“Personal contact with Domi is coming up in three days,” said Gable. “They got a good operator to meet our girl?”
“Case officer named Ricky Walters,” said Benford, reading off a cable from Moscow Station. “Looked him up. Good on the street, ice for nerves, likes the ladies, but no zipper trouble in Russia. He looks okay.”
Gable grunted. “In her current pissed-off state, she’s not gonna be happy without covcom. Hope he doesn’t try to get saucy with her,” he said. “He’ll start his return SDR with a kick in the nuts. She doesn’t need another Romeo. Nash is pissing her off enough as it is.”
“Tell me that’s still not a problem, Nash and DIVA,” said Forsyth.
“They’re fucking in love,” said Gable, holding up his hands. “I know, I know, but if you fire Nash, Domi might flat-out quit on us; she’s in that frame of mind lately. So you tell me what’s worse, them belly thumping or her quitting.”
“We may be able to put some space between those thumping bellies,” said Benford. “The Aussies have a clambake brewing in Hong Kong, and they think they might need a Russian speaker. If we send Nash it’ll keep him away from her for a while. We can only hope that an extended separation will result in atrophy of one or both of their libidos.” No one laughed.
“Christ, is there any good news? What about that illegal in New York?” said Forsyth.
“Everything’s done,” said Gable. “Hearsey spritzed the phone and we wrapped it so Domi could load the dead drop in some crazy little 1805 Jewish cemetery on West Eleventh Street in the Village. Thirty moss-covered tombstones on a little triangle of land behind a peeling wall. You’d walk by it all day without seeing it. She put the package behind the middle headstone of three against the brick wall; it tilts forward, so she wedged the package down low. We left it alone, lots of apartment windows around. That gal could be watching the drop.”
“We’ll give it some time, to insulate DIVA, then go up to New York with fifty UV flashlights and bag us an illegal,” said Benford.
* * *
* * *
After New York City—even including Staten Island—feeling the energy, and prosperity, and freedom of America, Dominika had returned to Moscow, which in comparison she now found sluggish, gray, and sad. Back in her office, she attacked her in-box and read through the backlog of SVR global counterintelligence developments. Overseas rezidenturi reported three separate recruitments—in Venezuela, Indonesia, and Spain. The Signals Intelligence Agency, the FAO, had developed access to an encrypted military communications channel in the Baltics. The rezidentura in Washington, DC, reported the beginning of discreet developmental contact between an SVR intelligence officer operating under nonofficial business cover and a Congresswoman from California. The legislator was showing herself to be amenable to a lucrative consulting contract on international development policy and multilateral foreign assistance. The Washington rezident cautiously predicted that an eventual recruitment would be based on money—the representative had previously been implicated in a House banking scandal involving check kiting—and was judged to be corrupt and venal.
These were important intelligence tidbits, but she could not report them to Langley for lack of functioning SRAC equipment. Last weekend, she had buried the SRAC gear damaged in the fight with the street toughs in a hole in Vorontsovsky Park, ten kilometers outside the ring road southeast of Moscow, on the forested grounds of the abandoned eighteenth-century neo-Renaissance Vorontsov-Dashkov Manor. It would be decades before the excavations for the high-rise developments inexorably spreading out from Moscow would reach this far, and by then the city might well be renamed Putingrad, with homeless zombies roaming the dystopian suburbs. By then she hoped she would be lying on a sun-drenched veranda somewhere tropical, sipping rum while Nate painted her toenails Island Pink and, maybe, she dreamed, with a little girl at their feet chattering to her dolls in Russian and English. Would my children be synesthetes? What would Nate say after all these years of keeping the secret? Would we be happy together? Will it ever happen?
Dominika instead minutely printed her report in pencil on both sides of two sheets of water-soluble paper—it would dissolve to mush instantly on contact with liquid—and rolled the sheets into a tight tube. She unscrewed the bottom of a clunky Russian Pukat-brand thermos bottle and slid the paper into the narrow space between the interior glass vacuum chamber and the plastic outer case. In an emergency, throwing or whacking the thermos against a hard surface would shatter the inner-glass chamber, flooding the space between the outer shell, rendering the paper the consistency of ovsyanaya kasha, Russian oatmeal. If you had to use this prehistoric destruction device (Nate had showed it to her in Finland), you already were probably stopped at the roadblock about to be carted off, but it was effective. The personal meet was in two days, and pray God they’re sending someone smart. She fantasized it would be Nate coming out of the shadows to wrap her up and kiss her forever in the fog-shrouded woods.
Then the inevitable courtly call from Gorelikov, welcome back, congratulations on the meet with SUSAN, and the president would see them this afternoon at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow in the Odintsovo District on the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway. The yellow mansion, nestled among pines, with its classical peaked fa?ade and four Corinthian columns, seemed small and modest when compared with the regal apartments of the Kremlin. They were shown into a living room of pale blue with peach-colored satin curtains, sat at a small antique table, and listened to a clock ticking from a corner bookcase across the room. Anton Gorelikov was stylish as usual, in a tailored dark suit and starched tape-stripe shirt. Delicate ceramic cuff links in blue and green showed at his sleeves. The blue halo about his head and shoulders was like a diadem, and glowed in exultation.
They were served tea in elegant podstakanniki glasses emblazoned with the double-headed eagle of the new Russian Federation, ironically similar to the bygone imperial eagle of the Romanovs and the tsar. Plus ?a change, plus c’est la même chose, thought Dominika, The more things change, the more they stay the same. A young aide in a light-blue suit stood against the wall near the door, eerily blending into the blue paneling like some color-adaptive rain forest lizard, so that only his face was visible and seemed to be floating in the air. Dominika reflected that disembodied heads floating in the air seemed normal in a Putin residence.
The little gold and ormolu clock chimed eleven, and at that instant the door opened and the president walked in. How does he do that? thought Dominika. Was he outside the door, hand on the knob, waiting for that infernal clock to chime? Or was the clock connected to an unseen power source and made to chime as the president entered?