Moscow Sting (22 page)
O
N THE MORNING AFTER
the revelation of Mikhail’s identity, Burt and Anna alone discussed the details of her plan to contact him. It was straightforward, and beautiful, Burt said, in its simplicity.
The dagger would be sent to the Russian cultural centre in Washington, D.C., purporting to come from an elderly émigré who wished to know its provenance and value. There was a box number to reply to, and a peremptory request to return the dagger, whether the cultural centre could be of any help or not.
If Burt was surprised by Anna’s easy agreement to continue with her original plan, with his and his watchers’ oversight, he didn’t show it. For herself, Anna understood Burt’s adoption of her idea completely. It was the best way, that was all, maybe the only way to take the step into Mikhail’s awareness.
Burt had his people in the capital run a routine check on all the staff at the cultural centre, in the course of which it was established that Mikhail was actually in residence, and not on vacation or travelling for work.
When that information was nailed down, Burt and Anna sat alone, working on the message to accompany the dagger. At Burt’s insistence she wrote it in her own hand, to be typed later. She chose an awkward and old form of Russian to couch her request, in the make-believe that this émigré was an older person who had been in the West for many decades. At Burt’s direction, the address she gave to Mikhail for his reply was mailbox no. 3079 at a mail office on Fifty-fifth Street.
On one of his occasional trips from the apartment, Burt had set up the arrangement, and she realised that this was the element Burt loved most, to be an operative himself again, on the streets, as he had been in his youth.
Burt then asked one of the bewildered guards to find a typewriter—secondhand from a flea market, he insisted, but make sure it worked—and in the interests of the security around Mikhail, he personally typed her words and personally handed it to the fake UPS driver to make the delivery. Finally, the dagger itself had been bound in cardboard and bubble wrap.
“I’m having the mailbox watched,” Burt informed her. “But it’s not anyone from here—someone who’s out of the whole Mikhail loop.”
She wondered why he didn’t trust even the closest of his employees with the information, but she sensed he was right. Like her, Burt wanted nothing to impede the smooth reception of Mikhail’s contact with her.
“Why watch it at all?” she said. “Either he leaves something, or he doesn’t. Watching won’t change that.”
“It’s just to ensure that nobody opens that box apart from us,” he said. “By accident or not,” he added.
And she saw the sense in that too.
“And then what?” she asked him. “If he makes a drop?”
“Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll bring whatever he leaves straight here. Nothing happens without you.”
But maybe something can happen without you, she thought.
After lunch, Burt had checked that the package had safely arrived, accepted and signed for by a receptionist at the cultural centre, and he was in an even more jovial mood than usual, though none of his staff at the apartment knew the reason for his elation.
For them, it was a time of waiting, as they believed, for Anna’s meeting with Vladimir. Anna retired to her room to rest. But once there, she began to work out her own mission, her plan that, once again, had to be unknown to Burt.
In the evening, they all ate supper—Burt, Anna, Marcie, and Logan—and there was the desultory feeling of nothing happening among all of them but Burt.
After supper Logan suddenly suggested, in front of them all, that he and Anna go to the movies. There was nothing going on, he reasoned. With the usual security, surely a visit to the movie theatre was a good way to relax. But he didn’t suggest that Marcie accompany them.
It was completely unexpected and, Burt said, all the more welcome for that reason. They could go to see a matinee in the next few days, he said, but only if she wished to.
It was the first moment of near freedom she would have had since the last day with Little Finn at the house in France, back in August.
“Let’s see,” she said. “Sometime in the next few days I’d love to, Logan. Maybe a walk would be better, though, rather than sitting in the theatre.”
And so, the next morning, Logan, Anna, and six watchers walked “for miles in the damn cold,” as Larry complained afterwards. She and Logan stopped and drank coffee and watched the watchers as they stamped their feet outside the café, trying to look like normal people who happened to be standing in subzero temperatures in a New York street in January.
Meanwhile, inside the café, Anna found she was more relaxed than she’d been for a long time.
Deemed a success by Burt, the exercise was repeated the following day, to the consternation of the watchers, and then on the third day after the dagger had been sent, she agreed this time to accompany Logan to the movies.
Logan had asked her this time in a way that carried a suggestion of something more than just time spent in her company. She had consulted Burt about this developing relationship and about the wisdom of accompanying Logan on what looked remarkably like a date.
Burt took her alone into one of the many small ops rooms in the apartment that was vacant.
“If you’re all right about Logan, I want to ask you something,” he said.
“So I have the right to turn you down?” She smiled.
“Oh, yes. Nothing’s changed. I want you to know that. You are highly respected here, and always will be by me. More so than before, if anything. No. This is a request, Anna. I’d like you to be friendly to Logan.”
“Friendly?”
“Yes.” He looked at her and grinned. “Be sweet with him. Can you do that?”
“Sweet with him? That seems to be a role I can’t escape,” she said.
Burt paused and seemed to be deciding what to say. Then:
“It’s something about Logan,” he said eventually. “I don’t live with my mistakes. But I’m going to have to live with this one a little longer. If it is a mistake.”
“Is Logan a mistake? Is he unreliable?”
“Logan was one of the best officers I ever had at the agency. Maybe the best.”
“And now?”
“Let’s say I’m giving him a chance—a reward too—with this assignment in the past months. I’m not certain how he’s responding to the opportunity. But I know he’ll respond to you, Anna. People do. As an SVR colonel or as a beautiful woman, I couldn’t say.” He smiled conspiratorially as he turned to her. “This isn’t something I’d ask you, Anna, unless I thought it was important.”
“I can be friendly to Logan,” she agreed. “Is that it? Or am I watching him?”
Burt walked away from her in the windowless room and sat in a swivel chair that was too small for him. He looked as if he’d been forcibly squeezed into it.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he said. “It might help you understand Logan a little.” His rotund body fit the chair like a cushion. “Logan ran agents in the Balkans in the nineties,” Burt began. “He was involved in an operation at the heart of the Milosevic government. Running an agent inside the Tigers, you know, the organisation led by the notorious paramilitary Arkan. As I’m sure you know also, Arkan was responsible for the murder of at least twenty thousand Bosnians. He was a killer, politician, warlord, bank robber. . . . Logan got very close to him through one of his female agents. So the agency decided to bring Arkan down.”
Burt paused, as if unwilling to divulge what he was going to say.
“But then the CIA station in Vienna made a mistake. They confused two communications sent out from our embassy there. One of these communications was intended for Arkan himself. It was a warning, a threat. We were going to get him, and he had nowhere deep enough to hide. The warning was intended to panic him into making the mistake that would allow us to follow through with his assassination.
“The other, second message was a detailed account of Arkan’s internal operations that could only have come from his inner circle. This communication was intended for our station head in Sarajevo. The two messages got mixed up, would you believe—they were sent the wrong way round. Arkan received the CIA assessment of his own operations, clearly aided by inside sources, and our station head in Sarajevo received the threat to Arkan. Incredible, isn’t it?” he said, looking at her.
“It happens,” she replied. “I’m sure I could match you for any mistake of the CIA’s with mistakes from the Russian side. Even mistakes as crass as that.”
“There are mistakes, and there are spectacular mistakes,” Burt said. “Arkan learned everything we knew about him, and he soon found the source of this information inside his own circle.” He paused. “She was tortured to death.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
Burt paused, discomfited, it seemed to her, by this unaccustomed departure from his regular world of relentless optimism.
“And it was a ‘she,’ ” Anna added.
“Yes. Logan’s agent was also Logan’s woman,” Burt continued. “And as if that weren’t enough, Logan was made the fall guy for the whole mistake, to save someone else’s skin at the station.”
Anna said nothing, but was thinking what Burt said next as he was saying it.
“Logan became what you might call a compromised, angry, washed-up piece of emotional wreckage,” Burt said.
“Who you’ve hired again,” she said. “Not the best material for an intelligence officer. So why? Why wasn’t he pensioned off? Why is Logan working for you?”
He looked at her.
“Two reasons. The first is a personal loyalty to him. If this doesn’t bring him back,” Burt said, “I fear he’ll be lost for good. And by ‘bring him back,’ I don’t mean bring him back to this world of ours necessarily, the world of secrets, but bring him back to any kind of life at all.”
“That’s taking a big risk,” she said. “Surely your heart isn’t that big, Burt. It’s a charming thought, but not much use in our operation now.”
“The second reason may seem odd to you. But it’s important to what we’re doing. Naturally Logan hates the CIA. To me, that’s a valuable asset. In this business of private intelligence companies, the revolving door between the CIA and us contractors is constantly spinning. It’s mostly one way, CIA people coming over to our side. They can earn twice, even three times, what they earn with the government. Department heads and even heads of the CIA come into the private sector, bringing their knowledge and government contacts with them.” Burt paused. “That’s all good, or nearly all good. But we’re in a situation of concealing something from the CIA, and the revolving door can in theory go both ways. I have to be careful that former CIA employees now at Cougar aren’t talking to their old colleagues. That’s why Logan hating the CIA makes him trustworthy—at least in that.”
“It’s still a risk in other ways,” she said, “if Logan’s unstable.”
“As I say, Logan was the best, and he was allowed to take the fall for someone else. In the end everything is and everything isn’t a risk,” he said, and he grinned once again, now he’d made his way through the uncomfortable story to the other side. Then he went on. “He doesn’t have any woman close to him. He keeps his various women at a long arm’s length. For obvious reasons, I guess.”
“So you want me to look after him.”
“Just be sweet. And only if it fits for you,” Burt said. “Only if it seems to work in the context of the assignment. And nothing too intimate, unless that works for you too.”
She was silent.
“That’s fine, then.”
The next morning Anna postponed her date with Logan at the movies to another day. It would be the fourth day since the contact with Mikhail. She needed time, but the reason she gave was that she felt unwell.
In the course of that day, after her discussion with Burt, she began to make her preparations. Everything was going to have to be alarmingly spontaneous, but it was all she could do. Improvisation was familiar to her. Any trained intelligence officer could follow instructions, but only the best improvised successfully.
In the course of the day, she collected what she could find in the apartment, away from prying eyes; a large wedge-shaped doorstop made of wood that was used in the conference room, and then another one she found lying unused in one of the smaller rooms; a small hammer that was in a kitchen drawer. There wasn’t much.
After some discussion between Burt and Bob Dupont the following morning—details that related to her security outside the apartment walls—it was agreed that she and Logan could go to the movies, accompanied by the usual swarm of minders.
With the boyish enthusiasm of a teenager on a date, Logan bought tickets and popcorn and they watched the new Clint Eastwood film at a theatre on Broadway. From time to time he used a whispered comment on the film as an excuse to put his hand briefly on her knee, as if it were merely to get her attention. Anna was amused by his sudden eagerness to be physically intimate, but she didn’t respond, and he didn’t press her. He seemed pleased just to be in her company, and she found, to her surprise, that she was similarly enjoying the experience. But her mind, when it wasn’t focused on the movie, was elsewhere.
They emerged from the movie theatre at just before five p.m. onto Broadway, where the half a dozen watchers were spread out on either side along the sidewalk.
It was well below freezing, even this early in the evening. But Logan suddenly declared he didn’t want to go back to the apartment, despite the instruction that it was a movie, then back “home.”
Anna could see Larry standing on the sidewalk outside the movie theatre, clapping his hands together from the cold, but also out of impatience to get going. The other watchers were invisible, but out of some professional habit or merely for her own amusement, she began to pick them out—one standing looking at a paper, two others waiting by the street as if for a taxi, another over to the right, beyond Larry, and the sixth idling by a newsstand on the sidewalk to the left. All were ahead of her and Logan or to the side, she noted.
Behind them, in the movie theatre itself, there was no one, and what had been running through her mind in the course of watching the movie now came to dominate her next step.