Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  At the end of dinner, Burt, mercifully as far as Adrian was concerned, didn’t want to smoke another cigar. They drank coffee and cognacs in the library, and Adrian picked this moment to play the card he’d been waiting all evening to play.

  Withdrawing a brown envelope from his pocket, he passed it across to Burt, who by now was sliding slowly but majestically down the overstuffed cushions of a dark green embroidered velvet sofa. He appeared to consider that their business was done.

  But Burt hauled himself up and opened the envelope. He gave Adrian a sharp interrogatory look.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “A tape.”

  “A tape?”

  “With a story on it,” Adrian said.

  “You have something to play it on?”

  “You’re not going to play it in here, are you?” Adrian said, shocked.

  “This is the Union Club,” Burt replied. “The library of the Union Club. Perhaps the most discreet six hundred square feet in America. And as you see, it’s empty and probably will be for a week, knowing the members’ reading habits. They come in here to sleep or not at all.”

  Adrian did have a recorder with him, in case there’d been an opportunity to play the tape somewhere. He pulled it out of his pocket and handed Burt some earphones.

  Chapter 14

  AT SEVEN THOUSAND FEET, the custom Chevy Silverado began the slow climb up from the mesa. It cut through a narrow gap in high red cliffs into an equally narrow pass of switchback curves that trebled the real distance to the higher plateau above. The knife-edge existence of the mesa’s dry sagebrush scrub finally gave way altogether to bare rock and to a thin orange sand that blew in the wind.

  Only where an occasional stream tumbled into the valley were there signs of life—small clumps of aspen trees, the leaves of which were a shocking gold in colour, or turning to murky yellow before they fell away. It was the end of the first week in November. The sun was high in a savage blue sky, but there was the unmistakable chill of approaching winter.

  Anna sat in the middle seat of an elongated version of one of Burt’s company’s fleet cars. It was a vast grey and gold, gadget-rich, bulletproof truck that could withstand an explosion of a thousand pounds of TNT directly beneath it. For what purpose it was needed here—on American territory in the middle of New Mexico—she wasn’t sure. But by now she’d come to know Burt well enough to suspect it was just one of his toys—the military version of a vehicle adapted by his labyrinthine security corporation.

  She studied the bleak, spectacular scenery through a blackout window. Little Finn’s questions were growing less frequent, and he seemed awed by the sight of the rocks and bluffs that towered above them and by the yawning drop below.

  As the vehicle climbed, Anna sat back into rich-smelling black leather. Over the previous nine and a half weeks, they had been housed in a comfortable shingled family home in pleasant woodland, near a place called Tysons Corner in Virginia.

  As Burt told her in his deceptively guileless way, this was the location of the CIA’s highly secret Counterterrorism Center and the Pentagon’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. These units were housed in a huge underground complex designed for the purpose by the Walt Disney Imagineering Company, which Burt joked had taken time off from designing theme parks to bring reality to America’s fight against terror.

  Burt was naturally indiscreet. It was true he believed that his own secrecy business suffered from a vast overload of discretion. But in reality Anna knew that his indiscretion gave away nothing of real value. It was just one of the tools he used to slowly bind her to him. He was clever in this, she had to admit. The intimacy he fostered in their friendship, the inclusiveness he awarded her, a former KGB officer, was beguiling.

  On a visit to Cougar’s company headquarters close by to Tysons Corner, she’d felt she was being shown around her new working environment, like a fresh recruit.

  “Why are we here?” she’d asked Burt on several occasions over the weeks at the shingled house. “What are we doing at the heart of counterterrorist ops?”

  “If you want to get anything done in this country these days, you invoke the spectre of ‘terrorism,’ ” Burt replied cheerfully. “It’s the magic word; the open sesame to all things; the source of all gold. But don’t worry, Anna,” he added with a grin, “it’s nothing personal, nothing to do with you.”

  The period at the shingled house in Virginia was, Burt told her, for the purpose of negotiations. These were just formalities, he said.

  These negotiations were over her future. She was a commodity of value. She was wanted by several of the United States’ sixteen state intelligence agencies, and also by many of Burt’s competitors in the even darker world of private contract intelligence. Access to her was keenly contested in high places. Senators—especially those on the Senate Intelligence Committee—were being leaned on, and Burt was deploying all his own contacts in government to keep her for himself. In the private intelligence world, she realised, she meant money, government funding on a grand scale.

  During this period at the safe house in Virginia, she preserved a relentless sangfroid with Burt and the half dozen intelligence officers from the Byzantine American intelligence community he invited to meet her. But inside her mind was the unasked question: When would they ask her about Mikhail?

  Paraded initially at an apparently depthless reinforced concrete bunker near Liberty Crossing, the centre for the “secret of secrets,” as Burt called it, America’s Threat Matrix, she’d felt like Cleopatra being led through the streets of ancient Rome. Her status as the youngest female colonel in the KGB had first won their interest. Her personal charms as a woman increased it.

  And there had been lengthy discussions at one stage about literally parading her, by exposing her “defection,” as they were calling it, to the media. Bob Draco from the CIA station in Paris had accompanied them across the Atlantic, and he led this movement.

  “It’s time to snub the Russians,” he said. “They need a direct hit. Or at least a shot across the bows. They’re getting far too big for their boots, and they need to be taught a lesson.” He backed up his argument with the examples of Russia’s invasion of Georgia and its threat to move warheads into Kaliningrad.

  But Burt steered these more hawkish members of the Black Committee, as they were calling it—and their friends on the Senate committee—away from such precipitous action.

  As her captor, Burt held the floor in these sessions. America, he said grandly, could always make its announcements in the press later. Better to let her interrogation—or debriefing, as it was politely called—unfold before adding any stresses to the process. The last thing they needed now was the media snooping around. Exposing her at this moment would leave nothing in the locker for later.

  Burt had protected her too from those who wanted to “shake her down” right away; to get the juice out of her while she was still rebounding from the low of losing her son to the high of being reunited with him. There were those who wanted her drugged for the information they were after.

  Again, Burt’s performance at least seemed like protection. She was to be led, not driven, he said. She would give—oh, yes, she would give—but only when she was ready to give.

  All of Burt’s stately pirouettes in these negotiations over her future had been deftly performed. To Anna, their deftness seemed almost too expert, however. That she was present at all in some of their secret discussions suggested to her that she was meant to see all the arguments concerning her fate. Burt’s constant riding to her rescue and his protection of her against the apparently less subtle creatures in the American intelligence community—all of it added to Burt’s elevation as her saviour.

  Burt had thus slowly developed his role from being her rescuer, to her defender, her knight and aegis against not just the Russians but the Americans too. That was the drama that had played out over the previous weeks.

  And she knew it was all done for her benefit, to bind her t
o him.

  Over to the right of the vehicle, as it wound around the switchback curves, Little Finn was pointing at a herd of elk wandering through the dark, sunless depths of the canyon that fell away into a greyish area of trees far below. Anna told him they were a type of deer—she didn’t know the English word elk. Burt provided the information from the front seat, and Little Finn squealed, “Elf, Elf, Elf,” enjoying the word, until she touched him gently on the arm to distract him. He settled back in the leather seat, and she wedged a pillow against the door, so that finally he settled down.

  That was the meaning of the drama of the previous months, she was sure of it. Since she was both audience and player, she was being led to draw a conclusion—that Burt was her only hope. She realised that she was being artfully “developed,” in order for Burt to emerge as a defence between her and the snapping dogs at the CIA. She’d better give Burt what he wanted, or the dogs would take her. That was the clear message.

  And now here she was, heading into the remotest wilderness of New Mexico in one of Burt’s company trucks at the onset of winter. She was accompanied by Burt himself and by members of Burt’s private army from his private intelligence company.

  One evening, just before they’d left for the Southwest, he’d informed her quite casually that the Cougar Corporation received over one billion dollars of government money annually to perform intelligence work—and perhaps military functions too, she guessed.

  As if to back up her guess, Burt fulsomely detailed the many activities Cougar involved itself in; the provision of “warfighters”—by which he meant private soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere; covert operations; electronic surveillance; overhead reconnaissance with UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles; intelligence analysis; the development of intelligence software; private spy networks that were run out of American embassies all around the world; the interrogation of enemy suspects; communications interception.

  He explained that his own private employees provided a significant percentage of those hired to run the Threat Matrix, the secret of secrets; that his company personnel, 18,000 of whom had the highest possible security clearance, were involved in programmes that could tap into every telephone call and every e-mail in or out of the United States; that even the landing points of undersea fibre-optic cables were now in the domain of private security companies, his and his competitors’. They could monitor communications not just on American soil but anywhere in the world that was connected to these fibre optics.

  “America now contracts out nearly three-quarters of its intelligence budget to companies like Cougar,” he said. “That makes a total of over fifty billion dollars a year.”

  She’d wondered then at the difference between this new America and the way the Kremlin’s spy agencies plied their trade. In the new Russia, the KGB was itself the state. And yet it called itself the kontori—the company. It controlled all the financial and operational strings of the state’s intelligence activities, as well as Russia’s political will and most of its strategic industrial might. Was that really so different from the new America?

  If nearly three-quarters of the American intelligence budget was handed out to private companies, how long would it be before the state and the private intelligence companies—the kontori—became one and the same thing, just as in Russia?

  Sitting in the truck as it ground its way around yet another bend on the mountain, she recalled how she’d been feted, befriended, loved even, given chauffeurs and comfortable homes, teachers for Little Finn. But if the audition were a failure, she would find herself on the way to the airport in a locked, nameless van.

  The real interrogation was about to begin. Nobody in all the preceding weeks had mentioned Mikhail. But without Mikhail, there would have been no rescue of her, no red carpet treatment, no Burt.

  Burt was now listening to something on headphones in the front of the truck, while Bob, one of his “fitness freaks,” drove, and Larry, the bodyguard from the beach, sat in the third row seat, “riding shotgun,” as Burt had put it.

  In the middle seat Anna and Little Finn continued to look out over the canyon that was fast dropping away beneath them. Sheer red rock bluffs towered over the pass they were going through, cutting out the sun, and way up above them, on a small outcrop at the top of the road, she could now see a few dilapidated brown adobe buildings.

  Planted among them, and looking out over the huge stark landscape, was a wooden cross, twice the height of the houses, its white paint faded and peeling. It was dipping at a violent angle after two and a half centuries of sun and wind and ice, and maybe—Burt said when he took off the headphones—violent worship.

  The higher mountains beyond the little village rose to thirteen thousand feet and were white with snow that capped their peaks like candle snuffers. An early snowfall down at the level where they were had left patches of white in the fields where the low winter sun hadn’t reached, and there was a grey slush at the road’s edge.

  “Back over your shoulder,” Burt enthused from the front, “you can see a light-coloured plateau, about thirty miles away. That’s Los Alamos.”

  Anna turned and looked at the patch of light that was appearing as they headed higher towards the sky. The sun was illuminating a stretch of flat mesa, about halfway up another set of mountains, on which the weapons research station and the birthplace of the atomic bomb was bleached into the huge, empty land, its buildings invisible in the flat light.

  As they came round the final bend and up to the edge of the village, she saw that the bare rock and infertile sand had gone. There were meadows up here, and a few scraggy horses and a herd of cattle were still finding something to eat in the winter pasture.

  The first of the buildings they reached was crumbling sideways into the meadow, its brown adobe walls peeled back to reveal mud bricks. The whole imperfect structure leaned at an angle so extreme that the doorway had been distorted into a rhomboid.

  A toothless old man with a weather-beaten face, wearing a beat-up Stetson and torn and faded denim overalls, shouted something at them as they passed the home and shook his fist.

  Burt laughed.

  “They can be pretty crazy up here,” he said. “They don’t get out much, if you know what I mean. They need to meet new people—not just the relatives,” he joked. “But don’t worry, you won’t be staying in the village,” he added.

  He pointed at another long adobe hall structure, which came up beside them to the left of the truck. It had no windows, but a squat bell tower sat on its wavy roof.

  “That’s the morada,” Burt said. “There’s a Catholic sect run by the hermanos, the brotherhood. Call themselves the pentitentes. You see them out here on the mountain at Easter time, carrying crosses, flagellating. They used to have crucifixions up here. Not with nails, but even tied to a cross, they had the occasional death. It’s cold around Easter time. Traditionally, a young man from the village was chosen by lottery to hang up there, and if he died, the hermanos would take care of his family and his obligations. They were excommunicated by Rome, for giving the church a bad name.” Burt guffawed, as if this were a preposterous thought. “They say they still crucify people up here in the out-of-the-way spots,” he added. “But they do it in secret now.”

  Anna wondered how much more out-of-the-way it could get than this dismal collection of mud houses at ten thousand feet.

  The truck moved into the quiet, impoverished village and pulled up at a general store. They all climbed out and stood in the damp earth street, feeling the icy air coming down from the mountains ahead. There were just adobe buildings, she now saw, their mud walls in various states of decay. The rooftops were made of corrugated iron, rusted and torn.

  Apart from the crosses everywhere, it could have been a village in the foothills of the Caucasus—Chechnya or Dagestan, Anna thought. But this was America.

  “Founded in 1754,” Burt said. “By the Spanish king. They came up that way”—he pointed south—“from Mexico. They first arrived in 1583, s
ettled here, then got driven out by the Indians. Then they came back and stayed.” He took her arm. “Let me show you something.”

  Anna took Little Finn’s hand as they crossed the dirt road, and they followed Burt into what looked like an unkempt field. But when they were inside it, she saw it was an untended graveyard. Burt pointed at the second gravestone they came to. “Kilt by Indians,” it read.

  Anna shivered in the cold after the warmth of the car. Burt had promised her somewhere remote—that was all he’d said about their destination—but this was not the America she’d imagined.

  Burt read her thoughts.

  “Not what you expected huh?’

  “No.”

  “It’s like Siberia out here,” he said. “It certainly has about as much respect for Washington as Siberia does for Moscow. The Hispanics have been arguing—sometimes fighting—for a hundred years to have their land back. They don’t even speak English up here, many of them.”

  Anna wondered how much she was in this empty hole on the map for her protection and how much to encourage her to comply with greater alacrity.

  “You won’t be here long,” he said, as if reading her thoughts again. “It all depends on how we judge your safety. And Little Finn’s,” he added. “And how other things come into play,” he said vaguely. “We’ll see.”

  Burt bought Little Finn a candy bar at the general store, which seemed, also like the remoter parts of Russia, to sell just a few oddments, whatever was available at the lowest end of the demand chain. Most of the shelves were empty; there were a few lightbulbs, their boxes dusty, a few boxes of screws, a chain saw, some jam. . . . Always tins of jam wherever you went, she thought. If there was nothing else, there were tins of jam. It was the same in Russia.