Red Sparrow 02 - Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  “I’ll keep her safe,” Hannah said quietly. Nate searched her eyes.

  “You love her, don’t you?” said Hannah. “DIVA. I mean … Dominika.”

  Nate didn’t move his head.

  “I can’t imagine how it feels,” she said. “The worry, the not knowing.” Nate didn’t know what to say. She was silent for a moment.

  “I’m glad we did this,” said Hannah, smiling. “I’m glad I know you. And I won’t let anything happen to her.”

  Nate felt a wave of affection for her well up inside him, supplanting for an instant the rising contrition blocking his throat.

  Hannah rose up and leaned forward to kiss Nate, but he shot upright off the pillow and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “What are you doing?” said Hannah, looking wide-eyed at him.

  “What do we have today?” said Nate, alarm on his face.

  “Ten o’clock with Benford for training review,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Come here,” said Nate, pulling her off the bed and across the room to the little mirrored coatrack near the front door. He steered Hannah in front of the mirror and turned her jaw to one side. “Is it too hot to get away with a turtleneck?” he asked.

  “Oh, fuck me,” said Hannah, looking at a hickey on her neck the approximate shape of the Republic of Romania.

  Their affair charged the air like a thunderstorm building over a still wheat field, the thunder-rumble moment before the deluge when the grasshoppers on the stalks stop buzzing. Their days together were coming to an end and it spawned an urgency between them. They spent edgy, tick-tock days now, reviewing the files, studying the pictures, sitting together at the hastily organized, survival-Russian language lessons so she could at least read the street signs. Lovers’ tradecraft was hasty and ridiculous, but they couldn’t stop themselves: the spooks in them refused to look at the wall clocks; consciously they did not sit at the same cafeteria table; they waved theatrically as they left Headquarters and walked to their cars at opposite sides of West Lot. They pulsed with anticipation for dusk, and for the moment when the front door opened, and for the taste of each other, an eternity apart—well, twelve hours anyway. Like stoats, they baptized every room of their respective apartments—kitchen, living room, closets, window seats—and they talked into the dawn until one of them had to go; it felt as if they had known each other forever, and their shared secrets bound them together. Nate gave her a corny gift of a baby-blue woven cotton bracelet, which Hannah soaked in hot water to shrink it snug on her wrist.

  He didn’t talk about it, but Hannah instinctively knew what Dominika was to Nate, and she resolved, in a way, to be case officer to them both. Her job was to protect and support DIVA in Moscow. She would do that with every fiber of her being. She would also adore Nate as much and as deeply and for as long as she could. She knew she had no cause to expect that there was a fairy-tale ending in any of this. For the time being, she savored both the mountainous challenge of operating in Moscow and the sweet ache of loving Nathaniel Nash.

  Loving Hannah Archer affected Nate in a way he neither expected nor could adequately explain. Dominika was his life, CIA asset or not; her passion, courage, and determination in all things enthralled him. But as elegantly explained over the years by Forsyth, and somewhat less elegantly by Gable, their future was going to be a series of long, dark railway tunnels, out of which the train would periodically emerge into the sunlight before plunging back into another tunnel. More ominously, Gable said that their relationship was a threat to Dominika’s security, both emotionally and practically. Dominika discounted that peril, but Nate wasn’t so sure. His loving Dominika could kill her.

  Nate didn’t know what to think, even as he began wondering about what a life with Hannah, a fellow case officer, would be like. Tandem couples—spouses both inside CIA—worked together and covered each other. Nate shook himself like a dog. Life without Dominika was unimaginable. A surveillance-detection run with Hannah would be like having two Beethovens at the keyboard. Dominika’s Parthenon profile in the lights of Prater Park came to him, then morphed into Hannah’s cool fingers running through her mop of hair as she laughed. Jesus.

  The thunderstorm broke the day Hannah was occupied with a preassignment physical. Could a doctor tell if a woman had been making love last night on a coffee table? Benford had commanded Nate to lunch in the Executive Dining Room (EDR) on the seventh floor of Headquarters, a long, narrow space with a panoramic view of the Potomac and primarily patronized by senior-grade Agency lawyers, congressional liaison mavens, and ambitious staffers with Caesar dressing on their ties. Benford—known, feared, reviled—made his way past the white tablecloths and clinking stemware, ignoring tentative greetings from other diners, to a small table at the far end of the room. Nate felt eyes on him as he walked behind Benford, and remembered Dominika’s long-ago report about her lunch in a private dining room at the Center. Dominika. Nearly midnight in Moscow. Sleep well.

  Benford waved off the menus and told the waiter to bring two bowls of crab bisque, turning to Nate without apology to tell him the bisque in the EDR was excellent.

  “It must be a really excellent soup,” said Nate.

  Benford tore a dinner roll with his hands and munched bread. “Some things—chowder, bisque, denied-area operations—should be prepared perfectly, or not at all. Possibly including chili con carne.”

  “I agree with you, Simon,” said Nate, going for ironically urbane, “including chili.”

  “Then why are you sleeping with Hannah Archer on the eve of her departure to Moscow to assume handling duties for DIVA, whom you are also fucking?” Benford tore another piece of bread. “Do you think this is the way to make a proper bisque?”

  The waiter came and placed a bowl of thick, glossy soup at each place. Nate got one quavering spoonful into his mouth. He could taste nothing; he put his spoon down.

  “I’m not going to try to excuse myself,” said Nate. “With Dominika, it was the recruitment, with Hannah it was the training, being thrown together.”

  Benford slurped his bisque. “And you wanted bookends?”

  Nate bowed his head, took a deep breath, and started talking to Benford, who was concentrating on his soup but listening to every word. Nate told him of his struggle with loving Dominika, of talks with Forsyth and Gable, of the nightmare ambush in Vienna and the aftermath. Now in Washington, mentoring Hannah through IO training, the affair had happened. Benford reached across and took Nate’s soup, switching it with his own empty bowl. He resumed spooning bisque as Nate told him about his dark thoughts, his unworthy thoughts, about contemplating life with either Dominika or Hannah.

  Benford wiped his chin with a napkin and sat back. “Nash, you’re fairly fucked up,” he said. “But I empathize with you.”

  “This never happened to you,” said Nate.

  “Let me continue the Sisyphean task of expanding your vocabulary. One feels empathy when one has been there; sympathy when one has not.”

  “You?” said Nate.

  “Do not expect me to relate a mewling anecdote with a pithy moral at the end. What I want you to hear is that you would have been separated from the service long ago if you had not been ably handling MARBLE and DIVA, two Cadillac assets, and now LYRIC, who’s immensely important, and but for the incidental reason that you are an excellent officer in matters not involving your dick. Forsyth and Gable have been steadfast in their support for you. But this bacchanalia cannot continue.”

  Benford pushed away from the table. “What a pleasant lunch. I want you to go away and think about this, then come back, and tell me what you want to do. My only requirement is that you do not ruin DIVA as an asset, and that you do not break Archer’s heart on the eve of her assignment. That son of a bitch COS Moscow will do that to her soon enough.”

  BENFORD’S CRAB BISQUE

  Sauté finely diced onion and carrot until soft. Separately mix butter and flour to make a light brown roux, then add chicken br
oth and whisk into a velouté. Add the onions and carrots and simmer. Incorporate heavy cream, sherry, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne, salt, pepper, and shredded crab meat. Garnish with sour cream and chives.

  19

  The tritium face on Hannah’s watch read five minutes after midnight. She had been on Moscow streets for thirteen hours and was marshaling her flagging reserves as she chewed an energy bar. She was in the park, at the staging point for loading the last sensor site. Moscow summer light lasted late—at the height of the solstice there was never full darkness. She had run a complicated surveillance-detection route—the SDR had been planned meticulously, down to the last turn and the last minute. COS Throckmorton had looked over her shoulder the whole time, his Jerusalem artichoke nose inches from her ear, and hadn’t said a word when she finished drafting the plan in Station.

  Nate had been right: The minute she was out onto the street on an ostensible shopping tour, backpack slung over her shoulder, her senses lit up and she moved with confidence. She had done her homework: She knew Moscow streets as if she had lived there for years. She thought she might have had coverage in the first hour out of the embassy, but time over distance had stripped away the “possibles” one after the other. A loop to the north beyond the ring road in her sweet little Czech-made Skoda—the new-car smell was better than anchovies—ended with a turn to the west and a series of planned provocative moves, culminating in her stashing her car in the massive parking garage under Vremena Goda shopping mall. Parking underground was a precaution: A signal from any beacon emplaced on her car by the FSB would not reach the street from beneath the building. She had not seen any discernible surveillance indicators: no running pedestrians, no hastily averted looks, no revving engines, no car doors chunking closed, no feel of pressure on the wings, or behind, or ahead. You never know completely—that’s where instinct and nerve take over—but as dusk approached, Hannah Archer felt the street and knew she was black.

  Hannah sat in the gloom of the park, leaning against a tree trunk, her blond hair tucked under the hood of a light nylon jacket, the backpack between her legs. She wore black jeans, a moisture-wicking tank top under the jacket, and soft-soled shoes. Besides the pack, she was traveling light: a dry magnetic compass, two-inch tactical flashlight with red lens, mini multitool, Hearsey’s digging trowel. The black jacket was reversible to light blue, and would change her profile slightly. The summer night had a slight chill. Her body ached, her legs throbbed, her glasses were fogged around the edges, and she saw her hands shaking with fatigue as she unpeeled the last half of the energy bar. She felt sticky and longed for a shower. Her head, however, was clear, her brain processing everything, her senses alert. Now it was time to listen. The park was completely still, absolutely empty, utterly dark. She waited for the minute squeak of cheap shoe leather, the scratchy static of a radio squelch break. She was part of the Russian night; she was one of those Russian sylphs drifting through the air, she was— Why don’t you gambol through the park sprinkling fairy dust, you idiot? Concentrate.

  She put her head back against the trunk of the tree and closed her eyes. Half a bottle of water left, she thought. Finish this and move to the signal site. I’m on schedule, should get back to the car when the mall opens at— She suddenly bolted upright and frantically swung the backpack away from her crotch and to the side. Christ, strontium-90 and you have it jammed against your freaking womb; won’t need a night-light ever again. The prospect of just having irradiated her vaginal canal prompted Hannah to think about Nate, then about the faceless woman who would be depending on these sensors she had hauled in her pack. They would be DIVA’s lifeline to the Agency. She flashed briefly to images of beautiful, naked Nate in the slanting light of her little Washington apartment.

  The last days in Washington with Nate had been strange: He seemed remote and unsettled. Hannah’s blithe nature-girl intuition sensed he was struggling with their relationship in the context of Dominika Egorova, the woman she knew Nate loved. With New England equanimity, Hannah had not pushed herself on him physically, which was really too bad—she had planned on jumping his bones every night until the day of her departure. To fill up the reserve tank, she told herself, because she expected that Moscow was going to be a long dry spell in the jumping-bones department for a single woman in the US Embassy with a nonfraternization rule, which, in other words, meant American diplomats couldn’t sleep with non-NATO lovers.

  On their last night in her little apartment she broiled a steak and Nate made a salad, and they opened a bottle of wine. Hannah set the little table with a bowl of flowers, lit a candle—a little corny, but it looked nice in the darkened apartment—and turned the volume down on José González’s “How Low”—exactly how she felt—while they ate and looked at each other. The whole thing sucked because they were both uncomfortable—you will not start crying—and she put her hands in her lap so he wouldn’t see them tremble. Dissecting Moscow operations any more seemed stupid, and talking about Dominika was out, and discussing their relationship seemed flinty and pointless. She had seen how Nate was keeping the lid on—case officers can read faces—and she got up to pour him the last of the wine, and he had put his arm around her waist, more big brother than lover, and she tried to ease away but he pulled her back and kissed her, and kissed her again. Like a moron she was still holding the empty wine bottle, and he took it out of her hand and walked her backward to the bedroom—dude, I mean, really—and she heard herself say his name in the dark, over and over.

  She shook her head. Let’s go, she thought. Hannah was on the edge of Gorkogo, a huge wooded park that ran along the Moskva River in the Central Administrative Okrug, at the upper end of a grassy slope that ran down from the trees to a long set of stairs ascending from the river. Glass-globed lamp poles were spaced evenly along the stairs. Along the southern edge of the park, traffic on the elevated eight-lane Tret Transportnoye Kol’tso, the TTK, roared out of a tunnel and across the Andreevsky Bridge. Hannah’s slope was visible from vehicles in all lanes, moving in either direction, and there is where she’d bury sensor number three, on the slope. In a car, DIVA would have line-of-sight to the sensor for the requisite two seconds, and would be able to initiate an undetectable SRAC burst as she drove by. A Station car similarly could load and retrieve messages to and from DIVA by driving past on the TTK.

  Hannah checked one more time and slid halfway down the grassy slope in darkness, a ninja invisible in her black clothes. She knew exactly where to bury the sensor so its receiver/transmitter would be in electronic line-of-sight from the highway—which at this hour was only three-quarters jammed with careering cars, belching buses, and overloaded trucks. Hearsey’s special trowel cut into the sod smoothly and she levered up the grassy patch, held it up like a scalp, dug sensor number three out of the pack—Good-bye, you bastard, thought Hannah, I hope you’re not the one who gives me a tumor—and seated it in the earthen cavity. She replaced the sod, pressed it firmly in place—the sensor’s slight convexity, Hearsey had explained, would prevent a noticeable depression over time as the earth settled around the device—and from a package the size of a sugar packet she sprinkled a green-tinted, granular seed mixture around the edges of the cut sod to promote additional grass growth. The next rain would let the seed—researched and developed by agrostologists from the US Department of Agriculture to exactly match the park’s indigenous Russian wild rye grass—sprout and totally camouflage the edges of the patch.

  Hannah scuttled back up the slope and into the trees. She stayed motionless for two minutes, listening for the scratch of a match, a muffled cough, the nearly imperceptible musical note of night-vision goggles. Or the panting and nose whining of a tracker dog. Silence. That was it. She had done it. She now knew what Janice had meant about the “perfect circle” of an operational act. She imagined Benford’s face when he received her cable saying “all packages emplaced.” She hoped he would be pleased; perhaps he would cable Nate in Athens to let him know. She hoped Nate
would also be impressed. He would understand how it felt. She would have a week of leave in a few months, maybe Athens? Hannah inexplicably thought then of her family, and about how proud her parents would be if they knew what their daughter was doing, how her mother’s eyes would sparkle, how her father would grin, how her two raucous brothers would thump her on the back. She could never tell them.

  She shook herself out of the daydream. She still had to make a signal to DIVA, retrieve her car, then reappear at the embassy compound as if she were coming to work a little late this morning. The three sensor sites Hannah loaded that long night—substantially separated in different sections of the city, stealthily buried, all near arteries with a high volume of traffic—were, most important, away from any Western diplomatic installations (all of which were ringed by electronic burst detectors that could alert the FSB that an agent SRAC exchange had just taken place).

  The most important drop—the package with DIVA’s SRAC equipment—had been the first operational act a week ago. That night, Hannah’s nine-hour SDR was executed through blustery squalls from the east. The heavy raindrops were the lashing tears of impotent rage from the ghosts of the old politburo who were watching a woman—blond, American, fearless—commit espionage in their Moskva, the ancient name, the city of “dark and turgid waters.” If Hannah knew they were looking down on her, she would have waved and told them to chill.

  DIVA’s equipment package—in the textile district of southeastern Moscow—was buried in the dirt of a pocket park under the highway bridge that took Volgogradskiy Prospekt over Lyublinskaya Ulitsa. After Hannah reported to Headquarters that the cache was loaded, the site had been monitored by satellite coverage for seven days to determine whether there was any extraordinary activity around the park, whether there were new tire tracks in the dirt, whether an out-of-place maintenance shed had been erected nearby. Or whether an FSB team was going to surge out of spider holes when Dominika walked under the abutment.