Red Sparrow 02 - Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  “She’s done a spectacular job since she went back inside,” said Forsyth. “Top-secret Kremlin intel, moles, counterintelligence leads, the whole Iran thing.”

  “We got to talk to her about risk, though,” said Gable, looking at the slight vibration of the cable as Nate held it in his hands. “Judging from the variety of her reports, my guess is she’s recruiting subsources inside her own directorate who have different access. Wonder how many she’s sleeping with. Fucking nervy.”

  Nate looked at him and laughed thinly. “We can introduce LYRIC and DIVA on the plane,” he said. “They can learn to ride horses together in Wyoming.”

  “Slow down,” said Forsyth. “We don’t know what we have yet. DIVA’s in Line KR and sounds like she’s got at least one subsource. We’ll walk this back carefully with her, see what we have. Benford’s coming out to talk with us and her next week.”

  “And LYRIC?” said Nate. “He’s exposed. His reporting is pretty specific.”

  “They think LYRIC is in Moscow. As long as they don’t call him back, we can wait a little,” said Gable. “But get ready for the midnight boogie if we need to exfil him. Sites, safe houses, safety signals.”

  “I got all that. But I have a problem.”

  “Apart from your afflicted appearance?” said Gable.

  Nate ignored him. “My problem is that I asked LYRIC to bring me the budget documents. This is the third meeting I’ve asked for them. It’s not like he doesn’t have them—he’s the frigging GRU attaché in his embassy.”

  “You tell him you’ll kick his ass next time?” said Gable.

  “Sure, and all the rest of it. Langley’s trust in him, memory of his kids, getting back at Putin. He understands it all.”

  “You think they already got to him?” said Gable.

  “No, the old guy is still bringing stuff out in shopping bags. Productive as hell. And getting better each meeting,” said Nate. “It’s just that he does what he wants, when he wants.”

  “You’ve got yourself a Russian agent who’s a general-rank officer. Used to doing things his own way,” said Forsyth. “He came to us in crisis, but you’re now his life; you’ve done a good job with rapport, and he’s blooming again, feeling his oats. Control him, especially now.”

  “That’s the problem,” said Nate. “He’s got an ego as big as Red Square; it’s like he’s forgotten how low he was when we popped him. I’m not sure he’ll agree to bug out if we tell him to defect.”

  “Well, start talking to him, gently,” said Forsyth. “Don’t spook him, but get him ready.”

  “One thing for sure,” said Gable, yawning and stretching his arms over his head. “If they call him home to the Aquarium—that’s what they call GRU Headquarters—for any reason, like consultations, or to take a prestigious new job, or to sit on a six-week promotion panel, or because his great-aunt Natasha just fell down the stairs, and he walks through the front door of the Aquarium, that’ll be the last we see of him.”

  Two nights later, Nate was walking with LYRIC along a marble-paved walkway in the modest Glyka Nera neighborhood on the darkened east slope of Mount Hymettus, away from downtown Athens traffic, a world away from where any official Russians would conceivably live or shop. They walked slightly uphill through pools of light cast on the marble by streetlamps with white globes, and passed unexpectedly through an unseen puff of incense coming from the open door of the little Church of the Metamorphosis. They continued in silence, up the deserted path, among the pines, the incense giving way to a fragrant fog of wild oregano.

  LYRIC was dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt and black tie, a contrast to Nate’s dark slacks and nylon shell. Nate had run an extralong surveillance-detection route that night—DIVA’s intel that the Center was now aware of a CIA asset encrypted LYRIC had rocked him. He was determined that he arrive black at the nonsked meeting with the general, and hoped the nonscheduled call out had not spooked the old soldier. Not likely with LYRIC. Nate had waited on a bench among the pines, sighting through the branches, to observe LYRIC’s arrival. No pedestrians at this late hour, no loitering cars filled with dark silhouettes and cherry-red cigarette tips. Black. Now business.

  As they walked, the general’s soft steps did not hesitate for even half a beat when Nate told him that the Center might be aware of a CIA reporting source, a GRU source with access to intelligence on military acquisition of foreign technology. LYRIC cocked his head at Nate while lighting a cigarette. “What exactly do they know?” said LYRIC.

  “We will know more in several days’ time,” said Nate. “Right now we believe the identification lacks details.” He knew he sounded pretty lame.

  “No specific information on directorate or rank?” said LYRIC. His hands were behind his back, cigarette in his mouth. Out for a stroll.

  “No specific information on directorate or rank, no,” said Nate, “but the Center is aware that Athens is a possible venue. That could narrow the search and move the investigation dangerously close.”

  LYRIC waved his hand dismissively. “Kto sluzhit v armii ne smeyetsya v tsirke, he who has served in the army does not laugh at the circus. I am too familiar with the clowns in the counterintelligence staff in GRU. They could not catch a tethered goat.” LYRIC rakishly blew smoke up into the night air.

  “What about FSB or SVR?” said Nate. “Would they be involved in an investigation?”

  LYRIC shrugged.

  “SVR perhaps, if they need to investigate overseas,” said Lyric. “FSB if in Moscow. But GRU will resist any attempts to steal primacy. Everybody is clamoring for advantage, pecking for morsels; they are like a flock of pigeons.” They had reached the top of the walkway and looked up. The ridgeline of Hymettus was silhouetted against the glow of city lights on the other side of the mountain. They turned to walk slowly back downhill—there was no seven-minute time limit for personal meetings now. No Moscow Rules—yet. But there was every bit as much danger lurking around the corner. The hot-oil aroma of crispy fried fish and skordalia—garlic dip—from an unseen tavern down the hill drifted up through the pines, suddenly strong, then fading.

  “General, I want you to consider travel to America if the investigation appears to be getting too close,” said Nate.

  LYRIC looked at him sideways. “You mean defect? Flee to the West?” He stopped and faced Nate. The garlicky air was perfectly still; nothing stirred in the pine tops. “I did not start all this with you to flee,” he said. “Besides, it is safe. You will see.”

  Nate put his hand on the general’s arm. “There is no thought of flight. I’m talking about an honorable retirement. A peaceful and comfortable life.”

  “Out of the question,” said LYRIC, lighting his fourth cigarette.

  “We would value your continued expertise, to continue to advise our government in military and scientific matters,” said Nate, thinking, trying to sell the LYRIC retirement plan. Next he’d throw in cabana privileges at the Fontainebleau in Miami.

  “I will assist and advise your organization regardless of where I am. I have been pleased with our collaboration, and I have been pleased with your professionalism. Well pleased.”

  LYRIC’s lofty assuredness and ego were unshakable. Nate felt like popping the soap bubble. “We would not be able to continue if you were in Chyorny Del’fin, the Black Dolphin,” said Nate softly. The casual mention of the worst prison in Russia, Federal Prison No. Six, near the Kazakh border, made LYRIC’s head snap up. Nate knew he didn’t have to mention that life in prison would be the least of the punishments LYRIC could expect.

  “I’m asking you, General, to consider what I am saying to you. There’s no need for undue alarm now, but you and I must prepare for the necessity of a new life, a new start. There’s nothing dishonorable in it.”

  LYRIC looked at Nate and shrugged his shoulders noncommittally. As valuable as he is, thought Nate, this agent is no MARBLE. I’ll never call this guy dyadya, uncle.

  “I will consider what you say,” said
LYRIC. “But I have no wish to flee from my country. As they pay for what they have done, I am still loyal to the Rodina, my motherland.”

  Nate kept still—this was classic agent rationalization, a balm to the tortured conscience that contemplates treason in the still hours before sunrise. LYRIC went through the familiar routine of fieldstripping his cigarette. They were nearing the bottom of the path, where they must separate. Nate wearily contemplated several more hours of an outbound SDR, walking and riding three buses to get clear of the area and make his way to his stashed car. LYRIC stopped and faced him.

  “As you report my continued willingness to operate with you, I want you also to please convey to your Headquarters my disappointment over this security lapse. But we will continue.”

  “Thank you, General,” said Nate, a little weary of his star agent. It was time to separate and get out of the area. “Do you still have the local number to request an emergency meeting?”

  LYRIC nodded.

  “Do you remember the drill? Call from a clean phone, a hotel, a restaurant, a bar. And no speaking.”

  “I remember what you told me,” said Lyric. “I will tap on the mouthpiece with a pencil. Tapping means Solovyov”—LYRIC patted his own chest lightly—“code name BOGATYR, is calling for an urgent meeting. Somewhat primitive methods, I must say. GRU officers use advanced frequency-hopping mobile phones to communicate with sources.”

  “Prostota, General. Simplicity—landlines and nonverbal signaling—is the best security,” said Nate. My friend, your GRU would shit if they knew how the FBI and the NSA were crawling up their frequency-hopping asses, thought Nate.

  “Call for any reason,” he said, putting his hand on LYRIC’s shoulder to get him to concentrate. “I’ll be here at the usual time, and for three consecutive nights, as we agreed.”

  LYRIC nodded.

  “And General, don’t fool around with this. Please do it carefully. For me. Any summons to Moscow, for any reason, you tell me instantly. Okay, General?”

  LYRIC patted Nate’s hand. Nate kept it where it was and looked him in the eyes.

  “Okay, General?” he said.

  “Da ladno,” LYRIC said, I get it already. Nate shook his hand.

  “Stupay s Bogom,” said Nate, go with God, and turned for the street.

  “Podozhdite minutu,” wait a minute, said LYRIC, taking an envelope out of his suit pocket. “Computer disk, Ninth Directorate budget, per your request.” He smiled at Nate.

  A point in time, the pendulum swinging; the will of the agent in the moment acknowledging the authority of the case officer. But for how long?

  COD FRITTERS WITH SKORDALIA

  Process water-soaked bread, abundant pureed garlic, ground pepper, olive oil, and red wine vinegar into a thick dip. Serve alongside chunks of quick-fried cod coated with a batter of flour, eggs, beer, white vinegar, and a drop of ouzo.

  22

  She had scant hours before leaving for Athens. But this morning there was something going on in the Line KR corridors in Yasenevo. Fussed junior officers were scuttling in and out of the large conference room at the end of the hall. Dominika looked in. The dusty and chipped birch conference table was being wiped down, and four heavy glass ashtrays were spaced down the middle of it. Oxidized aluminum carafes were arranged on a sideboard. The walls of the room were lined with dingy gray-blue felt, a worn blue carpet covered the floor, and water-stained acoustic tiles ran along the ceiling. The Line KR conference room really is a dump, Dominika thought. Not electronically soundproofed like the director’s elegant conference room on the fourth floor, and certainly not as grand as the formal ground-floor auditorium off the Yasenevo lobby.

  But this grubby little room had its own history. Dominika knew that the eleven SVR illegals officers arrested in and expelled from the United States—they had been imbedded in their deep cover lives from Seattle to New York to Boston—were debriefed in this room upon their ignominious return to Moscow. Afterward they had joined hands with then–Prime Minister Putin and sung patriotic songs as they contemplated the rest of their ersatz careers and lives in the bosom of the Rodina.

  Looking around the room, Dominika briefly wondered whether that would be her legacy: Remembered as a despicable traitor now fled to the enemy West, with an in absentia sentence of twenty-five years imprisonment for treason and desertion—some still called it Staliniskii chetvertak, Stalin’s quarter century—or maybe she’d end up like others before her, consigned to an unmarked grave.

  A junior officer noticed Dominika in the doorway and stood up straight, heels together. No one in Line KR had seen much of the new captain with the blue eyes, though there were the usual Yasenevo rumors: foreign operations, priceless documents stolen from the Americans, arrested in Athens, and an exalted deliverance from CIA captors. Other whispered stories were darker, could not be discussed openly: She had killed men, Russians and foreigners alike; she had been through the Kon Institute—the shadowy Sparrow School; she had been imprisoned but had survived the interrogators in Lefortovo. Rumors or not, you didn’t toy with those blue lasers.

  “What is happening?” said Dominika. At her voice the other two junior officers stopped what they were doing and faced her.

  “Captain, good morning,” said the first junior officer. Green light swirled around his head, the green of apprehension leavened with fear. Dominika vaguely registered—not for the first time—that people were afraid of her. It was what this tar-black Putin regime did to them all. What a waste her Russia had become.

  “Good morning,” said Dominika. The three young men weren’t blinking. No one spoke. Dominika looked at them, then at the conference table, then back at the first officer. She caught his eye and raised an eyebrow, for the practice of it. The young man jumped as if shocked.

  “Oh, pardon, Captain. The colonel instructed us to prepare the room for a meeting at noon.” Dominika would not ask this underling with whom the meeting was scheduled. It didn’t matter; she already knew, thanks to Yevgeny. She sourly noted that Zyuganov had told her nothing about it. She nodded at the three officers, left the room, and walked down the corridor painted light yellow with three decades of black scuff marks along the baseboard from the wheels of mail and equipment trolleys.

  She knocked once sharply on Zyuganov’s office door and pushed through. He looked up from the papers on his desk. Yevgeny was sitting in a side chair bathed in a satisfied horn-dog halo of yellow that flared when she walked in the door. Last night with him had been a trial: She had had to shake her sheets out the window to get rid of the curly hairs after he left her apartment.

  Looking at smug Yevgeny slumped in the chair sparked the familiar cocktail of resentment in Dominika’s chest, constricting, pulsating, migrating upward to stick in her throat. What she was doing with Yevgeny would otherwise be unthinkable for her—for any woman with free volition—who loved and lusted healthily with her whole heart. The siloviki, the bosses, had done very well by her, had trained her to close her ears to the whistling nostrils, to close her nose to the sour-drain smell behind the ears, to glaze her eyes and ignore the silver thread of spittle hanging from eggplant lips. They had taught her to slip without a ripple into the sewer. It was not love, it was not sex, and it was not earthy, exhilarating rutting with a naughty lover. It was rabota—work, labor, a job, duty.

  Dominika took a sliding step to the side of Yevgeny’s chair and hit him with a fore-knuckle strike in the temple, aiming for a spot an inch inside his skull. His eyes rolled up and his head flopped to the side. Without a break in her step, she rounded the desk and dug her nails into Zyuganov’s teapot handle ears and mashed his face down against the desk, once, twice, then shifted slightly to skiver his eye socket into the corner of the wood. Ocular fluid squirted over the blotter. She let go of the ears, and Zyuganov’s ruined face slid beneath the desk.

  “Good morning, Colonel,” said Dominika, clearing her head and straightening her jacket. He looked down at the papers on his desk, then back up a
t her. There was something wrong with Zyuganov’s hair this morning. He had apparently pomaded it and it was lopsided. With the acuity of a bipolar sociopath, Zyuganov saw Dominika looking at his head. The black bat wings swelled a fraction. Yevgeny continued smirking.

  “Egorova,” Zyuganov said. Nothing else.

  “Colonel, I noticed preparations in the large room. Is there a meeting scheduled for today?”

  Zyuganov sat still and looked at her, as if deciding whether to respond. Yevgeny shifted slightly in his chair. Last night he had briefly told her about the conference and who would be attending. But Dominika had to ask about it—she could not hint that she knew the details, nor could she plausibly feign uninterest. Zyuganov fiddled with a six-inch stainless-steel bone chisel—one of a number of tchotchkes that littered his desk.

  “The rezident from Washington is in the Center today,” said Zyuganov reluctantly. “She arrived last night.”

  Yulia Zarubina, shveja, the Seamstress, thought Dominika. The legendary operator and Washington rezident, a product of the Foreign Language Institute and the old KGB, educated, multilingual, a hybrid too well connected for any nadziratel, any Kremlin overseer, to interfere with. Decades of spectacular operational successes, recruited target assets sewn up tightly like the cloth undertaker sacks used in villages in the Urals, with minute, precise stitches. Putin had sent her to Washington last year. The directorship was now within her grasp. And she was back in Moscow to discuss a new case.

  “And the meeting?” asked Dominika. “Is there an issue for our department?”

  “Zarubina will be making a report on the state of the rezidentura in Washington. She will review the counterintelligence atmosphere, and offer an assessment of political developments.” The little bastard was being coy. No senior rezident returned to the Center for mundane briefings. He was not going to tell her anything. She looked at Yevgeny. Do you see who your patron is? she telegraphed him. Yevgeny avoided her eyes.