Red Sparrow

17

The recruitment of Dominika was not in any sense normal. She was a trained intelligence officer, but she now had to learn how to become a spy. It wasn’t a natural transformation. Cement the bond, Forsyth had said.

Station’s first move, therefore, was to make extremely discreet inquiries into the whereabouts of Marta, to demonstrate their concern. Gable arranged a meeting with a cooperative liaison officer from Supo. No trace of the Russian woman. The security video of a possible crossing at Haaparanta was inconclusive. A tearless Dominika thanked Nate for trying.

They kept the BIGOT list way down, the registered tally of officers cleared to read into the operation, though they couldn’t do much about the Headquarters end. The case was already in Restricted Handling channels, which was bullshit, said Gable, because only about a hundred people read the cables. They still tried to limit distribution. Forsyth and Gable had done this before, knew the more carefully they started the case the longer the intel stream would last. Nate felt his resolve building—protect her at all costs. Do not fail, do not fail her.

Nate found a two-bedroom in Munkkiniemi along the Ramsay Strand and the marina inlet, and the rat-faced NOC came back and rented it for twelve months as a Dane, a business flat, he’d be coming and going at all times. The gratified landlord couldn’t have cared less.

A night of spring rain, headlights reflecting on the pavement. Dominika was backlighted as she stepped off the green-and-yellow No. 4 trolley at Tiilimaki. Nate caught up to her after two blocks, put his arm in hers. Not even a hello, in strict SVR operative mode, back straight, nervous. Her first safe-house meeting as an agent, grappling not so much with fear as she was with the shame. They walked wordlessly down narrow lanes, behind apartment blocks, silver light from the television game shows in all the windows. They hurried through the main door, cooking smells, boiled reindeer and cream sauce, up two flights, walking quietly.

The first night of the rest of their lives. A couple of lamps on, and Gable was waiting and crowded her, took her coat. Dominika could not stop looking at Gable’s wire-brush hair. She liked his look, his eyes, the purple behind them. Another solid purpirnyj, she thought. Forsyth came out of the kitchen, glasses up on his forehead, wrestling with a cork. Elegant, wise, calm, the air around him was azure. Lazurnyj. He would be sensitive. Dominika sat on the couch and looked at the three men moving around the room. They were natural, unaffected, yet they looked at her and she knew she was being assessed.

She knew it was for real, with them in the room, filling it up. Nate was a young officer, all she had known of the CIA up till now, but these other men were calm, serious, you could feel the years, like General Korchnoi back home. Then Gable raised a glass and massacred zdorov’e and Dominika suppressed a smile, stayed serious and correct.

No business tonight, that was how good they were, just talk, and they let Nate do most of the talking, that was how good they were, and they listened and heard everything. At the end she left first—standard tradecraft for them too, she registered—and walked along the strand; not all the boats were in the spring water yet, and she didn’t feel ashamed like before. That was how good they had been.

The second meeting, Dominika had time to look around. The galley kitchen had a two-ring cooktop, enough to boil water, and a refrigerator with rubber trays to squeeze the ice cubes out of. In the nature of furnished safe houses, the couch and chairs and tables were thin and cheap and garish, avocado and harvest gold, still the rage in Scandinavia, said Gable. The cheap prints on the wall were crashing waves and elk in moonlight, the throws on the floor were straight Lapland. One bedroom had a double bed that touched the wall on either side, and you’d have to crawl onto it over the footboard. The second bedroom was empty save for a hanging fixture of bright red glass. The bathroom had a tub and the requisite bidet, which Gable one night mistook for the toilet, and Dominika had tears in her eyes and started calling Gable Bratok, dear brother, from then on.

Running a trained intelligence officer as an agent is more difficult than directing a sweaty banker desperate for the euros because he’s got King Kong for a wife, a two-year-old BMW, and Godzilla for a mistress. Dominika was an AVR grad. They argued, wryly, over tradecraft (“I cannot believe you think this is a suitable site”) or security (“No, Domi, the rug on the railing when it’s safe, didn’t they teach you positive signals?”). Nate wondered how many times he had to say, “Let’s do it my way,” and cringed every time she said, dramatically, to get under his skin, “It is my head if you’re wrong.”

The CIA men quickly recognized that Dominika had extraordinary intuition. She finished their sentences, nodded quickly at discreet suggestions, had an uncanny sense of when to listen. An intelligent woman, trained as an intelligence officer, thought Forsyth, but there was something else he had never seen before. Clairvoyance was the wrong word, but it was close.

A part of Dominika watched the process from afar. She saw how they respected her, valued her training, yet took nothing for granted. She knew they were testing her in little ways. Sometimes they deferred to her, other times they insisted on doing it their way. They were very thorough, she thought.

The weekly meetings at the safe house, her work with them, all began defining her. The torment of the decision forgotten, her recruitment by the CIA became the burning gemstone in her brain. She walked around with it, savored it. It was especially sweet when talking to Volontov. Can you guess what I am doing? she thought as the sweaty rezident droned on about her work. Nate had been right. This was something she owned, hers alone.

Forsyth came back when it was time to discuss, with infinite care, what secrets Dominika could steal from the rezidentura. They built the igloo, big blocks on the bottom, starting with what papers she personally handled, then what she could safely steal, then what treasures she knew existed but didn’t have access to. They told her to take it easy. Trained spooks as agents always initially push too hard, try to do too much. Dominika asked whether they would give her a camera and commo gear. She wanted to show them how much ice and edge she had, but it only rang bells in the CIA men’s heads. Dominika saw their faces and their halos change, and understood she had made a misstep. Let’s talk about equipment a little later, Forsyth said, and wrote a cable the next day asking for an examiner; they might as well get it over with.

Polygraph. The Flutter. Nate sat in the little bedroom listening to the muffled voices from the living room, one deep, the other sweet. Dominika was in a white ash chair answering yes or no to a thick-fingered examiner with a mustache whom Gable knew from other polygraph sessions and disliked. “Guy hit bottom twenty years ago, then started digging,” Gable said. Dominika knew this was an important test for her and she willed herself not to read the man, not to get cute, not to play with him. She concentrated on his questions, which drifted, colored, past her cheek.

Nate sweated for an hour, then went out to the living room when he heard them wrapping up. Dominika gave him a nod, but Big Fingers didn’t bat an eye. They never do, they withhold results till they “review the charts,” coy as virgins. In the end Forsyth got him back to the Station and sat him down and told him he didn’t give a fuck, he wanted a preliminary up or down, because this was important. Fussed, the examiner declared himself satisfied that Dominika was who she said she was, held the rank of corporal in the SVR, and most important, was not a double agent dispatched by the SVR to disinform the CIA, or to identify clandestine service officers, or to elicit current US intelligence requirements.

Now a confidant, the examiner did note privately to Forsyth that the charts showed a mild galvanic spike whenever she responded to a question in which the recruiting case officer, Nash, was mentioned. It required another series of rephrased questions, he said gravely, before he could confirm this was not evidence of classic Czech or Cuban polygraph countertechniques—there had been no controlled breathing, no bunched fists or clenched anus. Gable, when Forsyth related the examiner’s comments about Dominika’s reaction to Nate, simply said, “Orgaspasm,” and left the room.

With a test result of “no deception” in their pockets, the operation could move forward, and they had to talk about managing her security, about cover, behavior, comportment, pacing.

“You have to keep your profile normal,” lazurnyj Forsyth said. “You have to keep reporting your contacts with Nathaniel to the Center, keep showing modest progress. Once a month, not so good. Every two weeks, every week, better. It’s what gives you the freedom to move.”

“I know I must do this,” Dominika said. “I have telegrams already written in my head. From now until winter.”

“You have to write them on your own,” said Forsyth. “We can help you, but they must be your reports, in your words, with your details.” Dominika nodded her head. She knows the Game, thought Forsyth. She’s at home with it.

“I will paint a picture of Neyt. Vain, boastful, but cautious. Easy to manipulate, but suspicious, distracted.” She turned to look at Nate, raised an eyebrow.

“Hard to believe it will take you till next winter to figure all that out,” said Gable, sitting on the couch next to Nate, who flipped him a middle finger.

“I don’t know how long we can roll this out. Yasenevo is going to lose patience sooner or later,” said Forsyth. He already was thinking about the day Dominika would be recalled to Moscow. Would she be ready to operate inside? Could they get her ready in time? It would be the calendar that beat them, he thought, not her.

“There is one way to prolong the contact, keep my collar loose. Something that will persuade Yasenevo to invest more time,” Dominika said. “Uncle Vanya expects it.”

“What is it?” asked Forsyth.

“In time, if I report that Neyt and I have become lovers, Moscow will be gratified; it will satisfy their expectations. It will make sense to them—they will remember State School Four.”

Gable heaved himself up from the couch, a look of pain on his face. “Lovers? Jesus Christ, I couldn’t ask anybody to do that with Nash. It’s too much.”

A blustery Sunday, and the little skiffs and day-sailers snubbed against the pontoon docks in the inlet. In the safe house Dominika spoke a little of Marta but stopped and told Nate her news. The monotreme Volontov had recently realized he was without an administrative assistant and solicitously had asked Dominika to assume some admin duties. She wanted to tell him no, to discredit him in the eyes of the Center, but she thought now about Nate and Forsyth and Bratok, and had replied that she would be willing to help out. Her gemstone secret was burning deep now. She was learning to look for opportunities to feed her mounting appetite.

They gave her rezidentura officers’ time cards and filing of operational accountings. The latter came with an added benefit, could Nate guess? Each expense must be referenced to a case report or to an operational telegram describing the activity. “Volontov and his officers should do it themselves, but they just toss everything on my desk,” said Dominika. “No one but the rezident may read others’ cables, there is strict razdelenie, compartmentation.” Dominika’s blue eyes blazed. “Except that they need me to reference the expenses.” She stretched it out. “So… Volontov has given me access to the operational traffic. All of it.”

The intelligence started coming in bits and pieces, and they watched it, Forsyth firsthand, the arthropods back in Langley long-distance, for any false note, anything too pat, too clever. She was prodigious in remembering details, recalling one story line, which triggered another, then another. She began to take cryptic notes, they checked her on it, and she was sound.

She memorized nearly the complete text of the Line N referent’s monthly support activity report, blowing up three Line S illegals in Helsinki, sleepers who had lived in Finland as Finns for decades. One had already exited the country at Haaparanta as a smoke screen after Marta’s disappearance. The other two lived in the nearby municipality of Espoo, but they left them alone to protect Dominika.

Next meeting, she scared them when she unfolded an original document plucked out of Volontov’s in-box. She had stuffed it crumpled into a pocket instead of taking it to be shredded with the rest of the dross. Sovershenno Sekretno, Top Secret, from Line PR, four pages on the Estonian and Latvian Parliaments. They were NATO allies now, so Langley took that intel downtown, to the NSC and the Oval. Gable yelled at her never to do that again.

Headquarters agreed with Gable. No more pinching documents, give her a concealed camera. Nate didn’t like it, as risky as it gets, but Forsyth said they had to get her used to it, he thought she could handle it.

“I’m not sure she’s ready for that,” said Nate. Any spy gear trebled the risk and he didn’t want the case blowing up, didn’t want to put her in any more danger.

“Well, you better get her the fuck ready,” said Gable. “If they call her home tomorrow, the case ends.”

“Speaking of which, it’s time for a little Moscow internal ops training,” said Forsyth to Nate. “Your specialty.”

Dominika’s education in denied-area tradecraft began. Summer had settled on the peaked roofs and copper domes of Helsinki, and perpetual twilight replaced dusk, and scores of drab Finns rode the escalators down to the Metro platforms. Dominika in a scarf, Dominika in a beret, Dominika in a coat, counting the paces, funneling with the crowd toward the turnstile. She got through and at a corner of the passageway she brushed by him, through the crimson air, she could smell him, feel the sleeve of his sweater as she held a cigarette pack firmly between two fingers against her waist. He palmed it—a perfect Brush Pass—and was gone into the crowd.

Summer rain, fresh and light, traffic slow and sluggish, lights reflected off the pavement. She checked her watch by the light of a display case. No tickles behind her, she felt good, and she knew she would hit the timing window. When Nate had described what they were going to do, she had laughed. “We do not resort to such drama,” she had told him, and he said, “That’s because SVR operates in democracies,” and she had huffed but listened carefully.

She walked tight beside the granite wall, cars hissing past on the wet street. She turned the corner and stopped in the shadow of a scaffolding, in the covered pedestrian walkway. Nate’s car had come around the corner at thirty-eight minutes after the hour, random and quick, the car rolling and the passenger-side window down, and she stepped off the curb and stuck her hand in the window, letting the plastic bag drop on the seat, and took the replacement cassette from his hand, and stepped back under the scaffolding and he had driven on. He hadn’t looked at her, but she had seen his hand pulling on the hand brake, no brake lights, the Moving-Car Delivery. Such drama, she thought.

They were hitting their stride, all of them, and inevitably the Headquarters heat-seekers started circling. She was a controlled asset, well-placed inside an SVR rezidentura, they had written, and they wanted to “explore other possibilities.” Forsyth kept them off for weeks, but then they made it an order, and Gable wanted to get on a plane and go back there, but Forsyth told him to stop.

The madness began. The engineers in the Directorate of Science and Technology wanted DIVA to download the entire rezidentura computer network, attack the crypto systems, emplace audio and video inside the rezidentura. The S&T techs blithely admitted that some of their devices might, repeat, might dim the lights of southern Helsinki, and in one instance required DIVA to install a radioactive source on the roof of the Russian Embassy. Headquarters then advised that the “Rule of Sixes” that governed the development of all new technology would, however, delay deployment of any equipment to the field: R&D for the device would take six more years, it would cost an additional six million dollars, and, based on breadboard bench testing, one device would weigh six hundred pounds. Madness.

As the clandestine side of the operation expanded, Nate and Dominika continued their dilatory public contact for Volontov and the Center’s benefit. Dinners, trips to the country, concerts. Nate provided personal details about himself, something the Center could check independently, to illustrate how well Dominika was prying open the oyster. But as Forsyth predicted, Volontov wanted more and faster progress, so with Gable’s enthusiastic assistance Dominika drafted the much-anticipated contact cable reporting the beginning of a physical relationship with Nate, to buy more time. Gable wanted to write an “erectile dysfunction angle” into the script, arguing that would build in even more delay, but a red-faced Forsyth overruled him. Nate flipped Gable the bird.

Dominika commenced taking photographs of classified Russian documents from within the rezidentura using a variety of concealed cameras installed in purses, key fobs, lipsticks. She was discerning in photographing only the best documents, flexible enough to know when to wait. Gable praised her but Nate was perpetually worried and gloomy at the risks Dominika was taking.

One Sunday afternoon in the safe house, Dominika had heard enough. “Are you worried about me, or about this case and your reputation?” she asked. The room fell silent and Gable cleared his throat.

Nate turned slowly toward her, embarrassed and angry. “I’m intent about preserving the intelligence,” he said, and watched her face harden. “I just think you should slow down.”

“If that’s what you think,” said Gable, “you’re gonna love the next round.”

The cable from Headquarters ran five pages. They wanted her to insert a specially prepared thumb drive into a rezidentura computer, preferably the machine in the file room, but the one under Volontov’s desk would do. Fourteen seconds of downloading and Langley would be able to access the clear text behind all encrypted, “point-to-point” SVR cables, Yasenevo–Helsinki, transmitted over commercial telephone lines. Reading messages en claire was a lot easier than trying to crack ever-changing encryption algorithms. But this was the riskiest thing yet. Forsyth saw Nate’s face and told him to skip the meeting at the safe house. Gable would run her through it.

Two days later, Dominika pushed the wire trolley with the wobbly wheels loaded with files and burn bags and ledgers into the file room. Thank God she could hold on to the thing, because her legs were trembling. The file-room custodian looked up expectantly, a middle-aged man named Svets, who wore enormous glasses and a wide wool tie that came only to the middle of his belly. He looked forward to watching Egorova replace the files every evening at close of business, especially when she stretched to reach the higher safe drawers. His compound beetle eyes followed her as she horsed the trolley through the door.

She had practiced it in pantomime with Gable, he said don’t stop, make it flow. She caught the trolley on the corner of the clerk’s desk, let it go over, cascading paper across the floor, and Svets got up, all fussed, and she was on her knees beside his desk and there was the port with a winking green light, and she made sure the pins were the right side up and felt it go in, and started counting while she kept picking up paper, nine, ten, eleven, and Svets was straightening up and Dominika pointed to another file on the floor in the far corner, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, out came the thumb drive, and she was up on her feet, brushing her hair behind her ear, the piece of plastic in her skirt pocket thumping like the Tell-Tale Heart. She tidied the files and put them back in the drawers, and let him look at her on tiptoe, lifting one foot for effect.

Two hours till the end of the day and every eye seemed on her, every person seemed to know. Then the lobby and the impatient grumbling line of embassy employees stacked up at the double front doors, beside which was a table with two Volga boatmen behind it, embassy security with brown clouds around their heads, checking purses and pockets. Dear God, random bag check and I pick today. A rivulet of sweat went down her back, she could feel it all the way down, and she was caught in line, she couldn’t retreat back upstairs, they watched for that, and she held her coat close in front of her and slipped the thumb drive under the waistband of her skirt and down the front of her underwear. The security man reeked of vodka and his red eyes knew, had to know, she had the thing in her panties, but he stirred the contents of her purse and slid it to the end of the table and waved her through.

She told them about it that night, the adrenaline of the risk still hot in her belly, with Nate standing apart, in the door of the little kitchen, and Forsyth listening quietly with his glasses up on his forehead. Gable opened a longneck and tipped it back in one swallow. “I guess now we know why it’s called a thumb drive,” he said, and pushed past Nate and started making cheese fondue, for Christ’s sake. Dominika had never tasted it, didn’t know what it was, and when it was ready they sat around the table and dipped bread into the sharp, melted cheese, smelling the wine in it, and talked and laughed a little.

Forsyth and Gable left after dinner. Nate poured two glasses of wine and they walked into the living room. “What you did today was too risky. I should have never let you try it,” said Nate.

“It came out all right,” said Dominika, turning to face him. “We both know there are risks.”

“Some risks are acceptable, a few of them unavoidable, most are stupid.”

“Stupid? Glupyj? Don’t worry, Neyt,” said Dominika, “you won’t lose your star spy.” The word stupid had lit her fuse. His was already smoldering.

“It’s just that you should learn to get high on something other than adrenaline,” he said.

“You mean like wine?” she said, and threw the wineglass against the wall. “No, thank you, I prefer adrenaline.” The drip of liquid was the only sound in the room.

Nate crowded her, and grabbed her arms above the elbows. “What is wrong with you?” he hissed. They glared at each other, their faces inches apart.

“What is wrong with you?” she said in a whisper. The room was out of focus for her. Nate was purple and hazy. She looked at his lips, daring him, willing him to come closer. Another second, and the moment disappeared into the slipstream. “Please let go of me,” she said, and he dropped her arms and she picked up her coat and without looking at him opened the door—taking the automatic, precautionary glances into the hallway and stairwell—then went out, closing it softly behind her.

Nate stared at the closed door, his tongue thick in his mouth, his heart pounding in his chest. Jesus, all he wanted was to keep the case running smoothly. All he wanted was to keep her safe. All he wanted…

GABLE’S CHEESE FONDUE

Reduce white wine and crushed garlic, add grated Gruyère and Emmentaler cheese, whisk over medium heat until melted. Stir in cornstarch slurry, more wine to taste, and reheat (do not boil) until fondue is creamy and thick. Serve with lightly toasted, cubed country bread.