Georgian row house on P Street NW in DC, but on the weekends he regularly escaped to his late father-in-law’s five-bedroom ranch house near Edgewater, Maryland, on the banks of Pooles Gut, a narrow tidal creek that emptied into the South River below Annapolis, one of the hundreds of tributaries that made up the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Down the sweeping lawn from the house, there was a fixed pier alongside a paved boat-launching ramp. An extended garage behind the house contained two small boats on trailers: one a twenty-five-foot black rigid inflatable boat (RIB) with a center steering console, a Decca radar mounted on an aluminum frame aft, and two 115 hp Mercury outboards, beasts that could push the RIB along at forty knots. The RIB was used by the DCIA’s protective detail and had a waterproof locker just forward of the steering console in which were stored two .223-caliber Colt M4A1 carbines.

The second vessel at the back of the garage was Larson’s pride and joy: a seventeen-foot Lyman Runabout built in 1961, with a restored lapstrake hull, graceful flared bow, and mahogany spray rails and brightwork. The distinctive angled windshield and the jaunty Lyman pennant on the bow marked the Runabout as a classic, but not as much as the 1955 forest-green, teardrop Johnson Seahorse 25 hp outboard, an antique refurbished to flawless working order, and perfect for running the smooth-riding hull ahead of frequent Chesapeake squalls at twenty knots, or slow trolling for striped bass at nine knots. Two Shimano fishing rods were in beckets along the gunwales with expensive Tekota trolling reels. In a seat locker under the aft banquette were two tackle boxes with lures, jigs, and spoons.

Alex Larson was not a fanatical fisherman, but he enjoyed solitary time out on his boat, and loved preparing striped bass à la Fiorentina, the way he had first tasted it in Rome. His wife did not enjoy going out into the middle of the bay, which could get quite rough and make the round-bottomed Lyman pitch and roll like a floating ninepin, especially in a beam sea at lazy trolling speed. Simon Benford had once reluctantly agreed to go out with Alex, but the plunging and yawing made him green, and he detested handling live bait, so he vowed the next time to stay ashore and drink Larson’s scotch while his friend caught dinner.

At 0600 hours on a crisp fall day, the cloudless eastern sky was going pink as the two agents of DCIA’s protective detail backed both trailers into the green water of the creek. They knew Larson would be walking down from the house in fifteen minutes with a thermos of coffee, a flask of bourbon (which they knew he hid from his security guys), and a roast-beef sandwich wrapped in foil made by his housekeeper. The agents today were Bennett and Scott, each with five years’ experience on the detail and more than ten years’ time in Special Forces. They had examined the undersides of both boats for limpet mines on the keel, checked the lockers on the Lyman, and started the Johnson outboard to let it warm up. Before the Old Man came down from the house, they snapped 30-round magazines into their M4s, charged and snapped the bolts closed, safed the weapons, and put them back into the footlocker. They both additionally carried 17-round, 9mm Glock 17s in Frontier Gunleather CC1 holsters under their sweaters and foul-weather jackets—they knew from experience that once out on the bay, it could get cold and wet in a hurry. They weren’t experienced watermen, but they knew the basics.

Once afloat, Bennett and Scott spun the RIB on a dime, and skimmed ahead along the creek to make sure it was clear, the Lyman sedately following, raising hardly a wake in the early light. No one noticed the man in the pickup truck parked on the side of Waterview Drive watching through the trees as the Lyman chugged down Pooles Gut and out onto the South River.

The RIB was infinitely faster than the Lyman, even when the antique was running with the outboard full-out, so Bennett and Scott pushed the throttles flat and bounced ahead to check for traffic downriver as it opened up onto the vast Chesapeake. One of them would always keep the Lyman in sight, and periodically check the radar display set at ten miles range to keep an eye out for the heavies: the tankers and container ships plowing up the channel to Baltimore. They would then pound back to the DCIA, take station astern in a violent turn that sent spray flying in the early sunlight, and throttle back in his wake, smelling the boss’s pipe smoke even two hundred feet astern. The process of darting ahead, then racing back was repeated as required, especially if an unknown boat—runabout, cabin cruiser, or tacking day sailer—looked as if it would pass close by.

There was only one rule: the RIB had to keep off at least one hundred yards when the DCIA began fishing. The noise of the burbling Merc outboards would scare off finicky stripers in the Gulf Stream for Christ sake, not to mention around Thomas Point Shoal at the mouth of the river, or Bloody Point Bar, five miles across the bay, off the tip of Kent Island on the Eastern Shore. These two spots were Larson’s favorites—productive and not too far from home. He tied on a Slug-Go, a five-inch bone-white plastic worm with a flattened tail that made the lure undulate irresistibly to predatory stripers. He tried the rock ledge around the historic Thomas Point lighthouse: the frivolous hexagonal house on stilts with green shutters and six gables, with the Fresnel light in a pagoda-roofed cupola, like a cherry on a sundae.

No one was home around the ledge; stripers sometimes go deep and suspend, feeding on deep baitfish schools, not unlike some members of Congress, Alex thought, retrieving his lure, setting down his rod on the aft deck, and clambering over the front-seat stanchion to sit behind the wheel, a little tricky with the Lyman’s tipsiness. He cranked up the Johnson with the electric starter, eased the throttle ahead, and waved to the guys in the RIB who, bored stiff and soporific from the rocking of the waves, actually didn’t see the Lyman settle down in the water and swing east to cut across the bay to Kent Island, until the DCIA gave them two shorts and a long on the horn. Embarrassed, they escorted the Lyman across the ship channel, watching for traffic. Larson could estimate where Bloody Point Bar was by taking bearings between the breakwater of the Kent Island Marina and the collapsed seawall off Bloody Point beach. Alex kept his eye on his bearings and about a mile offshore, killed the outboard, stood in the aft deck, balancing easily against the roll, and tried a few casts with a silver spoon. Bennett and Scott in the RIB took station 150 yards upwind of the little Lyman so they’d be drifting down to it instead of away from it.

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