‘And I’m sure if he cooperates he’ll be out of there well before that deadline …’
Margo leaned forward. Her blue eyes locked and immovable on Anderson. ‘I want to make myself perfectly clear, Dean. Our man is on a flight to London by Thursday night. And I’ll be with him in New York every step of the way.’
Anderson raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘I got it, Margo, OK? Be nice to us and we’ll be nice back. Isn’t that how allies are supposed to behave?’
She got up to leave.
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
‘I didn’t forget. I’ll send you his name, once he’s on the flight.’
‘That’s no good.’ Anderson rose abruptly, his smile lost in the movement. ‘I need it now. We have to assemble the right team in New York, the right files, the right experts – otherwise there’s no point. You know that as well as I do.’
‘His name’s Arkady Mazurin.’ She spoke so quietly, almost whispered, watching him strain to catch the words in the crowded café, wondering, in that moment, if she would look back and regret for years to come and in ways she couldn’t even imagine, what she had just said.
WASHINGTON DC
He had left the White House early that day. Traffic had been horrible. But he stopped at a flower shop in Georgetown and bought Rosalind the yellow daffodils she loved.
‘They’re flowers that look forward,’ she had said once. ‘Yellow means someone’s coming back home. Put out a red flower and it’s like they’re already dead and buried.’
So yellow it was.
And I, Harry Jones, the hypocrite, am buying.
Options. Harry’s mind always turned to options. But he knew he’d already taken the decisions that counted. The major ones that mark you, define you as you really are. Sometime back in early September, with summer well on the wane and autumn inbound, he had, in his own mind, left his sick wife and his vows by the side of the road and driven off in full knowledge of what he was doing. There was no undoing what he had done …
As he headed back to the house, he could hear Mai’s voice, calling out just a month before from the tiny kitchen in Adams Morgan; Gershwin, cracked but triumphant on the ancient turntable. They had sat at the blue kitchen table looking out over the yard.
‘Why are you staring at me?’ she had asked him over coffee.
‘I want to remember this.’
She laughed. ‘You’re just looking at my chipped tooth.’
‘It’s endearing.’
‘You say that but you’re wondering why I haven’t got it fixed.’
His turn to laugh.
‘You Americans – unless you all look the same, same noses, same teeth, same button-down shirts, you feel insecure.’
He wasn’t smiling anymore.
‘You’re so inventive, creative – and yet you all want to belong to a herd. It’s a big contradiction, Harry. I leave my car in an empty parking lot and when I come back someone’s parked right next to me. When there’s a thousand other spaces! How do you explain that, mister?’
‘Do I have to?’
‘Harry Jones …’ She slurred the words intentionally. ‘Don’t look so down. We can talk about other things if you want.’
‘Us?’
‘Aren’t we real enough already?’
‘Yes, but …’
‘You want me to tell you things …’ She looked up as if searching for a word. ‘Endearments. Is that it?’
‘Maybe.’
She had leaned across the table and taken his hand. ‘They’re just words, Harry. We both know that. They don’t mean anything.’
He forced himself to concentrate on the road but the memories were discomforting. Each of the days before she had left seemed shorter and faster and darker.
They had taken the wine to the sofa and lain side by side, everything said, his love declared, hers unstated, the sky hovering between orange and blue, thin lines of charcoal cloud.
Harry parked the car and cleared his mind. Inside his home was a woman who needed him now, tonight, fully committed, as she fought her way in terrible pain towards the end of her life.
He couldn’t let her down again.
She hadn’t woken at all that evening. The doctor had called after midnight. His verdict: it hadn’t been a good day for her. And, yes, the good days were surely diminishing. There wouldn’t be many of them in the time she had left.
‘You need to know that, Harry.’
He must have dozed for a while. The banging had started in his dream but was now very real at the kitchen window. He could see the uniform, took in the red nose of one of the president’s military aides.
Harry wide awake now, realizing his shirt was open to the waist, trousers loosened.
At the door, the marine handed him a package and asked him to sign electronically on a tablet.
‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but they said this was urgent. Should I wait to see if there’s a reply?’
‘That won’t be necessary.’
Harry muttered his thanks and opened the sealed plastic envelope. It was from the CIA – the source was Dean Anderson in London.
He couldn’t help the whistle, the sharp intake of breath. A day of surprises was ending with one he had least expected.
The identity of the former British double agent, now about to leave Moscow for good.
He didn’t know the name and didn’t much care. Arkady Mazurin was nothing more than the means to an end.
Harry took a mobile phone from his pocket and sent a text to a number with a Geneva prefix. The phone had come to him a year ago from a friend in Lagos who had bought the device in a slum, hacked and unlocked, so that nobody else in the world would have a clue into whose exalted hand it had now passed.
The Geneva number offered its owner a remarkably similar level of protection.
Across Washington, Vitaly Yanayev read the message twice in his official car and nodded to himself. In the darkness on Key Bridge, he wound down his window and threw the mobile into the Potomac.
MOSCOW
Vasya looked at him with suspicion as Arkady rolled up his blanket, a favoured old shoe, a water bowl and a tin dish from which he ate his food. The entire inventory of the dog’s possessions.
He had indeed travelled light through life, asking little from it, but giving his loyalty and his companionship without question.
‘I’m sorry to do this to you.’ Arkady looked up, Vasya inclined his head.
He seemed to be waiting for an excuse or an explanation, but Arkady had none to offer.
He finished tying the bundle of Vasya’s things and sat down at the kitchen table. The two of them eyed each other in silence.
You can lie to humans so easily but you can’t fool a dog because he can read your mind. Whatever you say, he seems to know the truth. Vasya is my conscience. No wonder he looks disappointed.
They took a taxi to Yelena’s flat. He had to bang on the door for at least five minutes before she came.
‘Why the fucking noise?’ she asked by way of a greeting and then dropped to the ground hugging Vasya, who was snorting and snuffling and wagging his tail and licking her face, all at the same time.
They hadn’t seen each other for five years, but neither had forgotten the other.
Perhaps dogs were better to live with than humans, thought Arkady. No permanent sense of injustice. No requirement to talk when all you wanted was silence.
‘I’ve brought his things,’ he said lamely.
She stood up. ‘I can see. He’ll have a good supper and I’ll let him out before I go to bed.’
Sounded so normal, the way she said it. Yelena and Vasya beginning a life they would live happily ever after.
And yet they both knew that wouldn’t happen. They would snatch a day or so and then there would be a knock on the door and life would never be the same again.
Arkady’s thoughts began to race. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea. I need to sit down.’
She fetched him a cha
ir and he sat in his winter coat in the middle of the tiny hall, with the dark, dirt-stained walls, unpainted for decades and the book shelves stuffed to overflowing. A baby began howling in the next-door flat.
‘What is it, Arkady?’
‘You and Vasya. Once I’m gone there could be trouble for you. You know what they’re like.’
She looked at him and sighed. ‘You made your decision. You should go. One of us should leave this chamber of horrors and I don’t want to. Never did. I hate it, but it’s mine. I hate these people – brutal, arrogant and so incredibly stupid, but they’re my people. You never felt that way. You had your career …’ She raised her hands as if to halt her own train of thought.
‘Listen to me, Yelena—’
‘No, you listen. Just this once. I’m prepared for anything, however bad. That’s what this country did to me. Turned me into the kind of person who’s always waiting for disaster. And not just me. Tens of millions of us. This is what they did. Whenever something good happened, we always waited for the bash on the head or the punch in the face. We’re Russians. Our life is hard. But we make it like that. We’re stupid people who create our own problems and then battle with them unsuccessfully all our life. How much more idiotic can you get?’
‘Maybe if I stay …’
‘If you stay, you’ll just piss me off even more. I stopped you when you came here last time with your sob story, but we had something once. Better than most people. And nothing lasts forever. Why should we try for something more and then just end up hating each other all over again?’ A thin smile appeared on her lips and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen it. ‘So fuck off and leave us in peace.’ Even that was said kindly. ‘Send me a postcard from somewhere and sign it “Vasya” – and then we’ll know that you’ve got to where you’re going.’
He stood up, leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.
Yelena turned away and went into the kitchen. Vasya limped after her. Residence and loyalty had been transferred. The animal understood that.
Arkady blew his nose and shut the front door quietly behind him.
So a new life had begun – as it always did – with a farewell.
SYRIA/JORDAN BORDER
The contact was pleased with himself. A few miles inside the border, at a rat-hole called Tell Shihab, he had stopped at the house of a former colleague in the Syrian police to see if the man might know something.
It wasn’t an easy encounter. The man, in underpants and stinking T-shirt, had been drinking and hadn’t wanted to let him in. But when the subject of money for information was raised, he had become increasingly hospitable.
Muttering nonsense to himself, he had led the contact to the kitchen and seated him by the warm stove. ‘You’re hungry, aren’t you? Course you are – look at the state of you …’ He produced some bread and another glass, filling it from the wine bottle he had hurriedly concealed beneath the table.
‘Drink, my friend. In a while, we talk business. But you are my guest and at least we can celebrate the fact we’re still alive!’
The contact sipped the wine and put down his glass. ‘So which side are you on these days, brother? Uh? Or maybe you’re on everyone’s side?’ He grinned broadly, trying to put the man at his ease.
‘Perhaps I should ask you same question. Brother.’ The smile wasn’t returned. ‘You come here, middle of the night … and you ask which side I’m on. The question has no meaning. All of us are on the side that lets us live a little longer. One day this one, tomorrow the other.’ He sneered. ‘Let me tell you something. There’s no difference between any of them. They all kill, they all torture. They would all do the same terrible things if they came to power.’ He stopped for a moment, listening. ‘Dangerous times, my friend … talking to you could get me a bullet in the head.’
In the pocket of his tracksuit, the contact felt the butt of his revolver.
‘I’m looking for someone and I need your help.’
‘Listen carefully to me. I have many sources of information. People are searching these days for friends, for loved ones. Our country is a slaughterhouse. You know this just as I do. Every day we drown in blood, every day there is more.’
He pushed the wine bottle across the table towards the contact. ‘You need to be very careful, my friend. People here will kill for nothing. For a suspicion, for a word they didn’t expect; because they don’t like your face; because they sense danger everywhere and fear you are part of it. Information is the most dangerous thing you can buy … more than bombs, I tell you, even guns and bullets …’
‘Can you help me or not?’
The policeman stared straight ahead. Seconds passed before he spoke.
‘If there’s radio traffic about your friend, or phone calls, we can try. There’s a man who has the technology. It belonged to the Americans, but was stolen at the start of the war. It can monitor transmissions over a long distance. I tell you, my friend, it can pull words from the sky …’
‘Where is it?’
‘I’ll take you there, but it’s expensive. A very big risk. To me. You understand? There must be compensation.’
‘I said I’d pay.’
‘You have to pay first …’
For a few seconds the two men stared unkindly at each other. The contact had divided the money in advance into $500 bundles. He pulled one from his pocket and laid it in front of the policeman.
The officer didn’t look at it. ‘We leave in the morning, my friend. It’s late, get some sleep.’
‘I need to leave now. The morning’s too late.’
The policeman raised his hand, as if signalling a car to stop at a junction.
‘I won’t go in darkness. It’s impossible. Life is dangerous enough.’ He picked up the pile of dollars on the table and threw it back down. ‘Besides, this will cost you much more than you’ve given me.’ He raised his eyebrows and smiled. ‘Relax my friend. Drink. Be calm. The sun will rise in a few hours.’
For just a moment the contact shut his eyes. All his life he’d been a gambler, come close to the edge a few times, but he’d been lucky till now. He had a good instinct for danger.
He reckoned the odds were about even that the policeman would try to kill him before dawn.
LONDON
There had been no sign of Jimmy at home. Not that she had time for him. Mazurin’s exit from Moscow had pushed her own life to the sidelines. It was always that way. You negotiated a path between the extraordinary and the mundane – and everyone with a normal life had to get out of your way.
A selfish life?
Of course not. Wasn’t about her. Wasn’t as if she were chasing a career or a fat salary or a bigger car. It was simply about getting the job done, saving a life or even many lives.
Was it really so difficult to understand, if she had to work odd hours or nights or weekends – or couldn’t tell someone every moment of her life where she was and what she was doing?
No wonder the Service personnel got together, slept together, cried together.
Sure, they shared secrets – but when she looked at some of her colleagues, they didn’t seem to share much else.
Two offices down the corridor she had known a Charley, a Brenda and a Philippa and they had all seemed to pass each other around when needed. Like a bottle of pills, you took a Charley when you felt low and then Brenda might take Philippa for a bit of a high, and Charley might take one of each, even at the same time if life was a pisser that week.
So they got each other through the weekends or an odd evening here or there. But the general view was that office relationships were crap. Convenient but you wished you didn’t have to. Like holding onto a handrail.
She zipped up her bag, locked the front door and shook herself like a dog. The flat had felt unbelievably cold, the pizza and the laughter long gone.
Could they piece something back together, ‘work on it’ in earnest, late-night encounters in the local Café Rouge, when she’d be tired and he�
�d be brittle? And the same old stuff dredged up and dissected; his weeping wounds, her ‘unfeeling, hurtful’ responses; respect draining away.
Probably wouldn’t go well.
She called Manson from the secure mobile.
‘I’m on my way to Heathrow.’
‘I know. You want a medal?’
‘Listen to me. I want to be sure that if the Americans try to screw us, my government will make a bloody great fuss and resist.’
‘I can’t promise you that.’
‘Of course you can’t. You know what? I sometimes wonder whether you bloody exist at all.’
MOSCOW
It felt lonely without the dog. He hadn’t realized how the animal had substituted for human contact. Decent human contact. A creature that didn’t have an angle, didn’t want to use you or trade you, wasn’t looking to climb over your body to get promoted.
In the flat overlooking Leninsky Prospekt, Arkady allowed himself a small whisky and then another.
Tomorrow, he thought, is almost here. My plane ticket is in my pocket, my passport in my jacket. My permission to leave Moscow and fly to New York – all typed and stamped and folded in an official envelope. Wrapped like a Christmas present – the best he could ever have imagined.
‘New York.’ He mouthed the name silently, stifling an urge to fling open his filthy, frozen windows and yell it out across the rooftops to anyone who could hear.
For the first time in so many years he let his mind return to the city. Three years he had spent there – a trophy posting for the KGB – only the rising stars went there, the brightest, the most trusted. The ones who could recruit and handle their own agents, who understood the duality of the American psyche: the need to be loved and admired coupled with that brutal, extreme focus on the job in hand.
Their arrogance often made them myopic, gullible: believing only in what they wanted, not what they saw.
So it had been easy to hide there in the open. People accepted you at face value. You said you were a nice guy, they believed you. As long as you had a sad story and a smile and a generous wallet. Americans were suckers for warmth, suckers for a hard luck tale. Suckers full stop.
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