“For the future, Anna,” he said, for the first time using her name. “To deter them from doing it again.”
“You think they’ll care? The killer’s probably some common criminal they trained up for the purpose. Expendable. That’s what they do. Killing someone like that won’t deter them.”
“But it must be done,” Adrian said.
She didn’t ask him who the killer was, though she saw in Adrian’s eyes that he wanted her to. She knew he wouldn’t tell her, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of refusing.
And then Adrian reverted to his ruthless exposition of her position.
“Do you really think you can get your way?” he said to her. “Think hard before you decide you don’t know Mikhail. It may be final. You’re useful now, and maybe for a while longer, but eventually that will come to an end. You’ll need to be a bit more accommodating if you want your freedom. You’ll need friends. And in this game, friends are the people you help.”
“If I need friends, are you offering?” she said.
He looked like he wanted to strike her. But then he calmed his face and regarded her with cold eyes.
“For the last time, who’s Mikhail?”
“And for the last time, Adrian, I don’t know.”
“Burt can protect you for a while. But his time’s running out too. I’ll see to that,” he said.
Adrian got up from his chair, but he didn’t leave the room. She stayed seated, as she had been since he’d entered. He walked back over to the window, and once again his face was lost against the blinding white of the winter sun. Then he turned to her.
“All right. Suppose I believe you,” he said. “Suppose I accept you don’t know Mikhail. What would you do in my position?”
She said nothing.
“Time, safety, and all hope are running out for you,” he said, and left.
Chapter 20
ON THE DAY AFTER Adrian’s visit, Burt suddenly announced that they would be decamping for New York on the following day. Adrian’s visit seemed to have injected a new vigour into Burt’s measured plans. Burt had made a decision and seemed happier with the prospect of action. In the study after breakfast there was an air of expectancy.
But Anna knew that Little Finn would have to stay. They were on an operational footing now, Burt told her, and it was unsafe for the boy to be moved around.
“Why New York?” Anna asked.
It was Marcie who answered her question. “You’re going to make contact with Vladimir,” she told her. “Vladimir is the new starting line for Mikhail.”
At seven o’clock on the following morning, Anna, Burt, Logan, and Marcie left the log house. Little Finn seemed more concerned that the bodyguards were leaving. They’d played endlessly with him since Anna’s arrival in America, and Burt promised him some more bodyguards to play with. “They’re on the helicopter right now that’s coming to pick us up,” he said, and stroked Little Finn’s head with affection.
By nine o’clock they were on a Cougar company jet to New York, and by afternoon the four of them, as well as Larry, Christoff, and Joe, moved into a set of three fifth-floor apartments on Twenty-third Street. More of Burt’s property empire, Marcie informed Anna.
Inside, the apartments, except the bedrooms, were in chaos. There were a dozen Cougar employees setting up communications equipment, testing listening devices, and filling floors and tables with computers, empty boxes, and tangled skeins of wire.
They were tired from the journey, and there was nowhere inviting enough in the apartments to sit around just yet. Anna made her excuses and went to her room. To sleep, she said. But what she needed now was to plan for what lay ahead. And that meant the deception of Burt and all of them.
In the morning, the preparations—laying the ground for her approach to Vladimir—would begin.
At ten o’clock on the following day, Anna and Logan drank coffee in a kitchen piled with boxes of catering equipment. He was civil, but reserved, she noted. Her rebuff, perhaps? She’d voiced her concern to Marcie about Logan’s discipline. Perhaps Logan had received a warning from Burt.
They all met after breakfast in Burt’s control room, as the technical people who had rigged the place were calling it. It had four windows overlooking the street, fitted with blackout blinds.
Logan as usual opened the questioning.
“We’re interested in your relationship with Vladimir,” he said.
Outside the window, the New York sky hung low like a wet, grey blanket, and there was little cheer except in the eager faces in the room.
Burt had appeared only briefly, to explain to her that they would need to get right beneath the skin of her former attachment to Vladimir, in order to establish a base for her contact with him. And the first task was to figure out all the options available for the approach.
“Tell me, what’s the purpose of making contact?” she’d asked Burt.
“So that your presence here is known to the Russians.”
“As bait for them?” she said
“No.” Then: “Only in part,” he corrected himself.
“I show myself to Vladimir. . . . What then?”
“If the Russians know you’re here, then it’ll become known to Mikhail.”
“So you think he’s here? In America?”
“He may be, he may not be. But if he is, I believe he’ll contact you. Even if he’s not here, there’s a chance he will. And that way, Mikhail will tell us who he is.”
“And you’ll give him the opportunity to accept or refuse the Americans?” she asked.
“Everyone has a choice.”
Anna saw an opportunity. If Mikhail came to her, then she was relieved of the burden. She would be his intermediary, as Finn had been. And it would solve the impasse between her and the Americans. It was, perhaps, a way out.
At that point, Burt left the room.
But now Logan was looking directly at her with his clear blue eyes, and he didn’t let his gaze fall as he usually did.
“You and Vladimir go back a long way,” Marcie said. “But we’re most interested in the time when your relationship became an affair.”
So they knew that too.
“It was just a week,” Anna said.
“You’ve told us briefly about Vladimir,” Marcie said. “We want you to fill it out a little.”
Anna paused to decide on the best place to start.
“As soon as I was assigned by my controllers to join Finn in France,” she began, “every eleven days I would compile a report for my chief in Moscow. The reports went to Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB chief. He and Putin were old comrades from Petersburg, and Putin was taking an interest in Finn. Because of Mikhail, of course. Finn and I would compile the report together, to make sure I was able to give them genuinely useful information. Finn, I know, gave away certain secrets of the British—minor ones—in order to establish my usefulness. We both knew that unless I was seen to be useful, I would be recalled to Russia, perhaps for good. And that would be the end of us. Already I was writing my reports for the sole purpose of staying with Finn.
“On my first recall to Russia, which was routine after over two years with Finn, I was debriefed at the Lubyanka in Moscow and then at the Forest. There were two schools of thought, I came to realise. The first one was that my mission as Finn’s lover was wasting valuable time and resources without getting the crucial information that would lead to the discovery and arrest of Mikhail. The second was that it was a long process, and that victory would come only with patience.”
She looked up at Marcie. “Nothing changes, does it, Marcie, whichever side you’re on?”
