streets by a bitter wind. With amazed annoyance he noticed that his companion was apparently oblivious to the cold. Burt sat in a similarly uncomfortable wrought iron chair, puffing cigar smoke into the night and wearing his habitual good-humoured expression.
Grinding his teeth, Adrian sucked at a cigarette as if he might derive some thin warmth from the glowing end.
“When do I get to see the woman?” he said with a bluntness that came more from discomfort at another cap-in-hand mission than from the cold.
“All in good time, my friend,” Burt said happily. “All in good time.”
Adrian seethed. The fact that Burt, a private American intelligence contractor, albeit running a multibillion- dollar company and with a senior CIA background, could talk to him in such a way was at complete odds with his world.
Did the head of the British intelligence service now play second fiddle to private American intelligence contractors? He supposed so. The CIA’s employees themselves were now ordered about by private companies like Burt’s in many of America’s embassies around the world, including Baghdad’s. Private enterprise had its viselike grip around the country’s traditionally government-run intelligence ops. The revolving door between government spy agencies and these private spy companies ensured that American government intelligence contracts were awarded by government officials who had previously directed the companies they were awarding them to. Adrian considered it all to be way upside down.
The military industrial complex has now become the intelligence industrial complex, he thought, and Burt had carved himself and Cougar a strong niche at the very heart of it.
Adrian had thus known to approach Burt personally rather than go to his opposite number at the CIA, and he had come to Burt for a reason. Burt had kept Anna Resnikov to himself for three months now. It looked as if the agency was letting him keep her—at least for a period.
Soon—later this evening, in fact—he would see if Burt’s apparently endless patience with the Russian colonel would survive what he had to tell him.
At last, after two years trying to get to the woman, Adrian felt he had something to work with, something that was going to put him back in the game. And he was looking forward to knocking the smile off Burt’s face when he sprang it on him tonight.
It had been a difficult—not to say frustrating—few months. First, there’d been the unexpected arrival of her photograph. Adrian had gone at once to the Treasury committee to ask for the half million dollars the little thief who took the picture had been demanding. They had to pay up or lose her. She was what they’d all been waiting for, for over two years since Finn’s death. Even Teddy Parkinson had come with him to the Treasury.
But the committee had delayed granting this ex officio payment, blustering; was MI6 the only place that hadn’t heard of the financial crisis? Did they think that with institutions falling like flies, half a million dollars could be signed off just like that?
When Adrian pointed out to the five men and one woman on the committee that this kind of information didn’t fall into their laps once in ten years, they had looked at him as if he were some kind of street-corner cardsharp.
And when, after the haggling and veiled threats were over, they finally granted him the money to pay for the information that went with the picture—the colonel’s location—it was too late, far too late. The Americans had already grabbed her. Half a mil down the drain for nothing, and he knew he would end up carrying the can for that, thanks to the committee’s procrastination.
Connected to his laying hands on the woman, there was also Grigory Bykov, Finn’s killer. Some at the Secret Intelligence Service whispered that Adrian had become obsessed with killing Bykov, and that the woman’s value was in gaining access to Mikhail, not in giving Adrian the green light to bump off the Russian. But the fact that the Yanks had got her had merely given the politicians back home an excuse to put Bykov’s death sentence back on hold. Adrian had almost heard a sigh of relief in Teddy Parkinson’s voice when he’d said, “Sorry you missed her, old boy. Bad luck. Not your fault. Those tightarses at the Treasury are the bane of all our lives, believe me.”
It had enabled the politicians to delay indefinitely Bykov’s moment of truth.
Apart from negotiating with the Americans—principally Burt—over access to Anna Resnikov, Adrian had also spent an inordinate amount of time on the assassinations of the two Russians. Helping the Russians, in other words. Why? It was beyond him. The British government seemed willing to break its back bending over for them. To Adrian, the victims were just a couple of billionaire hoods the world was better off without. Maybe by now the exceptionally skilled assassin had himself been bumped off. That was usually the way of these things.
And then, two weeks before he’d come to New York to try to persuade Burt to give him access to the woman, the Russians had started getting up to their old games. The Kremlin had threatened to move nuclear warheads into Kaliningrad. Just a day after the American elections! And the Russians had presumably made the threat to up the ante for the new president-elect.
But against all this damaging and inconclusive catalogue of events, Adrian at last had one card up his sleeve, and it was a killer card. He would wait, however, before he laid it on the table this evening. Let Burt have his moment to gloat over the woman’s capture.
“What progress have you made with her?” Adrian enquired. “Has she given us Mikhail?”
“The process is only just beginning,” Burt replied. “We’re taking it gently. A lot of bureaucracy, as I’m sure you’ll understand, Adrian.” The large man looked at him across the freezing patio. “Our debriefing of her is starting this week, as a matter of fact.”
“You’ve had her for three months!” Adrian protested.
“Competing interests, Adrian, competing interests. Everyone wants a piece of her, and I’ve been covering my back. She’s now, I’m happy to say, Cougar’s asset and Cougar’s alone.”
“For how long?”
“We’ll see. It depends on what she gives us, doesn’t it.”
“You’re treating her as a very long game,” Adrian said disapprovingly. “You may have less time than you think to find Mikhail.”
Burt sucked on his cigar. He stood up and walked over to the edge of the balcony, where the light snow fell on his bare head. He seemed oblivious.
“Mikhail is the endgame, Adrian,” he said at last. He turned round to face him. “You guys threw him away, now it’s up to us to revive him. Anna may or may not know his identity. But having fought off the agency’s desire to put the thumbscrews on her, I’m not going to hurry the process for the sake of the Brits who ditched Mikhail in the first place. She’s a very clever and a very tough woman. If she knows the identity of Mikhail, I want her to tell me voluntarily. Any other way, and I believe we lose her, and lose Mikhail.”
“She knows, all right. She’s just concealing Mikhail,” Adrian said angrily.
“We don’t know that,” Burt replied with infuriating equanimity. “Let’s stick to what we know, shall we.”
“Isn’t it time you read her the riot act?” Adrian demanded. “If she doesn’t give us Mikhail, you’ll pack her and the boy back to Russia. That should sharpen her memory.”
“She’s our friend, Adrian,” Burt protested. “You’re missing the point.”
Adrian seethed once again at this insulting implication. Burt added, “I’ll tell you something. Finding Mikhail is just the first part of the process. It’s the beginning of the endgame, if you like. If she supplies the information voluntarily, that’s when she’ll be most useful. If we force it out of her with threats or worse, she can mess up the operation at any time, and without us being aware she’s doing it.”
“The operation? What operation?” Adrian said, suddenly interested.
“Okay, let me include you in on this, Adrian.” Burt leaned in generously. Adrian felt cigar breath on his face. “Once we know who Mikhail is, then it’s two bits to a dollar she’s the only person he’ll speak to. That’s her real value, don’t you see. Actual contact with Mikhail is the beautiful result all of this. Mikhail has a clear connection to Anna, through Finn. But Mikhail’s smart too. Very smart. He’s evaded all of us for a long time. And he only ever spoke to Finn. So that’s why we need her onside. Marching shoulder to shoulder with us, in fact. She’s our only link, and therefore our only chance not just to find him but, crucially, to get to him.”
“And if she doesn’t give us Mikhail?”
Burt sat back, supremely self-satisfied, to Adrian’s way of thinking.
“She’ll give him to us,” Burt said. “Eventually. Even if she really doesn’t know who he is.”
Adrian lit another cigarette. Whatever Burt meant by this arcane remark was beyond him.
