Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

ESTONIAN BEET SALAD—ROSOLJE

Chop in half-inch dice boiled beets, boiled potatoes, pickles, peeled apples, hard-boiled eggs, cooked beef or pork, and salt herring (soaked overnight and cleaned), and mix with sour cream, mustard, sugar, pepper, and vinegar until incorporated. Chill and serve.

Gable dragged Dominikafrom the safe house—she came along grudgingly—and they went to ground. They talked for a full day in a room Gable had booked in alias at the Astir Palace twenty klicks out of Athens in Vouliagmeni overlooking the bay. They had registered as a married couple, easier that way. Gable never recognized the off-duty cop, moonlighting behind the hotel desk, but the cop knew the big American and picked up the phone.

Gable didn’t even give it fifty-fifty. Dominika told Bratok that she no longer respected or trusted him; they had all used her. He listened with his purple halo in the Aegean light coming through the windows while she told him that ever since ballet school her choices had been taken away, she had been shoved this way and that, the things most dear to her had been stolen. It was why she had decided to work with them. Nate and Bratok and Forsyth had been like family; they knew what she needed. And everyone was so smart, so professional.

But the result turned out the same. They had colluded against her. Even the general had broken faith. Her Russian mind saw conspiracy, her Russian soul felt betrayal. She would not work with them. She told him she had decided that she would not stay in Russia either. She realized the futility of defying the system. The vlasti would always win. All that remained was to decide where she would go. If the Americans would permit her to resettle in the United States, she would go there; if they refused to accept her defection, she would consider settling in a third country. If the CIA blocked her, she would return to Russia as a civilian. But she was quitting. She was out.

Gable let her talk and brewed tea for her and put lemon in the Perrier and listened. When she became tired they sat on the balcony with their feet on the railing and looked at the turquoise water and he told her stories about his early assignments as a young officer and made her laugh. He kept her laughing over a lunch of fried calamari with parsley, lemon, and oil, and as the afternoon shadows lengthened they walked around the gardens. Gable told her that he was not going to try to persuade her to do anything. Dominika smiled and said, “Which is the first step in persuading me to do exactly what you want.” Gable laughed and took her back to their room and let her take a nap in the bedroom while he sat awake on the balcony. That evening Dominika put on a summer dress and sandals and they took a rattletrap bus along the coast to a small fish restaurant in Lagonissi and Dominika ordered baked sardines in grape leaves, and shrimp yiouvetsi baked with tomatoes, ouzo, and feta, and grilled swordfish in latholemono sauce, and Gable ordered two wines, a bottle of ice-cold Asprolithi and an aluminum beaker of pungent retsina.

They stopped at another taverna for coffee and Gable ordered two glasses of Mavrodaphne, sweet and arterial-black from southern Greece, which once turned Homer’s sea wine-dark. The Christmas lights on the canopy of the taverna glowed and small waves chuckled on the beach beyond, invisible in the night. Looking at Gable’s big beefy face and brush-cut hair, Dominika waited, leaning back against the ropes, waiting for him to begin throwing punches. “You’re going to talk to me now, aren’t you, Bratok ?” said Dominika. Gable ignored her and said he wanted her to think about the whole thing seriously, he wanted her to reconsider on her own terms. He would explain how he saw that, what that would mean for her. She agreed to listen, she expected his tricks, but his steady purple bloom told her he would probably tell her the truth. Probably.

Gable said he thought her original reasons for joining the SVR were just and right and fine. She could serve her country, she could excel at a demanding job. Turned out she was good at it. But the promise of it all turned to ashes because of the beastliness of the system. There was nothing left. “Am I right so far?” he asked.

Dominika sat back and nodded. His purple was steady and strong.

“Okay,” said Gable, “now ops or luck or fate comes along and you meet Nate Nash, and he’s unlike anyone you ever met before—and that goes for the other handsome senior officers in the CIA—and you stick your big toe in the water to see how it feels, maybe to get back at the bastards. It isn’t about money or ideology, it’s your self-worth.” Gable signaled a waiter for two more glasses of wine.

“Then something screwy happens. You realize that you thrive on this life, on the risk and the trickiness and the ice and the deception and the secret in your head every day. You thrive on it, you develop a real taste for it.” The wine came, and Gable sipped. “How am I doing?” he said. Dominika crossed her arms.

“So suddenly you’re betrayed again, this time by the people you thought were the good guys, but that would be the wrong way to think about it.” Dominika blinked at Gable sideways. “The general, and Benford, and all of us wanted you to assume the general’s place as our top gun in Moscow. Maybe we should have asked you, but it didn’t happen. So now we’re in the last act, and Benford is trying to get you back inside Moscow, and sweetheart, it’s up to you. No one can force you; you have to decide on your own.” Dominika looked out at the black water, then back at Gable.

“What are you going to do without all this?” he asked. “What are you going to do without your fix?”

Dominika closed her eyes and shook her head. “You think I cannot live without this?” she said.

“Forget about the CIA. Think about the general; he’d tell you the same thing. Go back and get to work. Don’t think about the CIA for the first six months, a year. Don’t give those bastards at the Center an inch. Run them over. You have a head start now; begin building your career. Go back and finish with your uncle. Tell the Center what he did, make sure he gets what he deserves. You’ll be on the winning side, and it’ll make you seem unpredictable and dangerous. First you caught Korchnoi, now you demolish your own uncle. They’ll be scared of you.

“Choose, demand, force them to give you an important job, something with a lot of access, somewhere in the Americas Department, Line KR, whatever. Run your shop like you mean it. Recruit foreigners, cause trouble, catch spies, make allies, throw your enemies off balance. Be bitchy around the conference table.”

Dominika tried not to smile. “Bitchy, this means zlobnyj, I think,” she said.

“Once a year, twice, you come out on an operation of your choosing and I’ll be there. You tell us what you want to tell us. You call the shots on internal communications. If you need to see us in Moscow, I’ll personally make sure you’re safe. You want commo gear, we’ll give you some. You need help, you got it. You want us to go away, we’re gone.”

“And would Nathaniel be involved in the future?” she asked.

“People think it would be ill-advised to bring the two of you together, given the operational history. But I’m here to tell you that if you want him handling outside meetings, we can arrange that.”

“You’re being very accommodating,” said Dominika.

“This work, Dominika. It’s in your blood, you can’t leave it alone, it’s in your nose and under your nails and growing out of the tips of your hair. Admit it.”

“I would never have come to dinner with you if I knew you were a janychar, ” she said. “Did the CIA take you from your crib and train you from youth?”