Palace of Treason

33

Hannah broke about a dozen rules for a proper SDR, pushing her little Skoda hard, pulling provocative move after provocative move to flush coverage. There was nothing, and she had to trust she was not on the list tonight — she was black. She vectored east through heavy evening traffic, then south, entering Lyubertsy, a desolated district of warehouses and truck parks. She used her mirrors to mark cars that turned when she did, stripping “possibles” one by one until she was alone. Hannah waited in silence for fifteen minutes, then dumped her car in a deserted construction site and set off on foot. Maybe the car would be there when she got back — it was fifty-fifty. She had another forty minutes to walk.

Site SKLAD was along a fenced-in walkway that skirted a darkened warehouse. In the opposite direction, the walkway ascended in a rusty steel-and-rivet staircase to cross above the electric wires over tracks for the elektrichka commuter train. Cavernous warehouse after warehouse stretched into the darkness, a grid square of oily access roads between them creating a maze of muddy lanes illuminated by the few mercury vapor lights that weren’t burned out. Dogs roamed the warehouse grounds and they howled at the shrill whistle of a locomotive as it rumbled through, shaking the tin roofs of the warehouses. It was a muddy, rusty, decrepit, barbed-wire-wrapped, paint-flaking, ramshackle Gomorrah — in other words, suburban Moscow.

The air was still and crackling cold as Hannah ghosted past dark warehouses smelling of machine oil and iron filings. She stopped at the corner of one of the buildings and used her scope to scan up the road, then back behind her, then down the two side lanes. Empty. No engine noise, no acrid whiff of a cigarette, the scope registered only the faint thermal bloom of the lamps on the sides of the warehouses. She proceeded to the next corner and checked the four points of the compass again. Clear. She checked her watch and wondered if her COS was coming in with a horde of surveillants on his ass. With luck, he had gotten lost and was leading the opposition in circles on the ring road.

Hannah got to the walkway and silently ghosted up the steps to the elevated span over the tracks. Another dark green train rumbled beneath the walkway, the overhead power lines zinging and snapping arc-light flashes. The steel walkway swayed as the train passed, and Hannah squatted down, holding on to the rusty handrail. From the elevated walkway, she could see for some distance over the cruciform length of the four lanes between the warehouses. There was no moon, and it started raining softly, dimpling the oily pools on the ground.

It happened in a rush, the curtain going up on a nightmare tableau that Hannah watched with disbelief. A lumbering figure was coming up the side lane directly in front of her, a pigeon-toed shuffle she recognized as Throckmorton’s. He had studied the site report and come straight to it. He was bundled in an overcoat and wore an enormous Muscovite fur hat on his head, big as a holiday fruitcake. His head was down, hunched into his shoulders, hands in his pockets, as he carefully stepped around puddles in the dirt. Oblivious. At a distance behind him, the hood of a blacked-out car peeked around the corner of a warehouse. Dude, you dragged them here. Hannah looked down the right-hand lane and saw another darkened car slow to a stop, and two dark silhouettes got out to stand in the shadows. Beyond a farther warehouse, another dark figure hugged the building to look around the corner. He started moving forward slowly — the others hung back. Big team. Hannah could feel her heart hammering in her jaw.

The nightmare got worse. With the instincts of an internal ops officer, Hannah knew where to look next. Three buildings down on the left she saw another figure — thinner, head erect — walking slowly toward the intersection. Jesus. It has to be DIVA. Hannah watched, frozen, as the three figures — Throckmorton, DIVA, and the foot surveillant — converged in the night. They would arrive at the intersection simultaneously. More black silhouettes appeared on the wings. The hood of another car eased out around the first corner, and two more men — indistinct, wearing hats — stood behind it, watching.

Even as she moved silently down the stairway toward the muddy intersection, Hannah flashed to her father — not to Benford, or to DIVA or to Nate, she consciously marveled — and emerged at the end of the walkway, her head covered in her scarf, fur collar turned up. She was keyed up, breathing hard, yet icy cool in knowing what she was going to do. She waited a beat, until Throckmorton saw her and drew up with a start. He was instantly swarmed by two men who rushed from behind and tackled him facedown in the mud, their knees on his neck, their hands wrenching his arms behind him. COS Moscow started a high, keening wail and flailed his legs until another man sat on them.

This had taken two seconds, and in the third second Hannah turned and sprinted to her right, up the muddy road, in the opposite direction of DIVA’s approach. The man coming in from the right yelled something and tried to cut her off, but Hannah had a step and got past him as he slipped in the mud and went down. More shouts — they were bellows of rage, of the hunt — and the sound of racing engines and the whine of mud-slick tires started up all around her. Throckmorton kept up his stuck-pig squeals. That’s it boys, Hannah thought, make as much noise as you can.

The sound of footsteps was behind her, but they weren’t getting closer. Just so they think they’ve flushed the Russian agent, come on you turkeys, don’t lose the rabbit. She thought she might even get away, over a fence and across some tracks, rub their noses in the shit. The thermal scope was bumping her chest inside her coat; the more time they spent chasing her, the more time she would buy for DIVA.

The surveillance car — a muddy Volvo C30 with wipers going full tilt — came too fast out of a side alley between two warehouses and hit Hannah on the right hip with its left front bumper, throwing her twenty feet in the air and against the corrugated side of the warehouse on the other side of the lane. The car slid to a stop at an angle in the mud and the passenger got out and walked over to Hannah. The driver stood at the open door on his side, as if afraid to go near. The wipers slapped back and forth. Another car eased up to the scene, and four men ran up on foot. The rain had stopped.

Hannah had felt only an enormous blow on her side, and a flash, but woke on her back looking up at a circle of sweaty faces — eyebrows, Slavic cheekbones, moles, knit caps. She felt the pressure of the dirt beneath her body, but couldn’t feel her legs. She tried to find her hands, and thought she moved some fingers, but couldn’t see them. She tried to take a breath, but it felt like sucking air through a collapsed straw. The breathing part wasn’t the worst — she felt something loose inside. The silent, grave faces looked down at her, and she stared back at them. She wasn’t going to let them see her cry. Dad, I saved her, I did. You would be proud of me, Daddy. I won’t let them see me cry, but come and bring me home.

The surveillance team leader bent down and loosened the scarf from under Hannah’s chin and gently pulled it off — her head flopped to one side. The blond curls partially covered her peaceful face.

Dominika waited for an hour in the abandoned warehouse, looking out a cracked window down the muddy lane. There were two groups of people down the muddy street, both lit by the headlights of at least four vehicles that had appeared out of nowhere. The first group was holding a man who was bellowing something unintelligible as he was pushed into the backseat of a car. The second group of ten or a dozen men farther down the street were standing in a circle around a shape on the ground. It was too far to see, but when one of the men bent to take off a scarf, Dominika thought she could see a woman’s hair.

She had been two warehouses from the actual meeting site spot — not more than one hundred meters — and had flattened herself against the wall when she heard the shouts and engine noises. She saw running figures moving away from her, but the number of car noises all around shocked her, and she squeezed through a gap in a broken chain-link fence and crawled into the corroded bucket of a steam shovel that probably had last been used to excavate the Moscow Canal in 1932. Men and vehicles passed back and forth for about fifteen minutes with Dominika huddled in a ball in a slurry of rainwater and flaking rust. Things quieted down and Dominika was able to peek over the lip of the bucket. She wasn’t going anywhere for a while: FSB would leave a car with two men — silent trailers — in the area to see if anybody moved after things quieted down.

Marta and Udranka sat on packing crates near the door. You treated that young American a little hard, Marta said as Udranka tapped her foot. You see how everybody loves you?

Dominika shivered in the bucket and closed her eyes. She didn’t know what had happened, but Hannah was supposed to have been there, and Dominika had a dreadful intuition that Hannah was the figure on the ground. The FSB would not knowingly harm a diplomat, but these surveillance men were feral pack hunters when they got the blood scent in their nostrils — the dogs were capable of anything.

Speaking of dogs. From around the corner of the warehouse Dominika saw two red eyes looking at her. They moved closer and became the black muzzle and hunched shoulders of an enormous dog — half dog, half wolf — which no doubt had slipped his leash somewhere in hell. The dog looked at Dominika, its visible breath drifting around its head in the cold air. A bark, a growl, much less an attack, would bring the FSB in a flash, but it was still, watching her with lowered head. Dominika remembered her childhood and what her father used to do with their little dachshund, Gustave, and she held out her hand. The massive dog hesitated and came closer, then closer, and sniffed.

What is your life, you devil? Dominika thought, keeping her hand still. Men’s voices echoed off the warehouse walls. Do they beat you and starve you? Do you hate them as I do? Do they fear you? The dog looked into her eyes, turned, and shuffled into the darkness, looking back once as if to tell her S volkami zhit, povolchi vyt, to live with wolves, you have to howl like a wolf. Dominika silently thanked Satana’s dog. The devil had just told her what she had to do.

Benford could not move, could not think, could not speak. He had raved for twelve hours after having received the call from DCOS Schindler alerting him that COS had gone out on the street to meet DIVA, and that Hannah had gone after him. Nate had arrived in Washington from Athens that evening in the middle of the crisis. He now sat on the couch in Benford’s office, jet-lagged and unshaven. Janice Callahan ferried in cups of coffee and tea, and Margery Salvatore brought containers of homemade soupe au pistou — hearty vegetable soup with basil puree — which would hold them over until the cafeteria downstairs opened. Benford’s lair filled with the smell of the Provençal comfort food, but no one was comforted — no one could eat.

They waited for word of disaster, for the exultant news on VGTRK, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, that the counterintelligence organs of the Federation’s intelligence services had unmasked another traitor, a criminal paid by the Main Enemy to betray her country — Comrades, let’s revive the apt Cold War labels, for that is what the Americans are: Russia’s Main Enemy — and was now in custody waiting for the investigation to conclude and the trial to begin. Benford had spoken several times to a shaky-sounding DCOS Moscow asking for updates, but there were none: Neither COS nor Hannah had returned to the embassy; both were now seriously overdue. No news about DIVA. Schindler had prevailed on the consul general to make inquiries with the Russian Foreign Ministry concerning the missing diplomats, but there had been no response.

It had been rough lately for Nate Nash — he was turning the mental pages of an enormous photo album with “This Is Your Seriously Fucked-Up Life” embossed on the cover: He had lost LYRIC (through no fault of his own, but the agent was still lost); his bifurcated lover/agent relationship with Dominika was demented; he had slept with Hannah Archer, the case officer colleague now missing in Moscow; DIVA had announced her suicidal intention to exfiltrate LYRIC from Russia’s Baltic coast despite the fact that the latter was under house arrest for suspicion of espionage; he had been designated by Benford to take charge of an as-yet-unspecified operation somehow to prevent an unidentified mole inside CIA from passing DIVA’s identity to the SVR rezident in Washington, a grandmotherly necromancer who appeared to be unbeatable on the street; and his Athens DCOS Marty Gable had asked him to reserve some time for a protracted counseling session when Nate returned to Station to discuss his lack of professionalism, his disregarding instructions, and, in Gable’s words, his being “a dumbassador from the Republic of Stupid.”

Five thousand miles east, Alexei Zyuganov also fumed at his desk in Line KR in Yasenevo. Those swineherds in FSB had blown it last night at the last possible moment — an additional second of restraint and they would have reeled in a Russian skunk the Americans intended to meet in that dismal warehouse district. He was sure of it. And chances were that it would have been the mole, the big fish they were all looking for. Instead they had a diplomatic incident on their hands: The accidental death of the American woman would cost more than one man on the surveillance team his job, and he personally would see that prison time would be tacked on. The blond American was nothing to him — unimportant. But on getting the word, he had hurried to the police morgue in Lyublino in the South-Eastern Okrug to examine her belongings — he found only her dip ID card and the commercial thermal scope. A blue, woven cotton bracelet had been cut off her wrist. No meeting notes, no pocket litter that might provide a clue to who she was meeting. He checked the lining and seams of her clothing. He cut into the heels of her snow boots, ripped out the insoles. Nothing. They had lifted the sheet to show him the blue-black, caved-in right side of her body and instead looked at the face and had a micro-second of bat-wing doubt: a young woman such as this, operating in the capital, stealing their secrets, recruiting Russians. How many others like her? What sort of opponent was this?

Zyuganov checked his watch. The Foreign Ministry would be informing the American Embassy about Blondie in an hour, after they had finished screaming at and slapping the fat face of the CIA chief who had been kept in an FSB office for nearly six hours, covered in dried mud and with snot dripping out of the armadillo he called his nose. His weeping, cringing performance was filmed, including when he made a puddle under his chair. It would play well in a future television documentary. To his credit, he had admitted anything to the interrogators, and he certainly did not confirm what they already knew: that the young girl on the gurney was a CIA officer. The whole evening was a waste.

Messy, inconvenient, incompetent. Zyuganov instinctively knew, however, that this incident would not ruffle the president’s feathers. In fact, he would insist on press play. Any evidence of perfidious CIA violating the sovereignty of Russia played into Putin’s domestic narrative. Russia must stay strong against the predations of the West. The Cold War never ended. Rebuild Russia’s former power and majesty. Putin himself liked to tell the story:

It is discovered that Stalin is alive and living in a cabin in Siberia. A delegation is sent to convince him to return to Moscow, assume power, and restore Russia to greatness. After some reluctance, Stalin agrees to come back. “Okay, he says, but no Mr. Nice Guy this time.”

Zyuganov, in fact, was secretly glad that the FSB had not successfully sprung the trap. He wanted to wrap up the mole himself, based on the name TRITON was going to provide to Zarubina in five days’ time. He wanted to drag the traitor in chains to Putin only slightly less than he wanted to strap the swine to a table and listen to the hiss of escaping perfumed air as he perforated his thoracic cavity with a surgical trocar. Besides, Zyuganov had become preoccupied with a nascent theory about the mole. A small, niggling idea, delicious to contemplate, impossible to let go. He was still forming his theory. He would be like a speckled karakurt, the venomous steppe spider, tight roping along the web, laying more silk, tips of his little feet on the signal line, waiting for a vibration.

Captain Dominika Egorova, of the elegant stride and blue-eyed ice. She had a spectacular ops history — you might say it transcended luck. She had survived — improbably — attacks by a Spetsnaz assassin, Department Five mechanics, and Eva Buchina. She miraculously had developed the information to nail Korchnoi. Quite remarkable. Her performance regarding the Iran deal — the suggestion regarding the water route through Russia had pleased Putin — to Zyuganov’s pinched mind hinted at some sort of coaching. Who knew such geography? And her remarkable intuition about recalling Solovyov from Athens was implausible. Really? On the basis of one interview?

And more recently there were other gossamer tugs of the web. The Athens rezident had cabled Line KR congratulations on Egorova’s successful investigation. A fawning rezident wrote Zyuganov that he regretted he didn’t have the opportunity to entertain the captain more, but he understood the preferences of a counterintelligence inspector. Curious, Zyuganov had called Athens on the secure phone to discover that Egorova had chosen to stay not at the compound, but in an unknown outside hotel. With the exception of a few Russian Embassy reception evenings, Egorova had been out-of-pocket every night for two weeks. Not an infraction, but irregular. How could one explain all the suspicious factors? What was this busty ex-ballerina doing every night? Should he ask her? No, better not to telegraph his interest. TRITON and Zarubina would supply the answer soon enough.

There was another stone in his shoe. Zyuganov caught a fleeting interaction between Egorova and his deputy, Yevgeny, in the corridor outside his office. Egorova was leaving the conference room and Yevgeny made way for her in the doorway, bowing slightly at the waist in comic opera butler style. That was not so much — Yevgeny was a hairy clown in front of women — but Zyuganov was interested, very interested, to see Egorova flash a smile at him. Zyuganov knew nothing about flirting, or courtship, or seduction, but other synapses fired, inky thoughts that his busty celebrity employee was working on Yevgeny, that he was being flanked, that she threatened him.

Egorova’s most-favored status with Putin was the ultimate, screaming outrage. Zyuganov gnashed his teeth at the thought of it. He had rounded up spies. He had handled the Persians. In fact, he had done as much to secure the Iran deal as anyone. Govormarenko had said so himself, had mentioned it to Putin. So why was she favored? When he became Zarubina’s deputy director in SVR, he would be shown more respect. And by the time I become deputy, he thought, Putin will have moved on from Egorova, and then her fortunes will be what I decide: SVR advisor to the Northern Fleet at Severomorsk; intelligence administrator in Grozny, Chechnya; adjutant at the Kon Institute, back to Sparrow School. Let her spend the rest of her career demonstrating fellatio to hayseed students from the republics. Then he remembered: If she turns out not to be the mole.

Zyuganov would have been apoplectic if he had known about Putin’s invitation to her for some sort of power weekend near Petersburg. He would have been additionally outraged if he knew that Dominika had persuaded Yevgeny — Sparrow style — to sign an authorization chit for a pool car for Egorova to drive the six hundred kilometers to Strelna on the M10. Yevgeny increasingly was seeing the light: Having Dominika as an ally was the smart bet, so he took the risk of not telling Zyuganov.

Word came to Benford and his coterie simultaneously from the Ops Center and State Department wire in a treble rush of body-blow news. The Foreign Ministry informed the consul general of the US Embassy in Moscow that First Secretary Vernon Throckmorton had been detained by Federal Security Service officers on suspicion of espionage but had invoked diplomatic immunity. He was free to return to the embassy, but the Ministry was issuing PNG expulsion orders designating Mr. Throckmorton persona non grata. He was given forty-eight hours to leave Russia.

The second piece of bad news was in fact the absence of news: DIVA did not respond to three separate SRAC messages loaded by a dyspeptic DCOS Schindler urgently calling for a sign-of-life reply. She could be home sleeping, recovering from what must have been a nightmare evening of a busted meeting — Janice, Dante, and Nate had lived it, knew the freezing cold gripping the legs, felt the sweat running underneath the layers of clothing, remembered the sound of men and vehicles coming closer from behind, the sides, and all around. Or DIVA could be in a chair in some overheated office with sooty venetian blinds carelessly canted, handcuffed, and stripped to her underwear, while a rotation team of FSB officers — little sly men, or brutal brawlers, or wet-lipped matrons — softened her up before the vertigo ride in the back of a van to Lefortovo or Butyrka for the real pros to begin. These would include the alligator-clip, car-battery fraternity of interrogators, chemists, doctors, and psychologists, a Matryoshka collection of tormentors, like wooden nesting dolls, each monster emerging out of the previous monster, each succeeding horror worse than the final horror. Which, Benford knew, would be Zyuganov.

The third piece of bad news was the worst. Dante was summoned to the Ops Center after midnight to pick up a statement off the wire — impersonal, dismissive, with the familiar trace of Soviet irony — from the protocol department of the Russian Foreign Ministry: Third Secretary Hannah Archer of the US Embassy died in a traffic accident late in the evening of the 17th. Due to inattention on her part, she was struck by a vehicle in rainy conditions. The US Embassy is requested to inform the Ministry regarding the disposition of the remains.

Dante sat with his head in his hands. Margery and Janice were silent, red-eyed, sniffling. Benford sighed. “She was an exceptional young woman,” he said softly. He looked up at Nate. “What are you prepared to do?” he said. Everybody in the room turned toward him.

“I’m going to make it rain on Zarubina,” said Nate quietly. “She’s not getting Domi’s name.” Benford stared at him in silence, and Nate looked him right back in the eyes.

“Simon, spin up Red Route Two,” said Nate. “DIVA’s coming. And no one’s going to stop her.”

Heat olive oil and sauté diced onions, leeks, and celery in a Dutch oven. Add trimmed chard or kale leaves, cooked white beans and chicken stock to cover, bring to a moderate boil, then add chopped tomato, diced potato, small pasta (anelli or ditalini), diced zucchini, and chopped stems of chard or kale. Simmer until the ingredients are cooked and tender. Season aggressively. Spoon pistou (process garlic, salt, basil leaves, chopped tomato, olive oil, and grated Gruyère or Parmesan cheese into a thick sauce) into the soup when serving.