Red Sparrow

34

Vanya Egorov was in his office staring through the plate glass, anticipating the imminent collision of the operational factors swirling around him. SWAN was still producing magnificently, but her lack of discipline made it likely she would burn up eventually. Egorov dared not contemplate losing SWAN.

The news from Korchnoi, just returned from Italy, was barely adequate. Some contact with Nash, relationship renewed, he had accepted the legend that Dominika was now in the Courier Service. They established a universal contact plan. Too slow, always too damn slow.

The mole was still out there, a threat to SWAN, to other cases, to Egorov himself. He ordered Korchnoi to prepare Dominika for another trip, ostensibly as a courier. He needed results. Then his phone rang. The special phone.

“Unsatisfactory,” said the president. “I trust you are moving ahead to engineer subsequent contact. No delays.” From his KGB days, President Putin knew how important operational momentum could be.

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Egorov, “a second trip by the officer is already scheduled. Results will be forthcoming.” Iisus, Jesus, now he was blowing smoke up Putin’s ass.

“Very good,” said Putin. “Where?”

Egorov swallowed. “We are determining exactly which overseas location will be most advantageous. I will inform you the instant I decide.”

“Athens,” said Putin.

“Mr. President?” said Egorov.

“Send the officer—your niece—to Athens. Low security threat, we have people inside the police.” Why was he insisting on Greece?

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Egorov, but Putin had already hung up.

One floor down, Zyuganov looked into a milky eye and at the death’s head skull. “Make arrangements for Athens,” said the dwarf, and watched the man get up and leave his office. Zyuganov considered briefly that Dominika could be in danger if she were caught between this Spetsnaz maniac and his target, but that couldn’t be helped.

Benford had CID researching compartmented defense projects and crunching names. He was waiting for an echo from Vanya’s canary trap. The Orions were trying to fox Golov again on the streets of Washington. But he needed something right away.

They had discussed it in Rome and MARBLE knew what he had to do, despite the risk, and Benford had reluctantly agreed. Korchnoi walked down to the first-floor laboratory of Directorate T. Nasarenko was seated behind his desk, a moonscape riot of papers, boxes, and folders. A long table against the wall was chaos, and similarly covered to overflowing. Nasarenko looked up at Korchnoi, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Yury, please excuse the interruption,” said Korchnoi, walking up to the desk and shaking Nasarenko’s hand. “May I speak with you?” Nasarenko looked like a sailor suddenly caught on a disintegrating ice floe, contemplating the widening gap between his ship and the ice.

“What is it?” Nasarenko asked. His face was gray and his hair—never overly combed anyway—was strawlike and dull. His glasses were smudged and cloudy.

“I need your advice on a communications matter,” said MARBLE, and for the next fifteen minutes discussed a backup communication system for a Canadian recruitment target. Nasarenko, agitated and with twitching thumbs, distractedly discussed the matter.

Korchnoi leaned over Nasarenko’s desk, crowding him, creating blind spots. “What’s bugging you, old friend?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Nasarenko. “It’s just that work has been piling up.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help…”

“It’s nothing,” said Nasarenko. “Just a lot of work. I’m drinking from a fire hose of data. I need translators, analysts.” His thumbs bent spasmodically as he spoke. “Do you know how much information is on a single disc?” He swiveled his chair around to face a four-drawer safe, took out a lidded steel box, and shook it out over his desk. A dozen plastic bags, stapled at the top, spilled onto his blotter. Inside each bag was a disc inside a gray sleeve. He picked up several discs in shaky hands. “These can hold gigabytes of data. I have all these waiting for processing.” He threw a plastic bag across his desk, where it skittered under a pile of dun-colored folders.

Korchnoi reached over to pick up the little bag. He peered at the piece of plastic as if he could not imagine so much information could fit into such a small object. He read the Pathfinder logo on the side of the discs. “Why can’t they give you more staff?”

Nasarenko put his head in his hands. Korchnoi felt sorry for this pugalo, this scarecrow, with his straw hair and flapping arms. “Yury, don’t panic,” he said. “You’ve done too much excellent work for too many years to be treated this way.” As Korchnoi reached across the desk to pat Nasarenko on the shoulder, he slipped the plastic bag with the disc into the out-of-sight pocket of his suit coat. Were the discs sequential? Were they logged in? Would Nasarenko notice one of two dozen was missing? “I could send one or two analysts from my department to assist you temporarily, if that would help. God knows we’re all shorthanded, but your work is critical. Could you use them?”

Nasarenko looked up gloomily. “Your analysts could not work on the sensitive project, it is restricted.”

“Maybe they can work on other projects, to give you some time. Yury, don’t say no. It’s settled,” said Korchnoi. “I’ll send over two of my analysts this afternoon, but Yury”—Korchnoi wagged a finger at him—“don’t even dream that you’ll steal them.” Nasarenko smiled thinly.

Washington rezident Golov’s cable reporting the barium variant with “shingles” was lying on Vanya Egorov’s desk. A single page with a diagonal blue line across the text, it was wrinkled from repeated clench-fisted readings. The Line KR chief, Zyuganov, sat in a chair in front of Egorov, delighted beyond measure. Egorov shook his head. “I cannot believe that Nasarenko is the mole,” he said. “He can barely carry a conversation in the cafeteria. Can you see him at night, meeting with the Americans?”

Zyuganov licked his lips. “Shingles. Golov would not make a mistake with this. You read his report, a direct quote from SWAN. ‘The mole is afflicted with shingles.’ The variant used with Nasarenko.”

“He is an absentminded fool,” said Egorov, not really knowing why he was defending the man. “He could have mentioned it to others, the word could have gotten back from another source.” Zyuganov didn’t really care. All he knew was that he would be crawling into Nasarenko’s head. Now he had a job to do.

“Damn it, it’s all we have right now,” said Egorov. “Start immediately on an investigation. Every aspect.”

Zyuganov nodded, hopped down off the chair, and headed for the door. He tried to remember where he had put his Red Army tunic, the one with the buttons on the side, the one he liked wearing during interrogations. The greenish brown material—stiff with brown dried blood spots and thick with the stable stench of a hundred bowels—looked smarter than a lab coat, though the sleeves were slightly frayed.

“One more thing,” said Egorov after him. “Check him for metka, for tracking compounds. If he’s touched an American in the last two years, something may show up.” Zyuganov nodded, but he had his own opinion of spy dust.

He preferred povinnaya—confession, magnificent, liberating confession, the best way to establish guilt. Zyuganov had a connate sense of how to convince subjects, after the screams and separated tendons and spilled ocular fluid, to agree to confess to whatever they were required to confess to.

He still couldn’t remember where his army tunic was.

They summoned Nasarenko to Counterintelligence for a “random security update.” One did not need to work in the SVR for long to know that this kind of interview represented quite serious trouble, and it set Nasarenko into a panic. After the requisite inconclusive interview with the confused and weeping scientist, Zyuganov transferred him straight to the cellars, in this case to Butyrka in central Moscow. He shrugged on his tunic with anticipation.

People are funny, thought Zyuganov, fingering the lightweight truncheon. They all react differently. With Nasarenko it was the soles of his feet and the hollow aluminum baton—much more of a reaction than the average subject. Zyuganov was able to complete one session with the pop-eyed scientist before an inventory of his laboratory revealed that a SWAN disc was missing, and the pytka, the torture, stopped because this was something critical. Zyuganov authorized a course of amobarbital that unpeeled Nasarenko’s memory enough for him to walk them through the recent past, reviewing staff, and colleagues, and visitors, including the brief visit by General Korchnoi to Nasarenko’s laboratory. Korchnoi? Impossible. Make another sweep of the lab. There had to be an explanation. Where was the disc?

Korchnoi heard the rumors about the mole hunt redoubled, about trouble in Directorate T, about sensitive materials gone missing. He spoke to old friends in other departments, and listened to the “porcelain gossip” in the senior-officer toilets. Nasarenko had not been seen in days.

Korchnoi knew the searchers and investigators and counterespionage interrogators would start closing in. He urgently had to send Benford a note, as well as pass the disc he had shoplifted from Nasarenko’s lab to the CIA instantly, via dead drop, this evening; that is, if they still let him walk out of Headquarters. He wondered if he had played it too close, whether he had enough time for Dominika to make another trip—to Athens—and blow the whistle on him.

Korchnoi walked out of headquarters on his own legs—not very much longer, he reckoned—and, once back in his apartment, composed a message. His burst transmission took a fraction of a second. Twenty minutes later Benford read the two lines of the message: Nasarenko is in the snare. Will load DD DRAKON.

Dead drop, thought Benford. The old fox must have something important. And Nasarenko’s in trouble. That means one of their twenty-three names in Washington is SWAN. He reached for the phone to call the FBI.

The night rain sheeted the street, blowing almost horizontally with the gusts of wind. The platform and stairs of the Molodezhnaya Metro stop were deserted, a few cars moving, stores closed. MARBLE flipped up the collar of his raincoat, jammed his hands into the pockets, and started walking slowly up Leninskaya Ulitsa. He had ridden three separate trains, taken a long walk along the river, before his instincts had been satisfied. There was nothing moving around him, or out on the wings, and he did not sense the presence or pressure of men on the street watching him.

Keep walking, steady pace, final approach and sloshing through the rain, water like fingers down his back. Night creature, hug the wall, listen for the squeak of shoes behind you. Follow Leninskaya through black woods, then the dogleg curve of the road in the trees, one light from Obstetrics School No. 81 flickering through the branches. Quickly now, off the pavement and into the dripping woods. MARBLE shivered. Shut up, stop moving, watch and listen, especially listen, for the gearbox banging or the brakes squealing or the doors chunking. Just the wind creaking the trees.

Time to move. Black water was gurgling through a metal culvert under the roadway, and MARBLE knelt and took the pouch out of his pocket, stripped the backing off the adhesive, stuck his arm in, and pressed the gray matte package hard against the inner curve of the culvert. Hold for a count of ten, let the epoxy cure, and listen for the splash that doesn’t come. Satisfactory.

He checked himself again, defending the cache on the way out and all the way to the barnyard heat of the Krylatskoye Metro. There was a sodden pile of clothes on his kitchen floor and the keyboard shook in his hands and the stylus was too small, even with reading glasses. Hell, don’t they build these things for old eyes? Because no one lives that long, that’s why, and the recessed button felt hot as he released the dove into space: HAVE LOADED DD SITE DRAKON.

MARBLE sat back in his armchair and closed his eyes. Come unload DRAKON, retrieve the little black disc, and God preserve the young-limbed CIA boy who will get mud on his suit, or the ponytailed Embassy wife, Phonak in her ear, listening for squelch breaks from the radio cars.

The Station heat-wrapped it twice, tight around the corners, and swaddled the box in burlap and stapled it and banded it and jammed it into the Halloween-orange K bag with the lockable zipper, and flew it home, couriered direct, because this one was from MARBLE. And the dove came back with the branch in its mouth, DRAKON RECOVERED, and the culvert in the woods vomited its black water but kept its secret nearly forever.

Benford sat at a conference table in the basement of FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. The table was littered with the remains of lunch ordered out from several local restaurants. This was a working lunch, no executive dining room for them now. Benford had ordered a Thai chicken salad called larb gai, succulent ground chicken with onions and chilies, basil, and lime, so highly seasoned that he was blowing contentedly like a steam boiler while others around the table finished their more conventional Episcopalian lunches of sandwiches or soup.

The table was divided evenly between CIA and FBI, mostly senior-level officers from technical and counterintelligence divisions. When the courier from Moscow arrived with MARBLE’s pouch, Benford—even Benford—agreed to let the FBI handle the forensic dissection of the package, to ensure proper procedure. “These federal automatons,” said Benford earlier to Nathaniel, “have been speaking to me about maintaining the ‘evidentiary chain’ as regards MARBLE’s package. If he has in fact recovered an actual disc containing top-secret information, passed by hand to the Russians from SWAN, then according to our FEEBish colleagues we must begin thinking about considerations of admissible evidence and securing convictions and such things.” Benford had uncharacteristically deferred to them.

Benford contemplated a metal evidence tray at the center of the table. The disc—now out of its SVR outer plastic and Pathfinder inner paper sleeve—lay in the bottom of the tray, on a sterile towel, its surface lightly coated with gray powder. FBI techs had followed procedure and staggered the tests—a ninhydrin swab to raise existing latent prints on the drive, then the spritz of calcium oxide for contrast. Seated around the table, everybody could see the three distinct, single prints on the dull surface. What would it be: a Russian lab rat’s salami thumbprints, or the whorls and ridges of an American mole? Benford knew that MARBLE would not have opened the plastic envelope, he would have been too good, too careful, to touch the actual disc itself. The FEEBs had taken photos and lifts to the laboratory for enhancement. An automated search in the FBI’s print archives was already under way.

Benford was in his car heading back up the GW Parkway toward Headquarters when his car phone rang. It was the deputy chief of the FBI Laboratory Services. “You might want to turn around and come back down here,” the FBI man told Benford. “You are freaking not going to believe the hit we just got.”

“This better be good,” said Benford, looking for the Spout Run exit so he could double back.

“Oh, it’s good, all right,” said the FBI scientist.

BENFORD’S THAI CHICKEN SALAD (LARB GAI)

Finely hand-chop lean chicken breasts with a large knife or cleaver. Season with lime juice and rice wine and sauté until crumbly and white. Let chicken cool and fold in lemongrass, diced garlic, diced chilies, lemon zest, fish sauce, salt, and pepper. Incorporate well. Add chopped cilantro, basil, mint, and scallions. Toss well; serve in lettuce cups with rice.