Four hours later, with a tab of Sparrow-issue Mogadon, a mild benzodiazepine relaxant, under her tongue, Dominika sat at the Chaliapin Bar next to an already bleary-eyed Audrey Rowland, who looked sideways at the antique Ottoman necklace Dominika wore around her throat, the hammered silver pendants of which were rattling in the deep vee of her breasts.
“Service at this bar leaves something to be desired,” said Audrey, apparently assuming Dominika spoke English. “I thought this hotel was five stars.” The tumbler in front of her was empty.
Dominika leaned close and whispered conspiratorially. “Russians sometimes need a little encouragement,” she said. “I know this barman; he can be a bit contrary, we say upryamyy, like a mule.” Audrey laughed and watched as Dominika ordered two iced vodkas that were served instantly and with great deference. Audrey ignored the barman, drank the vodka in one gulp, and appraised Dominika with heavy-lidded eyes. She could not know that the barman and three other patrons in the bar were all from Line KR, countersurveillance assets looking for opposition coverage as Dominika moved on the tall American woman. The bar was clean; Audrey was alone.
Dominika did not have to work it too hard. A light legend—cover story—that she was a salaried office worker was sufficient, and really couldn’t afford drinking at the Metropol but once a month. She told jokes about Russian men, gently steering the conversation, holding on to Audrey’s wrist occasionally, establishing physicality, straight out of the Sparrow manual. Dominika purposely showed no curiosity about Audrey’s work or her navy career. There was no need to elicit: Audrey showed herself to be utterly self-absorbed and inclined to talk about herself—a narcissist perhaps, ego will be a button with this one, thought Dominika, who asked what her hometown of San Diego was really like, eyes wide and interested. Audrey said that she was the only child of a naval aviator father and a quiet mother (biographical facts already in her SVR file), then went on at length about growing up a lithe surfing California beach girl, which Dominika suspected was fiction. Audrey was an unmik, a physics geek, and looked it. After the third vodka, Dominika became serious and cocked her head toward the barman.
“Russian men. Beware of them. Not just stubborn, but mostly bastards too,” she said. Audrey pried the story out of a seemingly reluctant Dominika in stages. Drying her eyes with a cocktail napkin embossed with the “M” logo of the hotel, she eventually told Audrey of her broken engagement with a fiancé who had been unfaithful by sleeping with a cashier who worked at the GUM department store in Red Square, a total fiction.
“She was a little harlot with hair dyed purple, newly arrived from some rural oblast, how do you say, some unimaginable province,” said Dominika. “Two years we were engaged, and it was over in a night.” Audrey patted Dominika’s hand, incensed at the nameless philandering fiancé. The “hook” was always more believable by adding incongruously specific detail like the dyed hair (No. 87, “The short stories of Pushkin stir the imagination” was the relevant tagline, and one of scores memorized at Sparrow School to illustrate tradecraft points).
Audrey’s eyes searched Dominika’s, now expectant and intense. Audrey was moved by the story only slightly less than by the high cheekbones and bee-stung lips of the chestnut-haired beauty sniffling beside her. Agreeing that all men were svinya and toasting to eternal sisterhood, Audrey huskily said she wanted to show Dominika her hotel room. Dominika put an elegant finger to her lips and whispered that instead of Audrey’s room they could sneak into the opulent Yekaterina Suite on the fourth floor—her cousin was a chambermaid at the hotel with a passkey. Audrey shivered in anticipation and grabbed her cardigan. Her profound knowledge of electromagnetic physics sadly provided no warning of the curved tail of the scorpion poised above her head.
The suite was magnificent, ablaze in gold and green, with an imposing red tombak samovar on an oval Fabergé tea table in the corner of the room. They looked at the furnishings, and at each other. Neither said a word. Dominika knew the nectar trap was about to snap shut. She pretended to stare at the frescoes capering across the Baroque vaulted ceiling when Audrey—now in musth—stepped up to her, put her hands on her breasts, and mashed their mouths together. Dominika kissed her back, then slowly disengaged, smiled, and poured two flutes of champagne from an ice bucket on the settee (she palmed a tab of Mogadon into Audrey’s glass to smooth her out), and pushed a silver platter of pecheniya toward her, powdered sugar Russian tea cakes stacked high in a snowy pyramid, taking one herself. Audrey did not register the incongruity that Dominika’s chambermaid cousin apparently had provided the expensive champagne and delicate cakes along with the passkey.
It was too much watching Dominika nibble the pastry with her even white teeth. Audrey’s Dutch oven was at a rolling boil, and with trembling fingers she brushed powdered sugar off the front of Dominika’s little black dress, and pulled her across the salon into the bedroom. The next thirty minutes were filmed by four remote-headed, infrared lenses (and slaved COS-D11 mikes) concealed in the ornate acanthus moldings in each corner of the ceiling, operating at 29 megapixels. The feed was being digitally recorded by an SVR technical team in a special utility room down the hotel hallway. Not taking their eyes off the monitors, two sweating technicians bundled and encrypted the images, immediately routing them for real-time review to the Kremlin offices of a few relevant ministers—all former intelligence cronies of the president—a half kilometer away, on the other side of Red Square. Watching the live-action feed was decidedly better than looking at Brazilian bikini girls in National Geographic.
Tall, ferret-faced, all hip bones and rib cage, with light brown hair styled in a Prince Valiant cut last seen in the 1928 French silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, mousey Audrey was a Gordian knot of guilty passion, fumbling awkwardness, and anorgasmia, with a tendency to spritz the bed as she vainly chased her elusive release. Thank God, thought Dominika, nothing complicated. Without much effort, she could avoid active participation and instead assume the role of masseuse and bring this bony scarecrow through the four corporeal stages of arousal—in school they called them Fog, Breeze, Mountain, and Wave—to coax what the instructors called malenkoye sushchestvo, the little creature, out of her, which is exactly what happened thirty teetering minutes later, the first shuddering spasm triggered by the unexpected introduction of the ribbed rubber handle of Audrey’s hairbrush (No. 89, “Pray at the back altar of Saint Basil’s Cathedral”).
Moaning and wide-eyed, Audrey came off the mattress like a vampire sitting up in a coffin, wrapped her arms around Dominika’s neck, sunk her teeth into her shoulder, and rode her successive, shuddering orgasms like a witch on a broom, out of the hotel, over the Kremlin walls, past President Putin’s bedroom window, and around the star on the spire of the Ukraina Hotel, two hundred meters above the Arbatsky bend of the river.
That should give the GRU recruiter enough to work with, thought Dominika, with technical aplomb, as Audrey collapsed on her back, sighing. Dominika draped a towel over Audrey’s trembling loins.
The last time, she thought, and thank God she was leaving this behind. Helsinki was going to be a dream. She couldn’t know she was both right and wrong.
Audrey was stirring out of her benzodiazepine-fueled, four-climax coma, her head surprisingly clear, her thighs sticky and trembling. As per procedure, the Sparrow always slipped out of the room as the recruiter came in, and Dominika shouldered past him, ignoring his courteous nod. Audrey didn’t even see her go, and she didn’t know that the inveigling Sparrow’s role was complete. For Audrey, what’s-her-name would be only a fading memory—a Venus with blue eyes holding that hairbrush—albeit immortalized permanently on digital video.