Rowland’s delo formular, her operational file, was flipped onto Dominika’s worn metal desk in SVR headquarters in Yasenevo district in southwest Moscow, by a warty, dismissive section chief. He told her to read it, go home, change into something water soluble, get to the Metropol by 2100 hours, and compromise the American. Dominika’s short fuse flared and she told the pudgy deputy to go to the Metropol himself since it was obvious the target preferred pussies (which in Russian came out significantly more profane).
As if he had been listening via a microphone in her cubicle, Uncle Vanya called four minutes later, assuring Dominika this would be the last such assignment—hereafter she would be an ops officer on assignment in Helsinki and the Sparrow seductions would cease. “Take this assignment, please, don’t tell me no,” Vanya had said, his voice suddenly edgy. “Your mother would tell you the same thing.” Translation: follow orders or your mother with her rheumatoid arthritis and spinal stenosis will be out on the sidewalk by the time the real Moscow winter arrives.
Four hours later, with a tab of Sparrow-issue Mogadon, a mild benzodiazepine relaxant, under her tongue, Dominika sat at the Chaliapin Bar next to an already bleary-eyed Audrey Rowland, who looked sideways at the antique Ottoman necklace Dominika wore around her throat, the hammered silver pendants of which were rattling in the deep vee of her breasts.
“Service at this bar leaves something to be desired,” said Audrey, apparently assuming Dominika spoke English. “I thought this hotel was five stars.” The tumbler in front of her was empty.
Dominika leaned close and whispered conspiratorially. “Russians sometimes need a little encouragement,” she said. “I know this barman; he can be a bit contrary, we say upryamyy, like a mule.” Audrey laughed and watched as Dominika ordered two iced vodkas that were served instantly and with great deference. Audrey ignored the barman, drank the vodka in one gulp, and appraised Dominika with heavy-lidded eyes. She could not know that the barman and three other patrons in the bar were all from Line KR, countersurveillance assets looking for opposition coverage as Dominika moved on the tall American woman. The bar was clean; Audrey was alone.
Dominika did not have to work it too hard. A light legend—cover story—that she was a salaried office worker was sufficient, and really couldn’t afford drinking at the Metropol but once a month. She told jokes about Russian men, gently steering the conversation, holding on to Audrey’s wrist occasionally, establishing physicality, straight out of the Sparrow manual. Dominika purposely showed no curiosity about Audrey’s work or her navy career. There was no need to elicit: Audrey showed herself to be utterly self-absorbed and inclined to talk about herself—a narcissist perhaps, ego will be a button with this one, thought Dominika, who asked what her hometown of San Diego was really like, eyes wide and interested. Audrey said that she was the only child of a naval aviator father and a quiet mother (biographical facts already in her SVR file), then went on at length about growing up a lithe surfing California beach girl, which Dominika suspected was fiction. Audrey was an unmik, a physics geek, and looked it. After the third vodka, Dominika became serious and cocked her head toward the barman.
“Russian men. Beware of them. Not just stubborn, but mostly bastards too,” she said. Audrey pried the story out of a seemingly reluctant Dominika in stages. Drying her eyes with a cocktail napkin embossed with the “M” logo of the hotel, she eventually told Audrey of her broken engagement with a fiancé who had been unfaithful by sleeping with a cashier who worked at the GUM department store in Red Square, a total fiction.
“She was a little harlot with hair dyed purple, newly arrived from some rural oblast, how do you say, some unimaginable province,” said Dominika. “Two years we were engaged, and it was over in a night.” Audrey patted Dominika’s hand, incensed at the nameless philandering fiancé. The “hook” was always more believable by adding incongruously specific detail like the dyed hair (No. 87, “The short stories of Pushkin stir the imagination” was the relevant tagline, and one of scores memorized at Sparrow School to illustrate tradecraft points).
Audrey’s eyes searched Dominika’s, now expectant and intense. Audrey was moved by the story only slightly less than by the high cheekbones and bee-stung lips of the chestnut-haired beauty sniffling beside her. Agreeing that all men were svinya and toasting to eternal sisterhood, Audrey huskily said she wanted to show Dominika her hotel room. Dominika put an elegant finger to her lips and whispered that instead of Audrey’s room they could sneak into the opulent Yekaterina Suite on the fourth floor—her cousin was a chambermaid at the hotel with a passkey. Audrey shivered in anticipation and grabbed her cardigan. Her profound knowledge of electromagnetic physics sadly provided no warning of the curved tail of the scorpion poised above her head.
The suite was magnificent, ablaze in gold and green, with an imposing red tombak samovar on an oval Fabergé tea table in the corner of the room. They looked at the furnishings, and at each other. Neither said a word. Dominika knew the nectar trap was about to snap shut. She pretended to stare at the frescoes capering across the Baroque vaulted ceiling when Audrey—now in musth—stepped up to her, put her hands on her breasts, and mashed their mouths together. Dominika kissed her back, then slowly disengaged, smiled, and poured two flutes of champagne from an ice bucket on the settee (she palmed a tab of Mogadon into Audrey’s glass to smooth her out), and pushed a silver platter of pecheniya toward her, powdered sugar Russian tea cakes stacked high in a snowy pyramid, taking one herself. Audrey did not register the incongruity that Dominika’s chambermaid cousin apparently had provided the expensive champagne and delicate cakes along with the passkey.
It was too much watching Dominika nibble the pastry with her even white teeth. Audrey’s Dutch oven was at a rolling boil, and with trembling fingers she brushed powdered sugar off the front of Dominika’s little black dress, and pulled her across the salon into the bedroom. The next thirty minutes were filmed by four remote-headed, infrared lenses (and slaved COS-D11 mikes) concealed in the ornate acanthus moldings in each corner of the ceiling, operating at 29 megapixels. The feed was being digitally recorded by an SVR technical team in a special utility room down the hotel hallway. Not taking their eyes off the monitors, two sweating technicians bundled and encrypted the images, immediately routing them for real-time review to the Kremlin offices of a few relevant ministers—all former intelligence cronies of the president—a half kilometer away, on the other side of Red Square. Watching the live-action feed was decidedly better than looking at Brazilian bikini girls in National Geographic.
Tall, ferret-faced, all hip bones and rib cage, with light brown hair styled in a Prince Valiant cut last seen in the 1928 French silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, mousey Audrey was a Gordian knot of guilty passion, fumbling awkwardness, and anorgasmia, with a tendency to spritz the bed as she vainly chased her elusive release. Thank God, thought Dominika, nothing complicated. Without much effort, she could avoid active participation and instead assume the role of masseuse and bring this bony scarecrow through the four corporeal stages of arousal—in school they called them Fog, Breeze, Mountain, and Wave—to coax what the instructors called malenkoye sushchestvo, the little creature, out of her, which is exactly what happened thirty teetering minutes later, the first shuddering spasm triggered by the unexpected introduction of the ribbed rubber handle of Audrey’s hairbrush (No. 89, “Pray at the back altar of Saint Basil’s Cathedral”).
Moaning and wide-eyed, Audrey came off the mattress like a vampire sitting up in a coffin, wrapped her arms around Dominika’s neck, sunk her teeth into her shoulder, and rode her successive, shuddering orgasms like a witch on a broom, out of the hotel, over the Kremlin walls, past President Putin’s bedroom window, and around the star on the spire of the Ukraina Hotel, two hundred meters above the Arbatsky bend of the river.
That should give the GRU recruiter enough to work with, thought Dominika, with technical aplomb, as Audrey collapsed on her back, sighing. Dominika draped a towel over Aud
rey’s trembling loins.
The last time, she thought, and thank God she was leaving this behind. Helsinki was going to be a dream. She couldn’t know she was both right and wrong.
* * *
* * *
Audrey was stirring out of her benzodiazepine-fueled, four-climax coma, her head surprisingly clear, her thighs sticky and trembling. As per procedure, the Sparrow always slipped out of the room as the recruiter came in, and Dominika shouldered past him, ignoring his courteous nod. Audrey didn’t even see her go, and she didn’t know that the inveigling Sparrow’s role was complete. For Audrey, what’s-her-name would be only a fading memory—a Venus with blue eyes holding that hairbrush—albeit immortalized permanently on digital video.
Audrey likewise didn’t know that the Kremlin recruiter was the renowned Doctor Anton Gorelikov, the fifty-year-old director of Putin’s mysterious Sekretariat, a shadowy office in the Kremlin with a single member—Gorelikov himself—that handled delicate, strategic matters of importance, such as the coercive recruitment of a young US Navy officer. Uncle Anton had scored monumental recruitment successes over the years. Speaking in fluent Oxfordian English, Gorelikov had a number of issues to discuss after Audrey finished dressing and came out of the gilt bathroom nervously combing her hair with the still-hot hairbrush. He rarely used threats, preferring instead to rationally discuss the benefits of cooperating with Russian intelligence, and ignoring the “unpleasantness” that had just concluded.
They sat in the salon, Audrey apprehensive but clueless. It was two o’clock in the morning.
“It’s a distinct pleasure to meet you, Audrey,” said Uncle Anton.
Audrey shifted in her chair and looked at him. Some of her starch was on display. “How do you know my name?” she said. “Who are you?”
Gorelikov smiled the smile that had doomed a thousand blackmailed recruits. Audrey’s voice was not calm; he heard the telltale wavering tone. “Please call me Anton,” he said. “I know your name because your bona fides are superb: a brilliant career in weapons research ahead of you, excellent prospects for promotion, influential mentors, and powerful sponsors who will supercharge your navy career.”
“How do you know so much about me? What entity do you represent?” said Audrey, still not comprehending what this was.
Uncle Anton ignored her questions. “As for the brief liaison this evening with the young girl from the bar, it is wisely left unmentioned—best for all concerned,” said Uncle Anton. “I greatly admire the wisdom of the US Navy’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell reforms. Sadly, our Russian military is too monolithic for such liberal farsightedness,” he sighed.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” said Audrey, whose exceptional mind was beginning to connect the dots. A cold wave ran down her back.
“I have an abiding worry,” said Uncle Anton. “I fear that if your sapphic indiscretions become public, the old institutional prejudices in your service regrettably would almost certainly reemerge, putting you at risk of early retirement on the beach at half pay. That would be both unjust and unfair.” With prescient timing, Gorelikov pointed the remote at the television in the corner of the salon, which began showing precisely which indiscretions he was talking about, namely, images of Audrey’s trembling legs in the air with what appeared to be a lemur’s tail protruding from between her buttocks. Audrey sat numbly in the armchair, watching expressionless, giving few psychic clues to the wily old wizard, which was interesting—she was placid, emotionless, acquiescent. She accepted a cigarette and drew on it deeply. Gorelikov knew she was considering the consequences. Good sign.
Audrey indeed was considering the consequences. She knew what would happen as they had been given security briefings on just these situations. She had chosen to ignore them; they were regulations that would not, did not, apply to her. She was going places in the navy, and she didn’t have the time. But she knew she was in a jam: The Russians would concoct a charade. The young Russian girl would come forward, tearfully claiming to the authorities that she was coerced into making a salacious sex tape, which was a violation of at least half a dozen Russian morality laws. Such a scandal would destroy Audrey’s career, this career she had been preparing for since graduate school, through Officer Candidate School, to the research lab, in order to climb the ladder, to outdo her ungenerous father, to best his own accomplishments in the navy, and to earn the benefits and prestige of flag rank in a service that was the impenetrable preserve of smugly solicitous men. All this would be hers; nothing was more important. Her physicist’s mind leapt ahead with comprehension.
“In the simplest terms, you are blackmailing me, an officer in the US Navy.” Audrey couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice. Uncle Anton held up his hands in an expression of alarm.
“My dear Audrey,” he said. “That is the furthest thing from my mind. The very notion repels me.”
“Then perhaps you’ll have the courtesy to tell me exactly what it is you have on your mind.” Gorelikov noted that she already could give orders like an admiral.
“Gladly,” he said. “Enough of hypotheticals. I have an exceptional offer. I would like to propose a discreet relationship between you and a sympathetic Russia to work together for a year toward peaceful global parity, a relationship that would be beneficial to both countries, and to all nations. A twelve-month collaboration. I ask you to consider: after all, even military research has the avoidance of war as its defining goal, does it not?”
She did not move, but he knew she was listening. Audrey assessed his words. He was, in a sense, right. Audrey’s long-suffering mother had lived under the callous weight of her regnant husband for thirty years. She was a kind soul and, well, a love child of the sixties who danced at Woodstock and believed in global peace, in a world devoid of strife, cruelty, and hate. Audrey’s analytical mind knew that such things as railguns did not exist in her mother’s Elysian world, but she never forgot her placid words, in the quiet months before the tumult when her father came home after sea duty.
“But no one can live on world peace alone, can they?” said Uncle Anton, breaking into her thoughts. A discreet relationship would bring other tangible, less abstract benefits, such as a consultant’s fee, including a monthly “stipend,” an alias offshore bank account into which significant deposits would be made regularly and, most important, opekunskiy, tutorials for her prepared by Russian military experts, the North American Institute, and Kremlin staffers on strategic naval doctrine, weapons design, global forecasts, international political priorities, and economic trends. (Never mind that all intelligence services use the fiction of “tutorials” for their assets as elicitation sessions to extract even more information from their agents while giving nothing important away.)
With such a start, Audrey Rowland would become the US Navy’s rising star in military research, assuring promotion, management of entire R&D programs, and plum Pentagon billets. These kinds of assignments often led to national politics after a military career—the Senate, the cabinet, even higher. Audrey flicked ash onto the floor. She knew what was happening, yet the rewards were exactly the emoluments she coveted.
Gorelikov analyzed her in layers, like turning a baluster on a wood lathe. She was a social narcissist with an inflated sense of herself, a compensating careerist with a deep need for admiration and yet a lack of empathy for others, like her father. She was in a system that made her by definition a sexual misfit. She had been a brilliant PhD student with an orderly mind, now impressing superiors at NRL. She was not by nature reckless or impulsive, and yet she was picking up women in a Moscow hotel bar, clearly ignoring ironclad security practices stipulated for criteria countries, high-security-threat nations. Odarennost and sobstvennoye, genius clouded by ego, with the albatross of conflicted sexuality heavy around her neck. Indeed, a potent profile in a recruitment candidate. Based on his assessment of her, he doubted she would refuse his pitch and choose to face the consequences.
Audrey blew a stream of smoke toward the
ceiling, winding up her indignation. “Thanks for the offer, Anton, but go fuck yourself,” she said flatly, not looking at him. Gorelikov was delighted: it was just the response he’d been waiting for.
PECHENIYA—RUSSIAN TEA CAKES
Mix butter, sugar, baking powder, and vanilla. Incorporate flour, salt, and chopped almonds until dough holds together. Roll one-inch balls, place on ungreased sheet, and bake in a medium oven, but not till brown. Roll still-hot balls in powdered sugar. Let cool, then roll in the sugar again.
1
A Mole in Their Midst
Present day. Colonel Dominika Egorova, Chief of Line KR, the counterintelligence section in the SVR, sat in a chair in the office of the Athens rezident, Pavel Bondarchuk, and bounced her foot, a sign of nettled impatience to those who knew her. Bondarchuk, also an SVR Colonel, was Chief of the rezidentura and responsible for the management of all Russian intelligence operations in Greece. He technically outranked Egorova, but she had acquired patrons in the Kremlin during her career, and a professional reputation that was whispered about over the porcelain telegraph at SVR headquarters (gossip only repeated in the headquarters toilets): recruitments, spy swaps, gunfights; this Juno had even blown the top of a supervisor’s head off with a lipstick gun on an island in the Seine in Paris on Putin’s orders. Who was going to pull rank on this fire-breathing drakon? thought Bondarchuk, who was a nervous scarecrow with a big forehead and sunken cheeks.
The Kremlin's Candidate Page 2