Nate heard Dominika coming up behind him; he caught her and steered her off the tipsy dock, and she looked out at the black winter water, screamed and bent over, and vomited on the grass. He led her back inside, splashed her face with water, pocketed the spool of wire from the recorder, rummaged around Ioana’s bedroom and retrieved her Romanian alias passport. They both knew there could be no thought of tipping the police. Professor Ri would be reported missing, but God knows how long it would be before they found him in a rental cottage on the river. Austrian state police forensics were exceedingly thorough. As he closed the front door of the cottage, Nate wiped the doorknob, thinking that between the tub, the furniture, the dishes, and dredging the river bottom under the dock, the owner would have a little spring cleaning to do before the summer rental season began.
They walked back down Laberlweg, the way they had come, Dominika’s cheeks wet with tears. As they walked, Nate half watched for Blokhin to emerge out of the Kaiserwasser in an explosion of foam, like a Nile crocodile ambushing a baby gazelle. But Nate was pretty sure Blokhin would already be halfway to Schwechat and the airport. He had knocked off Dominika’s agent per instructions, had slaughtered the safe-house keeper as a bonus, but had not waited for Egorova, probably because she had been designated a target of opportunity—take her if you can, but don’t loiter on target and don’t get arrested. Ioana’s screams had hurried him on his way. Their late arrival and the North Korean’s early appearance at the cottage probably saved their lives. Nate had no illusions about being able to fend Blokhin off in hand-to-hand combat.
Nate was shocked at the brutality of the Spetsnaz killer. He must be quite the lad. All those guys were hard cases, but this one had a screw loose. It was obvious now that Dominika was a target and in danger. Could her new Kremlin patrons protect her? Inside the palace, sure, but on the street? Opposition party leader Nemtsov had been shot on the busy Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, in the very shadow of the Kremlin’s Vodovzvodnaya Tower. One thing was for sure: Dominika was dead unless CIA could take out this Shlykov asshole and his dancing bear, Blokhin.
Dominika sagged against him, her body trembling and voice shaking. “We were in your room, making love, while she was being tortured, stalling for time, giving herself to save me,” she sobbed. “She had the courage to describe the man who was torturing her, even though she knew she was going to die. Oh, neschastnyy Ioana, poor ill-fated sister. We should have been there.”
“We didn’t know, and if we had been there, we’d be in the river too,” said Nate. “That guy wasn’t going to let anyone walk away.”
“I should have been there,” said Dominika.
Nate stopped in the middle of the pathway and shook her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. Not your fault. A little less guilt and a lot more thinking about surviving. Will this Shlykov take a whack at you in Moscow?”
Dominika shrugged and shook him off. “In the Rodina anything can happen.”
“Then fucking him up in Istanbul is critical. Will you be able to finish him if we can complicate his life?”
“If he fails and embarrasses the president, he is lost. But what will you do?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Nate. As they walked, he outlined the plan to burn Major Shlykov, and her part in the operation. She stopped crying, her eyes blazed, and she thought of Ioana.
* * *
* * *
In Washington, the ponderous process of selecting a new DCIA heated up and Langley was told to prepare for briefings for the candidates’ use during congressional testimony. Benford contemplated this requirement with unease.
The only policy position of the president that preoccupied Benford was the former’s oft-stated distrust of CIA and the president’s conviction that it was an anachronistic organization, organically prone to misdeeds and illegal acts and, consequently, overdue for demolition and a thorough reorganization. Happily, said the president, a new DCIA would begin critical reforms. To this end, the White House was putting forward three candidates for DCIA, one of whom would be selected by his staff for Senate confirmation. The unsympathetic SSCI approved the plan and ordered CIA to brief the three candidates equally in preparation for confirmation hearings. Briefing sources and methods to candidates before a formal nominee had been selected was heresy, but both the sitting director and the congressional bootlicker Duchin saw to it that division chiefs complied.
Benford sat at the end of the massive oval conference table on the seventh floor of Headquarters, sourly listening to Forsyth finish briefing the three nominees for DCIA on a sensitive EUR Division asset—the representative of the Palestinian Authority to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which case was producing voluminous intelligence on Iranian support to the PLO and Hezbollah. Forsyth’s presentation had been preceded by a briefing from Chief of Latin America Division, the garrulous Johnny Cross—with a pencil mustache and as handsome as a matinee idol—on a case in Caracas, the recruited deputy minister of Petroleum, who had developed into a gold mine of information on the moribund Venezuelan petrochemical industry, including secret payments in the billions from China to keep the spavined government afloat. Next up was Chief of East Asia Division Brenda Neff, blond, busty, and profane, who would tell the nominees about an EA asset, a captain in the Philippine navy who was providing useful assessments and imagery of the fortified atolls in the South China Sea being constructed by Beijing.
Benford wryly noted that his colleagues were briefing on important, but midlevel assets. No division chief was going to totally lift his or her skirt and give up any crown jewels, at least not yet. Duchin knew enough to suspect they were slow rolling, and when the Acting Director heard—as he certainly would from that woodpecker Duchin—the chiefs would be ordered to open the books to the nominees completely. Only a matter of time.
The three nominees sat at the opposite far end of the table, respectively bored, attentive, and mystified. US Senator Celia Feigenbaum was seething: based on her many years on the Senate Appropriations Committee, she was utterly convinced that duplicitous CIA needed to be radically downsized if not abolished, commencing with the ceding of various Directorates to the DOD, the NSA, and the FBI. If confirmed as DCIA, she was determined to clean house, and to Benford, this was a calamitous notion, made trebly astounding by the senator’s expressed view that the abiding clandestine tenets of the Agency—stealing secrets and exploiting vulnerabilities to suborn human targets—were immoral. “It’s not who we are, it’s not what America stands for,” purred the senator frequently and piously to any reporter who thrust a microphone in her face. She was a leading contender, in part because her Pecksniffian views mirrored the president’s.
The senator had arrived with her senior staff director, Robert Farbissen, and she blithely demanded he receive the same briefings as the nominees, to which Congressional Affairs Chief Duchin immediately agreed, seeing as how Rob also had TS clearances. Benford gritted his teeth; it was an outrageous concession. He knew all about Farbissen: he’d been a fixture in Washington for decades, flitting from staff to staff, wreaking havoc with his revanchist fevers and partisan distemper. Short, and squat, with a lopsided mouth and capped teeth beneath a hedge-apple nose, Farbissen triumphantly sat down at the conference table to listen to the cherished secrets from the vaults of the detested CIA. He turned to notice for the first time that Simon Benford was sitting next to him, made a face of great distaste, got up, and moved three seats away, as if Benford were “patient zero” in a plague ward. The measure of the man, thought Benford, is the distance of three seats at the table.