On the seventh floor, Maria hurried along windowless, poorly lit hallways. The soft parquet squares compressed beneath her steps. The low-grade pine constantly wore out, and workers perpetually circled the building adding new layers. A running joke at Lubyanka was that eventually there would be no space between the floor and ceiling.
To gain entrance to the Secretariat, Maria put her eyes to a scanner. A green light traced her irises and granted access. She pulled open the heavy door and stepped inside. The women seated at their desks gave a collective sigh of relief. The more experienced looked frazzled but not particularly concerned; they had been through many Sokalov tantrums. The less experienced looked terrified, which only fed Sokalov’s ego—as massive as his appetite for food and sex. It took Kulikova just seconds to determine who had borne the brunt of Sokalov’s latest tirade. Tiana, relatively new, wept at her desk as she packed picture frames of her children.
“Put your photographs back, Tiana,” Kulikova said, passing by the young woman’s desk.
“But the director . . . ,” Tiana said.
“Is having a bad morning. Continue with whatever it is you were doing.”
Karine, Kulikova’s second in charge, quickly approached. She grabbed Kulikova’s arm and spoke in hushed tones as they moved toward Kulikova’s office door. “His Majesty is on the warpath again.”
“I’ve heard. What this time?”
“Something about a meeting this morning and a file he needs.”
Kulikova stopped outside her office door. “I’ll handle the deputy director. You calm everyone. Tell them I said not to worry.”
Kulikova stepped into her office and closed the door. She set her briefcase beside her desk, moved to her credenza, and exchanged her tennis shoes for a pair of black Christian Louboutin pumps, one of seven pairs she kept at work. She tipped a drop of Roja Parfums—a Sokalov present for her sixtieth birthday—on each wrist, then rubbed her wrists along her neck. She touched another drop to her index finger and ran that finger down her cleavage, then freed a button of her blouse. She peeled the yellow magnetic strip of tape that sealed her safe each night, entered a password that changed weekly, and exchanged her daily wristwatch for the Rolex, then slipped on a diamond-and-ruby bracelet—Sokalov gifts she also never brought home.
She found the file Sokalov needed inside her safe, exactly where he had told her to put it, then walked to the interior door that provided access to Sokalov’s inner sanctum—an office that was a testament to his excess. The furniture and accoutrements were worth more than the GNP of some small countries, and the bar so well stocked it would rival the most popular in Moscow. She pushed open the door without a knock and stepped inside.
Sokalov paced the hardwood floor along the draped windows that provided a view of downtown Moscow while he spoke on his personal cell phone. FSB officers carried two cell phones: one for personal calls, and one encrypted and used only for FSB business. Kulikova waited alongside Sokalov’s Louis XV desk while his wife, Olga, led him by his nose over his personal cell phone.
Olga Sokalov had something other women did not—a father who adored his little girl and his grandchildren, and whom Sokalov feared intensely.
Sokalov nodded to Maria, then rolled his bloodshot eyes. He wore his suit jacket in anticipation of his meeting. The tip of his tie rested on his protruding stomach, which tested the resiliency of the thread on his shirt buttons. The chemical odor of Sokalov’s hair oil, used in a futile effort to protect what remained of his thinning hair, dominated the room.
“Yes. I have told you that I will be there. Of course, I will be there. No. Nothing will come up. Yes, I understand you do not wish to disappoint your father on his birthday. Yes, of course.”
Olga’s father was General Roman Portnov, the former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, or SVR. “I have to go, Olga,” Sokalov pleaded. “I have a meeting starting in minutes and I must prepare. No, nothing is more important than your father’s seventy-sixth birthday, and I would be pleased to hear about all the preparations, just not this morning. Fine. Yes. This afternoon.” He moved the phone away from his ear as he spoke. “Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. Goodbye. Good . . .”
He lowered the phone and gave Kulikova an exhausted sigh, then lumbered to his desk. With thin shoulders and legs, and no butt to speak of, Sokalov looked like a pregnant Popsicle stick. “What could be more important than a man’s seventy-third, seventy-fourth, and seventy-fifth birthdays? His seventy-sixth, of course!” He sighed. “She is exhausting. I have—”