Red Sparrow 02 - Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  Nate looked at Gable, thinking that DIVA would have to try to find out what they needed. “How big a shipment?” he asked.

  “You’d need to ship by sea,” said Bromley. “Hall C will be eighty thousand square feet, something like the area of twenty-five tennis courts. Flooring, beams, sensors, wiring—it all makes a big package. Not so much heavy as bulky.”

  “Okay, so we find the company building the floor for the Persians,” said Forsyth. “What then?”

  “We prod them,” said Bromley, looking delightedly at her colleagues. A bursting noise of stifled laughter came from Barnes.

  “What the fuck are you guys talking about?” said Gable.

  “We prod them,” giggled Bromley. “Prod? As in, Proliferation Division? PROD?”

  “It’s an inside joke in the Division,” said Westfall. His face was red.

  Gable scowled.

  “We mean that we get to the shipment at the factory or in the warehouse and alter the equipment before it even gets to Iran. We PROD them,” Bromley said with a grin. Her smile looked like a maritime knackers’ yard.

  “ ‘Alter’ means what, exactly?” said Forsyth.

  “It’s pretty technical; we’ve been thinking about something complicated,” said Bromley.

  Gable leaned forward. “Honey, there are three kinds of people: those who are good at math, and those who aren’t. Keep it simple.” Nate watched the techs to see who would ask the inevitable question. Gable was floating the old conversational trick used by case officers to measure an interlocutor’s rapidity of mind.

  “What’s the third kind of people?” asked Barnes. Bromley put her hand on his arm and shook her head.

  “Look, since the late eighties, Iran got smart,” said Bromley. “They’ve stopped buying computers from the West. They inspect everything they import from the outside. What they can’t fabricate in-country, they procure on the sly.” She started clicking her pen again, oblivious to Gable’s baleful stare.

  Bromley’s eyes glazed over as she fixed them on a spot on the Lucite wall above Gable’s head. “They’re putting everything deep underground, immune from bombs, unaffected by satellite telemetry or other radio commands,” she mumbled. “Hall C is behind blast doors, the air is controlled and filtered, seventeen hundred centrifuges are humming, and enriched uranium is flowing through the pipes. And the whole thing will be on an aluminum floor that is almost a living thing, moving and shifting imperceptibly, keeping the cascade plumb level. They’re making a nuclear weapon.” She stirred and looked at Gable, blinking her eyes. “They’re making a nuclear weapon.”

  Gable’s eyes narrowed. “Welcome back. Have a nice trip?” he said. Bromley stared at him.

  “We get the picture,” said Forsyth, “but what do you guys have in mind?”

  Westfall swallowed a couple of times. “We’re still discussing it, but we’re thinking of substituting some of their under-floor aluminum beams with our own. We’d want to do it at the factory before everything is wrapped for shipment.”

  “Substitute how many beams?” asked Nate, immediately thinking about the logistics of getting into a warehouse.

  “We’d have to calculate it,” said Westfall. “Maybe a hundred out of thousands. Floor like this, each beam is four feet long and very light.”

  “So, what, we saw them through halfway, and our beams bend and fuck up the floor?” said Gable.

  Westfall shook his head. “The Iranians will inspect every part, every fitting, every sensor—X-rays, spectroscope, weight comparison. The substitute beams have to be identical.” His expression indicated that sawing the beams was, quite frankly, inappropriately primitive, sort of like Gable.

  “Talking to you guys is like interviewing Uighurs in a yurt,” said Gable, who actually had interviewed Uighurs in a yurt. “Can you tell us about the substitute beams in the next forty minutes?”

  Barnes was doodling on a sheet of paper. “We were thinking about casting the substitute beams with an amalgam—that’s a mix—of aluminum, scandium, and white phosphorus, with the same weight as the factory-made beams. Scandium to provide density to match that of the original beams, white phosphorus to create a fire.”

  “Willy Pete?” said Gable quietly. He had seen white phosphorus in use in Laos.

  Barnes kept doodling. “WP has a very low ignition point—about eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit—but it burns at five thousand degrees.” He looked around the table. “Aluminum burns at forty-five hundred degrees. It would act as fuel in a WP combustion.”

  “That’s gonna take a pretty long fuse,” said Gable.

  “The scandium will raise the WP ignition point to safer levels—around two hundred degrees—but the beams are going to have to combust without outside command,” said Westfall. “No timers, no software, no TOW switch—”

  “TOW switch?” said Nate.

  “Time-of-war switch, you dumbass,” said Gable. That was one thing he knew.

  “So the Persians install the floor after inspecting it. What makes it catch fire?” asked Forsyth.

  “The S waves of an earthquake. God’s detonator,” said Barnes.

  “Try shorter syllables,” said Gable.

  Westfall’s smile was lopsided. “We’ve been reading up on earthquakes, too. Seismic shocks are either deep P waves or surface S waves. Both occur during an earthquake, but S waves are what really shake things.” He looked over at Barnes, who was doodling wavy lines. “The strain gauges that detect seismic movement are essentially electric transducers. S waves will make them spark—producing the electricity that’s normally part of the reactive, flexible floor—but in our hundred amalgam beams, the sparks will begin the ignition of the white phosphorus. All the aluminum turns into fuel, including centrifuge rotors and casings.”

  “Structural steel, wiring, piping, concrete, desks, chairs … and people all turn into fuel,” said Barnes, putting his pen down.

  “Hall C becomes a barbecue pit half as hot as the surface of the sun,” said Bromley in a small voice.

  No one spoke for a minute. “How did you guys come up with this?” said Forsyth.

  The techs looked at each other. “It was basically her idea,” Westfall said, looking at Bromley.

  “Bottom line is that the inside of Hall C looks like a Jackson Pollock,” said Nate.

  “Jackson who?” said Bromley.

  “You know,” said Barnes, “the guy in the nuke shop at Department of Energy.”

  “That’s Johnson at DOE,” said Bromley, “not Jackson.”

  “It’s okay, guys,” said Forsyth, smiling.

  “My vote is to drop you three inside the fence line at Natanz,” said Gable. “Iran would surrender in about three fucking minutes.” The analysts looked delighted at the compliment from this gruff ops guy.

  Gable looked over at Nate. “You get how important this is? Iran’s nuclear program, right? Enough HEU, highly enriched uranium, for a bomb potentially in a year. You make sure that billy goat tells you where they’re shopping for this equipment. Nothing less.”

  Nate nodded.

  Barnes took a candy bar out of his pocket, peeled the wrapper, and took a bite. Gable looked across the table at him.

  “You three done good. Gimme a piece of that.”

  The Restricted Handling Headquarters cable to Athens Station drafted by Simon Benford in his trademark narrative—a style once described by an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence as “Victorian stroke novel”—arrived several days after the PROD analysts had returned to Washington.

  1. Kudos to Station and case officer Nash for significant first debrief of Iranian scientist Jamshidi. Intelligence on the Natanz nuclear facility and AEOI plans for centrifuge project acceleration briefed to senior policymakers.

  2. Urge Station to ascertain Iranian construction time lines and report any pending international purchase of seismic-reactive flooring. Potential covert-action opportunities are being examined, and available technologies are being reviewed. Covert-action
project has been encrypted BTVULCAN and is compartmented in Restricted Handling channels.

  3. Headquarters is well pleased with GTDIVA recontact. Commend GTD for her vigilance and initiative in recognizing the operational potential in BTVULCAN. While it is imperative that DIVA not rpt not jeopardize her security, her reporting on high-level government of Russia (GOR) players and their plans and intentions would be of critical interest.

  4. Anticipate time-sensitive intelligence as DIVA becomes privy to GOR decisions and actions, necessitating internal handling of asset in Moscow. Given DIVA continued presence in Europe for the next week, C/CID requests meeting in two days in secure Vienna location with asset and handlers. Request Vienna Station support.

  Three days after she returned to Moscow from Vienna, Dominika was taken in an official Mercedes at speed on the Rublevo-Uspenskoe Highway west out of Moscow. Zyuganov sat on the plush rear seat beside her, filling the interior with a soot-black cloud of resentment and bile that should have been spiraling out the windows of the vehicle as if the upholstery were alight.

  Dominika’s preliminary report from the Jamshidi meeting had been enthusiastically received by science Line X, which forwarded highlights to the Kremlin, the Ministry of Defense, and the nuclear specialists at Rosatom. As no recording of the meeting had been made—every experienced field officer knew you don’t spook a new source with a tape recorder, concealed or otherwise—Dominika had to present the results personally. Kremlin bigwigs—ministers, generals, and bureaucrats—were smitten by the blue-eyed spy. She had created quite a sensation.

  Zyuganov seethed as Dominika had been called several times to the director’s office, once without him. Then came this summons from the president’s sekretariat. Thank God Zyuganov was included, thought Dominika. She could feel the dwarf’s resentment smoldering like a hot brick wrapped in wool.

  Driven by a uniformed farm boy with red ears, the car careered off the Rublyovka at the town of Barvikha, past the iron gates of the famous sanatorium, pounded smoking dust down a country road that bordered a lake, past a score of wooden dachas among the trees, and finally slowed at the gatehouse to Barvikha Castle, one of the summer residences of the president.

  They drove more slowly down a leafy lane until the pink-stone-paved drive emerged from the forest, and skirted a small formal garden with a single fountain. A light misting rain darkened the gray conical turrets of the castle—more a château than a castle, thought Dominika—as they stopped at an entrance at the base of one of the turrets. A white-coated butler waited at the top of the steps. There were a half dozen black cars parked in the front drive: Mercedeses, BMWs, a shark-nosed Ferrari. Zyuganov fussily got out of the car and unnecessarily said “Come on” as he climbed the steps. His black bubble was pulsating with excitement.

  The dwarf was dressed in an ill-fitting brown suit, tailored as if to hide a hunchback. A cream-colored shirt, a carelessly knotted brown tie, and brown shoes completed the hedgehog look. Dominika said a word of thanks that she was not wearing brown herself. She had chosen a navy suit and low heels as a safe compromise. We’re not going to be asked to play croquet, she thought. As usual she wore her hair up. The only jewelry she wore was a thin wristwatch on a narrow black band.

  They walked on squeaking antique parquet floors down a brightly lit hallway into a small reception room, opulent with a spectacular Kashan carpet, a crystal chandelier, raised wooden wall panels, and heavy club chairs with massive curved arms, upholstered in rich green brocade flecked with gold. Podletsy, thought Dominika, villains; the inheritors of modern Russia still decorate their palaces like the tsars. The aide left them alone, with the door to the hallway open. There was the sound of another door opening nearby, and the buzz of men’s voices drifted out, the shuffle of footsteps filling the hall. Then President Putin entered the room, followed by a short man in a tussore suit. The president was dressed in his usual dark suit, brilliant white shirt, and robin’s-egg-blue tie.

  “Colonel Zyuganov, Captain Egorova,” said the president, shaking hands. The same ice-blue aura, steady, dramatic. He did not introduce the other man, who was jowly and had a hooked nose, dark eyebrows, and wavy gray hair. He looked about sixty years old; his perfectly cut, crème-colored suit mostly hid what appeared to be a prodigious belly. He stood quietly to the side, his hands behind his back, a filmy yellow mantle about his head and shoulders. Deceit, greed, obzhorstvo. Gluttony.

  “I have read your report about the debriefing of the Iranian,” said Putin to Dominika. “A good first meeting.” Dominika could feel Zyuganov stir beside her.

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” said Dominika. “Colonel Zyuganov’s operational guidance was essential in teasing the information out of him.” She did not look at Zyuganov.

  “I’m sure it was,” said Putin, glancing in Zyuganov’s direction. “I want you to follow up with this scientist in the matter of the specialty floor for their secret centrifuge hall.”

  “As of today, it’s a priority, Mr. President,” said Zyuganov, stepping forward. Dominika wondered why the president was involving himself in purely intelligence matters, and, more pointedly, why he was talking about operational details in front of a stranger. To question him, however, was unthinkable. Zyuganov apparently had no such reservations about speaking in front of an outsider.

  “Line KR will determine what sort of equipment the Iranians require, and with whom they are negotiating,” said the dwarf.

  “Of course. I can tell you that we would like to examine this procurement activity closely,” said Putin. “If we can determine Iranian intentions, perhaps there is a commercial opportunity for Russia,” he said.

  Ochevidno, obvious. Dominika instantly understood. Putin intended to use SVR intelligence to attempt to secure a big equipment deal for a crony—a hefty slice of the transaction would be tithed into one of Putin’s swollen foreign accounts. His blue halo was steady. Guilt did not intrude into his calculations.

  “I present Gospodin Govormarenko,” said Putin half turning toward the short man. “He is associated with Iskra-Energetika. Colonel, I want you to assist him in gaining contact with AEOI representatives.” Dominika recognized the name, a former Leningrad party boss, a Putin ally, now with a personal worth of ninety billion rubles. A Paris suit, London shoes, and, undoubtedly, stained undershorts. His yellow fog drifted around him like cigar smoke in a closed room.

  “Of course, Mr. President,” said Zyuganov, nodding at Govormarenko. “We can make contact quickly through the Iranian Intelligence representative in Moscow. I have a direct connection with MOIS.”

  “Do it any way you like,” said Putin, “but prompt action is critical.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. President,” said Dominika. “I suspect that there is scant time for Gospodin Govormarenko to satisfy Iranian requirements for sophisticated building materials. They are in a rush.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Zyuganov said, stepping in to block her from Putin. “I’m sure we can make those determinations in Moscow.”

  “If there’s no time to satisfy these Persians,” said Govormarenko, looking at Dominika, “what would you suggest?” His voice was gruff and scratchy, etched by decades of fusel oil in bathtub vodka. Zyuganov stiffened beside her—this was his account—and she could feel the wet flapping of his black bat wings.

  She glanced briefly at the little man who had discovered that striking the tips of a woman’s toes created more pain, whose face was now wet with the urgency of the sycophant, and knew he too had been involved in Korchnoi’s assassination. In a flash, Dominika decided to spare them all nothing. She looked at Putin with ice welling in her throat, remembering what her grandmother told her the serfs used to say to one another: Da pozabyl tebe skazat, zhena tvoya pomerla vesnoi, oh, I forgot to tell you, your wife died last spring. Disaster has befallen you—you just don’t know it yet.

  She took a breath. “I say only that the Iranians will not wait for equipment to be manufactured in Russia,” said Dominika. “If I can extra
ct the information about where the Persians are procuring, then perhaps Russia can purchase the foreign equipment on their behalf, and transfer it to Tehran.” She did not add “for a profit.” Zyuganov fussed at her insolence. Putin saw his agitation, instinctively sought to drive a wedge.

  “What would be the advantage to Iran to purchase, say, German equipment from Russia, rather than directly?” He turned to Zyuganov, but Dominika stepped on his halting reply.

  “Mr. President,” she said offhandedly, “the procurement could be kept secret, which will appeal to the Persians. The equipment is quietly diverted, international sanctions and embargoes are circumvented, a most attractive element for the Iranians, even at double the cost. And Russia—you, Mr. President—gains influence inside Iran and by extension in the region.” Dominika saw Putin’s blue halo pinwheel like sunbeams: the tsar of all Russia, the unchallenged master of the Turniry Teney, the Tournament of Shadows, the Great Game.

  “You see, Vasya,” said Putin, turning to Govormarenko, revealing by the familiar diminutive his given name Vasili. “The strength and utility of intelligence is unquestioned. Our Service is without equal.” He turned to look at his two spooks. “Now it remains to be seen which approach brings us the results we need: Zyuganov and you through official channels, or Captain Egorova through clandestine means.” He turned to Dominika. A corner of his mouth turned up and he nodded—high praise from the president. She could hear Zyuganov breathing through his nose.

  They had remained standing throughout the exchange and now Putin motioned them to the massive armchairs around an ornate table. A waiter brought a crystal chill bowl with four glasses and a bottle of vodka. A tray of toast rounds topped with glistening tapenade was set beside it. Govormarenko’s eyes lit up and he quickly poured four glasses and proposed a toast to future success. The vodka burned in Dominika’s chest. Govormarenko shoveled a piece of toast into his mouth and chewed vigorously. He nodded to Dominika, grinning, to try the appetizer, presumably so he could have more. Food was caught in his teeth. Meshchanin vo dvoryanstve. He was a mud-splattered villager turned gentry. She reached, took a toast point, and tasted the zakuska, the hors d’oeuvre. Eggplant, rich and savory, with a hint of sweetness, a hint of spice.