by Alex Dryden
“So I have the right to turn you down?” She smiled.
“Oh, yes. Nothing’s changed. I want you to know that. You are highly respected here, and always will be by me. More so than before, if anything. No. This is a request, Anna. I’d like you to be friendly to Logan.”
“Friendly?”
“Yes.” He looked at her and grinned. “Be sweet with him. Can you do that?”
“Sweet with him? That seems to be a role I can’t escape,” she said.
Burt paused and seemed to be deciding what to say. Then:
“It’s something about Logan,” he said eventually. “I don’t live with my mistakes. But I’m going to have to live with this one a little longer. If it is a mistake.”
“Is Logan a mistake? Is he unreliable?”
“Logan was one of the best officers I ever had at the agency. Maybe the best.”
“And now?”
“Let’s say I’m giving him a chance—a reward too—with this assignment in the past months. I’m not certain how he’s responding to the opportunity. But I know he’ll respond to you, Anna. People do. As an SVR colonel or as a beautiful woman, I couldn’t say.” He smiled conspiratorially as he turned to her. “This isn’t something I’d ask you, Anna, unless I thought it was important.”
“I can be friendly to Logan,” she agreed. “Is that it? Or am I watching him?”
Burt walked away from her in the windowless room and sat in a swivel chair that was too small for him. He looked as if he’d been forcibly squeezed into it.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he said. “It might help you understand Logan a little.” His rotund body fit the chair like a cushion. “Logan ran agents in the Balkans in the nineties,” Burt began. “He was involved in an operation at the heart of the Milosevic government. Running an agent inside the Tigers, you know, the organisation led by the notorious paramilitary Arkan. As I’m sure you know also, Arkan was responsible for the murder of at least twenty thousand Bosnians. He was a killer, politician, warlord, bank robber. . . . Logan got very close to him through one of his female agents. So the agency decided to bring Arkan down.”
Burt paused, as if unwilling to divulge what he was going to say.
“But then the CIA station in Vienna made a mistake. They confused two communications sent out from our embassy there. One of these communications was intended for Arkan himself. It was a warning, a threat. We were going to get him, and he had nowhere deep enough to hide. The warning was intended to panic him into making the mistake that would allow us to follow through with his assassination.
“The other, second message was a detailed account of Arkan’s internal operations that could only have come from his inner circle. This communication was intended for our station head in Sarajevo. The two messages got mixed up, would you believe—they were sent the wrong way round. Arkan received the CIA assessment of his own operations, clearly aided by inside sources, and our station head in Sarajevo received the threat to Arkan. Incredible, isn’t it?” he said, looking at her.
“It happens,” she replied. “I’m sure I could match you for any mistake of the CIA’s with mistakes from the Russian side. Even mistakes as crass as that.”
“There are mistakes, and there are spectacular mistakes,” Burt said. “Arkan learned everything we knew about him, and he soon found the source of this information inside his own circle.” He paused. “She was tortured to death.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
Burt paused, discomfited, it seemed to her, by this unaccustomed departure from his regular world of relentless optimism.
“And it was a ‘she,’ ” Anna added.
“Yes. Logan’s agent was also Logan’s woman,” Burt continued. “And as if that weren’t enough, Logan was made the fall guy for the whole mistake, to save someone else’s skin at the station.”
Anna said nothing, but was thinking what Burt said next as he was saying it.
“Logan became what you might call a compromised, angry, washed-up piece of emotional wreckage,” Burt said.
“Who you’ve hired again,” she said. “Not the best material for an intelligence officer. So why? Why wasn’t he pensioned off? Why is Logan working for you?”
He looked at her.
“Two reasons. The first is a personal loyalty to him. If this doesn’t bring him back,” Burt said, “I fear he’ll be lost for good. And by ‘bring him back,’ I don’t mean bring him back to this world of ours necessarily, the world of secrets, but bring him back to any kind of life at all.”
“That’s taking a big risk,” she said. “Surely your heart isn’t that big, Burt. It’s a charming thought, but not much use in our operation now.”
“The second reason may seem odd to you. But it’s important to what we’re doing. Naturally Logan hates the CIA. To me, that’s a valuable asset. In this business of private intelligence companies, the revolving door between the CIA and us contractors is constantly spinning. It’s mostly one way, CIA people coming over to our side. They can earn twice, even three times, what they earn with the government. Department heads and even heads of the CIA come into the private sector, bringing their knowledge and government contacts with them.” Burt paused. “That’s all good, or nearly all good. But we’re in a situation of concealing something from the CIA, and the revolving door can in theory go both ways. I have to be careful that former CIA employees now at Cougar aren’t talking to their old colleagues. That’s why Logan hating the CIA makes him trustworthy—at least in that.”
“It’s still a risk in other ways,” she said, “if Logan’s unstable.”
“As I say, Logan was the best, and he was allowed to take the fall for someone else. In the end everything is and everything isn’t a risk,” he said, and he grinned once again, now he’d made his way through the uncomfortable story to the other side. Then he went on. “He doesn’t have any woman close to him. He keeps his various women at a long arm’s length. For obvious reasons, I guess.”
“So you want me to look after him.”
“Just be sweet. And only if it fits for you,” Burt said. “Only if it seems to work in the context of the assignment. And nothing too intimate, unless that works for you too.”
She was silent.
“That’s fine, then.”
The next morning Anna postponed her date with Logan at the movies to another day. It would be the fourth day since the contact with Mikhail. She needed time, but the reason she gave was that she felt unwell.
In the course of that day, after her discussion with Burt, she began to make her preparations. Everything was going to have to be alarmingly spontaneous, but it was all she could do. Improvisation was familiar to her. Any trained intelligence officer could follow instructions, but only the best improvised successfully.
In the course of the day, she collected what she could find in the apartment, away from prying eyes; a large wedge-shaped doorstop made of wood that was used in the conference room, and then another one she found lying unused in one of the smaller rooms; a small hammer that was in a kitchen drawer. There wasn’t much.
After some discussion between Burt and Bob Dupont the following morning—details that related to her security outside the apartment walls—it was agreed that she and Logan could go to the movies, accompanied by the usual swarm of minders.
With the boyish enthusiasm of a teenager on a date, Logan bought tickets and popcorn and they watched the new Clint Eastwood film at a theatre on Broadway. From time to time he used a whispered comment on the film as an excuse to put his hand briefly on her knee, as if it were merely to get her attention. Anna was amused by his sudden eagerness to be physically intimate, but she didn’t respond, and he didn’t press her. He seemed pleased just to be in her company, and she found, to her surprise, that she was similarly enjoying the experience. But her mind, when it wasn’t focused on the movie, was elsewhere.
They emerged from the movie theatre at just before five p.m. onto Broadway, whe
re the half a dozen watchers were spread out on either side along the sidewalk.
It was well below freezing, even this early in the evening. But Logan suddenly declared he didn’t want to go back to the apartment, despite the instruction that it was a movie, then back “home.”
Anna could see Larry standing on the sidewalk outside the movie theatre, clapping his hands together from the cold, but also out of impatience to get going. The other watchers were invisible, but out of some professional habit or merely for her own amusement, she began to pick them out—one standing looking at a paper, two others waiting by the street as if for a taxi, another over to the right, beyond Larry, and the sixth idling by a newsstand on the sidewalk to the left. All were ahead of her and Logan or to the side, she noted.
Behind them, in the movie theatre itself, there was no one, and what had been running through her mind in the course of watching the movie now came to dominate her next step.
“Better go,” she said to dampen Logan’s enthusiasm, and as she’d expected, she just increased it.
Logan hesitated without moving towards the waiting car.
“Why not walk for a bit?” he said.
“We should go back,” she replied. “Won’t they cut our privileges if we disobey?” she added in a tone of mockery.
“Let’s go somewhere,” he said, slowly revealing intentions that were beginning to be insistent.
She returned his open gaze. “Look, Logan, if you want to sleep with me,” she said, “why don’t you just say so?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s about it. I do.”
“Only it isn’t very convenient, is it. Not right now.”
“That’s a not a no, then,” he said, and gave her a broad smile.
“It isn’t a yes either.”
She put her arm through his, and from the corner of her eye watched as Larry scowled at them.
“But if it ever did happen,” she said carefully, “I’d rather we had a situation that was a bit more relaxed than this, don’t you think?” She laughed.
She felt him squeeze her arm in his. The warmth of the movie theatre was fading fast out here on the sidewalk.
She looked around casually at the watchers. “I’ve no doubt I could evade all of them,” she said easily. “But could you, Logan? Burt says you’re the best. But are you really that good?” She smiled up at him with the challenge, and he laughed, the tension easing between them.
“Are you kidding?” he said.
“The Mercer Hotel in half an hour. Make your own way. Alone, or you’ve blown it. And I bet I beat you.”
“How much?”
She looked him in the eyes. “You never know your luck.”
Then suddenly she was gone, not onto the street, but straight back into the movie theatre. She didn’t look back.
She knew she only had a few seconds. Six pairs of eyes were on her. But she crossed the foyer at a brisk walk, and when she turned, she saw that the watchers were only just moving towards the doors outside.
She pushed through the doors to the interior. The auditorium was lit only by dull wall lights high up. There was nobody there, no staff or stragglers from the movie still left behind. When she was through the door, she snatched a fire extinguisher from the wall on the inside, fed the hose through the two handles of the doors so that it gripped them shut, and placed the end of the hose behind the lever, so that when the doors were pushed, it would set off the extinguisher.
She ran now—down the side aisle, through a fire door to the right of the screen, slamming the door shut behind her. She looked down the dimly lit concrete corridor, took one of the wooden doorstops from the inside pocket of her coat, and beat it into the foot of the door with the hammer. Once it was jammed as far it would go, she ran down the corridor. It might give her a few extra seconds, perhaps, longer than the task had taken at any rate, but those might be the seconds that counted.
She came to another fire door. Pushing it gently, she saw the street. She had come out at the side of the theatre.
She looked to the left and exited in front of a group of three men who were passing. She didn’t look back, but walked in front of the men, letting them screen her. In another long few seconds she reached the end of the block, half walked, half ran straight across the street, dodging hooting cars, and kept running.
Outside the theatre, by the waiting car, Larry saw Anna turn almost as she did so and watched her begin to walk back inside. He hesitated, then walked fast towards Logan.
“Where’s she going?”
“Ladies’ room,” Logan said.
Larry whistled, and the two watchers on either side of the theatre came up fast towards him.
“She’s gone back inside. Ladies’ room—so he says,” Larry added, and scowled at Logan. “Stay with her.” He looked at Logan. “You. Get in the car.”
“Sure.” Logan walked to the car and looked from the sidewalk in through the front passenger window at the driver. He tapped on it.
“We’re almost there. Just waiting for her,” Logan said through the fractionally opened glass. The driver didn’t acknowledge he cared either way.
Logan walked around the trunk at the back of the car and made for the door to the back seat on the street side. He opened the door. When he saw a bus coming fast and pulling out to pass their stationary car, he stepped in front of it and ducked through, feeling the rush of air as it passed behind him. There was a loud blast of its horn.
He dodged a car into the next lane with inches to spare. Then he ran across the three remaining lanes, inviting angry blasts from half a dozen cars, and reached the sidewalk on the far side.
Larry was watching him like a hawk. He saw him approach the car, speak to the driver, inexplicably walk around the rear instead of getting in from the sidewalk, and then open the door. He saw the sudden jerking movement as he leaped across the path of the bus, and knew that things were falling apart. He shouted to one of the three remaining watchers to get inside the theatre.
“She’s making a break! Get her!”
They ran inside and found their colleagues waiting in the lobby, uncertain what to do. But it seemed it was dawning on them that something was going wrong.
“She’s making a goddamn run!” one of the new arrivals shouted.
All three ran for the interior doors. They came up against the crude obstruction of the thick rubber hose jammed through the handles on the other side, and smashed their way through them, to be met by a flailing fire extinguisher that was shooting violently from side to side in the corridor and firing streams of foam.
Fifty pounds of reinforced steel spinning at high speed caught the edge of the wall, whirled away at higher speed still, and smashed into the ankle of the man in front. He collapsed howling, then fell to the floor clutching his ankle and shouting obscenities.
The other three didn’t stop, but ran on two sides down the aisles of the auditorium, two on one side, one on the other, and came up against the fire doors that flanked the screen.
“Jesus. What’s she got on the other side of this?” one shouted.
On the sidewalk, Larry shouted at the remaining two watchers, one to cross the street to the far side and hunt down Logan, the other to head in the opposite direction, up to the left of the theatre.
He himself stepped straight off the sidewalk in front of the waiting car and ran across the four lanes of the street, dodging cars, slipping once almost to his death in front of a truck that refused to brake, until he reached the far side. He would kill Logan if he found him now.
Anna caught her breath after running for three blocks. She saw a cab rank on the far side of the road, crossed the street quickly, and stepped into the darkness of the rear seat.
“The mail office on Fifty-fifth and Broadway,” she said, and the cab pulled out and headed uptown.
Her mind raced back over the years to her training at the Forest. Three or eleven, those were the Moscow Rules. When you had a dead drop, a number, you added either three o
r eleven to the number, and if neither of those came right, you began to count up from three towards eleven.
The box number Burt had chosen was 3079. Therefore Mikhail would place anything for her in 3090 or, in the event of that being incorrect, in 3082. He would work on Moscow Rules. He would know that’s how she would work.
If neither of those numbers were true, she would have to begin from 3083 and work upwards.
The cab reached the mail office in less than ten minutes. She gave the driver the fare and a twenty-dollar bill on top, and told him there’d be a hundred dollars if he waited for her. Before stepping out of the cab, she wrapped a scarf over her head and carried her coat rather than wearing it. Then she opened the door and, leaving the car behind her, walked into the mail office.
They would only have one watcher here, and not one of Burt’s regulars. Whoever it was would be watching 3079.
She stepped down a broad, brightly lit corridor, not looking ahead, only noting the numbers on the boxes at the sides. She began to slow when the numbers descended below 4000. Then she stopped purposefully by 3090 and rummaged in a pocket for a key. What she brought out was a small lock pick she’d made the day before in the apartment.
Fitting the bent piece of metal into the keyhole, she agitated it from side to side. It was just large enough, but not as good as it should be. She’d had to guess at the size of the locks. The box opened after nearly thirty seconds, too long, and she rummaged inside with her other hand, finding some mail, three letters. She looked at them, saw a name, the logo of the New York Electrical Company on the envelope, and pushed them back. The box was in use.
She locked the box and stepped over to 3082. Anyone watching her would probably make his move now. It might be seen as suspect to be opening two boxes.
She fitted the key again. It seemed to take an interminable length of time. She expected at any moment a shout, a hand on the shoulder, the click of a readied weapon. But the door finally opened unwillingly, and she reached inside to find a single sheet. She looked at it and knew it was from him. She wrote an X on the floor of the box and shut the door. Then she locked it again carefully.