“I guessed you weren’t Marcie.”
He smiled and pressed her hand a little too long for her liking.
“I’m glad to meet you,” he said.
“Well, that’s good,” she replied. To Anna, he seemed like someone relaxing on the first morning of his vacation. But she thought this impression wasn’t cultivated for her benefit. It seemed genuine. Logan evidently wasn’t someone who was concerned about making impressions.
“I think we only need to remember one thing, Anna,” Logan said, sipping his coffee and watching her.
“What’s that?”
“We’re all on the same side.”
“Thanks, Logan. I’ll try to remember.”
He smiled at her. “Friends,” he said.
“We’ll find that out, won’t we?”
He was lazily charming, and, she saw, a watchful figure. His intense blue eyes, which he rarely offered for contact with hers, were striking. He was good-looking in an uncared-for kind of way. If he’d been a piece of furniture, she thought, she’d describe him as artfully distressed.
“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“I’m okay, thanks.”
He smiled again.
She studied him for any signs of weakness. That was what would help her in the days ahead. He couldn’t hold her gaze; that was interesting. Self-conscious? She thought so. Or was that an invention? Was this his default behaviour with a woman, or was it just with her? He was conscious of his own attraction, she observed, and maybe compensated for it by hiding behind an attitude of self-deprecation. That was how Finn had been.
Just then, Marcie entered the kitchen, and the atmosphere changed at once. Corkscrew hair tied back with multicoloured play-school ribbon, Marcie projected an extrovert vibrancy that contrasted with Logan’s laid-back attitude. She wore a denim dress and scuffed black biker boots. Cheap and garish glass jewellery seemed to be hanging off her in various places. Striped socks rose above the boots. She had a hippieish air.
“Anna!” she said, with boisterous pleasure. “Marcie. I’m looking forward to us getting to know each other.”
Anna smiled back.
“You’ve met Logan,” she said, though it was obvious she had, and it was said just to make conversation.
“Yes.”
“Be careful of him,” Marcie warned. “He thinks he’s God’s gift,” she added, lowering her voice, in the pretence of a private confession.
Logan just smiled and didn’t protest.
The relationship between Logan and Marcie would surely be part of their tactics. To appear to create small splits between them invited her to develop intimacies with each of them separately. They were a team, and were also individuals. She would have to watch the moments when apparent conflict between them encouraged her to be confessional to one or other of them.
She decided for the time being that Marcie was the more dangerous of the two. She was superb at creating the deception of normality in the situation they were all in.
“I’ll watch out for him,” Anna said.
“You do that,” Marcie replied.
Interrogation is a battle for control. To the uninitiated, it may seem one-sided. If the interrogator has domination over the life or death, pain or release from pain, of a subject, how can control be other than in the hands of the interrogator?
Anna knew that it was not so clear-cut, however. In many exhaustive training sessions at the Forest she had learned that the object of interrogation had ways of subtle manipulation.
At the KGB’s main training centre in Yasenevo southwest of Moscow, known as the Forest, instructors were particularly focused on interrogation and resistance to interrogation. It had been a separate course alongside self- defence, hand-to-hand combat, the making of improvised explosive devices, weapons handling, escape and rescue, recruiting an agent, and all the others.
One vital lesson the Forest had taught her was that nobody would ever need to use interrogation—of any kind—unless ignorance and doubt were present. Principally, she’d been taught, even in situations where physical domination was overwhelming and completely one-sided, that there was still doubt over who controlled the outcome of an interrogation. Logan and Marcie had an obvious need of their subject. To begin with, they did not know what she knew. A low-level battle of wills would underlie all the ensuing days, Anna knew. It was true, of course, that no physical threat was hanging over her. There were no blazing lights twenty-four hours a day, permanently deafening noise, the threat of torture, fabricated sounds of torture, or actual torture itself. There was no coercion, let alone terror, in Logan’s and Marcie’s methods.
Burt meanwhile spent their sessions in the study, sitting on the sidelines, and only occasionally guiding the process to lower the temperature, or guide them over any impasses with a light, deft touch.
It was Logan who began, after the three of them had sat down on three sides of the large table in the study, while Burt took an armchair by the fire.
“If you knew who Mikhail was,” Logan said, for once looking straight in her eyes, “what would prevent you from telling us?’
As an opening salvo, Anna saw it contained several traps.
“Mikhail’s security,” she replied.
“His security,” Logan said slowly. “As a member of Russia’s elite under Vladimir Putin?”
“That’s right.”
Logan’s eyebrows raised. “You want to protect him from us?”
“His security in Russia is absolutely necessary,” she said calmly, “or he’s no good to the Americans.”
Marcie put her hand on Anna’s arm—another message intended, perhaps, to indicate the special relationship she planned to develop with her.
“You think that we might endanger Mikhail’s security?” she said, and looked genuinely concerned.
“I can’t know that,” Anna replied. “But—on the hypothetical basis that I knew who Mikhail was—then I would have to accept that as a possibility. Endangering Mikhail’s security not only risks his life, but also risks losing what you want from him.”
“So you’d act on that possibility,” Logan stated.
“Yes. The protection of a source or potential source is paramount.”
“Yet they can’t be a source unless there’s some degree of danger to them,” Logan replied.
Anna said nothing.
“Why do you think Mikhail only ever communicated through Finn and nobody else?” Marcie asked.
“Because that way he controlled contact. And of course he trusted Finn.”
“We’re assuming Mikhail is a man, then,” Logan said. But Anna had prepared herself for this potential trap.
“If Mikhail is as close to Putin as we all believe he is, then he can only be a man,” she said.
Logan smiled at her, in a way that suggested he was commending her method rather than the information she was providing.
But Anna ignored him and leaned her elbows on the table. She decided to take some small control, to disrupt the question-and-answer nature of the proceedings, if only for a moment or two.
“What we’re attempting to do is to make contact with Mikhail,” she said. “You have to understand that’s completely different from what happened between Mikhail and Finn. It was Mikhail who made contact with Finn, not vice versa. It was Mikhail who dictated the terms. We’re trying to reverse that. I’m not sure it can work.”
“Why not?”
“Because Mikhail is the one who does the choosing,” she replied. “That’s his past form.”
Logan searched in his jacket for a cigarette and finally found a crumpled box. Burt stood up and turned on the exhaust. Logan knocked out a cigarette and lit it. Marcie looked at him in disapproval.
“Okay. Let’s look at Finn,” he said. “But first of all, I’m sorry. This is bound to be difficult for you.”
