Jason Matthews - Red Sparrow

Korchnoi heard the rumors about the mole hunt redoubled, about trouble in Directorate T, about sensitive materials gone missing. He spoke to old friends in other departments, and listened to the “porcelain gossip” in the senior-officer toilets. Nasarenko had not been seen in days.

Korchnoi knew the searchers and investigators and counterespionage interrogators would start closing in. He urgently had to send Benford a note, as well as pass the disc he had shoplifted from Nasarenko’s lab to the CIA instantly, via dead drop, this evening; that is, if they still let him walk out of Headquarters. He wondered if he had played it too close, whether he had enough time for Dominika to make another trip—to Athens—and blow the whistle on him.

Korchnoi walked out of headquarters on his own legs—not very much longer, he reckoned—and, once back in his apartment, composed a message. His burst transmission took a fraction of a second. Twenty minutes later Benford read the two lines of the message: Nasarenko is in the snare. Will load DD DRAKON.

Dead drop, thought Benford. The old fox must have something important. And Nasarenko’s in trouble. That means one of their twenty-three names in Washington is SWAN. He reached for the phone to call the FBI.

The night rain sheeted the street, blowing almost horizontally with the gusts of wind. The platform and stairs of the Molodezhnaya Metro stop were deserted, a few cars moving, stores closed. MARBLE flipped up the collar of his raincoat, jammed his hands into the pockets, and started walking slowly up Leninskaya Ulitsa. He had ridden three separate trains, taken a long walk along the river, before his instincts had been satisfied. There was nothing moving around him, or out on the wings, and he did not sense the presence or pressure of men on the street watching him.

Keep walking, steady pace, final approach and sloshing through the rain, water like fingers down his back. Night creature, hug the wall, listen for the squeak of shoes behind you. Follow Leninskaya through black woods, then the dogleg curve of the road in the trees, one light from Obstetrics School No. 81 flickering through the branches. Quickly now, off the pavement and into the dripping woods. MARBLE shivered. Shut up, stop moving, watch and listen, especially listen, for the gearbox banging or the brakes squealing or the doors chunking. Just the wind creaking the trees.

Time to move. Black water was gurgling through a metal culvert under the roadway, and MARBLE knelt and took the pouch out of his pocket, stripped the backing off the adhesive, stuck his arm in, and pressed the gray matte package hard against the inner curve of the culvert. Hold for a count of ten, let the epoxy cure, and listen for the splash that doesn’t come. Satisfactory.

He checked himself again, defending the cache on the way out and all the way to the barnyard heat of the Krylatskoye Metro. There was a sodden pile of clothes on his kitchen floor and the keyboard shook in his hands and the stylus was too small, even with reading glasses. Hell, don’t they build these things for old eyes? Because no one lives that long, that’s why, and the recessed button felt hot as he released the dove into space: HAVE LOADED DD SITE DRAKON.

MARBLE sat back in his armchair and closed his eyes. Come unload DRAKON, retrieve the little black disc, and God preserve the young-limbed CIA boy who will get mud on his suit, or the ponytailed Embassy wife, Phonak in her ear, listening for squelch breaks from the radio cars.

The Station heat-wrapped it twice, tight around the corners, and swaddled the box in burlap and stapled it and banded it and jammed it into the Halloween-orange K bag with the lockable zipper, and flew it home, couriered direct, because this one was from MARBLE. And the dove came back with the branch in its mouth, DRAKON RECOVERED, and the culvert in the woods vomited its black water but kept its secret nearly forever.

Benford sat at a conference table in the basement of FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. The table was littered with the remains of lunch ordered out from several local restaurants. This was a working lunch, no executive dining room for them now. Benford had ordered a Thai chicken salad called larb gai, succulent ground chicken with onions and chilies, basil, and lime, so highly seasoned that he was blowing contentedly like a steam boiler while others around the table finished their more conventional Episcopalian lunches of sandwiches or soup.

The table was divided evenly between CIA and FBI, mostly senior-level officers from technical and counterintelligence divisions. When the courier from Moscow arrived with MARBLE’s pouch, Benford—even Benford—agreed to let the FBI handle the forensic dissection of the package, to ensure proper procedure. “These federal automatons,” said Benford earlier to Nathaniel, “have been speaking to me about maintaining the ‘evidentiary chain’ as regards MARBLE’s package. If he has in fact recovered an actual disc containing top-secret information, passed by hand to the Russians from SWAN, then according to our FEEBish colleagues we must begin thinking about considerations of admissible evidence and securing convictions and such things.” Benford had uncharacteristically deferred to them.

Benford contemplated a metal evidence tray at the center of the table. The disc—now out of its SVR outer plastic and Pathfinder inner paper sleeve—lay in the bottom of the tray, on a sterile towel, its surface lightly coated with gray powder. FBI techs had followed procedure and staggered the tests—a ninhydrin swab to raise existing latent prints on the drive, then the spritz of calcium oxide for contrast. Seated around the table, everybody could see the three distinct, single prints on the dull surface. What would it be: a Russian lab rat’s salami thumbprints, or the whorls and ridges of an American mole? Benford knew that MARBLE would not have opened the plastic envelope, he would have been too good, too careful, to touch the actual disc itself. The FEEBs had taken photos and lifts to the laboratory for enhancement. An automated search in the FBI’s print archives was already under way.

Benford was in his car heading back up the GW Parkway toward Headquarters when his car phone rang. It was the deputy chief of the FBI Laboratory Services. “You might want to turn around and come back down here,” the FBI man told Benford. “You are freaking not going to believe the hit we just got.”

“This better be good,” said Benford, looking for the Spout Run exit so he could double back.

“Oh, it’s good, all right,” said the FBI scientist.

BENFORD’S THAI CHICKEN SALAD (LARB GAI)

Finely hand-chop lean chicken breasts with a large knife or cleaver. Season with lime juice and rice wine and sauté until crumbly and white. Let chicken cool and fold in lemongrass, diced garlic, diced chilies, lemon zest, fish sauce, salt, and pepper. Incorporate well. Add chopped cilantro, basil, mint, and scallions. Toss well; serve in lettuce cups with rice.

The DNA FingerprintAct of 2005 was in that year drafted, submitted to, and discussed in the Senate Judiciary Committee of Congress, but, for a variety of political reasons unrelated to national security, was deferred twice and taken off the docket. The bill intended to establish a national fingerprint and DNA archive for background checks, criminal and immigration registration, and identification for federal employees in sensitive jobs. Caucus leadership in the Senate had at the time mildly suggested to freshman senator Stephanie Boucher that in the interest of bipartisan comity she join a mixed group of Democrats and Republicans in support of the bill. Even though she personally opposed the notion of a national archive of identity information as an obscene invasion of privacy, Senator Boucher privately assessed that her public support of the bill would strengthen her national-security credentials and play well to the many high-tech aerospace companies in her state. She even participated in a televised bit of dumb crambo. Legislators agreed to be fingerprinted and for DNA samples to be taken in front of reporters. Senator Boucher smiled for the cameras as a technician swabbed the inside of her cheek, prompting one off-camera staff aide to wonder how many separate DNA nucleotides would be found inside that mouth at any given time.