Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  “Dense. You mean detailed?” said Nate.

  “Yes. I have read a reporting summary. The source is inside the program, by the look of it.” MARBLE took another sip of water. “But there is something strange. As chief of the Americas Department, I am unaware of any active source in my area providing military information. Judging by their interest, the GRU is not running the asset either. The information is new to them.”

  “What does that tell you?” said Nate.

  MARBLE ticked off the points on his fingers. “There is a new stream of reporting. I myself am not aware of any registered source to explain this. An illegal exists. So I think perhaps this illegal, run by Directorate S, could be the submarine source,” said MARBLE.

  “The reports just began, but you said it’s likely the illegal has been in this country for five years,” said Nate.

  “Precisely,” said MARBLE. “For five years he has been careful and built his legend, and he has finally developed access and has now begun actively reporting. It would be the perfect combination, an invisible and well-placed mole who has eased into a position of importance,” MARBLE said. Nate nodded, writing in a small notebook.

  “What about the Director’s Case you mentioned in Helsinki?” asked Nate. “Is there any more on that?”

  “Nothing. I know how important this could be, so I am listening and looking every day. There is one thing that might be related. I was in the Director’s office one day, sitting at the back of the room. Egorov came in and told the director, ‘There is something new from LEBED.’ He didn’t know I had heard.”

  “SWAN?” asked Nate.

  “Yes, lebed, swan.”

  “The cryptonym for the mole?”

  “Precisely,” said MARBLE.

  “Anything else? Any other clues?”

  “Just what I have told you. SWAN must be very high up in someone’s government, to be run as a Director’s Case. There are no indications anywhere in my department about such a case. No handling protocols, no operational cables.”

  “What do you think?” asked Nate. “What do you conclude?”

  MARBLE took another sip of water. “What I conclude, dorogoy drug, my dear friend, is that this wouldn’t be a Director’s Case if it were not in Washington, inside your government.”

  “You think SWAN’s here?” MARBLE nodded. “How do we find him?”

  MARBLE shrugged. “I will redouble my efforts to identify him. In the meantime, you might look at Rezident Golov in Washington. He would have the stature to meet someone senior. And he is a britva, as sharp as a razor on the street.”

  He got up and walked to the window to look out over the street. “So many games,” he said to the city below, “so many dangers. I will be glad to see an end to it.”

  “As long as we’re speaking of dangers,” said Nate, “what is your status? Are you secure? What are they doing to find their leak?” Nate avoided the word krot, mole, with all its connotations.

  “I will have to save that for our next meeting,” said MARBLE, looking at his watch. “There’s nothing urgent, so it will keep.”

  MARBLE turned, walked to the bed, and put on his overcoat. Nate straightened the old man’s twisted collar, patted him on the shoulder. They no longer had to worry about metka. MARBLE looked at him affectionately. “We can discuss the most fascinating subject—me—in two days. The conference ends at midday. We can have dinner and talk all night.” He looked out the window again. “I love this city. I would like to live here someday.”

  “And someday you will,” said Nate, thinking it was unlikely that MARBLE would be permitted to relocate here. It would depend on the nature of his retirement, specifically if he was alive to retire. MARBLE walked to the door with his arm in Nate’s arm. Nate desperately wanted to ask whether MARBLE had heard something—anything—about Dominika, but he could not. Per the strict catechism of compartmentation, he had never told MARBLE about Dominika’s recruitment, nor her mission to unmask the mole through Nate. Agents simply didn’t know other agents.

  Instead Nate said, “We’re hearing that Vanya Egorov recently was promoted.”

  “Vanya is reckless,” said MARBLE. “I’ve known him for twenty years. He wants to run the Service but does not have enough support yet in the Kremlin, with you-know-who. He needs an operational success to please the oboroten, his werewolf master. If he does well with SWAN, perhaps it will help him, but he needs something more, something dramatic.”

  “Such as?” asked Nate.

  “To catch me, for instance.” MARBLE laughed. “I don’t wish him luck.” MARBLE grasped Nate’s hand warmly. Something was on his mind, Nate could sense it.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “I have a request, a message that I would like you to pass along,” said MARBLE.

  “Of course,” said Nate.

  “I would like to speak to Benford, if he has the time to come to New York in two days’ time. I must discuss something with him.” MARBLE looked into Nate’s eyes.

  “Do you want me to pass him a message?” Nate said.

  “Nate, I do not wish you to feel offended, but I must speak directly to Benford. Do you understand?” MARBLE searched Nate’s face but saw nothing other than affection and regard.

  “Of course I do, Uncle,” said Nate. “He will be here.”

  MARBLE opened the door; Nate saw the instinctive, undetectable beat as the old man checked the corridor. “Spokoinoi nochi,” said MARBLE.

  “Vysypat’sja,” said Nate. “Sleep well.”

  A change of hotel at Benford’s insistence, and Nate waiting in Bryant Park to pass MARBLE the room number, the basalt-and-gold battlements of the former headquarters of the American Radiator Company bathed in milky footlights against the city night glow. A bear hug at the door, it had been four or five years, and they sat, and the radiator rattled, and the Manhattan taxi horns came up from West Fortieth through the window glass. A bottle of brandy half-full and two glasses filled and refilled. They were not quite old friends, but Benford had followed MARBLE for fourteen years. Once a year he had read the file, watching it expand, like a swimming pool filled from a garden hose, fat with contact reports describing the precious outside meetings each year, twice a year, in Paris, or Jakarta, or New Delhi.

  The MARBLE file was the well-thumbed chronicle in twenty volumes of the life of an agent, a wife’s death, a widower’s sadness, the unexpected trips out to the West, the hurried arrangements to meet. CIA medals presented, three of them, and taken back, saved for a rainy day. Thank-you notes from handlers and chiefs and directors, and the implausible certificates commending MARBLE for “preserving democracy around the world.” Problems over the years solved, big and small, and the deposits to the retirement account, the yellow flimsies bookmarking each six-month chapter of the odyssey.

  The file captured a chronology of CIA Russia Division chiefs, some prodigious, some less so, who claimed MARBLE’s successes as their own. It likewise documented a genealogy of CIA directors, some formerly admirals or generals who unconcernedly wore their uniforms and ribbons among the spooks in the building that Allen Dulles built, and who carried MARBLE’s occasionally stunning intelligence to the White House, presenting it as the unmistakable fruit of their tenancies. And the file listed the names of the young men and women, MARBLE’s handlers, case officers of the snowy streets and the flyblown lobbies and the ringing stairways, all moved on, some upward, some not.

  As was his custom, Benford had read the file annually over the years for the signs of tradecraft fissure, listening for the tapping of the deathwatch beetle in the woodwork. Cynically, Benford looked for signs of the turning, the flip, the falloff in production, the photographic exposures more frequently out of focus or out of frame, the coincidental loss of access. There were no indications of trouble. MARBLE was the best Russian case in the CIA not only because he had survived so long, but also because he kept getting better.

  “Nathaniel has told you what I have reported?” asked MARBLE.


  “Yes,” said Benford. “We’re going to be busy.”

  “The illegal, the submarine matter, the Director’s Case, this SWAN?”

  “I read his summary this morning,” said Benford.

  “I’m sorry to say that the end of the Cold War has not diminished our leaders’ inclinations to do mischief. In many ways the old Soviets were easier to understand.” MARBLE poured two more glasses of brandy, lifted his glass, and sipped.

  Benford shrugged. “We’re probably just as bad. Besides, if we stopped, we’d all be out of a job.”

  “Which is what I want to talk to you about,” said MARBLE.

  “Volodya, are you telling me you want to stop?” said Benford. “Is there any reason for the timing?”

  “Benford, do not misunderstand me. I do not want to quit. When it is time, I would very much like to retire calmly, to move to America, to let you buy me an apartment in this city.”

  “You will have all that and more. Tell me what you are thinking.”

  “How long I can continue working with you, and the precise nature of my retirement, whether voluntary or kinetic, remains to be seen,” said MARBLE. Benford thought he had never heard an agent refer to the possibility of his arrest and execution as a “kinetic retirement.” MARBLE continued. “One thing is certain. I have two or three years left in the normal course of my career, given Vanya Egorov’s aspirations and the general direction of the Service.”

  “You could still become a deputy director,” said Benford with conviction. “You’re respected in Yasenevo, you have friends in the Duma.”

  MARBLE took another sip of brandy. “You would have me in harness for another ten years, then? Among the politicians? Benford, I thought we were zakadychnyi drug, comrades. No, my friend, my time is finite. And with some boasting may I say that when I stop working, the intelligence will stop, and the loss will be felt?”

  “Correct,” said Benford. “No false modesty need intrude. It will be a grave loss. You cannot be replaced.”

  “And then will come the frantic cries of alarm from your masters, the calls to replace the intelligence, the wrong candidates considered, the rush to recruit.”

  “A time-honored process, it keeps people like me young,” said Benford. “Volodya, what are you driving at? I can hardly wait for what we call the ‘payoff.’ ”

  “I propose to provide my successor, a replacement to continue the work.”

  Benford had seen too much over the years to be surprised, but he did lean closer. “Volodya, with respect, are you telling me you have a protégé? Someone who knows the work we do together?” He thought briefly of the lead sentence of a CI memo documenting that.

  “No, she has no idea of our work together. This will come with time, when I train and prepare her.”

  “ ‘Her’?” said Benford. “You propose to replace yourself, a general in the SVR with thirty years of experience and in charge of the Americas Department, with a woman? I do not object to the gender, but there are no senior women in the Center. I am aware of only one woman ever sitting on the Collegium in the last thirty years. There are junior officers, administrators, clerks, support staff. What kind of access will she have?”

  “Calm yourself, Benford, such a person exists.”

  “Pray, tell,” said Benford.

  “Dominika Egorova, the niece of Vanya Egorov,” said MARBLE.

  “You’re not serious,” said Benford, face dead, eyes unmoving, steady hands pouring another brandy. Lightning thoughts one after the other in that wire-snare mind. Jesus H. Christ, she’s alive. The two agents have met. They’re working together. Please God they have not shared their respective secrets while eating borscht in the cafeteria. Young Nash is going to be busy. And finally, in a hot flash: This could fucking work.

  “Tell me why,” said Benford with immense skepticism. “Please, Volodya, before the brandy runs out and I start to sober up.”

  MARBLE tapped the little table with his forefinger. “Benford, I want you to open your ears. This is a perfect konspiritsia, an opportunity as good as you have ever had in the history of your service.” He tapped the table with each point he made. “She is the perfect solution to our problem. I have considered it carefully. Her last name gives her something of a pedigree, at least until Vanya retires or is purged, but by then she will be on her own way. She is a graduate of the Foreign Intelligence Academy, the AVR, and she graduated with honors. She is intelligent and has spirit.” Looking down, Benford turned the stem of the glass in his hand. MARBLE knew what he was doing.

  “You and I know that a good record is not enough,” continued MARBLE. “She has the motivation, a mountain of resentment. Her father died, she was expelled from dance academy, her svin’ya uncle used her in the elimination of a Putin rival. He traded her silence for a slot at the Academy, then broke his word and sent her to Sparrow School. You know what that is, I presume.” Benford nodded.

  “And then there was Helsinki, I assume you know she was there. Then an operational flap, not her fault, but there was trouble, and they brought her back and sweated her for two months. In Lefortovo, can you imagine, like the old days. I can tell you she will not soon forgive them that.

  “I’m saving the best for last,” said MARBLE, sitting back in his chair. “I know what you’re thinking, that her career prospects as a woman are doubtful, that she is on the bottom rung of the ladder, that she will never, ever be able to develop any access. I propose to accelerate her career, to ensure her success, and she will never have to sit on a single general’s lap, mine included.”

  “I see,” said Benford. “And how will you accomplish this, to catapult her to stardom?”

  “Vanya Egorov is obsessed by the almost-certain knowledge that there is a spy in the Service.” MARBLE pointed to himself and laughed. “He in fact directed Egorova to Helsinki to get close to Nathaniel to generate some clue, or a name, about who the spy is. Did you know Nathaniel was targeted in Helsinki?” Benford kept his face shut down. MARBLE continued.

  “Vanya’s plans have been delayed by her security investigation, but she is out, and cleared, and frankly this test of her, this Lefortovo episode, gives her more allure, more losk, more luster.”

  Only Russians can think like this, thought Benford.

  “I have taken her into my department,” said MARBLE, “to give her a foundation. Vanya has informally asked me to reopen the operation using Dominika against Nate, and this will establish her as my close subordinate. We will choose our best moment, you and I, Benford, then make young Egorova a heroine, a star in the Service, her career assured, from whom no advancement will be denied.”

  “The payoff, Volodya,” said Benford. “It’s getting late. How are you going to make her a heroine?”

  “It’s quite simple,” said MARBLE. “Dominika will discover I am the spy and turn me in.”

  They wanted the noise and the people and the distance from the UN, away from the other Russians, in the Village, on West Fourth Street. It was MARBLE’s last night. The restaurant had a red canopy, with steps down from the street, and drawings of dancers on the walls, and high-backed wooden booths that screened well and let them talk. Benford made MARBLE order pasta con le sarde, Palermo-pungent with finocchio and saffron and raisins and pinoli, and they sat shoulder to shoulder at the table, so they could hear each other.

  Benford was worked up, talked a blue streak, was even a little frightened. He had thought about it for two days, from every angle, and it was monstrous, impossible, exorbitant. Things weren’t that desperate; if they had to suffer a break in the intel stream, then so be it, it was the nature of things. But to contemplate giving yourself the chop simply to establish a successor—it cannot happen, he said. MARBLE said of course it could happen, it had to happen.

  “If I am caught—who knows how the mole hunt will end?—it all stops instantly, no retrieving anything. We cannot afford to let things fall apart, and if you doubt it, then think about the faceless illegal crawling around th
e inside of a submarine, or whoever is SWAN, reporting to Yasenevo from Foggy Bottom or Capitol Hill or the White House. We can’t afford to wait.”

  And Benford, running out of room, said there was no guarantee that Dominika would even get the boost she needed and MARBLE’s gesture would have been wasted, to which MARBLE said, Don’t be a shutnik, are you kidding? A young officer, a woman in the new-age Russian Service, covetous for a place in the new millennium, with a counterintelligence coup like that, they’ll make her a colonel overnight. Benford looked at MARBLE and ordered two more grappe, and MARBLE said, Look, Benford, if I told you I have cancer and they give me a half year, would it make more sense to you? and Benford said, You have cancer? And MARBLE said no, and Benford said, Now who’s being the shutnik? Benford was down to his last card and said, rather pathetically, What about retiring to New York? MARBLE smiled and said he never really expected he would, he really couldn’t finish it like that, and put his hand on Benford’s arm and said, Let’s play it forward a step at a time, to see how it shapes up, and Benford, surrendering, said, On one condition: We don’t tell anyone—not even Nash—until we’re sure, and MARBLE said, Two conditions: We don’t tell Egorova either. And they drank the grappa as the voices of the late-night crowd swirled around them, secure in their conspiracy.

  PASTA CON LE SARDE

  In olive oil sauté chopped onions, slivered fennel, saffron, golden raisins, and pine nuts. In the bottom of the same skillet melt cleaned fillets of sardines and anchovies. Add a splash of white wine, season, cover, and simmer until flavors mingle. Toss with pasta of substance such as bucatini or perciatelli.

  24

  MARBLE’s reports about illegals and moles were restricted to a few senior managers in ROD. The real gerents of the information were the fussy introverts in the CIA’s Counterintelligence Division, the cave dwellers of the fourteen-hour days in the wilderness of mirrors, the balmy men and women who at home had train sets in their basements and pruned bonsai trees. They began to read Nate’s reports, dissecting the information, starting the research.