Red Sparrow

Across town, Dominika was also looking in the mirror, her blue eyes wide. She did not use perfume, but combed her hair for the tenth time with the tortoiseshell talisman. She got ready to walk out of her apartment to take the Metro, taking a slantwise look through the curtains of her front window to the street below. She looked forward to this, talking to him, sparring, learning a little more each time.

She wore a turtleneck sweater and tweed jacket over woolen pants for warmth. She also wore sensible shoes. She tied a scarf over her head like an old babushka and left her apartment, locking the door. She went down to the basement of her apartment building, walked through the storeroom, and pushed through to the boiler room. A small corridor led from the room to a heavy iron-barred window high on the wall that Dominika had discovered several weeks ago. It looked as though it had been a coal chute, long since converted. It had taken her almost an hour to pick the padlocked grille two nights ago; the damn things weren’t easy, especially since she had only an improvised torsion wrench fashioned from a hairpin. Dominika stacked boxes under the window, boosted herself up, and wormed through the window. Some start to a date, she thought, thinking about seeing him again.

Dominika eased the window shut and stepped out into the alleyway, looking up at the curtained windows. Nothing. She walked quietly up the alleyway, squeezed between a parked truck and a Dumpster, boosted herself over a low brick wall and out onto a city street. She was already a block away from her apartment building. Her coat collar was turned up and the scarf hid her features. She walked west for another block casually, checking for repeats whenever she crossed the street and looked both ways for traffic. She entered the Kamppi complex, walked through the mall, stopped at a bookstore, checked for faces, then down into the Metro entrance. She stayed still on the slowly descending escalator, using the reflective bounce on the fashion posters on the walls. No silhouettes. Dominika was halfway to the platform level as a slight elderly lady dressed in a raincoat and floppy hat stepped on the escalator at the top and started down behind her. She was holding a bunch of flowers wrapped in green paper and a string bag with two apples. VERONICA hoped that one day she could speak to the dear girl about how predictable she had been, using the mall and its integral Metro station so close to her apartment.

Nate’s surveillance instructor a hundred dim years ago was named Jay, a former physicist who wore a Van Dyck beard and long sandy hair and looked, well, a lot like Van Dyck. “Get it out of your heads, stop being heroes,” he had said. “If you detect surveillance, your night is over, you will abort.” He had drawn a horizontal line on the chalkboard. “Your SDR is to compel surveillance you have not seen to show themselves. It is not designed to lose anyone. All surveillance has a breaking point,” he had said, intersecting the line with a vertical stroke. “This is the point when the bad guys must choose between staying undetected and losing the eye.” He brushed his hands of chalk dust. “If you can force them to show themselves without breaking their hearts, you have succeeded. For that night only. Then you have to start all over again.”

Fuck breaking their hearts, thought Nate. If he had coverage they’d have to show. He slid down an embankment near the rail yard behind the central station, climbed a chain-link fence in an alley, and dodged traffic as he crossed the E12. He wondered what she would be wearing. Along his route, Nate would look for ARCHIE, but he was wasting his time. The old man was a ghost on the street, protoplasm, smoke around dry ice. ARCHIE was countersurveilling Nate, looking for repeats using time and distance. Forget coats, forget hats, ARCHIE was looking at the way people walked, their gaits, the sets of their shoulders, the shapes of their ears and noses. Things surveillants cannot change. And shoes. They never change shoes.