Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  Dominika got to her feet and let the sheet fall to the floor. Every eye in the room was transfixed by her body, chest heaving, legs braced. Her foot flashed out in a feint, and the SVR man bent forward to protect himself. Dominika quickly reached out and dug the nails of her thumb and forefinger into the septum between his nostrils, pinched hard, and pulled him toward her, a torture-cell NKVD come-along from the 1930s. Dominika pulled the howling and unresisting thug’s head sharply downward against the little table in the room—littered with French Embassy commercial documents—the corner of which caught him on the cheek, knocking the table and the papers over and dropping the man into a heap on the floor. He didn’t move. From the couch Delon looked at her in disbelief.

  The entire sequence had taken less than ten seconds. One of the other SVR men grabbed Dominika and hustled her out of the apartment, frog-marched her down the hall, and shoved her into another room. “Take your hands off me,” she said as the door slammed shut in her face. The man was gone. A voice came from the back of the room.

  “An effective performance, Corporal, a strong finish to a discreet intelligence operation.” Dominika turned to see Simyonov sitting on a couch in front of two monitors. One screen showed the apartment, a man bending over the insensate lump on the floor, while the other man stood over Delon, who was still holding his trousers in his hands, his face looking up at him, upturned as if in prayer. The other screen replayed Dominika and Delon in bed. With the sound muted, their lovemaking looked clinical, staged. She ignored it.

  Dominika clutched the sheet around her with one hand while fingering her throbbing cheek with the other. “Zhopa! Asshole! We would have gotten it all,” she screamed. Simyonov did not respond. His eyes darted from one monitor to the other. “He would have recruited his own daughter for me,” she raved. Simyonov did not turn to look at her but muttered, “He will do so at any rate.” He pointed a remote and the sound came from the live monitor. The two SVR men were now screaming at Delon, who sat motionless on the couch. Dominika took another barefoot step into the room toward Simyonov, seriously contemplating driving a thumbnail into his eye. “Don’t you know he will not succumb to blackmail? He is not brave enough. Do you really think . . . ?”

  Simyonov turned to her as he lit a cigarette. His eyes blazed yellow. “If it doesn’t work, we can log it into your copy book as a failure, then,” he said. “It’s not your decision and it never was,” he said, smiling at her. “And this Service is not your private preserve.” He turned to the silent monitor. Dominika dully watched herself wrap her legs around Delon’s waist.

  “What is the purpose of replaying the bedroom film, comrade?” she said to Simyonov. He did not reply but blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling.

  “Given the fact that Serov struck you, I will not initiate charges against you for what you did to him.” He pointed at the other monitor and at Serov, still unconscious on the floor. “You have quite a temper, don’t you, Vorobey? It should be an asset to you in your budding career.” He smiled again and nodded at the door to an adjoining room.

  “There is a change of clothing in there if you want to get dressed, Corporal. That is, unless you choose to remain naked all night.” Dominika went into the little room and quickly threw on a formless smock and plastic belt, a pair of black tied shoes. The approved look for the last fifty years for the Modern Soviet Woman.

  Dominika never saw Delon again. The story came out in segments. An SVR informant working in the clerical pool of the French Embassy reported that Delon requested an appointment with the ambassador the next morning. Delon confessed to an “unreported, intimate relationship with a Russian woman.” The little man had shown quite a lot of courage as he described the number and nature of the commercial documents that he had shared, copied, or otherwise compromised. The DGSE chief in Moscow cabled his headquarters in Paris, as well as the Counterintelligence Division of the DST. There had been knowing shakes of the head. A beautiful woman, quoi faire? What could you do?

  The Germans would have found him shuldhaft, culpable, and given him three years. The Americans would have pegged the poor sap a victim of sexpionage and sentenced him to eight years. In Russia the predatel’, the traitor, would have been liquidated. French investigators handed down a stern finding of négligent. Delon was transferred home quickly—out of reach—and consigned to duties without access to classified information for eighteen months. He was near his daughter and back in Paris. His ultimate penance was living again in his wife’s elegant, lofty house in the Sixteenth with only the memories—in the sleepless early mornings—of a dingy little Moscow apartment and a pair of cobalt-blue eyes.

  JEAN JACQUES BEEF STEW DIJONNAISE

  Season and dust with flour small cubes of beef and brown aggressively. Remove meat. Sauté chopped bacon, diced onion, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, and thyme until soft. Return meat to pan, cover with beef broth, and simmer until meat is tender. Blend in Dijon mustard, splash of heavy cream; reheat and serve.

  10

  Vanya Egorov was chain-smoking Gitanes sent to him via SVR couriers by the rezident in Paris. His eyes were tired and it felt as if there were a steel band around his chest. On his red leather blotter lay another FSB surveillance report, the third in as many months. An American diplomat—suspect CIA—had been followed during a twelve-hour SDR two nights ago. There had been multiple teams on the young American, and the number of surveillants deployed had grown through the late afternoon and into the night when it seemed increasingly likely that the Yankee was operational and was headed for a meeting with an asset. The teams had grown excited when it appeared that the young American fool had not detected coverage. That was very rare.

  The final number of surveillants topped out at one hundred twenty, the FSB report baldly boasted. Driving snow flurries during the day had grounded spotter aircraft, but ground units followed in multiple layers, switching the eye frequently. Foot assets were salted ahead of the American along likely routes, teams paralleled on the flanks. There had been at least one FSB static surveillant in sixty of Moscow Metro’s one hundred eighty stations, in case the American changed course suddenly. Egorov flipped the last pages of the report impatiently. FSB dolboyoby, those fuckheads.

  The American entered Sokolniki Park in northeast Moscow at dusk, walked through the decrepit amusement park, dark and frozen, past the rusted Ferris wheel, and entered the labyrinth of lanes and alleys lined with black, bare trees. He stopped at an empty ornamental fountain and sat on the cement rim in the cold, stupidly contemplating the barren flower beds. Encrypted radio traffic spiked. This was it. A meeting. Keep the night-vision goggles on the Yank, but fan out and lock on to anyone in the vicinity, anyone. A solitary pedestrian, furtive, nervous, moving in the direction of the fountain.

  Reading the report, Egorov could imagine FSB men darting from tree to tree, NVGs strapped to their heads, a forest full of green, bug-eyed aliens. A tracking dog was brought up to look for buried drops. The keyed-up Alsatian was used to follow Americans, trained to focus specifically on the scent generated by Dial soap and Sure deodorant—the scent of America.

  And they waited. And the American waited. Well beyond the traditional four-minute window. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes. Nothing. The rest of the park was empty. The dog was run back along the American’s foot route but did not alert on anything. No caches, ground spikes, devices, nothing. Radio cars on the outer edges of the park cruised slowly, recording one hundred license plates in the area that would be checked and cross-referenced. Nothing. The American then left the park and, again nontraditionally, proceeded directly home, with no effort to test for coverage. FSB radios went silent.

  Egorov flipped the report into his out-box disgustedly. The FSB were congratulating themselves on a “perfect surveillance evolution,” in that the rabbit had no idea he had been stoppered in the bottle. Big deal, thought Egorov, what had they accomplished?

  Vanya Egorov did not know it, but the thrashing about of FSB coverage on the American case o
fficer created enough of a stir that MARBLE, headed into Sokolniki Park to attempt a meeting with the American, instead decided to wait and watch from a covered bus stop on Malenkovskaya Ulitsa, several blocks from the entrance to the park. His exceptional street instincts were confirmed when he saw three surveillance radio cars pull abreast of each other a hundred meters from him. The surveillance team leaned against the fenders of their cars, smoked cigarettes, and not-so-furtively passed around a bottle. This was the classic surveillance error on the street, bunching and scuttling together like tarakanki. Cockroaches.

  Very well, another reprieve in the life I have chosen, thought MARBLE as he walked away from the neighborhood. How many more did he have left? He thought about what he would write in his burst transmission tonight, and how he had to urgently find a reason to travel abroad. He had to meet Nathaniel again.

  The next morning Line KR Chief Zyuganov sent a classified zapiska to General Egorov, a memo designed to demonstrate Zyuganov’s prescience and command of the situation.

  There could be a limited number of explanations for the American officer’s activities. 1. This could have been an exercise to draw, then quantify, FSB surveillance capabilities, including collecting signals intelligence on FSB encrypted frequencies; 2. The American did detect coverage and aborted his meeting plans, leading surveillance into the park to misdirect; 3. The American was oblivious but his agent aborted the meeting for unknown reasons.

  This activity by the Americans seems poorly planned and clumsily executed and reflects our continued assessment of the CIA Station Chief Gondorf as a senior officer unsuited for dealing with the intricacies of his grade, the unhappy product of long-time patronage.

  Who cares about that polyp? thought Egorov. We have enough dim-witted, vain, pampered bunglers in our own Service.

  Vanya knew, was certain, that they had missed again, that the mole was still out there, sweating in his bed at night, betraying Russia, jeopardizing his—Vanya’s—own political and personal future.

  Then the day had been shattered by a midafternoon telephone call from the Kremlin, the smooth voice of the president hollow over the encrypted line. President Putin knew about the last night’s surveillance in Sokolniki Park, recited back the various interpretations of what had happened. Vanya mentally filed away the fact that Zyuganov’s zapiska had found its way to that office.

  “A counterespionage success against the Americans would not be unwelcome now,” the president had purred into the phone. “In a time of crisis for the Motherland, there is less time for hozjajki, these housewives, to bang pots and pans in protest.” The line went silent but Vanya did not interrupt. He was familiar with the cadences of the president’s speech. “We do not have the luxury of time,” said Putin finally, and the line was disconnected.

  Vanya stared into the phone receiver and replaced it on the instrument. Sookin syn. Son of a bitch. He pushed the key on his intercom. “Zyuganov, immediately.” The mole was still out there, but if clandestine meetings in Moscow were not working, third-country meetings outside Russia were the key. And Nash was right next door in Finland. Nash. He pushed his intercom again. “Egorova. My niece. This instant.”

  In twenty minutes, Dominika was sitting in front of his desk. CI Chief Zyuganov, his feet not touching the floor, sat on the other side of her. All three buttons of the dwarf’s shapeless black suit were buttoned and he gripped both arms of the chair. His perpetual bland little smile aggravated Vanya. His poisonous dwarf.

  As usual, Dominika was a vision, dressed in a navy-blue wool skirt and jacket, her hair up in the regulation bun. She looked quickly at Alexei Zyuganov, and the black triangles behind his head. She was not so new in the Service as not to have heard about his handiwork in the torture cells of the Lubyanka during the waning years of the Soviet Union.

  They were whispered stories, unbelievable, repeated only between close friends inside the Service. Zyuganov had been one of two chief Lubyanka executioners in the old days, young for the job but suited to it simply because he was immune to its horrors. It was said the dwarf had a fascination for his executed prisoners as they hung from the overhead beams, or lay on the tables or splayed on the sloping floor, heads down toward the drains. He would handle them, move them around—“ragdolling,” they called it—would lean them up against the wall so he could talk to them while fussily arranging and rearranging their limbs. Dominika imagined the dirty smocks, the purple necks, the—

  “It seems like we are always sitting here, you and I,” said Vanya brightly. Dominika cleared her head of the cellars. She saw Vanya’s yellow halo, bright and broad. This would be an interesting meeting. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. She braced herself.

  “I am pleased to hear that General Korchnoi offered you a seat in the Americas Department.”

  Oh, get on with it, she thought. “When Colonel Simyonov released me from the Fifth, I had no office. I am grateful to the general for the opportunity,” Dominika said.

  “Korchnoi told me he was impressed with your work against the Frenchman,” said Vanya.

  “Despite the fact that the operation was unsuccessful,” said Dominika.

  “We all have our successes and failures,” said Vanya, bathed in yellow, acting sweet.

  Dominika’s voice rose a little. “The operation against Delon would still be progressing if the Fifth Department had not acted prematurely. We could have developed a penetration of the French Defense Ministry.”

  “I read the file. There was promise. Why did we not?” interrupted Zyuganov mildly. Dominika willed her eyes not to grow large as she saw the parabolas of black unfold from behind Zyuganov’s shoulders like bat wings. Shaitan, thought Dominika, pure evil.

  “You’ll have to ask the chief of the Fifth Department,” said Dominika, not looking into Zyuganov’s eyes, not wanting to see what lived behind them.

  “Perhaps I shall,” said Zyuganov.

  “Enough. There’s no value in recriminations. Corporal Egorova, it is not your place to question the decisions made by senior officers,” said Vanya mildly.

  Dominika kept her voice level as her eyes never left her uncle’s. “This is why the Service is struggling to exist. This is why Russia cannot compete. Attitudes like this. Officers like Simyonov. They are krovopiytsy, attached to the belly, sucking blood, impossible to remove.” There was silence in the room as they stared at each other. Zyuganov watched her face; his hands did not move on the arms of his chair.

  “What am I to do with you, niece?” said Vanya finally, getting up from his desk and walking to stand in front of the picture window. “Your record is strong, you should not jeopardize the career ahead of you. The manner in which you have spoken to me already is enough for your separation from the Service. Do you wish to continue your complaints?” And think about your mother, thought Dominika.

  “And think about your mother,” said Vanya. “She needs your support.”

  “I am taking advantage of our relationship, I know,” said Dominika. “But our work is too important to let it be done starinnyj, in the manner it has always been done.” She turned to watch her uncle at the window and knew two things. Vanya did not care about any of this, he had another agenda that involved her, and she had some latitude in her comments. She also knew Zyuganov was drinking her words in, she could feel him radiating like a furnace. He was a creature that was not content unless he had prey. She did not look at him.

  Looking out the window, Vanya shook his head. Welcome to the modern SVR, he thought—improvements, reforms, public relations, and women in the Service. Junior officers could criticize the old ways. “So you do not like the old ways?” said Vanya.

  “I do not like to fail at an operation that could have succeeded, whatever the reason,” said Dominika.

  “And you believe you are ready to manage your own operation?” said Vanya softly.

  “With guidance and advice from officers like you and General Korchnoi . . . and C
olonel Zyuganov, of course,” said Dominika. She forced herself to include the little cadaver-lover sitting beside her. He turned his head toward her, jug-handle ears extended, and nodded.

  “Most would say you are too young, too inexperienced, but we shall see.” Dominika noted the tone of Vanya’s voice, the honeyed phrase before the knout. “The nature of the assignment I have in mind unfortunately will take you out of the Americas Department.”

  “What is the assignment?” she asked. She would scream if he told her she would have to seduce someone.

  “It is a foreign assignment, to a rezidentura, to do real operational work. A recruitment operation.” Vanya’s own recollection of foreign operations was dim, but he spoke as if he relished it himself.

  “A foreign assignment?” Dominika did not know what to say. She had never been out of Russia.

  “To Scandinavia. I need someone new, fresh, with those instincts you have displayed,” he said. You mean with a man, she thought bitterly. He saw her eyes and put up his hand. “I don’t mean what you’re thinking. I need you as an operupolnomochenny, an operations officer.”

  “That’s what I want to be,” said Dominika. “To be a member of the Service, to work for Russia.”

  Zyuganov spoke, his voice mild and oily, the words coal-black. “And so you shall. This is a delicate task which will require great skill. One of the most difficult tasks. You must destroy an American CIA officer.”

  From his office, Maxim Volontov, SVR rezident in the Russian Embassy in Helsinki, watched Dominika walk across the hall to return the dun-colored file to the file room for the evening. Since she had arrived in the rezidentura from Moscow, Dominika would check out the file each morning and take it to a work area to read, usually writing in a notebook, taking notes. At the end of each day she would return it to the file clerk per established rezidentura practice. Besides Volontov, Dominika was the only officer allowed to check out this particular file. It was a copy of the SVR papka on the American CIA officer Nathaniel Nash, transmitted from Yasenevo.