It was perfect, he thought. He was taking advice, orders almost, from his own captive. For that, in truth, was what she’d been all along. The perfection of this turning of the tables filled him with a sense of contentment that was only partly due to his knowledge that she was right about Mikhail. He knew they only had one chance with Mikhail, and that was her. If she couldn’t get through to him, nobody and nobody’s legions could.
He asked her if she wanted to find somewhere warm, have a drink perhaps? But she preferred to walk, and he was happy to be outside. The more the weather threw at them, the more he enjoyed it.
“You were lucky you didn’t break my man’s leg with that damn fire extinguisher,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t.”
“He’s got an ankle the size of a football, though,” Burt said with some mirth.
“I’ll apologise.”
“And Logan?” he asked her, after they’d tramped along the beach about a quarter of a mile from his grandfather’s old house.
“None of this was his doing,” she said.
“I’m angry with him. For you, it was about something important, for him it was a whim. He could have jeopardised everything we’ve spent months working on. I had half a mind to turn him over to Larry.” Burt chuckled. “People don’t cross me unless it’s for a good reason.”
“I’ll remember, Burt.”
“You had a good reason.” He laughed. She talks to me like we’re equals, partners, he marvelled. And I guess we are, in some way. She apologises for nothing, except the guy’s damn leg. She justifies nothing. And that was another reason he had to trust her now.
“Logan’s not going to be pleased with you,” Burt said.
“I’ll have to make it up to him.”
He looked at her, but her face gave nothing away.
“Would you have gone to a room with him?” he said. “If we hadn’t got to him?”
“That’s what I said,” she replied. “It’s the least I could have done.”
He caught himself feeling protective of her, like a father. He didn’t like it that she was so casual with herself.
“It’s not the way I’d like to think of you giving yourself to men,” he said, and heard the awkwardness in his voice.
She laughed out loud and put her hand on his back.
“I don’t give myself to men,” she said. “That’s a very sweet, old-fashioned thought.”
“You’d do it for yourself, then?” he asked. “Sleep with him?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I like Logan, and I’d like to go to bed with him. He’s done me that favour, he’s broken the spell of Finn. He’s cleared the way, and I’m grateful.”
A rare cloud crossed Burt’s mind as he thought of Logan’s part in her entrapment.
“You’d sleep with him?” he asked and felt suddenly like an awkward father with a sixteen-year-old daughter. It was deeply unfamiliar territory.
“As a friend, yes,” she said. “Why not?”
They turned away from the sea and made for a car park at the edge of the beach dusted with wind-blown sand.
As they arrived, the car drew in, followed by another of Burt’s war vehicles, as Logan called them. Somewhere the watchers had seen Burt’s movements—and even his intentions.
They drove back to the city, and Anna slept most of the way. Despite the coming events, she felt more calm than she had done for many weeks. Her ultimate goal might be different from Burt’s, but they both shared the same methods to reach where they each wanted to go. They also shared a wish to find Mikhail in order to reach their goals.
That evening, she and Logan went out to dinner, at Burt’s suggestion. It was a reconciliation, he said.
Larry was furious, the muscles in his face twitching with barely repressed frustration. There were the usual watchers with them, and they followed them along the street afterwards as they headed for another apartment to which the keys were magically provided.
“See you in the morning,” Burt had said to her quietly, and away from everybody, before they’d left. “Ten o’clock. We have work to do.”
For Burt, the whole arrangement had a surreal quality to it. But he realised there was no ulterior motive, either his own or from the two of them, and that the seemingly forced nature of the assignation had more to do with natural circumstances than he liked to admit.
If she had been a man relaxing on the eve of an assignment, he realised, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
In the restaurant, Anna and Logan skirted around the events of the day before, he because he didn’t want to bring up his own failure, she for more philosophical reasons; the events of the past were not in her mind to use as a bludgeon for the present.
But as they entered the apartment after dinner, she looked at Logan and said, “So I won the bet. You got caught.”
He saw the mischief in her eyes.
“Yes. You did.”
“But I’m quite generous,” she said.
“I appreciate that.”
“Maybe you’ll be better in the bedroom than on the street,” she said with a laugh. “You couldn’t be any worse.”
He looked at her supremely confident eyes and felt his nerves and his skin and his flesh reaching out towards her touch. But she just stood and looked straight back at him, in neither a challenge nor a retreat.
Still facing each other, they took off their coats and hung them on a stand by the door. They both looked around at the service apartment; a sitting room with a huge window thirty-four floors above the street, the elegant digits of Manhattan’s skyline lit around their edges like constellations.
Behind the sitting room, a door was open to a bedroom and another large picture window. The apartment, he thought inconsequentially, had no kitchen.
He flicked the lock on the door behind them and kissed her. They kissed for a long time, standing four feet inside the room. She unbuttoned his shirt, and they kicked their shoes away. Then she took his hand and walked to the sofa.
“There’s a bedroom through there,” he said.
“Maybe later.”
She let go of the confusion of passions and motives that tried to insinuate themselves into her mind. She wanted sex, that was all. If he was looking for something more, that was his lookout. He was what she wanted right now.
But when they made love, she didn’t have her eyes open, as she had always done with Finn.
For security reasons left unexplained, but which Burt described as “normal procedure,” they decamped from the apartment on Twenty-third Street the morning after her night with Logan. Her meeting with Vladimir would take place the next day.
At ten o’clock, when they both arrived at the apartment—and Larry grimaced in the background, unable to meet her eyes—Burt, Logan, Marcie, and Anna left in a car for the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, where a helicopter took them away from New York to another property in Burt’s apparently inexhaustible empire. It was a farmhouse this time, in the New Hampshire countryside.
By midday the four of them were sitting around a hickory table in the kitchen, while a new security team patrolled the perimeters. Larry, it appeared, was being given a rest.
Burt wasted no time. “The immediate requirement for both your meeting with Vladimir and then your meeting with Mikhail concerns a piece of intelligence gleaned from our British friends,” he said.
Marcie and Logan both looked up in surprise, while Anna, Burt noted, remained focused on a point somewhere in the middle distance beyond the sliding glass doors in the kitchen, which looked out onto snow- covered gardens. But Logan and Marcie both saw that Burt was in no mood for interruptions.
