Moscow Sting (15 page)
B
URT WAS WAITING FOR
Anna when she came out onto the porch the next morning. He seemed his usual self, at ease with the world, content with what happens. But she also detected a new urgency. After three months of waiting, she guessed he wanted to proceed quickly now to the main event.
He asked after Little Finn, how he liked the nanny and housekeeper he’d provided—questions that had an unusually perfunctory attitude behind them.
Little Finn was with the nanny now, she told him as they walked down the wooden steps into the meadow and he took her arm.
“There’ll be ten of us here from now on,” he said. “The Hispanic lady Frutoza looks after Little Finn and cooks the meals. I know, she sounds like a fizzy drink. Her family’s lived in this valley for two hundred years, and she and her husband are like family. He’s the one who keeps the house running. Then there’s Larry, Christoff, and Joe. They’re backup in case of trouble, but no one will get down here in winter. That makes five, plus you, me, and Little Finn. And you have two constant companions from now on. They arrived at four o’clock this morning. They’re Logan and Marcie.”
“Interrogators?” she asked.
“Yes. And they’ll be with you every second of the day, whether there’s formal debriefing in progress or not. One or other of them never leaves your side.”
“They work for your company?” she asked.
“Marcie worked in conflict resolution down in the Balkans in the nineties. She’s a tough lady, and she was smart enough to handle a roomful of bad men, not to mention NATO troops. She’s a New Yorker, CIA background, now works for me. She’s been to Interrogation School,” he said, and smiled at her. “She went on to teach it at the Farm . . . at Langley.”
“And Logan?”
“Logan. Ah, Logan.” Burt walked on for a few paces before continuing. “He was a CIA officer, also in the Balkans in the nineties, who took a fall for someone else’s mistake. But he was one of the best.” He looked at her with a mixture of amusement and concern in his eyes. “I’m giving him another chance, Anna, let’s call it that. He’s complex. . . . Sometimes I feel he has similarities with Finn.”
“In what way?”
“Led by his passions. A little . . . undisciplined, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Finn was disciplined in his lack of discipline, I’d say.”
Burt chuckled. “In any case, I think you’ll like him. Not that that’s the point, of course,” he added.
She thought about this strange, unnecessary addition to Logan’s description.
“Both of them have been studying you for nearly two months,” Burt said. “As well as Finn. And Mikhail. All under my supervision, of course. They’ll be on top of their material.”
It didn’t sound like a threat, but Burt’s method, she’d learned, was indirect.
“Then I’ll try to be on top of my material too,” she said.
Burt laughed and patted her on the back.
“And your role?” she asked him. “You’re everywhere on the pitch, aren’t you, Burt?”
“I’ll be there,” he said vaguely.
“And what are your expectations?” she asked him.
“Expectations are for dummies. You know that. And you know what we need now. Mikhail.”
She didn’t reply.
He stopped and separated from her, then turned to face her.
“We have a week, Anna. Then Adrian arrives.”
She couldn’t conceal her shock.
“Adrian! Why? I’ve nothing to say to Adrian. I thought this was your operation.”
“I know,” he said. “And it is. So far. But that’s why it would be best for you to finish this up before he gets here. It’s all about Mikhail, Anna. It’s up to you.”
“I don’t know where Mikhail is, or who he is. Finn never told me. Mikhail was handled in a total vacuum by Finn.”
Burt linked his arm in hers again.
“Let’s just say you think you don’t know him,” he said mysteriously. “But he’s out there somewhere. Very close to Putin. You know him, even if you don’t know he’s Mikhail.”
She saw him looking at her intently, but she kept her face expressionless. One thing was true. Finn had never told her. It was Mikhail who had revealed himself to her.
“My future depends on finding Mikhail?” she asked.
“As do all our futures,” Burt replied.
At ten o’clock Logan sauntered over from the guesthouse alone. He was elated. Employed by Burt in a senior position at the company, he was now going to meet the woman he’d been thinking of since he’d first looked properly at her picture in the days after he’d taken it.
He was wearing jeans, a cowboy shirt, and boots that crumpled over at the top. His hair was long and tangled from sleep. To his surprise and even shock, he saw she was already in the kitchen.
Nodding a shy hello to her, he poured himself a coffee. When he had drunk half the cup with a swiftness that clearly burned his mouth, he walked over to Anna and held out his hand.
“Logan,” he said.
“I guessed you weren’t Marcie.”
He smiled and pressed her hand a little too long for her liking.
“I’m glad to meet you,” he said.
“Well, that’s good,” she replied. To Anna, he seemed like someone relaxing on the first morning of his vacation. But she thought this impression wasn’t cultivated for her benefit. It seemed genuine. Logan evidently wasn’t someone who was concerned about making impressions.
“I think we only need to remember one thing, Anna,” Logan said, sipping his coffee and watching her.
“What’s that?”
“We’re all on the same side.”
“Thanks, Logan. I’ll try to remember.”
He smiled at her. “Friends,” he said.
“We’ll find that out, won’t we?”
He was lazily charming, and, she saw, a watchful figure. His intense blue eyes, which he rarely offered for contact with hers, were striking. He was good-looking in an uncared-for kind of way. If he’d been a piece of furniture, she thought, she’d describe him as artfully distressed.
“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“I’m okay, thanks.”
He smiled again.
She studied him for any signs of weakness. That was what would help her in the days ahead. He couldn’t hold her gaze; that was interesting. Self-conscious? She thought so. Or was that an invention? Was this his default behaviour with a woman, or was it just with her? He was conscious of his own attraction, she observed, and maybe compensated for it by hiding behind an attitude of self-deprecation. That was how Finn had been.
Just then, Marcie entered the kitchen, and the atmosphere changed at once. Corkscrew hair tied back with multicoloured play-school ribbon, Marcie projected an extrovert vibrancy that contrasted with Logan’s laid-back attitude. She wore a denim dress and scuffed black biker boots. Cheap and garish glass jewellery seemed to be hanging off her in various places. Striped socks rose above the boots. She had a hippieish air.
“Anna!” she said, with boisterous pleasure. “Marcie. I’m looking forward to us getting to know each other.”
Anna smiled back.
“You’ve met Logan,” she said, though it was obvious she had, and it was said just to make conversation.
“Yes.”
“Be careful of him,” Marcie warned. “He thinks he’s God’s gift,” she added, lowering her voice, in the pretence of a private confession.
Logan just smiled and didn’t protest.
The relationship between Logan and Marcie would surely be part of their tactics. To appear to create small splits between them invited her to develop intimacies with each of them separately. They were a team, and were also individuals. She would have to watch the moments when apparent conflict between them encouraged her to be confessional to one or other of them.
She decided for the time being that Marcie was the more dangerous of the two. She was superb at creating the deception of normality in the situation they were all in.
“I’ll watch out for him,” Anna said.
“You do that,” Marcie replied.
Interrogation is a battle for control. To the uninitiated, it may seem one-sided. If the interrogator has domination over the life or death, pain or release from pain, of a subject, how can control be other than in the hands of the interrogator?
Anna knew that it was not so clear-cut, however. In many exhaustive training sessions at the Forest she had learned that the object of interrogation had ways of subtle manipulation.
At the KGB’s main training centre in Yasenevo southwest of Moscow, known as the Forest, instructors were particularly focused on interrogation and resistance to interrogation. It had been a separate course alongside self-defence, hand-to-hand combat, the making of improvised explosive devices, weapons handling, escape and rescue, recruiting an agent, and all the others.
One vital lesson the Forest had taught her was that nobody would ever need to use interrogation—of any kind—unless ignorance and doubt were present. Principally, she’d been taught, even in situations where physical domination was overwhelming and completely one-sided, that there was still doubt over who controlled the outcome of an interrogation. Logan and Marcie had an obvious need of their subject. To begin with, they did not know what she knew. A low-level battle of wills would underlie all the ensuing days, Anna knew. It was true, of course, that no physical threat was hanging over her. There were no blazing lights twenty-four hours a day, permanently deafening noise, the threat of torture, fabricated sounds of torture, or actual torture itself. There was no coercion, let alone terror, in Logan’s and Marcie’s methods.
Burt meanwhile spent their sessions in the study, sitting on the sidelines, and only occasionally guiding the process to lower the temperature, or guide them over any impasses with a light, deft touch.
It was Logan who began, after the three of them had sat down on three sides of the large table in the study, while Burt took an armchair by the fire.
“If you knew who Mikhail was,” Logan said, for once looking straight in her eyes, “what would prevent you from telling us?’
As an opening salvo, Anna saw it contained several traps.
“Mikhail’s security,” she replied.
“His security,” Logan said slowly. “As a member of Russia’s elite under Vladimir Putin?”
“That’s right.”
Logan’s eyebrows raised. “You want to protect him from us?”
“His security in Russia is absolutely necessary,” she said calmly, “or he’s no good to the Americans.”
Marcie put her hand on Anna’s arm—another message intended, perhaps, to indicate the special relationship she planned to develop with her.
“You think that we might endanger Mikhail’s security?” she said, and looked genuinely concerned.
“I can’t know that,” Anna replied. “But—on the hypothetical basis that I knew who Mikhail was—then I would have to accept that as a possibility. Endangering Mikhail’s security not only risks his life, but also risks losing what you want from him.”
“So you’d act on that possibility,” Logan stated.
“Yes. The protection of a source or potential source is paramount.”
“Yet they can’t be a source unless there’s some degree of danger to them,” Logan replied.
Anna said nothing.
“Why do you think Mikhail only ever communicated through Finn and nobody else?” Marcie asked.
“Because that way he controlled contact. And of course he trusted Finn.”
“We’re assuming Mikhail is a man, then,” Logan said. But Anna had prepared herself for this potential trap.
“If Mikhail is as close to Putin as we all believe he is, then he can only be a man,” she said.
Logan smiled at her, in a way that suggested he was commending her method rather than the information she was providing.
But Anna ignored him and leaned her elbows on the table. She decided to take some small control, to disrupt the question-and-answer nature of the proceedings, if only for a moment or two.
“What we’re attempting to do is to make contact with Mikhail,” she said. “You have to understand that’s completely different from what happened between Mikhail and Finn. It was Mikhail who made contact with Finn, not vice versa. It was Mikhail who dictated the terms. We’re trying to reverse that. I’m not sure it can work.”
“Why not?”
“Because Mikhail is the one who does the choosing,” she replied. “That’s his past form.”
Logan searched in his jacket for a cigarette and finally found a crumpled box. Burt stood up and turned on the exhaust. Logan knocked out a cigarette and lit it. Marcie looked at him in disapproval.
“Okay. Let’s look at Finn,” he said. “But first of all, I’m sorry. This is bound to be difficult for you.”
“Finn died two years ago,” Anna said. She would give him no room to feel sorry for her, if that was his approach.
“Finn was found in the back seat of a Jeep Cherokee outside the British embassy in Berlin,” Logan recapped. “He was respectfully delivered there. I think that’s the right word. It was a friend then, or friends. Everything about the way he was found suggests that. But who? Who brought him there at considerable risk to themselves? We don’t believe it was the killer, naturally.”
Anna was there again, on the Autobahn on that dull, cloudy October night, with the car barrelling along at speed, the junction arc lamps flashing on her face and Finn’s as she cradled him in her arms in those last hours of his life. It was Mikhail who was driving. It was Mikhail who had found Finn, and then in turn found her so she could say good-bye to Finn for the last time.
“You were in Germany then, Anna,” Marcie said, breaking into her thoughts.
So they knew that much, she thought. “I was in the south,” she said. “In Bavaria.”
The past unravelled. She had found Finn’s secret house in Tegernsee, down near the border with Switzerland. Finn had given Willy instructions to find it, if he ever disappeared, and Willy had given the instructions to her when Finn didn’t return. There, in the small pink house that Finn had kept a secret even from her, she had read through all Finn’s notes, found the microfiches that proved what the British intelligence service had denied. And Mikhail had found her there. He had taken her away, moments before the house had been encircled by security forces.
How did Burt, Marcie, and Logan know she’d been in Germany? It had been too risky to deny it. Perhaps it was a guess on their part, and now she’d provided the information.