Red Sparrow

Dominika was dressed in a blue cotton dress with a square neck and black sandals. She carried a small black clutch bag and wore round sunglasses with black frames. An inexpensive wristwatch with a black face and a simple link band was on her left wrist. She wore her hair up, cooler in the midmorning heat, a blue-eyed Russian doing countersurveillance before meeting a member of the opposition.

Dominika turned off Ermou onto a side street, passing tiny storefronts displaying religious vestments, golden cassocks, stoles, and miters. Silver pectoral crosses hung on heavy chains and rotated slowly in the display windows. She was alone on these side streets, alone after one, two, three turns. Ahead of her was the little Byzantine chapel of Kapnikarea, sunken in the middle of Ermou Street, broad brick and slit windows and sloping tile roof. Dominika crossed the street, went down five steps—the level of the street in AD 1050—and entered the chapel.

The inky interior of the church was minuscule. Frescoes and icons in the ceiling arches were chipped and water stained, the spidery Byzantine letters came off as pale red to her, faded as if by eons of candle smoke and incense. Near the door was a sand table with long orange tapers, some tilted against each other. Dominika took a candle out of a nearby stack and lit it with the flame of a candle already burning in the sand tray.

Before she could seat the bottom of the candle into the sand, a hand appeared and tipped another wick to the flame of her candle. Dominika looked around and saw Nate standing close behind her. He had a wry expression on his face, and the purple halo around him made him look like one of the Byzantine saints on the peeling frescoes. He put his finger to his lips, gestured with his head, and slipped out the door. Dominika waited a moment, planted her candle in the sand, turned, and went out into the white sunlight and city noise.

Nate was standing across the street, and Dominika went over to him. He was very proper, businesslike, the case officer meeting his asset. Dominika remembered the intimacy of Rome the time before, and of Helsinki earlier. They had been lovers, apart from the spying, something vital and edgy and true.

For Nate, the memory of them was more complicated. He had slept with his agent, he was risking his career, her safety, an enormous misstep. He had been warned by Forsyth and Gable, men he respected, yet he made love to her again in Rome, helpless to stop, and with the transcendental Benford in the next room. He had died a little inside when she had been recalled to Moscow, and he blamed himself for what she had had to endure. Now they had a mission to complete and there was a line of dew on her upper lip and he wanted to reach out and touch her.

Dominika knew it too, with the clarity of a synesthete. She stood apart from him, not offering her hand, watching his eyes, the purple in the air around his head. She knew he wanted her to be his asset, his source, his agent, but they were more than that. He wouldn’t budge, so she was determined to remain professional. They stood there in the drubbing sunlight for a second, then Dominika said, “Shall we go?” and she followed him as he turned to walk up the street.

They meandered down narrow alleys into the heart of the Plaka, turning left, then right on a seemingly aimless course, a route that would force any coverage to close up in the maze of passageways and courtyards and little open squares ringed by shops. Music drifted out of stores, yellow sponges threaded together in lumpy ropes draped the doorways, the peppery perfume of incense and sandalwood drifted in the air. Automatically, Nate stole glances over Dominika’s shoulder—she fluidly looked past his ear to check the other side of the street. He caught her eye and she shook her head slightly. Nothing that I can see. He nodded his agreement.

As dusk fell, they walked slowly around Plateia Filomouson, ringed with chairs and canopies and umbrellas, crisscrossed overhead by strings of lightbulbs. Dishes clattered from the kitchens of the restaurants. Nate guided Dominika around a corner to a worn green door in a wall. A small placard beside the door read TAVERNA XINOS. They sat at a corner table in the gravel garden and ordered taramo and beet greens and papoutsakia, sautéed eggplant stuffed with ground lamb, cinnamon, tomatoes, and béchamel baked golden brown.

Heads together, they talked quietly about the script that Dominika would play back to Moscow. They agreed that she would report to the Center that she had seduced him, and he avoided her eyes for a second. She would report that he was starting to talk about his work, the clever little Sparrow winding up her target. They had two days to create the legend, stay away from her hotel room, watch for surveillance. There would be no contact whatsoever with the Station.