Red Sparrow 02 - Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  Lights flashed off the façades of the buildings. There was a small crowd of gawkers, those already moving at this early-morning hour, and Nate pushed through them. He ran up to a policeman in boots and a helmet who turned with extended arms to stop him. Nate could think of nothing to say in French except ma femme, my wife, the irony of which almost made him choke with emotion. The policeman nodded and Nate walked a few feet and stopped at the top of the steps. The cobbled terrace looked like an invasion beach: Discarded medical packaging and two clumps of red-soaked gauze were strewn around amid two substantial puddles of black treacle—by lamplight blood appeared quite shiny and black—and Nate could see a knife on the ground, the gore on its blade in lacy streaks. Dominika did not have a knife. It must have been Zyuganov’s. And the blood on the blade must be hers.

  There was another policeman standing beside a body on the ground with a rubber sheet over it with more blood showing from underneath. An ambulance team was unzipping a body bag. A second policeman in coveralls and a garrison cap was writing on a clipboard. The cop signaled the medical personnel with a wave and they laid the bag next to the figure and dragged the rubber sheet off the body. Nate held his breath.

  It was Zyuganov without the top of his head. Lipstick gun, thought Nate. Where was Dominika? Was she stabbed? God, the river. Nate imagined Dominika, having blown the dwarf’s head off, clutching herself and trailing intestines, staggering blindly and pitching headfirst into the water. The gurney with Zyuganov’s bagged body came up the stairs, the two policemen following. Cremate the little bastard, thought Nate. Otherwise he’ll crawl out of the crypt during the next full moon.

  The first cop signaled that Nate had to leave. Nate tried to ask a question, but his brain was stuck in Russian. All he could get out was Ma femme? again and the cop shrugged and said, Hôpital several times, then, Elle était mourante, and Nate got enough of it, and he could feel the blood drain from his face and he stammered, Mort? dead? but the impatient cop repeated, Elle était mourante, which Nate guessed meant not dead but dying. The cop looked at him with interest.

  Nate sat down on a bench in the shadows and closed his eyes, his hands shaking, his clothes still dripping. Phone it in. Encrypted cell phone, but be careful.

  Gable answered after the first ring. “What?” he said.

  “We saw them on the island. I went after TRITON.”

  “You get him? Tell me you got him,” said Gable.

  There was buzzing and a thump. “Nash?” said Benford. “You’re on speaker. What happened?”

  “Simon, listen, your mole is dead; he fell in when we fought and was run down by a riverboat. The prop took his head off. I saw it. By now he’s bumping against the flood walls along the Île aux Cygnes, the Isle of Swans, downstream from the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Where’s sweet pea?” said Gable.

  “She went after her boss, chased him to the end of the island.”

  “What the fuck were you two doing out of the hotel?” said Gable.

  “We went out for dinner and were walking back. You can fire me later,” said Nate.

  “Never mind that,” said Benford. “What happened? Where is the dwarf?”

  “Missing half his skull. She did it, but Jesus, Simon, it looks like he stuck her; there’s blood, a lot of it, and the medics took her away before I got there. I think the cop said she was dying.”

  “Maybe it was his blood,” said Benford.

  “There was a bloody fillet knife on the ground. The cop kept saying ‘hospital.’ ”

  “Did he say where?” said Benford.

  “I don’t know what hospital, but I’m going to find out and go.”

  “Negative, Nash. Stand down,” said Benford.

  “What do you mean stand down? She’s fucking dying.”

  “Nash, did she have her dip passport with her?” asked Benford.

  “Yeah,” said Nate, holding his head.

  “The hospital authorities will inform her embassy. When they hear her name, there will be a diplomat, a consular officer, and two security men in her room within thirty minutes.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Nate.

  “Hey, dumbass,” said Gable. “You see where this is going? You want to go visit her with a handful of daisies and bump into half her embassy?”

  “We can’t just leave her,” said Nate, rocking back and forth.

  “Stop talking and start thinking,” said Gable. “She did what she was supposed to do; she completed her mission. She’s a frigging hero.”

  “Maybe a dead hero,” said Nate.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said Gable. “Think it through.”

  “So we’re withdrawing and letting her go through this alone?”

  “And we hope for the best and we wait till we hear from her back inside,” said Benford quietly.

  “What do you mean hope for the best? What if she dies? She won’t be around to answer her messages.”

  “If she comes through this her bona fides will be unassailable. Anyone who could hurt her now is gone. It’s perfect,” said Benford.

  “Simon, listen to yourself,” said Nate. “She’s all torn up and you’re talking about her cover?”

  “I am concerned for her as much as you are,” said Benford. “But she has excelled in the service of the State. She’ll be untouchable.”

  “If she doesn’t die in one of their shitty clinics,” said Nate.

  “Nash, I want to see you in twenty minutes at the hotel,” said Gable. “I’ll help you check out.”

  “Sure, Bratok,” said Nate. “Some big brother.”

  “That’s right,” said Gable. “I’ll do anything, no matter how difficult, to keep her safe.”

  “Abandoning her is your way to keep her safe?” said Nate, gripping the phone. It’s probably best we aren’t face-to-face, he thought.

  “That’s exactly how we’re going to keep her safe,” said Gable. “That dark day I told both of you about just happened.”

  Nate closed his eyes and saw Dominika with a tube in her mouth, her vital signs twerking on a green screen, one hand and arm wired with sensors and IVs, the other lying at her side; that’s the one he would hold to his cheek, to let her know he was there. His eyes stung and he didn’t speak.

  “Nash, you there?” said Gable.

  He didn’t answer, looking at the river, blinking at the fuzzy lights.

  “Nathaniel,” said Benford. “Talk to her now. What would she tell you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nate.

  “Yes, you do,” said Benford. “Listen to her.”

  A chill went through him as Nate heard her voice, at once stern and sweet, with the lilting accent that went straight through him, and his name, Neyt, and she said, dushka, let me go, I will do this work and see you next time, and he asked her when, and she said next time, and Nate thought he could hear Dominika’s Kremlin Mermaids singing on the riverbank.

  He let out a shuddering sigh. “I’ll see you at the hotel,” Nate said brutally, and clacked the lid of his phone shut.

  It was midnight, eighteen months later, two hundred miles southeast of Tehran. A musical note—like a ticker-tape bell—began dinging in the underground control room dedicated exclusively to Centrifuge Hall C at the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility. Two night-duty technicians roused themselves and looked at each other across the control console. They could feel movement in the floor, and their wheeled desk chairs swayed slightly. On the wall, a framed photograph of the Ayatollah Khamenei swung lopsidedly on its hook, and a glass of tea with a spoon in it chittered across the desk like a wind-up toy. The little bell kept dinging. Earthquake.

  One technician casually roll-walked his chair to the barrel-shaped CMT40T triaxial broadband seismometer in the corner of the control room and made sure it was recording and sending MMI values to their desktops. He noted that initial seismic intensity readings were in the 4.0 to 4.5 range. Heavy, but not dangerous. At least, not now that they had the seismic-isolation floor under
the machines.

  Both technicians automatically checked digital and analog dials to verify cascade feedstock flow, rotor status, and bearing temperatures. All normal. The Hall C cascade was operating perfectly; it had been absolutely perfect since its installation and testing a year ago. Seventeen hundred gas centrifuges were spinning at fifteen hundred revolutions per second, a speed of over Mach two. Now, six months of careful, measured production—kept secret from IAEA inspectors—was increasing stock and pushing enrichment up toward weapons-grade percentages. The late martyr, Professor Jamshidi—likely a victim of Zionist assassins—had built this. It is his magnificent legacy, thought the technician.

  The earthquake bell continued dinging, but tremor values were decreasing. There might be aftershocks, but it was over. The two technicians flicked quick looks at the closed-circuit video of the cascade hall, dimly lit, cool, and quiet, a forest of tubes and spaghetti clusters of pipes above them, the soothing, steady hum of centrifuge rotors the only sound in the room. All normal, all running smooth and true. Even through a four-point-oh tremor, thought the tech.

  It was the floor, the seismic floor, a true marvel of German engineering. The techs knew that the equipment was German—all the labels said so—but Russian technicians had assisted in the installation. Who knows why? Don’t ask. The new display on their board was mesmerizing; you could look at it for hours. A graphic schematic of the seismic floor—the whole thing was computer-controlled—with hundreds—no, thousands—of LED lights representing subfloor pivots, pintles, and hinges. The dark-blue LEDs winked and flashed, sometimes singly, sometimes in blocks or rows or ranks, sometimes in vertigo-inducing waves, indicating the constant, individual, minute adjustments made by the mechanism beneath the pebble-grain aluminum floor. Like the flashing marquees at the casinos and hotels in Las Vegas, enough lights to turn night into day, thought the tech. Like to see all that, preferably before we bomb New York.

  The LED display was active, lights blinking first on one side and then the other, showing the technicians that the floor was reacting to and dampening tremors they themselves could no longer feel through the control-room floor. Amazing. Then a single red warning light appeared on the master display, a light they never expected to see: Fire. The techs looked at the dials, then at each other. Short circuit? Negative. Mechanical failure? None indicated. Equipment racks? Air handlers? AC power? Nothing.

  The floor display came alive as all the LEDs blinked on, flashed once, and went dark. Both techs simultaneously looked at the video monitor and saw a spot of blinding white light burning from beneath the floor, now visible among the rotors, growing arc-weld white, casting Clockwork Orange shadows of centrifuge tubes against the far walls. One of the techs dove for and slapped the red SCRAM button to stop the centrifuges, but a melting spot on the floor had created a minute imbalance in the third machine of the second row of the first cascade. It came off its bottom bearings, and with the vacuum broken, the spinning internal rotor first cracked the casing and then shattered it, sending whining shrapnel squealing into neighboring machines, beginning a deep, rumbling crash that increased in fury as rank after rank of dervish machines came off their rotor points. The bellowing destruction was overwhelmed only by the cacophony of the fire alarms howling in the hallways.

  One tech had already hit the emergency radiation alarm, and the klaxon began braying outside the control room. The other tech picked up the phone and called IRGC General Reza Bhakti, the four-star Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander of the facility. Screaming into the phone and cursing foully, Bhakti ordered the two technicians to stay in the control room until he got there. He put on his hat with the gold leaf on the bill and rushed in his Jeep to the aboveground adit to the Hall C tunnel. Both techs knew the drill and remained calm: they would stay in the sealed, windowless control room until the immediate crisis was over, then walk out dressed in the protective radiological suits hanging in the closet. This emergency procedure did not, however, take into account the accelerating white-phosphorus-and-aluminum-fueled meltdown whose next stop was, arguably, the center of the earth.

  The techs watched the monitor as the picture went white from pixel overload, then to brown when the lens fused, then to black when the camera melted off its wall strut like candlewax. Had the camera still been working, the technicians would have seen the few still-upright centrifuge tubes melting like sand castles at high tide. With gaseous feedstock released into the superheated air, the conflagration became radioactive. The white phosphorus by that time had taken over the entire aluminum floor, and was now consuming the cement walls and the steel reinforcing beams in the ceiling, creating a supersonic, swirling annulus of fire that drew in air so violently that the Hall C blast doors buckled inward. The slanted, quarter-mile entrance shaft was turned into a wind tunnel, sucking equipment, carts, and loose construction materials down into the furnace at 100 mph. The Hall C air vents were likewise turned into jet nacelles, a phenomenon IRGC General Bhakti personally experienced when he parked his Jeep next to an aboveground air intake and was lifted out of his seat, slammed through the protective grate, and sucked down into the superheated vent, igniting halfway down like a kerosene lamp wick. His general’s billed hat somehow remained on the floor of the Jeep.

  It was getting hot in the control room, and the phone no longer worked. The dials were dead, the digital displays black, and air screamed down the tunnel, rattling the door. The techs swiveled in their chairs when they heard a hissing noise. A spot of fire had begun in a lower corner of the control room and soon elongated and climbed up the angle of the wall and along the line of the ceiling. The control room was constructed of concrete, which wasn’t supposed to burn. The techs struggled into their protective suits as the fire spread along the join of the ceiling. The far wall was changing color as the magma in the cascade hall next door began to burn through. The swaddled techs hesitated at the door, not knowing whether to go out into the bellowing entrance tunnel. The tilting photo of Ayatollah Khamenei fell to the floor and spontaneously combusted.

  A week later Ali Larijani, chairman of the Parliament of Iran, was instructed by Supreme Leader Khamenei to place a call to the office of the president of the Russian Federation. Larijani’s previous position as secretary to the Supreme National Security Council and leading nuclear envoy made him well versed in the minutiae of Iran’s nuclear program. His high rank, moreover, gave him sufficient gravitas to speak to the northern idolater frankly, informing the Kremlin of the suspension of diplomatic relations between the Islamic Republic and Russia, and of Tehran’s intention to reestablish cooperative, unilateral contacts with Islamic groups in the Caucasus. Larijani ended his call by passing a personal message from the supreme leader to the president. Eeshala tah akhareh ohmret geryeh bakoney. I hope you mourn for the rest of your life.

  43

  President Putin sat at his desk in the birch-paneled president’s office in the Kremlin Senate Building. He wore a dark-blue suit, a light-blue shirt, and a silvery-blue necktie. He drummed his short fingers on the desk as he read the urgent and sensitive blue-stripe SVR report about the fire and centrifuge crash that had occurred two days ago at the uranium facility in Natanz. Overhead imagery from the Russian Defense Ministry’s YOBAR satellite was included in the folder. Infrared pictures revealed a miles-long tail of climbing, superheated smoke billowing southeast from the site. That was a toxic plume that would kill anyone downwind—Iranians, Afghans, and Pakistanis alike. Synthetic aperture radar on the bird saw through the pall of smoke to reveal a (radioactive) caldera where the roof of Hall C had melted and collapsed. A technical endnote equated the intensity of the Natanz heat bloom to that of the 2014 eruption of the Kelud volcano in East Java.

  Kakaya raznitsa, who cares, thought Putin, flipping the folder closed and tossing it into an out box of white Koelga marble. He didn’t give a shit; global imbalance, confusion, and chaos suited him and Russia just fine. Maybe this fire was the work of the Americans or the Israelis, or maybe t
hose Persian babuiny, baboons, didn’t know how to handle uranium. Well, he had long since received the money from Tehran for the shipment, and “investors’ deposits” had been made—Govormarenko had already divvied up the euros. Never mind; when the Iranians were ready to rebuild, Russia would step up with equipment and expertise to assist. At à la carte prices.

  And let them try to rile up the Caucasus—no chance, he had his domestic audience well in hand. Ninety-six percent of Russians approved of his recent military initiatives in Ukraine; ninety-five percent of them believed that America was goading fractious Kiev to persecute ethnic Russians in that country. Ninety-two percent believed—no, knew—that the same situation existed in Russian enclaves in the Caucasus, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Opportunities would present themselves. They always did.

  He would keep an eye on the oligarchs. They were rumbling about their money troubles in the face of Western banking sanctions. Nothing a few corruption trials and prison sentences wouldn’t smooth out. Massive gas and oil deals with China, India, and Japan would take the teeth out of the sanctions soon enough. And he would continue to defame and stress the NATO weak-sister coalition. Conditions were right to shatter the Euro-Atlantic alliance once and for all, which would be redress for the dissolution of the USSR. With NATO razed to the ground, the Czech-Polish missile shield proposal would no longer be a worry.

  As President Putin contemplated his suzerainty, his Slavic soul lifted. He regarded his opinions as revealed truth. He alone was keeping the barbarians at the gate at bay. Russia would be feared anew; Russia would be respected once again. He did not dwell on the stern measures that were required to achieve his goals—Ukrainian orphans had smoldered in the street before, and if necessary, they would do so again. This was his; it belonged to him. His soul took wing and soared over the crenellations of the Kremlin wall, past Bolotnaya Square where thousands had protested in vain, and then dipped its taloned wings and ghosted along the river and over the gray V-shaped roof of Lefortovo Prison, where Russian traitors went to die. Catching a draft, it soared higher over the Lubyanka, protecting them all with sword and shield, and, tilting, sailed over Tolstoy’s roof in Khamovniki and over the Doric façade of the State Conservatory, where Sofronitsky, God’s pianist, astounded mortals but was never allowed to play outside Rodina. An updraft carried Putin’s soul over the Mednoye Forest, where Vasili Blokhin executed seven thousand men in twenty-eight days, and then over the Yasenevo pines to the glass and metal tower among the trees—SVR headquarters—spinning faster around the trees and then steadying, sailplaning up to and through a window with blinds drawn against the afternoon sun to fill the office with the breath of scything wings, Putin’s soul come for a visit.