Two
New York, New York
“. . . it may be the fiftieth anniversary of Gorbachev’s assassination, but there’s something else dominating the headlines
and the airwaves in New York today: the trial of Klaudia Shimonova, the fifteen-year-old Trinity student who allegedly made
counts of forgery and identity fraud, which carry a maximum penalty of fifteen years in prison. What do you think, folks?
Prodigy or criminal? Schoolgirl or swindler? Follow along with our coverage of Ms. Shimonova’s trial here . . .”
The Corinthian colonnade of the New York County Courthouse cast a grid of shadows over the street. Alternating planks of darkness
and light, made even more stark by the crisp and unobstructed rays of sun. It was a cloudless day typical of early November,
where the air seemed to have a brittle quality, punishingly cold.
Klaudia hadn’t managed to take more than two steps out of the town car before the reporters descended, pens poised over their
notepads, shouting until their voices peaked. The flash of cameras blurred the corners of her vision.
The NYPD had cordoned off a section of the sidewalk for her supporters, corralling them behind a web of yellow caution tape.
The police presence seemed to have intimidated them: Their shouts of encouragement were more hesitant, their signs hoisted
only half-heartedly.
THE CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE, one sign read. Another: STOP THE brAIN DRAIN. For weeks the Post had been circulating rumors that she might be deported.
But the NYPD had not been so solicitous about cowing her detractors. They were mingling uninhibitedly with the reporters,
trying to shove their way to the front of the crowd.
“See how her lawyers dressed her up in pearls? All-American as hell; they want to make her look like some little Greenwich
debutante, some Hamptons housewife, instead of like a Russian ki—”
The sonorous voice belonged to Felix Fox: conservative webshow host, conspiracy theorist, and self-described “Soviet sniffer,”
because he couldn’t come up with anything cleverer and didn’t seem to recognize the double entendre. Joseph McCarthy would
have advised him to have a softer touch.
Klaudia resisted the urge to reach for her necklace. Her mother had gifted it to her the day she started her McKinsey internship.
But Fox wasn’t entirely off the mark. She and her attorney had carefully curated her trial wardrobe. The idea was to make her look girlish and innocent. They had even discussed her wearing her Trinity uniform.
They had decided against it, in the end. The last thing she needed was to risk legal action from her high school, too.
“Are you sure your father isn’t going to back down?” Siegel had asked her. “There’s a chance he could make this all go away.”
There was no chance. Siegel knew that, despite his questionable credentials. He was a celebrity attorney, all pomp and showmanship.
He had taken on the case pro bono—anything to increase his profile and maximize his chances of getting on television. His
last case had been defending a twenty-two-year-old pharmaceutical CEO accused of trafficking endangered pangolins. Afterward,
his podcast listeners increased by 180 percent, a metric more valuable to him than his trial victory record.
“My father wants to make sure I’ve learned my lesson,” Klaudia had replied.
“By sending his only kid to federal prison? What happened to a good old-fashioned paddling?”
Truthfully, Klaudia considered that her father had another motive. This was a test, just like the thousands of others that
had come before. He wanted to see how she would get out of it. He believed that, if she was clever enough, she could.
Or maybe he didn’t believe in her at all. She had to assign that possibility an equal weight.
Klaudia ascended the courthouse steps precisely the way Siegel had instructed her: gaze fixed forward, face impassive. Behind
her sunglasses, her eyes revealed nothing.
(The sunglasses, as it would turn out, were a mistake. Some fashion-minded internet sleuth would discover that they were Prada.
Several Aurapix accounts dedicated to “Klaudia Shimonova’s Court Looks” would surface in the next week. Siegel probably should
have advised her against the fur-trimmed Burberry coat, too.)
When she reached the top of the steps, Klaudia couldn’t help but pause. Having been out on bail since her arrest in May, she’d
had plenty of time to reflect on her circumstances, research every aspect of the case, and develop a formula that predicted
her chances of victory. But she could not account for all statistically significant factors; there were too many variables.
She had gotten mired in a tangle of conditional probability equations.
She had not, for example, managed to predict that a Soviet DDOS attack would crash half the government servers on the Eastern
Seaboard a week before her trial. Someone at the NSA must have beseeched Auric—the West’s premier tech company—for help, because
the servers were back online in a matter of hours, with a reassuring press conference where Auric’s CEO stood preening beside
the lectern, flanked by Secret Service agents.
But the public was still in a residual state of panic. The French magazine Thermidor, one of the seven daily periodicals that Klaudia read via a translation app, warned that America was staring down the barrel
of a third Red Scare.
So the circumstances were less than ideal. Klaudia glanced up at the courthouse facade. Carved on the lintel above the colonnade
was the phrase THE TRUE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE IS THE FIRMEST PILLAR OF GOOD GOVERNMENT.
Weather and time had faded the words. Two docents opened the double doors to the courthouse and Klaudia stepped through. The
roar of the crowd dulled to a murmur, then cut off.
The relative silence and emptiness of the corridor was jarring. The docents led her down the hall and handed her off to the
bailiff, who didn’t so much as blink at being delivered a fifteen-year-old girl who was tottering slightly in her stilettos.
Another one of Siegel’s miscalculations. She should have worn kitten heels.
Inside the courtroom itself, the gallery was packed. Dozens of members of the press, identifying themselves with lanyards
and laminated badges, immediately surged to their feet. Pencils scratched furiously against notepads. There were no cameras
allowed inside, which Klaudia had determined was actually to her detriment. She was now at the mercy of the reporters’ subjective
impressions and the dubious talents of the courtroom sketch artist.
Klaudia used the cover of her sunglasses to discreetly probe the crowd. She was searching for only one familiar face. Against
her better judgment, she allowed herself, for a moment, to hope.
But Irina Kokoshkaya was nowhere to be seen. The hope flickered out as quickly as it had been kindled.
Siegel had been the one to impress upon her the importance of her mother being in attendance. “We need to remind the jury
that you’re just a little girl,” he said. “If you could cast some teary-eyed looks back at her every now and then, that would
be superb.”
Much as Klaudia had resisted the idea at first, she had decided she would try it, if things seemed truly dire. Now she no longer had the option. And she was certain that it had not been her mother’s choice to be absent.
As she approached the table, Ivan Shimonov’s gaze swiveled and pinned her to the wall.
Siegel had advised her to ignore him completely. But Klaudia, for all her characteristic discipline, could not. Not in that
moment, not when her father’s gray eyes bored into her mercilessly, their almost colorless color identical to her own.
She tried to discern the sentiment in them but failed, as she almost always did. Ivan Shimonov was not a man to be easily
read. His gaze tracked her as she walked to her table, and only when she was seated beside Siegel did he at last look away.
As soon as she dropped into her chair, Siegel leaned over and whispered, “I’m afraid we might be cooked, my dear.”
“What?” Klaudia ducked her head. “Why?”
“The ADA dropped out of the case at the last minute. The DA is prosecuting now. And he’s up for election at the end of the
year.” Siegel grimaced. “After the Morningside Six fiasco, he’s going to need to come down hard on crime. Especially on . . .”
Especially on someone surnamed Shimonova. The Morningside Six, as they had been dubbed, were a group of Columbia computer science PhD students who were found to have
been KGB recruits, passing secrets about the development of new cyberwarfare methods to Soviet intelligence. Two of them had
been killed during a shoot-out with the NYPD, but that wasn’t the most embarrassing part. The decisive blow to the DA’s reputation
was dealt when it was discovered that the other four had managed to smuggle cyanide capsules into detention. They were found
dead in their holding cells before they could be tried.
It was a mistake the US could hardly afford, given the outcome of its last two proxy wars, and the DA had taken the brunt of the public outrage, including several acerbic statements from hawkish senators. Here was an opportunity—albeit an abstruse one—to redeem himself.
Klaudia was surprised to learn that she still had a flicker of hope left to be extinguished.
“That seems like it could be grounds for a mistrial” was all she managed to reply.
“Maybe. Maybe.” Siegel wrung his hands, knuckles cracking. “Let’s see if we can make it through day one, huh?”
The trial of Klaudia Shimonova unfolded over the course of weeks. Everyone, from the doorman of her building to her teachers
at Trinity, was brought in to testify. Videos both defending and denouncing her proliferated across social media. Felix Fox’s
viewership numbers tripled. A satirical courtroom sketch of her wearing the latest Chanel suit set with a snake draped over
her shoulders went viral. Wharton offered her automatic acceptance into the class of 2039—should she avoid a prison sentence.
It wasn’t until the third of January, when the court reconvened for the first time in the new year, that Klaudia noticed the
white-haired man in the gallery. He had been there the whole time, she would later learn, sitting unobtrusively among the
press but without a lanyard or a badge of his own. He took no notes; his hands remained steepled across his chest, his expression
tepid and unchanging. Klaudia found him almost as unreadable as her father.
And then, on January 14, after a particularly damning testimony by her former desk mate at McKinsey, the man rose from his
seat. He approached the bench, the bailiff too taken aback to stop him. The audience, too, was stunned into stillness.
The man conferred a moment with the judge, their voices both taut whispers. Then he turned, gaze resting on Klaudia, and smiled
a very slight, enigmatic smile.
“Ms. Shimonova,” he said. “I have a proposal.”