Palace of Treason

26

Twenty-one hundred hours and Zyuganov sat in the backseat of a Lada Niva, a small utility vehicle belonging to the Moscow police. A police driver dressed in civilian clothes sat behind the wheel smoking, and beside him sat Zyuganov’s protégée, Evdokia Buchina, unmoving, looking straight ahead down the dark street at a dimly lit door about a block in front of them. Eva was in a light warm-up jacket and pants, and under the unzipped jacket was a white T-shirt stretched tight by her mezzo-soprano’s bust. The sergeant behind the wheel had offered Eva a cigarette earlier in the evening, but she had not looked at him or even responded, so he left it alone, sensing something wrong with the mannish woman. If he only knew what was percolating under those dark roots, or behind those granite eyes, or between those track-and-field thighs, he would have gotten out of the jeep and smoked his cigarette by the rear fender.

Zyuganov looked at his watch. Five more minutes, then they would go through the door and up the narrow staircase of the dingy four-story building in the northeastern Golyanovo district of Moscow to the apartment where Madeleine Didier, second secretary for cultural affairs of the French Embassy — she was in fact the chief of the three-person station of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), the external intelligence service of France — was meeting a Russian man who worked in the scheduling department of Sevmash, Russia’s largest shipbuilding company. The DGSE had been developing the young Muscovite for a year, not, as was usual practice, to steal military secrets on the Russian navy’s next-generation ballistic submarine, but rather to collect commercial intelligence on Sevmash to better position French shipbuilders like STX Europe to sell French-built warships to Moscow on advantageous terms.

The CI lead had started small, as it always does, then it got worse. One rainy afternoon the FSB had followed an incautious Didier to a restaurant meeting with the Sevmash employee, then to another, and to the one after that. FAPSI had intercepted DGSE cables documenting operational progress with the target, who by then had himself been covered in cotton wool — total surveillance coverage — at home, at work, at play.

Zyuganov had no appreciation for the nuances of commercial espionage. All he knew was that a foreign intel service was spying in Moscow, and that President Putin had turned to SVR Line KR counterintelligence and him, to handle the situation. In an exhilarating, ten-minute personal interview (Zyuganov promised himself there would be many more personal interactions with the president in his future) Putin told him he wanted the matter handled in a specific manner, to send a message to the French that Russia was not stupid, that with a swipe of a paw the bear could shatter their operation and, particularly, that the long-honored convention between spy services of not using violence against one another’s officers did not apply. Putin directed Zyuganov to create shock and fear and to break the French of their garlicky arrogance so they would come to the table to sell ships on Russia’s terms, which really meant on Putin’s terms, which really meant a closing commission deposited in a sheltered account. Zyuganov stopped listening at “shock and fear” and made careful arrangements to bust the next clandestine DGSE meeting.

Eva had been shaping up nicely since her coming-out performance in the prison cellar, but Zyuganov wanted to test her in the more fluid atmosphere of the street, to see how she would perform against an opponent who wasn’t zip-tied to a chair or strapped spread-eagle on a table. “Eva,” Zyuganov said softly, and the woman opened her door, slid out of the jeep, and came around to stand next to him, her granny glasses catching the light from the streetlamps. They walked to the door of the apartment building, entered, and quietly climbed the dim stairwell. Eva led the way and Zyuganov, without a prurient thought, noted how her gluteus muscles flexed under the fleece warm-up. She trailed a bloom of animal earthiness, of horses and hay and barn.

The third-floor landing was nearly pitch-dark but Eva walked silently to an apartment door near the end of the hall and squared her shoulders to it. She glanced at Zyuganov, who nodded, and then she knocked softly twice. Zyuganov approved, a light tap from a neighbor to borrow some butter, not the pounding of the militsiya. The door opened a crack and a man’s face appeared. “I need to telephone,” said Eva in Russian, her voice cracked with urgency, close to crying.

Before the man could answer, Eva shouldered the door open, tearing the chain out of the wood and catching him in the face with the edge. Zyuganov followed her inside in time to see her pick up the dazed man off the floor, step behind him, put a hand on his forehead and another on his chin, and violently snap his neck, letting him fall to the floor like wet laundry. Another man came out of the kitchen; he wore a jacket over a shirt, and he reached under it for a gun, but Eva crowded him and held his wrists and pushed him backward into the kitchen. Zyuganov heard dishes breaking and a bellow, and Eva came out of the kitchen with blood on her face, spitting on the rug. Zyuganov looked into the kitchen and saw the man sitting on the floor, holding his neck, with blood squirting through his fingers across the room onto the opposite wall. A short linoleum knife with a bird’s beak curved blade was on the floor beside him. Zyuganov had not even seen Eva take the thing out of her pocket.

So much for French security guards providing cover for the meeting. They had been in the apartment ten seconds.

Eva’s glasses glinted as she shrugged off her arterial speckled warm-up jacket and wiped her face with it. Zyuganov clinically noted that she was not breathing particularly hard, but that under the straining T-shirt, her nipples stood out. He put a finger under the line of her jaw and felt a rock steady pulse. Zyuganov held up his hand — Softly, follow me — and toe-walked down the little corridor. Light was coming from under the bedroom door. Zyuganov drew an MP-443 Grach auto out of a formed leather holster at his back. As he turned the knob a French voice inside said, Qu’est-ce qui a fait ce bruit, what made that noise? Zyuganov pushed the door open. Madeleine Didier, in a white shirt and navy skirt, was sitting on a straight-backed chair beside the bed, taking notes on a steno pad. The Russian man was on the bed, sitting up against the headboard. Both of them froze when they saw the nightmare pair of Petrushka puppets, one a troll with a gun too big for his hand, the other a gray-eyed reform school matron with nipples like safe dials, come through the door.

Eva slid behind the Frenchwoman and lovingly slipped a forearm around her throat, stood her up straight, and held her still. Zyuganov stepped up to the Russian man, put a pillow over his face, and shot him in the head through the pillow. The muffled shot made no sound, but the pillow started smoldering from the discharge gases from the muzzle. Didier looked on, horrified, as the pillow fell away to reveal the sightless stare of her source and the dripping applesauce wall behind his head. The traitor’s death sentence carried out, Zyuganov moved to the next page of President Putin’s programme: to complete the horror, to violate the gentlemen’s agreement among spies, and to send an unambiguous message back to the French. Zyuganov nodded to Eva, who had been watching him while keeping mild but unyielding pressure on the Frenchwoman’s throat. They had been in the apartment for ninety seconds.

Madeleine Didier was forty-six, a married mother of two. She had risen through the administrative ranks of an unapologetically chauvinistic DGSE with a combination of smarts, good looks, and the willingness to challenge the overstuffed croissants in her service who tried to sideline her, or deny her promotion, or put their milk-fed hands on her knee. Sharp-featured, with liquid brown eyes and shoulder-length black hair, she had unexpectedly landed the plum Moscow posting and was determined to make her mark in operations, as she had done in the management track. The Sevmash case had excited the analysts at the Swimming Pool (La Piscine, the nickname for DGSE Paris Headquarters, because of its proximity to a nearby swimming federation pool) and Madeleine knew that continued production from her source would give her even more political leverage on her return to Paris next year.

Even as she was being stood on her toes by this carnival creature, the elegant Mme Didier did not fully comprehend that her heady foray into the glittering, champagne-bubble world of international espionage and intrigue had been interrupted by two cloven-hoofed, elemental beasties the likes of which not many in the sunlight-basking world could imagine existed. Brutal Moscow was one planet too far for Madeleine Didier and the DGSE. So it was with some disbelief and rising French indignation that she was thrown facedown on the bed and roughly, impossibly, had her shirt, skirt, brassiere, and culottes (Chantelle) yanked off her, and her Saint Laurent patent leather Escarpin pumps (460 euros) pulled off her feet and thrown into the corner of the room. Real alarm rose in the Frenchwoman’s mind when her hands were tied together behind her back.

As Zyuganov watched, Eva pulled Didier to her feet and put a strangle-knot loop of electrical cord around her neck and strained it tight, cutting off the protests that quickly morphed into short screams of panic and, with the increasing constriction, rasping gasps for air. Eva pushed Didier against the bedroom door, grabbed her around the hips with one arm, and lifted her two inches off the floor. With her free hand, Eva flipped the loose end of the electrical cord over the top of the door and wound it around the doorknob on the other side. Eva then let Didier go. The cord stretched, the hinges crackled with the extra weight, and the knob creaked in protest, but Madeleine Didier’s toes were now an inch off the floor, and her heels started beating against the door, her bound hands scrabbled at the wood, and the cord bit into her neck, forcing her head to a lopsided angle as saliva dribbled out one side of her open mouth. Eva stood close to her and watched her through her wire-rimmed glasses as the shuddering in the feet and shoulders started, and Madeleine’s eyes stopped blinking and went wide in the amazed horror that this was happening to her, the head of the French service in Moscow, in a civilized world, with her husband waiting for her at home and her expensive still-warm shoes tossed in the corner of the room.

It had been four minutes since Zyuganov entered the apartment.

Eventually the involuntary tremors stopped and Madeleine was still. Eva tilted her head to look at the blackened, slack face, then turned to Zyuganov, who was collecting Didier’s notebook and phone. He emptied the contents of her purse on the floor so the police would find her identification, and, looking at the dead Russian man again, he signaled Eva to follow him. Didier’s body swung as they opened the door, which slowly drifted back from the weight on the hinges, and a lock of hair fell across her face. They stepped over Monsieur Broken Neck in the front room, and Zyuganov, avoiding the blood pool in the kitchen, lifted the lid of a cold on the stove. It was Russian red lentil soup, his favorite, and he took the pot with two spoons to the couch, where they took turns taking sips. It was good, but not enough cumin. Eva, his genetically contorted engine of vengeance, spoon poised above the pot, deferentially waited for Zyuganov to take a spoonful before she dipped in.

“Go on,” he said, paternally. “Eat your soup.”

Zyuganov reviewed Egorova’s first report from Athens. She was methodically interviewing officers from every department of the Russian Embassy, and sending her anodyne reports through encrypted channels from the rezidentura. She could flail around in Greece for as long as she wants, thought Zyuganov, while I narrow down the suspects here in Moscow and bag the GRU traitor who’s talking to the Americans.

Things were going well with the Persians too: Zyuganov had gotten energy sector big shots like Govormarenko together several times with dreary Iranian nuclear representatives from AEOI, and details about the purchase, transport, and delivery of the seismic floor were being hammered out. Zyuganov was sure this progress was being reported to Putin, to his credit. At one Moscow meeting he had taken the Iranian secret service rep Naghdi aside and outlined his concept of transporting the cargo via an internal water route through Russia and the Caspian to ensure secrecy. He presented the plan as chiefly his own, saying only that other officers had “discussed its feasibility.” The Persian scowled at him, but looked impressed nevertheless. Zyuganov daydreamed about letting Eva give the bearded Persian a deep tissue massage with a carpenter’s adze.

Eva. And Egorova. That would be quite a dance. Zyuganov rolled the idea around in his head of sending Eva to Athens to arrange an accident. He knew he couldn’t whack Egorova outright: Putin liked her and had his eye on her. But Eva could push Egorova into traffic, or throw her down the stairs, or snap her neck in a slippery bathtub. It could also be a nice touch if Egorova disappeared completely. His Line KR would be the very section to investigate the possibilities: kidnapping, accidental drowning, defection. He could keep the ball rolling for years.

A wet job on Egorova was still risky in the extreme, especially with Putin’s patronage of her growing. He would, of course, not discuss this with his hairy deputy, Pletnev, who increasingly seemed to be attracted to Egorova — at least he salivated more around her than he did with the other women in the section. No, not with Yevgeny, thought Zyuganov. He pressed a button on his phone.

Eva came in two minutes. She wore her usual gray reform school dress, opaque nylons, and clunky black tie shoes with a thick heel. Her blond hair lay close on her skull. She walked splay-footed and leaned forward a fraction, as if she would break into a run in the next few steps. She entered Zyuganov’s office and stood with her heels together, as usual looking at him like a performing seal looks for the smelt in its trainer’s hand.

Zyuganov leaned back in his chair. “Eva, sit down,” he said sternly. She eased into the chair beside the desk, but sat upright, yellowed hands in her lap.

“I have been pleased with your work, Eva, very pleased,” said Zyuganov. Eva nodded her head but said nothing, her eyes not visible behind the glint in her glasses.

“Have you ever traveled outside Russia, Eva?” Zyuganov asked. She shook her head no. Bozhe, God, it was like talking to a primate through a symbols keyboard.

“There may be need for you to travel to a nearby country in the future. Nothing for sure yet, but I wanted to speak to you about it.”

Eva bobbed her head again. “I can be ready to travel when you need me,” she said. “Where do you want me to go?”

“Nothing for sure yet,” repeated Zyuganov, being careful. “You don’t have family to take care of?” he said, imagining dinner time at the Buchin household.

Eva shook her head.

“A man in your life? A boyfriend?” said Zyuganov. He might as well find out a little about her quadruped habits.

“I knew a man once,” she said vaguely. It was unclear whether she had been acquainted with a man, or had been intimate with him, or simply had eaten one. She shifted slightly in her chair, perhaps moved by the memory.

“Well, there’s plenty of time to meet new friends,” said Zyuganov, wondering for an instant what he would do with Eva when he became deputy director of the Service.

“Thank you, Eva,” said Zyuganov. “I’ll let you know.”

Eva stood and smoothed her dress in an approximately feminine way. “I’m ready to travel when you want,” she said, leaving his office.

If he fired that prehistoric cannonball downrange to decimate Egorova, Zyuganov’s only regret would be not being present to see her die. He made a mental note to explore ways to film the assassination with a stationary video camera. Oh, and he’d want audio with the images too.

Sauté chopped onions, minced garlic, and diced apricots till soft. Add red lentils, cumin, oregano, diced tomatoes, honey, salt, and pepper, and cover with chicken stock. Bring to a boil, simmer, and then process to desired consistency. Serve warm or at room temperature, with mint and sour cream.