more, and urging his friends to do the same. She recalled that he’d told her in complete seriousness, three days before, that he was going to marry Amandine, aged three.
She and Willy took him from the teachers, who were reluctant to give him up. Willy hoisted him onto his shoulders, and he waved good-bye to the women. They loved him, Anna saw. Sometimes he was painfully like his father.
The three of them walked back up the lane to the house.
“Call them now,” Willy said. “The first thing you do is call your security. You won’t get rid of me until they’re here.”
“I’ll do that,” she said. But she was angry that after so many months of freedom from anxiety, it should all have washed back into her life—into their lives.
Willy had given Little Finn an ant house. While they played with it in the garden, she called her contact in Paris.
The man listened to her story. He didn’t seem to feel any urgency. That was how the French were, she thought. Unlike the British, who injected urgency into anything, the French sucked it out. She wasn’t sure at first if he was taking her seriously, but she’d come to know the way they worked.
“When will you send a team down here?” she asked.
“A team? I don’t know. But someone will come today—I promise you. We’ll take care of everything.”
She went out into the garden. Willy went inside to fetch a bottle of wine.
“So they don’t know,” Willy said, when he’d poured himself a glass. “Listen, Anna. If the French knew about Mikhail, they’d give you permanent security, not this excuse for it. Maybe you should tell them.”
“I’ve already told you. No, Willy. They’ll be all over me forever if I tell them about Mikhail.”
The afternoon idled into evening. The air was completely motionless, the trees like statues. Movement became an effort.
“Even the weather is waiting for something,” Willy complained.
He clumped off around the enclosed courtyard, inspecting everything for the third or fourth time. It was completely enclosed, with two-storey walls and high metal gates on three sides, and the house and high wrought iron railings where the palm tree stood on the fourth. Once again, he seemed satisfied.
He dozed off for an hour in the evening shade of the sycamore tree.
Anna went into the house and began to make supper. Willy appeared and began to make phone calls, until she asked him to stop. The French might be trying to reach her, she said, and there was no reliable mobile network in the village. Little Finn had gone back into the garden to play with his ant house. Anna heard him singing from time to time, and every so often she went outside, just to make sure he was there.
At seven thirty, Willy poured them both a glass of wine. She called Little Finn in from the garden for supper. He didn’t come at first, and she sent Willy out to get him. When he didn’t return either, Anna went into the garden.
Willy was looking under an open shed, calling the boy’s name. She felt a flutter of fear. She could see from the doorway that Little Finn wasn’t in there, so why was Willy calling for him? When he turned around, she saw the look on Willy’s face. And she saw that Little Finn had disappeared.
Chapter 10
BURT MILLER WAS A large, ebullient man, full of loud self-confidence. This expressed itself in numerous ways, but could be summed up by an almost profligate attitude of general largesse. He doled out ladlefuls of life to all comers, and in equal proportion to the magnanimous bounty he habitually awarded himself.
“Life is about expansion,” he once boomed to junior recruits at the CIA training centre in Virginia, otherwise known as the Farm. And then he would point out with his trademark guffaw that his physical size had kept pace with his expansive nature, as well as with his other, more worldly assets in the thirty years since the agency had first invited him to serve his country.
“I’m twice the man I once was,” he would proudly, and accurately, proclaim.
Back in the 1960s, when he was a fit, agile sportsman adventurer at the age of twenty-two, he had entirely illegally entered Soviet-occupied Central Asia on foot, off his own bat. He proceeded to learn four of the local languages and cultivated local mafiosi, who twenty-five years later would become the foundation stones of Russia’s new capitalism.
He and his then new wife, Martha, honeymooned for a year in the mountains of Afghanistan with his Pathan tribesmen friends, one of whom would, in maturity, come to control half the world’s heroin trade. Under various noms de plume, he spent his spare time writing academically entertaining articles for
He swept through Central Asia like the Karaburan wind, befriending old-style Communist bosses, medieval mullahs, anti-Communist revolutionaries, criminals, royalty, fixers, taxi drivers, and spies with equal bonhomie.
His world, as he would put it to the wide-eared recruits at the Farm, was the world according to Burt.
And now, after forty years as the self-proclaimed King of the Stans, his Central Asian beat, he owned the Coca-Cola franchise for half the region, prime vineyards in the south of France, an island in the Caribbean, and a network of agents in Russia’s former territories who were not only source material for his intelligence operations but also a lucrative business partnership for his numerous commercial activities, some of which failed, but most of which succeeded.
As he told his younger, more awestruck operatives after their graduation—when like a fairy-tale uncle he took them on clandestine CIA adventures—things usually worked out how he wanted them to; and if they didn’t, it meant he had simply been mistaken about what he’d wanted.
“Self-belief is ninety percent of the battle in this game,” he told them. “Same as in any game. But most important to remember is this—omniscience isn’t part of the human condition,” he added with another bellow of laughter.
And now, sitting in the plush varnished teak saloon of the yacht
“God,” he said jovially. “God is what happens. That’s all you need to know. What happens is why we’re here. The rest is nothing.”
And what had happened with Logan’s missive concerning the Russian colonel undoubtedly had this divine hand, perceived by Burt in any case, behind it.
“It’s Burt’s line to God that counts,” he said, beaming, but with a large slice of self-mockery rather than any evangelical or otherwise religious connotation. “Remember that, boys,” he instructed the three pumped-up young men in black combat fatigues that he had unsuccessfully tried to head them off from wearing. “Much time is wasted, many lives, and untold sums of money, on what might happen, or on what has happened. But all you need to devote your underdeveloped minds and overdeveloped bodies to is what happens. What happens is king, god, and all the philosophy you’ll ever need.”
As his words ricocheted around the confined space of the yacht’s saloon like trapped birds, they were met with puzzlement, admiration, and a kind of wonderment at the meaning behind his arcane statements from the three young men, who suspected the teacher was good—great, even—but didn’t really have a clue what he was talking about.
Larry, Joe, and Christoff were more at home on the assault course than in the library.
So Burt colonised God with the same broad-minded good humour with which he colonised a new recruit, a disaffected tribal chief, or a factory in Tajikistan that made anything from aluminium to ladies’ hairpins. He was a clown with a brain, a trickster with unassailable cunning, and he cultivated an image of buffoonery you believed at your peril.
He offered the three young warriors accompanying him a glass of
The upper echelons of the CIA, with one or two crucial exceptions, regarded Burt’s spiritual views as an
