Red Sparrow 02 - Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  Dominika bent, picked up the straight razor, and folded it closed, stilling an impulse to reach over and drag the edge heavily across the unconscious thug’s throat. Jamshidi had slid slowly to the floor, gasping. She squatted beside him, her dress riding halfway up her thighs and revealing the lacy black triangle of her underwear, but Jamshidi was staring only at her luminous face, a strand of hair bedroom-sexy over one eye. Slightly out of breath, she spoke softly, straightening her eyeglasses. “I told you we support our friends. I will protect you always. You’re my agent now.”

  PORK SATAY

  Marinate thin strips of pork in a thick paste of sesame oil, cardamom, turmeric, pureed garlic, pureed ginger, fish sauce, brown sugar, and lime juice. Grill over cherry-red coals until pork is caramelized and crispy.

  2

  Three a.m. and the fourth arrondissement was dark and quiet. The Louboutins were pinching as Dominika walked through the narrow streets of the Marais back to her boutique hotel near Place Sainte-Catherine. Tant pis, a shame, but one does not go barefoot on the sidewalks of dog-loving Paris.

  Finishing her encrypted text to Zyuganov as she walked, Dominika did a quick appraisal of the pitch. Stepping over the unconscious thug, a bewildered Jamshidi had stutter-stepped into the night, nodding vaguely at Dominika’s sweet whispered reminder to meet in a week’s time. The yellow fog around his head was starched almost white with shock. She reported the results of the Jamshidi pitch modestly to the Center—and to a skeptical and resentful Zyuganov—as a provisional success. As in all intelligence operations, she would not know whether Jamshidi was fully cooked until and unless he appeared at Udranka’s apartment in Vienna in a week, docile and ready to be debriefed. The continued lollipop promise of the 1.85-meter-tall, magenta-haired Serb, now a Sparrow under Dominika’s direction, would be an incentive for Jamshidi to behave. Dominika commiserated with her Sparrow, shared an occasional glass of wine with her, paid her well—solidarity between sisters. Most of all, she had listened to Udranka’s canny assessments of Jamshidi, every detail, the better to stopper him in the recruitment bottle.

  As she walked along the deserted street she checked her six for trailing surveillance, unlikely at this hour, by crossing the street and taking half-second snap glances in either direction. She was escorted first by one, then two, then three, street cats, tails high and trotting serpentinely around her ankles. Dominika thought that Sparrow School had wrought one elemental change. Her life had been forever altered when she was directed against an officer of the American CIA—specifically Nathaniel Nash—to unman him, to compromise him, to elicit the name of his Russian mole. But the whole operation had turned out differently than her SVR masters planned, hadn’t it? She was now working with CIA, spying for the Americans, she told herself, because Russia was rotten, the system was a canker. And yet, what she was doing, she was doing for Russia. She had thrown in with CIA, she had become the mole. And she had fallen into Nate’s bed against all logic, against all prudence. She closed her eyes for a second and whispered to him, “Where are you, what are you doing?” One of the French cats looked over its shoulder at her, and gave her a qu’est-ce que j’en sais? look. How should I know?

  That same minute, in the deserted offices of Line KR, Zyuganov fumed in his darkened office, the light of a single desk lamp highlighting Egorova’s text-message report of the successful Paris recruitment approach to Jamshidi at the Pigalle nightclub, forwarded a few minutes earlier via encrypted email. The terse report detailing the episode stared up at him, mocking him. Egorova was a direct threat to him, her facile management of the operation making him look plodding and trivial. Zyuganov scanned the short paragraph, weighing risk and gain. She’s done well, flying solo, this well-titted-out upstart, he thought. The Paris rezidentura had been totally cut out of the operation—no need for additional, local colleagues shouldering up to the trough. He reread her message—clipped, balanced, modest. Zyuganov squirmed in his seat, his envy overlaid by annoyance that built into a gnashing anger, fueled by fearful self-interest.

  Her Jamshidi approach up to this point had been a precise operation, and she managed it with relentless thoroughness in a short time. Damn it, thought Zyuganov. Egorova had researched the target, conducted surveillance in Austria and France to determine his patterns, and then meticulously concocted a classic polovaya zapadnya, honey trap, using a primal, leggy Slav as a nectar bribe to lure the goateed physicist into the snap trap of a chintz-upholstered Viennese love nest that kept his khuy in a perpetual state of leaky anticipation. Invaginirovatsya. Jamshidi had been turned inside out. And tonight she had stage-managed the Paris pitch—playing the hooker, naturally. Zyuganov calculated: Egorova was returning to Moscow from Paris tomorrow. His crawly mind raced as he searched through papers on his desk to find the name of her hotel—Paris can be a dangerous city. A very dangerous city. Zyuganov picked up the phone.

  The cats had deserted her. Three thirty in the morning and a bird was trilling in a tree along Rue de Turenne as Dominika turned into the dimly lit Rue de Jarente. There was a single lamp burning over the door of the Jeanne d’Arc; she’d have to buzz the night porter to get in. She was nearly to the entrance when she heard footsteps coming from across the narrow street, from behind the parked cars on the right curb. Dominika turned toward the sound while leaning on the night-bell button with her shoulder blade.

  A man was approaching—a large man with black, shoulder-length Fabio hair and a leather coat. From her left, a second man rounded the corner of a side street and walked toward her. He was shorter but thicker, balding, and wore a padded vest over a work shirt. She saw a wiggly leather sap in his right hand. They both looked at Dominika with dull, wet-lipped relish. Not professionals, she thought, not from any intel service. These were gonzo bullyboys high on absinthe and blunts. Dominika leaned on the bell again, but there was no response from inside the hotel, no lights, nothing stirring, and she backed smoothly away from the entrance, hugging the wall, her red-soled Louboutins rasping on the pavement. She kept facing the two men, who had now converged and were walking shoulder to shoulder. She backed into another side street, Rue Caron, which opened onto tiny Place Sainte-Catherine—cobblestoned, tree-lined, stacked café tables darkly sleeping. Two fights in one night: You’re pushing your luck, she thought.

  With the extra room, the men rushed her, hands out to grab her arms, and as the sap came up Dominika touched off the lipstick gun in her bag, the metallic click of the electric primer muffled by the disintegrating satin clutch. Close range, point and shoot. There was a puff of goose down as the bullet hit the vest just above the shorter man’s right nipple and its metal dust core expanded inside his chest cavity at three times the rate of a copper slug, vaporizing the vena cava, right ventricle, right lung, and the upper lobe of his liver. He collapsed as if spined, and his chin made a tok as it hit the pavès of the square. The black sap on the cobbles looked like a dog turd.

  A two-shot lipstick gun, she thought. Fabio was on her now, a head taller. A streetlamp lit up his red-rimmed eyes, and the air around his head was swimming yellow. As he reached to grab her, a not unpleasant scent of leather came off him. She gave him a wrist, which he took, and she trapped his hand and quickly stepped into him, leaning him back on his heels. Dominika hooked her calf slightly behind his leg and pushed with her shoulder, applying torque to his knee. He should have gone down and given her time to put the heel of her shoe into his eye socket, but he grabbed the plunging front of her dress and pulled her down with him, tearing the material and exposing the lacy cups of her bra. They hit hard together, and Fabio rolled Dominika over onto her back, the Louboutins flying off, and he was on top of her—she smelled his leather jacket and the stale-cake bloom of week-old shirt—and she was using her hands to try to reach something, eyes, temples, soft tissues, but there was a singing bang and her head rocked, and maybe she could take one, two of those punches, but not many more.

  The weight was off and Fabio was standing over her; she covered
up but he kicked her ribs once and was measuring the distance for a big-booted neck stomp when a blessed street cleaner holding a power nozzle connected to a little bug-nosed water truck with a merry revolving orange light entered the other end of the square and started hosing down the cobbles. Fabio kicked Dominika again in the ribs, a glancing blow, and ran. She lay on the ground for a second, feeling her ribs for damage, watching the sweeper truck wetting down the far end of the square. She turned her head and saw the body of the man she had shot, lying small and facedown in a pool of black blood. The sweepers would have some extra spraying to do, she thought. Now get out of here. Stifling a groan, Dominika rolled to her feet, gingerly retrieved her shoes and glasses, and limped around the corner to her hotel, holding the scraps of her dress together with her other hand. She was quite a sight: She’d tell the night porter she was through working conventions—the hell with fertilizer salesmen from Nantes.

  She left the room lights off and went into the bathroom, peeled off her torn dress, and examined the bruises in the mirror—red now, the eggplant purple would come tomorrow. Her cheek ached. She put a cold cloth on her eye, then eased herself with a groan into a hot tub, thinking about the towering coincidence of being mugged in Paris, about the pitch to Jamshidi.

  And about Zyuganov. Yadovityi, poisonous. One of only two men she had ever known who showed not color but black foils of evil. She guessed that he betrayed without conscience, and would in turn expect and watch for betrayal. She knew he would consider Putin’s heavy-lidded attention to her a serious threat, as if she were stalking him with a knife. And an operational triumph—such as recruiting Jamshidi—would be equally threatening to his standing. So if she failed, or if she was injured—say, mugged on the street—Zyuganov could take over management of the operation and personally carry the sensational intelligence reports to the fourth floor of Yasenevo and to the Kremlin.

  It was the familiar, acid taste of double cross, the usual knife-across-the-throat treachery, and Dominika weighed her grim determination to fight them, to burn down the Service, to damage their lives. She considered reactivating contact with the CIA and Nate now, this very evening. Her assignment to Line KR and the Jamshidi case would potentially provide magnificent access, stupendous intelligence. They would marvel at her accomplishment in so short a time. She sank up to her neck in the hot water. She had six hours before her flight to Moscow.

  It wasn’t her mother this time. Marte had been a classmate at Sparrow School—corn-silk blond hair, blue eyes, and delicate lips—who, driven mad by the salacious requirements of the school, had hanged herself in her dormitory room. Dominika had been very sorry at the time, then furious: Another soul consumed by the Kremlin furnace. Marte sat on the rim of the tub and trailed her fingertips in the bathwater. There’s time enough later for the Americans, said Marte; you have to go back now and put the noose around the neck of the Devil.

  Dominika returned to Moscow on the morning Aeroflot flight from Paris sore and stiff, one raccoon eye throbbing. A car brought her to Yasenevo directly, and before she could report to Zyuganov, a waiting aide whisked her into the elevator and up to the executive fourth floor, past the portrait gallery of former directors, bushy-browed and wearing their medals on the lapels of their Savile Row suits, their rheumy eyes following the familiar figure of Dominika Egorova along the cream-carpeted hallway. Hello! You again. Have they caught you yet? the directors asked her as she passed. Take care, malyutka, be careful little one.

  Pushing through the door of the director’s suite, then passing through the lush-carpeted reception area and into the office brought back a flood of memories, of when she had been manipulated by her uncle Vanya Egorov, then first deputy director of SVR. Dominika and her dear uncle had quite a history together: Vanya had used her as sexual bait in a political assassination, then recruited her into the Service, then packed her off to Sparrow School—Whore School—for professional instruction in the carnal arts. She knew his yellow halo of deceit and puffery all too well, and didn’t blink an eye when he was removed from the fourth floor, dismissed from the Service, pension forfeited.

  Ancient history. Now as she entered the bright office, one wall of windows looking out onto the pine forest around the headquarters building, the doughy, distracted director rose from his desk, fussed, looked at his watch, and grunted at Dominika to follow him. To see the president. They rode down to the underground garage and into an immense black Mercedes redolent of leather and sandalwood cologne. They careered north through Moscow in the VIP counterflow lane, the emergency blue migalka flasher on the dashboard lighting up Dominika’s black eye, which the director occasionally glanced at with faint interest.

  The car shot through the Borovitskaya Gate—suddenly filled with the kettledrum notes of the tires on the Kremlin cobbles—and past the yellow and gold Grand Kremlin Palace, around the ivory Cathedral of the Archangel, and through the arch into the courtyard of the green-domed Senate building. Dominika shuddered inside. The Kremlin. Majestic buildings, gilded ceilings, soaring halls, all filled to the rafters with deceit, rapacious greed, and cruelty. A Palace of Treason. And now Dominika—another sort of traitor—was coming to the palace, to smile and lick the impassive face of the tsar.

  A quick tug at her skirt and tuck of a strand of hair behind her ear as they heel-clicked in unison down the corridor. They waited under the vaulted ceiling in the grand reception hall in the Kremlin Senate, a room so large that the colossal Bokhara carpet on the parquet floor seemed like a prayer rug. Dominika could see the bloom of green around the director’s head, and she was surprised that he was nervous, even fearful, of the interview with the president. Putin’s chef de cabinet came out a door on the far side of the room and walked with muffled footsteps toward them. Brown suit, brown shoes, brown aura. Closed down and proper, he bowed slightly as he addressed them.

  “Mr. Director, would you take advantage of the opportunity to call on the minister? He would be pleased to welcome you in his office.” Another door opened and a second aide stood with his heels together. The message was unmistakable: Putin would see Egorova alone. The director of SVR nodded to Dominika and watched her dancer’s legs as she crossed the room toward the massive twin doors of Putin’s private office. Just like in the old days, he thought—how long would this one remain in favor?

  Putin’s aide stuck out a protocol arm and led her across the warmly paneled office of the president to another door, knocked once, and opened it. A small sitting room, blue flocked wallpaper bathed in afternoon sunlight, richly carpeted, a satin couch in celeste blue beneath the window. Outside, the copper spire of the Troitskaya Gate was visible over the Kremlin garden trees. The president came across the room and shook her hand. He was dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt and deep blue silk tie that matched those remarkable blue eyes.

  “Captain Egorova,” Putin said, referring pointedly to her new rank—a stunning promotion after her return. No smile, no expression, the unblinking stare. Dominika wondered if he chose his neckwear to match his eyes. He gestured to her to sit, and the satin brocade sighed as she sank into it.

  “Mr. President,” said Dominika. She could be phlegmatic too. He was bathed in a turquoise-blue haze, the color of emotion, of artistry, of intricate thought. Not the yellow of deceit nor the crimson of passion—he was deep, complex, unreadable, never what he seemed.

  Dominika was dressed in a dark-gray two-piece suit with a navy shirt, dark stockings, and low heels—thank God for that; she would not tower over the president. Her brown hair was up, the recommended style in the Service, and she wore no jewelry. Standing, Putin continued looking down at her, perhaps measuring the depth of her blue eyes against his own. If he saw her black eye he gave no indication. An aide came in silently from a side door with a tray that he set down on a small side table. The president nodded at it.

  “I have called you to the Kremlin during the lunch hour, for which I apologize. Perhaps a snack?”

  An exquisite fluted Lomonosov
porcelain serving dish in the cobalt net pattern first used by Catherine the Great held glossy sautéed mushrooms and greens, swimming in a mustard sauce. Silver spoon and toothpicks. Putin bent and spooned a dollop of the mushrooms onto a toast point and held it out, actually held it flat in his palm, to her. Eat kitty, won’t you taste? Dominika thought of politely refusing, but accepted. The president watched her chew—the dish was mushroom earthy and complex, the sauce smooth and rich—as if he were assessing how she ate. He poured mineral water. This was madness. The blue haze behind his head and shoulders did not change. Bozhe, God, eating appetizers in the Kremlin, she thought. What next, perhaps he’ll offer me his toothbrush? She shifted slightly to ease the throbbing in her ribs.

  “I am glad you returned safely from Estonia,” Putin said, finally sitting down beside her on the couch. “The information you acquired was instrumental in unmasking the traitor Korchnoi. I commend you for your coolness and fortitude.”

  SVR General Korchnoi had spied for the Americans for fourteen years, the best Russian agent in the history of the Game. The general had been her protector, like a second father, when she entered the Service. After the general’s arrest, CIA had concocted the swap to exchange Dominika for him, simultaneously saving the general and inserting Dominika as the new CIA supermole in Moscow. But something had gone wrong—she didn’t know what. Someone had been hurt on the bridge after she crossed the midpoint and was back in Russian hands—through the night fog she had gotten a glimpse of a body on the ground, had heard a man bellowing. A monstrous double cross? And the man sitting next to her had certainly given the order. It could have been Korchnoi crumpled on the bridge roadway; it could even have been Nate. Nate could be dead, and all along she had been thinking about him as if he was safe. He could be dead. At the thought she tamped down the cloying taste of mushrooms in her mouth, swallowed the mustard sauce in her throat.