Moscow Sting (20 page)

“What are you doing—” They both recognised the humour, and she laughed first. Then he laughed too, but it was a nervous response to hers.

“I’m living here,” she said.

“In New York?”

“Yes. And you too?”

“Yes.”

There was another pause, more awkward this time, neither wishing to ask a question that might seem too inquisitive.

“Anna,” he said. “I must ask you. Are you alone?”

She didn’t know immediately whether he meant alone as a former lover, or alone, with no watchers.

She smiled freely. “At this moment, yes,” she said. “I’m alone in every way.”

“And you have a boy.”

“Finn’s son, yes.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“And you?”

She saw him watch her to see if the question was disingenuous, to look for signs that she knew.

“I’m the same,” he said. But he didn’t wish to talk about himself. “I’m with the Russian mission here,” he said in a slightly clipped voice, as if it were something to be ashamed of.

“Shall I join you?” It was the most normal remark in the world. Then she laughed. “At the table, I mean.”

He looked flustered. Every word seemed a mine of possibilities. Then, bringing his thoughts together, he looked at the empty chair at his table, as though someone might be in it. Then he nodded, leaned over and picked his coat off the back of the chair, and hung it on his own without turning around, not wanting to take his eyes away.

He was looking good, Anna thought. Not just prosperous, but fit, healthy. His black hair, which grew thick around the temples, was swept across his forehead in a way that would have suited New York in the 1950s. His hands were manicured; his face, apart from the intensity in his eyes, was calm. He looked lean, with slightly dark Caucasian skin, as if he had a suntan. She remembered how handsome he’d looked in uniform twenty years before. He hadn’t changed much—there was still strength in his jaw, and the skin around his neck was taut, not flabby. His eyes in their fright were as intense and dark as ever.

She crossed over to his table and put her coat on the back of the chair where he’d removed his.

His food arrived—pasta, she saw.

“Don’t wait,” she said. “Eat. It’ll get cold.”

He looked at the pasta, but his appetite was gone.

“Are you going to eat?” he said.

“I’ll eat yours if you don’t hurry up,” she said. But he made no move to eat.

“Why are you here?” he said suddenly, and all the promise of his slight relaxation a moment before vanished.

“I live not far from here.” It was not an answer to his question.

“Where?”

“You want my address?” She gave him a smile that indicated the unlikelihood of receiving it.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and looked momentarily defeated.

“I’ve never been in here,” she said.

“The food’s okay.”

She picked up the menu.

“I’ll have chocolate cake,” she said. “I won’t eat it all.”

They were silent. She saw he was not yet willing to accept this as a chance encounter.

A waitress came to the table, and she ordered chocolate cake.

When she’d gone, they both began to speak at once again, and each stopped for the other.

“You first,” he said.

“As far as I know, I’m alone,” she said. “They stopped following me months ago. I’ve been debriefed for longer than I thought possible. I’m clear.”

“Good,” he said. “I hope you’re right.”

They were silent, neither appearing able or willing to come up with an appropriate remark.

“You want to see me?” he said.

“I’m seeing you now.”

He looked hurt, confused.

“I’m sorry, Volodya,” she said. “But how can we see each other?”

“We can make another accidental meeting,” he said.

She saw he was desperate that this not be the last time.

He stretched his hand across the table towards hers and then stopped, unable to commit himself.

“I’m sorry about . . .” He didn’t finish. There seemed perhaps too many things to be sorry about.

“I’m sorry too, Volodya.”

He didn’t want to approach the subject of them too closely. Not yet.

“Your grandmother,” he said. “You know she died last year.”

“I know.”

Anna thought of the night at her grandmother’s five years earlier, when Vladimir had woken them at five in the morning to take her away.

“I owe you, Vladimir,” she said. “Thanks to you, Nana and I were able to say good-bye to each other before she died. But she was ready to go. You gave her a great gift, as well as me. I know she died happy, knowing I was safe. Eighty-five years of life, and at last one of her family breaks free, escapes their fate. It was what she always wanted for me. So thank you from her too.”

“I’ve seen your mother,” he said. “Once or twice.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“And him?” Vladimir said. “Your father?”

“I’ll never speak to him again,” she said.

“He’s gotten old,” Vladimir told her. “He’s in a care home for the Paradise Group,” he said.

Anna couldn’t imagine her father, the great SVR officer and tyrant, sitting in a care home. But the Paradise Group would look after him, whatever he wanted. They were the most senior retirees from the heart of the KGB. She didn’t reply. The thought of her father disgusted her. Her chocolate cake arrived, and she urged him to eat once again. They both ate without noticing the food.

She finished half the cake and pushed the plate across the table to him.

“Coffee?” she said.

“Are you?” He’d hardly touched the pasta.

“Yes. Two coffees,” she said to the waitress. “And another fork for my friend, please.”

The coffees arrived, and he heaped sugar into his. Conversation had ground to a halt. There was nothing to say that wasn’t charged with meaning, either dangerous or intimate. She was prepared for him to backtrack on his request to meet again, and had her response ready when he did.

“How many of them are there outside?” he said. “Or in here?”

“Volodya, there’s no one. Or not that I know.”

She wrote something on the bill the waitress had left, as if she was paying. Then she pushed it under his newspaper, a distance of a few inches. She was sure it would be unnoticed by anyone but the two of them.

“And you? Are you usually watched?” she said.

“No. Not usually.”

“Then if you wish, we could meet again,” she said, and lowered her eyes to the bill under the newspaper. “On Tuesdays I go to a gym. There’s a café behind the gym. I can usually be sure to be alone for an hour. I’ll go there. There’s a fire escape at the back. I’ll come straight out of the back and be in the café. Three o’clock.”

He didn’t reply.

“But if you don’t wish to meet me,” she said, “then I’m glad I’ve had the chance to thank you for what you did. You didn’t just save my life, you saved my love of life.” She paused, as if uncertain she was saying the right thing to her former lover. “Finn always wanted to thank you too,” she added finally. “It amazed him.”

A look of anxiety crossed his face.

“They killed him,” he said.

He looked down at the table. He had saved her. But the organisation he worked for had killed the man he had saved her life for.

“I know,” she said, in a way that understood his remorse. “But don’t worry, you’re safe. Your secret will be buried with me. I’m not here to threaten you. Ever.”

He didn’t reply at first.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I’m so sorry about Finn.”

“It’s not your fault. But thank you, Volodya.” She gave him a big, happy smile that was the first genuine expression she’d worn since they’d met. “And I’m happy to see you. Really I am.”

She took out a purse from her coat.

“I’ll get this. Pasta, salad, coffees, and half a chocolate cake. Fair exchange for saving my life?”

He smiled for the first time. “Fair exchange. We’re even.”

Then he fractionally extended his hand across the table again. It was such a small gesture, she might have missed it if she hadn’t been in a state of heightened awareness of his every reaction. She laid her own hand on top of his for the briefest moment.

“I’m happy to see you too,” he said. “It was something I never dared to dream.”

She left some dollar bills on the table, and stood up.

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said.

“Maybe.”

She felt him watching her leave the café and knew he’d be alert for any movement behind her out on the street, anything to indicate it had been a setup. She hoped Burt’s team and anyone else from the American side were far away.

But Burt’s decision to be spontaneous, to cut out the teams of watchers from the café, had been the right one. Even as she stepped back out onto the cold sidewalk, she saw nothing.

Chapter 22

A
NNA SAT AT THE
end of the long wooden table at the Twenty-third Street apartments, her chin rested in one hand. Logan sat slightly slumped next to her on the right, with his elbows on the table, while Marcie was bolt upright on the other side of her, a position she always adopted when Burt was present.

At the far end of the table, flanking Burt, sat Bob Dupont, Burt’s silver-haired head of internal security, and next to him was a man in his thirties with jet-black hair and dark eyes whom Anna hadn’t seen before but whom she learned in passing, though without an introduction, was called Salvador.

On chairs around the walls outside the door and prowling the corridors outside the door were the ubiquitous bodyguards, with Larry, as ever, in charge. The bodyguards had been doubled, and then doubled again like some rampant algae, until a small army of them had grown up, as if to suck the air from any opposition to Burt’s plans.

It was now just under an hour since Anna had returned, and Burt had insisted they should meet immediately. He said this with even more than his usual sense for drama.

Anna was listening to Burt as he wound up his appraisal of her encounter with Vladimir. They all were, in their different guises of concentration—Logan, Marcie, Dupont, Salvador.

Outside the windows, which Burt commanded should be left without the blinds pulled down—against nearly everyone’s advice—the early winter New York night had descended over the city, and snow had begun to fall.

She was tired, she realised. Her mind raced back again over her recent conversation with Vladimir, as it had done repeatedly since she’d left him in the café. She was recalling each word, each expression in his face, looking for anything she might have missed—some nuance in his voice, perhaps, some hint in his eyes, or in the gestures of his hands. Was there something hidden in the silences and pauses between them? All might be indications of something that Vladimir hadn’t actually said, or of which even he himself was ignorant.

She knew the meeting with him had taken the strength out of her for the moment, and that alone shocked her. Meeting with Vladimir at all, let alone meeting him again after all these years, had been a strange experience. It had brought back the past—Finn too, as well as Vladimir himself—and most vitally, it had brought back her intimacy with both of them.

And the meeting with Vladimir had also brought her face-to-face with memories of Russia and the stark danger her old country represented to her and Little Finn. Vladimir in New York was an uncomfortable proximity to that.

But while Logan and Marcie and the others were hanging on to Burt’s detailed exposition, with its customary flattering flourishes of praise in her direction, her mind was working along parallel lines at the same time. She was weighing the fateful decision to deceive Burt.

To meet again with Vladimir, in secret from Burt’s teams of observers, at the café behind the gym was to take a dangerous step. It risked her whole, albeit tenuous, security and that of Little Finn, painstakingly won over the past months.

Nevertheless, she was already beginning to run her own storyline of her planned breakout from the twenty-four-hour-a-day scrutiny she had lived with for so long. She felt her power increase, both from her own decision to meet Vladimir in secret and as the crucial figure in Burt’s plans.

She looked up at Burt now and felt a change in his own demeanour too. Behind the natural ebullience, she detected a new unfamiliar anxiety, however faint, and she wondered if it had anything to do with the presence of Salvador.

“So we have a narrowed field of possibilities,” Burt was saying, while five floors below an ambulance screamed its siren into every corner of the city streets. “ . . . but it’s not constricting. It helps us, in fact. What Anna has done is to reduce the sauce nicely.” He beamed at her. “She has left Vladimir with just two options; either to meet her again or to refuse contact. Whichever course he takes will tell us something.”

Logan looked up sharply. There was a frown on his face.

“What about the option of simply informing his boss at the KGB residency here?” he said, with unusual bluntness. “That’s what he’ll do, surely? And then the Russians will most likely set up a counteroperation.”

“I don’t consider that in the frame,” Burt replied abruptly, to the surprise of everyone.

There was an awkward silence in the room.

“Why not, Burt?” Marcie asked eventually.

“It is an option. We must consider it,” Logan persisted. “If anything, it’s the closest to a certainty we have.”

“And we’ll leave it out of our considerations,” Burt said, once more with the clear intention of closing this avenue of discussion altogether.

Logan took his elbows off the table and straightened in his chair, putting one hand on the arm as if intending to get up. His eyes flashed with anger, or just incomprehension. Anna read the faces around the table and saw confusion and consternation in all but Salvador’s. He seemed entirely impassive.

Burt let his gaze rest on Logan for a moment, and paused to indicate the importance of what he was he going to say.

“Listen again, Logan. All of you,” he said. He swept his gaze now around the table. “If we include that as a possibility, if Vladimir brings in the Russians, their activity will be visible on the streets. Yes? And that will draw others in, from our own side. So we’ll have the agency and God knows who else crawling all over this. We need to keep it tight. Just us. Just Cougar. This must be deeply personal. It’s about a relationship, a once cruelly intimate relationship between Anna and Vladimir.”

He looked at her without expression. This was not how Burt had ever behaved with her. It was not like Burt to be anything but strenuously sensitive in the matters of her past. But now his tone of voice was almost crude, as if he wanted to sting her.

Where is he leading with this? she thought. What is the purpose?

“It’s between Anna and Vladimir now,” Burt repeated. “Under our protection, of course. That way it’s controllable. Savvy?”

He looked at Logan in particular. Logan nodded without agreement, but Burt wasn’t finished. “Once we let this operation out of our own control, we lose our momentum,” he said. “It’s vital we all understand this now. We don’t just lose our grasp on the operation, which is a company matter—Cougar’s. We will also most likely lose Mikhail. Why? They’re all waiting out there to pounce on Mikhail. To be blunt, Mikhail represents a huge victory for whoever gets him, and victory means money, government contracts, expansion, Cougar’s expansion. Mikhail is the bottom line—he is on the profit side in the profit-and-loss account. Mikhail means power. I intend Mikhail to be Cougar’s asset and Cougar’s alone. We’re the biggest game in town right now, and all the rest of them want a place at the high table.”

There was a stunned silence around the room. Mikhail had suddenly been presented as a balance sheet item, rather than a figure of national importance to America’s security.

It was Dupont who broke the silence. He spoke in the soft, rumbling tone of voice he used in matters of urgency.

“Because we don’t want Vladimir to bring in his own people by informing the Russian intelligence services here,” he said carefully, “and because we don’t want the agency responding to their subsequent presence on the streets, that doesn’t mean it’s not an option for Vladimir.”

Anna sensed for the first time that what Burt wanted was interfering with the facts. She was reminded, chillingly, of Adrian. When people got in Adrian’s way, Finn had once said, he ignored them, as if they and what they represented didn’t exist. But there was something else too in Burt’s behaviour that she couldn’t detect, which sent off an alarm in her mind. Burt wasn’t like Adrian. Be wary, an inner voice told her. Be wary of the man who behaves out of character.

In the deeper recesses of her mind, she sensed that Burt was weaving some landscape of deceit, against which the truth, when it came, would be starkly illuminated. There was some purpose behind Burt’s almost nonsensical denial of his cohort’s objections.

But she thrust her instincts away, unable to comprehend them, whether through tiredness, from the intrusive presence of others in the meeting, or simply from the need to think in the present rather than listen to her inner voices. In her logical mind, she analysed and understood the competitiveness that Burt was trying to inspire in his team. But it was an unfamiliar form of competition to her. It was more of a competitive hunger engendered against the rival powers of Cougar within America’s own intelligence community, than against Russia. How many fronts was Burt fighting on?

“And if that happens,” Burt continued, ignoring Dupont’s considered interjection, “if other firms like Cougar get in on this, then they’ll interfere. And that will simply have the effect of putting more distance between us and Mikhail than ever. We don’t want Mikhail developing into some common asset. The more competing interests there are on the ground, the greater the risk of blowing the whole thing. And then, like as not, nobody will win the prize. It is therefore a matter of national security to keep it to ourselves.”

It was Logan who volubly refused to accept Burt’s thesis.

“But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen,” Logan insisted again, his voice betraying exasperation that now bordered on incredulity. “We have to plan for Vladimir informing the Russians that he’s met Anna, even if he doesn’t. It’s madness not to!” He was looking aghast at Burt, as if unable to comprehend that Burt didn’t see, or was ignoring, this simple fact.

There was now visible confusion fluttering around the table at Burt’s wilful disregard of the most likely outcome of Anna’s meeting with Vladimir. And once again she heard the voices inside.
Confusion is the aim
. But for a second time, she ignored her better instincts.

Burt was now looking amiably around the long table. Marcie was staring down at her hands to avoid meeting his eye in this confrontation; Anna flickered her eyes in acknowledgement of nothing. Bob Dupont was silently fidgeting with a pencil. For a moment the scene reminded Anna of a set of courtiers in the presence of an omnipotent but mad king.

Only the dark-eyed Salvador remained still, contained in himself and apparently unaffected by Burt’s disruption of clear thinking. Whoever he was, Anna thought, he was either too far on the inside to be troubled by Burt’s curious and illogical insistence on his point, or he was observing Burt from a different position than the rest of them, a position that derived from knowledge.

As Burt rested his gaze on Logan once again, Anna felt she saw a challenge.

“Logan?”

“Burt,” Logan said, giving no ground.

There was a tense silence as Burt seemed to be gauging Logan’s opposition. But then Burt relaxed again, allowing a broad grin to spread across his face.

“Anna,” he said, and glanced down the table at her as if she were the last resort of sanity in the room. “Why don’t you give your opinion. You are the mind and heart of the operation in so many ways. Will Vladimir go to his chief? Will he really reveal that he’s met you—at this stage? Tell us what you think.”

She thought for a moment, but only in order to appear to be giving Burt some vestige of support through her opposition to him.

“Not out of personal choice—no, he won’t,” she said carefully. “You’re right about that, Burt.” But that was all the meat she could throw Burt in the circumstances. “Vladimir would rather keep it to himself, I’m sure. But don’t forget, he’ll be afraid as well. So I think we can assume he will make a report, formally or not,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s less of a risk for him than concealing it,” she said. “He’ll weigh it up, see the risk attached to concealment, and then go to his boss. That’s my opinion, and it’s based on knowing a little about the way his mind works, as well as what any intelligence officer would do in the circumstances. He’ll be uncertain whether the meeting between us was under surveillance by his own people. So he won’t take the risk.”

Burt’s grin faded, and Anna saw the showman that was Burt by its very absence. She saw the ruthless core of him, the powerful ambition that had propelled him through life in the guise of good humour. Burt, like Adrian, hated to be denied. But Burt was not Adrian.

He continued to look at her, willing her on, his face an open invitation to her to spread enlightenment. She felt she had said enough, that her words were already excessive. But she nevertheless felt driven onwards, unable to listen to the voices that were telling her to stop now, to wait, not to be led by Burt. For one thing was certain. He was leading her—them?—somewhere that was too obscure for her to see clearly.

“I don’t quite understand the premise of this argument of yours anyway, Burt,” she said, buying a little time from her instinct to cease.

“Oh? Why not?” he replied, even though to all of them it was obvious.

“Surely the idea of my meeting Vladimir in the first place was precisely so that he would inform his superiors here. The only way Mikhail will know I’m here is if Vladimir does reveal it. Mikhail will pick it up very quickly. So we actually need Vladimir to inform his superiors. It’s not an option, it’s a necessity.”

There was silence in the room. Anna saw only Salvador move, a small movement, but he looked up at her for the first time, and then he looked at Burt.

Burt’s gaze hadn’t moved away from her.

“Let’s take a break,” he said suddenly and stood up. “All of you. Take a walk, have a coffee, whatever you like. All of you except you, Anna.” He turned to fix her with a neutral stare. “You’ll stay here with me, please.”

There was surprise, but all except Logan got to their feet. Logan was only just pushing back his chair as Marcie, Salvador, and Dupont were leaving the room.

“Logan?” Burt said.

“I’d like to stay,” he said.

“You’ll see Anna later. Don’t worry, I’m not going to strangle her,” Burt said without mirth.

Logan looked back at her as he left, and she saw something in his face she hadn’t seen before; an intensity, passion perhaps. Then he slowly turned and left the room.