Red Sparrow

The California house owned by Senator Boucher was a low-slung, slate-roofed, Prairie-style five-bedroom hilltop retreat on Mandeville Canyon Road in Brentwood with a view of the Pacific on one side and the waffle-iron lights of Los Angeles on the other. A black-bottomed pool and sprawling paved deck in the center of the U-shaped house fizzed under the hazy sunlight. The sliding glass doors of the bedroom wing were open and music drifted out, languorous, careening, enticing, k. d. lang and Miss Chatelaine.

Stephanie Boucher lay on the sheets of an immense bed with an imposing black ash headboard of a certain Scandinavian severity. The slash of black contrasted with a bedroom done in beiges and creams. The senator was naked; a band pulled her hair back tightly on her head. Next to her lay a man half Boucher’s age. In his midtwenties, he played in one of those outfield positions either for the Dodgers or the Angels, Stephanie couldn’t remember which. He was asleep, naked, an ebony baby grand glistening with morning sweat, the rippling muscles of his back like the stones in a creek bed. He lay on his stomach, feet crossed at the ankles.

Stephanie slowly moved to the edge of the bed, trying not to wake what’s-his-name. It was less a matter of being considerate than it was of not wanting to stir him to additional exertions. Last night had been enough, hours of it, some of it significantly painful. Legs weren’t designed to bend that far, certain body parts were meant to be used in only one direction. But it was the only way to fly, she thought as she slid off her side of the bed, her back and thighs and belly itchy.

She looked into the bathroom mirror and combed her hair, and saw her mother’s face, in the little bedroom of the little house in Hermosa, swollen and slack and sitting up in bed sharing a cigarette with a man, sometimes old and fat, sometimes young and skinny, tattoos and mustaches and buzz cuts and ponytails, and Stephanie would close the door and look at the wall clock in the kitchen and wish, just once, her timid, frightened father would come home from work early. After the funeral, and the trial, Stephanie looked into another mirror and told herself that no one was going to help her if she didn’t help herself, which was why she had called her father to come home that final afternoon.

=====

Senator Boucher reclined on a padded steamer chair by the side of the pool and picked at a shrimp salad laced with cumin and dill. She had thrown on a white cotton cover-up to spare her assistant the discomfort of seeing her topless as they worked. This latest staff aide, a jumpy, size-fourteen nail-biter named Missy, was sitting at a table covered with papers. Missy was the senator’s third personal assistant in the last twelve months. The bleached bones of previous staffers on Team Boucher littered the landscape from Washington to Los Angeles. Missy read from a folder, reviewing the senator’s upcoming California schedule. There would be two speaking events in San Diego and Sacramento, a visit to Pathfinder Satellite in Los Angeles for a classified briefing, and a fund-raising dinner in San Francisco. She had to return to Washington no later than Tuesday of next week, in time for the appropriations vote on supplementals for the Pentagon. Boucher told Missy to remind her also to order a top-to-bottom review of the CIA’s classified budget. She would ram unpleasant things up the CIA’s fanny in the next few months.

That mental image prompted Boucher to look across the pool at the open bedroom doors. Her shortstop was still asleep, thank God. She would get her driver to take him to the ballpark or Malibu or—

Movement. Quite a lot of it. The housekeeper escorted four men onto the pool area from the main wing of the house. Three wore suits and white shirts with muted ties, laced shoes, and aviator shades; one carried a briefcase. The fourth man was Nate, dark-haired and thin. He wore a blazer over a cotton shirt, jeans, and loafers. Boucher watched them come across the deck. Her brain, overheated and mazy, registered a whiff of danger. Whoever these bureaucrats were, she would break some balls, act pissed at this interruption. They didn’t give her a chance to build up a head of steam.

“Senator Stephanie Boucher,” said the oldest of the three suits, “I am Special Agent Charles Montgomery from the National Security Division of the FBI.” He opened a black wallet to display official identification. His two colleagues did the same, but young Tab Hunter behind them didn’t make a move. “You’re under arrest for espionage as an agent of a foreign power in violation of USC Title 18, Sections 794(a) and 794(c) of the Espionage Act of 1917.”