“It’s damn cheeky, if you ask me. What are the Brits doing talking to our operatives?”
“It’s a free world,” Burt said casually. But behind his insouciance, he was wondering, not why Adrian would wish to dine with Logan, but why Logan would want to dine with Adrian.
“Listen, Bob,” he said. “The only important thing in this is Mikhail. Only two people in the world know who Mikhail is. Me. And Anna. And if anything happened to me, you’re next on the list. That’s arranged under lock and key.”
“It’s need-to-know at a crazy level,” Dupont burst out.
“If the CIA know Mikhail, what do you think the security clearance will be? Five . . . six people, maybe more? More than three times the risk, in other words. The fewer the better, you know that’s right.”
Dupont was silent, but he assented with a small nod of the head.
“Let things ride, Bob, we’ll get there in the end,” Burt said.
Chapter 32
WHEN LOGAN RECEIVED BURT’S call at just after nine o’clock that morning, he was about to leave the service apartment. Burt’s instructions not to come in afforded him a wave of relief. He would need no excuses now.
How long did this hiatus in Burt’s requirements give him? Twenty-four hours if he were lucky. Time enough to get out of the country, in any case, and be well clear by the time the hue and cry began.
He had a plan, ill-formed but becoming clearer through the sleepless hours of the passing night.
When a triumphant Larry had shown him Anna’s note the day before, and Burt had explained that she knew, it had almost broken him. What he wanted most of all was to speak with her. But he knew also that it was impossible now. His mind raged with grief, with guilt, and with a desperation to see her and to explain. But he knew it would be useless. And so the plan had formed. It was all that came to him in the night, and its clarity was what he hung on to. In the turmoil of his rage at himself, it was the only thing he could do. It was his road to absolution.
He didn’t pack much, even in the small bag he had; he took a very expensive suit, that was all. Otherwise he took roubles that were still part of his emergency pack. Anything else, he could buy where he was going.
He put the thing he would most need in the pocket of his jacket—the spare, unused passport in the false name that would guarantee his anonymity for long enough.
Then he left the functional service apartment with its soulless air of other anonymous people like himself, other empty lives like his own who had passed through.
He walked to Pennsylvania Station and took the train northwards that linked to Toronto. There would be no record of his departure from American soil. From Canada, he could be in Moscow almost before they even knew he’d disappeared.
As he sat on the train that ground its way northwards, he made notes, to be destroyed later certainly, but for now a guide through his mind, befuddled from sleeplessness and despair.
It was the unexpected invitation from Adrian the evening before that had opened the door to his plan. Over dinner at a chic Italian restaurant uptown, Adrian—supremely confident, arrogant in his expectations—had not so gently pumped him for anything that might be useful concerning Burt’s operation. Logan had demurred on the issues that were classified, but in the course of the evening Adrian revealed to Logan the name of a man.
He was a man Adrian was after himself, it seemed, and now he was the man Logan would hunt. Adrian had given Logan the man’s current occupation—or at least one of his no doubt many occupations.
It never occurred to Logan that Adrian had deliberately given him the name of the man, for his own reasons.
And then, back at his apartment, Logan had obsessively pursued his own enquiries, while New York slept and it was daytime in the East. In Logan’s fourth phone call of four, made at just after five o’clock that morning, he had finally located an old source of his, a Russian now residing in Cyprus. This man had filled in the yawning gaps left after Adrian’s artfully imprecise description.
Logan’s target turned out to be an MP in the Russian parliament, but that was more like an honorary title than an elective post in the modern Russia. That was his reward from the Kremlin, it seemed. In truth he was no politician; he had no history at the barricades of Putinism. He was a small-time nobody, a petty crook from Prazshkaya, south of Moscow. Those, at any rate, were his origins, and they were origins from which he’d never strayed very far.
Through graft and old-fashioned violence he had made his way into more serious, organised crime. He had been inducted into the Ismailovo gang, the Mafia organisation that controlled Moscow south. Bodyguard, hit man, bagman, and finally close lieutenant to the boss, he had been entrusted with the gang’s bigger secrets—the drug runs from the southern republics and, beyond them, Afghanistan.
For ten years, when the Ismailovo mob and the KGB fought, made truces, fought again, and finally ended up as partners in crime, he had survived the hits and counter-hits. The KGB under Putin had eventually exerted its control over the Ismailovo, that was true, but it was the control of a monarch over a distant province, controllable only with the acquiescence of his subject.
The Ismailovo had made a deal. It was a black deal of coexistence and mutual profit between a Mafia mob and the country’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB.
And all that had taken place with the imprimatur of the man who had mattered most in the previous nine years since 2000, Vladimir Putin, himself former head of the FSB, then president, now an eminence grise waiting in the wings for what everyone believed would be a third, fourth, and who knew, indefinite presidential term.
And of the many deals the KGB and the Ismailovo mob struck in this unholy alliance of organised crime and state intelligence agency, the most common was an exchange of personnel, on a job-by-job basis. KGB officers would guarantee the guarding of shipments of drugs from the south, and in return, the Ismailovo would provide the KGB, when asked, with an assassin for the KGB’s own business, in order to keep the intelligence service’s own hands notionally clean. And so the square of mob violence fitted the circle of the Russian state’s needs.
Such a man was Grigory Byko, an Ismailovo mobster who had purchased a law degree, a killer first for the gang and finally for the state. Bykov, Adrian had told Logan, was Finn’s murderer.
On the train northward, Logan surveyed his options. Moscow was the only possibility. Bykov never left Moscow if he could help it. His membership of parliament might protect him and ring-fence his deeds throughout Russia, but he was still, essentially, a small-time city crook at heart. The trip to Paris to end Finn’s life had been the only time he’d ever ventured abroad.
Logan had learned from his Cyprus contact that nowadays Bykov owned a chauffeur business with armoured cars and bodyguards that dovetailed exorbitant rides for the rich with favours for his friends in the mob and in the Kremlin. He also owned a stake in a gold mine out east, somewhere in the Yakutsk region, Logan’s source had thought. But it was a stake bought with the threat of violence or death, not money.
And, most presciently, Bykov owned a nightclub in the Patriarshiye Ponds, a plush area in downtown Moscow, to which the rich and famous flocked for its fashion and its beautiful whores. The club was called the Venus Apollo.
That was where he would have his best chance, Logan decided, if he had any chance at all. It was either that, or meet his own death—and his absolution lay in either outcome.
In Toronto he withdrew $100,000 in cash from an operational account. Then, on the flight to London and again on the three-hour trip to Kiev, he slept. He needed rest after the night before and before the task that lay ahead.
There was no visa requirement to enter Ukraine, and no fingerprint analysis in either stopover. Logan exulted in his plan. And God bless the Europeans.
He took a short internal flight from Kiev to the small Ukrainian town of Sumy up in the northeast of the country, bordering Russia. It was empty land, with fewer people and police than the border areas farther south, in the Donetsk.
In a cheap clothes shop in a backstreet of Sumy, he bought a set of workman’s overalls, boots, and a cap, as well as a fur hat and a thick coat. From Sumy he took a bus in the direction of L’gov on the Russian side, but
