Red Sparrow: A Novel

by Jason Matthews

  Beneath the surface, Gable later remarked, Benford had a large case of flop sweat as he laid out the Chinese-puzzle operational schedule in a narrative flood that suggested the drive belt of his tongue had slipped the flywheel of his mind.

  “Forsyth, you must remain at Station to deflect the inevitable obstreperous cable traffic from the First Lord of the Admiralty, Chief Europe, and the other savants in Headquarters.

  “I will fly ahead to Estonia to take the local young COS in hand and to liaise with the police—KaPo, they’re called, once Russian-trained but now NATO and very earnest and intense. I expect the Center to be active, ticks all over Estonia, to see what they can pick up, even try a snatch to get DIVA back.

  “You, Gable, have the most critical task. Hide her, keep her safe. Convince DIVA to return. You have one or two days in which to do this, then deliver her, at the end of the second day, to the bridge in Narva at 1700 local.

  “Until that time, under absolutely no circumstances is anyone to use a phone, cell or landline. Moscow Rules, is that clear? Russian SIGINT is every bit as good in tracking mobile phones, and the Center still controls assets in their former satellite.

  “I suggest, Gable, that you fly from Greece to Latvia, then make the trip from Riga in the early morning; it’s three hundred sixty kilometers from Latvia on the E67, and the Narva Bridge will be closed by KaPo when the daily traffic subsides and before the night truck traffic begins.

  “Gable, you must devote any available time to coach DIVA on the exchange on the bridge. They’ll be looking at her very closely.

  “I want MARBLE out of Estonia within two hours of the exchange, out of their reach. The air attaché promised me a C-37 in Tallinn, but Forsyth, please remind him to have the aircraft there; I do not want to have to fly economy on an Estonian Air flight to Trondheim to get him clear.”

  Later, as he walked Benford to the departure gate at Venizelos, Forsyth took him by the arm. “Quite an operation you’ve put together here, Simon,” he said. “You will have Russians, Estonians, SVR, and CIA at the bridge, all fingering their weapons nervously. God willing, MARBLE will be standing in the night fog, waiting to be exchanged.”

  Benford stopped and turned toward Forsyth. “Tom, Gable and DIVA must stay black. No cell phones, no contact, nothing that would give the Center even the remotest opportunity to attempt a hostile action.”

  “Gable’s already disappeared,” said Forsyth. “As of yesterday afternoon, even I don’t know where he is.”

  Benford nodded. “We have no choice; we’ve got to move ahead as if she’s already agreed. I want MARBLE there, physically, before they decide to execute him. This is our one chance.” Benford stared out the window at the tarmac. “Gable will convince her. He has to.”

  In the Station in Tallinn, Estonia, the young Chief of Station put down his coffee cup and sat up when he read Benford’s cable, relayed by Headquarters. He stuck his head around the corner and called his wife into the office; it was just the two of them, a tandem couple. Together they reread the cable several times. She stood behind him, her chin on his shoulder, making a list of things to do quickly, hotels, cars, radios, binoculars.

  Per Benford’s instructions, the young COS called his liaison contact in KaPo, the Kaitsepolitsei, to ask for an urgent meeting. Escort in town? Follow car to Narva? Overwatch at the bridge? Kick our former Russian tenants in the bloody balls? Delighted, KaPo said. Everything will be arranged.

  Benford arrived in Tallinn from Venizelos via Tempelhof on Lufthansa. With a brief stop at the Hotel Schlössle in the Old Town, Benford dragged the eager young COS on a pounding casing-and-timing run to Narva and back. A nondescript Lada followed them sporadically on the E20, but disappeared on the outskirts of Narva. The Russians knew where the action was going to be. On the way back to Tallinn, Benford stopped at a highway café grill, to see how the Lada would react. Surveillance proceeded two hundred meters and waited on the side of the highway. Benford made himself stretch out a lunch of boiled sausages, pickles, herring, Baltic rosolje salad, black bread, dark loamy beers. He hoped the goons in the car were hungry.

  Benford’s hotel room had been entered, but they had been very good. None of the traditional telltales Benford had left for them had been disturbed. The stray hairs, the talcum, the aligned corners of the notepad on the desk. But they weren’t as good as Benford. COS Tallinn watched, fascinated, as Benford used a rice-grain-sized Stanhope lens concealed on the bezel of his wristwatch to examine the back cover of the decoy cell phone left in a side pocket of his suitcase. Benford looked up, nodded. The microscribe marks on the cover were misaligned. They had pried the back off and probably downloaded the useless memory.

  Other preparations were under way. In Saint Petersburg, the director of the SVR office for the Leningrad Oblast was called by Yasenevo on the director’s VCh phone. He was informed only that there would be an exchange. He was told to organize and deploy a team to handle a prisoner for release, and then to escort a “person of importance” from the Narva Bridge to Ivangorod, and then to Saint Petersburg in the shortest time possible.

  The director was authorized to call the Saint Petersburg FSB and the oblast Border Guards Service to provide support during the exchange. A Colonel Zyuganov in Moscow ordered and stipulated that there should be no trouble whatsoever during the exchange and that it should be accomplished with the greatest secrecy.

  The Saint Petersburg director acknowledged the directions, and subsequently asked for and received approval to transport the important person from Ivangorod to Saint Petersburg by Border Guard helicopter. A Yak-40 executive jet, part of the presidential squadron, would fly the repatriated individual—whoever the devil he was, thought the Leningrad chief—the rest of the way to Moscow.

  The exchange for MARBLE was scheduled the next day at 1400 Zulu. Perhaps because they were all keyed up, perhaps because Forsyth worried about Gable, perhaps because he knew Nate had been frozen out of the operation and was headed to Washington, he took Nate out for a beer.

  They were sitting under pale plane trees at the Skalakia Taverna in Ambelokipi down the hill from the Embassy. Nate had been mooning around the Station, waiting for his flight, and Forsyth felt sorry for the kid; he’d been through a lot, been scratched up pretty good. Forsyth knew what else was nagging at him, apart from Nate’s usual fretting about his hall file and career.

  So Forsyth walked him down Mesogeion and up the steep flight of stairs to the polished wood entrance of the taverna, and they sat outside listening to the city quiet down for the midday break. Nate asked Forsyth if DIVA was back in Russia now, after she had blown MARBLE up, then tossed back his beer and signaled for another.

  Forsyth looked at him pretty sharpish, and Nate told him he had read the Restricted Handling file in the office when Maggie wasn’t looking and knew the whole story, about Benford’s plan, about Dominika burning MARBLE. Didn’t we try to protect our assets? How could she? Russians. MARBLE wouldn’t have done it; he was a guy apart.

  Forsyth leaned into it, gave it to him between the eyes, told him he had his head up his ass. Forsyth said that he was considering kicking it farther up his ass for sneaking the RH traffic. Dominika hadn’t known about the plan to burn MARBLE, Forsyth said; she was following orders, doing what Benford had told her to do, she had no knowledge of the canary trap, of the fatal words she was told to repeat. She was directed not to tell Nate any of it. She had discipline, she was the professional. She had broken down when they told her about MARBLE.

  Nate was silent for ten minutes. He told Forsyth he was going to the safe house to see her. “Don’t bother,” said Forsyth. “We closed it up yesterday. She’s with Gable, and even I don’t know where Gable is.” He told Nate about Benford’s spy swap, about the two-lane highway bridge in Estonia. “We’re playing this by Moscow Rules—well, Narva Rules, anyway—because we have only one shot at this.”

  Nate’s jaw was set. “Tom, I have to see her. You have to help me.”

  �
��I couldn’t if I wanted to,” said Forsyth. “There’s one point on the surface of the globe where it’s possible that she will show up tomorrow, and that’s fifty-fifty.” Nate understood that Forsyth was telling him because he would let him go.

  For Nate, the next twenty-four hours were a journey of self-loathing and guilt. He started the physical journey after getting up from the table and walking away from Forsyth, who let him go and knew what he was going to try to do, because if he didn’t try, it would be even worse than it was now. He had a day to get there. The Athens traffic didn’t move and the white Aegean light shone through the windows of the taxi and the sweat ran down his back onto the plastic seats and he threw the euros down and went into the terminal and bought a bag and a toothbrush and a T-shirt and a ticket on the next flight to Germany, to Munich, and the cattle in line didn’t move and he almost started yelling but limped through security and didn’t even register the lift as they took off and he wondered why the plane was flying so slowly over the Alps and the articulated bus in Munich circled the whole airport twice before coming to a halt at the sliding doors and he told himself not to hurry up the stairs, cameras were everywhere, and his stitches were acting up, itching. The endless concourse in Munich with a knackwurst and a beer, which he threw up five minutes later, and the two VoPos, cops with MP5s, asking him for his passport and boarding pass, almost told them he was too much in a hurry, and the epaulets in the booth looking at him for an extra beat, and he wanted to reach through and grab his papers but willed his hand to stay at his side, wet and trembling. The waiting lounge was full of lumpy Balts with string-tied suitcases and he wanted to shoulder his way through them and get to the gate but they clumped in front of him and the announcement of a two-hour delay sent his sour stomach sinking and he checked his watch for the hundredth time as he sat in the cracked plastic chair, hearing the Balts chatter, and smelled them eat bread and sausage and he made it to the bathroom in time and vomited on an empty stomach, an agony, and he lifted his shirt to check that he hadn’t popped any stitches and his skin was pink and hot to the touch but nothing was leaking. Back out at the gate, he fell asleep in a sweat, seeing her face and hearing her voice. Someone kicked his feet going by and he woke to get in line, semiconscious and numb with a buzz in his head and packed tight and they made him wait on the tarmac until they resolved the technical difficulty, twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour and the Balts wouldn’t stop talking and Nate’s head buzzed and his ears would not clear when they took off and the flight attendant asked him if he was all right. Two hours later, and they weren’t descending because of the fog and they were going to divert to Helsinki, he couldn’t bear that, and he closed his eyes and put his head on the seatback and the fog lifted in time and the customs table was stainless steel in the dinky-modern Tallinn airport and the anonymous, throwaway mobile phone purchased at the airport didn’t work and the rental car had a steering wheel that was loose on the column but he didn’t have time to swap cars and the little engine rattled and he was going too fast and fucked up on the roundabout outside Tallinn and went south on the E67 until a sign told him he was headed for goddamn Riga and he got turned around and on the E20 with the double-carriage rigs buffeting the wobbly little car and the radar cop pulled him over and took his time before tearing off the ticket and saluting him and the towns rolled past, alien names in an alien moonscape of flat hills and windbreak trees beside muddy farms and it was Rakvere, then Kohtla-Järve, then pissant Vaivara and the city limits of Narva, dingy Narva, and it was afternoon and the clouds were thick across the sky and he found the castle and the bridge, Russia across the water, but something made him get out of there, Don’t heat up the site, the last scrap of operational discipline. He drove around town hoping for a glimpse of her but there was no chance and he fought the guilt and the shame and dredged up the last scrap of operational discipline, and he sat in a parking lot downtown, the car rocking as the trams went by, and Nate’s hands trembled and he sat behind the fogged-up windshield, the minute hand on the dash was ticking backward, and he splashed cold water on his face and armpits and stomach—the stitches still itched—in the gas station and looked at his face, one side black-and-blue, like the Phantom of the Opera, some lover he had been, and he shrugged on the Greek flag T-shirt and ate a Narva sandwich with lettuce going brown on the edges and the lard oozing onto the waxed paper and Forsyth had told him sundown so he started the car and he couldn’t feel his legs and feet on the clutch and he drove back toward the bridge, but the striped sawhorse was already up and the jeep was parked sideways on the center line and he told the soldier he was part of the clambake down the road, but the blue eyes beneath the forage cap and the buzz cut didn’t understand “clambake” and was staring again at Nate’s passport when he popped the clutch and went around the sawhorse and heard the police whistle but didn’t think they would shoot and up ahead he saw a van and a jeep and Benford standing there and his vision blurred, Don’t know if it’s the wobbly steering wheel or me, and he let out the clutch and coasted down toward him, quietly, the last scrap of operational discipline left to him.

  ESTONIAN BEET SALAD—ROSOLJE

  Chop in half-inch dice boiled beets, boiled potatoes, pickles, peeled apples, hard-boiled eggs, cooked beef or pork, and salt herring (soaked overnight and cleaned), and mix with sour cream, mustard, sugar, pepper, and vinegar until incorporated. Chill and serve.

  41

  Gable dragged Dominika from the safe house—she came along grudgingly—and they went to ground. They talked for a full day in a room Gable had booked in alias at the Astir Palace twenty klicks out of Athens in Vouliagmeni overlooking the bay. They had registered as a married couple, easier that way. Gable never recognized the off-duty cop, moonlighting behind the hotel desk, but the cop knew the big American and picked up the phone.

  Gable didn’t even give it fifty-fifty. Dominika told Bratok that she no longer respected or trusted him; they had all used her. He listened with his purple halo in the Aegean light coming through the windows while she told him that ever since ballet school her choices had been taken away, she had been shoved this way and that, the things most dear to her had been stolen. It was why she had decided to work with them. Nate and Bratok and Forsyth had been like family; they knew what she needed. And everyone was so smart, so professional.

  But the result turned out the same. They had colluded against her. Even the general had broken faith. Her Russian mind saw conspiracy, her Russian soul felt betrayal. She would not work with them. She told him she had decided that she would not stay in Russia either. She realized the futility of defying the system. The vlasti would always win. All that remained was to decide where she would go. If the Americans would permit her to resettle in the United States, she would go there; if they refused to accept her defection, she would consider settling in a third country. If the CIA blocked her, she would return to Russia as a civilian. But she was quitting. She was out.

  Gable let her talk and brewed tea for her and put lemon in the Perrier and listened. When she became tired they sat on the balcony with their feet on the railing and looked at the turquoise water and he told her stories about his early assignments as a young officer and made her laugh. He kept her laughing over a lunch of fried calamari with parsley, lemon, and oil, and as the afternoon shadows lengthened they walked around the gardens. Gable told her that he was not going to try to persuade her to do anything. Dominika smiled and said, “Which is the first step in persuading me to do exactly what you want.” Gable laughed and took her back to their room and let her take a nap in the bedroom while he sat awake on the balcony. That evening Dominika put on a summer dress and sandals and they took a rattletrap bus along the coast to a small fish restaurant in Lagonissi and Dominika ordered baked sardines in grape leaves, and shrimp yiouvetsi baked with tomatoes, ouzo, and feta, and grilled swordfish in latholemono sauce, and Gable ordered two wines, a bottle of ice-cold Asprolithi and an aluminum beaker of pungent retsina.

  They stop
ped at another taverna for coffee and Gable ordered two glasses of Mavrodaphne, sweet and arterial-black from southern Greece, which once turned Homer’s sea wine-dark. The Christmas lights on the canopy of the taverna glowed and small waves chuckled on the beach beyond, invisible in the night. Looking at Gable’s big beefy face and brush-cut hair, Dominika waited, leaning back against the ropes, waiting for him to begin throwing punches. “You’re going to talk to me now, aren’t you, Bratok?” said Dominika. Gable ignored her and said he wanted her to think about the whole thing seriously, he wanted her to reconsider on her own terms. He would explain how he saw that, what that would mean for her. She agreed to listen, she expected his tricks, but his steady purple bloom told her he would probably tell her the truth. Probably.

  Gable said he thought her original reasons for joining the SVR were just and right and fine. She could serve her country, she could excel at a demanding job. Turned out she was good at it. But the promise of it all turned to ashes because of the beastliness of the system. There was nothing left. “Am I right so far?” he asked.

  Dominika sat back and nodded. His purple was steady and strong.

  “Okay,” said Gable, “now ops or luck or fate comes along and you meet Nate Nash, and he’s unlike anyone you ever met before—and that goes for the other handsome senior officers in the CIA—and you stick your big toe in the water to see how it feels, maybe to get back at the bastards. It isn’t about money or ideology, it’s your self-worth.” Gable signaled a waiter for two more glasses of wine.

  “Then something screwy happens. You realize that you thrive on this life, on the risk and the trickiness and the ice and the deception and the secret in your head every day. You thrive on it, you develop a real taste for it.” The wine came, and Gable sipped. “How am I doing?” he said. Dominika crossed her arms.