Palace of Treason (34 page)

“That will be all for now,” he said. “Line OT, please stay behind.”

Those officers excused began filing out, including Dominika. Yevgeny
stayed in his seat at Zyuganov’s left, taking notes. Zarubina chatted amiably with an officer on the other side of the table, but Dominika saw her eyes flitting around the room at the departing personnel, checking for resentment at being excluded, cataloging faces, assessing expressions, sniffing for trouble. Zarubina’s golden halo was steady and strong; this was a creature with no doubts, no hesitation. Her only appetite was for the hunt, and the kill, and the feeding.

Whatever she was planning for her Washington
rezidentura
—the presence of the technical officers from Line T strongly suggested that the Seamstress intended to enhance agent handling for her new source, TRITON—details of her plan would be screamingly critical for CIA to know. Dominika resignedly told herself that she would have to endure one more night with Yevgeny before her trip.

Marta and Udranka were sitting in her office when she got back. Marta was smoking, as usual. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Sparrow, said Marta. Fifteen minutes with that orangutan between your legs and you’ll have the best present imaginable to bring your beautiful lover.

Dominika was leaving for Athens tomorrow morning. She told herself she should have been drafting and transmitting another SRAC message, or packing her suitcase, certainly ordering her thoughts for the inevitable marathon CIA debriefing, and checking a street map to get to the first meet with
Bratok
and Nate at a safe house, the address for which had been sent to her via SRAC exchange. Instead Dominika stood in front of the shower-fogged mirror in her bathroom, wiping her breasts clean with a washcloth. Yevgeny had tiresome predilections.

In classic Sparrow style, Dominika had navigated across Yevgeny’s bow in the office late in the day, catching his eye, returning his lopsided smile, suffusing her face with an embarrassed blush at his inevitable and lurid suggestion for a good-bye hump to hold him over for the two weeks she would be gone. At least she was spared the tedious coquetry of suggesting it herself. She fed him, poured vodka down his gullet—alas, not enough—and had to lie with him, watching him sweat, whispering
ugovarivaniye,
coaxing
encouragements, helping his body follow his mind, and purr convincingly as, finally, he hunched over her chest, shoulders shaking.

Then the next skin-crawling half hour cuddling the woolly caterpillar, faces inches apart, with his
huile de Venus
–oil of Venus they had called it at Sparrow School—drying on her chest, whispering to him about their shared secret, about his future, about the golden promise of a career with Zarubina in charge of the Service. Now Dominika played it stern, with his stubbly face in her hands: Your welfare is what I’m thinking about; there’s nothing to feel guilty about. Don’t throw it all away. Coming forward and what, confessing, would be the end, an unforgiveable transgression in their eyes. It would be the end of this,
of us.

The smile was coming more frequently, staying longer on his lips, Yevgeny was reassured. His hand—those fingernails were marginally clean—trailed down her belly.
Ni khuya sebe, no fucking way,
thought Dominika wearily, and held his wrist. Instead she moved her own hand lower, and looked him in the eyes, which grew wider, then wider still.
Is this what you want?
Dominika thought dryly, moving her hand.
Is this sufficient
?
No. 96, “Chairman Mao’s Chopsticks”
: After hours of practice at Sparrow School, it wasn’t the hand or wrist that gave out, it was the electric ache in the shoulder, until you couldn’t raise your arm, until you couldn’t look at another oiled cucumber. Dominika still could not go near
Okroshka,
cold cucumber soup.

Yevgeny’s lower lip quivered as if he were going to weep. Dominika had to slow her insidious hand so he could talk.

“God … knows,” he said, concentrating. “Madame Zarubina was the one who made the request to discuss using an illegal to handle TRITON.”

Throw the bone in the wrong direction. “Interesting but illogical,” sniffed Dominika. “What could Zarubina want with someone like that?” Fast then slow.

Yevgeny closed his eyes and his breath caught. “Zarubina anticipates that she will be able to identify TRITON in the near future, and that he will agree to be handled personally. She says it’s inevitable, whether in a week or a month. When that time comes she will meet him and settle him down. But then long-term handling must be by an officer not assigned to an official Russian diplomatic installation. Safer that way.” He expelled a breath in a long sigh.

“An illegal?” said Dominika, almost sitting up, protesting to draw him
out. “They cannot contemplate using someone without diplomatic cover with someone as potentially valuable as TRITON.”

“Why did you stop?” said Yevgeny dreamily, looking down at her hand. If Dominika had an ax handle under her bed, she would have resumed with that. “Zarubina—wants to meet TRITON—herself at first,” stuttered Yevgeny. “Yes, that’s better—keep going. Zarubina said she eventually wants a faceless illegal—an expert in operating inside America—to assume handling. All traces of the case will evaporate.”
And Benford will have no chance to catch him,
thought Dominika.

“The illegals cadre was decimated when the deputy in Line S, the illegals directorate, defected,” said Dominika, thinking furiously, multitasking. “The identities of most illegals in S were blown to the Americans. The cupboard is bare.”

Yevgeny shook his head. He spoke with an effort. “Zarubina said there is another illegals school, not the main one at Teply Stan, another one, not even a school, just a program, very small, just one or two students a year. It was not under Line S management, so it was not compromised. It belongs to the Kremlin.”
What a coup it would be to get inside this program,
thought Dominika,
to identify illegals before they ever deployed to America.

“What is the Kremlin thinking, directing such operations?” said Dominika, already knowing the answer. Russia’s blue-eyed president-for-life and former KGB flunky wanted to keep his hand in the Game, but not to revel in the clandestine geometry of dispatching spies and saboteurs to impose his designs on the world. Putin’s servants were all fungible and dispensable to him. No, this was another display of His Highness the Tsar’s
muzhestvennost’,
his Russian virility. Yevgeny winced—in her anger, perhaps Dominika had yanked the wrong way. “Zarubina seems to know a lot about things,” said Dominika, slowing down.

“How she knows about all this, I don’t know.”

“Perhaps Zarubina will be this new illegal’s patron,” said Dominika almost to herself, already mentally drafting another report, this one for Benford. Mentor one of Putin’s
khor’ki,
one of his hot-eyed ferrets, and Zarubina would be rewarded—the directorship of SVR.

“Zarubina doesn’t mentor anyone,” said Yevgeny vaguely, looking down at Dominika’s hand with heavy-lidded eyes. “Don’t stop.”

When would the new illegal be sent to America? Have they identified a
specific person? How far along in training is he? Man or woman? What city will she live in? What is her occupation? What is her legend?
“Feel good?” said Dominika, watching Yevgeny’s flaring, bushy nostrils.

“Zarubina is a woman possessed,” said Yevgeny, closing his eyes. Dominika thought he was more right than he knew. “She’s insisting on absolute security. She will meet TRITON for as short a time as possible, then assign the illegal to TRITON to be totally clandestine. Line T is researching secure communications. All of this is to be outside Line KR. No one is to know, not even you. Zyuganov’s orders.”

Dominika smiled at Yevgeny. “I won’t tell a soul in the Center,” she said. She moved her arm more quickly—
martellato,
a little hammer in her hand.

“I know,” said Yevgeny distractedly. He was breathing faster now.

“You’re so sexy like this,” said Dominika, thinking irony came naturally in the bedroom. Yevgeny suddenly started trembling. He fell back and ground the back of his head into the pillow, groaning. It was thirty seconds before he opened his eyes and his breathing slowed.

“It will be a long two weeks apart,” panted Yevgeny.

Two weeks will be over before you know it, said Udranka from the corner of the bedroom.

“Two weeks will be over before you know it,” said Dominika.

Hannah Archer had been busy. For four nonconsecutive days in the past week she had made careful surveillance-detection runs of five, six, four, and three hours, not only determining her status—that is, whether she had trailing surveillance that day—but also quantifying with eyes and instinct increasingly honed on the street
what sort
of surveillance might be on her. It was a good bet that she was still low on the FSB priority list, but since her arrival she had seen a slight incremental increase in coverage on her. Some FSB desk officer had probably picked her file and thrown it into the “check activity” pile in the “foreigners” box.

To COS Moscow’s annoyance, Hannah regularly cabled detailed descriptions to Headquarters of what she saw on the street. Vern Throckmorton thought he should be doing the reporting on security conditions, but Hannah deferentially paid him no mind and filed weekly cables to Benford, per the latter’s instructions. COS brooded about it but let it go, wary of the savant’s mercury-switch temper. Never mind, both Benford and Hannah knew that surveillance activity was a delicate barometer of counterintelligence danger—whether the Russians’ tails were up, whether they were on the scent, whether they were pulling on a string—and Benford now had to worry about DIVA.

Even if her operational act for a given day was simply to drive by and load/unload one of the SRAC receivers she herself had buried around Moscow, she had to know what sort of ticks were on her, what sort of gap they were giving her, whether they were tired and bored or riled and skittish. Passing an invisible SRAC site under trailing surveillance was nothing like meeting a source face-to-face, but Jesus, you still had to do it perfectly, still had to keep your shoulders square, look straight ahead, snap-check your mirrors, then fire the precisely timed shot with a hand casually inside the bag, remembering not to jackrabbit away after passing the site, and it was very preferable not to rear-end the Muscovite car ahead of you—little things that tech-savvy surveillance teams watch for, one lane over and three cars back, looking inside your vehicle with binoculars.

God, she loved the street, basked in the rhythms of it, kept her window down despite the cold to hear the sounds of it. On several nights she experienced what Jay, her internal-operations instructor, had told her sporadically occurs in case officers under surveillance: a state of grace where she became one with the grim, unshaven, unwashed men in the cars with the radios hot under the dashboards. On those nights, her transported spirit rode silent in the musk-ox backseat with them, listened to the clicks and squelch breaks, heard the muted profane comments, understood how they followed her that night.

One foggy evening she would hear the tire squeals of parallel coverage, glimpsing the telltale sidelights of cars on flanking streets keeping pace with her. Another night she would see—no, feel—them leapfrogging, her mind riffling through the growing catalog:
There’s Oscar and Mustache Man, you switched off your left headlight, naughty, the bread truck we saw last week, boys, wipe the smudges when you take off the roof rack, coming up to the intersection and … there you are Matinee Idol, you should have waited behind the bus, never mind, I love you guys, come on, I’ll go home early tonight so you all can rest.

And the worst nights were when they weren’t there, when the boys had abandoned her for another rabbit, and Hannah was fitful and lonesome. Those were the days when she gripped the wheel:
Okay fuckers, are you using the Doomsday Maneuver, so perfect that no one can fathom how you do it, no one can see it to beat it, and you’re trying to catch DIVA, and kill her, and all that stands against your unshaven, flat fucking Slavic faces sinking your mandibles into the agent,
my agent,
is my gas pedal, and the narrow rippled mirrors on this chirping little hatchback, and my strontium-fortified cooz, and you guys
cannot
have her, it’s not going to happen.

Hannah knew that this shit, unrelieved, made you a little twitchy. Just look at Janice and Benford at Headquarters. She noted to herself that Nate wasn’t twitchy at all, at least not in the bad sense. She thought of him all the time, but there was no question of sending him a friendly email, even a secure internal message. Too ex-lover, too possibly misunderstood.

She needed a friend: The catechism was to stay away from the other officers in the station—preservation of cover, avoid contamination, compartmentalize your individual activities. There were some workmates from
State, from her consular cover job in the embassy, but no real social prospects. Moscow was a nonfrat post, so unless she wanted to bench press an eighteen-year-old, off-duty American Marine security guard, it would be evenings in the embassy housing compound, sitting on kilim pillows around a coffee table eating cheese and crackers with six earnest State Department third secretaries listening to the new commemorative Joni Mitchell CD and wondering why the hostess, an overly dramatic thirty-seven-year-old global-studies major from Mount Holyoke named Marnie, wore a beaded peasant necklace with an oversized wooden
M.

Stop it. Eighteen months left in this Moscow tour, with a hinny mule of a COS on one side of the office trailer and a tipsy, nicotine-saturated DCOS Schindler hanging upside down from the ceiling on the other. And scores of lynx-eyed FSB surveillants waiting for her to come out and play on the street. Hannah had accomplished what Benford asked her to do: DIVA had SRAC and could talk to CIA securely in Moscow, a towering if jeopardous triumph. At the end of her first year, Hannah would be due an R&R break. Rest and relaxation, at a location of her choice. Certainly home to New Hampshire, but maybe somewhere else, say, Greece, for a bit of sun and sea. And a bit of Nate?

“Hi, Dad,” said Hannah, sitting in her darkened apartment, bathed in the light of the computer screen. The jumpy images of Hannah’s mother and father in their sunny New Hampshire kitchen smiled back. It was morning back home in Moultonborough.

“How are you, Hannah?” said her mother. “Keeping warm over there?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” said Hannah. “I bought a big brown furry hat. It’s dreadful—muskrat I think—but warm.”

“Are you eating well?” said her mother. She had mailed a box of cookies last month.

“Don’t worry,” said Hannah. “The commissary has everything: peanut butter, bologna, Velveeta.” She dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand. This ghastly prattle was the best she could do: Before leaving for Moscow she had told her parents on no account to refer to or ask about her job. Never. They knew where she worked. Her parents had stared at her, unhappy and aghast, when Hannah said the Russians were always listening. Tonight the FSB techs would be watching the same images of her parents,
hearing the same conversation. But not to use Skype as every other embassy employee did (with abandon) would be unexplainable and interpreted only one way:
She’s a spook; deploy more surveillance.

“Aren’t there restaurants over there?” asked her father. Hannah smiled. He was role-playing the goofy New England hick.
Careful, Daddy,
she thought.

“Oh sure,” said Hanna. “A bunch of us go out and try local dishes. It’s a lot of fun. There’s a dish with lamb and eggplant called
chanakhi,
and it’s pretty good.” Hannah wondered if the transcribers would note that the Georgian stew had been Stalin’s favorite.

“It sounds heavy,” said her mother. God. Hannah ached to tell her father what she was doing, how she had been selected and trained to beard the Bear in his own lair, about what she had accomplished. She knew he loved her and was proud of her. But her triumphs could not be celebrated. “Get used to it,” Benford had said before she left. “Self-abnegation builds character.” Whatever that meant.

“I should sign off now,” said Hannah. “It’s pretty late here.” Her hand twitched on the mouse to click the disconnect icon.

“I hope you’re getting enough sleep,” said her mother. “Do you need anything, a warm nightgown, snuggly slippers?” The eavesdropping, slack-jawed louts with the earphones would be making jokes tomorrow about snuggly slippers.

“Nope, I have everything I need,” said Hannah. “I’ll talk to you guys next week,” she said. Her mother blew a kiss, got up, and moved off camera. Her father stayed still, looking at her through the screen.
Careful, Daddy,
Hannah telegraphed.

“Good talking to you, baby girl,” he said. “You take care over there. Love you.”

“Bye, Daddy,” said Hannah.
He means give ’em hell,
she thought.
That’s just what I’m doing, Daddy.

In Headquarters, Benford read Hannah’s cables, icily impressed. She had performed well, he knew, and DIVA’s SRAC system was working beautifully,
full-out. Hannah had cased superior sites, her surveillance-detection runs were nearly perfect, and she was a brick on the street. So natural, so cool, in fact, that FSB surveillance apparently assessed her to be a low-ranking functionary in the embassy, a junior officer in personnel, and accordingly had deployed only sporadic “check-up” coverage on her. Most nights she was black—she was sure of it. And thank God that hammerhead COS had not interfered with her. Benford would keep his eye on Throckmorton.

The DIVA reporting (via SRAC bursts) about the mole TRITON and Russian attempts to discover the identity of LYRIC had torn away the rotten wainscoting to reveal a mass of termites. Big CI trouble. Benford looked dyspeptically at the Moscow cables again. If TRITON was inside the Agency, he would not see these DIVA reports—Benford had hurriedly invoked a dedicated compartment to limit distribution to himself, three officers in CID, and the new chief of ROD, Dante Helton.

With sandy hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and the wry look of a dissolute academic, Helton was relatively young for a division chief, having started his career in communist Eastern Europe as a junior officer. Helton once told Benford that ops in the former East Bloc in the Wild West days were every bit the challenge of Moscow, with the added dimension that your host-country adversaries—from intel-service chiefs and planners all the way down to surveillance personnel—were the inheritors of brilliant national patrimonies from Poland (Chopin) to Czechoslovakia (Freud) to Hungary (Teller) to Romania (Vlad the Impaler). They were devilishly smart as well as committed. Helton had operated in Warsaw under murderous pressure—his hostile surveillance team, eventually driven into a rage by Helton’s endlessly smooth manipulation of them, had one December night in 1987 flattened the roof of his Polski Fiat 125 level with its doors with coal shovels. The next evening he fucked them all over again.

Benford sat in his littered office with Helton and Margery Salvatore, a CID maven whose Sicilian ancestors, Benford was convinced, must have included the Fisherwife of Palermo who in 1588 claimed to have flown on goats with local witches. Margery could figure things out, complicated things, and Benford wanted her insights. He likewise had summoned Janice Callahan. She had not yet arrived, to Benford’s annoyance.

“If it’s all right with you two, I will offer preliminary comments until Janice arrives.” He bellowed through the door to his secretary, the one with the fluttering eyelid. “Tell Callahan to come instantly. If she is en route, tell her to begin running.” He looked at Dante and Margery for any sign of disapproval or unease, and saw none. Benford registered that he was known as a temperamental crank, but was agnostic about it.

“I am going to Athens in several days to consult with Station and to participate in the debriefing of DIVA,” said Benford, running nervous fingers through his unruly salt-and-pepper hair, inadvertently creating a modified Mohawk ridge on one side of his head. Normal: Dante and Margery did not blink.

“Only a few agents—all of them retired or dead—in the pantheon of Russian operations have been able to report with the scope and potential that DIVA is displaying. The fortuitous upcoming opportunity for a personal meet will, I expect, provide abundant detail.” The door opened and Janice, ice-tea cool in a leopard-print wrap dress and Jimmy Choo black mules, ambled in. Benford scowled at her. “What took you so long?” said Benford. Janice looked around for someplace to sit—Dante and Margery had cleared the two frayed chairs of newspapers and boxes. The only other perch—a small swaybacked couch—was brimming with more files.

“If I run, my dress falls off and these shoes come off my feet, Simon,” Janice said absently, running a hand through her hair and looking around. “I keep forgetting to bring a camp stool when I come to your office.” Benford watched her as she cleared a space for herself. A small avalanche of files hit the floor. She leaned down to pick them up, her cleavage revealed exponentially. Helton studiously looked away.

“As I was saying, DIVA is a fitting successor to MARBLE, as well as a testament to his farsightedness, God rest him,” said Benford. The room was silent. Every one of them had come up the ranks by reading the MARBLE omnibus.

“We now have to consider several matters,” he said. “At this time I will not discuss DIVA’s contribution to the Iranian nuclear covert action, nor her success in coming to the favorable attention of the Russian president.”