“Bratok, you do not torment him too much, do you? He’s so young, like you were once.” Gable grunted.
“I was born old. But tell me more about the Spetsnaz sergeant.”
“This man Blokhin is worse than either Zyuganov or Matorin. He is intelligent, but behind his eyes are, how do you say, hot rocks like when you grill shashlik.”
“Like hot coals? Well, don’t arm wrestle him,” said Gable.
“I am forcing myself to go with him to an event at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue in two days. A Russian journalist, Daria Repina, is speaking at a Free Russia fund-raising event. She is a loud critic of everything Putin does. She is without fear, but now that she is in America raising money it will become dangerous for her.”
“Is it smart for you to be going to something like that? Why would a Spetsnaz snake eater want to go to hear some dissident?” said Gable.
“Attending with him will be a good appearance—I mean bona fides—for me,” said Dominika. “It is a public event. I will stay in the background and leave early. As for Blokhin, I think he is curious. Like a dog sniffing a lamppost. It will be his last night in New York. We both return separately to Moscow the next day.”
“And when you get back, you find out the name of MAGNIT, fast as you can, right?”
“Someone will make a slip. I will hear the name eventually,” said Dominika.
“That’s all well and good, but we gotta wrap MAGNIT up before then, preferably before you’re briefed on the case, before you’re officially told his name. How’s it gonna look if he gets arrested the very weekend you’re read in? Plus that prick is selling secrets wholesale. So let’s blow him up ASAP.”
“There is a problem.” Dominika told Gable about the malfunction with her SRAC transmitter after she had brained the street mugger. Gable shook his head.
“We wondered why you hadn’t sent anything for a week. I told them you had a boyfriend and wouldn’t get out of bed.”
“Nekulturny,” she said. Crude and rude.
“Dammit. Bad time to lose your commo,” said Gable. “I’ll cable the station to get you another set. You want them to cache it or do a personal meet?”
“If you have a good station officer who won’t bring surveillance with him, a personal meet is faster than me digging up a package in the forest. There are five new brief-encounter sites left in the inventory that are still good.”
“You sure? I’d rather break one nail using a shovel than have ten nails pulled out in a prison basement,” said Gable. One normally did not remind agents about being captured and tortured, but Gable and Dominika dealt with each other on a different plane.
“Bratok, that is because you are delicate and sensitive,” said Dominika.
“You fucking got that right,” said Gable, as he signaled for the bill.
KIYMALI ISPANAK—TURKISH SAUTéED SPINACH
Sauté finely chopped onion in olive oil and butter. Add ground beef and cook until browned. Add diced tomatoes, red-pepper paste, tomato sauce, and a handful of rinsed rice. Season and stir to incorporate. Layer coarsely chopped spinach on top, cover and cook on medium heat until spinach is wilted and rice is tender. Serve with a dollop of yogurt and crusty country bread.
8
To Shoe a Flea
Dominika sat on the upper deck of the crowded, lumbering Staten Island Ferry, drolly appraising the collection of people lining the rail—they looked primarily like tourists—talking about, pointing at, and photographing the receding skyline of Manhattan. They would then rush to the starboard rail to snap the Statue of Liberty, then stampede back to gawk at a vintage gaff-rigged schooner tacking up the bay. They honked like a flock of geese. They were dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and brassiere tops, and wore boots, sneakers, shoes, and sandals, a bizarre tribe that rasped at Dominika’s Russian sensibilities. She was dressed in a light cotton summer-print dress, with fashionable flats, and carried a beige over-the-shoulder bag. She wore her Line T sunglasses. Despite the raucous passengers, she thought these ferries were a marvel, big orange birthday cakes that never stopped crisscrossing the bay, nothing like the belching, shark-nosed hydrofoils that skimmed across Lake Ladoga from Saint Petersburg.
She literally had been swept down the ferry boarding ramp by the crush of laughing, excited sightseers, past placid bomb-sniffing dogs, and was able to find a quiet seat along the outside rail where she enjoyed the salt breeze and thought about today’s meeting with the illegal, SUSAN. She had returned to her hotel room last night and felt the rubber band around her doorknob, a signal confirming a meeting at the site on Staten Island tomorrow afternoon. Dominika wondered if the old lady down the hall had snapped the band in place. She had reviewed the memorized drill, the surveillance detection route she would take: ferryboat, Staten Island train, walking route up to and through the sprawling Moravian Cemetery on Todt Hill, and final approach to the site (which was inside the ornate mausoleum of Gilded Age billionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, constructed in 1886, and secluded in a private, wooded corner of the park). She had studied the satellite images and memorized the way along the lanes that wound through the forty-five hectares of the graveyard, and knew she could find her way to the site at the appointed time, without coverage. God knew who she had to worry about more on the street during this insane operation—Russians, the illegal, or the FBI.
Gable had been right: Moscow had moved fast. This call-out for the meeting with the illegal came less than forty-eight hours after Dominika had arrived in New York. Dominika could imagine the hurried consultation between Gorelikov and Putin in the Kremlin, their quiet voices briefly discussing options and then the stoic, blue-eyed nod validating whatever tactics Gorelikov suggested to enable the contact. Dominika immediately had gone back out and called Gable from a public phone at a nearby bar, to tell him that “lunch was on tomorrow.” Gable told her to stay cool, that everything she did or said would get back to the men who would be evaluating her. They agreed to meet after Dominika returned to Manhattan.
A swarthy young man leaning against the ferry rail in front of Dominika was obviously a local from Staten Island, dressed in a sports jersey, his dark hair slicked back. He noticed Dominika and came to sit beside her on the plastic molded seat. He flirted, charming and irreverent, his face close, pointing out landmarks as the ferry plowed across New York Harbor, including the arching Verrazano-Narrows Bridge—he called it the Guinea Gangplank although it was unclear to Dominika why—connecting the two boroughs of Brooklyn and Staten Island. Dominika could understand about half of what he said, but smiled and looked where he pointed. When she told him she was from France, he winked at her and knowingly said “Nice wines.”