There was a silence in the room.
“Still friends?” Marcie said at last.
“We were always friends. My father wanted me to marry him.” Anna laughed. “There was never any chance of that. My father wanted the union of two great SVR families. But I wanted a career—not to be married to a careerist.”
“Like your mother was,” Marcie said.
“Yes. My mother gave everything up for my father’s career. They separated in the nineties when my father completed his posting in Damascus and went back to Moscow. My mother saw a way out eventually.”
“This could be good,” Burt said, stirring from the armchair. “Vladimir could be very good indeed.”
But none of them explained why.
“What’s the purpose of the list?” Anna asked a second time, but they weren’t prepared to tell her yet.
They went through each name that she said she recognised. She filled in the details of whatever she knew. Then they went through the list from top to bottom, in order, in case she’d forgotten anything.
“All KGB?” Burt asked. “The ones you know?”
“That, or close to the Putin administration,” she said.
“Good,” Burt replied.
Then Logan began to fillet the twelve names she knew once more. He was interested in those who weren’t simply KGB officers. Two of these were government officials. One of them worked in the Kremlin administration, and one of them was Mikhail. She knew she had to be extremely careful now, to be as open about him as she was about the others.
“This Vasily Dubkov,” Logan said at last. “What about him?”
They’d left Mikhail last of all.
“He’s a time-serving figure in the administration,” she answered. “As I remember, he was the Russian deputy railways minister.”
There he was in front of her on the page, with a low-key job that kept him away from the public eye. But unknown to all outside the highest echelons of the KGB elite, the deputy railways minister was also the SVR’s secret controller of all Russia’s foreign agents in Europe. Vasily Dubkov was there from the beginning, when Putin came to Petersburg from his KGB posting in East Germany. He was as close to Putin as it was possible to get. And he was Mikhail.
Anna kept her eyes fixed to the list and ran them down it twice more. Once she was confident her expression wouldn’t betray her and her breathing was under control, she put the list on the desk. Then she looked Logan in the eye.
“So?” she said.
But it was Burt who answered.
“This is a list of appointments the Russians have made in the past year to their embassy in Washington, their New York consulate, and the UN in New York,” he revealed.
Anna was aghast. Mikhail was in America. Vladimir, Burt went on to say, was part of the Russian delegation at the UN. But Burt believed he was running the KGB residency in New York.
“There’s been a big turnover of personnel in the past year,” Logan explained. “Both at the Russian embassy and at the Russian UN delegation. It’s unusual. Very unusual, actually.”
“We’d like you to take your time with the list,” Marcie said. “You may remember other things.”
For the rest of the day, they left her in the study, and she wrote down all she knew but the one vital piece of information. Mikhail’s face came into her mind constantly and faded away again.
Over the next two days, Logan and Marcie were determined to seize control of the routine in small matters, the specific times they wanted formally to sit her down in the study, rather than walk in the forest, or ride the horses up to the ridge before the snow became too deep in December.
These small things were a ready-made battleground between Anna and her inquisitors. To disrupt their desired routine in minor ways was a tactic she used from the moment of their arrival. In the small ways, ways that weren’t possible to identify, she could to some degree set her terms, her control, however minor it seemed.
But in the big ways, the control of information itself, she knew she held all the cards. And their weakness was that they didn’t know she knew who Mikhail was.
Covering all the bases, she weighed up the effect of telling them about Mikhail—who he was, how to make contact with him, his background, his relationship to the Kremlin and to Putin, everything. It certainly occurred to her to tell them. But, she told herself in these opening days, Mikhail needed protection too. She owed him that, and she didn’t trust her handlers, even the silk-gloved approach of Burt, not to blunder all over Mikhail, destroy his cover, and in the process destroy him.
He deserved to be the one to make the approach to the Americans, the British, whoever he wanted to. It wasn’t for her to reveal his secret. She also knew that if she told them about Mikhail, she and Little Finn would be free.
Mikhail was also her talisman, her protective amulet. Mikhail was her wandering exile’s deeply hidden stash of gold that could be used only once, and then only in the eventuality of extreme danger to herself and to Little Finn.
They sat in the study for longer and longer periods, broken up by walks, a horse ride with Logan, playing with Little Finn. Sometimes Logan and Marcie only seemed interested in the names on the list that she didn’t know. At other times they wanted to extract anything further about the ones she did know. And then they’d return to the night Finn died.
“What about this guy?” Logan would ask. Or, “You must have come across this guy? Are you sure? Think again, Anna.” They then showed her photographs of each of the men on the list, in turn, just in case the face had been given another name, and she might recognise that instead.
On the third day, they were sitting in the study in the early afternoon. She was tired, and felt her concentration was lower than usual. Logan suddenly brought the name of Vasily Dubkov into the room again. They’d been over it several times before, but the name had never been pulled out of the hat in as startling a way as it was now.
She had no expression on her face, no inflection in her voice. The deputy railways minister was, she had rehearsed to herself in bed at night, just one more name. She treated Mikhail the same way as she had treated the others.
“This guy Dubkov,” Logan said. “He doesn’t seem right.”
“You say he’s not KGB,” Marcie said.
“I don’t whether he is or not,” she replied. “In all likelihood he is. But I don’t know. I only know of him. He’s a minor public figure, I suppose. I never met him.”
“There’s something odd about his appearance on the list,” Logan said. He had his hand on his jaw and was apparently staring at his copy of the list.
Anna didn’t respond.
“He was transferred to the Russians’ Washington embassy—its cultural division actually—seven months ago. That’s five months after Vladimir was assigned to the United Nations in New York and, we suspect, became head of the KGB residency there.” He looked at her intently.
“What’s odd about it?” she said.
“I can see why Vladimir’s on the list,” Logan replied. “He’s KGB—not just verified by you, but by others. And the other names you’ve been able to identify as having various different backgrounds in domestic and foreign intelligence services. But why would the Kremlin transfer Dubkov to their cultural centre in Washington? He’s a deputy railways minister. He’s a nobody.” Logan looked at her as if the answer, in its obviousness, barely needed stating.
“I guess because he’s not just a deputy railways minister,” Anna replied.
“Exactly. So who, or what, is he?”
“We can guess he’s KGB,” she said, “but look—I don’t know for sure.”
“Do you know what his background is?” Marcie asked. “Before he got the railways job, I mean?”
“That’s another interesting thing about him,” Logan interrupted. “He seems to have no background that we can trace.”
“No, I don’t. Where’s he from?” Anna said.
