She let Nate’s head drop like a rejected melon at the market and turned to the young Kremlin toad. “Go immediately to the Kremlin and tell the president that this interrogation is an abomination, and that this subhuman piece of Spetsnaz shit will kill the American officer before he utters a word.” She stamped her foot. “Go! Go now, immediately!” She pointed at one of the armed guards. “You, go with him to see he gets out of the prison without trouble. Did you hear me?” The guard and the Kremlin toad jumped as if scalded and ran out the door.
Dominika turned to Blokhin. “You animal! This American has important information, the identity of a mole operating inside our government, passing our most sensitive secrets, and you are breaking arms and legs with a steel bar. You are an imbecile.”
Nate started moving his head and groaning, and Dominika went to a sink at the far end of the room to wet a cloth to wipe his face, and she turned to see Blokhin standing in front of Nate with a swagger, and Nate was saying something through parched lips and swollen tongue, and Blokhin stiffened, then straightened, and raised the steel bar above his head, and Dominika saw Bortnikov leap out of his chair and scream No, but Blokhin brought the rebar down on the right side of Nate’s neck with an overhand chop, breaking his right clavicle in a compound fracture—the visible broken tip of the bone punctured the skin—and collapsing the vagus nerve inside the brachial plexus, causing global brain ischemia, a catastrophic interruption of blood to the brain, which resulted in Nate passing out again and slumping forward in his chair, and Bortnikov and the guard both grabbed Blokhin’s arms as he raised the bar to strike Nate again, and Dominika walked behind the guard, pulled the Berdysh automatic pistol from the holster, racked the slide, and pointed it at Blokhin, whose eyes went wide. His exceptional reflexes turned his head almost out of the line of fire, but Dominika was too close, and she shot him twice in his shiny, scarred forehead, splattering both the prison guard and the horrified Director of FSB with gray brain matter. Blokhin collapsed face forward onto the floor. His head bounced twice on the tiles, his blood flowing out of his head neatly in two different directions into the two nearest drains, as his legs twitched involuntarily, because the frog’s brain was dead but his legs didn’t know it, and Dominika watched as Bortnikov and the guard reeled unsteadily out the door, wiping the gore from their eyes, and Dominika wiped Nate’s bloodied face and, mindful of the cameras in the ceiling, limited herself to attending to the prisoner, and the cold cloth revived him and he opened one eye, then the other, but the pupils were two different sizes, and a small trickle of blood was coming out of his right nostril, and all Dominika could do was wipe his face and say to him, “American, are you all right?” and Nate’s irises wobbled erratically in little circles. “You’re safe now,” he whispered to her. She heard the edge in her voice as she screamed “Medic!” down the corridor, telling herself to control her panic, and the blood kept coming out of his nostril even though Dominika kept wiping it, and his breath was labored and Dominika loosened the chest strap so he could breathe, but by the sound of his breaths, she guessed he was aspirating blood, and all she could do was wipe his cheek and say, “Medical attention is coming,” but somehow knowing it wouldn’t make a difference, and Nate’s uneven eyes locked on hers and there was a faint smile that passed over his lips and his halo grew brilliant and radiated, and she felt the minute caress of one shattered finger touching her hand, a light touch, brushing the top of her hand, just for an instant, unseen by the cameras, more intimate than a kiss, and he took two more deep breaths and went still, and his purple halo dissolved, and Dominika fought her tears, then heard footsteps pounding down the corridor even as Blokhin’s legs on the pinkish tiles wouldn’t stop twitching.
* * *
* * *
Dominika felt the nearly undetectable puff of air from the air-vortex nozzle on her desk lamp sitting on the corner of the desk in the Director’s office of SVR headquarters in the pine forest of Yasenevo. It indicated that a message from Benford had just come in. She positioned the flexible display, engaged the system by moving her eye in line with the integral optical reader that biometrically authenticated the pattern of her iris, and began projecting the short message on the flat base of the lamp in a directional hologram. The scrolling letters were invisible to anyone not positioned exactly in line with the lamp, and could be turned off with a casual wave of her hand. Though previously skeptical of the contraption, Dominika now marveled at the efficiency of the covcom device. Just this morning she had undetectably used the digital lens in the lamp to photograph and transmit to Washington a top-secret read-and-return bulletin from the Security Council as the Kremlin courier respectfully waited three feet from her desk for her signature. There was even a self-destruct feature that would fuse the components in case of emergency. The SVR headquarters building, as Hearsey predicted, was proving to be an efficient, massive antenna.
The multiparagraph message was not from Benford, but rather from Forsyth. Strange.
1. FYI, MAGNIT sentenced life imprisonment at Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado.
2. Request advise current status Nash, including when feasible diplomatic initiative to bring home. Pls advise possibility of swap.
3. Be advised Counterintelligence Chief Simon Benford retired. Forward his deep thanks and regards.
Nate and Gable gone, Benford retired. She had never known any other CIA officers since her recruitment in Helsinki, they were her family, and their comforting presence mitigated the stark solitude of her life as a spy. Now she felt alone, even though she was at the pinnacle. She started drafting a reply, husbanding characters as she typed on the flexible display while her throat closed tight in despair.
1. Contact with president two nights per week. He sharing opinions of siloviki—Patrushev now in disfavor. He discussing Russia clandestine alliances with Iran, North Korea. Will advise.
2. Regret inform officer Nash died as a result of injuries sustained during unauthorized interrogation.
DIVA.
END END END
With burning eyes and trembling lip, Dominika pushed “send,” and the message was transmitted. She remembered what Agnes had said: “Nate came to rescue you and I came to help Nate. So I suppose all of us lost.” Everyone indeed had lost, but Dominika was running the SVR, and she moved inside the Kremlin, and astride President Putin, ironically back to her hated Sparrow roots in a hopelessly febrile world without her Neyt. She sighed and shuddered.
Then DIVA got back to work in her large office with the panoramic view of the pine forest and the endless horizon of her beloved Rodina.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
* * *
With each completed book, I find the list of people whom I must thank grows exponentially.
My thanks first to my agent, Sloan Harris, who is responsible for guiding my second career as a novelist (which occasionally has proven more delirious than my first career) and who continues to advise, encourage, and inspire me as a colleague and friend. I add my thanks to the team at ICM, including Esther Newberg, Josie Freedman in Los Angeles, Heather Karpas, Heather Bushong (in case President Putin sues), and Alexa Brahme, for their aeonian support.
I gratefully acknowledge my editor, the supranatural Colin Harrison, without whose discerning novelist’s eye and literary acumen this book would not exist, period. Many thanks, too, to the entire Simon & Schuster family, including Carolyn Reidy, Susan Moldow, Nan Graham, Roz Lippel, Brian Belfiglio, Jaya Miceli, Jen Bergstrom, Irene Lipsky, Colin Shields, and Gary Urda. Special thanks to Sarah Goldberg for her unremitting support, Katie Rizzo, and Valerie Pulver for infallible copyediting. At S&S Audio, thanks to Chris Lynch, Elisa Shokoff, Tom Spain, Sarah Lieberman, Tara Thomas, Elliot Rambach, and Jeremy Bobb, who narrated all of the Red Sparrow Trilogy audiobooks.
I thank colleagues in CIA’s Publication Review Board for their consistent and timely support in reviewing the manuscript. Any errors in fact or language are the author’s, and any similarities to characters in th
e novel with real people are wholly coincidental. This is a work of fiction.
My appreciation, too, to all my fellow officers in the Directorate of Operations—especially to the CT class of November 1976, for a lifetime of memories and frequent expressions of support. Among these, I must mention the late Stephen Holder, who provided a primer of authentic and obscure operational terms used by the Chinese Intelligence Service, and the late Jack Platt, who taught us, blaspheming, about double corners and trailing surveillance. Former partners and close friends from an allied service, Alasdair and DT, variously advised the author, including passing along several exceptional family recipes, normally more closely held than politburo minutes.
As usual, friends and family contributed endlessly. Yogini Alison introduced me to the sublime essence of yoga; Steve and Michael revealed the mysteries of New York and Staten Island, the latter occasionally more sublime than yoga. Kelly demonstrated the ancient and silent code gestures of the Chinese folded fan. My brother William and sister-in-law Sharon read the manuscript and made helpful suggestions. Brother William also continued in his role as the author’s science adviser. How a university professor of economics knows about electromagnetic railguns is a puzzle. I suspect he has one in his apartment. Daughters Alex and Sophie continued in the Sisyphean task of explaining modern music, current fashion, and popular English usage to the author.
Finally, I thank my wife, Suzanne, for being the better half of a tandem couple in CIA for three decades, for raising two independent and accomplished young women as daughters, for her hours of help with the manuscript, and for her aplomb in good times and bad.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
© DAVID MOORE
Jason Matthews is a retired officer of CIA’s Operations Directorate. Over a thirty-three-year career he served in multiple overseas locations and engaged in the clandestine collection of national security intelligence, specializing in denied-area operations. Matthews conducted recruitment operations against Soviet–East European, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean targets. As Chief in various CIA Stations, he collaborated with foreign partners in counterproliferation and counterterrorism operations. He is the author of Red Sparrow (which was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jennifer Lawrence and produced by 20th Century Fox) and Palace of Treason. He lives in Southern California.
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THE RED SPARROW TRILOGY
Red Sparrow
Palace of Treason
The Kremlin’s Candidate
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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The Kremlin's Candidate Page 53
