Red Sparrow

Summer rain, fresh and light, traffic slow and sluggish, lights reflected off the pavement. She checked her watch by the light of a display case. No tickles behind her, she felt good, and she knew she would hit the timing window. When Nate had described what they were going to do, she had laughed. “We do not resort to such drama,” she had told him, and he said, “That’s because SVR operates in democracies,” and she had huffed but listened carefully.

She walked tight beside the granite wall, cars hissing past on the wet street. She turned the corner and stopped in the shadow of a scaffolding, in the covered pedestrian walkway. Nate’s car had come around the corner at thirty-eight minutes after the hour, random and quick, the car rolling and the passenger-side window down, and she stepped off the curb and stuck her hand in the window, letting the plastic bag drop on the seat, and took the replacement cassette from his hand, and stepped back under the scaffolding and he had driven on. He hadn’t looked at her, but she had seen his hand pulling on the hand brake, no brake lights, the Moving-Car Delivery. Such drama, she thought.

They were hitting their stride, all of them, and inevitably the Headquarters heat-seekers started circling. She was a controlled asset, well-placed inside an SVR rezidentura, they had written, and they wanted to “explore other possibilities.” Forsyth kept them off for weeks, but then they made it an order, and Gable wanted to get on a plane and go back there, but Forsyth told him to stop.

The madness began. The engineers in the Directorate of Science and Technology wanted DIVA to download the entire rezidentura computer network, attack the crypto systems, emplace audio and video inside the rezidentura. The S&T techs blithely admitted that some of their devices might, repeat, might dim the lights of southern Helsinki, and in one instance required DIVA to install a radioactive source on the roof of the Russian Embassy. Headquarters then advised that the “Rule of Sixes” that governed the development of all new technology would, however, delay deployment of any equipment to the field: R&D for the device would take six more years, it would cost an additional six million dollars, and, based on breadboard bench testing, one device would weigh six hundred pounds. Madness.

As the clandestine side of the operation expanded, Nate and Dominika continued their dilatory public contact for Volontov and the Center’s benefit. Dinners, trips to the country, concerts. Nate provided personal details about himself, something the Center could check independently, to illustrate how well Dominika was prying open the oyster. But as Forsyth predicted, Volontov wanted more and faster progress, so with Gable’s enthusiastic assistance Dominika drafted the much-anticipated contact cable reporting the beginning of a physical relationship with Nate, to buy more time. Gable wanted to write an “erectile dysfunction angle” into the script, arguing that would build in even more delay, but a red-faced Forsyth overruled him. Nate flipped Gable the bird.

Dominika commenced taking photographs of classified Russian documents from within the rezidentura using a variety of concealed cameras installed in purses, key fobs, lipsticks. She was discerning in photographing only the best documents, flexible enough to know when to wait. Gable praised her but Nate was perpetually worried and gloomy at the risks Dominika was taking.

One Sunday afternoon in the safe house, Dominika had heard enough. “Are you worried about me, or about this case and your reputation?” she asked. The room fell silent and Gable cleared his throat.

Nate turned slowly toward her, embarrassed and angry. “I’m intent about preserving the intelligence,” he said, and watched her face harden. “I just think you should slow down.”

“If that’s what you think,” said Gable, “you’re gonna love the next round.”

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The cable from Headquarters ran five pages. They wanted her to insert a specially prepared thumb drive into a rezidentura computer, preferably the machine in the file room, but the one under Volontov’s desk would do. Fourteen seconds of downloading and Langley would be able to access the clear text behind all encrypted, “point-to-point” SVR cables, Yasenevo–Helsinki, transmitted over commercial telephone lines. Reading messages en claire was a lot easier than trying to crack ever-changing encryption algorithms. But this was the riskiest thing yet. Forsyth saw Nate’s face and told him to skip the meeting at the safe house. Gable would run her through it.