Red Sparrow

Korchnoi said nothing, held his hands in his lap. “All those years, all our work together, a life’s career, everything undone so easily,” said Egorov. “The trust I showed you, the love.”

“This is about you, of course,” said Korchnoi. “It always is about you, Vanya.”

“Zalupa, dickhead,” said Egorov, flicking his ash to the floor. “You have gravely damaged the Service. You have damaged your country, forsaken Russia.” He was playing it up for the microphones, thought Korchnoi.

“Zalupatsia is more like it,” said Korchnoi, Vanya playing the big man, taking airs. “What is it you want, Vanya? Why are you here?”

Vanya looked at Korchnoi for a second, then looked at the equipment on the table. “I came to tell you that it was my niece, your protégée, Dominika, who elicited the information that led to your arrest. She is a hero, and you are the plodovyi cherv, the cankerworm.”

There it was, their succession konspiratsia. Korchnoi said a silent word of congratulations to Benford.

Vanya watched Korchnoi’s face to gauge his reaction, and was satisfied to see the older man look down, as if in defeat. He gathered up his cigarettes and pounded on the cell door. Walking down the cement corridor past the steel doors, Vanya calculated. Loss of SWAN balanced out by the arrest of Korchnoi. Dominika. Get her back.

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Mysheniye voznya. Mice games. Line T technical officers carefully moved the covcom equipment back to MARBLE’s apartment building in Strogino, to originate the transmission from the usual coordinates. A knot of quiet men huddled on the roof looking out over the blue-black Moskva River and hit SEND and waited for the rukopozhatie, handshake, from the satellite over the Arctic Circle. The uppercase “NIKO” signature on the covcom transmission told Benford that MARBLE’s message had been written by someone else, or by MARBLE under duress. Whatever the case, it meant that his arrest had finally come. Even though he and MARBLE had gone over and over the plan, Benford’s instincts recoiled at the thought of his agent sacrificing himself, and he silently mourned the loss.

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His Mercedes covered the twenty-five miles on the deserted Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway in fifteen minutes, but Vanya had to wait at the reception building for ten minutes before the duty vehicle arrived to take him through the black fir and pine forest to the neoclassical front entrance of Novo-Ogarevo. Vanya checked his watch. Nearly midnight, and he inwardly shuddered at the late-night summons to the secluded presidential dacha west of Moscow. Just like you-know-who, thought Vanya. Uncle Joe made men wait till three a.m. in an anteroom superheated by a roaring fireplace.

This was different than Stalin. Egorov was ushered down a curving flight of steps into a massive basement gymnasium that stretched the entire width of the building, brimming with machines and weight stacks glittering in the overhead lights. Egorov dryly noted that his Line KR chief, Alexei Zyuganov, was sitting in a chair next to an exercise station. A witness, thought Vanya, bad sign.

President Putin was shirtless, his hairless chest slick, the veins in his arms popping. His hands were through the grips of two nylon suspension straps, anchored to an overhead bar. The President of All Russias leaned forward against the straps and, by extending his arms like Christ on the Cross, lowered himself face forward, nearly parallel to the mat, a foot off the floor. Shaking with exertion, he raised himself up by bringing his arms together, then lowered himself, then up again. That little ulitka, that escargot Zyuganov, never took his eyes off Putin. A matter of seconds before he would be licking the sweat off his benefactor’s chest.

Putin continued raising and lowering himself, with hissing exhalations of breath, then stopped at maximum extension, raised his head, and looked at Egorov with eyes the color of an old glacier. Motionless. Levitating. Another second, and up again.

“I want her out of Greece, back in Russia,” said Putin thinly. He mopped his face with a towel, threw it backhanded at Zyuganov, who caught it, flustered. Putin stared, his eyes bored into Egorov’s, an unsettling habit, featuring himself as a clairvoyant, a savant. Some believed the president could read minds.

“I am working through several contacts,” said Egorov. “The Greeks are furious.”

Putin held up his hand. “The Greeks are incapable of such outrage, they’re puffed-up little birds,” said Putin. “We will show them Kuzka’s mother.” In other words, he’ll bury them, thought Egorov, right after he finishes with me.