Red Sparrow

Burbank had Waltzed with the Pig, he had done it all. In his early twenties he had exfiltrated an agent and his family out of Budapest past idling tanks in Martyrs’ Square. He had hammered landing beacons into the doomed beaches at the Bay of Pigs. He had sat in an overheated safe house in Berlin, coaxing the intel out of a Soviet general officer stupid with vodka, holding the vomit can between the Russian’s knees. Not even Benford interfered when Burbank was running the Orions, grease pencils between his fingers, laminated street maps on his knees, Toulouse-Lautrec holding a radio, softly talking to the amoeba.

An afternoon of towering thunderheads in the west that evening culminated in a stupendous line of storms and lightning strikes that paralyzed metropolitan Washington. Tree limbs littered the flooded roads, the Beltway became an unmoving annulus, and both airports suspended operations. It was the worst night for an SDR, it was the best night for one.

Golov used the traffic to screen himself as he crawled from the embassy south through Georgetown, across the river on the Key Bridge, and then south along the Potomac, stopping variously in Crystal City Underground and Old Town Alexandria. Stops in the equatorial downpour were more than uncomfortable—by the time Golov finished desultory shopping in Alexandria he was soaked. So too was the FBI team that followed moodily in his wake.

Despite the weather, Golov was trying to sell Mount Vernon as his ultimate destination, supported by a mild and linear route in that direction. Evening concerts and colonial dinners were popular at the mansion, and no surveillance team worth its salt would fail to flood the area if a rabbit even hinted at heading that way. The FBI did exactly that, sending two cars ahead and keeping four trailing cars way back on the rezident. It was time for Golov’s magic. His move would be covered by the traffic, the FBI too far behind. His fishhook was a quick turn onto the ramp to the Wilson Bridge, across the Potomac into Maryland and Oxon Hill, through Forest Heights, and toward Anacostia.

A puff of smoke and he was gone. Thirty minutes later, the FBI team glumly radioed that they had lost the rabbit somehow on GW Parkway south, Mount Vernon was negative, and they were retracing the route, sweeping back through Alexandria and north into suburban Virginia. Golov’s fishhook was stuck firmly in their mouths, pulling them farther and farther away.

The rain stopped and traffic thinned as Golov cut north through southwest Washington, stairstepping, doubling back, parking at the curb to wait and watch. The wipers streaked his windshield in the intermittent mode. He now had only to traverse the National Mall to enter downtown. He would park his car in an underground garage in the K Street corridor and walk the dozen or so blocks to the Tabard Inn. He had seen no whisper of trailing surveillance; his years of experience told him he was black, alone, free.

Soc Burbank’s grease pencil squeaked on the map. The reverse had been on the Wilson Bridge—the only explanation—and the shank was pointing downtown. He tossed the FBI brick to the side; the only things coming out of the FEEB frequencies now were profanities. His pencil squeaked some more and he built a static picket line along the south side of the Mall, three cars on Seventh, Fourteenth, and Seventeenth Streets, leaving the tunnels at Ninth and Twelfth unguarded. At dusk, Clio observed Golov’s black BMW ooze up Fourteenth Street. Softly she called him through, just direction and speed. She pulled into traffic and followed him as only a grandmother could, tenderly and with great concern.

The two other Orion cars converged on Golov using parallel tracks along Eighteenth and Pennsylvania. Mel and Soc relinquished the eye to Johnny near McPherson Square, where he saw Golov enter a parking garage. The team prepared to cover the Russian on foot; and it was here they really excelled. They had not used the ABC formation in a decade. Instead they swirled around the rabbit, dipped him in chocolate. They moved ahead, they walked back through, they crossed in front, they looped far ahead. If Golov happened to glance in an Orion’s direction, he or she did not flinch or turn away or window-shop. Rheumy eyes met his for an instant, then proceeded with absentminded sweetness, blue hair under improbable berets, rakish fisherman caps, packages, purses, librarian eyeglasses, and a briar pipe. Golov, tall and patrician and at home on the streets of Paris or London, didn’t register a thing.