That had been five years after her first overseas tour in Helsinki. Finland had been a dream. Gingerbread-trim houses, and sizzling venison cutlets, and the excitement and ecstasy of a real operational mission: to find CIA officer Nathaniel Nash of the American Embassy, meet, befriend, and, if necessary, seduce him to elicit the name of a high-ranking Russian the SVR knew, just knew, Nash was handling, but could never catch. Nash and Dominika started working on each other—dinners by the light of candle-wax-covered wine bottles, walks in leafy city parks, coffees along the breezy harbor promenade, the girls’ summer skirts billowing above their hips. Elicitation, bone throwing, verbal snares, and assessment traps. They both knew all the developmental tricks, and banged heads for three months, trying to recruit each other. She noted that his crimson halo—passion, devotion, constancy—never wavered or rippled. He told the truth and she could see his interest deepening by the day.
Then the impossible happened. Nate’s easy, honest nature; his mild—but accurate—criticism of the current mess in Russia; the earnest, flirty attention he paid to her made her question what she was doing, for whom she was doing it, and why. When her friend in the Russian Embassy disappeared (Dominika was positive she had been assassinated over a minor infraction of security), it pushed her over the edge. On a rainy Helsinki night, she accepted Nate’s recruitment pitch to spy for CIA, and she was encrypted DIVA. How better could she do maximum damage to the tsar and his bandits? What more could she do to feed the otvrashcheniye, the loathing for them she felt? By spying for CIA, Dominika was helping the Rodina, not betraying it.
Bozhe, God, they were a different breed, these CIA men who gathered around to train her, and coach her, and support her like family, beneficence unheard of and impossible in her own SVR. A small group of them had come into her life. Chief of Europe Division, Tom Forsyth, the salt-and-pepper-haired legend in the DO, the Directorate of Operations, and beneficent mentor to Nate Nash. The urbane Forsyth had recruited prime ministers, Emirati princes, and, once, the pampered mistress of a Red Fleet admiral by taking her to an orphanage in Paris to watch children gambol in the playroom (Forsyth knew the admiral had refused to marry her and give her children). Recruitment was all about human needs, vulnerabilities, and motivations. Deeply affected by his solicitude, she started stealing Soviet naval secrets for Forsyth the next day.
Then there was Marty Gable, career-long colleague of Forsyth. He was usually dressed in khaki bush shirt and hiking boots, and slouched on a couch. There wasn’t much Gable hadn’t seen. He had run assets in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Maghreb. He had recruited a penetration of the PKK terrorist group in Istanbul and rescued the blown agent by shooting a PKK enforcer between the eyes. To him, protecting his agents—namely DIVA—came first. Dominika took to calling him Bratok, big brother. He had taken the young Nate under his wing, lovingly kicking Nash’s ass to learn the Rules of the Game.
The last of these new friends was Chief of Counterintelligence Simon Benford—podgy, angry, necktie perpetually askew. Most days the hair on one side of his head stuck out in a wing, exact cause unknown. Like Forsyth, Benford was an obelisk in the DO. In the last five years alone, the mercurial genius had led three separate investigations to unmask Russian-run moles inside CIA and the US government. Benford hated bureaucrats, careerists, mooncalves, mutton-heads, most of the special agents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the entire Defense Intelligence Agency, and what he called the “homoerotic” Department of State. Due to the extreme sensitivity and restricted-handling protocol within the compartment, Benford became the senior Headquarters officer personally directing the DIVA case.
Under their careful guidance, Dominika emptied the Helsinki rezidentura of all its secrets and, when she returned to Moscow, began reporting sensitive blue-stripe intelligence (designating the most sensitive and perishable secrets) from the vaults of Yasenevo, which soon made her CIA’s premier Russian source. For more than seven years, Dominika had stolen everything she could, and her CIA men kept her sane and alive, through heart-pounding personal meetings in Moscow alleyways, furtive rendezvous in foreign capitals, and abbreviated burst transmissions from her SRAC (short range agent communications) equipment. She laid open for CIA the Kremlin’s clandestine activities around the world.
There was also the situation with her recruiting case officer, Nathaniel Nash. Dark hair spilling across his forehead, his exceptional falcon eyes on the street, the crimson aura around his shoulders, worked cumulatively on Dominika, already dazzled by CIA men and the wild sleigh ride of spying for them. What else happened between Nate and Dominika in Helsinki perhaps was inevitable. Thrown together under the unrelenting pressure of recruitment and espionage, Nate the agent handler and Dominika the clandestine asset fell in love. Their passion was unrelenting, their lovemaking volcanic, furtive, and limited to the rare occasions they were alone together. For Nate, an affair between a case officer and his asset was a career-ending infraction. For Dominika, sleeping with Nate the American would be fatal if discovered by the Center.
Their liaison did not—could not—remain secret from CIA for long. Gable’s pheromonal instincts and Benford’s warlock prescience soon detected the forbidden affair. Nate was called on the carpet, but Benford chose for the moment not to fire him summarily from the service in the interests of intel production and keeping DIVA motivated. For her part, Dominika unconcernedly acknowledged the situation, accepted the risks, ignored Bratok Gable’s warnings, and reveled in her love for Nate. Nash had tried to stop the affair several times, but their passion was overwhelming. She refused to give him up, and he could not extinguish his crimson ardor.
* * *
* * *
Brushing her heavy breasts across Nate’s face, Dominika got out of bed and padded over to the tiled corner of the tiny kitchen that was a makeshift shower, and doused herself with the handheld nozzle, wetting a substantial patch of the marble floor. Nate watched her wash her lithe body, white scars crisscrossing her ribs, ballet calves flexing as she rotated under the water. He got out of bed and joined her in the shower. Nate was muscular and thin with unruly black hair and brown eyes that missed little.
“Can you see what I wrote?” asked Dominika, soaping his chest, tracing his own scars, the brown one across his belly, the angry red furrows on his arms. They were stitched mannequins, the two of them. Nate did not answer, but kissed her, holding her head in his hands, enveloping her in his red cloud.
“Ti moy,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You are mine.”
“Does Vladimir Putin know?” he said.
They sat on the tiny balcony of the cottage, the sun setting below the mountain behind the house. The rickety table had uneven legs and wobbled. The wicker chairs creaked loosely. They ate a peasant dinner with two oversized spoons, communally from a chipped terra-cotta bowl with painted blue dolphins around the rim. Nate had cooked the green beans slowly all day in olive oil, with onions, garlic, and crushed tomatoes. A separate dish was piled with olives, feta, and crusty country bread. They drank cold Retsina from a bottle floating in a tin washtub with the last of the ice slurry from yesterday. The shadows on the hillside were growing longer as they talked.
“All I’m saying is that it’s dangerous for you to continue bouncing around the world personally recruiting North Koreans—or anyone for that matter—considering Putin could make you Director of SVR soon,” said Nate. They had spent the entire first day in the safe house discussing Dominika’s recruitment of Professor Ri, and the other intelligence Dominika had brought out of Moscow. Especially the most exciting news.