Red Sparrow (35 page)

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.