Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

Egorov swallowed. “We are determining exactly which overseas location will be most advantageous. I will inform you the instant I decide.”

“Athens,” said Putin.

“Mr. President?” said Egorov.

“Send the officer—your niece—to Athens. Low security threat, we have people inside the police.” Why was he insisting on Greece?

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Egorov, but Putin had already hung up.

One floor down, Zyuganov looked into a milky eye and at the death’s head skull. “Make arrangements for Athens,” said the dwarf, and watched the man get up and leave his office. Zyuganov considered briefly that Dominika could be in danger if she were caught between this Spetsnaz maniac and his target, but that couldn’t be helped.

Benford had CID researching compartmented defense projects and crunching names. He was waiting for an echo from Vanya’s canary trap. The Orions were trying to fox Golov again on the streets of Washington. But he needed something right away.

They had discussed it in Rome and MARBLE knew what he had to do, despite the risk, and Benford had reluctantly agreed. Korchnoi walked down to the first-floor laboratory of Directorate T. Nasarenko was seated behind his desk, a moonscape riot of papers, boxes, and folders. A long table against the wall was chaos, and similarly covered to overflowing. Nasarenko looked up at Korchnoi, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Yury, please excuse the interruption,” said Korchnoi, walking up to the desk and shaking Nasarenko’s hand. “May I speak with you?” Nasarenko looked like a sailor suddenly caught on a disintegrating ice floe, contemplating the widening gap between his ship and the ice.

“What is it?” Nasarenko asked. His face was gray and his hair—never overly combed anyway—was strawlike and dull. His glasses were smudged and cloudy.

“I need your advice on a communications matter,” said MARBLE, and for the next fifteen minutes discussed a backup communication system for a Canadian recruitment target. Nasarenko, agitated and with twitching thumbs, distractedly discussed the matter.

Korchnoi leaned over Nasarenko’s desk, crowding him, creating blind spots. “What’s bugging you, old friend?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Nasarenko. “It’s just that work has been piling up.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help…”

“It’s nothing,” said Nasarenko. “Just a lot of work. I’m drinking from a fire hose of data. I need translators, analysts.” His thumbs bent spasmodically as he spoke. “Do you know how much information is on a single disc?” He swiveled his chair around to face a four-drawer safe, took out a lidded steel box, and shook it out over his desk. A dozen plastic bags, stapled at the top, spilled onto his blotter. Inside each bag was a disc inside a gray sleeve. He picked up several discs in shaky hands. “These can hold gigabytes of data. I have all these waiting for processing.” He threw a plastic bag across his desk, where it skittered under a pile of dun-colored folders.

Korchnoi reached over to pick up the little bag. He peered at the piece of plastic as if he could not imagine so much information could fit into such a small object. He read the Pathfinder logo on the side of the discs. “Why can’t they give you more staff?”

Nasarenko put his head in his hands. Korchnoi felt sorry for this pugalo, this scarecrow, with his straw hair and flapping arms. “Yury, don’t panic,” he said. “You’ve done too much excellent work for too many years to be treated this way.” As Korchnoi reached across the desk to pat Nasarenko on the shoulder, he slipped the plastic bag with the disc into the out-of-sight pocket of his suit coat. Were the discs sequential? Were they logged in? Would Nasarenko notice one of two dozen was missing? “I could send one or two analysts from my department to assist you temporarily, if that would help. God knows we’re all shorthanded, but your work is critical. Could you use them?”

Nasarenko looked up gloomily. “Your analysts could not work on the sensitive project, it is restricted.”

“Maybe they can work on other projects, to give you some time. Yury, don’t say no. It’s settled,” said Korchnoi. “I’ll send over two of my analysts this afternoon, but Yury”—Korchnoi wagged a finger at him—“don’t even dream that you’ll steal them.” Nasarenko smiled thinly.

Washington rezident Golov’s cable reporting the barium variant with “shingles” was lying on Vanya Egorov’s desk. A single page with a diagonal blue line across the text, it was wrinkled from repeated clench-fisted readings. The Line KR chief, Zyuganov, sat in a chair in front of Egorov, delighted beyond measure. Egorov shook his head. “I cannot believe that Nasarenko is the mole,” he said. “He can barely carry a conversation in the cafeteria. Can you see him at night, meeting with the Americans?”

Zyuganov licked his lips. “Shingles. Golov would not make a mistake with this. You read his report, a direct quote from SWAN. ‘The mole is afflicted with shingles.’ The variant used with Nasarenko.”

“He is an absentminded fool,” said Egorov, not really knowing why he was defending the man. “He could have mentioned it to others, the word could have gotten back from another source.” Zyuganov didn’t really care. All he knew was that he would be crawling into Nasarenko’s head. Now he had a job to do.

“Damn it, it’s all we have right now,” said Egorov. “Start immediately on an investigation. Every aspect.”

Zyuganov nodded, hopped down off the chair, and headed for the door. He tried to remember where he had put his Red Army tunic, the one with the buttons on the side, the one he liked wearing during interrogations. The greenish brown material—stiff with brown dried blood spots and thick with the stable stench of a hundred bowels—looked smarter than a lab coat, though the sleeves were slightly frayed.

“One more thing,” said Egorov after him. “Check him for metka, for tracking compounds. If he’s touched an American in the last two years, something may show up.” Zyuganov nodded, but he had his own opinion of spy dust.

He preferred povinnaya— confession, magnificent, liberating confession, the best way to establish guilt. Zyuganov had a connate sense of how to convince subjects, after the screams and separated tendons and spilled ocular fluid, to agree to confess to whatever they were required to confess to.

He still couldn’t remember where his army tunic was.

They summoned Nasarenko to Counterintelligence for a “random security update.” One did not need to work in the SVR for long to know that this kind of interview represented quite serious trouble, and it set Nasarenko into a panic. After the requisite inconclusive interview with the confused and weeping scientist, Zyuganov transferred him straight to the cellars, in this case to Butyrka in central Moscow. He shrugged on his tunic with anticipation.

People are funny, thought Zyuganov, fingering the lightweight truncheon. They all react differently. With Nasarenko it was the soles of his feet and the hollow aluminum baton—much more of a reaction than the average subject. Zyuganov was able to complete one session with the pop-eyed scientist before an inventory of his laboratory revealed that a SWAN disc was missing, and the pytka, the torture, stopped because this was something critical. Zyuganov authorized a course of amobarbital that unpeeled Nasarenko’s memory enough for him to walk them through the recent past, reviewing staff, and colleagues, and visitors, including the brief visit by General Korchnoi to Nasarenko’s laboratory. Korchnoi? Impossible. Make another sweep of the lab. There had to be an explanation. Where was the disc?