Red Sparrow

They had pointed her to a corner of the French Section of the Fifth Department. She had stared at the windowless angle of the walls as they met at the corner of the chipped desk, which was bare save for a cracked wooden in-tray. Two fat file folders were thrown rudely on her desk. Simyonov had finally released them to her to get her off his back. The dull blue covers with black diagonal stripes were dog-eared, spines fuzzy from sweaty hands. Osobaya papka. Her first operational file. She opened the cover and drank in the words, the colors.

The target was Simon Delon, forty-eight, first secretary in the Commercial Section of the Embassy of France in Moscow. Delon was married but his wife remained in Paris. He traveled infrequently to France for conjugal visits. As a geographical bachelor in Moscow, Delon had been noticed by the FSB almost immediately. They assigned a single watcher at first, but as time passed and interest in him peaked, he was covered in FSB ticks. They spent a lot of time with their krolik, their rabbit. A twelve-man team took him to work and put him to bed. Photos spilled out of an envelope stuck between the pages of the file. Delon walking alone along the river, alone watching the skaters at the Dynamo rink, alone eating at a restaurant table.

Dominika smoothed the creased blue surveillance flimsies. They had used the mirror to watch a long-legged hooker slide her hand up Delon’s leg in a little escort bar off Krymskiy Val Ulitsa. Subject uncomfortable, nervous, refused (unable?) to pick up hooker, read the entry. Poor devil, he didn’t belong there, thought Dominika.

Technical annex: An audio implant in a living-room electrical outlet produced hours of tape: 2036:29, Sounds of dish in the sink. 2212:34, music softly played. 2301:47, retired for night.

They had spiked his phone from the central exchange to cover the weekly call to his wife in Paris. Dominika read the transcripts in French. Madame Delon was impatient and dismissive on one end, Delon small and silent on the other. A sexless, joyless marriage with an impatient woman, an unknown transcriber had written in the margin.

Sometime during the assessment process, the SVR had elbowed its way in and declared primacy over the FSB—it was a foreign case, not domestic. The second volume of the file began with an operational assessment, written in the abbreviated style of the semiliterate Soviet, the kind of writing they had mocked at the Academy. Subject potential for operational exploitation excellent. No identifiable vices. Sexually unfulfilled. Access to restricted information good. Assessed to be retiring and unaggressive. Susceptible to blackmail given lucrative marriage. And so on.

Dominika sat back and looked at the pages and thought about her Academy training. It was clear that this was a small case, with a small target, and with a small payout. Delon might be a lonely little man, vulnerable perhaps, but his access in his embassy was low-level. The Fifth didn’t have anything better than this, this navoz, this manure? Simyonov was building this up, inflating the case, it was clear. She had gone through the Academy, had endured whore school, only to find herself now among a different kind of prostitute? Was the entire Service like this?

She took the elevator to the cafeteria, took an apple, and went out onto the terrace in the sunshine. She sat away from the bench seats, on a low wall along a hedge, flicked off her shoes, closed her eyes, and felt the warmth of the bricks on her feet.

“May I join you?” said a voice, startling her. She opened her eyes and saw the tidy figure of General Korchnoi of the Americas Department standing before her. His suit coat was buttoned and he stood with his feet together, as if he were a maître d’. The sunlight made his purple halo deeper in color, almost with a discernible texture. Dominika jerked upright, fumbling with her flats, trying to get them back on. “Leave your shoes off, Corporal,” Korchnoi said with a laugh. “I wish I could take mine off and find a fish pond in which to dangle them.”