Red Sparrow

Keep walking, steady pace, final approach and sloshing through the rain, water like fingers down his back. Night creature, hug the wall, listen for the squeak of shoes behind you. Follow Leninskaya through black woods, then the dogleg curve of the road in the trees, one light from Obstetrics School No. 81 flickering through the branches. Quickly now, off the pavement and into the dripping woods. MARBLE shivered. Shut up, stop moving, watch and listen, especially listen, for the gearbox banging or the brakes squealing or the doors chunking. Just the wind creaking the trees.

Time to move. Black water was gurgling through a metal culvert under the roadway, and MARBLE knelt and took the pouch out of his pocket, stripped the backing off the adhesive, stuck his arm in, and pressed the gray matte package hard against the inner curve of the culvert. Hold for a count of ten, let the epoxy cure, and listen for the splash that doesn’t come. Satisfactory.

He checked himself again, defending the cache on the way out and all the way to the barnyard heat of the Krylatskoye Metro. There was a sodden pile of clothes on his kitchen floor and the keyboard shook in his hands and the stylus was too small, even with reading glasses. Hell, don’t they build these things for old eyes? Because no one lives that long, that’s why, and the recessed button felt hot as he released the dove into space: HAVE LOADED DD SITE DRAKON.

MARBLE sat back in his armchair and closed his eyes. Come unload DRAKON, retrieve the little black disc, and God preserve the young-limbed CIA boy who will get mud on his suit, or the ponytailed Embassy wife, Phonak in her ear, listening for squelch breaks from the radio cars.

The Station heat-wrapped it twice, tight around the corners, and swaddled the box in burlap and stapled it and banded it and jammed it into the Halloween-orange K bag with the lockable zipper, and flew it home, couriered direct, because this one was from MARBLE. And the dove came back with the branch in its mouth, DRAKON RECOVERED, and the culvert in the woods vomited its black water but kept its secret nearly forever.

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Benford sat at a conference table in the basement of FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. The table was littered with the remains of lunch ordered out from several local restaurants. This was a working lunch, no executive dining room for them now. Benford had ordered a Thai chicken salad called larb gai, succulent ground chicken with onions and chilies, basil, and lime, so highly seasoned that he was blowing contentedly like a steam boiler while others around the table finished their more conventional Episcopalian lunches of sandwiches or soup.

The table was divided evenly between CIA and FBI, mostly senior-level officers from technical and counterintelligence divisions. When the courier from Moscow arrived with MARBLE’s pouch, Benford—even Benford—agreed to let the FBI handle the forensic dissection of the package, to ensure proper procedure. “These federal automatons,” said Benford earlier to Nathaniel, “have been speaking to me about maintaining the ‘evidentiary chain’ as regards MARBLE’s package. If he has in fact recovered an actual disc containing top-secret information, passed by hand to the Russians from SWAN, then according to our FEEBish colleagues we must begin thinking about considerations of admissible evidence and securing convictions and such things.” Benford had uncharacteristically deferred to them.