The Blind Spy

The sub was based on an old model, but reworked by Cougar’s scientists into a piece of equipment Burt proudly stated was a stage beyond anything any nation possessed. It was designed for infiltrating frogmen onto enemy shores and for small-scale assaults into enemy territory. Data systems took up nearly all the space, there was real-time imagery and advanced sonar, high-precision echo sounders, as well as optronic masts carrying thermal pictures of their surroundings. The sonars could listen up to a thousand miles.

“Even the U.S. Navy has nothing quite like this,” Burt boasted. And then he frowned briefly, like an actor remembering his lines. He said, “The others?” He was looking at Anna now.

“They’re not coming back,” she replied. “And neither is Logan,” she added.

Burt seemed uniquely stumped by this information. But there was nowhere to pace in the confined space and, for once, he had to face an unpleasant situation without covering it with any histrionics.

“How do you know Logan isn’t coming back, Anna?” he said finally.

“Because I saw my shell going into his heart,” she replied brutally.

Burt suddenly looked stunned. He was speechless. His thick, pudgy hands flickered at the fingertips and finally came to rest at his sides as if he was trying to stand at attention. His face was white.

“Why, Burt? It’s the question we’re all asking, not just me. Why did you let it happen? If you’d listened to any of us—any of us—Logan wouldn’t be dead but maybe running one of his own nasty little operations out of harm’s way.” She stared at Burt’s face and saw he couldn’t meet her eyes. His face was losing its paleness and taking on a livid red colour. “Logan is dead because he teamed up with some French intelligence officer from Kiev and his accompanying thugs to kidnap me. Again. A second time, Burt! You let it happen. You endangered all our lives. For what? You’re smart, Burt, but in this you were a fool. Why?”

In the confined space, the only sound was Burt’s harsh breathing. Everyone but Balthasar was staring at him. Finally it was Balthasar who spoke. “Why don’t you just tell them?” he said. “It’s finished now.”

Burt breathed deeply. The others were silent and the anger that flowed from Anna, Larry, and Lucy was as palpable as a monkey wrench. In the sub, descended now to the limits of its operating depth in the blindness of the Black Sea, Burt wrung his hands and his head seemed to sway. Finally he looked up and faced his accusers. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted him to come around to good. I thought I could make him come around to good. I thought if I gave him my trust, he would change. I thought I could make Logan. Logan was my son.”

Before dawn, the submersible entered the dry dock of the Cougar and the ship set course for the Mediterranean.

EPILOGUE

THE VIEW FROM THE PARADE-GROUND-SIZE SITTING ROOM at Burt’s ranch in New Mexico took in the low mountains to the northwest and, in the foreground, a stretch of scrubby mesa of cactus and sagebrush that petered out in the red-rock foothills. Any observer who admired the grandeur of the sweeping panorama would see that, and would also see the low hangar half a mile distant, where one of Cougar’s jets simmered in the eighty-degree heat. They might pick out the perimeter fence nearly a mile away and, on closer inspection, spot the guards and watchtowers at the entrance to the vast compound. And they would undoubtedly be awed by the richest blue of a sky that domed this corner of the world in what was, to some, a spiritual embrace. But would they have seen the trillions of details that existed in this brief landscape that led to the line between mountain and sky?

“Between here and that peak,” Burt said, without turning from the window, “the insects alone can be counted in the billions.”

Anna didn’t reply.

Burt finally turned towards her. She sensed that he’d been building up for some time to making the explanation he was about to make.

“Intelligence—and the people engaged in it,” he stated flatly, “are only feeling their way in near-perfect darkness. The great intelligence operator is the one who is concerned with the greatest number of hypotheses. The person who has only one cherishes and promotes that one of his own, and is blind to its faults. That fatally limited hypothesis means he observes very little—almost nothing, in fact—and therefore his crucial observations are marred by prejudice. And the triumph of truth is postponed.”

Burt picked up a bottle of Krug ’87 champagne and nipped the edges of the foil until he could untwist the wire and open it, gently and purposefully towards an antique champagne flute on a fine antique Persian marquetry table. He picked up the glass and placed it on an identical table next to where Anna was sitting before pouring himself a glass.

Burt raised his glass and drank.

“Lish’s mistake,” he said, and she noted that it was now “Lish,” not Theo, no longer the friend and colleague of thirty years’ standing. “Lish’s mistake,” Burt repeated, “was to be the latter, the man with a single hypothesis. The blind spy. Yes.” Burt seemed to gaze into the distance. “Lish is the blind spy.” Then his mind focused again on Anna, in front of him. “But Lish’s mistake is a mistake every agency makes, including, thankfully, the KGB. Lish is the perfect bureaucrat. No wonder that he found such common cause with the Russians.”

“You mean—?” Anna began, but Burt cut her off.

“No, no, I don’t mean that Lish is a traitor,” he said. “Not in the big sense, anyway. But we’ll come to that in a moment. What I mean is that he feels more comfortable with any bureaucracy, even the dead hand of the Kremlin machine, than he did with me, with Cougar. He’s a man who hides behind the safety of organisations.” Burt sighed expansively. “But now that he’s hanging upside down from a piano wire in Washington, I guess he’ll be thinking about his mistakes.”

Anna saw that this was one of Burt’s melodramatic figures of speech. The Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington didn’t yet, as far as she knew, interrogate their intelligence chiefs that way.

“And you, Burt?” Anna said. “You kept all the hypotheses in your head at the same time?”

Burt looked at the floor. “All of them but Logan,” he said. “Right up to the final days, I was prepared for my own prejudices to be proved wrong. But at least I left the opportunities alive in my head until the last.”

“Except for Logan,” she said.

“Logan was always a project,” he said quietly. “I wanted to make him in my image. It was a deep personal failure of mine. I will think about that mistake for a long time. For the rest of my life.”

“He betrayed me once,” Anna said. “Then he betrayed me a second time in Odessa back in January. And then you gave him the opportunity to betray me a third time. And now he’s dead. But it could have been me.”

He looked up at her sharply. “It wasn’t Logan who betrayed your trip to Odessa to the Russians,” he said.

“Oh no?”

“That’s what I meant a moment ago,” he said. “About Lish and treason. Lish didn’t commit treason against his country. He committed it against me, and, by extension, against you. It was Lish. He told Logan, but Logan didn’t take it to the Russians, Lish did. I have the documentary evidence to prove it and we’ll see before this enquiry is over that it will be the final nail in Lish’s coffin.”

Anna sat, silent. She was stunned that Burt’s man at the CIA, the boss himself, could have betrayed her.

“You see, what I also failed to see was Lish’s fundamental resentment towards me. His deep-seated jealousy. He wanted to damage Cougar. Now it’s the CIA that’s damaged. The Pride of Corsica was ultimately registered to a letter-box company in Omsk with KGB connections. The Russians set the whole thing up. The CIA go off on some Russian-inspired wild goose chase in the Black Sea and end up killing their own former colleagues on an empty ship. The British, too. It’s not just a PR disaster, it has deeply damaged the relationship between the CIA and the military in my country. No doubt in Britain, too. Adrian will shortly be looking for a job, I don’t doubt.” Burt paused. “On the plus side, all that’s happened in the Crimea will, in time, add another billion or so to Cougar’s government contracts.” He looked at her. “And you, Anna, you should have a stake in that.”