Palace of Treason (10 page)

“My Sparrow. In an apartment about ten minutes from here, close to his IAEA office.” She took a sip of wine.

“And you convinced him to cooperate how?” asked Gable.

“I showed him streaming video of himself breaking the rules of sharia.” She bounced her foot.

“Meaning …”

“Ramoner,”
Dominika said in French. “Sweeping the chimney, all the time, quite oversexed.”

Gable started laughing, unable to talk.

“And what exactly has he agreed to?” asked Nate.

“He has agreed to a meeting, a debriefing on his country’s nuclear program. He is hostile, will doubtless try to withhold some details, but he will cooperate in the end.” Dominika reached for a chocolate and started unwrapping the foil.

“A debriefing where?” asked Nate. The two Americans were now both leaning toward her.

“At my Sparrow’s apartment,” said Dominika, popping the bonbon into her mouth.

“And when does this debriefing take place?” asked Nate.

“Tomorrow night,” said Dominika.

“Tomorrow night?” said Nate.

“Yes,” said Dominika, “and you’re coming.”

“Jesus wept,” said Gable.

Gable later said he had never heard of such an operational gambit: DIVA, a recruited Russian agent, proposing that Nate, her CIA handler, impersonate a Russian nuclear analyst from Line KR and together meet DIVA’s unilateral Iranian source. If they could pull it off, CIA would essentially get a secret drop copy of all the intelligence generated by the case that was being sent to the Center in Moscow, a priceless look inside the Iranian program.

“Jesus H. Christ, it’s the damnedest false flag op I ever heard of,” said Gable, throwing clothes into his suitcase. He had passed Vienna Station a summary of Dominika’s proposal for forwarding to Langley, and was immediately returning to Athens to talk to Forsyth. What the CIA officers did not tell their captivating Russian agent was that they would begin examining covert-action possibilities with the supersecret Headquarters component called the Proliferation Division (PROD) whose virtuoso officers conceived, developed, and executed operations to combat weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs around the globe. It was an eclectic division, populated by quirky officers—physicists, operators, engineers—a number of whom were relatively normal: The extroverts in PROD were the ones who looked
at your shoes
when they spoke to you. On his way out, Gable stopped at the door and turned toward Nate.

“I have no authority to do it, but I’m green-lighting this without Headquarters’ approval. No risk aversion, no politics, no lawyers. Forsyth and COS Vienna will back me up. But that means no fuckups tomorrow.”

He stuck his ruddy face into Nate’s. “Listen up. Nash, you have to be as smooth as you ever dreamed of being. Tomorrow night. No rehearsals. When you walk into that apartment with Dominika, that Persian dickwad has to believe you’re a fu … a Russian. Any mistake and he’s going to squawk to his people about the third man—the analyst—in the room, it’ll get to the Center in five minutes, and Domi’s in the wringer. Remember what I told you in Athens? Tight as a Laotian bar hostess? Do you not understand
any
part of what I just told you?”

Dominika looked back and forth at the two men. “Does he always speak like this?” she said. “What is this about Laos?”

Gable turned to her. “I already told you how glad I am to see you. Right off the bat, you bring us this once-in-a-decade lead. You’ve outdone yourself, but I don’t want you to get careless. I want to eat room service with you for the next five years.”

“Thank you,
Bratok
. For my organization, this is not so much, just a simple
maskirovka,
a deception. We Russians are good at it.”

Gable looked at Nate and Dominika, shook his head, and went out into the corridor, the door closing behind him.

Dominika and Nate stood in the middle of the ruined suite, which looked like Sunday morning after Saturday night, plates stacked everywhere, napkins on the floor, wine bottles upside down in sloshy ice buckets.

“What did
Bratok
mean about Laos?” Dominika asked casually, stacking plates.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Nate. “Give them time to clean up.”

Dominika looked at him calmly. “Laos?”

“It’s not Laos,” said Nate. “It’s about an operation being run carefully, everything thought out, no mistakes.”

“With bar girls?” said Dominika, putting the dirty plates on the wheeled trolley.

“No, it’s an expression describing close coordination, like hugging a girl. Jesus, Domi, I can’t explain it now.”

“You’re quite the
muzhlan,
” said Dominika dryly. “How do you say this in English?”

“Sorry, I don’t know that word,” said Nate.
Who’s she calling a bumpkin?
he thought.

“A pity to leave this, but we need to plan for tomorrow night,” she said. “I want to show you Line X requirements. I will be speaking to the Persian in French, but you must speak only Russian. He probably speaks English—most scientists do.”

“How many pages of requirements are there?” said Nate. “Did you bring them yourself?”

“There are forty pages, some with diagrams. Of course I brought them myself. We are not going to transmit them through the
rezidentura
in Vienna; this case is
razdelenie,
strictly compartmented.”

Nate shook his head. “You carried intel requirements with you on the plane? That’s not very professional. What if you lost them?”

Nate hadn’t meant to criticize Dominika, but he worried about flaps. One accident and Langley’s covert-action possibilities would be lost. But he saw her eyes flare: Gable once told Nate that there is not an intelligence officer in the world who does not bristle at being accused of shoddy tradecraft. Tell him there’s a nickel parking meter beside his sister’s bed, but don’t impugn his tradecraft.

Dominika’s voice crackled like hoarfrost on a windowpane. “I do not lose documents,” she said. “And do not lecture me, Mr. Neyt, on techniques. Your agency’s professionalism is no better than ours.”

Nate swallowed the “So who recruited who?” because he knew it wasn’t fair, and also because he’d very likely get a slap across the face.
Agent handling, Mr. Case Officer,
he thought,
leave it alone.

Dominika wasn’t through. “Russians invented spying,” she said, waving a fork at him. “Do you know
konspiratsiya?
Operating secretly, not being detected, what you Americans call tradecraft, we invented it.”

Invented spying? How about the Chinese in the sixth century BC?
Nate raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, I just want us to be careful.”

Dominika looked at him sideways, reading his purple halo, steady and bright, and decided that (a) he wasn’t disparaging her, and (b) she really did love him. “So you want to study the notes?”

“Yeah, I’ll have to memorize the Line X stuff. Gable won’t have time to send our requirements before tomorrow night,” Nate said.
The Center’s nuclear requirements alone will be golden intel to analysts in Langley,
he thought.

“We have a lot of work,” said Dominika. A pause.

“And we can’t be seen on the street together,” said Nate. More silence.

“We could use my safe apartment,” said Dominika. “To continue the operational planning.”

“More discreet than this hotel room,” said Nate. “You go ahead. I’ll come over in a half hour. What’s the address?”

“Stuwerstrasse thirty-five, apartment six. Come in an hour.”

“I’ll see you soon,” said Nate, his throat closing.

“Ring two short, one long. I will buzz you in,” said Dominika, who could not feel her lips.

“Roger,” said Nate idiotically, sounding like a test pilot.

Dominika looked at him as she opened the door. “And Neyt,” she said, “I think it is all right for you to be a bumpkin.”

When she was five, Dominika began seeing the colors. Words in books were tinted red and blue, the music from her mother’s violin was accompanied by rolling, airborne bars of maroon and purple, and her professor father’s bedtime stories in Russian, French, and English flew on wings of blue and gold. At age six, she was—secretly—diagnosed as a synesthete by a psychologist colleague of her father’s, who also observed the rare
additional
ability in Dominika to read people’s emotions and moods by the colored auras that surround them.

Her synesthesia made her one with music and dance, and she catapulted through the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, destined for the Bolshoi. A rival broke the small bones of her right foot, finishing her ballet career in an afternoon. Vulnerable and drifting, she was recruited into the SVR by her scheming uncle, then deputy director of the Service. He had pitched her to join the Service during the funeral wake for her beloved father.

That was about the time when the other began, the
buistvo,
the anger, the rage, the temper that would surge through her in reaction to deceit and betrayal at the hands of her Service and against the swollen bureaucrats who appropriated and encumbered her life. Dominika had long ago lost the patriotic idealism of her youth. The anger was overlaid by sadness and grief, as only a Russian could mourn, broadly and dark as the steppes, as she saw how the successors to the sclerotic Soviet Politburo—the cashiered KGB hustlers, and the thirsty oligarchs, and the crime lords, and the poker-faced president with his trademark sidelong glance—spindled Russia’s potential, sold the future, and squandered the magnificent patrimony of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, and Ulanova, the greatest ballerina ever, Dominika’s childhood idol. It was all done behind multiple curtains, masquerading as a government, a sovereign state, all behind Kremlin curtains.

Her parents had embodied Russian soul—her father a professor of literature, her mother a concert violinist—but they had been ground down between the Soviet mortar and Stalin’s pestle, confiding only in each other,
out of young Dominika’s earshot, walking gingerly through life just as citizens now walk on Moscow streets, different but the same, wearily paying bribes and boiling their brown tap water and, outside Moscow, dreaming of milk, and waiting for meat, and hoarding the dear little tin of caviar for
Maslenitsa,
the end-of-winter holiday—a celebration as old as Russia is old—which brings the springtime promise of sun, and warmth, and food, and change, which never comes. It never comes.

As she sailed through SVR Academy, then inhaled the disinfectant stench of Sparrow School, then was assigned the delirious first overseas posting to Helsinki, Dominika’s synesthesia became an operational asset. She could read the deceptions and suspicions in her own
rezidentura.
When she met the unflappable CIA officers who handled her after her recruitment she read the haloes of constancy—the same royal purple as her father’s—and in the case of Nathaniel Nash, the luminous purple of passion. Passion for CIA, for his country, and perhaps for her.

They had fallen into their affair, pushed together by the strain of Dominika’s spying, by Nate’s dread for her safety. They made love against the rules, against good sense, flaunting every tenet of security. Dominika rationalized that she was already committing espionage—the second bullet behind the ear for sleeping with the Main Enemy wouldn’t much matter. When Nate hesitated, retreating behind his regulations, worried about career dislocations, Dominika’s anger and pride would not forgive him.

Nearly a year later, things had changed. Her disgust with the
zveri,
the animals in Moscow, was renewed. She knew that Zyuganov would just as soon liquidate her as look at her, but she knew that Putin’s wet-lipped patronage of her would keep him at bay, at least for a time. She wondered quite seriously whether she would have to kill Zyuganov before he killed her. And her fury at the thought of Korchnoi, gunned down a few meters from freedom, swirled unchecked and unabated in her breast. She supposed it was inevitable that she would gravitate to her CIA handlers—and she suspected that those smiling professionals always knew it. She was satisfied with the recontact with CIA and Gable; he was right, she missed the game. And she had done a lot of thinking about Nate—the last thing he told her before she went back inside Russia had been that he cared about her. Fine, but she would not offer herself to him again.

She combed her hair in the little bathroom with the long-handled
antique tortoiseshell brush that once belonged to her
prababushka,
her great-grandmother, in Saint Petersburg. She had brought it with her to the Academy, then to Sparrow School, and on her first tour in Helsinki. It was one of the few mementos from her family. She looked at the brush in her hand. The elegant, curved handle had helped her unlock—unleash—her nighttime adolescent urges, without shame. As she entered young womanhood, she noted the emergence of her “secret self,” another part of her, sexual and edgy and questing, that lived quietly in the deeply barricaded hurricane room inside her—that is, until she opened the door. She set the brush down and asked herself what she expected from a life of espionage on the brink, from Udranka holding on by her fingernails, from earnest and conflicted Nate, from herself.

The street door intercom buzzed
dit-dit-dah.