by Alex Dryden
When he returned to the meeting with Adrian, Burt hadn’t the slightest clue to the meaning of the six words, or of who Rafael might be—if anyone. But Burt Miller was a man who allowed his instincts full rein, and they were usually good. On this occasion he felt a growing sense of excitement that these instincts—this time for an intelligence coup of some importance—were genuine. This instinct, he regularly told his juniors in briefing sessions, and using the third person to describe himself like any autocrat would, was “Burt’s line to God.”
9
SUNDAY, JANUARY 17
THE VIEW BEYOND THE TABLE and through the porthole from aboard Burt Miller’s 302-foot yacht Cougar was of Tower Bridge and the City of London. Anna looked through the round glass and saw the skies were a uniform battleship grey. A light rain was spattering the glass of the porthole and the wide panoramic windows on either side of it in a needling sort of way. The irritable flecks of rain glancing off the glass seemed to be an insistent reminder that London’s monochrome winter wasn’t going away.
Inside, however, the artificial lighting in the sumptuous operations room of the ship was almost too bright by comparison and was particularly focused over the large, square, mahogany table. It was almost the size of a small room in itself and stood with a kind of magnificent defiance right at the centre of the deck-wide space. Burt Miller was standing by the table, while Anna sat to the side on a high upholstered stool and pensively drank from a cup of coffee.
Burt grinned at her as he made a great ceremony of opening the plastic envelope she had delivered. There was a boyish glint in his eye, as if it had been a birthday present Anna had given him and she was his lover rather than an employee of Cougar Intelligence Applications who had brought him secret intelligence documents.
He finally drew out a sheaf of folded papers and carefully opened them up until they could both see there were three large, light blue sheets in all, each four feet by three feet in dimension. Burt triumphantly laid out the three photocopied sheets of what would have been, in the original, drawings on architectural white paper. He placed them on the mahogany desk in a row, one after the other. Burt surveyed the plans with an air of satisfaction. Then he looked at her and grinned a second time.
“Plans for the port of Novorossiysk,” he said triumphantly and looked back at them as if they were a map of buried treasure. “Or the development of the port of Novorossiysk, shall we say. Highly secret. Very restricted. Our agent has done very well to obtain them.” Then he looked at Anna. “And you, my dear, had an even more difficult task, I hear from Larry.” He beamed his wide grin that creased the flesh of his face upwards until his eyes were almost invisible. “You are the best there is.”
Anna was sitting on the high stool that gave her a view from higher up on to the table and the plans. She’d arrived at the yacht only an hour before and it had been just over ten hours since they’d picked her up off the beach in the Crimea. With Larry alone, she had been helicoptered off the Nigerian-registered freighter to Ankara, where one of Burt’s private jets was waiting to take them both to London. She’d slept little on the flight and then Burt had wanted to see her immediately. She would have been happy to send Larry with the delivery without her. She’d done her job. She took pride in being just a field operative. But she knew Burt wouldn’t leave her alone until she agreed to share with him the contents of the package. As with most things in his life, Burt enjoyed the ritual, the ceremonial element, and her company was an essential ingredient for both things.
Now he stood in a pair of navy blue trousers and an extravagantly tailored Gilbert and Sullivan–style yachting blazer that seemed to her to be a deliberate mockery of maritime pomposity. Perhaps it was. Burt liked dressing up—it was playacting—she knew that. She’d seen him in many such incongruous situations and disguises and the yachting paraphernalia was undoubtedly a disguise and one that he had donned simply for his own amusement. On this ship, he was the eccentric Edwardian billionaire owner. When he was at his mansion in Connecticut he was the English gentleman in tweeds and plus fours who owned his own fox hunt, had his clothes made to measure in London’s Savile Row, but couldn’t actually ride a horse. At his vast ranch in New Mexico he dressed in the manner of a nineteenth-century American cattle baron. And in the corridors of power in Washington he was the ultimate flamboyant corporate owner in silk suits and handmade shoes. Wherever he was, it seemed he simply enjoyed living any dream he felt like living, and which his enormous wealth could effortlessly make a reality.
His big round face glowed like a ripe apple and his rotund, well-fed form seemed itself to stretch the imagination. There was nothing too big for Burt, apparently. At least that was the effect of his outsize physical presence and the outsize personality that kept in lockstep with it. Now he smoked a large cigar, a Churchill, another almost permanent accessory in his props cupboard, which, for the moment, was fuming quietly on its own in a large bronze ashtray shaped like an anchor. There were other half-smoked or quarter-smoked cigars of great commercial value that could be found discarded wherever it was that Burt was currently passing through life and Anna could see at least three of them now lying like unexploded ordnance in various ashtrays around the room.
She didn’t respond to his knowing enquiry. Burt’s questions and interrogatory remarks were in general of a declamatory nature and usually didn’t require a reply.
But Burt wanted to relish the moment, to extract the maximum amount of suspense from the presence of the architectural plans and, before he took a close look at them, he went over to a refrigerator, plucked out a bottle of Krug champagne, and opened it. Another largely ceremonial gesture, as he would drink perhaps half a glass at most.
A big man—though at just under five feet eight inches he seemed bigger than he was—Burt was, to Anna, exuding his usual warmth and confident bonhomie this afternoon, though it was tinted as always with a subcutaneous level of granite. The geological strata of Burt began on the surface with a sunny, welcoming, friendly terrain, while underneath it the bedrock was absolutely unyielding. And his smile usually left room for this hard power to be always visible behind it.
The combination of the two effects—the sweet and the sour of Burt—would have been equally appropriate in a mafia boss attending his daughter’s wedding, or a casino owner welcoming a high-net-worth client. Welcome to my World, was Burt’s usual modus operandi and he treated others largely as if they were present for his own entertainment.
Burt handed her a glass and raised his own.
“To a great partnership,” he said. “I have everything to be grateful for that I ever came across you.”
“Thank you, Burt.” She drank. “You know we lost the courier. I believe she shot herself.”
“Larry told me.”
“Apparently in order to save the agent,” Anna said. “He must have trained her well.”
Burt allowed a moment of silence, more to allow the evaporation of the awkwardness of the news than in respectful memory of the girl.
“We have to protect our agents,” he said simply. Then he looked back at the table and the event was forgotten.
“Let’s see what we have here,” he said, beamed, and put his glass down. He fingered the left-hand sheet and read the title, which Anna had already studied while he was displaying his relaxed self-assurance and opening the champagne. “This one, the sheet on the left, is what exists already. Port facilities, refuelling capacity, open water anchorages, quays and dry docks, as well as land transportation to and from the port.” He walked eighteen inches or so to the right and the next page. “And these two,” he said, reading the Russian Cyrillic writing on the legend at the top of the second and third sheet, “these two are the proposed developments, signed and sealed by the Ministry of Defence in Moscow, approved by the navy and the security services, rubber-stamped unseen by the Russian parliament, and ultimately ordered by Czar Vladimir Putin. So what do we see?”
Anna stayed on the stool. She knew Burt and knew
she was expected to join the little dramas in which he chose to perform. But to her, the drama of the plans in front of them seemed overblown. They were plans of a relatively minor Russian naval military installation and commercial port on the far side of the Kerch Straits and across the Black Sea, to the east of the Crimea on Russian territory. Novorossiysk was just a Russian port, that was all, across the water from its old possession, Ukraine. She wondered how the plans could possibly have been worth the death of a courier, an innocent, deceived courier at that, not to mention her own near capture and the execution that would inevitably have followed back in Moscow.
“Well?” Burt said almost gleefully.
She got up from the stool now and, walking up to the table, leaned forward to study the drawings.
“They’re architectural engineering plans that show proposed extensions to what’s already there at the port,” she said. “The proposition seems to be a deepening of the harbour. Most of the quays and loading facilities look like they’re being upgraded, there are new oil storage tanks, two new roads leading in to the port, and an upgrade of the rail track.” Anna looked more closely. “I guess it’s an expansion of the port by maybe twenty percent.”
“Exactly. Twenty, maybe thirty, percent,” Burt said. “And that’s not enough, is it?” He beamed at her triumphantly.
“Enough for what?” she said.
But Burt wasn’t going to be drawn on this point, not yet in any case. He ran his finger down the lines of the drawings as if he were studying some old masterpiece and trying to judge its origins. He was a collector of art, mainly modern British art in the past few years. That suited his general Anglophilia, which he had developed over forty years before as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. But at his other homes in the United States—Anna remembered seeing a Picasso sketch hanging in a bathroom, a Turner on a staircase, and one old master she couldn’t recall in a study somewhere that was reputed to have cost Burt sixty-five million dollars.
“Tell me about Novorossiysk, Anna,” he said.
Anna returned to her seat on the stool and gave him a brief description. “It’s a southern port of Russia’s on the Black Sea. A warm-water port, one of very few Russia possesses, and therefore strategically important. Russia’s and, before that, the Soviet Union’s Mediterranean fleet has used it more or less in its present form for more than fifty years, though it was always second to Sevastopol in Ukraine. Sevastopol’s always been the big base. Until the Soviet Union collapsed, Sevastopol had a hundred thousand men stationed there. Now it’s more like forty thousand. The Russian Mediterranean fleet has been largely inactive since the 1990s. Many of its ships are going out of date, rusting away, and being decommissioned. But now Putin wants to expand it again, to patrol the Mediterranean, go up against America’s Sixth Fleet once more. Novorossiysk was—is—mainly a commercial port, with some Russian navy facilities. In the days of the Soviet Union, it was the main exporter from the southern republics. But oil and gas were its main exports. And that’s been on the increase. Oil and gas from the Caspian. Now that’s being diverted into pipelines, so the importance of Novorossiysk will undoubtedly decline. There isn’t much else that Russia exports from there. Some timber, foodstuffs from the southern republics. That’s about it.”
“It’s in decline as a commercial port, then,” Burt said. “And as an alternative? Is it an alternative to the Russian Black Sea fleet’s base in Sevastopol?”
“It could be, but unlikely.”
“After the upgrade that these plans demonstrate, perhaps?”
“Yes, but it would need more development than these plans show. Besides, Sevastopol has a natural deep-water harbour, bays five miles deep. It’s one of the best harbours in the world.”
“Exactly,” Burt said again. “And that’s what makes these plans so interesting. They’re just what I expected.”
Anna got up from the stool again and walked to the far end of the room. She looked out at the Thames through one of the wide panoramic windows, two of which flanked the porthole that was really just for show, it seemed. She began to tot up what Burt had spent on this operation in the previous days: the freighter that was presumably hired, Larry and the others in the boat, a helicopter to Turkey, then the private flight to London. And herself, of course. She didn’t take into account the death of the courier; it was unquantifiable. Yet all this money and the girl’s death had been for a few drawings of port improvements at Novorossiysk. None of it made a great deal of sense to her.
“Larry treat you all right?” Burt said.
“He was on time,” she replied.
“He’d never be late for you, Anna.” Burt grinned. “Even on a windswept beach in the Crimea. None of us would be.”
He seemed to enjoy her coolness, she thought. The perfect complement, perhaps, to his own flamboyance. He’d as good as said so when he’d made her a director of Cougar. As a former KGB colonel in special forces and in the highly secret Department S, she’d caused quite a stir inside Washington’s beltway. Specialist magazines had wanted to write her profile, though largely, it appeared, in order to show pictures of her. Burt paid them not to by taking several large and expensive corporate advertising spots.
“It was a wise move to come out off the beach,” Burt continued. “Much better than risking the border posts.”
Was this remark disingenuous? she wondered. Did he really think she’d have risked so much in order to rendezvous with a boat on hostile territory? She turned towards him, but all she saw was his big beaming expression.
“It was the only choice,” she replied. She looked across the room at him and held his eyes. He looked back at her with a quizzical expression now. “There’s a leak, Burt,” she said. “They were following me from Istanbul. On the ferry. They also knew about the pickup. They had the barn staked out. That’s why the courier killed herself.”
Burt raised his eyes and looked at her. “You didn’t mention this to Larry.”
“No.”
“And you still got the goods,” he said in admiration. He always focused on the positive, sometimes to the point of foolish optimism, she thought. Once again, the courier’s death went unmentioned.
“There’s a leak, Burt, perhaps at Cougar,” she repeated firmly. Then she looked straight into his eyes until he could no longer return her gaze with equanimity.
“They were there? On the boat from Istanbul?” he said, seriously now.
“More important, they were there at the barn. They knew everything about my movements from the start. It was only because they wanted me alive that I got out at all. They could have taken me anytime.”
Burt picked up a phone and immediately connected with a switchboard. “Get me Bob Dupont. In here.” He replaced the phone. “We’ll see what Bob has to say. I had no idea, Anna. This is serious. I’m sorry.”
“Never be sorry,” she said, repeating one of his own maxims.
He grinned at her.
Bob Dupont, Burt’s head of internal security, entered the operations room a few minutes later. Tall, silver haired, his running joke at Cougar was that he was the only person in the company who was older than Burt. He greeted Anna, nodded at Burt, and came over to the table. He looked down at the drawings. Burt poured him a glass of champagne that he didn’t touch. Dupont didn’t drink, Burt knew that perfectly well. Sometimes Anna thought that Burt just liked to have two glasses available for himself, even though he didn’t drink them. Life is about expansion, he liked to say.
“I went to Novorossiysk over forty years ago,” Burt said as Dupont studied the plans. “Twenty-eight years old, just married, and working for the agency.” He grinned at Anna’s questioning look. “Before you were born,” he said to her. “The height of the Cold War.”
“These are what Anna’s returned with?” Dupont asked.
“That’s right,” Burt answered. “And only I knew what the delivery consisted of. Not even Anna.” He walked over to stand beside Dupont. “But how many people in Cougar knew of Anna�
��s assignment, Bob? The details. And who outside Cougar?”
“The three of us. And Larry—but none of the other boys with him.”
“Did you tell the Russians, Bob?” Burt said mischievously.
Dupont looked momentarily wrong footed, before realising that this was Burt’s usual line of humour. He didn’t respond.
“The three of us and Larry,” Burt said. “Who outside?”
“You informed the CIA,” Dupont pointed out.
“But not the times or dates, just the general outline.”
“The general outline, but they could have looked more closely if they’d wished. They might have been checking out the hiring of the freighter, I suppose, and found it was ours. We disguised it, of course, but you never know. They might even have been tracking Anna. It’s possible.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Professional jealousy, that’s the only reason. You know how the agency feels threatened by Cougar. And you also know, Burt, how they like to know everything.”
“Lish is our man,” Burt said.
“But who knows if he passed it on to anyone. Watching us, or Anna, is in the normal run of things for the agency.”
“Get him on the phone.”
Burt picked up the cigar from the ashtray and champed it between his teeth.
“Why are you asking this?” Dupont said.
“There’s been a leak. Anna could have lost her life.”
“And the courier was killed,” Anna reminded him.
Dupont looked shocked. Against Burt’s easy acceptance of the status quo he was visibly disturbed.