Red Sparrow

“But you suspect it’s so, and Volontov asked you outright, and you didn’t say a thing, correct?” asked Marta, leaning toward Dominika. “Open your eyes, look at me.”

She opened her eyes. “Correct. I didn’t say anything.” She closed her eyes.

Marta sipped her wine, noting with some detachment that Dominika not only had committed treason against the State—saying treason against the Duma sounded ridiculous—by not reporting and lying about it, but also had that evening made Marta likewise guilty of treason for having heard about the crime. She reached out and squeezed Dominika’s hand. “You must be careful,” she said.

Marta had devoted her life to the State, had for years ignored its excesses and personally contributed to the downfall of men whose only sin was to succumb to the pleasures of the flesh. But inside, she had long since broken with the bastards. She knew what a situation Dominika was in. The beasts, she thought, they will utterly empty this beautiful, intelligent girl, then cast her aside. And if what she was doing even remotely thwarted Vladimir Putin, it would be mortally dangerous. Dominika’s knowledge was like a knotted bag of snakes—safe for the moment, but don’t bang it against the wall.

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MARBLE’s short visit to Helsinki was a triumph in multiple ways. First, MARBLE himself met and made significant progress with Trade Minister Trunk, thus incontrovertibly establishing the continuing need to pursue the flamboyant Canadian. Second, three nights of midnight-to-dawn meetings in the Hotel GLO with Nate had already produced eight highly graded intelligence reports (with notes for a possible thirty-seven more) on SVR operations in Europe and North America. Third, MARBLE provided the name of an assistant commissioner in the RCMP’s Strategic Policy and Planning Directorate who was meeting a Russian illegal (whose day job was as a dancer at the Bare Fax in Ottawa). Last, the old agent repeated from memory—he did not normally have access to China reporting—the gist of three superb SVR reports from Beijing detailing the power struggle still smoldering within the Politburo Standing Committee fully two years after the removal of Bo Xilai in early 2012. MARBLE’s “source comments” regarding President Putin’s interest—“significantly obsessive,” he called it—in Chinese Communist Party disunity were highly valued by analysts.

That was just the positive intelligence from MARBLE. The most explosive item was a hint MARBLE had picked up that there was a “Director’s Case” being run out of the fourth floor of Yasenevo, an asset in the pay of Russia so important and so sensitive that SVR leadership were running the case exclusively. To CIA counterintelligence, this special handling could only mean a megamole. Some government, some country, had a big problem, was gravely penetrated, and they all looked at one another and wondered if it was in Washington. That intel tidbit was compartmented from the rest of MARBLE’s reporting and handled separately.

No one had to tell the old spook what to do about this. He told them what he would do. He knew how to pull the string with his fingertips, how to be the spider sitting on the web, waiting for the tremble of the radius threads. He would collect—softly, softly—more information when he could. Meanwhile, the words SVR mole, Director’s Case, and Yasenevo went on the office whiteboards of a dozen counterintelligence analysts in CIA headquarters. They were good at waiting, they would wait for months, even years, to fit more pieces into the mosaic.

The last evening, MARBLE told Nate that Anthony Trunk would within the next six months attend an economic conference in Rome as well as the UN General Assembly in New York, providing two future opportunities for MARBLE to travel out of Russia with plausible cover provided by the SVR’s pursuit of Trunk.

Headquarters was pleased with this round of MARBLE meetings and with Nate’s performance. A bonus was deposited in MARBLE’s secret fund account, and Nate was awarded a Quality Step Increase amounting to a salary bump of $153 per pay period, after taxes. “Wicked good,” said Gable when he heard about Nate’s QSI. “One hundred and fifty-three dollars. Just as long as they don’t fucking devalue your contribution. You realize you also get a voucher for six free car washes?”

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