Red Sparrow (74 page)

Authors: Jason Matthews

Tags: #Thriller

The two cars drove slowly up the road to the blocking trucks at the bridge, and the three men got out, one on each side supporting the smaller man. They squeezed past the trucks and stood silently, unmoving, while looking down the roadway at the dim figures at the other end. The border guards around the trucks unslung their rifles and the spotlights on the trucks came on, flooding the Russian side of the bridge in light. The railings and light pole stanchions cast slanted shadows across the roadway. There were half a dozen cherry pinpricks of light behind the window of the customs tollbooth. The Leningrad boys were smoking, watching, not talking.

They got out of the van and came around to stand in front, facing the Russians. The Russian spots came on and Benford signaled the KaPo jeep to turn on its headlights and single spotlight. The Russian side was now obscured by a glaring wall of light past which the fog continued to billow.

“We’ll walk you to the start of the bridge,” Gable said, holding Dominika’s arm steady. Benford stepped close and stood on the other side of her, holding her other arm above the elbow. Nate had exited the van and stood to one side. Gable and Benford walked forward.

“Wait,” said Dominika, and she leaned toward Nate and slapped him hard across the cheek.

“Atta girl,” said Gable. The KaPo troopers in the jeep nudged one another.

Dominika and Nate looked at each other for a beat, no one else in the entire fog-shrouded world, then Dominika whispered, “
Poka,
be seeing you.” She straightened and pulled Gable and Benford forward. “Come on,” she said.

“Be cool, baby,” Gable said out of the corner of his mouth. He and Benford steered Dominika by each arm, like custodians in a prison. Her hands were fists as she resisted their pressure. They walked up to the beginning of
the bridge roadway and stood there, watching the fog spill over the span. At the far end of the bridge there were flashes of cars pulling up, impossible to make out details, and there was a flurry of movement, then three men silhouetted at the other end, a short one in the middle. A spotlight winked off, then on again, and Benford signaled the troopers to send the same signal. The KaPo lights glinted off a dozen binoculars looking at them. “Stop when you get to the center,” Gable said.

Dominika contemptuously tore both her arms free of their grasp, told them, “
Yob tuvoyu mat’,
” straightened her coat, and stepped forward. With that slight hitch, she began walking into the fog, head up, ballet calves flexing, shoulders back. The short figure at the far end of the bridge also began walking.

“What did she say?” asked Benford.

“Sounded fairly obscene,” said Gable.

Dominika’s silhouette grew less distinct as she passed progressively through the faint circles of light on the roadway. She and the solitary figure walking the other way were nearly abreast of each other.

“She’s at midspan with MARBLE now,” said Gable softly. A bullhorn barked something and the two figures stopped. The two silhouettes were standing side by side in midspan, in the light of one of the lamps, fog swirling between them, soaking them. Dominika looked straight ahead, imperious, disdaining. She never turned her head, but she could feel his majestic purple presence, it was the last time she’d feel him. MARBLE looked over at Dominika, his white hair caught in the lamplight, and he shrugged off his overcoat and held it to her, an offering from one exchanged spy to another. Dominika took the coat and dropped it on the fog-wet pavement. Just as MARBLE had hoped she would do. The light glinted off a dozen binoculars.

MARBLE looked straight ahead, noting the city glow of Narva, the loom of the castle keep, the wink of a star in the western sky, the headlights and silhouettes of the men at the far end of the bridge. When lights on both ends of the bridge flashed again, he began walking. He heard Dominika’s footsteps fading behind him. His body felt light, the pains were familiar, but the hollowness in his chest was gone. His head was clear and he concentrated on not walking too fast, he would show them to the last how a professional
finishes. As he came nearer, the silhouettes turned into faces, familiar faces. It was more important to see his friends than it was to actually be free. Benford. Nathaniel. A spy swap. He almost laughed.

The 9x39mm round from Lyudmila’s suppressed rifle passed through the left side of MARBLE’s neck, severing his carotid artery before exiting his right pectoral muscle below the armpit. Tsukanova, intending a head shot, had held a touch low, and the cold night air had affected the subsonic SP-5 round. She was up and walking her egress route along the south fortress wall before MARBLE’s legs buckled. The Russians on their side of the bridge did not know anything had happened.

Benford caught him, but MARBLE’s dead weight slipped through his arms and the old man collapsed to the wet asphalt. Nate sat on the roadway and cradled MARBLE’s head against his thigh, but the old spy was still, they had flipped a switch on him and he was gone, eyes closed, face strangely composed. Benford looked at his hands, red with Korchnoi’s blood.

The KaPo troopers unslung their Galils and brought them up, but Gable screamed, “Stop!” and waved them to stand down. Across the bridge, Dominika turned briefly—she had heard Gable’s bellow—but she was swallowed up in the searchlights’ glare. She registered the dark knot of figures around the black lump on the ground, and she knew, instinctively, what had happened.

She screamed,
No!
once in her head, then willed herself to close down, to compose her face, relax her shoulders. She was hustled into a waiting vehicle, a heated Mercedes, luxuriously warm, which immediately sped off down the highway. The car rocked around the curves, and she contained her horror, replaying images of Korchnoi. She choked down her venomous rage as a yellow-draped Leningrad colonel filled the inside of the car with cigarette smoke.

Benford looked down at MARBLE, paralyzed, unable to move, unable to think. Nate’s head was bowed, and his hands shook as he continued cradling MARBLE’s head in his lap. This was violence too cruel; they were speechless, insensate with the finality, the irretrievability of MARBLE’s lost life. They were shaken by the despot’s towering treachery, by the enormity of the ruthless act.

All except Gable. He quickly stepped back out into the roadway and raised his binoculars. A jumble of silhouettes on the Russian side was
moving around; the taillights of a luxury sedan receded into the night. Gable could not tell whether Dominika had seen what had happened, but he hoped she had,
Please God she knows what happened.

The fog swirled around them, wetting their hair, touching MARBLE’s placid face. The old man’s sodden overcoat lay forgotten at the middle of the bridge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In counting the number of people who in one way or another materially assisted me in writing this book, I was surprised to see how many there were. I owe them all my thanks.

I must begin with my literary agent, the incomparable Sloan Harris of International Creative Management, who, in the early days of writing, acted as a sustaining guide and mentor, and later, as an unyielding advocate of the manuscript. I am certain that in another life Sloan was a farsighted Venetian doge or a conquering Byzantine sultan. Without him the book would not have been born.

Many thanks to the rest of the ICM team, including Kristyn Keene, Shira Schindel, and Heather Karpas, all of whom embody patience as a virtue.

I owe another debt of gratitude to my editor at Scribner, the legendary Colin Harrison, who simultaneously edited the manuscript with the acuity of a mapmaker while teaching me how to write good. His dedication to the science and art of writing is boundless, and he improved the final product beyond measure. Without him the book would not have been completed.

Thanks too to all the people at Scribner and Simon & Schuster, including Carolyn Reidy, Susan Moldow, Nan Graham, Roz Lippel, Brian Belfiglio, Katie Monaghan, Tal Goretsky, Jason Heuer, Benjamin Holmes, Emily Remes, and Dave Cole for their support, encouragement, and the warm welcome into the S&S family. Special thanks go to Kelsey Smith for all her hard work. All these people are collectively responsible for creating the book, though I hasten to add that any error of fact or language or science is mine.

I must acknowledge a number of friends who helped me begin the effort, some of whom cannot be named. They know who they are: the discerning Dick K. of Beverly Hills; the eclectic Mike G. at USC; and superattorney Fred Richman, also of Beverly Hills.

Of course the book would not have come to pass without a career in the CIA, a life I shared with hundreds of colleagues beginning with my career trainee class, and including lifelong friends made in Langley and in all the
foreign postings over thirty-three years. A number of them are still relatively young. I salute all of them.

As a young CIA officer I benefitted from the (at times) not-so-gentle guidance and patronage of a number of senior officers such as Clair George, Paul Redmond, Burton Gerber, Terry Ward, and Mike Burns, operators of towering talent and unshakable patriotism. In those days they were referred to as “barons” in the Directorate of Operations. And I sat at the knee of the laconic Jay Harris, a nuclear-physicist-turned-case-officer; together we reinvented internal operations in Castro’s Cuba.

My brother and sister-in-law William and Sharon Matthews made critically important suggestions, and my daughters, Alexandra and Sophia, more than once reminded the author that eight-track tape decks are no longer sold at Woolworth’s.

Finally I thank my wife, Suzanne, herself a thirty-four-year veteran of the CIA, for sharing an endlessly varied life with me, for the late nights, and the surveillance nights, and the evacuation nights, and for raising two sublime daughters, and for her patience while I wrote.

© DAVID MOORE

JASON MATTHEWS
is a retired officer of the CIA’s former Operations Directorate, now the National Clandestine Service. Over a thirty-three-year career he served in multiple overseas locations and engaged in clandestine collection of national security intelligence, specializing in denied-area operations. Matthews conducted recruitment operations against Soviet–East European, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean targets and, as Chief in various CIA Stations, managed covert-action projects against the weapons-of-mass-destruction programs of the world’s rogue states and collaborated with foreign liaison partners in counterterrorism operations. He lives in Southern California.