Red Sparrow

Those ten nights that neither Golov nor his Zeta countersurveillance team were able to detect even the remotest hint of coverage were, perversely, the worst nights. The nights of not knowing, of not being totally certain. Did the Americans have some new technique, some new technology? The devil knew what their strategy was. But he had to get black.

Everything must be done to protect SWAN, but she was a security nightmare. She continued to refuse all reasonable proposals to improve her security—electronic communication, messaging, discreet hotel meets, prearranged alternates to cover missed meetings—she wouldn’t have any of it. “If I have my ass at the meeting,” she had said to Golov, “you can damn well have your ass there too.” Impossible woman. Golov yearned to turn SWAN over to a low-profile illegals officer, but Moscow forbade it, especially after the compromise of the illegal in New London.

Golov therefore was confronted by one of the most classic of espionage conundrums—having to meet a sensitive asset on a predetermined night, at a predetermined site, regardless of conditions on the street. An abort was unacceptable, impossible. Tonight was the next scheduled meeting with SWAN. He had to make it.

That afternoon he reviewed his surveillance detection route with the Zeta Team. Golov told them he wanted to try to channel any trailing coverage into a dymohod, a stovepipe, to expose surveillance and, more important, to try a breakout—escaping surveillance altogether. They designated a code number on the encrypted radios that would signal whether the stovepipe had worked. They reviewed the route once again.

Golov knew this was madness. Only an asset as valuable as SWAN would make him take these risks, but the Center was insistent. Golov had to try.

He kicked off in midafternoon, the middle car in a simultaneous departure by eight of his officers in eight cars who exited the embassy gates on Wisconsin Avenue, each headed in a different direction. FBI watchers in the lookout post transmitted starburst starburst, a stampede departure, designed to overload surveillance and get a few cars free. The starburst call-out was also heard by the CIA’s Orion Team. They were interested only in the rezident, and they patiently listened for the watchers to call out Golov, who was driving his own vehicle, a gleaming black BMW 5 Series sedan. Golov headed up Wisconsin Avenue, his Zeta Team already deployed to the west of Wisconsin. Golov crossed Western Avenue, the border between the District and Maryland, and turned south, reversing his course into the grid pattern of American University Park, using the neighborhood streets to drift sideways, reverse direction, pull up to the curb, and wait. After fifteen minutes the Zetas signaled, No apparent surveillance. They had missed two static Orion cars that had been in place on the margins of AU Park.

Golov stairstepped west again along residential streets while his team moved to parallel his route. They did not get the slightest whiff of the familiar swirling movement of active FBI surveillance because there was none. The Zeta Team covered Golov as he pushed west downhill to Canal Road and crossed the Chain Bridge into Virginia. This was called by a static Orion car sitting on the intersection of Arizona and Canal Roads, the single route onto the only Potomac River crossing into Virginia between Georgetown and the Beltway. The Orions were tempted to flood suburban Virginia but the team leader, a sixty-five-year-old former surveillance instructor by the name of Kramer, told them to hold. He instead directed three cars to parallel Golov’s directional axis on the Maryland side of the Potomac. They were going north along the river anticipating the route. TrapDoor was in play.

One Orion—a grandmother when she wasn’t tracking SVR officers—held at the parking lot of Lock 10 on the C&O Canal National Park. Another grandmother drove four miles to the Old Angler’s Inn on MacArthur Boulevard, took a garden table in the waning light, ordered a sherry, and tried to guess which of the couples at the other tables were having affairs.