Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

Marta had the rare combination of a sublime allure and a superior intellect. The former quality served to attract hapless foreign diplomats, journalists, and businessmen. The latter gave her perspective and a keen eye for making influential friends. At the end of her nearly twenty-year career, Marta was known as Koroleva Vorobey, Queen Sparrow. She had participated in scores of SCD honey traps, among which were included the recruitments by the KGB of a sex-crazed Japanese billionaire, a philandering British ambassador, and a reptilian Indian minister of defense. At the apex of Marta’s career, she was the bait in the legendary seduction, compromise, and recruitment of a cipherine, a female code clerk working in the German Embassy, the suborning of whom enabled the KGB to read German and NATO encrypted traffic for an uninterrupted seven years. It was the only time Marta worked against another woman, but the recruitment was still taught at KGB Higher School as a classic operation.

Over the years, Marta’s nonoperational romances included discreet affairs with two members of the Politburo, with a general in the First Chief Directorate, and with various sons of influential officials in the Collegium of the KGB. Many bushy-browed old bosses remembered her with affection. Thanks to these “mentors,” Marta was bulletproof and was given an SVR major’s pension on retiring from Sparrow operations by grateful if exhausted benefactors. Marta decided to enjoy life and see a little of the outside world, so she requested and was readily granted an overseas assignment, to Helsinki.

At first Marta did not know whether Dominika was SVR clerical or administrative. She certainly was very young to be assigned overseas. The last name explained much, but the fact that Dominika had no steady duties in the rezidentura, came and went as she liked, and spoke directly and privately with the rezident suggested that she was in Helsinki under a special charter. Dominika’s clothes were new, she must have been provided a wardrobe. Office gossip accelerated when it was discovered that this beautiful newcomer had been assigned a private apartment outside the block reserved for all embassy personnel. To Marta, that had a familiar ring to it.

In the rezidentura she was correct, reserved, did her work quickly and well, with an uncommon intensity. On the street, Marta saw how Dominika’s eyes flitted from people’s faces to the doors, along the sidewalk, across the street, using normal movements to mask her constant glances. When they were sitting together at a café, there was the flash of gratifying intuition, a hint of playfulness, the brilliant smile. Marta knowingly identified Dominika’s nearly unconscious use of her beauty—eyes, smile, body—in her interactions. And when they talked, Marta recognized how Dominika used techniques of conversation and elicitation.

Quite a creature, thought Marta, and in operations! Beauty, brains, tradecraft, and incandescent blue eyes. It was apparent that she knew her duty, loved her country, but there was something beneath the surface, an underground spring bubbling unseen. Pride, anger, disobedience. And something else, hard to define, a secret side, an addiction to rebellion, as if she courted risk. Marta wondered how long it would be before this young woman, with her discerning eye and natural instincts, would realize that the Center’s work was pokazukha, something done solely for effect, for show. Rezident Volontov was an extreme example of the work ethic, the type of functionary who had run the KGB and the Kremlin for the last seventy years.

They began walking out of the embassy at the end of the day, stopping at a local bar for a glass of wine and a sinful slice of caviar pie oozing crème fraîche and cheese. They spoke of family, of Moscow, of experiences. Dominika did not mention Sparrow School. Marta laughed and made Dominika laugh, and they walked arm in arm down the sidewalk at the end of the evening.

One night in a bar, after smoothly telling a disgusting German to leave them alone, Marta told Dominika her life story, about her career as a Sparrow. She was proud of having served her country; she didn’t think about the beastly years of the KGB. She was not in the slightest ashamed of who she was or what she’d done. Dominika’s lip trembled and she looked at her friend and began silently weeping. It was a long evening after that, but Marta knew everything about Dominika in the end. The assignment to pursue Nate, Uncle Vanya, Sparrow School, the Frenchman Delon, even Ustinov. The words came out of Dominika in a flood. There was no thought about elicitation or manipulation. The two women thereafter were, simply, friends.

Evening after evening, cool and collected, Marta listened and thought, My, how the vlastiteli, the bosses, have wrung quite a lot out of this girl in such a short time. But Marta saw strength in Dominika, and something else. Marta suspected Dominika’s exposure to the easygoing young American CIA officer was creating deeper reactions as well. To have said so would have been to imply that Dominika could not operate correctly, so Marta said nothing.

“I don’t know,” said Dominika. “He’s arrogant, he’s facetious, he doesn’t like Russia, or at least he doesn’t give us much credit. Uncle Vanya believes he is a desperate operative.”

“He sounds unpleasant,” said Marta. “But it should make it easier to work against him—even to sleep with him—to get what you want.” She lit a cigarette and looked at Dominika leaning back in the booth. They were on their third glass of wine.

“Not so much unpleasant as frustrating. But nice.” She sighed. “I am supposed to tell Volontov when I think he’s operational, distracted. They want to catch him with his agent.” Dominika was feeling the wine.

“And do you know him well enough to do that?” asked Marta. “Will you be able to know?”

Dominika brushed a lock of hair off her forehead. “I think I already have—I mean, I already do,” she said.

“And you ran right in and reported to Colonel Volontov,” said Marta. She already knew what was happening.

“Not exactly,” said Dominika. “I told him I would keep watching.”

“And you positively did not report that you suspected your young American was becoming busy.”

“He’s not my ‘young American,’” said Dominika, her eyes closed.

“But you suspect it’s so, and Volontov asked you outright, and you didn’t say a thing, correct?” asked Marta, leaning toward Dominika. “Open your eyes, look at me.”

She opened her eyes. “Correct. I didn’t say anything.” She closed her eyes.

Marta sipped her wine, noting with some detachment that Dominika not only had committed treason against the State— saying treason against the Duma sounded ridiculous—by not reporting and lying about it, but also had that evening made Marta likewise guilty of treason for having heard about the crime. She reached out and squeezed Dominika’s hand. “You must be careful,” she said.

Marta had devoted her life to the State, had for years ignored its excesses and personally contributed to the downfall of men whose only sin was to succumb to the pleasures of the flesh. But inside, she had long since broken with the bastards. She knew what a situation Dominika was in. The beasts, she thought, they will utterly empty this beautiful, intelligent girl, then cast her aside. And if what she was doing even remotely thwarted Vladimir Putin, it would be mortally dangerous. Dominika’s knowledge was like a knotted bag of snakes—safe for the moment, but don’t bang it against the wall.

MARBLE’s short visit to Helsinki was a triumph in multiple ways. First, MARBLE himself met and made significant progress with Trade Minister Trunk, thus incontrovertibly establishing the continuing need to pursue the flamboyant Canadian. Second, three nights of midnight-to-dawn meetings in the Hotel GLO with Nate had already produced eight highly graded intelligence reports (with notes for a possible thirty-seven more) on SVR operations in Europe and North America. Third, MARBLE provided the name of an assistant commissioner in the RCMP’s Strategic Policy and Planning Directorate who was meeting a Russian illegal (whose day job was as a dancer at the Bare Fax in Ottawa). Last, the old agent repeated from memory—he did not normally have access to China reporting—the gist of three superb SVR reports from Beijing detailing the power struggle still smoldering within the Politburo Standing Committee fully two years after the removal of Bo Xilai in early 2012. MARBLE’s “source comments” regarding President Putin’s interest—“significantly obsessive,” he called it—in Chinese Communist Party disunity were highly valued by analysts.