Red Sparrow

“You’re not serious,” said Benford, face dead, eyes unmoving, steady hands pouring another brandy. Lightning thoughts one after the other in that wire-snare mind. Jesus H. Christ, she’s alive. The two agents have met. They’re working together. Please God they have not shared their respective secrets while eating borscht in the cafeteria. Young Nash is going to be busy. And finally, in a hot flash: This could fucking work.

“Tell me why,” said Benford with immense skepticism. “Please, Volodya, before the brandy runs out and I start to sober up.”

MARBLE tapped the little table with his forefinger. “Benford, I want you to open your ears. This is a perfect konspiritsia, an opportunity as good as you have ever had in the history of your service.” He tapped the table with each point he made. “She is the perfect solution to our problem. I have considered it carefully. Her last name gives her something of a pedigree, at least until Vanya retires or is purged, but by then she will be on her own way. She is a graduate of the Foreign Intelligence Academy, the AVR, and she graduated with honors. She is intelligent and has spirit.” Looking down, Benford turned the stem of the glass in his hand. MARBLE knew what he was doing.

“You and I know that a good record is not enough,” continued MARBLE. “She has the motivation, a mountain of resentment. Her father died, she was expelled from dance academy, her svin’ya uncle used her in the elimination of a Putin rival. He traded her silence for a slot at the Academy, then broke his word and sent her to Sparrow School. You know what that is, I presume.” Benford nodded.

“And then there was Helsinki, I assume you know she was there. Then an operational flap, not her fault, but there was trouble, and they brought her back and sweated her for two months. In Lefortovo, can you imagine, like the old days. I can tell you she will not soon forgive them that.

“I’m saving the best for last,” said MARBLE, sitting back in his chair. “I know what you’re thinking, that her career prospects as a woman are doubtful, that she is on the bottom rung of the ladder, that she will never, ever be able to develop any access. I propose to accelerate her career, to ensure her success, and she will never have to sit on a single general’s lap, mine included.”

“I see,” said Benford. “And how will you accomplish this, to catapult her to stardom?”

“Vanya Egorov is obsessed by the almost-certain knowledge that there is a spy in the Service.” MARBLE pointed to himself and laughed. “He in fact directed Egorova to Helsinki to get close to Nathaniel to generate some clue, or a name, about who the spy is. Did you know Nathaniel was targeted in Helsinki?” Benford kept his face shut down. MARBLE continued.

“Vanya’s plans have been delayed by her security investigation, but she is out, and cleared, and frankly this test of her, this Lefortovo episode, gives her more allure, more losk, more luster.”

Only Russians can think like this, thought Benford.

“I have taken her into my department,” said MARBLE, “to give her a foundation. Vanya has informally asked me to reopen the operation using Dominika against Nate, and this will establish her as my close subordinate. We will choose our best moment, you and I, Benford, then make young Egorova a heroine, a star in the Service, her career assured, from whom no advancement will be denied.”

“The payoff, Volodya,” said Benford. “It’s getting late. How are you going to make her a heroine?”

“It’s quite simple,” said MARBLE. “Dominika will discover I am the spy and turn me in.”

=====

They wanted the noise and the people and the distance from the UN, away from the other Russians, in the Village, on West Fourth Street. It was MARBLE’s last night. The restaurant had a red canopy, with steps down from the street, and drawings of dancers on the walls, and high-backed wooden booths that screened well and let them talk. Benford made MARBLE order pasta con le sarde, Palermo-pungent with finocchio and saffron and raisins and pinoli, and they sat shoulder to shoulder at the table, so they could hear each other.

Benford was worked up, talked a blue streak, was even a little frightened. He had thought about it for two days, from every angle, and it was monstrous, impossible, exorbitant. Things weren’t that desperate; if they had to suffer a break in the intel stream, then so be it, it was the nature of things. But to contemplate giving yourself the chop simply to establish a successor—it cannot happen, he said. MARBLE said of course it could happen, it had to happen.