Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  34

  Yevgeny told Dominika at the morning staff meeting about the young woman—suspect CIA officer Hannah Archer—who had been struck and killed by a surveillance car in Lyubertsy District the night before. FSB was keeping the accident quiet for the time being. Dominika’s mind clicked off as she collected her files, and she heard herself say something offhand, like “I hope they roast the stupid idiot who did it” and got back to her office, sat down behind her desk, fought tears, and tried to breathe.

  Udranka called to her from the corner of the room. We’re all the Kremlin Mermaids, dushka, we’re all with you. And Hannah walked through the door and smiled at her.

  She had always been able to control her outward emotions, even as she built, refined, and polished the soaring rage that had become part of her. The death of Hannah rocked her as much as Udranka’s murder had, but with the added pain of knowing the spirited, devoted, brave little nature girl had saved her life last night. She closed her eyes and asked Nate for help, asked why she, Dominika, brought death. And there was an old soldier waiting in his apartment for the interrogations to resume, a process most certainly to conclude with vyshaya mera, the highest punishment. She had put him in the cellars, and she was going to get him out—tonight.

  As Dominika left work, a new image came to her, gentle and fair, yet terrible and deadly. She thought of her grandmother’s stories about the Rusalki, the mythic Russian water nymphs, the lovely, long-haired mermaid demons who were the spirits of young women, dead before their time. They would sit along the shore and sing, and lure men close, to drag them to the bottom.

  Dominika knew she would have the spirits of Marta, Udranka, and Hannah riding with her. We’ll sit on the shore, sisters, and sing, and then you’ll be able to rest. Then she thought, Hurry up, you’re losing your mind. And the sweet nymphs in her mind’s eye turned into something with canine red eyes living in the freezing coal-black of a warehouse. And you can come, too; we all go together. Whatever was going on in that overheated brain and anguished breast, Yevgeny saw it in her face and did not say good night, much less suggest a farewell session of slap-and-tickle before she left. Zyuganov also saw her walk past his office door, and his schitzy receptors registered that she looked different—suffused with something—another tantalizing anomaly for his Egorova-the-mole theory, another furry fact for the dung beetle to roll back to the brood hall and munch on.

  Nine o’clock. Her hands shook as she washed the single plate and teacup with painted sparrows on it. She couldn’t exactly remember packing the small overnight case, but somehow the high heels went in, along with the dress with the plunging neckline. She checked the tool kit for Red Route Two and the test lights winked green; she looked around her apartment wondering if she would ever be back, and saw her bed, neatly made—she hated what she had done in it—but she was going to pull this off and send them to hell. The dark-blue Lada Priora from the motor pool had a stick shift and smelled like hulled pistachios; Dominika ground the gears until she got the feel for it. Kutuzofsky Prospekt was crowded, but the MKAD was a belching, streaming mass of evening traffic and she couldn’t roll the windows down to breathe—she couldn’t remember breathing—but she got off onto M10 and then onto Yubileynyy, then took a right turn onto Lavochinka, LYRIC’s street, and found the building directly across from Dubki Park and the golden domes of the Church of the Epiphany in Khimki, walls walrus-tusk white, and found the apartment block with the covered cement entrance painted a faded pink. Dominika went up the stairs, past apartment doors, listening to the televisions and the crying babies, her heart pounded in her mouth, her jaw throbbed, and her vision was a gray cone as the door opened. The bored police officer guarding the old man had a flat, ugly face and lank dirty hair and wore a track suit. LYRIC was visible in the living room behind him, in old felt slippers, sitting on a couch, newspapers on the floor. Dominika’s arm moved before her brain willed it, aiming at the hollow of the meaty neck, and the policeman staggered back one step, clutching his smashed trachea, then collapsed. Dominika stepped over his strangling blue face, and General Solovyov, looking shrunken, put on some pants, shoes, and topcoat—no discussion—and her voice was someone else’s, and she shook him then pulled him, ignoring the slack-eyed stare on the floor, down the stairs. She dragged the seat belt across the old man’s chest, smelling sour fear, and she had to backtrack, then got onto M10, sometimes four lanes, usually two, the trucks had trailers with bald tires, the bastards didn’t ease over to let her pass, so peek and floor it, engine whining, over and over and over. The general was silent, not asking, looking straight ahead, her responsibility now, eleven o’clock and the muddy little towns, Zelenograd, Solnechnogorsk, Klin, Novozavidovsky, Tver, and Dominika asked him how much time; they probably had another hour before the relief guard discovered the body. The general started rambling, honor and the Red Army and Russia, and he called himself a fool, he knew it now, an old zhopa, an old asshole, and he asked who she was, and cried remembering his children, and thanked her over and over, and his panicked green words filled the dark of the car, with the center line painted not exactly straight, and the oncoming headlights filled her eyeballs, and the rearview mirror was clear and dark, and the towns stopped; now came the vastness of the Rodina, spruce and pine trunks in the headlights, flashing metronome steady, midnight and the land flattened to the horizon, the floor of the sky, stars like dust, and Dominika’s eyes started to blur. She shook her head, and the hound loped on the road in front of her, looking back at her with red eyes, and she heard Udranka laughing somewhere out there in the dark fields, and red dog eyes became the flashing red lights of a GAI traffic militia on the shoulder, the undercarriage of a truck visible in the ditch, a cop waving them through, no radio alerts yet. The road kept unpeeling itself into the black vastness ahead; she looked at the general and Hannah was sitting there instead, with her hands in her lap and the wind in her hair, and Dominika caught it before they drifted into the trees. The general helped her stay awake, with cold night air and Soviet patriotic songs, “Katyusha” and “Svyaschennaya Voyna (The Sacred War),” sung in a roaring bass, then hiccups from singing so hard, then laughing, two spies hurtling through the night with wet cheeks and the King of Hell’s dog in the headlights, loping tirelessly as they ghosted through Veliky Novgorod, at one o’clock, two hundred kilometers to go. Then the singing and remembering were too much, he wanted to turn around, sniffling, then silence and the city glow of Saint Petersburg, where the roadblocks would be. Two o’clock, and Dominika got off the M10 onto the KAD to avoid going into the city, the early morning ring road was empty. Now she had to watch her mirrors; it would be here, jeeps across the roadway, they’d both be cooked now. Three o’clock, and the little blue car was on the Petergofskoye, the A121, along the tsar’s long-ago palace coast; there were glimpses of the Gulf of Finland and tang of ocean, and they were past the lighted gates of Constantine Palace—the president was in—then the darkened Peterhof Palace, massive white in the distance, then the domes of the Oranienbaum Palace—nothing in the mirrors—now under the KAD causeway. She checked the kilometers—exactly two point four said Benford—and the marshy coast opened up on the right, water flat as silver glass, and she turned at a squat billboard onto the pitch-black beach road, windows down and headlights playing over the riprap boulders and the stony beach and the sea grass. Now she turned the lights off, pulled the hand brake to crunch to a stop; it was nearly four o’clock. And where the water was clear up to the beach, opposite the boulder with two vertical slashes in red paint, was the start of Red Route Two.

  General Solovyov—and his interrogation and conviction for espionage—was Zyuganov’s responsibility. The relief guard had called in at midnight reporting that Solovyov’s apartment was empty except for the corpse of starshina Bogdanov—the sergeant’s windpipe had been crushed. Zyuganov was informed an hour later and came as close to losing his mind as he ever had. He was in his office within a half hour, raving into the phone about CIA action te
ams loose in Moscow. He screamed high-pitched at the SVR watch center duty officer to issue Moscow-wide bulletins describing Solovyov to police and militsiya units throughout the city. Yevgeny, unshaven and sleepy, was told to connect with Moscow Police’s Main Office of the Interior for Transport and Special Transportation and this instant order a 100 percent watch at Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo, and Vnukovo International Airports and at Bykovo regional airport. Zyuganov woke up the director of the FTS, the Federal Customs Service, and demanded that his Department of Contraband Control at the airports X-ray without exception all large outgoing diplomatic pouches from the American, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand embassies (the Five Eyes allies had been in league against Russia since the October Revolution in 1917). When told by the Customs director—himself a former KGB crony of the president—that diplomatic pouches were inviolable, Zyuganov impoliticly threatened to smash his testicles with a Moscow telephone book, and the director said, Idi na khui, fuck off, and hung up.

  Zyuganov was breaking crockery all around town, issuing orders and making threats; the siloviki wire, the crony network, even at this hour started buzzing about the missteps, the potential colossal failure of the little SVR ghoul whom no one liked or trusted anyway. Careers—and not just careers—were in real jeopardy when such gossip floated up and eventually reached the Kremlin, like an embolism reaching the brain. Zyuganov knew he was making a show of himself, but he couldn’t let Solovyov escape. He was already exhausted, but the sandstorm in his head abated for a second and he could think. It wasn’t the local CIA station; they had lost one of their own and were leaderless at the moment. No, CIA would direct one of their assets to spirit Solovyov out of Russia. Would they risk their best asset—the Mole—to save this old man? They might: The Americans historically had gone to great and expensive lengths to rescue lost assets, something his own service did not bother about.

  And what kind of person could deliver such a devastating blow against a trained police officer—Bogdanov had been a shot-put champion in the police league—killing him without a struggle? Egorova, trained in Sistema; Egorova, who killed Spetsnaz operatives and the unbeatable Buchina; Egorova, the ballerina who was mesmerizing the president. Egorova, his nemesis. He screamed for Yevgeny, ordered him to call Egorova at home and tell her to report to the Center instantly, but his hirsute deputy would not look him in the eye. Something was going on. Zyuganov recalled Egorova smiling at Yevgeny—was he covering for her? As Yevgeny sweated in a chair in Zyuganov’s office, an assistant called Egorova’s apartment—no answer at two thirty in the morning.

  Ten minutes of roaring questions at a terrified Yevgeny netted no results, but the interrogator in Zyuganov sensed that there was much to find out. The dwarf’s instincts, already aroused, now stood on hind legs and howled at the moon. Taking a steel spring baton out of a bottom desk drawer, Zyuganov wheeled on Yevgeny. The panicked assistant in the outer office quietly left her desk and ran down the hallway—she had no desire to hear the coming attractions. Zyuganov was aware only of an itchy impatience to learn what was happening—he was aware of a clock ticking down, of criminals making their escape. He swung and brought the barrel of the baton down on the chair’s armrest, splintering four of the five long metacarpal bones in Yevgeny’s left hand. The hairy baboon screamed like, well, a hairy baboon, clutched his ruined hand, and doubled over. Zyuganov yanked him upright and brought the black steel spring down on the top of Yevgeny’s left thigh, creating a greenstick fracture of the femur just above the knee. Yevgeny grunted like a beast and collapsed off the chair onto the floor. Like an insect that can lift ten times its own weight, Zyuganov bodily hauled Yevgeny back up into the chair, where his protégé sat with spittle on his chin, his head lolling. Zyuganov brought his face close to Yevgeny’s, inhaled the familiar, delectable scents, and whispered, Pora spat’, polnoch; skoro zapojut petuhi, it’s time to go to bed; it’s midnight and roosters will sing soon. The Lubyanka Lullaby.

  Through the spittle and tears and snot, Yevgeny talked. “We were intimate,” he said.

  Zyuganov shook Yevgeny’s head by the hair. “Pig. Intimate with who?”

  “Captain Egorova. Dominika,” whispered Yevgeny.

  Of course, thought Zyuganov. “What did you tell her?”

  “Office matters. She was in Line KR, after all.”

  Zyuganov used the shank of the baton to lift Yevgeny’s chin. “Mudilo, motherfucker, what office matters?”

  Yevgeny stared at Zyuganov, not speaking, daring to resist, and the baton was snapped on Yevgeny’s cheekbone, one-quarter force, just enough to get the ears ringing and the eyes watering. “What office matters?” he repeated.

  “Zarubina,” panted Yevgeny, “TRITON, Solovyov’s house arrest.”

  More came out. He had authorized a car for her to drive to Saint Petersburg to visit family—fearing additional demonic ministrations, Yevgeny did not mention the invitation from the president. Zyuganov straightened, exultant. This was as good as confirmation for him that she was the mole, that Solovyov was with her, that she probably intended to hand him over to CIA officers in Petersburg—there were cruise ships, ferries, trains to Finland and the Baltics, innumerable flights. He left Yevgeny sobbing in the chair, picked up the phone, and called the SVR dispatcher. It was a matter of seconds to establish which pool car Egorova had been issued. Zyuganov barked orders to activate the transponder in the vehicle via encoded phone—all staff cars had tracking beacons installed to prevent their unauthorized private use (unless of course the dispatcher’s palm had been greased).

  Zyuganov then called the Big House—the Saint Petersburg SVR regional office—and forced the duty officer to wake up the chief. It was three in the morning, but Zyuganov did not apologize: Moreover, he was taking an immense bureaucratic risk in demanding all the resources for a full-out sweep search for Egorova’s vehicle. He was almost certain she was heading to Saint Petersburg. The chief, another Putin crony, agreed reluctantly—a spy case was nothing to fool with, so he’d comply—but he resolved to report Zyuganov’s unhinged behavior to the director in Moscow and, given the opportunity, to the president during the breakfast reception at Strelna later this morning.

  In the meantime, police and militsiya mobile units would be alerted by radio, the car, plates, and passengers’ descriptions broadcast widely. Additional teams would roll the minute the drivers reported for work and, most important, two stubby, twin-boomed, twin-tailed Kamov Ka226 militia helicopters would be airborne within thirty minutes. The midnight-blue aircraft were equipped with standard receivers that could detect the beacon signal from Egorova’s vehicle at a distance of two miles and an altitude of one thousand feet. It would take time for them to quarter the city airspace, to cover the urban sprawl around the horseshoe-shaped Neva Bay, but once locked onto the beacon signal, moving or stationary, vectoring ground units could converge in a matter of minutes. Zyuganov closed his eyes, picturing blue lights all around the car, Egorova and Solovyov facedown on the roadway, hands cuffed behind them.

  Zyuganov asked the chief to keep him informed. He declared that this manhunt was the culmination of a protracted and highly classified mole hunt that would ultimately conclude with the arrest of two dangerous traitors. And Saint Petersburg would share in the credit, and foreign enemies would be thwarted, and the Federation would remain strong and inviolate, under the inspired leadership of the president. The Petersburg chief purred something into the phone, an exchange between them of vranyo, the Russian bureaucratic lie—the chief knew Zyuganov was lying, and Zyuganov knew he knew, and both of them didn’t blink an eye. Zyuganov hung up the phone, incrementally placated. He might have all this under control.

  Yevgeny was sitting tilted in his chair, head forward, a thread of saliva from his mouth to the floor. Yevgeny’s disloyalty to the Service and to his country was monstrous, but his betrayal of Zyuganov personally stirred up in him all the noxious, misanthropic, adult-diaper issues that his mother—SVR doyenne Ekaterina Zyuganova,
now political advisor in the Paris rezidentura—had palliated in his early career by tucking her son into the Lubyanka job. But he was chief now, chief of Line KR, and on his own, responsible for the imminent capture of two CIA agents in Russia. He was partner with the genius Zarubina in the conduct of the massively productive TRITON case. He wondered whether Egorova had reported about the case to Washington. No matter, once an illegals officer began handling TRITON the Americans would never find him.

  And he would be running SVR with Zarubina, and the Service would multiply and prosper, and the Main Enemy would thrash hopelessly against them, and other enemies would quail, and fractious former republics would come back into the fold, and a new Russian hegemon would be born with Vladimir Putin in charge, stronger than before, and traitors—he looked down at the back of Yevgeny’s wooly head as his doubled-over deputy quietly retched on the carpet—traitors like this, thought Zyuganov, hearing his own shrill voice as he brought the baton in a singing arc down on the back of Yevgeny’s skull, pig manure like this will be eliminated.

  They ate in moonlight off the hood of the car, soft pyrahi buns with blood-red savory beet filling. Nathaniel would tease about the beets, she thought. Dominika then registered that this would be the last authentic Russian meal LYRIC would ever have, and it would be her last nonprison Russian meal too, if the United States Navy did not appear in approximately twelve minutes. At exactly seven minutes after four in the morning, she dug the radio out of the pack and stood on the boulder above the water, a statuesque Rusalka mermaid (despite the black jeans, sweater, and black running shoes) about to serenade the moon. The empty sea was a slab of smooth slate, the horizon in the gulf a silvery line. Dominika’s elegant hands with square-cut nails—the same hands that six hours ago had snapped the hyoid bone in a Moscow policeman’s throat—held the radio and depressed the transmit button of the jet-black, cigarette-pack-sized AN/PRC-90 modified by CIA, transmitting an encrypted very-low-frequency (VLF) trinumeric code to the British Ministry of Defense’s Skynet 5 satellite in geosynchronous earth orbit at fifty-three degrees meridian east, twenty-two thousand miles above Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Barents Sea. DIVA did not know any of this.