Red Sparrow 02 - Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  It took Nate twelve hours to get to Vienna after the SENTRY system automatically cabled Athens Station to inform them that Moscow-based, Russian asset GTDIVA had called to trigger contact. Vienna, Stadtpark Clock Tower, starting tomorrow, every day at noon. Nate took the first flight to Munich, then the train to Vienna. They always added a rail leg to tweak ops security: Once inside the European Union with common, permeable borders, there was no paper trail, and light disguise took care of ubiquitous security cameras in the terminals. Gable followed through Prague—he would back up Nate because he was a case officer Dominika had trusted—and they booked a suite at the Schick Hotel Am Parkring, on the margins of the park.

  Nate stood in the suite looking out the French doors at the Viennese skyline, knowing she was under one of those peaked slate roofs. Dominika had called; she was out. It felt like she had been back in Russia, status unknown, for ten years. Nate’s guts skipped as he tried to order his thoughts. Intel requirements, communications, access, security, signals, sites—the list was endless. Nate knew that this recontact with Dominika was critical; it was the first time she would be met since recruitment. Despite her call out, would she be willing to continue? The case officer in him knew that the case must be maintained on a professional basis. He would stay professional at all costs. This was espionage.

  She wasn’t at the RDX the first day—a bit worrying—but Nate slipped into case-officer mode and watched the rendezvous site and waited. On the next day, from his vantage point on a bench behind a low hedge, he saw her walking down the gravel path bordered by linden trees, the familiar slight hitch in her stride. She looked as he remembered her—ever so subtly older perhaps, features more sculpted, but the blue eyes were the same, the head still held high. He let her go by, checking her status, and let her wait at the ornate marble balustrade at the base of the clock. She looked at her watch once, briefly. Nate stayed still, watching for casuals, to see if anyone lingered in the shadows under the far-off trees.

  After four minutes—the standard meeting window for SVR too—she began walking, not obviously looking for coverage, but he knew she saw everything. Nate walked behind her at surveillance distance for a while—he felt black, there were no repeats—watching her pinned-up hair and strong legs. She slowed to look at a statue and Nate passed her and continued walking toward the white bulk of the hotel, visible over the trees. She turned and followed him.

  They were alone in the elevator, standing in opposite corners of the car, looking up at the floor numbers on the display. Nate looked over at her and she met his gaze. His purple halo was unchanged, strong and constant. The catechism stipulated that they should not speak in the elevator, but Nate had to say something.

  “I’m glad to see you,” said the CIA officer to his Russian agent. Dominika looked at him, blue eyes giving nothing away. She said nothing as the doors opened and Nate walked ahead of her to their room and tapped softly. Gable opened the door and pulled Dominika into the center of the room—cream carpet, dark-green couch, open double French doors with a view of the sand-drip castle spire of St. Stephen’s in the distance.

  “Nine months. You kept us waiting long enough,” said Gable, smiling. “You okay?” His purple mantle was the same, too, pulsating, raucous, circular.

  “Zdravstvuy Bratok, hello big brother,” said Dominika, shaking his hand. She had started calling him Bratok after her recruitment in Helsinki, a sign of affection. She turned toward Nate.

  “Hello, Neyt,” she said, but did not extend her hand.

  “It’s good to see you, Domi,” said Nate.

  “Yeah, well, now we’re all glad to see one another,” said Gable. “Before I start weeping, let’s hear what you’ve been up to. How much time do you have? All day? Okay.” Dominika sat on the velour couch with Gable. Nate pulled up a chair.

  “Let’s get something to eat first,” said Gable, bounding up. “Nash, call room service—never mind, give me the phone.” He looked at Dominika while waiting for the operator, hand over the mouthpiece. “You look too skinny. You been sick, or just missed us?” Dominika smirked and leaned back on the couch, starting to relax. She avoided looking at Nate. She had forgotten how smooth and professional these CIA men were, how much she liked them. They were purple and crimson and blue, strong and reliable.

  Gable ordered so much food they needed two trolleys to bring it all: smoked trout and salmon, beet salad, Olivier salad, poached chicken, fresh mayonnaise, runny Brie, Gouda, a crusty loaf of bread, iced butter, cucumber salad, sliced ham, two different mustards, lamb kabobs, yogurt sauce, two strudels, palatschinken with brandy apricot jam, a tray of Austrian chocolates, ice-cold Alpquell, Grüner Veltliner Sauvignon, and yellow-gold Ruster Ausbruch.

  They talked for four hours. They let her do the talking; she didn’t need prompting. She knew what was important, what to include, what to leave out. She spoke in English—sometimes Nate had to help her over a word in Russian, but she talked in whole paragraphs. Her return to Moscow. Promotion to captain. Assigned to Line KR under a new boss, Alexei Zyuganov. Interview with Putin. Mamulova interrogation in Lefortovo. The limited hard intel she had gleaned from KR—SVR foreign operations, counterintelligence leads—would come later.

  “Hold it,” said Gable. “You got in to see Putin?”

  Dominika nodded. “Twice. He congratulated me on exposing General Korchnoi,” she said softly, looking down at her hands. “He said Korchnoi was destroyed. I’m sure he gave the order. I thought I saw something on the bridge, but couldn’t be sure. Is it true?”

  “They shot him from across the river, at the end of the bridge,” said Nate. “He was home free and they shot him.” His voice was even, emotionless.

  “I will never forget him,” she said. Her eyes glistened. They sat in silence for a while, the faint buzz of traffic on the Parkring coming through the open French doors.

  “It is why I made the call for you to come,” she said finally. “I was not sure I would ever work with you again. But the siloviki, the bosses, have not changed, it is as bad as ever. Worse than before.”

  “We’re glad you came back out,” said Gable, reaching for a plate. “I knew you would. It’s in your blood. Sweet pea, we’re back together again.”

  Oh shit, thought Nate, and he held his breath.

  “What is this ‘sweet pea’?” said Dominika casually, putting down her wineglass. It was the moment when someone yells “Grenade” and everyone hits the floor.

  “It’s like baloven,” said Nate hurriedly in Russian, “something a big brother would say. ‘My pet,’ like that.” Dominika blinked, only half believing him, only half placated. Oblivious, Gable slathered mustard on a piece of ham.

  Back to business. Nate’s business: internal operations, the science, art, and necromancy of meeting agents in denied environments such as Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Tehran. Running agents in the most dangerous counterintelligence states imaginable. Meeting spies inside was like wading through a tannin-black, piranha-infested pool with infinite care, trying not to stir up the bottom. In Helsinki, Nate had rebelled at the thought of putting Dominika in danger by running her inside Russia. Now, after Korchnoi, he told himself they all had to get on with it, whatever the cost, but he felt his pulse in his jaw, seeing her on the couch, legs crossed, that habit of bouncing her foot.

  “Domi, we have to talk internal ops, how we’re going to communicate in Moscow,” he said. “If you can arrange foreign travel, we’ll rely on every opportunity to meet outside. But something could happen, a fast-breaking issue, or an emergency, or a travel ban or anything, and then we need a way to meet inside.”

  Dominika nodded.

  “We have covcom for you,” said Nate, “covert-communications equipment, very fast, very secure. You can send abbreviated messages, we can direct you to new sites, we can plan face-to-face meets. You know all this.

  “The first challenge, the danger, is physically getting the covcom set to you. We have to dead drop it—a longtime cache is no good. We wa
nt you to retrieve it within a day, a few days at most, of our putting it down.”

  What he did not say was that her life depended on the tradecraft of the Moscow Station officer assigned to load the DD, and on the perspicacity of the chief of Moscow Station in validating and approving the officer’s ops plan. If the young American spook did not accurately determine his surveillance status during his surveillance-detection route, if he blundered through his run on that future fragrant night with the summer twilight silhouetting the Moscow skyline, it would be the end. If FSB surveillance saw him load a site, they would set up on it and wait for weeks, months, a year, to see who came to unload it. Dominika would never know the sequence of events that killed her.

  “It will be possible,” said Dominika evenly. “Line KR has access to all nadzor assignments and schedules. I will be able to determine surveillance deployments throughout the city—FSB, militsiya, police, our teams. The first exchange will be dangerous, but we can do it.”

  “We take this slow,” said Gable. “We fucking take everything slow. There’s no use getting you comms if we can’t do it securely.” He poured more wine into Dominika’s glass.

  “Remember when we talked in Greece?” said Gable. “In that little restaurant on the beach? I said you should establish yourself, take your time, create a reputation, find a good assignment, start pushing your weight around.”

  Dominika smiled at him.

  “Well, you done all that and more. I’m proud of you.”

  Nate thought Gable sounded like a parent dropping his kid off at the prep-school dormitory with the engine running, but Dominika knew what he meant. She patted him on the arm.

  “Well, Bratok, I have done something else that you both need to know about,” said Dominika, picking up her wineglass. She ran her finger around the wet rim, raising a single lonely note.

  “I have approached an Iranian nuclear expert; the case is brand-new. His name is Parvis Jamshidi. He is here in Vienna, in the IAEA.” The CIA officers looked at each other; they didn’t know the name right off, but he sounded like a target that would be high on the list.

  “I gave him some bad news—how do you say, compromised him—and convinced him to cooperate,” said Dominika. Gable, the legendary recruiter, the grizzled scalp-taker, cocked his crew-cut head. He wanted to hear more.

  “Compromised him how?” asked Gable. Dominika looked at him as though she were a cool gin and tonic.

  “I provided him a Sparrow,” said Dominika. Fingers circling the rim, letting the note hang in the air. She was playing it coy, teasing them.

  “What Sparrow?” said Gable.

  “My Sparrow. In an apartment about ten minutes from here, close to his IAEA office.” She took a sip of wine.

  “And you convinced him to cooperate how?” asked Gable.

  “I showed him streaming video of himself breaking the rules of sharia.” She bounced her foot.

  “Meaning …”

  “Ramoner,” Dominika said in French. “Sweeping the chimney, all the time, quite oversexed.”

  Gable started laughing, unable to talk.

  “And what exactly has he agreed to?” asked Nate.

  “He has agreed to a meeting, a debriefing on his country’s nuclear program. He is hostile, will doubtless try to withhold some details, but he will cooperate in the end.” Dominika reached for a chocolate and started unwrapping the foil.

  “A debriefing where?” asked Nate. The two Americans were now both leaning toward her.

  “At my Sparrow’s apartment,” said Dominika, popping the bonbon into her mouth.

  “And when does this debriefing take place?” asked Nate.

  “Tomorrow night,” said Dominika.

  “Tomorrow night?” said Nate.

  “Yes,” said Dominika, “and you’re coming.”

  “Jesus wept,” said Gable.

  OLIVIER SALAD

  Boil potatoes, carrots, and eggs. Dice vegetables, eggs, and dill pickles into quarter-inch cubes and place into a bowl. Similarly dice boiled ham or shrimp, or both, and add to the bowl. Add sweet baby peas. Season aggressively and add fresh chopped dill. Incorporate with freshly made mayonnaise.

  6

  Gable later said he had never heard of such an operational gambit: DIVA, a recruited Russian agent, proposing that Nate, her CIA handler, impersonate a Russian nuclear analyst from Line KR and together meet DIVA’s unilateral Iranian source. If they could pull it off, CIA would essentially get a secret drop copy of all the intelligence generated by the case that was being sent to the Center in Moscow, a priceless look inside the Iranian program.

  “Jesus H. Christ, it’s the damnedest false flag op I ever heard of,” said Gable, throwing clothes into his suitcase. He had passed Vienna Station a summary of Dominika’s proposal for forwarding to Langley, and was immediately returning to Athens to talk to Forsyth. What the CIA officers did not tell their captivating Russian agent was that they would begin examining covert-action possibilities with the supersecret Headquarters component called the Proliferation Division (PROD) whose virtuoso officers conceived, developed, and executed operations to combat weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs around the globe. It was an eclectic division, populated by quirky officers—physicists, operators, engineers—a number of whom were relatively normal: The extroverts in PROD were the ones who looked at your shoes when they spoke to you. On his way out, Gable stopped at the door and turned toward Nate.

  “I have no authority to do it, but I’m green-lighting this without Headquarters’ approval. No risk aversion, no politics, no lawyers. Forsyth and COS Vienna will back me up. But that means no fuckups tomorrow.”

  He stuck his ruddy face into Nate’s. “Listen up. Nash, you have to be as smooth as you ever dreamed of being. Tomorrow night. No rehearsals. When you walk into that apartment with Dominika, that Persian dickwad has to believe you’re a fu … a Russian. Any mistake and he’s going to squawk to his people about the third man—the analyst—in the room, it’ll get to the Center in five minutes, and Domi’s in the wringer. Remember what I told you in Athens? Tight as a Laotian bar hostess? Do you not understand any part of what I just told you?”

  Dominika looked back and forth at the two men. “Does he always speak like this?” she said. “What is this about Laos?”

  Gable turned to her. “I already told you how glad I am to see you. Right off the bat, you bring us this once-in-a-decade lead. You’ve outdone yourself, but I don’t want you to get careless. I want to eat room service with you for the next five years.”

  “Thank you, Bratok. For my organization, this is not so much, just a simple maskirovka, a deception. We Russians are good at it.”

  Gable looked at Nate and Dominika, shook his head, and went out into the corridor, the door closing behind him.

  Dominika and Nate stood in the middle of the ruined suite, which looked like Sunday morning after Saturday night, plates stacked everywhere, napkins on the floor, wine bottles upside down in sloshy ice buckets.

  “What did Bratok mean about Laos?” Dominika asked casually, stacking plates.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Nate. “Give them time to clean up.”

  Dominika looked at him calmly. “Laos?”

  “It’s not Laos,” said Nate. “It’s about an operation being run carefully, everything thought out, no mistakes.”

  “With bar girls?” said Dominika, putting the dirty plates on the wheeled trolley.

  “No, it’s an expression describing close coordination, like hugging a girl. Jesus, Domi, I can’t explain it now.”

  “You’re quite the muzhlan,” said Dominika dryly. “How do you say this in English?”

  “Sorry, I don’t know that word,” said Nate. Who’s she calling a bumpkin? he thought.

  “A pity to leave this, but we need to plan for tomorrow night,” she said. “I want to show you Line X requirements. I will be speaking to the Persian in French, but you must speak only Russian. He probably speaks English—mos
t scientists do.”

  “How many pages of requirements are there?” said Nate. “Did you bring them yourself?”

  “There are forty pages, some with diagrams. Of course I brought them myself. We are not going to transmit them through the rezidentura in Vienna; this case is razdelenie, strictly compartmented.”

  Nate shook his head. “You carried intel requirements with you on the plane? That’s not very professional. What if you lost them?”

  Nate hadn’t meant to criticize Dominika, but he worried about flaps. One accident and Langley’s covert-action possibilities would be lost. But he saw her eyes flare: Gable once told Nate that there is not an intelligence officer in the world who does not bristle at being accused of shoddy tradecraft. Tell him there’s a nickel parking meter beside his sister’s bed, but don’t impugn his tradecraft.

  Dominika’s voice crackled like hoarfrost on a windowpane. “I do not lose documents,” she said. “And do not lecture me, Mr. Neyt, on techniques. Your agency’s professionalism is no better than ours.”

  Nate swallowed the “So who recruited who?” because he knew it wasn’t fair, and also because he’d very likely get a slap across the face. Agent handling, Mr. Case Officer, he thought, leave it alone.

  Dominika wasn’t through. “Russians invented spying,” she said, waving a fork at him. “Do you know konspiratsiya? Operating secretly, not being detected, what you Americans call tradecraft, we invented it.”