Red Sparrow

The recruitment of Dominika was not in any sense normal. She was a trained intelligence officer, but she now had to learn how to become a spy. It wasn’t a natural transformation. Cement the bond, Forsyth had said.

Station’s first move, therefore, was to make extremely discreet inquiries into the whereabouts of Marta, to demonstrate their concern. Gable arranged a meeting with a cooperative liaison officer from Supo. No trace of the Russian woman. The security video of a possible crossing at Haaparanta was inconclusive. A tearless Dominika thanked Nate for trying.

They kept the BIGOT list way down, the registered tally of officers cleared to read into the operation, though they couldn’t do much about the Headquarters end. The case was already in Restricted Handling channels, which was bullshit, said Gable, because only about a hundred people read the cables. They still tried to limit distribution. Forsyth and Gable had done this before, knew the more carefully they started the case the longer the intel stream would last. Nate felt his resolve building—protect her at all costs. Do not fail, do not fail her.

Nate found a two-bedroom in Munkkiniemi along the Ramsay Strand and the marina inlet, and the rat-faced NOC came back and rented it for twelve months as a Dane, a business flat, he’d be coming and going at all times. The gratified landlord couldn’t have cared less.

A night of spring rain, headlights reflecting on the pavement. Dominika was backlighted as she stepped off the green-and-yellow No. 4 trolley at Tiilimaki. Nate caught up to her after two blocks, put his arm in hers. Not even a hello, in strict SVR operative mode, back straight, nervous. Her first safe-house meeting as an agent, grappling not so much with fear as she was with the shame. They walked wordlessly down narrow lanes, behind apartment blocks, silver light from the television game shows in all the windows. They hurried through the main door, cooking smells, boiled reindeer and cream sauce, up two flights, walking quietly.

The first night of the rest of their lives. A couple of lamps on, and Gable was waiting and crowded her, took her coat. Dominika could not stop looking at Gable’s wire-brush hair. She liked his look, his eyes, the purple behind them. Another solid purpirnyj, she thought. Forsyth came out of the kitchen, glasses up on his forehead, wrestling with a cork. Elegant, wise, calm, the air around him was azure. Lazurnyj. He would be sensitive. Dominika sat on the couch and looked at the three men moving around the room. They were natural, unaffected, yet they looked at her and she knew she was being assessed.

She knew it was for real, with them in the room, filling it up. Nate was a young officer, all she had known of the CIA up till now, but these other men were calm, serious, you could feel the years, like General Korchnoi back home. Then Gable raised a glass and massacred zdorov’e and Dominika suppressed a smile, stayed serious and correct.

No business tonight, that was how good they were, just talk, and they let Nate do most of the talking, that was how good they were, and they listened and heard everything. At the end she left first—standard tradecraft for them too, she registered—and walked along the strand; not all the boats were in the spring water yet, and she didn’t feel ashamed like before. That was how good they had been.

The second meeting, Dominika had time to look around. The galley kitchen had a two-ring cooktop, enough to boil water, and a refrigerator with rubber trays to squeeze the ice cubes out of. In the nature of furnished safe houses, the couch and chairs and tables were thin and cheap and garish, avocado and harvest gold, still the rage in Scandinavia, said Gable. The cheap prints on the wall were crashing waves and elk in moonlight, the throws on the floor were straight Lapland. One bedroom had a double bed that touched the wall on either side, and you’d have to crawl onto it over the footboard. The second bedroom was empty save for a hanging fixture of bright red glass. The bathroom had a tub and the requisite bidet, which Gable one night mistook for the toilet, and Dominika had tears in her eyes and started calling Gable Bratok, dear brother, from then on.

Running a trained intelligence officer as an agent is more difficult than directing a sweaty banker desperate for the euros because he’s got King Kong for a wife, a two-year-old BMW, and Godzilla for a mistress. Dominika was an AVR grad. They argued, wryly, over tradecraft (“I cannot believe you think this is a suitable site”) or security (“No, Domi, the rug on the railing when it’s safe, didn’t they teach you positive signals?”). Nate wondered how many times he had to say, “Let’s do it my way,” and cringed every time she said, dramatically, to get under his skin, “It is my head if you’re wrong.”