“We’re fairly sure Saint Petersburg,” Logan replied. “We almost know that for a fact.”
“When? What’s the timing?”
“We don’t know.”
“If he’s close to Putin, it’s a sure thing he goes back to around 1990 or 1991,” Anna said. “Back then Putin turned up in the city and became deputy mayor. Then Putin moved all his Petersburg friends to Moscow when he went there to take over the top job at the KGB in 1999, before he became president.”
“Probably that’s right, yes,” Logan answered. “Maybe he and Putin knew each other back then, if not before then.”
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe.”
Marcie looked up at Anna. “Maybe Dubkov goes back to when Putin was stationed in Dresden, East Germany, back in the eighties before the Wall fell,” she said.
“It’s possible,” Anna agreed.
“But you don’t know,” Logan asked, and his question had a hard edge to it.
“No. I don’t know.”
“Nothing comes up on him,” Marcie said. “No name, no photo match, nothing in the records at all about him.”
“That’s odd,” Logan repeated. “He has no traces. Why would a deputy railways minister have no traces?”
Anna said nothing.
Logan looked at her hard. “There should be something, some backstory. He can’t just turn up—even in an insignificant job with the railways—without some kind of background. And he certainly can’t be posted to Washington without one.”
She shrugged. “I would guess so.”
“What else does your guesswork tell you?” Marcie said, and there was only innocence in her voice.
Anna paused to think. “It’s possible he just did someone a favour back in Petersburg in the early nineties, some relatively small thing, and that got him the railways job. It was a small reward. Maybe he has no actual record. There are hundreds of thousands of KGB active reservists out there. They’re all people waiting for the call. Most of them probably don’t have any record that you could get your hands on.”
“Except for one important difference between him and the hundreds of thousands,” Logan said, with a slight acidity in his voice. “This guy is assigned to Washington. That’s a big leap from nothing.”
She had to agree.
He reached into his pocket and took out a stiff photo envelope.
“I want you to look at this picture again,” he said and handed it to her.
She pulled the photo from the envelope and felt Logan watching her intently all the time. She moved neither slowly nor fast, the most difficult pretence of all—to be absolutely normal.
When she turned the photo the right way up to look at it, she saw Mikhail’s face again. She studied it closely. It was the only picture they had of him. It had been taken in Washington the week before. There was only one picture of Mikhail in the public arena, even in Russia. And that wasn’t conclusive unless you knew it was him.
Back in 2000 when Putin became president, a picture was taken at a very special religious service in the Kremlin’s chapel. It was presided over by the Orthodox archbishop who had publicly proclaimed when Putin came to power, “God creates everything. And so he created the KGB to care for us. God bless the KGB.”
At this service, the picture was intended to show only Putin, thus demonstrating that he cared for the people’s religion. But in the pew behind him—a place of honour—was the left side of Mikhail’s face, Dubkov’s face, hardly more than his ear and his jaw. It was unmistakable—if you knew it was him.
“Recognise it now?” Logan said.
At first she acted like she thought she might. But then she shook her head.
“No. I thought it was someone . . . someone who looks quite like him. But it isn’t who I thought.” She looked directly at Logan. “Sometimes you can try too hard to see what you want to see,” she said.
“My perennial problem, apparently,” he said.
Chapter 18
ON THE DAY BEFORE Adrian was to arrive, Burt gave them all what he called a day off, though Logan was detailed to stay with Anna throughout the day. Marcie was going “into town,” as she put it.
Anna and Logan decided to follow a herd of elk that Larry had seen up on the ridge, and maybe bring one down. Burt had a cupboard full of rifles at the house.
They walked off up the meadow at nine in the morning and onto a path into the forest. When they emerged on the far side through the trees, they were on top of the ridge. Logan looked through binoculars and then handed them to her.
“They’re over a thousand yards away,” he said.
The herd of elk, she saw, was moving slowly through trees on another ridge. There was snow everywhere up here, deep in places, and it would be slow, quiet work. Between them and the herd was a deep ravine, treeless, and they would have to go around somehow, find other cover, if they were going to get a shot.
Anna pointed down to the right, where some rocks afforded a good place to remain unseen. From there, they could approach in the shadow of the far ridge where the herd was. If they didn’t spook them, they would be able to get as close as 250 yards. She beckoned to Logan and began to crawl belly-down through the snow, over the top of the crest, and down towards the rocks.
It took half an hour of crawling, stopping to check their direction, or to lie completely still when one of the herd looked up. But they reached the rocks, and as they did so, he offered her a silver flask.
“Whisky and ginger wine,” he said.
She drank and handed the flask back to Logan.
“You take the shot,” she said, nodding in the direction of the herd.
“It’s yours,” he replied. “I want to see how good you are.”
She wasn’t going to argue.
When they began to get cold again, they crawled beyond the rocks, until they were in the shadow of the ridge, where they couldn’t be seen. Then they stood and walked slowly up until they reached the far ridge she had spotted earlier. She’d been right—it was 250 yards or so from the herd. The elk were still there, in the shelter of the trees.
She took the rifle from her back and removed it from its cover. Then she put one shell up the barrel, the other five in her pocket. She looked back at Logan and, crouching down again, began to crawl to the rim of the ridge.
He watched her reach the top and bring the rifle round, lying flat in the snow, legs splayed, and then begin to take aim. He waited for nearly a minute of dead silence. Then he heard the crack of the shot, the echo that chased around the valley and up to the mountains, and the silence that returned deeper than before. He saw her standing and waving him up.
They walked together up to the edge of the forest. Thirty yards inside the trees they found the elk, killed immediately from a shot to the right of its foreleg and straight to the heart.
“Okay shot,” Logan said. He grinned at her. “For a KGB colonel.”
She knelt by the animal and carefully cut its belly with a thin-bladed knife; the stomach sac spilled out into the snow.
“How are we going to get it back to the house?” she said. “We’ll never drag it up the ravine.”
“Something for the boys to do,” Logan replied. “They’ll bring a mule. I think they’ll be happy to have a job.” She watched him scrape some snow from the forest floor until he’d made a bare patch. Then he walked farther into the trees and returned, carrying tinder for a fire.
When he’d got the fire going and they were sitting warming themselves, Logan retrieved some bacon and eggs and an old pan from his pack. He propped the pan up on some stones and put the bacon in first, for the fat, then broke the eggs and tipped them carefully in afterwards.
While the food was cooking and they’d been silent for some time, he asked her a question so casually that it
