After two operations on her shoulder in Washington and three months recuperating up here at the cabin, Anna realised she’d become comfortably—even lethargically—tied to the place. She’d watched winter change to spring with precise slowness. She’d spent most of every day with her son, and the rest of the time she’d read books, slept, and done the exercises needed to restore the muscles in her shoulder. She didn’t want to go to the nearest village, let alone to Burt’s ranch, fifty miles away.
“Okay,” she said, when Larry didn’t reply. “I suppose we’d better go.”
“We’ll leave in a couple of hours,” he said.
Anna went up to her room and lay down. It was a long time since she’d been released from the events that ended in her wounding at the park. First, because of her injury, she’d been excused from attending the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing. Then her presence was not required anyway. Either Burt had got her off the hook, or she was disbarred from attending for security reasons.
But Burt was still in the thick of it, up in Washington, parrying the questions of the committee day after day.
She fell asleep and dreamed of Finn.
In a high-backed leather armchair at the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Burt faced the committee for the eleventh day running. Today being Friday, they were going to break early, with just one session after lunch. They were on the home lap before the weekend.
The number of committee members and cross-examiners had shrunk this afternoon to just seven; the chairman, three senators from the Intelligence Committee itself, an attorney representing the director of the CIA, another attorney for the director of the FBI, and a director of the National Intelligence Agency.
On Burt’s side of the table were Bob Dupont and Cougar’s senior attorney.
Burt, as usual comfortable in any surroundings, fielded questions from friend and foe alike with equanimity. He was enjoying himself, “even in there,” as Bob Dupont would say later.
“We can now turn to the representative for the director of the CIA,” the chairman said. “Mr. Ronald Sabroso.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Sabroso replied and looked across the expansive table at Burt. “I’d like to pick up on a couple of points from your testimony of May twentieth,” he said, addressing Burt. “The Russian known as ‘Mikhail’ made an approach to you on what date exactly?”
“He didn’t make an approach to us,” Burt said smoothly. “He made an approach to one of my employees, the former KGB colonel Anna Resnikov.”
“Who should have been a national asset,” Sabroso said acidly, “not an employee of your company.”
“The former directors of the CIA and the NSA are now both working for private intelligence companies,” Burt said. “Ask them where their loyalties lie today.”
“Can we get back to the question, please?” the chairman interjected.
Sabroso sucked his teeth. “Given the national security risk ‘Mikhail’ represented, why did you or your company not inform the Central Intelligence Agency about him?”
“Firstly, Mikhail was not a security risk to the United States of America,” Burt said. “He was a security risk to his own country, on our behalf. He was—or would have been—a highly valuable asset.”
“Would have been?” the chairman interjected.
“Mikhail is still in intensive care, Mr. Chairman,” Burt replied. “It’s not known if he’ll regain consciousness and, if he does, whether he’ll be of any use.”
“And secondly?” Sabroso said.
“Secondly,” Burt replied, “Mikhail made clear that he would only speak to former colonel Resnikov. He stipulated that anyone else, the CIA included, would result in a complete breakoff of contact on his part.”
“Which resulted in a shoot-out in a park a stone’s throw from where we sit,” Sabroso said. “And the probable loss of Mikhail as useful source at all.”
“The reason for the events in Glencarlyn Park, as I stated in my testimony, was that Mikhail had made a sudden decision to defect that morning, at that meeting. He was effectively on the run. Colonel Resnikov was meeting him at his request in the belief that she was simply making a first contact.”
“They’d never made contact before?” Sabroso asked.
“Only once. In Germany. Back in 2007.”
Burt stared straight back at Sabroso, daring him to challenge the statement. But Sabroso was unaware of anything concerning Mikhail outside what Burt admitted to. And Burt knew he could be confident too about Adrian keeping his mouth shut. The whole affair—Icarus, and then the blowback in the park—was principally the fault of the British. Their source, their mistake—though Burt was also sanguine enough to admit to himself that he’d fallen for Icarus too.
“If the CIA had been given knowledge of this meeting. And the FBI,” Sabroso said, nodding in the direction of his fellow attorney, “then proper backup would have been provided at the park.”
The senator for Wisconsin, an ally of Burt’s and lobbyist for Cougar, broke in. “I think Mr. Miller has already stated that the CIA’s involvement in any way would have ensured that there was no possibility at all of gaining access to Mikhail,” he said. “At least, thanks to the operation of Mr. Miller’s, we still have that possibility.”
“And three people dead,” Sabroso said. “And a behind-the-scenes row with Russia’s government.”
“The three dead provoked the incident in the first place,” another of Burt’s supporters said.
The mood of the committee, even when it was fully attended, was clearly on Burt’s side. He, unlike the CIA or FBI, had taken great care to nurture its members, in particular the senators themselves. That was normal business. “Casting the lens backwards,” as one of the senators had said at an earlier session, “we have to be very careful how much we can trust the CIA.”
That had infuriated Sabroso and, when he was informed, the director of the CIA himself.
After the session broke up at just after three o’clock, Burt took two of the senators aside before he headed for the airport and his private jet to the south.
They walked away from the committee room and out of the building, onto the warm May lawns on Capitol Hill.
“It’s pretty much there,” one of them said to Burt. “You’ll be found clean.”
“We’ll get the all-clear soon, then,” Burt said.
“Yes, I’m sure. It’s this other business that’s really taking up their anger. This terrorist assassin debacle is causing great problems on the Hill. One of our own intelligence companies hiring an assassin to do his business on American territory! That overshadows just about everything. The Intelligence Committee are only going through the motions with you. They’re saving their wrath for your rival.”
“I agree with you,” Burt said. “But we must go through the motions.” He lit a cigar and puffed contentedly across the green expanse. “And we need to be as transparent as we can be,” he added, and paused. “For future good relations with Procurement.”
“There’ll be no problem with that,” the senator replied. “These days the government knows they have to use you guys. They don’t have a choice. Next year it’s predicted more than seventy percent of all intelligence work carried out by the United States will be contracted out to private companies. The state just isn’t capable anymore.”
“And the bad boys from the company that hired this assassin?” Burt asked. “What’s going to happen to them?”
“Jail for certain, and for a very long time. It’s pretty much established that they hired this assassin. Two murders in Europe, just to establish a threat. He was a Serbian, apparently, not a Russian as they claimed. And it’s pretty much established that they hired him for the sole purpose of creating mayhem and then supposedly ‘catching’ him.”
“What they did,” Burt said, “was all about a smallish intelligence contract company that wanted to get big in a hurry. They were creating a threat. An artificial threat from Russia. And they did it in order to be the first in line for funding when they ‘uncovered’ it.”
“It may cause problems all around,” the senator agreed.
“I always said intelligence contracting would lead to the false creation of a threat,” Burt said. “It was inevitable.”
The senator looked taken aback. “So how does that square with your company?” he said.
