Red Sparrow

Benford nodded approval. The kid had been on the other end, staring into the FSB barrel on the mean streets of Moskva. Benford knew what an agent’s vulnerabilities were, what scared his handler. Nate was coming along, he noted with satisfaction.

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Benford owned the Orions, kept them off people’s screens, didn’t loan them out. Who would want them, the geriatric surveillance team of retired field officers? Clunky cars, black socks and sandals, bird-watcher’s binoculars. The size of the team was fluid, grew or shrank depending on personal schedules, grandchildren’s visits, or doctors’ appointments. It was the very nature of the Orions—slow, patient, thoughtful—that made them so effective. It was impossible to goad them with provocative countermaneuvers. They watched, waited, faded in and out. They caressed their targets, they sniffed delicately, they flooded and ebbed like the tide. But they never stopped coming at you.

And they used TrapDoor. Only a certain kind of surveillance team could make TrapDoor work, a different kind of coverage, a philosophy, the difference between a dog chasing a car and a cat watching a bird. They had worked on it for some time. The Orions had perfected it, grease pencil on laminated maps, the overall compass vector telegraphed by a rabbit who is, after all, nothing but human. Never mind the twists and turns, the reverses and funnels, tell me where he’s going, where he’s headed.

They had brought federal surveillance experts in to observe the Orions, wanted to train other teams to get the same results, wanted to put a label on their black magic. Predictive coverage based on profile analysis, they wrote. Situational projections supporting discreet surveillance, they wrote. Anticipatory deployments determined by “route of march” balanced by mitigation of acceptable risk, they wrote.

Pretty much all nonsense, the Orions said. It was about developing a feeling, making a guess, taking a chance. The feds blinked at them. Think of it this way, said the sixty-eight-year-old team member who early in his career had tapped the GRU telephone exchange from the Berlin Tunnel. We’re an amoeba. You know, protoplasm, flexible, soft, stretching out ahead on either side, flowing along the edges. The experts smiled politely. How the hell do you put that in a field manual?

During street demonstrations, the experts looked for the Orions in the usual surveillance-team positions. They had disappeared. This isn’t coverage, the target has been left unobserved, where is the team? But when the rabbit arrived at the site, the Orions were waiting, parked in the neighborhood, in the park, at the crossroads, waiting so quietly that they didn’t see them. Crackpot ideas, alchemy, said the feds, thanks very much. They left the Orions to Benford.

So they began looking at Golov, and the assessment began. Quite a distinguished gentleman, still a proto-commie, smooth and unruffled. Get to know him, said Benford, and mind the CS team covering him. Stay loose, observe, stay invisible.

“All right,” Benford said, “it’s time to put Mr. Golov out of work for a while.” The next morning the FBI Gs were outside the embassy of the Russian Federation on Wisconsin Avenue, slumped in their Crown Vics, wearing Oakleys, with Bring it in their faces and two hundred fifty horses under their hoods.

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Closed sessions of the SSCI to discuss “intelligence matters” were held in Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building on Constitution Avenue. Designated HS, for “Hart Senate,” in congressional directories, the building was a nine-story black-glass-and-marble tower, not at all like the more elegant neoclassical Dirksen and Russell Senate Office Buildings. Arriving alone, Benford crossed the soaring atrium lobby and took the stairs to the second floor. At Room 216, he entered the outer office, registered with the guard behind the counter, and surrendered his mobile phone. He stepped through the open gray steel vault door into the committee room. He was early for the session and the room was empty except for aides distributing folders at each position on the raised oak dais. Of course the dais was raised, thought Benford. Senators enjoyed looking down at witnesses.

Invisible behind the marble- and wood-paneled walls, ceiling, and floor of the committee room was a hatchwork grid of copper filaments continuously pulsing energy that ensured that, once the latches dogged the vault door tight against the copper finger stock around the frame, no signals could penetrate into or escape out of the room.