Moscow Sting (24 page)
B
URT PAUSED BEFORE A
nineteenth-century clapboard house that stood about three hundred yards above the beach. A bitterly cold wind blew onshore from the direction of Greenland, and the icy waves nodded their heads onto the raked pebbles with a lethargy that, in a human being, would have been the final stage before freezing to death. A few gulls circled above their heads, screeching faintly into the wind.
He turned to Anna. Without removing his hands from the pockets of his coat, he simply nodded towards the house.
“That belonged to my grandfather,” he said. “From my mother’s side of the family.”
“So you didn’t start with nothing, Burt,” she said.
He guffawed hugely. “No. I had a great deal. A great deal. But I could have frittered it away.” He paused, as if reflecting on the possibilities of simply spending the family fortune. “He was in steel,” he added. “Out in Pittsburgh. But they all bought their summer homes in Long Island and built their country clubs in Pennsylvania for weekends.”
He walked on, and she kept in step with him, the wet stones crunching softly beneath her feet. She couldn’t see them, but she knew his scouts were out, ahead and behind them somewhere. Larry had been pacified. He’d wanted to break parts of Logan, in the wilful belief that it had been him who had led her astray.
Logan was now at the apartment with Dupont and Marcie, while Burt had brought her up here alone. They were to be questioned apart, her and Logan.
For his part, everything that had happened twenty-four hours before confirmed to Burt that he had been right. She knew what she was doing, particularly when it came to Mikhail. And since he hadn’t let her run free himself, she had devised a way of doing so. The escapade to the Mercer Hotel was brilliantly done, and he still hadn’t asked her why, what was the purpose of it. Yet he knew that it had been something to do with her and Mikhail, and nothing connected to Logan. Logan was just the wrench that opened the door.
Burt glanced sideways at her as they walked. She seemed to read him perfectly, he thought, just as she’d read Logan. How he admired her for that. Her genius for the long game lay in her bet that she could expect his, Burt’s, admiration even when—no, particularly when—she sabotaged his plans. She’d played him along for weeks, and now he was about to find out why.
Something told him now, and had told him right back at the start, that even with her vulnerable child as a pawn and an execution squad and worse waiting for her back in Russia, she would have still hardened herself to threat like tempered steel.
“You reached the hotel a few minutes before Logan,” he said conversationally. “That’s some feat. All he had to do was get there. But you did something else too, didn’t you.”
“Mikhail made contact,” she said simply. There was no reason to lie.
He didn’t ask her how Mikhail had made contact. He didn’t regret that he personally had kept her in the loop about the exact arrangements whereby Mikhail was to make contact. She was spontaneous, she worked with whatever material she had available. It wasn’t his own devious thinking or even instinct that had led him to allow her to know the mail office and box number. So it must have been, he thought with amusement, his direct line to God. He’d acted entirely without thought.
“When?” he said. “When did he make a meeting?”
“The day after I meet with Vladimir.”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“And you and you alone want to be the one who asks him what he wants.”
“Yes, Burt. That’s the only way it’s going to work. With his willingness. Neither you, nor your organisation, nor all the organisations or the full force of the American government can change that.”
“I understand.”
“I know,” she said.
He chuckled to himself. And I know you know I know, he thought. She was a gift from God, this girl.
“You want to leave the apartment alone?” he said. “Go solo. You want to meet him with no surveillance whatsoever?”
“That’s the only way this is going to work. He hasn’t survived this long inside the Kremlin, all around Europe, and now over here by being blind. He’ll know. That’s my opinion.”
“Mine too,” he said, and thought briefly that this, perhaps, was one good thing that could come out of the privacy of an intelligence operation being conducted through a contract company. If the CIA had their hands on this, they’d just lie to her. There was no way that Langley would let her off the leash on her own, not with Mikhail as the prize.
But most likely, even in the context of the private intelligence companies, he believed that only he, Burt, would have had the foresight to consider it, let alone act on it.
They walked on for a hundred yards or so. His face where the scarf didn’t quite cover it was burned from the cold.
“And you’ll trust me in this,” he said. “In letting you go solo.”
“Completely,” she lied.
It was perfect, he thought. He was taking advice, orders almost, from his own captive. For that, in truth, was what she’d been all along. The perfection of this turning of the tables filled him with a sense of contentment that was only partly due to his knowledge that she was right about Mikhail. He knew they only had one chance with Mikhail, and that was her. If she couldn’t get through to him, nobody and nobody’s legions could.
He asked her if she wanted to find somewhere warm, have a drink perhaps? But she preferred to walk, and he was happy to be outside. The more the weather threw at them, the more he enjoyed it.
“You were lucky you didn’t break my man’s leg with that damn fire extinguisher,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t.”
“He’s got an ankle the size of a football, though,” Burt said with some mirth.
“I’ll apologise.”
“And Logan?” he asked her, after they’d tramped along the beach about a quarter of a mile from his grandfather’s old house.
“None of this was his doing,” she said.
“I’m angry with him. For you, it was about something important, for him it was a whim. He could have jeopardised everything we’ve spent months working on. I had half a mind to turn him over to Larry.” Burt chuckled. “People don’t cross me unless it’s for a good reason.”
“I’ll remember, Burt.”
“You had a good reason.” He laughed. She talks to me like we’re equals, partners, he marvelled. And I guess we are, in some way. She apologises for nothing, except the guy’s damn leg. She justifies nothing. And that was another reason he had to trust her now.
“Logan’s not going to be pleased with you,” Burt said.
“I’ll have to make it up to him.”
He looked at her, but her face gave nothing away.
“Would you have gone to a room with him?” he said. “If we hadn’t got to him?”
“That’s what I said,” she replied. “It’s the least I could have done.”
He caught himself feeling protective of her, like a father. He didn’t like it that she was so casual with herself.
“It’s not the way I’d like to think of you giving yourself to men,” he said, and heard the awkwardness in his voice.
She laughed out loud and put her hand on his back.
“I don’t give myself to men,” she said. “That’s a very sweet, old-fashioned thought.”
“You’d do it for yourself, then?” he asked. “Sleep with him?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I like Logan, and I’d like to go to bed with him. He’s done me that favour, he’s broken the spell of Finn. He’s cleared the way, and I’m grateful.”
A rare cloud crossed Burt’s mind as he thought of Logan’s part in her entrapment.
“You’d sleep with him?” he asked and felt suddenly like an awkward father with a sixteen-year-old daughter. It was deeply unfamiliar territory.
“As a friend, yes,” she said. “Why not?”
They turned away from the sea and made for a car park at the edge of the beach dusted with wind-blown sand.
As they arrived, the car drew in, followed by another of Burt’s war vehicles, as Logan called them. Somewhere the watchers had seen Burt’s movements—and even his intentions.
They drove back to the city, and Anna slept most of the way. Despite the coming events, she felt more calm than she had done for many weeks. Her ultimate goal might be different from Burt’s, but they both shared the same methods to reach where they each wanted to go. They also shared a wish to find Mikhail in order to reach their goals.
That evening, she and Logan went out to dinner, at Burt’s suggestion. It was a reconciliation, he said.
Larry was furious, the muscles in his face twitching with barely repressed frustration. There were the usual watchers with them, and they followed them along the street afterwards as they headed for another apartment to which the keys were magically provided.
“See you in the morning,” Burt had said to her quietly, and away from everybody, before they’d left. “Ten o’clock. We have work to do.”
For Burt, the whole arrangement had a surreal quality to it. But he realised there was no ulterior motive, either his own or from the two of them, and that the seemingly forced nature of the assignation had more to do with natural circumstances than he liked to admit.
If she had been a man relaxing on the eve of an assignment, he realised, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
In the restaurant, Anna and Logan skirted around the events of the day before, he because he didn’t want to bring up his own failure, she for more philosophical reasons; the events of the past were not in her mind to use as a bludgeon for the present.
But as they entered the apartment after dinner, she looked at Logan and said, “So I won the bet. You got caught.”
He saw the mischief in her eyes.
“Yes. You did.”
“But I’m quite generous,” she said.
“I appreciate that.”
“Maybe you’ll be better in the bedroom than on the street,” she said with a laugh. “You couldn’t be any worse.”
He looked at her supremely confident eyes and felt his nerves and his skin and his flesh reaching out towards her touch. But she just stood and looked straight back at him, in neither a challenge nor a retreat.
Still facing each other, they took off their coats and hung them on a stand by the door. They both looked around at the service apartment; a sitting room with a huge window thirty-four floors above the street, the elegant digits of Manhattan’s skyline lit around their edges like constellations.
Behind the sitting room, a door was open to a bedroom and another large picture window. The apartment, he thought inconsequentially, had no kitchen.
He flicked the lock on the door behind them and kissed her. They kissed for a long time, standing four feet inside the room. She unbuttoned his shirt, and they kicked their shoes away. Then she took his hand and walked to the sofa.
“There’s a bedroom through there,” he said.
“Maybe later.”
She let go of the confusion of passions and motives that tried to insinuate themselves into her mind. She wanted sex, that was all. If he was looking for something more, that was his lookout. He was what she wanted right now.
But when they made love, she didn’t have her eyes open, as she had always done with Finn.
For security reasons left unexplained, but which Burt described as “normal procedure,” they decamped from the apartment on Twenty-third Street the morning after her night with Logan. Her meeting with Vladimir would take place the next day.
At ten o’clock, when they both arrived at the apartment—and Larry grimaced in the background, unable to meet her eyes—Burt, Logan, Marcie, and Anna left in a car for the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, where a helicopter took them away from New York to another property in Burt’s apparently inexhaustible empire. It was a farmhouse this time, in the New Hampshire countryside.
By midday the four of them were sitting around a hickory table in the kitchen, while a new security team patrolled the perimeters. Larry, it appeared, was being given a rest.
Burt wasted no time. “The immediate requirement for both your meeting with Vladimir and then your meeting with Mikhail concerns a piece of intelligence gleaned from our British friends,” he said.
Marcie and Logan both looked up in surprise, while Anna, Burt noted, remained focused on a point somewhere in the middle distance beyond the sliding glass doors in the kitchen, which looked out onto snow-covered gardens. But Logan and Marcie both saw that Burt was in no mood for interruptions.
“The reason for meeting Vladimir a second time at all might have seemed vague to you,” he said, looking at Logan and Marcie. “The possibility of turning the deputy head of the KGB presence in New York, while worth pursuing, is as we all know a long-term strategy, however unlikely its outcome. That element of Anna’s assignment is a secondary reason at this stage. The principal focus is this British fragment of intelligence, highly classified, restricted to just us in this room. And that is just for Mikhail.”
“What meeting with Mikhail, Burt?” Marcie said, unable to contain her curiosity any longer.
“That’s something I’ll brief you and Logan on separately,” he replied.
He looked up at Marcie and Logan and received surprised expressions from both of them. Anna turned from her sightless view of the vista outside and looked at Burt.
“This British intelligence originates from a reliable British operation in Russia itself,” Burt continued. “It comes from a source in the Russian defence establishment. The British source has provided convincing information that the Russians have an agent called Icarus in the United States. Icarus is an American who is working in a highly sensitive government defence programme somewhere on our territory.”
Burt paused and sipped from a glass of water.
“It may be that Vladimir knows of Icarus, of course. He may even run him or her. That’s possible. But Icarus may also not be his source. He—or she—may be a source and an operation that’s being run out of their embassy in Washington.” He looked around the table. “As you know, relations between the Russian embassy in D.C. and the KGB in America have always been competitive, to say the least. If their embassy is running Icarus—if Icarus is an embassy source—it’s quite possible Vladimir will have no knowledge of him. But Mikhail will have the access to such information. Of that I’m certain.”