take a look at it. It’s empty but for a few hundred boxes of cigarettes.”
Omsk, Russia. Burt wished Theo wouldn’t keep insisting on giving them a geography class.
“Beneficiaries,” Adrian said. “What are the names behind the company?”
“Don’t know that yet, Adrian,” Theo replied.
“So. She docks in Tripoli—Libya,” Burt added in deliberate imitation of Theo’s style, “and then picks up another cargo there,” he said.
“Right, Burt. But this is the important thing,” Theo replied. “She isn’t what you’d call laden coming out of Tripoli, if you know what I mean. Whatever she picks up there has no effect on her waterline.”
“So how do you know she took anything on?” Burt said.
“Our teams have pictures,” Adrian said, and Archie brought them to the surface of the paperwork on the table. “Wooden boxes, three in all,” Archie said. There were pictures of large wooden crates, big enough to hold two men, and well insulated by the look of them. They were being lifted onto the deck and then dropped down into a hold out of sight.
“Something small and valuable, then,” Burt said.
“We think so.”
“And then there are the bodyguards,” Adrian chipped in. “What are they there for?”
“What indeed?” Burt said. “So, Theo, what then?”
“She returns by a roundabout route back eastwards again, across the Med. Docks in Piraeus first of all, then at Tartous, on the Syrian coast. Then she turns north to the Bosphorus again, enters the straits—”
“And is now?” Burt interrupted.
“Our teams have her pinpointed at Lat 44.53, Long 32.65,” Adrian replied crossly.
“Around fifty miles off the coast of the Crimea,” Burt said, to both Theo’s and Adrian’s astonishment.
“I didn’t know you were so familiar with the Black Sea,” Theo said. “Or with the exact coordinates in the area, for that matter. You didn’t know this all along, did you, Burt? I haven’t been wasting my time?”
“No, Theo. Just what you and Adrian have told me.”
It didn’t look like either of them believed him.
“So what’s the thesis?” he pressed on.
“That’s what we now need to pursue,” Theo replied.
Burt thought for some moments. Then he walked away from the table so he could get the maps and pictures and names and numbers out of his head, and think. Finally he turned around.
“Kind of an obvious trail, isn’t it?” he said.
“Not at all, Burt,” Theo replied primly. “It’s just that we have the capabilities to follow it. Simple as that. We’ve got every smart device known to man trained on this ship. Plus the British teams,” he nodded in Adrian’s direction. “Celebrate our ingenuity, Burt, don’t cast suspicion on it.”
So that was it. We’re cleverer than they are, Burt thought. We’re smarter than the Russians. Somehow he doubted that. Nevertheless, what the
“What’s your take, Adrian?” he asked.
“The ship picked up something in Libya. Something small, something valuable, and, most likely, something deadly,” Adrian replied. “Now she’s standing well off the coast of the Crimea. We can perhaps assume the two are connected.”
“What are we doing to discover her cargo?” Burt asked Theo.
“It’s difficult,” Theo admitted. “We have agents on the ground in Libya, of course. They’re doing the best they can, but it’s not exactly easy. The whole loading operation took place in a well-guarded and separate part of the port. Plus the fact that we think there was a special army loading team on the case, not the usual dockworkers. And it’s not exactly a friendly environment in which to be asking sensitive questions.”
“But they are,” Burt said. “Asking sensitive questions, I mean.”
“As best they can,” Theo replied, awkwardly, Burt thought. Even Theo Lish, the CIA chief, found human intelligence difficult to factor in these days.
“Well, good luck to them,” Burt replied.
Outside in the unusually warm spring air of Harper’s Crossing, Burt took Adrian aside and invited him to lunch. They took a limousine that had been waiting for Burt and travelled in towards Langley and a restaurant named Rocco’s where Burt seemed to be well known enough to be given a prime table by the window and receive the attention of half a dozen waiters. When they had sat down, Burt didn’t wait.
“What do you make of it, Adrian?” he asked.
“I think it fits in with other intelligence,” Adrian replied. “Dangerous stuff coming over the border from Russia into Ukraine that you’ve detected. The only difference is that this is aimed from the sea.”
“If only we knew what ‘this’ was,” Burt said.
“We’re treating it as high priority,” Adrian replied. “The highest. Just as the CIA is.”
“Then it must be important,” Burt replied drily.
17
BURT AND ANNA WERE TO TAKE a Cougar executive jet from Washington Dulles airport for the flight south. Larry was at the wheel of a Porsche four-by-four as they drew up outside a hangar at the private end of the airport and she saw the plane gleaming in the early spring sunshine.
She saw that, like all Burt’s fleet of planes, it had been highly polished. It looked like an outsize model ornament destined for a giant mantelpiece, or a sculpture belonging to a proud collector and which only needed a pedestal to mount it on. The jet had the cleanliness of an anaesthetised surgeon’s knife, nothing like the dirty, oiled, mechanised tool that was a commercial plane. And that was how Cougar liked to present itself to the world, she thought: as a clean, pure white, and beautiful instrument. Like Cougar—like Burt—the plane was a thing of ideological and even moral certainty.
Larry unloaded the bags from the car and carried them onto the plane. Burt turned to her before they stepped out: “How is Little Finn? Enjoying life, I trust,” he said.
She nodded. “He misses seeing Larry and the boys, I think, more than he misses me.”
Burt looked at her. “But he’s in the right place, you’re sure of that? Anything more we can do?”
“Oh yes, he’s in the right place,” she replied easily, but she betrayed none of the hollowness that her visits to him always left her with. And Burt didn’t press her, as he never did, about anything. “He’s very well,” she added unnecessarily, more to convince herself than him, and then she looked away, out of the window across the tarmac.
“He’ll always be your son, Anna,” was all he said.
They boarded the plane, Larry chatted to the pilot, and then they took off into a startlingly blue sky that seemed as if it had been designed by Burt to receive his pristine jet.
Burt was relaxed as ever on the journey. Never a care in the world, a world which to him, anyway, it seemed to her, was like a Roman circus prepared for his own carefully planned shows and games, rather than the dangerous and inconsistent place it was to others and which forced its constantly changing flux on them. Burt, the ruler of the world; a plump Caesar who this morning wore bright yellow slacks, a blue blazer, and expensive suede loafers. And as always puffed on a half-smoked cigar.
When they were settled at their cruising height and food had been served, Anna turned to him. “What will you do when you’re too old?” she asked him. “Who’s going to run Cougar then?”
“We train youth teams.” He beamed. “Just like the football clubs.”
“But there’ll never be anyone else like you,” she said. “You are Cougar, aren’t you?”
“And Cougar will therefore change,” he replied. “It’ll become a bureaucracy like the CIA, perhaps, with all the dead hand that implies.” He smiled broadly at her. “A company can only be as good as its leader. And it can only be a dictatorship like Cougar when you have a benevolent dictator,” he said, and laughed his rolling laugh. “And that’s
