Red Sparrow

“I call him Uncle, if that’s what you mean,” said Nate. “We’re close.”

“I didn’t ask if you engage in frottage with him,” said Benford. “I asked you whether you trust him.”

“Yes, I trust him,” said Nate. “He’s been spying for us for fourteen years.” Benford’s mouth turned down in impatience at being told something he already knew.

“And do you think the nature of his new information, these clues and hints and traces about illegals and moles, is authentic?”

“It seems like it to me,” said Nate, instantly regretting it.

Benford puffed his cheeks with annoyance. “Seems like it, or you believe it is?”

Nate took a deep breath. “I think his information is authentic. If MARBLE were being fed a barium meal, the leads would be more distinct, more identifiable.” Nate waited for the next series of frowns and pouts.

Benford’s head came up slowly. “Barium meal, indeed. Where did you hear that, have you been reading history?” His gaze drifted to the far wall. “Do you know who that is?” he asked, pointing to a small black-and-white photograph of a square-jawed man in gig-lamp glasses, hair slicked close to his head.

“That’s Angleton, isn’t it?” said Nate.

“James Jesus to you,” said Benford. “For ten years he thought every Soviet agent was a double, every volunteer was dispatched, every piece of information was disinformation. He was charming and poisonous and paranoid and utterly convinced that his night sweats were reality. He might have been right. I keep his picture to remind me not to rebuild his asylum. Now, about MARBLE. I believe him too.” Nate nodded. His eyes drifted to the other side of the room, to a bookshelf overflowing with papers and books. Five leather-bound volumes were unevenly stacked on the top shelf. Benford followed his gaze. “Those are the Wind in the Willows books: full of rats and moles.”

Benford stared at Nate for a few seconds, his face working, whether in mounting distaste or in deep thought, it was impossible to tell. Nate kept his mouth shut, the only possible course of action. This misanthrope. Twenty years of mole hunts, double traps, and triple crosses. Networks disrupted, attic radios silenced, spies arrested. Black-and-white newsreels of shrunken men being led out of courthouses with jackets over their heads, hands manacled at the waist. Benford’s battlefield.

He was clairvoyant, they said, a savant who relished the Byzantine world of deception and doubles and false trails. Nate took in the twitchy hands, long fingers running through his hair, the brain perhaps running too hot for its own good. Nate could see that MARBLE’s recent report about moles and illegals was to Benford what a sack of rats was to a terrier.

“I suspect he’ll draft you to work with him,” C/ROD had said. “Good luck with that.”

“I want you to work with me on MARBLE’s information,” Benford said. “Starting today. Move your belongings up from ROD. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing. We’re going to find the illegal.”

“Do I tell C/ROD?” asked Nate. “Should I tell him how to reach me?”

“No one. I’ll let him know if he asks. But he won’t. We’re not going to tell anyone about these leads. No Boston or New York Station, no tight-ass FBI, no interior decorators in DIA, no NSC, no congressional committees. No fucking fuckers in Washington fuck-starting this fiesta with their fucking leaks. It’s just you, me. I trust that meets with your approval?”

Nate nodded.

Becoming Benford’s acolyte is either a distinct honor or a prison sentence, thought Nate, but it didn’t matter much. His career path after Helsinki had stalled. Benefactors like Forsyth and Gable were still in the field, but unable to support him. Nate looked at the brilliant, twitchy Benford and decided. Nate was good at internal ops, he knew Russia, and he could contribute. Benford could hardly be viewed as a patron—someone this misanthropic and sour would never be a willing mentor to anyone—but Nate decided to throw in with him, to immerse himself in counterintelligence, to learn about the fog-shrouded world in which Benford thrived. Maybe he could salvage his rep. In any case, for the first time since the Farm, Nate stopped worrying about the future.

=====

Nate was quietly installed in a disused office in the corner of the Counterintelligence Division. It was utterly quiet in the hallway. Were people in there, working? Or would Norman Bates’s mother’s desiccated skeleton swivel grinning in her chair to greet you? “Here you are,” said the secretary, giving him a wink, or perhaps it was her twitch. Ambiguous conundrums, Benford had said, get used to it.

His new office was windowless, nude, and stale. Pushpins dotted the walls… what must they have held up for display? A desk drawer that squealed when pulled open was filled with fingernail clippings, hundreds of them, thinly covering the bottom of the drawer.