by Alex Dryden
Larry unloaded the bags from the car and carried them on to the plane. Burt turned to her before they stepped out: ‘How was your boy?’ he said.
She had just returned from her monthly visit to see him.
‘How is Little Finn? Enjoying life, I trust.’
‘Very much so,’ she said. ‘He misses seeing Larry and the boys, I think, more than he misses me.’
Burt looked at her. ‘But he’s in the right place, you’re sure of that? Anything more we can do?’
‘Oh yes, he’s in the right place,’ she replied easily, but she betrayed none of the hollowness that her visits to him always left her with. And Burt didn’t press her, as he never did, about anything. ‘He’s very well,’ she added unnecessarily, more to convince herself than him, and then she looked away, out of the window across the tarmac.
‘He’ll always be your son, Anna,’ was all he said.
They boarded the plane, Larry chatted to the pilot, and then they took off into a startling blue sky that seemed as if it had been designed by Burt to receive his pristine jet.
Burt was relaxed as ever on the journey. Never a care in the world, a world which to him, anyway, it seemed to her, was like a Roman circus prepared for his own carefully planned shows and games, rather than the dangerous and inconsistent place it was to others and which forced its constantly changing flux on them. Burt, the ruler of the world; a plump caesar who this morning wore bright yellow slacks, a blue blazer and expensive suede loafers. And as always puffing on a half-smoked cigar.
When they were settled at their cruising height and food had been served, Anna turned to him. ‘What will you do when you’re too old?’ she asked him. ‘Who’s going to run Cougar then?’
‘We train youth teams.’ He beamed. ‘Just like the football clubs.’
‘But there’ll never be anyone like you,’ she said. ‘You are Cougar, aren’t you?’
‘And Cougar will therefore change,’ he replied. ‘It’ll become a bureaucracy like the CIA, perhaps, with all the dead hand that implies.’ He smiled broadly at her. ‘A company can only be as good as its leader. And it can only be a dictatorship like Cougar when you have a benevolent dictator,’ he said, and laughed his rolling laugh. ‘And that’s true. There’ll never be another Burt Miller.’
It was an honest assessment, she saw, rather than simply smug self-satisfaction.
He looked at her seriously for a moment. ‘Anna, I’ve offered Logan the Russian and East European Desk. What do you think?’
Anna felt a chill of bewilderment, then astonishment. Logan wasn’t management material at all, in her opinion, let alone the right person to be put in charge of Cougar’s second largest division. Over and over again, he’d shown himself to be unreliable, not even completely loyal. Burt knew this and she didn’t understand. Burt continued to give Logan chances which he always saw that Logan wasted. She found she couldn’t reply.
‘It’s OK. He turned it down,’ Burt said.
‘Why?’
‘No reason. What do you think, Anna? What do you really think?’ Burt asked again.
It was unusual for Burt to ask for advice about something outside another person’s area of expertise. It was out of character and Anna’s interest was always piqued when someone – particularly someone in Burt’s all-powerful position – behaved out of character. She wondered whether to tell him what she thought, but knew that Burt only and always wanted honesty, no matter how difficult it was to hear.
‘If someone rejects a part of something, it often means they want the whole,’ she said. ‘Logan fits that model. To me anyway, Burt.’
He didn’t reply, but grinned at her, just to show he didn’t take offence. But she saw he’d filed away her remark and that it conflicted with something in him outside the logic of usually clear thoughts.
On a wide circular table in the centre of the plane, Burt unfolded an old copy of the Wall Street Journal at the page which detailed the results of the final round of the Ukrainian elections. There was the Russian-backed candidate, Viktor Yanukovich with his arms raised in victory. He had beaten Yulia Timoshenko by three percentage points for the presidency. There were pictures of him with a grim face even in victory – just like the Politburo used to look, Anna thought. And underneath were pictures of Timoshenko with her corn-braided hair wrapped tightly like an ornamental towel around her head. Her face was set in defeat but she said she would contest the results. Yanukovich had received a warm welcome from the Kremlin, however, and was already forming a cabinet, with an Economics Minister who spoke only Russian and had no Ukrainian.
‘Theo says we can take our eyes off Ukraine now,’ Burt said. ‘It’s almost a relief to the CIA that the Kremlin stooge has won. They’d rather have a Russian proxy president than a democrat who might raise Russia’s ire.’
She didn’t reply, but read the report and saw that most of eastern Ukraine nearest Russia had voted for Yanukovich while most of the western part of the country had voted for Timoshenko.
‘Theo reckons that this result will lower tensions between Ukraine and Russia,’ Burt said. ‘Their man got in, so that’s it, Theo says. And – wonder of wonders – they were declared free and fair elections, according to international electoral monitors. Timoshenko protests but doesn’t have a leg to stand on.’ He looked across at her. ‘What do you think, Anna?’
She looked away and out of the window at the endless, intense blue of a sky that seemed to share nothing with events in Eastern Europe. Then she turned to him. ‘Why does the CIA think that?’ she asked.
‘Theo reckons the Russians have got what they want in Ukraine now. The Kremlin can relax. And therefore so can we.’
‘For now, maybe. But it’s just the beginning,’ she said. ‘A temporary respite at most, in my opinion. But what then? When the dust settles, Yanukovich may prove to be not just their ally in the Kremlin but also their Trojan Horse in Kiev.’
He looked at her questioningly.
‘I don’t agree with Lish and the CIA,’ she said simply.
‘Neither do I,’ Burt replied. ‘I agree with you, Anna. A Trojan horse – I like it. But we’ll discuss it – the three of us – when we see Mikhail,’ he said.
They were flying south-west and Anna slept for the rest of the journey. She was used to taking sleep when there was any window of opportunity. In just over three hours after they’d set out they landed on the long runway at the edge of Burt’s vast ranch in northern New Mexico.
Cougar emblems decorated the watchtower – a mountain lion rampant, like some medieval jousting symbol – and they drove away from the strip towards high Spanish-style gates that announced an intensely guarded area at the centre of the ranch. Security guards were everywhere in evidence, a small private army in the semi-desert.
There were discreet, concentric circles of defence around the hundreds of thousands of acres of land and the circular defensive lines shrank in size eventually to a sort of fortress climax at the centre, though even this was still discreet. Another Cougar emblem reared its raised paws in bas-relief on a giant bronze tableau at the inner ranch gates. And Burt’s private army, increased in size for the purpose of guarding his most prized asset – Mikhail – wore embroidered cougars on their shoulders, but were otherwise armed more effectively with MP5N machine guns. Any further Russian attempt to wrestle Mikhail from his chosen exile at Burt’s ranch was not anticipated, but, nevertheless, planned for. Burt liked to ‘futurise for all the eventualities’, as he put it, like a seasoned general before a battle.
They walked across the high desert gardens that separated the parking area from the house. There was snow on the distant mountains and there was a scattering down here on the mesa. A frost gripped the land and it was two degrees below zero. The desert plants and cacti, like bristling steel gun emplacements, were dug in, biding their time for the short and almost invisible burst of growth that would begin in June.
Burt withdrew an envelope from the inside of his blue, silverbuttoned
blazer and held it casually in the hand that also clutched his cigar. The sun was bright in the sky, but made little difference to the temperature in the depth of winter.
He hadn’t shown Anna the message from the man who called himself ‘Rafael’ and which he had received from the American embassy in Kiev two months before, but he had it in the envelope he was holding now and the way he held the envelope showed off its wax seal of a bird, bright red and firmly imprinted in the dried wax that had flowed outwards at its edges before it had solidified. Something told him that Mikhail – as well as providing insights into the developing situation in Ukraine – might have something to say about it.
They found Mikhail sitting on a verandah at the rear of the sprawling ranch house. The verandah was heated by a line of gas heaters like an outdoor restaurant.
Burt’s staff were everywhere in evidence; wheeled trolleys with coffee and cold drinks stood within Mikhail’s reach; uniformed maids appeared to be polishing windows inside a drawing room behind them, and gardeners were covering the roots of shrubs with further mesh and straw against frost which lasted as late as June up here in the mountains.
Anna looked at the two gardeners who were working in her sight and saw the bulges beneath their arms. Burt didn’t just have armed guards, he had armed gardeners too.
Mikhail was sitting in the wheelchair he’d been confined to for a year and a half now, ever since the KGB’s assassination attempt against him in a Virginia park, across the river from Washington, DC. Anna, too, had been wounded in the fire-fight, the attempted abduction of Mikhail and of herself by the KGB. She’d taken a bullet in the shoulder, but, unlike Mikhail, she had made a full recovery. Despite the attention of the best doctors Burt’s bottomless fortune could provide, however, it was by now conceded – not least by Mikhail himself – that the effect of the Russian bullet which had entered his spine on that day in 2008 would not now be reversed. Only Burt’s faith in the everdeveloping and banned medical technology of stem cells allowed the question to remain open. Burt never gave up his endless optimism for the prospect of Mikhail’s improvement and full recovery. Mikhail never gave up hope regardless of any situation he found himself in – whether he was to remain permanently crippled or cured – and his injury seemed to concern him less than it did Burt. It was a mere detail for Mikhail. It didn’t interfere with his brain, and that was all that seemed important to him.
They pulled up cushioned leather seats next to Mikhail. Anna kissed him on both cheeks, three times in the Russian way, and Burt raised his hand casually. Here down at the ranch, Burt would shortly adopt another of his many disguises, this time as a nineteenth-century cattle rancher – despite the fact that he had never sat on a horse.
‘What news from the front?’ Mikhail said. ‘Where is the front these days, anyway?’
He was a tall man; even in a wheelchair it was possible to see that. His once thick, black hair had turned to grey in the eighteen months since he’d been shot. But his face was finely cut like soft and weathered stone and his eyes were piercing and dark. He had several newspapers opened on tables surrounding him, including the Journal.
‘I believe the front is still Ukraine,’ Burt said. ‘Never mind that Yanukovich won. But I’m apparently in a minority. At least out there,’ he waved his hand vaguely at the world. ‘The CIA disagree.’
‘The Kremlin’s choice has won, that’s true,’ Mikhail said. ‘How will that make the spies in Moscow feel? And will it tame the monster? I’ll tell you, Burt. If the monster gets one square meal, it won’t think they’ll come regularly, on time, every day, believe me. The Kremlin won’t view this victory as satisfying its ambitions in Ukraine. It’s just the beginning. It will just want more. It will see the Yanukovich victory as a sign of weakness among its enemies, not as a sign of its own strength. And that is always an indication of the most dangerous of enemies. The paranoia of the self-pitying and wounded animal always looks to its opponents’ weaknesses, it never enjoys its own strengths.’
‘Then the three of us agree,’ Burt said.
Anna looked into the eyes of the old spy and wondered if Mikhail was sliding into becoming like other exiles and defectors from the KGB she’d met in the West – an intransigent, hectoring and bitterly entrenched mind that would always see the Kremlin from now on as a two-dimensional enemy. But what she saw was his old intelligence and far-sightedness that could only come from calm contemplation. Neither his injury nor his exile, she realised, would ever blunt that. He spent most days entirely alone, Burt had told her, despite Burt’s attempts to entertain him with arranged visits from friends and colleagues. Some made the trip down from Washington or Virginia for three days in order to meet the West’s greatest double agent for a generation, and left without ever seeing Mikhail. He devoted his time, it seemed, to solitary contemplation. He was like a monk. But did he think of the past, his past as the West’s great source in the Kremlin? Or was it contemplation of the future? Anna guessed the latter.
‘Anna says this victory might just give the Kremlin what she calls a Trojan Horse inside Ukraine,’ Burt said. ‘That far from being the end it’s the beginning.’
‘If the Russians want to repossess Ukraine – really repossess it like in Soviet times,’ Mikhail said, ‘then Yanukovich can be their useful fool, yes. He can weaken the structures from the centre – from the inside – in line with the Kremlin’s plans.’
Burt didn’t reply or acknowledge Mikhail’s remarks for now, but simply turned over the envelope he’d taken from his blazer pocket as they walked to the house and put it on the table in front of Mikhail. ‘Take a look at it too, Anna,’ he said. ‘Your two heads are better than an army.’ Anna got up out of her chair and stood behind the wheelchair, looking over Mikhail’s shoulders.
But before either of them could comment, Burt explained the provenance of the envelope and the antics of its sender, the ghost who called himself Rafael, in summoning most of the world’s intelligence agencies who had a presence in Kiev to meetings that never took place. ‘As far as I know,’ Burt said, ‘I’m the only one who received a message from the mysterious Rafael that said there would be no meeting. Even though there had never been a meeting in the first place.’ He poured himself a glass of squeezed orange juice and took another Havana cigar from a leather case in his jacket pocket, even though the one he’d been smoking wasn’t yet half-finished. Then he sat back in a semi-reclining position and appeared to be tanning himself, fully clothed, under the heater, eyes closed, while puffing at the cigar and sipping from the glass at regular intervals.
Mikhail and Anna read the six words of the message. ‘There will be no meeting tonight’. And then Mikhail put the envelope on top of it, its back facing up, and with the seal facing him and Anna. The bird had a longish beak and long legs, a water bird, it looked like.
‘It’s a snipe,’ Mikhail said. ‘In Russian we call it bekac. In French it’s becasse.’ He looked up at Burt. ‘They emigrate from Russia to Western Europe – for the winter.’
‘I thought it was some kind of snipe,’ Burt said. ‘Good to eat then, if we can catch it. So. Who sends wax impressions of snipe through the mail accompanied by arcane messages? It was mailed in Novorossiysk, by the way. Not that its geographical origins have much to bear on the situation, I’m sure.’
‘Maybe they do in this case. It’s the ferry terminal from Russia to the Crimea,’ Mikhail said. He handed the envelope to Anna with the seal facing her. ‘Have you ever seen this before, my dear?’ he asked. ‘Recognise it?’
She looked again. ‘No, Mikhail. But the message is in the seal, yes?’
‘Yes.’
Mikhail sighed. ‘It’s a message that he’s coming West,’ he said slowly, and all the time his mind seemed to be working, thinking of the implications. ‘Like the bird migrating. And it was sent to you via your embassy in Ukraine?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Coming West?’ Burt said. ‘You mean he’s defecting?’
Mikhail thought for a long ti
me. ‘I don’t know, but I doubt it’s as simple as that,’ he said finally. ‘I think we can assume, perhaps, that he’s coming there, only as far as Ukraine. Only that far West. For the time being, in any case. Maybe he’s keeping his options open.’
‘And maybe he’s luring us to believe that he’s open to our offers,’ Anna said. ‘Maybe it’s a sting.’
‘That’s also possible,’ Mikhail replied. ‘We have to be very careful.’
‘The snipe is coming West, to Ukraine,’ Burt said in the mock dramatic tones of someone delivering a badly coded sentence. Then he laughed robustly. ‘So what do we do? Shoot it? Eat it? Put it in a cage?’
Mikhail looked sideways at Burt, but he didn’t – and rarely did – enjoy Burt’s easy mirth. ‘No. We do none of those things. We should give it a feather bed,’ he said. ‘We should guard it with our lives. The snipe might bring us good luck, or at least insight. For you, for us. And it might bring us very bad luck indeed. It depends on the circumstances.’
For Burt, luck was something you used, not something that used you. ‘It depends, as always, on what happens,’ Burt said, and repeated his favourite dictum: ‘What happens is the only God there is.’
‘You’re a pagan, Burt,’ Mikhail said and Burt roared with laughter. He surveyed the mesa with its mysterious rock formations that contained the petroglyphs of ancient Indian cultures. ‘Out here it’s a good place to be a pagan,’ he said.
Mikhail leaned back against the wheelchair and left the envelope on the table without taking any further interest in it. Then he looked at Burt again and patted Anna’s arm. He was the only man from whom she ever seemed happy to receive such casual physical contact, Burt noted.
Mikhail was the friend of her former Brit husband, the MI6 officer Finn, who was now dead. Finn had been murdered by the KGB four years ago now. Little Finn’s father. Perhaps that was it, the friendship between Mikhail and Finn. But Finn had also been Mikhail’s closest and indeed only direct contact with the West in the years when Mikhail had acted as a double agent inside the Kremlin. Finn had been the only person Mikhail allowed to know him when Mikhail was still at the top in Russia. Finn had been Mikhail’s handler and so there was a bond with her dead husband through Mikhail.