Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  Larry saw Logan weaving down a street that ran perpendicular to the four lanes they had crossed. He called into the radio to two of the others and gave them the location, ordering them to turn off Broadway and head west.

  They would keep Logan flanked on either side, while he would stay on the target. Logan was around fifty yards ahead of him, moving fast, not looking back, only to the sides when he reached a street. He was running fast, and Larry ran after him in fury.

  Then he saw Logan descend some subway steps into the subterranean depths of the Twenty-third Street station. Larry ran forward, simultaneously ordering the two watchers to pick up a cab each and wait for him for instructions. As he descended the steps two at a time, there was a call from the three watchers at the theatre.

  “She’s away,” was all the man said.

  “Fucking find her!” Larry shouted.

  He saw Logan running now, towards the corridor that led to the downtown trains. He hurled himself after him, jumping the stile, and as he did so, he ordered the men in the two cabs somewhere above him to head downtown and wait at the exits from the Fourteenth and Eighth Street stations for further instructions.

  Anna stepped back into the cab and gave the Mercer Hotel as her destination. She opened the folded paper again and read. There were four lines, each a place, a time, and a date. All were places she had never heard of, somewhere in New York—one main venue to aim for and three fallback meetings.

  She memorised the information, and screwed the paper up in one hand as the cab turned into Mercer Street, where the hotel jutted out onto the sidewalk.

  “Drive past it, please,” she instructed the driver. A hundred yards beyond the hotel, she told him to pull up. She gave him the fare and added a hundred-dollar bill.

  Outside the cab, she watched the hotel entrance in the distance, then bent down and dropped the paper into a drain. She stood up and walked towards the hotel.

  On the platform at Twenty-third Street, Larry caught sight of Logan at the far end as he stepped onto the train. He just had time himself to force a set of doors open to let him in.

  If he’s getting in at the bottom of the train, he thought, then the station he’s disembarking from must have an exit at that end of the train. But it seemed unlikely that Logan would know that, unless this whole exercise had been planned long in advance—and it seemed improvised.

  He began to make his way down the train. It was crowded, and he moved slowly. He’d travelled three, four cars by the time the train pulled in to the next station. He waited in the train, and when the door was clear of people getting out, he risked a look. Logan was just twenty yards away, walking down the platform. Larry withdrew.

  “He’s getting out on Fourteenth Street,” he barked into the radio. “You have two minutes.”

  Then he sat down with his back to the platform and almost felt Logan walking by behind him. Without glancing for more than a few seconds through the window, Larry watched the stairs at the end of the platform as the train pulled out. Logan was nowhere in the stream of people walking along or turning for the exit. Somewhere, he thought, Logan had moved back onto the train, and it must be within a few cars of where he was sitting.

  He radioed again with orders to both watchers to move on to the next station, if Logan didn’t emerge.

  At the Spring Street station, he saw Logan again, stepping out a second time, from two cars away, and heading with his back to Larry towards an exit. Larry stepped out. He was sure now.

  “He’s coming out on Spring,” he said. “Hit him hard.”

  He would stay behind Logan in case he made a run back.

  Anna walked into the lobby and looked around her. She checked her watch. She’d taken thirty-five minutes, but she couldn’t see Logan. She walked over to a sitting area and checked the bar. He had not arrived. Not that it mattered now. She would sit and wait in the most prominent part of the lobby and see who showed up.

  It was Larry who walked in. He looked the wrong way, then turned in her direction. She was looking straight at him, and she saw that his face was set with infuriated calm. So they’d found Logan. She stood up and walked over to him.

  “Sorry, Larry,” she said.

  “Are you coming quietly?”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied.

  Chapter 25

  VLADIMIR STOOD IN FRONT of Villamil’s painting The Bullfight in Washington’s National Gallery and admired the chaotic scene of capes that swirled like smoke, men hidden beneath them, and the tall wooden pole that drew the viewer’s eyes into the centre of the painting and down to the scene below.

  It was more like a battle scene, he thought, than the formal execution of the corrida.

  He was aware of the man who had stepped up to another picture three to the right of him, a Goya. The man was slightly closer to the picture and seemed equally absorbed.

  Neither of them glanced in the other’s direction, but Vladimir knew just from his field of vision when he took his attention away from the painting that it was the man he had come to meet. He was on time as always, eager to give, pulsing almost visibly with some need to divulge classified information that would have put him in prison for the rest of his life if he were caught.

  Why? Vladimir wondered, as he always did. But Erosion was his best source. He gave to Vladimir what he gave for reasons the Russian didn’t really understand.

  Erosion sat on a special committee, which was privy to information of high value to the Russians. He was paid well by the American government, he had a pleasant house in the suburb of Chevy Chase, a wife he seemed to appreciate, two kids in decent schools. It couldn’t be the money, Vladimir thought, as he often did when he was trying to comprehend the motives of his agents.

  Thanks to Vladimir, Erosion also had a healthy and growing bank account in Mexico City. But all this cash in return for secrets was money the man dared not openly reveal. To spend it on luxuries, to be richer than his perfectly respectable salary permitted, would ultimately have drawn the attention of the CIA or one of the other government intelligence agencies who might take an interest in individuals like Erosion. He held valuable secrets of state, and could ultimately draw down all the wrath in the world. What was the money for?

  The SVR paid its American agents well, but Vladimir found it hard to believe that a man with so much could hazard it all for a few hundred thousand dollars he was afraid to use. It was more like the illusion of money than money itself. Was it greed, then? Money for money’s sake? No, he thought, greed did not fully explain the phenomenon, not just of Erosion but of his other American agents. He detected a hoarding mentality. Sometimes he thought it wouldn’t really matter what the Russians gave in return for these secrets—acres of land, tons of coffee beans stored in a warehouse, artworks—because the disease seemed to be about possession. It was the hoarder’s faulty mental state they were feeding. The man was an empty shell, and maybe he sought exterior things to fill the hole in himself. Money just happened to be the commodity that was most familiar to the hoarder’s imagination.

  From the corner of his eye Vladimir saw the man take a final look at the painting and move slowly away, pausing at the next briefly, another Goya, then looking at his watch. A decision was made, and he walked purposefully towards the gallery’s cafeteria.

  Vladimir waited until he was out of sight before looking down at his programme, studying the room’s other offerings and walking past the next two pictures, until he paused at the third, the one Erosion had been studying. But this time, he looked sightlessly at the picture, the countess of something or other, and instead began with imperceptible precision to make a sweep of the gallery’s large hall.

  There was a man at the far end who hadn’t taken his hat off; a couple, probably retired; two girls who looked like students; and two uniformed staff members who guarded the doors at either end as well as the pictures between them. He decided he would watch the man with the hat a while longer, to make sure he recognised him if he appeared again, in the c
afé, without his coat and hat.

  Temporarily satisfied, Vladimir made his own way into the café.

  Erosion had just reached the front of the queue at the self-service counter and was paying for his lunch; soup, bread, cheese, and something sweet in a wrapper. Vladimir joined the end of the queue. When he had paid, he carried his tray to the nearest available table, without looking up to find where Erosion was seated. He put the tray down, took off his coat, and placed it over a second chair. Then he sat down.

  The café was half full; it was easy to observe without seeming to observe. He found Erosion sitting at a table in the corner where he sat for their meetings when he had some material. So he had received the drop Vladimir had left for him the night before. His presence meant the presence of information, the table where he sat a sign for a delivery.

  The drop would be made here in the cafeteria, and the pickup would follow. They never need look in each other’s eyes.

  Vladimir saw the man in the hat enter the café. He had removed it, along with his coat, as Vladimir had expected. It meant nothing in itself; anyone who had entered the museum would have entered it wrapped up against the cold outside, and then slowly unwrapped in the warmth inside.

  But despite the perfectly normal behaviour of the man, Vladimir decided to follow through the pickup without the man still present in the café. That would mean a wait until he had gone. Vladimir’s tradecraft had taught him that no pickup was better than a messy one. If it meant returning to the museum later, when the man had gone, that’s what he would have to do.

  Vladimir read the morning’s newspaper, the meal taking second place in his attention. He ate slowly, until he finally observed the man with the hat take his tray to the trolley by the door and exit from the café. A civilian, he thought, just a casual visitor.

  He glanced up and saw that Erosion had also finished his meal and was piling up the plates and wrappers onto the tray and then carrying the tray to a trolley and leaving. No glance, no word exchanged between them. It was a simple drop-off. The signal to indicate the need for a face-to-face meeting had not been made. It was routine. Vladimir continued reading and idly left the remains of his plate of pasta. It was two thirty in the afternoon.

  He watched the busboys in the kitchen behind the serving counter and took his tray to the trolley, where he slid his hand beneath the tray Erosion had left and withdrew a screwed-up napkin at the same moment as he slid his tray onto the trolley. He didn’t put the paper in his pocket, not yet, but concealed it in his hand until he was clear of the café and he’d had the chance to check the first exhibition room for the man in the hat. But as he entered it for the second time, he saw it was empty, just the two staff members who sat by the doors like statues.

  He slipped the paper into his pocket and left the room, into the next hall, consulting his programme to see the history of the painting he’d chosen to stop and observe. When he was calmly in a state of almost believing his own interest in the painting, he left the gallery and took a cab to the airport.

  On the way, he read the coded words Erosion had left him on the napkin.

  There had been a Russian intelligence officer at Langley, around four months previously. It isn’t known what was the purpose of her visit, it read. There was considerable excitement about her presence among the various echelons of government,

  Erosion was eager to please, as always. Was that it, he wondered, simply a desire to please? Was that the motivation of the lost people on the American side who aided his, the Russian, cause? But deep inside himself, he knew with bitterness that he possessed the desire to please in equal measure.

  So it was a “her.” Vladimir tucked the screwed-up napkin in the pocket of his coat to dispose of later. Anna—there was almost no doubt it was her—had been at Langley. But was she working for them, or were they just debriefing her? Either way, she bore the marks of a defector, as far as the Forest was concerned. Back in Moscow, they had erected shooting targets bearing her image, for trainee officers to practice on down on the rifle ranges at Yasenevo.

  Where did that leave him? With the knowledge of her likely affiliations, certainly—and then his prospective meeting with her. He knew he would not pass on the information to his superiors, not yet in any case. Anna was his—one way or the other.

  The plane touched down at LaGuardia at half past six in the evening. He took another cab, through the Midtown Tunnel to Manhattan. Then he switched cabs for the ride along the East River, and disembarked once again several blocks from the residence in Riverdale.

  He walked without stopping at any bar this time. There was an urgency about him, the fresh blood of pursuit in his nostrils. He wanted clarity. He wanted to know, absolutely, if such a thing were possible.

  He entered the residency as the evening shift was coming on and went upstairs to the cramped room, tapped the codes into the computer on his desk, and looked at what came up. He saw that his friend, the SVR resident in Geneva, had made contact. He scrawled down the message on a piece of paper, marked with the stain of a coffee cup, reached for the china cup with the month’s codes stamped on the bottom, and began to decipher the message.

  “She was offered to our head of station in Montenegro in August last year. For a high price. It was agreed. The interlocutor was an American called Logan Halloran, formerly with the Main Adversary’s station in the Balkans, now believed to be operating alone. A freelancer. Money paid to him, but no exchange. Shit everywhere. Believed the MA got her.”

  Vladimir sat back in the chair and swung gently from side to side. The blinds were pulled down as they usually were; there was just the desk lamp for light. He felt himself cocooned.

  So this man Halloran had sold her to all of them, perhaps. Who else? To the British too, as well as the Americans and the Russians? She was more a hostage than a defector, he thought. The Americans had bought her like a sack of corn.

  And the Montenegro resident would no doubt have had a lot of explaining to do. Moscow wanted the female Russian colonel very badly, and he’d slipped up. A demotion in rank? Or would they put him right out in the cold, like they’d done to him, Vladimir, all those years ago with his posting to the Cape Verde Islands? Or would it be even worse for him than that?

  Vladimir sat in the darkness, having pushed himself away from the pool of light on the desk. He surveyed his options. The longer he held on to the knowledge of her without informing his superiors, the worse it would be for him. If they ever found out.

  Chapter 26

  BURT PAUSED BEFORE A nineteenth-century clapboard house that stood about three hundred yards above the beach. A bitterly cold wind blew onshore from the direction of Greenland, and the icy waves nodded their heads onto the raked pebbles with a lethargy that, in a human being, would have been the final stage before freezing to death. A few gulls circled above their heads, screeching faintly into the wind.

  He turned to Anna. Without removing his hands from the pockets of his coat, he simply nodded towards the house.

  “That belonged to my grandfather,” he said. “From my mother’s side of the family.”

  “So you didn’t start with nothing, Burt,” she said.

  He guffawed hugely. “No. I had a great deal. A great deal. But I could have frittered it away.” He paused, as if reflecting on the possibilities of simply spending the family fortune. “He was in steel,” he added. “Out in Pittsburgh. But they all bought their summer homes in Long Island and built their country clubs in Pennsylvania for weekends.”

  He walked on, and she kept in step with him, the wet stones crunching softly beneath her feet. She couldn’t see them, but she knew his scouts were out, ahead and behind them somewhere. Larry had been pacified. He’d wanted to break parts of Logan, in the wilful belief that it had been him who had led her astray.

  Logan was now at the apartment with Dupont and Marcie, while Burt had brought her up here alone. They were to be questioned apart, her and Logan.

  For his part, everything that had
happened twenty-four hours before confirmed to Burt that he had been right. She knew what she was doing, particularly when it came to Mikhail. And since he hadn’t let her run free himself, she had devised a way of doing so. The escapade to the Mercer Hotel was brilliantly done, and he still hadn’t asked her why, what was the purpose of it. Yet he knew that it had been something to do with her and Mikhail, and nothing connected to Logan. Logan was just the wrench that opened the door.

  Burt glanced sideways at her as they walked. She seemed to read him perfectly, he thought, just as she’d read Logan. How he admired her for that. Her genius for the long game lay in her bet that she could expect his, Burt’s, admiration even when—no, particularly when—she sabotaged his plans. She’d played him along for weeks, and now he was about to find out why.

  Something told him now, and had told him right back at the start, that even with her vulnerable child as a pawn and an execution squad and worse waiting for her back in Russia, she would have still hardened herself to threat like tempered steel.

  “You reached the hotel a few minutes before Logan,” he said conversationally. “That’s some feat. All he had to do was get there. But you did something else too, didn’t you.”

  “Mikhail made contact,” she said simply. There was no reason to lie.

  He didn’t ask her how Mikhail had made contact. He didn’t regret that he personally had kept her in the loop about the exact arrangements whereby Mikhail was to make contact. She was spontaneous, she worked with whatever material she had available. It wasn’t his own devious thinking or even instinct that had led him to allow her to know the mail office and box number. So it must have been, he thought with amusement, his direct line to God. He’d acted entirely without thought.

  “When?” he said. “When did he make a meeting?”

  “The day after I meet with Vladimir.”

  “The day after tomorrow.”