by Alex Dryden
“Do you mean ‘working together’?” he interrupted and his lips tightened as if they were gripping a straw. He had a sudden notion that, as head of the British intelligence service, good English usage—or any other damn language for that matter—was the prerequisite for good international relations.
Most of the other figures around the large, perfectly oval, polished cherrywood table—it had reportedly cost over fifty thousand euros—looked at him as if it were he who had just uttered sounds in some as yet undiscovered language. Osvald Kruger, the head of the BND, Germany’s spy agency, in particular looked like he was completely at home with “Coalition Interoperability.” It was simply the norm. It was international English, his raised eyebrows seemed to say—at least they seemed to say so to Adrian. There was an uncomfortable pause.
“It’s not, actually, exactly the same thing, Adrian,” the CIA head Theo Lish said at last in a patiently hushed voice, and then gave a little cough, either from a sense of linguistic superiority or simply from awkwardness. He had been drawing to the close of a complex exposition of the latest NATO strategy for combating cyberwarfare and had now lost his thread.
“I know it’s not exactly the same thing, Theo,” Adrian retorted. “But at least everyone understands what it bloody means. It’s Anglo-Saxon English, not some bureaucratic bloody gobbledegook.”
Lish now reddened in anger.
Only one of the thirty or so figures sitting around the table wasn’t remotely ruffled by this disturbance. And he announced himself to Adrian with his trademark loud guffaw from the opposite side of the table. Whether from the loudness of the laugh or from its diversionary opportunity, the small explosion afforded an exit from the momentary impasse Adrian had created. Burt Miller banged the table with his chubby pink hand as a sort of percussion accompaniment to his boom box laugh, and looked around the table with a twinkle of mirth in his eyes.
“The Brits never agree on the wording,” he announced to the assembled espionage chiefs with a broad grin on his face. “That’s the way they’ve lied their way around the world for five hundred years.”
This time it was Adrian who reddened. He looked across the table at Burt with a mixture of fury and concealed admiration that contorted his expression for a brief moment into something resembling a squashed cartoon.
Adrian then saw that the head of France’s DGSE, Thomas Plismy, was obviously enjoying his discomfort and actually had a slight but deliberate smirk on his face.
Next to Burt, as always these days, Adrian noted, sat the Russian woman, the former KGB colonel Anna Resnikov. She had remained expressionless throughout Adrian’s encounter with Lish and now looked across the table at Adrian with a level stare. The contrast between Adrian’s rough and claret-tinged face and her smooth, finely textured features was like two Renaissance paintings, one of a bawdy house in downtown Venice, the other a pastoral Elysian idyll. The cool terrain of her personality seemed to wash over Adrian in an attempt to extinguish him with a single glance. On top of everything—for some reason this crossed his mind—she was taller than he was by an inch or two. He searched her face for any sign of contempt, caught himself doing it, and felt angrier than before.
The consultative meeting between national security chiefs of the NATO countries was a regular event that took place several times a year and was held either in Washington or, more usually, as this time, at NATO headquarters in Brussels. The thirty-one nations sent their spymasters to confer, compare notes, pursue the alliance’s common aims—and, with familiar regularity, to hide, withhold, or obscure anything from each other that was considered by their respective governments to be of greater national importance than something to be shared among notional allies. It was a forum of supposedly common aims and strategies, but where conflicts of interest were everywhere and everyone knew it, though no one openly mentioned them.
In recent years the get-together included not just the heads of the thirty-one national intelligence services of NATO countries. Occasionally a few very select intelligence gurus like Burt Miller, who owned their own private spy companies, were also invited. There were one or two of these companies that had become indispensable to the American national effort and therefore to NATO. Cougar had become the tail that wagged the dog, in Adrian’s opinion. A kind of reverse takeover had taken place. Directors and officers left the CIA, joined companies like Cougar, then turned around and gave the CIA advice and even, on occasion, instructions. Then, when they’d served their time at Cougar, they would rejoin the CIA at the highest level and award Cougar intelligence contracts. Lish was just one of them. It was practically a protection racket, as far as Adrian was concerned.
But the other side of Adrian wished for himself the wealth that private intelligence gathering had sumptuously bestowed on Burt.
The woman, Anna Resnikov, only rubbed salt in this particular wound. A year before, she’d been under the threat of extinction. It seemed that somehow, inevitably with Burt’s help, she had effortlessly turned that around. After her brilliant coup de grâce in the previous year when she had exposed a KGB spy ring in Washington and nearly been killed for her pains, she’d become some kind of hero to the Americans. She was now Burt’s associate vice-president—another meaningless expression that, to Adrian, was just Burt’s method of getting her to accompany him on trips across the Atlantic like this one. In a year, Adrian seethed, she’d probably earned more from Cougar than he’d earned in two or three as deputy, and now head, of MI6.
With a finality in his voice, Burt looked up the table at Theo Lish. “Damn fine run down of the situation,” he said supportively, as if the cyberwarfare question was now done with. “Let’s get back to the table refreshed for the afternoon session.”
As the meeting broke for lunch, Burt singled out Adrian.
“We’re going to the Trois Couleurs,” he said. “Why don’t you join us?”
What did he mean by “we,” Adrian wondered. “We’ve only got an hour,” he grunted, however. “It’ll take fifteen minutes to get out there and it’s the most expensive restaurant in Brussels.”
“And the best,” Burt replied. “What’s more, it’s preordered and on me.” He grinned. “We’ll eat the best food in this town—some of the best in Europe—and be back here only a few minutes late.”
Outside the NATO building, a large, black, armoured limousine awaited Burt. He ushered Anna first into the long backseat—as if she were the bloody queen, Adrian thought—and then stepped in himself, leaving Adrian to follow. There was nobody else invited, Adrian saw.
The preordered lunch was brought to the table in the time it took them to be escorted by the maître d’ from the entrance of the restaurant to their seats at a private table in a room at the rear. A bottle of Pomerol ’56 had been decanted and was now poured. Burt waved aside the opportunity to taste it and the sommelier smiled as if in complicity with Burt’s apparently transcendental appreciation of the vintage and its quality.
“Expect it to be good, and it will be good, eh, Adrian?” Burt said, and raised his glass.
Adrian was nonplussed. Burt’s curious combination of earthiness and, to Adrian, fanciful, airy-fairy, New Age remarks like this one never failed to confuse him. “To lunch!” Burt toasted, ignoring Adrian’s demurral and, tucking a four hundred–count linen napkin somewhere into his chins, he began to enjoy the boeuf en croûte.
To Adrian’s surprise, the conversation was minimal and he began to wonder what was behind this invitation after all. Indeed, why were they in a private room if they weren’t here to talk? But Burt seemed intent on enjoying the dégustation and in no mood for talk, formal or otherwise. It was only when the bill had been invisibly paid—preordered and on an account, Adrian supposed—and they were heading back in the limousine for the afternoon session that Burt beamed at Adrian in a way that suggested something was coming.
“Know what’s on the agenda this afternoon?” he said.
Of course Adrian knew, they all knew. “Iran. For the um
pteenth time,” Adrian replied patiently. “And then a general discussion about the perils of scaling down in Afghanistan. What the intelligence role in that eventuality will be.”
“Ukraine,” Burt said. “Russia and Ukraine. That’s top of my agenda.”
“But it’s not on the agenda at all, Burt,” Adrian protested.
“I think you’ll find it is.” Burt leaned slightly towards the M16 chief. “And, Adrian, I know you’ll instinctively give your support for my—actually, for Anna’s—thesis. She’s been doing fine work in the past months. Particularly in the past few weeks. Work on the ground. And I just want you to know that your support will be a thing of great value to me.”
Adrian looked past Burt’s bulk at Anna, but she didn’t seem to be listening. She was staring somewhere into the distance through the side window of the limousine. The long profile of her face was caught by the sun flashing behind the trees as they drove. She seemed to cultivate an impenetrable, enigmatic identity.
Not for the first time, Adrian wondered what she was like in bed. She’d been Finn’s woman until his death, and after that she’d picked and discarded at least one other man in the past year that he knew of. Including Logan Halloran, he recalled. Unlike the girls in his office, who he felt regarded him as the leader of the herd, she gave him nothing. Once, when Finn was alive, she’d come with Finn to Adrian’s and his wife Penny’s house in the country. He’d made it clear to her what he wanted—practically in front of his wife—and she’d looked at him as if he were a piece of dirt.
He snapped himself out of the memory. “A thesis about Ukraine?” he said, momentarily baffled.
Anna then looked round at him at last, fixing him with her expressionless gaze, and he felt the infuriating calmness of her presence once again.
“Yes, Adrian,” she said. “The second-largest country in Europe, which borders Russia to the east and the European Union to the west.”
“Don’t tease Adrian.” Burt grinned, and looked like he might pat her on the knee, but then thought better of it.
With this arcane exchange completed, the limousine drew up outside the NATO building and they were in their seats just ten minutes late.
Back in the committee room, Burt and Theo Lish drove a “cookie cutter”—in Burt’s words—through the Afghanistan question, dicing it into bite-size pieces that concluded the intelligence role there was all but finished.
“Intelligence is a matter of preemption,” Burt summed up flatly. “Intelligence protects, and intelligence is the tool to flush out our enemies. Afghanistan is over the edge. There’s no longer anything to preempt. We know our enemies, and our enemies are winning. We’re on an irreversible slide there. The White House knows it, even if it won’t admit it yet, and the Europeans know it.”
Lish didn’t disagree and the European intelligence chiefs seemed almost relieved the Americans were leading the retreat.
Then there was an hour discussing the latest intelligence in from Iran; its increased uranium processing facilities, the time line for its nuclear weapons capability, Chinese support of the Iranian government, the illegal imports of material, the mind-set of the ayatollahs and their political puppets, and the fledgling resistance to them. Finally, Theo Lish shuffled some papers and brought a sheet to the top.
“The added agenda,” he stated. They all shuffled papers and brought the swiftly printed sheet into view. “Events concerning Russia and Ukraine.”
Burt rested his hand on the back of Anna’s chair and introduced her to the rest of the committee, as if most of them didn’t already know her and the rest didn’t know her by her considerable reputation.
14
ANNA SAT, COMPOSED AND STILL. The thin northern European light on this January afternoon slanted in through a window where the blinds were only half shut and made a pattern across the table that was elongating with the sun’s fall.
She was aware of the effect she had in the room, the only woman among more than thirty men. She was aware of their curiosity and their attention, and she was equally aware of the resentment that emanated from some of them. But she had been accustomed to such undisguised male attention for as long as she could remember and had long ago developed a quality of absorbing it that was neither a barrier nor an encouragement, but just a kind of neutralising aura.
According to Burt in a conversation with Lish earlier that day, which she had overheard—perhaps by design—she was the personification of Russia itself. In the kind of typically sweeping assessment of a person or event that Burt was fond of making, he had summed her up as follows: “Anna,” he had told Lish, “will tactically withdraw until the opponent is weakened, desperate, and all out of ideas. Then, if she chooses, she picks him off. She’s like the history of Russia and its enemies, Russia withdrawing into an endless interior until their enemies are exhausted and beaten.”
Now, in the committee room, she effortlessly deflected the underlying motives of the men back in their direction and—brought face-to-face with their own conscious or subconscious thoughts about her—they experienced an uncomfortable moment of self-revelation. She destabilised the baser or more simplistic thoughts they held about her by exposing them in some sort of mirror.
Looking at them in the long silence she’d allowed to settle following Burt’s introduction, the fractured group of intelligence chiefs seemed a fragile defence against any single-minded, powerful, and united enemy. Certainly the upper echelons of the KGB had never been this democratic, let alone this diverse. These were a strange group of people, brought together by an old war seventy years before and then—after the Berlin Wall came down—augmented by the incorporation of Europe’s eastern states, which had formerly been under the heel of the Soviet Union. Twenty years after the Cold War had ended—in the fond hopes of the West anyway—the Eastern European nations were now at NATO’s table.
This committee, she thought, was as porous an institution as you could find, yet it was made up of the brightest minds in the countries it represented, men who possessed the most secret and privileged information.
Anna knew—they all did—that someone had been passing on to the Kremlin details of America’s proposed missile shield in Eastern Europe. But the committee had been unreliable for a long time. During the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, a French officer had passed NATO secrets to Serbia. Some people suspected Greece of doing the same. And the Estonian Defence Ministry security chief, Herman Simm, had been convicted of passing NATO secrets to the Russians. It was not surprising therefore that the nations represented around the table withheld their most private intelligence information.
Her presence, she knew, would be reported to the Forest by someone—and maybe more than one of the men in this room. What she had to say now would be read at the Forest within days, if not hours.
Not for the first time, she wondered what Burt’s game was. Burt knew the score where the committee’s trustworthiness was concerned as well as anyone. One thing she was certain of, however, was that in this presentation he’d asked her to make Burt was undoubtedly making a play. He was putting a divining rod into the earth, as he liked to call it, to see what he would find. “Intelligence is a tool to flush out your enemies”—his words from earlier in the week flashed across her mind. And our known enemies’ intentions, she’d silently added to herself. “We need conflict because that is where our enemies are revealed.” And if this was a play of Burt’s—as it undoubtedly was—Anna could assume that the CIA was in on it; the Canadians, almost certainly; and Adrian…? That was why Burt had openly solicited Adrian’s support in the car after lunch. Burt always played a long game and he never told everyone everything, herself included.
There was a hush of anticipation and of curiosity—even admiration, in some cases—both for her unique presence in this room and for her known exploits in the field. She was also the youngest of them by at least fifteen years and the only one who was still active as an operative.
She leaned forward imperceptibly and her sti
llness and quiet drew the others’ attention even more. Theirs was the rapt concentration afforded to a person who speaks in barely audible tones. Anna’s cool demeanour and measured forcefulness was as effective, in its way, as Burt’s loud, bulldozing style. And the men in the room could not separate her skills and experience from her beauty.
“The Kremlin is upping the ante,” she began quietly. “It’s been well known to all of us here for a long time that the mood among Russia’s leaders has become increasingly belligerent since Putin came to power in 2000. Two years ago, Russian forces made their first military adventure outside Russian territory and invaded the sovereign republic of Georgia. There were complaints from the West, but no action. In other words, the Kremlin got away with it. Thus the appetite of the men of power, the siloviki and their allies among the Patriotiy in the intelligence community, was whetted for a far bigger prize. Something the Kremlin wants more than anything. That prize, we believe, is Ukraine.
“For the past ten years the Kremlin has engaged in a series of actions intended to destabilise its neighbour. The Orange Revolution in 2004 prevented the Kremlin’s stooge Yanukovich from gaining power in Kiev, but the Ukrainians’ democratic choice for president was nevertheless poisoned by the KGB, almost fatally. In the east of Ukraine, next to the Russian border, there is a large Russian community from Stalin’s time and before, which is sympathetic to Russian rule. This, combined with the great resentment among Russia’s intelligence community that Ukraine is an independent state, is creating a flashpoint which we believe the Kremlin intends to exploit. Today, from reports on the ground, as well as satellite pictures and KGB sources who are unfriendly to Putin’s KGB clan, we have formed an increasingly clear picture, but it’s still far from certain what exactly the Kremlin plans to do.”