Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  It was a busy street, lined with tourist stalls and cheap restaurants and cafés. Pedestrians wrapped against the cold stopped only briefly or dashed inside, more for warmth than with any intention of buying anything. There were chestnuts roasting in a metal barrel. The vendor was stamping his feet and warming his gloved hands over the heat. He was wrapped in layers of clothing and a balaclava so that she could just make out a black face and a pair of eyes.

  A few yards before the café, she stopped and looked at a stand that was selling postcards and scarves. She collected her thoughts, and made a check around her. She didn’t trust Burt’s teams to spot anyone following Vladimir. She could do it better.

  Then she walked the few steps and turned right into the doorway of the café. She saw Vladimir immediately sitting with his back to her at the far end. He was in the process of ordering something from a waitress who stood, pen poised over her pad.

  Anna walked to the counter, where there were bar stools, sat on one, and ordered a coffee. She adjusted her hearing to the low hubbub, not looking towards the rear of the café. She paid for the coffee and took a magazine from the pocket of her coat.

  She then turned to watch as a waitress cleared the table next to Vladimir’s. Before anyone else could take it, she walked to the back of the café and told the waitress loaded with armfuls of screwed-up paper mats and dirty crockery that she’d like a menu.

  She put the cup and the magazine on the table, took off her coat, and sat down in the chair that faced outwards. She sipped her coffee, watching from the corner of her eye as Vladimir saw her again from the next table.

  It happened almost in slow motion. Vladimir glanced up from a copy of the New York Times and was interrupted by the waitress bringing a glass of water. He removed some utensils from a paper napkin, then apparently remembered from some previous existence that he’d looked up at her, seen her, but not registered what he’d seen with his eyes, and he looked up again. She was looking straight at him.

  In her eyes, he saw alarm, the same alarm that she’d seen in the bookstore. They were like a mirror, but her face was invented for him, while he just couldn’t believe what his eyes were telling him.

  “It’s really you” he said.

  “And I guess it’s really you, Vladimir,” she said. She saw what she thought was a kind of loss or longing in his face, or it might have been grief.

  A look of worry immediately replaced it. He looked startled now, his eyes flickering beyond her to another table. Then he carefully took in the whole café, turning slowly, pretending to be looking for a waitress. Then he looked back, and they both started the same sentence.

  “What are you doing—” They both recognised the humour, and she laughed first. Then he laughed too, but it was a nervous response to hers.

  “I’m living here,” she said.

  “In New York?”

  “Yes. And you too?”

  “Yes.”

  There was another pause, more awkward this time, neither wishing to ask a question that might seem too inquisitive.

  “Anna,” he said. “I must ask you. Are you alone?”

  She didn’t know immediately whether he meant alone as a former lover, or alone, with no watchers.

  She smiled freely. “At this moment, yes,” she said. “I’m alone in every way.”

  “And you have a boy.”

  “Finn’s son, yes.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “And you?”

  She saw him watch her to see if the question was disingenuous, to look for signs that she knew.

  “I’m the same,” he said. But he didn’t wish to talk about himself. “I’m with the Russian mission here,” he said in a slightly clipped voice, as if it were something to be ashamed of.

  “Shall I join you?” It was the most normal remark in the world. Then she laughed. “At the table, I mean.”

  He looked flustered. Every word seemed a mine of possibilities. Then, bringing his thoughts together, he looked at the empty chair at his table, as though someone might be in it. Then he nodded, leaned over and picked his coat off the back of the chair, and hung it on his own without turning around, not wanting to take his eyes away.

  He was looking good, Anna thought. Not just prosperous, but fit, healthy. His black hair, which grew thick around the temples, was swept across his forehead in a way that would have suited New York in the 1950s. His hands were manicured; his face, apart from the intensity in his eyes, was calm. He looked lean, with slightly dark Caucasian skin, as if he had a suntan. She remembered how handsome he’d looked in uniform twenty years before. He hadn’t changed much—there was still strength in his jaw, and the skin around his neck was taut, not flabby. His eyes in their fright were as intense and dark as ever.

  She crossed over to his table and put her coat on the back of the chair where he’d removed his.

  His food arrived—pasta, she saw.

  “Don’t wait,” she said. “Eat. It’ll get cold.”

  He looked at the pasta, but his appetite was gone.

  “Are you going to eat?” he said.

  “I’ll eat yours if you don’t hurry up,” she said. But he made no move to eat.

  “Why are you here?” he said suddenly, and all the promise of his slight relaxation a moment before vanished.

  “I live not far from here.” It was not an answer to his question.

  “Where?”

  “You want my address?” She gave him a smile that indicated the unlikelihood of receiving it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and looked momentarily defeated.

  “I’ve never been in here,” she said.

  “The food’s okay.”

  She picked up the menu.

  “I’ll have chocolate cake,” she said. “I won’t eat it all.”

  They were silent. She saw he was not yet willing to accept this as a chance encounter.

  A waitress came to the table, and she ordered chocolate cake.

  When she’d gone, they both began to speak at once again, and each stopped for the other.

  “You first,” he said.

  “As far as I know, I’m alone,” she said. “They stopped following me months ago. I’ve been debriefed for longer than I thought possible. I’m clear.”

  “Good,” he said. “I hope you’re right.”

  They were silent, neither appearing able or willing to come up with an appropriate remark.

  “You want to see me?” he said.

  “I’m seeing you now.”

  He looked hurt, confused.

  “I’m sorry, Volodya,” she said. “But how can we see each other?”

  “We can make another accidental meeting,” he said.

  She saw he was desperate that this not be the last time.

  He stretched his hand across the table towards hers and then stopped, unable to commit himself.

  “I’m sorry about . . .” He didn’t finish. There seemed perhaps too many things to be sorry about.

  “I’m sorry too, Volodya.”

  He didn’t want to approach the subject of them too closely. Not yet.

  “Your grandmother,” he said. “You know she died last year.”

  “I know.”

  Anna thought of the night at her grandmother’s five years earlier, when Vladimir had woken them at five in the morning to take her away.

  “I owe you, Vladimir,” she said. “Thanks to you, Nana and I were able to say good-bye to each other before she died. But she was ready to go. You gave her a great gift, as well as me. I know she died happy, knowing I was safe. Eighty-five years of life, and at last one of her family breaks free, escapes their fate. It was what she always wanted for me. So thank you from her too.”

  “I’ve seen your mother,” he said. “Once or twice.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “And him?” Vladimir said. “Your father?”

  “I’ll never speak to him again,” she said.

  “He’s gotten old,”
Vladimir told her. “He’s in a care home for the Paradise Group,” he said.

  Anna couldn’t imagine her father, the great SVR officer and tyrant, sitting in a care home. But the Paradise Group would look after him, whatever he wanted. They were the most senior retirees from the heart of the KGB. She didn’t reply. The thought of her father disgusted her. Her chocolate cake arrived, and she urged him to eat once again. They both ate without noticing the food.

  She finished half the cake and pushed the plate across the table to him.

  “Coffee?” she said.

  “Are you?” He’d hardly touched the pasta.

  “Yes. Two coffees,” she said to the waitress. “And another fork for my friend, please.”

  The coffees arrived, and he heaped sugar into his. Conversation had ground to a halt. There was nothing to say that wasn’t charged with meaning, either dangerous or intimate. She was prepared for him to backtrack on his request to meet again, and had her response ready when he did.

  “How many of them are there outside?” he said. “Or in here?”

  “Volodya, there’s no one. Or not that I know.”

  She wrote something on the bill the waitress had left, as if she was paying. Then she pushed it under his newspaper, a distance of a few inches. She was sure it would be unnoticed by anyone but the two of them.

  “And you? Are you usually watched?” she said.

  “No. Not usually.”

  “Then if you wish, we could meet again,” she said, and lowered her eyes to the bill under the newspaper. “On Tuesdays I go to a gym. There’s a café behind the gym. I can usually be sure to be alone for an hour. I’ll go there. There’s a fire escape at the back. I’ll come straight out of the back and be in the café. Three o’clock.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “But if you don’t wish to meet me,” she said, “then I’m glad I’ve had the chance to thank you for what you did. You didn’t just save my life, you saved my love of life.” She paused, as if uncertain she was saying the right thing to her former lover. “Finn always wanted to thank you too,” she added finally. “It amazed him.”

  A look of anxiety crossed his face.

  “They killed him,” he said.

  He looked down at the table. He had saved her. But the organisation he worked for had killed the man he had saved her life for.

  “I know,” she said, in a way that understood his remorse. “But don’t worry, you’re safe. Your secret will be buried with me. I’m not here to threaten you. Ever.”

  He didn’t reply at first.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I’m so sorry about Finn.”

  “It’s not your fault. But thank you, Volodya.” She gave him a big, happy smile that was the first genuine expression she’d worn since they’d met. “And I’m happy to see you. Really I am.”

  She took out a purse from her coat.

  “I’ll get this. Pasta, salad, coffees, and half a chocolate cake. Fair exchange for saving my life?”

  He smiled for the first time. “Fair exchange. We’re even.”

  Then he fractionally extended his hand across the table again. It was such a small gesture, she might have missed it if she hadn’t been in a state of heightened awareness of his every reaction. She laid her own hand on top of his for the briefest moment.

  “I’m happy to see you too,” he said. “It was something I never dared to dream.”

  She left some dollar bills on the table, and stood up.

  “Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  She felt him watching her leave the café and knew he’d be alert for any movement behind her out on the street, anything to indicate it had been a setup. She hoped Burt’s team and anyone else from the American side were far away.

  But Burt’s decision to be spontaneous, to cut out the teams of watchers from the café, had been the right one. Even as she stepped back out onto the cold sidewalk, she saw nothing.

  Chapter 22

  ANNA SAT AT THE end of the long wooden table at the Twenty-third Street apartments, her chin rested in one hand. Logan sat slightly slumped next to her on the right, with his elbows on the table, while Marcie was bolt upright on the other side of her, a position she always adopted when Burt was present.

  At the far end of the table, flanking Burt, sat Bob Dupont, Burt’s silver-haired head of internal security, and next to him was a man in his thirties with jet-black hair and dark eyes whom Anna hadn’t seen before but whom she learned in passing, though without an introduction, was called Salvador.

  On chairs around the walls outside the door and prowling the corridors outside the door were the ubiquitous bodyguards, with Larry, as ever, in charge. The bodyguards had been doubled, and then doubled again like some rampant algae, until a small army of them had grown up, as if to suck the air from any opposition to Burt’s plans.

  It was now just under an hour since Anna had returned, and Burt had insisted they should meet immediately. He said this with even more than his usual sense for drama.

  Anna was listening to Burt as he wound up his appraisal of her encounter with Vladimir. They all were, in their different guises of concentration—Logan, Marcie, Dupont, Salvador.

  Outside the windows, which Burt commanded should be left without the blinds pulled down—against nearly everyone’s advice—the early winter New York night had descended over the city, and snow had begun to fall.

  She was tired, she realised. Her mind raced back again over her recent conversation with Vladimir, as it had done repeatedly since she’d left him in the café. She was recalling each word, each expression in his face, looking for anything she might have missed—some nuance in his voice, perhaps, some hint in his eyes, or in the gestures of his hands. Was there something hidden in the silences and pauses between them? All might be indications of something that Vladimir hadn’t actually said, or of which even he himself was ignorant.

  She knew the meeting with him had taken the strength out of her for the moment, and that alone shocked her. Meeting with Vladimir at all, let alone meeting him again after all these years, had been a strange experience. It had brought back the past—Finn too, as well as Vladimir himself—and most vitally, it had brought back her intimacy with both of them.

  And the meeting with Vladimir had also brought her face-to-face with memories of Russia and the stark danger her old country represented to her and Little Finn. Vladimir in New York was an uncomfortable proximity to that.

  But while Logan and Marcie and the others were hanging on to Burt’s detailed exposition, with its customary flattering flourishes of praise in her direction, her mind was working along parallel lines at the same time. She was weighing the fateful decision to deceive Burt.

  To meet again with Vladimir, in secret from Burt’s teams of observers, at the café behind the gym was to take a dangerous step. It risked her whole, albeit tenuous, security and that of Little Finn, painstakingly won over the past months.

  Nevertheless, she was already beginning to run her own storyline of her planned breakout from the twenty-four-hour-a-day scrutiny she had lived with for so long. She felt her power increase, both from her own decision to meet Vladimir in secret and as the crucial figure in Burt’s plans.

  She looked up at Burt now and felt a change in his own demeanour too. Behind the natural ebullience, she detected a new unfamiliar anxiety, however faint, and she wondered if it had anything to do with the presence of Salvador.

  “So we have a narrowed field of possibilities,” Burt was saying, while five floors below an ambulance screamed its siren into every corner of the city streets. “ . . . but it’s not constricting. It helps us, in fact. What Anna has done is to reduce the sauce nicely.” He beamed at her. “She has left Vladimir with just two options; either to meet her again or to refuse contact. Whichever course he takes will tell us something.”

  Logan looked up sharply. There was a frown on his face.

  “What about the option of simp
ly informing his boss at the KGB residency here?” he said, with unusual bluntness. “That’s what he’ll do, surely? And then the Russians will most likely set up a counteroperation.”

  “I don’t consider that in the frame,” Burt replied abruptly, to the surprise of everyone.

  There was an awkward silence in the room.

  “Why not, Burt?” Marcie asked eventually.

  “It is an option. We must consider it,” Logan persisted. “If anything, it’s the closest to a certainty we have.”

  “And we’ll leave it out of our considerations,” Burt said, once more with the clear intention of closing this avenue of discussion altogether.

  Logan took his elbows off the table and straightened in his chair, putting one hand on the arm as if intending to get up. His eyes flashed with anger, or just incomprehension. Anna read the faces around the table and saw confusion and consternation in all but Salvador’s. He seemed entirely impassive.

  Burt let his gaze rest on Logan for a moment, and paused to indicate the importance of what he was he going to say.

  “Listen again, Logan. All of you,” he said. He swept his gaze now around the table. “If we include that as a possibility, if Vladimir brings in the Russians, their activity will be visible on the streets. Yes? And that will draw others in, from our own side. So we’ll have the agency and God knows who else crawling all over this. We need to keep it tight. Just us. Just Cougar. This must be deeply personal. It’s about a relationship, a once cruelly intimate relationship between Anna and Vladimir.”

  He looked at her without expression. This was not how Burt had ever behaved with her. It was not like Burt to be anything but strenuously sensitive in the matters of her past. But now his tone of voice was almost crude, as if he wanted to sting her.

  Where is he leading with this? she thought. What is the purpose?

  “It’s between Anna and Vladimir now,” Burt repeated. “Under our protection, of course. That way it’s controllable. Savvy?”

  He looked at Logan in particular. Logan nodded without agreement, but Burt wasn’t finished. “Once we let this operation out of our own control, we lose our momentum,” he said. “It’s vital we all understand this now. We don’t just lose our grasp on the operation, which is a company matter—Cougar’s. We will also most likely lose Mikhail. Why? They’re all waiting out there to pounce on Mikhail. To be blunt, Mikhail represents a huge victory for whoever gets him, and victory means money, government contracts, expansion, Cougar’s expansion. Mikhail is the bottom line—he is on the profit side in the profit-and-loss account. Mikhail means power. I intend Mikhail to be Cougar’s asset and Cougar’s alone. We’re the biggest game in town right now, and all the rest of them want a place at the high table.”