The Seventh Floor, page 17
“Blyad,” Rem muttered. Bloody hell. He did not know it, but he was sitting so far forward, stooped over the ops note, with only his toes remaining on the floor, that he looked like a hunchback ballerina. His face was a mere inch from the document—and that was not only because his eyesight was fading. If anyone had walked into the reading room at that moment—which would not happen, only three SVR officers possessed the fingerprints to unlock the door—they would have mistaken Rem for a calm yet avid and engrossed reader. Nothing suggested that beneath the surface Rem was stuffed with an anxiety flooding into rage. He sat up for a moment, realizing he had been failed by his sentimentality, and perhaps his greed. He cursed himself. “I should have killed him,” Rem murmured, fastening the rubber reading thimble tighter on his thumb, before flicking over to the next page. “I should have killed him.”
“An investigation run by Artemis and Sam places everything we are working toward at risk,” wrote Dr. B, “but I do believe we have options.” Dr. B said Samuel could be shoved out. “He is an emotionally damaged officer stuck at a desk at Headquarters, and will not be missed. But Procter is a different animal.” Much of the reasoning here rested on Procter being, as Dr. B described, “a pain in the ass of world-historical proportion, a woman who will not rest until she is satisfied, and who, despite her mistreatment, seems to harbor a slavish devotion to CIA because she has nothing left but her sense of duty. For much of her career this was an asset. Now it is a glaring liability.” Dr. B had appended Procter’s and Samuel’s phone numbers and the physical addresses on file with the Agency’s HR and alumni relations departments.
And here, at the end, even Rem had to admire the cold depths of Dr. B’s commitment to the cause: the SVR’s crown jewel asset was laying out a compelling case that the surest method of safeguarding “the security of our strategic partnership” was to “forcibly silence” an old friend and a recently imprisoned colleague. “Wherever my mission has collided with my friendships,” concluded Dr. B, “I have chosen the mission.”
The Americans glamorized black work. Their spy movies, which Rem had consumed compulsively during tours in Rome and London, featured jet-setting assassins in tuxedoes, diabolically clever technology (“Too cutesy,” he’d snarl, and Ninel would bop his shoulder and tell him to hush), and beautiful women spilling out of too-tight dresses.
The Americans saw black work this way, Rem thought, because they’d not been forced to shoot dozens of traitors through the neck; their political strongmen had as of yet refrained from poisoning rivals or gunning down dissidents in daylight, broad or otherwise; in America it was uncommon for politicians to fall to their death from balconies. Not that their hands were clean. No, the Americans had spent the decades after 9/11 killing their adversaries in foreign lands, often pulling joysticks, not triggers. At such distances one could afford to glamorize a business.
But in Rem’s experience black work was a pudgy former convict in an ill-fitting suit shoving a drugged man from a third-floor window; it was an underpaid civil servant slathering poison in someone’s underpants; it was a heroin-addled former gangster from Piter stabbing a journalist to death in her apartment for sums equivalent to a few weeks’ pay.
Rem had no appetite for this work. In truth, he considered it beneath him. He was an artist, not a thug. But Rem was not squeamish. He understood that sometimes the solution to a problem was death. And in this case, he believed it necessary because Dr. B was at risk, and Dr. B was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Russian Federation. Billions, even, according to the higher-end estimates from the analysts.
He supposed the Americans would also believe that a Russian decision to kill someone would be made by the President, in a wood-paneled room at the Kremlin, in dramatic fashion. This had not once been his experience. More than anything the process was marked by its vagaries, its lack of clarity. You had to discern the deep things of such conversations. You had to scrape the meaning out from under the words.
Rem, seated in the SVR Director’s anteroom, rubbed his fingers; arthritis was acting up that morning, as if anticipating the brittle cold of the coming winter.
The Director’s aide put down his phone and said: “Rem Mikhailovich, you may go in now.”
Easing up from the tired blue chair, Rem trudged into the Director’s office. There had been a time when Rem wondered if he might occupy this space, but long ago he’d realized that the Director’s chair required its occupant to forfeit the actual work to play politics, and he could not bring himself to make the sacrifice. You wouldn’t have succeeded if you’d tried, Ninel would say. She was right, of course.
The Director’s office was situated on a corner of the Forest’s executive third floor. Picture windows covered the exterior walls, affording expansive views of the woods sprawling across the campus. The birches had flared to bright orange; many were already stark-naked in preparation for winter, Rem’s sixty fourth. He eased into a seat; for some reason the damn cushions at the Director’s table were thin as sandpaper, and about as scratchy. The Director took his own chair, tapping his thick fingers on the glossy wood. “Rem”—he cleared his throat, the signal a lecture was coming—“we, you, rather, designed the Special Section to avoid the very situation we now find ourselves in. Our top asset is in danger because of leaks. First Singapore. And now this.” Rem saw the Director had a note in his hand, sliding it idly back and forth across the table.
Rem jostled his crotch into a more comfortable position. He’d begun to wonder if the Director—or even the President himself—had accidentally let slip Dr. B’s identity in front of Golikov before Singapore. This, though, could not be said aloud, much less investigated. From this opening, Rem could not figure how the meeting the Director had held that morning with the President had gone. Did they want a scapegoat? Or did they want the problem solved?
“I agree with you,” Rem said. “And if I could go back and do it again, I would shoot Samuel Joseph. But as it stands, we cannot, which is why I have proposed shooting him and his friend now.”
“But you recommend starting with the friend, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And why is that?”
“Because she is the only one capable of piecing it all together.”
The Director’s eyes twinkled with mirth, and he slid the note back and forth once more on the table before shoving it to Rem, who put on his reading glasses. The margins were blank, there was no signature, the few paragraphs that Rem and the Director had penned together were maddeningly unedited.
When he looked up, the Director’s hands were folded across his chest. “The President wouldn’t mark it up, much less sign it. We had a very general conversation about the rules of the game with our American friends right now, and the aggressive shift this would mark in our posture on their soil. The President is keen to do what is required for Dr. B, he understands the grave risks to our top American asset—his words, Rem, and you know he reads every scrap of intel the good Doctor is providing—but when I pressed the memo into his hands he simply took it, read it, and handed it back to me. He would not say yes. He would not even nod.”
Rem grunted, flapped his tie against his shirt, and folded his arms across his own chest, mirroring the Director. “But did he say no?”
24
MOSCOW
Rem slid an alka seltzer into his water and watched Gennady patrol the bookshelves. His former protégé was now also a general, head of Directorate S (Illegals), because Rem was of an age where all your old friends and enemies were the ones running the place. Unlike Rem, as Gennady had aged his hair had thinned. His shirts were perpetually untucked, his hair mussed. He’d considered pursuing an academic career prior to the Forest, and still carried the sartorial preferences of a university man. Gennady took his first tentative sips of tea as he wandered along the shelves, scanning the titles with mild amusement. “Your poetry selection is thinning out, Rem,” he said, plucking a history of the United States from one of the shelves. “Your library is becoming too . . . practical.”
“And I am getting old, Gennady. There is a correlation.”
“Aren’t we all.”
Rem’s office was spacious but sparse. His desk had been used by Lenin for a season during the Civil War, but otherwise the furniture was soulless: a circular table, chairs, a tired couch running along the window that he used primarily to store books. The shelves lining the available wall space were groaning with them. He’d long ago hit capacity.
“What are you reading these days, then?” Gennady said, flipping open a memoir written by George Tenet, a former Director of CIA.
Rem shifted in his chair. His arthritis had worsened as the day ground along. He’d felt brittle and achy putting on his suit; now his bones creaked from the mere act of sitting still.
“Your case files,” Rem said.
“I see,” Gennady said, sliding the book back onto the shelf and joining Rem at the table. He cleared his throat. “Is there a problem?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. I need some black work managed. And I’m looking for a particular profile.”
“And you don’t want to use the Vympel . . .”
“Oh, you know how it will go,” Rem growled, flicking his hand in the air. “It will be echoes of the preparation for Singapore. Bunch of goddamn meetings to figure out who will do it: us or the cousins or, god help us, the bats at the GRU’s Aquarium. This time we will lose weeks on ridiculous meetings alone. How long, then, to infiltrate a team into the States that doesn’t require us working through mobsters and the cartels? That is time we do not have. And in the end, in any case, we risk such clownish buffoonery as we saw in Salisbury, in Bulgaria, and in the mess with Navalny. I understand that sometimes the warning, the theater is the point, but not here. I don’t need poison in someone’s Jockeys. I need a problem solved.”
“Have you found any of my cases interesting?” Gennady asked.
“MICKEY and MINNIE,” Rem said. “Your American volunteers, the patriots we discovered online before cultivating them in the flesh.”
“They’ve never done black work before,” Gennady said flatly.
“Their file says otherwise.”
“They freelanced,” Gennady interjected. “She freelanced. We did not ask her to do that.”
“Well, in any case,” Rem said, “they seem to be eager. The type that might say yes.”
Gennady was staring through the bookshelves behind Rem. “And as you doubtless saw in the notes, the case hasn’t progressed much because, quite frankly, we’re not sure what do with them. Their access is . . . peripheral.”
“And the woman is . . .” Rem said.
Gennady looked up, as if the elusive description lurked on the ceiling. When the words came to him, his lips parted into a thin smile. “A budding patriot.”
Rem laughed. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots, if I might quote their Jefferson. Eager patriotism is just what we require.”
“And tyrants,” Gennady said. “Mr. Jefferson also felt their blood was required.”
“Well, based on your files, I would wager MICKEY and MINNIE are sufficiently patriotic. There should be no need for such excess. The blood of patriots, that should be enough.”
“The security footage in the file, Rem. Did you actually watch it?” Gennady inquired with a thin smile, his gaze returning from the ceiling. His academic sensibilities, Rem thought, sometimes made Gennady appear apprehensive, tentative, passive.
“No, my friend, I merely read the summary,” Rem said. “I am an old man. Sleep is difficult enough already.”
It had been at least a decade since Rem had stayed up all night planning an operation. On the drive home from Lefortovo he nodded off in the backseat and awoke, head heavy, to the lurch of the driver braking outside his Khamovniki apartment. Ninel was at the kitchen table in her robe, her wet gray hair pinned up in a towel, sipping tea while reading a magazine. The kitchen smelled of burned toast and her shampoo.
Standing, she planted a kiss on his forehead and put on water for tea. Rem flung the suit coat over a couch in the living room and stared for a moment at the obscene number of missed calls on his phone. He powered it off. He required a few hours of rest. He had to be able to think. It was his only advantage. He joined Ninel at the table, where she was steeping his tea. “Some toast, my dear?” she said. “Or selyodka? Let me fix you something.”
“No, thank you, my love,” he said. “Just tea. I am too tired to eat.”
They sat for a long while in a companionable silence. “I am proud of you, Rem,” she said. “Do you feel proud?”
“I feel exhausted.”
“Don’t be sarcastic. You are not handsome anymore, so you cannot be sarcastic. Now you must be sweet, gentle, and thoughtful to hold my attentions.”
He sipped at his tea with a widening smile. “I’m still quite handsome, I am told.”
Ninel arched one of her painted-on brows and snorted, mouth bending into a crooked smile. Taking her teacup in her hands, she fixed him with a stern gaze: “It doesn’t suit you to be cocky, Rem. It never has.”
He yawned. “My looks are my one indulgence Ninel,” he said wryly. “Humor me.”
She rolled her eyes and said: “I would, but that rumpled suit says otherwise. What were you doing all night? Should I be jealous, given how allegedly handsome you are?”
He’d found his appetite; he eased up and stood at the counter, where he parachuted bread into the toaster. “All of the young girls helping me plan the operation were ugly dimwits.”
Ninel smiled, generously refraining from a reminder that through the years their various infidelities had but one thing in common: whether they had been twenty or fifty, trysts had occurred with lovers their own age. The young were not necessarily to be feared above the old, at least not when it came to the Zhomov marriage bed. Still smiling, Ninel opened her magazine and languidly turned the pages, letting the conversation fizzle out.
Rem ate his breakfast and finished another cup of tea. Ninel leafed through her magazine with a breezy disinterest. With each casual flip of a page Rem could sense that she had things to say but was holding her tongue. “Out with it, love,” he said. “Tell me.”
The magazine slapped shut. She regarded him thoughtfully for a few significant seconds. “Italy was such fun. And do you know why?”
“The pasta.”
“Because it was all in front of us.”
“Youth has that quality.”
“You are going to be bored when they don’t call you away late in the night,” she said. “I fear that boredom for you. It will make you even more insufferable. You will become a grumpy, irritable old man who waits by the phone for the youngsters to call and ask for his advice.”
“It could be worse,” he said. “Imagine if no one wanted to call.”
“I look forward to that day,” she said.
“I’ll find a hobby when they run me out.”
She laughed. “Like what?”
“Drinking.”
“You haven’t had a drink since Pyotr was born. You are not so good at drinking.”
“Maybe carpentry, then? I will make you a rocking chair.”
“You will cut your fingers off with a saw, Rem. And then I will have to change your diapers. No, no, that will not do. I think it is too late for hobbies.” She went back to her magazine. He finished his toast, set the plate in the dishwasher, and as he’d picked up the suit coat from the couch he could sense her presence behind him. He turned to her. She kissed his forehead and took the suit coat from his hands. He lay down for a nap on the couch, setting the alarm for three hours so he could return to the Forest by lunchtime. He drifted off to the sight of Ninel ironing the suit coat. She was whistling a song he did not know.
25
GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
Petra Devine’s home was buried in a pine forest outside Gettysburg. Thin reeds of sunlight reached the dirt through the trees. The yard was needles, the drive a minefield of pinecones. The house was one-story and timbered with an American flag hung on a pole stretching from the roof. Procter knocked three times and stepped back. Dogs barked for a while. She knocked again, and now could hear Petra’s shouts mixing with the barks. The door opened to a slit, chain lock still in place. Confirming every instinct Procter had about this visit, why she’d put it off for long as she could, Petra met her own half smile with a severe frown that buckled into a look of abject disgust.
“They sent you? For what?”
“To kill you.”
The dogs set to barking, though only one of them had the nerve to stick its nose through the door, a little hairy wiener dog yipping away in a nagging tone similar to that of its owner. Blijf! Blijf! Petra shushed them in Dutch. Blijf! The door was still open a crack, not that the chain would hold if Procter threw her shoulder into the wood.
“I told those clowns on my last day,” Petra said, after the dogs finally shut up, “that if they were going to kill me, they should damn well contract a handsome gigolo to do it. Send me to the afterlife satisfied and in style. Instead, they sent you.”
“I can rise to the challenge, hon,” Procter said. “Don’t tempt me.” Procter put out a hand toward a dog peering through the crack in the door. Sniffing her, it backed into the house. “And I wouldn’t say they sent me. This is a shade unofficial. The kind of visit various seniors might be in the dark about.”
“I had heard you skipped town,” Petra goaded.
“I took my talents to Florida. I’m the chief of operations at a place called Gatorville. Third largest alligator-themed amusement park in Central Florida, if you can believe it.”
“They didn’t send you? Gus? Theo? Mac? Or maybe Deborah Sweet, dat pokkenwijf? You swear it?”
