Red Sparrow

Boil cubed beef, chopped onion, celery, shredded carrots, and whole garlic in water for two hours. In a separate pot, cover sauerkraut and heavy cream with boiling water and steep in a medium oven for thirty minutes. Boil cubed potatoes, celery root, and slivered mushrooms until soft. Combine all ingredients; season liberally with salt, whole peppercorns, bay leaves, and marjoram and boil for twenty minutes. Cover pot with cloth, set in low oven to steep for thirty minutes. Serve with sour cream and dill.

22

Nathaniel Nash walked aimlessly down a light-green corridor of CIA Headquarters. The hallway was empty, stretching into the waxed-floor distance of D Corridor past where it transitioned into E Corridor and the DI. To an operations officer, passing through Directorate of Intelligence territory was like walking in a mysterious jungle. Heads would peer around corners and jerk back, doors would open an inch and slam shut. A braying laugh, a howler monkey in the forest canopy, the booming notes from across the river of a hollow teak log being struck with sticks.

Helsinki was a memory, a torment. Dominika had been swallowed up, disappeared, status unknown, welfare unknown, “contact with agent broken,” wait till she comes out again, perhaps a station officer meets her at a dip party halfway around the world, maybe in ten years, maybe never. Or wait till another agent hears how she was sent to lagerya, the camps, or when the Moscow watchers read in Pravda how she died. The ongoing tap on Helsinki rezidentura communications revealed nothing of her fate.

A month after Dominika’s recall, Nate had asked Forsyth if he could go LWOP. He artlessly said he thought he’d travel to Moscow, privately, to see if he could find out what had happened to her. The usually unflappable Forsyth lost his temper.

“You want to go to Moscow?” Forsyth raved. “An officer of the CIA with knowledge of Moscow operations wants to enter Russia as a private citizen, without diplomatic immunity? A CIA officer the SVR knows was active in their capital committing espionage? Is that what you’re telling me?” Nate did not reply. Gable, hearing the shouting, came into the office. “What’s your plan, Nate?” said Forsyth. “Do you plan to storm the Lubyanka, blow her cell door, shoot your way up to the roof, and hang-glide to the West?”

“It would be too far to hang-glide from Moscow,” said Gable. “Otherwise, it’s a wicked good plan.”

“I’m going to tell you this once,” said Forsyth. “You do not have my permission, or that of the Central Intelligence Agency, to go on leave without pay, to leave this duty post, or even to remotely contemplate travel to the Russian Federation. We do not know whether DIVA is in trouble, nor do we know her current location or status. We wait for word. We collect intelligence.” Nate slumped in his chair.

“If she’s in trouble, we’ll eventually hear,” said Forsyth. “You are not responsible for this; you did not put a foot wrong. DIVA was an agent, we protect agents, we run risks, we run them, the best ones we run against horrendous odds. And sometimes we lose them, despite all the tradecraft and all the precautions. Do you understand me?” Nate nodded.

“The long and short of it, Nate,” said Gable later in his office, “is shut the fuck up. We have lots to do. Get to work, for Christ’s sake. Stop mooning around. It’s like a Jane Austen novel.”

=====

In Headquarters, it made sense for Nate to be reassigned to CE/ROD, which stood for Central Eurasia/Russian Ops Desk, the “Hot RODs,” the elephant’s graveyard for officers returning from Moscow, still feeling the yips from constant surveillance. There were also officers who had swung and missed at a Russian in Malaysia or Pretoria or Caracas, and there were the first-tour cherries who were in the pipeline for Moscow, all puffed up and serious, never having tasted the asshole-shrinking fear of having an agent’s life depend on how well you use your mirrors.

Chief ROD sat in his Langley office, a small corner space with a sealed, double-paned window looking out onto the triple-vaulted roof of the cafeteria between the Original and New Headquarters Buildings. C/ROD was in his fifties, a slight man with liver spots on his cheeks and thinning white hair combed across the top of his nearly bald head. A wiry white mustache and heavy-rimmed glasses gave him the look of a professor; the rack of pipes on his desk added to the fiction, for C/ROD was anything but a donnish academic.