Our American Friend

by Anna Pitoniak

Genres: Women's Fiction; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

A mysterious First Lady, the intrepid journalist writing her biography – and the secret that could destroy them both.
When White House correspondent Sofie Morse gets a call from the office of First Lady Lara Caine, asking her to come in for a private meeting, her curiosity is piqued.
Sofie, like the rest of the world, knows only that Lara was born in Soviet Russia, raised in Paris, and worked as a model before moving to America and marrying the notoriously brash future president.
Now Lara wants Sofie to write her official biography. After decades of silence, she is finally ready to speak candidly about her past: about her father's work for the KGB, and about her ill-fated relationship with Sasha--which may be long in the past, but which could have explosive ramifications for the future. As Lara's story unfolds, Sofie can't help but wonder: why is she revealing such sensitive information? And why now?
“Elegant and well-paced... Like Emily in Paris meets Scandal - fantastic fun.” - New York Times
“Spectacular - a global thriller with pace, tension and ever-higher stakes, born of an intimate and unlikely friendship between two very different women.'”- Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"A gripping tale of the Cold War and its legacy." – People
"Wholly original." - Entertainment Weekly
"A smart, timely take on American politics, Soviet spy craft, and the lengths we'll go to for love and revenge." - Town and Country

Release date: February 15, 2022

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 336

Sample

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
The Mediterranean was a deep winter blue, cold and dimpled like hammered steel, on the morning that I began wondering if I had made the worst mistake of my life.

The night before, I’d been walking home through our quiet corner of the city, no more or less nervous than usual. Light flickered from the dying bulb in the streetlight. Cars were parked tight up against the white stucco buildings. We lived on a narrow street where no one knew our name, in a home that was meant to remain anonymous. But in the doorway—our doorway—there was a strange figure, standing and waiting.

A young woman, blond hair peeking from beneath her knit hat, wearing a plush parka, bent over her phone, her face illuminated in an eerie glow. Hearing my footsteps, she suddenly looked up. “You’re Sofie, aren’t you?” she said. “Sofie Morse?”

She held out a business card and I glanced down. I recognized her name. My heart began thudding against my rib cage. With a patient smile, she explained how much effort it had taken for her to track me down, given that I hadn’t returned any of her emails or phone calls, and she didn’t mean to startle me but she really did have some important questions to ask.

I took the card from her and looked away, mumbling, “Right, right, thanks. Uh, sorry, got to get these groceries inside.” I could sense her continuing to stare at me. She stood in front of the door, blocking the way. “Sorry,” I repeated. “Do you mind?”

As she stepped aside, she placed her hand on my arm and said: “So you’ll call me?”

Though I had no intention of seeing this woman again, I needed to get away from her. I nodded, and said I’d call her, because every second we stood here was another second in which she might see through me.

Upstairs, I unlocked our apartment door with shaking hands. I dropped the grocery bags to the floor, forgetting the carton of eggs, which now seeped from their cracked shells. I took deep breaths, trying not to panic. Stop freaking out, I told myself. You’re okay.

Except that a stranger had tracked me down, flown across the Atlantic, and waited on my doorstep for who-knew-how-long in the cold January night, because that’s how badly she wanted to know the truth; the truth, which, if revealed, could cause the entire operation to collapse. It wasn’t just my safety, or Ben’s safety. I’d been reminded, time and again, that the stakes were much bigger than that. No, I wasn’t okay. I was definitely not okay.

“It’s unlikely that you’ll need it,” the man had said, last year, back in New York. He had the seen-it-all sangfroid of a person familiar with the furthest edges of life. “But if you’re in real trouble, and you need to signal for a meeting, here’s what you do.”

I hurried into the bedroom and took the red towel from the shelf in the closet. I grabbed a few stray items from the laundry hamper—a T-shirt, a sweatshirt—and soaked everything in the kitchen sink. The towel was brand-new, never washed before. The red dye bled and stained the water. The wet bundle left a trail along the floor as I carried it to our small balcony, where we kept a collapsible laundry rack. On the outermost edge, clearly visible to anyone passing, the red towel dripped and dripped.

When Ben got home an hour later, his eyes were wide. He had seen the towel. Silently, he nodded toward the balcony. Why the towel? What happened?

I slid the business card across the counter. His eyebrows arched in recognition. The woman was a journalist from a TV network back in New York. She told me she would love the chance to talk about my relationship with Lara Caine, the First Lady of the United States. Would love, that’s how she phrased it. Would sell a kidney for is a better way to put it.

That night I lay wide awake, unable to sleep. The fear had ebbed and flowed since we arrived in Croatia four months before, but this was the worst yet. Ben breathed steadily in the darkness. Okay, I thought, engaging in my usual practice. Ask yourself this. What was I scared of? Was I scared of her? I was familiar with the hunger she felt, the relentless drive to uncover the truth. Wasn’t she just a journalist, not so different from me? Anyway, it wasn’t like she was interested in me specifically. She was only doing her job. As the gray light of dawn softened the edges of the bedroom curtains, I convinced myself that I had overreacted.

“What are you doing?” Ben said drowsily, as I climbed out of bed.

“Nothing,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

No harm, I thought, bringing the laundry back inside. It had been an unusually cold night, and the towel had frozen stiff. Maybe no one had seen it and I would be spared from embarrassment. I ran a hot shower. I got dressed, brushed my teeth, and put away last night’s dishes. You’re fine, Sofie. I would live my life like it was any ordinary day, because that’s what I wanted it to be.

And I began every day with a long walk through town and along the corniche, where the towering procession of palm trees shivered in the wind. Or, more accurately, shivered in the bora: the name of the winter wind that swept along the undulating Adriatic coastline. Ben had defined the word bora for me. He read constantly, to keep his mind busy. He’d recently read Ernest Shackleton’s memoir, which inspired his suggestion that we each establish our own daily routines to maintain our sanity during this strange exile.

We’d arrived in Split the previous September. I thought we’d be in Croatia for a month, two months tops. We’d left behind our life in New York in a hurry, figuring we’d be back soon enough. Then two months turned into three, and then it was Christmas, and then it was a new year, and still there was no end in sight. Whenever I expressed guilt about the mess I’d gotten us into, Ben shook his head.

“Stop,” he’d say. “We did this together, Sofe.”

Except that my decisions—mine, not his—had brought us to this point. And no matter how many times Ben told me that it was okay, I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe him.

That morning, walking along the corniche, as the cold wind whipped my hair into a frenzy, I scanned the faces of everyone I passed. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for—a returned gaze? surreptitious sign language?—but whatever it was, it didn’t materialize.

“We’ll have people on the ground,” the man had said to us, before we left. “They’ll be watching, just in case.”

I remembered nodding. I remembered feeling relieved by his reassurances. I remembered thinking: This man is a stranger, and yet we’re trusting him with our lives.

The bell on the café door jangled, and the waiters waved at me as I headed to my regular table. I liked this place. The café was too haphazard to be elegant, but it was cozy and generously heated in the wintertime. The room was tall and narrow, like a shoebox stood on its end. The tables were covered in red damask, with squares of white paper to shield the fabric, and the warm light of the sconces were reflected in the wall-hung mirrors.

They made a decent cappuccino, and the pastries were passable, but mostly I liked this café because the waitstaff remembered me, and that kindness made a tiny dent in our anonymity. The waiters—teenagers for the most part—were as bored and affable as high school students sitting through last period. The café was cramped, so they were constantly colliding with one another, spilling coffee and yelping in indignation, but they also never had quite enough work to keep themselves busy, and they bickered to pass the time.

My waiter that day, Mirko, was my favorite. He was gangly and gregarious, and saving money toward the goal of achieving his greatest desire, which was to travel to America—specifically to Chicago. (He was obsessed with Michael Jordan and could recite the entire roster of the 1996 Bulls.) That morning, as he placed my cappuccino and cornet pastry on the table—I hadn’t even needed to order it—Mirko said, “There is a big story about your president.”

“Oh?” I said. Even though a lot of Americans had long since wearied of the conversation, the foreigners I’d met remained intensely curious about President Caine.

“Yes,” Mirko said, standing up straight, looking slightly indignant. “It is very bad news. He says he is planning to visit Serbia next month for an important meeting.”

“Why is that bad news?” I asked.

“Bad for Croatia!” he exclaimed. “We are much more beautiful than Serbia. Why would he go there instead of here? He is choosing our greatest rival instead of choosing us, even though we are so much better. It is very bad.” Mirko’s eyes were wide. “Why do you think he did this, Sofie?”

“Who knows?” I said. “No one understands him, Mirko.”

After Mirko left, I scrolled through the news on my phone, just like every morning. I glanced up whenever the bell on the door jangled— a pair of tourists chattering in German; a mother with a baby swaddled against her chest—but none of the new arrivals met my eye. There was a story that day about Caine’s recent phone call with Russian president Nikolai Gruzdev. The White House released little detail about the conversation, except to emphasize that Gruzdev was fully supportive of Caine’s recent decision to withdraw American troops from Mozambique.

“Great conversation with President Gruzdev, or as I call him, NICKY!” Caine tweeted. “We are making progress!”

I kept scrolling, but stopped abruptly when I saw a story about the construction of Nord Stream 2. Nord Stream 2 was Russia’s new natural gas pipeline, which would begin at the country’s western edge, snake through the Baltic Sea, and end in Germany. Officially, America was opposed to the pipeline for geopolitical reasons. Unofficially, President Gruzdev knew that his American friend Henry Caine wouldn’t do anything about it. The article described how worried the state department and foreign policy wonks in Washington were about the rapid progress of the pipeline. But no amount of saber rattling could change reality, which was that Caine wasn’t going to stand in Nicky’s way.

For a long time now, the world had suspected there was an understanding between the American president and the Russian president. Almost two years earlier, at the conclusion of a lengthy investigation, the Special Counsel released his report, which contained certain clear facts. Yes, the Russians used disinformation and propaganda to help Caine win his first election. Yes, Caine treated Gruzdev with special favoritism once elected. Yes, there was an increasingly worrisome pattern of their agendas aligning. But there was no smoking gun. No secretive backroom deal. If there was something distasteful, something ugly, about the relationship—well, Caine never let himself become troubled by mere ugliness.

My coffee and pastry long since finished, I was standing up and leaving a tip for Mirko when I noticed a gray-haired woman across the room. She stood at the bar, talking with the waiter. Another regular, it seemed. (But why had I never seen her before?) She turned away from the bar, carrying a brimming cup of coffee, but kept looking back at the waiter. As she walked blindly across the room, right toward me, the collision seemed to happen in slow motion. Scalding coffee, up and down my sweater.

“Oh my God! Oh my God, I am so sorry!” she exclaimed. She launched into a multilingual apology: “Je suis désolée! Mi scusi! Es tut mir Leid!”

I shook my head. “It’s fine,” I said, reaching for a napkin.

“No, no, I am so embarrassed. Please let me help you.” She seized the napkin and began dabbing. “Oh, your poor sweater. I ruined it. I am so sorry. Here, please. Come with me. I’ll help you.”

She grabbed my hand and, before I could object, dragged me toward the bathroom. She ran the faucet, and then turned around to lock the door.

“Well, Sofie,” she said in a brusque tone. “I’m sorry about the sweater, but it was the only way.”

I swallowed hard, performing rapid calculations. “You’re…? So you saw…?”

“My name is Greta,” she said. In the claustrophobic bathroom, with the harsh light and the scent of chemical cleaner, this woman had undergone a chameleon-like transformation. Her mouth set in a grim line, her eyes hard and unblinking, she looked nothing like the carefree woman of a few minutes ago. “I am a friend of your friend. Are you and Ben okay? You have something you need to tell us?”

I felt vaguely terrified of Greta, and inclined to do whatever she told me. But as I was starting to sputter out an explanation, it came back to me: another instruction from that distant day.

“No, wait. Wait a second,” I said, shaking my head. “How is… How is my neighbor Maurice doing?”

She gave a brisk nod. “The soil is healthy. The tulips will have a good spring.”

“Okay,” I said, mirroring her movement, nodding to myself. Okay.

I described what had happened the night before, how the producer, who had been calling and emailing for weeks, had actually shown up in person. “On my doorstep,” I said, my voice straining. Saying it out loud made me understand just how real it was. “Where we live. Where we’re supposed to be safe.”

“Yes,” she said. “I thought it might be that. We saw her, too.”

“Then you need to help me!” I exclaimed. “Get her to leave me alone.”

“No, Sofie. Think about how it would look if we interfered.”

“I don’t care how it looks!” I said, the heat rising in my cheeks.

“Certainly you care.” Her tone was cold, as if the concept of caring was mere abstraction. “Think, Sofie. Why would she come all the way to Croatia? She suspects something. Likely, that you haven’t told the full truth about your relationship with Lara Caine. You’re a journalist. If someone tried to stop you, what would it make you do?” She stared at me bloodlessly. “You’d just work ten times harder, wouldn’t you?”

A knock on the bathroom door.

“One minute!” Greta shouted. Then she continued: “Here’s what we want you to do. Take the meeting. Show her that you have nothing to hide. You might even learn something useful in the process. The nature of her suspicions. The reason for her persistence. Really.” She arched an eyebrow. “You have nothing to fear from her. She’s exactly who she says she is. She’s just looking for a good story.”

“I can’t do it,” I insisted. “I’m not a good enough liar.”

“She wants a good story,” Greta repeated, like a teacher instructing a slow-witted student. “Isn’t this the nature of your work? Certainly you have experience coming up with a good story.”

She grabbed a handful of paper towels and held them out to me. “Here,” she said. “You ought to clean yourself up before you go back outside.”

As I walked home through the cobblestoned streets, I pulled out my phone. Maurice was our upstairs neighbor in New York. It gave a pretext for my regular calls: he was checking our mail, watering the plants, keeping an eye on things. His landline rang, and there was his familiar voice, his Russian accent still strong even after decades in America: “Good morning, Sonechka.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“You’re the only person who calls this early,” he said. It would be dawn in New York, darkness out the window. Maurice was an early riser, brewing tea to the soft strains of Mozart on WQXR while the rest of the building slept. “But I’m glad you did. I have some news.”

“News?” I said, pricking to attention.

“I spoke to our friend yesterday,” he said. “Our friend was in good spirits.”

“That’s good,” I said, my heart suddenly thumping. “Isn’t it?”

“I said you were very happy with your new routine.”

“Oh,” I said. “Uh, yeah. Of course we’re happy. But there was nothing about”—I searched for the right words, the right disguise for the question I was asking—“about, you know. How the work is going?”

“I’m sorry, Sonechka,” he said. “We spoke for only a minute or two.”

“Ah,” I said. (Why did I bother? Why did I search for reassurance when I knew, I knew, there was none to be found?) “Okay. Well, the reason I called is that, actually, something weird happened last night.”

“Oh?”

“This TV producer from New York,” I said. “She wants to interview me for a feature about Lara Caine. She showed up on my doorstep. I don’t know how she found me.”

“Interesting,” Maurice said quietly. “Do you think you’ll say yes?”

“I think”—I coughed, my mouth gone dry—“I think I have to.”

A brief silence on the other end. I could picture it so vividly: Maurice walking to the window, pulling back the curtain, checking to see if anyone else on the block was awake. Keeping an eye on things, like always. I heard the clink of his china cup in its saucer.

“Yes, that sounds sensible. Curiosity is to be expected,” he said. “What you had with Lara Caine was very unusual. Of course this person wants to know more.”

Looking back, it’s strange to think how quickly everything happened. Lara Caine was the third wife of President Caine, the only First Lady since Louisa Adams to be born outside the United States, the most enigmatic occupant of the East Wing in decades, the silent companion of the most toxic leader in American history, the couture-clad Rorschach test for the nation at large—and the subject of my next book.

That was the plan, at least. After her husband was, horrifyingly, reelected to a second term, Mrs. Caine had approached me to write her biography. The access she granted was irresistible, giving me free rein with memories, diaries, photographs, and family members. She had no desire to write her own book. Like any wealthy woman, Mrs. Caine was comfortable with delegation: she relied on professionals to cook her meals, style her hair, tailor her clothes. So why not have a professional tell her story? The First Lady demanded no control over the final product. As far as I could tell, there were no strings attached.

I hesitated at first. I wondered whether it was selling out; whether devoting so much time to this project would be amoral, or immoral. Wasn’t it cynical to say yes? But Lara Caine had made it impossible for the public to get to know her. Like the rest of America, I’d assumed things about her without really knowing anything about her. So was it cynical to say no? I spun in circles for a while, but in the end, my curiosity decided for me.

And her life, I soon discovered, had been unusual and eventful. The material was rich. Mrs. Caine and I settled into a comfortable routine. Trust blossomed. We grew closer. I expected the arrangement to last awhile. There would be a lot to cover.

Before we began, I hadn’t been planning on doing anything like this. I’d written a book years earlier, but that was an accident more than anything else; after graduate school in England, I was able to turn my history dissertation into a book that sold modestly but respectably. After that, at the tail end of my twenties, I’d moved to New York. I began working as a journalist just as the brash oil tycoon Henry Caine was casting his eye toward Washington, DC.

Calling myself a journalist was charitable, at first. I had no training in cultivating sources, or digging up scoops, or writing on deadline. But I could reach into the past and unwind dusty skeins of context for readers, and my new boss, the managing editor of the newspaper, thought that was useful for the times we were living in. The day after Caine won his first election, she reassigned me to the White House beat.

“We need someone like you in that chair right now,” Vicky said. “And you wanted to learn, right? Well, you’re going to learn a lot on the fly.”

The newspaper was a lean operation, a few steps above the local city tabloids but nowhere near the New York Times and Wall Street Journals of the world. It was mostly propped up by analog subscribers who were too loyal or apathetic to cut bait, and while it had no national presence to speak of, it had been chronicling Henry Caine, a born-and-bred New Yorker, for decades. These were stories that the wider world suddenly cared about, and it led to a resurgence of readership, and profit. For the first time in years, the budget steadied. For those of us at the newspaper, it was nice to get a raise and a 401(k) match, but it was also unsettling to realize the source of this newfound prosperity.

Four years, which seemed like a life sentence at the outset, went by quickly. Despite his constant sabotage, both of himself and of the country, Caine had enjoyed an unbroken streak of luck. The corruption investigations resulted in a collective shrug; the impeachment proceedings failed to pass; and the economy remained white-hot, which apparently was all that mattered, because there we were, gathered in the newsroom on a Tuesday night in November, a little after 9:00 p.m., and the networks had just called Pennsylvania for President Caine.

Vicky Wethers crossed her arms as she stared at the TV. The electoral map disappeared from the screen, replaced by a panel of pundits, arguing about what to expect from his second term. Vicky said to no one in particular: “Well, of course. Who’s going to vote against three percent unemployment?”

“Someone with a conscience,” Eli chimed in. “Someone who gives a rat’s ass about more than their bank account.” Eli was old-school, coming up during the New York tabloid wars. He had the habit of cracking open hundreds of pistachios a day, which he started doing after he quit smoking because he had to do something with his hands.

Vicky sighed. “This is so depressing.”

“It’s like he’s made out of Teflon,” I said. “The normal rules just don’t apply to him.”

Eli craned his neck toward me, popping in a handful of pistachios. “When’d you get to be so jaded, Morse? Nah, the rules apply to everyone. Sometimes they just take longer to catch up.”

“How long is longer?” I said. “At this rate, he’ll be dead before they catch up to him.”

He shook his head. “Eventually something’s gonna stick. I’ve got this guy at Langley, he’s convinced there’s something weird about that Dresden meeting.”

“Dresden?” I echoed, half listening while texting with a White House source (on background, she said, most of them were miserable that night; his aides wanted nothing more than for Caine to lose, and for their lives to get back to normal). I didn’t give much attention to what Eli was saying. Eli had a lot of guys, and those guys tended to have a lot of theories.

“Yeah. That summit he had with Gruzdev, a few years back? Where the two of them snuck off and Caine wouldn’t let anyone else inside the room? Not even our side’s translator? My guy thinks that—”

“Hold up,” Vicky said, waving at Eli to be quiet. “We’re getting something out of Ohio.”

In unison, we swiveled toward the TV screen. Nights like this were when the office was most alive. Some moments in history arrive quietly. In graduate school, we talked about the hidden turning points, which are only revealed with plenty of retrospect. Who could imagine the ripple effects of these contingencies—the heir born with hemophilia; the Austrian boy rejected from art school; the invisible mutation of a spike protein structure? But other moments in history arrive like a screaming meteorite. You can’t help but know that you’re living through something. When that happened, we sprang into action.

That night, while Vicky paced the floor and asked for updates, I thought about Ben and our group of friends. They would be watching the returns at someone’s apartment on the Upper West Side, frantically changing channels, sifting for nuggets of hope as the night unfolded. I could imagine the empty bottles of wine on the sideboard, the remnants of cheese rind drying out, the shattered fragments of tortilla chip at the bottom of the bowl. I was glad not to be there; I was glad, at least, to have this task to keep myself busy. And yet that gladness left a sour taste in my mouth. It was an awful, ironic privilege of this job—to always be distracted, to always have more work to do. Chronicling the nonstop drama had created a strange set of blinders, numbing me to the pain. I hated that I felt this way. Four years of this had left their mark. What, I asked myself, will another four years do?

Vicky stepped behind me, leaning forward to look at my screen. “How’s it coming?”

“Almost done,” I said. “It’ll be ready to go as soon as the networks call it.”

Vicky once said it was my job to tell readers how bad it really was. Taking the long view, and considering everything we’ve been through before, tell us: Are we at DEFCON 3, or DEFCON 2, or, God forbid, DEFCON 1? I told her it wasn’t possible for any one person to know such a thing, and certainly not within the moment itself.

She said, “I’m not asking for perfect empiricism, honey. I’m asking for a smart person’s educated guess.”

It had taken me a while to really understand her request, and figure out how to answer it. Vicky wanted an assessment that wasn’t drawn solely from the brain. On a night like this, the screaming meteorite provoked a specific kind of physiological response: the adrenaline, the rapid heartbeat, the deepened breathing. Sometimes history announces itself within the bloodstream.

HENRY PHILIP CAINE, MORE THAN ANY CHIEF EXECUTIVE IN AMERICAN HISTORY, SPENT HIS FIRST TERM MIRED IN UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL. AFTER DEVASTATING INVESTIGATIONS, REPEATED CALLS FOR HIS IMPEACHMENT, AND HISTORICALLY LOW APPROVAL RATINGS, PRESIDENT CAINE APPEARED TO BE A FATALLY WOUNDED CANDIDATE. BUT ON TUESDAY, AMERICA CHOSE TO RETURN HIM TO THE WHITE HOUSE FOR ANOTHER FOUR YEARS.

The next morning, I walked to a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue, a popular spot around the corner from the office. The sleek white walls and black cement floors were a trendy picture of elegant restraint. There were only a few drinks on the menu (cappuccino, latte, drip coffee), and even fewer pastries available within the small glass case. Fewer options meant fewer chances to choose the wrong thing, and lately people seemed to crave that certainty.

A long line of customers snaked through the front door into the November sunshine, smartly employed men and women within that substantial bracket of thirty- to fiftysomethings who had enough money to splurge on high-end coffee but not enough power to send an assistant to get it for them. As the line crept forward, people were mostly staring at their phones, insulated by white earbuds. Despite the morning rush, the tables inside were nearly empty. Except for a table in the back, where Vicky sat, two coffees already procured.

“I thought I was on time for once,” I said, unzipping my coat, which was too heavy for the mild weather. My neck was sticky, and sweat pricked my forehead. I felt vaguely, irrationally annoyed with myself. This was an important moment, and I felt like I was botching it.

“You are on time,” V