immaculate staircase in the quiet Austrian apartment building. Udranka opened the door before Dominika knocked. The cramped apartment was a riot of color: mirrors on the walls, bright pillows on the couch, the impossible pink bedroom—ruffles and fringed lampshades—visible through an open door. All courtesy of SVR, including the video and audio pickups in every room. Udranka extended her albatross-wing arms in welcome, her crimson aura, as usual, blazing like a banked coal fire.
Not your typical Sparrow,
thought Dominika, hugging her. This creature was not the usual perfect Slav snow queen, overbred to anorgasmy, with rouged nipples and a French wax. No, taken separately, Udranka’s parts did not define libidinous beauty. She was scarecrow thin and 1.85 meters tall, with corresponding angular elbows, knees, and hip bones. Her breasts lay flat against her chest—she would not contemplate implants. She had a faint pencil-line scar running from the left corner of her mouth to her left ear, a childhood memento left by a paramilitary trooper with a stockyard whip. Her hands were long-fingered and restless, with short nails painted hibiscus red. Endless, long legs ended in large feet and red toenails. This morning she wore small drop earrings of orange coral, and a short hot-pink kimono that stopped precariously high on her thighs.
Her flaming magenta hair—the shade must be called Balkan Rust—was cut short and close to her head. Her mouth was extreme—a candy dish of large white teeth—and in constant movement: smiling, pouting, tongue wetting full lips, clucking in disapproval, open in uncontrolled laughter. Udranka’s large eyes were light green with dark flecks, like ice cream with chips in it, and they could transmit, in the time it took for her pupils to expand, ineluctable sexual desire.
Udranka was a voluptuary, a natural. The spotters at Sparrow School recognized it when they saw it; the training staff had known how to refine the raw instinct, and operations officers like Dominika knew enough to point the cannon, light the fuse, and step back. Dominika had never seen anything like it—this woman could transform her striking but decidedlyunglamorous persona into something captivating, using that dugout canoe of a body to mesmerize, paralyze,
devour
her Sparrow targets.
A decade ago, the leggy Serb had filled a backpack and gone to Moscow, a teenager looking for work, baby-giraffe tall with a booming laugh. She started modeling for low-end fashion houses, mostly shoes and jewelry. She went through the requisite relationships with ad execs, government ministers, and a musician, but by age twenty-six the modeling was over. Heads would turn when she entered a Moscow restaurant, eventually including the pear-shaped head of the Italian ambassador (short and stout, a count and a descendant from the Barberinis of Palestrina), who was tantalized by her toothy, high-voltage smile and transfixed by her height. The diminutive Italian had never made love to an extremely tall woman, and he couldn’t wait to see how the parts would fit.
The ambassador was generous and considerate and loquacious, and kept Udranka secret from his wife. The FSB soon identified the count’s leggy illicit companion. In a year’s time Udranka had been recruited by the FSB as an access agent, and then highjacked by SVR and sent to Sparrow School. She needed money; they threatened to send her back to Belgrade, and she would have comfortable apartments to live and love in. Why not?
Three years later, Captain Dominika Egorova, looking for
primanka
in the Jamshidi case—bait so extraordinary that the Persian would forget the rules and his religion and put his neck on the block—came across Udranka’s
delo formular.
Her service record rated her among the best of SVR’s trained Sparrows, with evaluations of “excellent” in tradecraft and elicitation and “accomplished” in what State School Four called “seduction art.” Udranka was
Not your typical Sparrow,
thought Dominika, hugging her. This creature was not the usual perfect Slav snow queen, overbred to anorgasmy, with rouged nipples and a French wax. No, taken separately, Udranka’s parts did not define libidinous beauty. She was scarecrow thin and 1.85 meters tall, with corresponding angular elbows, knees, and hip bones. Her breasts lay flat against her chest—she would not contemplate implants. She had a faint pencil-line scar running from the left corner of her mouth to her left ear, a childhood memento left by a paramilitary trooper with a stockyard whip. Her hands were long-fingered and restless, with short nails painted hibiscus red. Endless, long legs ended in large feet and red toenails. This morning she wore small drop earrings of orange coral, and a short hot-pink kimono that stopped precariously high on her thighs.
Her flaming magenta hair—the shade must be called Balkan Rust—was cut short and close to her head. Her mouth was extreme—a candy dish of large white teeth—and in constant movement: smiling, pouting, tongue wetting full lips, clucking in disapproval, open in uncontrolled laughter. Udranka’s large eyes were light green with dark flecks, like ice cream with chips in it, and they could transmit, in the time it took for her pupils to expand, ineluctable sexual desire.
Udranka was a voluptuary, a natural. The spotters at Sparrow School recognized it when they saw it; the training staff had known how to refine the raw instinct, and operations officers like Dominika knew enough to point the cannon, light the fuse, and step back. Dominika had never seen anything like it—this woman could transform her striking but decidedlyunglamorous persona into something captivating, using that dugout canoe of a body to mesmerize, paralyze,
devour
her Sparrow targets.
A decade ago, the leggy Serb had filled a backpack and gone to Moscow, a teenager looking for work, baby-giraffe tall with a booming laugh. She started modeling for low-end fashion houses, mostly shoes and jewelry. She went through the requisite relationships with ad execs, government ministers, and a musician, but by age twenty-six the modeling was over. Heads would turn when she entered a Moscow restaurant, eventually including the pear-shaped head of the Italian ambassador (short and stout, a count and a descendant from the Barberinis of Palestrina), who was tantalized by her toothy, high-voltage smile and transfixed by her height. The diminutive Italian had never made love to an extremely tall woman, and he couldn’t wait to see how the parts would fit.
The ambassador was generous and considerate and loquacious, and kept Udranka secret from his wife. The FSB soon identified the count’s leggy illicit companion. In a year’s time Udranka had been recruited by the FSB as an access agent, and then highjacked by SVR and sent to Sparrow School. She needed money; they threatened to send her back to Belgrade, and she would have comfortable apartments to live and love in. Why not?
Three years later, Captain Dominika Egorova, looking for
primanka
in the Jamshidi case—bait so extraordinary that the Persian would forget the rules and his religion and put his neck on the block—came across Udranka’s
delo formular.
Her service record rated her among the best of SVR’s trained Sparrows, with evaluations of “excellent” in tradecraft and elicitation and “accomplished” in what State School Four called “seduction art.” Udranka was
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