“Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said at last. “We’ll send him this dagger.”
She looked at him, half believing it was going to be this easy.
“You were right, Burt,” she said. “Mikhail was on the list.”
“I guessed so,” Burt replied. “But I had to be sure.”
“He’s Vasily Dubkov. At the Russian cultural centre in Washington, D.C.,” she said.
“So you’ll send him this dagger as a cultural artefact to be identified perhaps?”
“Yes.”
“Just one thing, before we move on,” he said, and put his hand on her arm. “Mikhail’s identity is to remain just between the two of us. For the time being. This goes no further than you and me.”
She nodded her assent.
Then he stood up and looked down at her.
“And now, thank Christ, I can dispense with the services of Salvador,” he said. Behind the triumph in his face, she saw a kind of relief, even compassion for her. “I’m not sorry to do that,” he said. “Salvador is very effective at extracting information.”
“Your chief company enforcer?” she said.
“And a very good one too,” he replied. “Though we don’t call them that these days.”
“Strange name for an enforcer—Salvador,” she said.
“Saviour? Yes, it is, isn’t it. But it makes a kind of sense.” He smiled at her again. “In this upside-down world, at any rate.”
Part Three
Chapter 23
ALONE IN A RENTED apartment, in a foreign city, Vladimir slumped in a scruffy armchair he had bought for forty dollars from a refugee Somali at a flea market in the underground car park around the corner on West Eighty- eighth Street.
After his meeting with Anna, he felt cut off from his own side now, as well as from the Americans. She had driven a wedge of anxiety into his routine.
As the deputy chief of the KGB residency in New York, he had position, if less actual influence than some of his junior officers. The most ambitious of them had linked their positions in the intelligence service to the ministries and the big state energy giants, all now overseen by the KGB back home. But he had missed out, or, as he more truthfully acknowledged, had felt less motivation for the fruits of greed and power than some of his subordinates. He was still trying to work for Russia.
He reflected that while he had never had the political will—or maybe it was lust—to extend his power beyond the job, at least he was good at his job.
His own department was called Line X by Moscow Centre. Line X had produced the best, most prolific, and most profitable information in the past two years from its agents in America, outstripping all the other KGB operations. The Main Adversary, as America was still known at Moscow Centre, continued to produce a regular flow of greedy, or dysfunctional, or merely bored agents who possessed the highest security clearances—Flash and even Critical, as the Americans called them. They were sources who were happy to take the Russian dollar in exchange for, mostly technological, secrets. Line X was the KGB department responsible for technological espionage.
These Russian dollars came from the Kremlin-controlled energy companies; companies that provided a quarter of the world’s natural gas and had the world’s largest oil reserves. Control over them had made the KGB far more powerful than it had ever been during the Cold War. Russia itself might be little changed, but under Vladimir Putin, the KGB was no longer a state within a state. It had become the state, and consequently commanded the state’s money. At the KGB’s New York residency, and at the KGB residency in Washington, D.C., money was almost no object when there was a potential American agent to acquire.
The foreign service of the KGB, the SVR, to which Vladimir was attached, was the elite of the country’s intelligence power. SVR officers were paid far better than they had been in the Cold War, when the most a successful officer stationed abroad could expect were a few foreign-denominated goods to take back home at the end of his service. Now, under Putin’s regime, the intelligence services were awash with cash, siphoned off as they liked from the state energy companies, all of which were now run either by Putin’s KGB cronies or by businessmen who took their orders from the Kremlin.
Corruption had increased proportionately, of course, and Vladimir rued that. Corruption was inefficiency. The favoured officers at the KGB residence in New York, he knew, now creamed off fat percentages from their company backers in the motherland, in return for under-the-counter favours on American soil that only an intelligence officer could perform.
In person and as a spy station, the employees and the residency itself now had far more money than had ever been available. In the new cold war against the Main Adversary, operations against America’s political, industrial, and intelligence institutions were now at full throttle on the Russian side, and he, Vladimir, had been highly commended for his recruitment of American agents in the past year.
But still, as he sat now on the scruffy armchair in the darkness, at this moment he had other things on his mind. He realised he wanted to stay sitting in the chair and drink away his dissatisfaction with the present. He sat without seeing, and as so often in the past, he tried to concoct in his imagination a better future. And he bleakly wondered if that had been his mistake all along.
Walking in darkness over to the cupboard that was screwed badly to the wall and getting looser, he rummaged blindly for the bottle of vodka that was normally there. He found it, shook it in the darkness next to his ear, and heard the splash that told him there was little more than a mouthful left.
He replaced it, picked up his coat and hat from the hook on the inside of the door, and, still without switching on the light, went to the window and surveyed the street four floors below. It was lit in bands where the streetlamps traced by the angled fall of the snow washed their glow onto the wet tarmac.
On a freezing night like this, any watcher would be in a car—he was confident about that. But there were none idling their engines anywhere within his field of vision.
He left the apartment for the walk down the four flights of stairs to the street. The lift was broken again. But he didn’t mind the walk. It suited his mood to be slow.
The two questions since his meeting with Anna were continually playing across his mind. Had she been sent—assigned—to meet him by the Americans? Or was their meeting in the bookshop a genuine coincidence?
Either way, he was wishing it had never happened. He felt himself drawn towards her once again. The embers of his feelings towards her, that stretched back to school days and which he had long assumed were cold ashes, had sprung to life almost immediately.
His mind told him one thing about their meeting, and his heart another. His mind told him—loudly and clearly—that the meeting had been a setup.
But what he desperately wanted in his loneliness and loss was to believe the demands of his heart. And his need for that was stronger than his logical mind. He realised he was caught in a trap, knowing one thing and believing entirely the opposite.
He turned to the left out of the apartment block and saw the desultory Christmas lights still strung around the entrance to the seedy hotel next door. He noted the tramp with the tatty coat and blackened hands, like a burn victim, he thought, and who seemed to suck the intermittent heat from the hotel lobby whenever the automatic doors hissed open. He observed the various aimless or purposeful passersby who came at him through the snow that now fell with increasing force.
In truth, nothing was any different than it had been before the meeting. Nothing, essentially, was any different anywhere, he thought. New York, Moscow—there seemed to him suddenly no difference between the two,
