facilities, the time line for its nuclear weapons capability, Chinese support of the Iranian government, the illegal imports of material, the mind-set of the ayatollahs and their political puppets, and the fledgling resistance to them. Finally, Theo Lish shuffled some papers and brought a sheet to the top.
“The added agenda,” he stated. They all shuffled papers and brought the swiftly printed sheet into view. “Events concerning Russia and Ukraine.”
Burt rested his hand on the back of Anna’s chair and introduced her to the rest of the committee, as if most of them didn’t already know her and the rest didn’t know her by her considerable reputation.
14
ANNA SAT, COMPOSED AND STILL. The thin northern European light on this January afternoon slanted in through a window where the blinds were only half shut and made a pattern across the table that was elongating with the sun’s fall.
She was aware of the effect she had in the room, the only woman among more than thirty men. She was aware of their curiosity and their attention, and she was equally aware of the resentment that emanated from some of them. But she had been accustomed to such undisguised male attention for as long as she could remember and had long ago developed a quality of absorbing it that was neither a barrier nor an encouragement, but just a kind of neutralising aura.
According to Burt in a conversation with Lish earlier that day, which she had overheard—perhaps by design —she was the personification of Russia itself. In the kind of typically sweeping assessment of a person or event that Burt was fond of making, he had summed her up as follows: “Anna,” he had told Lish, “will tactically withdraw until the opponent is weakened, desperate, and all out of ideas. Then, if she chooses, she picks him off. She’s like the history of Russia and its enemies, Russia withdrawing into an endless interior until their enemies are exhausted and beaten.”
Now, in the committee room, she effortlessly deflected the underlying motives of the men back in their direction and—brought face-to-face with their own conscious or subconscious thoughts about her—they experienced an uncomfortable moment of self-revelation. She destabilised the baser or more simplistic thoughts they held about her by exposing them in some sort of mirror.
Looking at them in the long silence she’d allowed to settle following Burt’s introduction, the fractured group of intelligence chiefs seemed a fragile defence against any single-minded, powerful, and united enemy. Certainly the upper echelons of the KGB had never been this democratic, let alone this diverse. These were a strange group of people, brought together by an old war seventy years before and then—after the Berlin Wall came down— augmented by the incorporation of Europe’s eastern states, which had formerly been under the heel of the Soviet Union. Twenty years after the Cold War had ended—in the fond hopes of the West anyway—the Eastern European nations were now at NATO’s table.
This committee, she thought, was as porous an institution as you could find, yet it was made up of the brightest minds in the countries it represented, men who possessed the most secret and privileged information.
Anna knew—they all did—that someone had been passing on to the Kremlin details of America’s proposed missile shield in Eastern Europe. But the committee had been unreliable for a long time. During the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, a French officer had passed NATO secrets to Serbia. Some people suspected Greece of doing the same. And the Estonian Defence Ministry security chief, Herman Simm, had been convicted of passing NATO secrets to the Russians. It was not surprising therefore that the nations represented around the table withheld their most private intelligence information.
Her presence, she knew, would be reported to the Forest by someone—and maybe more than one of the men in this room. What she had to say now would be read at the Forest within days, if not hours.
Not for the first time, she wondered what Burt’s game was. Burt knew the score where the committee’s trustworthiness was concerned as well as anyone. One thing she was certain of, however, was that in this presentation he’d asked her to make Burt was undoubtedly making a play. He was putting a divining rod into the earth, as he liked to call it, to see what he would find. “Intelligence is a tool to flush out your enemies”—his words from earlier in the week flashed across her mind. And our known enemies’ intentions, she’d silently added to herself. “We need conflict because that is where our enemies are revealed.” And if this was a play of Burt’s—as it undoubtedly was—Anna could assume that the CIA was in on it; the Canadians, almost certainly; and Adrian…? That was why Burt had openly solicited Adrian’s support in the car after lunch. Burt always played a long game and he never told everyone everything, herself included.
There was a hush of anticipation and of curiosity—even admiration, in some cases—both for her unique presence in this room and for her known exploits in the field. She was also the youngest of them by at least fifteen years and the only one who was still active as an operative.
She leaned forward imperceptibly and her stillness and quiet drew the others’ attention even more. Theirs was the rapt concentration afforded to a person who speaks in barely audible tones. Anna’s cool demeanour and measured forcefulness was as effective, in its way, as Burt’s loud, bulldozing style. And the men in the room could not separate her skills and experience from her beauty.
“The Kremlin is upping the ante,” she began quietly. “It’s been well known to all of us here for a long time that the mood among Russia’s leaders has become increasingly belligerent since Putin came to power in 2000. Two years ago, Russian forces made their first military adventure outside Russian territory and invaded the sovereign republic of Georgia. There were complaints from the West, but no action. In other words, the Kremlin got away with it. Thus the appetite of the men of power, the
“For the past ten years the Kremlin has engaged in a series of actions intended to destabilise its neighbour. The Orange Revolution in 2004 prevented the Kremlin’s stooge Yanukovich from gaining power in Kiev, but the Ukrainians’ democratic choice for president was nevertheless poisoned by the KGB, almost fatally. In the east of Ukraine, next to the Russian border, there is a large Russian community from Stalin’s time and before, which is sympathetic to Russian rule. This, combined with the great resentment among Russia’s intelligence community that Ukraine is an independent state, is creating a flashpoint which we believe the Kremlin intends to exploit. Today, from reports on the ground, as well as satellite pictures and KGB sources who are unfriendly to Putin’s KGB clan, we have formed an increasingly clear picture, but it’s still far from certain what exactly the Kremlin plans to do.”
“If anything,” Plismy, the French chief, said acidly.
The historical precedent of a female, former KGB officer addressing an internal NATO intelligence committee did not intimidate all of them and Plismy was one of them. Plismy was her enemy, too, now. She’d run from French protection two years before—“protection” that had almost gotten her killed after she’d fled from Russia—and into American arms in the person of Burt and Cougar. The French were unlikely to forgive her.
“Do we get to see the evidence of this clear picture you talk about?” the head of Spain’s National Security Service, Jorge Barrius, enquired.
“All the satellite evidence is available. Reports on the ground and from KGB sources are, of course, source protected.”
“How can we assess its reliability?” This time the objection came from Ton Van Rijn, the head of the Netherlands intelligence agency, a trim man in his early sixties with a small moustache and sensible shoes, like a schoolteacher’s or a policeman’s.
“As it’s material that originates from Cougar, you can expect it to be of the usual high standard,” she replied smoothly. “We have networks of agents in Russia and Ukraine that national agencies and the rest of the world would envy.”
Burt grinned amiably. Anna paused to invite further questions, but none came.
“First,” she continued, “Russian interior ministry officers are handing out passports to citizens of Ukraine near the Russian border, as well as in the Crimea. This was a tactic they employed in Georgia and subsequently used as a reason for the invasion there: the defence of Russian citizens. Second, unusual movements of small numbers of
