by Alex Dryden
‘Between here and that peak,’ Burt said, without turning from the window, ‘the insects alone can be counted in billions.’
Anna didn’t reply.
Burt finally turned towards her. She sensed that he’d been building up to making this explanation he was about to make for some time.
‘Intelligence – and the people engaged in it,’ he stated flatly, ‘are only feeling their way in near-perfect darkness. The great intelligence operator is the one who is concerned with the greatest number of hypotheses. The person who has only one cherishes and promotes that one of his own, and is blind to its faults. That fatally limited hypothesis means he observes very little – almost nothing, in fact – and therefore his crucial observations are marred by prejudice. And the triumph of truth is postponed.’
Burt picked up a bottle of Krug ’87 champagne and nipped the edges of the foil until he could untwist the wire and open it, gently and purposefully towards an antique champagne coupe on a fine antique Persian marquetry table. He picked up the glass and placed it on an identical table next to where Anna was sitting, before pouring himself a glass.
Burt raised his glass and drank.
‘Lish’s mistake,’ he said, and she noted that it was now ‘Lish’, not Theo, no longer the friend and colleague of thirty years’ standing, ‘Lish’s mistake’, Burt repeated, ‘was to be the latter, the man with a single hypothesis. The Blind Spy. Yes.’ Burt seemed to gaze into the distance. ‘Lish is the Blind Spy.’ Then his mind focused again on Anna before him. ‘But Lish’s mistake is a mistake every agency makes, including, thankfully, the KGB. Lish is the perfect bureaucrat. No wonder that he found such common cause with the Russians.’
‘You mean …?’ Anna began, but Burt cut her off.
‘No, no, I don’t mean that Lish is a traitor,’ he said. ‘Not in the big sense, anyway. But we’ll come to that in a moment. What I mean is that he feels more comfortable with any bureaucracy, even the dead hand of the Kremlin machine, than he did with me, with Cougar. He’s a man who hides behind the safety of organisations.’ Burt sighed expansively. ‘But now he’s hanging upside down from a piano wire in Washington, I guess he’ll be thinking about his mistakes.’
Anna saw that this was one of Burt’s melodramatic figures of speech. The Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington didn’t yet, as far she knew, interrogate their intelligence chiefs that way.
‘And you, Burt?’ Anna said. ‘You kept all the hypotheses in your head at the same time?’
Burt looked at the floor. ‘All of them but Logan,’ he said. ‘Right up to the final days, I was prepared for my own prejudices to be proved wrong. But at least I left the opportunities alive in my head until the last.’
‘Except Logan,’ she said.
‘Logan was always a project,’ he said quietly. ‘I wanted to make him in my image. It was a deep personal failure of mine. I will think about that mistake for a long time. For the rest of my life.’
‘He betrayed me once,’ Anna said. ‘Then he betrayed me a second time in Odessa back in January. And then you gave him the opportunity to betray me a third time. And now he’s dead. But it could have been me.’
He looked up at her sharply. ‘It wasn’t Logan who betrayed your trip to Odessa to the Russians,’ he said.
‘Oh no?’
‘That’s what I meant a moment ago,’ he said. ‘About Lish and treason. Lish didn’t commit treason against his country. He committed it against me, and, by extension, against you. It was Lish. He told Logan, but Logan didn’t take it to the Russians, Lish did. I have the documentary evidence to prove it and we’ll see before this enquiry is over that it will be the final nail in Lish’s coffin.’
Anna sat silent. She was stunned that Burt’s man at the CIA, the boss himself, could have betrayed her.
‘You see, what I also failed to see was Lish’s fundamental resentment towards me. His deep-seated jealousy. He wanted to damage Cougar. Now it’s the CIA that’s damaged. The Pride of Corsica was ultimately registered to a letter-box company in Omsk with KGB connections. The Russians set the whole thing up. The CIA go off on some Russian-inspired wild goose chase in the Black Sea and end up killing their own former colleagues on an empty ship. The British too. It’s not just a PR disaster, it has deeply damaged the relationship between the CIA and the military in my country. No doubt in Britain too. Adrian will shortly be looking for a job, I don’t doubt.’ Burt paused. ‘On the plus side, all that’s happened in the Crimea will, in time, add another billion or so to Cougar’s government contracts.’ He looked at her. ‘And you, Anna, you should have a stake in that.’
‘That’s your motive, Burt, not mine.’
‘And you? Dear Anna, what are your motives?’
She didn’t reply.
‘The Senate Intelligence Committee is very pleased with Balthasar’s damning evidence against the KGB. They don’t intend to use it – as long as the Russians play ball. As long as the Russians drop their plans to implicate Qubaq in the events at Sevastopol, we’ll keep the world from knowing what those plans were. You’ve read the newspapers. The Kremlin is talking about a rogue group of special forces soldiers of their own who went on a psycho rampage in Sevastopol’s harbour. All good. They can’t go back on that now, even if we didn’t hold the cards against them that Balthasar brought.’
Anna picked up the glass on the table next to her for the first time. She drank half of it.
‘And who will you put forward to be the next head of the Agency?’ she said.
‘I’ll wait until I’m asked.’ Burt grinned.
‘I’m not sure you’re going to find anyone who doesn’t end up resenting you and wanting their freedom from you,’ she said. ‘You don’t give someone their freedom, they resent you. It’s written in stone.’
‘Maybe. But I can’t help what other people think.’
To see and not to know, to know and not to see. Anna thought of Balthasar.
‘Because you were right?’ she asked. ‘Is that why you’re so full of yourself?’
‘I think you know I’m always full of myself.’ Burt guffawed, then he became serious. ‘Every time I’m right,’ he said, ‘I get richer and more powerful. But every time I’m right it also becomes more difficult to be rich in hypotheses. Being right – or just thinking that – is an open invitation to prejudice. That’s what I try to guard against in every waking minute.’
As Anna rode away from the ranch house, the sun was dimming to the west. She opened the throttle of the bike on the straight, brown-grey road until the wind tore her eyes and all she could see were the road’s edges and still she increased her speed. She rode blind until she thought she sensed where the track led up into the mountains – it was maybe two miles, maybe more, during which she had seen nothing but light. She closed down the throttle and stopped. The track was to her right, not far off. She wiped the tears away that the wind had wrenched from her eyes and turned up the canyon that disappeared into the red rock.
When Balthasar opened the door of the cabin that looked down from high up on to the mesa below, he smiled at her.
‘I thought I heard you coming,’ he said.
She looked past him into the cabin. There was a table and two chairs, a wood burner. The kitchen was in a separate room at the back and there was a bedroom to the right of the living room. Everything seemed the same as she’d left it earlier in the day. Then she saw that there was something different. She couldn’t place it at first. But then, on the table, she saw there was an open book. She looked at Balthasar and saw that he was looking at her looking at the book.
‘You’ve been reading,’ she said, as casually as she could.
‘The Complete Works of Montaigne,’ he said, and smiled again.
He put his arms around her and kissed her head, moving down to her face and neck, before pulling away.
‘My mother’s family were mistaken,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless, to pretend you can’t see with your eyes is difficult. But I learn
ed to pretend from that moment. It became easier. And then I realised that seeing into people’s minds was a great deal more useful than using my eyes. And I saw, continually – all my life, in fact – the fallibility of those who trust their eyes.’