Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  Now what? she thought. They had been separated and she had built up expectations, but things, apparently, would be different. They could not return to the heady days of Helsinki, with her sneaking out of Volontov’s rezidentura with pilfered documents under her sweater. The long afternoons in the little sun-splashed safe house, cooking on the little stove, were past. So was the little moonlit bedroom.

  She was a silly fantazerka, a woolly-headed dreamer. All right, she could be all business and she wasn’t about to make it easy for him. Dominika brutally told Nate about her recall to Moscow, about the cellars of Lefortovo, the endless days of questions, and the slaps and the purple lips, and how the cabinets at the ends of the corridors had creaked when she was shoved inside them.

  His face was ashen when she told him she had kept his image in her mind and it helped her survive, bringing him along with her at her side, down the corridors and into the next room. Nate did not react but she saw it in his eyes, the purple haze behind him was intense with emotion. Rattled, he got up from his chair.

  He was pouring wine at a sideboard across the room, and Dominika got up and went over to him. His hand was shaking as he filled the glasses. He wouldn’t look at her. He knew that if, in that moment, they touched, he would be lost. Nate turned to face her. He looked at her hair, her lips, the fifty-fathom blue of her eyes. His eyes told her, No, we mustn’t, but his throat closed up and his guts ached, and he took her face in his hands and kissed her, remembering the taste of her.

  They kissed each other madly, as if someone were coming to pull them apart. Dominika clutched his neck and she walked him backward out onto the little marble balcony in the dying light. Doves were darting between the tips of the cypresses, black against the sky. There was no sound and not a breath of wind. She pushed him against the balcony railing and wordlessly they fumbled with his belt buckle and hitched up her dress and Dominika was on her toes, facing him, like a five-minute tart in an alley off Kopevskiy Pereulok. She gripped the wrought iron with white knuckles, lifted one leg, and hooked her shoe on the railing. She mashed her mouth over his and moaned into his throat down to his belly. Her body shivered and she let go of the railing and wrapped her arms around his neck to hold on. All the bucking and shuddering and shaking on the little balcony made the doves in the trees jumpy, and they dipped and turned and flared among the cypress tops.

  Clinging to each other was sweet and natural and logical, and the little balcony became Dominika’s entire world, and Nate became the only thing in it as he trailed his lips across her mouth. His arms tightened around her waist and her legs began to convulse. She whispered, “Dushenka,” in his ear, and the doves swooped in the night sky.

  They didn’t move for two minutes, then Dominika breathed raggedly through his kiss and pulled away from his embrace, smoothing her skirt. He tucked in a trailing tail of his shirt. They went back inside. Nate turned on a lamp and handed her a glass of wine. They sat beside each other, looking straight ahead, not speaking. Dominika’s legs trembled and she could feel her heartbeat in her head. It seemed that Nate was about to say something, but Benford entered the room just then to fetch them for dinner.

  Sergey Matorin, the SVR’s executioner from Line F, sat at a small sidewalk table at Harry’s Bar at the top of the Veneto. He had a view of the front entrance of Egorova’s hotel down Via di Porta Pinciana, and was waiting to catch a glimpse of her, of Korchnoi, but especially of the figure of the young American. His squirrel-jumpy brain had committed the American’s face to memory before leaving Moscow. There should have been some activity by now, he thought. His chest felt heavy and his mouth was dry.

  He was tempted to break into Egorova’s hotel room, to wait in the dark, in a corner, enveloped in his own vinegar-ammonia body odor, but he had been given strict instructions directly by Chief Zyuganov, absolutely secret. No unnecessary action, wait for an opportunity, make no mistakes. Matorin was content to sit and wait.

  He eyed several young women walking up the escalator from the underground Borghese Gallery, but ignored them in favor of his latest daydream of the group of Afghan women and children cowering behind the mud and rock walls of a hilltop sheep pen during the Parwan offensive. As the grenades from the GP-25s floated in lazy arcs and bracketed them, the women’s screams mingled with the soft crumps of the explosions, until they were silent. A raucous horn from a passing car on the Veneto shook him out of his reverie, and Matorin was sorry for that.

  FORI IMPERIALE’S SPAGHETTI ALLA BOTTARGA

  Sauté garlic in olive oil until golden, then remove garlic. Stir in butter and a spoonful of grated bottarga di muggine roe, but do not overcook, as it will become bitter. Add al dente pasta to the oil and toss to coat. Remove from heat; add additional butter and a second spoonful of bottarga. Finish with fresh chopped parsley.

  33

  Rezident Anatoly Golov would have been unsettled to learn how much the Orion team had divined about him personally from studying his streetcraft. This was a maestro, they said, an intellectual, an artist. He didn’t use the ponderous SVR rules of streetcraft, the punishing, high-speed surveillance detection routes, the arrogant demeanor, the offensive “provocations” at the end of a run. Golov’s style reflected his many years as an operations officer in Europe and in America. His routes caressed surveillance, made peace with it, and only after many hours of gentle manipulation did he break their hearts. But the Orions had identified patterns, preferences, predilections in Golov’s SDRs. He was unaware of his stylish predictability, that he telegraphed his favored maneuvers. One of these was to execute a rybolovnyi krjuchok, a fishhook reverse, in his route about three-quarters of the way through a normally straight and benign SDR. It was a murderously effective maneuver—he would simply disappear.

  Golov’s fishhook confounded the Gs, who for months had been jamming his right-rear quarter. The frustrated teams were ready to give him a spanking soon by boxing his car and taking him around the Beltway three times before letting him take an exit. The Orions, observing from the wings, were more patient. They quietly studied Golov’s maneuver, they wanted to understand it, quantify it, to confirm what they all began to realize. After he dematerialized, the shank of the fishhook was Golov’s true compass course; it pointed to the final destination—and his agent—as directly as the leading edge of the Big Dipper points to Polaris.

  It was the math, really. Golov would have been safe if he ran only the normal five SDRs a year. But the Russian spooks in the Washington rezidentura were being starved out. They had work, contacts, sources to meet, Golov most of all. He had the enormousness of cosseting SWAN, and he needed to be black for meetings with her. That required two or three SDRs a week. Like the aging movie star who takes any work she can get, Golov’s SDR tricks were becoming overexposed.

  Sitting around a big table at a suburban Maryland Sizzler, members of the Orions enjoyed the Early Bird Dinner Special before the start of the evening. It was a small team that night, only five of them, but it made no difference. They were all old rock stars.

  Orest Javorskiy had emplaced polystyrene tree stumps packed with electronics in the snow of the Fulda Gap to listen for the midnight rumble of Soviet armor. Mel Filippo had led her blinded agent out of Brasov by the hand. Clio Bavisotto had played Chopin for Tito while her husband cracked the safe upstairs. Johnny Parment recruited a Vietcong general in Hanoi under the noses of a twenty-person surveillance team. And sitting at the end of the table was “the Philosopher,” goateed Socrates Burbank, nearly eighty, thrice married and thrice divorced, the Buddha who invented TrapDoor surveillance and who, from the backseat, called the shots and directed the team.

  Burbank had Waltzed with the Pig, he had done it all. In his early twenties he had exfiltrated an agent and his family out of Budapest past idling tanks in Martyrs’ Square. He had hammered landing beacons into the doomed beaches at the Bay of Pigs. He had sat in an overheated safe house in Berlin, coaxing the intel out of a Soviet general officer stupid with vodka, holding the v
omit can between the Russian’s knees. Not even Benford interfered when Burbank was running the Orions, grease pencils between his fingers, laminated street maps on his knees, Toulouse-Lautrec holding a radio, softly talking to the amoeba.

  An afternoon of towering thunderheads in the west that evening culminated in a stupendous line of storms and lightning strikes that paralyzed metropolitan Washington. Tree limbs littered the flooded roads, the Beltway became an unmoving annulus, and both airports suspended operations. It was the worst night for an SDR, it was the best night for one.

  Golov used the traffic to screen himself as he crawled from the embassy south through Georgetown, across the river on the Key Bridge, and then south along the Potomac, stopping variously in Crystal City Underground and Old Town Alexandria. Stops in the equatorial downpour were more than uncomfortable—by the time Golov finished desultory shopping in Alexandria he was soaked. So too was the FBI team that followed moodily in his wake.

  Despite the weather, Golov was trying to sell Mount Vernon as his ultimate destination, supported by a mild and linear route in that direction. Evening concerts and colonial dinners were popular at the mansion, and no surveillance team worth its salt would fail to flood the area if a rabbit even hinted at heading that way. The FBI did exactly that, sending two cars ahead and keeping four trailing cars way back on the rezident. It was time for Golov’s magic. His move would be covered by the traffic, the FBI too far behind. His fishhook was a quick turn onto the ramp to the Wilson Bridge, across the Potomac into Maryland and Oxon Hill, through Forest Heights, and toward Anacostia.

  A puff of smoke and he was gone. Thirty minutes later, the FBI team glumly radioed that they had lost the rabbit somehow on GW Parkway south, Mount Vernon was negative, and they were retracing the route, sweeping back through Alexandria and north into suburban Virginia. Golov’s fishhook was stuck firmly in their mouths, pulling them farther and farther away.

  The rain stopped and traffic thinned as Golov cut north through southwest Washington, stairstepping, doubling back, parking at the curb to wait and watch. The wipers streaked his windshield in the intermittent mode. He now had only to traverse the National Mall to enter downtown. He would park his car in an underground garage in the K Street corridor and walk the dozen or so blocks to the Tabard Inn. He had seen no whisper of trailing surveillance; his years of experience told him he was black, alone, free.

  Soc Burbank’s grease pencil squeaked on the map. The reverse had been on the Wilson Bridge—the only explanation—and the shank was pointing downtown. He tossed the FBI brick to the side; the only things coming out of the FEEB frequencies now were profanities. His pencil squeaked some more and he built a static picket line along the south side of the Mall, three cars on Seventh, Fourteenth, and Seventeenth Streets, leaving the tunnels at Ninth and Twelfth unguarded. At dusk, Clio observed Golov’s black BMW ooze up Fourteenth Street. Softly she called him through, just direction and speed. She pulled into traffic and followed him as only a grandmother could, tenderly and with great concern.

  The two other Orion cars converged on Golov using parallel tracks along Eighteenth and Pennsylvania. Mel and Soc relinquished the eye to Johnny near McPherson Square, where he saw Golov enter a parking garage. The team prepared to cover the Russian on foot; and it was here they really excelled. They had not used the ABC formation in a decade. Instead they swirled around the rabbit, dipped him in chocolate. They moved ahead, they walked back through, they crossed in front, they looped far ahead. If Golov happened to glance in an Orion’s direction, he or she did not flinch or turn away or window-shop. Rheumy eyes met his for an instant, then proceeded with absentminded sweetness, blue hair under improbable berets, rakish fisherman caps, packages, purses, librarian eyeglasses, and a briar pipe. Golov, tall and patrician and at home on the streets of Paris or London, didn’t register a thing.

  They were too good, too natural, too fluid. They were invisible among the casuals on the street, especially to a senior SVR officer exhausted by the pressure, fed up with the uncompromising burdens of tradecraft, and who was working on a serious case of tunnel vision with each step closer to the Tabard Inn. The Russian was being had by five pensioners with liver spots and bad knees. If he could detect someone, he could turn away, buy a newspaper, order a coffee, head home, the meeting aborted. But he didn’t see anything.

  The rain had stopped, and when Golov turned down N Street, TrapDoor closed. It was the Tabard Inn, the only possibility on N, forget the Topaz Hotel. Mel and Clio were already waiting inside the lobby, shoes off, chafing their feet, exclaiming, My goodness how they hurt. They watched as Golov got a room key and disappeared up the narrow staircase.

  Their discipline—and a firmly established procedure—compelled them to stay in place for a half hour, to observe activity and potentially interesting individuals. They had no law-enforcement arrest authority and loitering longer than that would alert the target. So Soc called Benford, gave him a terse report, and hung up. Then he keyed the radio and clicked them out of there.

  They hadn’t witnessed a meeting, they didn’t have squat. They had foxed the SVR rezident, but there was no agent, no suspect. Patience and perspective helped them cope with the inconclusive evening. As did late-night hot dogs at the Shake Shack on Eighteenth.

  A Russian intelligence officer was very likely meeting clandestinely with an unidentified penetration of the US government as the Orions ordered their dogs. Johnny’s China Ops background manifested itself in sesame slaw and chilies. Orest was a purist and would accept only mustard and kraut. Mel favored onions and ketchup, Clio the classical pianist had hers with lettuce, tomato, bacon, and blue cheese. Socrates had years ago shocked them into uneasy silence by inventing the Depth Charge, the ingredients for which were available only at the Shake Shack: a disgusting schmear of pan-fried potatoes, caramelized onions, anchovies, and fiery Argentine chimichurri sauce. By mutual consent the Orions had agreed that they would never eat in their vehicles with Soc.

  Benford was on the phone to the FBI, alternatively screaming and blaspheming, then begging them to deploy a team to cover the Tabard Inn this instant. Several calls were relayed, a shift supervisor was notified, surveillance squad members were activated. In the two hours it took for the Gs to deploy around the little hotel, Stephanie Boucher had arrived, met with Golov, and departed. It would not have been difficult to follow the senator, certainly not as challenging as it was following Anatoly Golov. It would not have been as challenging as following a flock of Japanese tourists walking along the Tidal Basin holding pink umbrellas. In fact, it would not have been as challenging as following an elephant through a rice-paper factory with a bell on its tail.

  The measure of her arrogance and sociopathy was that Senator Boucher did not even remotely look for surveillance when on the street, even though she was engaged in the ultimate adventure of treason. She had parked in a loading zone on N Street, the only free space around—she counted on the inviolability conferred by her red-and-white congressional license plates. When she left the meeting with Golov, minus another Pathfinder Corporation disc, she drove straight home. The FBI missed it all.

  Benford reviewed the Orion surveillance log the next day while raving at the FBI Special Agents in the room. Nate, back-benched, sat quietly along the wall.

  “Forgive me,” said Benford in his reedy professor voice, which Nate recognized as the first of the red swallowtail storm flags of a whole gale. “I alert you to the fact that the SVR Washington rezident has gone to ground after a multi-hour SDR, doubtless to meet the US mole classified as a ‘Director’s Case’ by the Center. It takes your organization over one hundred and twenty minutes from the time of my call to deploy around the Tabard Inn, which is, roughly, one-point-six miles distant from the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Despite the empirical evidence of contact between the Russian and an American traitor, your people did not check the register, or speak with hotel staff, much less pound up the stairs and enter Golov’s room. Had you entered that roo
m and physically searched the most senior SVR officer in the Northern Hemisphere, you doubtless would have recovered classified information—in one form or another—provided that very evening by Golov’s American agent.” The FBI SAs shifted in their seats.

  “Yet the FBI did nothing. In this, arguably the biggest espionage case since 2001, you let the traitor walk out of the room, unidentified and at large.”

  “Suspect,” said Chaz Montgomery. His tie was a Gauguin print of a lounging Polynesian girl. Benford experienced physical pain when looking at it.

  “What?” said Benford, his voice rising. Nate wondered if the exchange would end with one of the FBI SAs actually shooting Benford to make him stop talking.

  “I said ‘suspect,’ ” said Montgomery. “Whoever is meeting with Golov is a suspect.”

  Benford looked around the room. “Chaz, would you send me the current curriculum of your basic-training course at the academy?” he said. “I expect to discover brightly colored pictures of ponies and flowers.”

  “Fuck you, Benford,” said Montgomery. “You know the rules, and I’m guessing you are at least remotely familiar with the law. We need evidence, incontrovertible evidence, before we move forward to arrest anyone.”

  “And tossing Golov?” asked Benford.

  “Ever hear of diplomatic immunity? We don’t even know if there was a meeting or what, if anything, was passed. He could have been there to hand out invitations to the Russia Day reception at the embassy.”

  “You’re not serious,” said Benford.

  “You know as well as I that we need to build a solid book before we act. These investigations take time. It could break tomorrow, next week, next year.”

  “You men are Tartars, Mongols, Visigoths, Carthaginians,” said Benford, shaking his head.

  “What’s cancer have to do with it?” asked a young SA whose biceps were visible beneath his starched white shirt.