by Alex Dryden
“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.”
Burt paused again, but this time to allow questions, without actually inviting any. It was Marcie who spoke.
“If Vladimir runs Icarus,” she said, “will he necessarily know who Icarus is?”
“No. Good question. Icarus may be run remotely, at the end of a chain, via another American agent of the Russians. That’s the way they’ve done it in the past. Like us in Russia, when they’re operating on enemy territory they know that some sources, in the main those who are closest to high-grade material, won’t risk having any direct contact with a Russian intelligence officer. Most likely, in fact, as Icarus is believed to be a very important agent to them, he or she will communicate via another American agent who they’ve recruited over here in the past, maybe a long way back in the past. That agent would be someone whose only role is just that—to be a go-between for Icarus. High-profile double agents of the Russians in the United States want whatever security they can get. My belief is that Icarus—if not high profile in terms of actual name recognition—is extremely high profile in his or her field.”
He looked at Anna now.
“So tomorrow’s meeting with Vladimir is strictly personal. A further getting-to-know session. I want you to establish whatever trust can be built between you, based on your past relationship with him. Vladimir is a long game, as I said. It’s Mikhail who is the only recipient of our questions about Icarus. I want you to ask Mikhail directly and only Mikhail. Mikhail is our best chance with Icarus. And in everything.”
Anna wondered who else inside Cougar, or anywhere else, would know of her meeting with Mikhail. Bob Dupont? The thought crossed her mind that Burt was going right out on a limb with her, taking a huge risk. It seemed to her impossible, but Burt was full of surprises. Maybe she, Burt, and Mikhail were the only people in the world who knew Mikhail’s identity. That would be typical of Burt.
Logan fidgeted with a brand-new, highly sharpened pencil from a pile of similar ones in the centre of the table. Lying beside them was another pile of pristine, unused notebooks. Nobody, it seemed, ever made notes in here. They were almost like a discreet decoration that said simply “conference room.”
“Icarus,” Logan said. “What’s the need-to-know situation with Icarus, Burt? Who’s in the select club apart from us?”
“Icarus goes nowhere outside of this room. Icarus is to be as tightly guarded as Mikhail.”
With the meeting apparently over, Anna and Marcie decided to walk outside. Logan and Burt started making toasted sandwiches from the contents of a fully stocked fridge. Burt seemed to have at his constant disposal not just the portfolio of Cougar properties but a kind of parallel world of fully operational lives that he could dip into whenever he felt like it.
Outside, Marcie and Anna walked silently towards some stables, where the noses of four horses were searching out over the half door. Marcie stroked them all in turn, dutifully being fair, while Anna took a fondness for one with a broad white blaze.
“Who looks after all this stuff?” she said. “And why? Who even uses it?”
“Abundance is an explanation for Burt’s life,” Marcie said. “They say when he was a young man, among all the other adventures he enjoyed, he spent six months in an ashram in India.”
Anna burst out laughing. “Burt in an ashram! Presumably he was the Buddha.”
Marcie laughed with her. “I guess. The Buddha Incarnate is not a bad way to describe Burt’s opinion of himself. Now he even looks like him. You’ve seen the way the fat in his face has made his eyes look kind of Eastern?”
They both grinned.
“Anyway, so they say,” Marcie went on, “in this ashram the guru offered him peace, wisdom, or abundance. He chose abundance. But I guess he and the guru didn’t necessarily have the same idea of what it was. Burt thinks abundance is endless replications of material wealth. Wherever he is in the world, there’s always a full fridge, a clean bed, a box of Havanas, and a decent wine cellar.”
They walked on beyond the stable block. As usual during these interludes after a meeting, the unspoken rule was that they never talked about anything that had taken place. But when the silence between them had settled into a comfortable mist, Marcie approached the subject Anna knew was on her mind.
“So. Last night, Anna. Who was being led to the slaughter, you or Logan?”
“Neither of us.” Anna laughed. “It was just a bit of fun. Forgetfulness.”
“As far as you know. Burt wouldn’t have let it happen for no reason.”
“I’m sure you’re right there. Burt will have his reasons.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“I don’t think about it, no.”
“Are you starting some affair, or what?”
“Oh, Marcie, come on.”
“Well, I can’t help asking.”
“And I can’t help not being concerned.”
“Just be careful. This isn’t some holiday romance. Logan’s not exactly a gentleman, let me tell you.”
“Logan’s nice. But I appreciate it, Marcie, thank you.”
“You’re smart, Anna. But maybe not so smart in this.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
She looked at Marcie’s stern face and laughed. “I will,” she said. “Don’t worry about m
e.”
“Enough’s happening to you without getting fucked over by Logan.”
“Okay, okay. And now I’m going to phone Little Finn.”
She squeezed Marcie’s arm and walked slowly back across the garden to the front door.
When she entered the house she heard, above loud reggae music, Burt shouting from the kitchen, “Come and have toasted sandwiches.”
She walked into the kitchen and found Burt and Logan laying out a dozen sandwich fillings on the counter.
“Where are the servants?” she said.
“Right here.” Burt guffawed. “I’m the chef. This is the sous-chef. What would you like?”
“I’m going to call Little Finn first.”
“Go right ahead. Find some quiet room.”
She spoke to Little Finn for a few minutes, which was all he could manage. He sounded completely at ease. Is he like me, or like Finn? she wondered. Nothing much seemed to perturb him.
When she came back, Logan was absent, and she accepted a sandwich from Burt with just melted cheese and tomatoes. She wanted to ask Burt a question that had come to her in the meeting, but it was the unwritten law with Burt that nothing was discussed outside the formal times for discussion.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Anything,” he said expansively.
“Is Icarus known outside your company? And to the British, of course?”
“You mean, does the CIA know?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“That’s a very personal question,” he said.
“Then don’t answer it.”
Burt laughed. “I’ll tell you. And just you,” he said. “The answer’s no. Not yet. They know only about a possible Russian agent, that’s it.”
“A national security risk, and you haven’t told the government?”
“Not yet, as I say. But I will. It’s all about the revolving door. If I tell the agency before I’ve got it sewn up, the chances are that someone outside the agency will hear about it.”
“A competitor?”
“That’s it.” He turned to face her fully. “Yes, it’s a risk. I have a deal with Adrian. When that’s played out, then I’ll let the government in. By that time Cougar will be indispensable.” He rubbed his thumb against his forefinger and grinned at her. “More money,” he said, but she knew he was joking, at least in part.