Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  Nate tapped his TALON a few times and shook his head. “Over forty million euros. Double the purchase price.”

  “Of course, a lot of people will become rich,” said Dominika.

  “And the mullahs get a bomb.” Nate put down his tablet.

  “Then we are done,” Dominika slurred, leaning against the doorjamb. Her hair was a tangled mess; it fell forward and covered half her face. A wave of shivering racked her body. Nate shut the laptop and hurried over to her. She had wrapped a blanket around herself, but her bare feet stuck out from underneath. He wrapped his arms around her inside the blanket. Her skin was dead cold—lingering shock, he thought—and he led her back into the bedroom. She held on to his wrist, a tight grip in those graceful fingers.

  “You’re still shivering,” said Nate.

  “Gipotermiya,” said Dominika absently, closing her eyes.

  “Get back into bed,” said Nate. He covered her with the sheet, then a blanket, and unfolded the comforter over her. She shivered under the covers, her teeth showing through blue lips. Nate put his hand under the comforter and felt her hands, then her feet. Ice cold. He boiled water for tea, threw in four spoons of sugar, and made her drink it. She wouldn’t stop shivering.

  Nate didn’t know what else to do. He quickly started unbuttoning his shirt, pulling it off his arms—he had to backtrack so he could unbutton his sleeves. He took off his pants and slipped under the covers, turning her on her side and fitting himself spoon-tight behind her. Her haunches fluttered against his thighs. She reached behind for him, grabbed his hand, and pulled it around her waist. Her whole body shivered, felt as cold as marble. Cold as MARBLE, thought Nate with a little shudder himself. Nate willed his body heat into her.

  They fell asleep like that. An hour later, maybe two, Nate awoke; he didn’t know what time it was. Her staccato breathing had smoothed out and her shivers had subsided. He moved slightly and she woke up, rolled over, and faced him, keeping her face close, eyes locked onto his. She was drowsy and blinked slowly. He could feel that her skin was warmer. Nate inhaled, drank her in. Everything was different—what they had been, what they subsequently became, what they were now. Surviving this night had shaken the mosaic of their relationship. Nate knew what was right, what was secure, but he now contemplated having broken every rule—sharing requirements, revealing the covert action, sleeping with his agent—with equanimity. This was something more important. As the familiar tightness began in his throat, he tried not to think of Gable and Forsyth.

  They lay on their sides looking at each other. Dominika was dizzy and nauseated, but her body shivered—not with cold now but from desire, survivor’s shock, her need for him—and she remembered the feel of his skin. She mashed her breasts against his chest and snaked her leg over his hip, kicking the comforter half off them. She reached to peel off his shorts. What had stalled between them she willed from her mind. Whatever happened tomorrow had nothing to do with tonight. She felt him move closer; they were kissing each other on the lips, the eyes, the throat, and his hands pressed against her back, against her hips. Her head swam—idiotka, she thought, you probably have a concussion—but she didn’t care. His touch sent sparks up her spine and into the base of her brain.

  Nate leaned forward and nibbled her bottom lip. “How do you feel?” he said. “Are you all right?” Dominika blinked at him.

  “You know you don’t have to go back inside,” he whispered, his voice quiet, matter-of-fact; it was hard to talk and kiss at the same time. Dominika searched his eyes and put her hand behind his head, pulling him close for another kiss. His purple halo enveloped them both. She knew her secret sexual self was standing in the open doorway of her hurricane room. Will you come out or duck back inside?

  “Do you think I will not return to Moscow?” she said. Her words were slightly slurred. “Dushka, now more than ever I must go back. You know it and I know it—we must both do our jobs.”

  “I’m saying you don’t have to,” said Nate. “Not after what happened tonight.”

  They stopped moving. His eyes searched hers, and his purple aura pulsed and glowed around his head. “Stop talking about work,” she said.

  And before the spell between them disintegrated, Dominika pushed Nate onto his back, swung her leg over him, and sat up, fighting the dizziness. Her eyes closed in concentration—it also helped to stop the room from tilting too much. Nate looked up at her half in alarm. Dominika’s mouth was slightly open, teeth partially visible; she was breathing in little huffs. Straddling him, her hands splayed open on his chest, Dominika slowly raised up, moved forward, then back, delving for him, a Sparrow no-hands trick, until she trapped him, distending and electric, and her shoulders hunched in response. She started rocking—jangha vibhor came into her head, the erotic position implausibly translated from Sanskrit to Russian for the long-ago Sparrow handbook. She pushed hair away from her face, kitten grunts of exertion coming faster, eyes moving behind closed eyelids. Each flex of her hips stirred her insides; each time she dragged her mons across his pelvis, she felt her klitor—what was it in English?—thrummed up and down, like a light switch endlessly flicked on and off.

  Nate put his hands around her waist to keep her from pitching to the floor when she started tilting a little. Even as he clenched his teeth and flexed his stomach under Dominika’s genital onslaught, he suddenly, madly, flashed to the purring laptop out there in the living room loaded with secrets from the underground Persian centrifuge halls. Light slanting through the apartment blinds cast bent bars across Dominika’s silver heaving chest, and Nate saw the strobe bars of neon lighting the catwalk under the bridge, saw the black bodies sprawled on the forest floor. He closed his eyes and saw the Persian man’s eyes in the warehouse widen in shock, then fade out, pumping blood. Flashbacks. His own shock was bleeding off, too. Jesus, he thought, concentrate.

  Something was happening, and Nate refocused. Dominika’s eyes were still closed—she was rocking like Satan’s baby on a hobby horse—her hands now up in front of her, clenched into fists, and she was hyperventilating. Her eyes popped open and she fumbled, frantic, for his hands, and she clapped them on her heavy breasts. She was hung up on the cliff edge, over the foaming sea, the rear wheels spinning in empty air, the chassis teetering one way then back. The hot-bubble sensation between her legs was fading, her slick, shivering ascent was breaking up. Exhaustion, concussion, hypothermia—she breathed a desperate moan. “Pomogi mne,” help me.

  Help me? thought Nate. You’re the Sparrow, I’m just your peeled willow stick. But he remembered what a lovely girlfriend in college liked, and Nate pinched Dominika’s nipples, then held them firmly and pulled until he brought her down to him, her mouth plastered to his. He didn’t let go. The sudden pleasure-pain took Dominika by surprise as she ground her mouth onto Nate’s, and the car tilted the right way and slid off the lip of the cliff, and the familiar drum-head vibration started in her belly, and surged down her lateral lines to her feet and back again as her crotch seized up, three serious pulses, then two little ones, then the cartwheeling car hit the rocks at the bottom of the cliff and exploded, bigger than those before—combined. A stuttering moan deep from her belly wouldn’t stop.

  Amid the smoking rubble of her groin, Dominika dully registered Nate’s arms now locked around her, and his breath in her mouth grew ragged. His arms squeezed her more tightly, the muscles of his stomach fluttered, his body shook violently, physically lifting her. Dominika’s head bobbled and their teeth clicked together painfully. She hung on and rode his bucking body once, twice, three times, Bozhe, four, Moy, five, my God, and it impossibly started again for her, different this time, not an explosion but a resonance—B flat two octaves below middle C—that surged and receded and surged again inside her. This time she whimpered into Nate’s mouth—she heard herself in her own head—and held on to him and twitched, and waited for someone to turn off the electricity.

  They didn’t move for ten minutes, listening to each other’s heartbea
ts. She cleared the hair off her face and looked at him, then half slid off and lay beside him, found his hand, and held it in the darkness. She was still dizzy but not nauseated anymore.

  “Cover us, dushka,” Dominika said. “I’m cold again.” Nate pulled the comforter over them.

  “Do you want water?” asked Nate.

  Dominika shook her head. “I swallowed enough of the Danube tonight.”

  They held hands under the covers, his thumb caressing her palm, and once he turned to kiss her damp temple. Dominika was still and heavy limbed, filled with Nate in her head and in her swelling heart. He had saved her life tonight; he had bathed her body, had lain with her to share his body heat. Tonight’s lovemaking was as if they had never been apart, as if they had never struggled with their passion. A rogue tremor fluttered her thighs, and she smelled him lying beside her.

  Her thoughts drifted from the corporeal to spying. The immensely risky move of introducing Nate in the false-flag operation against Jamshidi nearly ended in disaster. They had been lucky. Dominika contemplated the treachery of Zyuganov. He was free now—with Jamshidi’s brains decorating Udranka’s canary-yellow kitchen—to assume primacy in Putin’s procurement deal with Iran. Khorosho, very well.

  She closed her eyes, her thoughts swirling. And her own future? She contemplated working in place for years, decades, as long as she survived. Would she end up like Udranka—how sorry she was for her, for all her friends, her Rusalki, victims of the system, the Kremlin’s Mermaids. At best, she would see Nate once or twice a year, the rest of the time operating alone on the knife edge inside Moscow, stealing secrets, defying the shakaly, the jackals in the Kremlin and in Yasenevo, risking her life to stanch the moral hemorrhage of Russia. She was doing it for her father, for the general, for the man who breathed softly beside her, but mostly she was doing it for herself. She knew that, better even than her perceptive CIA handlers did. She glanced sideways at Nate, and he turned his head and smiled at her. Deep purple.

  He had confided in her, had shown her CIA internal-intel requirements, had brought her into the covert-action operation and broken rules significantly more draconian than the nonfraternization protocols they previously had violated. But she saw that Nate had changed: He was willing now to run her on the denied area stage of Russia, to hang the albatross of impersonal handling around her neck. She could handle the dread and risk, knowing he was determined.

  Nate felt his heart reattaching itself to the hard points inside his chest, beating more slowly, getting back to normal. His fingertips and toes were fuzzy numb, and he felt the bloom of her body heat next to him. He ran his thumb over her sweet hand, noted that her palm was slightly callused, as if she had been hauling on a rope, and a surge of emotion welled up in him. She was risking all, her existence, for him, for the Agency. It wasn’t at all a matter of feeling sorry for her—it was instead a gut-filling tenderness for this brave, mercurial creature with brown hair and blue eyes and a hitch in her stride, Russian-stubborn and Russian-passionate. And she had calluses on those elegant hands.

  They stared at the ceiling. Outside the window, the Prater was dark and still. The streets were quiet except for the whine of a garbage truck in the next district emptying bins with a roar of bottles and cans. The compressor in the little refrigerator in the kitchen kicked on with a rattle. Dominika’s foot moved slightly and touched his. Nate looked at the luminous dial on his watch: 0400. The fridge compressor shuddered and stopped. They didn’t look at each other.

  “Of course I shall go back to Moscow,” Dominika said in the dark.

  The next morning Nate signaled Vienna Station for a meeting in a coffee shop a block off the Augarten and was surprised and delighted to see Kris Kramer, a former classmate from the Farm—they had begun calling him Krispy Kreme in the first week—quartering the block, checking his six, before sidling into the café and sliding into the booth. Kramer was short and dark and focused, had been first in their class, but they had not seen each other since graduation. In ten minutes Nate related what had happened the night before—Kramer took notes on a Hello Kitty spiral pad that belonged to his six-year-old daughter. “I was at home when you called, grabbed the first thing I saw,” he said, daring Nate to give him shit about the pad.

  When Nate finished, Kramer looked at him sideways. “Quite an evening,” he said.

  Nate shrugged, handed over his TALON, told Kramer the password, and asked him to get the downloaded intel to Langley immediately, with a drop copy to COS Forsyth in Athens. “When you forward the files, please send an ops cable. Just tell them that DIVA’s okay and that I left the laptop behind so the Persians still think their secrets are intact. I’ll tell the whole story again to Benford tomorrow.” Kramer nodded, exited the café, and dematerialized around a corner.

  It was eight o’clock in the evening when they met again, in the atrium café in the Hotel König Von Ungarn on Schulerstrasse behind the cathedral. They ordered beers and a small plate of croquettes with speck and Gruyère. Nate read the note from COS Vienna with instructions from Headquarters, specifically from Simon Benford, chief of Counterintelligence Division.

  Benford would arrive in Vienna the next afternoon, and Marty Gable was coming from Athens—he was already in the air. The note was elliptical, but said they would discuss the next steps regarding DIVA’s future and for exploiting the newly acquired information. Nate reread the note. He registered the silky feel of the paper and looked at Kramer, who nodded. Nate stuffed the water-soluble paper into his water glass. The paper fizzed and turned to the consistency of oatmeal in half a second. Kramer looked at him over the rim of his beer.

  “You’ve been busy since Moscow,” he said, popping a croquette and sipping beer. “All I hear is stories about Nash: working with Simon Benford, Restricted Handling cases, big recruitments, Athens fireworks, pursued by assassins in nighttime Vienna. And now this mysterious laptop download. I don’t know the details, of course, but it would appear, nugget, that rumors out of Moscow of your demise were greatly exaggerated.”

  “Not so much,” said Nate, blushing, and it occurred to him that the career torments of his early years were over, replaced by more serious stakes. He was working on projects other case officers would never know, had worked ops that did not normally develop in the space of five careers.

  “Your favorite patron, Gondorf, is alive and well, you’ll be glad to hear,” Kramer said, sensing Nate’s mood and trying to lighten it up. “He left Moscow Station a shambles, too scared to send anyone on the street. They gave him Latin America Division and he nearly destroyed that: Word is that on a visit to Buenos Aires, during a liaison reception with scotch-swilling Argentine generals, Gondorf ordered a drink that came with an umbrella—you don’t recover from something like that. They sent him to Paris, where he is now, apparently insulting the DGSE in his high school French—you know how that service is.”

  Nate laughed.

  “I should get going,” said Kramer, eyeing the last of the croquettes. “I have to open up the house you guys are going to use tomorrow. Wait till you see this place. US Army used it for defector debriefings after the war, and now Station keeps it for contingencies . . . like when the great Nate Nash comes to town. Three stories, tower room, covered in ivy, in Grinzing, use the number thirty-eight tram.”

  “Krispy Kreme, thanks for all the help,” said Nate. He knew what it was like, having to tend to safe houses for visiting colleagues.

  “No problem, glad to assist,” said Kramer. “I get vicarious pleasure watching you operate.” His tone became serious. “Watch yourself, okay?”

  VIENNESE CROQUETTES

  * * *

  Make a thick béchamel and add shredded speck (or prosciutto), grated Gruyère and nutmeg, incorporating well. Spread the mixture on a sheet and refrigerate. Form the stiffened filling into small balls, dip in beaten egg, then roll in panko. Chill breaded croquettes and then fry in hot vegetable oil till golden brown. Serve with aioli made with mayonnaise, pureed gar
lic, lemon juice, and smoked paprika.

  12

  Early evening and Nate and Dominika walked quickly from the next-to-last tram stop in Grinzing toward Heiligenstädter Park. The fluid move off the tram had not flushed any suspicious pedestrians, and their zigzag route—at one point they separated, then circled back on each other to look for a reaction—away from the station revealed no vehicles scurrying into position. Arm in arm, Dominika and Nate transitioned from “thick”—the bustle of touristic downtown Grinzing—to “thin”—the solitude of the park—and checked their status once, twice, a dozen times. They walked along the pathway, past a row of acacias with lamplight winking through the leaves. It was dead still as they turned into Steinfeldgasse—the street was gently curving and narrow, and it dead ended against the park. No coverage.

  The house sat apart, close against the trees—massive, Gothic, covered totally in ivy, from entrance columns to the ragged slates on top of the square tower anchoring one side of the house. The ivy had been trimmed—hacked—from around some of the windows. The curtains were drawn and only a small light showed in an upstairs window. Nate expected to hear insane Bach being played on a pipe organ by the deformed monster in the turret. Did the Agency employ deformed monsters? he wondered. I mean, apart from the emotional ones? I’ll ask Gable.

  Nate thought of the desperate refugees, soldiers, informants, sympathizers, and defectors, who must have looked up at this façade before going in to be interrogated by US Army investigators in the months after World War II, with Vienna a moonscape of tumbled bricks piled two stories high, the city awash in poisonous bootleg penicillin. Now they were going inside to meet with Simon Benford, to discuss the future, to determine whether Dominika would survive a return to Moscow. None of them wanted to lose her, as they had lost General Vladimir Korchnoi, their prize snatched away by a single sniper’s bullet; From Putin with Love.