by Alex Dryden
“For the future, Anna,” he said, for the first time using her name. “To deter them from doing it again.”
“You think they’ll care? The killer’s probably some common criminal they trained up for the purpose. Expendable. That’s what they do. Killing someone like that won’t deter them.”
“But it must be done,” Adrian said.
She didn’t ask him who the killer was, though she saw in Adrian’s eyes that he wanted her to. She knew he wouldn’t tell her, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of refusing.
And then Adrian reverted to his ruthless exposition of her position.
“Do you really think you can get your way?” he said to her. “Think hard before you decide you don’t know Mikhail. It may be final. You’re useful now, and maybe for a while longer, but eventually that will come to an end. You’ll need to be a bit more accommodating if you want your freedom. You’ll need friends. And in this game, friends are the people you help.”
“If I need friends, are you offering?” she said.
He looked like he wanted to strike her. But then he calmed his face and regarded her with cold eyes.
“For the last time, who’s Mikhail?”
“And for the last time, Adrian, I don’t know.”
“Burt can protect you for a while. But his time’s running out too. I’ll see to that,” he said.
Adrian got up from his chair, but he didn’t leave the room. She stayed seated, as she had been since he’d entered. He walked back over to the window, and once again his face was lost against the blinding white of the winter sun. Then he turned to her.
“All right. Suppose I believe you,” he said. “Suppose I accept you don’t know Mikhail. What would you do in my position?”
She said nothing.
“Time, safety, and all hope are running out for you,” he said, and left.
Chapter 20
ON THE DAY AFTER Adrian’s visit, Burt suddenly announced that they would be decamping for New York on the following day. Adrian’s visit seemed to have injected a new vigour into Burt’s measured plans. Burt had made a decision and seemed happier with the prospect of action. In the study after breakfast there was an air of expectancy.
But Anna knew that Little Finn would have to stay. They were on an operational footing now, Burt told her, and it was unsafe for the boy to be moved around.
“Why New York?” Anna asked.
It was Marcie who answered her question. “You’re going to make contact with Vladimir,” she told her. “Vladimir is the new starting line for Mikhail.”
At seven o’clock on the following morning, Anna, Burt, Logan, and Marcie left the log house. Little Finn seemed more concerned that the bodyguards were leaving. They’d played endlessly with him since Anna’s arrival in America, and Burt promised him some more bodyguards to play with. “They’re on the helicopter right now that’s coming to pick us up,” he said, and stroked Little Finn’s head with affection.
By nine o’clock they were on a Cougar company jet to New York, and by afternoon the four of them, as well as Larry, Christoff, and Joe, moved into a set of three fifth-floor apartments on Twenty-third Street. More of Burt’s property empire, Marcie informed Anna.
Inside, the apartments, except the bedrooms, were in chaos. There were a dozen Cougar employees setting up communications equipment, testing listening devices, and filling floors and tables with computers, empty boxes, and tangled skeins of wire.
They were tired from the journey, and there was nowhere inviting enough in the apartments to sit around just yet. Anna made her excuses and went to her room. To sleep, she said. But what she needed now was to plan for what lay ahead. And that meant the deception of Burt and all of them.
In the morning, the preparations—laying the ground for her approach to Vladimir—would begin.
At ten o’clock on the following day, Anna and Logan drank coffee in a kitchen piled with boxes of catering equipment. He was civil, but reserved, she noted. Her rebuff, perhaps? She’d voiced her concern to Marcie about Logan’s discipline. Perhaps Logan had received a warning from Burt.
They all met after breakfast in Burt’s control room, as the technical people who had rigged the place were calling it. It had four windows overlooking the street, fitted with blackout blinds.
Logan as usual opened the questioning.
“We’re interested in your relationship with Vladimir,” he said.
Outside the window, the New York sky hung low like a wet, grey blanket, and there was little cheer except in the eager faces in the room.
Burt had appeared only briefly, to explain to her that they would need to get right beneath the skin of her former attachment to Vladimir, in order to establish a base for her contact with him. And the first task was to figure out all the options available for the approach.
“Tell me, what’s the purpose of making contact?” she’d asked Burt.
“So that your presence here is known to the Russians.”
“As bait for them?” she said
“No.” Then: “Only in part,” he corrected himself.
“I show myself to Vladimir… . What then?”
“If the Russians know you’re here, then it’ll become known to Mikhail.”
“So you think he’s here? In America?”
“He may be, he may not be. But if he is, I believe he’ll contact you. Even if he’s not here, there’s a chance he will. And that way, Mikhail will tell us who he is.”
“And you’ll give him the opportunity to accept or refuse the Americans?” she asked.
“Everyone has a choice.”
Anna saw an opportunity. If Mikhail came to her, then she was relieved of the burden. She would be his intermediary, as Finn had been. And it would solve the impasse between her and the Americans. It was, perhaps, a way out.
At that point, Burt left the room.
But now Logan was looking directly at her with his clear blue eyes, and he didn’t let his gaze fall as he usually did.
“You and Vladimir go back a long way,” Marcie said. “But we’re most interested in the time when your relationship became an affair.”
So they knew that too.
“It was just a week,” Anna said.
“You’ve told us briefly about Vladimir,” Marcie said. “We want you to fill it out a little.”
Anna paused to decide on the best place to start.
“As soon as I was assigned by my controllers to join Finn in France,” she began, “every eleven days I would compile a report for my chief in Moscow. The reports went to Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB chief. He and Putin were old comrades from Petersburg, and Putin was taking an interest in Finn. Because of Mikhail, of course. Finn and I would compile the report together, to make sure I was able to give them genuinely useful information. Finn, I know, gave away certain secrets of the British—minor ones—in order to establish my usefulness. We both knew that unless I was seen to be useful, I would be recalled to Russia, perhaps for good. And that would be the end of us. Already I was writing my reports for the sole purpose of staying with Finn.
“On my first recall to Russia, which was routine after over two years with Finn, I was debriefed at the Lubyanka in Moscow and then at the Forest. There were two schools of thought, I came to realise. The first one was that my mission as Finn’s lover was wasting valuable time and resources without getting the crucial information that would lead to the discovery and arrest of Mikhail. The second was that it was a long process, and that victory would come only with patience.”
She looked up at Marcie. “Nothing changes, does it, Marcie, whichever side you’re on?”
Marcie gave a smile of sympathy and encouragement.
“Anyway, I was aware that certain factions around Patrushev were snapping at my heels and that I needed to redouble my efforts, not only to be reassigned to Finn after my recall, but also for my own survival. There was deep suspicion in certain quarters that I was already on the outside.
“Vladimir and I were sent together to the Forest for ten days of physical retraining, the establishment of new code work, and so on. Vladimir was by now working as the liaison between me and the chief, Patrushev. We’d always been close friends, and that was the reason for his new position on my case with Finn.
“It was an exhausting ten days—I’m sure you know what these things are like. And I was increasingly anxious that my involvement with Finn was going to be shut down. If I was taken off the case, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave Russia. I realised then that I couldn’t—or more accurately didn’t want to—live without Finn. To get back to him, I had to establish to my own side that I was totally loyal as well as being able to make progress on my assignment. I believed I needed to establish my loyalty, in particular, in as many ways as I could.
“Vladimir was fond of me—keen on me, yes. He always had been since school days. One night at the dacha where we were both staying out at the Forest, he made one more attempt to seduce me. I’d laughed him off, in the manner of the old friends we were, on several occasions already. I don’t know whether the cynical plan was already formed in my head, or whether that came later, but anyway we went to bed. He thought I’d finally given in—as he probably saw it, anyway. We spent the next week working fourteen hours a day, making love, talking about old times, teasing each other—it was a good week. I told Vladimir I loved him. He asked me to marry him, and I accepted.
“It was then that I was fully conscious of what was happening. I wanted to be with Finn, yet I had told Vladimir I would marry him. I was using him to establish in the minds of my superiors, and particularly Patrushev, that if my loyalty to the Kremlin was doubted in some quarters, I had the strongest personal ties to Russia. When all this is over, I told Vladimir, we’ll be married. I then realised how much I dreaded them calling off the assignment, and finding that all I had left was my agreement to marry Vladimir. Much as I liked him, I was now devoted to Finn.”
“Did you feel any… guilt about that?” Logan said.
Marcie looked at him sharply. “That isn’t relevant,” she said.
“I justified my actions towards Vladimir,” she replied, “because I knew he was to be trusted no more than I was. He was a KGB officer. That was his task, no doubt, to bind me in. And therefore his proposal of marriage to me was as cynical as my acceptance—”
She stopped.
“But it wasn’t?” Marcie prompted.
“No. Vladimir was sincere. But I wasn’t to find that out until a year later. To my relief, after the retraining programme with Vladimir, I was reassigned to join Finn in France. We both felt—Finn and I—that this might be our last chance to stay together. He asked me then and there to leave Russia. He told me he would stop the dangerous work he was doing behind the back of the British intelligence service and that we’d settle down in the West, have children… raise pigs, I think he said, though I’m not sure whether he meant actual pigs or was referring to the children.
“But I still couldn’t make that leap. Leave Russia, leave everything I knew, for the hazard of life with Finn. I thought I could play it out just a little bit longer.
“I was recalled a second time, around a year later, and against my better instincts—and I guess Finn’s, though he put no pressure on me—I did return to Moscow. Once more I was debriefed, and this time the faction in the KGB that was angry with the lack of progress on Mikhail was getting the upper hand. At four o’clock one morning at the dacha where I stayed with my grandmother, we were woken by the kind of loud knocking that heralds only one thing in the annals of the KGB—arrest. But it was Vladimir at the door. Alone. He told me they wanted me at the Lubyanka, the KGB’s headquarters in Moscow. Just for further questioning, he said. But we both knew.
“We drove from the Forest into Moscow. At his insistence, we stopped at his apartment for a fortifying drink and breakfast, as he told me.” She looked up at Logan and Marcie. “The rest you know,” she said. “Vladimir smuggled me into Finland.”
“He loved you very much,” Marcie said.
Anna didn’t reply directly. Instead she said, “Later, Finn would say that I owed Vladimir my life and my freedom,” she said. “Finn said that Vladimir had loved me so much that he had delivered me to another man, the man I loved. Finn said it was the most selfless act he’d ever seen.”
She sipped from a glass of water, but it was only to pause and reflect on that moment five years before.
“Everything Finn said about Vladimir only confirmed what I knew, but hadn’t dared to admit to myself—that he was genuine all along, and that I had used him mercilessly. Vladimir risked his own life to allow me to be with Finn.”
Anna fell silent. She was lost for a moment in the deliberate cruelty of her own behaviour.
Marcie was respectfully silent. Logan was making notes, or pretending to.
The second session of their questions about Vladimir was more brisk, less reflective. This time, Burt was present throughout. How should Anna make her approach to him? Should it be an “accidental” meeting? Or should she make herself known to Vladimir deliberately, so that he couldn’t mistake it? Her behaviour towards Vladimir would clearly be different in either scenario.
“Will Vladimir believe it’s accidental?” Logan said. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”
“I don’t agree,” Marcie said. Marcie now seemed to Anna to be entrenched in an antagonistic position towards Logan. “Coincidence is seductive.”
“Not to intelligence officers on foreign territory,” Logan objected.
“It depends how much Vladimir wants to believe in the chance of running into Anna,” Marcie cut in. “It depends on the story Vladimir tells to himself. But if he thinks it’s a coincidence, then it’s the better method. Anything he knows is planned will have a sour feeling to it, which will take a lot of time and effort to dispel.”
Anna said nothing in response to either thought. She was trying to think herself into Vladimir’s mind.
Burt looked at her, watching her thinking.
“What if Vladimir sees you, not the other way around?” he said.
She looked up at him, nodding slightly. “That would be the most intriguing from his point of view,” she said. “He would have to make the move.”
“What if he doesn’t make the move?” Logan said.
“Then Anna can always see him at a later stage,” Burt says. “It doesn’t negate that possibility.”
“It has more chance of seeming a coincidence,” Marcie agreed.
“What do you think, Anna?” Burt asked her.
“It’s always better for a false seduction to begin from the other side,” she said.
“Is that where your strength is?” Logan asked. “False seductions?”
Marcie shot him a look.
“Just one of my strengths, Logan,” Anna answered him coolly, and Marcie laughed.
When they’d tentatively agreed that it should be Vladimir who made the move, they moved on to what Anna’s story should be. Should she be relieved to see him? Would he be her rescuer again? She—a remorseful and forlorn figure who was disillusioned with the West, homesick for Mother Russia. He—the hero, the rescuer?It was Anna who finally put a firm rejection on this proposal.
“I don’t regret the past,” she said. “I don’t regret that I left Russia for Finn, and that Finn finally left us in death. I’m not a person who feels regret for what cannot be changed. Vladimir knows that.”
Burt nodded in agreement.
“You really have no regrets?” Logan said.
“None.”
Burt nodded his head in understanding.
“Vladimir loved you,” Marcie said. “He will want to see the woman he loved. If he still harbours affection for you, let alone a dream, he will want you as he remembers you. To him, I think, you’re stronger than he is—more wilful and independent, almost careless about the future. I think we need to massage those emotional muscles of Vladimir’s, to enhance—exaggerate eve
n—those qualities you have, and maybe he would like to have, as well as admiring them in you.”
“Yes—good, Marcie,” Burt drawled. “Anna, you need to present yourself as entirely confident in whatever the future holds, here in America or back in Russia. It doesn’t matter to you. You will be—you are—who you are despite your circumstances. Quintessentially you. That is your strength. Let’s play always to the truth.
“Firstly,” he continued, “Vladimir gets no choice about meeting you, no time to plan, no time to rehearse a reaction. We’ll work on the details. Maybe he has to follow you, that would be best. But you’ll meet him cold, no previous contact. It could be that you walk into one of the cafés he goes to. Either he’ll approach you, or he’ll stay back, watch you, then follow you. He’ll be wary, sure—he’ll be looking out for tails. He won’t believe entirely in the coincidence, but he’ll want to believe.”
“He’ll be afraid too,” Logan said. “He smuggled you out of Russia.”
“And if he no longer has those feelings for me that he had?” Anna asked. “Maybe he’s thought for years now that our affair was just fiction from my point of view. Maybe he’ll be angry. Maybe he’ll have learned to hate me.”
“Is he a resentful man?” Marcie asked.
Anna thought for a moment. “No, he isn’t resentful,” Anna replied. “I think the key to Vladimir, apart from his feelings for me in the past, is that he has seen the way our system operates. Don’t forget, he was banished for ten years at the beginning of the nineties to the Cape Verde Islands. He knows the viciousness of our masters, and their essential stupidity. In some ways, if Vladimir had had the incentives I had—a lover in the West, in other words—I’m not sure he wouldn’t have seen that as a way out of his past too.”
“But does he have the courage?” Marcie said.
“Where we’re getting to, I think,” Burt said, “is that rather than you suggesting you want to return to Russia, the role you play is tempting him to come the other way. To us. Principally to you, of course. But like Marcie says, does he have the balls?”