Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  He approached her and rested his free hand on her shoulder, and Willy made a movement forward.

  “It’s all right, Willy,” she said.

  “Finn was a friend,” Burt said. “And you’ll need some better friends now than you’ve had so far. With the exception of you, of course,” he added for Willy’s benefit.

  “Is it okay, sir?” Larry said, apparently eager for it not to be.

  “All is perfect,” Burt said. He turned back to Anna. “The boat, and your boy, are this way,” he said.

  They walked up the beach, at first in silence. Joe and Christoff appeared out of the dunes. It was Burt who broke the silence.

  “You’ll have to think what you need to do,” he said to Anna at one point. “There aren’t many options, as I see it. For your safety, and of course your usefulness to us, I recommend you get as far away from Europe as you can. You won’t be safe here—either of you. I can guarantee your security. You’ll have a house, schooling for your son, citizenship of course. We’ll help you settle in America. It’s not such a bad place to be. Most of the Americans who cause real trouble in my country, we’ve sent to other countries so they can cause trouble there instead.” Burt laughed. He turned to Willy. “Haven’t you ever thought of emigrating out of Europe?” he said.

  “I’m happy here,” Willy said.

  “If we can find your place on the beach, others can too,” Burt replied.

  Anna looked at him, questioningly.

  “It was Finn,” Burt said. “Finn trusted me.”

  They reached the rib, and Joe pulled the anchor out of the sand. At last, Burt’s muscle-bound company had something to do with their biceps. It was a heavy boat and, though only just grounded, hard to push away from the clinging sand.

  Burt escorted Anna into the stern, and the others climbed in. The silent engines were started, and they headed into the darkness.

  They reached the yacht in five minutes, and Anna saw Little Finn holding a woman’s hand and looking over the side at the water, rather than at their approach. When he looked up as they drew alongside, he didn’t seem in the least bit surprised to see her.

  She felt a rush of grief and happiness that choked her. Burt sent her up the ladder first, and she took her child in her arms and held him closely. There were tears in her eyes, and she clung to him, noticing nothing else.

  “Are you okay?” she said at last, and stroked the long hair away from his forehead.

  “Look at that star,” he said. His head was turned away from her, up towards the night sky. A shooting star was just completing its trajectory to the southwest.

  “When are we going swimming?” he said.

  Part Two

  Chapter 13

  NOVEMBER 2008

  NEW YORK’S UNION CLUB at Sixty-ninth and Park is America’s oldest gentleman’s club. It was also Burt’s idea of where to keep good company while visiting the city. In its 175 years, American presidents, newspaper magnates, railway and shipping tycoons, even the occasional writer or lyricist, have graced its three-hundred-foot dining room, played cards or backgammon in its purposefully designated salons, and fallen asleep in its sumptuous library.

  For Burt, however, the historical continuum was more than simply glory by association. The club’s longevity overarched fleeting fashions and outlived breakaway clubs that disagreed with the Union’s founding principles. For Burt, the club itself was a gigantic clue to the skills of survival and prosperity.

  Adrian Carew surveyed the roll call of its elite membership as Burt signed for the key to the smoking room—“with its matchless humidor,” as he’d enlightened Adrian. Burt’s name was written in gold leaf on a dark wood board. Club Secretary, Adrian read. Burt Miller, philanthropist and chairman of Cougar Intelligence Applications Corporation.

  Burt’s little joke, Adrian remembered now, to name his company CIA. It was said that the agency had been moved to insist he add the word Corporation.

  They walked beneath the impressive domed ceiling of the entrance hall and turned right down a series of Alice in Wonderland corridors lined with portraits of the club’s alumni.

  Adrian searched his mind for a suitable put-down of the whole setup. Excessive occurred to him, architecturally overflamboyant, and the mostly dreadful portraits were a typically American weakness for the supremacy of the individual over the institution.

  But even as he erected these mental defences, Adrian was painfully aware that it was he who was here on Burt’s ground at Burt’s bidding, not the other way around.

  “The club’s ethos,” Burt was saying, “is prosperity by inclusiveness. If you’re rich, you get in.” He laughed loudly.

  Adrian dutifully smiled.

  “During the Civil War, we refused to disbar our friends the Confederate members,” Burt said.

  Genuine inclusiveness of a kind then, Adrian thought. And he wondered at Burt’s own legendary ability to embrace all comers, friend and enemy alike. He also wondered which of these he was this evening.

  They reached the door to the smoking room; Burt waved Adrian inside and then opened an external door to a small terrace that overlooked the club’s service entrance.

  “Our new smoking patio for the diehards,” Burt said with a broad grin. “That’s you and me, Adrian.”

  And now Adrian sat in a cold, uncomfortable metal chair on this tiny balcony. It was the first week of November. The temperature felt like it was below freezing. An unexpectedly early snow flurry had fluffed the dark alley below them as well as the balcony’s parapets with a white dusting blown through the tunnels of Manhattan’s streets by a bitter wind. With amazed annoyance he noticed that his companion was apparently oblivious to the cold. Burt sat in a similarly uncomfortable wrought iron chair, puffing cigar smoke into the night and wearing his habitual good-humoured expression.

  Grinding his teeth, Adrian sucked at a cigarette as if he might derive some thin warmth from the glowing end.

  “When do I get to see the woman?” he said with a bluntness that came more from discomfort at another cap-in-hand mission than from the cold.

  “All in good time, my friend,” Burt said happily. “All in good time.”

  Adrian seethed. The fact that Burt, a private American intelligence contractor, albeit running a multibillion-dollar company and with a senior CIA background, could talk to him in such a way was at complete odds with his world.

  Did the head of the British intelligence service now play second fiddle to private American intelligence contractors? He supposed so. The CIA’s employees themselves were now ordered about by private companies like Burt’s in many of America’s embassies around the world, including Baghdad’s. Private enterprise had its viselike grip around the country’s traditionally government-run intelligence ops. The revolving door between government spy agencies and these private spy companies ensured that American government intelligence contracts were awarded by government officials who had previously directed the companies they were awarding them to. Adrian considered it all to be way upside down.

  The military industrial complex has now become the intelligence industrial complex, he thought, and Burt had carved himself and Cougar a strong niche at the very heart of it.

  Adrian had thus known to approach Burt personally rather than go to his opposite number at the CIA, and he had come to Burt for a reason. Burt had kept Anna Resnikov to himself for three months now. It looked as if the agency was letting him keep her—at least for a period.

  Soon—later this evening, in fact—he would see if Burt’s apparently endless patience with the Russian colonel would survive what he had to tell him.

  At last, after two years trying to get to the woman, Adrian felt he had something to work with, something that was going to put him back in the game. And he was looking forward to knocking the smile off Burt’s face when he sprang it on him tonight.

  It had been a difficult—not to say frustrating—few months. First, there’d been the unexpected arrival of her photograph. Adr
ian had gone at once to the Treasury committee to ask for the half million dollars the little thief who took the picture had been demanding. They had to pay up or lose her. She was what they’d all been waiting for, for over two years since Finn’s death. Even Teddy Parkinson had come with him to the Treasury.

  But the committee had delayed granting this ex officio payment, blustering; was MI6 the only place that hadn’t heard of the financial crisis? Did they think that with institutions falling like flies, half a million dollars could be signed off just like that?

  When Adrian pointed out to the five men and one woman on the committee that this kind of information didn’t fall into their laps once in ten years, they had looked at him as if he were some kind of street-corner cardsharp.

  And when, after the haggling and veiled threats were over, they finally granted him the money to pay for the information that went with the picture—the colonel’s location—it was too late, far too late. The Americans had already grabbed her. Half a mil down the drain for nothing, and he knew he would end up carrying the can for that, thanks to the committee’s procrastination.

  Connected to his laying hands on the woman, there was also Grigory Bykov, Finn’s killer. Some at the Secret Intelligence Service whispered that Adrian had become obsessed with killing Bykov, and that the woman’s value was in gaining access to Mikhail, not in giving Adrian the green light to bump off the Russian. But the fact that the Yanks had got her had merely given the politicians back home an excuse to put Bykov’s death sentence back on hold. Adrian had almost heard a sigh of relief in Teddy Parkinson’s voice when he’d said, “Sorry you missed her, old boy. Bad luck. Not your fault. Those tightarses at the Treasury are the bane of all our lives, believe me.”

  It had enabled the politicians to delay indefinitely Bykov’s moment of truth.

  Apart from negotiating with the Americans—principally Burt—over access to Anna Resnikov, Adrian had also spent an inordinate amount of time on the assassinations of the two Russians. Helping the Russians, in other words. Why? It was beyond him. The British government seemed willing to break its back bending over for them. To Adrian, the victims were just a couple of billionaire hoods the world was better off without. Maybe by now the exceptionally skilled assassin had himself been bumped off. That was usually the way of these things.

  And then, two weeks before he’d come to New York to try to persuade Burt to give him access to the woman, the Russians had started getting up to their old games. The Kremlin had threatened to move nuclear warheads into Kaliningrad. Just a day after the American elections! And the Russians had presumably made the threat to up the ante for the new president-elect.

  But against all this damaging and inconclusive catalogue of events, Adrian at last had one card up his sleeve, and it was a killer card. He would wait, however, before he laid it on the table this evening. Let Burt have his moment to gloat over the woman’s capture.

  “What progress have you made with her?” Adrian enquired. “Has she given us Mikhail?”

  “The process is only just beginning,” Burt replied. “We’re taking it gently. A lot of bureaucracy, as I’m sure you’ll understand, Adrian.” The large man looked at him across the freezing patio. “Our debriefing of her is starting this week, as a matter of fact.”

  “You’ve had her for three months!” Adrian protested.

  “Competing interests, Adrian, competing interests. Everyone wants a piece of her, and I’ve been covering my back. She’s now, I’m happy to say, Cougar’s asset and Cougar’s alone.”

  “For how long?”

  “We’ll see. It depends on what she gives us, doesn’t it.”

  “You’re treating her as a very long game,” Adrian said disapprovingly. “You may have less time than you think to find Mikhail.”

  Burt sucked on his cigar. He stood up and walked over to the edge of the balcony, where the light snow fell on his bare head. He seemed oblivious.

  “Mikhail is the endgame, Adrian,” he said at last. He turned round to face him. “You guys threw him away, now it’s up to us to revive him. Anna may or may not know his identity. But having fought off the agency’s desire to put the thumbscrews on her, I’m not going to hurry the process for the sake of the Brits who ditched Mikhail in the first place. She’s a very clever and a very tough woman. If she knows the identity of Mikhail, I want her to tell me voluntarily. Any other way, and I believe we lose her, and lose Mikhail.”

  “She knows, all right. She’s just concealing Mikhail,” Adrian said angrily.

  “We don’t know that,” Burt replied with infuriating equanimity. “Let’s stick to what we know, shall we.”

  “Isn’t it time you read her the riot act?” Adrian demanded. “If she doesn’t give us Mikhail, you’ll pack her and the boy back to Russia. That should sharpen her memory.”

  “She’s our friend, Adrian,” Burt protested. “You’re missing the point.”

  Adrian seethed once again at this insulting implication. Burt added, “I’ll tell you something. Finding Mikhail is just the first part of the process. It’s the beginning of the endgame, if you like. If she supplies the information voluntarily, that’s when she’ll be most useful. If we force it out of her with threats or worse, she can mess up the operation at any time, and without us being aware she’s doing it.”

  “The operation? What operation?” Adrian said, suddenly interested.

  “Okay, let me include you in on this, Adrian.” Burt leaned in generously. Adrian felt cigar breath on his face. “Once we know who Mikhail is, then it’s two bits to a dollar she’s the only person he’ll speak to. That’s her real value, don’t you see. Actual contact with Mikhail is the beautiful result all of this. Mikhail has a clear connection to Anna, through Finn. But Mikhail’s smart too. Very smart. He’s evaded all of us for a long time. And he only ever spoke to Finn. So that’s why we need her onside. Marching shoulder to shoulder with us, in fact. She’s our only link, and therefore our only chance not just to find him but, crucially, to get to him.”

  “And if she doesn’t give us Mikhail?”

  Burt sat back, supremely self-satisfied, to Adrian’s way of thinking.

  “She’ll give him to us,” Burt said. “Eventually. Even if she really doesn’t know who he is.”

  Adrian lit another cigarette. Whatever Burt meant by this arcane remark was beyond him.

  A waiter appeared with a silver tray on which were two whisky and sodas. He brought them out to the balcony, and Burt tipped him handsomely.

  “So what’s your plan with her?” Adrian asked when he was gone. He spoke in a conciliatory way now, having reminded himself that access to Anna was now through Burt, not through government channels, the CIA, or anyone else.

  “First we’re going to give her a list,” Burt said. “There’s been a big increase in KGB activity in the United States over the past year. Big turnover of names—new names coming in, old ones going back to Russia. It’ll be a process of identification. Who of this new pack of wolves she knows, and who she doesn’t.”

  “For what purpose?” Adrian demanded.

  “It’s useful in itself,” Burt answered. “But principally, it’s a psychological thing. It’s about letting her limber up. Getting her to focus. Allowing her to get used to helping us in the smaller things—then, when the big question comes up, she’s already relaxed. In the flow.”

  To Adrian, it all sounded unnecessarily elaborate, and Burt saw his expression of disapproval.

  “Like I said, we need her willingness, Adrian,” he said. “Without that, there might be Mikhail, but there won’t be the prospect of real contact with Mikhail. See?”

  “If you say so,” Adrian replied.

  Adrian got to his feet, as Burt placed the empty tumbler on the table.

  “Let’s go have some supper,” Burt said. “It’s damn near freezing out here.”

  As they walked back inside, Adrian saw the water in the ashtray was frozen over.

  They ate beef Wellingt
on at a table beneath a middling good portrait of George Washington. Adrian decided that Burt the Anglophile was nevertheless demonstrating by his choice of table a rather crude independence from any British interference with the woman’s debriefing. It reminded Adrian of Margaret Thatcher having paintings of the Battle of Waterloo hung on the walls at 10 Downing Street every time the French president paid a visit.

  It was Burt who brought up the subject of Adrian’s visit again. As usual, he liked to demonstrate he was in the driving seat.

  “Wait until we’ve finished with her,” he said. “Then she’s all yours. Under our conditions and supervision, of course.”

  “I have a special relationship with her,” Adrian protested. “We met on several occasions when Finn was alive.”

  “So I understand. Which is why it’s unfortunate that you left on such bad terms with him,” Burt said resolutely. “Face it, Adrian, you blew it.”

  Adrian was practically catatonic at the casual nature of the criticism.

  “Finn and I were as close as you can get, for sixteen years,” he said. “Officer to handler. You know that kind of relationship, Burt. Ultimately, it’s unbreakable.”

  “If Finn were alive, I’m sure he’d forgive you. But he’s not alive, and she is—and I don’t think she’s going to forgive you. In any case, to me it’s not worth the risk of upsetting things as they are.”

  “She knows how close Finn and I were. And she knows I was just doing my job.”

  “Like all the concentration camp guards say.” Burt chortled.

  “I have the right to see her.” Adrian put his knife and fork down with too much of a clatter.

  Burt’s face changed to a hard, cold-eyed flatness that was all the more shocking for its contrast with his usual bonhomie.

  “This isn’t about you, though,” he said emphatically. “Or the British. Or even the Americans. It’s about her. It’s about getting what we can from her.” His face relaxed. “Reasonably, Adrian, can you see any way I’d risk this delicate process by suddenly associating myself with a very bad memory for her? So far, we in America have a clean sheet with Anna. We’ve rescued her and her boy, goddammit. What do I get for letting the British in? Just the risk of alienating her.”