Palace of Treason (2 page)

Dominika held her head erect, elegant on a long neck, as she pushed through the musky velvet curtain into the La Diva club. The bouncer at the inner door looked with professional approval at her little black dress, then glanced briefly into her tiny black satin clutch, barely large enough to hold a lipstick and wafer-thin smartphone. He pulled the heavy curtain aside and
motioned her to enter.
No weapons,
he thought.
Mademoiselle Doudounes, Miss Big Chest, is clean
.

Captain Egorova was in fact more than able to dispense lethal force. The lipstick tube in her purse was an
elektricheskiy pistolet,
a single-shot electric gun, a recent update from SVR technical—Line T—laboratories, a new version of a venerable Cold War weapon. The disposable lipstick gun fired a murderously explosive 9mm Makarov cartridge accurately out to two meters—the bullet had a compressed metal dust core that expanded massively on contact. The only sound at discharge was a single loud click.

Dominika scanned the black-lit interior of the club, a large semicircular room filled with chipped tables in the center and tired leatherette booths along the walls. A low stage with old-timey footlights stood dark and empty. Her target, Parvis Jamshidi, sat alone in a center booth pensively looking up at the ceiling. Dominika did a second quick scan, quartering the room, focusing on the far corners: No obvious countersurveillance or lounging bodyguard. She weaved between the tables toward Jamshidi’s booth, ignoring the snapped fingers of a fat man at a table, signaling her to come over, either to order another
petit jaune
or to suggest they go together for thirty minutes to the Chat Noir Design Hotel down the block.

She was keyed up as the familiar feel of the hunt, of contact with the opposition, rose in her throat, tightened across her chest, and switched on the glow-plugs in her stomach. Dominika eased into the booth and put the little clutch down in front of her. Jamshidi continued looking up at the ceiling, as if in prayer. He was short and slight, with a forked goatee. His El Greco hands were folded on the table, long-fingered and still. He wore the requisite pearl-gray suit with white collarless shirt buttoned at the neck. A small man, a physicist, an expert in centrifugal separation, the lead scientist in Iran’s uranium-enrichment program. Dominika said nothing, waiting for him to speak.

Jamshidi felt her presence and his eyes lowered, appraising Dominika’s figure—the slim arms, the plain, square-cut nails. She stared at his face until he stopped looking at the blue-veined cleft between her breasts.

“How much for one hour?” he said casually. He had a reedy voice and spoke in French. In the club’s musk-cat air his words came out milky yellow and weak, all deceit and greed. Dominika noted with interest that the
ultraviolet light in the club did not affect her ability to read his fetid colors. She continued to look at him mildly.

“Did you hear me?” Jamshidi said, raising his voice. “Do you understand French, or are you a
putain
from Kiev?” He looked up again at the ceiling, as if in dismissal. Dominika followed his gaze. A Plexiglas catwalk hung suspended from the rafters and a naked woman in heels was dancing directly above Jamshidi’s head. Dominika looked back at his preposterous goatee.

“What makes you think I’m a working girl?” said Dominika in unaccented French.

Jamshidi looked back down, met her eyes, and laughed. It was at this point that he should have heard the rustling in the long grass, the instant before grip of fang and claw.

“I asked you how much for an hour,” he said.

“Five hundred,” said Dominika, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. Jamshidi leaned forward and made a further obscene suggestion.

“Three hundred more,” said Dominika, looking at him over the tops of her eyeglasses. She smiled at him and pushed her glasses back up. As if on cue the stage footlights came on and a dozen women trooped out wearing nothing but thigh-high vinyl boots and white peaked caps. Filtered spotlights dappled their bodies with pink and white stripes as they gyrated in formation to blaring Europop.

Jamshidi originally had been spotted in Vienna by the Russian Rostekhnadzor representative in the International Atomic Energy Agency, who noted the Iranian’s after-hours predilection for the leggy escorts who sipped sherry in the bars of the Gurtel district. The IAEA lead was passed to the Vienna
rezident
who in turn reported it to Moscow Center, SVR Headquarters in Yasenevo, in southwest Moscow.

A vigorous debate in the Center ensued regarding whether Jamshidi was a valid recruitment target. Pursuing an official from a client state was unwise, some said. The old techniques of blackmail and coercion would not work, others said. The risk of blowback and damage to bilateral relations was too great, still others said. A single department head wondered
out loud whether this was a too-convenient opportunity. Perhaps this was a provocation, a disinformation trap somehow hatched by the Western services—CIA, Mossad, MI6—to discredit Moscow.

This
zagovoritsya,
this dithering, was not uncommon in SVR. The modern Foreign Intelligence Service was as riven by fear of the president of the Federation—of the blue-eyed X-ray stares and back-alley reprisals—as the NKVD was of Stalin’s rages in the 1930s. No one wanted to validate a bad operation and commit the ultimate transgression: embarrassing Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin on the world stage.

Alexei Ivanovich Zyuganov, chief of the Counterintelligence Department of the Service—Line KR—was first among many who declared Jamshidi’s recruitment too risky (chiefly because the case was not his). But the president, a former KGB officer himself (his service record, including a torpid foreign posting to Communist Dresden in the late 1980s, was never discussed,
ever
), overruled the too-timorous voices in SVR.

“Find out what this scientist knows,” Putin ordered the SVR director in Yasenevo over the secure
vysokochastoty
high-frequency line from the Kremlin. “I want to know how far along these Iranian fanatics are with their uranium. The Zionists and the Americans are losing patience.” Putin paused, then said, “Give this to Egorova, let her run with it.”

It normally could be considered a towering compliment when the president of the Federation specifically designated an officer in the Service to manage a high-profile recruitment operation—it had happened occasionally in the past with old KGB favorites of Putin’s—but Dominika was under no illusion about why she had been selected. She had not even met the president. “It’s a great honor,” said the director, when he summoned her to his office to inform her that the Kremlin had given instructions. Khuinya,
bollocks,
thought Dominika.
They want a former Sparrow to run this pussy snare. Very well, boys,
she thought,
mind your fingers.

Her selection did accomplish one thing. The palpable weight of the FSB counterintelligence reinvestigation was lifted. All the games stopped: The tinted-window Peugeot was no longer parked outside her apartment on Kastanaevskaya Ulitsa in the mornings and evenings; the periodic jovial interviews with the counterespionage staff trailed off; and
Sistema
workouts with the toothsome Daniil ended. Dominika now knew she had been cleared—certainly Putin’s impatient orders had hastened the process, but
she was through. She savored the irony that President Putin himself had just put her, the fox, in the henhouse. But the savored irony soon turned into a thin white line of anger in her stomach.

Things moved rather quickly after that, including her assignment to Line KR, the counterintelligence staff. Alexei Zyuganov summoned her and without emotion informed her that the decision had come down from the fourth floor that she was to manage the operation against Jamshidi from Line KR. His demeanor was sour, his voice contemptuous, his gaze indirect. And beneath the façade, in the few seconds of direct eye contact, she saw demented paranoia. He sat in a swirl of black as he spoke. He droned that the resources of his department were to be used to ensure that her planning was sound, and that there would be no flaps—none whatsoever would be tolerated. Zyuganov’s deputy, Yevgeny, in his thirties, scowling, stout, and broad, dour as an Orthodox deacon and impossibly dark, from thatched hair to woolly eyebrows to orangutan forearms, leaned against the office doorjamb behind Dominika, listening, while appraising the curve of her buttocks under her smooth skirt.

The truth was that Zyuganov was furious at being publically overruled regarding the recruitment of the Persian. The poisonous and diminutive Zyuganov—he was just over five feet tall—was doubly stung by the case being handed to Dominika Egorova and not to him, was
trebly
stung by the fact that the president of the Russian Federation knew of and had an eye on a mere captain, his new subordinate. Zyuganov appraised this
shlyukha,
this trained whore, from the sodden duck blind of his mind.

She was the rare, ridiculous female
operupolnomochenny,
operations officer, in the Service, but with a pedigree and an unassailable reputation. He had heard the stories, read the restricted reports. Among other accomplishments in her young career, she acquired the information that led to the arrest of one of the most damaging penetrations of SVR, veteran Lieutenant General Vladimir Korchnoi—a traitor run for
a decade and a half
by the Americans—ending a mole hunt that had lasted years. Zyuganov had managed part of the search to unmask Korchnoi, and had not succeeded where this bint had. Then she had been wounded, captured, and held briefly by CIA, returned from the West in triumph to Yasenevo, given a meritorious promotion to junior captain, and now, peremptorily, was assigned to Line KR to work a director’s dossier case.

Zyuganov, who started his own venomous career during the precursor KGB years as an interrogator in the Lubyanka cellars, could not oppose her personnel assignment. He dismissed Egorova and watched her go—she was forced to squeeze by an unmoving, smirking Yevgeny in the doorway. The operation against the Persian was too important to scuttle, but Zyuganov’s Lubyanka instincts stirred in another direction. He could take control and earn high-profile credit for bagging the Persian if Captain Egorova were out of the picture. He sat back in his swivel chair thinking, his little feet dangling, and looked at the dark-browed Yevgeny, daring him with a gassy stare to say anything.
Vilami na vode pisano,
the future is written with a pitchfork on flowing water. No one knows what’s going to happen.

Outside the club, Dominika led Jamshidi by a clammy hand through the thick haze of nighttime traffic, dashing across Place Blanche and then more slowly downhill a half block to the little Hotel Belgique with its blue-striped canopy over the door. A bored
ubiytsa
behind the counter, a bruiser with big arms in a dirty T-shirt, threw Dominika a key and a towel.

The door opened a foot before it hit the metal frame of the bed as Dominika pushed into the room. They had to squeeze past the cracked dresser. The screened toilet in the corner of the room was ringed in rust stains, and a large mirror, spotted and smoky, hung over the headboard by a dangerously frayed velvet rope. Jamshidi walked to the toilet to relieve himself. “Take off your clothes,” he said over his shoulder, splashing liberally outside the porcelain. Dominika sat at the foot of the bed with her legs crossed, bouncing her foot. For five kopeks she would put her lipstick tube against his forehead and push the plunger. Jamshidi zipped and turned toward her.