attitude to match, Halloran had once been a CIA officer in Bosnia back in the 1990s until he’d been fired by the agency many years back now. Yet here he was practically giving orders to one of the CIA’s station heads in one of the world’s intelligence hot spots and on the CIA’s own ground to boot.
Was it Burt Miller’s idea of a joke to send Halloran? Probably, MacLeod thought. At any rate, he wouldn’t put it past him. Burt Miller walked the corridors of power in Washington with effortless ease, thanks to Cougar’s generous dispensation of lobbying fees. He operated like some private satrap at the heart of power. Since 9/11, Cougar had grown from a regular intelligence outfit into Washington’s most influential intelligence hub, with the power and money to show for it. And, if he knew little else about Burt Miller, MacLeod understood how Miller enjoyed flaunting this power and wealth.
But MacLeod also knew that Cougar’s power on this particular evening at the embassy in Kiev was now replicated in other American embassies around the world. Cougar was now able to issue orders on more than an occasional basis at CIA stations throughout the world and it made MacLeod almost visibly seethe with indignation.
The others sitting around the table consisted of MacLeod’s junior officers, all in their mid-twenties to early thirties. Younger than MacLeod, they were more overtly angry at this indignity. Sandra Pasconi, the only woman present, was the senior of these three young spooks and she spoke first, as arranged beforehand. Macleod had dictated before the meeting that he wanted to stay in the background, as befit his position, and not stoop to liaising directly with Halloran. He affected a position of not acknowledging that Logan was in the room at all.
“Isn’t it a bit premature to have this meeting the night before a presidential election?” Pasconi asked acidly. “We don’t know what Ukraine’s going to look like yet. The election tomorrow is just narrowing it down to two candidates. Then there’ll be a runoff in three weeks’ time. That’s when it’s appropriate, if ever.”
Logan smiled back at her without replying. He felt supreme self-satisfaction that the CIA was at his bidding after his mistreatment at their hands. He still had scores to settle with his old organisation over his dismissal. The resentment he felt towards the agency looked like it would never die and he now felt a dangerous desire to rub their noses in it. Yet at the same time, if you were to study Logan’s erratic motivation—something he didn’t do himself with any great zeal—he had a great need for acceptance by his old employer at the same time as he nurtured resentment against it. He wanted them to recognise their mistake in ever dismissing him. He wanted to extract love from humiliation.
“But we all know what the result of the election’s going to be, don’t we, Sandra?” Logan replied. “The current president is out. It’s between Yanukovich and Timoshenko now. That’ll be decided in three weeks. And we all know Moscow’s favourite, Yanukovich, is going to win. It’s practically a done deal. The Orange Revolution is over. Russia holds the cards.”
Pasconi bristled at the use of her first name. “Look, Halloran,” Pasconi continued, “we know just how important you are—or Cougar is, in any case,” she almost sneered, “so you don’t have to throw your weight around, okay?”
Logan was delighted by her angry response. Hostile, that was what Logan had expected, and that was what Burt had told him to expect. “Let them be hostile.” But Logan wanted to exacerbate that hostility. It only made his enjoyment at their predicament all the greater. He’d already noticed that MacLeod refused to look at him, while the other two younger men seemed to be waiting on the edge of their chairs with an eager fixation in his direction, like terriers ready to rip his throat out. He smiled benignly, but in his heart he felt the old anger surfacing.
Logan paused to let the sarcasm in Pasconi’s tone of voice dissipate into a flat silence that had the effect of leaving the tone, rather than the words themselves, hanging in the air.
“The question is,” he said smoothly, “what is Ukraine going to be in three weeks’ time? Burt Miller sees it this way,” he said quietly. “He believes that Ukraine is moving to the top of our concerns. Your boss in Washington apparently agrees with him,” he added. “Miller’s convinced him that this is priority, red alert. And he simply wants the agency to be fully in the picture.”
“Our instructions are to listen to what you have to say,” Pasconi said. “That’s all. There’s nothing here about Mr. Lish agreeing or disagreeing with Miller’s thesis on Ukraine.”
Logan leaned back in his chair before replying and delayed his reaction, like a sportsman who lowers the pace of his game in order to upset the urgency of an opponent. “Cougar sees it that the Ukraine will soon become a front line of sorts,” he said finally. “More so than it is now. Ukraine is an independent, democratic, pro-Western country under threat from its more powerful, belligerent, and antidemocratic neighbour. Soon it will have a pro-Russian president. Yanukovich has made that clear enough. And Cougar sees it that Russia’s geopolitical intentions may be viewed most clearly through the prism of Ukraine. It’s not just about Ukraine, it’s about all the former Soviet republics.” Logan leaned in. “Moscow wants them back and Ukraine is the jewel in the crown.”
“That doesn’t explain why now, why this evening of all times,” Pasconi snapped and Logan felt that she was flailing in the wind. “It’s damned inconvenient,” she added. “Pointless, I’d go so far as to say.”
Logan opened the file he’d brought with him—the same file he’d distributed to the others in the room and which they had studiously kept unopened. “We didn’t think it should wait,” he said flatly, with a trace of contempt and without acknowledging Pasconi’s hostility. “Intelligence is coming in all the time and it’s of a very disturbing colour.” He looked up with what passed for a helpful expression on his face, but everyone else saw it as merely arrogant. “Cougar is very conscious of the fact that our embassies around the world want to know anything with any terrorist implications immediately. They want to know like the day before yesterday. And, naturally, the terrorists are aware that our defences are most likely to be lowered on occasions like a presidential election in a foreign country, as well as on our own national holidays.” He paused. “We want to set the agenda here, not allow them to. Cougar didn’t want our embassy here to be caught napping.” He leaned towards Pasconi. “We’re just trying to help.”
The nerve of this approach was lost on none of the others in the room. Pasconi bristled again, her face contorted in an ugly grimace, but she stayed silent. MacLeod himself was feeling a deep resentment at the incursion of Cougar on his territory, never mind that it had been endorsed by his chief. The implication that, without Cougar, the agency—and his station, in particular—would be caught napping now infuriated him and he struggled to retain his studied aloofness.
Logan watched a similar struggle competing on all of their faces. But he was following Burt’s instructions exactly. Mention terrorism right at the top, Burt had told him. Then they can’t afford to ignore you. The potential blowback is too risky for them.
“When you care to take a look at this,” Logan continued smoothly, indicating the file, “you’ll notice that Russia has been ramping up its hostile, or potentially hostile, actions in Ukraine over the past few months. And they were high enough already. You have all the facts, I’m sure. But Cougar also has evidence that smuggling across the—”
“Smuggling what?” Pasconi loudly demanded to know. “Smuggling terrorists!”
“Perhaps. And it could very well be so. But I’ll get to that later. Right now I’m talking about the smuggling of materiel. And what kind of materiel is something that Cougar is currently investigating,” Logan replied, unruffled by the interruption.
“So you’re saying the KGB could be smuggling paper towels, or pork fat, or spare parts for jeeps.”
“Unlikely,” Logan replied. “Unless Russia’s
There was a prolonged silence this time. Then Pasconi, who seemed to be the only other person in the room with a voice, spoke.
“What’s the evidence? What’s the threat? What have Russian special forces got to do with terrorism—even if we could disengage that from their normal activities?”
Logan paused, a change of pace again. “We have satellite pictures from our own hardware, and we’ve also had a piece of luck. Or what Burt Miller, in his great wisdom, calls a dodo.”
Logan enjoyed watching the expressions around the table change from hostility to bemusement. He was getting into his stride now; a pleasantly nasty thought crossed his mind that, if he didn’t pass on Burt’s instructions, they might all, like he had once, lose their jobs when some crisis blew up. But he continued in a relaxed voice.
“A dodo, according to Burt, is the reappearance of something that you thought doesn’t or couldn’t possibly exist. In this case, the dodo is a face recognition from satellite pictures of one of the officers who took part in these border missions. This KGB officer is leading the smuggling operation. He’s a colonel in the Vympel group who was jailed two years ago for atrocities committed in Chechnya in the late 1990s. His jail sentence was one of Moscow’s
