Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  “A competitor?”

  “That’s it.” He turned to face her fully. “Yes, it’s a risk. I have a deal with Adrian. When that’s played out, then I’ll let the government in. By that time Cougar will be indispensable.” He rubbed his thumb against his forefinger and grinned at her. “More money,” he said, but she knew he was joking, at least in part.

  “Does the deal with Adrian involve Mikhail?”

  “Yes.”

  She thought for a moment.

  “Why are you so free in telling me that?”

  “So you have something to give Vladimir,” he said.

  She was silent, wrong-footed by Burt.

  “Is all this just the thrill of risk for you, Burt?” she said at last.

  “Isn’t it for all of us?” he said. “Why else would we do it?”

  Chapter 27

  ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, the helicopter took all four of them back into the city. Anna was dropped at the airport to make her own way to the gym for her meeting with Vladimir, and it was arranged that she would return to the apartment as soon as she was finished.

  The last thing Burt said to her was, “You’re unprotected. I know you’re close to him, or were, but be careful of what you eat, drink, and touch. I want you alive this afternoon.”

  It was a warning that revived her memory of Finn’s last night.

  She took a cab and felt once more the sense of freedom from oversight, a freedom that she expected to win in its fullness soon now. Whatever was to happen, her usefulness would be over in the unwinding of Vladimir and the cooperation, or not, of Mikhail. She felt that all outcomes were for her the beginning of a new life.

  She entered the gym at just after midday. She did a workout and then showered and had an hour of massage. Then she dressed and found the exit at the rear of the club. It was nearly three o’clock.

  She turned left out onto the street and walked the few yards to the café.

  When she entered, she saw Vladimir hadn’t yet arrived. She took a table at the far end, looking out, where she could survey the scenes in the street and memorise the faces of anyone who didn’t just pass along. But she was confident that, at this stage, Vladimir would not have alerted the KGB bureau. He would want to meet her alone, at least one more time.

  He entered the café eight minutes after she’d sat down and made his way to her table without looking to the right or left. He was wearing the same coat, no hat this time, his thick head of black hair seemingly always set in a neat mop. She looked at his hands as he took off the coat and, to her alarm, remembered them on her body five years before.

  “You came,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “Are you hungry, or shall I order coffees?”

  “I’m going to eat. I’m starving,” she said.

  “Then I’ll join you.”

  She ordered an omelette and a coffee, and he pasta, the same as he’d eaten when they’d met before.

  “Are you living on pasta, Vladimir?” she asked.

  “On my salary? Yes.”

  “Why aren’t you making money on the side, like all the other officers in our new democratic Russia?”

  He didn’t answer. She knew that Vladimir was probably one of the best officers they had, if for no other reason than he was entirely immune from corruption. But he would only be suspected for that, of course, in the paranoia of the upside-down world of Russian intelligence.

  Neither of them spoke for a minute, as if each knew that what was said next would throw them over an edge from which there was no return. It was Anna who finally broke the silence.

  “So have you checked me out?” she said.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “And what have you found?”

  “More or less what I expected.” He wasn’t going to reveal what he knew about her apparent status with the Americans. That would only be information that was potentially useful to them.

  “But you came anyway,” she said. “So what you believe to be true isn’t an obstacle.”

  “Not yet.”

  The coffees arrived, and he heaped spoons of sugar into his.

  “You know how they blew Litvinenko’s murder,” he said casually.

  “What do you mean, ‘they,’ Vladimir? Aren’t you part of them? Besides, they didn’t blow it—he’s dead, isn’t he?”

  It was a little over two years since the KGB had murdered one of their own former officers in London by slipping the poison polonium-210 into his tea at a sushi restaurant in Piccadilly.

  “And is it ‘they’ who murdered Finn, too?” she said. “Are you part of them or not?”

  “I am, and I’m not, Anna.” He sighed. “You remember what that’s like?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, I guess I do. But I remember what I said to you back in 2000, out in Yasenevo, when I hadn’t seen you for nearly ten years. ‘Aren’t you better than this?’ But you’re still there, hanging in with the thieves who stole our country and doing their dirty work.”

  “And you?” he countered. “Whose dirty work are you doing?”

  “Everything I do, I do for my eventual freedom,” she said. “You want to know what I’m doing here today? I’m here to persuade you, Vladimir. But aside from that, I would like it if you too did what you needed to do for your own freedom. Finn never quite made it. He was sidetracked by one more loose end he wanted to tie up. And they—or is it you, too?—got him. Can you do that? Can you act entirely for yourself?”

  He didn’t reply. But she was satisfied she had made her initial move.

  “The reason they blew Litvinenko’s murder,” he said, deliberately avoiding answering her, “is that they didn’t want it to be known, and it was. They didn’t want it to be traced back to Russia, back to the KGB and the Forest. There was a lot of talk at the time that they’d done it as an act that blatantly showed the ruthlessness of their power and their willingness to use it. That’s not the case. When they slipped the polonium into his tea that afternoon, he didn’t drink from it immediately. In fact he didn’t drink for so long that the tea went cold. When he finally picked it up and sipped it, that was all he did. He didn’t want cold tea. That sip was enough to kill him, but not for days. And in that time the British were able to trace the polonium in his body and build their case. A fairly watertight case, I admit. But if he’d drunk the whole cup, he’d have been dead that afternoon, and the British would never have found the poison in the autopsy. It’s extremely difficult to trace unless you’ve got a dying man to examine for days on end.”

  “And what’s the purpose of this macabre story as I sit here drinking coffee with you? Wait for it to get cold and then don’t drink it?”

  “It’s about whether you and I, Anna, can deal with each other on the personal or only the political and intelligence level. It’s about whether any trust can exist between us as who we are to each other, not who we are as far as my people—once your people, remember—and the Americans are concerned. Can we eliminate all considerations outside each other?”

  “Then it’s the almost same as what I was saying,” she replied. “Are we ultimately working for ourselves, or are we working for others? I’ve told you what I’m doing. Everything, including making an invitation to you on their behalf, is for my benefit. That’s my endgame, not entrapping you or any other Russian spy. The fact that I believe your freedom can’t lie in Russia—not with your background—and it might lie here is incidental to my own interests. By coming here, I’m fulfilling a task that will result, someday, in my freedom from it all.”

  “So you believe.”

  “With the cards that I have, yes.”

  “So you’re here to make me an offer?”

  “Yes. But as I say, whether you accept it, or even consider it, is not important to me. I’ll have done what I was asked to do, discharged my responsibilities to them. If you refuse, I’m a stone. They can’t extract water from me. At some point my usefulness to them will be at an end.”

&
nbsp; “I hope you’re right,” he said. “Really, Anna, I do. You know, I care for you as much as I ever did.”

  “You’ll always be my true friend. That’s what I believe.”

  “And more than that?”

  “I can’t see the future. But if you accept this invitation, don’t do it for anything other than your own welfare. Then you won’t be disappointed.”

  He smiled and went to put his hand on hers, but withdrew it before they touched.

  “One thing I’ve always loved about you is that you’re impossible to disbelieve. You never gave me any hope. I love you for that.”

  “I never found that hope gave me very much, other than anxiety and disappointment.”

  “That sounds cynical.”

  “It isn’t. It’s what makes me free.”

  “I’ll think about that.”

  She leaned across the table and looked him in the eyes. She did put her hand on his, where he’d been too afraid to do so.

  “Finn died because he didn’t act in his own interests. He thought he could put something right. He was guilty about a boy who’d been killed, again by your people, in Luxembourg. He blamed himself. It was one of his contacts who had given the KGB the information that was the boy’s death warrant. Finn wanted to absolve himself of this guilt. He couldn’t be selfish—in the best sense of the word. He wanted to change the things and people outside himself. That’s what doomed him. He never asked himself the question, ‘Is this guilt in my best interest?’ He went instead to look for absolution, and they killed him.”

  She left the palm of her hand flattened against the back of his.

  “You really think you can be free, darling Anna?”

  “I can only act freely.”

  “And that’s what you’re doing now—with this invitation.”

  “Yes. Do whatever’s right for you, Vladimir, and you’ll always be my true friend. You can come over to the Americans or stay where you are, it’s the same to me.”

  He glanced sideways at the plates the waitress had left some time before, and Anna withdrew her hand.

  “The food’s cold,” he said, and they both laughed.

  He called the waitress and asked her for two more meals, the same again.

  “Is your son like you?” he asked suddenly.

  “You know,” she replied, “I can’t work it out. Sometimes he seems more like Finn. But he’s only two years old.”

  The omelette and the pasta arrived, and this time they ate immediately. The conversation had lifted the heavy weight of expectation from them both, and had restored their appetite.

  When they’d finished, and Vladimir had ordered more coffee, he looked at her, and she saw concern in his face.

  “How much do you know about how you were found in France?” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Haven’t you ever thought about it?” he said, and she saw he was deliberately not answering her question.

  “Yes. But I’ve had no real information. Anyway, the outcome was the best it could have been in the circumstances.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Moscow found us. My son was kidnapped. They nearly had me back there. I’d have had to go back. I knew that, of course.”

  “For your son’s sake.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though it wouldn’t have been in your best interests. You’d have been shot.”

  “Touché,” she said smiling. “But then the Americans arrived just in time and got my son away from them.”

  “The cavalry riding to the rescue,” he said, and smiled thinly.

  She didn’t see the point he was making.

  “And that information, of course, comes from your American saviours,” he continued.

  “Yes. They were watching me at the same time. They saw what happened. They intercepted my son before he could be taken out of France. And then they found me.”

  “Heroes.”

  “What are you getting at? Trying to undermine my relationship with them? Come on, Vladimir, things were going nicely.”

  “I’m trying to help you.”

  She saw the depth of his concern for her this time, and she laid down her objections.

  “What have you got to say?”

  “When I was checking you out in the past week,” he said, “I spoke to an old contact. In Geneva. I was asking him about the last sighting of you in Europe. He told me this story. Our resident in Montenegro received a communication from a man he’d known in the Balkans in the nineties. As a result, our resident came into possession of photographs of you, taken last summer in France.”

  “So that’s how they found me.”

  “That’s how they would have found you . . . if they had.”

  “What do you mean?” Suddenly she was alert only to what he was saying.

  “Our resident paid half a million dollars for the location that would fit the pictures of you. Your address in a village in the south of France, yes? Of course, he received all the necessary permissions to pay the money, from the highest in the land, so they say. He wanted to cover his back with such a large sum involved, and with you being the object of their obsessive vindictiveness in Moscow. But when they turned up, you’d gone, you and your son. There was nothing but a dead trail. Needless to say, our Montenegro resident was dragged over the flames in Moscow for losing the money and losing you. It’s probably set back his career twenty years. But you know what they’re like, of course. They’d have taken the credit at the Forest if they’d got you, but failure is always someone else’s.”

  She looked into his eyes. What she was looking for was some sign of triumph, something that told her he was feeding her doubt and disinformation. But what she saw was the same concern, the same Vladimir who had never done anything to her before that wasn’t in her best interests.

  She was silent. Neither believing nor disbelieving. He filled in the answers to some of her questions before she could ask them.

  “I didn’t take it at face value,” he said. “You know how it is. It was second-, even thirdhand, source information, and maybe even it was planted for some reason of their own. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I sense there’s at least some truth in it. There are material facts that can be established, for example; the fate of the Montenegro resident, for one. It was checkable, at least in part. So I’ve come to believe there is some truth in it, in any case.”

  “Have you checked it out?” she said.

  “I haven’t had the time.”

  “Half a million dollars.”

  “Yes. Hard currency, same as always.”

  “They really want me that badly.”

  “Worse. It’s small change to them.”

  He looked away for a moment, as if afraid they were being observed. But the café was a third full, with nobody who attracted his interest in particular. Then he looked back at her.

  “So I asked who had offered the photographs in the first place; who had profited, with no merchandise in exchange,” Vladimir said. “It was an American who had worked for the CIA in the Balkans in the nineties—which was how he knew our Montenegro resident. He seems to have been acting independently, judging from how he made his approach. His name’s Logan Halloran.”

  Chapter 28

  ANNA’S SENSES FELL AWAY. She heard nothing of the buzz in the café. She gazed sightlessly at her hands, now clasped tightly on the plastic table in front of her. She felt nothing in their touch. It was only the smell of fried food that slowly brought her back to some approximation of full consciousness and then reassembled her other senses. She was shattered, and what emerged from the wreckage first was cold analysis. Anger, perhaps rage, was a luxury that might return later.

  “Is that all?” she said without looking up.

  “It’s all I know.”

  She looked up and saw him staring intensely at her.

  “I need your help, Vladimir.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Money.”<
br />
  “I have around five hundred dollars with me.”

  He reached for the inside pocket of his jacket and withdrew a worn leather wallet. She recognised it from the days in Moscow that now seemed permanently unreal to her, and from the bookshop. He withdrew all the notes and carefully pushed them into her hands, shielding the movement from anyone not at the table.

  “That’s all I have. What else do you need? A place?”

  “I do. But not from you. It’s something else I’ll have to think about.”

  “I understand.”

  “I want you to do one thing. I’m leaving out of the back of the café.”

  “Are there watchers?”

  “A team of five, as far as I know. They’re probably all out at the front. I want you to stay for fifteen minutes after I’ve gone, then leave exactly as you would have done.”

  “Okay.”

  “We need a place of contact.”

  “There’s a café on Ninth and Broadway,” he said at once. “The Ganymede. It has a library. On the third shelf from the top there’s a copy of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Page two sixty-seven.”

  She registered the information, and her mind immediately translated it into the Rule of Three, the Rule of Eleven.

  “That’s it, then.” She smiled at him. “And you can let me know too if you accept the invitation. Who knows, it may be more important than I thought.”

  He didn’t smile back. “Be careful, Anna.”

  She pushed her hat into a bag and got up from her seat. She left her coat on the back of the seat and walked into the interior of the café, towards the kitchen and bathrooms.

  There was a small kitchen with three or four chefs and washers, where grease hung on the walls like translucent skin. Someone eventually noticed her, a small Chinese man in a stained white chef’s coat.

  “Bathroom there,” he barked at her.

  She didn’t move but leaned on and simultaneously held the doorjamb as if she were feeling unwell.

  “Bathroom there!” the Chinese man snapped again.