Red Sparrow 02 - Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  “She asked me about myself. I told her I needed the money, like we rehearsed. I admitted I liked to gamble,” said Thorstad.

  “And how did she respond?” asked Benford. The OSI agents weren’t listening because they were all busy taking notes—second contact with RIS, contact with the Washington chief of SVR, specific requirements on the F-35. Their DA op named SEARCHLIGHT was catching fire. They would draft another lead item in the next monthly report—no, a separate memo to the Secretary of the Air Force, maybe even SecDef. They looked over at Benford. This dipstick from Langley said it would be a no-show. Some expert.

  “She said we all occasionally have difficulties,” said Thorstad. “She was, like, really understanding. No hard-line stuff, nothing.”

  Of course, thought Benford, you just had a pleasant evening stroll with an old lady, a shveja, a seamstress. But Benford’s three decades of low-crawling through the wilderness of mirrors told him something did not add up. In matters of intelligence collection, the Russians were—had always been—greedy, covetous, rapacious, suspicious, impatient, avaricious, extorting, brutal. But never stupid. Benford knew the feeling, felt the familiar bolus in his throat, when contemplating some as-yet-unknown Russian action. In due course the plot would become apparent, like a sheep’s head floating up from the bottom of the stew pot, staring and grinning. But by then it would be too late.

  KROPPKAKOR-POTATO DUMPLINGS

  Fry salt pork and onions until golden brown. Into cold mashed potatoes mix egg, black pepper, nutmeg, and flour and work into a dough. Cut and roll dough into balls, make a cavity in each, and fill with the pork/onion mixture. Crimp dumplings closed and boil in beef broth until cooked through. Serve with sour cream.

  16

  Vern Throckmorton, the difficult chief of Station, sat scowling behind his desk in his tiny office in Moscow Station. Even with the laminate pocket door opened, the closet-sized space had no chairs, so Hannah Archer had to stand uncomfortably under Vern’s avocado glare. Hannah was the newest case officer in Moscow—she had been at Station for three days—and this was the first time Throckmorton had called her in, or even acknowledged her existence.

  “Metrics,” said the chief. “You know what metrics are?” Vern was a large man, broad shouldered and big bellied, with a double chin, bushy eyebrows, and thinning brown hair slicked flat in one piece with mousse across his beach-ball head. Hannah imagined that if one were able to get a fingernail delicately under an edge of the stiffened hair, it would lift off the top of his head like the lid on a tin of ship’s biscuits.

  “I don’t know, Chief,” said Hannah. “Isn’t metrics a scale to measure things?” Hannah was twenty-five years old, just out of IO training—“sticks and bricks,” they called it—internal operations for running agents in denied areas like Moscow. Hannah was pretty and a little lean—she liked her nature-girl figure—with curly blond hair and full lips. Hannah knew her eyes were her best feature, if unusual: the luminous green of the Caribbean, flecked with gold around the pupil. She wore dark-framed hipster glasses and a simple blouse and skirt. Lacrosse through high school and college had given her slim, strong legs. She knew people thought she had a smart mouth—from growing up with brothers—but she had tried to keep it shut during training. She stood still but for a tapping foot out of the chief’s line of sight. Too much nervous energy—she had to work on that.

  COS Moscow looked at her closely: The kid radiated intensity, and smarts, and brass, goddamn it. The evaluation cable said she had been one of the best students in IO training: She could detect coverage on the street like an instructor, had smoked a twenty-car FBI surveillance team during the course’s final exercise, had pulled off an MCD right under their noses. Vern huffed. The moving-car delivery—one of the most screamingly dangerous agent-to-handler exchange techniques in the book. Hot shot, he thought.

  There was a further complication: Before this golden girl’s arrival at Station, Throckmorton had gotten an “eyes only” cable from Counterintelligence Division—direct from Simon Benford—essentially ordering him, COS Moscow, to designate soon-to-arrive case officer Hannah Archer to be the action officer to deploy the SRAC network in support of a sensitive asset, GTDIVA. The cable perfunctorily mentioned only that Archer had received additional training in such systems. Bullshit, thought Vern. I should be the one involved in this compartmented case. He had immediately written back, stating his intent to handle DIVA personally, but received a call on the encrypted line from Gloria Bevacqua, the new DNCS, telling him to shut up and follow orders. He was still pissed.

  “No,” said Throckmorton, leaning back in his swivel chair. “Metrics is what I use to send case officers back home when they don’t produce.” He waited for a beat to read Archer’s face, which was impassive—the kid kept the cork in the bottle.

  “I got a cable designating you as the action officer for DIVA. So, I expect you to do that, under my direction. And if you think I’m not qualified, you can drop that idea,” said Vern puffily.

  He didn’t advertise the fact that he had dodged IO training before coming to Moscow as chief—he had loftily declared he was too busy with other preparations, but in truth there had been no way he was going to risk washing out of the devilishly demanding course: Student attrition traditionally was 25 percent. He sat back in his chair behind the modular desk. On the corner of the desk was a dummy hand grenade mounted on a wooden base. The plaque on it read COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT. PULL PIN FOR FASTER SERVICE. It had been left by a former COS Moscow, now forgotten, but Throckmorton liked it, liked the message it sent.

  “My first tour I served in Bucharest,” said Vern, noticing that this Archer kid looked him straight in the eyes. “I’m one of the original denied-area specialists. I pulled off car tosses right under the nose of surveillance, and let me tell you, the Securitate were animals.”

  “The Golden Age of Internal Ops,” said Hannah, with no inflection, but she instantly regretted it. Smart mouth, shut the fuck up. COS did not seem to register the crack, actually seemed to like it. Denied-area specialist, thought Hannah. Benford had told her that in the seventies one of Throckmorton’s poorly executed car tosses along the number 3 highway through the Padurea Pantelimon, the dense forest of pine and oak outside Bucharest, had been observed by the Securitate. A thuggish team had waited for three weeks in the rain, and actually dropped four poplars across the road—two in front and two behind—with detcord to block any escape when the agent rolled up to the site in his car. One of the original specialists, thought Hannah.

  An instructor had told her she assessed people well—something you don’t think about until you go through fricking spy school and they tell you some nonsense about yourself—and she sniffed at her new COS’s ego, clearly born of envy, and saw his chronic suspicion, doubtless fueled by self-doubt. And what a burden that oversized head must be walking into a room. Or putting on a sweater.

  Hannah took a breath and looked down the length of the empty Moscow Station, which was essentially a soundproof trailer—bigger than a sea-land container. No windows, one entrance door, a little claustrophobic. Thick felt panels of muted blue covered the walls, and a durable carpet of the same color was underfoot. On either side of a narrow central pass-through, a half dozen modular desks were tucked along both walls, illuminated by recessed lamps that cast small pools of light on each desk, above which hung a credenza, the only place to store personal gear. The case officers otherwise had to “hot bunk” the desks—sit at whichever was free to read incoming traffic or draft cables. Under the desks huddled stumpy, two-drawer steel safes, gunmetal gray and dented. More room in the 777 coming over. This is your home for the next two years, thought Hannah. Moscow Station. The Real Steel. The Game.

  The main door to the container swung open with a hydraulic whine, the brass finger-stock gasket ringing the massive frame—which guaranteed acoustical integrity around the door—gleaming in the light. Irene Schindler, deputy chief of Moscow Station, walked into the trailer. Without loo
king she swatted the oversized red button on the wall that caused the door to grind ponderously closed with a hiss. About thirty-five, Irene was tall, gray-skinned, sunken-cheeked, with hair cut short in a Prince Valiant. The top of her head brushed the low ceiling of the trailer as she looked wordlessly at Hannah, her narrow beaky nose pointing in her direction, then turned toward the opposite end of the enclosure and opened another pocket door. The deputy’s office. Irene entered the little space and slid the door closed with a click. A faint astringent whiff hung in the air behind her.

  Jesus Christ, thought Hannah, my first tour and I end up inside the Addams Family’s double-wide, sandwiched between two misanthropes. And with about three thousand Russian surveillants outside on the street, salivating for her to come out and play. And DIVA, who was waiting for Hannah to deliver her lifeline.

  Hannah had been used to Wonder Bread normal all her life: big family, all steady, Episcopalian, New Hampshire, lacrosse in the fall and spring, sailing in the summer. Her parents taught her to earn her own money, so she learned to flip burgers and fry clams during school breaks. Say what you do and do what you say. Tell the truth and stand up for what you believe. Necking with sunburned boys with crinkly eyes and freckles; drinking ice-cold shandies out of aluminum tennis-ball cans; steering a jeep with no top in lazy eights on a moonlit meadow.

  A taste of the genteel South during four years at Washington and Lee University, then two more at Virginia to finish graduate work in philosophy and cognitive science—though she found UVA subjacent to W&L. It was interesting, but she wanted something else; she had to get going in life. Then, seriously, joining CIA was a commitment that mattered: service, sacrifice, contributing. Not exactly patriotism, but protecting her country came close.

  Hannah was accepted and went to Langley. There she stepped from her polished mahogany world hip deep into a slack-water cypress swamp—thick with fusty methane bubbles and squishy underfoot. Central Intelligence Agency. She met people she never knew existed—seemingly with DNA strands identical to the antediluvian fish that crawled out of the ocean, grunted oxygen, and sprouted legs. Oh Lord, but this was a workshop for cognitive science, this rogue’s gallery: droll skeptics; conflict junkies; bipolar egotists; indolent browbeaters—the sly inquisitors who relished causing distress as a gourmand relishes a mousseline.

  And before Hannah concluded that she had mistakenly entered through the back door of an asylum, she began picking out people she thought of as the Worthies: the managers and engineers and analysts and assistants with good hearts and kind dispositions, who tithed their lives to the mission and to their country, and who all seemed to believe that the only enduring legacy in the service was to mentor and develop and support subordinates, to leave behind future leaders who would in turn become mentors to others. (Later, she wondered whether Simon Benford was a Worthy, or whether he was simply a demented ecstatic.)

  As training started in earnest, observant Hannah began to know the operations folks—the field officers, men and women—who accomplished heroics from the depths of the shadows, who stole inaccessible secrets and skirted physical danger and manipulated the odds, and who in their anonymity seldom received credit for their secret successes but invariably shouldered the blame for their public failures. Hannah’s sturdy mind knew who she was, and she knew what she wanted to be: an ops officer.

  She worked hard at the Farm, passed with top marks, and expected to be picked up by Africa or Latin America Division—she was ready for the rough-and-tumble world of operations in the Third World; the mission appealed to her. But a mid-level manager with the sloping forehead and jutting mandible of a Neanderthal insisted, for no reason other than he could, that Hannah be assigned to Europe Division, where he was serving as the executive officer (EXO) to the chief. Hannah therefore was ordered to report to EUR Division. A respectful visit to his office to plead for reconsideration of assignment resulted only in the nettled EXO summarily postponing Hannah’s first overseas posting and banishing her until further notice to the Iberian desk, amid the endless cubicles under the buzzing fluorescent lights. He petulantly told her she would be running name traces and drafting talking-point memos—she would learn her lesson for questioning his authority.

  As she contemplated tendering her resignation from CIA, finding a schooner, signing on as cook, and sailing around the world, Hannah saw a face looking at her from over the partition of the adjoining cubicle. “I take it you just got out of the Farm,” said a woman’s voice. Only the top of her head and blue eyes were visible. Her voice was slow and smooth.

  “And ended up in the third subbasement,” said Hannah hopelessly. “I thought I was getting an assignment, but the EXO had another idea.”

  “Yes, the EXO,” said the woman softly. “He’s quite the wet orchard.”

  “Wet orchard?” said Hannah.

  “Drippy. Smelly and unpleasant,” she said. The woman’s eyes scanned her, took in her shoes, and swept over her cubicle, cataloging everything. Hannah had no doubt that this woman could then write from memory everything she had seen in the last blink of an eye.

  “How long have you been on the branch?” said Hannah.

  “You’re Hannah Archer, correct?” said the woman, gliding around the partition. She offered a warm dry hand, and her grip was surprisingly strong. “Name’s Janice, Janice Callahan.”

  “Hi, I’m Hannah. How did you know my name?”

  “Care for a walk?” said Janice.

  “Sure,” said Hannah. “Janice, do you always answer a question with a question?”

  “What do you think?” said Janice.

  Janice was over fifty years old, a honey-redhead with bedroom hair boyishly swept to the side, and crinkly blue eyes over a sharp nose and strong chin. Her mouth seemed to be in a perpetual grin, as if she knew the answer before the question was asked. When she smiled there were dimples. She wore a dark-turquoise silk blazer with Chinese buttons over a black pencil skirt; hints of a voluptuous figure were unmistakable. Whoever she is, thought Hannah, regal just met sultry.

  They had lunch together in a corner of the cafeteria, then took a walk around the Headquarters building. Janice walked quickly, light on her feet, and her eyes never stopped moving: She has swivel eyes like a freaking tree chameleon, thought Hannah. She can see in two different directions simultaneously. They looped around the ornamental fish pond, then beneath the massive SR-71 Blackbird spy aircraft, displayed on a pylon as if in flight, the legacy of a former director from the military who blithely conflated fifty years of American espionage with an air museum. And they walked past the three mounted cement panels of the Berlin wall, one side raucous with Western graffiti, the other side unmarked and untouched by human hands.

  Janice frequently ran her fingers through her untamed hair, perhaps stirred by memories of past spies and lovers. Her nougat voice enveloped them both as she told Hannah about her career. Only the old-timers remembered her now, she said with some indifference, and a lot of the old-timers remembered her exceptionally well.

  Janice loved ops. She had the distinction—unique in the CIA—of having had successive assignments in every Cold War Eastern European capital. No other man or woman had done it. Never married, the nectarous Janice had gone from posting to posting, besting in turn seven inimical intelligence services—red-toothed and red-clawed, all vassals of the Soviets—the Polish SB, the East German Stasi, the Czech StB, the Hungarian AVH, the Serbian SDB, the Romanian Securitate, the Bulgarian SD. Voluptuous and distracting, Janice had faked the central European thugs out of their socks, without removing their shoes, for twenty years. She had handled sources, serviced dead drops, copied Warsaw Pact documents, and exfiltrated doomed agents to safety across a rust-red Iron Curtain limned from the Baltic to the Black Sea with plastic bags, scarves, and woolen caps caught on the barbed wire, flapping in the wind.

  Hannah listened with rapt attention. “It’s like the most perfect circle ever,” said Janice, describing to Hannah the feel of a successful o
perational act while under surveillance, from kickoff to getting black to meeting the agent and returning with the intel, an empyreal cycle of action. Her eyes blazed in the remembering. Was this something that interested her? Hannah was intrigued, and she asked Janice to tell her more. She did better than that. The next day, Janice took her to meet Simon Benford, chief of Counterintelligence Division. CID was a mazelike windowless space, office after office, all closed, cipher locks on all the doors. In a far corner, Benford’s office was a dimly lit burrow, spilling over with papers and files and newspapers. Benford sat behind a desk with approximately one square foot of clear space in front of him. On that clear space Hannah could see an orange personnel file with her name printed on the side tab. Benford was reading it carefully. Hannah looked over at Janice, who nodded slightly as if to say “watch your hands and feet.”

  “It appears you excelled in your basic training,” said Benford finally, without raising his eyes from the open file folder. His voice was soft, his tone pained and impatient. “You logged especially good marks in street exercises. Your evaluations are topflight.” Hannah thought, Huh. It looked as though they were reviewing her background, as if Janice had been talent scouting. She shrugged.

  “I liked all my training,” said Hannah. “I just want to get out of this wet orchard and get an assignment.” She thought the argot would sound slick. Janice looked over at her with a grin that said don’t.

  “I’m sure you do,” said Benford, now looking up. His hair was uncombed and a lock fell across his forehead. “I have a proposal to make to you. Listen carefully, for your response could affect the direction and nature of the rest of your career, however long or short it turns out to be.”

  Hannah did not move.

  “There is an urgent need for an officer, specially trained in denied-area operations and covert communications, to deploy overseas to support an ongoing, sensitive case that is producing remarkable intelligence,” said Benford. “I am looking for a first-tour case officer who is not widely known to the opposition. I am looking for an officer with intuition, nerve, judgment, imagination, calculation, and—pardon, Janice—the balls to operate securely against considerable hostile pressure on the street. I would like to consider you for this internal-ops assignment.” He flipped Hannah’s file closed and stared at her.