Red Sparrow

“He is an absentminded fool,” said Egorov, not really knowing why he was defending the man. “He could have mentioned it to others, the word could have gotten back from another source.” Zyuganov didn’t really care. All he knew was that he would be crawling into Nasarenko’s head. Now he had a job to do.

“Damn it, it’s all we have right now,” said Egorov. “Start immediately on an investigation. Every aspect.”

Zyuganov nodded, hopped down off the chair, and headed for the door. He tried to remember where he had put his Red Army tunic, the one with the buttons on the side, the one he liked wearing during interrogations. The greenish brown material—stiff with brown dried blood spots and thick with the stable stench of a hundred bowels—looked smarter than a lab coat, though the sleeves were slightly frayed.

“One more thing,” said Egorov after him. “Check him for metka, for tracking compounds. If he’s touched an American in the last two years, something may show up.” Zyuganov nodded, but he had his own opinion of spy dust.

He preferred povinnaya—confession, magnificent, liberating confession, the best way to establish guilt. Zyuganov had a connate sense of how to convince subjects, after the screams and separated tendons and spilled ocular fluid, to agree to confess to whatever they were required to confess to.

He still couldn’t remember where his army tunic was.

=====

They summoned Nasarenko to Counterintelligence for a “random security update.” One did not need to work in the SVR for long to know that this kind of interview represented quite serious trouble, and it set Nasarenko into a panic. After the requisite inconclusive interview with the confused and weeping scientist, Zyuganov transferred him straight to the cellars, in this case to Butyrka in central Moscow. He shrugged on his tunic with anticipation.

People are funny, thought Zyuganov, fingering the lightweight truncheon. They all react differently. With Nasarenko it was the soles of his feet and the hollow aluminum baton—much more of a reaction than the average subject. Zyuganov was able to complete one session with the pop-eyed scientist before an inventory of his laboratory revealed that a SWAN disc was missing, and the pytka, the torture, stopped because this was something critical. Zyuganov authorized a course of amobarbital that unpeeled Nasarenko’s memory enough for him to walk them through the recent past, reviewing staff, and colleagues, and visitors, including the brief visit by General Korchnoi to Nasarenko’s laboratory. Korchnoi? Impossible. Make another sweep of the lab. There had to be an explanation. Where was the disc?

Korchnoi heard the rumors about the mole hunt redoubled, about trouble in Directorate T, about sensitive materials gone missing. He spoke to old friends in other departments, and listened to the “porcelain gossip” in the senior-officer toilets. Nasarenko had not been seen in days.

Korchnoi knew the searchers and investigators and counterespionage interrogators would start closing in. He urgently had to send Benford a note, as well as pass the disc he had shoplifted from Nasarenko’s lab to the CIA instantly, via dead drop, this evening; that is, if they still let him walk out of Headquarters. He wondered if he had played it too close, whether he had enough time for Dominika to make another trip—to Athens—and blow the whistle on him.

Korchnoi walked out of headquarters on his own legs—not very much longer, he reckoned—and, once back in his apartment, composed a message. His burst transmission took a fraction of a second. Twenty minutes later Benford read the two lines of the message: Nasarenko is in the snare. Will load DD DRAKON.

Dead drop, thought Benford. The old fox must have something important. And Nasarenko’s in trouble. That means one of their twenty-three names in Washington is SWAN. He reached for the phone to call the FBI.

=====

The night rain sheeted the street, blowing almost horizontally with the gusts of wind. The platform and stairs of the Molodezhnaya Metro stop were deserted, a few cars moving, stores closed. MARBLE flipped up the collar of his raincoat, jammed his hands into the pockets, and started walking slowly up Leninskaya Ulitsa. He had ridden three separate trains, taken a long walk along the river, before his instincts had been satisfied. There was nothing moving around him, or out on the wings, and he did not sense the presence or pressure of men on the street watching him.