“That’s your motive, Burt, not mine.”
“And you? Dear Anna, what are your motives?”
She didn’t reply.
“The Senate Intelligence Committee is very pleased with Balthasar’s damning evidence against the KGB. They don’t intend to use it—as long as the Russians play ball. As long as the Russians drop their plans to implicate Qubaq in the events at Sevastopol, we’ll keep the world from knowing what those plans were. You’ve read the newspapers. The Kremlin is talking about a rogue group of special forces soldiers of their own who went on a psycho rampage in Sevastopol’s harbour. All good. They can’t go back on that now, even if we didn’t hold the cards against them that Balthasar brought.”
Anna picked up the glass on the table next to her for the first time. She drank half of it.
“And who will you put forward to be the next head of the Agency?” she said.
“I’ll wait until I’m asked.” Burt grinned.
“I’m not sure you’re going to find anyone who doesn’t end up resenting you and wanting their freedom from you,” she said. “You don’t give someone their freedom, they resent you. It’s written in stone.”
“Maybe. But I can’t help what other people think.”
To see and not to know, to know and not to see. Anna thought of Balthasar.
“Because you were right?” she asked. “Is that why you’re so full of yourself?”
“I think you know I’m always full of myself.” Burt guffawed, then he became serious. “Every time I’m right,” he said, “I get richer and more powerful. But every time I’m right it also becomes more difficult to be rich in hypotheses. Being right—or just thinking that—is an open invitation to prejudice. That’s what I try to guard against in every waking minute.”
As Anna rode away from the ranch house, the sun was dimming to the west. She opened the throttle of the bike on the straight, brown-grey road until the wind tore at her eyes and all she could see were the road’s edges and still she increased her speed. She rode blind until she thought she sensed where the track led up into the mountains—it was maybe two miles, maybe more, during which she had seen nothing but light. She closed down the throttle and stopped. The track to their cabin was to her right, not far off. She wiped the tears away that the wind had wrenched from her eyes and turned up the canyon that disappeared into the red rock. Balthasar was waiting for her.
About the Author
ALEX DRYDEN is the pseudonym of a British writer who worked for the British security services. He has had extensive firsthand experience with Russia for many years. He is the author of the critically acclaimed
Other Books by Alex Dryden
