put her on her guard once more. The freedom of the morning evaporated.
“You still miss Finn, Anna?”
“What difference is it to you, Logan?”
“Well, put it this way, it’s not of national importance,” he said, without rising to her response.
She didn’t reply at first, and he poked the bacon over with a fork.
“So,” she said finally, “it’s not work, then?”
“On a beautiful day like this, it’s all one as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
“Why don’t you tell me about you?” she said. “Why you were thrown out of the agency?”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s true, then.”
“Marcie?”
“Touchy about it?”
“The best people get thrown out of intelligence services,” he said. “Finn included, I understand.”
She sat back against a tree and took the bacon and egg sandwich he was offering.
“I don’t think about Finn,” she said, “or miss him—not as a lover or a husband, not anymore. Does that answer your question?”
“I find that hard to believe,” he said.
“And you, Logan? Who do you think about? Tell me about the women you’ve betrayed,” she joked.
He looked startled.
“No wife and kids when the job’s over?”
“No longer a wife, and one daughter I never see,” he replied.
“What’s her name?”
“Angelica,” Logan replied.
“Your wife made the wrong choice, or did you?” she asked.
“She did, since you ask. She left me about ten years ago. We were married in our early twenties, we were young, and we were still young when it was over. Then—” He didn’t go on.
“Why did she leave?” Anna said.
“It wasn’t what she’d expected, I guess. We began to fall out. Small things, bigger things. Neither of us seemed prepared to make the effort. And I was away a lot.”
“The job was more important?”
“I lost the job. That was the end.”
“So your wife left you, and after that—or maybe before that—it was one in every port,” Anna said. “That was Marcie,” she added and laughed.
“Oh, not just the ports,” he replied, smiling in return.
When they’d finished, he refilled the pack. They descended into the ravine and up the far side to the ridge above the house.
“What’s the best way of getting to know someone, do you think?” he asked suddenly.
The innocence of the question reminded her of something that Little Finn might have said. And then she realised it reminded her of Finn himself.
“Sitting in a study asking personal questions all day not enough for you?” she replied.
“I find I’m enjoying getting to know you,” he replied.
“Better be careful then, Logan. There’s a string of dead spies behind me.”
He was shocked by her casual reference to Finn.
They walked out of the forest and into the meadow in front of the house. He stopped, took her arm, and faced her.
“I know you know who Mikhail is,” he said suddenly. “So Burt must know too.”
“Well, just don’t tell anyone else, Logan,” she said mockingly. And then she pulled away from him. She walked back to the house twenty or thirty yards in front.
When they reached the house, they found that Burt had left, and Marcie wasn’t back.
“Marcie won’t be back until the morning,” Frutoza told Logan. “She and Mr. Miller left in a helicopter.”
Frutoza cooked dinner for the two of them, and afterwards they settled into the sitting room to watch a movie. She didn’t particularly want to watch the one Logan chose, but said nothing. What she wanted was to observe Logan with as few barriers between them as possible, to see what he was like when he was doing what he wanted to do.
Afterwards, she decided to have a whisky before they said good night. Not to her great surprise—she had grown used to it—he let his eyes linger a moment too long on her.
“Good night, Logan,” she said, and walked to her bedroom at the back of the house.
When she’d switched the shower on and was about to undress, she was aware of someone and turned to find Logan in the doorway. He hadn’t entered the room, but leaned against the jamb of the door. He was fiddling with an ornamental dagger she carried with her and had put on the table by the door. It was a gift from Mikhail. Finn had given it to him, and he had passed it to her the night that Finn died.
“What’s this?” he said. “You used it on the mountain.”
“It’s a gift from a friend,” she said.
“Where’s it from?”
“It’s Caucasian. From Chechnya. My grandmother gave it to me.”
“It’s a very beautiful thing.”
“Was that it?” she said. “I’m going to bed.”
He paused.
“Why not come over to the guesthouse?” he said.
She stopped and looked at him. He was smiling, relaxed.
“What for, Logan?” she said. “To play Scrabble?”
There was a moment of tense silence.
“Sure. Okay, sure. I’m sorry, Anna,” he said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for, Logan. It’s been a nice day.”
Chapter 19
ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Anna was reading on her own in the sitting room while Larry was showing Little Finn how to sit on a horse. Logan hadn’t appeared. She heard the distant sound of an engine, and as it came closer, she saw it was the helicopter. She glanced up, but saw that Larry was removing Little Finn from the saddle. He’d heard it too.
She stood and looked out of the study window, watching it touch down on a pad at the bottom of the meadow. She could make out three figures descending before it took off again. Burt, Adrian, and Marcie moved up across the meadow, talking closely.
It had been four, maybe five, years since she’d seen Adrian. When Finn had first left the SIS, and she was living with him back in London, they saw Adrian from time to time. She was still watching Finn then—at least as far as her controllers in Moscow were concerned. The KGB believed that Finn’s departure from MI6 was a decoy to fool them.
Adrian had been very attentive, she recalled. He’d been very complimentary about Finn’s work in Moscow, but he was watching Finn too, she knew. Adrian wasn’t convinced that Finn had bought the lie that Mikhail was a fraud.
On one occasion, she and Finn had even spent a weekend down at Adrian’s country house, with his wife, Penny. Even in front of his wife, Adrian had practically pawed her.
But when two years later Adrian found that Finn had been disobeying his instructions to stay away from Mikhail, Adrian turned nasty. He’d finally issued a very ugly threat to Finn—as ugly as if it had come from her own side—and then he’d told Finn he’d wreck him, and destroy her too. It was for that reason that they’d disappeared and fetched up in France at Willy’s place, where they’d stayed until Finn’s murder.
