Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

The room was deathly still. Simyonov’s antediluvian Soviet instincts were alerted; the bureaucrat in him calculated. His thoughts in an instant proceeded in the nature of the traditional KGB functionary: This little tsarevna with the big last name is making me look lacking and stupid. How can I profit in the end from her work? If this maneken is correct, the rewards could be huge, but so are the risks. An operation targeting the French Ministry of Defense would need to be approved all the way to the top.

“If this is true,” he said stingily, “there could be an added benefit.” He spoke as if he had known all along. He flicked ash into the ashtray.

She could read his oily, humid mind. “I agree with you, Colonel. It’s Delon’s real potential, it’s what makes him worth pursuing, what makes it worth the risk to recruit him.”

Simyonov shook his head. “The daughter is in Paris, twenty-five hundred kilometers away.”

“Not so far, I think,” said Dominika, smiling. “We will see.” Simyonov was unsettled by that smile. “Of course, we’ll have to develop a more detailed profile about the relationship between father and daughter.”

“Of course, thank you, Corporal,” Simyonov said. A few more minutes of this and she would be taking over the Fifth Department. All right, he thought, she could do the preparatory work, as much as she liked. As the operation proceeded he’d ensure she’d be on her back with her legs in the air with the cameras rolling, and that would take care of that.

“Very well, Corporal, since you uncovered this interesting detail, I want you to draw up your own thoughts about contact with the target Delon,” he said to Dominika.

“With your permission, Colonel, I have already drawn up a plan to engineer first contact,” said Dominika.

“I see…”

The Fifth Department officers pushed back in their chairs and crushed their unfinished cigarettes in the ashtrays. Jesus, the gossip about this Sparrow had been limited to blue eyes, how she filled out her regulation skirt, the size of her chest. No one had mentioned anything about her yaitsa, her set of balls. They filed out of the room, leaving Dominika to gather the paper scattered around the table, the new girl left behind to clean up the room. She didn’t mind. She stacked the papers, piled them on top of the dog-eared folders of Delon’s file, and walked out of the conference room, closing the door behind her.

In the Arbat, at number 12 Nikitsky Bulvar, there is a small restaurant called Jean Jacques. It is something like a French brasserie, noisy, smoky, filled with the winey aroma of cassoulets and stews. Tables covered with white tablecloths are jammed nearly edge to edge on a black-and-white tile floor, bentwood chairs tucked in tight. The walls are covered in wine bottles on shelves to the ceiling, the curving bar is lined with stools. Jean Jacques is always crowded with Muscovites. At lunchtime, if one is alone one shares a table with a stranger.

Midday on a rainy Tuesday, Jean Jacques was even more busy than usual. Customers stood inside the front door or under the canopy outside, waiting for single seats to come free. The din was overwhelming, cigarette smoke hung heavy. Waiters scurried between tables, opening bottles and carrying trays. After a fifteen-minute wait, Simon Delon of the French Embassy in Moscow was shown to a two-cover in the corner of the room. A young man sat in the other seat, finishing a deep bowl of Dijonnaise stew thick with vegetables and chunks of meat. He dipped black bread into the gravy. As Delon sat at the table, the young man barely looked up in acknowledgment.

Despite the crowds and the noise, Delon liked the restaurant, it reminded him of Paris. Better still, the Russian lunchtime practice of seating strangers together occasionally provided an opportunity to be seated beside a cute university student or an attractive shopgirl. Sometimes they even smiled at him, as if they were together. At least it would look that way from across the room.

Delon ordered a glass of wine while he looked at the menu. The young man sitting across from him paid his check, wiped his mouth, and reached for his jacket on the back of his chair. Delon looked up to see a stunning dark-haired woman with ice-blue eyes walk toward his table. He held his breath. The woman actually sat down in the seat just vacated by the young man. She wore her hair up, there was a single strand of pearls beneath her collar. Under a light raincoat she was wearing a beige satin shirt over a darker chocolate-colored skirt, with a brown alligator belt. Delon took a ragged pull of his wine as he peeked and saw how the shirt moved over the woman’s body.

She took a small pair of square reading glasses out of an alligator clutch; they perched on the end of her nose as she looked at her menu. She sensed him looking at her and she raised her eyes. He dove back behind his menu in a panic. Another peek, he took in the elegant fingers holding the menu, the curve of her neck, the eyelashes over those X-ray eyes. She looked at him again.

“ Izvinite, excuse me, is there something wrong?” said Dominika in Russian. Delon shook himself and gulped self-consciously. He looked to be in his fifties, with strawlike brown hair combed across a big head balanced on a skinny neck perched on narrow, rounded shoulders. Small black eyes, a pointy nose, and pursed mouth topped with a little mustache completed the whiskered-mouse effect. One point of his collar slightly stuck out of his blue-black suit, and the knot of his tie was small and uneven. Dominika resisted the impulse to tuck in his collar and straighten his tie. She knew his birth date, what kind of aspirin was in the cabinet above his bathroom sink, the color of the bedspread on his lonely bed. Well, she thought, he certainly looked like a commercial attaché.

Delon could barely look her in the eye. Dominika sensed the effort he made to speak to her. When he finally did, the words were the palest of blue, not unlike the cornflower blue that had defined Anya at Sparrow School. He took a breath and Dominika waited. She already knew her assessment of him was correct, that her plans for him were beginning.

“I beg your pardon,” said Delon. “I’m sorry, I do not speak Russian. Do you speak English?”

“Yes, of course,” said Dominika in English.

“ Et français? ” asked Delon.

“ Oui, ” said Dominika.

“How wonderful. I did not mean to stare,” he stammered in French. “I was just thinking how fortunate you were to be seated. Have you been waiting long?”

“Not too long,” said Dominika, looking around the restaurant and at the front door. “In any case, it looks like the crowd is less.”

“Well, I’m glad you got a seat,” said Delon, running out of things to say.

Dominika nodded and looked back down at the menu. Fortune had nothing to do with Dominika getting that particular seat in the corner of the room. Every customer that day in Jean Jacques was an SVR officer.

A second chance encounter at Jean Jacques provided the excuse to introduce herself in alias “Nadia” to the owlish little diplomat. Another bump on the sidewalk outside the brasserie days later somehow gave him nerve enough to suggest that they lunch together. After that they tried another restaurant for lunch. Delon was excruciatingly shy, with courtly good manners. He drank in moderation, spoke haltingly about himself, and furtively mopped at his glistening forehead as he watched Dominika absentmindedly brush a strand of hair behind her ear. Over the space of these contacts, Delon’s reticence began fading, while his azure aura was strengthening. It was what she was looking for.