Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

“ Vsego dobrogo, my friend,” said MARBLE. “Good luck to you. I will keep an eye open and signal in the event poor Nasarenko jumps out a window.”

“Very helpful,” said Benford, “and if you could keep your eyes open for any other clues…”

“I have something in mind, but later,” said MARBLE.

Nate and Dominika sat together in his room and talked quietly. He acted nonchalant, but she knew better, she could see the intensity of his aura. He repeated that he had been worried about her, they all had been waiting for some word, and they all had been relieved when General Korchnoi reported that she was safe. He blamed himself for what had happened, her recall to Moscow. But now they could restart the relationship, they would work together again. Dominika thought he sounded like a case officer handling an agent, which was exactly what he was. He had been worried, then relieved . Chto za divo! Wonderful.

Nate heard himself prattling on. He was conscious of the men in the adjoining room, conscious of the awkwardness of the moment, he knew he had to maintain control. He stumbled and stopped talking when he saw her face. She was elegant, stunning, poised. He remembered that expression, the set of her mouth. She was becoming angry. The endless months spent apart, not knowing if she was dead, and in the first hour together he was pissing her off.

Now what? she thought. They had been separated and she had built up expectations, but things, apparently, would be different. They could not return to the heady days of Helsinki, with her sneaking out of Volontov’s rezidentura with pilfered documents under her sweater. The long afternoons in the little sun-splashed safe house, cooking on the little stove, were past. So was the little moonlit bedroom.

She was a silly fantazerka, a woolly-headed dreamer. All right, she could be all business and she wasn’t about to make it easy for him. Dominika brutally told Nate about her recall to Moscow, about the cellars of Lefortovo, the endless days of questions, and the slaps and the purple lips, and how the cabinets at the ends of the corridors had creaked when she was shoved inside them.

His face was ashen when she told him she had kept his image in her mind and it helped her survive, bringing him along with her at her side, down the corridors and into the next room. Nate did not react but she saw it in his eyes, the purple haze behind him was intense with emotion. Rattled, he got up from his chair.

He was pouring wine at a sideboard across the room, and Dominika got up and went over to him. His hand was shaking as he filled the glasses. He wouldn’t look at her. He knew that if, in that moment, they touched, he would be lost. Nate turned to face her. He looked at her hair, her lips, the fifty-fathom blue of her eyes. His eyes told her, No, we mustn’t, but his throat closed up and his guts ached, and he took her face in his hands and kissed her, remembering the taste of her.

They kissed each other madly, as if someone were coming to pull them apart. Dominika clutched his neck and she walked him backward out onto the little marble balcony in the dying light. Doves were darting between the tips of the cypresses, black against the sky. There was no sound and not a breath of wind. She pushed him against the balcony railing and wordlessly they fumbled with his belt buckle and hitched up her dress and Dominika was on her toes, facing him, like a five-minute tart in an alley off Kopevskiy Pereulok. She gripped the wrought iron with white knuckles, lifted one leg, and hooked her shoe on the railing. She mashed her mouth over his and moaned into his throat down to his belly. Her body shivered and she let go of the railing and wrapped her arms around his neck to hold on. All the bucking and shuddering and shaking on the little balcony made the doves in the trees jumpy, and they dipped and turned and flared among the cypress tops.

Clinging to each other was sweet and natural and logical, and the little balcony became Dominika’s entire world, and Nate became the only thing in it as he trailed his lips across her mouth. His arms tightened around her waist and her legs began to convulse. She whispered, “ Dushenka, ” in his ear, and the doves swooped in the night sky.

They didn’t move for two minutes, then Dominika breathed raggedly through his kiss and pulled away from his embrace, smoothing her skirt. He tucked in a trailing tail of his shirt. They went back inside. Nate turned on a lamp and handed her a glass of wine. They sat beside each other, looking straight ahead, not speaking. Dominika’s legs trembled and she could feel her heartbeat in her head. It seemed that Nate was about to say something, but Benford entered the room just then to fetch them for dinner.

Sergey Matorin, the SVR’s executioner from Line F, sat at a small sidewalk table at Harry’s Bar at the top of the Veneto. He had a view of the front entrance of Egorova’s hotel down Via di Porta Pinciana, and was waiting to catch a glimpse of her, of Korchnoi, but especially of the figure of the young American. His squirrel-jumpy brain had committed the American’s face to memory before leaving Moscow. There should have been some activity by now, he thought. His chest felt heavy and his mouth was dry.

He was tempted to break into Egorova’s hotel room, to wait in the dark, in a corner, enveloped in his own vinegar-ammonia body odor, but he had been given strict instructions directly by Chief Zyuganov, absolutely secret. No unnecessary action, wait for an opportunity, make no mistakes. Matorin was content to sit and wait.

He eyed several young women walking up the escalator from the underground Borghese Gallery, but ignored them in favor of his latest daydream of the group of Afghan women and children cowering behind the mud and rock walls of a hilltop sheep pen during the Parwan offensive. As the grenades from the GP-25s floated in lazy arcs and bracketed them, the women’s screams mingled with the soft crump s of the explosions, until they were silent. A raucous horn from a passing car on the Veneto shook him out of his reverie, and Matorin was sorry for that.

FORI IMPERIALE’S SPAGHETTI ALLA BOTTARGA

Sauté garlic in olive oil until golden, then remove garlic. Stir in butter and a spoonful of grated bottarga di muggine roe, but do not overcook, as it will become bitter. Add al dente pasta to the oil and toss to coat. Remove from heat; add additional butter and a second spoonful of bottarga. Finish with fresh chopped parsley.

Rezident Anatoly Golovwould have been unsettled to learn how much the Orion team had divined about him personally from studying his streetcraft. This was a maestro, they said, an intellectual, an artist. He didn’t use the ponderous SVR rules of streetcraft, the punishing, high-speed surveillance detection routes, the arrogant demeanor, the offensive “provocations” at the end of a run. Golov’s style reflected his many years as an operations officer in Europe and in America. His routes caressed surveillance, made peace with it, and only after many hours of gentle manipulation did he break their hearts. But the Orions had identified patterns, preferences, predilections in Golov’s SDRs. He was unaware of his stylish predictability, that he telegraphed his favored maneuvers. One of these was to execute a rybolovnyi krjuchok, a fishhook reverse, in his route about three-quarters of the way through a normally straight and benign SDR. It was a murderously effective maneuver—he would simply disappear.

Golov’s fishhook confounded the Gs, who for months had been jamming his right-rear quarter. The frustrated teams were ready to give him a spanking soon by boxing his car and taking him around the Beltway three times before letting him take an exit. The Orions, observing from the wings, were more patient. They quietly studied Golov’s maneuver, they wanted to understand it, quantify it, to confirm what they all began to realize. After he dematerialized, the shank of the fishhook was Golov’s true compass course; it pointed to the final destination—and his agent—as directly as the leading edge of the Big Dipper points to Polaris.