Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  “Marta was my friend. She served loyally all her life, they gave her medals, a pension, an overseas posting. She was strong, independent. She had no regrets about her life, she enjoyed everything. In the time I knew her, she showed me who I am.” She squeezed Nate’s hand slightly.

  “I don’t know what happened to Marta, but she’s gone, without a word, and I know she’s dead. She never did anything to them. My uncle is afraid of exposure. He would protect himself. There’s a man, a koshmar, a nightmare creature who belongs to my uncle. He would use him for such a thing.”

  “Are you in danger?” asked Nate. His thoughts were racing. She was talking about past operations, a political assassination, liquidation of one of their own personnel, scandal at the top of the SVR. She was dictating at least a half dozen intel reports right there, from the couch. He didn’t dare take notes, he had to keep her rolling.

  “You were involved in the Ustinov affair,” said Nate, “so your uncle may be nervous about you.”

  She shook her head. “My uncle knows I cannot hurt him. My mother is in Moscow. He uses her as a zalozhnica, a hostage, like in the old days. Besides, he trained me, put me through school, sent me abroad. I am as much his creature as that monster of his.

  “I was sent to Helsinki to meet you, to develop a friendship with you,” Dominika said. “My uncle says he considers me one of his operations officers, but he looks at me as his little Sparrow, right out of the 1960s. They have been impatient with the progress I have been making with you. They want to hear how I took you to bed.”

  “I’m willing to help you there,” said Nate. She stared back at him and sniffled thinly.

  “You are pleased to continue joking,” she said. “Perhaps you will not think it is so funny when I tell you that I am supposed to find out about your former activities in Moscow, about the mole you meet. Uncle Vanya sent me to watch you, to see if you become operational, active, like you did for two weeks last month.”

  The mole you meet? Nate felt like the child standing beside the tracks as a fast freight roars by, inches from being swept away. He tried not to react, but he knew Dominika saw it in his face.

  “I did not say anything to that slug Volontov,” said Dominika. “Marta was still alive then. She knew what I had decided.” Nate was trying to concentrate on her words while numbly contemplating the close call with MARBLE. They had had no idea of the danger. Dominika’s decision not to report most probably saved his life.

  “Since I bumped into you at the swimming pool, I was trying to establish a friendship with you,” said Dominika. “In many ways, we were doing the same thing to each other. I know you were trying to identify my weaknesses, my ujazvimoe mesto, what is the word, vulnerability?

  “Your charming pursuit ensured only that we would spend more time together. I suppose that was Uncle Vanya’s plan all along. What surprised me was that I continued to let you work on me because—it dawned on me—I wanted you to continue to work on me. I liked being with you.”

  Nate sat motionless, still holding her hand. Jesus Christ, she had been working him, just like Gable thought. The SVR were hunting for MARBLE. Thank God she had decided the way she had. And, thought Nate, God bless Marta, wherever she was.

  He knew Dominika was already out of the starting gate, the critical stage. Her flat voice was a distillate of anger, fear, her desire to lash out. She had already told him enough to cook her three times over. Now came the infinitely delicate moment when she would pull back and go away, or she would make the decision that she would become a CIA source.

  “Dominika,” he said, “I already told you I wanted to help you. I already asked you what you needed. What do you want to do?”

  Dominika took her hand out of his, her cheeks flushed. “I don’t regret anything,” she said.

  “I know you don’t,” said Nate. There was no sound in the room. “What do you want to do?” he asked softly.

  It was as if she could read his mind. “You’re very clever, aren’t you, Mr. Neyt Nash?” she said. “I came here to cry on your shoulder, to tell you about my mission against you, to tell you I helped you.”

  “I am grateful for all that,” said Nate, not wanting to show how scandalously relieved he was.

  Dominika could see it in his face nonetheless. “But you’re not asking me to work with you to avenge Marta, nor to get back at my uncle, or Volontov, or the rest of them, nor to try to reform my beloved country.”

  “I don’t have to tell you any of that,” he said.

  “Of course you don’t,” she said. “You’re too careful for that.” Nate looked at her without saying anything. “All you do is ask me what I want to do.”

  “That’s right,” said Nate.

  “Instead, suppose you tell me what you want me to do.”

  “I think we should begin working together. Stealing secrets,” Nate said immediately, his heart in his mouth.

  “For revenge, for Marta, for Rodina, for—”

  “No, none of those,” interrupted Nate. Gable’s words came into his head. Dominika looked at him. His purple halo had spread like the rays of a rising sun. “Because you need it, Dominika Egorova, because it helps you feed that temper of yours, because it’ll be something you own, for once in your life.”

  Dominika stared at him. His eyes were steady, open. “That’s a very interesting thing to say,” she said.

  The best recruitments are the ones where the agents recruit themselves, his instructor had bellowed at the Farm. Remember that, no surprises, a natural evolution, he had said. Well, this was hardly a natural evolution of the phased recruitment. Nate felt as though he had just run Class Four rapids in a bathtub.

  It was an hour later and Dominika had never actually uttered, Yes, I will do it. No agent makes the decision with a handshake and a signature. Instead Nate just got her to start talking about it. He had told her, “Whatever you decide, I promise we will work safely,” which is the standard catechism when addressing agents. You mean it, but everyone—case officer and agent alike—knows that long-term survival for an agent, especially inside Russia, is unlikely. But the bland comment got a reaction.

  “To do this work correctly we cannot avoid risks. We both know that,” said Dominika archly. She said “we,” thought Nate.

  “And we’ll start slowly, carefully . . . if we decide to start at all,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Dominika. “If we decide.”

  “And we’ll proceed as quickly or as slowly as you want,” said Nate.

  “Your side can examine my motivaciya at their leisure. If our collaboration turns out to be unsatisfactory, I will tell you and we will agree to the okonchanie, the termination of our relationship.” They apparently had the same agent-handling cant in the SVR.

  She was through the first stage. It was getting late. Dominika stood and reached for her coat. Nate helped her, watching her eyes, the corners of her mouth, her hands. Was this going to stick? They stood looking at each other for a moment. She turned to him at the door, offered her hand. He took it and said, “Spokoinoi noci,” good night, and she left quickly, making no sound in the stairwell.

  After Dominika left his apartment, Nate stayed up, jotting notes, remembering what she had told him. He resisted the idiotic urge to walk to the Embassy, wake up the Station, begin writing cables to Headquarters. Recruitment. SVR officer, Sparrow cadre, her uncle runs the whole outfit, assassinations. It’s a spy movie, for Christ’s sake. He couldn’t wait to get into the Station tomorrow.

  His high spirits evaporated. He tossed in bed, throwing the bedclothes off. The Dead Sea fruit turned to ashes in his mouth. He had to secure the recruitment, make sure of her commitment; she could back out, a lot of agents did. When he put her in harness, he’d have Headquarters breathing down his neck. What’s her motivation? How much salary? What’s her access? What do you mean, she didn’t sign a secrecy agreement? This was very sudden. Is she a provocation?

  Production. They were going to want results, fast.
They would ask first for the best information she could get, and that would be dangerous. The little men in the little offices with the little beady eyes would want to validate her as a bona fide asset. Everything would be a test, they would not be satisfied until her information was corroborated, until she was “boxed,” passed a polygraph. Push her too hard, or push in the wrong direction, and they’d lose her, Nate knew that. And if he lost her after claiming a recruitment, there would be the knowing looks from Headquarters. Case was bogus from the start.

  That was just the beginning. If Dominika was caught, the SVR would kill her. It didn’t matter how she was caught: a mole in Headquarters, a mistake in handling, hostile surveillance, or simply bad luck, the lights coming on with her standing in front of an open safe drawer with a rollover camera. Nate turned over in the bed.

  There would be an interrogation and a trial, but they wouldn’t care about the facts. Uncle Vanya wouldn’t save her. They’d walk her, barefoot and wearing a prison smock, to the basement of the Lubyanka or Lefortovo or Butyrka. They’d push her down the hallway lined with chipped steel doors into the room with a drain in the sloping floor, and the hooks in the ceiling beams, and the stapled, waxed-cardboard coffin standing upright in the corner of the room. They’d shoot her behind the right ear even before she was halfway into the room, no warning, and they’d look at her lying facedown on the floor before picking her up, wrists and ankles, and dropping her into the cardboard coffin. That simple. That final.

  ROGAN JOSH

  In a mortar, roughly grind chopped onions, ginger, chili, cardamom, clove, coriander, paprika, cumin, and salt into a smooth paste. Add bay and cinnamon. Add heated clarified butter. Cook until fragrant. Add cubed pieces of lamb, stir in yogurt, warm water, and pepper. Bake in medium oven for two hours. Sprinkle with coriander.

  17

  The recruitment of Dominika was not in any sense normal. She was a trained intelligence officer, but she now had to learn how to become a spy. It wasn’t a natural transformation. Cement the bond, Forsyth had said.

  Station’s first move, therefore, was to make extremely discreet inquiries into the whereabouts of Marta, to demonstrate their concern. Gable arranged a meeting with a cooperative liaison officer from Supo. No trace of the Russian woman. The security video of a possible crossing at Haaparanta was inconclusive. A tearless Dominika thanked Nate for trying.

  They kept the BIGOT list way down, the registered tally of officers cleared to read into the operation, though they couldn’t do much about the Headquarters end. The case was already in Restricted Handling channels, which was bullshit, said Gable, because only about a hundred people read the cables. They still tried to limit distribution. Forsyth and Gable had done this before, knew the more carefully they started the case the longer the intel stream would last. Nate felt his resolve building—protect her at all costs. Do not fail, do not fail her.

  Nate found a two-bedroom in Munkkiniemi along the Ramsay Strand and the marina inlet, and the rat-faced NOC came back and rented it for twelve months as a Dane, a business flat, he’d be coming and going at all times. The gratified landlord couldn’t have cared less.

  A night of spring rain, headlights reflecting on the pavement. Dominika was backlighted as she stepped off the green-and-yellow No. 4 trolley at Tiilimaki. Nate caught up to her after two blocks, put his arm in hers. Not even a hello, in strict SVR operative mode, back straight, nervous. Her first safe-house meeting as an agent, grappling not so much with fear as she was with the shame. They walked wordlessly down narrow lanes, behind apartment blocks, silver light from the television game shows in all the windows. They hurried through the main door, cooking smells, boiled reindeer and cream sauce, up two flights, walking quietly.

  The first night of the rest of their lives. A couple of lamps on, and Gable was waiting and crowded her, took her coat. Dominika could not stop looking at Gable’s wire-brush hair. She liked his look, his eyes, the purple behind them. Another solid purpirnyj, she thought. Forsyth came out of the kitchen, glasses up on his forehead, wrestling with a cork. Elegant, wise, calm, the air around him was azure. Lazurnyj. He would be sensitive. Dominika sat on the couch and looked at the three men moving around the room. They were natural, unaffected, yet they looked at her and she knew she was being assessed.

  She knew it was for real, with them in the room, filling it up. Nate was a young officer, all she had known of the CIA up till now, but these other men were calm, serious, you could feel the years, like General Korchnoi back home. Then Gable raised a glass and massacred zdorov’e and Dominika suppressed a smile, stayed serious and correct.

  No business tonight, that was how good they were, just talk, and they let Nate do most of the talking, that was how good they were, and they listened and heard everything. At the end she left first—standard tradecraft for them too, she registered—and walked along the strand; not all the boats were in the spring water yet, and she didn’t feel ashamed like before. That was how good they had been.

  The second meeting, Dominika had time to look around. The galley kitchen had a two-ring cooktop, enough to boil water, and a refrigerator with rubber trays to squeeze the ice cubes out of. In the nature of furnished safe houses, the couch and chairs and tables were thin and cheap and garish, avocado and harvest gold, still the rage in Scandinavia, said Gable. The cheap prints on the wall were crashing waves and elk in moonlight, the throws on the floor were straight Lapland. One bedroom had a double bed that touched the wall on either side, and you’d have to crawl onto it over the footboard. The second bedroom was empty save for a hanging fixture of bright red glass. The bathroom had a tub and the requisite bidet, which Gable one night mistook for the toilet, and Dominika had tears in her eyes and started calling Gable Bratok, dear brother, from then on.

  Running a trained intelligence officer as an agent is more difficult than directing a sweaty banker desperate for the euros because he’s got King Kong for a wife, a two-year-old BMW, and Godzilla for a mistress. Dominika was an AVR grad. They argued, wryly, over tradecraft (“I cannot believe you think this is a suitable site”) or security (“No, Domi, the rug on the railing when it’s safe, didn’t they teach you positive signals?”). Nate wondered how many times he had to say, “Let’s do it my way,” and cringed every time she said, dramatically, to get under his skin, “It is my head if you’re wrong.”

  The CIA men quickly recognized that Dominika had extraordinary intuition. She finished their sentences, nodded quickly at discreet suggestions, had an uncanny sense of when to listen. An intelligent woman, trained as an intelligence officer, thought Forsyth, but there was something else he had never seen before. Clairvoyance was the wrong word, but it was close.

  A part of Dominika watched the process from afar. She saw how they respected her, valued her training, yet took nothing for granted. She knew they were testing her in little ways. Sometimes they deferred to her, other times they insisted on doing it their way. They were very thorough, she thought.

  The weekly meetings at the safe house, her work with them, all began defining her. The torment of the decision forgotten, her recruitment by the CIA became the burning gemstone in her brain. She walked around with it, savored it. It was especially sweet when talking to Volontov. Can you guess what I am doing? she thought as the sweaty rezident droned on about her work. Nate had been right. This was something she owned, hers alone.

  Forsyth came back when it was time to discuss, with infinite care, what secrets Dominika could steal from the rezidentura. They built the igloo, big blocks on the bottom, starting with what papers she personally handled, then what she could safely steal, then what treasures she knew existed but didn’t have access to. They told her to take it easy. Trained spooks as agents always initially push too hard, try to do too much. Dominika asked whether they would give her a camera and commo gear. She wanted to show them how much ice and edge she had, but it only rang bells in the CIA men’s heads. Dominika saw their faces and their halos change, and understood she had ma
de a misstep. Let’s talk about equipment a little later, Forsyth said, and wrote a cable the next day asking for an examiner; they might as well get it over with.

  Polygraph. The Flutter. Nate sat in the little bedroom listening to the muffled voices from the living room, one deep, the other sweet. Dominika was in a white ash chair answering yes or no to a thick-fingered examiner with a mustache whom Gable knew from other polygraph sessions and disliked. “Guy hit bottom twenty years ago, then started digging,” Gable said. Dominika knew this was an important test for her and she willed herself not to read the man, not to get cute, not to play with him. She concentrated on his questions, which drifted, colored, past her cheek.

  Nate sweated for an hour, then went out to the living room when he heard them wrapping up. Dominika gave him a nod, but Big Fingers didn’t bat an eye. They never do, they withhold results till they “review the charts,” coy as virgins. In the end Forsyth got him back to the Station and sat him down and told him he didn’t give a fuck, he wanted a preliminary up or down, because this was important. Fussed, the examiner declared himself satisfied that Dominika was who she said she was, held the rank of corporal in the SVR, and most important, was not a double agent dispatched by the SVR to disinform the CIA, or to identify clandestine service officers, or to elicit current US intelligence requirements.

  Now a confidant, the examiner did note privately to Forsyth that the charts showed a mild galvanic spike whenever she responded to a question in which the recruiting case officer, Nash, was mentioned. It required another series of rephrased questions, he said gravely, before he could confirm this was not evidence of classic Czech or Cuban polygraph countertechniques—there had been no controlled breathing, no bunched fists or clenched anus. Gable, when Forsyth related the examiner’s comments about Dominika’s reaction to Nate, simply said, “Orgaspasm,” and left the room.