Dominika walked up New Dorp Lane, the sidewalks broad and clean, people in storefront offices working. A corner food market, the “Convenient Mart,” whatever that meant, had cases of bottled water stacked high on either side of the door. The young man was still following her and she knew she had to shake him before she neared the cemetery. The illegal might be observing her approach and it would be a disaster if she couldn’t get rid of him. As she was entering the store in an effort to shake him off, Dominika heard footsteps and the young man called “Hey, Mam’sell!” and she turned to see Romeo take a picture of her with his cell phone at a distance of five feet, then hold it up to admire. Besides her official academy photo, and the ID pics Gable had taken of her in Helsinki, and ops alias passport photos, there was no extant photograph of SVR Colonel Dominika Egorova, especially not on the mobile phone of some
Dominika made an instant calculation. “Since you seem so intent on following me,” said Dominika to him, “perhaps you can show me a good bottle of American wine in this store.”
The young man stepped up to her, exuding his snail-trail charm. “Show you a bottle of wine, or share it with you?” he cooed.
Dominika let a slight smile move her lips. “It depends how good the wine is,” she said.
The young man led her into the little market, down a food aisle where Dominika stopped in amazement to count no fewer than ten different types of breakfast cereals on the shelf, an impossible riot of color. She followed Romeo to the back of the store, and stood in front of a wine cooler with sliding glass doors, while Romeo pointed out the reds, then the whites. They had everything, anything she wanted. Almaden, Gallo, Carlo Rossi, Blue Nun, Lancers. He said the Franzia box wines were underrated. If she didn’t like any of the wines, they had pints behind the counter: gin, vodka, rye. Dominika chose a white and let Romeo pay, then followed him across the avenue to sit on a step that was part of a cement bridge that carried ribbed steam-heat pipes over the commuter train tracks and was screened from the main road. The cement bridge shook when a train passed beneath. Blokhin would have driven the tactical spike through Romeo’s eye and into his brain, but Dominika took a sip from the bottle—the wine was sweet and metallic—then handed it back. She turned and hit him on the side of his neck with a hammer fist that started down by her left hip and snapped around with torque provided by her hips. The strike overloaded the nerves in his mastoid process, and his head slumped forward as he pitched unconscious face-first onto the concrete. If he wasn’t dead, he would be out for several hours, and Dominika would be long rid of Staten Island. She fished Romeo’s phone out of his back pocket and used a broken, pointed chunk of concrete as a Paleolithic tool to pulverize the modern appliance into plastic crumbles, none remotely recognizable as a phone. She scattered the smithereens onto the tracks under the bridge, took a final vile sip from the bottle, and threw that too, to smash on the rail bed among all the detritus piled along the tracks.
“
Moving quickly, Dominika turned right onto Richmond Road and walked uphill past houses with painted fences and trimmed bushes. Many of the houses had American flags hanging from the porches. The street was quiet, she was black, and there was no trailing coverage, she was sure. She was a Russian intelligence officer loose in America, proceeding to a meeting with a sleeper agent.
