Red Sparrow 02 - Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  “A million years ago, my first tour, I recruited a code clerk from the Czech Embassy in Rome,” Forsyth said. “Cute little thing, shy, couldn’t go out on her own. Cipherines, they called them, had to have an accompanying escort all the time: an older woman, an embassy wife.

  “We had an Italian support asset—young guy, sold stereos, but looked like a movie star. Over the space of six months, he seduced the older lady, so every time the two women came out on Saturday afternoon, the escort would sprint up the Via Veneto to get to Romeo’s apartment, leaving our little flower alone. And I was there. Took another six months, but she started bringing out copies of cable traffic, intel service details, counterintelligence stuff, correspondence with Moscow, some pretty good East Bloc intel—back then Headquarters was nuts for it. Fucking Cold War.”

  “How did you recruit her?” asked Nate. “Sounds like she would have been terrified.”

  Forsyth spun back in his chair. “It took a while; we walked in the park a lot. I heard about the older brother in the army a hundred times. Started talking about her life, and her dreams—she was twenty-four for Christ’s sake. When she began talking about her work at her embassy, about her code books, it was done, my first recruitment. But it didn’t last.”

  Nate waited: Forsyth wasn’t done. “We were both kids. We had been sleeping together, it’s how I closed the deal,” said Forsyth, looking at Nate evenly. “I had genuine feelings for her, but I also told myself a lovesick girl would do more for me. I got emotionally involved and I took my eye off the ball. And she tried smuggling out a reel of crypto tape to surprise me and they stopped her at the front door. Romeo’s girl told him the whole story. Czechs caught her and sent her home, maybe prison, maybe worse. We never heard.”

  Nate didn’t say anything. Cars on the boulevard outside were honking at something.

  “My chief in Rome didn’t fire me,” said Forsyth, “and twenty years later I’m not going to fire you … yet.” They stared at each other for ten seconds, then Forsyth pointed to the door. “Go out and start stealing secrets. Protect DIVA. Run her professionally. It’s ultimately your decision.”

  LYRIC’S SHASHLIK-KEBABS

  Cut small cubes of lamb and marinate in lemon juice, oregano, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Thread lamb on skewers and grill until crispy and brown. Slather with thickened yogurt. Serve with onion and cucumber salad.

  4

  Colonel Alexei Zyuganov had neither the sophistication nor, frankly, the inclination to win Egorova’s loyalty. Personal relationships were not important. No one knew his early history; no one knew anything about his childhood. His father, a prominent apparatchik, had disappeared in the early sixties, at the tail end of the Khrushchev purges. His mother was Ekaterina Zyuganova, a well-known figure in the old KGB. Ekaterina had sat on the KGB Executive Council, then as KGB liaison officer in the Secretariat of the Central Committee, and finally on the Collegium of the KGB. Short, mustached, bosomy, with fantastic upswept hair, Ekaterina had worn the Orden Krasnoy Zvezdy, the Order of the Red Star, awarded for her “great contribution to the defense of the USSR in war and peacetime and for ensuring public safety” until things changed and it no longer was modnyi, fashionable, to continue wearing the red ceramic device.

  Nineteen-year-old Alexei was brought into the Service by bonna, maternal patronage, but failed to make an impression in various low-level assignments. Bad tempered, at times irrational, and occasionally prone to displays of violent paranoia, Alexei was going nowhere in the bureaucracy: Everyone knew it, but supervisors’ instincts for self-preservation prevented them from recommending he be cashiered. No one dared defy Madame Zyuganova; Ekaterina protected her son with implacable determination. Then Zyuganov disappeared from the corridors of Headquarters: Momma finally had found sonny boy an assignment for which he was singularly qualified.

  Zyuganov was read in as one of four subcommandants of the Lubyanka prison, a formal KGB position title sufficiently anodyne to discourage public scrutiny, with no paperwork or records required. In reality he had joined the small staff of present-day Lubyanka interrogators, experts in chernaya rabota, black work: liquidations, torture, and executions. They were the successors of the Kommandatura, the coal-black department of the NKVD, which was the instrument of Stalin’s purges and had eliminated White Russian émigrés, Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, and, in twenty-eight consecutive nights in the spring of 1940, seven thousand Polish prisoners in the Russian forest of Katyn. In four years Zyuganov was promoted as Lubyanka’s second chief executioner and, when the chief executioner—a patron and protector—faltered, he had reveled in the career high of putting a bullet behind his boss’s right ear. Zyuganov had found a home.

  The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought an end to unrestricted wet work. Part of the KGB morphed into the modern SVR; the Lubyanka cellars closed and the building now belonged to the internal service, the FSB. Zyuganov could have made the lateral move to SVR Department V, colloquially still referred to as the Otdel mokrykh del, the department of wet affairs, as one of the “wet boys,” but his mother, Ekaterina, knew better and wanted to forfend his future. She had by that time stepped down from her last position in the Collegium, and a cushy if inconsequential retirement assignment to Paris as zampolit, a political advisor to the rezident, had been arranged. Mother’s last act from Headquarters had been to place Zyuganov as third chief in Line KR, the counterintelligence department. Alexei would be safe there and could work his way up. It was all she could do for her murderous little boy.

  The psychopathy of not feeling pity, mixed with innate aggression fueled by sadism, leavened by the utter inability to relate to others’ emotions, had been singularly well suited to Zyuganov’s ingenue career in the cellars. With the passing of the Lubyanka salad days, when an executioner could be as busy as he wished, the post-Soviet era was a definite disappointment. Things had picked up with President Putin, however. Splashy overseas operations—Yushchenko in Ukraine, Litvinenko and Berezovsky in the United Kingdom—had settled the hash of noisy exiles, and domestic troublemaking journalists and activists—Politkovskaya, Estemirova, Markelov, and Baburova—had been obliterated. But for every one of these high-publicity actions there were dozens of lesser bugs that needed quiet squashing: independent provincial administrators, military logistics managers who did not tithe sufficiently to Moscow, uppity oligarchs who needed a reminder of how Russia worked now. All these and more eventually found themselves in the basement medical wings of either Lefortovo or Butyrka prisons.

  Defendants would be remanded to Colonel Zyuganov after extended sessions in the procurator’s office, denying scattershot accusations of fraud, or bribery, or tax evasion. This is when trouble would start. Whispered rumors in Yasenevo held that once Colonel Zyuganov inhaled the bloom of the clammy drains in those desperate subbasements he changed—literally and figuratively—insisting on taking over and directing the interrogations personally, but only after having buttoned the vintage Red Army field tunic he favored while working: a brown-speckled coat, stiff and cracking with blood, reeking of pleural or vitreous or cerebrospinal fluids, all grudgingly spilled by enemies of the State.

  They were already guilty—Zyuganov’s head swam with impatience to inflict pain, he could taste it—and his instructions were to extract a confession—prisvoenie, embezzlement; vzyatochnichestvo, bribery; khuliganstvo, hooliganism; nizost’, turpitude; whatever—by means of increasingly vigorous levels of physical discomfort: Levels One through Three. There occasionally were accidents—when they would not listen, or refused to comply—and Zyuganov’s vision would clear in time to see guards wheeling broken bodies out of the interrogation theater on gurneys draped with rubber sheets. Zyuganov couldn’t help that: Instruments sometimes slipped, arteries were nicked, and dislodged hematomas would cause the brain to swell.

  Occasionally, a prisoner’s real or imagined potential for embarrassing, resisting, threatening, thwarting, or plotting against President Putin made him or her inco
nvenient. Colonel Zyuganov would receive the vintage “VMN” code-word call on the prison administrator’s Kremlovka line direct from the commissariat of the president. VMN, Vysshaya Mera Nakazaniya, Supreme Degree of Punishment, from the old Article 58 of Stalin’s state penal code. It meant that the citizen should disappear, and that Zyuganov could indulge himself during an interrogation. He could splinter the bones of the legs and pelvis of a prisoner with a heavy baton—bendy steel reinforcing bars worked best—then walk around to the head of the table, sit on a low stool, stick his face close, and breathe in the shivering groans, watch the rolling eyes, and listen to the silver thread of spittle hit the slippery tile floor.

  A year earlier there had been official trouble—recriminations—during the interrogation of two Chornye Vdovy, two Chechen Black Widow suicide bombers. The women had been arrested as they were boarding a bus in Volgograd; the bombs around their bellies had not detonated. A directive from the Kremlin secretariat—essentially instructions from the president himself—took primacy away from the internal security service, the FSB, and by name designated SVR Colonel Zyuganov, veteran KGB and Lubyanka executioner, responsible for the women’s interrogation. Zyuganov’s swamp-water heart nearly burst with pride: He would not fail the president.

  As chief of Line KR, Zyuganov knew counterintelligence information was urgently needed: the Chechens’ cutouts, bomb-making confederates, and urban safe houses had to be identified. His impatience to extract the info, more to please his leader than to protect and preserve the Motherland, put a ragged edge on his already ragged soul.

  At the start of the first session, the stronger of the two girls—Medna was her name, she was dark, thin, vital—spat on Zyuganov’s vintage Red Army tunic. This was a serious infraction, massive impertinence. The scaly rage that lived in Zyuganov’s intestines roared up and out of his mouth. Before he could stop himself, he dogged the knurled handle of the high-backed garrote chair Medna had been strapped to one turn too far, and the mechanism that had been slowly choking her instead collapsed her trachea with an audible pop, obstructing her airway and resulting in a noiseless, blue-faced death in thirty seconds. Shit, thought Zyuganov—one potential source of tactical intelligence was gone. That suka, that bitch, had cheated him.

  The second Chechen prisoner clearly was terrified. Her name was Zareta, and she was thinking about the day a middle-aged woman came to her parents’ house in the capital city of Grozny, spoke quietly to her mother, then took Zareta into the bedroom for an hour of mesmerizing, overwhelming, hypnotizing conversation. That recruitment afternoon had been the beginning, she thought, and now this is the end. Through the sour hood over her head she could hear shoes squeaking on floor tiles around her and the click of a snap hook on the wire that bound her wrists behind her back. Her legs shook with fright and she breathed hard into the cloth hood. A ratchet sound began and her arms were hoisted behind her, higher than her waist, forcing her to lean forward, her shoulder tendons screaming. If they had been conversational, Zyuganov could have told Zareta that strappado—suspension by the arms—was used by the Medici family in Florence as early as 1513. But Zyuganov didn’t have time to chat.

  Screaming into the hood, Zareta could not immediately identify what was being done to her—it sufficed to know only that her body was engulfed in pain, serious pain that was elemental, sharp, and electric, beneath her skin, deep in her vitals. Her legs shook and she felt her urine on the floor under her bare feet. Then the questions in Russian began; each was repeated by a female voice in accented Chechen. In thirty minutes, Zareta had stuttered the names of the woman who recruited her and the head and number two of her training cell, as well as the location of two training camps in Chechnya, one in Shatoy, seventy kilometers south of the capital at the end of the P305, and another east of Grozny, in Dzhalka, off the M29.

  It was infinitely more terrifying not to be able to see, not to be able to anticipate each assault on her nervous system. She screamed out the name of the young man who assembled the suicide vests in Volgograd, and that of the boy who had strapped the tape-wrapped explosive sausage around her waist, snug under her breasts. He had smiled at her through his beard. If he wasn’t dead already, she had just killed him.

  The woman’s voice came to her again, in the strange accented Chechen, asking about Black Widow operations in Moscow. Zareta knew one name and one address, but was determined not to betray these last colleagues. The Chechen voice was replaced by the Russian voice, reedy and harsh—it barely sounded human. Even though bent over double, Zareta could feel the person next to her. Someone slapped her on the back of the head. She felt fingers fiddling with her hood and it was roughly whisked off. The sudden white light of the laboratory made her wince, but it was nothing compared to what was in front of her, a foot away. Zareta screamed for three minutes, seemingly without taking a breath.

  Medna’s body was upright in the high-backed chair. She sat regally, hands wired to the armrests, head held upright by a strap around her forehead. Her face was a mass of purple bruises. She stared at Zareta through half-closed lids, her mouth barely open. Dried blood trails on either side of her mouth and nostrils completed the war-paint look. The real horror, the Zyuganov touch, was that Medna sat in the chair with her legs delicately crossed, as if at the theater, with the little toe of the foot closest to Zareta’s face snipped off. Zyuganov clapped his hand over Zareta’s mouth to stifle the paroxysm of screams.

  “Look at her,” Zyuganov said. “She’s telling you to live.” He grabbed a handful of Zareta’s black hair and shook her head. “Live, and survive, and return to your parents. You have been deceived and used by these animals. All I require is one name and one address. Then we are done.” As if to demonstrate, he lowered Zareta’s arms until she could stand upright and wobbly, unclipped the hoisting rope, and snipped the wire off her wrists. She bowed her head, unable to look at the ruined envelope of her friend, unwilling to contemplate her own surrender.

  She looked up at Zyuganov and hesitated, then whispered the name of the controller in Moscow and the address of an apartment in a high-rise building in the southern Moscow suburb of Zyablikovo. Zyuganov nodded and clasped Zareta’s face and squeezed her cheeks, a “that’s a good girl” gesture. He then walked to a stainless-steel table against the wall. Zareta, the busty matron who spoke Chechen, and the uniformed prison guard in the corner of the room all watched as he pulled a large gray handgun from under a towel, turned, and walked back to them. Zyuganov raised the pistol—an MP412 REX revolver loaded with devastating .357 magnum cartridges—and shot the already-dead Medna in the left temple from a foot away.

  Zareta looked at Zyuganov with horrified disbelief. The guard held his hand over his mouth. The matron had turned away, clasping her stomach, and was vomiting on the floor. The hydrostatic shock of the bullet had tipped Medna and her chair over and the blood left in her body was spreading out in a black lake over the white tiles, migrating slowly toward the large central drain. Normal’no, just right, thought Zyuganov. This was just the kind of ogre’s party he liked.

  “Her mother can stuff her head with newspaper, to fill out her kozhukh, her head shroud,” said Zyuganov in a voice that seemed several octaves too low, as if the devil had suddenly started speaking. Hands trembling, Zareta blinked away the blood from her lashes and wiped her sticky face, seeing the horns and yellow goat’s eyes and the cloven hooves, and wondered how she would ever erase the memory of this brilliant, white-tiled room, or this chort, this little black devil with the foul jacket, or how she could return alive to Chechnya, where there would be a reckoning with the council for her betrayal and with her parents’ shame. She could see their faces, but she would be alive, and she told herself that she wanted to live.

  Zyuganov motioned for the guard—the soldier’s face was gray—to take Zareta away, and as she turned toward the door and shuffled past him, Zyuganov put the muzzle of the revolver behind her left ear and pulled the trigger. Zareta dropped in a heap and lay on her face, th
e prison smock up around her hips. No dignity in death, thought Zyuganov, the little provincial slut. The guard howled in fright—he had been splattered with something out of the girl’s head—and the matron began vomiting again in the corner. Zyuganov surveyed the pink and dripping room for a second, then hurried out to draft his interrogation report for the internal service—but really for Putin. He wanted to report success and the vital CI information promptly.

  Days later, prison administrators submitted a written complaint, requesting that Colonel Zyuganov be censured for excessive brutality and criminal acts including torture and homicide, but the complaints evaporated in the blue-eyed blink of an eye. The president had given him a task, and Alexei delivered. To the grousing officials Putin was reported as saying, Delat’ iz mukhi slona, don’t make an elephant out of a fly.

  Young Alexei had surprised himself by doing well in the distrustful peat bog of SVR counterintelligence, and in time was promoted to the chief’s position. His paranoid grain was well suited to the work. Zyuganov had learned much during the formative Lubyanka years—cunning overlaid his crusty homicidal urges—though his instincts were still firmly in a Soviet Jurassic zone. He understood the politics a little better. He missed the excesses of the Soviet years, and the president was Russia’s best hope to reclaim the majesty and power of the Soviet Union, to restore the red-toothed fury and jaw-breaking brutality that had made former enemies cower.

  Very few of the officers working in Line KR could in clinical terms define the worm farm that was Chief Alexei Zyuganov’s brain. A trained psychologist in SVR’s Office of Medical Services perhaps would classify Zyuganov’s monstrous urges as patent malignant narcissism, but that would be like calling Dracula a melancholy Romanian prince. Zyuganov was much more than that, but all his subordinates needed to know was that the whiplash sting of the bantam centipede could come without warning, rages triggered by a perceived slight, an omission in work, an urgent tasking from the fourth floor, or, especially, opprobrium from the Kremlin—disapproval from the other diminutive narcissist who ruled behind those red walls. People in Line KR paid for any mistake that might even remotely make their chief appear lacking to the president. Zyuganov worshipped Putin like an Aztec worships the sun.