Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  On his return from New York, Nate was summoned again to Benford’s lair. CID occupied an entire floor of Headquarters, a series of interior rooms bisected with hallways and warrens that, unlike the normal Headquarters suites, were equipped not with the usual cubicles, but with individual offices. All the doors were closed, each had a combination dial above the doorknob. There occasionally was a door without a knob, the keyway painted over. What were these rooms, and what did they contain? A bland secretary whose left eye twitched intermittently sat at a desk outside Benford’s office. She looked at Nate carefully, blinked, got up, and knocked on the door, but did not open it. She listened carefully, then knocked again, gingerly. A voice from inside, and she opened the door a crack, uttered Nate’s name, and stood aside, motioning for him to enter.

  Benford’s office looked like the atelier of a dissolute professor at a forgotten midwestern college. A torn and faded couch along the back wall was completely covered by stacks of files, some of which had fallen to the floor, where they lay fanned out like spilled poker chips. At the other end of the room, Benford’s desk was a riot of overflowing in-boxes, stacked three high. A pile of newspapers leaned precariously on the opposite corner. On the walls were small framed photographs—grainy, black-and-white—not of wife, children, or relatives, but rather of bridges, tree stumps, wooded country lanes, and snowy alleyways between derelict warehouses. Nate realized that these were photographs of infamous sites, long-ago signals, drops, and car pickups. Benford’s children. Behind Benford’s desk was a framed photograph of the Neo-Baroque All-Russia Insurance Company building in Moscow, otherwise known as the Lubyanka.

  “Have a seat,” said Benford, his voice gravelly and low. Benford was short and paunchy, with a high forehead and uncombed salt-and-pepper hair, a wing of which stood out from the side of his head. He looked at Nate with large, deep-brown cow’s eyes through long lashes that were nearly feminine. Jowly cheeks framed a small mouth that displayed in its constant tics and frowns Benford’s utter disgust, or at best his contemptuous dismissal, of the matter at hand. “I read your final reports from New York,” he said. “Grammar notwithstanding, they were satisfactory.”

  “Thanks, I think,” said Nate. He had carefully moved a few files and perched on the edge of the couch.

  “Do you like MARBLE?” asked Benford. “Do you trust him?”

  “I call him Uncle, if that’s what you mean,” said Nate. “We’re close.”

  “I didn’t ask if you engage in frottage with him,” said Benford. “I asked you whether you trust him.”

  “Yes, I trust him,” said Nate. “He’s been spying for us for fourteen years.” Benford’s mouth turned down in impatience at being told something he already knew.

  “And do you think the nature of his new information, these clues and hints and traces about illegals and moles, is authentic?”

  “It seems like it to me,” said Nate, instantly regretting it.

  Benford puffed his cheeks with annoyance. “Seems like it, or you believe it is?”

  Nate took a deep breath. “I think his information is authentic. If MARBLE were being fed a barium meal, the leads would be more distinct, more identifiable.” Nate waited for the next series of frowns and pouts.

  Benford’s head came up slowly. “Barium meal, indeed. Where did you hear that, have you been reading history?” His gaze drifted to the far wall. “Do you know who that is?” he asked, pointing to a small black-and-white photograph of a square-jawed man in gig-lamp glasses, hair slicked close to his head.

  “That’s Angleton, isn’t it?” said Nate.

  “James Jesus to you,” said Benford. “For ten years he thought every Soviet agent was a double, every volunteer was dispatched, every piece of information was disinformation. He was charming and poisonous and paranoid and utterly convinced that his night sweats were reality. He might have been right. I keep his picture to remind me not to rebuild his asylum. Now, about MARBLE. I believe him too.” Nate nodded. His eyes drifted to the other side of the room, to a bookshelf overflowing with papers and books. Five leather-bound volumes were unevenly stacked on the top shelf. Benford followed his gaze. “Those are the Wind in the Willows books: full of rats and moles.”

  Benford stared at Nate for a few seconds, his face working, whether in mounting distaste or in deep thought, it was impossible to tell. Nate kept his mouth shut, the only possible course of action. This misanthrope. Twenty years of mole hunts, double traps, and triple crosses. Networks disrupted, attic radios silenced, spies arrested. Black-and-white newsreels of shrunken men being led out of courthouses with jackets over their heads, hands manacled at the waist. Benford’s battlefield.

  He was clairvoyant, they said, a savant who relished the Byzantine world of deception and doubles and false trails. Nate took in the twitchy hands, long fingers running through his hair, the brain perhaps running too hot for its own good. Nate could see that MARBLE’s recent report about moles and illegals was to Benford what a sack of rats was to a terrier.

  “I suspect he’ll draft you to work with him,” C/ROD had said. “Good luck with that.”

  “I want you to work with me on MARBLE’s information,” Benford said. “Starting today. Move your belongings up from ROD. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing. We’re going to find the illegal.”

  “Do I tell C/ROD?” asked Nate. “Should I tell him how to reach me?”

  “No one. I’ll let him know if he asks. But he won’t. We’re not going to tell anyone about these leads. No Boston or New York Station, no tight-ass FBI, no interior decorators in DIA, no NSC, no congressional committees. No fucking fuckers in Washington fuck-starting this fiesta with their fucking leaks. It’s just you, me. I trust that meets with your approval?”

  Nate nodded.

  Becoming Benford’s acolyte is either a distinct honor or a prison sentence, thought Nate, but it didn’t matter much. His career path after Helsinki had stalled. Benefactors like Forsyth and Gable were still in the field, but unable to support him. Nate looked at the brilliant, twitchy Benford and decided. Nate was good at internal ops, he knew Russia, and he could contribute. Benford could hardly be viewed as a patron—someone this misanthropic and sour would never be a willing mentor to anyone—but Nate decided to throw in with him, to immerse himself in counterintelligence, to learn about the fog-shrouded world in which Benford thrived. Maybe he could salvage his rep. In any case, for the first time since the Farm, Nate stopped worrying about the future.

  Nate was quietly installed in a disused office in the corner of the Counterintelligence Division. It was utterly quiet in the hallway. Were people in there, working? Or would Norman Bates’s mother’s desiccated skeleton swivel grinning in her chair to greet you? “Here you are,” said the secretary, giving him a wink, or perhaps it was her twitch. Ambiguous conundrums, Benford had said, get used to it.

  His new office was windowless, nude, and stale. Pushpins dotted the walls . . . what must they have held up for display? A desk drawer that squealed when pulled open was filled with fingernail clippings, hundreds of them, thinly covering the bottom of the drawer.

  The office next to his belonged to Alice LNU (last name unknown). In her forties, or fifties, or perhaps sixty, she was square, with apple cheeks and a fleshy nose, russet hair cut tight to her head and combed forward on the front and sides, like Napoleon’s. She wore prison matron’s shoes and walked splayfooted and fast. She spoke to Nate, as to everyone else, by tilting her head and leaning forward, as if to share a confidence or a secret, which of course she never did—no one in CI ever did.

  In the first days, colleagues drifted by slyly to tell him that Alice was a “plank owner” in the division. She’s been here forever, they said. She’s the one who really killed Trotsky, they said. She fucked Allan Pinkerton, they said as they fled back to their offices. CID, the Island of Broken Toys. Nate checked behind his door for Boo Radley flattened against the wall.

  Benford had told Alice to help Nate. She had sat a
t her desk—her office was actually sunny, a fern and geraniums flourished on a file cabinet—her sensible shoes propped up and squeaking. “You don’t know much,” she had said. “Let’s review: We have an illegal, we have submarines, we have New England, and we have meetings in Boston and New York. MARBLE mentioned submarine maintenance and five years. Okay,” she said, “where would you start?”

  “Navy personnel lists?” said Nate.

  “Nope,” Alice said swiveling in her chair. “Lunch.”

  They sat on the upper level of the cafeteria. Nate played with a salad, Alice spooned soup. Alice’s friend Sophie arrived, huffing from climbing the mezzanine stairs on massive legs. She worked in OSR, where they still counted the rusting, radioactive nuke subs, the Oscars and Typhoons and Akulas in Olenya Bay and Polyarny, it still mattered, she said, thin-lipped, never mind what the Seventh Floor said. She was fifty and had jet-black hair, big hair, and black eyebrows, a profile off a Knossos frieze. She wore black tights and a black billowing dress and black therapeutic shoes with ski-jump toes. A black scrunchy was wrapped around her wrist for emergencies.

  She set a Sailor Moon lunch box on the table and unpacked plastic boxes and containers, chopsticks and tasting spoons that stood up on their own, and a cruet of salad dressing. Sophie looked at Nate’s salad and poured some of her dressing on top, “Try this, homemade.” The dressing had a balsamic sweetness cut with Dijon and a hint of heat, unlike any vinaigrette he had ever tasted. He said so, and Sophie beamed.

  Alice told them to stop fooling around and told Sophie what they needed to know, and she ate her curry and reeled it off, eyes closed in the remembering, or in the pleasure of the eating, or both. New London, Connecticut. Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Brunswick, Maine. Only three bases. Subs were big. Only one place repairs them, they’re getting old, being refitted all the time, like the Akulas in the late 1980s, Schukas they called them, really, a lot quieter, and Alice got her back on track. Electric Boat Works, big shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, across the Thames River from New London. Start there, Sophie told them.

  Back in Alice’s office, the CID link was cathode-tube-archaic and the names inched down. Security-clearance databases, employee roles, US Navy active duty and contractor rosters. Alice’s mannish finger ran down the screen; nope, nope, longer than seven years, less than three, nope. Senior management at Electric Boat and General Dynamics, of course not. Alice was fast, she looked at a name, scanned the info, and moved on. She had been pulling at names on lists for three decades. They had two piles of papers and Nate stopped arguing about “possibles” because Alice was so fast. She had her “first string,” her Lovely Eleven, she called them, and started going through the holies: employment, salary, taxes, residence, phone, Internet, vehicle, banking, mail, marriage, education, children, arrests, divorces, travel, parents, ethernet or cable, straight or gay. “How well did you prepare our little illegal? How far back did you go? As far as me?” whispered Alice to the screen.

  Three days later, Nate and Alice brought Benford the list, and he tapped the end of his pencil on each name as he glanced at the profiles, tap, tap, tap, and tossed the pencil aside and handed Nate the paper. “It’s Jennifer Santini,” Benford said with a yawn, the casual savant with unruly hair. Alice nudged Nate—See, I told you—and cackled.

  “Let’s do a deep dive, but I’m sure she’s our boy,” said Benford. He looked at Nate. “Now we go to New London and look around.”

  SOPHIE’S VINAIGRETTE

  Combine puréed garlic, dill weed, dried oregano, dried pepper flakes, Dijon mustard, sugar, salt, pepper, and grated Parmesan cheese with one part balsamic vinegar and three parts extra virgin kalamata olive oil and emulsify.

  25

  Despite the splendid summer weather, New London was drab and depressed, past its commercial and cultural prime (which had concluded when the whaling fleets disappeared in the 1860s). The once-teeming Thames River waterfront, which during World War II had seen gray hulls rafted three-deep, a forest of masts and antennae and funnels rocking gently on the tide, was now a brackish moonscape of tilting, oil-soaked piers and rusted-out warehouses with collapsed roofs. Two- and three-story clapboard houses, mostly double-family units, covered the residential hills above the river. The black tarpaper roofs were separated by the width of two outstretched arms, clotheslines stretched between second-floor balconies. Waist-high chain-link fences and swingy gates pitted by the salt air marked tiny front yards and weedy back lots.

  Across the river in Groton, the Electric Boat Shipyard stretched along miles of the riverbank, a city of cranes, steam plumes, and arching factory roofs. Occasionally visible from the seaward end of a massive floating dry dock, itself the size of a cruise ship, was the impossibly big cigar shape of a matte-black nuclear submarine, high and dry on blocks, its seven-bladed propeller shrouded in heavy plastic, hidden from Russian spy satellites.

  Nate did not know what to expect. They took the train up—Benford did not drive—and they stood on the station platform like two Bulgarian swineherds in Sofia for the weekend, not mole hunters looking for a Center-trained illegal. It was not clear whether Benford was parsimonious or crazy or simply operationally deluded to insist, mystifyingly, that they share a turret room at the Queen Elizabeth Inn, a B&B in a creaky Victorian halfway up a leafy hill. And the constant walking—casing, he called it—five, six, twelve hours a day, during which the quirky, brilliant cockatoo talked to Nate about the OGPU and the NKVD and the Cambridge Five, a primer of Cold War history.

  Day One: They worked up and down the hill, uphill in the morning, downhill in the late afternoon, looking at the houses, at the cars parked solid along the curb, the weeds coming up on the sidewalk, and the lace curtains in the front windows. They looked for likely signal sites, cache sites, nearby parks, the geography that could support an illegal. They had nothing.

  Day Two: They walked past Santini’s house at different times to mark the positions of her window shades, to see if the empty geranium pot on the front steps was moved, which could be a safety signal. They were careful at night, walked by the darkened house only once, dim lamplight behind the shade of an upstairs room. Was she sitting in the dark, looking out at the street? Did she have another apartment, rented in alias, for meetings with her handler? They had nothing.

  Day Three: They casually asked about her at the faded mom-and-pop store on the corner. No one knew her, no one cared. How the fuck we must look, Nate thought, this counterintelligence mystic and his young sidekick, and he tried a joke but Benford told him if he didn’t pay attention he’d send him home, and Nate said, “Pay attention to what?” while they were jerking off in New frigging London, Connecticut. They had nothing.

  They were working on the margins; Benford was determined to keep this out of the gun-and-badge clutches of the FBI. “If she’s a Center-trained illegal, she’ll smell trouble long before anyone drives up to the front of the house. She’ll bolt ninety seconds after she sees or hears something she doesn’t like. It’s their training.” They had to do this solo.

  Day Four: They did it all over again. That night, a summer thunderstorm rocked the trees and moved the shutters on the turret room, and the electricity went out and a battery radio played downstairs. Nate awoke to a flash of lightning and saw Benford in a chair sitting at the window, staring at the storm, seriously creepy. He was seeing the faces of the twelve Russian agents the CIA lost in one year, 1985, the Year of the Spy, all victims of Ames, and Hanssen, victims of inexplicable treachery that fed them all to the belching blast furnaces of the Soviet Union.

  And meals with Benford were the real test, the challenge. It wasn’t just the bumper-car conversation, but also the lobster bibs and hot sauce and oyster crackers and rating the clam chowders—too creamy, too many potatoes, too brothy, not enough sand, you needed a minute amount of grit—and discussing the difference between cod and scrod and what did and did not belong in a New England boiled dinner. “No cloves. Ever. There are rules that cannot be viola
ted,” said Benford the mole hunter.

  With little of substance to go on, Benford on Thursday night over dinner announced that it was time to do an entry into Jennifer Santini’s house the next morning. “An entry?” said Nate across the table. They were dining at the Bulkeley House on Bank Street near the harbor. “Benford, what do you mean, ‘an entry’?”

  Benford was sawing at an immense rare piece of prime rib, head turned sideways, the better to slice the flesh. Nate put down his knife and fork.

  “Compose yourself,” said Benford, chewing. “By ‘entry’ I mean the extralegal breaking and entering into the private residence of a presumed innocent American citizen against whom there is no evidence of wrongdoing by two unauthorized officers of the Central Intelligence Agency who are, incidentally, currently engaged in an uncoordinated and thus illegal counterespionage investigation which in the domestic field is the purview of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as stipulated by Executive Order 12333.” He looked back down at his plate and slathered more creamed horseradish sauce onto his beef. “That’s what I mean,” he said, then added, “This horseradish sauce is excellent.”

  Day Five: A quiet Friday morning. They waited until ten and walked bareheaded and with empty hands through the little gate to the back of Santini’s two-story house. The windows of the houses across the street were empty. The backyard was unkempt. A rusted washtub lay upside down on the bare earth next to a tilting shack. Benford walked up the wooden steps and tried the back door. It was locked and he peered through the chintz curtains. No one home.

  “Can you pick the lock?” asked Nate, standing behind Benford looking through the curtain.