Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

“I know I must do this,” Dominika said. “I have telegrams already written in my head. From now until winter.”

“You have to write them on your own,” said Forsyth. “We can help you, but they must be your reports, in your words, with your details.” Dominika nodded her head. She knows the Game, thought Forsyth. She’s at home with it.

“I will paint a picture of Neyt. Vain, boastful, but cautious. Easy to manipulate, but suspicious, distracted.” She turned to look at Nate, raised an eyebrow.

“Hard to believe it will take you till next winter to figure all that out,” said Gable, sitting on the couch next to Nate, who flipped him a middle finger.

“I don’t know how long we can roll this out. Yasenevo is going to lose patience sooner or later,” said Forsyth. He already was thinking about the day Dominika would be recalled to Moscow. Would she be ready to operate inside? Could they get her ready in time? It would be the calendar that beat them, he thought, not her.

“There is one way to prolong the contact, keep my collar loose. Something that will persuade Yasenevo to invest more time,” Dominika said. “Uncle Vanya expects it.”

“What is it?” asked Forsyth.

“In time, if I report that Neyt and I have become lovers, Moscow will be gratified; it will satisfy their expectations. It will make sense to them—they will remember State School Four.”

Gable heaved himself up from the couch, a look of pain on his face. “Lovers? Jesus Christ, I couldn’t ask anybody to do that with Nash. It’s too much.”

A blustery Sunday, and the little skiffs and day-sailers snubbed against the pontoon docks in the inlet. In the safe house Dominika spoke a little of Marta but stopped and told Nate her news. The monotreme Volontov had recently realized he was without an administrative assistant and solicitously had asked Dominika to assume some admin duties. She wanted to tell him no, to discredit him in the eyes of the Center, but she thought now about Nate and Forsyth and Bratok, and had replied that she would be willing to help out. Her gemstone secret was burning deep now. She was learning to look for opportunities to feed her mounting appetite.

They gave her rezidentura officers’ time cards and filing of operational accountings. The latter came with an added benefit, could Nate guess? Each expense must be referenced to a case report or to an operational telegram describing the activity. “Volontov and his officers should do it themselves, but they just toss everything on my desk,” said Dominika. “No one but the rezident may read others’ cables, there is strict razdelenie, compartmentation.” Dominika’s blue eyes blazed. “Except that they need me to reference the expenses.” She stretched it out. “So… Volontov has given me access to the operational traffic. All of it.”

The intelligence started coming in bits and pieces, and they watched it, Forsyth firsthand, the arthropods back in Langley long-distance, for any false note, anything too pat, too clever. She was prodigious in remembering details, recalling one story line, which triggered another, then another. She began to take cryptic notes, they checked her on it, and she was sound.

She memorized nearly the complete text of the Line N referent’s monthly support activity report, blowing up three Line S illegals in Helsinki, sleepers who had lived in Finland as Finns for decades. One had already exited the country at Haaparanta as a smoke screen after Marta’s disappearance. The other two lived in the nearby municipality of Espoo, but they left them alone to protect Dominika.

Next meeting, she scared them when she unfolded an original document plucked out of Volontov’s in-box. She had stuffed it crumpled into a pocket instead of taking it to be shredded with the rest of the dross. Sovershenno Sekretno, Top Secret, from Line PR, four pages on the Estonian and Latvian Parliaments. They were NATO allies now, so Langley took that intel downtown, to the NSC and the Oval. Gable yelled at her never to do that again.

Headquarters agreed with Gable. No more pinching documents, give her a concealed camera. Nate didn’t like it, as risky as it gets, but Forsyth said they had to get her used to it, he thought she could handle it.

“I’m not sure she’s ready for that,” said Nate. Any spy gear trebled the risk and he didn’t want the case blowing up, didn’t want to put her in any more danger.

“Well, you better get her the fuck ready,” said Gable. “If they call her home tomorrow, the case ends.”

“Speaking of which, it’s time for a little Moscow internal ops training,” said Forsyth to Nate. “Your specialty.”

Dominika’s education in denied-area tradecraft began. Summer had settled on the peaked roofs and copper domes of Helsinki, and perpetual twilight replaced dusk, and scores of drab Finns rode the escalators down to the Metro platforms. Dominika in a scarf, Dominika in a beret, Dominika in a coat, counting the paces, funneling with the crowd toward the turnstile. She got through and at a corner of the passageway she brushed by him, through the crimson air, she could smell him, feel the sleeve of his sweater as she held a cigarette pack firmly between two fingers against her waist. He palmed it—a perfect Brush Pass—and was gone into the crowd.

Summer rain, fresh and light, traffic slow and sluggish, lights reflected off the pavement. She checked her watch by the light of a display case. No tickles behind her, she felt good, and she knew she would hit the timing window. When Nate had described what they were going to do, she had laughed. “We do not resort to such drama,” she had told him, and he said, “That’s because SVR operates in democracies,” and she had huffed but listened carefully.

She walked tight beside the granite wall, cars hissing past on the wet street. She turned the corner and stopped in the shadow of a scaffolding, in the covered pedestrian walkway. Nate’s car had come around the corner at thirty-eight minutes after the hour, random and quick, the car rolling and the passenger-side window down, and she stepped off the curb and stuck her hand in the window, letting the plastic bag drop on the seat, and took the replacement cassette from his hand, and stepped back under the scaffolding and he had driven on. He hadn’t looked at her, but she had seen his hand pulling on the hand brake, no brake lights, the Moving-Car Delivery. Such drama, she thought.

They were hitting their stride, all of them, and inevitably the Headquarters heat-seekers started circling. She was a controlled asset, well-placed inside an SVR rezidentura, they had written, and they wanted to “explore other possibilities.” Forsyth kept them off for weeks, but then they made it an order, and Gable wanted to get on a plane and go back there, but Forsyth told him to stop.

The madness began. The engineers in the Directorate of Science and Technology wanted DIVA to download the entire rezidentura computer network, attack the crypto systems, emplace audio and video inside the rezidentura . The S&T techs blithely admitted that some of their devices might, repeat, might dim the lights of southern Helsinki, and in one instance required DIVA to install a radioactive source on the roof of the Russian Embassy. Headquarters then advised that the “Rule of Sixes” that governed the development of all new technology would, however, delay deployment of any equipment to the field: R&D for the device would take six more years, it would cost an additional six million dollars, and, based on breadboard bench testing, one device would weigh six hundred pounds . Madness.