For a while, after Semonov returned from St. Petersburg, there was no sign of the agents from Unit 29155. Weeks went by. Were they avoiding him on purpose? Did they know?
Then, finally, in mid-November, they appeared.
“Maybe you thought we’d forgotten about you,” Tweedledee said, leaning against the doorjamb. “But we never forget about our friends, do we?”
Tweedledum sank into the spare chair. “Is he our friend?”
“I’m feeling charitable today.”
It was curious. Anticipating this moment, Semonov had expected to feel nervous. Paralyzed, even. Instead, he found that instinct took over. With an air of wounded casualness, he said: “I suppose you’ve been busy lately.”
“Very busy. But we know how you are, Semonov.” Tweedledee pointed a finger at him. “You do your best work when we’re here to keep you in line. Isn’t that right?”
“Does the unit have a new request? Is there an upcoming trip?”
“Always so professional. No, no, not today.”
“Ah.” Semonov slumped, feigning disappointment.
Tweedledum laughed. “You’ve missed us!”
He shrugged, fiddling with the papers on his desk. “I like to know that the work makes a difference. That, in a small way, I’m helping to keep our enemies in line, like you do. That’s what you do, isn’t it? When you travel to places like Iceland and the rest?”
Tweedledee smiled. “You aren’t so ignorant after all. Yes, we keep the enemy in line. If they require a… lesson. Yes, a lesson. Then we give them that lesson.”
“I suppose it needs doing,” Semonov said. “People in other countries want to attack Russia because she is strong. People in Iceland and the rest.”
Tweedledum said, “Well, Iceland was different. That was a particular kind of enemy.”
“What kind of enemy?”
“The worst kind. The Russian who forgets his allegiance to Russia.”
Bingo.
Semonov shook his head. “What kind of man forgets such a thing?”
“He’s not a man.” Tweedledee’s voice dripped with scorn. “He lives like a pampered prince, with his mansions and yachts and airplanes. He’s weak, and rotten to the core.”
“I’ve heard of such things happening,” Semonov said. “The Russians who move to the West, to places like New York or Paris or London.”
“Dogs, all of them. And they ought to be shot like dogs. Though we aren’t without mercy. We always give them a chance to fix their mistakes.”
“And what if they don’t listen?” Semonov lowered his voice. “These people you describe, have you ever had to…”
“Kill them?”
Both men laughed. By now they were radiating lethal contentment, like two lions napping in the sun after a kill. This was it, Semonov thought. This was the time to strike. “So the man in Iceland. Did he fix his mistake?”
“Oh, yes. He was terrified.”
Semonov sighed. “Still. It saddens me.”
“Poor little Semonov! You pity the man? Is that it?”
“No, no. It saddens me to think of a Russian betraying his country. I have even heard rumors.” He glanced at the open door, speaking in a whisper: “Rumors of these rich men working with the Americans. Is that… Have you ever heard such things?”
Tweedledee smiled. “You think we were born yesterday?”
They were relaxed enough, by now, to alleviate any possibility of suspicion. The problem, now, was that they were too relaxed, parrying his questions, not taking the bait. How to reawaken their insecurity? What would sting them back into bragging? They were simple men. They wore their prejudice like a badge of honor. They were better than the West. They were better than America. What else? They were better than Semonov. They were better than—Aha, he thought. Yes. This should do the trick.
“Well,” Semonov said. “I heard these rumors from my friend at the FSB. He seemed to know a lot about these things. He’s told me many stories.” The two men frowned. Semonov continued: “Many stories. Many times has he had to defend Russia from America. Once he even received a commendation from President Gruzdev.”
Voice dripping with scorn, Tweedledum said: “The FSB. The FSB. Why would you listen to those idiots?”
Most of the time, to be honest, Semonov forgot the rivalry even existed. There was a long-standing tension between the GRU and the FSB. Ostensibly the two Russian intelligence services shared the same goals, but what really mattered to each of them was that they, and not their rival, be the one to achieve those goals. This pointless Cain-and-Abel psychodrama was mostly perpetuated by those who had nothing better to think about it, which was to say those in the uppermost echelons, and those, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who only knew how to define themselves by hatred.
Semonov’s words were like a red flag to a bull. Tweedledee sneered: “The FSB understands nothing about the world. It’s thanks to your friends at the FSB that we had to go to Iceland in the first place.”
“They can’t even handle their own agents!” Tweedledum added. “And then we have to go and clean up their mess! And will they ever thank us for it?”
“Hah! Thank us! How can they, when they don’t even realize what is wrong?”
Semonov could sense himself losing control of the conversation, but he had his orders. He took a deep breath and hoped, desperately, that their tempers were hot enough to mask the obviousness of his next question. “The man in Iceland,” he said. “The one you went to see. Is he one of those people? Was he working with the Americans?”
“Don’t let those fools fill your head with their stupid ideas.”
“So he wasn’t? But then—”
“Pathetic,” Tweedledee spat. “The FSB doesn’t even realize they have a traitor on their hands. A corrupt, cowardly traitor. But he takes one look at us, and blam.” He smacked his fist into his palm. “Blam. He runs right back to London and does what he is told.”
Shortly after, the contact report landed on Amanda’s desk in Rome.
She read it once. She read it a second time, to be sure. Then she sat back in her chair, tilted her head to the ceiling, and let out a laugh of relief, the knots in her shoulders beginning to dissolve. Thank you, she thought, unsure who she was addressing. Thank you. THANK YOU.
The outset of the report wasn’t promising. Describing the encounter to Adrian, Semonov was convinced he had failed. Despite his provocation, he had learned nothing of what the GRU had said to Komarovsky in Iceland. He hadn’t realized that the nature of his provocation was, in fact, a stroke of genius.
In the conference room, Amanda found Kath humming along to Rachmaninoff and working through a tall stack of documents. “What are those?” Amanda asked, cocking her head to get a better angle.
“S-1 filings.”
“How thrilling.”
“You’d be surprised.” Kath glanced up. “Well, you certainly look pleased.”
“Semonov got them to talk about Komarovsky. And listen to what they said.”
After Amanda finished telling the story, she said: “You see what this means? Vitsin. The gallery owner in London. We always assumed Vitsin was GRU. And that, therefore, he was the one controlling the goons from Unit 29155. But what if—”
“What if he’s FSB,” Kath interrupted. “Yes. Of course. That makes perfect sense.”
Several beats of silence, during which both women thought the same thing. Russia had multiple security services, each with its own specialty. A scheme like this, one involving elite oligarchs and market manipulation and corporate string-pulling, was exactly in the FSB’s wheelhouse. Because the assassins were GRU, they had also assumed Komarovsky’s handler was GRU, but had they ever had any solid proof? Why hadn’t they thought to question this sooner?
“So,” Amanda said, scraping her hair back into a ponytail. “Let’s run through this. Vitsin is FSB.”
“Vitsin is FSB,” Kath repeated. “Vitsin relays instructions from the Kremlin. The targets. The list of demands. Komarovsky follows those instructions.”
“And when he doesn’t? There was that stretch of time when he stopped cooperating, after he and Vogel started talking. Why didn’t the FSB catch on sooner?”
“Because,” Kath said, “Komarovsky has the upper hand. This is his turf. His sense of when to strike, of when the market has an appetite for the idea. Vitsin will never understand any of that. And it doesn’t translate to Kremlin-speak. So when Komarovsky tells them he needs to cool his heels, suspend trading because conditions aren’t right, or there’s a bug in the algorithm, or whatever the excuse, they believe him. They don’t question him. They don’t even know what questions they should be asking.”
“Right. So earlier this year, when he paused the scheme, that by itself didn’t raise any red flags. He gave them a reason, they swallowed it. Vogel must have been the tip-off. Someone realized they were meeting. But someone at the GRU, not the FSB. So the GRU suspects that Komarovsky is betraying the Kremlin. More than suspects. Even they wouldn’t kill Bob Vogel without being certain.”
“So the GRU kills Bob Vogel,” Kath said. “They bully Komarovsky into submission. And, meanwhile, do they tell the FSB what they’ve discovered? Or do they keep them in the dark about this agent’s traitorous behavior?”
Amanda was quiet for a minute. “No,” she finally said. “It’s too juicy. It could be useful. A bird in the hand beats two in the bush.”
“Good, Amanda. You’re starting to think like them.”
Their leverage. This was it.
Officially, the Russian government had only a modest cadre of diplomats at their embassy in London. The precise number fluctuated based on the temperature of the relationship between the Kremlin and 10 Downing Street. At the present moment, 10 Downing Street wasn’t particularly pleased that these oligarchs—who were, after all, tax-paying citizens of the United Kingdom—kept turning up dead throughout London. Mysterious heart attacks and strokes, muggings and burglaries gone wrong: Funny, wasn’t it, how this bad luck tended to afflict Russians in particular?
Whenever the problem became too glaring to ignore, the prime minister handed a list of names to the Russian ambassador. The diplomats on that list boarded a plane back to Moscow, and for a time, a handful of desks and chairs at the Russian embassy sat empty, gathering dust. But once the public’s thirst for justice had been slaked—which never took as long as one thought it might—the prime minister would quietly permit the numbers to rise again.
The two sides were expert at the kabuki, knowing, of course, that these official diplomats were mere props. The people to actually worry about had no apparent connection to the Russian government. Hundreds of FSB agents thickened the streets of Mayfair and Knightsbridge, enmeshing themselves in stylish nightclubs and art galleries, behaving like card-carrying members of the global elite. They lived under deep cover, beyond the reach of the public tit-for-tat. It was, in a sense, better this way. Simpler. It spared the British government from engaging in real antagonism. The Russian wealth flooding into the country had, after all, improved the lives of so many barristers and bankers and peers. Unfortunately for the wealthy Russians, it also meant that the laws and protections of the British government didn’t necessarily apply to them.
But back in 2002, when he moved to England, Ivan Komarovsky had no idea that any of this would come to pass. Back in 2002, Komarovsky thought he was freeing himself from the whims of Moscow. At that point, Nikolai Gruzdev was just two years into his open-ended tenure as Russian president, but already any smart person could see that he was nothing like the most recent batch of Russian leaders. Not a reformist, like Gorbachev. Not a drunk, like Yeltsin. No, Gruzdev was a throwback to the autocrats of yore; a tsar for the twenty-first century. A man who wanted to control everything for himself.
Before he left Russia, Komarovsky extricated himself from the state-owned shipping business he had purchased in 1993 and walked away with a respectable profit. His friends laughed at him, because the value of the shipping company was only going up, and only an idiot would leave that fortune on the table. But Komarovsky used his profit to start a hedge fund in London, and while the fund’s returns would never approach the might of a Gazprom or Rosneft, the fund was his. Komarovsky believed that, unlike those who had chosen to stay in Russia, he was truly free.
The illusion lasted less than a year. One day in April 2003, he and his family trooped down to the Old Marylebone Town Hall for their citizenship ceremony. (The normal process having been sped along by—what else—money.) They swore their allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen and celebrated with lunch at the Ritz. A fine spring afternoon, cottony clouds and blooming daffodils, citizenship papers in hand, gratitude in his heart. He didn’t realize it until later, until it was ripped away from him, but in that glorious twenty-four-hour stretch, Komarovsky had felt truly British. He had succumbed to the softening civilities that made the country such a pleasant place to live.
But the very next morning, when a strange man stopped him outside his house in Mayfair, the downside of that softening became apparent.
The bright blue sky. The black Bentley idling by the curb. The stranger in a well-tailored suit, leaning against the lamppost, calling Komarovsky’s name. They spoke for some minutes. There was, in truth, nothing particularly alarming about that conversation. It was a mark of Komarovsky’s newfound naivete that he considered it a funny coincidence, nothing more, that this stranger happened to show up on his first morning as a British citizen.
But now, decades later, recalling it made him feel ill. That was your chance, he thought, so many years later. Your only chance to say no. Because once you let this kind of guest into your house, you could never ask him to leave.
Komarovsky had had a number of handlers since then. By the time Alexander Vitsin arrived on the scene, he had long since resigned himself to participating in this charade of loyalty. Vitsin had been with him for about five years. And Vitsin, to his credit, was good. Beneath the Savile Row costume, he had a core of Siberian steel.
During their first meeting, Vitsin explained that Komarovsky’s help was required. The Kremlin had identified a new opportunity. He was a man of valuable talents, and this was a unique chance to help his country. And he loved his country, didn’t he? He wanted Russia to be strong and successful, didn’t he? For the next five years, Komarovsky did what was asked of him. He saw no other choice in the matter. He had gotten rich by understanding the free market, by harnessing the dynamics that drove prices up and down. Now he was being ordered to distort the forces he had respected so much.
There had been that wonderfully delusional stretch of time when he thought he could resist this fate; when he had confessed to Bob Vogel and set the racket aside. But really: How did he ever think he was going to get away with it? Didn’t he know how the world worked? Didn’t he know that virtue couldn’t last? The middle-of-the-night episode in Iceland had been a cold dose of reality.
And now here he was, picking up the phone, resuming his role as the Kremlin’s favorite lackey. It was a November morning in the Pavel Partners office in London. The Aeromach share price had been climbing steadily for the last two months. They had reached the point of maximum leverage, and it was time for Komarovsky to make the call.
After a bit of small talk, he said: “David, listen. I have a proposition for you. Much better to explain it in person. Can you come to London?”
David Hopkins, the CEO of Aeromach, didn’t usually respond to requests like this. But for the sake of a major shareholder like Ivan Komarovsky, he was willing to rearrange his schedule and jet across the Atlantic. The next day, Hopkins arrived looking especially jovial. And why shouldn’t he? His company’s value had more than doubled since September. He smiled as they shook hands. “So coy, Ivan,” he said. “Making me fly all this way just to cop a feel.”
“I guess I should congratulate you. What’s it at today? Eighty-seven a share?”
“Eighty-eight. Well, and, Ivan, congratulations to you. Your slice is worth a pretty penny these days.”
Komarovsky indicated for Hopkins to sit. “You think it can last?”
“I absolutely do. The market is finally realizing what we’ve always known. How many times did we say the stock was underpriced?”
“So it’s not just a fluke.”
“Tell me, Ivan. You’ve always been bullish on Aeromach. Do you think it’s a fluke?”
“Ah, well.” Komarovsky took a sip of tea. “I actually have something specific I’d like to discuss with you.”
“You know, I was waiting for you to call.”
“You were?”
“Sure. This gives us the chance to maneuver a little bit. Spend more on R and D. Expand our reach. I know that’s always been what you’ve wanted.”
“I like you, David. But I don’t think you have the slightest idea what I want.”
Hopkins’s smile faded. As a former military man, this was the part he struggled with. He didn’t know what to do when faced with unhappy board members or shareholders. The instinct for hierarchical deference remained too strong within him.
“What I want,” Komarovsky continued, “is for you to halt the development of those new missiles. The ones you’ve been promising to sell to Poland.”
Hopkins blinked. “That’s a six-billion-dollar contract.”
“Correct.”
“But why would we—”
“David,” he said soothingly. “David, David, David. Let me finish. Of course, you don’t have to do this. You can do whatever you’d like. But I should warn you that if those missiles proceed as planned, the Aeromach stock price is going to plummet. It will go even lower than where it was over the summer. You know, you were right. It wasn’t just a fluke. There’s a specific reason the stock began to climb. You just don’t understand what that reason is.”
Hopkins blinked again. “I don’t understand.”
“Yes, well. As I said.”
“But I don’t… Ivan, what is this? Some kind of blackmail?”
“Yes.”
After a beat, Hopkins laughed bluffly. “I’m sorry, Ivan. This isn’t going to work. You don’t own nearly enough of the company to go around making these demands. So, what? If I don’t play ball, you’ll issue a statement, announce you’re selling your shares? And you think that’s enough to cause the price to plummet?”
“Oh no, no, no. David! Don’t be absurd. I don’t pretend that my words carry such weight. But you’re familiar with how this whole thing started. Someone posted about Aeromach, the post went viral, the world responded accordingly. But why did the post go viral? Who do you think caused that to happen?”
Again, that uncomprehending blink. This part always took longer than expected. It was frankly shocking, the degree to which these CEOs thought they deserved this newly profitable position. They were innocent in the way Komarovsky himself had once been innocent. They thought this was the market at work! But the market was just people, and they failed to understand how easily people could be manipulated. Hopkins was proving especially difficult. Maybe it was simplemindedness, or maybe it was a military stubbornness, or maybe Komarovsky himself was rusty at this. Even once he had grasped the mechanism, Hopkins remained fixated on the question of why. Why was Komarovsky so against the idea of Poland possessing these missiles? “Do you really need me to tell you that?” Komarovsky said. “David. Think about it. Do you really want to know?”
But the poor dumb man did want to know, and so Komarovsky explained. “And, yes, David, I see what you’re thinking. You could call the authorities in your country and expose this whole scheme. But will they really believe you? And if they did, won’t it make you look terribly stupid? We’re friends, after all. I’ve been a shareholder in Aeromach for years. Just this spring you were a guest on my yacht.”
Hopkins was turning ashen, the color draining from his face.
“I’ll tell you what,” Komarovsky continued. “No need to take my word. I’ll show you. That ought to make things easy. Your daughter, the older one. She’s a producer at that Hollywood studio, isn’t she? Well, keep an eye on that. Tomorrow someone will say something about the studio. And it will spread like wildfire, and their price will start to climb, and then you will believe me, won’t you? Okay, David. I’ll await your call.”
That same night, after returning from yet another black-tie gala, Komarovsky stopped in the foyer and kissed his wife on the cheek. “I’m sorry, Annushka,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
She nodded. Though she was young, she wasn’t naive, and she understood there was work she couldn’t know about. Wearily he dragged himself back out into the cold, where Osipov had kept the car idling. Komarovsky climbed into the back seat and said: “East Ferry Road.”
Four years ago he had rented a storefront near Canary Wharf, an old hair salon whose back room now housed his team of programmers. It was a forgettable corner of the city, a squat building with beige brick walls and metal shutters over the doors, harsh fluorescent streetlamps and garbage bags piled outside every night. Komarovsky unlocked the door and stepped inside. This part still looked like a salon: vinyl chairs with ripped padding, bumpy linoleum flooring, cracked mirrors along the walls. He would have liked to rip those mirrors down—he hated catching his reflection in the shadowy darkness—but that would have required hiring a contractor, and it was unwise to expand the circle of awareness beyond what was absolutely necessary.
In the back of the salon was a steel door with an electronic keypad. The old storage room was now the nerve center of the operation, crammed with desks, computer monitors, and a blinking stack of servers. A generator sat in the corner in case of a sudden power cut. The air was warm, thick with the scent of stale coffee and take-out curry. Cooler currents drifted from the air conditioner in the corner, installed to keep the server from overheating.
He had summoned the five programmers earlier that day, after his meeting with Hopkins. They didn’t so much as glance up when Komarovsky entered. He stood behind Yulia and asked: “Everything is good?”
Without looking at him, she nodded. Her eyes were locked on the screen, her fingers flying across the keyboard. It was, he thought, not unlike watching Lang Lang perform a piano concerto, or Jackson Pollock fling paint across a canvas. Anything, when done at the highest level, could fill a person with awe. As he sat down, he envied Yulia this purity of purpose. He was the one with the mansions, the cars, the planes—but who, really, was happier?
“Why are you shaking your head?” Yulia asked, still glued to her screen.
“Never mind,” Komarovsky said. “Show me the new code.”
“This is a bad time to interrupt.”
“Indulge me.”
Technically they worked for him, technically he paid their salary, but they weren’t motivated by money. What they cared about was the challenge of cracking this supposedly uncrackable algorithm. The programmers had countless opportunities to profit from this manufactured momentum, and they never did. Komarovsky had them followed and monitored their bank accounts—just as a precaution—but it only confirmed what he already knew. He trusted them precisely because of their fuck-off attitudes. Komarovsky didn’t need to chaperone them, didn’t need to spend so much time in this cloistered room. But he did because, well, because he liked it here. He liked the blinkered focus, the underdog camaraderie, the sense of uncompromising rigor.
Wearing an annoyed frown, Yulia walked him through the new code. When she finished, she sighed loudly and reached for her noise-canceling headphones. Komarovsky walked across the room and switched on the electric kettle to make tea. It was funny, he thought. An hour ago he was longing to climb into bed. Now that he was here, he felt wide awake.
Around 5:30 a.m., Yulia stood up, put on her jacket, and left. Soon the others followed. A user by the name of HotDogQueenzzz had posted about the Hollywood studio in question, and already the algorithm was churning the post to the top of the feed. Komarovsky checked his watch: he had just enough time to get home and take a short nap before showering, changing, and heading to the offices of Pavel Partners. Where, in a matter of hours, after the markets had opened and the shares began to skyrocket, he would receive a conciliatory phone call from Aeromach CEO David Hopkins.
But instead of hurrying, he lingered before the whiteboard. The programmers had spent a good part of the night arguing, scribbling out code, pointing out the mistakes, erasing, writing again. His heart swelled with fondness. This was the part he found hard to explain. “What you’re doing is wrong, Ivan,” Bob Vogel had said to him. He remembered that exchange so well: sitting before a crackling fire in an elegant canal house in Amsterdam, a bottle of Barolo decanting on the sideboard. The righteous intensity of his friend’s gaze. “You’re taking these companies, honest companies, and you’re ripping them to shreds on behalf of a man you hate. You can’t feel good about that.”
Of course he didn’t. But the work itself felt separate from the corruption it served. He was like a scientist, prodding the fabric of the universe, observing cause and effect. It was hard to make Vogel understand. Americans were never able to understand. How many times had it been asked of him? Wasn’t life in the Soviet Union miserable? Weren’t you cold, and hungry, and tired? Yes. Of course. Every day. Then why the nostalgia? Why do you claim to miss it?
Because, despite the hardship, they had the dignity of playing on their own field. Because, even if the socialist experiment was failing them, at least it was their experiment.
Komarovsky switched off the lights. Tested the door to make sure it had locked, retraced his steps through the salon. Outside, he rolled down the metal shutter, locked the padlock, and began walking. He always asked Osipov to park a few streets away. He didn’t like to draw attention to the storefront, even though East Ferry Road was usually deserted at this hour.
Strange, though. As he began down the sidewalk, a woman appeared from around the corner. She wore a long puffy jacket, shapeless as a sleeping bag. She was short; the hem nearly touched the ground. Hood pulled up, hands shoved in pockets. Komarovsky pitied her. She would only be walking in this area, at this particular hour of the day, if she was a tired old beggar, or something of the sort.
But as she got closer, she lifted her head. The hood fell back. The streetlights illuminated just enough of her face for Komarovsky to freeze. She was young, with apple-round cheeks and a freckled nose—and she was looking right at him.