free. But behind this munificence, and as always with Burt, strategy was everything. His purpose was to reassure her that in the forthcoming meeting with Mikhail—the crucial meeting—she would be equally her own master. Burt wished to set a precedent.
She arrived at the cafe called Ganymede late one morning when the sun was making a brief appearance through heavy clouds, which looked like they were going to win the day. The cafe was a student hangout, and she bought a coffee in a queue of sleepy-eyed youths carrying jute shoulder bags and with woolly hats pulled half down over their pale faces. Then she perused the rows of books in stacks by the window at the front, overlooking the street. She found the copy of Defoe, looked at the page they’d agreed, moved eleven pages on, and found a note on the page. On the back was written in pencil, “I like your invitation.” Then there was a time and a date. Vladimir’s proposal was to meet again, a week from now, and with three days added, that made ten days.
Perhaps he needed time to collect material for his initial offering to the Americans. Or maybe, she thought, it was a period for him to say good-bye to everything he knew.
Leaving the cafe, she returned to the apartments. There was a general air of jubilation that Vladimir, albeit the second string of their operations, was yielding fruit. Burt was particularly pleased. He seemed to take it as sign that everything else he’d planned was going to fall into place.
Mikhail had insisted that Anna meet him for the second time in Washington, D.C. It was assumed that another trip to New York was too high a risk for him.
Once again, the team was to decamp, to be flown down to another of Burt’s safe houses in the capital.
It was two days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, and Mikhail had chosen the day of the inauguration itself for their meeting.
Burt, with Dupont alone now included in the knowledge of the meeting, professed himself to be in two minds about the choice. On the one hand, the million or more people who were expected to arrive at the capital and greet the new era was cover of a kind that might well provide enough confusion for a meeting. On the other side there were hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers stacked in a ring around the central procession and presidential celebrations.
But he accepted that the meeting was set in stone, and he trusted Mikhail’s instincts.
All Anna would say was, “The focus of everyone will be inwards—the law, the FBI, the CIA, everybody.”
From this Burt guessed that the meeting would not be in the centre of the city itself, but outside the perimeter of events. Everyone, both literally and metaphorically, would be looking the other way.
The wooden house in the chic Washington neighbourhood of Georgetown was another tour de force in Burt’s collection of classic American properties. To Anna, they now seemed almost like a separate project of Burt’s, a one-man preservation society of Americana, with state-by-state attention to the detail of local nuances.
“I’m an American.” Burt laughed when she displayed her astonishment at the house’s beauty and authenticity. “I’m not a Virginian or a Texan or a Californian. I love the whole damn country in all its quirky mess.”
On the day before the meeting, just before they all sat down to lunch, Burt took her aside into another study with another fire blazing like a picture in a holiday catalogue. He wanted to run over some details that had occurred to him on the trip down from New York.
He was particularly attentive to her every need, as if she were an athlete before a race.
“I don’t like you going in unprotected,” he said.
“We’ve discussed it,” she said. “Nobody but me. Mikhail’s a fox. Any sign that what he trusts will happen has changed, and he won’t make an appearance.”
“I know, I know,” Burt agreed. “I agree with you.”
He seemed unusually nervous. Maybe it was because this was the culmination of all his plans since the end of the previous summer.
“In that case, you personally could be better protected,” he said. “What about a weapon?”
“Why? Against what? ” she asked surprised.
“I don’t know. But we’re reaching the apex of the pyramid now, and any trouble will occur around this moment.”
Was he being his usual prescient self, she wondered, or was it just nerves?
“If you’re going unprotected by my watchers, as we all agree you should, I’d like you to be armed, that’s all,” he said. “Let me have that, Anna.”
He was behaving like a father on his daughter’s wedding day, she thought. Giving her away to Mikhail.
“It’s not a great day to be armed,” she said. “On a presidential inauguration.”
“Well, you tell me. Are you going to be anywhere near the main event?” he said. “What are the chances of a routine search?”
“No,” she admitted. “I want to be dropped out of the city, away from everything. Around Arlington.”
“Across the river?” Burt said. “In Virginia?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t reply, but she could see his mind trying to follow Mikhail’s logic, and that it finally approved.
“So what kind of weapon would you like?” he said.
“Are you sure, Burt? This ups the risks in all kinds of ways.”
“Not so much. And I’d be happier. If there’s any trouble from regular law enforcement, you’d have clearance after the event.”
“Then I’ll take a Thompson Contender,” she said, believing that this might deter him.
Burt smiled.
“Not the carbine, I trust.”
“No. The pistol. I can still shoot a man at two hundred yards.”
“Then that’s what you’ll have. And the rounds?”
“Standard NATO issue. Point two two three. Two dozen.”
“Okay.”
And there it was, by the end of the day, delivered personally to her by Burt.
At six o’clock the next morning, Burt, Anna, Larry, and two guards drove the few miles from Georgetown across the Potomac to Arlington Cemetery.
“Kind of a grim place to start the day,” was Burt’s comment.
It was dark as they left, but the day seemed to be dawning without rain or snow for the new president.
At her direction, they halted the Humvee—another in Burt’s stable of outsized American vehicles—about half a mile from the main gates of the cemetery. Burt laid his hand on her arm and told her they would be in the vicinity whenever she called.
He’d insisted she take a cell phone, which she didn’t trust, but she acquiesced in the knowledge that she could check it for bugs before she went anywhere near the rendezvous.
Then she began the long walk away from the vehicle, feeling the eyes of all four of them boring into her back, like dogs left behind on a promised walk.
After a few minutes she disappeared around a bend in the road.
She was carrying a small backpack over her shoulders and wore a long coat, boots, and a felt hat. The pistol was wrapped in clothing inside the pack.
When she’d walked for a mile, past the main entrance to the cemetery, she found the kind of place she was looking for. Everything now had to be improvised until she reached the rendezvous.
It was a small, neat mall, which would be closed for the national holiday. She skirted across the front of it and made her way around to the rear, watching for cameras, until she was out of sight from the road.
Behind the mall there was a delivery yard, and behind that, a high wall against theft.
She kept to the outside of the wall, where the dulled winter grey of grass offered a slice of neat wasteland, until she found a niche where the wall doglegged to the left; from here there was no view apart from straight out.
Checking that there was nobody on this piece of ground, she then dismantled the phone, examined it for a positioning device, and, when she was satisfied there was none, reassembled it. As long as she left it switched off, she’d be untraceable.
She then stripped off her coat, trousers, boots, and jacket until she stood in just her jogging clothes. She took jogging shoes from the pack and then unwrapped the gun from a fleece jacket and removed the firing pin for safety.
