of his for the briefest moment.
“I’m happy to see you too,” he said. “It was something I never dared to dream.”
She left some dollar bills on the table, and stood up.
“Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said.
“Maybe.”
She felt him watching her leave the cafe and knew he’d be alert for any movement behind her out on the street, anything to indicate it had been a setup. She hoped Burt’s team and anyone else from the American side were far away.
But Burt’s decision to be spontaneous, to cut out the teams of watchers from the cafe, had been the right one. Even as she stepped back out onto the cold sidewalk, she saw nothing.
Chapter 22
ANNA SAT AT THE end of the long wooden table at the Twenty-third Street apartments, her chin rested in one hand. Logan sat slightly slumped next to her on the right, with his elbows on the table, while Marcie was bolt upright on the other side of her, a position she always adopted when Burt was present.
At the far end of the table, flanking Burt, sat Bob Dupont, Burt’s silver-haired head of internal security, and next to him was a man in his thirties with jet-black hair and dark eyes whom Anna hadn’t seen before but whom she learned in passing, though without an introduction, was called Salvador.
On chairs around the walls outside the door and prowling the corridors outside the door were the ubiquitous bodyguards, with Larry, as ever, in charge. The bodyguards had been doubled, and then doubled again like some rampant algae, until a small army of them had grown up, as if to suck the air from any opposition to Burt’s plans.
It was now just under an hour since Anna had returned, and Burt had insisted they should meet immediately. He said this with even more than his usual sense for drama.
Anna was listening to Burt as he wound up his appraisal of her encounter with Vladimir. They all were, in their different guises of concentration—Logan, Marcie, Dupont, Salvador.
Outside the windows, which Burt commanded should be left without the blinds pulled down—against nearly everyone’s advice—the early winter New York night had descended over the city, and snow had begun to fall.
She was tired, she realised. Her mind raced back again over her recent conversation with Vladimir, as it had done repeatedly since she’d left him in the cafe. She was recalling each word, each expression in his face, looking for anything she might have missed—some nuance in his voice, perhaps, some hint in his eyes, or in the gestures of his hands. Was there something hidden in the silences and pauses between them? All might be indications of something that Vladimir hadn’t actually said, or of which even he himself was ignorant.
She knew the meeting with him had taken the strength out of her for the moment, and that alone shocked her. Meeting with Vladimir at all, let alone meeting him again after all these years, had been a strange experience. It had brought back the past—Finn too, as well as Vladimir himself—and most vitally, it had brought back her intimacy with both of them.
And the meeting with Vladimir had also brought her face-to-face with memories of Russia and the stark danger her old country represented to her and Little Finn. Vladimir in New York was an uncomfortable proximity to that.
But while Logan and Marcie and the others were hanging on to Burt’s detailed exposition, with its customary flattering flourishes of praise in her direction, her mind was working along parallel lines at the same time. She was weighing the fateful decision to deceive Burt.
To meet again with Vladimir, in secret from Burt’s teams of observers, at the cafe behind the gym was to take a dangerous step. It risked her whole, albeit tenuous, security and that of Little Finn, painstakingly won over the past months.
Nevertheless, she was already beginning to run her own storyline of her planned breakout from the twenty- four-hour-a-day scrutiny she had lived with for so long. She felt her power increase, both from her own decision to meet Vladimir in secret and as the crucial figure in Burt’s plans.
She looked up at Burt now and felt a change in his own demeanour too. Behind the natural ebullience, she detected a new unfamiliar anxiety, however faint, and she wondered if it had anything to do with the presence of Salvador.
“So we have a narrowed field of possibilities,” Burt was saying, while five floors below an ambulance screamed its siren into every corner of the city streets. “ . . . but it’s not constricting. It helps us, in fact. What Anna has done is to reduce the sauce nicely.” He beamed at her. “She has left Vladimir with just two options; either to meet her again or to refuse contact. Whichever course he takes will tell us something.”
Logan looked up sharply. There was a frown on his face.
“What about the option of simply informing his boss at the KGB residency here?” he said, with unusual bluntness. “That’s what he’ll do, surely? And then the Russians will most likely set up a counteroperation.”
“I don’t consider that in the frame,” Burt replied abruptly, to the surprise of everyone.
There was an awkward silence in the room.
“Why not, Burt?” Marcie asked eventually.
“It is an option. We must consider it,” Logan persisted. “If anything, it’s the closest to a certainty we have.”
“And we’ll leave it out of our considerations,” Burt said, once more with the clear intention of closing this avenue of discussion altogether.
Logan took his elbows off the table and straightened in his chair, putting one hand on the arm as if intending to get up. His eyes flashed with anger, or just incomprehension. Anna read the faces around the table and saw confusion and consternation in all but Salvador’s. He seemed entirely impassive.
Burt let his gaze rest on Logan for a moment, and paused to indicate the importance of what he was he going to say.
“Listen again, Logan. All of you,” he said. He swept his gaze now around the table. “If we include that as a possibility, if Vladimir brings in the Russians, their activity will be visible on the streets. Yes? And that will draw others in, from our own side. So we’ll have the agency and God knows who else crawling all over this. We need to keep it tight. Just us. Just Cougar. This must be deeply personal. It’s about a relationship, a once cruelly intimate relationship between Anna and Vladimir.”
He looked at her without expression. This was not how Burt had ever behaved with her. It was not like Burt to be anything but strenuously sensitive in the matters of her past. But now his tone of voice was almost crude, as if he wanted to sting her.
Where is he leading with this? she thought. What is the purpose?
“It’s between Anna and Vladimir now,” Burt repeated. “Under our protection, of course. That way it’s controllable. Savvy?”
He looked at Logan in particular. Logan nodded without agreement, but Burt wasn’t finished. “Once we let this operation out of our own control, we lose our momentum,” he said. “It’s vital we all understand this now. We don’t just lose our grasp on the operation, which is a company matter—Cougar’s. We will also most likely lose Mikhail. Why? They’re all waiting out there to pounce on Mikhail. To be blunt, Mikhail represents a huge victory for whoever gets him, and victory means money, government contracts, expansion, Cougar’s expansion. Mikhail is the bottom line—he is on the profit side in the profit-and-loss account. Mikhail means power. I intend Mikhail to be Cougar’s asset and Cougar’s alone. We’re the biggest game in town right now, and all the rest of them want a place at the high table.”
There was a stunned silence around the room. Mikhail had suddenly been presented as a balance sheet item, rather than a figure of national importance to America’s security.
It was Dupont who broke the silence. He spoke in the soft, rumbling tone of voice he used in matters of urgency.
“Because we don’t want Vladimir to bring in his own people by informing the Russian intelligence services here,” he said carefully, “and because we don’t want the agency responding to their subsequent presence on the
