debriefing her? Either way, she bore the marks of a defector, as far as the Forest was concerned. Back in Moscow, they had erected shooting targets bearing her image, for trainee officers to practice on down on the rifle ranges at Yasenevo.
Where did that leave him? With the knowledge of her likely affiliations, certainly—and then his prospective meeting with her. He knew he would not pass on the information to his superiors, not yet in any case. Anna was his—one way or the other.
The plane touched down at LaGuardia at half past six in the evening. He took another cab, through the Midtown Tunnel to Manhattan. Then he switched cabs for the ride along the East River, and disembarked once again several blocks from the residence in Riverdale.
He walked without stopping at any bar this time. There was an urgency about him, the fresh blood of pursuit in his nostrils. He wanted clarity. He wanted to know, absolutely, if such a thing were possible.
He entered the residency as the evening shift was coming on and went upstairs to the cramped room, tapped the codes into the computer on his desk, and looked at what came up. He saw that his friend, the SVR resident in Geneva, had made contact. He scrawled down the message on a piece of paper, marked with the stain of a coffee cup, reached for the china cup with the month’s codes stamped on the bottom, and began to decipher the message.
“She was offered to our head of station in Montenegro in August last year. For a high price. It was agreed. The interlocutor was an American called Logan Halloran, formerly with the Main Adversary’s station in the Balkans, now believed to be operating alone. A freelancer. Money paid to him, but no exchange. Shit everywhere. Believed the MA got her.”
Vladimir sat back in the chair and swung gently from side to side. The blinds were pulled down as they usually were; there was just the desk lamp for light. He felt himself cocooned.
So this man Halloran had sold her to all of them, perhaps. Who else? To the British too, as well as the Americans and the Russians? She was more a hostage than a defector, he thought. The Americans had bought her like a sack of corn.
And the Montenegro resident would no doubt have had a lot of explaining to do. Moscow wanted the female Russian colonel very badly, and he’d slipped up. A demotion in rank? Or would they put him right out in the cold, like they’d done to him, Vladimir, all those years ago with his posting to the Cape Verde Islands? Or would it be even worse for him than that?
Vladimir sat in the darkness, having pushed himself away from the pool of light on the desk. He surveyed his options. The longer he held on to the knowledge of her without informing his superiors, the worse it would be for him. If they ever found out.
Chapter 26
BURT PAUSED BEFORE A nineteenth-century clapboard house that stood about three hundred yards above the beach. A bitterly cold wind blew onshore from the direction of Greenland, and the icy waves nodded their heads onto the raked pebbles with a lethargy that, in a human being, would have been the final stage before freezing to death. A few gulls circled above their heads, screeching faintly into the wind.
He turned to Anna. Without removing his hands from the pockets of his coat, he simply nodded towards the house.
“That belonged to my grandfather,” he said. “From my mother’s side of the family.”
“So you didn’t start with nothing, Burt,” she said.
He guffawed hugely. “No. I had a great deal. A great deal. But I could have frittered it away.” He paused, as if reflecting on the possibilities of simply spending the family fortune. “He was in steel,” he added. “Out in Pittsburgh. But they all bought their summer homes in Long Island and built their country clubs in Pennsylvania for weekends.”
He walked on, and she kept in step with him, the wet stones crunching softly beneath her feet. She couldn’t see them, but she knew his scouts were out, ahead and behind them somewhere. Larry had been pacified. He’d wanted to break parts of Logan, in the wilful belief that it had been him who had led her astray.
Logan was now at the apartment with Dupont and Marcie, while Burt had brought her up here alone. They were to be questioned apart, her and Logan.
For his part, everything that had happened twenty-four hours before confirmed to Burt that he had been right. She knew what she was doing, particularly when it came to Mikhail. And since he hadn’t let her run free himself, she had devised a way of doing so. The escapade to the Mercer Hotel was brilliantly done, and he still hadn’t asked her why, what was the purpose of it. Yet he knew that it had been something to do with her and Mikhail, and nothing connected to Logan. Logan was just the wrench that opened the door.
Burt glanced sideways at her as they walked. She seemed to read him perfectly, he thought, just as she’d read Logan. How he admired her for that. Her genius for the long game lay in her bet that she could expect his, Burt’s, admiration even when—no, particularly when—she sabotaged his plans. She’d played him along for weeks, and now he was about to find out why.
Something told him now, and had told him right back at the start, that even with her vulnerable child as a pawn and an execution squad and worse waiting for her back in Russia, she would have still hardened herself to threat like tempered steel.
“You reached the hotel a few minutes before Logan,” he said conversationally. “That’s some feat. All he had to do was get there. But you did something else too, didn’t you.”
“Mikhail made contact,” she said simply. There was no reason to lie.
He didn’t ask her how Mikhail had made contact. He didn’t regret that he personally had kept her in the loop about the exact arrangements whereby Mikhail was to make contact. She was spontaneous, she worked with whatever material she had available. It wasn’t his own devious thinking or even instinct that had led him to allow her to know the mail office and box number. So it must have been, he thought with amusement, his direct line to God. He’d acted entirely without thought.
“When?” he said. “When did he make a meeting?”
“The day after I meet with Vladimir.”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“And you and you alone want to be the one who asks him what he wants.”
“Yes, Burt. That’s the only way it’s going to work. With his willingness. Neither you, nor your organisation, nor all the organisations or the full force of the American government can change that.”
“I understand.”
“I know,” she said.
He chuckled to himself. And I know you know I know, he thought. She was a gift from God, this girl.
“You want to leave the apartment alone?” he said. “Go solo. You want to meet him with no surveillance whatsoever?”
“That’s the only way this is going to work. He hasn’t survived this long inside the Kremlin, all around Europe, and now over here by being blind. He’ll know. That’s my opinion.”
“Mine too,” he said, and thought briefly that this, perhaps, was one good thing that could come out of the privacy of an intelligence operation being conducted through a contract company. If the CIA had their hands on this, they’d just lie to her. There was no way that Langley would let her off the leash on her own, not with Mikhail as the prize.
But most likely, even in the context of the private intelligence companies, he believed that only he, Burt, would have had the foresight to consider it, let alone act on it.
They walked on for a hundred yards or so. His face where the scarf didn’t quite cover it was burned from the cold.
“And you’ll trust me in this,” he said. “In letting you go solo.”
“Completely,” she lied.
