Red Sparrow

Benford looked down at MARBLE, paralyzed, unable to move, unable to think. Nate’s head was bowed, and his hands shook as he continued cradling MARBLE’s head in his lap. This was violence too cruel; they were speechless, insensate with the finality, the irretrievability of MARBLE’s lost life. They were shaken by the despot’s towering treachery, by the enormity of the ruthless act.

All except Gable. He quickly stepped back out into the roadway and raised his binoculars. A jumble of silhouettes on the Russian side was moving around; the taillights of a luxury sedan receded into the night. Gable could not tell whether Dominika had seen what had happened, but he hoped she had, Please God she knows what happened.

The fog swirled around them, wetting their hair, touching MARBLE’s placid face. The old man’s sodden overcoat lay forgotten at the middle of the bridge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In counting the number of people who in one way or another materially assisted me in writing this book, I was surprised to see how many there were. I owe them all my thanks.

I must begin with my literary agent, the incomparable Sloan Harris of International Creative Management, who, in the early days of writing, acted as a sustaining guide and mentor, and later, as an unyielding advocate of the manuscript. I am certain that in another life Sloan was a farsighted Venetian doge or a conquering Byzantine sultan. Without him the book would not have been born.

Many thanks to the rest of the ICM team, including Kristyn Keene, Shira Schindel, and Heather Karpas, all of whom embody patience as a virtue.

I owe another debt of gratitude to my editor at Scribner, the legendary Colin Harrison, who simultaneously edited the manuscript with the acuity of a mapmaker while teaching me how to write good. His dedication to the science and art of writing is boundless, and he improved the final product beyond measure. Without him the book would not have been completed.

Thanks too to all the people at Scribner and Simon & Schuster, including Carolyn Reidy, Susan Moldow, Nan Graham, Roz Lippel, Brian Belfiglio, Katie Monaghan, Tal Goretsky, Jason Heuer, Benjamin Holmes, Emily Remes, and Dave Cole for their support, encouragement, and the warm welcome into the S&S family. Special thanks go to Kelsey Smith for all her hard work. All these people are collectively responsible for creating the book, though I hasten to add that any error of fact or language or science is mine.

I must acknowledge a number of friends who helped me begin the effort, some of whom cannot be named. They know who they are: the discerning Dick K. of Beverly Hills; the eclectic Mike G. at USC; and superattorney Fred Richman, also of Beverly Hills.

Of course the book would not have come to pass without a career in the CIA, a life I shared with hundreds of colleagues beginning with my career trainee class, and including lifelong friends made in Langley and in all the foreign postings over thirty-three years. A number of them are still relatively young. I salute all of them.

As a young CIA officer I benefitted from the (at times) not-so-gentle guidance and patronage of a number of senior officers such as Clair George, Paul Redmond, Burton Gerber, Terry Ward, and Mike Burns, operators of towering talent and unshakable patriotism. In those days they were referred to as “barons” in the Directorate of Operations. And I sat at the knee of the laconic Jay Harris, a nuclear-physicist-turned-case-officer; together we reinvented internal operations in Castro’s Cuba.

My brother and sister-in-law William and Sharon Matthews made critically important suggestions, and my daughters, Alexandra and Sophia, more than once reminded the author that eight-track tape decks are no longer sold at Woolworth’s.

Finally I thank my wife, Suzanne, herself a thirty-four-year veteran of the CIA, for sharing an endlessly varied life with me, for the late nights, and the surveillance nights, and the evacuation nights, and for raising two sublime daughters, and for her patience while I wrote.

About the Author

^{© DAVID MOORE}

JASON MATTHEWS is a retired officer of the CIA’s former Operations Directorate, now the National Clandestine Service. Over a thirty-three-year career he served in multiple overseas locations and engaged in clandestine collection of national security intelligence, specializing in denied-area operations. Matthews conducted recruitment operations against Soviet–East European, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean targets and, as Chief in various CIA Stations, managed covert-action projects against the weapons-of-mass-destruction programs of the world’s rogue states and collaborated with foreign liaison partners in counterterrorism operations. He lives in Southern California.

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