Kathleen Frost was better known as Kath, but she was best known as the only person at the agency who intimidated Director Gasko. Like Charlie Cole and Osmond Brown, she came from the last generation of the Cold Warriors, but unlike them, she never feared becoming a victim of the director’s purges. And even if such an absurd possibility were suggested to Kath, she would retort, in her gravelly voice: “That young man? Please. I wish he had the guts to fire me. God knows I’m sick and tired of this place. But every time I tell him I’m quitting, he just sticks his fingers in his ears and pretends not to hear me.”
That morning in late August, back in Rome station, Amanda was sitting in her office, waiting nervously for Kath to arrive. It had taken Gasko a while to track her down, but now Kath was allegedly en route, and allegedly planning to arrive that day. The rumors had circulated through the Clandestine Service for years. Kath Frost had understood the KGB better than the KGB itself did. Kath Frost had sniffed out more double agents than anyone in agency history. Kath Frost had accurately predicted exactly what Mikhail Gorbachev would say to every Western leader he ever met. And Kath had accomplished all these things while also being a woman.
Working in the Clandestine Service wasn’t easy for anyone, but it especially wasn’t easy for a woman. They didn’t teach you this during training. Amanda had learned it the hard way, in a variety of stations and safe houses and windowless offices. Her first lesson came in Mexico City, at age twenty-six, while arguing with a senior officer over the fate of an agent. “It’s wrong,” Amanda had said. “You made her a promise, and as soon it gets tough, you want to break that promise.” The senior officer rolled his eyes and said life wasn’t fair, hadn’t she heard? “Yeah,” she said. “But this isn’t about fairness. This is about you being lazy.”
The next day the station chief summoned Amanda to his office. “He told me you were getting emotional,” he said. “You can’t let yourself get emotional.”
“But I wasn’t. He is lazy. It’s an objective fact. Also, sir. Respectfully. How much do you trust the judgment of a man who can’t even fight his own battles? I mean, really. Why does he have to involve you in this?”
“See, there you go again.”
“There I what again?”
“These ad hominem attacks. Look, Amanda. I run a certain kind of operation here. I need a certain kind of team player. I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is going to work out.”
It had surprised her, honestly, that two grown men could be so offended by a few words uttered by a twenty-six-year-old woman. How was it possible to endure a life, especially this life, with such delicate sensibilities as theirs? Back at Langley, awaiting her next assignment, nursing her pride, she wondered if she should have done things differently. The thing was, she didn’t doubt her conviction. (She’d managed to slip a warning message to the agent before leaving Mexico City.) Without her conviction, she had nothing. But the color, the tenor, the intensity of that conviction: apparently this would have to be modulated. She would have to finesse her way to her end goals. So she learned to show them only what they needed to see, and kept the rest of herself private.
But the them had only ever been men, and now she wondered if the same approach would work with Kath Frost. For someone who had recently been promoted to station chief, Amanda was feeling painfully insecure. In the past month, she’d made only the barest progress on the Vogel case. The main thing she’d done was to establish the protocol for Semonov, now back in Moscow, to contact the agency. When he was ready to set a meeting, he called a number, asked for Vladimir, said he needed to get his car serviced. CIA officers in Moscow would handle the meetings and dead drops. It was too risky for Amanda herself to travel to Russia, and too obvious a red flag for Semonov to travel to Italy more than once a year.
She’d also taken a start at constructing a timeline of Senator Vogel’s final months. Each piece of paper in that manila folder was marked with a date. There were flight manifests that indicated where Vogel had been: Davos in January, Courchevel in February, Maastricht in March for the European Fine Arts Fair, Emilia-Romagna in April for a Formula 1 race. Taken together, the itinerary formed a portrait of the European social calendar for the zero point zero one percent.
Frustratingly, there was one date she couldn’t pin down. The final date, May 30. There were no records of Vogel having flown anywhere. Possibly his source had traveled to him, and the meeting had taken place in New York or Washington, but that didn’t seem likely. Amanda was certain another explanation was at play, but she couldn’t see what. Unlike human intelligence, this wasn’t her strength. Put her in the room with another person and an hour later she would emerge with their trust. But when it came to sorting through dry documents like this? She was average at best, and right now they needed better than average.
“Oh, sure.” Kath was standing in the doorway, surveying the office. “Charming. Love what you’ve done with the place.”
Kath plunked herself in the visitor’s chair. She looked like she had wandered onto the set of the wrong movie. She wore a linen dress belted at the waist, a chunky turquoise necklace, a pair of red cowboy boots. Her gray hair hung long and loose over her shoulders. She craned her neck. “Not even a plant? A plant would go a long way.”
Amanda glanced down at her own navy suit and white button-down. She’d never thought much about her clothes, but now that she actually looked at them, they struck her as both basic and hideous. “I, um, haven’t had time to redecorate,” she lied.
“Well, here I am,” Kath said. “I came straight from the airport. Actually, no, I stopped for breakfast. They ran out of vegetarian meals by the time they made it to the back of the plane. The back of the plane! The CIA couldn’t even spring for economy plus. So I made it from Anchorage to Rome on one package of peanuts, if you can believe that.”
“Well.” Amanda extended her hand across the desk. “It’s great to finally meet you.”
“So,” she said, as they shook hands. “You’re Charlie’s kid.”
Amanda startled. Not that many people at the agency knew both Charlie and Amanda. Even fewer knew that Charlie was her father. Although Amanda supposed she ought not to be surprised that the legendary Kath Frost was one of them.
“We overlapped in Geneva, way back in the day. He was a nice guy. Most of them are assholes, so you remember the nice guys.” She sighed. “You know I was in Alaska when John called? Every year I take August off, every year I try to find a place where they can’t find me, but these people we work for, my God, they are relentless. There I was, in a little log cabin in the middle of Denali, totally anonymous, happy as can be, and then one morning this ranger shows up and hands me a satellite phone and says, ‘Ma’am, it’s for you.’ Jesus Christ. I haven’t had a real vacation since Nixon was in the White House. And you know what kills me? They spend a small fortune to track me down, and then they make this seventy-three-year-old woman fly the middle seat in the back of the plane from Alaska to goddamn Rome.”
Amanda was experiencing a kind of synaptic overload. “You call him John?”
“Oh, believe me, he’s asked me to stop.” She cocked an eyebrow. “He said it undermines his authority. It sends the wrong message. And I said, ‘Well, John, that’s the point, isn’t it?’ Anyway. The middle seat is bad enough, but when you’re half-starved and there’s a crying baby next to you, it means you’re not going to get the slightest bit of sleep, so you might as well get started. I spent the plane ride going through everything. Listen, Amanda, if I thought you cared about these things, I’d act deferential and ask you to tell me the whole story, get me up to speed, etcetera, but I don’t think you care about these things. Am I wrong?”
“Uh, no. No, that’s fine.” She shook her head. “Wow. Sorry. It’s just…”
“It’s just that I’m not like most of the Langley folks you’ve met?”
Amanda smiled. “Not really.”
Kath laughed, a pleasantly guttural sound. “You’ll get used to it. Everyone does.”
Back in July, before flying back to Rome, Amanda had told Director Gasko about the papers. She kept the precise origins a secret. A trusted source, close to the senator: that was all she said.
Walking into his office that day, she thought she’d made her decision. No way, no way she was going to cover for her father and risk jeopardizing the investigation. The last seventeen years of her life had been shaped by allegiance to the agency. She was proud of the work she’d done. This was her integrity. This was her identity. And now her father was asking her to… what? Just let it dissolve in a warm bath of sentiment?
Gasko read the papers in silence. He reached the end of the folder. She had to come clean about Charlie’s strange request; had to tell the director that her father was clearly hiding something. It was now or never. Come on, she thought. Start talking. Right now. Right now! But there, in the thick silence, it suddenly occurred to her. The obvious outcome of telling Gasko: the agency needed to investigate the Vogel story, and the Charlie story, and the way they were linked. The conflict of interest was glaring. She, as his daughter, would instantly lose the assignment.
But she badly wanted to see this through. The Russians assassinating an American politician was uncharted territory. Plus, Amanda was the person Semonov trusted. What if, by removing herself, she destroyed any chance at progress? Despite her diligent rehearsals over the last few days, despite her intellectual certitude that coming clean was the right thing to do, she found herself abandoning that carefully written script. Instantly, instinctively, a new plan had formed. Stay quiet. Pursue the intelligence. Get the answers, and then tell Gasko. He would ask her why she had lied. She would tell him the truth: that she didn’t see any other way. He would be furious, of course, but she would cross that bridge later.
“So,” Gasko had said. “Let me see if I’m getting this right. They’re figuring out a way to hold these companies hostage. They drive the stock price up through some… Actually, I don’t understand that part. Meme stocks? Anyway. They drive the stock price up, which creates leverage, because no one wants the price to go down. And then they call up the CEO in question, they tell him or her what to do. And, voilà, the CEO falls in line.”
“It’s clever, right?” Osmond’s phrase came to mind: “It’s the soft underbelly.”
It was a mark of the plan’s elegance that, the first time Amanda read the Vogel papers, she found herself wondering why this hadn’t been done before. Gruzdev had figured out a way to tilt the global playing field in his favor, not by manipulating the leaders of other countries—his rivals were on alert for that, and besides, it rarely worked—but by manipulating levers of power where they actually existed. Which was to say, inside American corporations.
The average American was basically indifferent to the problems of the rest of the world. The average American didn’t have an opinion about, say, how the Chinese government treated their ethnic minorities. Sometimes a sense of outrage grew hot enough to spur the country to action, but most of the time, Americans didn’t bother to expend much energy on dealing with the problems of the rest of the world.
Except that the rest of the world still existed. The average American might be indifferent to Uyghur detention camps in western China, but what about the American companies that had dealings in China? There was no way around it. They had to take a position on these things. These corporations had built out entire teams to craft their policy portfolios. It had become a well-trod career path, from the State Department to places like Disney, or Coca-Cola, or Google. Even Georgia Markopolous, who worked for the national security advisor and was currently grappling with the spread of Islamic terrorism in western Africa, had lately been the recipient of overtures from a Fortune 500 company that, of all things, specialized in making board games.
Positions on Uyghur detention camps, on border disputes in Kashmir, on human rights in Saudi Arabia: at first glance this had nothing to do with selling movie tickets and soda, except that the Chinese went to the movies, too. Saudis drank Coca-Cola, too. World-shaping geopolitical decisions increasingly lay in the hands of these businesses. And Gruzdev had figured out a way to manipulate these businesses to his ends. Finger on scale of algorithm. Plant idea, create virality, stock goes up. Leverage. This was an easy, efficient route to compliance. Greed usually sufficient. Don’t want music to stop.
“But the actual mechanism of it,” Gasko had said. “The finger on the scale. Whose finger are we talking about? Who is actually making this leverage happen? The papers don’t tell us anything about that, right? So how do we figure that out?”
Amanda had known, of course, that this would be Gasko’s next question. But before she could say anything, he interjected: “Actually, I know exactly who you need.”
That August day in her office, Amanda said: “So what jumps out at you?”
“You mean you don’t want to waste the next hour telling me your interpretation of the situation?” Kath smiled. “I’ll give him this, John did say I would like you. How about we take a walk? I’ve been stuck in a tin can for the last nineteen hours.”
They left the embassy and set off toward the Villa Borghese. Kath explained that she did her best thinking while walking. “Gets the blood flowing,” she said. “The ideas, too. God, I love this city. Don’t you love this city? Have you ever seen such a perfect day?”
It was the swan song of the Roman summer. In the park they followed a white gravel pathway lined with tall stone pines. Trunks as long and graceful as a giraffe’s neck, crowns of foliage shaped like broccoli. “Here’s what strikes me,” Kath said. “How beautifully it blends the blunt and the subtle. In the end, essentially, the leverage is a kind of thuggery. Mob tactics. They have these companies in a chokehold. But the way in which they arrive at the leverage, that’s the innovation. It’s sophisticated. Were you familiar with this phenomenon?”
“Meme stocks?” Amanda said. “Sure. Of course.”
Kath turned, squinted at her.
“Well, actually, no. Not really. But I’ve been getting up to speed. I think I understand the basic mechanism of it.”
“This way.” Kath touched her arm, steered her to the left. She set a quick pace, the kind Amanda rarely encountered beyond the island of Manhattan. “So. Tell me how it works.”
“These investors—amateurs, right? Day traders, regular people at home—they decide that some stock is the cool new thing. So they start buying it, talking it up on social media, it creates this frenzy, the price shoots up. And eventually, usually, the stock price comes back down to earth, but sometimes it stays up. And I’m assuming that when the prices stay up, when these companies get rich and manage to stay rich, that those are the ones we want to pay attention to?”
Kath nodded. “Essentially. But this is one of the clever things. There is a pattern among those whose prices stay elevated, but it’s not universally true. There’s plenty of noise to hide the signal.”
“What do you mean?”
“On the one hand, you have plenty of American companies that do business with Russia and take favorable stances. But a lot of them have pretty steady market caps. On the other hand, you have plenty of companies whose market caps have skyrocketed thanks to this new trend. But a lot of these meme stocks haven’t caused any substantive corporate changes of note. We are looking for a very slender Venn diagram. But I don’t think that part will be hard. What’s going to be hard is figuring out how these frenzies actually start.”
“On those message boards, right? And then the word spreads, and then it’s on Twitter, and it’s all over the place, and then—”
“How much time have you spent on those message boards? People are tossing out hundreds, thousands of ideas a day. But when you log on, only a few make it to the home screen. Only a few get clicked on, and only a few start to spread. That’s where it begins.”
It suddenly clicked. “The algorithm. The finger on the scale.”
“Exactly. And this, for my money, is the cleverest part. They don’t have to create the entire frenzy. They only need to nudge it in the right direction. Get the ball rolling. Do enough to stoke the enthusiasm, suppress the naysayers. The algorithm determines which ideas spread. And they found a way to get inside.”
Without asking permission, Kath commandeered Rome station’s sole conference room. For security reasons, she insisted that the ten-digit combination to the conference room change every day.
One day in September, when Amanda finally remembered the day’s code and got the door open, she found Kath sitting in front of the paper-covered wall. Kath was slouching down, her arms crossed, her legs stretched out. Rachmaninoff played on the speakers. “Anything?” Amanda asked, raising her voice to be heard over the music.
Kath shook her head.
In just a matter of days, Kath had given form to the formless: the machinery of conspiracy had been mapped and labeled with clinical precision. The wall was beautiful to behold, covered with evidence, graphs showing wild growth in a company’s stock price, articles describing internal changes at said company. The changes, Kath had discerned, tended to happen nine or twelve or eighteen months after the initial frenzy, long enough that no one bothered to link the two. The media company that fired their steel-spined general counsel, replacing her with someone much more lukewarm on the First Amendment. The investment bank reopening their Moscow offices after a long absence. The oil company that decided to shift their focus to drilling in the Russian Arctic. Public records, hiding in plain sight.
Kath, it was obvious, had a knack for it. Although the rest of the station didn’t see her genius. To them, Kath just looked like a kooky old woman holed up in the conference room. And she was kind of kooky. One night, when Amanda suggested they break for dinner, Kath declared that she didn’t believe in dinner. It ruined your sleep, she explained, and was bad for your digestion. In addition to not believing in dinner, she also thought Tchaikovsky was a sentimental jingoistic sellout of a composer. She also slept for precisely six hours and fifteen minutes every night and never took naps. She also doodled mountain ranges in the margins of whatever paper was before her. Stalin had drawn wolves, she told Amanda, when he was stuck in a meeting. She saw the wisdom in this (same idea as the walks: the mind was sharper when the body was occupied), but wolves were tricky to draw, so she’d picked mountain ranges.
Amanda found herself spending a lot of time in the conference room, more than was strictly necessary, letting her other station chief duties fall by the wayside. At the end of that first week, she looked at Kath and thought: She’s becoming a friend. It had been a while, because life in the DO wasn’t exactly conducive to making new friends. But Kath had a way of putting her at ease.
That day, Amanda walked over to the speaker and turned down the Rachmaninoff. On one area of the wall were pictures of half a dozen men. Kath murmured: “The leak. Vogel’s source. It has to be one of them.”
“And they were all at Davos,” Amanda said. “And they all overlapped with Vogel.”
“Correct.”
“And there’s no way to narrow it down.”
“There’s some way to narrow it down. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
It had been Kath’s hunch that the source, the person whose confessions were recorded in the senator’s spidery scrawl, was a Russian oligarch. The Kremlin itself wouldn’t carry out the algorithm-manipulation scheme. They would rely on an intermediary, a person whose allegiance was assured, but who could also move easily among the global elite. A person who wouldn’t be out of place in Courchevel or Cannes; a person with multiple fluencies, smart enough to supervise a team of hackers, connected enough to have his calls taken by, say, the CEO of a media company whose market cap had recently tripled.
Amanda asked: “Which of them had the motive? Which of them really hated Gruzdev?”
“They’re not doing Gruzdev’s bidding because they like him,” Kath said, with an edge of irritation. “It’s because they’re terrified of him. And with good reason.”
Amanda cocked her head. The half dozen men even looked the same. Kath finally turned around. “Stop hovering,” she snipped. “Are you going to sit or not?”
“Well, you’re in a bad mood.”
“And you’re about as useful as a chocolate teapot.”
Amanda laughed. “A what?”
“I mean it. Make up your mind. Stay or go.”
“I’ll stay,” she said, but she took a seat at the other end of the room, where her presence wouldn’t disturb Kath’s concentration.
A few days later in Moscow, Konstantin Nikolaievich Semonov picked up the phone, dialed a memorized number, and said: “I would like to make an appointment with Vladimir to have my car serviced.”
After a brief pause, the voice at the other end replied: “Vladimir is on vacation right now. But Adrian can fix your car instead. Please bring it tomorrow at nine a.m.”
The next day, Semonov took the Metro to VDNKh. He checked his watch as he emerged from the station. He’d left plenty of time, just to be safe. Feigning leisure he didn’t feel, Semonov walked slowly through the park, down the wide plaza, toward the monumental stone arch at the entrance that commemorated the triumph of Soviet-era agriculture. He had always been conflicted about this arch. It was a garish thing, topped with golden statues of a strapping Soviet tractor driver, his Soviet farmer-wife, and an abundant sheaf of golden Soviet wheat. The message was patently absurd, given how many millions had starved to death in the Soviet Union. And yet, he thought, if they tore down these falsehoods, what would remain? History was hard to come by in Moscow. The Soviets had ruthlessly destroyed the old buildings, old monuments, old memories. Sometimes it seemed better to leave these monstrosities intact, no matter how awful, because if they didn’t—then what would they be left with?
Semonov checked his watch again. He walked to the west side of the park, where buses were discharging the first tourists of the day. The area was busy and hectic, the cars blatantly ignoring the traffic signs. He stood on the corner, waiting. Finally, right at 9 a.m., the silver Lada pulled up to the curb. Semonov opened the door on the passenger side, ducked his head into the car, and said: “Hello, Adrian. The car is running well?”
The driver, Adrian or whatever his name was, nodded. “It needed a new battery.”
Semonov climbed into the passenger seat. As they began driving, he asked nervously: “Are we going somewhere?”
“Not really. We’re just going to drive for a while.”
They headed south on Prospekt Mira, toward the Third Ring Road. After several minutes of silence, Adrian glanced over at his passenger. Fidgety hands, roving gaze: about the normal level of nerves. Adrian had been doing this job long enough to know that, in certain cases, chitchat was pointless, even counterproductive. The best cure for anxiety was, simply, to endure the anxiety. Give it a few minutes. Semonov would acclimate. And sure enough, several minutes later, the Russian cleared his throat and said: “You work with Amanda Clarkson?”
Adrian nodded. On paper, and in the eyes of the wider world, he and Amanda were both employees of the State Department. In reality, they had been in the same training cohort on the Farm many years ago, during which she had impressed Adrian, and everybody else, with her freakish talent. “She’s an old friend,” he said.
“A nice woman,” Semonov said.
“Yes. She is.”
“Is she married?”
“Uh… no. She isn’t.”
“She must be very picky.”
Adrian stifled his smile. Rolling meetings like these were designed to be efficient. It was simply a chance for Semonov to give Adrian whatever he needed to give him. But (and it never ceased to amuse him) in even just a few minutes, you could get the strangest window into another person’s brain. Eventually, Semonov sighed and pulled out a USB drive. “I don’t know how useful this will actually be,” he said. “But I hope it will help.”
Over the following days, the USB drive traveled a careful course. Back to the embassy in Adrian’s pocket, then from Moscow to Rome via diplomatic pouch, where it underwent a thorough inspection to ensure it didn’t conceal any Trojan horse malware. Finally, a junior officer knocked on Amanda’s door and said: “Package for you.”
She opened the envelope and took out the drive. It was just a bit of metal and plastic, and maybe it wouldn’t prove to be anything, but still: this moment always filled her with reverence. The unknown possibilities. Until she removed the lid from the box, the cat was alive. Amanda placed the drive on her desk and gazed at it for a solid minute. It was one of her private superstitions, the hope that patience might prove something to the Fates, might help her odds.
She plugged it in, and hundreds of documents popped up on her computer screen. A little over a month had passed since Semonov’s return to Moscow. It was unlikely that he would have come across actionable intelligence in that short span of time. And yet, you never knew.
She clicked through emails, memos, other bureaucratic flotsam and jetsam. He was thorough; understandably so. Though Semonov was aware of the Vogel assassination, he wasn’t aware of the bigger picture surrounding that assassination. Without knowing what he was looking for, he erred on the side of giving them everything. Amanda clicked and clicked.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. Two hours later, her eyes were gritty and her stomach was rumbling. But just as she considered taking a break for lunch, something caught her attention.
She sat up straight. Took the elastic from her wrist, pulled her hair back. Okay. Here was something: a memo from earlier in the summer, outlining a request for passports and visas for two men traveling to Egypt on July 20. The request, fulfilled by Semonov, that had ultimately resulted in Vogel’s death. The two men listed on this memo were designated not by names but by numerical codes, which meant she now knew the codes for Tweedledee and Tweedledum, these two members of Unit 29155.
Unit 29155 was the violent dark heart of the GRU, the people who carried out assassinations, ambushes, and poisonings. Rarely did Semonov work with them. He spent ninety-nine percent of his time creating documents and paper trails to backstop the more ordinary GRU officers, the ones who traveled the world under diplomatic cover. She felt an extra jolt of energy, now that she knew what she was looking for.
She kept clicking and clicking, and at last, her eye caught again on the familiar numbers: the codes for the men in Unit 29155. The memo specified that they were going to travel to Iceland. Semonov, again, would be tasked with fabricating the necessary papers. Her adrenaline spiked for a second (Actionable intelligence! Iceland is where they’re going next!), but then she noticed that their travel dates were specified, too. August 24. The trip had already happened.
“Iceland,” Amanda said, bursting into the conference room. “Did something happen in Iceland?”
Kath spun around. “Iceland?”
“Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They were there last month.”
Kath stared at Amanda for a beat. Then she broke into a grin. “Of course. Of course.” She walked over to the wall and tore down five of the six pictures. Most of the oligarchs flew private, but occasionally they appeared on commercial flight manifests, and Kath had been mapping their travel as best she could. She pointed at the remaining oligarch, who gazed out at them from under a pair of thick eyebrows. “Ivan Komarovsky. He was in Iceland in August, too.”
“I thought Komarovsky was the least likely of the bunch.”
“That’s the genius of it!” Kath exclaimed. “The oligarchs tend to toe the line. Not Komarovsky. He’s been critical, scathingly critical, of Gruzdev. Not just once, not just twice, but over and over. God! Yes, see, he fit our criteria in a technical sense. His hedge fund, his financial sophistication, and so on. But I just didn’t believe he would be willing to carry the Kremlin’s water. But you see it, don’t you? You see the brilliance of this?”
“Um,” Amanda said.
“It’s part of the plan. He’s only critical of Gruzdev with Gruzdev’s permission. Same reason Gruzdev allows other political parties to hold seats in the Duma. The veneer of opposition lends legitimacy. Also”—she pointed at another piece of paper—“Komarovsky and Vogel were neighbors, back in the day. Vogel’s hedge fund had an office in London. He kept a mansion in Mayfair, right next door to Komarovsky.”
Amanda stepped toward the wall. She peered at the oligarch’s features. “So this is it? You think we found our source?”
Kath laughed. “Oh, honey. I know we found our source.”