Palace of Treason (38 page)

The CIA men took notes. The quiet conversation was businesslike but cordial. There was an occasional chuckle. Nate recorded everything on
his TALON tablet. Benford led them through the entire concerto, including current intel on SVR operations and SRAC reporting—he reminded Dominika that she had to keep her message numbers straight. They discussed Zyuganov, updates on the Iran deal, President Putin, Zarubina, and getting an ID on TRITON. She listened when they told her about the suspicious matter of the recalled military officer from Caracas, and she told them she’d try to find out. Nate spoke to her about possibly adding more SRAC sites for geographic flexibility, and they looked at a map to find contingency backup personal-meeting sites, in case of mechanical failure with the equipment. Personal meetings—a Russian asset meeting a CIA officer in Moscow—were the ultimate risk. For one brief-encounter site Dominika pointed to the massive wooded park on the Luzhniki bend of the Moskva River—
Vorobyovy Gory
, Sparrow Hills—looking out over all Moscow. It was accessible, close to teeming Moscow State University, and there were a thousand ways in and out.
Sparrow Hills,
thought Nate.
You couldn’t make this up.

Gable brought out the book on Red Route Two, the exfiltration plan for Dominika, in case she had to bug out of Russia. They studied it for an hour, and she memorized the timing, routes, and sites. Red Two came with a small equipment package that Gable opened and showed Dominika—they would have to deliver it to her hand-to-hand at the meeting site in Sparrow Hills Park once the location was validated. Nate sweat thinking about an unknown case officer rattling around in those woods with Dominika’s life on the line, until he realized it would be razor-sharp Hannah Archer who was the action officer.
Hannah.
He blinked, uncomfortable, and shifted in his seat.

Benford sat back on the couch, eyes half-closed, listening to Dominika as she talked and the night air stirred the drapes. After the first two hours, Nate went into the kitchen with Gable to get more glasses. “She’s something else,” said Gable. “Most agents have one complete report and parts of a second. She’s bringing out the fucking kitchen sink.”

“If she’s right, she also just saved LYRIC’s life. The general has to listen to me now. We have to get him out.”

“What do I keep telling you?” said Gable. “The best operational security comes from a penetration of the opposition.”

“Miraculous getting that info out of that Yevgeny guy,” said Nate, leaning against the kitchen counter, looking at Gable.

“You getting all huffy now?’ said Gable. “She’s been trained to get info out of men. What do you want from her?”

“Nothing,” said Nate. “She just took a big risk, popping him like that.”

“You gonna ask her if she fucked the guy?” said Gable. “You’re her case officer; you should know everything about her—what she knows, how she got the info, what position he likes best.”

Nate stared at him. “Marty, if you’re trying to piss me off you’re doing it just right.”

“Yeah, well I hope Yevgeny didn’t give her a dose.”

“Fuck you, Marty,” said Nate.

“What did I tell you, rookie? You get involved with her, you invest emotional capital, and it’s going to be a black day when one or both of you have to do your jobs—maybe like she did back there in Moscow. But you don’t listen to me.”

Gable picked up the tray. “Make up your mind whether you’re gonna be the insightful case officer handling his agent with perceptivity and skill or the spoony little choirboy chewing his quivering lower lip.”

Nate followed him through the door. “Golly, Marty, the way you put it, it’s a tough choice.”

Twenty-one hundred hours and Zyuganov sat in the backseat of a Lada Niva, a small utility vehicle belonging to the Moscow police. A police driver dressed in civilian clothes sat behind the wheel smoking, and beside him sat Zyuganov’s new protégée, Evdokia Buchina, unmoving, looking straight ahead down the dark street at a dimly lit door about a block in front of them. Eva was in a light warm-up jacket and pants, and under the unzipped jacket was a white T-shirt stretched tight by her mezzo-soprano’s bust. The sergeant behind the wheel had offered Eva a cigarette earlier in the evening, but she had not looked at him or even responded, so he left it alone, sensing something wrong with the mannish woman. If he only knew what was percolating under those dark roots, or behind those granite eyes, or between those track-and-field thighs, he would have gotten out of the jeep and smoked his cigarette by the rear fender.

Zyuganov looked at his watch. Five more minutes, then they would go through the door and up the narrow staircase of the dingy four-story building in the northeastern Golyanovo district of Moscow to the apartment where Madeleine Didier, second secretary for cultural affairs of the French Embassy—she was in fact the chief of the three-person station of the
Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure
(DGSE), the external intelligence service of France—was meeting a Russian man who worked in the scheduling department of
Sevmash
, Russia’s largest shipbuilding company. The DGSE had been developing the young Muscovite for a year, not, as was usual practice, to steal military secrets on the Russian navy’s next-generation ballistic submarine, but rather to collect commercial intelligence on
Sevmash
to better position French shipbuilders like STX Europe to sell French-built warships to Moscow on advantageous terms.

The CI lead had started small, as it always does, then it got worse. One rainy afternoon the FSB followed an incautious Didier to a restaurant meeting with the
Sevmash
employee, then to another, and to the one after that. FAPSI had intercepted DGSE cables documenting operational progress with the target, who by then had himself been covered in cotton wool—total surveillance coverage—at home, at work, at play.

Zyuganov had no appreciation for the nuances of commercial espionage. All he knew was that a foreign intel service was spying in Moscow, and that President Putin had turned to SVR Line KR counterintelligence
and him,
to handle the situation. In an exhilarating ten-minute personal interview (Zyuganov promised himself there would be many more personal interactions with the president in his future) Putin told him he wanted the matter handled in a
specific
manner, to send a message to the French that Russia was not stupid, that with a
swipe of a paw
the bear could shatter their operation and, particularly, that the long-honored convention between spy services of not using violence against one another’s officers
did not apply.
Putin directed Zyuganov to create shock and fear and to break the French of their
garlicky arrogance
so they would come to the table to sell ships
on Russia’s terms,
which really meant on Putin’s terms, which really meant a closing commission deposited in a sheltered account. Zyuganov stopped listening at “shock and fear” and made careful arrangements to bust the next clandestine DGSE meeting.

Eva had been shaping up nicely since her coming-out performance in the prison cellar, but Zyuganov wanted to test her in the more fluid atmosphere of the street, to see how she would perform against an opponent who wasn’t zip-tied to a chair or strapped spread-eagle on a table. “Eva,” Zyuganov said softly, and the woman opened her door, slid out of the jeep, and came around to stand next to him, her granny glasses catching the light from the streetlamps. They walked to the door of the apartment building, entered, and quietly climbed the dim stairwell. Eva led the way and Zyuganov, without a prurient thought, noted how her gluteus muscles flexed under the fleece warm-up. She trailed a bloom of animal earthiness, of horses and hay and barn.

The third-floor landing was nearly pitch-black, but Eva walked silently to an apartment door near the end of the hall and squared her shoulders to it. She glanced at Zyuganov, who nodded, and then she knocked softly twice. Zyuganov approved, a light tap from a neighbor to borrow some butter, not the pounding of the
militsiya.
The door opened a crack and a man’s face appeared. “I need to telephone,” said Eva in Russian, her voice cracked with urgency, close to crying.

Before the man could answer, Eva shouldered the door open, tearing the chain out of the wood and catching him in the face with the edge. Zyuganov followed her inside in time to see her pick up the dazed man off the floor, step behind him, put one hand on his forehead and the other on his chin, and violently
snap his neck, letting him fall to the floor like wet laundry. Another man came out of the kitchen; he wore a jacket over a shirt, and he reached under it for a gun, but Eva crowded him and held his wrists and pushed him backward into the kitchen. Zyuganov heard dishes breaking and a bellow, and Eva came out of the kitchen with blood on her face, spitting on the rug. Zyuganov looked into the kitchen and saw the man sitting on the floor, holding his neck, with blood squirting through his fingers across the room onto the opposite wall. A short linoleum knife with a bird’s beak curved blade was on the floor beside him. Zyuganov had not even seen Eva take the thing out of her pocket.

So much for French security guards providing cover for the meeting. They had been in the apartment ten seconds.

Eva’s glasses glinted as she shrugged off her arterial-speckled warm-up jacket and wiped her face with it. Zyuganov clinically noted that she was not breathing particularly hard, but that under the straining T-shirt, her nipples stood out. He put a finger under the line of her jaw and felt a rock-steady pulse. Zyuganov held up his hand—
Softly, follow me
—and tiptoed down the little corridor. Light was coming from under the bedroom door. Zyuganov drew an MP-443 Grach auto out of a formed leather holster at his back. As he turned the knob a French voice inside said, “
Qu’est-ce qui a fait ce bruit,
what made that noise?” Zyuganov pushed the door open. Madeleine Didier, in a white shirt and navy skirt, was sitting on a straight-backed chair beside the bed, taking notes on a steno pad. The Russian man was on the bed, sitting up against the headboard. Both of them froze when they saw the nightmare pair of
Petrushka
puppets—one a troll with a gun too big for his hand, the other a gray-eyed reform-school matron with nipples like safe dials—come through the door.

Eva slid behind the Frenchwoman and lovingly slipped a forearm around her throat, stood her up straight, and held her still. Zyuganov stepped up to the Russian man, put a pillow over his face, and shot him in the head through the pillow. The muffled shot made no sound, but the pillow started smoldering from the muzzle’s discharge gases. Didier looked on, horrified, as the pillow fell away to reveal the sightless stare of her source and the wall behind his head dripping applesauce. The traitor’s death sentence carried out, Zyuganov moved to the next page of President Putin’s programme: to complete the horror, to violate the gentlemen’s agreement among spies, and to send an unambiguous message back to the French. Zyuganov nodded to Eva, who
had been watching him while keeping mild but unyielding pressure on the Frenchwoman’s throat. They had been in the apartment for ninety seconds.

Madeleine Didier was forty-six, a married mother of two. She had risen through the administrative ranks of an unapologetically chauvinistic DGSE with a combination of smarts, good looks, and the willingness to challenge the overstuffed croissants in her service who tried to sideline her, or deny her promotion, or put their milk-fed hands on her knee. Sharp-featured, with liquid brown eyes and shoulder-length black hair, she had unexpectedly landed the plum Moscow posting and was determined to make her mark in operations, as she had done in the management track. The
Sevmash
case had excited the analysts at the Swimming Pool (
La Piscine
, the nickname for DGSE Paris Headquarters because of its proximity to a nearby swimming federation pool) and Madeleine knew that continued production from her source would give her even more political leverage on her return to Paris next year.

Even as she was being stood on her toes by this carnival creature, the elegant Mme Didier did not fully comprehend that her heady foray into the glittering, champagne-bubble world of international espionage and intrigue had been interrupted by two cloven-hoofed, elemental beasties the likes of which not many in the sunlight-basking world could imagine existed. Brutal Moscow was one planet too far for Madeleine Didier and the DGSE. So it was with some disbelief and rising French indignation that she was thrown facedown on the bed and roughly, impossibly, had her shirt, skirt, brassiere, and
culottes
(Chantelle) yanked off, and her Saint Laurent patent leather Escarpin pumps (460 euros) pulled off her feet and thrown into the corner of the room. Real alarm rose in the Frenchwoman’s mind when her hands were tied together behind her back.

As Zyuganov watched, Eva pulled Didier to her feet and put a strangle-knot loop of electrical cord around her neck and strained it tight, cutting off the protests that quickly morphed into short screams of panic and, with the increasing constriction, rasping gasps for air. Eva pushed Didier back against the bedroom door, grabbed her around the hips with one arm, and lifted her two inches off the floor. With her free hand, Eva flipped the loose end of the electrical cord over the top of the door and wound it around the doorknob on the other side. Eva then let Didier go. The cord stretched, the hinges crackled with the extra weight, and the knob creaked in protest, but Madeleine Didier’s toes were now an inch off the floor, and her heels started
beating against the door, her bound hands scrabbled at the wood, and the cord bit into her neck, forcing her head to a lopsided angle as saliva dribbled out one side of her open mouth. Eva stood close to her and watched her through her wire-rimmed glasses as the shuddering in the feet and shoulders started, and Madeleine’s eyes stopped blinking and went wide in the amazed horror that this was happening to her, the head of the French service in Moscow, in a civilized world, with her husband waiting for her at home and her expensive still-warm shoes tossed in the corner of the room.

It had been four minutes since Zyuganov and Eva entered the apartment.

Eventually the involuntary tremors stopped and Madeleine was still. Eva tilted her head to look at the blackened, slack face, then turned to Zyuganov, who was collecting Didier’s notebook and phone. He emptied the contents of her purse on the floor so the police would find her identification, and, looking at the dead Russian man again, he signaled Eva to follow him. Didier’s body swung as they opened the door, which slowly drifted back from the weight on the hinges, and a lock of hair fell across her face. They stepped over Monsieur Broken Neck in the front room, and Zyuganov, avoiding the blood pool in the kitchen, lifted the lid of a warm pot on the stove. It was Russian red lentil soup, his favorite, and he took the pot and two spoons to the couch, where they took turns taking sips.
It’s good, but not enough cumin.
Eva, his genetically contorted engine of vengeance, spoon poised above the pot, deferentially waited for Zyuganov to take a spoonful before she dipped in.

“Go on,” he said, paternally. “Eat your soup.”

Zyuganov reviewed Egorova’s first report from Athens. She was methodically interviewing officers from every department of the Russian Embassy, and sending her anodyne reports through encrypted channels from the
rezidentura. She could flail around in Greece for as long as she wants,
thought Zyuganov,
while I narrow down the suspects here in Moscow and bag the GRU traitor who’s talking to the Americans.

Things were going well with the Persians too: Zyuganov had gotten energy sector big shots like Govormarenko together several times with dreary Iranian nuclear representatives from AEOI, and details about the purchase, transport, and delivery of the seismic floor were being hammered
out. Zyuganov was sure this progress was being reported to Putin, to his credit. At one Moscow meeting he had taken the Iranian secret-service rep, Naghdi, aside and outlined his concept of transporting the cargo via an internal water route through Russia and the Caspian to ensure secrecy. He presented the plan as chiefly his own, saying only that other officers had “discussed its feasibility.” The Persian scowled at him, but looked impressed nevertheless. Zyuganov daydreamed about letting Eva give the bearded Persian a deep-tissue massage with a carpenter’s adze.

Eva. And Egorova. That would be quite a dance. Zyuganov rolled the idea around in his head of sending Eva to Athens to arrange an accident. He knew he couldn’t whack Egorova outright: Putin liked her and had his eye on her. But Eva could push Egorova into traffic, or throw her down the stairs, or snap her neck in a slippery bathtub. It could also be a nice touch if Egorova disappeared completely. His Line KR would be the very section to investigate the possibilities: kidnapping, accidental drowning, defection. He could keep the ball rolling for years.