Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

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.

“You will never guess who is in Athens,” said Nate, filling Dominika’s glass with retsina from a battered aluminum pitcher. “Forsyth arrived two months ago. He’s Chief here now.”

Dominika smiled. “And Bratok, has he followed him?” she asked. She wondered if they knew of their secret affair.

“Gable? Yes. They’re inseparable,” said Nate. Conversation stalled. They looked at each other in silence. There was a heaviness in the air, a weight on their heads. Nate looked at Dominika and his vision dimmed around the edges.

“We have two days,” Nate said. “It is important we go through the act. We need to fill the days.”

“We must carry on the actual conversations, we must actually say the things I report to the Center. Everything must be, how do you say, podlinnyj ?” said Dominika.

“Authentic,” said Nate. “We have to appear authentic.”

“It is important for me to live the details now, for when I report back,” she said, remembering the interrogations in Lefortovo.

Then they had little more to say; they both were leaden with the lie, with the denial of their passion. His purple cloud never changed, as if he felt no conflict. Dominika closed her mind to him. They were walking again, skirting the margins of the Plaka, along the narrow, dark side streets hard against the Acropolis walls. They went quietly up a narrow staircase with flowerpots on each step. At the top Dominika put her hand on his arm to stop. They stood in the shadow, looking down, listening in the night for the sounds of footsteps. It was still, and Dominika took her hand off Nate’s wrist.

“Decision point,” whispered Nate. “Do we split up, go to our hotels, meet early tomorrow?”

She didn’t want to make it easy for him. “What if my room is monitored? You would be expected to take me to your hotel, and I would be expected to accept.”

Nate fought the sensation of sliding headlong into frigid water. “In the interests of authenticity, of cover, that would be right. Authenticity.”

They looked at each other for a minute. “Shall we go?” asked Nate.

“As you wish,” she said.

Sergey Matorin stood naked in front of a full-length mirror in his room at the King George Hotel in Syntagma Square. He knew Dominika was staying at the Grande Bretagne next door, both venerable, jewel-box hotels of Old World elegance amid the discordance of the city. Matorin did not look at his body, crisscrossed with scars from combat in Afghanistan, or at the dimpled hole in his right shoulder where he had been wounded in the bazaar in Ghazni while leading a sweep with his Alpha Group. He concentrated instead on a regime of movements in slow motion: strikes, blocks, pivots, and traps, Apollyon performing tai chi, as the noise of the evening traffic roared outside his window. He bent at the waist, then straightened, his milky eye frozen in its socket, and took a deep breath.

He turned, picked up his small roller valise, and flipped it facedown on the bed. He twisted four set screws in the metal frame of the suitcase to unlock a tubular concealment cavity developed by the technical branch, and drew out his two-foot-long Khyber knife with its gently curved hilt. He returned to stand in front of the mirror and went through a combat drill of cuts, parries, and slashes. The knife whistled as he swung it in a backhand cutting blow.

Matorin’s body glistened from his exertions. He sat down on a Louis XIV chair, his sweat staining the powder-blue brocade. He picked up a large ceramic ashtray embossed with the King George crest and turned it over. Matorin stropped the blade of his knife along the unglazed ceramic base, heel to tip, heel to tip. The metronome rasp of steel on ceramic filled the room, drowning out the sound of the street. In a while, satisfied with the killing edge, Matorin put down the knife and dug a small zippered pouch out of his suitcase with the word insuline printed on the leatherette side. He shook two thick epidermic auto-injector pens from the pouch, one yellow, the other red, field syringes designed to be injected into the thigh muscle or the buttocks. The yellow pen contained SP-117, a barbiturate compound designed by Line S. That would be for the questions. The red pen from Laboratory 12 contained one hundred milligrams of pancuronium, which would paralyze the diaphragm in ninety seconds. That would be for after. Two pens, the gold and red of Spetsnaz.

They took a taxi in silence to Nate’s hotel, the St. George Lycabettus, nestled among the pines of Likavittos Hill. From the soaring balcony they could see the spotlighted Parthenon, and the flat sprawl of city lights winking all the way to the horizon, and the black strip of the sea, and the harbor lookout where Aegeus waited for a ship with white sails. Dominika peeked into the bathroom, switching the light on, then off. They kept the rest of the lights off; the ambient light from the hotel’s façade was enough. Nate paced a little in the dark room, and Dominika, arms crossed, looked at him.

“If you are reconsidering our plan,” she said, “I can report that my visit to your room lasted four minutes, and tell them your… ardor… was somewhat, how do you say, ukorachivat kratkiy ?” asked Dominika.

“Abbreviated,” said Nate. His color flared at the gibe.

“Yes,” said Dominika, going to the other set of balcony doors and looking out. “The readers at Yasenevo would be delighted by the gossip that CIA officers’ endurance is lacking. Your prowess would be well-known at our headquarters.”

“I’ve always loved Russian humor,” said Nate. “It’s a shame there’s so little of it. But in the interest of protecting our operational legend, I think you should stay overnight.”

In the interest of our operational legend, thought Dominika. “Very well, I will sleep on this divan, and you will sleep in the bedroom, and you will keep the door closed.”

Nate was matter-of-fact. “I’ll bring you a blanket and a pillow,” he said. “We have a long day tomorrow, doing nothing.” Dominika did not slip out of her dress until Nate had gone into the bedroom and closed the door. Another moon, she thought sourly, it shone through the open balcony door. She got up to draw the gauzy curtains but stopped and lay back down, letting the moonlight wash over her, paint her silver.

She was tired of being used like a pump handle by all of them, the vlasti, the inheritors of the former Soviet Union, General Korchnoi, the Americans, Nate, telling her what was expedient, indicating what had to be done. How had Korchnoi done it for so long? How long could she last? She listened for Nate in the bedroom beyond the door. She needed something more from them all. She was weary of having her feelings denied to her.