Twelve Hours to Get Back

Hour zero: the start point

The first sentence of the trilogy is this: Twelve hours into his SDR Nathaniel Nash was numb from the waist down.

An SDR is a surveillance detection route. It is not an escape and it is not a chase. It is a long, boring, entirely plausible journey across a city, designed so that anybody following you must either keep showing themselves or lose you. You walk, you ride, you shop for nothing, you double back, you funnel yourself down an empty street where a follower has nowhere to hide. It can take twelve hours. At the end of it, if nothing has repeated and nothing has reacted, you are black, and you may spend twenty minutes with the person whose life depends on your having done it properly. Not seeing anything is not the same as being clean. That is the part that eats people.

Since this is the shape of the books, it may as well be the shape of the introduction. What follows is a route. Five stops, and a meeting at the end.

One thing to establish at the start point. Jason Matthews spent thirty-three years in the CIA’s Operations Directorate, specialising in denied-area operations, which is the trade of running agents in places where the opposition owns the streets. He served as chief of station. He began writing novels after he retired, published three, and died in 2021. This is why the tradecraft in these books is not decoration. It is the load-bearing wall.

Hour three: a rehearsal room, and then a mansion in the pines

Dominika Egorova was diagnosed at five as a synesthete by a psychologist friend of her father’s, and her parents made her swear never to tell anyone. She sees words as coloured. She sees music as coloured. Asked at the ballet academy why she wanted to dance, she said it was because she could see the music, and the panel laughed, and then stopped laughing when the beautiful child looked at them as though weighing whether to do them harm.

She was headed for the Bolshoi. A rival broke the small bones of her right foot and ended a twenty-year career in an afternoon, leaving her with a hitch in her walk that a good watcher can spot at a hundred metres. Adrift and supporting a widowed mother, she was recruited by her uncle Vanya, then deputy director of the SVR, who made the pitch at her father’s funeral wake.

Then he sent her to State School Four. Sparrow School. A walled and peeling mansion in the pine forest outside Kazan, on the Volga, where the state teaches women and men the art of sexual entrapment: clinical lectures on human sexuality, nightly films, hundreds of numbered techniques memorised and practised, everything sprinkled with rose water to cover the smell, and staff watching through the walls at night. A girl in Dominika’s intake, a farm girl she had tried to protect, knots a pair of tights around a coat hook on the back of her door and pulls her feet off the floor. The body is carried out under a blanket. Nothing is said by anybody. Instruction resumes at seven the next morning as scheduled.

What is left in Dominika afterwards is a word Matthews keeps returning to: beshenstvo, a white fury. Not against Russia. She loves Russia and goes on saying so. Against the men who have made themselves its owners.

Hour seven: reading the colours

The synesthesia extends to people. Dominika sees a coloured haze around a person’s head and shoulders that tells her what they are actually feeling, and she has spent her life learning to read it. Reds and purples for passion, constancy and affection. Yellows and greens for ill will, cowardice and sloth. Blues for thought, cunning and calculation. Vladimir Putin, who appears in these novels as a working character rather than a rumour, is an arctic blue that sits on his head like a crown.

Once, and only once in three books, she sees something else, and Matthews gives it a phrase that lands harder for being used a single time: the black bat wings of pure evil.

On paper this ought to be a cheat, a superpower that makes espionage easy. It is nothing of the kind, because Matthews treats it exactly as a professional treats every other source. It is data. It is incomplete. It tells her what a man feels and not what he intends or what he will do about it. She misjudges people with it. And she has to hide it from everyone, forever, which means she can never explain how she knows what she knows. Her CIA handlers spend three novels admiring an instinct they cannot account for.

Hour eleven: what the trade actually looks like

This is the reason to read these books rather than the hundred others on the shelf. Matthews shows you the work, and the work is nothing like the films.

Eight officers leave a Russian embassy in eight cars in eight directions at the same minute, and the watchers call out a starburst, because the point is to overload the team and let two or three cars come free. A rezident with thirty years in Europe runs routes so gentle they seem to make friends with surveillance, and three-quarters of the way through executes a fishhook reverse and simply vanishes, and it takes a team of retired legends eating an early-bird dinner at a Sizzler to work out that the shank of the fishhook points at his agent like the Dipper points at Polaris. A case officer rolls out of a moving car in a three-second gap behind a snowbank and leaves her mobile phone in the vehicle so the FSB can happily track it across the city for the next three hours. An agent’s report is capped at fifteen hundred characters because that is what the miniaturised burst transmitter will hold. A buried equipment cache is watched by satellite for seven days before anyone goes near it, looking for new tyre tracks and a maintenance shed that was not there before.

There is a moment on a wooded trail outside Moscow where an American officer meets her Russian agent and does not shake her hand, because the FSB spray a colourless powder on doorknobs and floor mats and coat pockets, and a Russian who has touched an American thing will glow under ultraviolet like a billboard. And the first business of the meeting, before anything else, is to fix the time and place of the next one, in case this one has to be abandoned in the next ten seconds.

Underneath the mechanics is the moral question the trilogy is really about, and the veteran officer Marty Gable puts it to a young case officer who has fallen in love with his agent. Your only job is to protect her. Not because you love her. Not because it is against regulations. Because she agreed to steal for you and put her life in your hands to do it, and everything else is subordinate to keeping her alive. Nate Nash spends three books failing to be equal to that sentence, which is the most honest thing in the series.

One oddity, which readers either love or find baffling. Every chapter ends with a recipe for whatever was eaten in it. Crab bisque, pelmeni, spaghetti with bottarga, a Kremlin mushroom appetiser. Twenty-odd per book, printed straight, no explanation. It reads as a strange joke until you notice how much of the trade in these novels is conducted over food, and that the men and women doing it are exiles who cook to feel at home.

The meeting site: where to begin

At the start, and in order. Red Sparrow (2013), Palace of Treason (2015), The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018). It is one continuous story with one continuous cast, and the third book pays off things planted in the first. Matthews died before writing a fourth, so what you have is complete and finished, which is rarer than it should be.

Two honest warnings. The film exists, it changed a great deal, and it is not a substitute. And the first novel is genuinely hard in places. Sparrow School is not written as titillation, and there is an interrogation late in the book that some readers will want to skim. Matthews neither leers at this material nor softens it, which is the correct choice and is still difficult to read.

Read them for Dominika, who is the best thing in modern spy fiction: a woman whose body was requisitioned by her own state, who was trained to be an instrument, and who spends three books turning herself back into a person by the only means available, which is treason. Read them for a Moscow written by somebody who worked its streets. And read them for the sensation, rare in the genre, of being shown how something is actually done by a man who spent his life doing it and waited until he retired to tell you.

You have been on the street a long time now. Nothing has repeated. Nothing reacted. You are as black as you are ever going to be.

Go to the meeting.