A waiter appeared with a silver tray on which were two whisky and sodas. He brought them out to the balcony, and Burt tipped him handsomely.
“So what’s your plan with her?” Adrian asked when he was gone. He spoke in a conciliatory way now, having reminded himself that access to Anna was now through Burt, not through government channels, the CIA, or anyone else.
“First we’re going to give her a list,” Burt said. “There’s been a big increase in KGB activity in the United States over the past year. Big turnover of names—new names coming in, old ones going back to Russia. It’ll be a process of identification. Who of this new pack of wolves she knows, and who she doesn’t.”
“For what purpose?” Adrian demanded.
“It’s useful in itself,” Burt answered. “But principally, it’s a psychological thing. It’s about letting her limber up. Getting her to focus. Allowing her to get used to helping us in the smaller things—then, when the big question comes up, she’s already relaxed. In the flow.”
To Adrian, it all sounded unnecessarily elaborate, and Burt saw his expression of disapproval.
“Like I said, we need her willingness, Adrian,” he said. “Without that, there might be Mikhail, but there won’t be the prospect of real contact with Mikhail. See?”
“If you say so,” Adrian replied.
Adrian got to his feet, as Burt placed the empty tumbler on the table.
“Let’s go have some supper,” Burt said. “It’s damn near freezing out here.”
As they walked back inside, Adrian saw the water in the ashtray was frozen over.
They ate beef Wellington at a table beneath a middling good portrait of George Washington. Adrian decided that Burt the Anglophile was nevertheless demonstrating by his choice of table a rather crude independence from any British interference with the woman’s debriefing. It reminded Adrian of Margaret Thatcher having paintings of the Battle of Waterloo hung on the walls at 10 Downing Street every time the French president paid a visit.
It was Burt who brought up the subject of Adrian’s visit again. As usual, he liked to demonstrate he was in the driving seat.
“Wait until we’ve finished with her,” he said. “Then she’s all yours. Under our conditions and supervision, of course.”
“I have a special relationship with her,” Adrian protested. “We met on several occasions when Finn was alive.”
“So I understand. Which is why it’s unfortunate that you left on such bad terms with him,” Burt said resolutely. “Face it, Adrian, you blew it.”
Adrian was practically catatonic at the casual nature of the criticism.
“Finn and I were as close as you can get, for sixteen years,” he said. “Officer to handler. You know that kind of relationship, Burt. Ultimately, it’s unbreakable.”
“If Finn were alive, I’m sure he’d forgive you. But he’s not alive, and she is—and I don’t think she’s going to forgive you. In any case, to me it’s not worth the risk of upsetting things as they are.”
“She knows how close Finn and I were. And she knows I was just doing my job.”
“Like all the concentration camp guards say.” Burt chortled.
“I have the right to see her.” Adrian put his knife and fork down with too much of a clatter.
Burt’s face changed to a hard, cold-eyed flatness that was all the more shocking for its contrast with his usual bonhomie.
“This isn’t about you, though,” he said emphatically. “Or the British. Or even the Americans. It’s about her. It’s about getting what we can from her.” His face relaxed. “Reasonably, Adrian, can you see any way I’d risk this delicate process by suddenly associating myself with a very bad memory for her? So far, we in America have a clean sheet with Anna. We’ve rescued her and her boy, goddammit. What do I get for letting the British in? Just the risk of alienating her.”
At the end of dinner, Burt, mercifully as far as Adrian was concerned, didn’t want to smoke another cigar. They drank coffee and cognacs in the library, and Adrian picked this moment to play the card he’d been waiting all evening to play.
Withdrawing a brown envelope from his pocket, he passed it across to Burt, who by now was sliding slowly but majestically down the overstuffed cushions of a dark green embroidered velvet sofa. He appeared to consider that their business was done.
But Burt hauled himself up and opened the envelope. He gave Adrian a sharp interrogatory look.
“What’s this?” he said.
“A tape.”
“A tape?”
“With a story on it,” Adrian said.
“You have something to play it on?”
“You’re not going to play it in here, are you?” Adrian said, shocked.
“This is the Union Club,” Burt replied. “The library of the Union Club. Perhaps the most discreet six hundred square feet in America. And as you see, it’s empty and probably will be for a week, knowing the members’ reading habits. They come in here to sleep or not at all.”
Adrian did have a recorder with him, in case there’d been an opportunity to play the tape somewhere. He pulled it out of his pocket and handed Burt some earphones.
Chapter 14
AT SEVEN THOUSAND FEET, the custom Chevy Silverado began the slow climb up from the mesa. It cut through a narrow gap in high red cliffs into an equally narrow pass of switchback curves that trebled the real distance to the higher plateau above. The knife-edge existence of the mesa’s dry sagebrush scrub finally gave way altogether to bare rock and to a thin orange sand that blew in the wind.
Only where an occasional stream tumbled into the valley were there signs of life—small clumps of aspen trees, the leaves of which were a shocking gold in colour, or turning to murky yellow before they fell away. It was the end of the first week in November. The sun was high in a savage blue sky, but there was the unmistakable chill of approaching winter.
Anna sat in the middle seat of an elongated version of one of Burt’s company’s fleet cars. It was a vast grey and gold, gadget-rich, bulletproof truck that could withstand an explosion of a thousand pounds of TNT directly beneath it. For what purpose it was needed here—on American territory in the middle of New Mexico—she wasn’t sure. But by now she’d come to know Burt well enough to suspect it was just one of his toys—the military version of a vehicle adapted by his labyrinthine security corporation.
She studied the bleak, spectacular scenery through a blackout window. Little Finn’s questions were growing less frequent, and he seemed awed by the sight of the rocks and bluffs that towered above them and by the yawning drop below.
As the vehicle climbed, Anna sat back into rich-smelling black leather. Over the previous nine and a half weeks, they had been housed in a comfortable shingled family home in pleasant woodland, near a place called Tysons Corner in Virginia.
As Burt told her in his deceptively guileless way, this was the location of the CIA’s highly secret Counterterrorism Center and the Pentagon’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. These units were housed in a huge underground complex designed for the purpose by the Walt Disney Imagineering Company, which Burt joked had taken time off from designing theme parks to bring reality to America’s fight against terror.
Burt was naturally indiscreet. It was true he believed that his own secrecy business suffered from a vast overload of discretion. But in reality Anna knew that his indiscretion gave away nothing of real value. It was just one of the tools he used to slowly bind her to him. He was clever in this, she had to admit. The intimacy he fostered in their friendship, the inclusiveness he awarded her, a former KGB officer, was beguiling.
On a visit to Cougar’s company headquarters close by to Tysons Corner, she’d felt she was being shown around her new working environment, like a fresh recruit.
“Why are we here?” she’d asked Burt on several occasions over the weeks at the shingled house. “What are
