Anna walked into the lobby and looked around her. She checked her watch. She’d taken thirty-five minutes, but she couldn’t see Logan. She walked over to a sitting area and checked the bar. He had not arrived. Not that it mattered now. She would sit and wait in the most prominent part of the lobby and see who showed up.
It was Larry who walked in. He looked the wrong way, then turned in her direction. She was looking straight at him, and she saw that his face was set with infuriated calm. So they’d found Logan. She stood up and walked over to him.
“Sorry, Larry,” she said.
“Are you coming quietly?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied.
Chapter 25
VLADIMIR STOOD IN FRONT of Villamil’s painting
It was more like a battle scene, he thought, than the formal execution of the corrida.
He was aware of the man who had stepped up to another picture three to the right of him, a Goya. The man was slightly closer to the picture and seemed equally absorbed.
Neither of them glanced in the other’s direction, but Vladimir knew just from his field of vision when he took his attention away from the painting that it was the man he had come to meet. He was on time as always, eager to give, pulsing almost visibly with some need to divulge classified information that would have put him in prison for the rest of his life if he were caught.
Why? Vladimir wondered, as he always did. But Erosion was his best source. He gave to Vladimir what he gave for reasons the Russian didn’t really understand.
Erosion sat on a special committee, which was privy to information of high value to the Russians. He was paid well by the American government, he had a pleasant house in the suburb of Chevy Chase, a wife he seemed to appreciate, two kids in decent schools. It couldn’t be the money, Vladimir thought, as he often did when he was trying to comprehend the motives of his agents.
Thanks to Vladimir, Erosion also had a healthy and growing bank account in Mexico City. But all this cash in return for secrets was money the man dared not openly reveal. To spend it on luxuries, to be richer than his perfectly respectable salary permitted, would ultimately have drawn the attention of the CIA or one of the other government intelligence agencies who might take an interest in individuals like Erosion. He held valuable secrets of state, and could ultimately draw down all the wrath in the world. What was the money for?
The SVR paid its American agents well, but Vladimir found it hard to believe that a man with so much could hazard it all for a few hundred thousand dollars he was afraid to use. It was more like the illusion of money than money itself. Was it greed, then? Money for money’s sake? No, he thought, greed did not fully explain the phenomenon, not just of Erosion but of his other American agents. He detected a hoarding mentality. Sometimes he thought it wouldn’t really matter what the Russians gave in return for these secrets—acres of land, tons of coffee beans stored in a warehouse, artworks—because the disease seemed to be about possession. It was the hoarder’s faulty mental state they were feeding. The man was an empty shell, and maybe he sought exterior things to fill the hole in himself. Money just happened to be the commodity that was most familiar to the hoarder’s imagination.
From the corner of his eye Vladimir saw the man take a final look at the painting and move slowly away, pausing at the next briefly, another Goya, then looking at his watch. A decision was made, and he walked purposefully towards the gallery’s cafeteria.
Vladimir waited until he was out of sight before looking down at his programme, studying the room’s other offerings and walking past the next two pictures, until he paused at the third, the one Erosion had been studying. But this time, he looked sightlessly at the picture, the countess of something or other, and instead began with imperceptible precision to make a sweep of the gallery’s large hall.
There was a man at the far end who hadn’t taken his hat off; a couple, probably retired; two girls who looked like students; and two uniformed staff members who guarded the doors at either end as well as the pictures between them. He decided he would watch the man with the hat a while longer, to make sure he recognised him if he appeared again, in the cafe, without his coat and hat.
Temporarily satisfied, Vladimir made his own way into the cafe.
Erosion had just reached the front of the queue at the self-service counter and was paying for his lunch; soup, bread, cheese, and something sweet in a wrapper. Vladimir joined the end of the queue. When he had paid, he carried his tray to the nearest available table, without looking up to find where Erosion was seated. He put the tray down, took off his coat, and placed it over a second chair. Then he sat down.
The cafe was half full; it was easy to observe without seeming to observe. He found Erosion sitting at a table in the corner where he sat for their meetings when he had some material. So he had received the drop Vladimir had left for him the night before. His presence meant the presence of information, the table where he sat a sign for a delivery.
The drop would be made here in the cafeteria, and the pickup would follow. They never need look in each other’s eyes.
Vladimir saw the man in the hat enter the cafe. He had removed it, along with his coat, as Vladimir had expected. It meant nothing in itself; anyone who had entered the museum would have entered it wrapped up against the cold outside, and then slowly unwrapped in the warmth inside.
But despite the perfectly normal behaviour of the man, Vladimir decided to follow through the pickup without the man still present in the cafe. That would mean a wait until he had gone. Vladimir’s tradecraft had taught him that no pickup was better than a messy one. If it meant returning to the museum later, when the man had gone, that’s what he would have to do.
Vladimir read the morning’s newspaper, the meal taking second place in his attention. He ate slowly, until he finally observed the man with the hat take his tray to the trolley by the door and exit from the cafe. A civilian, he thought, just a casual visitor.
He glanced up and saw that Erosion had also finished his meal and was piling up the plates and wrappers onto the tray and then carrying the tray to a trolley and leaving. No glance, no word exchanged between them. It was a simple drop-off. The signal to indicate the need for a face-to-face meeting had not been made. It was routine. Vladimir continued reading and idly left the remains of his plate of pasta. It was two thirty in the afternoon.
He watched the busboys in the kitchen behind the serving counter and took his tray to the trolley, where he slid his hand beneath the tray Erosion had left and withdrew a screwed-up napkin at the same moment as he slid his tray onto the trolley. He didn’t put the paper in his pocket, not yet, but concealed it in his hand until he was clear of the cafe and he’d had the chance to check the first exhibition room for the man in the hat. But as he entered it for the second time, he saw it was empty, just the two staff members who sat by the doors like statues.
He slipped the paper into his pocket and left the room, into the next hall, consulting his programme to see the history of the painting he’d chosen to stop and observe. When he was calmly in a state of almost believing his own interest in the painting, he left the gallery and took a cab to the airport.
On the way, he read the coded words Erosion had left him on the napkin.
There had been a Russian intelligence officer at Langley, around four months previously. It isn’t known what was the purpose of her visit, it read. There was considerable excitement about her presence among the various echelons of government,
Erosion was eager to please, as always. Was that it, he wondered, simply a desire to please? Was that the motivation of the lost people on the American side who aided his, the Russian, cause? But deep inside himself, he knew with bitterness that he possessed the desire to please in equal measure.
So it was a “her.” Vladimir tucked the screwed-up napkin in the pocket of his coat to dispose of later. Anna— there was almost no doubt it was her—had been at Langley. But was she working for them, or were they just
