Red Sparrow

They were too good, too natural, too fluid. They were invisible among the casuals on the street, especially to a senior SVR officer exhausted by the pressure, fed up with the uncompromising burdens of tradecraft, and who was working on a serious case of tunnel vision with each step closer to the Tabard Inn. The Russian was being had by five pensioners with liver spots and bad knees. If he could detect someone, he could turn away, buy a newspaper, order a coffee, head home, the meeting aborted. But he didn’t see anything.

The rain had stopped, and when Golov turned down N Street, TrapDoor closed. It was the Tabard Inn, the only possibility on N, forget the Topaz Hotel. Mel and Clio were already waiting inside the lobby, shoes off, chafing their feet, exclaiming, My goodness how they hurt. They watched as Golov got a room key and disappeared up the narrow staircase.

Their discipline—and a firmly established procedure—compelled them to stay in place for a half hour, to observe activity and potentially interesting individuals. They had no law-enforcement arrest authority and loitering longer than that would alert the target. So Soc called Benford, gave him a terse report, and hung up. Then he keyed the radio and clicked them out of there.

They hadn’t witnessed a meeting, they didn’t have squat. They had foxed the SVR rezident, but there was no agent, no suspect. Patience and perspective helped them cope with the inconclusive evening. As did late-night hot dogs at the Shake Shack on Eighteenth.

A Russian intelligence officer was very likely meeting clandestinely with an unidentified penetration of the US government as the Orions ordered their dogs. Johnny’s China Ops background manifested itself in sesame slaw and chilies. Orest was a purist and would accept only mustard and kraut. Mel favored onions and ketchup, Clio the classical pianist had hers with lettuce, tomato, bacon, and blue cheese. Socrates had years ago shocked them into uneasy silence by inventing the Depth Charge, the ingredients for which were available only at the Shake Shack: a disgusting schmear of pan-fried potatoes, caramelized onions, anchovies, and fiery Argentine chimichurri sauce. By mutual consent the Orions had agreed that they would never eat in their vehicles with Soc.

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Benford was on the phone to the FBI, alternatively screaming and blaspheming, then begging them to deploy a team to cover the Tabard Inn this instant. Several calls were relayed, a shift supervisor was notified, surveillance squad members were activated. In the two hours it took for the Gs to deploy around the little hotel, Stephanie Boucher had arrived, met with Golov, and departed. It would not have been difficult to follow the senator, certainly not as challenging as it was following Anatoly Golov. It would not have been as challenging as following a flock of Japanese tourists walking along the Tidal Basin holding pink umbrellas. In fact, it would not have been as challenging as following an elephant through a rice-paper factory with a bell on its tail.

The measure of her arrogance and sociopathy was that Senator Boucher did not even remotely look for surveillance when on the street, even though she was engaged in the ultimate adventure of treason. She had parked in a loading zone on N Street, the only free space around—she counted on the inviolability conferred by her red-and-white congressional license plates. When she left the meeting with Golov, minus another Pathfinder Corporation disc, she drove straight home. The FBI missed it all.

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Benford reviewed the Orion surveillance log the next day while raving at the FBI Special Agents in the room. Nate, back-benched, sat quietly along the wall.

“Forgive me,” said Benford in his reedy professor voice, which Nate recognized as the first of the red swallowtail storm flags of a whole gale. “I alert you to the fact that the SVR Washington rezident has gone to ground after a multi-hour SDR, doubtless to meet the US mole classified as a ‘Director’s Case’ by the Center. It takes your organization over one hundred and twenty minutes from the time of my call to deploy around the Tabard Inn, which is, roughly, one-point-six miles distant from the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Despite the empirical evidence of contact between the Russian and an American traitor, your people did not check the register, or speak with hotel staff, much less pound up the stairs and enter Golov’s room. Had you entered that room and physically searched the most senior SVR officer in the Northern Hemisphere, you doubtless would have recovered classified information—in one form or another—provided that very evening by Golov’s American agent.” The FBI SAs shifted in their seats.

“Yet the FBI did nothing. In this, arguably the biggest espionage case since 2001, you let the traitor walk out of the room, unidentified and at large.”