Anton recognized that the notion of espionage as an engine of Audrey’s emancipation was a potent control factor. Additional control naturally came from her sexual appetites. Despite liberalizations in the US armed forces, Anton continually harped on the necessity of keeping her predilection for female lovers a secret lest she derail her career. The closeted world that Audrey inhabited kept her in an itchy state and made her a better agent: nervy, edgy, and resentful. Her annual vacations abroad were delicious opportunities to spot, pursue, and bed tantalizing lovers. Anton several times had to intercede with local authorities when sessions with Audrey and a local partner became too spirited—Audrey on the boil occasionally became physical. Anton even arranged for forged-alias identity cards to keep her true name out of local police blotters if things got out of control. The sex was a handling problem, but it was worth the bother as a tool to control MAGNIT, for when she was back in Washington behind her desk at ONR, the Office of Naval Research, broad stripes on her sleeves and three stars on her collar, she was by necessity benignly celibate, and had to live the part.
Anton even advised her to eschew battery-operated boyfriends at home because she was assigned a live-in navy steward and cook in the gabled Victorian Quarters B on Admiral’s Row at the Washington Naval Yard in SE Washington. He sternly told her that her snow-white image as a laudably asexual professional would be sullied if her staff found any sex toys, and rumors would quickly circulate about the wild-haired, three-star stoker in the attic at midnight with a 220 V massager making the lights flicker and scaring the mice. The same applied when Audrey one year discovered spicy Thai cucumber salad while on a temple tour in northern Thailand, and announced she would have her cook in Washington prepare it often. During their meeting in the swanky Anantara Resort in provincial Chiang Mai, Anton sternly told her to leave the contents of the reefer crisper alone; the household staff would be bound to notice missing cucumbers. Audrey laughed at the image. After so many years, Uncle Anton could talk to her about such things freely.
Between her sustaining foreign meetings with Uncle Anton, MAGNIT met once a month in Washington with GRU handlers who were military intel officers from the Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue. Covered as run-of-the-mill military attachés, GRU spooks rarely ran true clandestine sources, inhabiting instead the margins of classic intelligence of elicitation, open-source collection, and technology transfer. The meetings were held in suburban parks and along nature trails and greenswards in Washington and suburban Maryland and Virginia. These meetings were little more than five-minute brief encounters during which Audrey would pass her intel and send messages to Uncle Anton. Audrey’s quantitative mind took to the challenge of finding imaginative meeting sites, ones that she could surveil from a distance to ensure the GRU dolt-of-the-month hadn’t dragged FBI surveillance with him. Audrey had discussed the fine points of site casing with Anton—her tutor in so many things—and had become quite adept. Audrey had lost count of the endless discs, thumb drives, digital cameras, hard drives, and, occasionally, sheaves of physical documents, bound volumes, and printouts on every aspect of naval-weapons research, antisubmarine warfare, ship design and radar, stealth technology, and encrypted communications she dumped in the laps of her handlers. After twelve years in harness, she couldn’t have accurately listed the sum total of the secrets she had passed the Russians. She really didn’t care. The three stripes on her uniform coat were reason enough to continue.
A source such as MAGNIT unquestionably was the jewel in the GRU crown, as well as a constant burden on the collective abilities of GRU Headquarters, commonly known as the Aquarium. From the beginning, Anton Gorelikov had been secretly assigned by Putin to monitor the MAGNIT case, and observe the quality and durability of GRU tradecraft. When MAGNIT received her third star, Gorelikov none-too-gently began prying the case away from the military, eventually to be assigned to an illegals officer in New York who would be anonymous, invisible, and inviolate. At that time, the MAGNIT cryptonym would be changed and the files tightly restricted. Gorelikov also had his eye on SVR Chief of Counterintelligence Colonel Egorova, who he thought eventually could share MAGNIT handling duties abroad, based on her previous experience in street operations and counterintelligence.
President Putin had for years been on a low simmer for his counterintelligence chief, the former busty ballerina, since the night he had visited Dominika’s room in the Constantine Palace at midnight and casually fondled the lace bodice of her nightgown while ordering her to fly to Paris and eradicate her chief, the psychopath Zyuganov, who had gotten on Putin’s bad side. The president had not forgotten how Egorova’s nipples had responded to his touch, could not forget the faint scratching of the dockyard rivets swelling beneath the lace, and how her lashes fluttered in coy arousal. He would own her eventually, it was inevitable. He had intentions of promoting Egorova in the near future, but not yet. And handling MAGNIT could wait: the mole’s continued production was critical. Gorelikov assured Putin this was just the beginning: as the US Navy would founder and disintegrate, so would the United States. “Chto bylo, to proshlo I bylyom poroslo, what used to be will be gone and overgrown with grass,” said Gorelikov to Vladimir.
MAGNIT’S SPICY THAI CUCUMBER SALAD
Peel and deseed cucumber and slice paper-thin, preferably on a mandolin. Put cucumber slices in a colander, sprinkle with salt, and let drain, squeezing out excess water. In a bowl, mix rice vinegar, lime juice, thin slices of garlic, lots of finely diced Thai bird’s-eye chilies, nam pla (fish sauce), chopped cilantro, a dash of sesame oil, sugar, finely diced scallions, and thinly sliced red onion (soak onions in ice water briefly beforehand). Toss cucumbers in dressing and sprinkle with either dried shrimp powder or finely ground peanuts. Serve immediately.
3
You Are Mine
Dominika uncapped the lipstick tube and wrote Ti Moy on Nathaniel Nash’s naked chest as she lay on top of him in bed in CIA’s safe house: a sun-blasted, white stucco cottage at the end of a dusty road at the top of a rocky cactus hill in Vouliagmeni, fifteen kilometers south of Athens, with a hazy view of the island of Aegina across the dead-calm turquoise Saronic Gulf. White island ferries heading into the Port of Piraeus left intersecting foaming wakes as they passed. Outside the window, hummingbirds flitted around the blossoms on the wisteria vines that grew up the outside walls of the one-room villa. Dominika hitched herself a little higher and kissed him on the lips.
“I hope that wasn’t one of your lipstick guns,” said Nate. Two years earlier, SVR’s Line T (technical) had given Dominika two electrically fired, single-shot weapons disguised as lipstick tubes that she had used in Paris to separate the skullcap from the brainpan of her diminutive and psychotic chief Zyuganov, who at the time was raking her ribs with a stiletto, trying to shiver the tip of the blade between her ribs and into her heart. He had divined that Dominika was working for CIA, and when the exploding dumdum bullets from the lipstick guns aerosolized the poison dwarf’s brain into the river Seine, she was safe, again, for the time being, until the next crisis.
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