After Finn had died, Adrian organised a memorial service for him in London. She hadn’t gone to it. It wasn’t worth the risk. And anyway, the hypocrisy of Adrian celebrating Finn in death when he’d threatened him in life disgusted her.
She watched Adrian approach the house now and felt a surge of anger.
When the three of them entered the house, she stayed in the sitting room. Finally Burt came in alone. She could see he was no more pleased to have Adrian here than she was.
Burt sat down opposite her. He made a halfhearted attempt to be good-humoured, but she wasn’t buying it. The thought of Adrian in the house with her and her son made her sick.
“Adrian’s presence here is a formality,” Burt said, without preamble. “It’s a gesture to our British friends.”
She didn’t believe that and made no attempt to hide her feelings. There was more to it.
“Certain events that have recently come to light have forced a change of pace,” Burt continued. “We no longer have as much time as I’d hoped. In fact, everything has suddenly become very urgent, as I told you.”
She’d never seen Burt like this, operating at a pace other than his own.
“Your cooperation is critical now. You don’t have to say anything to Adrian—in fact, if you have anything to say, I want you to keep it between us. But Adrian has Langley’s ear, or will have if he thinks you’re not cooperating.”
Burt looked her in the eye, and she saw an urgency in his face.
“Let me put it this way,” he said. “If they take you up to Langley, if you’re taken off my hands, you’ll be drugged.”
“Why would that yield anything different?” she said.
“Only you know that.”
“I also know that drugs aren’t reliable.”
“That may not be what they think at Langley,” he said. “I just want you to know the score, Anna.”
So the men of power were at war, she thought. She paused and watched him.
“Thank you, Burt,” she said, and meant it.
“I’ll tell him you’re in the study,” Burt said.
Adrian made no attempt to greet her, or even to shake her hand. He stopped in the centre of the room and acknowledged her with a brief nod—almost embarrassed, she thought. He seemed to know he’d be unwelcome, and he had no way of dealing with this except brusqueness.
She stayed in her seat.
Adrian walked over to the study window and looked out of it sightlessly as he spoke to her behind him.
“You must realise, Anna, the time for silk gloves is over. It’s time to move on to something stronger. Either we have your help, or you are of no help to us. In the latter case, it is merely a matter of our kindness—or not— whether we send you back to Russia. So this is the moment of truth. We need Mikhail.”
“I’ve said everything I know about him,” she replied.
“Which is nothing,” Adrian said coldly, without turning round.
She didn’t reply.
Adrian finally looked round to face her, but didn’t step away from the window.
“What about your son?” he said.
“I don’t think a two-year-old is going to be much help to you,” she said.
“On the contrary,” he replied. “It’s his future we’re talking about, just as much as yours.”
“What do you mean by that, Adrian? Why don’t you say what you’ve got to say and get out.”
“What are the orphanages like these days in Russia?” Adrian said. “Any better than they were?”
She saw no reason to reply.
“So you’re prepared to face being returned to Russia. With your son,” Adrian added, grinding his teeth irritably at the necessity for such crude threats. “For whatever fate awaits you both,” he added.
“My fate, as you call it, is not in my hands.”
Adrian looked at her coldly from the window. She couldn’t see his face with the brightness behind him.
“Fatalism is not a defence against events,” Adrian said. “It simply encourages those events. You can make your history. Here—in America. I repeat, we need to know Mikhail. That is your choice, for yours and the boy’s future.”
“What do you have in mind to exchange me for?” she said. Adrian at last left the blindness of the window and walked over to the desk in front of where she was sitting. He perched himself on the front of it and crossed his feet on the floor a few inches from her—too close. She felt his breath and the smell of his clothes and saw the livid anger in his eyes.
“We’re not planning to return you, my dear,” he said, “if we have your cooperation.”
“You want me to invent Mikhail, Adrian? Threats don’t work if the person you’re threatening has nothing to give up.”
“So that’s it.” Adrian stood up abruptly. “I hope you’re prepared for what happens.”
“It’s not in my hands,” she said.
“Can you imagine what they’ll do to you—and the boy—if we send you back?”
“There’s nothing they’ll give you for me,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter.” Adrian looked even more furious. From the headmaster who’d leaned on the front of the desk to the street fighter who stood before her now, he looked ready to break her neck.
“We might just return you to Moscow to encourage a better quality of defector next time,” he sneered.
“Not a strategy I’d rely on,” she said.
“You’re a tough bitch, aren’t you,” he snapped. “But I wonder how tough you’ll be in a cell at the Lubyanka. With the boy,” he added.
“So you’ve come to fuck up Burt’s operation when it’s hardly begun,” she said, and saw, as she’d predicted, that Adrian liked to see a woman swear.
“We haven’t got the name we want,” was all he said, taking a seat behind the desk now. His attitude suddenly changed. He became less threatening—a new approach, she saw.
“If this is about Finn,” he said, “you know the way it was.”
“This isn’t about Finn.”
“Finn left MI6,” Adrian said, ignoring her. “He disobeyed every agreement to stay out of the way. And tragically he died—as a result of getting in the way. Do you have any idea how sad that made me? Finn and I were close, Anna. For sixteen years. He was like a son.”
“If this is about your absolution for Finn’s death, you don’t get to use me as a tool.”
“Finn would have been more forgiving.”
“I’m not Finn.”
“No.” Adrian paused, then leaned his elbows on the desk and clasped his hands together like a prayer. “But revenge for Finn’s death, however, is within our grasp,” he said.
She looked up at him, for the first time. There was no need to speak.
“We’ve found Finn’s killer,” he said. “The man who administered the nerve agent.”
Her eyes flickered. For the first time since she could remember, the closeness to Finn’s death was almost unbearable.
“How sure are you?”
“We know. And once we have Mikhail, my political masters will allow me to deal with him,” Adrian said.
She looked at him. She didn’t know what to say
“The two hang together, you see,” he explained.
A silence descended on the room. Her thoughts were humming over what he’d said. She imagined the car park in Paris, two years before, Finn’s rental car, and the man who had dealt death to him.
She pictured too the laboratory itself, a building she knew well in Moscow, where the KGB made its poisons. Right in the heart of a residential Moscow district, it was. That was typical of the regime she’d escaped from. They built their poison laboratories in the centre of the city.
“We will get our revenge,” Adrian said grittily through the silence.
“Revenge for Finn? Or for you, Adrian?” she said. He looked at her, and she saw a weariness in his eyes. Adrian had aged noticeably in the years since they’d last met, she realised.
