“Yes—good, Marcie,” Burt drawled. “Anna, you need to present yourself as entirely confident in whatever the future holds, here in America or back in Russia. It doesn’t matter to you. You will be—you are—who you are despite your circumstances. Quintessentially you. That is your strength. Let’s play always to the truth.
“Firstly,” he continued, “Vladimir gets no choice about meeting you, no time to plan, no time to rehearse a reaction. We’ll work on the details. Maybe he has to follow you, that would be best. But you’ll meet him cold, no previous contact. It could be that you walk into one of the cafes he goes to. Either he’ll approach you, or he’ll stay back, watch you, then follow you. He’ll be wary, sure—he’ll be looking out for tails. He won’t believe entirely in the coincidence, but he’ll want to believe.”
“He’ll be afraid too,” Logan said. “He smuggled you out of Russia.”
“And if he no longer has those feelings for me that he had?” Anna asked. “Maybe he’s thought for years now that our affair was just fiction from my point of view. Maybe he’ll be angry. Maybe he’ll have learned to hate me.”
“Is he a resentful man?” Marcie asked.
Anna thought for a moment. “No, he isn’t resentful,” Anna replied. “I think the key to Vladimir, apart from his feelings for me in the past, is that he has seen the way our system operates. Don’t forget, he was banished for ten years at the beginning of the nineties to the Cape Verde Islands. He knows the viciousness of our masters, and their essential stupidity. In some ways, if Vladimir had had the incentives I had—a lover in the West, in other words—I’m not sure he wouldn’t have seen that as a way out of his past too.”
“But does he have the courage?” Marcie said.
“Where we’re getting to, I think,” Burt said, “is that rather than you suggesting you want to return to Russia, the role you play is tempting him to come the other way. To us. Principally to you, of course. But like Marcie says, does he have the balls?”
Anna stayed silent.
“There are some things we can’t know until you both meet,” Logan said. “And even then, Vladimir isn’t just going to throw his hands in the air and defect, just because he loves you.”
“There are two things the first meeting needs to achieve,” Burt summed up. “The first thing is a second meeting. The second is the most accurate assessment you can make of his feelings towards you.”
“Vladimir’s not like one of the mindless apparatchiks who fill my old organisation,” Anna said.
“And yet he’s got the top spot at the UN in New York and, we believe, is the KGB’s resident here,” Logan said. “He must be trusted a great deal.”
“Let’s play to his known differences with the KGB,” Burt said.
“Appeal to his personal courage,” Marcie said.
“What do you think, Logan?” Anna said. For a reason she didn’t fully understand, she wanted his reaction.
“You fooled him once with your pretence of love,” Logan said. “Maybe you can do it again.”
Anna looked at him questioningly, and saw a broad smile break across his handsome face.
“Only joking.”
Anna found herself smiling back at him, as if they had some implicit secret.
“You should be wired, of course,” Logan said adamantly.
“Why?” Marcie, once again contradicting Logan at every turn.
Anna decided to wait while the others had their say.
“It’s too much,” Marcie said. “We’ll know from Anna what takes place.”
“Certainly we will,” Burt said supportively.
So she was to be trusted to convey what took place between her and Vladimir.
“What about you, Anna?” Marcie said.
“In my opinion it’s unnecessary,” Anna replied. “Besides, I want to be able to demonstrate to Vladimir that I’m not wired. There are ways I can show him fairly conclusively that I’m not. He can search me if he likes. He’ll do what he has to do. But if he even thinks I might be wired, we lose everything with him.”
“You?” Burt shot a look at Logan.
“Okay,” he said.
But Anna saw that he didn’t agree.
“That’s four of us then,” Burt said.
Outside the control room, Burt took Marcie aside. They withdrew into one of the smaller rooms in the labyrinthine apartments, and Burt shut the door.
“What’s with Logan?” he asked without preamble.
“I think he’s getting too involved with Anna.”
“He’s behaving badly. Is she getting to him?”
“I think so. She doesn’t take him as seriously as he wants her to take him.”
“He’ll need watching,” said Burt. “I don’t want him fucking things up over some juvenile infatuation.”
The meeting between Anna and Vladimir had now been sanctioned by four National Security committees. There had even been a special note in the morning White House intelligence briefing.
Marcie and Logan returned with files on Vladimir’s activities, his known contacts and preferred New York hangouts—all the minutiae of his life since his arrival in America a year before.
A round-the-clock spot team was put on to Vladimir, provided by the CIA but reporting to Burt’s headquarters. “We’re working together,” Burt said grimly. Vladimir was photographed wherever he went outside the UN and the Russian compound. Logan and Marcie returned with recorded conversations, tapped phone calls, even satellite images of Vladimir’s movements, as well as the surveillance on the ground.
The vast array of American technology had been brought to bear. The WorldView-1 military satellite that invisibly circled the earth on a daily basis was tasked to pay special attention to Vladimir and anyone he came into contact with. The satellite was capable of mapping 300,000 square miles a day, with definition that could read a car licence plate anywhere in the day’s field of view.
This overkill, as Burt called it, was, he believed, running the risk of itself being spotted by the Russians. But it was justified at the CIA by the fact that the entire state intelligence community now needed Mikhail more than ever. It was firmly accepted that the first step in drawing Mikhail out into the open—if indeed he proved to be in America at all—was for Anna to present herself at the heart of the KGB’s presence.
The Russian agent the British had detected through their source in Moscow’s defence ministry was now given critical status. And finding Mikhail had become more important than ever.
As a piece of valuable bait, Anna discovered that those around her had become more courteous than ever. She was now a most prized piece of meat, the lure without which the endgame could not be reached, let alone won. And she accepted her role, not just because there was no choice, but also because in her mind she was personally curious to see if Mikhail would contact her. It would lift the burden of the previous months, of the two years since Finn’s death. Mikhail’s anticipated approach to her would be the real beginning of the end—a new life.
All of these preparations took weeks of grinding slowness to approach the moment of contact itself, and it was now just a few days before Christmas. Burt insisted they all take some time off—Anna to reunite with Little Finn, and Marcie to stay with her. They were all invited to Burt’s ranch for Christmas itself. It consisted of half a million acres of New Mexico wilderness, and Burt took Little Finn on tours to find the herds of bison and elk. They even spotted a mountain lion on the day after Christmas. “A cougar,” Burt proudly said, and smiled.
But for the three days of the vacation Anna was loaded with boxes of photographs of Vladimir and transcripts of conversations covertly obtained. Recordings of Vladimir’s voice were also included, as well as several lists of his favourite New York shops and cafes. She memorised them all, the cafes, bars, shops, parks—and anywhere else he liked to spend his free time.
Finally, details of the routes he habitually took to and from the Russian compound and the UN building were marked with refinements, detours, and inconsistencies, all updated daily.
