Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  The relevant portion of the tape had been marked, and Egorov ran the counter forward to the spot. Nasarenko numbly was admitting that he had spoken of the crushing backlog of work with the Americas Department chief, General Vladimir Korchnoi. Korchnoi had offered to send him two analysts to ease the workload. Nasarenko had showed Korchnoi one of the discs during the conversation. No, he had not inventoried the discs after that conversation. Yet by the investigators’ count one disc was missing, misplaced. No, it was ridiculous to think Korchnoi would have taken one of the discs. Impossible.

  Impossible? thought Egorov.

  He had known Volodya Korchnoi for nearly twenty-five years, ever since the Academy. Korchnoi had proved himself to be a superlative operations officer, adept, bold, cunning, the sort of man who could in theory excel as a clandestine asset for the CIA and survive the dangers. His foreign assignments moreover would have presented many opportunities to connect with the Americans. Impossible, he thought. Nasarenko would be spluttering for months, more names, more mewling explanations, more temporizing delays. Egorov would raise the idea of Korchnoi with Zyuganov, but there was no time now. The American Nash was the key. His niece was already on her way to Greece. They would see how things turned out.

  Dominika marveled at the white light in the Athens air. Rome’s sunlight was golden, softer. This Aegean light weighed down on you. The buildings reflected it, the black roads shimmered in it. Downtown traffic—taxis, trucks, and motor scooters—poured in a liquid mass down Vasilissis Sofias to part, like waves against a spile, around Syntagma Square and the House of Parliament, to recede down smaller streets toward the Plaka. Dominika left her hotel and walked downhill through the buzz of Ermou Street, past shops with two-story displays of lighting fixtures, sports bags, and fur coats. Mannequins in white fox stoles stared back at her, signaling her with tilted heads and segmented wrists. Be watchful, they said.

  Dominika worked the street hard, crossing in midblock, entering doorways, using the mirrors in the shops and in the sunglasses stores to categorize elements on the street. Short, dark, sleeveless, mustache, dusty rubber sandals, flicking dark eyes. She smelled roasted, popping chestnuts, heard the twang of the wheeled barrel organ on the corner. Look for the foreign face, the blue eyes, the Slav cheekbones. Look for the brown bloom, the yellow, the green, the signals of danger, deceit, or stress.

  Dominika was dressed in a blue cotton dress with a square neck and black sandals. She carried a small black clutch bag and wore round sunglasses with black frames. An inexpensive wristwatch with a black face and a simple link band was on her left wrist. She wore her hair up, cooler in the midmorning heat, a blue-eyed Russian doing countersurveillance before meeting a member of the opposition.

  Dominika turned off Ermou onto a side street, passing tiny storefronts displaying religious vestments, golden cassocks, stoles, and miters. Silver pectoral crosses hung on heavy chains and rotated slowly in the display windows. She was alone on these side streets, alone after one, two, three turns. Ahead of her was the little Byzantine chapel of Kapnikarea, sunken in the middle of Ermou Street, broad brick and slit windows and sloping tile roof. Dominika crossed the street, went down five steps—the level of the street in AD 1050—and entered the chapel.

  The inky interior of the church was minuscule. Frescoes and icons in the ceiling arches were chipped and water stained, the spidery Byzantine letters came off as pale red to her, faded as if by eons of candle smoke and incense. Near the door was a sand table with long orange tapers, some tilted against each other. Dominika took a candle out of a nearby stack and lit it with the flame of a candle already burning in the sand tray.

  Before she could seat the bottom of the candle into the sand, a hand appeared and tipped another wick to the flame of her candle. Dominika looked around and saw Nate standing close behind her. He had a wry expression on his face, and the purple halo around him made him look like one of the Byzantine saints on the peeling frescoes. He put his finger to his lips, gestured with his head, and slipped out the door. Dominika waited a moment, planted her candle in the sand, turned, and went out into the white sunlight and city noise.

  Nate was standing across the street, and Dominika went over to him. He was very proper, businesslike, the case officer meeting his asset. Dominika remembered the intimacy of Rome the time before, and of Helsinki earlier. They had been lovers, apart from the spying, something vital and edgy and true.

  For Nate, the memory of them was more complicated. He had slept with his agent, he was risking his career, her safety, an enormous misstep. He had been warned by Forsyth and Gable, men he respected, yet he made love to her again in Rome, helpless to stop, and with the transcendental Benford in the next room. He had died a little inside when she had been recalled to Moscow, and he blamed himself for what she had had to endure. Now they had a mission to complete and there was a line of dew on her upper lip and he wanted to reach out and touch her.

  Dominika knew it too, with the clarity of a synesthete. She stood apart from him, not offering her hand, watching his eyes, the purple in the air around his head. She knew he wanted her to be his asset, his source, his agent, but they were more than that. He wouldn’t budge, so she was determined to remain professional. They stood there in the drubbing sunlight for a second, then Dominika said, “Shall we go?” and she followed him as he turned to walk up the street.

  They meandered down narrow alleys into the heart of the Plaka, turning left, then right on a seemingly aimless course, a route that would force any coverage to close up in the maze of passageways and courtyards and little open squares ringed by shops. Music drifted out of stores, yellow sponges threaded together in lumpy ropes draped the doorways, the peppery perfume of incense and sandalwood drifted in the air. Automatically, Nate stole glances over Dominika’s shoulder—she fluidly looked past his ear to check the other side of the street. He caught her eye and she shook her head slightly. Nothing that I can see. He nodded his agreement.

  As dusk fell, they walked slowly around Plateia Filomouson, ringed with chairs and canopies and umbrellas, crisscrossed overhead by strings of lightbulbs. Dishes clattered from the kitchens of the restaurants. Nate guided Dominika around a corner to a worn green door in a wall. A small placard beside the door read TAVERNA XINOS. They sat at a corner table in the gravel garden and ordered taramo and beet greens and papoutsakia, sautéed eggplant stuffed with ground lamb, cinnamon, tomatoes, and béchamel baked golden brown.

  Heads together, they talked quietly about the script that Dominika would play back to Moscow. They agreed that she would report to the Center that she had seduced him, and he avoided her eyes for a second. She would report that he was starting to talk about his work, the clever little Sparrow winding up her target. They had two days to create the legend, stay away from her hotel room, watch for surveillance. There would be no contact whatsoever with the Station.

  “You will never guess who is in Athens,” said Nate, filling Dominika’s glass with retsina from a battered aluminum pitcher. “Forsyth arrived two months ago. He’s Chief here now.”

  Dominika smiled. “And Bratok, has he followed him?” she asked. She wondered if they knew of their secret affair.

  “Gable? Yes. They’re inseparable,” said Nate. Conversation stalled. They looked at each other in silence. There was a heaviness in the air, a weight on their heads. Nate looked at Dominika and his vision dimmed around the edges.

  “We have two days,” Nate said. “It is important we go through the act. We need to fill the days.”

  “We must carry on the actual conversations, we must actually say the things I report to the Center. Everything must be, how do you say, podlinnyj?” said Dominika.

  “Authentic,” said Nate. “We have to appear authentic.”

  “It is important for me to live the details now, for when I report back,” she said, remembering the interrogations in Lefortovo.

  Then they had little more to say; they both were leaden with the lie, with the denial of t
heir passion. His purple cloud never changed, as if he felt no conflict. Dominika closed her mind to him. They were walking again, skirting the margins of the Plaka, along the narrow, dark side streets hard against the Acropolis walls. They went quietly up a narrow staircase with flowerpots on each step. At the top Dominika put her hand on his arm to stop. They stood in the shadow, looking down, listening in the night for the sounds of footsteps. It was still, and Dominika took her hand off Nate’s wrist.

  “Decision point,” whispered Nate. “Do we split up, go to our hotels, meet early tomorrow?”

  She didn’t want to make it easy for him. “What if my room is monitored? You would be expected to take me to your hotel, and I would be expected to accept.”

  Nate fought the sensation of sliding headlong into frigid water. “In the interests of authenticity, of cover, that would be right. Authenticity.”

  They looked at each other for a minute. “Shall we go?” asked Nate.

  “As you wish,” she said.

  Sergey Matorin stood naked in front of a full-length mirror in his room at the King George Hotel in Syntagma Square. He knew Dominika was staying at the Grande Bretagne next door, both venerable, jewel-box hotels of Old World elegance amid the discordance of the city. Matorin did not look at his body, crisscrossed with scars from combat in Afghanistan, or at the dimpled hole in his right shoulder where he had been wounded in the bazaar in Ghazni while leading a sweep with his Alpha Group. He concentrated instead on a regime of movements in slow motion: strikes, blocks, pivots, and traps, Apollyon performing tai chi, as the noise of the evening traffic roared outside his window. He bent at the waist, then straightened, his milky eye frozen in its socket, and took a deep breath.

  He turned, picked up his small roller valise, and flipped it facedown on the bed. He twisted four set screws in the metal frame of the suitcase to unlock a tubular concealment cavity developed by the technical branch, and drew out his two-foot-long Khyber knife with its gently curved hilt. He returned to stand in front of the mirror and went through a combat drill of cuts, parries, and slashes. The knife whistled as he swung it in a backhand cutting blow.

  Matorin’s body glistened from his exertions. He sat down on a Louis XIV chair, his sweat staining the powder-blue brocade. He picked up a large ceramic ashtray embossed with the King George crest and turned it over. Matorin stropped the blade of his knife along the unglazed ceramic base, heel to tip, heel to tip. The metronome rasp of steel on ceramic filled the room, drowning out the sound of the street. In a while, satisfied with the killing edge, Matorin put down the knife and dug a small zippered pouch out of his suitcase with the word insuline printed on the leatherette side. He shook two thick epidermic auto-injector pens from the pouch, one yellow, the other red, field syringes designed to be injected into the thigh muscle or the buttocks. The yellow pen contained SP-117, a barbiturate compound designed by Line S. That would be for the questions. The red pen from Laboratory 12 contained one hundred milligrams of pancuronium, which would paralyze the diaphragm in ninety seconds. That would be for after. Two pens, the gold and red of Spetsnaz.

  They took a taxi in silence to Nate’s hotel, the St. George Lycabettus, nestled among the pines of Likavittos Hill. From the soaring balcony they could see the spotlighted Parthenon, and the flat sprawl of city lights winking all the way to the horizon, and the black strip of the sea, and the harbor lookout where Aegeus waited for a ship with white sails. Dominika peeked into the bathroom, switching the light on, then off. They kept the rest of the lights off; the ambient light from the hotel’s façade was enough. Nate paced a little in the dark room, and Dominika, arms crossed, looked at him.

  “If you are reconsidering our plan,” she said, “I can report that my visit to your room lasted four minutes, and tell them your . . . ardor . . . was somewhat, how do you say, ukorachivat kratkiy?” asked Dominika.

  “Abbreviated,” said Nate. His color flared at the gibe.

  “Yes,” said Dominika, going to the other set of balcony doors and looking out. “The readers at Yasenevo would be delighted by the gossip that CIA officers’ endurance is lacking. Your prowess would be well-known at our headquarters.”

  “I’ve always loved Russian humor,” said Nate. “It’s a shame there’s so little of it. But in the interest of protecting our operational legend, I think you should stay overnight.”

  In the interest of our operational legend, thought Dominika. “Very well, I will sleep on this divan, and you will sleep in the bedroom, and you will keep the door closed.”

  Nate was matter-of-fact. “I’ll bring you a blanket and a pillow,” he said. “We have a long day tomorrow, doing nothing.” Dominika did not slip out of her dress until Nate had gone into the bedroom and closed the door. Another moon, she thought sourly, it shone through the open balcony door. She got up to draw the gauzy curtains but stopped and lay back down, letting the moonlight wash over her, paint her silver.

  She was tired of being used like a pump handle by all of them, the vlasti, the inheritors of the former Soviet Union, General Korchnoi, the Americans, Nate, telling her what was expedient, indicating what had to be done. How had Korchnoi done it for so long? How long could she last? She listened for Nate in the bedroom beyond the door. She needed something more from them all. She was weary of having her feelings denied to her.

  Nearly 0300, and Nate dully registered the door to his room opening. A diffused orange glow from the street lamps came through the sheer curtains. He turned his head slightly and saw Dominika’s silhouette—that unmistakable catch in her graceful stride—move across the bedroom to the window. She reached out and drew the sheers open, first one side, then the other, until she stood backlighted against the sliding glass door, which she slid open. The night air wafted the curtains out and back, snaking on either side of her, around her, over her face, and across her body. She walked toward him, the curtains parting, and stood at the side of the bed. Nate propped himself up on one elbow.

  “Are you all right? Is there anything wrong?” he asked. She did not reply and stood still, looking down at him. The case officer in him instantly wondered whether she had heard something, some noise at the door. Did they have to bug out of the hotel right now? He had checked the back stairwell earlier that evening. Still Dominika did not reply, and Nate sat up, reached out to take her hand softly in his.

  “Domi, what is it? What’s going on?”

  Her voice was a whisper. “When we have made love, did you report it to your headquarters?”

  “What are you talking about?” said Nate.

  “In Helsinki and in Rome, when we were lovers, did you tell your superiors?”

  “What we did was against the rules, unprofessional; it was my fault, we risked your security, the operation.” She was silent, looking down at him. It was another second before she spoke.

  “ ‘The operation,’ ” Dominika said. “You mean we risked the continued collection of razvedka, the intelligence.”

  “Look,” said Nate, “what we did was crazy, both professionally and personally. We nearly lost you. I thought about you all the time. I still do.”

  “Of course, you think about the case, about Dominika, the national asset.”

  “What are you talking about? What do you want me to say?” said Nate.

  “I want to feel that sometimes we leave the operation behind, that there is just you and me.” Her bosom heaved in her brassiere. He stood up and put his arms around her. His mind was a riptide of damage control battling the stirring of his passion for her. He smelled her hair, and felt her body. You gonna slip a third time, Mr. Case Officer? he thought.

  “Dominika,” he said, and the rushing in his ears started, the old danger signal.

  “Will you break your rules again?” she asked. She saw his purple lust, it lit up the darkened room.

  “Dominika . . .” he said, staring into her eyes. Her lashes caught some of the light from the window. He saw Forsyth’s face floating in the air above his head, scary, u
nblinking. He wanted her, more than his power to resist, more urgently than it was possible to think.

  “I want you to violate your rules . . . with me . . . not your agent, me,” said Dominika. “I want you to violate me.”

  The lace of her brassiere rustled as she unclasped it. They fell onto the bed, and she was on her stomach, and she pulled Nate on top of her, heavy and hot, his lips at her neck, his fingers twined in hers. She held his hands tight. He fumbled, she teased him, and he trapped her hips with his legs and her breath came up sharp. She groaned, “Trahni menya,” and reached behind to touch him while he whispered in her ear.

  “How many rules will you force me to break?”

  She looked back at him, wordlessly, to see if he was mocking her.

  “Shall I break five regulations, ten?” He kept his mouth close to her ear and began counting to ten slowly, matching the numbers with the cadence of his hips.

  “Odin . . . dva . . . tri . . .” She was trembling but at a different hertz rate than before.

  “Chyetirye . . . pyat . . . shest . . .” She stretched her arms out, gathered fistfuls of bedsheet.

  “Syem . . . vosyem . . . dyevyat . . .” Fingers like claws, she twisted the sheets around her wrists.

  “Dyesyat, ten,” Nate said, lifting himself off her back, hotly connected yet soaring above her glistening spine, and suddenly the gentle line of her back and buttocks arched, and she buried her face in the mattress, mouth gasping.

  The bar of moonlight inched across the room and they watched it as they lay next to each other. Nate leaned over and held her chin in his hand, kissed her on the lips. She took his hand away gently. “If you say the wrong thing,” she said, “I will put my thumbnail in your right eye and tip you over the balcony railing.”

  “I have no doubt you could do it,” said Nate as he lay back against the pillow.

  “Yes, Neyt,” Dominika said, “and if I need anything more, your little Sparrow will lure you into bed again.”