information, and maybe even it was planted for some reason of their own. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I sense there’s at least some truth in it. There are material facts that can be established, for example; the fate of the Montenegro resident, for one. It was checkable, at least in part. So I’ve come to believe there is some truth in it, in any case.”
“Have you checked it out?” she said.
“I haven’t had the time.”
“Half a million dollars.”
“Yes. Hard currency, same as always.”
“They really want me that badly.”
“Worse. It’s small change to them.”
He looked away for a moment, as if afraid they were being observed. But the cafe was a third full, with nobody who attracted his interest in particular. Then he looked back at her.
“So I asked who had offered the photographs in the first place; who had profited, with no merchandise in exchange,” Vladimir said. “It was an American who had worked for the CIA in the Balkans in the nineties—which was how he knew our Montenegro resident. He seems to have been acting independently, judging from how he made his approach. His name’s Logan Halloran.”
Chapter 28
ANNA’S SENSES FELL AWAY. She heard nothing of the buzz in the cafe. She gazed sightlessly at her hands, now clasped tightly on the plastic table in front of her. She felt nothing in their touch. It was only the smell of fried food that slowly brought her back to some approximation of full consciousness and then reassembled her other senses. She was shattered, and what emerged from the wreckage first was cold analysis. Anger, perhaps rage, was a luxury that might return later.
“Is that all?” she said without looking up.
“It’s all I know.”
She looked up and saw him staring intensely at her.
“I need your help, Vladimir.”
“What do you need?”
“Money.”
“I have around five hundred dollars with me.”
He reached for the inside pocket of his jacket and withdrew a worn leather wallet. She recognised it from the days in Moscow that now seemed permanently unreal to her, and from the bookshop. He withdrew all the notes and carefully pushed them into her hands, shielding the movement from anyone not at the table.
“That’s all I have. What else do you need? A place?”
“I do. But not from you. It’s something else I’ll have to think about.”
“I understand.”
“I want you to do one thing. I’m leaving out of the back of the cafe.”
“Are there watchers?”
“A team of five, as far as I know. They’re probably all out at the front. I want you to stay for fifteen minutes after I’ve gone, then leave exactly as you would have done.”
“Okay.”
“We need a place of contact.”
“There’s a cafe on Ninth and Broadway,” he said at once. “The Ganymede. It has a library. On the third shelf from the top there’s a copy of Daniel Defoe’s
She registered the information, and her mind immediately translated it into the Rule of Three, the Rule of Eleven.
“That’s it, then.” She smiled at him. “And you can let me know too if you accept the invitation. Who knows, it may be more important than I thought.”
He didn’t smile back. “Be careful, Anna.”
She pushed her hat into a bag and got up from her seat. She left her coat on the back of the seat and walked into the interior of the cafe, towards the kitchen and bathrooms.
There was a small kitchen with three or four chefs and washers, where grease hung on the walls like translucent skin. Someone eventually noticed her, a small Chinese man in a stained white chef’s coat.
“Bathroom there,” he barked at her.
She didn’t move but leaned on and simultaneously held the doorjamb as if she were feeling unwell.
“Bathroom there!” the Chinese man snapped again.
An older white man looked round from a skillet on the stove.
“What’s up?” he said.
“I’m feeling unwell,” she said. “Is there somewhere I could lie down for a few minutes?”
He wasn’t going to refuse her.
“Take her to the back room,” he said to the Chinese. “I’ll look in later.”
“Thank you.”
“You okay?”
“I’m all right. Just a bit faint.”
The Chinese man led her through to a room at the rear of the cafe, with a bare cement floor, a desk and chair, and a couple of old, stained armchairs.
“Here,” he said.
“Thank you,” she replied, but he had gone.
She quickly took in a metal door that led to the outside. She opened it and stepped out into a tiny concrete courtyard, covered with snow that had iced over on the surface. She surveyed the mildewed walls and saw a fire escape that led down from a building abutting the rear of the yard. But for her it led upwards.
She waited. Finally, the older chef opened the door, looking for her when he hadn’t found her in the room.
“I just need some air, I think. I’ll only be a few minutes. Please.”
He looked at her and seemed easily to overcome his suspicion. “Mind how you go,” he said. “I gotta get back.”
He shut the door behind him, and she waited a couple more minutes until she knew he’d gone. Then she climbed the iron fire escape, which zigzagged several floors until, on the third floor, she saw an open-plan office that had maps of the world on the walls—maybe some kind of trading company, she thought.
There was no one sitting at the nearest desk, which had a view of the fire escape door. Outside the door, cigarette butts were scattered in the snow. It was a door in use. She opened it, stepped inside, and walked briskly into the centre of the room. A secretary looked up abruptly.
“I thought I’d left my coat,” Anna said, “but it isn’t here.”
It wasn’t much of a reason, but saying it got her past the secretary, and she sailed through to a far door that led onto a corridor with an elevator and stairs that ran beside it. She took the stairs. In a few minutes she found herself in a dead-end street, with the noise of traffic on Broadway at the far end. She guessed it was a block, maybe more, from the entrance to the gym she had entered earlier.
She looked left, down towards the entrance. Burt would have someone outside the gym, no doubt. The crowd on the sidewalk was sparse in the icy weather as she turned out onto Broadway and away from the gym to the right. She began to walk steadily, without a coat but with her hat now pulled over her ears.
Larry watched from the inside of a clothing store directly across the street from the cafe. His point men were, variously, in one of Burt’s yellow cabs, another stamping his feet and blowing on his hands at a bus stop, a third on the other side of the cafe just inside the doorway of a stationery shop and apparently making a phone call.
There were two others out there at a greater distance, who he couldn’t see from this angle.
He looked back at the cafe and watched as Vladimir exited, hands thrust deep in the pockets of a herringbone
