Palace of Treason

38

There was still a rust-colored spot on the carpet where something had leaked out of Yevgeny’s head. Zyuganov sat at his desk, staring at the spot but not seeing it. Under his hands, on the desk blotter, were the cables from Washington reporting in detail every aspect of the disastrous events of the night before. Zarubina’s CS team had described what appeared to be an ambush at the site — the source disappearing into the night, pursued on foot by two men — outcome unknown. Another cable recounted the scene at the bottom of the cascade, where medical technicians attended someone. Cable three was the consul’s report of the death of rezident Yulia Zarubina, and his visit to the District of Columbia city morgue in southwest Washington to identify her. The remains would not be released to the Russian Embassy for another day, but the consul had been able to collect Zarubina’s personal effects — wristwatch, overcoat, one shoe, pocket litter — to ensure there was nothing of operational value. The consul moreover elicited from the morgue physician that Zarubina’s mottled face and purple lips strongly indicated a massive myocardial infarction.

Zyuganov was badly shaken: He had planned on riding the Zarubina elevator all the way up to the executive fourth floor at Yasenevo, but that zastupnichestvo, that patronage, was gone. Zyuganov’s scaly amphibian instincts knew that, despite his oily efforts, he was not favored by Putin — in fact, he was barely tolerated. The fourth cable from Washington was an operational perspective: Until the status of TRITON could be verified, the rezidentura would make no attempt at recontact. After an operational flap like this the likelihood of a possibly arrested source being directed against his former handlers was high. Unless and until TRITON began reporting “incompatible” intelligence — that is, information the Americans would never give up — the case was on ice. Zyuganov swore. Now this compounded his troubles: He could not prove that Egorova was the mole; General Solovyov had disappeared, possibly in the hands of the Americans; Zyuganov’s grandstand play of tracking Egorova’s staff car to Petersburg had led police to a presidential guest house where she was being entertained by Putin himself.

Zyuganov ominously had received no call about these setbacks from the president or the director — in Stalin’s day the hollow cessation of communication from the top meant only one thing: Kiss the wife and kids goodbye. The one call he had received was doubly alerting. Govormarenko telephoned on the secure line — Since when did civilians use encrypted government communications? Since Putin handed him the receiver, that’s when — to curtly announce that his continued participation in the matter of the cargo now enroute to Iran would no longer be required. Govormarenko mouthed the explanation that the deal was concluded, the last of the monies were being deposited, and the intervention of the service could be brought to a close. Zyuganov knew very well what that meant: There would be no vyplata, no spoon of sugar — no payoff — for his work putting together the operation. It also meant that his connections to the siloviki around Putin likewise were being severed, like mooring lines on a departing ship, dropping one after another from the pier into the water.

Egorova. Zyuganov closed his eyes and saw her on the stainless steel table in the Butyrka prison cellar as he worked his way up her body with an iron bar — feet, shins, knees, pelvis, stomach, ribs, wrists, arms, collarbone, throat. He would use a bent spoon on her eyes. She would flop like a screaming leather bag of broken glass. Investigators still wanted to talk about Yevgeny. He did not experience even a second of remorse about staving in the skull of his moronic deputy — he had told everything he knew, but nothing that could nail Egorova. Zyuganov’s options were narrowing, his career standing was tottering, his prospects were bleak. His career: Bog ne vydast, svin’ja ne s’est, God won’t give it away, pigs won’t eat it.

Mother. She had survived four decades in the Soviet grinder, a high administrative functionary successively in the NKVD, KGB, and SVR, through Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev, through the dissolution of the Soviet Union, through the turmoil with drunken Yeltsin into the proto-Soviet moonscape of Putin. She had retired with honors and was now zampolit, political officer in the Russian Embassy in Paris, a ceremonial position, a reward for a lifetime of loyalty to the Rodina. She had brought him into the service under her patronage. Maybe she could help him now. He picked up the secure Vey-Che phone and ordered the operator to connect him with Paris. He would tell her all the details. Mamulya, Mommy would know what to do.

Dominika had been at the guest house in Strelna for three days. She had no way of knowing what had happened with the TRITON meeting, and she expected and anticipated sudden exposure, the tramp of footsteps coming for her, the icy blue-eyed stare as she was led away from the madhouse charade of this power weekend. She was already surfeited with the cloying cream sauces, the endless ranks of chilled vodka bottles, the rose-scented sheets, the limitless views of the gunmetal sea, the piped-in patriotic songs — Putin’s favorite was “From What Begins the Motherland” — for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There had been a steady stream of guests — fat-bellied oligarchs, nicotine-fingered ministers, sloe-eyed models, and dissolute actresses — and they socialized together in groups in the salons, dining rooms, and terraces, then separated and came together again in different groups, in clouds of greedy yellows, fearful greens, or, occasionally, the blues of intellect.

Govormarenko, in a dingy yellow haze, early on took it upon himself to introduce Dominika to the arriving luminaries, transmitting with an arm around her waist a “she’s with us” message, and the eyes would narrow and the heads would nod, and women would appraise her jutting dancer’s glutes, and men would stare at her top hamper, and Govormarenko’s hand would snake around her waist to steer her toward another introduction. Dominika initially planned to break the little finger of his encircling hand by bending it back to his wrist, but she quickly assessed this train of events and the opportunity it presented. She could not send a SRAC shot to Hannah — Oh God, Hannah is gone — but she knew what Nate would say, and Gable, and she could hear Benford’s voice, so she smiled and joked with the men, hinted darkly about her work in the service, and flattered the women with clotted foundation on their collars and salt rings under the arms of their blouses.

Dominika’s magnificent radar registered the absence of sexual overtures from any of the men at the weekend retreat. To be sure, there were undisguised stares and furtive sidelong glances, but it was as if some invisible letter Z had been hung around her neck, zapovednyy, reserved, forbidden, hands off. But reserved for whom? After an initial and half-hearted flirtation from Govormarenko — his principal interest was food and drink — he did nothing more than paw at her waist and occasionally contrive to bump a shoulder against the side of her breast. It was clear that the only alpha male in the mansion had sprayed the tree trunk, and that the lesser omegas of the pride could read territorial pheromones very well.

Udranka’s spirit, sitting by the shore and singing the sweet song of the Rusalka, threw back her head and laughed. You’re Putin’s pussy.

Khorosho, very well. Dominika resolved to be CIA’s penetration not only of SVR, but now of Putin’s wheeling circle of vultures in business, politics, and government. The president spoke to her whenever he saw her, a fact noted by one of the actresses who, by her dismayed expression, clearly had previously been one of Vladimir’s wind-up toys. The president certainly was a dandy, dressed in open-necked shirts and fitted jackets. He had a jaunty sailor’s roll when he walked. He was usually accompanied by a statuesque beauty who, it was whispered, had been a rhythmic gymnastics dancer — a Russian and Olympic champion. The rumor was confirmed on the second day, in the sprawling, mirrored basement gymnasium filled with machines and free weights, when the blonde, dressed in spandex, demonstrated some routines, including lying on her chest and bringing her legs back over her body so her toes touched the floor on either side of her head. The president, dressed in a heavy, woven judogi tied at the waist with a black belt, beamed at his soft pretzel.

Now the judo demonstration. To the delight of the overdressed guests who lined the enormous gym mat, Putin began grappling with a chunky man in his twenties, and threw him with great force each time they grabbed each other’s lapels. The president was not thrown, ever — the young man knew how to fall and roll in this job. After one particularly violent takedown — Putin used hane goshi, the spring hip throw — a woman guest cried out in alarm, and she was shushed as if she were interrupting a pianist at a concert. After ten minutes, Putin straightened, wiped his face with a towel, and walked over to the nuzzling knot of sycophants, who politely applauded. Putin acknowledged the applause with Olympian modesty. His eye caught Dominika, standing in the back of the crowd.

“Captain, do you know judo?” Putin asked. Faces turned toward her.

“No, Mr. President,” said Dominika.

“What do you think?” Putin said. Faces were swiveling between the two.

“Very impressive,” said Dominika.

“I understand you were trained in Sistema,” said Putin. Faces turned again, expectant.

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Dominika. She hoped she wasn’t sounding like a cow.

“How would you compare judo against Sistema?” said Putin, draping the towel around his neck.

“It would be difficult to compare, Mr. President. For instance, I could identify only four ways to kill you during your sparring session.” The nervous woman gasped again, and they all looked at Putin’s face for his reaction. Putin’s blue halo was pulsing, and the corners of his mouth twitched.

“The notorious reserve of the external service,” said Putin to the crowd. He walked across the gym to the broad staircase leading up to the dining room, content to let the buzzing guests follow him and his blue aura like geese. The woman brushed past Dominika with her nose in the air, and a sweating industrialist mopped his face with a handkerchief and shook his head at Dominika, but she knew she had scored positive points with Putin. He was one-dimensional, primal, nationalist, instinctive, afflicted with a world lens that registered only blacks and whites. But he was a natural conspirator who was concerned with only one thing — sila — power, strength, force. It was from having and keeping sila that everything else derived: personal wealth, Russian resurgence, territory, oil, global respect, fear, women. He consequently respected others who displayed strength. Dominika just hoped she hadn’t overdone it.

That night, Dominika was on the terrace after dinner talking to a ferret-faced man from Gazprom who was predicting that, by controlling natural gas exports, Russia would reclaim the Baltic countries as integral republics in thirty-six months. Dominika imagined Benford’s face when he read that. A white-coated attendant approached, stood with his heels together, and said that Captain Egorova was required in the president’s study.

The first thing she saw on entering the room was that there were no armed men lined along the walls to take her away. Putin was sitting behind an ornate desk covered by green felt under a heavy piece of glass. He wore an open-necked shirt under a preposterous velveteen smoking jacket — his notion of what a chentelman wore after dinner. He motioned Dominika to a chair and stared at her in silence for ten seconds. Dominika willed herself to look back at him. Had TRITON delivered her name? Was the door going to blow in and security thugs fill the room? Putin’s halo was steady; he did not appear outwardly agitated. He continued looking at her, his hands flat on the glass. How tiresome this Svengali act was; Dominika wanted to slap his blue eyes crossed.

“Rezident Zarubina is dead,” said Putin. “She died last night during a meeting in Washington.” Was this a trap? She wasn’t supposed to know about TRITON. Play dumb.

Dominika kept her face closed down. “My God,” she said. “How did she die?” Satisfactory. But do they know my name?

“Heart attack,” said Putin, “while trying to escape from an ambush.”

Too bad, Baba Yaga. I guess your broom couldn’t fly you to safety, thought Dominika. “Ambush? How can this be? Zarubina was too good on the street,” said Dominika, shaking her head. “But what about the source?” Do you know my name?

“Status unknown,” said Putin, still looking at her. Is this a game he is playing? Does he know something else?

“Mr. President, this is a disaster. But in my work, when we speak of ambushes, we speak of foreknowledge, of setting a trap. Besides Zarubina and her team, the only two people in KR who knew the location of any Washington, DC, meeting sites were Colonel Zyuganov and Major Pletnev. Madame Zarubina kept very close control on such operational details.”

“Pletnev is dead too,” said Putin.

This time Dominika did not have to feign surprise. Poor hairy Yevgeny, but now he’s no longer a danger. Her mind was racing, calculating, evaluating the risk of what she was going to do. “Pletnev dead?” said Dominika. “Did Colonel Zyuganov kill him?”

Putin leaned forward on the desk. “That’s an interesting question,” he said. “Why would you think that?” Putin smelled intrigue like a croc smelled a carcass in the river. And like crocodile Stalin, Vladimir Putin knew the value of keeping subordinates at each other’s throats. Dominika registered his animated interest, took a deep breath, and told Putin about Zyuganov’s boycott of information in KR, about how Yevgeny was frightened of him, about Zyuganov’s fixation on and determination to uncover the mole.

“He is unsettled and imbalanced,” said Dominika, as casually as she could. “He treated Yevgeny like a barn animal. Pletnev told me some of his troubles and, frankly, asked me for advice on operational matters.” It won’t hurt Yevgeny now to say he talked out of school. “And you have seen how Colonel Zyuganov tracked my vehicle, how he thought I was involved in the disappearance of Solovyov — I, who originally identified the general as suspicious.” Dominika paused for effect. “The colonel is under immense strain. He has grown erratic.”

“I have remarked on it,” said Putin. “What do you make of him?” Softly, obliquely, thought Dominika.

“Mr. President, based on the little Major Pletnev confided in me, this all came to a head two days before Zarubina was reportedly to acquire a CIA mole’s name. There is great turmoil. Zyuganov sends police to arrest me here, and now you tell me that he has killed Pletnev, and the unbeatable Zarubina is ambushed.”

“What are you saying, Captain?” said Putin. Time for the desinformatsiya, the deception.

“These mishaps are nothing less than Zyuganov protecting himself, with the aid of the Americans. And who searches loudest and most noisily for the mole? The mole himself, Mr. President.” Putin’s blue eyes never left her face, but his cerulean halo pulsed, and Dominika knew he believed her.

That night in her bedroom at the mansion Dominika could not sleep. The medieval and massively heavy dinners continued: Tonight it had been carved roast beef, veal medallions, buzhenina, baked ham, roast duck and patychky, breaded Ukrainian meat skewers served with a fiery Moldovan adzhika pepper sauce. Cream and butter sauce boats sailed in formation between silver candlesticks. There were platters of herring, salmon, and sturgeon in dill and sour cream, and kulebyaka, salmon in puff pastry. Pelmeni and vareniky dumplings were ladled from tureens like hatchlings poured out in a fish farm. Chafing dishes of buttered vegetables; terrines of pork, salmon, and boar; and casseroles of mushrooms, truffle-laden, steaming when spooned out, covered the table. Govormarenko had joked loudly to Putin that delicacies from Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova were all the more savory, to appreciative laughter from guests with full mouths. A yellow haze enveloped the table.

Dominika lay in the four-poster bed under a spectacular rose-colored goose-down comforter, listening to the ticking of an antique ormolu Empire mantel clock and the competing faint buzz of the sea outside her window. She had one more day in the extended weekend and was positively itching to get back to Moscow, to spin up her SRAC equipment, and to send a flurry of messages reporting everything that had happened. And it was certain that SRAC messages from Nate and Benford to her had been preloaded and would be waiting for the electronic handshake from her unit. She was on fire to know the status of TRITON, the circumstances of Zarubina’s death, whether LYRIC was safe, and the small matter of whether she was safe. Hannah’s spirit would be riding with her back to Moscow, she knew, and would be with her when she made her SRAC runs, working the mirrors, wide-eyed and laughing.

How she longed for Nate. The stress of the past days — the drive to Saint Petersburg, waiting on the exfil beach, watching and smelling and tasting this ghastly Putin menagerie — had exhausted her. She missed Nate’s touch, longed to feel his lips. God, she wanted him. Dominika lay still under the billowing comforter and moved her hand between her legs. Grandmother’s long-handled hairbrush — the tortoiseshell talisman that had helped her decipher her first adolescent urges — was in the luxurious tiled bathroom across the room, too far away. It didn’t matter: She closed her eyes and saw Nate. Udranka laughed outside the window as Dominika’s head pushed back deeper into the pillows, and her breath came in puffs through barely parted lips, and her eyes jounced around under closed eyelids, and the jolts started down her legs, to her curling toes. After a few delirious seconds her breath slowed and she blinked her eyes open, wondering for an instant where she was. Her thighs trembled with tiny aftershocks, and she wiped the dew off her upper lip. Then the impossible happened.

There was a soft rattle of the door handle and the door began to open. Dominika half sat up. The leading edge of a brilliant blue halo appeared slowly around the door. Bozhe moy! My God, thought Dominika, it can’t be.

Marta, voluptuous, lush, abundant — with a mane of hair around her face — sat across the room on a couch, legs crossed, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Dominika’s dead sister and fellow Sparrow blew a stream of smoke straight into the air, looked at the swinging door, and then at Dominika. What are you prepared to do? she whispered.

The president slipped into Dominika’s bedroom — presumably knocking was not a consideration when Vlad had something on his mind. He walked slowly, passing through a shaft of moonlight from the ocean side window that turned his blue halo turquoise. As he rounded the corner of her four-poster bed, Dominika hurriedly tried composing herself under the comforter — she had been thinking about Nate and her nightgown was gathered above her waist. Was the president’s sudden appearance in her room the result of video coverage in her suite? Had the president watched grainy night footage of the stirrings of her trembling hand beneath the comforter? If he had, he moved quickly.

The president was wearing a plain dark blue silk sleep shirt and pajama pants — Dominika drolly noted that there were no heraldic devices on the breast of the shirt, no Romanov double eagles, no hammer and sickle, no red star. Putin pulled up a delicate antique chair and sat beside the bed, close to Dominika, as if he were a country doctor come to take a patient’s temperature. Dominika sat up and was about to pull the comforter demurely to her chin but instead let it drop to her lap — What did it matter, she was Putin’s Sparrow after all — and reached to snap on the little coral-shaded bedside lamp. She saw the president’s eye flicker over the bodice of her sleeveless nightgown and the swell of her breasts under the lace.

Across the room, on the Recamier sofa the two of them — Marta and now Udranka — sat watching, her dead Sparrows there to give her strength. Hannah’s ghost would not be here, not her, not for this.

“Good evening, Mr. President,” said Dominika, casually, as if unannounced visits by the silk-festooned Sovereign of all the Russias to female guests’ bedrooms in the Strelna guest mansion after midnight were perfectly common, which, Dominika concluded, they probably were.

“Captain Egorova,” said Putin, not even remotely begging forgiveness for the intrusion, his eyes still on her cleavage. “I have been receiving a steady stream of communications concerning the subject we have been discussing. The most recent cable just arrived.”

“Which subject is that, Mr. President?” said Dominika.

Udranka, signaled she should do the discreet Sparrow Shrug and let one lacy nightgown strap fall off her shoulder. Devchonka, you slut, be quiet, thought Dominika.

“About Zarubina’s source TRITON and the American mole in the Center,” said Putin without a trace of impatience. “We received a cable tonight from the Paris rezidentura. TRITON attempted contact with the embassy there but the fools thought he was a crank and he was turned away by mistake. He left a local telephone number.”

My God, thought Dominika, the man who could kill her was already there and running free in Paris, a phone call away from contact. “So it is likely he escaped. Is the rezidentura going to try to find him?” she said. She would have to draft a dozen SRAC messages to Nate and Gable and Benford. They had to get after him. Putin did not answer.

“Colonel Zyuganov was informed of TRITON’s appearance by an unauthorized secure phone call from Paris placed by his mother.” Dominika registered that this meant Zyuganov’s phone lines had been monitored. Her suggestion that he was the mole apparently had made an impression. Something else.

Putin leaned back in his chair. His blue halo pulsed. He was enjoying himself, perhaps he was imagining slipping under the comforter next to her. “Colonel Zyuganov was logged out of Vnukovo on a flight to Paris tonight. He has not checked in with our embassy. His whereabouts in Paris are unknown. His mother, Ekaterina, was found murdered in her apartment.”

“Do you think he is gone, fled to the West?” said Dominika.

“Perhaps,” said Putin. “But I believe he has gone to Paris for a desperate reason. I think he will call the local number TRITON left and ask for a meeting.” Putin was thinking this through, dangerously so. Maybe he had doubts about Zyuganov’s guilt. God, she had to transmit SRAC messages, to give CIA enough information to catch TRITON. If Zyuganov spoke to TRITON for even two minutes she would be finished.

“It is possible, Mr. President,” said Dominika. “But what can he hope to accomplish?”

“Isn’t it clear to you?” said Putin. “Zyuganov intends to eliminate TRITON, the source who can identify him as the Americans’ mole.”

“Mr. President!” said Dominika, feigning shock, but gratified that he had made a wrong assumption. Putin’s blue halo positively glowed. The Russian in him was enjoying the chess game; the former KGB officer in him was savoring the maze of contradictions; the despot in him was relishing the mayhem. Something else in him was waking: he looked again at Dominika’s breasts, at the hint of darker nipples under the dentelle lace. Udranka clucked from the darkened corner of the room. Putin leaned closer and put his hand on Dominika’s hand.

“I want you to do something,” he said, stroking her wrist. Dominika waited for him to speak, mentally cataloging the Babylonian possibilities. Yes, or no, Benford? Nathaniel, will you understand?

“I want you to go to Paris, this morning, without delay. You speak fluent French, yes?” The president’s hand trailed up her stomach and lightly across her left breast. Dominika forced herself — willed herself — to stay still. She was conscious of involuntarily widening her eyes. Putin’s X-ray blue eyes searched her face.

“You will arrange a meeting with TRITON before Zyuganov gets to him.” His fingertips left the lace and traced a line on her skin between the swell of her breasts. Dominika was motionless. Could he feel her heart beating? Could he differentiate the normal pulses of passion from the timpani pounding of revulsion? My God, was this stroking the preliminary to seduction, or was it more like what it seemed: Namely the caress of a ravening collector handling an antique vase, the affirmation of ownership? Putin’s halo enveloped her. His furry cologne — a ghastly rosewater- and cumin-infused toilet water from someplace like Sochi — got into her nose like a gnat. The president watched her face as his finger slipped under the material and made a slow circle around her left nipple. Dominika, the clinically trained Sparrow, knew the involuntary pilomotor reflex triggered by the release of oxytocin was contracting the skin beneath her nipples, but Vlad baby knew only that she was getting hard.

“After he tells you Zyuganov is the mole, I want you to dispose of TRITON,” said the president. How charming, she thought. Hands on my tits and he orders me to commit statal murder, he wants me to kill for Mother Russia. He was not content to bleed his country, now he would — once again — defame her. Dominika looked into his unblinking eyes. His lips were pursed as if he had nougat in his mouth. He was sitting very close to the bed, waiting, and Dominika, seized with an appallingly lurid intuition probably shared two thousand years ago by Messalina when she wormed an oiled hand under Claudius’s toga, reached out and put her hand in the president’s lap.

“Kill him?” whispered Dominika. So this was what it would be like as a member of the club. The president’s nostrils flared as Dominika lightly felt around through the silk for the laska, the sleeping little weasel in his pajamas.

“And then I want you to clear up any misunderstandings remaining with Colonel Zyuganov,” said Putin. Dominika’s fingers detected something — it might be what she was looking for. Still sleeping.

“What do you—” The president softly squeezed her breast — his fingers were calloused — to silence her. Dominika thought a reciprocal squeeze would be appropriate. Nothing stirred in the silk forest.

“He need not return to Russia,” said Putin. He took his hand away from her breast. Should she do the same? Not yet.

“We have men in Department Five who do these things,” said Dominika, moving her thumb pad up and down. “Mr. President, I am hardly the best candidate.” There was no reaction from between his legs. Was she losing her Sparrow touch? She’d been at the top of the class in what the matron instructors at Sparrow School had called monkey love.

In the corner of the room, Marta and Udranka looked at each other, shaking their ghostly heads.

“I want you to attend to it,” said Putin. “As you will be promoted to chief of KR on your return from Paris, it is appropriate for you to manage this personnel action yourself.” Personnel action — Stalin’s venerable euphemism for wiping a human being from the face of the Earth. This was the typical bear trap: Promotion. Kremlin favor. Profit sharing. And then she would belong to them, these black-mouthed reptiles throwing their coils around her chest to draw her close. It didn’t make sense for her, specifically, to be sent to kill these two — it didn’t have to make sense. She recoiled at the oily orders given by this outwardly mellow potentate. Dominika knew that if she carried them out she would forever be under Putin’s thumb. She thought it ironic, however, that Putin had for the last five minutes been under her thumb, with no appreciable results.

Chief of KR. She would be running counterintelligence for the entire Service. It would mean unparalleled access. Nathaniel and Gable and Forsyth and Benford would not believe her at first. And her blue-eyed, melon-headed benefactor had just given her the travel opportunity to meet them and tell them. But God, she had to get to Paris immediately and prevent Zyuganov from closing with TRITON. Dominika knew Nate would rush to Paris when she called her SENTRY number — they would find a solution to this together. Together.

Her sudden longing for Nate reminded her she still had her hand in the president’s lap. His face was impassive, but there was some stirring, in fact quite a lot of stirring, as if Putin could on demand make the weasel come out of the forest. With practiced feel, Dominika estimated smaller-than-average dimensions, but it was quite firm. His hand reached out and caressed her breast again, lightly, just fingertips brushing skin. Dominika wanted to scream, but she lowered her eyes and smiled at him.

He looked back at her without agitation or emotion. “Are you willing to accomplish these things?” he asked her, the wakened weasel now noticeable under the pajamas. Dominika realized that giving the order to kill had been the stimulus, the turn-on.

Dominika balanced the prospect of a decades-long torrent of intelligence production for CIA against an abject and scurvy existence as a female member of this rat pack, the first scene of which she was now playing, teasing the weasel of the president.

“Mr. President, I will do anything to help you and my country,” said Dominika, with a look that might have also hinted You don’t own me.

President Putin returned her look with a rare, small smile that said, Sure I do, and, as if to demonstrate his adamantine will, stood up, looked down at her, nodded, and left the room silently. Her hand still tingling, Dominika could only stare at the slowly closing door. Exhausted by the last seven minutes, she sank back into her pillows, while Marta and Udranka applauded from the shadows. But now Hannah was in the room too; Dude, get ready, we have a lot of work to do. And Dominika was glad she had their spirits with her — and she would see Nate soon. The tiny clock on the mantelpiece, which had chimed the hour for the Grand Duke Constantine two hundred years ago, chimed now for Dominika, as if announcing the start of the race to Paris.

Thread meat cubes marinated in vinegar on skewers and squeeze together to form lumpy kebabs. Mix bread crumbs, curry powder, salt, and pepper, and coat the meat skewers. Roll them in an egg wash, then again in the bread crumbs, pressing to adhere and to compact the meat. Fry the skewers in oil until golden, then place them on a bed of butter and sliced onions and bake in a low oven until the meat is tender. Serve with salad and adzhika sauce.