Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

It was the math, really. Golov would have been safe if he ran only the normal five SDRs a year. But the Russian spooks in the Washington rezidentura were being starved out. They had work, contacts, sources to meet, Golov most of all. He had the enormousness of cosseting SWAN, and he needed to be black for meetings with her. That required two or three SDRs a week. Like the aging movie star who takes any work she can get, Golov’s SDR tricks were becoming overexposed.

Sitting around a big table at a suburban Maryland Sizzler, members of the Orions enjoyed the Early Bird Dinner Special before the start of the evening. It was a small team that night, only five of them, but it made no difference. They were all old rock stars.

Orest Javorskiy had emplaced polystyrene tree stumps packed with electronics in the snow of the Fulda Gap to listen for the midnight rumble of Soviet armor. Mel Filippo had led her blinded agent out of Brasov by the hand. Clio Bavisotto had played Chopin for Tito while her husband cracked the safe upstairs. Johnny Parment recruited a Vietcong general in Hanoi under the noses of a twenty-person surveillance team. And sitting at the end of the table was “the Philosopher,” goateed Socrates Burbank, nearly eighty, thrice married and thrice divorced, the Buddha who invented TrapDoor surveillance and who, from the backseat, called the shots and directed the team.

Burbank had Waltzed with the Pig, he had done it all. In his early twenties he had exfiltrated an agent and his family out of Budapest past idling tanks in Martyrs’ Square. He had hammered landing beacons into the doomed beaches at the Bay of Pigs. He had sat in an overheated safe house in Berlin, coaxing the intel out of a Soviet general officer stupid with vodka, holding the vomit can between the Russian’s knees. Not even Benford interfered when Burbank was running the Orions, grease pencils between his fingers, laminated street maps on his knees, Toulouse-Lautrec holding a radio, softly talking to the amoeba.

An afternoon of towering thunderheads in the west that evening culminated in a stupendous line of storms and lightning strikes that paralyzed metropolitan Washington. Tree limbs littered the flooded roads, the Beltway became an unmoving annulus, and both airports suspended operations. It was the worst night for an SDR, it was the best night for one.

Golov used the traffic to screen himself as he crawled from the embassy south through Georgetown, across the river on the Key Bridge, and then south along the Potomac, stopping variously in Crystal City Underground and Old Town Alexandria. Stops in the equatorial downpour were more than uncomfortable—by the time Golov finished desultory shopping in Alexandria he was soaked. So too was the FBI team that followed moodily in his wake.

Despite the weather, Golov was trying to sell Mount Vernon as his ultimate destination, supported by a mild and linear route in that direction. Evening concerts and colonial dinners were popular at the mansion, and no surveillance team worth its salt would fail to flood the area if a rabbit even hinted at heading that way. The FBI did exactly that, sending two cars ahead and keeping four trailing cars way back on the rezident . It was time for Golov’s magic. His move would be covered by the traffic, the FBI too far behind. His fishhook was a quick turn onto the ramp to the Wilson Bridge, across the Potomac into Maryland and Oxon Hill, through Forest Heights, and toward Anacostia.

A puff of smoke and he was gone. Thirty minutes later, the FBI team glumly radioed that they had lost the rabbit somehow on GW Parkway south, Mount Vernon was negative, and they were retracing the route, sweeping back through Alexandria and north into suburban Virginia. Golov’s fishhook was stuck firmly in their mouths, pulling them farther and farther away.

The rain stopped and traffic thinned as Golov cut north through southwest Washington, stairstepping, doubling back, parking at the curb to wait and watch. The wipers streaked his windshield in the intermittent mode. He now had only to traverse the National Mall to enter downtown. He would park his car in an underground garage in the K Street corridor and walk the dozen or so blocks to the Tabard Inn. He had seen no whisper of trailing surveillance; his years of experience told him he was black, alone, free.

Soc Burbank’s grease pencil squeaked on the map. The reverse had been on the Wilson Bridge—the only explanation—and the shank was pointing downtown. He tossed the FBI brick to the side; the only things coming out of the FEEB frequencies now were profanities. His pencil squeaked some more and he built a static picket line along the south side of the Mall, three cars on Seventh, Fourteenth, and Seventeenth Streets, leaving the tunnels at Ninth and Twelfth unguarded. At dusk, Clio observed Golov’s black BMW ooze up Fourteenth Street. Softly she called him through, just direction and speed. She pulled into traffic and followed him as only a grandmother could, tenderly and with great concern.

The two other Orion cars converged on Golov using parallel tracks along Eighteenth and Pennsylvania. Mel and Soc relinquished the eye to Johnny near McPherson Square, where he saw Golov enter a parking garage. The team prepared to cover the Russian on foot; and it was here they really excelled. They had not used the ABC formation in a decade. Instead they swirled around the rabbit, dipped him in chocolate. They moved ahead, they walked back through, they crossed in front, they looped far ahead. If Golov happened to glance in an Orion’s direction, he or she did not flinch or turn away or window-shop. Rheumy eyes met his for an instant, then proceeded with absentminded sweetness, blue hair under improbable berets, rakish fisherman caps, packages, purses, librarian eyeglasses, and a briar pipe. Golov, tall and patrician and at home on the streets of Paris or London, didn’t register a thing.

They were too good, too natural, too fluid. They were invisible among the casuals on the street, especially to a senior SVR officer exhausted by the pressure, fed up with the uncompromising burdens of tradecraft, and who was working on a serious case of tunnel vision with each step closer to the Tabard Inn. The Russian was being had by five pensioners with liver spots and bad knees. If he could detect someone, he could turn away, buy a newspaper, order a coffee, head home, the meeting aborted. But he didn’t see anything.

The rain had stopped, and when Golov turned down N Street, TrapDoor closed. It was the Tabard Inn, the only possibility on N, forget the Topaz Hotel. Mel and Clio were already waiting inside the lobby, shoes off, chafing their feet, exclaiming, My goodness how they hurt. They watched as Golov got a room key and disappeared up the narrow staircase.

Their discipline—and a firmly established procedure—compelled them to stay in place for a half hour, to observe activity and potentially interesting individuals. They had no law-enforcement arrest authority and loitering longer than that would alert the target. So Soc called Benford, gave him a terse report, and hung up. Then he keyed the radio and clicked them out of there.

They hadn’t witnessed a meeting, they didn’t have squat. They had foxed the SVR rezident, but there was no agent, no suspect. Patience and perspective helped them cope with the inconclusive evening. As did late-night hot dogs at the Shake Shack on Eighteenth.

A Russian intelligence officer was very likely meeting clandestinely with an unidentified penetration of the US government as the Orions ordered their dogs. Johnny’s China Ops background manifested itself in sesame slaw and chilies. Orest was a purist and would accept only mustard and kraut. Mel favored onions and ketchup, Clio the classical pianist had hers with lettuce, tomato, bacon, and blue cheese. Socrates had years ago shocked them into uneasy silence by inventing the Depth Charge, the ingredients for which were available only at the Shake Shack: a disgusting schmear of pan-fried potatoes, caramelized onions, anchovies, and fiery Argentine chimichurri sauce. By mutual consent the Orions had agreed that they would never eat in their vehicles with Soc.