we doing at the heart of counterterrorist ops?”
“If you want to get anything done in this country these days, you invoke the spectre of ‘terrorism,’ ” Burt replied cheerfully. “It’s the magic word; the open sesame to all things; the source of all gold. But don’t worry, Anna,” he added with a grin, “it’s nothing personal, nothing to do with you.”
The period at the shingled house in Virginia was, Burt told her, for the purpose of negotiations. These were just formalities, he said.
These negotiations were over her future. She was a commodity of value. She was wanted by several of the United States’ sixteen state intelligence agencies, and also by many of Burt’s competitors in the even darker world of private contract intelligence. Access to her was keenly contested in high places. Senators—especially those on the Senate Intelligence Committee—were being leaned on, and Burt was deploying all his own contacts in government to keep her for himself. In the private intelligence world, she realised, she meant money, government funding on a grand scale.
During this period at the safe house in Virginia, she preserved a relentless sangfroid with Burt and the half dozen intelligence officers from the Byzantine American intelligence community he invited to meet her. But inside her mind was the unasked question: When would they ask her about Mikhail?
Paraded initially at an apparently depthless reinforced concrete bunker near Liberty Crossing, the centre for the “secret of secrets,” as Burt called it, America’s Threat Matrix, she’d felt like Cleopatra being led through the streets of ancient Rome. Her status as the youngest female colonel in the KGB had first won their interest. Her personal charms as a woman increased it.
And there had been lengthy discussions at one stage about literally parading her, by exposing her “defection,” as they were calling it, to the media. Bob Draco from the CIA station in Paris had accompanied them across the Atlantic, and he led this movement.
“It’s time to snub the Russians,” he said. “They need a direct hit. Or at least a shot across the bows. They’re getting far too big for their boots, and they need to be taught a lesson.” He backed up his argument with the examples of Russia’s invasion of Georgia and its threat to move warheads into Kaliningrad.
But Burt steered these more hawkish members of the Black Committee, as they were calling it—and their friends on the Senate committee—away from such precipitous action.
As her captor, Burt held the floor in these sessions. America, he said grandly, could always make its announcements in the press later. Better to let her interrogation—or debriefing, as it was politely called—unfold before adding any stresses to the process. The last thing they needed now was the media snooping around. Exposing her at this moment would leave nothing in the locker for later.
Burt had protected her too from those who wanted to “shake her down” right away; to get the juice out of her while she was still rebounding from the low of losing her son to the high of being reunited with him. There were those who wanted her drugged for the information they were after.
Again, Burt’s performance at least seemed like protection. She was to be led, not driven, he said. She would give—oh, yes, she would give—but only when she was ready to give.
All of Burt’s stately pirouettes in these negotiations over her future had been deftly performed. To Anna, their deftness seemed almost too expert, however. That she was present at all in some of their secret discussions suggested to her that she was meant to see all the arguments concerning her fate. Burt’s constant riding to her rescue and his protection of her against the apparently less subtle creatures in the American intelligence community—all of it added to Burt’s elevation as her saviour.
Burt had thus slowly developed his role from being her rescuer, to her defender, her knight and aegis against not just the Russians but the Americans too. That was the drama that had played out over the previous weeks.
And she knew it was all done for her benefit, to bind her to him.
Over to the right of the vehicle, as it wound around the switchback curves, Little Finn was pointing at a herd of elk wandering through the dark, sunless depths of the canyon that fell away into a greyish area of trees far below. Anna told him they were a type of deer—she didn’t know the English word
That was the meaning of the drama of the previous months, she was sure of it. Since she was both audience and player, she was being led to draw a conclusion—that Burt was her only hope. She realised that she was being artfully “developed,” in order for Burt to emerge as a defence between her and the snapping dogs at the CIA. She’d better give Burt what he wanted, or the dogs would take her. That was the clear message.
And now here she was, heading into the remotest wilderness of New Mexico in one of Burt’s company trucks at the onset of winter. She was accompanied by Burt himself and by members of Burt’s private army from his private intelligence company.
One evening, just before they’d left for the Southwest, he’d informed her quite casually that the Cougar Corporation received over one billion dollars of government money annually to perform intelligence work—and perhaps military functions too, she guessed.
As if to back up her guess, Burt fulsomely detailed the many activities Cougar involved itself in; the provision of “warfighters”—by which he meant private soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere; covert operations; electronic surveillance; overhead reconnaissance with UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles; intelligence analysis; the development of intelligence software; private spy networks that were run out of American embassies all around the world; the interrogation of enemy suspects; communications interception.
He explained that his own private employees provided a significant percentage of those hired to run the Threat Matrix, the secret of secrets; that his company personnel, 18,000 of whom had the highest possible security clearance, were involved in programmes that could tap into every telephone call and every e-mail in or out of the United States; that even the landing points of undersea fibre-optic cables were now in the domain of private security companies, his and his competitors’. They could monitor communications not just on American soil but anywhere in the world that was connected to these fibre optics.
“America now contracts out nearly three-quarters of its intelligence budget to companies like Cougar,” he said. “That makes a total of over fifty billion dollars a year.”
She’d wondered then at the difference between this new America and the way the Kremlin’s spy agencies plied their trade. In the new Russia, the KGB was itself the state. And yet it called itself the
If nearly three-quarters of the American intelligence budget was handed out to private companies, how long would it be before the state and the private intelligence companies—the
Sitting in the truck as it ground its way around yet another bend on the mountain, she recalled how she’d been feted, befriended, loved even, given chauffeurs and comfortable homes, teachers for Little Finn. But if the audition were a failure, she would find herself on the way to the airport in a locked, nameless van.
The real interrogation was about to begin. Nobody in all the preceding weeks had mentioned Mikhail. But without Mikhail, there would have been no rescue of her, no red carpet treatment, no Burt.
Burt was now listening to something on headphones in the front of the truck, while Bob, one of his “fitness freaks,” drove, and Larry, the bodyguard from the beach, sat in the third row seat, “riding shotgun,” as Burt had put it.
In the middle seat Anna and Little Finn continued to look out over the canyon that was fast dropping away beneath them. Sheer red rock bluffs towered over the pass they were going through, cutting out the sun, and way up above them, on a small outcrop at the top of the road, she could now see a few dilapidated brown adobe buildings.
Planted among them, and looking out over the huge stark landscape, was a wooden cross, twice the height of the houses, its white paint faded and peeling. It was dipping at a violent angle after two and a half centuries of sun and wind and ice, and maybe—Burt said when he took off the headphones—violent worship.
The higher mountains beyond the little village rose to thirteen thousand feet and were white with snow that capped their peaks like candle snuffers. An early snowfall down at the level where they were had left patches of
