Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

United States SenatorStephanie Boucher (D-California) was not accustomed to driving or parking her own car, or to walking down a corridor unescorted, or even to opening her own doors. As vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, she had a phalanx of interns and staffers to carry her in a sedan chair if she wished. She could have used some help right now: The front bumper of her car kissed the bumper of the car ahead of her with a quiet crunch. This motherfucking parallel parking. Senator Boucher twisted the wheel and touched the gas. Her rear wheels hit the curb, the front of the car still sticking out into the street. Boucher banged the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. She eased forward to get a new angle. A car behind her honked. Take the spot or move on.

Senator Boucher rolled down the passenger-side window and screamed, “Fuck you,” at the other car as it squeezed by. Boucher knew she should be more discreet; she was a known face—a celebrity, even—on the Hill, but that cocksucker was not going to honk at her and get away with it. On the fourth try, Boucher managed to ease into the space. It was early evening on a dark and leafy N Street in Washington, D.C. As she locked the car, she saw that her left rear tire was up on the curb, but the hell with it. She turned and walked along the sidewalk past the elegant brownstones, their Georgian doorways lit by beveled glass lanterns.

Boucher was forty years old, short and thin, with a boyish figure, her legs toned and slim. Piercing green eyes and a button nose were set off by shoulder-length blond hair. Her mouth was her only feature that was not consistent with the image of vibrating energy and corporate power. It was small and frowny and thin-lipped and pinched—a mouth that would as soon bite down as pucker up.

Boucher was ascending the power chain on the Hill, young to be a senator, but she knew she had earned her position on the Select Committee on Intelligence with fierce preparation and hard work. She sat on other committees as well, but none were as prestigious as SSCI. Twelve years ago she had been elected to Congress after a hardscrabble campaign in a Southern California district replete with defense and aerospace contractors. She became adept at appropriations and at holding the bag of money over people’s heads to get what she wanted. Ascending to senator had been the next logical step, and now, in her second term, as newly named vice chair, she had a hand in legislation, appropriations, and oversight within the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Intelligence Community. Abrasive, impatient, and abusive during committee hearings, she tolerated Defense for the commerce it brought to her home state. She recognized the political unassailability of DHS, which she privately thought was a collection of third-stringers operating in a world they scarcely understood, trying to do brain surgery while wearing catchers’ mitts.

But it was for the Intelligence Community—the conglomerate of sixteen separate agencies—that Boucher reserved her most bitter, thin-lipped excoriation. Defense Intelligence organs—DIA and DH—did not concern her. They were career soldiers thrashing over their heads in the foreign intelligence milieu when all they really wanted was a clear photo of the next bridge beyond the next hill. The Department of State’s INR had some brilliant analysts, but State rarely collected secrets anymore. Their analysts needed to get out in the sun more, get some vitamin D. The FBI were the reluctant brides, forced into a domestic intelligence role they neither understood nor welcomed, inevitably reverting to their button-down cop roots, preferring to run stings on Arab teenagers in Detroit rather than build networks of long-term sources.

But these were just the crowd. Senator Boucher really had the wood for just one agency, the CIA. She loathed the intelligence officials who sat before her in the committee room, slouched in their chairs, at turns earnest and evasive. Boucher knew they were lying to her every time they spoke, confident, slick, smiling, and knowing. She knew the briefing papers they carried in their zippered security bags were so much wallpaper, concealing the real story. “The hardworking men and women of intelligence,” they’d say, “the National Clandestine Service,” they’d puff, “the gold standard of intelligence collection” they’d announce. These were the familiar phrases that drove Boucher up the wall.

It was during her first term as a freshman congresswoman that Boucher had met seventy-five-year-old Malcolm Algernon Philips, an on-again, off-again lobbyist, lavish party-giver, and behind-the-scenes power broker in Washington. Philips knew everyone in town and, more important, knew (in Washington parlance) who was spanking whom, with what, and why. His many admirers would have been scandalized to learn that the silver-haired, impeccably dressed Philips had since the mid-1960s been a talent spotter for the KGB, recruited as a young socialite when Khrushchev was still premier. Though the Russians paid him well, Philips was in it for the sheer joy of gossip, repeating secrets, breaking confidences, and wielding the power that came along with it. He cared not a whit about what the Russians did with his information. The Russians in turn displayed an uncharacteristic patience with Philips. They did not push him to elicit secrets or pay bribes or filch documents. They were content to let him spot candidates for recruitment from within the maelstrom of official Washington. He had been doing it for nearly forty years, and he was very good at it.

During a winter dinner party at his Georgetown home, Philips’s finely tuned antennae detected in the junior congresswoman from California something in addition to the usual Capitol Hill cocktail of ambition, ego, and greed. A private lunch with Boucher six weeks later confirmed his suspicions. Philips told his KGB handler that he might have found the perfect engine for their needs. Stephanie Boucher was, Philips assessed, utterly devoid of a sentient conscience. Notions of right or wrong did not occupy her thoughts. Neither did patriotism, nor loyalty to God or family or country. She was concerned only about herself. If it suited her, Philips reported, Stephanie Boucher would not think twice about the morality of spying for Russia.

She grew up in the South Bay, in Hermosa Beach, every day wearing cutoffs and surfing and smoking and fending off the smooth golden boys. Her father was pathetic, letting her mother whore around; she grew to despise her parents. Then her father surprised them both. She was eighteen when her father shot her mother, at the time in the arms of a FedEx deliveryman. Stephanie broke down for a while, but she rallied and made it shamefacedly through the University of Southern California, then graduate school, then drifted into local politics with a growing conviction that friendship was overrated and that relationships were worth it only if they could be exploited for personal advancement. Some of her mother’s DNA stuck, however, and along with serial misanthropy, Stephanie progressively discovered she liked sex, a lot, the kind with no commitment. She had to control herself as her political career blossomed, but it was always there, right beneath the surface.

The rezidentura in Washington did careful research on their recruitment target. A picture slowly came together, and everything the SVR saw and heard was consistent with what Malcolm Philips had reported. A recruitment operation was initiated and a progression of SVR officers and influence agents continued to vet the senator. But it was not until Washington Rezident Anatoly Golov—urbane, soft-spoken, and charmingly ironic—made contact that Boucher got a first peek behind the treasure-room door.