Her parents had embodied Russian soul—her father a professor of literature, her mother a concert violinist—but they had been ground down between the Soviet mortar and Stalin’s pestle, confiding only in each other, out of young Dominika’s earshot, walking gingerly through life just as citizens now walk on Moscow streets, different but the same, wearily paying bribes and boiling their brown tap water and, outside Moscow, dreaming of milk, and waiting for meat, and hoarding the dear little tin of caviar for Maslenitsa, the end-of-winter holiday—a celebration as old as Russia is old—which brings the springtime promise of sun, and warmth, and food, and change, which never comes. It never comes.
As she sailed through SVR Academy, then inhaled the disinfectant stench of Sparrow School, then was assigned the delirious first overseas posting to Helsinki, Dominika’s synesthesia became an operational asset. She could read the deceptions and suspicions in her own rezidentura. When she met the unflappable CIA officers who handled her after her recruitment she read the haloes of constancy—the same royal purple as her father’s—and in the case of Nathaniel Nash, the luminous purple of passion. Passion for CIA, for his country, and perhaps for her.
They had fallen into their affair, pushed together by the strain of Dominika’s spying, by Nate’s dread for her safety. They made love against the rules, against good sense, flaunting every tenet of security. Dominika rationalized that she was already committing espionage—the second bullet behind the ear for sleeping with the Main Enemy wouldn’t much matter. When Nate hesitated, retreating behind his regulations, worried about career dislocations, Dominika’s anger and pride would not forgive him.
Nearly a year later, things had changed. Her disgust with the zveri, the animals in Moscow, was renewed. She knew that Zyuganov would just as soon liquidate her as look at her, but she knew that Putin’s wet-lipped patronage of her would keep him at bay, at least for a time. She wondered quite seriously whether she would have to kill Zyuganov before he killed her. And her fury at the thought of Korchnoi, gunned down a few meters from freedom, swirled unchecked and unabated in her breast. She supposed it was inevitable that she would gravitate to her CIA handlers—and she suspected that those smiling professionals always knew it. She was satisfied with the recontact with CIA and Gable; he was right, she missed the game. And she had done a lot of thinking about Nate—the last thing he told her before she went back inside Russia had been that he cared about her. Fine, but she would not offer herself to him again.
She combed her hair in the little bathroom with the long-handled antique tortoiseshell brush that once belonged to her prababushka, her great-grandmother, in Saint Petersburg. She had brought it with her to the Academy, then to Sparrow School, and on her first tour in Helsinki. It was one of the few mementos from her family. She looked at the brush in her hand. The elegant, curved handle had helped her unlock—unleash—her nighttime adolescent urges, without shame. As she entered young womanhood, she noted the emergence of her “secret self,” another part of her, sexual and edgy and questing, that lived quietly in the deeply barricaded hurricane room inside her—that is, until she opened the door. She set the brush down and asked herself what she expected from a life of espionage on the brink, from Udranka holding on by her fingernails, from earnest and conflicted Nate, from herself.
The street door intercom buzzed dit-dit-dah.
They worked until nightfall, then quit. The table was covered in paper. Two water glasses had made rings on the pages of SVR Line X requirements concerning temperatures of the thermal gradient in the gas rotors of Iran’s centrifuges at Natanz. Dominika got up from the table, brushed the hair out of her eyes, sprawled out on the little couch in the corner of the room, and kicked off her shoes.
“We have an excellent chance of success tomorrow,” she said.
“If Jamshidi hasn’t changed his mind,” said Nate from the table.
“He will not change. He cannot afford the scandal. And he cannot resist Udranka. His lust is stronger than his fear.”
“If he refuses to cooperate, would you make good on your threat?” asked Nate. “Would you feed him to the mullahs?”
“Of course. I could not be seen to bluff.” She lifted her chin and pointed it at Nate. “You would not? What would you do if he refused to cooperate?”
“I don’t know. Try to persuade him, appeal to his reason as a scientist.”
“And if he still refused?”
“Then we’d try to get him kicked out of IAEA over some minor charge.”
“To let him return in good standing to his country to continue his destructive work?” Dominika wiggled her toes and stretched her legs.
“Dominika, in CIA we don’t eliminate a recruitment target when the pitch is refused,” said Nate. “We wait and watch, and come back in a month, or a year, or five years. Besides, we don’t pitch someone until we’re nearly sure of the outcome.” The wiggling stopped.
“Were you sure about me? Did you know my response before you asked?”
“I wasn’t sure; I held my breath when I started talking to you about working together. I thought I knew—hoped I knew—what your response would be.” Nate started shuffling the papers on the table. “Then things became complicated . . .” Time to shut up. Jesus. Her toes started wiggling again.
“And the other,” said Dominika, “was that part of the operation, my recruitment?” Nate’s upper lip was a little wet, and the papers were sticking to his hands.
“What do you mean ‘the other’?” said Nate.
“What do you suppose I mean?” said Dominika. “When we made love.”
“What do you think, Domi?” said Nate. “Do you remember what I said to you in Estonia before you crossed the bridge back to Russia? I said—”
“You said we didn’t have time for you to tell me you are sorry for what you said to me, no time to tell me what I meant to you as a woman, as a lover, as a partner, no time to tell me how much you will miss me.” Silence and the sound of a car horn on the street below. Dominika looked down at her hands in her lap.
“Have I remembered correctly?” she said softly.
“How lucky for us, on the eve of our meeting with Jamshidi, that your well-known memory hasn’t failed you,” said Nate. He stopped gathering the papers and looked into her eyes. “I meant what I said.”
Her mouth twitched, suppressing a smile, or perhaps some other emotion. “Well, it is good to be working together again,” she said quickly. The bubble popped; they both knew it. It was the only way.
“Are you hungry?” she said. “Do you want to go out for one of their beastly sausages and kraut?”
“What’s wrong with sausages? I like that stuff,” said Nate.
“Protivno, disgusting,” said Dominika.
“I suppose you think salo is better?” Dominika sat up and squared her shoulders.
“Salo is a delicacy,” she said.
“It’s fatback bacon, and you Russians eat it cold and raw, the more fat the better.”
Dominika sighed and shook her head. “Nevinnyi,” she said, “how little you know, almost childlike.”
“Maybe we should stay off the street,” said Nate.
“I know a restaurant with a covered garden, the Good Old Whale; it’s in the park. We can stay away from downtown,” said Dominika, seeing him hesitate. “Come on dushka, I will watch for trouble and protect you.” Dominika knew she was good, but she also knew that Nate was twice the street operator she was.
Nate pushed open the door to the apartment building and they stepped onto the sidewalk. Neither of them consciously registered that each simultaneously looked across the street and scanned both wings as they turned to walk toward the Prater, crossing busy Ausstellungsstrasse, using the double-lane boulevard to look both ways and check for trailing coverage again. They left the traffic behind and walked down pedestrian, tree-lined Zufahrtsstrasse, now inside the park, past the booths, the funhouses, the fairy lights, and the big Prater Ferris wheel always visible above the tree l
ine, its bread-box cars picked out in white bulbs. Dominika took Nate’s arm as they strolled through the smells of the confections and cakes and roasted meats, and they mentally cataloged the faces and the jackets and the shoes, to be able to recognize repeats later on.
The summer evening was cool and pleasant. Dominika’s bare arm was relaxed and warm and Nate felt the familiar constriction—desire, tenderness, lust—in his throat, and he looked over at her classic profile, reflected in a hundred spinning lights, and she caught him looking at her and yanked his arm to behave, and pulled him toward the tables of the restaurant under the linden trees, Der Gute Alte Walfisch—the Good Old Whale—and they ordered sauerkraut balls with mustard, sauerbraten and red cabbage for Dominika, and Nürnberger Rostbratwurst with horseradish cream for Nate, and a bottle of Grauburgunder, but Dominika shook her head and refused to toast when Nate held up his glass.
Nate put down his glass without taking a sip. “What’s up?”
Dominika made a sweeping gesture at the plates on the table. “This. In Russia the only people who eat like this are the siloviki, the fat cats licking their paws and purring when our dear president scratches them behind the ears,” she said. “They are in their dachas and villas and seaside resorts—do you know about Putin’s palace in Praskoveevka on the Black Sea? He stole hospital funds to build it.”
Nate picked up his wineglass again. “Well, then, confusion to the siloviki,” he said. “Dominika Egorova will keep them awake at night, like the Russian household demons—what do you call them?—that live under the floor and knock all night.”
Dominika raised her glass and touched the rim to Nate’s glass. “Barabashki, the pounders, the bad demons, the domovye.”
Nate sipped. “That’s you, the domovoi in Putin’s palace, under the floorboards. He just doesn’t know it’s you.”
“Thank you very much,” said Dominika. “Domovye are smelly and ill behaved.”
“You’re certainly not smelly,” said Nate.
“Funny,” Dominika said. “Are all the men in your family as charming?”
Nate held up his hand. “Let’s not go there. Talk about pounders and knockers.”
“What?” Dominika said.
“Forget it,” said Nate.
Dominika leaned forward. “No, you cannot refuse. Now I am curious.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” said Nate. He poured both of them some more wine.
Dominika kept looking at him, even as he avoided her eyes. “You’re supposed to keep your agent happy and motivated. Tell me.”
Nate took a deep breath. “Not so dramatic. Two brothers, both older. Partners in the family law firm. My father is a lawyer, my grandfather a judge. Great-grandfather started the firm. In Virginia, Dinwiddie County, near the capital of Richmond. The Old South, you know what that is?”
Dominika nodded her head. “Your Civil War. Abraham Lincoln. The film Blown with the Wind, yes I know.”
“That’s right, good movie.” Nate patted Dominika’s hand. “It was pretty competitive growing up. In school, sports, my brothers especially, we were always fighting. They like to win, like my father and grandfather; the whole family likes to argue, all lawyers. The only thing I did better than they did was swim, and one summer I pulled my oldest brother to shore after his sailboat flipped. I guess I saved his life, but when we got to shore he started wrestling me—I was smaller than him—and he threw me back into the lake and walked up to the house. I guess thanking me was out of the question. He had to win.
“My brothers married respectable girls from old Southern families. Obedient and genteel. Everything the way it had been for four generations. Always winning. My exhausted sisters-in-law got by on pills and bourbon. I found out that my oldest brother’s wife was getting back at him by sleeping around fraternity row in Richmond. I could have thrown it in his face, payback for all the thumping, but that would be losing—for the whole family—so I skipped it, and went off to school.
“My father wanted me to be a lawyer too. When I studied Russian instead, and then picked another career, it was a serious crisis. They bet that I’d fail and be back home in two years.”
Dominika took a sip of wine. “Instead you are here, and you have me, and we are daring and desperate and dangerous operatives, saving the world and planning the destruction of evil.”
“Imenno, exactly,” said Nate. “Do you want this last sauerkraut ball? I’m tired of talking about me.”
“Go ahead,” said Dominika. “But tell me, Neyt, you don’t hate your family, do you? You must never forget your family. They will always be there to help you. Like my mother is always there when I need her.”
“I thought your mother passed away a few years ago,” said Nate.
“She did. But she is always close by.”
“You mean her memory? Of course you remember your parents. We all do,” said Nate.
“Yes, but more than a memory. I can sometimes see her; she talks to me.”
Nate sat back in his chair. “Like a ghost?” Would he have to draft a cable to Headquarters documenting DIVA’s episodic schizophrenia?
“Stop looking at me that way,” said Dominika. “I am not sumasshedshiy, crazy. All Russians feel a closeness to their ancestors and friends. We’re spiritual.”
“Uh-huh. Comes from the bottle of vodka a day,” said Nate. “Do you see other ghosts?” He kept his tone neutral.
“There was a girl at Sparrow School who died, and my friend in Finland, the one who disappeared.” Dominika looked down at her hands.
“She was the former Sparrow?” said Nate.
Dominika nodded. “I know the Center eliminated her.”
“And they talk to you?”
Dominika leaned forward, chin in her hand. “Do not worry, Dr. Freud, I am not raving. I just remember my friends. They are with me in spirit, and they help me survive the days when you are not here. For me, they are like our Rusalki, the mermaids who sit by the river and sing.”
“I read about the Rusalki, Slavic folklore,” said Nate. “But don’t they sing to men to lure them to the water and drown them?”
“They sound dangerous, don’t they?” said Dominika, a trace of a smile on her lips. “But they are not here tonight, because you are here.” She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.
A blond waitress in a dirndl, a traditional peasant skirt, came to clear the table, bending to gather plates and silverware, taking her time, looking at Nate as she reached for the mustard pot. The traditional bodice was low cut and her blouse was strained tight. One arm balancing plates, she managed to fluff her hair and ask Nate in German if he wanted anything else. Nate smiled and simply made the universal signing gesture for the check. His smiled faded as he turned back to Dominika. Annoyed. Cossack displeased. White sparks from an arc welder.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “I thought we were dangerous operatives saving the world.”
“Do you love me?” asked Dominika, switching to Russian.
“What? What’s that got to do with this? She’s just a cute waitress.”
“You know the Danube is not that far away,” said Dominika. “I know Rusalki. They will drag you—” She stopped talking and looked over Nate’s shoulder.
Nate knew not to look, ingrained training, but watched her face, waiting.
“Two men, short sleeves, one tall, one fat,” Dominika said in a low voice.
“Stupid Tyrolean hat on the short one?” said Nate.
Dominika’s eyes searched his face, impressed. “Very good. They were ahead of us when we walked through the park.”
“Then they stopped at a food booth to let us go by,” said Nate.
“And they walked past us as we sat down here,” said Dominika.
“What are they doing now?”
Dominika shrugged. “Walking back up the lane, eating ice cream.”
“Three hits. Time for a loop out of the park,” said Nate.
They paid and unhurriedly walked in the opp
osite direction onto looping Messestrasse, stopping at the Hotel Messe bar for a drink, exiting through the hotel garden, crossing over into Messezentrum arcade just before closing, moving counterclockwise around the hall until they came to the exit onto Ausstellungsstrasse, then sprinting across the road against the lights and stair-stepping into Dominika’s neighborhood. They had seen no extraordinary movement in response to their provocatively aggressive movements, no scurrying or obvious parallel coverage, either foot or vehicular. And no Mutt and Jeff with the hat. They stopped again at a schnaps bar on Arnezhoferstrasse, sat, and looked out the plate glass, tired and a little winded, but stoked with the pulse of the street, with the aphrodisiac of sound, movement, and car exhaust. The adrenaline high of possible unseen opposition in the shadows faded: There was no feel of coverage, no nibbles from the street. Dominika wondered whether he was as “agitated” as she was, and whether he would try to take her to bed. She ached for him, but she would not suggest it first.
“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” she said. Their shoulders were nearly touching, and she could feel his body heat through her shirt.
“No, I think we’ll be fine. You?” said Nate. The purple halo around his head pulsated.
“I expect the Persian will try to dance around a bit, but there’s no way he can refuse us. I will have my Sparrow at the apartment,” said Dominika. “She will make an appearance, as a reminder of what a shalun, what a naughty boy, scientist Jamshidi has been.”
Palace of Treason Page 10
