Red Sparrow

There were five men in his apartment standing in a semicircle around the front door. Rough, lean faces, square-jawed and hard-eyed, wound up. They wore jeans, tracksuits, leather jackets, and they swarmed the old man the minute the door opened. He knew enough not to resist, but they grabbed his legs and arms and picked him up off the floor. They moved quickly, silently, a forearm around his throat, two others specifically holding his arms. They always pick you up, he thought, but where am I going to run? He said nothing as they forced a rubber wedge that smelled of drains between his back teeth (Not to be biting down on cyanide capsule, please, comrade) and they stripped him to his underwear, never letting go of his limbs (Not to be using weapons or buttons or needles in clothing, please, comrade). They forced an ill-fitting tracksuit on him and carried him bodily down the stairwell, passing at least ten other men in leather coats standing on the landings. He was wedged into the back of a dark-green van, their hands never letting go of his arms and legs. Pain ran through Korchnoi’s body; he was losing feeling in his arms where the men were gripping him tightly. It doesn’t matter, he thought, preparing himself for the next chapter. He knew what was coming.

The ride in the windowless van was long. They rocked violently as it made turns, jounced when it went over tracks, and tilted as they went around a traffic circle. Korchnoi knew where they were headed, he could track their route west through the city. When the van doors were flung open and he was dragged out, Korchnoi looked up. He thought he should take one last look at the sky, tonight inky black with an orange city glow, and breathe the air deeply, likely the last time he could do so. As they manhandled him to a small door, he also looked around quickly to confirm what he knew already. The crowded courtyard was littered and dirty, bleak walls of unfinished cinder block were topped by a jumbled lattice of barbed wire, the familiar ocher walls of the Y-shaped, five-story building were unmistakable. Lefortovo Prison.

Korchnoi knew what was inevitable: vyshaya mere, the highest punishment. He knew his final stop: bratskaya mogila, an unmarked grave. The only choice remaining to him was the manner in which he would go out. He already had decided not to make it easy for them, and that ironically meant he would talk, freely, but just not about what they wanted to hear.

To the mounting discomfort of his interrogators, he told them he had not been spying against Russia, rather, he’d been spying for Russia, first to defy the Soviet system, the system that strangled its people for fifty years, and now to confound the podonki, the current crop in the Kremlin. He told the steely faced men in the interrogation rooms that he had no regrets, that he’d do it again. His career as a spy overwhelmed them; he was a general officer. The damage assessment would take years. He could see it in their faces.

Contemplating his arrest and certain demise was made easier knowing that he had set in motion his legacy. He noted with satisfaction that Dominika was not mentioned during any of the questioning, nor was there any insinuation that she was under suspicion. She was safe.

Korchnoi answered their questions, and catalogued the intelligence he had provided for nearly a decade and a half to the Americans. Despite Korchnoi’s total cooperation, Zyuganov told them to shift to “physical means,” some of the old techniques from the original basement cells of the Lubyanka. It was Zyuganov’s pleasure, perhaps a little payback because Korchnoi had betrayed them, the bendy cedar slivers under the nails, black and oozing red, the wooden dowels pressed between the toes, the oily knuckle pressed into the hollow behind the earlobe. In another room, the woman doctor, a urologist, looked at his face as she eased the wire up one more millimeter.

When the rough stuff suddenly stopped and they left him in his cell for an entire day, Korchnoi suspected Vanya had probably ordered a halt. The next day Korchnoi entered the interrogation room as he had been doing for the last days, to be confronted with a display of his CIA communications equipment laid out on a table. They waited for some time before Vanya Egorov walked in, motioning the guard to get out and close the door behind him. Vanya went around the table slowly, not looking at MARBLE, fingering the equipment and battery packs with a faint smile on his lips.

“I considered it might be you, briefly, some months ago,” said Vanya, lighting a cigarette. He did not offer one to Korchnoi. “I told myself it was impossible, one of our best, the last person who could possibly engage in such disloyalty to Russia.”