Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

Dominika entered theSVR’s Academy of Foreign Intelligence (AVR) soon after her father’s funeral. The school had been renamed several times during the Cold War, from the Higher Intelligence School to the Red Banner Institute to the AVR, but veterans simply called it School No. 101. The main campus for decades had been located north of Moscow, near the village of Chelobityevo. By the time it became the AVR, the school had been modernized, the curriculum streamlined, admission criteria liberalized. The campus had moved to a clearing in the dense forests east of the city at kilometer twenty-five on the Gorky Highway. It was therefore now referred to as “Kilometer 25” or simply “the Forest.”

In the early weeks, wary and excited, Dominika, the only woman, and a dozen new classmates were driven in rattling PAZ buses with darkly tinted windows to various locations around Moscow and the surrounding suburbs. They rolled through sliding metal gates into anonymous walled compounds registered as laboratories, research centers, or Pioneer Youth camps. The days were filled with lectures about the history of the Services, of Russia, of the Cold War, and the Soviet Union.

Whereas the chief attribute previously required for acceptance into former KGB schools was fealty to the Communist Party, the modern SVR required of its trainees an overarching devotion to the Russian Federation and a commitment to protect it from enemies within and without.

For the first period of indoctrination, trainees were evaluated not only for aptitude but also for what in the old KGB would have been called “political reliability.” Dominika excelled in class discussions and written assignments. There was a hint of the independent streak in her, of impatience with time-tested formulations and dicta. An instructor had written that Cadet Egorova would hesitate for just a second before answering a question, as if she were considering whether she chose to answer, then invariably respond with excellence.

Dominika knew what they wanted to hear. The slogans in the books and on the chalkboards were kaleidoscopes of color, they were easy to categorize and memorize. Tenets of duty, loyalty, and defense of the country. She was a candidate to become a part of Russia’s elite, the Sword and Shield of yesterday, the Globe and Star of today. Her youthful ideology had once horrified her freethinking father—she knew that now—and she no longer totally accepted the ideology. Still, she wanted to do well.

The start of the second training block. The class had moved permanently to the Kilometer 25 campus, a cluster of long, low buildings with pitched-tile roofs, surrounded by pines and stands of birch. Sweeping lawns separated the buildings, gravel paths led to the sports fields behind the buildings. The campus was a kilometer off the four-lane Gorkovskoye shosse, screened first by a tall wooden palisade, painted green to blend in with the trees. Past this “forest fence,” three kilometers farther into the woods, ran two additional wire fence lines, between which black Belgian Malinois hounds ran free. The dog run could be seen from the windows of the small classrooms, and from their rooms in the two-story barracks the students could hear the dogs panting at night.

She was the only woman in the dormitory and they gave her a single room at the end of the corridor, but she still had to share the bathroom and shower room with twelve men, which meant she had to find quiet times in the mornings and evenings. Most of her classmates were harmless enough, the privileged sons of important families, young men with connections to the Duma or to the armed forces or to the Kremlin. Some were bright, very bright, some were not. A few brave ones, used to getting what they wanted and seeing that silhouette behind the shower curtain, were ready to risk it all for a tumble.

She had reached for her towel on the hook outside the shower stall in the gang bathroom late one night. It was gone. Then a knuckly classmate with sandy hair, the burly one from Novosibirsk, stepped into the stall with her, crowding behind her, his arms around her waist. She could feel he was naked as he pushed her face against the wall of the shower and nuzzled her wet hair from behind. He was whispering something she couldn’t understand; she couldn’t see the colors. He pressed up against her harder and one hand drifted from around her waist to her breasts. As he squeezed her, she wondered if he could feel her heartbeat, if he could feel her breathing. Her cheek was pressed against the white tiles of the stall, she could feel them changing like prisms hung in sunlight, they were turning dark red.

The tapered, three-inch faucet handle for the cold water had always been loose, and Dominika wiggled it back and forth until it came off in her hand. She turned slippery and breathy to face him, breasts now crushed against his chest, and said, “ Stojat, ” wait, wait a second, through a constricted throat. He was smiling as Dominika drove the pointed end of the faucet handle into his left eye up to her knuckle and his vomit-green scream of pain and terror washed over her as he slid down the wall clutching his face, his knees pulled up tight. “ Stojat, ” she said again, looking down at him, “I asked you to wait a second.”

“Attempted rape and justifiable self-defense” was the secret AVR review board’s judgment, and Novosibirsk gained a one-eyed bus conductor and the board recommended that Dominika be separated from Academy training. She told them she had done nothing to cause the incident, and the panel—a woman and two men—looked her up and down and kept straight faces. They were going to do it to her again. Ballet school, Ustinov, now the AVR, and Dominika told the panel she would lodge a formal complaint. To whom would she complain? But word of the incident got back to Yasenevo and Deputy Director Egorov cursed so foully over the phone that Dominika would have seen brown treacle flowing out of the earpiece, and they told her the decision had been made to give her another chance, under probationary status. From then on the rest of her class ignored her, avoided her, a klikusha walking between the buildings in the Forest, an impossibly straight back and long elegant steps with the faintest hitch in her stride.

The start of the third block of AVR. They filed into classrooms with plastic chairs, and pebbled acoustic tiles on the walls, and clunky projectors hanging from the ceiling. Dead flies lay in piles between the double windowpanes. Now came instruction in world economies, energy, politics, the Third World, international affairs, and “global problems.” And America. No longer referred to as the Main Enemy, the United States nevertheless was her country’s main competitor. It was all Russia could do to maintain superpower parity. Lectures on the subject took on an edge.

The Americans took them for granted, they ignored Russia, they tried to manipulate Russia. Washington had interfered in recent elections, thankfully to no avail. America supported Russian dissidents and encouraged disruptive behavior in this delicate period of Russian reconstruction. American military forces challenged Russian sovereignty, from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan. The recent “reset” policy was an insult, nothing needed to be reset. It was simply that Russia deserved respect, the Rodina deserved respect. Well, if, as an SVR officer, Dominika ever met an American, she would show him that Russia deserved respect.

The irony was that America was in decline, said the lecturers, no longer the high-and-mighty US. Overextended in wars, struggling economically, the supposed birthplace of equality was now divided by class warfare and the poisonous politics of conflicting ideologies. And the foolish Americans didn’t yet realize they would soon need Russia to hem in a galloping China, they would need Russia as an ally in a future war.