by Alex Dryden
“It’s Burt’s line to God that counts,” he said, beaming, but with a large slice of self-mockery rather than any evangelical or otherwise religious connotation. “Remember that, boys,” he instructed the three pumped-up young men in black combat fatigues that he had unsuccessfully tried to head them off from wearing. “Much time is wasted, many lives, and untold sums of money, on what might happen, or on what has happened. But all you need to devote your underdeveloped minds and overdeveloped bodies to is what happens. What happens is king, god, and all the philosophy you’ll ever need.”
As his words ricocheted around the confined space of the yacht’s saloon like trapped birds, they were met with puzzlement, admiration, and a kind of wonderment at the meaning behind his arcane statements from the three young men, who suspected the teacher was good—great, even—but didn’t really have a clue what he was talking about.
Larry, Joe, and Christoff were more at home on the assault course than in the library.
So Burt colonised God with the same broad-minded good humour with which he colonised a new recruit, a disaffected tribal chief, or a factory in Tajikistan that made anything from aluminium to ladies’ hairpins. He was a clown with a brain, a trickster with unassailable cunning, and he cultivated an image of buffoonery you believed at your peril.
He offered the three young warriors accompanying him a glass of premier cru Château Laroque for the third time, and for the third time they refused.
The upper echelons of the CIA, with one or two crucial exceptions, regarded Burt’s spiritual views as an aberration derived from some strange Eastern influence he had picked up on his travels. But even his detractors couldn’t deny the evidence of his great effectiveness, both as an operative and an inspiring instructor to the latest talent, and now as the owner of one of America’s big three private intelligence firms.
For his maverick and independent mind, as well as—it has to be said—his financial independence and impeccable contacts, he was a prized asset to the CIA, the NSA, and all the rest of America’s government spy agencies. He was much needed, indeed loved, by the agency big shots, as much as they were wary and at times disapproving of his modus operandi and his general joie de vivre.
Burt had found himself on the wrong side of agency policy many times in recent years, but he had worked with it, lain low, waited for the policy to change—unlike his old Brit acquaintance, Finn, who had tried to change things and died for his trouble.
For one, Burt derided the abject worship of the electronic intelligence “that has taken over our intelligence community like a cargo cult landing from the skies on a Stone Age tribe.” And he had the human intelligence from his own network of sources to reveal the weaknesses of this overreliance on technology. Burt claimed not to be able to use a computer, and every so often, as here now on the yacht, or in one of the numerous private clubs around the world to which he belonged, he would wave a huge Havana cigar at imaginary American satellites up in the heavens.
“They might be able to see what brand of cigar I’m smoking,” he would say. “They might even be able to sniff its aroma, for all I know. But there is one thing they can’t see—and which is all that really matters—and that is the intentions of the man who’s smoking it.”
He was now sixty-two years old, his athletically charged youth superseded thanks to doing exactly what he liked in the smoke, drink, and food department. Accentuated by an expensive light blue blazer and a pair of lurid yellow slacks that totally negated the camouflaged blackness of his team, his rotundity seemed to swell even beyond its natural limits to include the yacht, the sea, and the grey, all but invisible shore beyond, towards which he now looked keenly for a sign through a polished brass porthole.
But it was a cell phone on the blacked-out yacht that gave the signal. It was answered by Larry, the taller of the twenty-somethings.
“She’s heading south,” he informed Burt. “She’s with the Hungarian. We have all three cars on them.”
“You can bet Willy’s seen at least one of them.” Burt chuckled. “One of the best, Willy is.”
“We think the French have at least two vehicles with them too. Unmarked. One of them’s some kind of utility truck,” Larry added, with one finger now pressed to the ear without the phone, just in case Burt made one of his louder exclamations.
“And the Russians?” Burt said. “Have we any Russians?”
Larry repeated this question into the phone and shook his head at Burt. “We don’t know. Maybe. The autoroute’s packed with vacationers, both sides, north and south.”
“And then there’s the Brits,” Burt said. “We can be sure that Logan hasn’t just invited us to the party.” He beamed hugely. “It’s like the Wacky Races out there.”
“That’s it,” Larry said, and clicked the phone shut. “We’re on.”
With a final look of fond farewell at his glass of Laroque, Burt finished the wine in one friendly slurp.
“Internal shower,” he declared, and smacked his lips.
The three others were already up on deck, champing at the bit, as he hauled himself off the bar stool.
“No dawdling now, boys,” he barked, clambering up the steps some minute or two behind them. “Come on, it’s time to play!”
They descended into a black twenty-six-foot rib with muffled engines.
It had taken Burt a considerable amount of power from his persuasive arsenal to scale down the operation they were about to put in play. The whole team now consisted of one yacht, the Divinity—with its twenty-six-foot rib—three cars with watchers, and a backup van of his own special forces just in case. But, at Burt’s insistence, the latter were well to the rear.
Although his own company had paid the half million for knowledge of the Russian colonel’s whereabouts, the special committee on Operation Mathilda—which is what they were calling Anna—also included the CIA chief from the Paris station. Burt considered that politic.
But then the CIA had tried to impose its own methods on the operation rather than Burt’s. Burt, however, could more or less tell the CIA what to do. That was the way America’s intelligence community had developed in the past few years; former senior men like Burt had set up their own operations, and now the agency was wholly dependent on them.
“Number one,” Burt had stated at the one and only meeting of this committee so far, with a relaxed coolness that acknowledged no opposition. “We’re on foreign soil. Number two. We don’t want to scare the pants off the woman. She’s our friend. We love her, and she is lovely. We’ve come to help her, and we will. We want to welcome her to the United States of America with gifts of kindness, not Halloween wraparound shades and sidearms. That will only remind her of what she escaped from in Russia. Number three. She has French protection. They are our allies, you may remember. We are their guests.”
Burt had successfully laid out his stall. The only thing he wished to add to the operational inventory, after cutting out the small army that the committee’s CIA chief, Bob Draco, was preparing, was a truckload of watermelons.
“Watermelons?” Draco had queried.
“Yes, they have to be watermelons. And a full truck,” Burt insisted.
Burt knew he was making his demands, disguised as requests, from a position of strength. He had been picked for this delicate lift of the Russian colonel, not just because it was he whom Logan had contacted, but because he already had previous acquaintance with the target. He was in pole position over other companies like his own who wanted a piece of the action.
Back at the turn of the millennium, when his young friend Finn had gone “feral” and was pursuing his own investigations—against the explicit instructions of British intelligence—Burt had contacted Finn and offered him support, even though it could only be of a moral nature. After all, the Americans had been dissuaded of Mikhail’s usefulness by their friends in British intelligence—Adrian leading the pack—whose false assessment concluded that Mikhail was a fraud.
But Burt, wheth
er through his contact with God or not, had always believed in Finn, known he was right, in fact, and he consequently knew that Mikhail was truly the gold seam inside the Kremlin that Finn said he was. And this was not simply because Finn said it was so; it was because Mikhail had been this gold seam in the previous eight years, during which the CIA, and Burt through his friends there, had received a steady stream of Mikhail’s intelligence from Finn, via MI6, thanks to the desire of the British to impress their American friends.
Burt had worked closely with Adrian through those days in the 1990s when Russia was struggling towards its short-lived democracy. But he had kept a Chinese wall between the working relationship with Adrian and his friendship with Finn. In fact, Adrian’s treatment of Finn—and hence of Mikhail—had earned Adrian a very black mark in Burt’s book.
Adrian had ignored what was happening, the cardinal sin in Burt’s book. And Finn had taken the ultimate fall.
But most important of all his assets in Operation Mathilda, Burt had actually met the woman, the Russian KGB colonel, Anna. Finn had uniquely—if you discounted Willy, anyway—introduced her to him at Burt’s London apartment in Mayfair. There they’d had a private supper, just the three of them, Burt’s butler hovering in the background. Anna had spoken to him that evening in confidence about Finn, and had asked him if he could really help her man.
She and Burt had hit it off, just as Finn had said they would. Burt mourned Finn’s death, almost like a son’s. He’d liked and admired him, and that was good enough for Anna.
Finn had been Logan, Burt thought, but with his idiot conscience still intact. And it was his conscience that had killed him.
And so Burt, apart from his own natural qualifications for the job, was the obvious choice in the thirty-six hours since Logan’s communication had been received. The money had been paid, Anna’s whereabouts communicated, the Russians were nowhere to be seen, at least for now, and Burt had flown from New York into Marseille.
And then there were the British. They too would no doubt be somewhere out there in the undergrowth. But so far Burt was fully confident that he was ahead of the game.
The four men climbed down a wooden ladder into the twenty-six-foot rib, which set off with silenced engines on the mile and a quarter to the beach. The yacht, in total blackout on this moonless night, had disappeared altogether by the time they were less than fifty yards away.
One of Burt’s dictums, which he had taught repeatedly at the Farm, was that if you were after someone, rather than chase them up hill and down dale, it was better to know where they were going in the first place. Burt knew where Anna and Willy were going. It was the only place they could go.
His entire plan for the night ahead was based on this—that Anna and Willy would head for Willy’s beach hut at the end of a three-mile track across the inhospitable salt pans close to Marseille’s industrial area. It was where Willy had hidden Finn and Anna. Neither the British nor the Russians knew of it. But Burt did. In a moment of revelation between them, Finn had told Burt that Willy’s beach hut was where they had stayed for a night or two when Anna had fled from Russia. And back then, Burt saw that Finn was being only partially open. It was Finn’s and Anna’s hole-in-the-wall. Burt could tell that. Willy’s beach hut was the perfect hiding place—if you didn’t know about it.
The rib crunched gently onto the beach. Larry was on the phone again.
“They’re going for exit seventeen,” he said.
“What did I tell you, boys?” Burt said. “They’re making for a spot eleven miles inland from this very beach. All the tails, all the vanloads of gun-toting CIA hoodlums like yourselves, all the watchers and all the satellites that clog up the pleasant skies above us, couldn’t tell you where they were heading. It’s Burt’s line to God that counts. Give me that phone.”
Burt placed the cell phone delicately in his large hand and spoke in clear, unmistakably authoritative tones.
“You don’t follow them, right? You stay on the tramlines. All the way down to Marseille. No more tails. Lose them.”
There was a brief pause as this settled in.
“The truck goes behind them,” Burt said. “Then it drops its load right at the foot of the slip road. Let me hear it.”
There was a lengthy pause.
Burt put his hand over the speaker and looked at the three jocks who stood on the sand as if they were about to set off on a hundred-metre dash. Burt was chuckling to himself, to them, to the universe.
“This is better than the bouncing bomb,” he said. “Not that you’d know about that.”
Finally, and with no more words from his end, Burt clipped the phone shut.
“It’s an old French farmer’s trick,” he explained. “When they go on strike for greater subsidies in this beautiful country, they clog the main intersections with watermelons. Thousands and thousands of watermelons. Beautiful. Believe me, boys, this is God’s own country,” he said, and watched with amusement the shock of the youthful muscle that surrounded him, who thought that God was born and raised in the US of A.
But Burt was laughing. “Anyone following that blue Merc is fruit salad,” he said.
He handed back the phone and took a long, slow piss in the dunes. When he returned, he spoke carefully, serious now.
“I want the two of you”—he indicated Joe and Christoff—“to walk with me down the beach. You will wait at intervals that I will show you. Anyone approaching from the west—in other words towards the beach hut—you politely stop. Though God knows how you can be polite in black spandex pants,” he added. “Just try. If they aren’t polite in return, you take them down, as silently as possible. We don’t expect anyone, but just suppose the Russians or the British, or maybe some extraterrestrial group that’s also interested in the woman, do know about this place, be prepared. Larry, you go over the back of the beach. Approach from the land side. Stay down in the dunes. Do not be visible at any time. When they’re out of the car—the both of them—when they’re out of sight, disable their vehicle. Okay. Me? When I drop you two off at your posts, I will go alone right along this beach to meet them.”
Burt lit a cigar, against general blackout procedures, and waved Larry off into the darkness with its glowing tip.
Chapter 11
ANNA SENSED HER MIND sliding with increasing speed down a black crevice. Its departure was taking her sanity with it. She was no longer aware that she was standing in a courtyard, her own garden; she no longer felt the clothes against her skin or the sun on her face.
She felt something violent at her shoulders, something that shook her so hard the fragments of thought that had scattered with her mind were jumbled up in twos and threes until some of them were thrown together in the violence and began to process signals in some kind of informational order. Something began to make a vague sort of sense.
It was Willy that was shaking her, that was her first clear impression. Her vision began to function dimly. She saw his face. Felt his big hands on her. He was staring at her intensely, but his eyes seemed pulled out sideways in a panic, as if they were on elastic bands. She felt his physical power. She had feeling. It was getting more real. His mouth was open. She began to hear the sounds, but not the words. Then her name. Anna! Anna!
She was suddenly overwhelmed by the aftershock from the trauma that had struck a single second before. Little Finn. Not in the garden. Not in the house. Disappeared.
A bolt of adrenaline-induced heat rose up through her core, and she broke away, rushing straight ahead at a closed shed door. She began to pull it frantically, but the catch was on, and it wouldn’t budge. She didn’t notice the catch that prevented her opening the dilapidated door. Only he must be inside. That was the answer. That was all there was, nothing else. The shed was the only place he could be.
Willy caught up with her and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders.
“Anna! Anna!”
He was clearer. Her dissolved senses began to coalesce into recognisable forms. The disappe
arance of her mind went into rapid reverse and her consciousness shot through her in one clear shattering image, like random streams of iron filings flying across the smooth surface of a table towards the point of a magnet.
They’d taken him. They’d taken her son.
“Get your phone! Be quick! I’ll start the car.” She heard him this time. She looked dully at the shed door. It was padlocked, she now saw. There was nobody inside.
Without thinking now, she ran into the house, picked her phone up off the table by the door, snatched up the gun, and heard the metal gates clanking open and the engine start. She ran out. They didn’t close the house or the metal gates. Willy behind the wheel turned the blue Mercedes out onto the lane down the hill.
“We may catch them,” he said. “They must be close.”
“Stop!” she screamed at him. Her mind was now blinding white, absolutely clear. She was functioning like a machine, with a relentless, automated attention to detail.
Willy slammed on the brakes. They were by the wrought iron fence where the palm tree reached up past the roof of the house. She ran out of the car and picked up something off the road, a small green plastic object that was part of the ant house.
She ran into the car.
“Now we know,” she said with unnatural loudness. “They took him through the railings. He was small enough to fit through the railings.”
She cried out with an animal anguish and wrapped her hands around the top of her head.
“They took him through the fucking railings, Willy,” she moaned through the blur of her arms. “Why didn’t we think of that? He’s so small, they could pull him through.”
Willy put his foot down and slammed the car to the right, into the village square, past the barn with the weighbridge, onto the road down the hill. He began to throw the car into the corners in a screamingly low gear until, finally, they flattened out onto the straight road with the plane trees that led to the town.