Red Sparrow

“Stop this tap dance,” snapped Boucher. “What are you talking about?”

Benford took an audible deep breath. He closed his briefing book and folded his hands on top of the cover. He looked at the Senate seal on the wall above the members’ heads. “We have fragmentary information that there is a high-level penetration of the US government with exceptional access to national security secrets currently being handled by the SVR.”

“How close are you to identifying this leak?” asked the senator from Florida.

“We do not know who, what, or where,” said Benford. “We’re checking every possibility.”

“Sounds like you don’t have the slightest idea,” said Boucher.

“Senator, these investigations take time,” offered the senator from New York.

Boucher laughed. “Yeah, I know all about these investigations. Hundreds of people keeping busy and drawing salaries, but no one seems to catch anyone.”

Benford let the members talk among themselves for a minute before raising his voice again. “As we try to develop more information, we do have an unsubstantiated report that the individual in question might suffer from an incapacitating condition—shingles. It may be useful later, as we narrow our search and begin cross-checking.”

“This is all inconclusive,” said Boucher, turning toward the dais. “If my committee colleagues have no objection, I must excuse myself for another important meeting of a separate committee.” She turned to Benford. “I’m done for today.” Boucher rose from her seat, gathered her classified folder, and walked to the door. The other senators rustled papers and fell silent as Boucher opened the massive door and left the room.

Benford did not raise his head. It was done. Fifteen of them had heard “shingles.” Two days earlier three undersecretaries of defense in a Pentagon briefing had heard the same thing, and in three days so would the special assistant to the president and senior director for Defense during a brief to selected NSC staff.

As he snapped his briefcase shut in the empty SSCI committee room, Benford pictured the jowly faces in the Kremlin and thought, You want a canary, comrades, I’ll give you a canary.

=====

General Korchnoi had been summoned to the Director’s secure conference room on the fourth floor of Yasenevo by Vanya Egorov’s aide. Dimitri had called him the instant he stepped into his office, even before Korchnoi had hung his coat in the closet and sat down to review morning traffic. It sounded urgent. The general looked wistfully at the covered plate of sirniki, hot cheese pancakes with sour cream that his secretary had left for him and that he had planned to munch as he read. They would grow cold and rubbery before he could get back. As he left his office, he rolled up one of the pancakes and stuffed it into his mouth.

Since he had discovered that Vanya was playing games, setting canary traps, dredging for the CIA mole within the SVR, Korchnoi’s double life hardened from a now-familiar baseline of danger into one of imminent, guilty dread. For fourteen years he had lived under constant pressure; he had learned to accommodate it, but there was a difference between spying undetected and being hunted.

As he pushed through the front doors of Headquarters each morning, he was never sure whether he would be greeted by stone-faced security officers who would hustle him from the lobby into a side room. Every time the phone rang on his desk, he could never know it was not a summons to a windowless room filled with unsmiling faces. Every weekend outing was a potential ambush arrest on a wooded country road or in a lonely dacha.

Korchnoi got off the elevator and walked past the portraits. Hello, old walruses, he thought. Have you caught me yet? He entered the executive conference room to see Vanya Egorov sitting on the corner of the table laughing at something Line KR Chief Alexei Zyuganov was saying. This is the little domovoi, the little goblin, who stuffed rags into prisoners’ mouths before shooting them in the forehead because their cries for mercy bothered him, thought Korchnoi. Zyuganov watched as the general walked across the room toward them.