But on that very morning of the elections, January 16, a letter had been delivered to the embassy, sealed in an old-fashioned way with red wax, on which there was an impression of a bird. The letter was addressed not to anyone at the embassy, but to Burt Miller, head of Cougar Intelligence Applications. And in the East, from Kiev to the Tajik border with China—including the vast landmass of Russia—Burt’s name was very well known indeed in certain circles. It was here in the empty regions of central Asia that had been his original stamping ground. As a man in his early twenties he had begun his explosive intelligence career over forty years before in the great central Asian plains and mountains.
Because of his—and Cougar’s—importance to the CIA and general good regard from its chief Theo Lish, the unopened letter was put on a morning plane to London, where Burt Miller was meeting with the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Adrian Carew, before they both attended a meeting of NATO intelligence chiefs in Brussels the following week. During a brief break in his talks with Adrian Carew, Burt carefully slit the top of the envelope, avoiding causing damage to the seal, and withdrew a single sheet of paper. On it he read, “Rafael will not be meeting tonight.” He stared at the message for a long time and then replaced the sheet back into its envelope.
When he returned to the meeting with Adrian, Burt hadn’t the slightest clue to the meaning of the six words, or of who Rafael might be—if anyone. But Burt Miller was a man who allowed his instincts full rein, and they were usually good. On this occasion he felt a growing sense of excitement that these instincts—this time for an intelligence coup of some importance—were genuine. This instinct, he regularly told his juniors in briefing sessions, and using the third person to describe himself like any autocrat would, was “Burt’s line to God.”
9
SUNDAY, JANUARY 17
THE VIEW BEYOND THE TABLE and through the porthole from aboard Burt Miller’s 302- foot yacht
Inside, however, the artificial lighting in the sumptuous operations room of the ship was almost too bright by comparison and was particularly focused over the large, square, mahogany table. It was almost the size of a small room in itself and stood with a kind of magnificent defiance right at the centre of the deck-wide space. Burt Miller was standing by the table, while Anna sat to the side on a high upholstered stool and pensively drank from a cup of coffee.
Burt grinned at her as he made a great ceremony of opening the plastic envelope she had delivered. There was a boyish glint in his eye, as if it had been a birthday present Anna had given him and she was his lover rather than an employee of Cougar Intelligence Applications who had brought him secret intelligence documents.
He finally drew out a sheaf of folded papers and carefully opened them up until they could both see there were three large, light blue sheets in all, each four feet by three feet in dimension. Burt triumphantly laid out the three photocopied sheets of what would have been, in the original, drawings on architectural white paper. He placed them on the mahogany desk in a row, one after the other. Burt surveyed the plans with an air of satisfaction. Then he looked at her and grinned a second time.
“Plans for the port of Novorossiysk,” he said triumphantly and looked back at them as if they were a map of buried treasure. “Or the development of the port of Novorossiysk, shall we say. Highly secret. Very restricted. Our agent has done very well to obtain them.” Then he looked at Anna. “And you, my dear, had an even more difficult task, I hear from Larry.” He beamed his wide grin that creased the flesh of his face upwards until his eyes were almost invisible. “You are the best there is.”
Anna was sitting on the high stool that gave her a view from higher up on to the table and the plans. She’d arrived at the yacht only an hour before and it had been just over ten hours since they’d picked her up off the beach in the Crimea. With Larry alone, she had been helicoptered off the Nigerian-registered freighter to Ankara, where one of Burt’s private jets was waiting to take them both to London. She’d slept little on the flight and then Burt had wanted to see her immediately. She would have been happy to send Larry with the delivery without her. She’d done her job. She took pride in being just a field operative. But she knew Burt wouldn’t leave her alone until she agreed to share with him the contents of the package. As with most things in his life, Burt enjoyed the ritual, the ceremonial element, and her company was an essential ingredient for both things.
Now he stood in a pair of navy blue trousers and an extravagantly tailored Gilbert and Sullivan–style yachting blazer that seemed to her to be a deliberate mockery of maritime pomposity. Perhaps it was. Burt liked dressing up—it was playacting—she knew that. She’d seen him in many such incongruous situations and disguises and the yachting paraphernalia was undoubtedly a disguise and one that he had donned simply for his own amusement. On this ship, he was the eccentric Edwardian billionaire owner. When he was at his mansion in Connecticut he was the English gentleman in tweeds and plus fours who owned his own fox hunt, had his clothes made to measure in London’s Savile Row, but couldn’t actually ride a horse. At his vast ranch in New Mexico he dressed in the manner of a nineteenth-century American cattle baron. And in the corridors of power in Washington he was the ultimate flamboyant corporate owner in silk suits and handmade shoes. Wherever he was, it seemed he simply enjoyed living any dream he felt like living, and which his enormous wealth could effortlessly make a reality.
His big round face glowed like a ripe apple and his rotund, well-fed form seemed itself to stretch the imagination. There was nothing too big for Burt, apparently. At least that was the effect of his outsize physical presence and the outsize personality that kept in lockstep with it. Now he smoked a large cigar, a Churchill, another almost permanent accessory in his props cupboard, which, for the moment, was fuming quietly on its own in a large bronze ashtray shaped like an anchor. There were other half-smoked or quarter-smoked cigars of great commercial value that could be found discarded wherever it was that Burt was currently passing through life and Anna could see at least three of them now lying like unexploded ordnance in various ashtrays around the room.
She didn’t respond to his knowing enquiry. Burt’s questions and interrogatory remarks were in general of a declamatory nature and usually didn’t require a reply.
But Burt wanted to relish the moment, to extract the maximum amount of suspense from the presence of the architectural plans and, before he took a close look at them, he went over to a refrigerator, plucked out a bottle of Krug champagne, and opened it. Another largely ceremonial gesture, as he would drink perhaps half a glass at most.
A big man—though at just under five feet eight inches he seemed bigger than he was—Burt was, to Anna, exuding his usual warmth and confident bonhomie this afternoon, though it was tinted as always with a subcutaneous level of granite. The geological strata of Burt began on the surface with a sunny, welcoming, friendly terrain, while underneath it the bedrock was absolutely unyielding. And his smile usually left room for this hard power to be always visible behind it.
The combination of the two effects—the sweet and the sour of Burt—would have been equally appropriate in a mafia boss attending his daughter’s wedding, or a casino owner welcoming a high-net-worth client. Welcome to my World, was Burt’s usual modus operandi and he treated others largely as if they were present for his own entertainment.
Burt handed her a glass and raised his own.
“To a great partnership,” he said. “I have everything to be grateful for that I ever came across you.”
“Thank you, Burt.” She drank. “You know we lost the courier. I believe she shot herself.”
“Larry told me.”
“Apparently in order to save the agent,” Anna said. “He must have trained her well.”
Burt allowed a moment of silence, more to allow the evaporation of the awkwardness of the news than in respectful memory of the girl.
“We have to protect our agents,” he said simply. Then he looked back at the table and the event was forgotten.
“Let’s see what we have here,” he said, beamed, and put his glass down. He fingered the left-hand sheet and
