by Alex Dryden
It looks like a sculpture, Burt Miller thought – though he was thinking, not of a stone god, but of one of the modern pieces the British artist – something-or-other Quinn, he seemed to remember – made and which consisted of a plastic head filled with the artist’s own blood. But the colour of the flesh, Burt mused with an art historian’s appreciation, was more like the grey, dead-looking humanity to be found in a Lucian Freud, one of whose works Burt owned – at a cost from Christie’s in New York of something in the region of ten million bucks.
‘So, Theo ...’ Burt said breezily, exhaling a slightly frosted breath. Then, sticking to the modern art similes that continued to come and go in his mind, he said, ‘Exhibit A.’
Theo Lish, the CIA chief, drew his coat further around his neck. ‘Exhibit A-Z actually,’ Lish replied moodily. ‘It’s all we have, Burt.’
‘Not the usual headless corpse, but the less common corpseless head,’ Burt said lightly and with his usual upbeat view of any situation that presented itself to him, no matter how complex and inconvenient it was. ‘It’s a message, then.’
‘Presumably,’ Lish said with a nod. ‘They want us to know the man’s identity. That’s the significance.’
Burt looked to his left at Anna Resnikov, the only woman present in the lab. ‘Normally, in an identification parade, we’d have half a dozen severed heads for you,’ Burt joked. ‘I guess the others just never turned up. You’ve got to up your fees if you want these identity parades to make a difference, Theo,’ he said, turning back to Lish.
But his gaze returned to rest on Anna.
She didn’t return his look. Either she wasn’t amused or she was staring so hard at the head on the table that she hadn’t heard his little witticism. That was the reason she was here, after all – to study, identify, bring her knowledge to bear. For she was not just Burt’s highly valued lieutenant in his vast private intelligence empire that went under the cheekily named Cougar Intelligence Applications, she was also a former colonel in the KGB and – until her defection – right at its dark intelligence heart, Department S.
‘How did it get here, Theo?’ Burt asked, looking back to the CIA chief again.
‘It was delivered to the home of one of our junior embassy officers in Kiev,’ he replied. ‘Young man, name of Bill Singleton, married, two small children.’
‘What about security?’ Burt shot back.
‘In Ukraine all our staff houses have cameras, security alarms, early warning systems, sensors – you name it. The usual, in terms of the bare minimum. But Kiev isn’t high up on the list as far as security threats are concerned. This’ – he indicated the severed head with a nod from his own living one, ‘... this was left in the garden, actually, not the house,’ he said by way of correction. ‘The person who placed it there was caught on camera, but set off no sensors. Not close enough to the house, apparently. The film shows a man, we presume, wearing a balaclava. He enters the garden, carefully removes the head of the Singleton children’s snowman, drops this one out of a sack, and replaces the snow head with it. The four-year-old daughter of the family found it next morning. Someone had been tampering with the family’s snowman and she was outraged – in tears.’ Lish sighed. ‘Clearly it was delivered in that particular place because security allowed it to be. We don’t have – or need – razor wire-topped, twelve-foot walls for all our Kiev embassy staff. But it was clearly left for us. So, yes, it’s a message. They want us to know who it is.’
‘And then?’
‘Singleton called our embassy sweepers in straightaway. We kept the head in the freezer until it could be put on a NATO bus that was flying into Kiev from Afghanistan for refuelling that morning. It was here twenty hours later. Left as a decoration on a snowman on Thursday night – in this here laboratory by today at six a.m.’
‘And if you know who the man is,’ Burt said, ‘what’s the purpose of Anna’s presence? What’s she here to identify?’
He looked at her again to find she was tracing the man’s scar with her finger, not quite touching the flesh, and her face only an inch or two from the head. Then she stepped back for another overall reappraisal. Burt was keen now to head for lunch, but it looked like that was some way off.
‘He goes by the name of Yuri Saltyakov,’ Lish explained. ‘He approached one of our operatives in Kiev three weeks ago saying he had “information”. We checked him out on all the Agency photo and data bases. No tags. Nothing. Nothing in London, either. Adrian was very obliging. No match to anyone we know. His story was that he had information on work being carried out at Novorossiysk port on the Russian side of the Kerch Straits, opposite the Crimea. He was a dock worker there, according to him. Wanted to sell us his story. But we never received any of the information about the port. His main interest to us was that he seemed to have quite detailed information about a ship called the Forburg. He described it as a “terror ship”, whatever that means. We never got out of him what he meant about that either; was it carrying nuclear fissile material, nuclear triggers, other high-grade weapons, anthrax ... who knows? We don’t. We tracked the Forburg, however, having eventually picked it up on the Worldview Satellite off the coast of Burgas, in Bulgaria, to the western end of the Black Sea. The Forburg seemed to be heading for the Bosphorus, then presumably the Mediterranean, unless Istanbul was its destination, or it turned off early.’ Lish paused, perhaps embarrassed by what he then had to say. ‘Because then,’ he finally continued, ‘God knows how, but we lost the damn ship. That was three days ago. Radio contact disappears, somehow the satellite loses it. Presumably, again, it goes into port and reappears under new guise, or more probably does all that changeover at sea under cover of cloud, night, a giant mosquito net – all three ... I’ve no idea. But it does disappear. Twenty-four hours later the head of the man who gave us the information turns up.’
Burt watched Anna. She was curling back one of the thick lips from the opened mouth. She was peering inside the mouth. Then she spoke for the first time. ‘Russian dental work,’ she said without looking at either of them.
She was, as always, Burt thought admiringly, completely unimpressed by anything or anyone, even here at the Agency’s HQ.
‘That’s what we concluded,’ Lish agreed. ‘But we assume his name isn’t Yuri Saltyakov and we have no other leads. That’s why we wanted you to come in, Anna. On the off chance.’ He looked at Burt. ‘Thank you for being so prompt.’
‘Happy to oblige, Theo,’ Burt said magnanimously, allowing the implication of Cougar always being there, ready and helpful, to get the CIA out of a spot of difficulty, to hang gently in the air.
‘He’s Russian,’ Anna said. ‘But they left just the head because his hands would show he wasn’t a dock worker. And a head is easier to transport. So it probably came from the south of the country. Not Kiev, but the Crimea itself, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps,’ Lish said uncertainly, slightly fazed by an analysis he hadn’t, so far, received from any of his own team. ‘Do you recognise him, Anna? Anything you can help us with?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I’ve never seen him, or a picture of him, before.’ Her voice measured, giving nothing away. You would never penetrate her thoughts, Burt told himself, unless she wanted you to.
Burt looked at her quizzically. ‘Sure?’ he said.
‘Yes. Sure.’ She was looking at the place where the neck had been cut. ‘It’s not a Russian execution,’ she said. There was a long pause in the room. ‘Or, at least, it’s not meant to look like a Russian execution,’ she finally added.
Burt looked sharply at her this time, but he didn’t want to pursue the implications of these appended words in front of Lish. That would be something for him and Anna alone, later.
‘What kind of an execution is it?’ Theo Lish enquired.
‘It’s like something the Chechens do,’ she replied. ‘It’s a specifically Islamic execution. Or that’s how it’s meant to look,’ she added, reinforcing the doubts she had already expressed.
Lish enquired no further.
They went upstairs in a warm elevator to the ground floor and all three loosened their coats until they’d warmed up enough to remove them.
‘I’m going to have a chat with Theo,’ Burt said to Anna. ‘Do you mind waiting?’
She didn’t mind. She never minded what was happening, Burt thought. It was his view of the world exactly. All that’s important is what’s happening. Forget the rest.
In an office on the fourth floor, which was not Lish’s but which he cleared of two young men in crisp white shirts and ties, Lish sat in a swivel chair and offered Burt a comfortable-looking sofa that was more suited to his bulk.
‘Do you have a decent cognac?’ Burt asked, without a great deal of hope.
‘I don’t think we do, Burt,’ Lish replied with a softly apologetic tone, and Burt felt satisfactorily confirmed in his decision to leave the CIA ten years before, after a glittering career, in order to set up a private intelligence company awash with decent cognac and, more importantly, awash with government contract money.
He’d served with Lish in the Agency for many decades, more than three, anyway. They’d joined together back in the sixties – Burt, the maverick operative, Theo, the meticulous bureaucrat. Then Burt had left, sensing new opportunities for intelligence-gathering in the modern world. Three years into Cougar’s existence, the company was turning over two billion dollars a year in the wake of 9/11, on the basis of several healthy government contracts. And then he’d lured Lish away from a senior Agency position in order to head up Cougar’s Eastern European Section. Three years after that, Cougar was turning over twice that sum, nearly four billion dollars. Two years after that, Lish had returned to the CIA, with Burt’s blessing, as its director, its chief, the Agency’s main man who had the president’s ear on all foreign security matters. But now he was Cougar’s main man too, at the pinnacle of the government-run intelligence establishment that filled DC like an undigested meal. After Lish became CIA director, government contracts to Cougar increased and Cougar became the largest private intelligence agency in the world. And into the bargain Cougar quickly made itself indispensable to the CIA.
Burt settled comfortably into a pile of cushions. ‘Ukraine,’ he said. ‘Cougar has a watch on Ukraine, Theo. Up-coming elections. As it happens, I was already sending Anna over there, anyway – down to the Crimea too,’ Burt announced. ‘We have some other business to conclude in Ukraine’s south-eastern sector. Crimea is its Achilles heel, if you like. And now it sounds like we have new work to do.’
‘Why on earth send her?’ Lish said. He was aghast. After the KGB’s attempt on her life in Washington just over a year before, it was clear she wasn’t even completely safe in America, and under Cougar’s massive protection to boot.
‘Because she’s the best, Theo,’ Burt said patiently.
‘She’s also on the KGB’s most-wanted list. She was almost assassinated on our ground, Burt. For God’s sake, she’ll be wandering around in Ukrainian territory where you know there’s a high-profile KGB presence. With their Black Sea fleet based there, the Russians are crawling all over Sevastopol. The base is also an excuse for them to insert all kinds of other, unconnected operations into the country. The place is completely porous to Russian operatives. She shouldn’t be going.’
‘Spoken like her fairy godfather, Theo,’ Burt said. Then he sighed contentedly. ‘But that’s the deal made by her, not me. She’s only mine – only Cougar’s – if she’s allowed to operate in the field, and against Russia. Otherwise I lose her and I can’t afford to do that. I give her what she demands, that’s all.’
‘What’s she going to do?’ Lish said, exasperated. ‘Go on fighting the Russians until she’s scaling the walls of the Kremlin with grappling hooks?’
Burt chortled. ‘Maybe, Theo, maybe. But she’s grown-up enough to make her own decisions. And I can’t afford to lose her.’
‘Her recklessness is getting to be of comic book proportions,’ Lish said. ‘We could never employ her here, you know.’
‘That’s a lie and you know it,’ Burt said good-humouredly. ‘You’d snap her up immediately if she were free.’
Lish huffed. Burt was right. She was gold. But he was thinking of another argument. ‘What about her child?’ he said, going off on this new tack. ‘Doesn’t she want to stay alive at least for him?’
‘We gave her boy a new identity,’ Burt replied.
‘I know. You told me.’
‘He lives with a new family now, three half-siblings, on a nice farm in Connecticut. Four years old, or coming up. She goes to visit him once a month.’ He looked directly at Lish. ‘But the boy needs a new life whether she’s working or not, Theo. It’s irrelevant if she’s a fully-engaged operative scaling the walls of the Kremlin, or a kitchen gardener producing new strains of purple broccoli. Either way, the KGB won’t rest until they have her. Her picture is used for target practice out at The Forest. They hate her, and they’re vindictive enough to let that obscure their vision.’ He smiled. ‘That’s good. That plays in our and her favour. Aside from her obvious – and huge – talents, in some ways the Kremlin’s hatred offers her a small amount of protection. They want her alive now – that’s the information coming out of Moscow. They want her to be an example, not in public, perhaps but in the intelligence community. They want to display her and that gives her a little immunity – at least from a bullet in the head in some backstreet.’ Burt heaved himself sideways and his bulk crushed another part of the sofa. ‘So she may as well have a crack at the Russians since they’ll be after her anyway. As we’ve already seen, her son is a vulnerable part of any trap they might set to get their hands on her. She knows his safety is assured if he’s far enough away from her. And she knows she’s lost him – effectively.’
‘That’s sad.’ Unlike Burt, Lish was a confirmed Christian family man who saw most of the problems in the world as arising out of family disfunction.
‘And it’s a fact,’ Burt replied stolidly. ‘We can’t ignore the facts, Theo. So she pursues her revenge against her former masters in any way she likes, as far as I’m concerned. She’s the best.’
‘You think it’s revenge? For her man they murdered? For Finn?’
‘Partly,’ Burt said, but he was deep in thought now. ‘But in my opinion it’s not revenge for Finn alone. Or even mainly about revenge for Finn.’ Burt clasped his hands over his generous stomach. ‘You know, Theo, for Anna, Finn was just the wrench that got her out of Russia. Sure, she loved him, maybe he was the only man she ever loved. But leaving Russia to make her life with the Brit wasn’t just about her and him falling in love. For Anna, there was a far greater question that filled her skies. A decisive break from her background, her father, the regime in Moscow, the organisation she so successfully worked for. In her mind, coming to the West was a decision in favour of life rather than of half-life. It was about the shedding of entrenched and decomposed ideas, like a snake sloughing off its coat. It was complete reinvention. It was about the destruction of the social, political and family DNA that held her in its prison. Above all, it was an act of extreme, risk-taking bravery. Finn was just the key that opened the door.’
‘But what’s the change? She’s still doing the same damn job,’ Lish protested, exasperated now. ‘Just for our side, that’s all.’
‘She’s smart. She knows it’s what she does best,’ Burt said simply. His mind turned to lunch once again. ‘And she likes her steaks underdone, with or without purple broccoli,’ he added.
And then Burt apparently tired of explaining the motives of the best operative he’d ever had in all of his long career, and he began to lay out for Theo Lish the real purpose of their little chat in this office. Apropos of the severed head and not, as with Anna’s trip, pre-planned at all, he was also sending Logan Halloran to Ukraine. He ignored Theo’s raised eyebrows. Separately from Anna’s assignment, he told Theo that while the three of them had been in the laboratory, looking at the head, he’
d decided Halloran would be going to Kiev.
He explained to Theo why he was sending Halloran, and that he wanted Halloran to have all the cooperation the CIA station in Kiev could give. Theo raised his eyebrows still higher. Burt explained that – who knew? – maybe the Forburg would turn out to be connected in some way to ‘other stuff’, as he put it vaguely. Maybe Halloran’s mission to Kiev would dovetail with the story behind the appearance and then the disappearance of the Forburg. He artfully painted a picture of a fascinating possible array of connections and coincidences, real or imagined. Then, once more, he threw in Anna’s assignment to the Crimea, pre-planned though it was, as another useful feeler worth extending in the hunt for the Forburg. Look for the connections, he said to Lish, even it’s only to eliminate them. As luck would have it, he said in conclusion to this pitch, his two most experienced field operatives in the Eastern European and Russian sectors would be on the spot. One in Kiev, the other in the Crimea. We’ll find the Forburg, he concluded triumphantly. We’ll track down this terror ship together, Theo. Burt now used the dead man’s words as if they were gospel.
And now too, suddenly, the Forburg began to take form, as if the ship itself were appearing through a thick sea fret. It was a full-blooded terror ship now, not just in the opinion of some dead and little-known Russian operative whose severed head lay propped up on a table four floors below. But it was so in the opinion of the great Burt Miller, the intelligence guru who had the ear not just of Theo Lish – and through him to the president – but of most of the senators on the Intelligence Committee whom Cougar had carefully lobbied over the years and who also represented the interests of Cougar in Washington’s intelligence hothouse. And when he’d established his position where the ‘terror ship’ was concerned, finally Burt wove a tapestry of cooperation and success between Cougar and the CIA which would bring glory to them both.