Red Sparrow

by Jason Matthews

  “Not so strange,” said Vanya. “And we could work together.” The words floated above his head, changing color with the sunlight outside. Of course, thought Dominika, a staff recruit would work closely every day with the Deputy Director.

  “What sorts of duties would I be assigned?” said Dominika. She knew enough already to guess the answer.

  “You would have to begin at the entry level, of course,” said Vanya. “But all the functions of the Service satisfy a critical need. Records, research, archives. An intelligence organization survives or perishes on how it manages information.” Of course, they wanted her buried in the third subbasement.

  “I’m not sure I know about such duties, Uncle,” said Dominika. “I don’t think I would do well.” Vanya hid his irritation. He really had only two choices with this Venus de Milo. Matorin could dispose of her before lunch, or he could get her into the Service, under control. The middle ground was unacceptable. She couldn’t be left walking around Moscow, resentment growing, perhaps thinking of getting even. Sookin syn.

  “I’m sure you would learn quickly. It’s quite important work,” Vanya said. Now he was reduced to trying to convince this silly twit.

  “I do think I would have an interest in another part of the Service,” said Dominika. Vanya peered over the desk at her, hands clasped and motionless. She was still sitting with a straight back, head erect, stricken. Vanya said nothing, waited. “I would like to be admitted to the Foreign Intelligence Academy as a candidate trainee.”

  “The Academy, the AVR,” said Vanya slowly. “You want to be an intelligence officer. In the Service?”

  “Yes, I think I would do well,” said Dominika. “You yourself said I performed satisfactorily with Ustinov in gaining his trust.” Raising Ustinov made the point. Vanya lit his third cigarette in as many minutes. Not counting the women in support functions, there had been two, perhaps three, women in the First Chief Directorate in the old KGB, and one of them was an old battleax in the Presidium. None had ever been admitted to the old KGB Higher School or to the Andropov Institute or to the current AVR. The only women involved in field operations were the co-opted wives of rezidenturi officers, and the vorobey, the trained “Sparrows” who seduced recruitment targets.

  But in thirty seconds Vanya Egorov made a lightning calculation. As a candidate in AVR, his niece would be under even more stringent control. Her performance, attitude, and physical whereabouts for the foreseeable future would be constantly monitored. She would be physically out of Moscow for long periods of time. If she strayed and was tempted to open her mouth, she would fall under the disciplinary jurisdiction of the Service. Her dismissal, even imprisonment, would be a matter of a stroke of the pen.

  More broadly, he could generate some political profit from putting her name forward as a candidate for the Academy. He would be the high-minded deputy director who for the first time selected a woman—athletic, educated, fluent in languages—for formal training in the modern SVR. Bosses in the Kremlin would see the public-relations benefits.

  From across the desk, Dominika saw his face, followed his calculations. Now would come the reluctant agreement, the inevitable stern warnings.

  “You’re asking a lot,” Vanya said. “There’s an entrance examination, a high refusal rate, then long training, quite rigorous.” He swiveled in his chair to look out the picture window, considering. He had made up his mind. “Are you prepared to commit yourself to this path?” he asked.

  Dominika nodded. She wasn’t absolutely sure, of course. But it would be a challenge, and that appealed to her. She was also loyal, she loved her country, she knew she wanted to try to join one of the premier organizations in Russia, perhaps, she thought, even to contribute. The Ustinov killing had repulsed her, but it also had shown her, in the space of an evening, that she could handle secret work, that she had the brains, and the courage, and the fortitude.

  There was something else, she knew, something ill-defined, something accumulating in her breast. They had used her. Now she wanted to intrude into their world, these domovladel’tsy, these landlords who abused the system and its people. She wondered what her father would think.

  “I will consider it,” said Vanya, swiveling back to look at her. “If I decide to submit your name, and if you are selected, your performance in the AVR will be a reflection on me, on the whole family. You realize that, do you not?” Charming. His concern for her and the family had not kept him from throwing her at Ustinov.

  She almost said, I’ll be sure to preserve your reputation, but pushed the anger back down and instead nodded again, more sure now about wanting the Academy. Vanya stood up. “Why don’t you go downstairs and have lunch? I will tell you my decision this afternoon.” He would have to clear it with the Director (gentle persuasion) and the director of training would have to be browbeaten (a pleasure). But Dominika’s place would be reserved, and the thing would be done, and his problem with her would be solved. When she left, Vanya picked up the phone and spoke briefly into it.

  Dominika was escorted back down the hallway to the elevator. The former directors all looked as if they had faint smiles on their faces. In the sprawling cafeteria, Dominika ordered the kotleta po-kievski, a hard roll, and a bottle of mineral water. The cafeteria was moderately crowded and Dominika had to search for an empty seat. She found a table where two middle-aged women were sitting at the other end. They looked at the beautiful young girl with the tired eyes and the visitor’s badge, but said nothing. Dominika began eating. The chicken was lightly breaded, golden brown, and delicious. A trickle of butter came from the rolled-up cutlet; there was the rich taste of garlic and tarragon. The cutlet morphed into Ustinov’s throat and the butter sauce turned vermilion. She put down her knife and fork with trembling hands. Dominika closed her eyes and fought the nausea. The two women at her table were looking at her. This was not something you see every day. They didn’t know how right they were.

  Dominika looked up and saw swirling black. Sergey Matorin was sitting at the table across from hers, leaning over a bowl, spooning soup into his mouth. He was staring at her as he ate, his dead eye unblinking, just as a wolf watches even while drinking at a brook.

  SVR CAFETERIA CHICKEN KIEV

  Mix and chill compound butter with garlic, tarragon, lemon juice, and parsley. Pound chicken breasts into wafer-thin cutlets. Roll tightly around thumb-sized pieces of compound butter, tie with twine. Dust with seasoned flour, dip in egg wash, coat with bread crumbs. Fry until golden brown.

  6

  Dominika entered the SVR’s Academy of Foreign Intelligence (AVR) soon after her father’s funeral. The school had been renamed several times during the Cold War, from the Higher Intelligence School to the Red Banner Institute to the AVR, but veterans simply called it School No. 101. The main campus for decades had been located north of Moscow, near the village of Chelobityevo. By the time it became the AVR, the school had been modernized, the curriculum streamlined, admission criteria liberalized. The campus had moved to a clearing in the dense forests east of the city at kilometer twenty-five on the Gorky Highway. It was therefore now referred to as “Kilometer 25” or simply “the Forest.”

  In the early weeks, wary and excited, Dominika, the only woman, and a dozen new classmates were driven in rattling PAZ buses with darkly tinted windows to various locations around Moscow and the surrounding suburbs. They rolled through sliding metal gates into anonymous walled compounds registered as laboratories, research centers, or Pioneer Youth camps. The days were filled with lectures about the history of the Services, of Russia, of the Cold War, and the Soviet Union.

  Whereas the chief attribute previously required for acceptance into former KGB schools was fealty to the Communist Party, the modern SVR required of its trainees an overarching devotion to the Russian Federation and a commitment to protect it from enemies within and without.

  For the first period of indoctrination, trainees were evaluated not only for aptitude but also for what in the old KGB woul
d have been called “political reliability.” Dominika excelled in class discussions and written assignments. There was a hint of the independent streak in her, of impatience with time-tested formulations and dicta. An instructor had written that Cadet Egorova would hesitate for just a second before answering a question, as if she were considering whether she chose to answer, then invariably respond with excellence.

  Dominika knew what they wanted to hear. The slogans in the books and on the chalkboards were kaleidoscopes of color, they were easy to categorize and memorize. Tenets of duty, loyalty, and defense of the country. She was a candidate to become a part of Russia’s elite, the Sword and Shield of yesterday, the Globe and Star of today. Her youthful ideology had once horrified her freethinking father—she knew that now—and she no longer totally accepted the ideology. Still, she wanted to do well.

  The start of the second training block. The class had moved permanently to the Kilometer 25 campus, a cluster of long, low buildings with pitched-tile roofs, surrounded by pines and stands of birch. Sweeping lawns separated the buildings, gravel paths led to the sports fields behind the buildings. The campus was a kilometer off the four-lane Gorkovskoye shosse, screened first by a tall wooden palisade, painted green to blend in with the trees. Past this “forest fence,” three kilometers farther into the woods, ran two additional wire fence lines, between which black Belgian Malinois hounds ran free. The dog run could be seen from the windows of the small classrooms, and from their rooms in the two-story barracks the students could hear the dogs panting at night.

  She was the only woman in the dormitory and they gave her a single room at the end of the corridor, but she still had to share the bathroom and shower room with twelve men, which meant she had to find quiet times in the mornings and evenings. Most of her classmates were harmless enough, the privileged sons of important families, young men with connections to the Duma or to the armed forces or to the Kremlin. Some were bright, very bright, some were not. A few brave ones, used to getting what they wanted and seeing that silhouette behind the shower curtain, were ready to risk it all for a tumble.

  She had reached for her towel on the hook outside the shower stall in the gang bathroom late one night. It was gone. Then a knuckly classmate with sandy hair, the burly one from Novosibirsk, stepped into the stall with her, crowding behind her, his arms around her waist. She could feel he was naked as he pushed her face against the wall of the shower and nuzzled her wet hair from behind. He was whispering something she couldn’t understand; she couldn’t see the colors. He pressed up against her harder and one hand drifted from around her waist to her breasts. As he squeezed her, she wondered if he could feel her heartbeat, if he could feel her breathing. Her cheek was pressed against the white tiles of the stall, she could feel them changing like prisms hung in sunlight, they were turning dark red.

  The tapered, three-inch faucet handle for the cold water had always been loose, and Dominika wiggled it back and forth until it came off in her hand. She turned slippery and breathy to face him, breasts now crushed against his chest, and said, “Stojat,” wait, wait a second, through a constricted throat. He was smiling as Dominika drove the pointed end of the faucet handle into his left eye up to her knuckle and his vomit-green scream of pain and terror washed over her as he slid down the wall clutching his face, his knees pulled up tight. “Stojat,” she said again, looking down at him, “I asked you to wait a second.”

  “Attempted rape and justifiable self-defense” was the secret AVR review board’s judgment, and Novosibirsk gained a one-eyed bus conductor and the board recommended that Dominika be separated from Academy training. She told them she had done nothing to cause the incident, and the panel—a woman and two men—looked her up and down and kept straight faces. They were going to do it to her again. Ballet school, Ustinov, now the AVR, and Dominika told the panel she would lodge a formal complaint. To whom would she complain? But word of the incident got back to Yasenevo and Deputy Director Egorov cursed so foully over the phone that Dominika would have seen brown treacle flowing out of the earpiece, and they told her the decision had been made to give her another chance, under probationary status. From then on the rest of her class ignored her, avoided her, a klikusha walking between the buildings in the Forest, an impossibly straight back and long elegant steps with the faintest hitch in her stride.

  =====

  The start of the third block of AVR. They filed into classrooms with plastic chairs, and pebbled acoustic tiles on the walls, and clunky projectors hanging from the ceiling. Dead flies lay in piles between the double windowpanes. Now came instruction in world economies, energy, politics, the Third World, international affairs, and “global problems.” And America. No longer referred to as the Main Enemy, the United States nevertheless was her country’s main competitor. It was all Russia could do to maintain superpower parity. Lectures on the subject took on an edge.

  The Americans took them for granted, they ignored Russia, they tried to manipulate Russia. Washington had interfered in recent elections, thankfully to no avail. America supported Russian dissidents and encouraged disruptive behavior in this delicate period of Russian reconstruction. American military forces challenged Russian sovereignty, from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan. The recent “reset” policy was an insult, nothing needed to be reset. It was simply that Russia deserved respect, the Rodina deserved respect. Well, if, as an SVR officer, Dominika ever met an American, she would show him that Russia deserved respect.

  The irony was that America was in decline, said the lecturers, no longer the high-and-mighty US. Overextended in wars, struggling economically, the supposed birthplace of equality was now divided by class warfare and the poisonous politics of conflicting ideologies. And the foolish Americans didn’t yet realize they would soon need Russia to hem in a galloping China, they would need Russia as an ally in a future war.

  But if Americans chose to pit themselves against Russia, thinking she was feeble and weak, they would be surprised. A student in the class disagreed. He suggested that yesterday’s notions of “East and West” were antiquated. Besides, Russia had lost the Cold War, get over it. There was a hush in the classroom. Another classmate stood, eyes flashing. “Russia most certainly did not lose the Cold War,” he said. “It never ended.” Dominika watched the scarlet letters ascend to the ceiling. Good words, strong words. Interesting. The Cold War never ended.

  =====

  Not long after, Dominika was separated from the rest of her class. She had no need for language instruction, for she could have been an instructor herself in spoken English or French. Nor was she hustled off to the administrative track. Her instructors had seen her potential, had passed it on to AVR administrators, who in turn had called Yasenevo and requested the Center’s permission to admit Dominika Egorova—niece of the First Deputy Director—into the practical, or operational, phase of training. She would be the rare female candidate trained by the SVR as an operupolnomochenny, an operations officer. There were no delays. Approvals from the Center had already been granted.

  She had been admitted to operations training, the Real Steel, the Game; she had entered a special phase, the last chrysalis stage before she would emerge to serve the Motherland. The time passed without her knowing it. Seasons seemed to change without her being aware of them. Classes, lectures, laboratories, interviews all came in a dizzying rush.

  It started with ridiculous subjects. Sabotage, explosives, infiltration, first taught when Stalin raved and the Wehrmacht encircled Moscow. Then came the more practical lessons, and they worked her hard. She developed legends, zashifrovat’, her cover for movement, ran routes to detect opposition surveillance on the street, found safe houses, transmitted secure messages, found meeting sites, yavki, ran vstrechki, agent meetings, plotted recruitment approaches. She practiced with disguises and digital communications, signals and caches. Her memory for detail, for lessons learned, astounded them.

  Instructors in unarmed-combat class were impressed by her strength and b
alance. They grew a little alarmed at her intensity and the way she wouldn’t stay down on the mat after having been thrown. Everyone had heard the story from the Forest, and the wide-eyed men in the class watched her hands and knees and protected their mudya when sparring with her. She saw their faces, saw the green breath of their disapproval and fear as they huffed and grunted in the gymnasium. No one came near her voluntarily.

  The practical instruction continued. They brought her to downtown Moscow, to the streets that were used as a living classroom to practice tradecraft principles taught in the dingy classrooms around Yasenevo. The streetcraft instructors were pensionerki, old spooks, some of them seventy years old, retired decades ago. They had some difficulty keeping up with Dominika as the exercises accelerated. They watched her bunched dancer’s calves striding long on the shimmering Moscow sidewalks. The slight telltale limp from her shattered foot, now mended, was endearing. She was driven, determined to excel. Her face shone with perspiration, the sweat darkened her shirt between her breasts and across her ribs.

  The colors helped her on the street; the blues and greens from the teams in the radio cars and the watcher vans made it possible to pick out coverage among the crowds on broad boulevards. She twisted surveillance teams around themselves, meticulously timed brush passes on crowded Metro platforms, met practice agents in dirty stairwells at midnight, controlled the meetings, read their minds. The old men would mop their faces and mutter, “Fanatichka,” and she would laugh at them, her hair pulled back tight on her head, her shoulders straight, secretly reading the colors of their breathless approval. Come on, dinozavry, come on, you old dinosaurs. The gruff old men secretly loved her, and she knew it.