Red Sparrow

15

Past midnight now, the Helsinki snow had given way to the rains of emergent spring, which spattered on the pavement, dripped off the bare limbs of the trees, and rattled against the windows. Nate tossed in his bed. Twelve blocks away, Dominika lay awake hearing the rain and felt the lingering tingle of Nate’s good-night kiss on her lips. She was glad she had saved him, and she would do it again, she decided.

Thank God for Marta. Not only had her friend’s support helped her with the decision, but also Marta’s wry commentary on life had crystallized her thinking, especially about keeping a secret from the Service. Marta did not believe in blind devotion. She told Dominika not to be a tricoteuse, to be true to herself, to owe allegiance first to herself, then, if there was room, to Russia. Dominika tossed in her bed.

Five blocks to the east, Marta Yelenova eased open her apartment door in the residence block reserved for Russian Embassy employees. Cooking smells of boiled beef and cabbage were heavy in the corridor and reminded her of apartment blocks in Moscow. She shook the rain off her overcoat and hung it on a hook next to the door.

Her apartment was small, a single room with a separate kitchen nook, beyond which was the tiny bathroom. The apartment had been used by generations of Russian Embassy employees and was dingy and worn, the furniture scarred and wobbly. Marta stumbled as she took off her wet shoes. She giggled to herself. She was tipsy after a long night alone in a small café. At some point during the evening she had ordered pytt i panna, a popular Scandinavian hash of beef, onion, and potatoes. She had left the bar and walked home in the rain. It had been some time since her blowup with Volontov, and the expected recall to Moscow, the reprimands, the firing from the Service had not come. The rezident studiously ignored her, but absolutely nothing had happened.

Marta saw that Dominika in the last days was trying to schedule more frequent operational meetings with Nathaniel, primarily because that was what kept Volontov happy, but also, Marta observed, because Dominika looked forward to contact with the young American. Volontov had called her into his office as well, and Dominika returned to her desk, giving Marta a wink. “He was very calm, almost apologetic,” said Dominika over wine after work. “He encouraged me to keep working, to try to pick up the pace if I could.”

“I don’t trust that jellyfish,” said Marta. “My advice, Domi, is to keep telling them you’re working very diligently, progress is slow, but you’re encouraged by developments. They all want to report success to the Center, so Volontov will keep up a good face.” Later that night, walking home, she tipsily told Dominika that if either of them had any sense, they’d both defect. Scandalous.

Marta went into her bedroom. She sat heavily on her bed, peeled off her damp clothes, and let them fall in a heap to the floor. She put on a short silk pajama shirt. It was from India, light beige, billowing, and embroidered with green and gold thread. Matching green knotted buttons ran from throat to hem. She stood in front of a wall mirror with its cracked corner and looked at herself. The shirt had been a present from a GRU general who had been posted to the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi. He had met Marta during the honey-trap operation against the Indian defense minister. They had had a torrid affair for eight weeks, but in the end he stopped it. Having the Queen Sparrow as a Moscow diversion was one thing, he said, but settling down with “someone like you” was another.

Someone like me, Marta thought, looking at her reflection. She opened the nightshirt and looked at her naked body in the mirror. Several years past fifty and she was still holding together, she thought. A little more waistline, some lines around her eyes, but her breasts had not completely fallen, and, turning slightly and holding the material aside, she saw that her backside still had the swoop and curve that had been, in large part, responsible for making the young French intel officer in 1984 forget his duty and spend a month of Sundays in a Leningrad hotel room with her. She thought about him sometimes, for no reason.

Marta padded barefoot into the kitchen to draw a glass of water. It would clear her head so she could sleep. She returned to the bedroom and felt an arm snake around her neck from behind. She had heard nothing. The man held tight against her throat. She grabbed his arm with both hands to relieve the pressure. The person behind her didn’t feel big; in fact, he felt somewhat thin. The breath on her neck was steady; he wasn’t scared. He did not overly tighten his grip on her throat—he was just holding her. Marta thought maybe a pervert, a molestation? She got ready to reach behind to twist his testicles off.

It wasn’t until he had frog-marched her sideways to stand in front of the mirror that she knew this wasn’t a Finnish delivery boy with a wet spot on the front of his apron. She smelled ammonia and sweat. Then something else. A voice in her ear like a beetle walking across rice paper. One word in Russian. “Molchat.” Silence. In a horrified flash she knew. It was Them.

There was a creature looking out over her shoulder into the mirror. Their eyes met. More specifically, her eyes met his single eye. The other, a chalky marble in its socket, stared obliquely. In the dim light of her bedroom, Marta could not see his body, just his disembodied arm and pocked, scarred face behind her, floating over her shoulder. His voice started scuttling again.

“Good evening, Comrade Yelenova. May I call you Marta? Or perhaps ‘my little Sparrow’?” Marta’s nightshirt was slightly open. The gold highlights in the shirt were vibrating, picking up the trembling in Marta’s body. Her pubic delta was visible between the folds of the slightly opened shirt. The monster pulled her a little straighter, Marta was lifted to her toes. “My little Sparrow,” the man whispered. “What have you been doing?” He moved her, still up on her toes, a step closer to the mirror. Marta looked in the mirror and saw her own terrified eyes looking back at her.

“Will you share your bed with me, little Sparrow?” the man said. “I have come a long way.” A second hand, black-gloved and holding a two-foot-long knife with a curved handle, came from behind and crossed her body. The man flicked one side of her shirt farther open with the tip of the knife. Her breast was heaving in fright. The floating head behind her smiled, tucked his chin into the crook of her neck, and tightened his grip. Marta’s vision of herself in the mirror was going gray at the edges. A rushing noise in her head grew louder. She heard the devil say, “Pokazat gde raki zimuyut.” I will show you where the crayfish spend winter. She knew this phrase, its deadly portent. Then the rushing noise got louder and she passed out.

Marta regained consciousness quickly, like a surfacing rush, coming back up to the light. She was naked on her back, on her narrow, bitter little bed. She felt the pull of tape over her mouth. Her hands were tied behind her, the knots on her wrists dug into her back. The familiar bedside lamp with its faded, gauzy pink shade cast a mild light on the bedspread. Her legs were tied together at the ankles. She pulled and tested each knot, but there was no give.

She heard a noise, turned her head, and her heart stopped. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. The man was wearing her India shirt. He was dancing around the little room, rocking his body forward and back. The knife was in his hand, and he occasionally twirled it above his head as he pirouetted. Marta began weeping silently.

Sergey Matorin was forty-five hundred kilometers away on a head trip to the Panjshir Valley. He contemplated the shadows cast by the little pink lamp in Marta’s bedroom. He was in his Alpha Group’s sandbag bunker built into the hill with the hissing gas lantern casting green light into the corners of the shelter. Marta’s trussed-up body became the body of the wife of the village headman, taken hostage during a dawn raid as punishment for sheltering insurgents. The Helsinki rain pattering against the window was the howling Hundred Nights Wind that carried the sands of the northern desert up and over the Kush in billowing clouds and shook the bunker’s corrugated tin door. “Khyber” was home again.

The Afghan woman had died sometime in the early evening, too much excitement, or too much handling by a succession of his troopers, or perhaps the ammo belt around her neck, stapled to the plywood wall, had gotten too tight across her throat. She was upright against the wall, chin up as if in pride, held by the collar, her dead eyes flashing green from the lantern. She kept Khyber company. He was sitting, swaying to tinny Afghan music from a tape deck, but the batteries were fading and the music kept slowing down and speeding up.

Marta thrashed from side to side hoping to loosen one arm, get her legs free, to be able to fight him. Her movement attracted his attention and he climbed on the foot of the bed and on hands and knees started inching toward her. The shirt billowed around his body. He hovered over her, looking down, pressing his weight on her. She kept straining her arms, the cords in her neck standing out. Matorin lowered his face inches from hers and looked into her eyes, listened to her huffing breaths. He ripped the tape from her mouth and savored her labored, panicked breathing. “Bozhe,” she whispered.

His eyes searched her face as his unseen hand shivered the tip of the Khyber knife at a shallow angle up under her diaphragm nearly nine inches, completely through her heart, and up into her throat. Marta arched her back, convulsing. Her open mouth could make no sound and her body bucked against the ropes. Matorin rode the tremors in her body, felt her hoarse breaths quicken, and watched, watched, watched the light go out in eyes that partially rolled back inside her head. A trickle of blood oozed from one nostril and out of the corner of her mouth. It took Marta three minutes to die. She didn’t hear Matorin whisper, “Bozhe? No, God could not be here tonight.”

Dominika entered the rezidentura the next morning and looked over at Marta’s empty desk. Probably a long night of aquavit, she thought.

When Marta had not come in by midmorning, Volontov stuck his head out of his office and yelled, “Where is Yelenova this morning? Has she called in sick?” No one knew where she was. “Corporal Egorova, call her at her flat. See if you can reach her.” Dominika dialed several times but no one answered. Volontov called the security officer and told him to go over to her apartment, pound on the door, use the office copy of her key to get in. He returned an hour later to say that the apartment was empty but looked perfectly normal. Clothes in the closet, dishes in the sink, bed made.

“Draft a short cable to the Center,” barked Volontov to the security man, who looked at Volontov like a Rottweiler waiting for hand signals. “Inform them that Administrative Assistant Yelenova, Marta, has not reported for work, whereabouts unknown. She has not called in sick. Inform them we are searching for her and also filing a request to the Finnish National Police to search for her. Call your contact in the police. Tell them the embassy demands immediate action and utmost discretion. Go.”

Volontov called his counterintelligence referent into the office and shut the door. “We may have a problem,” he said. “Marta Yelenova has not reported to work.” He checked the SVR-issue wall clock above the door. “It’s been almost five hours,” he said.

His Line KR man, an unimaginative beast of burden formerly from the KGB Border Guards Directorate, looked at his watch, as if to confirm Volontov’s estimate of the time. “Get over to Supo,” Volontov said. “Ask for an appointment with Sundqvist. Tell them about Yelenova, that we think she’s been kidnapped. Ask them to check all the terminals: air, rail, ship.”

“Kidnapped?” asked the CI man. “Who would kidnap Yelenova?”

“Idiot. We’re not going to tell Finnish intelligence we think she defected. Just get them to start checking. They’ll have visa photos of her. Tell them utter discretion is imperative. And keep your mouth shut.”

In the next six hours the police had made no progress, but Supo had retrieved a photo of a woman vaguely resembling Yelenova at the Haaparanta border-crossing station at the Swedish border on the Gulf of Bothnia. The woman was wearing a scarf and dark glasses that concealed most of her face, but the nose and chin were right. Supo said the woman was processed through immigration control with a Finnish passport in the name of Rita Viren, a name the Finns were tracing. She was in the company of an unidentified man with sunglasses and a baseball cap.

“That confirms it,” said the CI man. “It was the Americans. She defected to the CIA.”

“Imbecile. How did you arrive at that?” said Volontov.

“Look at the ball cap, Colonel,” said the CI man, pointing at the Supo security-video photos that had been faxed to the Russians. “It says New York on the cap.” Volontov told him to get out.

The office was afloat in rumors. A murder? A kidnapping? The word no one dared utter. Defection? Everyone knew Marta and Volontov had had a screaming match several weeks ago. But to run away? Dominika was beside herself. Marta would not defect, but if she did, she would not leave without saying good-bye. She had only joked about both of them defecting together. No. Something bad had happened. Then she froze. Did They somehow know she, Dominika, was not reporting, falsifying progress with Nash? Was Marta’s disappearance a warning? Ridiculous. There was some very easy explanation. Marta had run off for a week to Lapland with a blond yoga instructor. Anything. But Dominika couldn’t convince herself.

The search for Yelenova continued for days, without result. Volontov was frantic that the disappearance of one of his people would stain his copybook at the Center, an ironic fixation considering his pokey thirty-year career ledger was already liberally blotted with sloth, inattention, and careerism. The embassy protested to the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and to the Interior Ministry about the criminal kidnapping of one of its diplomatic personnel, whose security, they reminded the uncomfortable Finns, was the direct responsibility of the Finnish government. A special Moscow investigator arrived from Directorate K to interview embassy officers and the rezident, as well as to confer with Finnish investigators. He left after four days, solemnly concluding that Ms. Yelenova had disappeared.

Dominika suspected the truth as she lay facedown on her bed in her SVR-provided apartment and wept for her friend. She had been a true friend—a big sister she never had—and it was monstrous, inconceivable, that They would have harmed her. But why? As she ran things through her mind, the memory of her telling Marta about Ustinov came back in a chilling rush. Did They know about that? Did Marta mention it to someone? Would a slip on her part result in the disappearance of a colleague, an officer of the Service, from sleepy little Helsinki, in the twenty-first century, in a sane, civilized world? She closed her eyes and felt the bed spinning, and she was in Ustinov’s love nest, on his blood-soaked revolving bed. Thinking back, she remembered Volontov’s face had shown fear, his orange halo was ragged with it.

She got up, walked to the window, and looked up at the night sky. She scorned herself. Trained intelligence officer. A real operator. Relentless seductress. They used her, were using her still, as a little chess piece, a little pawn. Whoever it was that Nate was handling, she could understand that person a little better now, appreciate the hate that must sustain him.

Dominika more than ever was confirmed in her decision not to report on Nate. It had been like a draft of cold air sweeping across her. But her little games were passive, weren’t they? She saw Marta’s face in the glass. How could she make Them atone for what They had done to her? How could she destroy them, Volontov, Uncle Vanya, all the others?

Tears ran down her cheeks. She cried for Marta, for her father, perhaps for herself too. She cried for Russia, but she knew she no longer believed. She turned away from the window, eyes closed. Something broke loose inside her and she swept a little ceramic bud vase—Marta had bought it for her at the Sunday market—off a side table with her arm, her teeth clenched and fists bunched.

Back in the rezidentura, filled with dread, Volontov was waiting for official censure in some form. Instead he received a sympathetic call on the “Vey-Chey,” the VCh phone, from Vanya Egorov, who commiserated that service in the field, on the front lines, was not without risk. There had been defectors in the past, there will be defectors in the future. We deplore them, he said, and we must be vigilant, but it’s impossible to prevent all of them. Egorov asked Volontov to concentrate on managing secure operations, and especially to focus on the “special project” with his niece and the young American. “Of course, General,” said a relieved Volontov. “I believe we are making good progress on that front.”

Chush’ sobach’ya. Bullshit, thought Egorov, and ended the call. Vanya knew that his niece must have mentioned at least part of the Ustinov story to this Yelenova woman, a serious mistake, but one he had to overlook for the time being. It was actually a stroke of luck that Yelenova subsequently let it slip in front of the mouth-breather Volontov, who blessedly had the wit to call him. It was only a matter of dispatching Matorin, then a relatively simple konspiritsia to send the investigator for show, to wrap up all the loose ends. God, if the president had gotten wind of this breach—Egorov didn’t want to think about it.

On the Finnish-Russian border three kilometers west of Vyartsilya, Russia, through an uninhabited tract of dense pines and rolling hills, the Soviets after World War II had established an infiltration route past the towers, border wire, and plowed strips. The Finnish side was always lightly patrolled. For decades, cleared KGB border guards periodically were assigned to the area to allow agents to pass through unmolested. The more techniques changed, the more they stayed the same: Routes through the minefields in 1953 were marked by stakes driven into the snow with cloth strips tied to them. Since 2010, the correct route through the field was marked by plastic pylons fitted with infrared strobes visible only with night-vision goggles.

A week earlier, Matorin had infiltrated Finland using this route, was picked up by a Directorate S support illegal on country road number 70, and was driven four hundred kilometers south on Rural Route 6 and finally into the city on state highway E75. The Spetsnaz killer had gone directly to Yelenova’s apartment, killed her at midnight, and put her body in a rubber military body bag. He had sanitized the apartment, then signaled the illegal, who, in the early morning hours, drove Matorin and Marta’s body back north to the Vyartsilya bolt-hole. The illegal then returned to Helsinki. The next morning, using real Finnish documents, the illegal and his lightly disguised wife left the country at Haarparanta, ostensibly for the start of a nice vacation in Sweden. They would never return to Finland, further complicating the investigation into what had happened to Marta Yelenova. The entire operation had taken a little less than forty hours.

The sunlight was rising through the pinewoods of Vyartsilya, casting long, delicate shadows that crept up the snow-covered hills. Guards from the Federal Security Service stood in elevated tower B30, watching the tree line with binoculars. The sun came up behind the tower, over the tops of the pines, bathing the whole area in golden light. “Vot,” said one of the men. There. A single thin figure came out of the trees. He was dressed in a white snowsuit with a hood, and wore snowshoes. The guards saw he moved steadily through the drifts, his long shadow stretched out behind him. He dragged a small equipment sled on a tether. An oblong shape lay on the sled, shrouded in white nylon. Marta Yelenova had returned to the Rodina.

MARTA’S LAST MEAL—PYTT I PANNA

In foaming butter, separately and aggressively brown cubed beef, potatoes, and diced onions until crisp. Incorporate ingredients in the skillet with additional butter, season and reheat. Form a well in the mixture, and break a raw egg into it. Stir the egg into the hash before serving.