and then don’t drink it?”
“It’s about whether you and I, Anna, can deal with each other on the personal or only the political and intelligence level. It’s about whether any trust can exist between us as who we are to each other, not who we are as far as my people—once your people, remember—and the Americans are concerned. Can we eliminate all considerations outside each other?”
“Then it’s the almost same as what I was saying,” she replied. “Are we ultimately working for ourselves, or are we working for others? I’ve told you what I’m doing. Everything, including making an invitation to you on their behalf, is for my benefit. That’s my endgame, not entrapping you or any other Russian spy. The fact that I believe your freedom can’t lie in Russia—not with your background—and it might lie here is incidental to my own interests. By coming here, I’m fulfilling a task that will result, someday, in my freedom from it all.”
“So you believe.”
“With the cards that I have, yes.”
“So you’re here to make me an offer?”
“Yes. But as I say, whether you accept it, or even consider it, is not important to me. I’ll have done what I was asked to do, discharged my responsibilities to them. If you refuse, I’m a stone. They can’t extract water from me. At some point my usefulness to them will be at an end.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “Really, Anna, I do. You know, I care for you as much as I ever did.”
“You’ll always be my true friend. That’s what I believe.”
“And more than that?”
“I can’t see the future. But if you accept this invitation, don’t do it for anything other than your own welfare. Then you won’t be disappointed.”
He smiled and went to put his hand on hers, but withdrew it before they touched.
“One thing I’ve always loved about you is that you’re impossible to disbelieve. You never gave me any hope. I love you for that.”
“I never found that hope gave me very much, other than anxiety and disappointment.”
“That sounds cynical.”
“It isn’t. It’s what makes me free.”
“I’ll think about that.”
She leaned across the table and looked him in the eyes. She did put her hand on his, where he’d been too afraid to do so.
“Finn died because he didn’t act in his own interests. He thought he could put something right. He was guilty about a boy who’d been killed, again by your people, in Luxembourg. He blamed himself. It was one of his contacts who had given the KGB the information that was the boy’s death warrant. Finn wanted to absolve himself of this guilt. He couldn’t be selfish—in the best sense of the word. He wanted to change the things and people outside himself. That’s what doomed him. He never asked himself the question, ‘Is this guilt in my best interest?’ He went instead to look for absolution, and they killed him.”
She left the palm of her hand flattened against the back of his.
“You really think you can be free, darling Anna?”
“I can only act freely.”
“And that’s what you’re doing now—with this invitation.”
“Yes. Do whatever’s right for you, Vladimir, and you’ll always be my true friend. You can come over to the Americans or stay where you are, it’s the same to me.”
He glanced sideways at the plates the waitress had left some time before, and Anna withdrew her hand.
“The food’s cold,” he said, and they both laughed.
He called the waitress and asked her for two more meals, the same again.
“Is your son like you?” he asked suddenly.
“You know,” she replied, “I can’t work it out. Sometimes he seems more like Finn. But he’s only two years old.”
The omelette and the pasta arrived, and this time they ate immediately. The conversation had lifted the heavy weight of expectation from them both, and had restored their appetite.
When they’d finished, and Vladimir had ordered more coffee, he looked at her, and she saw concern in his face.
“How much do you know about how you were found in France?” he said.
“Why?”
“Haven’t you ever thought about it?” he said, and she saw he was deliberately not answering her question.
“Yes. But I’ve had no real information. Anyway, the outcome was the best it could have been in the circumstances.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Moscow found us. My son was kidnapped. They nearly had me back there. I’d have had to go back. I knew that, of course.”
“For your son’s sake.”
“Yes.”
“Even though it wouldn’t have been in your best interests. You’d have been shot.”
“Touche,” she said smiling. “But then the Americans arrived just in time and got my son away from them.”
“The cavalry riding to the rescue,” he said, and smiled thinly.
She didn’t see the point he was making.
“And that information, of course, comes from your American saviours,” he continued.
“Yes. They were watching me at the same time. They saw what happened. They intercepted my son before he could be taken out of France. And then they found me.”
“Heroes.”
“What are you getting at? Trying to undermine my relationship with them? Come on, Vladimir, things were going nicely.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
She saw the depth of his concern for her this time, and she laid down her objections.
“What have you got to say?”
“When I was checking you out in the past week,” he said, “I spoke to an old contact. In Geneva. I was asking him about the last sighting of you in Europe. He told me this story. Our resident in Montenegro received a communication from a man he’d known in the Balkans in the nineties. As a result, our resident came into possession of photographs of you, taken last summer in France.”
“So that’s how they found me.”
“That’s how they would have found you . . . if they had.”
“What do you mean?” Suddenly she was alert only to what he was saying.
“Our resident paid half a million dollars for the location that would fit the pictures of you. Your address in a village in the south of France, yes? Of course, he received all the necessary permissions to pay the money, from the highest in the land, so they say. He wanted to cover his back with such a large sum involved, and with you being the object of their obsessive vindictiveness in Moscow. But when they turned up, you’d gone, you and your son. There was nothing but a dead trail. Needless to say, our Montenegro resident was dragged over the flames in Moscow for losing the money and losing you. It’s probably set back his career twenty years. But you know what they’re like, of course. They’d have taken the credit at the Forest if they’d got you, but failure is always someone else’s.”
She looked into his eyes. What she was looking for was some sign of triumph, something that told her he was feeding her doubt and disinformation. But what she saw was the same concern, the same Vladimir who had never done anything to her before that wasn’t in her best interests.
She was silent. Neither believing nor disbelieving. He filled in the answers to some of her questions before she could ask them.
“I didn’t take it at face value,” he said. “You know how it is. It was second-, even thirdhand, source
