Red Sparrow (10 page)

She was the only woman in the dormitory and they gave her a single room at the end of the corridor, but she still had to share the bathroom and shower room with twelve men, which meant she had to find quiet times in the mornings and evenings. Most of her classmates were harmless enough, the privileged sons of important families, young men with connections to the Duma or to the armed forces or to the Kremlin. Some were bright, very bright, some were not. A few brave ones, used to getting what they wanted and seeing that silhouette behind the shower curtain, were ready to risk it all for a tumble.

She had reached for her towel on the hook outside the shower stall in the gang bathroom late one night. It was gone. Then a knuckly classmate with sandy hair, the burly one from Novosibirsk, stepped into the stall with her, crowding behind her, his arms around her waist. She could feel he was naked as he pushed her face against the wall of the shower and nuzzled her wet hair from behind. He was whispering something she couldn’t understand; she couldn’t see the colors. He pressed up against her harder and one hand drifted from around her waist to her breasts. As he squeezed her, she wondered if he could feel her heartbeat, if he could feel her breathing. Her cheek was pressed against the white tiles of the stall, she could feel them changing like prisms hung in sunlight, they were turning dark red.

The tapered, three-inch faucet handle for the cold water had always been loose, and Dominika wiggled it back and forth until it came off in her hand. She turned slippery and breathy to face him, breasts now crushed against his chest, and said, “
Stojat,
” wait, wait a second, through a constricted throat. He was smiling as Dominika drove the pointed end of the faucet handle into his left eye up to her knuckle and his vomit-green scream of pain and terror washed over her as he slid down the wall clutching his face, his knees pulled up tight. “
Stojat,
” she said again, looking down at him, “I asked you to wait a second.”

“Attempted rape and justifiable self-defense” was the secret AVR review board’s judgment, and Novosibirsk gained a one-eyed bus conductor and the board recommended that Dominika be separated from Academy training. She told them she had done nothing to cause the incident, and the panel—a woman and two men—looked her up and down and kept straight faces. They were going to do it to her again. Ballet school, Ustinov, now the AVR, and Dominika told the panel she would lodge a formal complaint. To whom would she complain? But word of the incident got back to Yasenevo and Deputy Director Egorov cursed so foully over the phone that Dominika would have seen brown treacle flowing out of the earpiece, and they told her the decision had been made to give her another chance, under probationary status. From then on the rest of her class ignored her, avoided her, a
klikusha
walking between the buildings in the Forest, an impossibly straight back and long elegant steps with the faintest hitch in her stride.

The start of the third block of AVR. They filed into classrooms with plastic chairs, and pebbled acoustic tiles on the walls, and clunky projectors hanging from the ceiling. Dead flies lay in piles between the double windowpanes. Now came instruction in world economies, energy, politics, the Third World, international affairs, and “global problems.” And America. No longer referred to as the Main Enemy, the United States nevertheless was her country’s main competitor. It was all Russia could do to maintain superpower parity. Lectures on the subject took on an edge.

The Americans took them for granted, they ignored Russia, they
tried to
manipulate Russia. Washington had interfered in recent elections,
thankfully to no avail. America supported Russian dissidents and encouraged disruptive behavior in this delicate period of Russian reconstruction. American military forces challenged Russian sovereignty, from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan. The recent “reset” policy was an insult, nothing needed to be reset. It was simply that Russia deserved respect, the
Rodina
deserved respect. Well, if, as an SVR officer, Dominika ever met an American, she would show him that Russia deserved respect.

The irony was that America was in decline, said the lecturers, no longer the high-and-mighty US. Overextended in wars, struggling economically, the supposed birthplace of equality was now divided by class warfare and the poisonous politics of conflicting ideologies. And the foolish Americans didn’t yet realize they would soon need Russia to hem in a galloping China, they would need Russia as an ally in a future war.

But if Americans chose to pit themselves against Russia, thinking she was feeble and weak, they would be surprised. A student in the class disagreed. He suggested that yesterday’s notions of “East and West” were antiquated. Besides, Russia had lost the Cold War, get over it. There was a hush in the classroom. Another classmate stood, eyes flashing. “Russia most certainly
did not
lose the Cold War,” he said. “
It never ended
.” Dominika watched the scarlet letters ascend to the ceiling. Good words, strong words. Interesting. The Cold War never ended.

Not long after, Dominika was separated from the rest of her class. She had no need for language instruction, for she could have been an instructor herself in spoken English or French. Nor was she hustled off to the administrative track. Her instructors had seen her potential, had passed it on to AVR administrators, who in turn had called Yasenevo and requested the Center’s permission to admit Dominika Egorova—niece of the First Deputy Director—into the practical, or operational, phase of training. She would be the rare female candidate trained by the SVR as an
operupolnomochenny,
an operations officer. There were no delays. Approvals from the Center had already been granted.

She had been admitted to operations training, the Real Steel, the Game; she had entered a special phase, the last chrysalis stage before she would
emerge to serve the Motherland. The time passed without her knowing it. Seasons seemed to change without her being aware of them. Classes, lectures, laboratories, interviews all came in a dizzying rush.

It started with ridiculous subjects. Sabotage, explosives, infiltration, first taught when Stalin raved and the Wehrmacht encircled Moscow. Then came the more practical lessons, and they worked her hard. She developed legends,
zashifrovat’,
her cover for movement, ran routes to detect opposition surveillance on the street, found safe houses, transmitted secure messages, found meeting sites,
yavki,
ran
vstrechki,
agent meetings, plotted recruitment approaches. She practiced with disguises and digital communications, signals and caches. Her memory for detail, for lessons learned, astounded them.

Instructors in unarmed-combat class were impressed by her strength and balance. They grew a little alarmed at her intensity and the way she wouldn’t stay down on the mat after having been thrown. Everyone had heard the story from the Forest, and the wide-eyed men in the class watched her hands and knees and protected their
mudya
when sparring with her. She saw their faces, saw the green breath of their disapproval and fear as they huffed and grunted in the gymnasium. No one came near her voluntarily.

The practical instruction continued. They brought her to downtown Moscow, to the streets that were used as a living classroom to practice tradecraft principles taught in the dingy classrooms around Yasenevo. The streetcraft instructors were
pensionerki,
old spooks, some of them seventy years old, retired decades ago. They had some difficulty keeping up with Dominika as the exercises accelerated. They watched her bunched dancer’s calves striding long on the shimmering Moscow sidewalks. The slight telltale limp from her shattered foot, now mended, was endearing. She was driven, determined to excel. Her face shone with perspiration, the sweat darkened her shirt between her breasts and across her ribs.

The colors helped her on the street; the blues and greens from the teams in the radio cars and the watcher vans made it possible to pick out coverage among the crowds on broad boulevards. She twisted surveillance teams around themselves, meticulously timed brush passes on crowded Metro platforms, met practice agents in dirty stairwells at midnight, controlled the meetings, read their minds. The old men would mop their faces and mutter, “
Fanatichka,
” and she would laugh at them, her hair pulled back tight on her
head, her shoulders straight, secretly reading the colors of their breathless approval.
Come on,
dinozavry,
come on, you old dinosaurs.
The gruff old men secretly loved her, and she knew it.

These ancient instructors were supposed to coach her on what conditions would be like abroad, on what she could expect on the street, on how to operate in foreign capitals.
Glupost,
thought Dominika, what stupidity, that these old men who had last been overseas when Brezhnev ordered troops into Afghanistan were telling her what to expect on the streets of modern-day London, New York, or Beijing. She had the temerity to mention the incongruity to a course coordinator, who told her to shut her mouth and reported her comments up the line. Her face flushed at being spoken to that way, but she turned away, cursing herself. She was learning.

As she was being evaluated, Dominika began courses on the psychology of intelligence collection, the psyche of sources, on understanding human motivations and identifying vulnerabilities. An instructor named Mikhail called it “opening the human envelope.” He was a forty-five-year-old SVR psychologist from the Center; Dominika was his only student. He walked her around Moscow, both observing people, watching interactions. Dominika did not tell him about seeing colors, for her mother long ago had made her swear never to mention it. “And how in God’s name do you know that about him?” Mikhail would ask when Dominika whispered that the man sitting on the next park bench was waiting for a woman.

“It just seems that way,” she would reply, never explaining that the bloom of passion-purple around the man flared when the woman came around the corner. Mikhail laughed and looked at her in amazement when it turned out to be right.

As Dominika focused on these practice sessions, her refined intuition told her she was having an effect on Mikhail. Even though he initially featured himself as a stern instructor from Directorate T, she would catch him looking at her hair or stealing darting glimpses at her body. She mentally counted the times he contrived to bump into her, or touch her on the shoulder, or put his hand on the small of her back when going through a door. He radiated desire, a dark crimson fog lingered around his head and shoulders.
She knew how he liked his tea, when he needed his glasses to read a menu, the rate of his heartbeat when pushed close against her in the Metro. She could see Mikhail stealing looks at her unpolished nails, or watching her dangle a shoe off her foot at the café table.

It was a monstrous risk to sleep with him. He was an instructor, and a psychologist to boot, charged with evaluating her personality and suitability for operations. Yet she knew he would say nothing, she knew she had an indefinable hold over him, and making love, a grave dereliction during training, was an edgy thrill, more than physical pleasure.