Palace of Treason (9 page)

“No, I need you to stay close in case he decides to stop talking. You’ll be a reminder he has to behave.”

“I’ll wear something tight,” Udranka said, deadpan, her crimson halo coming back, flaring. “The man might not listen to me, but the bald one with the turtleneck always does.” Dominika suppressed a laugh. She had not heard that phrase since Sparrow School. Udranka refilled both their glasses.

“After this is over, I’m getting you out,” said Dominika. “Not just Vienna, completely out.”

“Of course you are,” said Udranka pouring another glass. Sunlight in the canary-yellow kitchen and the burned caramel whiff of brandy in the still air. Their eyes met. “I can’t even get drunk anymore,” she whispered.

Dominika got up from the table and put an arm around the shoulder of her Sparrow, the long-legged destroyer of men with the piano-key smile that could light up a room, whose silent, slow tears wet the front of her handler’s shirt.

Vienna in summer: leafy parks and mustard-colored buildings with the gravitas of past empires in their façades, pitched roofs all of intersecting angles, trolley tracks joining and separating, polished brass door pulls, the loamy smell of endless coffees, and the sugary crunch of cakes and breads tumbled on trays set in café windows with gold lettering. And under the ubiquitous violins of Strauss in every doorway lingered the memory of the faded bass notes of tank treads from less happy times. Vienna.

Dominika was back in Vienna, with a briefcase of Center-drafted nuclear requirements, two lipstick guns, and her heart in her mouth. The upcoming debriefing with Jamshidi made action urgent. It was time to trigger recontact with CIA—and Nate. The prospect of seeing Nate again swelled in Dominika’s chest until she could hardly breathe. She didn’t know if he would be different toward her, didn’t know how it would be between them. Her Russian pride and cross-grainedness would not let her again be the first one to make a move. She would not throw herself at him, she would not ever again watch him retreat behind regulations or security requirements or a guilty conscience. She heard the calm voice of the SENTRY operator on the line as she repeated her security code, used the identifier alias, mentioned the city, and designated the city park and clock tower brief-encounter site. Now it was time for business, her business.

It took Nate twelve hours to get to Vienna after the SENTRY system automatically cabled Athens Station to inform them that Moscow-based, Russian asset GTDIVA had called to trigger contact. Vienna, Stadtpark
Clock Tower, starting tomorrow, every day at noon. Nate took the first flight to Munich, then the train to Vienna. They always added a rail leg to tweak ops security: Once inside the European Union with common, permeable borders, there was no paper trail, and light disguise took care of ubiquitous security cameras in the terminals. Gable followed through Prague—he would back up Nate because he was a case officer Dominika had trusted—and they booked a suite at the Schick Hotel Am Parkring, on the margins of the park.

Nate stood in the suite looking out the French doors at the Viennese skyline, knowing she was under one of those peaked slate roofs. Dominika had called; she was out. It felt like she had been back in Russia, status unknown, for ten years. Nate’s guts skipped as he tried to order his thoughts. Intel requirements, communications, access, security, signals, sites—the list was endless. Nate knew that this recontact with Dominika was critical; it was the first time she would be met since recruitment. Despite her call out, would she be willing to continue? The case officer in him knew that the case must be maintained on a professional basis. He would stay professional at all costs. This was espionage.

She wasn’t at the RDX the first day—a bit worrying—but Nate slipped into case-officer mode and watched the rendezvous site and waited. On the next day, from his vantage point on a bench behind a low hedge, he saw her walking down the gravel path bordered by linden trees, the familiar slight hitch in her stride. She looked as he remembered her—ever so subtly older perhaps, features more sculpted, but the blue eyes were the same, the head still held high. He let her go by, checking her status, and let her wait at the ornate marble balustrade at the base of the clock. She looked at her watch once, briefly. Nate stayed still, watching for casuals, to see if anyone lingered in the shadows under the far-off trees.

After four minutes—the standard meeting window for SVR too—she began walking, not obviously looking for coverage, but he knew she saw everything. Nate walked behind her at surveillance distance for a while—he felt black, there were no repeats—watching her pinned-up hair and strong legs. She slowed to look at a statue and Nate passed her and continued walking toward the white bulk of the hotel, visible over the trees. She turned and followed him.

They were alone in the elevator, standing in opposite corners of the car,
looking up at the floor numbers on the display. Nate looked over at her and she met his gaze. His purple halo was unchanged, strong and constant. The catechism stipulated that they should not speak in the elevator, but Nate had to say something.

“I’m glad to see you,” said the CIA officer to his Russian agent. Dominika looked at him, blue eyes giving nothing away. She said nothing as the doors opened and Nate walked ahead of her to their room and tapped softly. Gable opened the door and pulled Dominika into the center of the room—cream carpet, dark-green couch, open double French doors with a view of the sand-drip castle spire of St. Stephen’s in the distance.

“Nine months. You kept us waiting long enough,” said Gable, smiling. “You okay?” His purple mantle was the same, too, pulsating, raucous, circular.

“
Zdravstvuy Bratok
, hello big brother,” said Dominika, shaking his hand. She had started calling him
Bratok
after her recruitment in Helsinki, a sign of affection. She turned toward Nate.

“Hello, Neyt,” she said, but did not extend her hand.

“It’s good to see you, Domi,” said Nate.

“Yeah, well, now we’re all glad to see one another,” said Gable. “Before I start weeping, let’s hear what you’ve been up to. How much time do you have? All day? Okay.” Dominika sat on the velour couch with Gable. Nate pulled up a chair.

“Let’s get something to eat first,” said Gable, bounding up. “Nash, call room service—never mind, give me the phone.” He looked at Dominika while waiting for the operator, hand over the mouthpiece. “You look too skinny. You been sick, or just missed us?” Dominika smirked and leaned back on the couch, starting to relax. She avoided looking at Nate. She had forgotten how smooth and professional these CIA men were, how much she liked them. They were purple and crimson and blue, strong and reliable.

Gable ordered so much food they needed two trolleys to bring it all: smoked trout and salmon, beet salad, Olivier salad, poached chicken, fresh mayonnaise, runny Brie, Gouda, a crusty loaf of bread, iced butter, cucumber salad, sliced ham, two different mustards, lamb kabobs, yogurt sauce, two strudels, palatschinken with brandy apricot jam, a tray of Austrian chocolates, ice-cold Alpquell, Grüner Veltliner Sauvignon, and yellow-gold Ruster Ausbruch.

They talked for four hours. They let her do the talking; she didn’t need
prompting. She knew what was important, what to include, what to leave out. She spoke in English—sometimes Nate had to help her over a word in Russian, but she talked in whole paragraphs. Her return to Moscow. Promotion to captain. Assigned to Line KR under a new boss, Alexei Zyuganov. Interview with Putin. Mamulova interrogation in Lefortovo. The limited hard intel she had gleaned from KR—SVR foreign operations, counterintelligence leads—would come later.

“Hold it,” said Gable. “You got in to see Putin?”

Dominika nodded. “Twice. He congratulated me on exposing General Korchnoi,” she said softly, looking down at her hands. “He said Korchnoi was destroyed. I’m sure he gave the order. I thought I saw something on the bridge, but couldn’t be sure. Is it true?”

“They shot him from across the river, at the end of the bridge,” said Nate. “He was home free and they shot him.” His voice was even, emotionless.

“I will never forget him,” she said. Her eyes glistened. They sat in silence for a while, the faint buzz of traffic on the Parkring coming through the open French doors.

“It is why I made the call for you to come,” she said finally. “I was not sure I would ever work with you again. But the
siloviki,
the bosses, have not changed, it is as bad as ever. Worse than before.”

“We’re glad you came back out,” said Gable, reaching for a plate. “I
knew
you would. It’s in your blood. Sweet pea, we’re back together again.”

Oh shit,
thought Nate, and he held his breath.

“What is this ‘sweet pea’?” said Dominika casually, putting down her wineglass. It was the moment when someone yells “Grenade” and everyone hits the floor.

“It’s like
baloven,
” said Nate hurriedly in Russian, “something a big brother would say. ‘My pet,’ like that.” Dominika blinked, only half believing him, only half placated. Oblivious, Gable slathered mustard on a piece of ham.

Back to business. Nate’s business: internal operations, the science, art, and necromancy of meeting agents in denied environments such as Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Tehran. Running agents in the most dangerous counterintelligence states imaginable. Meeting spies inside was like wading through a tannin-black, piranha-infested pool with infinite care, trying not to stir up the bottom. In Helsinki, Nate had rebelled at the thought of putting Dominika in danger by running her inside Russia. Now, after Korchnoi,
he told himself they all had to get on with it, whatever the cost, but he felt his pulse in his jaw, seeing her on the couch, legs crossed, that habit of bouncing her foot.

“Domi, we have to talk internal ops, how we’re going to communicate in Moscow,” he said. “If you can arrange foreign travel, we’ll rely on every opportunity to meet outside. But something could happen, a fast-breaking issue, or an emergency, or a travel ban or anything, and then we need a way to meet inside.”

Dominika nodded.

“We have covcom for you,” said Nate, “covert-communications equipment, very fast, very secure. You can send abbreviated messages, we can direct you to new sites, we can plan face-to-face meets. You know all this.

“The first challenge, the danger, is physically getting the covcom set to you. We have to dead drop it—a longtime cache is no good. We want you to retrieve it within a day, a few days at most, of our putting it down.”

What he did not say was that her life depended on the tradecraft of the Moscow Station officer assigned to load the DD, and on the perspicacity of the chief of Moscow Station in validating and approving the officer’s ops plan. If the young American spook did not accurately determine his surveillance status during his surveillance-detection route, if he blundered through his run on that future fragrant night with the summer twilight silhouetting the Moscow skyline, it would be the end. If FSB surveillance saw him load a site, they would set up on it and wait for weeks, months, a year, to see who came to unload it. Dominika would never know the sequence of events that killed her.

“It will be possible,” said Dominika evenly. “Line KR has access to all
nadzor
assignments and schedules. I will be able to determine surveillance deployments throughout the city—FSB,
militsiya,
police, our teams. The first exchange will be dangerous, but we can do it.”

“We take this slow,” said Gable. “We fucking take everything slow. There’s no use getting you comms if we can’t do it securely.” He poured more wine into Dominika’s glass.

“Remember when we talked in Greece?” said Gable. “In that little restaurant on the beach? I said you should establish yourself, take your time, create a reputation, find a good assignment, start pushing your weight around.”

Dominika smiled at him.

“Well, you done all that and more. I’m proud of you.”

Nate thought Gable sounded like a parent dropping his kid off at the prep-school dormitory with the engine running, but Dominika knew what he meant. She patted him on the arm.

“Well,
Bratok
, I have done something else that you both need to know about,” said Dominika, picking up her wineglass. She ran her finger around the wet rim, raising a single lonely note.

“I have approached an Iranian nuclear expert; the case is brand-new. His name is Parvis Jamshidi. He is here in Vienna, in the IAEA.” The CIA officers looked at each other; they didn’t know the name right off, but he sounded like a target that would be high on the list.

“I gave him some bad news—how do you say
,
compromised him—and convinced him to cooperate,” said Dominika. Gable, the legendary recruiter, the grizzled scalp-taker, cocked his crew-cut head. He wanted to hear more.

“Compromised him how?” asked Gable. Dominika looked at him as though she were a cool gin and tonic.

“I provided him a Sparrow,” said Dominika. Fingers circling the rim, letting the note hang in the air. She was playing it coy, teasing them.

“What Sparrow?” said Gable.