Red Sparrow

by Jason Matthews

  She had to hit the right attitude—curious, a little puzzled, tired from the trip. Above all, for God’s sake, no hint of fear, no hint of desperation. Was there a problem? she asked. Was she permitted to know his name, rank, and directorate? She assumed he was a colleague from the Service. Colonel Digtyar, Directorate K, yes, of course, from the Center. Digtyar. Ukranian, she thought. The overhead lights cast a shadow on the hollow of his skull.

  She related the timeline of the operation, from the walk-in to the hotel meeting. No, she was unaware that there had been an incident, she knew nothing about an apparent arrest after she and the rezident had departed the Kämp. Rezident Volontov had not mentioned anything was wrong. Digtyar did not take notes, did not refer to any file. They were taping it all, looking at her face, watching her hands. She resisted the urge to look for where the cameras could be. Don’t look, don’t think, no one can help you, you have to do this yourself, this is your journey to make alone.

  They took her passport and let her go home that night. Her mother came to the front door in her dressing gown, initially surprised, but it took less than a second for her face to close down, her eyes to become blank.

  “Dominushka, what a surprise, come in, let me look at you. I did not know you were coming home,” her mother said flatly. Caution.

  “It was an unexpected trip,” said Dominika in as normal a voice as possible. “It’s good to be home, Mama, it’s good to see you again.” Danger. Mother and daughter hugged, they kissed each other’s cheeks the requisite three times, and hugged again.

  Dominika did not dare clutch her, she could not break down. They might be watching, listening. Mother and daughter stayed up and Dominika prattled on about the Finns, about life abroad. She had to sleep, she had work in the morning. Another kiss, and her mother stroked her cheek, then shuffled off to bed. She knew.

  They picked her up in the morning and deposited her back at Ryazanskiy, and she told the story again, this time to three men sitting at a table with the bowl of roses in front of them, probably an audio pickup tucked among the flowers. No one spoke, but they turned the pages in an unmarked file—had that pig Volontov sent in a report that quickly? They filed out and left her alone, then filed back in and she told the story again, just the same. They were looking for changes, contradictions. Dominika had never been stared at like that in her life, worse than in ballet school, worse even than the men looking at her at Sparrow School. She felt her throat constrict, felt the rage coming, but resisted and returned their stares with unflinching eyes. She did not let them near the icy secret in her breast.

  All day it lasted, then she was permitted to go home. Her mother had shchi, a rich meat stew, in the oven, the smell of dacha and vegetables and memories of snowy mornings filled the apartment. Dominika’s hand shook as she ate, her mother not eating, sitting across from her, watching. She knew.

  Her mother had not played professionally in fifteen years, but got up and came back to the kitchen with a case. It was a common violin, nothing like her Guarneri, but she sat close to her daughter at the table and put it under her chin and played slowly, Schumann or Schubert, Dominika didn’t know. The violin vibrated, the notes thick and rich and red-purple, like long ago in the living room with Batushka.

  “Your father was always very proud of you,” said her mother as she played. Was she consciously playing to defeat any microphones? Impossible. Her mother? “He always hoped that your enthusiasms, your patriotic duty, would sustain you.” Her eyes were closed. “He was desperate to tell you how he felt, he who had succeeded in the system. But he did not dare. He did not speak because he wanted to protect you.” She opened her eyes but continued playing, as if in a trance, her fingers firm and sure on the fingerboard. “He despised them, he would tell you now, in your time of trouble.” What had she guessed, how did she know? “His whole life. He wanted to tell you. Now I will tell you,” her mother whispered. “Resist them. Fight them. Survive.” With the last word she stopped playing and laid the violin on the table, got up, kissed her daughter on the head, and walked out of the room. The music lingered in the air, the violin was warm where it had rested beneath her mother’s chin.

  The next day a succession of offices, with one man or two or three, or a woman in a suit with her hair in a bun, cloudy black and evil, who came around the desk to sit close to her, or Colonel Digtyar with the yellow caved-in skull asking her to describe the pattern of the rug in the room of the Kämp Hotel, and the doors sometimes closing softly behind her, sometimes slammed with a bang that shook the frame, We don’t believe you. Then the unbelievable, the monstrous, the impossible, the inevitable.

  A poisonous, swaying ride in the closed van and the echo of the underground garage and they were in a prison, it had to be Lefortovo, not Butyrka, because this was political. She was pushed down an ill-lit corridor into a stinking anteroom. A man and a woman watched her step out of her skirt, shuck off her shoes, and reach behind to unclasp her brassiere. They expected her to hang her head, to turn away from their stares, to cover her nipples and mons, but she was Sparrow-trained and a graduate of the AVR. They could go to hell. Stark naked, she stood straight and stared back at them until they tossed her a stained cotton prison smock. It rasped against the mattress ticking in the dark cell, no windows, two cots, and she thought about her mother waiting for her with dinner, and silently called out to her father and then, surprising herself, to Nate.

  They walked her down the corridors, but they never let her see another prisoner, to starve her spirit. Guards clicked their stamped steel crickets, and when two crickets clicked, silver barbed click-clack, click-clack at the same time, they shoved her into a wooden closet, one at the end of each corridor, wedged tight, black and heavy with the smell of prisoners long gone, until the other prisoner went by. A skylight showed inky black, or pale yellow, night still followed day, but the overhead lights in her cell never stopped humming and the Klaxon screeched on a regular basis.

  Her father walked by her side and a smiling Nate was waiting for her in each of the different rooms, some hot, some cold, some dark, some bright. She shook her hair out of her eyes when they threw water on her and turned the blowers on. Nate sat beside her and held her hand, strapped to the arm of the chair, while she shivered. They didn’t speak to her, but it was enough to know they were with her, to feel their touch.

  The investigators screamed or they laughed, very close to her face, and they asked about foreign contacts—the Frenchman Delon and the American Nash. Was she working for the Americans? It was no problem these days, by the way, détente and all. They said they wanted to hear her side of the story, then slapped her to shut her up and told her Marta Yelenova was dead, that Dominika had as good as killed her, men would be sent to do the same to her mother. They slapped her so her face was mottled and sore, all little Sparrows like a bit of that, don’t they?

  They varied the days and the nights, and the screaming interrogations, and sometimes they strapped her flat on the stainless steel tables. It didn’t matter whether she was upright or whether her head hung down over the edge of the table. Dominika resisted with all her strength, all her will. It wasn’t hatred, because that would be too brittle. She cultivated disdain, she wouldn’t succumb to these beasts, she refused to let them exert their will on her.

  They didn’t look smart enough to find all the nerve bundles—at the base of the coccyx, or above the elbow, or on the soles of her feet—but the light, questing fingers never missed, and the screaming pains rocketed up her body into her head, and she heard her own ragged breath in her throat.

  The nerve pain was different from the tendon pain, which was different from the pain of a cable tie cinched tight around her head, across her open mouth. Dominika found that the anticipation of pain, waiting for what was next, was worse than the agonies they could generate. The glob of conductive lanolin slathered between her buttocks scared her more than the first nudge of the rounded aluminum peg they pushed into her, scared her more than feeling the
electrical current, the bitter, pulsing pain, involuntary, back-arching pain, that left her limp when the current stopped.

  One female jailer indulged in personal sport while conducting official business. Her strong hands and thick wrists were splotched by vitiligo, they lacked pigment. Strapped to a steel-and-canvas chair, Dominika watched the pinkish hands scuttle endlessly over her body, pressing, squeezing, pinching. The matron’s eyes—they were oval like a cat’s—watched Dominika’s face. One Appaloosa hand lingered low on Dominika’s belly, and the matron’s lips parted unconsciously in agitation.

  The matron leaned close—her face was inches from Dominika’s, her eyes questing, looking for revulsion, or terror, or panic. Dominika kept her face still and looked back into the darting eyes, then opened her thighs.

  “Go ahead, garpiya, harpy,” whispered Dominika in her face. “Go ahead and wet your sleeve.”

  The matron straightened and slapped Dominika across the cheek. Sorry to ruin your soggy little game, Dominika thought.

  The crickets clicked and she was shoved, thumping against the back of the cabinets at the ends of the corridors, and the lights stayed on in the cell until she could feel the sand under her eyelids, and the screeching hailer sounded like Schumann or Schubert, she couldn’t tell which. A sallow girl with bruises on her legs and a crusted sore in the corner of her mouth was thrown into her cell, face-first onto the floor, and she wanted to talk all night, a frightened cellmate sobbing about how she hated them, she hadn’t done anything wrong. The little yellow-winged kanarejka, the canary, wanted a friend. The girl licked the sore on her mouth and looked at Dominika on her cot and put her hand out and whispered she was lonely. Dominika turned her face to the wall and ignored the raspy voice.

  They didn’t know anything. They were looking for something to come adrift, something to pull on, but she held on tight to her secrets. They came back to the Americans, they wanted to know about her assignment to get close to Nash. Did you fuck him? Did you wrap your little Sparrow beak around his khuy? Every day there would be two hours without the straps, or the screaming, or the slaps across the face that brought her head left and right and blurred her vision. A nameless colonel—in formal uniform with powder-blue shoulder boards that matched his halo, sensitive like Forsyth, an artist—sat across a table. She had to be careful with him, stay alert.

  He spoke quietly, evenly, at the start of each session asking why she had betrayed her country. She replied she had done no such thing, and he continued as if not hearing her, asking mildly what were the reasons she had decided to do it, what was the exact point in time that she had decided.

  The colonel was so mild, so assured in his manner. His questions were drawn from a premise—her guilt—that began to become a reality. Let us talk about life’s disappointments, he would say, those disappointments that compelled you to do these things. Logic and fantasy and misstatements all began to invade her exhausted mind. Would you like to read the transcripts of Sinyavsky’s trial? She didn’t know who that was, a dissident, in 1966. Read how denial evolves into acceptance, how it can liberate, said the colonel. His voice was soft, modulated, his blue bubble seemed to envelope her. Stay awake.

  The ancient, poisonous, and dispassionate transcripts mesmerized her; it was as if she were physically present during the show trial. She felt herself slipping. The wearisome act of denying individual accusations brought her closer to agreeing with the colonel’s overarching assumption of her guilt. It was simple, really, he said, they simply had to establish how she had strayed, when, and how badly.

  He almost broke her, the moderate colonel in his pressed uniform, but she refused to be drawn down into their black hole. Her name was Dominika Egorova. She was a ballerina, an officer in the SVR, a Sparrow trained to bend others’ minds. She loved and was loved in return. She closed her eyes and flew high above Moscow, tracing the river, high above the fields and the forests, and dipped her wings over Butovo and the slit trench that held the body of Marta Yelenova, the ground frozen solid above her.

  Marta gave her strength and she wrenched her mind back from the abyss, she retreated inside herself, used everything they gave her to resist them, including the hallucinations, Dominika welcomed them. She lay in her cell and it was the bed in Helsinki, and the hot light in her eyes was the Finnish moonlight, and she lay still and felt him on top of her. The fever and the chills were his caresses. Her infected eye shed tears of love, which he kissed away. She turned on the mattress, her fists bunched under her stomach to stop the ache.

  Even as her arms went numb from the straps, she felt herself getting stronger. She touched the secret inside her, it had been buried deep, but she could feel it again. The secret that lived in her soul, the secret that she had stuffed away out of their reach, was rekindled, began to burn again. She could think about it, knowing they could not get their hands on it. Her mother had told her Resist, Fight, Survive. They were getting weaker, she was getting stronger. Their individual colors were stuttering on and off, as if a fuse were loose.

  She told them, kept telling them, she did not do anything wrong, she couldn’t tell them anything because there was nothing to tell. The louder they screamed, the happier she became. Yes, happy—she loved these men and women who tormented her, she loved the turquoise-painted colonel. They knew they could not keep on indefinitely, they were running out of time. Unless they forced a confession, they had nothing.

  =====

  Far above the crenellated roof of Lefortovo and Lubyanka and Yasenevo the ether was filled with sly messages, queries and responses, precedence and deadlines. Information was coming out of Washington about the Bullard affair. The Washington rezidentura had its feelers out, contacts were being taken to lunch, cooperative Americans were being met in underground garages, or on the C&O Canal Towpath, or on darkened cobblestoned streets in Georgetown or Alexandria. A rumor circulating out of the US Justice Department held that Bullard had been under suspicion for a year before he contacted Russian intelligence in Helsinki. His arrest in Washington had been planned, but his unexpected travel abroad had forced their hand.

  Official US sources downplayed the loss of the manual—not much made it into the public record, but a leak from a “high-placed government source” described the incident as a “grave loss of national security information.” Congressional calls for an accountability investigation followed. The dithering, and recriminations, and accusations were all a part of variegated deception, assembled and propagated via scores of unwitting sources and assorted blabbermouths, orchestrated by CI Chief Simon Benford, with the sole goal to reassure the Russians that the manual they had acquired was genuine. If an ancillary benefit was to protect the agent DIVA—if she was still alive—all the better.

  SVR Directorates R (analysis) and X (science) submitted reports. Preliminary analysis of the US National Communications Grid document passed by Bullard concluded with the assessment that the document was authentic and unique. Directorate T officers, FAPSI communications experts, and scientists from the Saint Petersburg University of Information Technologies began studying the manual in consultation with the Ministry of Defense to identify exploitable vulnerabilities in the vast US network. Funding had been requested from the defense budget for developing software, cyber applications, and other tools for potential use against the assessed weakest spots in the system.

  Because they wanted to believe, a consensus was reached among the Kremlin knyaz’ki, the princelings. The material was authentic, a significant windfall, even if the Americans knew of its loss. Obtaining Bullard’s information from under the nose of American intelligence was a tactical triumph, a demonstration of Russian mastery in tradecraft. That the volunteer Bullard had been arrested was his misfortune, obviously a result of his stupidity, sloppiness, and greed. The Kremlin couldn’t care less about his fate. He was the Americans’ concern now, for three consecutive life sentences.

  A commendation from the Duma recognized Rezident Volontov and the Helsinki rezidentura. In
a late afternoon ceremony in the gilded Andreyevsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, double eagles over the doors where red stars had once hung, SVR First Deputy Director Egorov was awarded a second star as lieutenant general. President Putin himself handed Egorov the oblong felt box with the two-star clusters, bussed him on three cheeks, and gave him a trademark crocodile smile that from the president was an exhilarating gesture of approval. The promotion ceremony coincided with the weekend and delayed Dominika’s release by two days.

  On Monday, after breakfast, Vanya Egorov finally made the calls. To KR, to the Internal Investigations Directorate, ultimately to the FSIN, the creeps in the Service for the Execution of Punishments, the demon offspring of the gulags. He identified himself using his new star, Lieutenant General Egorov, to tell them all to finish it up. It was beginning to look bad, she was his brother’s daughter, for God’s sake. No, he did not want them to go to Level Two. No, he did not authorize administering drugs, or a course of sensory deprivation, or more severe electric shock. What the hell is wrong with you people? These measures are for bastard traitors, like the mole still out there, he thought. If she hasn’t confessed, there is nothing to confess, though the devil knew what had happened in Helsinki, with that sliznjak, that garden slug Volontov running things. Clean her up and send her back to me, her mother is worried, I want her back on the job, he said with fatherly concern.

  Colonel Digtyar himself brought the cardboard box with her clothes to the cell, stood there while she undressed and returned the smock—State property—and dressed in front of him, her shins and thighs mottled blue-black, her fingernails purple, her ribs showing. They had accomplished all that in such a short time. They walked her upstairs to the grilled door and she stepped out onto the snowy street, with the traffic noise and the smell of exhaust from the buses, and she walked gingerly on the ice for a little way, just to feel the ground beneath her feet, her breath in clouds rising above her head. Her ballet limp was more pronounced now, and her foot throbbed, but she concentrated on swinging her arms and walking away from the walls with her back straight. The marks on her wrists were visible from under the cuffs of her overcoat.