Palace of Treason

19

The tritium face on Hannah’s watch read five minutes after midnight. She had been on Moscow streets for thirteen hours and was marshaling her flagging reserves as she chewed an energy bar. She was in the park, at the staging point for loading the last sensor site. Moscow summer light lasted late — at the height of the solstice there was never full darkness. She had run a complicated surveillance detection route — the SDR had been planned meticulously, down to the last turn and the last minute. COS Throckmorton had looked over her shoulder the whole time, his Jerusalem artichoke nose inches from her ear, and hadn’t said a word when she finished drafting the plan in Station.

Nate had been right: The minute she was out onto the street on an ostensible shopping tour, backpack slung over her shoulder, her senses lit up and she moved with confidence. She had done her homework: She knew Moscow streets as if she had lived there for years. She thought she might have had coverage in the first hour out of the embassy, but time over distance had stripped away the “possibles” one after the other. A loop to the north beyond the ring road in her sweet little Czech-made Skoda — the new-car smell was better than anchovies — ended with a turn to the west and a series of planned provocative moves, culminating in stashing her car in the massive parking garage under Vremena Goda shopping mall. Parking underground was a precaution: A signal from any beacon emplaced on her car by the FSB would not reach the street from beneath the building. She had not seen any discernible surveillance indicators: no running pedestrians, no hastily averted looks, no revving engines, no car doors chunking closed, no feel of pressure on the wings, or behind, or ahead. You never know completely — that’s where instinct and nerve take over — but as dusk approached, Hannah Archer felt the street and knew she was black.

Hannah sat in the gloom of the park, leaning against a tree trunk, her blond hair tucked under the hood of a light nylon jacket, the backpack between her legs. She wore black jeans, moisture-wicking tank top under the jacket, and soft-soled shoes. Besides the pack, she was traveling light: a dry magnetic compass, two-inch tactical flashlight with red lens, mini multi-tool, Hearsey’s digging trowel. The black jacket was reversible to light blue, and would change her profile slightly. The summer night had a slight chill. Her body ached, her legs throbbed, her glasses were fogged around the edges, and she saw her hands shaking with fatigue as she unpeeled the last half of the energy bar. She felt sticky and longed for a shower. Her head, however, was clear, her brain processing everything, her senses alert. Now it was time to listen. The park was completely still, absolutely empty, utterly dark. She waited for the minute squeak of cheap shoe leather, the scratchy static of a radio squelch break. She was part of the Russian night, she was one of those Russian sylphs drifting through the air, she was — Why don’t you gambol through the park sprinkling fairy dust you idiot? Concentrate.

She put her head back against the trunk of the tree and closed her eyes. Half a bottle of water left, she thought. Finish this and move to the signal site. I’m on schedule, should get back to the car when the mall opens at — She suddenly bolted upright and frantically swung the backpack away from her crotch and to the side. Christ, strontium-90 and you have it jammed against your freaking womb, won’t need a night-light ever again. The prospect of just having irradiated her vaginal canal prompted Hannah to think about Nate, then about the faceless woman who would be depending on these sensors she had hauled in her pack. They would be DIVA’s lifeline to the Agency. She flashed briefly to images of beautiful, naked Nate in the slanting light of her little Washington apartment.

The last days in Washington with Nate had been strange: He seemed remote and unsettled. Hannah’s blithe nature-girl intuition sensed he was struggling with their relationship in the context of Dominika Egorova, the woman she knew Nate loved. With New England equanimity, Hannah had not pushed herself on him physically, which was really too bad — she had planned on jumping his bones every night until the day of her departure. To fill up the reserve tank, she told herself, because she expected that Moscow was going to be a long dry spell in the jumping-bones department for a single woman in the US Embassy with a nonfraternization rule, which, in other words, meant American diplomats couldn’t sleep with non-NATO lovers.

On her last night in her little apartment she broiled a steak and Nate made a salad, and they opened a bottle of wine. Hannah set the little table with a bowl of flowers, lit a candle — a little corny but it looked nice in the darkened apartment — and turned the volume down on José González’s “How Low” — exactly how she felt — while they ate and looked at each other. The whole thing sucked because they were both uncomfortable — you will not start crying — and she put her hands in her lap so he wouldn’t see them tremble, and dissecting Moscow operations any more seemed stupid, and talking about Dominika was out, and discussing their relationship seemed flinty and pointless. She had seen how Nate was keeping the lid on — case officers can read faces — and she got up to pour him the last of the wine, and he had put his arm around her waist, more big brother than lover, and she tried to ease away but he pulled her back and kissed her, and kissed her again. Like a moron she was still holding the empty wine bottle, and he had taken it out of her hand and walked her backward to the bedroom — dude, I mean, really — and she heard herself say his name in the dark, over and over.

She shook her head. Let’s go, she thought. Hannah was on the edge of Gorkogo, a huge wooded park that ran along the Moskva River in the Central Administrative Okrug, at the upper end of a grassy slope that ran down from the trees to a long set of stairs ascending from the river. Glass-globed lamp poles were spaced evenly along the stairs. Along the southern edge of the park, traffic on the elevated eight-lane Tret Transportnoye Kol’tso, the TTK, roared out of a tunnel and across the Andreevsky Bridge. Hannah’s slope was visible from vehicles in all lanes, moving in either direction, and here is where she’d bury sensor number three, on the slope. In a car, DIVA would have line-of-sight to the sensor for the requisite two seconds, and would be able to initiate an undetectable SRAC burst as she drove by. A Station car similarly could load and retrieve messages to and from DIVA by driving past on the TTK.

Hannah checked one more time and slid halfway down the grassy slope in darkness, a ninja invisible in her black clothes. She knew exactly where to bury the sensor so its receiver/transmitter would be in electronic line-of-sight from the highway — which at this hour was only three-quarters jammed with careening cars, belching busses, and overloaded trucks. Hearsey’s special trowel cut into the sod smoothly and she levered up the grassy patch, held it up like a scalp, dug sensor number three out of the pack — Goodbye, you bastard, thought Hannah, I hope you’re not the one who gives me a tumor — and seated it in the earthen cavity. She replaced the sod, pressed it firmly in place — the sensor’s slight convexity, Hearsey had explained, would prevent a noticeable depression over time as the earth settled around the device — and from a package the size of a sugar packet she sprinkled a green-tinted, granular seed mixture around the edges of the cut sod to promote additional grass growth. The next rain would let the seed — researched and developed by agrostologists from the US Department of Agriculture to match exactly the park’s indigenous Russian wild rye grass — sprout and totally camouflage the edges of the patch.

Hannah scuttled back up the slope and into the trees. She stayed motionless for two minutes, listening for the scratch of a match, a muffled cough, the nearly imperceptible musical note of night vision goggles. Or the panting and nose whining of a tracker dog. Silence. That was it. She had done it. She now knew what Janice had meant about the “perfect circle” of an operational act. She imagined Benford’s face when he received her cable saying “all packages emplaced.” She hoped he would be pleased; perhaps he would cable Nate in Athens to let him know. She hoped Nate would also be impressed. He would understand how it felt. She would have a week of leave in a few months, maybe Athens? Hannah inexplicably thought then of her family, and about how proud they would be if they knew what their daughter was doing, how her mother’s eyes would sparkle, how her father would grin, how her two raucous brothers would thump her on the back. She could never tell them.

She shook herself out of the daydream. She still had to make a signal to DIVA, retrieve her car, then reappear at the embassy compound as if she were coming to work a little late this morning. The three sensor sites Hannah had loaded that long night — substantially separated in different sections of the city, stealthily buried, all near arteries with a high volume of traffic — were, most important, away from any Western diplomatic installation (all of which were ringed by electronic burst detectors that could alert the FSB that an agent SRAC exchange had just taken place).

The most important drop — the package with DIVA’s SRAC equipment — had been the first operational act a week ago. That night, Hannah’s nine-hour SDR was executed through blustery squalls from the east. The heavy raindrops were the lashing tears of impotent rage from the ghosts of the old politburo who were watching a woman — blond, American, fearless — commit espionage in their Moskva, the ancient name, the city of “dark and turgid waters.” If Hannah knew they were looking down on her, she would have waved and told them to chill.

DIVA’s equipment package — in the textile district of southeastern Moscow — was buried in the dirt of a pocket park under the highway bridge that took Volgogradskiy Prospekt over Lyublinskaya Ulitsa. After Hannah reported to Headquarters that the cache was loaded, the site had been monitored by satellite coverage for seven days to determine whether there was any extraordinary activity around the park, whether there were new tire tracks in the dirt, whether an out-of-place maintenance shed had been erected nearby. Or whether an FSB team was going to surge out of spider holes when Dominika walked under the abutment.

Benford made the final determination, to COS Throckmorton’s fussed annoyance: Pointing his globoid nose at her, Throckmorton read Benford’s cable to Hannah, not letting her read it herself. The cache was safe. Proceed. Tonight, the three sensors were down. Proceed. Benford directed Hannah to signal “have loaded” to DIVA, the last time a physical mark would have to be made.

The fatigue was affecting her vision a little, but Hannah slogged on foot northwest to the Dorogomilovo District, near DIVA’s state-provided apartment on Kastanaevskaya Ulitsa. No one was on the street, the broad boulevard was empty. Hannah spritzed three bars of an iron fence behind a bus stop shelter using a small spray bottle. The chemical in it was a delayed action marking system, DAMS for short, that went on colorless and undetectable but would react hours later to the UV light of the morning sun and turn rust-colored in a matter of minutes, an indistinct slash of dye on the bars noticeable only to someone who knew where to look. The fence and bus stop were on DIVA’s route to work, and she could check with a glance for a “have loaded” signal every morning and evening.

Two days later sensor number two was automatically interrogated by DCOS Schindler as she drove around Moscow on an ostensible trip to area antique shops. She returned to Station and with a trembling hand — she smelled like gin in the afternoon — put the SRAC receiver on Hannah’s desk, and walked away. Hannah connected a cable, the screen of her computer blinked, and DIVA’s burst message in English appeared.

Hannah noted the correct lowercase o and punctuation in the signature, the duress indicators that told her DIVA was not being forced to send the message from the basement of Butyrka prison in north Moscow, surrounded by SVR technicians, their salami-greasy hands resting lightly on the nape of her neck. All good things, sister, thought Hannah.

Nate had told Hannah that DIVA had herself chosen the Olga pseudonym for her messages, after Olga Prekrasna, Olga the Beauty, the medieval Slav warrior queen who destroyed an enemy capital by releasing hundreds of sparrows with sulfur-soaked strings attached to their feet. At dusk the wheeling birds nested throughout the city — under eaves, in attics, inside barns, in haystacks — and the smoldering sulfur eventually combusted and hundreds of fires started simultaneously, incinerating the city. The sparrow bringing fire and destruction, thought Hannah, Olga Prekrasna, the Beauty.

Line KR Chief Zyuganov rode down the elevator from the executive fourth floor of SVR headquarters in Yasenevo muttering to himself. He had just briefed the director on the emergence of the new American source, identified only by his self-bestowed code name TRITON. Zyuganov snorted: Triton, a newt. TRITON’s first report compromising a CIA recruitment of a Russian was ingeniously and deeply buried at the tail end of feed material passed by an oafishly transparent US Air Force double agent. It was all Line KR needed. The young attaché in Caracas who had agreed some months earlier to spy for the Americans against his own country was recalled to Moscow on an administrative pretext.

There had been no interrogation, at least not yet. The officer had been given a no-account job, kept under observation — in the old days he would have been shot in the Lubyanka basement, in the room with the hooks and the drains and the far wall lined with massive pine logs to prevent ricochets. This lesser administrative fate was a Potyomkinskaya derevnya, a Potemkin village, a false façade, concocted with the sole purpose of protecting the new source, TRITON. Later, with the blurring of months, the sentence would be carried out. The young perebezhchik, the turncoat, was already dead and he didn’t even know it. Neither did CIA.

That Line KR could bag a traitor with such swiftness, with such ruthless efficiency, was a feather in Zyuganov’s cap. The idiot director did not understand the salutary effects of having an omniscient counterintelligence machine hovering over the Service: No one would dare betray the Center with Zyuganov in charge. No, this politician-turned-director would never understand the nyuans, the nuance of the Game, but there was someone who did understand, a former intelligence officer, someone infinitely more important than the director. President Putin would know.

Zyuganov was in an exquisite position — he had cauterized the Caracas traitor, he was working the Iranian energy deal on the president’s behalf, and he and Zarubina would manage TRITON (whose access almost certainly originated in the White House, the NSC, or in Langley). It would be colossal. Putin’s unstinting patronage would follow. The future was rosy: Zarubina was nearly universally considered to become the next SVR director when she returned from Washington, the first female director ever. And there was an unspoken understanding with Zarubina that Zyuganov would ascend close behind her. Quite a partnership: The Seamstress and the Executioner.

The only prepyatstviye, impediment, in his career plans was his subordinate, Egorova. With the intuition of an interrogator, Zyuganov knew that Putin was intrigued with her, knew that she could be a challenge to Zyuganov’s success. She had not been damaged at all by the collapse of her Iranian case. It was relatively simple: He could let things ride for a while and trust in his own abilities. Alternatively, he could arrange another accident. The latter option was infinitely more attractive, not only because it was malicious and violent, but because Zyuganov recently had made an important discovery.

The one remotely social activity the misanthropic Zyuganov indulged in was an occasional visit to SVR Department Five, the “wet works,” to keep up with a handful of officers he had known during the Lubyanka years — they were the last remnants of a battalion of “special tasks” assassins and saboteurs from happier times. He marginally felt at home among these stolid, expressionless professionals, some nearing retirement, some younger ones still trying to make a name for themselves. At any rate, he liked them better than the new crop of SVR dilettantes in Headquarters who spoke English and knew how to order wines. No, the “wet boys” were his people.

Zyuganov had been sitting in the Department Five lounge when a woman approached him, stood with heels together, and asked in a whisper if she might speak with him. She was of medium height, about forty, dyed blond hair cut short, figure heavy but not fat, with the shoulders of a man. A broad, flat nose ended above a razor-cut mouth and an overly strong chin. Zyuganov normally would be in no mood to speak with anybody so clearly soliciting favors, but he noticed the gray eyes behind the wire-rimmed spectacles, eyes so purely gray they looked artificial. They were red-rimmed and held Zyuganov’s gaze unblinkingly. Some primal divining rod in his brain started quivering, a sociopath sensing a kindred spirit.

The woman was dressed in an inexpensive, long-sleeve cotton dress, also gray, buttoned at the neck. Too-long arms stuck out of her sleeves. There was some indistinct lumpiness that hinted at substantial breasts, or perhaps just mattress stuffing. Nervous hands picked at the side seam of her dress, and Zyuganov noticed the fingers were stained yellow.

“What is it?” Zyuganov had spat. He noticed she did not flinch, but kept staring at him.

“I would like to work for you,” said the woman, still whispering.

“Impossible, what do you mean by asking such a thing? Selection into Line KR is exceedingly competitive.” He looked away to terminate the conversation.

The woman did not move. “I don’t mean in KR,” she said. “With the other.”

As Zyuganov made a dismissive gesture with his hand, the chief of Department Five walked in and the woman, after another lupine stare, turned and left the lounge.

The chief of Five didn’t like Zyuganov, didn’t like when he visited his department, didn’t like the wormy little troll and his wormy little reputation. He was a reformer, a careerist, not an old palach, an executioner. “What are you doing talking to Eva?” the chief asked.

“I wasn’t talking to her,” said Zyuganov.

“Well, take my advice and give her a wide berth,” said the chief.

“Who is she?” said Zyuganov.

The chief filled a glass with hot tea from a hissing samovar on a side table, deciding how to describe one beast to another. “Evdokia Buchina, her friends call her Eva for short — if she had any friends — started as an SVR corporal in Saint Petersburg, transferred to Moscow, then put in an administrative position here in Department Five. My department. It’s been a year and I’ve tried to get rid of her since she arrived.”

Zyuganov tried not to look interested. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing much,” said the chief. “Disciplined for aggression in the office. Transferred for abusing prisoners.”

Zyuganov’s ears pricked up. “What do you mean, abusing prisoners?”

“Beating them to death in their cells. One in Petersburg, one in Moscow.”

“Accidents happen,” Zyuganov said.

The chief shrugged. “You want her transferred to your office? Wonderful. I’ll send you her personnel file. I don’t even know what half the words in her medical profile mean.”

Zyuganov was noncommittal. Eva had said she wanted to work “on the other.” He wondered whether he had found someone special. Her file was rich with tantalizing words, some of which Zyuganov had to look up: Androgyne. Pansexual. Schizotypal.

A personal interview with Eva was inconclusive: She answered in monosyllables, shook her head, and mumbled. But those eyes the color of wet cement never left Zyuganov’s face. Following his instincts, he took Eva one evening to Butyrka prison to observe the interrogation of a jailed activist, a member of the political performance art group Voina who, during a street demonstration to protest the policies of Vladimir Putin, threw a jar of green paint on an undercover officer of the SVR. It was the young rocker’s misfortune that this automatically became a matter for the SVR Department for Protection of the Constitutional System, which essentially meant he would be answering to Alexei Zyuganov and, in a debut appearance, Evdokia Buchina.

She broke six of his fingers, dislocated his left shoulder, crushed the small bones of his right foot, and fractured his condyle mandible, all before midnight. Zyuganov watched, fascinated, as Eva worked, methodical, lithe, patient, graceful, strong, her breathing steady, shooting him glances, the hellhound looking for approval, the schoolmarm spectacles glinting in the overhead lights. It was like sitting in Brahms’s music room, watching him compose. Zyuganov had found his izverg, his Belial, his monster.

Hurting Egorova. Clipping the Sparrow’s wings. Zyuganov left the idea in the wet locker of his brain. No, for the time being, he instead had resolved to starve Egorova of information in the matter of the deal with Iran, to compartment the relevant KR files so she would not meddle and steal his heat. He additionally needed to tie her up with useless work; he needed an otvlekayushchiy manevr, a distraction, a red herring.

The next morning fortune smiled on him.

Shaggy Yevgeny handed him a new cable from Zarubina’s Washington rezidentura reporting the latest nighttime meeting with US Air Force major Thorstad. Buried again at the end of the double agent chicken feed was another bombshell report from TRITON — fifteen frames. The anonymous newt had photographed three separate cables detailing an exchange between CIA Headquarters and the CIA Station in Athens on an intelligence source code-named LYRIC, who recently had been debriefed on Russian military intelligence (GRU) operations to acquire US military technology. Zyuganov’s eyebrows went up: Based on the summary, the information passed to the CIA was clearly from an insider deep within GRU, a source with firsthand access.

Pust’. So be it. Another spy to ferret out, thought Zyuganov, another dumpling to gobble up. The Americans apparently had been tireless in recruiting Russians recently. And in one stroke TRITON would neutralize their gains. He looked at Zarubina’s cable, deep in thought. This LYRIC had to be someone on active duty in Moscow, sitting in an important position with heavy-duty access, not a functionary assigned to an embassy. That the debriefing occurred in Athens was only marginally important, he decided. Greece was a popular and inexpensive summer vacation destination for sun-starved Russians. The traitor GRU officer likely had gone on holiday with his family, contacted the CIA while there, had been debriefed and paid, then had finished his vacation and was probably already back in Moscow. It would be a straight mole hunt here in the capital, a matter of checking military leave and international travel records. A handful of likely GRU candidates would be rounded up, there would be a series of interrogations, and the predatel svin’ya, the swine traitor, would be revealed.

More interrogations. Zyuganov licked his lips — he had acquired a corneal trephine, from the SVR ophthalmologic unit that he wanted to try out on someone. Then the thought occurred to him: He could use the Greece venue as a pretext to send Egorova to Athens on a “counterintelligence inspection tour,” to interview officers in the rezidentura and embassy. She could cool her heels there for two weeks on a futile snipe hunt while he unmasked the mole in Moscow.

He sourly regarded his deputy, who looked back at him from the door. He gave him instructions: Tell Captain Egorova there is a counterespionage lead in Greece. Do not mention Zarubina or TRITON’s report regarding LYRIC. She is to go to Athens and discreetly interview SVR, GRU, and embassy personnel and look for anything out of the ordinary; she should not return until she has interviewed everyone, two weeks or more.

“Interview everyone?” said Yevgeny. “On what pretext? How do we explain to the Athens rezidentura?” He knew his boss; it wouldn’t do to push too much. Whatever, Egorova would be kept busy.

“Tell her it’s a routine inspection. Tell her everyone has to do it,” said Zyuganov. “Now get out of here. And get Zarubina on the secure line.”

Yevgeny Pletnev looked across the desk at Captain Egorova and first thought that he had never seen such blue eyes in his life, then estimated the heft and feel of her breasts underneath that blouse, and then, transported, imagined himself in bed with her. He scratched himself under the arm. He had smoothly passed along Colonel Zyuganov’s instructions to her in her smallish office in KR spaces, while she had sat expressionless. He watched her carefully, curious — she already was a storied member of the Service. Yevgeny was the only officer in KR other than Zyuganov who had access to everything the department did, and in the iron-clad hierarchy of SVR, he owed allegiance to no one besides Zyuganov. But Egorova’s celebrity intrigued him; he sniffed at her influence, assessed her cool detachment. Today she was dressed in a dark suit with a light blue blouse, her hair pinned up, and she wore no jewelry except for a small watch with a narrow velvet band. Her blue eyes held his, like she was reading him. Graceful hands rested on the leather blotter. Her classical features were serene. She seemed different; he didn’t know what to expect. Yevgeny was used to toxic outbursts from invidious sociopaths.

“Thank you, Yevgeny, I will make preparations to travel,” said Dominika. Ironic: Zyuganov thought he was cutting her out, but he had just given her a two-week window to meet with CIA — and for her to see Nate again. She could not have imagined they would be together again so soon after Vienna. She mentally began drafting the SRAC message she would transmit this evening.

A golden opportunity. She looked at the grimy yellow halo around Yevgeny’s head, the color fading in and out. A plotting toad-eater, Zyuganov’s sycophant, but with information she needed. And not dialed in quite right with the ladies, no matter how much he daydreamed about skirts. Dominika looked at this weird creature and shuddered.

Udranka was sitting on top of a file folder, her legs crossed. Get on with it, you don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.

Yevgeny Pletnev had been drafted into the SVR after graduating from Moscow University with an undistinguished degree in computer science, the result of patronage from an uncle who was a deputy in the State Duma, the Federal Assembly of Russia, and the head of the Commission for Legislative Support for Anti-Corruption. Yevgeny’s uncle’s influence, however, stopped at the imposing front doors of Yasenevo and the new employee — he was twenty-five at the time — found himself directed to the administrative side of the Service in personnel, logistics, and support. It was not long before the hairy young man calculated that advancement was more reliably attained by avoiding the messy and politically dangerous operations directorates.

Yevgeny spent the required dreary years in personnel until there was a vacancy for an administrative assistant in Line KR, the shady office that dealt with counterintelligence and surveillance of Russian citizens abroad. Despite warnings from colleagues, Yevgeny saw an opportunity and applied for the position. Three years in the KR staff room spent improving the antiquated computer network and cleaning up the files got him noticed by the horrid, diminutive chief of KR, Alexei Zyuganov, who ordered him to move to his personal staff, first in the outer office, then as associate staff chief, then as his personal aide-de-camp, then, last year, as Zyuganov’s deputy. Yevgeny knew it was risky in the extreme — suicidal — even to contemplate hooking on to Zyuganov’s coattails. Chort poberi, to join the demon. But the thirty-five-year-old Yevgeny calculated that Zyuganov was powerful, irreplaceable, whispered about. Better still, his boss’s serrated and fear-inducing reputation would rebound to him.

“This position is sensitive,” said Zyuganov on Yevgeny’s first day as number two, looking sideways at him, like a turtle. “You will see everything I see, read everything I read. You will have access to my files. Loyalty and discretion are required. I have approved of your work since you arrived in KR, but any deviation from these standards will result in immediate disciplinary action. In other words, I personally will bring you to the cellars and strap you to the table. Do I make myself clear?”

Yevgeny had nodded, and for a year had worked fourteen-hour days. He was the model of efficiency, a paragon of discretion. He began anticipating his boss’s moods, began recognizing the onset of the dark days, the bezumiye, the madness, and saw how the trips to the cellars would lift his mood, how his brow would be clear when he returned to the office with the charnel house smell on his clothes, and in his hair, and on his breath.

For six months, the little sociopath stayed suspicious, but eventually grew accustomed to Yevgeny’s slavish and proper obedience. Zyuganov finally decided the hirsute young man could be trusted — to a point. The only human he ever brought completely into his confidence — the only other human accorded such access — was his mother. In any case, Yevgeny was deputy chief and there was important work to be done: They had a mole to catch.

Mix heavy cream, pureed garlic, lemon juice, tarragon, and grated Gruyère, and season well. Add peeled and thickly sliced Jerusalem artichokes, then pour the mixture into a casserole. Top with bread crumbs and grated cheese, drizzle with olive oil, then bake in a high oven until the artichokes are tender and the topping is browned.