Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  The Afghan woman had died sometime in the early evening, too much excitement, or too much handling by a succession of his troopers, or perhaps the ammo belt around her neck, stapled to the plywood wall, had gotten too tight across her throat. She was upright against the wall, chin up as if in pride, held by the collar, her dead eyes flashing green from the lantern. She kept Khyber company. He was sitting, swaying to tinny Afghan music from a tape deck, but the batteries were fading and the music kept slowing down and speeding up.

  Marta thrashed from side to side hoping to loosen one arm, get her legs free, to be able to fight him. Her movement attracted his attention and he climbed on the foot of the bed and on hands and knees started inching toward her. The shirt billowed around his body. He hovered over her, looking down, pressing his weight on her. She kept straining her arms, the cords in her neck standing out. Matorin lowered his face inches from hers and looked into her eyes, listened to her huffing breaths. He ripped the tape from her mouth and savored her labored, panicked breathing. “Bozhe,” she whispered.

  His eyes searched her face as his unseen hand shivered the tip of the Khyber knife at a shallow angle up under her diaphragm nearly nine inches, completely through her heart, and up into her throat. Marta arched her back, convulsing. Her open mouth could make no sound and her body bucked against the ropes. Matorin rode the tremors in her body, felt her hoarse breaths quicken, and watched, watched, watched the light go out in eyes that partially rolled back inside her head. A trickle of blood oozed from one nostril and out of the corner of her mouth. It took Marta three minutes to die. She didn’t hear Matorin whisper, “Bozhe? No, God could not be here tonight.”

  Dominika entered the rezidentura the next morning and looked over at Marta’s empty desk. Probably a long night of aquavit, she thought.

  When Marta had not come in by midmorning, Volontov stuck his head out of his office and yelled, “Where is Yelenova this morning? Has she called in sick?” No one knew where she was. “Corporal Egorova, call her at her flat. See if you can reach her.” Dominika dialed several times but no one answered. Volontov called the security officer and told him to go over to her apartment, pound on the door, use the office copy of her key to get in. He returned an hour later to say that the apartment was empty but looked perfectly normal. Clothes in the closet, dishes in the sink, bed made.

  “Draft a short cable to the Center,” barked Volontov to the security man, who looked at Volontov like a Rottweiler waiting for hand signals. “Inform them that Administrative Assistant Yelenova, Marta, has not reported for work, whereabouts unknown. She has not called in sick. Inform them we are searching for her and also filing a request to the Finnish National Police to search for her. Call your contact in the police. Tell them the embassy demands immediate action and utmost discretion. Go.”

  Volontov called his counterintelligence referent into the office and shut the door. “We may have a problem,” he said. “Marta Yelenova has not reported to work.” He checked the SVR-issue wall clock above the door. “It’s been almost five hours,” he said.

  His Line KR man, an unimaginative beast of burden formerly from the KGB Border Guards Directorate, looked at his watch, as if to confirm Volontov’s estimate of the time. “Get over to Supo,” Volontov said. “Ask for an appointment with Sundqvist. Tell them about Yelenova, that we think she’s been kidnapped. Ask them to check all the terminals: air, rail, ship.”

  “Kidnapped?” asked the CI man. “Who would kidnap Yelenova?”

  “Idiot. We’re not going to tell Finnish intelligence we think she defected. Just get them to start checking. They’ll have visa photos of her. Tell them utter discretion is imperative. And keep your mouth shut.”

  In the next six hours the police had made no progress, but Supo had retrieved a photo of a woman vaguely resembling Yelenova at the Haaparanta border-crossing station at the Swedish border on the Gulf of Bothnia. The woman was wearing a scarf and dark glasses that concealed most of her face, but the nose and chin were right. Supo said the woman was processed through immigration control with a Finnish passport in the name of Rita Viren, a name the Finns were tracing. She was in the company of an unidentified man with sunglasses and a baseball cap.

  “That confirms it,” said the CI man. “It was the Americans. She defected to the CIA.”

  “Imbecile. How did you arrive at that?” said Volontov.

  “Look at the ball cap, Colonel,” said the CI man, pointing at the Supo security-video photos that had been faxed to the Russians. “It says New York on the cap.” Volontov told him to get out.

  The office was afloat in rumors. A murder? A kidnapping? The word no one dared utter. Defection? Everyone knew Marta and Volontov had had a screaming match several weeks ago. But to run away? Dominika was beside herself. Marta would not defect, but if she did, she would not leave without saying good-bye. She had only joked about both of them defecting together. No. Something bad had happened. Then she froze. Did They somehow know she, Dominika, was not reporting, falsifying progress with Nash? Was Marta’s disappearance a warning? Ridiculous. There was some very easy explanation. Marta had run off for a week to Lapland with a blond yoga instructor. Anything. But Dominika couldn’t convince herself.

  The search for Yelenova continued for days, without result. Volontov was frantic that the disappearance of one of his people would stain his copybook at the Center, an ironic fixation considering his pokey thirty-year career ledger was already liberally blotted with sloth, inattention, and careerism. The embassy protested to the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and to the Interior Ministry about the criminal kidnapping of one of its diplomatic personnel, whose security, they reminded the uncomfortable Finns, was the direct responsibility of the Finnish government. A special Moscow investigator arrived from Directorate K to interview embassy officers and the rezident, as well as to confer with Finnish investigators. He left after four days, solemnly concluding that Ms. Yelenova had disappeared.

  Dominika suspected the truth as she lay facedown on her bed in her SVR-provided apartment and wept for her friend. She had been a true friend—a big sister she never had—and it was monstrous, inconceivable, that They would have harmed her. But why? As she ran things through her mind, the memory of her telling Marta about Ustinov came back in a chilling rush. Did They know about that? Did Marta mention it to someone? Would a slip on her part result in the disappearance of a colleague, an officer of the Service, from sleepy little Helsinki, in the twenty-first century, in a sane, civilized world? She closed her eyes and felt the bed spinning, and she was in Ustinov’s love nest, on his blood-soaked revolving bed. Thinking back, she remembered Volontov’s face had shown fear, his orange halo was ragged with it.

  She got up, walked to the window, and looked up at the night sky. She scorned herself. Trained intelligence officer. A real operator. Relentless seductress. They used her, were using her still, as a little chess piece, a little pawn. Whoever it was that Nate was handling, she could understand that person a little better now, appreciate the hate that must sustain him.

  Dominika more than ever was confirmed in her decision not to report on Nate. It had been like a draft of cold air sweeping across her. But her little games were passive, weren’t they? She saw Marta’s face in the glass. How could she make Them atone for what They had done to her? How could she destroy them, Volontov, Uncle Vanya, all the others?

  Tears ran down her cheeks. She cried for Marta, for her father, perhaps for herself too. She cried for Russia, but she knew she no longer believed. She turned away from the window, eyes closed. Something broke loose inside her and she swept a little ceramic bud vase—Marta had bought it for her at the Sunday market—off a side table with her arm, her teeth clenched and fists bunched.

  Back in the rezidentura, filled with dread, Volontov was waiting for official censure in some form. Instead he received a sympathetic call on the “Vey-Chey,” the VCh phone, from Vanya Egorov, who commiserated that service in the field, on the front lines, was no
t without risk. There had been defectors in the past, there will be defectors in the future. We deplore them, he said, and we must be vigilant, but it’s impossible to prevent all of them. Egorov asked Volontov to concentrate on managing secure operations, and especially to focus on the “special project” with his niece and the young American. “Of course, General,” said a relieved Volontov. “I believe we are making good progress on that front.”

  Chush’ sobach’ya. Bullshit, thought Egorov, and ended the call. Vanya knew that his niece must have mentioned at least part of the Ustinov story to this Yelenova woman, a serious mistake, but one he had to overlook for the time being. It was actually a stroke of luck that Yelenova subsequently let it slip in front of the mouth-breather Volontov, who blessedly had the wit to call him. It was only a matter of dispatching Matorin, then a relatively simple konspiritsia to send the investigator for show, to wrap up all the loose ends. God, if the president had gotten wind of this breach—Egorov didn’t want to think about it.

  On the Finnish-Russian border three kilometers west of Vyartsilya, Russia, through an uninhabited tract of dense pines and rolling hills, the Soviets after World War II had established an infiltration route past the towers, border wire, and plowed strips. The Finnish side was always lightly patrolled. For decades, cleared KGB border guards periodically were assigned to the area to allow agents to pass through unmolested. The more techniques changed, the more they stayed the same: Routes through the minefields in 1953 were marked by stakes driven into the snow with cloth strips tied to them. Since 2010, the correct route through the field was marked by plastic pylons fitted with infrared strobes visible only with night-vision goggles.

  A week earlier, Matorin had infiltrated Finland using this route, was picked up by a Directorate S support illegal on country road number 70, and was driven four hundred kilometers south on Rural Route 6 and finally into the city on state highway E75. The Spetsnaz killer had gone directly to Yelenova’s apartment, killed her at midnight, and put her body in a rubber military body bag. He had sanitized the apartment, then signaled the illegal, who, in the early morning hours, drove Matorin and Marta’s body back north to the Vyartsilya bolt-hole. The illegal then returned to Helsinki. The next morning, using real Finnish documents, the illegal and his lightly disguised wife left the country at Haarparanta, ostensibly for the start of a nice vacation in Sweden. They would never return to Finland, further complicating the investigation into what had happened to Marta Yelenova. The entire operation had taken a little less than forty hours.

  The sunlight was rising through the pinewoods of Vyartsilya, casting long, delicate shadows that crept up the snow-covered hills. Guards from the Federal Security Service stood in elevated tower B30, watching the tree line with binoculars. The sun came up behind the tower, over the tops of the pines, bathing the whole area in golden light. “Vot,” said one of the men. There. A single thin figure came out of the trees. He was dressed in a white snowsuit with a hood, and wore snowshoes. The guards saw he moved steadily through the drifts, his long shadow stretched out behind him. He dragged a small equipment sled on a tether. An oblong shape lay on the sled, shrouded in white nylon. Marta Yelenova had returned to the Rodina.

  MARTA’S LAST MEAL—PYTT I PANNA

  In foaming butter, separately and aggressively brown cubed beef, potatoes, and diced onions until crisp. Incorporate ingredients in the skillet with additional butter, season and reheat. Form a well in the mixture, and break a raw egg into it. Stir the egg into the hash before serving.

  16

  Nate sat with Gable in the India Prankkari in Kallio, at the back, looking out the windows. The restaurant was nearly empty. Gable had insisted on ordering rogan josh, fragrant, spicy, oily vermilion lamb stew. They ate it with soft bread, a fiery relish of tomatoes and ginger, and copious amounts of beer. Gable compared his first spoonful to a Nepalese rogan josh he had tasted around a campfire in Dhahran a hundred years ago, waiting at the airstrip beside the Pilatus that had infiltrated the four Tibetans into China.

  “Fucking Scandinavians cannot prepare Indian food,” he said, chewing. “With them it’s all reindeer and punk berries in cream sauce, boiled potatoes. Chef reaches for parsley and they have a stroke.” As usual, food was disappearing into Gable’s craw at a prodigious rate.

  “Four little guys, sherpas, tough as nuts, trained ’em for a month, going to pop in and pop out, splice a relay on a PLA trunk line running along the border, literally in the shadow of Everest and Kanchenchunga. The fucking end of the world. They flew in over the mountains, were supposed to walk out . . . but they never came back. Chicom patrol probably got ’em.” He was silent for a minute, then waved for more of the relish, and they started talking about the DIVA case, how to kick-start it. Nate couldn’t pin her down, he couldn’t turn the corner with her. She wasn’t softening, he was wasting precious time. Gable stopped chewing and stared at him when Nate admitted he had grown to like her.

  “She’s willing to come out, to engage, we debate stuff, but there’s no give,” said Nate.

  “You ever think she’s working on you, not the other way around?” said Gable, chewing.

  “Not impossible,” said Nate. “But there’s no handle she’s been working on. No career bullshit, no money, nothing.”

  “Yeah, and what would you do if she showed up with nothing on under her raincoat? Think you’d call that a recruitment peg?”

  Nate looked at Gable, nettled. “I don’t think she’d go with that kind of approach. Just a gut feeling.”

  “You wish. Well, it sounds like you guys are stuck. I suggest you think of something to unstick the case. Shake her up, rattle her, upset her equilibrium.” He emptied his beer and called for two more.

  “She’s not going to go with the standard canned pitch, Marty,” said Nate. “I’ve been trying to get her to talk more about Russia, about the problems, not pushing her, just giving her openings. Something there in her eyes, but not yet.”

  “You have to look for another handle. The good life in the West. Luxury items. Bank account.”

  “Wrong direction,” said Nate, “that’s not who she is. She’s idealistic, a nationalist, but she’s not a clunky Soviet. She grew up with ballet, music, books, languages.”

  “You talk about the Kremlin? All the shit going on behind the walls?”

  “Sure I did,” said Nate. “But she’s too gung-ho. She looks at it all at the level of the Rodina.”

  “Hell’s that?” said Gable.

  “The whole national myth—the Motherland, the soil, the hymns, chasing Nazis across the steppes.”

  “Oh, yeah, some of those Russian Red Army girls were hot,” said Gable, looking up at the ceiling. “Those tunics and boots, they looked—”

  “Is this your idea of operational coaching? Are we discussing DIVA?”

  “Well, you have to find something to jolt her out of her defensive position.” He leaned back in his chair, rocking slightly, hands behind his head. “Don’t discount her feelings for you,” said Gable. “Maybe she’ll want to help you in your career, a gift. It won’t feel to her like she’s committing treason. Or maybe she’s a thrill freak. Some agents drink adrenaline.”

  Nate’s doorbell rang that night. Dominika stood at the door, her face pinched, eyes red. She was not crying, but her lips trembled and she put her hand over her mouth, as if to stifle a sob. Nate checked the hallway quickly while pulling her inside the door. She was leaden, she didn’t resist his tug. He took her coat. She was wearing a white stretch top and jeans. He lowered her gently onto the couch. She sat at the edge of the cushion, looking down at her hands. Nate didn’t know what was wrong or what to do. She was being sent home short of tour, she was in trouble. That would be a first. Exfiling an SVR officer before recruitment.

  Got to calm her down. Whatever it is, she’s upset, vulnerable. A glass of wine, scotch, vodka? Teeth chattering against the glass as she took a sip.

  “I know you speak Russian,” Dominika said suddenly i
n Russian, her voice flat, exhausted. Her head was still down, her hair hung on each side of her face. “You’re the only one I can talk to, a boy from the CIA, it’s mad, isn’t it?”

  A boy from the CIA? thought Nate. Fuck’s going on? He sat still, made himself blink. Dominika took another ragged sip.

  She started talking slowly, in a low voice. She told him about Marta, about her disappearance. When Nate asked why, Dominika told him about Ustinov. When Nate asked how, she told him about her training. Those rumors about State School Four, he thought. Jesus.

  She looked at him then, trying to gauge his reaction on hearing she’d been to Sparrow School. There was no pity, no disdain, his eyes met hers. He was always that way. The purple mantle around his head pulsated. She wanted desperately to trust him. He poured her another glass. “What do you need?” he asked in English. “I want to help you.”

  She ignored the question, switched to English. “I know you’re not an American diplomat working in your embassy’s Economic Section. I know you’re a CIA officer. You know very well that I work in the rezidentura in my embassy as an officer of our state security. At least you should have realized it when I told you Volontov was my chief. I suppose you also know my uncle is Vanya Egorov, First Deputy Director of the Service.” Nate tried not to move.

  “In Moscow after the AVR, I worked in the Fifth Department in an operation against a French diplomat. It was unsuccessful. Then I was assigned to Helsinki.” Dominika looked up at Nate. Her face was puffy. She looked at him searchingly, and he reached out and held her hand. It felt cold to the touch.