Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

But if Americans chose to pit themselves against Russia, thinking she was feeble and weak, they would be surprised. A student in the class disagreed. He suggested that yesterday’s notions of “East and West” were antiquated. Besides, Russia had lost the Cold War, get over it. There was a hush in the classroom. Another classmate stood, eyes flashing. “Russia most certainly did not lose the Cold War,” he said. “ It never ended .” Dominika watched the scarlet letters ascend to the ceiling. Good words, strong words. Interesting. The Cold War never ended.

Not long after, Dominika was separated from the rest of her class. She had no need for language instruction, for she could have been an instructor herself in spoken English or French. Nor was she hustled off to the administrative track. Her instructors had seen her potential, had passed it on to AVR administrators, who in turn had called Yasenevo and requested the Center’s permission to admit Dominika Egorova—niece of the First Deputy Director—into the practical, or operational, phase of training. She would be the rare female candidate trained by the SVR as an operupolnomochenny, an operations officer. There were no delays. Approvals from the Center had already been granted.

She had been admitted to operations training, the Real Steel, the Game; she had entered a special phase, the last chrysalis stage before she would emerge to serve the Motherland. The time passed without her knowing it. Seasons seemed to change without her being aware of them. Classes, lectures, laboratories, interviews all came in a dizzying rush.

It started with ridiculous subjects. Sabotage, explosives, infiltration, first taught when Stalin raved and the Wehrmacht encircled Moscow. Then came the more practical lessons, and they worked her hard. She developed legends, zashifrovat’, her cover for movement, ran routes to detect opposition surveillance on the street, found safe houses, transmitted secure messages, found meeting sites, yavki, ran vstrechki, agent meetings, plotted recruitment approaches. She practiced with disguises and digital communications, signals and caches. Her memory for detail, for lessons learned, astounded them.

Instructors in unarmed-combat class were impressed by her strength and balance. They grew a little alarmed at her intensity and the way she wouldn’t stay down on the mat after having been thrown. Everyone had heard the story from the Forest, and the wide-eyed men in the class watched her hands and knees and protected their mudya when sparring with her. She saw their faces, saw the green breath of their disapproval and fear as they huffed and grunted in the gymnasium. No one came near her voluntarily.

The practical instruction continued. They brought her to downtown Moscow, to the streets that were used as a living classroom to practice tradecraft principles taught in the dingy classrooms around Yasenevo. The streetcraft instructors were pensionerki, old spooks, some of them seventy years old, retired decades ago. They had some difficulty keeping up with Dominika as the exercises accelerated. They watched her bunched dancer’s calves striding long on the shimmering Moscow sidewalks. The slight telltale limp from her shattered foot, now mended, was endearing. She was driven, determined to excel. Her face shone with perspiration, the sweat darkened her shirt between her breasts and across her ribs.

The colors helped her on the street; the blues and greens from the teams in the radio cars and the watcher vans made it possible to pick out coverage among the crowds on broad boulevards. She twisted surveillance teams around themselves, meticulously timed brush passes on crowded Metro platforms, met practice agents in dirty stairwells at midnight, controlled the meetings, read their minds. The old men would mop their faces and mutter, “ Fanatichka, ” and she would laugh at them, her hair pulled back tight on her head, her shoulders straight, secretly reading the colors of their breathless approval. Come on, dinozavry, come on, you old dinosaurs. The gruff old men secretly loved her, and she knew it.

These ancient instructors were supposed to coach her on what conditions would be like abroad, on what she could expect on the street, on how to operate in foreign capitals. Glupost, thought Dominika, what stupidity, that these old men who had last been overseas when Brezhnev ordered troops into Afghanistan were telling her what to expect on the streets of modern-day London, New York, or Beijing. She had the temerity to mention the incongruity to a course coordinator, who told her to shut her mouth and reported her comments up the line. Her face flushed at being spoken to that way, but she turned away, cursing herself. She was learning.

As she was being evaluated, Dominika began courses on the psychology of intelligence collection, the psyche of sources, on understanding human motivations and identifying vulnerabilities. An instructor named Mikhail called it “opening the human envelope.” He was a forty-five-year-old SVR psychologist from the Center; Dominika was his only student. He walked her around Moscow, both observing people, watching interactions. Dominika did not tell him about seeing colors, for her mother long ago had made her swear never to mention it. “And how in God’s name do you know that about him?” Mikhail would ask when Dominika whispered that the man sitting on the next park bench was waiting for a woman.

“It just seems that way,” she would reply, never explaining that the bloom of passion-purple around the man flared when the woman came around the corner. Mikhail laughed and looked at her in amazement when it turned out to be right.

As Dominika focused on these practice sessions, her refined intuition told her she was having an effect on Mikhail. Even though he initially featured himself as a stern instructor from Directorate T, she would catch him looking at her hair or stealing darting glimpses at her body. She mentally counted the times he contrived to bump into her, or touch her on the shoulder, or put his hand on the small of her back when going through a door. He radiated desire, a dark crimson fog lingered around his head and shoulders. She knew how he liked his tea, when he needed his glasses to read a menu, the rate of his heartbeat when pushed close against her in the Metro. She could see Mikhail stealing looks at her unpolished nails, or watching her dangle a shoe off her foot at the café table.

It was a monstrous risk to sleep with him. He was an instructor, and a psychologist to boot, charged with evaluating her personality and suitability for operations. Yet she knew he would say nothing, she knew she had an indefinable hold over him, and making love, a grave dereliction during training, was an edgy thrill, more than physical pleasure.

Of which there was a considerable amount. An afternoon after a street exercise, they found themselves in the apartment Mikhail shared with his parents and brother, all at work or away from the house. The coverlet from his bed was on the floor and her thighs trembled and her shoulders shook and her hair framed her face as she straddled him, pulses running up her spine and down to her toes, especially those of her once-broken foot. She knew what she wanted, her secret self had been neglected of late, what with school and training and barracks. She trapped him—who was impaled upon whom?—and rocked strongly downward, giving herself what she needed, while she was still fresh. There would be time for softness and cooing and sighing later. Right now her eyes were half-closed, and she concentrated on coaxing the building pressure, stronger, stronger— povorachivaisya! come on! —into the sudden teetering flush that made her double over, too sensitive to continue, too sweet to stop. Her vision cleared and she brushed the hair off her face, aftershocks cramping her thighs and toes. Mikhail lay wide-eyed and silent beneath her, a bystander unsure of what he had just witnessed.