Red Sparrow 02 - Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  Irina looked at her through a swirling green fog, and shook her head slightly. She didn’t believe her. Dominika swung the sap sideways, as if to strike her shoulder, but instead hit the back of the chair. Irina flinched and gasped—a good-enough reaction. Dominika’s own bruised ribs were alight with pain from swinging the thing, but she stood over the woman, brought her face close again, and whispered, “Do you ever want to have children? Do you want to see Boris again? Give them what they want. All of it.”

  Dominika bent closer to her, visualizing what it must look like on the video monitor.

  “Hand over your husband’s ledgers, the ones with the foreign account numbers. Give them the keys to the overseas bank boxes. Show them where the safe is in your house. Promise to get more from your husband. Then get out, with your mother. Can you arrange it?” Irina hesitated, nodded once. Not surprising—she probably had access to Mamulov’s well-paid lawyers, second-country passports, business jets. Getting out of modern Russia would be relatively easy for her, if she planned ahead this time.

  “You are one of them,” Irina said, wondering. “Why?”

  The sound of the latch of the cell door caused Dominika to stand up, and as Zyuganov poked his head in the door, Dominika slapped Irina hard across the cheek, turning her face and cutting her lip. Nothing a little bacitracin in Paris wouldn’t smooth out.

  And I’m not one of them, Dominika thought. Perhaps one day they would meet for tea in Paris at Le Procope, alligator bags and suede gloves on the table between them, and Dominika could explain it all. Sure. Kogda rak na gore svistnet, when the crayfish whistle on the mountain, when pigs fly.

  “Tell him,” said Dominika to Irina, tilting her head toward Zyuganov. “Tell him.” She looked at Irina, the green halo of fear and indecision swirling around her. Would the little twit decide to save herself? Zyuganov looked at Dominika, then back at Irina.

  “I … I will give you the account numbers,” Irina said, eyes downcast.

  Zyuganov, impressed, looked back at Dominika, who held up the sap and delicately ran a slim finger around the edge like an antiques dealer examining an objet d’art.

  “You’ll concede perhaps that a woman knows best what another woman fears the most,” Dominika said. “Mamulova did not want to test your patience further. Congratulations, Colonel.”

  This was all nonsense. But was it? Zyuganov contemplated the most interesting epiphany that perhaps a woman could torture a woman better than a man could; something about getting into each other’s heads, knowing their own bodies. Egorova certainly hadn’t been sickened by the tableau. Bah, Zyuganov didn’t know what to think, but he knew Egorova had given him a gift, a victory for the president over Mamulov, whose accounts would be siphoned dry in an hour of cybertheft. This would put Zyuganov at the top of Putin’s New Year’s Favorites List. But there had to be a trap: A gift from Egorova was poison, for she would use it against him; she would find a way to take advantage, to show him up. And President Putin would notice.

  As Mamulova was led out of the room, Dominika shoved the white tile walls, the surgical lights, and the sticky truncheon out of her mind, and huffed to clear her nose and mouth of the smell of pickled herring and ammonia disinfectant. With a hard swallow, she then realized she was due back in Vienna in a few days for the follow-up meet with the Iranian. And she would see Nate again.

  LEFORTOVO SELYODKA-PICKLED HERRING

  Line a deep dish with trimmed pieces of boned and skinned herring, cover with vinegar, olive oil, sugar, and chopped dill. Chill for several hours. Serve on squares of brown bread, topped with translucent thin slices of onion.

  5

  Simon Benford was the chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Division. Short, paunchy, and jowly, with gray-streaked hair in constant disarray thanks to his habit of gripping handfuls of it while screaming at cringing subordinates—or at anyone from the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, or any other government entity with “intelligence” in its title whose factotums, Benford raved, knew nothing about classic human espionage and operations, were ill prepared and unsuited to collect or analyze foreign intelligence, and, more abstrusely, were all “jacking off with oven mitts.”

  Besides being an enfant terrible and a misanthrope, the cow-eyed Benford was a legendary mole hunter, strategist, operational high priest, and savant who was considered the scourge of inimical foreign intel services: more treacherous than the Russian SVR, more inscrutable than the Chinese MSS, more elegantly devious than the Cuban DI, and twitchier than North Korea’s RGB. Those CIA officers closest to Benford privately described him as “bipolar with a sociopath vibe,” but secretly worshipped him. Allied foreign-liaison services loved him and hated him and listened to him: Years ago, Benford had helped the Brits uncover an illegals network run by Moscow for fifteen years in the House of Commons by following, Benford explained to the scandalized Joint Intelligence Committee, “the last heterosexual in Parliament directly to his Russian handler.” The Britons were not amused.

  Benford had called COS Athens Tom Forsyth on the secure line to congratulate them all on the acquisition of LYRIC. Preliminary assessment of the general’s early intelligence was favorable, and Benford approved of Nash’s handling of the case to date.

  “I am anxious to hear from DIVA,” Benford said over the phone.

  “We all are, Simon,” said Forsyth. “Nash is ready to go to her the minute she signals she’s out. He’s got a bag packed.”

  “There is no reporting on her status, no gossip, no sightings. No announcements in Rossiyskaya Gazeta.” He meant no obituaries, like former Soviet watchers would pick up in the old Pravda.

  “She’s resourceful,” said Forsyth. “A tough cookie.” The decision to send Dominika back inside had been Benford’s, and Forsyth knew the feeling of waiting for word from an agent who was back inside and out of contact. It didn’t matter where: Cuba, Syria, Burma, Moldova. “All we can do is wait,” said Forsyth.

  “Yes, Tom,” said Benford. “I fucking know that, goddamn it.” Had Forsyth been a GS-13 duty officer in Headquarters, Benford would have burst a blood vessel screaming into the phone, but one doesn’t yell at a senior officer, especially not at Tom Forsyth.

  “The minute she shows a feather, Nash is there,” said Forsyth soothingly. “We’re ducks—calm on top, paddling furiously underwater.”

  Benford groaned into the phone.

  The morning after her return from Moscow, Dominika lay on the floor in her underwear in the tiny living room of the Vienna apartment on Stuwerstrasse, several blocks from the Danube and a quarter mile from the elegant curved towers of the International Atomic Energy Agency on the east bank of the river. The apartment windows were open to let in the summer breeze. To the south, the giant Ferris wheel of Prater park was just visible in the haze—at night the boxy cars on the wheel were trimmed with white fairy lights.

  Dominika did incline push-ups on the floor, her breasts flattening on the carpet with each downward repetition. She exhaled on each slow press, feet planted high on a chair from the dining table. When her chest screamed for mercy, she shifted to the chair, hands on the seat and legs elevated on a small couch, and did slow dips—twenty, pushing to thirty—until she could do no more. The telephone in the kitchenette trilled. Breathing hard, she walked across the room to answer it.

  She recognized Udranka’s throaty voice. “Devushka, hey girl,” said Dominika panting into the phone. Sign.

  “Devchonka, you slut,” said Udranka in Russian. Countersign, all normal. “Why are you panting into the phone? What are you doing? It’s nine in the morning.” Mention of time: I need to see you, one hour.

  Sparrow tradecraft—trashy and quick and foolproof. A quick shower and six stops on the U-Bahn to Hardegasse, then up four flights on the immaculate staircase in the quiet Austrian apartment buildin
g. Udranka opened the door before Dominika knocked. The cramped apartment was a riot of color: mirrors on the walls, bright pillows on the couch, the impossible pink bedroom—ruffles and fringed lampshades—visible through an open door. All courtesy of SVR, including the video and audio pickups in every room. Udranka extended her albatross-wing arms in welcome, her crimson aura, as usual, blazing like a banked coal fire.

  Not your typical Sparrow, thought Dominika, hugging her. This creature was not the usual perfect Slav snow queen, overbred to anorgasmy, with rouged nipples and a French wax. No, taken separately, Udranka’s parts did not define libidinous beauty. She was scarecrow thin and 1.85 meters tall, with corresponding angular elbows, knees, and hip bones. Her breasts lay flat against her chest—she would not contemplate implants. She had a faint pencil-line scar running from the left corner of her mouth to her left ear, a childhood memento left by a paramilitary trooper with a stockyard whip. Her hands were long-fingered and restless, with short nails painted hibiscus red. Endless, long legs ended in large feet and red toenails. This morning she wore small drop earrings of orange coral, and a short hot-pink kimono that stopped precariously high on her thighs.

  Her flaming magenta hair—the shade must be called Balkan Rust—was cut short and close to her head. Her mouth was extreme—a candy dish of large white teeth—and in constant movement: smiling, pouting, tongue wetting full lips, clucking in disapproval, open in uncontrolled laughter. Udranka’s large eyes were light green with dark flecks, like ice cream with chips in it, and they could transmit, in the time it took for her pupils to expand, ineluctable sexual desire.

  Udranka was a voluptuary, a natural. The spotters at Sparrow School recognized it when they saw it; the training staff had known how to refine the raw instinct, and operations officers like Dominika knew enough to point the cannon, light the fuse, and step back. Dominika had never seen anything like it—this woman could transform her striking but decidedly unglamorous persona into something captivating, using that dugout canoe of a body to mesmerize, paralyze, devour her Sparrow targets.

  A decade ago, the leggy Serb had filled a backpack and gone to Moscow, a teenager looking for work, baby-giraffe tall with a booming laugh. She started modeling for low-end fashion houses, mostly shoes and jewelry. She went through the requisite relationships with ad execs, government ministers, and a musician, but by age twenty-six the modeling was over. Heads would turn when she entered a Moscow restaurant, eventually including the pear-shaped head of the Italian ambassador (short and stout, a count and a descendant from the Barberinis of Palestrina), who was tantalized by her toothy, high-voltage smile and transfixed by her height. The diminutive Italian had never made love to an extremely tall woman, and he couldn’t wait to see how the parts would fit.

  The ambassador was generous and considerate and loquacious, and kept Udranka secret from his wife. The FSB soon identified the count’s leggy illicit companion. In a year’s time Udranka had been recruited by the FSB as an access agent, and then highjacked by SVR and sent to Sparrow School. She needed money; they threatened to send her back to Belgrade, and she would have comfortable apartments to live and love in. Why not?

  Three years later, Captain Dominika Egorova, looking for primanka in the Jamshidi case—bait so extraordinary that the Persian would forget the rules and his religion and put his neck on the block—came across Udranka’s delo formular. Her service record rated her among the best of SVR’s trained Sparrows, with evaluations of “excellent” in tradecraft and elicitation and “accomplished” in what State School Four called “seduction art.” Udranka was assigned detached duty; Dominika assessed the hollow-cheeked Serb as cynical, dour, resourceful, a survivor. They got along, especially since Dominika treated her decently—she knew the burdens of being a Sparrow.

  It had been a simple matter of trolling her in front of Jamshidi—a transparent little scenario was staged during which Udranka ostensibly had her purse snatched by a motorbike thief outside a Viennese bar with the Persian as a chance witness. The grateful acceptance of Jamshidi’s offer of a taxi ride home followed, as did Udranka’s demure invitation upstairs for coffee. Once inside her kaleidoscope apartment—silently covered by Line T’s lenses and microphones—Jamshidi pushed past her maidenly reluctance, triumphed in her eventual swooning surrender, and relished her shuddering climaxes—two faked, one real—during which the fine-line scar across her cheek darkened with the flush of orgasm. Jamshidi’s sewer-pipe mind turned to round two and variations best known to Tunisian towel boys. He expected struggles and howls of pain from this shy giraffe—which was the appeal, after all—but he could not have anticipated her response, nor did he register that she must have been trained to be able to make a man lose his mind like this, like Jamshidi did sometime during No. 73, “Enter the Kremlin via Nikolskaya Gate.” From that evening on, Jamshidi was reeled in as surely as a record-book Volga carp that is prehooked to President Putin’s fishing line.

  “Come on,” said Udranka, motioning Dominika to a small table in the sun-splashed kitchen, canary-yellow tiles on the walls and a lime-green teapot on the stove.

  “How do you not go blind in here?” said Dominika.

  The girl shrugged. “Belgrade was always gray to me. Moscow is too,” she said. “A whorehouse should not be drab.” Her crimson halo expanded as she laughed, incandescent. Her front teeth flashed between full lips.

  “How’s your sych, your horned owl?” Dominika said.

  “Some progress,” said Udranka. “Maybe something important.” She got up from the table and opened an upper kitchen cabinet, easily reaching a squat bottle with a gold-colored cap. As she stretched, the kimono parted an inch, and Dominika caught a glimpse of her breasts, sleek against her body. Mine are bigger, thought Dominika, instantly feeling ridiculous.

  “Srpska Sljivovica, plum brandy from Sumadija, in Serbia,” said Udranka, pouring two small glasses.

  God, thought Dominika, it’s ten in the morning. She clinked glasses and sipped, while Udranka threw her head back and refilled her glass.

  “What?” asked Dominika. Her instincts twitched in this color-soaked little love nest. She looked into Udranka’s eyes, watching her swill brandy, watching her face.

  “Mr. Sych came to me last night. He acted normally. He was not angry; he wanted to make love.” Dominika had warned Udranka that Jamshidi might accuse her of setting him up for the pitch in Paris. Not a problem, Udranka had said; Sparrows were trained in professing their innocence in many things.

  “Did he say anything about being approached, about cameras in the apartment?” Dominika asked.

  “Nothing. It seems he does not blame me. He was very excited, impatient. That ridiculous goatee twitched up and down when I did ‘hummingbird wings.’ ” She said it flatly, an emotionless technician discussing her trade.

  “Number thirty-three,” Dominika said, remembering, repeating the long-ago memorized, Soviet-clunky Sparrow rules of sexual techniques, “overwhelm the nerve endings with unceasing stimulation.”

  “That’s right, you remember,” said Udranka dully, as if she did not want to talk about it. “If you miss the old life, we could take him to bed together.”

  Dominika laughed. The kitchen table was bathed in summer sunlight, the bottle of Sljivovitsa on golden fire.

  Udranka started laughing too, then stopped, bit her lower lip, and looked at Dominika, who also stopped laughing and reached across the table to briefly squeeze her hand—long bony fingers and bright-red nails. Her color, always bright and pulsing, slowed and faded.

  “You should try him,” said Udranka dully. “He likes to bite. Wants it only one way. He likes to hurt me. I hope he’s worth it.”

  “He’s worth it,” said Dominika, not intending to tell Udranka how really important this was. Udranka stared at her and grunted. Her head went back and she refilled her glass again. They didn’t talk for a minute.

  “The most important thing,” said Udranka. “He told me he wants to use this apartment
for an important meeting. Two nights from now. My apartment. Cheeky bastard.”

  Dominika nodded her head. That was it. He intended to show up for the debrief.

  “I assume the meeting is with you,” said Udranka. “I’ll let him in, then leave.”

  “No, I need you to stay close in case he decides to stop talking. You’ll be a reminder he has to behave.”

  “I’ll wear something tight,” Udranka said, deadpan, her crimson halo coming back, flaring. “The man might not listen to me, but the bald one with the turtleneck always does.” Dominika suppressed a laugh. She had not heard that phrase since Sparrow School. Udranka refilled both their glasses.

  “After this is over, I’m getting you out,” said Dominika. “Not just Vienna, completely out.”

  “Of course you are,” said Udranka pouring another glass. Sunlight in the canary-yellow kitchen and the burned caramel whiff of brandy in the still air. Their eyes met. “I can’t even get drunk anymore,” she whispered.

  Dominika got up from the table and put an arm around the shoulder of her Sparrow, the long-legged destroyer of men with the piano-key smile that could light up a room, whose silent, slow tears wet the front of her handler’s shirt.

  Vienna in summer: leafy parks and mustard-colored buildings with the gravitas of past empires in their façades, pitched roofs all of intersecting angles, trolley tracks joining and separating, polished brass door pulls, the loamy smell of endless coffees, and the sugary crunch of cakes and breads tumbled on trays set in café windows with gold lettering. And under the ubiquitous violins of Strauss in every doorway lingered the memory of the faded bass notes of tank treads from less happy times. Vienna.

  Dominika was back in Vienna, with a briefcase of Center-drafted nuclear requirements, two lipstick guns, and her heart in her mouth. The upcoming debriefing with Jamshidi made action urgent. It was time to trigger recontact with CIA—and Nate. The prospect of seeing Nate again swelled in Dominika’s chest until she could hardly breathe. She didn’t know if he would be different toward her, didn’t know how it would be between them. Her Russian pride and cross-grainedness would not let her again be the first one to make a move. She would not throw herself at him, she would not ever again watch him retreat behind regulations or security requirements or a guilty conscience. She heard the calm voice of the SENTRY operator on the line as she repeated her security code, used the identifier alias, mentioned the city, and designated the city park and clock tower brief-encounter site. Now it was time for business, her business.