Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  Gable suggested they direct the small Station surveillance team on Egorova to get a sense of what she was doing in Helsinki. Putting surveillance on her struck Nate as overkill. He had been trying to tell Forsyth and Gable that Egorova was a low-level target, an admin type with no access. Surveilling her was a waste. “Let’s agree to disagree,” Gable said. “In other words, shut the fuck up.”

  Forsyth held up his hand. “Nate, since you’re the action officer with Egorova, why don’t you handle the team while they cover her? Useful experience, and you can provide input. They’re an interesting old couple. They’re both sticklers for tradecraft.”

  Great, thought Nate. Gable had made the suggestion to employ surveillance to kick-start the operation, and Forsyth assigned him to run the team to focus him on the case. Forsyth and Gable worked well together, real pros, they knew how to motivate their officers.

  Gable slid the file to him, daring him with a look to say anything. “Here’s the file on ARCHIE and VERONICA.” He paused for a beat. “These two are legends. They’ve been working since the 1960s. Worked some shit-hot ops over the years, including Golitsyn’s defection. Tell ’em I said hello.”

  Twenty-four hours later, after a two-hour vehicular SDR that took him north for an hour on the E75 and then west on secondary roads to Tuusula and back into the city on the 120, Nate ditched his car in public parking at the Pasila train station and walked into Länsi-Pasila, a district of high-rises and commercial buildings. He found the right one, a modest apartment block of four stories of brick and glass, with enclosed angular balconies. He pressed the intercom button marked RÄIKKÖNEN and was buzzed in. Nate rang the bell at the door of the fourth-floor apartment.

  “Come in,” said the elderly woman who opened the door. Spry. In her seventies. VERONICA. Her face was narrow and patrician, with a straight nose and firm mouth that hinted at what must have been considerable beauty in her youth. Her ice-blue eyes were still striking, her skin was pink with good health. Her thick white hair was in a bun and a pencil stuck out of it. She wore woolen pants and a light sweater. Reading glasses hung from her neck, and there was a pile of papers and magazines on the floor beside a chair. “We’ve been eager to meet you,” she said. “I am Jaana.” She grasped Nate’s hand and shook it firmly. She radiated vitality and energy. Her grip, her eyes, the way she stood.

  “Would you like a cup of tea? What time is it?” She checked her watch, which she wore with the face on the bottom of her wrist, a classic tell of a street surveillant, thought Nate. “It’s late enough to contemplate something stronger,” said Jaana. “May I offer you schnapps?” All this was said in a flurry of movements, gestures, smiles, twinkling eyes.

  “Marty Gable sends his regards,” said Nate.

  “How kind of Marty,” said Jaana, clearing a space on a cluttered coffee table. “He’s a dear. You’re lucky to have him as a supervisor.” She was shuttling back and forth from the kitchen with glasses and an unidentified clear liquid that seethed in an oval bottle. Schnapps. “We’ve seen some strange chiefs over the years,” she said, “on both sides. Of course, the Russians were uniformly worse, beastly clods trying to survive in their beastly system, bless them. They certainly provided us with interesting times.”

  Jaana Räikkönen poured two glasses of schnapps, raised her glass in a Scandinavian toast, looking him in the eyes while taking the first sip. The living room was small and comfortable, with overstuffed furniture and bookshelves lining the polished wood walls. The house was filled with the smell of vegetable soup.

  “Is your husband home?” asked Nate. “I hoped to meet him too.”

  “He won’t be long,” said Jaana. “He was out on the street covering your arrival.” She shrugged. “I’m afraid it’s a habit with us.” Nate chuckled to himself. He had run a two-hour dry-cleaning route looking for a tail and had missed the old guy hanging around outside his building. That’s how they’ve operated for so long, he thought.

  Just then a key rattled in the lock, the front door opened, and Marcus Räikkönen walked into the room. ARCHIE. He led a tan dachshund on a leash, which, after sniffing briefly at Nate, trotted over to his bed and flopped down. His name was Rudy. Marcus was tall, over six feet, and broad across the shoulders. He had clear blue eyes under bushy eyebrows. Muscular cords stood out on the side of his neck, under a sharp jawline. He moved easily, athletically. He was balding and wore his remaining hair in a buzz cut. His handshake was firm. He wore a dark-blue tracksuit with black training shoes. There was a small Finnish flag on the left breast of the suit.

  “Across the street in the courtyard?” asked Nate. “The bench near the steps?”

  “Good,” said Marcus. “I didn’t think you noticed.” He smiled and picked up the third glass of schnapps. “To your good health,” he said, draining the glass while looking Nate in the eyes.

  Nate remembered the summary file on them. ARCHIE and VERONICA had been the core of Helsinki Station’s unilateral surveillance team for close to forty years. Both were retired pensioners now. ARCHIE had been an investigator in the Finnish Tax Administration, VERONICA a librarian. They were effective simply because they mixed different looks on the street with an instinct about what the rabbit was going to do next. Of course, they knew the city and its Metro system intimately, they had grown up as the city had grown. Dogged, discreet, with the patience and perspective of a lifetime, they could work on a target for months without being burned. Their style of coverage was what Gable had called “more of a wife’s caress than a doctor’s finger.”

  Nate and the Räikkönens drafted a surveillance sked on Dominika, who they would cover irregularly but at carefully selected times—evenings after work, weekends—when something interesting was likely to occur. From afar Nate watched them work. Knit caps, mittens, and parkas one day, business suits and umbrellas the next. Bicycles with ting-a-ling bells and Rudy on a leash. An indistinct gray Volvo compact, a motor scooter with a basket. Sometimes they walked together, holding hands, sometimes apart. One day Jaana followed Dominika into a store using a walker. ARCHIE and VERONICA did it all—trailing surveillance, static, leading, crossing, parallel, leapfrog.

  Nate met them again at their apartment after the first two weeks. They had taken a few photographs. Marcus summarized the results so far. His report was crisp, precise. Jaana would occasionally interrupt with observations. “First,” said Marcus, “we are quite sure that up until now she has not detected or suspected surveillance.” He shrugged his shoulders. “She is young, but we see considerable skill on the street. She does not resort to the usual tricks and she moves well, takes advantage of her surroundings. I would say she is significantly above average on the street.

  “She knows her way around already. We observed her using specific tradecraft only once,” said Marcus, looking at Jaana. “She waits in the mezzanine of the Torni Hotel across the street from Yrjönkatu Swimming Hall to watch you arrive. She waits for a few moments after, then enters.”

  “Marcus disagrees with me,” said Jaana, “but I think she is not operational. She is not handling agents and is not involved in operational support to the rezidentura. She does not have a job to do.” Jaana looked over to Marcus, waiting for the rejoinder.

  “Of course she has a job to do,” said Marcus. “It’s just that we have not seen it yet. Give it time.”

  “One thing is for sure,” said Jaana, ignoring Marcus. “She is lonely. She goes straight from the embassy to her little apartment. She buys groceries for one. She walks alone on the weekends.”

  “Have you seen any hint of coverage on her?” asked Nate. “Is anyone from the rezidentura keeping tabs on her?”

  “We think not,” said Marcus. “She is clear. We will keep looking for any indication that they are watching her.”

  “I’m going to have more encounters with her,” said Nate. “I’ll need you to help cover some of our meetings outside the swimming hall.”

  Marcus nodded. “As you see more of her it will become in
teresting. Especially what she does immediately after your meetings. That is when they always run to the phone or rendezvous with an embassy officer. As much as you can, let us know your plans. If you wish, we can make some suggestions for places to meet her,” Marcus said.

  “One last thing,” said Jaana, pouring another glass of schnapps. “If you would forgive me, she looks like a nice person, a sweet girl. She needs a friend.” Marcus looked at her and back to Nate with arched eyebrows.

  Nate reviewed ARCHIE and VERONICA’s reports with Gable. “Good, keep an eye on her, especially if she’s got anybody from her embassy supporting her,” said Gable. “If we see she’s got backup, then it’s possible she’s operational, maybe even she’s working on you.”

  “Not in a million years,” said Nate. “No way.”

  “Glad you’re so sure. Anyway, go after her, hard. Take your time, in a hurry.”

  Nate set a goal of seeing Dominika at least once a week outside of the swimming. He scoured the city for places to meet without being seen. They met after work at basement bars, for coffee on Saturday mornings, lunches on Sundays at remote cafés. Put her in the chair with her back to the room. There were embassy Russians all over Helsinki, and Nate wanted to avoid a chance sighting. Build a friendship, stay clandestine, always arrive separately, leave apart. Stay off the phones, vary patterns, build a relationship. A waste of time.

  Dominika applied her own tradecraft. She checked for coverage as she walked through the city to their meetings. Finns would stare at the beautiful dark-haired girl walking up the escalator, or slipping into a snowy alley, or leaving a store by a back entrance, unaware she was looking for coverage, or that she was watching from across the street as Nate arrived at their coffee shop, counting heads, looking at faces, marking hats and overcoats.

  They were getting to know each other. Over the last few meetings they had talked, really talked, a natural evolution after spending time together. Dominika assessed Nate as honest, natural, intelligent. He was not nekulturny. He was, well, just American. His comments about living in Moscow were evasive, of course they would be, he was hiding the fact that he had been handling a Russian mole. Dominika didn’t much care for his comments about Russia, even though she knew she felt mostly the same way. Come on, get going, she told herself. She had to spend more time with him, continue concentrating on his patterns. She had to determine when he was operational.

  She felt the pressure. If there was no breakthrough soon, with the Center and Volontov bearing down, would she contemplate a physical approach? Nelzya! she thought. No, never. He was attractive, his openness and humor appealing. But forget it.

  How many meetings had there been? Nate felt the anticipation of seeing Dominika again, but he wasn’t convinced that he could persuade her of anything. She was unbending. Facing a hundred surveillance cars in Moscow didn’t faze him, but he fretted over how to determine what motivated her. If she had an operational agenda, Nate couldn’t identify it. It almost seemed as if she were in Helsinki just to get experience, and that didn’t make sense. The SVR connection was important, the aspect that made her a worthwhile recruitment target. He had to get a handle soon or Forsyth would grow impatient and Gable would kick his ass.

  One thing. He could look at her face for hours. Jesus, listen to you. Concentrate on the developmental, on the assessment, what makes her tick. They talked more easily now, even though they disagreed. She got hot and fussy whenever he pinged on Russia, he could see that, but he also had a sense that she grudgingly agreed with him at times. She didn’t believe all the propaganda. Maybe an opening. Maybe not.

  He looked into the mirror and combed his hair. This Sunday he had suggested lunch at a little ethnic restaurant in Pihlajisto, a crossroads community on the Metro line northeast of the city. Dominika had agreed to meet him there. Weeks before, ARCHIE had suggested it as out-of-the-way: “We will not encounter any Russian friends there,” he said. “One of us on the train watching her, the other covering you.” Nate threw on an oiled field coat over a V-neck sweater and corduroy pants. He wore ripple-soled walking shoes. He left his apartment and walked a stairstep route through the swept streets of Kruununhaka, then along the frozen waterfront, then kicked off his real dry-cleaning route.

  Across town, Dominika was also looking in the mirror, her blue eyes wide. She did not use perfume, but combed her hair for the tenth time with the tortoiseshell talisman. She got ready to walk out of her apartment to take the Metro, taking a slantwise look through the curtains of her front window to the street below. She looked forward to this, talking to him, sparring, learning a little more each time.

  She wore a turtleneck sweater and tweed jacket over woolen pants for warmth. She also wore sensible shoes. She tied a scarf over her head like an old babushka and left her apartment, locking the door. She went down to the basement of her apartment building, walked through the storeroom, and pushed through to the boiler room. A small corridor led from the room to a heavy iron-barred window high on the wall that Dominika had discovered several weeks ago. It looked as though it had been a coal chute, long since converted. It had taken her almost an hour to pick the padlocked grille two nights ago; the damn things weren’t easy, especially since she had only an improvised torsion wrench fashioned from a hairpin. Dominika stacked boxes under the window, boosted herself up, and wormed through the window. Some start to a date, she thought, thinking about seeing him again.

  Dominika eased the window shut and stepped out into the alleyway, looking up at the curtained windows. Nothing. She walked quietly up the alleyway, squeezed between a parked truck and a Dumpster, boosted herself over a low brick wall and out onto a city street. She was already a block away from her apartment building. Her coat collar was turned up and the scarf hid her features. She walked west for another block casually, checking for repeats whenever she crossed the street and looked both ways for traffic. She entered the Kamppi complex, walked through the mall, stopped at a bookstore, checked for faces, then down into the Metro entrance. She stayed still on the slowly descending escalator, using the reflective bounce on the fashion posters on the walls. No silhouettes. Dominika was halfway to the platform level as a slight elderly lady dressed in a raincoat and floppy hat stepped on the escalator at the top and started down behind her. She was holding a bunch of flowers wrapped in green paper and a string bag with two apples. VERONICA hoped that one day she could speak to the dear girl about how predictable she had been, using the mall and its integral Metro station so close to her apartment.

  Nate’s surveillance instructor a hundred dim years ago was named Jay, a former physicist who wore a Van Dyck beard and long sandy hair and looked, well, a lot like Van Dyck. “Get it out of your heads, stop being heroes,” he had said. “If you detect surveillance, your night is over, you will abort.” He had drawn a horizontal line on the chalkboard. “Your SDR is to compel surveillance you have not seen to show themselves. It is not designed to lose anyone. All surveillance has a breaking point,” he had said, intersecting the line with a vertical stroke. “This is the point when the bad guys must choose between staying undetected and losing the eye.” He brushed his hands of chalk dust. “If you can force them to show themselves without breaking their hearts, you have succeeded. For that night only. Then you have to start all over again.”

  Fuck breaking their hearts, thought Nate. If he had coverage they’d have to show. He slid down an embankment near the rail yard behind the central station, climbed a chain-link fence in an alley, and dodged traffic as he crossed the E12. He wondered what she would be wearing. Along his route, Nate would look for ARCHIE, but he was wasting his time. The old man was a ghost on the street, protoplasm, smoke around dry ice. ARCHIE was countersurveilling Nate, looking for repeats using time and distance. Forget coats, forget hats, ARCHIE was looking at the way people walked, their gaits, the sets of their shoulders, the shapes of their ears and noses. Things surveillants cannot change. And shoes. They never change shoes.

  Three hours af
ter climbing through half of Helsinki, and seeing ARCHIE—finally—with the duffel in his right hand (you’re clean), Nate was confident he was black. The modest country restaurant was owned by an Afghan family. Nate entered the small whitewashed dining room decorated with rugs on the wall and colored cushions on the chairs. Each table had a candle. A dial radio on a shelf played softly. The place was deserted, only one other couple—young Finns—at a corner table. A wonderful smell of warm spices and stewed lamb came from the kitchen. Nate was seated at a corner table facing the front window. In two minutes ARCHIE and VERONICA walked arm in arm by the window, looking straight ahead. VERONICA flicked the side of her nose with a finger. All-clear signal. ARCHIE thought it idiotic but she was implacable. He looked at her and rolled his eyes, then they disappeared.

  A minute later, Dominika pushed through the door, saw Nate, and walked to the table. Cool, confident, composed. He held her chair but she shrugged her coat off by herself when he made to help her. Two glasses of wine came. Nate’s bad knee was throbbing from when he had rapped it on a fence post an hour ago. His left hand was scraped after a controlled slide down the rail embankment. Dominika’s jacket sleeve had a rip at the shoulder from when she had caught it on a corner of the Dumpster behind her house. A woolen sock and shoe were wet. She had gone ankle-deep in a slushy puddle crossing the street after getting off the train at Pihlajisto.

  “I’m glad you were able to find the place,” said Nate. “It’s a little out-of-the-way, but a friend said the food was excellent.” He looked at the light on her hair. “I hope it wasn’t too far to come.”

  “It was an easy trip, there was hardly anyone on the train,” said Dominika.

  If you only knew, thought Nate. “I hope you like the restaurant. Have you tried Afghan food?”

  “No, but there are several Afghan restaurants in Moscow. They are supposed to be good.” His halo was rich and full, and Dominika thought of her father.