The Moroccan Girl

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  For Luke Janklow and Will Francis

  There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

  —GRAHAM GREENE, THE COMEDIANS

  “Would you prefer to talk or to write everything down?”

  “Talk,” she said.

  Somerville crossed the room and activated the voice recorder. The American had brought it from the Embassy. There was a small microphone attached to a stand, a glass of tap water and a plate of biscuits on the table.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready.”

  Somerville leaned over the microphone. His voice was clear, his language concise.

  “Statement by LASZLO. Chapel Street, SW1. August nineteenth. Officer presiding: L4. Begins now.” He checked his watch. “Seventeen hundred hours.”

  Lara Bartok adjusted the collar of her shirt. She caught Somerville’s eye. He nodded at her, indicating that she should start. She brought the microphone slightly closer to her and took a sip of water. The American realized that he was standing in her eyeline. He moved to a chair on the far side of the room. Bartok did not continue until he was still and completely silent.

  “In the beginning, there were seven,” she said.

  SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE EYES ONLY / STRAP 1

  STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (“LASZLO”)

  CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H.—CHAPEL STREET

  REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE FILE: RE2768X

  PART 1 OF 5

  In the beginning there were seven. Ivan [Simakov], of course, who is still rightly regarded as the intellectual and moral architect of Resurrection; and , both American citizens whom Simakov had met in Zuccotti Park at the height of Occupy Wall Street. , formerly of the Service; , the cyber expert who had been active in Anonymous for several years and was instrumental in planning and orchestrating many of Resurrection’s most effective operations in the United States. Ivan had a way of contacting such people on the dark web, of gaining their trust over time, of drawing them out into the open. I used to say that he was like a child on a beach, pouring salt onto the sand so that the creatures of the deep would rise to the surface. He enjoyed this image very much. It is no secret that Ivan Simakov liked to think of himself as a man with extraordinary capabilities.

  Also present that day were Thomas Frattura, former assistant to Republican Senator Catherine McKendrick, who had been a prominent figure in Disrupt J20; and me, Lara Bartok, originally from Gyula, in eastern Hungary, about whom you know almost everything.

  These seven individuals met only once, in a suite at the Redbury Hotel on East 29th Street in Manhattan. Of course, no cellphones, laptops or Wi-Fi-enabled devices of any kind were permitted to be brought to the hotel. Each of the guests who entered the suite was searched by Ivan and myself and asked to remove watches and other items of jewelry, all of which we then took—along with personal belongings including bags and shoes—to a room on a separate floor of the hotel for the duration of the meeting. Ivan, who was meeting and for the first time, introduced himself as a Russian citizen, born in Moscow and educated in Paris, who was hoping to effect political change in his own country by inspiring “an international resistance movement directed against the advocates and enablers of autocratic and quasi-fascist regimes around the world.”

  Frattura asked him to explain in more detail what he meant by this. I remember that Ivan paused. He always had a good sense of theater. He crossed the suite and opened the curtains. It was a wet morning, there had been heavy rain all night. Through the glass it looked as though the thick fog of the New York skyline was going to seep into the room. What he said next was the best of him. In fact his response to Frattura would form the basis of all the early statements released on behalf of Resurrection outlining our movement’s basic goals and rationale.

  “Those who know that they have done wrong,” he said. “Those who have lied in order to achieve their political goals. Those who consciously spread fear and hate. Those who knowingly benefit from greed and corruption. Any person who has helped to bring about the current political crisis in the United States by spreading propaganda and misinformation. Those who aid and abet the criminal regime in Moscow. Those who lied and manipulated in order to see England [sic] break from the European Union. Those who support and actively benefit from the collapse of secular Islamic states; who crush dissent and free speech and willingly erode basic human rights. Any person seeking to spread the virus of male white supremacy or deliberately to stoke anti-Semitism or to suppress women’s rights in any form. All of these people—we will begin in the United States and countries such as Russia, the Netherlands, Turkey and the United Kingdom—are legitimate targets for acts of retribution. Bankers. Journalists. Businessmen. Bloggers. Lobbyists. Politicians. Broadcasters. They are to be chosen by us—by you—on a case-by-case basis and their crimes exposed to the widest possible audience.”

  The beauty of Ivan’s idea was that it was individually targeted. This is what made it different to Antifa, to Black Lives Matter, to Occupy, to all those other groups who were only ever interested in public protest, in rioting, in civil disorder for its own sake. Those groups changed nothing in terms of people’s behavior but instead gave various parties a chance merely to pose, to demonstrate their own virtue. There is a great difference between people of action and people of words, no? One thing you can say about Ivan Simakov, without a shadow of doubt, is that he was a man of action.

  At no point did anybody suggest that the targets for Resurrection were too broadly defined. We were all what you would call in English “fellow travelers.” We were all—with the exception of Mr. Frattura—in our twenties or early thirties. We were angry. Very angry. We wanted to do something. We wanted to fight back. We had grown up with the illegal wars in Iraq and Syria. We had lived through the financial crisis and seen not one man nor woman imprisoned for their crimes. All of us had been touched by the manifest corruption and greed of the first two decades of the new century. We felt powerless. We felt that the world as we knew it was being taken away from us. We lived and breathed this conviction and yearned to do something about it. Ivan was a brilliant man, possessed of fanatical zeal, as well as what I always recognized as considerable vanity. But nobody could ever accuse him of lacking passion and the yearning for change.

  A policy of nonviolence was immediately and enthusiastically endorsed by the group. At that stage nobody thought of themselves as the sort of people who would be involved in assassinations, in bombings, in terrorist behavior of any kind. Everybody knew that deaths—accidental or otherwise—of innocent civilians would quickly strip the movement of popular support and allow the very people who were being targeted for retribution to accuse Resurrection of “fascism,” of murder, of association with nihilistic, left-wing paramilitary groups. This, of course, is exactly what happened.

  Ivan spoke about his ideas for evading capture, eluding law enforcement and intelligence
services, men such as yourselves. “This is the only meeting of its kind between us that will ever take place,” he said. There were silent nods of understanding. People already respected him. They had experienced firsthand the force of his personality. Once you had met Ivan Simakov, you never forgot him. “We will never again communicate or speak face-to-face. Nothing may come from what we discuss today. I have a plan for our first attacks, all of which may be prevented from taking place or fail to have the desired effect on international opinion. I cannot tell you about these plans, just as I would not expect you to divulge details of your own operations as you create them. The Resurrection movement could burn out. The Resurrection movement could have a seismic effect on public attitudes to the liars and enablers of the alt-right. Who knows? Personally, I am not interested in fame. I have no interest in notoriety or my place in the history books. I have no wish to spend the rest of my life under surveillance or in prison, to live as the guest of a foreign embassy in London, or to save my own skin by making a deal with the devils in Moscow. I wish to be invisible, as you should all wish to be invisible.”

  So much has happened since then. I have been through many lives and many cities because of my relationship with Ivan Simakov. At that moment I was proud to be at his side. He was in the prime of life. I was honored to be his girlfriend and to be associated with Resurrection. Now, of course, the movement has moved deeper and deeper into violence, further and further away from the goals and ideals expressed on that first day in New York.

  They were so different, but when I think of Ivan, I cannot help thinking of Kit. On the boat he told me that I was like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, the faithless woman at the side of a revolutionary zealot. He called me his “Moroccan girl.” Kit was romantic like that, always living at the edge of what was real, as if life was a book he had written, a movie he had seen, and all of us were characters in the story. He was kinder than Ivan, in many ways also braver. I confess to you that I miss him in a way that I did not expect to. I wish you would tell me what happened to him. In his company, I felt safe. It had been a very long time since any man had made me feel that way.

  MOSCOW

  The apartment was on a quiet street in the Tverskoy District of Moscow, about two kilometers from the Kremlin, a five-minute walk from Lubyanka Square. From the third floor, Curtis could hear the ripple of snow tires on the wet winter streets. He told Simakov that for the first few days in the city he had thought that all the cars had punctures.

  “Sounds like they’re driving on bubble wrap,” he said. “I keep wanting to tell them to put air in their tires.”

  “But you don’t speak Russian,” Simakov replied.

  “No,” said Curtis. “I guess I don’t.”

  He was twenty-nine years old, born and raised in San Diego, the only son of a software salesman who had died when Curtis was fourteen. His mother had been working as a nurse at Scripps Mercy for the past fifteen years. He had graduated from Cal Tech, taken a job at Google, quit at twenty-seven with more than four hundred thousand dollars in the bank thanks to a smart investment in a start-up. Simakov had used Curtis in the Euclidis kidnapping. Moscow was to be his second job.

  If he was honest, the plan sounded vague. With Euclidis, every detail had been worked out in advance. Where the target was staying, what time his cab was booked to take him over to Berkeley, how to shut off the CCTV outside the hotel, where to switch the cars. The Moscow job was different. Maybe it was because Curtis didn’t know the city; maybe it was because he didn’t speak Russian. He felt out of the loop. Ivan was always leaving the apartment and going off to meet people; he said there were other Resurrection activists taking care of the details. All Curtis had been told was that Ambassador Jeffers always sat in the same spot at Café Pushkin, at the same time, on the same night of the week. Curtis was to position himself a few tables away, with the woman from St. Petersburg role-playing his girlfriend, keep an eye on Jeffers and make an assessment of the security around him. Simakov would be in the van outside, watching the phones, waiting for Curtis to give the signal that Jeffers was leaving. Two other Resurrection volunteers would be working the sidewalk in the event that anybody tried to step in and help. One of them would have the Glock, the other a Ruger.

  “What if there’s more security than we’re expecting?” he asked. “What if they have plainclothes in the restaurant I don’t know about?”

  Curtis did not want to seem distrustful or unsure, but he knew Ivan well enough to speak up when he had doubts.

  “What are you so worried about?” Simakov replied. He was slim and athletic with shoulder-length black hair tied back in a ponytail. “Things go wrong, you walk away. All you have to do is eat your borscht, talk to the girl, let me know what time Ambassador Fuck pays his check.”

  “I know. I just don’t like all the uncertainty.”

  “What uncertainty?” Simakov took one of the Rugers off the table and packed it into the bag. Curtis couldn’t tell if he was angry or just trying to concentrate on the thousand plans and ideas running through his mind. It was always hard to judge Simakov’s mood. He was so controlled, so sharp, lacking in any kind of hesitation or self-doubt. “I told you, Zack. This is my city. These are my people. Besides, it’s my ass on the line if things go wrong. Whatever happens, you two lovebirds can stay inside, drink some vodka, try the Stroganoff. The Pushkin is famous for it.”

  Curtis knew that there was nothing more to be said about Jeffers. He tried to change the subject by talking about the weather in Moscow, how as a Californian he couldn’t get used to going from hot to cold to hot all the time when he was out in the city. He didn’t want Ivan thinking he didn’t have the stomach for the fight.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said it’s weird the way a lot of the old buildings have three sets of doors.” Curtis kept talking as he followed Simakov into the kitchen. “What’s that about? To keep out the cold?”

  “Trap the heat,” Simakov replied. He was carrying the Glock.

  Curtis couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was in awe of Simakov. He didn’t know how to challenge him or to tell him how proud he was to be serving alongside him in the front ranks of Resurrection. Ivan gave off an aura of otherworldly calm and expertise that was almost impossible to penetrate. Curtis knew that he had styled himself as a mere foot soldier, one of tens of thousands of people around the world with the desire to confront bigotry and injustice. But to Curtis, Simakov was the Leader. There was nothing conventional or routine about him. He was extraordinary.

  “I just want to say that I’m glad you got me out here,” he said.

  “That’s OK, Zack. You were the right man for the job.”

  Simakov opened one of the cupboards in the kitchen. He was looking for something.

  “I need some oil, clean this thing,” he said, indicating the gun.

  “I could go out and get you some,” Curtis suggested.

  “Don’t you worry about it.” He slapped him on the back, tugging him forward, like a bear hug from a big brother. “Anyway, haven’t you forgotten? You don’t speak Russian.”

  * * *

  The bomb detonated six minutes later, at twenty-three minutes past four in the afternoon. The explosion, which also took the life of a young mother and her baby daughter in a corner apartment on the fourth floor of the building, was initially believed to have been caused by a faulty gas cylinder. When it was discovered that Zack Curtis and Ivan Simakov had been killed in the incident, a division of Alpha Group, Russia’s counterterrorism task force, was dispatched to the scene. Russian television reported that Simakov had been killed by an improvised explosive device that detonated accidentally only hours before a planned Resurrection strike against the American ambassador to the Russian Federation, Walter P. Jeffers, former chairman of the Jeffers Company and a prominent donor to the Republican Party.

  News of Simakov’s death spread quickly. Some believed that the founder of Resurrection had died while in the process of b
uilding a homemade bomb; others were convinced that Russian intelligence had been watching Simakov and that he had been assassinated on the orders of the Kremlin. To deter Resurrection opponents and sympathizers alike, Simakov’s remains were interred in an unmarked grave in Kuntsevo Cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow. Curtis was buried two weeks later in San Diego. More than three thousand Resurrection supporters lined the route taken by the funeral cortège.

  London

  EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER

  1

  Like a lot of things that later become very complicated, the situation began very simply.

  A few days short of his thirty-sixth birthday, Christopher “Kit” Carradine—known professionally as C. K. Carradine—was walking along Bayswater Road en route to a cinema in Notting Hill Gate, smoking a cigarette and thinking about nothing much in particular, when he was stopped by a tall, bearded man wearing a dark blue suit and carrying a worn leather briefcase.

  “Excuse me?” he said. “Are you C. K. Carradine?”

  Carradine had been writing thrillers professionally for almost five years. In that time he had published three novels and been recognized by members of the public precisely twice: the first time while buying a pot of Marmite in a branch of Tesco Metro in Marylebone; the second while queuing for a drink after a gig at the Brixton Academy.

  “I am,” he said.

  “I’m sorry to stop you,” said the man. He was at least fifteen years older than Carradine with thinning hair and slightly beady eyes that had the effect of making him seem strung out and flustered. “I’m a huge fan. I absolutely love your books.”

  “That’s really great to hear.” Carradine had become a writer almost by accident. Being recognized on the street was surely one of the perks of the job, but he was surprised by the compliment and wondered what more he could say.