“I’m sure,” he said.
“Then why did you come, Mikhail? Why not use a dead drop?”
But she knew the answer to the question before she asked it.
“The trap springs,” he replied, “as soon as someone mentions Icarus. That was the whole purpose of Icarus. A fake operation set up solely to catch the enquirer.”
“Then why haven’t they arrested you?” she said.
“Simple greed,” he replied. “They want you too, Anna.”
She let the implications of this swirl in her brain and then took out the cell phone from her pack and switched it on.
“Make the call,” Mikhail said. “I can’t go back now. That’s why I didn’t use a drop. I’m coming over.” Mikhail looked up over her shoulder. “Icarus was all about finding me. It’s the end,” he said.
She followed his gaze and recognised, standing in the trees two hundred yards away, the biker she had seen earlier. There he was, a yellow helmet, black Lycra pants, the same cycling sweater . . . but there was no bicycle anymore.
She swivelled her gaze across the sixty degrees or so of her vision from the small portalled sanctuary of the stone building. There were two more men. She recognised the man who she’d seen earlier walking the dog. But there was no dog. The other man she hadn’t seen before.
“We don’t know what’s behind us,” he said. “Behind the building. But there’ll be more. They’ve been waiting for nearly ten years for this. Make the call now. This is what they’ve wanted since Finn was first revealed in Moscow, to have the source Mikhail.”
She began to dial Burt’s number.
“How did you let yourself be followed?” she said to Mikhail.
“I took every precaution. But once they knew it was me, they’ve had all the time in the world.”
The biker moved out of the cover of the trees towards them. The two other men were already walking towards them. And there’d be more, as Mikhail said, behind the building.
“Glencarlyn Park,” she said into the phone. “You’re two miles away. We’re in a stone building to the north of the park. Be fast. We’re under attack.”
One of the two men was talking into a radio. All three men were quickening their pace. They’d seen her use the phone.
She withdrew the Thompson pistol from inside her arm and slotted a rifle round into the single shot chamber.
She and Mikhail withdrew behind the thin cover of the pillars. They were trapped here. It was better to stay in cover than to break around the side of the building.
She saw one of the men, the one she’d seen earlier with the dog, draw a weapon from his coat. She’d take him first, the armed man, take as many of them as she could before any more came at them from the back. She aimed the pistol from a hundred and fifty yards, and the man dropped like snow sliding from a roof.
She reloaded and saw the other two men fan away to the side, weapons drawn now. Then she saw a fourth man, right on the edge of her peripheral vision. He was close up to the right corner wall of the building, where the U extended, and using it as cover. He was only twenty yards from where they stood. The other two men began to run, moving targets, dodging at angles across the park but in the general direction of the cover to the side of the building.
Then a fifth figure appeared just at the corner of the other wall, twenty yards to the left this time.
She aimed at his left shoulder, all that was visible, as the first bullet from his revolver hit the pillar behind which she stood. The pillars were too thin to get right behind.
She thought her shot had grazed the edge of his shoulder, and he spun away, but it might have been just his reaction to her shot, rather than a hit. She reloaded fast. They’d know now she only had a single-shot weapon, and there were five of them, at least. It was just a matter of time—and of which of them was prepared to put himself in the line of fire.
A half-dozen shots rang out against the pillars, and she ducked back away from them. They would bombard her, and under that cover one of them, maybe two, would make a rush.
She glanced at Mikhail, standing six feet away from her behind the next pillar. Why was he unarmed? If he knew the dangers, why had he come without protection?
She fired again. She didn’t see whether the shot had made its target or not.
“Shoot for the man to the left,” Mikhail ordered her.
It was the man she thought she’d hit in the shoulder. She saw the edge of a coat flapping around the wall, and she ran to the right, from pillar to pillar, until she reached the far right edge of the yard, from where she could get a better view of the left wall, and where anyone firing from the right would have to come out and expose themselves in order to get a clear shot.
This time she knew she’d got the man to the left and saw the body fall away from behind the wall, surprised by her new angle of fire. Another volley came from the right-hand wall, as a gun was pointed around the wall and fired blindly.
“They’ll want me, at least, alive,” Mikhail shouted down the row of pillars.
At that moment, as the man to the left fell, she saw that Mikhail was running across the yard towards the left wall, away from the thin protection they enjoyed and into the open. He was taking the chance that there was nobody else to the left, but at the same time he left himself wide open from the right.
And they wanted him alive. That was his gamble, to make time for her.
She simultaneously heard the high-pitched roar of an engine and saw the Humvee swerving across the lawns beyond the trees.
Then she saw Mikhail fall. He was down. In quick succession and under heavy covering fire in her direction, she saw another man run to the fallen body of Mikhail.
It was Vladimir.
The Humvee thumped across a shallow ditch and along the edge of the trees, three or four hundred yards away, its tyres kicking up gouts of wet earth and lawn as it swivelled at them, its engine roaring.
She saw Vladimir look up as he dragged the body of Mikhail by the shoulders towards a van that had pulled up behind him, its back doors flung open. She saw his eyes and felt the ricocheting bullets fly around her head as the men to the right gave him cover while he sought to drag Mikhail’s body, alive or dead.
She saw in his eyes the Vladimir she’d hoped never to see. It wasn’t the Vladimir who had saved her life five years before, nor the Vladimir who had questioned their superiors many years before that, and been sentenced to the Cape Verde Islands for his pains. It wasn’t the Vladimir she’d known since she was ten years old, at School No. 47 on Leninskaya Street, the Vladimir who had loved her from that moment on.
This was a new Vladimir, the one who had chosen, she now saw, to set his career and his life on being the one to track down Mikhail. It was the Vladimir who wanted to be KGB General Vladimir, who had made his final choice; to be inside the regime in Russia Finn had so fatally hated, and the Russia from which she’d escaped.
Careless of exposing herself now to the wild firing from farther up the same wall where she was crouched behind the pillar, she shot this Vladimir between the eyes.
Then she slumped to the ground, aware only that all the shooting had stopped, and she was sinking into her own blood.
Chapter 36
LOGAN WALKED INTO THE Venus Apollo nightclub for the third night in a row. The only difference a casual observer would notice in his appearance from the previous two visits was that he now walked with a pair of crutches.
He was frisked at the door by two dark-coated, scowling bouncers, one of whom had a knife scar on the left side of his face.
Passing their scrutiny, he limped to the hole in the wall inside the club where the girl took the customers’ coats. He checked his crutches too, with the coat and hat. He then limped unaided into the green velvet-draped
