Red Sparrow

Gable took Nate to lunch in a grubby little Turkish restaurant in a small snow-filled alley near the train station. The steamy single dining room had half a dozen tables, a pass-through window from the kitchen, and a framed portrait of Atatürk on the wall. People were yelling in the kitchen, but when Gable went to the window and clapped his hands the noise stopped. A thin dark man with a black mustache and an apron parted the bead curtain and came out of the kitchen. He embraced Gable briefly and was introduced as Tarik, the owner. The Turk shook hands loosely without looking into Nate’s eyes. They took a corner table and Gable pulled out the chair he wanted Nate to sit in, against the wall with a view of the door. Gable sat with his back to the other wall. Speaking Turkish, Gable ordered two Adana kebabs, two beers, bread, and salad.

“I hope you like spicy,” said Gable. “This little shithole has the best Turkish food in the city. There are a lot of immigrants from Turkey around here.” Gable looked at the kitchen. He leaned forward. “I popped Tarik about a year ago, support asset, you know, pick up mail, pay rent on a safe house, keep his ear to the ground. A couple hundred a month and he’s happy. If we need to, we can tap into the expat community in Helsinki.” Gable straightened as the food came, two long flat kebabs speckled with red pepper, grilled a dark brown. A large broiled flatbread, splashed with melted butter, was underneath. Raw onion salad sprinkled with dark red sumac and lemon was piled on the side of the plate. Two sweating bottles of beer were plunked on the table as Tarik muttered, “Afiyet olsun, may it be good for you,” and withdrew.

Gable began eating before Nate picked up his fork. He wolfed food, talking and moving his big mitts in the air. “Not bad, eh?” he asked of the kebabs, his mouth full. He upended his beer and drank half the bottle. His jaws snatched at the food, gazelle going down the gullet of a crocodile. Without preamble or embarrassment, he asked Nate what the fuck had happened in Moscow between him and that asshole Gondorf.

Mortified, his worries rekindled, Nate explained briefly, a few sentences. Gable pointed at him with his fork. “Listen up: Remember two things about this fucking business. You can never mature as an operator unless you’ve failed, large, at least once. And you’re judged by your accomplishments, the results you bring, and how you protect your agents. Nothing else matters.” The other half of the bottle disappeared and Gable called for another. “Oh, and there’s another thing,” he said. “Gondorf’s a douche bag. Don’t worry about him.”

Gable was finished with his entire plate before Nate even had gotten through half of his. “Did you ever fail in your career?” he asked Gable.

“Are you kidding?” said Gable, tilting back his chair. “I was in the shit so often I rented the top floor of the latrine. That’s how I got here. After the most recent train wreck, Forsyth saved my ass.”

=====

Gable’s career had been spent primarily on the Shithole Tour—Third World countries in Africa and Asia. Some case officers make their bones in the restaurants and hotel rooms and sidewalk cafés of Paris. Gable’s world was one of midnight meetings on deserted dirt roads in red-dust-covered Land Rovers. Other officers tape-recorded their meetings with government ministers. Gable wrote secrets into a sweat-damp notebook while sitting with agents sour with fear, making them concentrate, making them stay fucking on topic. They would sit in the heat, engine block ticking, with the windows up, watching the heads of the mambas part the tops of the tall grass on either side of the vehicle. Nate had heard that Gable was a legend. He was loyal to his assets, then to his friends, then to the CIA, in that order. There was nothing he hadn’t seen, and he knew what was important.

Gable sat back and sipped his beer, started talking. Last assignment was in Istanbul, big fucking town, good ops, Dodge City. Spoke pretty good Turkish, knew where to go, who to see. Pretty fast he’d recruited a member of the PKK, the benighted Kurdish separatist terror group from eastern Turkey. They’d been leaving bombs in briefcases in government buildings, or shoeshine kits in the bazaar, or paper sacks in trash cans in Taksim Square.

One day Gable got into a taxi driven by a Kurd kid, twenty, twenty-one years old. Sounded sharp, drove okay. Listen up, you got to keep your eyes open, all the time. He had a hunch, an instinct, so he told the kid to stop at a restaurant, invited him to eat with him, this Kurd kid. He had to stare down the fat Turk motherfucker behind the counter, they all hated Kurds, called them “mountain Turks.”