Red Sparrow

Marta, Dominika supposed, was the closest thing she had to a friend in the Embassy. She was the senior administrative assistant in the rezidentura. They had spoken in the office occasionally, had sat next to each other during a dinner for some unknown embassy colleague. They had met one rainy Sunday for a walk along the harbor and among the fresh food stalls in Market Square. Marta was elegant, aristocratic, about fifty, with thick brown hair that she wore down to her shoulders. She had dark, prominent eyebrows over the most striking hazel eyes. Her fine mouth tended to turn up at the corners in a wry smile that hinted at an unshakably cynical view of the world. She was one of those with strong color about her head and body, a deep ruby red of passion and heat, a red as when Dominika listened to music.

Dominika thought that Marta must have been a beauty in her youth. She rounded on any man in the office who made even the slightest comment about her Junoesque figure, now a little thick around the waist, sending him scuttling for the exit. Marta was not in the least fazed by Rezident Volontov, characteristically telling him that he would get the voucher, or the accounting, or the monthly report, when she finished it. Volontov could not dent her Olympian aplomb.

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Dominika previously knew nothing about Marta’s life, but if she had, she would have been amazed to learn that Marta Yelenova had, in 1983, been conscripted by the KGB to attend State School Four—Sparrow School—in the forest outside Kazan. She was twenty years old. Her father had fought in the Great Patriotic War, then became an NKVD guard at the Leningrad headquarters, a party member, a loyal vassal of the State. Marta’s heartbreaking beauty had been noticed by a KGB major from Moscow making an inspection tour, and he arranged for her to be hired into the Service as, he originally hoped, his special assistant. Marta’s father, who knew the game but nevertheless hoped for a better life for her, said nothing, and sent his only daughter to Moscow to live with his sister and to begin work in the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate (internal security), Seventh Department (operations against tourists), Third Section (hotels and restaurants). The Seventh Department alone employed two hundred officers and sixteen hundred part-time informants and agents.

Now in Moscow, it was inevitable that Marta would be noticed by an SCD colonel, who outranked the major, and who assigned her to his staff. She was subsequently noticed by an SCD general, who outranked the colonel, and who made her his adjutant, even though Marta had no idea what an adjutant’s duties entailed. She found out when the general one afternoon forced her down on the divan in his office and put his hand under her uniform skirt. Marta hit him on the side of the head with a (typically Soviet) steel water carafe. The resultant scandal in the strangely puritanical KGB was exacerbated by the fact that the general’s wife was the sister of an alternate Politburo member. Marta was hurriedly transferred to State School Four. She had no choice. Marta was going to learn to be a Sparrow.

Marta had the rare combination of a sublime allure and a superior intellect. The former quality served to attract hapless foreign diplomats, journalists, and businessmen. The latter gave her perspective and a keen eye for making influential friends. At the end of her nearly twenty-year career, Marta was known as Koroleva Vorobey, Queen Sparrow. She had participated in scores of SCD honey traps, among which were included the recruitments by the KGB of a sex-crazed Japanese billionaire, a philandering British ambassador, and a reptilian Indian minister of defense. At the apex of Marta’s career, she was the bait in the legendary seduction, compromise, and recruitment of a cipherine, a female code clerk working in the German Embassy, the suborning of whom enabled the KGB to read German and NATO encrypted traffic for an uninterrupted seven years. It was the only time Marta worked against another woman, but the recruitment was still taught at KGB Higher School as a classic operation.

Over the years, Marta’s nonoperational romances included discreet affairs with two members of the Politburo, with a general in the First Chief Directorate, and with various sons of influential officials in the Collegium of the KGB. Many bushy-browed old bosses remembered her with affection. Thanks to these “mentors,” Marta was bulletproof and was given an SVR major’s pension on retiring from Sparrow operations by grateful if exhausted benefactors. Marta decided to enjoy life and see a little of the outside world, so she requested and was readily granted an overseas assignment, to Helsinki.

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