aberration derived from some strange Eastern influence he had picked up on his travels. But even his detractors couldn’t deny the evidence of his great effectiveness, both as an operative and an inspiring instructor to the latest talent, and now as the owner of one of America’s big three private intelligence firms.
For his maverick and independent mind, as well as—it has to be said—his financial independence and impeccable contacts, he was a prized asset to the CIA, the NSA, and all the rest of America’s government spy agencies. He was much needed, indeed loved, by the agency big shots, as much as they were wary and at times disapproving of his modus operandi and his general joie de vivre.
Burt had found himself on the wrong side of agency policy many times in recent years, but he had worked with it, lain low, waited for the policy to change—unlike his old Brit acquaintance, Finn, who had tried to change things and died for his trouble.
For one, Burt derided the abject worship of the electronic intelligence “that has taken over our intelligence community like a cargo cult landing from the skies on a Stone Age tribe.” And he had the human intelligence from his own network of sources to reveal the weaknesses of this overreliance on technology. Burt claimed not to be able to use a computer, and every so often, as here now on the yacht, or in one of the numerous private clubs around the world to which he belonged, he would wave a huge Havana cigar at imaginary American satellites up in the heavens.
“They might be able to see what brand of cigar I’m smoking,” he would say. “They might even be able to sniff its aroma, for all I know. But there is one thing they can’t see—and which is all that really matters—and that is the intentions of the man who’s smoking it.”
He was now sixty-two years old, his athletically charged youth superseded thanks to doing exactly what he liked in the smoke, drink, and food department. Accentuated by an expensive light blue blazer and a pair of lurid yellow slacks that totally negated the camouflaged blackness of his team, his rotundity seemed to swell even beyond its natural limits to include the yacht, the sea, and the grey, all but invisible shore beyond, towards which he now looked keenly for a sign through a polished brass porthole.
But it was a cell phone on the blacked-out yacht that gave the signal. It was answered by Larry, the taller of the twenty-somethings.
“She’s heading south,” he informed Burt. “She’s with the Hungarian. We have all three cars on them.”
“You can bet Willy’s seen at least one of them.” Burt chuckled. “One of the best, Willy is.”
“We think the French have at least two vehicles with them too. Unmarked. One of them’s some kind of utility truck,” Larry added, with one finger now pressed to the ear without the phone, just in case Burt made one of his louder exclamations.
“And the Russians?” Burt said. “Have we any Russians?”
Larry repeated this question into the phone and shook his head at Burt. “We don’t know. Maybe. The autoroute’s packed with vacationers, both sides, north and south.”
“And then there’s the Brits,” Burt said. “We can be sure that Logan hasn’t just invited us to the party.” He beamed hugely. “It’s like the Wacky Races out there.”
“That’s it,” Larry said, and clicked the phone shut. “We’re on.”
With a final look of fond farewell at his glass of Laroque, Burt finished the wine in one friendly slurp.
“Internal shower,” he declared, and smacked his lips.
The three others were already up on deck, champing at the bit, as he hauled himself off the bar stool.
“No dawdling now, boys,” he barked, clambering up the steps some minute or two behind them. “Come on, it’s time to play!”
They descended into a black twenty-six-foot rib with muffled engines.
It had taken Burt a considerable amount of power from his persuasive arsenal to scale down the operation they were about to put in play. The whole team now consisted of one yacht, the
Although his own company had paid the half million for knowledge of the Russian colonel’s whereabouts, the special committee on Operation Mathilda—which is what they were calling Anna—also included the CIA chief from the Paris station. Burt considered that politic.
But then the CIA had tried to impose its own methods on the operation rather than Burt’s. Burt, however, could more or less tell the CIA what to do. That was the way America’s intelligence community had developed in the past few years; former senior men like Burt had set up their own operations, and now the agency was wholly dependent on them.
“Number one,” Burt had stated at the one and only meeting of this committee so far, with a relaxed coolness that acknowledged no opposition. “We’re on foreign soil. Number two. We don’t want to scare the pants off the woman. She’s our friend. We love her, and she is lovely. We’ve come to help her, and we will. We want to welcome her to the United States of America with gifts of kindness, not Halloween wraparound shades and sidearms. That will only remind her of what she escaped from in Russia. Number three. She has French protection. They are our allies, you may remember. We are their guests.”
Burt had successfully laid out his stall. The only thing he wished to add to the operational inventory, after cutting out the small army that the committee’s CIA chief, Bob Draco, was preparing, was a truckload of watermelons.
“Watermelons?” Draco had queried.
“Yes, they have to be watermelons. And a full truck,” Burt insisted.
Burt knew he was making his demands, disguised as requests, from a position of strength. He had been picked for this delicate lift of the Russian colonel, not just because it was he whom Logan had contacted, but because he already had previous acquaintance with the target. He was in pole position over other companies like his own who wanted a piece of the action.
Back at the turn of the millennium, when his young friend Finn had gone “feral” and was pursuing his own investigations—against the explicit instructions of British intelligence—Burt had contacted Finn and offered him support, even though it could only be of a moral nature. After all, the Americans had been dissuaded of Mikhail’s usefulness by their friends in British intelligence—Adrian leading the pack—whose false assessment concluded that Mikhail was a fraud.
But Burt, whether through his contact with God or not, had always believed in Finn, known he was right, in fact, and he consequently knew that Mikhail was truly the gold seam inside the Kremlin that Finn said he was. And this was not simply because Finn said it was so; it was because Mikhail had been this gold seam in the previous eight years, during which the CIA, and Burt through his friends there, had received a steady stream of Mikhail’s intelligence from Finn, via MI6, thanks to the desire of the British to impress their American friends.
Burt had worked closely with Adrian through those days in the 1990s when Russia was struggling towards its short-lived democracy. But he had kept a Chinese wall between the working relationship with Adrian and his friendship with Finn. In fact, Adrian’s treatment of Finn—and hence of Mikhail—had earned Adrian a very black mark in Burt’s book.
Adrian had ignored what was happening, the cardinal sin in Burt’s book. And Finn had taken the ultimate fall.
But most important of all his assets in Operation Mathilda, Burt had actually met the woman, the Russian KGB colonel, Anna. Finn had uniquely—if you discounted Willy, anyway—introduced her to him at Burt’s London apartment in Mayfair. There they’d had a private supper, just the three of them, Burt’s butler hovering in the background. Anna had spoken to him that evening in confidence about Finn, and had asked him if he could really help her man.
She and Burt had hit it off, just as Finn had said they would. Burt mourned Finn’s death, almost like a son’s. He’d liked and admired him, and that was good enough for Anna.
Finn had been Logan, Burt thought, but with his idiot conscience still intact. And it was his conscience that had killed him.
And so Burt, apart from his own natural qualifications for the job, was the obvious choice in the thirty-six hours since Logan’s communication had been received. The money had been paid, Anna’s whereabouts communicated, the Russians were nowhere to be seen, at least for now, and Burt had flown from New York into Marseille.
And then there were the British. They too would no doubt be somewhere out there in the undergrowth. But
