Palace of Treason (53 page)

“He is unsettled and imbalanced,” said Dominika, as casually as she could. “He treated Yevgeny like a barn animal. Pletnev told me some of his troubles and, frankly, asked me for advice on operational matters.”
It won’t hurt Yevgeny now to say he talked out of school.
“And you have seen how Colonel Zyuganov tracked my vehicle, how he thought I was involved
in the disappearance of Solovyov—
I,
who originally identified the general as suspicious.” Dominika paused for effect. “The colonel is under immense strain. He has grown erratic.” Mentioning Solovyov was safe; Govormarenko had gossiped about the general’s disappearance.

“I have remarked on it,” said Putin. “What do you make of him?”
Softly, obliquely,
thought Dominika.

“Mr. President, based on the little Major Pletnev confided in me, this all came to a head two days before Zarubina was reportedly to acquire a CIA mole’s name. There is great turmoil. Zyuganov sends police to arrest me here, and now you tell me that he has killed Pletnev, and the
unbeatable
Zarubina is ambushed.”

“What are you saying, Captain?” said Putin. Time for the
desinformatsiya,
the deception.

“These mishaps are nothing less than Zyuganov protecting himself, with the aid of the Americans. And who searches loudest and most noisily for the mole? The mole himself, Mr. President.” Putin’s blue eyes never left her face, but his cerulean halo pulsed, and Dominika knew he believed her.

That night in her bedroom at the mansion Dominika could not sleep. The medieval and massively heavy dinners continued: Tonight it had been carved roast beef, veal medallions,
buzhenina,
baked ham, roast duck and
patychky,
breaded Ukrainian meat skewers served with a fiery Moldovan
adzhika
pepper sauce. Cream- and butter-sauce boats sailed in formation between silver candlesticks. There were platters of herring, salmon, and sturgeon in dill and sour cream, and
kulebyaka,
salmon in puff pastry.
Pelmeni
and
vareniky
dumplings were ladled from tureens like hatchlings poured out in a fish farm. Chafing dishes of buttered vegetables; terrines of pork, salmon, and boar; and casseroles of mushrooms, truffle-laden, steaming when spooned out, covered the table. Govormarenko had joked loudly to Putin that delicacies from Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova were all the more savory, to appreciative laughter from guests with full mouths. A yellow haze enveloped the table.

Dominika lay in the four-poster bed under a spectacular rose-colored goose-down comforter, listening to the ticking of an antique ormolu Empire mantel clock and the competing faint buzz of the sea outside her window. She
had one more day in the extended weekend and was positively itching to get back to Moscow, to spin up her SRAC equipment, and to send a flurry of messages reporting everything that had happened. And it was certain that SRAC messages from Nate and Benford to her had been preloaded and would be waiting for the electronic handshake from her unit. She was on fire to know the status of TRITON, the circumstances of Zarubina’s death, whether LYRIC was safe, and the small matter of whether
she
was safe. Hannah’s spirit would be riding with her back to Moscow, she knew, and would be with her when she made her SRAC runs, working the mirrors, wide-eyed and laughing.

How she longed for Nate. The stress of the past days—the drive to Saint Petersburg, waiting on the exfil beach, watching and smelling and tasting this ghastly Putin menagerie—had exhausted her. She missed Nate’s touch, longed to feel his lips. God, she wanted him. Dominika lay still under the billowing comforter and moved her hand between her legs. Grandmother’s long-handled hairbrush—the tortoiseshell talisman that had helped her decipher her first adolescent urges—was in the luxurious tiled bathroom across the room, too far away. It didn’t matter: She closed her eyes and saw Nate. Udranka laughed outside the window as Dominika’s head pushed back deeper into the pillows, and her breath came in puffs through barely parted lips, and her eyes jounced around under closed eyelids, and the jolts started down her legs, to her curling toes. After a few delirious seconds her breath slowed and she blinked her eyes open, wondering for an instant where she was. Her thighs trembled with tiny aftershocks, and she wiped the dew off her upper lip. Then the impossible happened.

There was a soft rattle of the door handle and the door began to open. Dominika half sat up. The leading edge of a brilliant blue halo appeared slowly around the door. Bozhe moy!
My God,
thought Dominika,
it can’t be.

Marta, voluptuous, lush, abundant—with a mane of hair around her face—sat across the room on a couch, legs crossed, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Dominika’s dead sister and fellow Sparrow blew a stream of smoke straight into the air, looked at the swinging door, and then at Dominika. What are you prepared to do? she whispered.

The president slipped into Dominika’s bedroom—presumably knocking was not a consideration when Vlad had something on his mind. He walked slowly, passing through a shaft of moonlight from the ocean-side window that turned his blue halo turquoise. As he rounded the corner of
her four-poster bed, Dominika hurriedly tried composing herself under the comforter—she had been thinking about Nate and her nightgown was gathered above her waist. Was the president’s sudden appearance in her room the result of video coverage in her suite? Had the president watched grainy night footage of the stirrings of her trembling hand beneath the comforter? If he had, he moved quickly.

The president was wearing a plain dark-blue silk sleep shirt and pajama pants—Dominika drolly noted that there were no heraldic devices on the breast of the shirt, no Romanov double eagles, no hammer and sickle, no red star. Putin pulled up a delicate antique chair and sat beside the bed, close to Dominika, as if he were a country doctor come to take a patient’s temperature. Dominika sat up and was about to pull the comforter demurely to her chin but instead let it drop to her lap—
What did it matter, she was Putin’s Sparrow after all
—and reached to snap on the little coral-shaded bedside lamp. She saw the president’s eyes flicker over the bodice of her sleeveless nightgown and the swell of her breasts under the lace.

Across the room, on the Recamier sofa the two of them—Marta and now Udranka—sat watching, her dead Sparrows there to give her strength. Hannah’s ghost would not be here, not her, not for this.

“Good evening, Mr. President,” said Dominika, casually, as if unannounced visits by the silk-festooned Sovereign of all the Russias to female guests’ bedrooms in the Strelna guest mansion after midnight were perfectly common—which, Dominika concluded, they probably were.

“Captain Egorova,” said Putin, not even remotely begging forgiveness for the intrusion, his eyes still on her cleavage. “I have been receiving a steady stream of communications concerning the subject we have been discussing. The most recent cable just arrived.”

“Which subject is that, Mr. President?” said Dominika.

Udranka signaled she should do the discreet Sparrow Shrug and let one lacy nightgown strap fall off her shoulder.
Devchonka,
you slut, be quiet,
thought Dominika.

“About Zarubina’s source TRITON and the American mole in the Center,” said Putin without a trace of impatience. “We received a cable tonight from the Paris
rezidentura.
TRITON attempted contact with the embassy there but the fools thought he was a crank and he was turned away by mistake. He left a local telephone number.”

My God,
thought Dominika, the man who could get her killed was already there and running free in Paris, a phone call away from contact. “So it is likely he escaped. Is the
rezidentura
going to try to find him?” she said. She would have to draft a dozen SRAC messages to Nate and Gable and Benford. They
had
to get after him. Putin did not answer.

“Colonel Zyuganov was informed of TRITON’s appearance by an unauthorized secure phone call from Paris placed by his mother.” Dominika registered that this meant Zyuganov’s phone lines had been monitored. Her suggestion that he was the mole apparently had made an impression. Something else.

Putin leaned back in his chair. His blue halo pulsed. He was enjoying himself; perhaps he was imagining slipping under the comforter next to her. “Colonel Zyuganov was logged out of Vnukovo on a flight to Paris tonight. He has not checked in with our embassy. His whereabouts in Paris are unknown. His mother, Ekaterina, was found murdered in her apartment.”

“Do you think he is gone, fled to the West?” said Dominika.

“Perhaps,” said Putin. “But I believe he has gone to Paris for a desperate reason. I think he will call the local number TRITON left and ask for a meeting.” Putin was thinking this through, dangerously so. Maybe he had doubts about Zyuganov’s guilt. God, she had to transmit SRAC messages, to give CIA enough information to catch TRITON. If Zyuganov spoke to TRITON for even two minutes she would be finished.

“It is possible, Mr. President,” said Dominika. “But what can he hope to accomplish?”

“Isn’t it clear to you?” said Putin. “Zyuganov intends to eliminate TRITON, the source who can identify him as the Americans’ mole.”

“Mr. President!” said Dominika, feigning shock, but gratified that he had made a wrong assumption. Putin’s blue halo positively glowed. The Russian in him was enjoying the chess game; the former KGB officer in him was savoring the maze of contradictions; the despot in him was relishing the mayhem. Something else in him was waking: He looked again at Dominika’s breasts, at the hint of darker nipples under the dentelle lace.
Udranka clucked from the darkened corner of the room.
Putin leaned closer and put his hand on Dominika’s hand.

“I want you to do something,” he said, stroking her wrist. Dominika
waited for him to speak, mentally cataloging the Babylonian possibilities.
Yes, or no, Benford? Nathaniel, will you understand?

“I want you to go to Paris, this morning, without delay. You speak fluent French, yes?” The president’s hand trailed up her stomach and lightly across her left breast. Dominika forced herself—
willed herself
—to stay still. She was conscious of involuntarily widening her eyes. Putin’s X-ray blue eyes searched her face.

“You will arrange a meeting with TRITON before Zyuganov gets to him.” His fingertips left the lace and traced a line on her skin between the swell of her breasts. Dominika was motionless. Could he feel her heart beating? Could he differentiate between the normal pulses of passion and the timpani pounding of revulsion? My God, was this stroking the preliminary to seduction, or was it more like what it seemed: Namely, the caress of a ravening collector handling an antique vase, the affirmation of ownership? Putin’s halo enveloped her. His furry cologne—a ghastly rosewater- and cumin-infused toilet water from someplace like Sochi—got into her nose like a gnat. The president watched her face as his finger slipped under the material and made a slow circle around her left nipple. Dominika, the clinically trained Sparrow, knew the involuntary pilomotor reflex triggered by the release of oxytocin was contracting the skin beneath her nipples, but Vlad baby knew only that she was getting hard.

“After he tells you Zyuganov is the mole, I want you to dispose of TRITON,” said the president. “He is blown, on the run, an embarrassment.”
How charming,
she thought.
Hands on my tits and he orders me to commit statal murder; he wants me to kill for Mother Russia.
He was not content to bleed his country; now he would—once again—defame her. Dominika looked into his unblinking eyes. His lips were pursed as if he had nougat in his mouth. He was sitting very close to the bed, waiting, and Dominika, seized with an appallingly lurid intuition probably shared two thousand years ago by Messalina when she wormed an oiled hand under Claudius’s toga, reached out and put her hand in the president’s lap.

“Kill him?” whispered Dominika. So this was what it would be like as a member of the club. The president’s nostrils flared as Dominika lightly felt around through the silk for the
laska,
the sleeping little weasel in his pajamas.

“And then I want you to clear up any misunderstandings remaining with Colonel Zyuganov,” said Putin. Dominika’s fingers detected something—it might be what she was looking for. Still sleeping.

“What do you—” The president softly squeezed her breast—his fingers were calloused—to silence her. Dominika thought a reciprocal squeeze would be appropriate. Nothing stirred in the silk forest.

“He need not return to Russia,” said Putin. He took his hand away from her breast. Should she do the same? Not yet.

“We have men in Department Five who do these things,” said Dominika, moving her thumb pad up and down. “Mr. President, I am hardly the best candidate.” There was no reaction from between his legs. Was she losing her Sparrow touch? She’d been at the top of the class in what the matron instructors at Sparrow School had called monkey love.

In the corner of the room, Marta and Udranka looked at each other, shaking their ghostly heads.