Palace of Treason (47 page)

Five thousand miles east, Alexei Zyuganov also fumed at his desk in Line KR in Yasenevo. Those swineherds in FSB had blown it last night at the last possible moment—an additional second of restraint and they would have reeled in the Russian skunk the Americans intended to meet in that dismal warehouse district. He was sure of it. And chances were that it would have been the mole, the big fish they were all looking for. Instead they had
a diplomatic incident on their hands: The accidental death of the American woman would cost more than one man on the surveillance team his job, and he personally would see that prison time would be tacked on. The blond American was nothing to him—unimportant. But on getting the word, he had hurried to the police morgue in Lyublino in the Southeastern Okrug to examine her belongings—he found only her dip ID card and the commercial thermal scope. A blue, woven cotton bracelet had been cut off her wrist. No meeting notes, no pocket litter that might provide a clue to who she was meeting. He checked the lining and seams of her clothing. He cut into the heels of her snow boots, ripped out the insoles. Nothing. They had lifted the sheet to show him the blue-black, caved-in right side of her body, and he instead looked at the face and had a microsecond of bat-wing doubt: a young woman such as this, operating in the capital, stealing their secrets, recruiting Russians. How many others like her? What sort of opponent was this?

Zyuganov checked his watch. The Foreign Ministry would be informing the American Embassy about Blondie in an hour, after they finished screaming at and slapping the fat face of the CIA chief who had been kept in an FSB office for nearly six hours, covered in dried mud and with snot dripping out of the armadillo he called his nose. His weeping, cringing performance was filmed, including when he made a puddle under his chair. It would play well in a future television documentary. To his credit, he had not admitted anything to the interrogators, and certainly did not confirm what they already knew: that the young girl on the gurney was a CIA officer. The whole evening was a waste.

Messy, inconvenient, incompetent. Zyuganov instinctively knew, however, that this incident would not ruffle the president’s feathers. In fact, he would insist on press play. Any evidence of perfidious CIA violating the sovereignty of Russia played into Putin’s domestic narrative. Russia must stay strong against the predations of the West. The Cold War never ended. Rebuild Russia’s former power and majesty. Putin himself liked to tell the story:

It is discovered that Stalin is alive and living in a cabin in Siberia. A delegation is sent to convince him to return to Moscow, assume power, and restore Russia to greatness. After some reluctance, Stalin agrees to come back. “Okay,” he says, “but no Mr. Nice Guy this time.”

Zyuganov, in fact, was secretly glad the FSB had not successfully sprung the trap. He wanted to wrap up the mole himself, based on the name TRITON was going to provide to Zarubina in five days’ time. He wanted to drag the traitor in chains to Putin only slightly less than he wanted to strap the swine to a table and listen to the hiss of escaping perfumed air as he perforated his thoracic cavity with a surgical trocar. Besides, Zyuganov had become preoccupied with a nascent theory about the mole. A small, niggling idea, delicious to contemplate, impossible to let go of. He was still forming his theory. He would be like a speckled
karakurt,
the venomous steppe spider, tightroping along the web, laying more silk, tips of his little feet on the signal line, waiting for a vibration.

Captain Dominika Egorova, of the elegant stride and blue-eyed ice. She had a spectacular ops history—you might say it transcended luck. She had survived—improbably—attacks by a Spetsnaz assassin, Department Five mechanics, and Eva Buchina. She miraculously had developed the information to nail Korchnoi. Quite remarkable. Her performance regarding the Iran deal—the suggestion regarding the water route through Russia had pleased Putin—to Zyuganov’s pinched mind hinted at some sort of coaching. Who knew such geography? And her remarkable intuition about recalling Solovyov from Athens was implausible. Really? On the basis of one interview?

And more recently there were other gossamer tugs of the web. The Athens
rezident
had cabled Line KR congratulations on Egorova’s successful investigation. A fawning
rezident
wrote Zyuganov that he regretted he didn’t have the opportunity to entertain the captain more, but he understood the preferences of a counterintelligence inspector. Curious, Zyuganov had called Athens on the secure phone to discover that Egorova had chosen to stay not at the compound, but in an unknown outside hotel. With the exception of a few Russian Embassy reception evenings, Egorova had been out-of-pocket every night for two weeks. Not an infraction, but irregular.
How could one explain all the suspicious factors? What was this busty ex-ballerina doing every night? Should he ask her? No, better not to telegraph his interest. TRITON and Zarubina would supply the answer soon enough.

There was another stone in his shoe. Zyuganov caught a fleeting interaction between Egorova and his deputy, Yevgeny, in the corridor outside
his office. Egorova was leaving the conference room and Yevgeny made way for her in the doorway, bowing slightly at the waist in comic-opera butler style. That was not so much—Yevgeny was a hairy clown in front of women—but Zyuganov was interested, very interested, to see Egorova flash a smile at him. Zyuganov knew nothing about flirting, or courtship, or seduction, but other synapses fired, inky thoughts that his busty celebrity employee was working on Yevgeny, that he was being flanked, that she threatened him.

Egorova’s most-favored status with Putin was the ultimate screaming outrage. Zyuganov gnashed his teeth at the thought of it. He had rounded up spies. He had handled the Persians. In fact, he had done as much to secure the Iran deal as anyone. Govormarenko had said so himself, had mentioned it to Putin. So why was she favored? When he became Zarubina’s deputy director in SVR, he would be shown more respect.
And by the time I become deputy,
he thought,
Putin will have moved on from Egorova, and then her fortunes will be what
I
decide
:
SVR advisor to the Northern Fleet at Severomorsk; intelligence administrator in Grozny, Chechnya; adjutant at the Kon Institute, back to Sparrow School. Let her spend the rest of her career demonstrating fellatio to hayseed students from the republics.
Then he remembered:
If she turns out
not
to be the mole.

Zyuganov would have been apoplectic if he had known about Putin’s invitation to her for some sort of power weekend near Petersburg. He would have been additionally outraged if he knew that Dominika had persuaded Yevgeny—Sparrow style—to sign an authorization chit for a pool car for Egorova to drive the six hundred kilometers to Strelna on the M10. Yevgeny increasingly was seeing the light: Having Dominika as an ally was the smart bet, so he took the risk of not telling Zyuganov.

Word came to Benford and his coterie simultaneously from the Ops Center and State Department wire in a treble rush of body-blow news. The Foreign Ministry informed the consul general of the US Embassy in Moscow that First Secretary Vernon Throckmorton had been detained by Federal Security Service officers on suspicion of espionage but had invoked diplomatic
immunity. He was free to return to the embassy, but the Ministry was issuing PNG expulsion orders designating Mr. Throckmorton persona non grata. He was given forty-eight hours to leave Russia.

The second piece of bad news was in fact the absence of news: DIVA had not responded to three separate SRAC messages loaded by a dyspeptic DCOS Schindler urgently calling for a sign-of-life reply. She could be home sleeping, recovering from what must have been a nightmare evening of a busted meeting—Janice, Dante, and Nate had lived it, knew the freezing cold gripping the legs, felt the sweat running underneath the layers of clothing, remembered the sound of men and vehicles coming closer from behind, the sides, and all around. Or DIVA could be in a chair in some overheated office with sooty venetian blinds carelessly canted, handcuffed, and stripped to her underwear, while a rotation team of FSB officers—little sly men, or brutal brawlers, or wet-lipped matrons—softened her up before the vertigo ride in the back of a van to Lefortovo or Butyrka for the real pros to begin. These would include the alligator-clip, car-battery fraternity of interrogators, chemists, doctors, and psychologists, a
Matryoshka
collection of tormentors, like wooden nesting dolls, each monster emerging out of the previous monster, each succeeding horror worse than the previous one until the final horror. Which, Benford knew, would be Zyuganov.

The third piece of bad news was the worst. Dante was summoned to the Ops Center after midnight to pick up a statement off the wire—impersonal, dismissive, with the familiar trace of Soviet irony—from the protocol department of the Russian Foreign Ministry:
Third Secretary Hannah Archer of the US Embassy died in a traffic accident late in the evening of the 10th. Due to inattention on her part, she was struck by a vehicle in rainy conditions. The US Embassy is requested to inform the Ministry regarding the disposition of the remains.

Dante sat with his head in his hands. Margery and Janice were silent, red-eyed, sniffling. Benford sighed. “She was an exceptional young woman,” he said softly. He looked up at Nate. “What are you prepared to do?” he said. Everybody in the room turned toward him.

“I’m going to make it rain on Zarubina,” said Nate quietly. “She’s not getting Domi’s name.” Benford stared at him in silence, and Nate looked him right back in the eyes.

“Simon, spin up Red Route Two,” said Nate. “DIVA’s coming. And no one’s going to stop her.”

Yevgeny told Dominika at the morning staff meeting about the young woman—suspect CIA officer Hannah Archer—who had been struck and killed by a surveillance car in Lyubertsy District the night before. FSB was keeping the accident quiet for the time being. Dominika’s mind clicked off as she collected her files, and she heard herself say something offhand, like “I hope they roast the stupid idiot who did it” and got back to her office, sat down behind her desk, fought tears, and tried to breathe.

Udranka called to her from the corner of the room. We’re all the Kremlin Mermaids,
dushka,
we’re all with you. And Hannah walked through the door and smiled at her.

She had always been able to control her outward emotions, even as she built, refined, and polished the soaring rage that had become part of her. The death of Hannah rocked her as much as Udranka’s murder had, but with the added pain of knowing the spirited, devoted, brave little nature girl had saved her life last night. She closed her eyes and asked Nate for help, asked why she, Dominika, brought death. And there was an old soldier waiting in his apartment for the interrogations to resume, a process most certainly to conclude with
vyshaya mera,
the highest punishment. She had put him in the cellars, and she was going to get him out—tonight.

As Dominika left work, a new image came to her, gentle and fair, yet terrible and deadly. She thought of her grandmother’s stories about the
Rusalki,
the mythic Russian water nymphs, the lovely, long-haired mermaid demons who were the spirits of young women, dead before their time. They would sit along the shore and sing, and lure men close, to drag them to the bottom.

Dominika knew she would have the spirits of Marta, Udranka, and Hannah riding with her.
We’ll sit on the shore, sisters, and sing, and then you’ll be able to rest.
Then she thought,
Hurry up, you’re losing your mind.
And the sweet nymphs in her mind’s eye turned into something with canine red eyes living in the freezing coal-black of a warehouse.
And you can come, too; we all go together.
Whatever was going on in that overheated brain
and anguished breast, Yevgeny saw it in her face and did not say good night, much less suggest a farewell session of slap-and-tickle before she left. Zyuganov also saw her walk past his office door, and his schitzy receptors registered that she looked different—suffused with something—another tantalizing anomaly for his Egorova-the-mole theory, another furry fact for the dung beetle to roll back to the brood hall and munch on.

Nine o’clock. Her hands shook as she washed the single plate and teacup with painted sparrows on it. She couldn’t exactly remember packing the small overnight case, but somehow the high heels went in, along with the dress with the plunging neckline. She checked the tool kit for Red Route Two and the test lights winked green; she looked around her apartment wondering if she would ever be back, and saw her bed, neatly made—she hated what she had done in it—but she was going to pull this off and send them to hell. The dark-blue Lada Priora from the motor pool had a stick shift and smelled like hulled pistachios; Dominika ground the gears until she got the feel for it. Kutuzofsky Prospekt was crowded, but the MKAD was a belching, streaming mass of evening traffic and she couldn’t roll the windows down to breathe—she couldn’t remember breathing—but she got off onto M10 and then onto Yubileynyy, then took a right turn onto Lavochinka, LYRIC’s street, and found the building directly across from Dubki Park and the golden domes of the Church of the Epiphany in Khimki, walls walrus-tusk white, and found the apartment block with the covered cement entrance painted a faded pink. Dominika went up the stairs, past apartment doors, listening to the televisions and the crying babies, her heart pounded in her mouth, her jaw throbbed, and her vision was a gray cone as the door opened. The bored police officer guarding the old man had a flat, ugly face and lank dirty hair and wore a track suit. LYRIC was visible in the living room behind him, in old felt slippers, sitting on a couch, newspapers on the floor. Dominika’s arm moved before her brain willed it, aiming at the hollow of the meaty neck, and the policeman staggered back one step, clutching his smashed trachea, then collapsed. Dominika stepped over his strangling blue face, and General Solovyov, looking shrunken, put on some pants, shoes, and topcoat—no discussion—and her voice was
someone else’s, and she shook him then pulled him, ignoring the slack-eyed stare on the floor, down the stairs. She dragged the seat belt across the old man’s chest, smelling sour fear, and she had to backtrack, then got onto M10, sometimes four lanes, usually two, the trucks had trailers with bald tires, the bastards didn’t ease over to let her pass, so peek and floor it, engine whining, over and over and over. The general was silent, not asking, looking straight ahead, her responsibility now, eleven o’clock and the muddy little towns, Zelenograd, Solnechnogorsk, Klin, Novozavidovsky, Tver, and Dominika asked him how much time; they probably had another hour before the relief guard discovered the body. The general started rambling, honor and the Red Army and Russia, and he called himself a fool, he knew it now, an old
zhopa,
an old asshole, and he asked who she was, and cried remembering his children, and thanked her over and over, and his panicked green words filled the dark of the car, with the center line painted not exactly straight, and the oncoming headlights filled her eyeballs, and the rearview mirror was clear and dark, and the towns stopped; now came the vastness of the
Rodina
, spruce and pine trunks in the headlights, flashing metronome steady, midnight and the land flattened to the horizon, the floor of the sky, stars like dust, and Dominika’s eyes started to blur. She shook her head, and the hound loped on the road in front of her, looking back at her with red eyes, and she heard Udranka laughing somewhere out there in the dark fields, and red dog eyes became the flashing red lights of a GAI traffic militia on the shoulder, the undercarriage of a truck visible in the ditch, a cop waving them through, no radio alerts yet. The road kept unpeeling itself into the black vastness ahead; she looked at the general and Hannah was sitting there instead, with her hands in her lap and the wind in her hair, and Dominika caught it before they drifted into the trees. The general helped her stay awake, with cold night air and Soviet patriotic songs, “
Katyusha
” and “
Svyaschennaya Voyna
(The Sacred War),” sung in a roaring bass, then hiccups from singing so hard, then laughing, two spies hurtling through the night with wet cheeks and the King of Hell’s dog in the headlights, loping tirelessly as they ghosted through Veliky Novgorod, at one o’clock, two hundred kilometers to go. Then the singing and remembering were too much, he wanted to turn around, sniffling, then silence and the city glow of Saint Petersburg, where the roadblocks would be. Two o’clock, and Dominika got off the M10 onto the KAD to avoid going into the city, the early morning
ring road was empty. Now she had to watch her mirrors; it would be here, jeeps across the roadway, they’d both be cooked now. Three o’clock, and the little blue car was on the Petergofskoye, the A121, along the tsar’s long-ago palace coast; there were glimpses of the Gulf of Finland and tang of ocean, and they were past the lighted gates of Constantine Palace—the president was in—then the darkened Peterhof Palace, massive white in the distance, then the domes of the Oranienbaum Palace—nothing in the mirrors—now under the KAD causeway. She checked the kilometers—exactly two point four said Benford—and the marshy coast opened up on the right, water flat as silver glass, and she turned at a squat billboard onto the pitch-black beach road, windows down and headlights playing over the riprap boulders and the stony beach and the sea grass. Now she turned the lights off, pulled the hand brake to crunch to a stop; it was nearly four o’clock. And where the water was clear up to the beach, opposite the boulder with two vertical slashes in red paint, was the start of Red Route Two.

General Solovyov—and his interrogation and conviction for espionage—was Zyuganov’s responsibility. The relief guard had called in at midnight reporting that Solovyov’s apartment was empty except for the corpse of
starshina
Bogdanov—the sergeant’s windpipe had been crushed. Zyuganov was informed an hour later and came as close to losing his mind as he ever had. He was in his office within a half hour, raving into the phone about CIA action teams loose in Moscow. He screamed high-pitched at the SVR watch center duty officer to issue Moscow-wide bulletins describing Solovyov to police and
militsiya
units throughout the city. Yevgeny, unshaven and sleepy, was told to connect with Moscow Police’s Main Office of the Interior for Transport and Special Transportation and
this instant
order a 100 percent watch at Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo, and Vnukovo International Airports and at Bykovo regional airport. Zyuganov woke up the director of the FTS, the Federal Customs Service, and demanded that his Department of Contraband Control at the airports X-ray without exception all large outgoing diplomatic pouches from the American, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand embassies (the Five Eyes allies had been in league against Russia since the October Revolution in 1917). When told
by the Customs director—himself a former KGB crony of the president—that diplomatic pouches were inviolable, Zyuganov impoliticly threatened to smash his testicles with a Moscow telephone book, and the director said,
Idi na khui,
fuck off, and hung up.

Zyuganov was breaking crockery all around town, issuing orders and making threats; the
siloviki
wire, the crony network, even at this hour started buzzing about the missteps, the potential colossal failure of the little SVR ghoul whom no one liked or trusted anyway. Careers—and not just careers—were in real jeopardy when such gossip floated up and eventually reached the Kremlin, like an embolism reaching the brain. Zyuganov knew he was making a show of himself, but he couldn’t let Solovyov escape. He was already exhausted, but the sandstorm in his head abated for a second and he could think. It wasn’t the local CIA station; they had lost one of their own and were leaderless at the moment. No, CIA would direct one of their
assets
to spirit Solovyov out of Russia. Would they risk their best asset—the Mole—to save this old man? They might: The Americans historically had gone to great and expensive lengths to rescue lost assets, something his own service did not bother about.

And what kind of person could deliver such a devastating blow against a trained police officer—Bogdanov had been a shot-put champion in the police league—killing him without a struggle? Egorova, trained in
Sistema;
Egorova, who killed Spetsnaz operatives and the unbeatable Buchina; Egorova, the ballerina who was mesmerizing the president. Egorova, his nemesis. He screamed for Yevgeny, ordered him to call Egorova at home and tell her to report to the Center instantly, but his hirsute deputy would not look him in the eye. Something was going on. Zyuganov recalled Egorova smiling at Yevgeny—was he covering for her? As Yevgeny sweated in a chair in Zyuganov’s office, an assistant called Egorova’s apartment—no answer at two thirty in the morning.

Ten minutes of roaring questions at a terrified Yevgeny netted no results, but the interrogator in Zyuganov sensed that there was much to find out. The dwarf’s instincts, already aroused, now stood on hind legs and howled at the moon. Taking a steel spring baton out of a bottom desk drawer, Zyuganov wheeled on Yevgeny. The panicked assistant in the outer office quietly left her desk and ran down the hallway—she had no desire to hear the coming attractions. Zyuganov was aware only of an itchy impatience
to learn what was happening—he was aware of a clock ticking down, of criminals making their escape. He swung and brought the barrel of the baton down on the chair’s armrest, splintering four of the five long metacarpal bones in Yevgeny’s left hand. The hairy baboon screamed like, well, a hairy baboon, clutched his ruined hand, and doubled over. Zyuganov yanked him upright and brought the black steel spring down on the top of Yevgeny’s left thigh, creating a greenstick fracture of the femur just above the knee. Yevgeny grunted like a beast and collapsed off the chair onto the floor. Like an insect that can lift ten times its own weight, Zyuganov bodily hauled Yevgeny back up into the chair, where his protégé sat with spittle on his chin, his head lolling. Zyuganov brought his face close to Yevgeny’s, inhaled the familiar, delectable scents, and whispered,
Pora spat’, polnoch; skoro zapojut petuhi,
it’s time to go to bed; it’s midnight and roosters will sing soon. The Lubyanka Lullaby.