Red Sparrow (41 page)

The matron straightened and slapped Dominika across the cheek.
Sorry to ruin your soggy little game,
Dominika thought.

The crickets clicked and she was shoved, thumping against the back of the cabinets at the ends of the corridors, and the lights stayed on in the cell until she could feel the sand under her eyelids, and the screeching hailer sounded like Schumann or Schubert, she couldn’t tell which. A sallow girl with bruises on her legs and a crusted sore in the corner of her mouth was thrown into her cell, face-first onto the floor, and she wanted to talk all night, a frightened cellmate sobbing about how she hated them, she hadn’t done anything wrong. The little yellow-winged
kanarejka,
the canary, wanted a friend. The girl licked the sore on her mouth and looked at Dominika on her cot and put her hand out and whispered she was lonely. Dominika turned her face to the wall and ignored the raspy voice.

They didn’t know anything. They were looking for something to come adrift, something to pull on, but she held on tight to her secrets. They came back to the Americans, they wanted to know about her assignment to get close to Nash. Did you fuck him? Did you wrap your little Sparrow beak around his
khuy
? Every day there would be two hours without the straps, or the screaming, or the slaps across the face that brought her head left and right and blurred her vision. A nameless colonel—in formal uniform with powder-blue shoulder boards that matched his halo, sensitive like Forsyth, an artist—sat across a table. She had to be careful with him, stay alert.

He spoke quietly, evenly, at the start of each session asking why she had betrayed her country. She replied she had done no such thing, and he continued as if not hearing her, asking mildly what were the
reasons
she had decided to do it, what was the
exact point in time
that she had decided.

The colonel was so mild, so assured in his manner. His questions were drawn from a premise—her guilt—that began to become a reality. Let us talk about life’s disappointments, he would say, those disappointments that compelled you to do these things. Logic and fantasy and misstatements all began to invade her exhausted mind. Would you like to read the transcripts of Sinyavsky’s trial? She didn’t know who that was, a dissident, in 1966. Read
how denial evolves into acceptance, how it can liberate, said the colonel. His voice was soft, modulated, his blue bubble seemed to envelope her.
Stay awake.

The ancient, poisonous, and dispassionate transcripts mesmerized her; it was as if she were physically present during the show trial. She felt herself slipping. The wearisome act of denying individual accusations brought her closer to agreeing with the colonel’s overarching assumption of her guilt. It was simple, really, he said, they simply had to establish
how
she had strayed,
when,
and
how badly.

He almost broke her, the moderate colonel in his pressed uniform, but she refused to be drawn down into their black hole. Her name was Dominika Egorova. She was a ballerina, an officer in the SVR, a Sparrow trained to bend others’ minds. She loved and was loved in return. She closed her eyes and flew high above Moscow, tracing the river, high above the fields and the forests, and dipped her wings over Butovo and the slit trench that held the body of Marta Yelenova, the ground frozen solid above her.

Marta gave her strength and she wrenched her mind back from the abyss, she retreated inside herself, used everything they gave her to resist them, including the hallucinations, Dominika welcomed them. She lay in her cell and it was the bed in Helsinki, and the hot light in her eyes was the Finnish moonlight, and she lay still and felt him on top of her. The fever and the chills were his caresses. Her infected eye shed tears of love, which he kissed away. She turned on the mattress, her fists bunched under her stomach to stop the ache.

Even as her arms went numb from the straps, she felt herself getting stronger. She touched the secret inside her, it had been buried deep, but she could feel it again. The secret that lived in her soul, the secret that she had stuffed away out of their reach, was rekindled, began to burn again. She could think about it, knowing they could not get their hands on it. Her mother had told her Resist, Fight, Survive. They were getting weaker, she was getting stronger. Their individual colors were stuttering on and off, as if a fuse were loose.

She told them, kept telling them, she did not do anything wrong, she couldn’t tell them anything because there was nothing to tell. The louder they screamed, the happier she became. Yes, happy—she loved these men and women who tormented her, she loved the turquoise-painted colonel.
They knew they could not keep on indefinitely, they were running out of time. Unless they forced a confession, they had nothing.

Far above the crenellated roof of Lefortovo and Lubyanka and Yasenevo the ether was filled with sly messages, queries and responses, precedence and deadlines. Information was coming out of Washington about the Bullard affair. The Washington
rezidentura
had its feelers out, contacts were being taken to lunch, cooperative Americans were being met in underground garages, or on the C&O Canal Towpath, or on darkened cobblestoned streets in Georgetown or Alexandria. A rumor circulating out of the US Justice Department held that Bullard had been under suspicion
for a year
before he contacted Russian intelligence in Helsinki. His arrest in Washington had been planned, but his unexpected travel abroad had forced their hand.

Official US sources downplayed the loss of the manual—not much made it into the public record, but a leak from a “high-placed government source” described the incident as a “grave loss of national security information.” Congressional calls for an accountability investigation followed. The dithering, and recriminations, and accusations were all a part of variegated deception, assembled and propagated via scores of unwitting sources and assorted blabbermouths, orchestrated by CI Chief Simon Benford, with the sole goal to reassure the Russians that the manual they had acquired was genuine. If an ancillary benefit was to protect the agent DIVA—if she was still alive—all the better.

SVR Directorates R (analysis) and X (science) submitted reports. Preliminary analysis of the US National Communications Grid document passed by Bullard concluded with the assessment that the document was authentic and unique. Directorate T officers, FAPSI communications experts, and scientists from the Saint Petersburg University of Information Technologies began studying the manual in consultation with the Ministry of Defense to identify exploitable vulnerabilities in the vast US network. Funding had been requested from the defense budget for developing software, cyber applications, and other tools for potential use against the assessed weakest spots in the system.

Because they wanted to believe, a consensus was reached among the
Kremlin
knyaz’ki,
the princelings. The material was authentic, a significant windfall, even if the Americans knew of its loss. Obtaining Bullard’s information from under the nose of American intelligence was a tactical triumph, a demonstration of Russian mastery in tradecraft. That the volunteer Bullard had been arrested was his misfortune, obviously a result of his stupidity, sloppiness, and greed. The Kremlin couldn’t care less about his fate. He was the Americans’ concern now, for three consecutive life sentences.

A commendation from the Duma recognized Rezident Volontov and the Helsinki
rezidentura.
In a late afternoon ceremony in the gilded Andreyevsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, double eagles over the doors where red stars had once hung, SVR First Deputy Director Egorov was awarded a second star as lieutenant general. President Putin himself handed Egorov the oblong felt box with the two-star clusters, bussed him on three cheeks, and gave him a trademark crocodile smile that from the president was an exhilarating gesture of approval. The promotion ceremony coincided with the weekend and delayed Dominika’s release by two days.

On Monday, after breakfast, Vanya Egorov finally made the calls. To KR, to the Internal Investigations Directorate, ultimately to the FSIN, the creeps in the Service for the Execution of Punishments, the demon offspring of the gulags. He identified himself using his new star,
Lieutenant General
Egorov, to tell them all to finish it up. It was beginning to look bad, she was his brother’s daughter, for God’s sake. No, he did not want them to go to Level Two. No, he did not authorize administering drugs, or a course of sensory deprivation, or more severe electric shock.
What the hell is wrong with you people? These measures are for bastard traitors, like the mole still out there,
he thought.
If she hasn’t confessed, there is nothing to confess,
though the devil knew what had happened in Helsinki, with that
sliznjak,
that garden slug Volontov running things. Clean her up and send her back to me, her mother is worried, I want her back on the job, he said with fatherly concern.

Colonel Digtyar himself brought the cardboard box with her clothes to the cell, stood there while she undressed and returned the smock—State property—and dressed in front of him, her shins and thighs mottled blue-black, her fingernails purple, her ribs showing. They had accomplished all that in such a short time. They walked her upstairs to the grilled door and
she stepped out onto the snowy street, with the traffic noise and the smell of exhaust from the buses, and she walked gingerly on the ice for a little way, just to feel the ground beneath her feet, her breath in clouds rising above her head. Her ballet limp was more pronounced now, and her foot throbbed, but she concentrated on swinging her arms and walking away from the walls with her back straight. The marks on her wrists were visible from under the cuffs of her overcoat.

Dominika dreamed about prison, in her bed, or sitting in a chair in the living room while her mother washed bedsheets sour from the poison that was leaving her body. She backed into the hall closet and closed the door on herself and stood wedged in the dark to relive the cabinets—smell and sound, click-
clack,
click-
clack
—and for the pleasure of knowing she could come out into the light whenever she liked. She wrapped her wrists together with panty hose and strained the knot tight with her teeth, to feel her pulses. After all the edgy urges left her, she cried silently, tears wetting her cheeks. Her mother played the violin every day now, a half hour at a time, while Dominika sat on the floor and stretched, and lifted her legs until her stomach screamed, and pushed up from the floor until her arms shook. Her mother washed her, sitting in the tub the first night, but now Dominika stood in the bath alone, seeing the marks disappear, watching herself heal. She nodded to herself in the mirror. She was getting better, and with the feeling of redemption the coda of a vermilion fugue, a red fury, repetitively welled up around her. It was a deep rage, one easily enough controlled, one that would last, one on which she could feed.

Dominika Egorova sat in a chair in front of the paperless desk of her uncle in his office on the executive fourth floor of SVR headquarters in Yasenevo. Outside, the snow-blasted pine forest stretched out of sight, beyond them the bare fields and the flat horizon. Sunlight streamed through the picture windows, illuminating half her uncle’s face but plunging the far side of it into
shadow. Half his beastly yellow aura was mottled, the other half sparkled in the sunlight. Vanya Egorov sat back, lit a cigarette, and looked at his niece. She was dressed in a plain white shirt buttoned at the neck and a blue skirt. Her dark hair was carefully combed. She looked thinner and pale.