Moscow Sting f-2

by Alex Dryden

  She tried to imagine him as the handsome youth of more than fifty years before, when he’d fled from Hungary after Russian tanks entered Budapest in ’56. Back then, his country’s brief leap for freedom was crushed. He had fought on the barricades, retreated, fought again until it was almost too late, survived, and escaped intact.

  In the West, the British had eventually recruited him. He’d made more than twenty trips across the Iron Curtain, Finn had told her, but he swiftly became disillusioned. Willy had thought the West was fighting for Hungary’s freedom, but, like other refugees from the East, he was to be disappointed. Hungary was just a walk-on part in the geopolitical game of the Cold War.

  Willy was important to her, she realised, not for the first time. He wasn’t just her last link to Finn; he was a mirror for her own survival as an exile.

  “How’s my godson?” Willy asked.

  “He’s loving life, Willy. Every minute of it. Maybe he’s a little self-absorbed sometimes, but I consider that to be a good thing. He finds out things for himself.”

  “He needs a man in his life, Anna. He’s surrounded by women. You, the school…”

  She laughed. Willy was always trying to get her fixed up with various “safe” men under the guise of it being right for Little Finn. He had a straightforward view of the relationship between men and women, but without the arrogance she knew in many men from the East.

  She and Willy had married shortly after Finn had died, but it was only for her security. He was more than thirty years older than her, after all. But she’d easily agreed that their friendship justified this arrangement. She was able to have a new name, a new identity, until she’d been able to broker the deal with the French and do it properly.

  “I mean it. He needs a man,” Willy repeated adamantly.

  “But not any man,” she stated.

  His eyes narrowed. She knew the look. It preceded something artful.

  “What about you, then? Get yourself a new man, why not?” Willy changed tack, his easy smile not quite concealing the old-fashioned attitude behind it. “You’re young, you’re beautiful, you shouldn’t be alone all the time,” he pressed her.

  “Like… get a new sofa, you mean?” she said. “Or get a new car?”

  “Well…” Willy wasn’t sure this wasn’t such a bad comparison.

  “Look, Willy, I’m happy as things are. And if I weren’t, why would a man be the antidote?”

  “Are you angry with Finn? Is that it? Do you feel he betrayed you?”

  “Finn never betrayed anyone but himself.”

  “And you and the boy were collateral damage.”

  She smiled at the aggressive chess game of his thoughts, always pushing the pieces out at her.

  “Not necessarily, Willy,” she replied. “It’s all a matter of how you perceive it. Do I look damaged?”

  “No. But you’re tough, Anna. Maybe you’re too tough sometimes for your own good. You can sit there and tell me, ‘It’s just a matter of how you perceive it.’ What kind of thinking is that? It’s not reality.”

  “Reality is exactly what it is. It’s that kind of thinking, Willy.”

  “But romance… !” Willy protested. He was off again, a new tack, new methods of persuasion. “What about a little physical comfort? What’s wrong with some fun? Eh?”

  She laughed. “You’re the old devil, Willy, not me.”

  “Romance never let me down,” Willy insisted. “It’s been like water in the desert.”

  “So it’s some unalloyed good then, is it?” she replied. “No, Willy. There’s good romance and bad romance, same as anything else. Read the poets. Anyway, maybe you should ask some of your exes how great their romances were. Or would it take too long?”

  “You’re cheeky and you are tough, édesem. Thank God I only have to be married to you.”

  She laughed. She liked it when he called her “sweetheart” in his own language.

  “You’ll frighten men away with that kind of talk,” he insisted. “You want to be the Virgin Queen?”

  “If the alternative is frightened men, yes. Finn was never frightened of anything.”

  “Ah, Finn.” Willy shook his head, suddenly quiet, and made no attempt to hide his deep sadness from her. She liked that about him too, that he was honest with his feelings and didn’t try to protect her from them. “Finn was a beautiful man,” he said.

  “And a fool in almost equal amounts,” she added.

  “I understand. You’re not over him. I apologise.”

  She smiled and held his hand.

  “You have nothing to apologise for, Willy. You’ve loved us both.”

  A waitress brought them a pissaladière and some salad and filled their glasses.

  It was true. She wasn’t over Finn; he was never far from her thoughts. How could she be over him? Finn was the reason she had left everything—Russia her home, her past, her roots, her people. Her Year Zero was 1999—the year she’d met Finn. She’d made the most of the men in her life up to then, but Finn was the only one she’d ever truly loved.

  And Finn was never far away, even two years after his death. He had been a part of her life for just seven years, until they’d finally got to him. She and Finn had seven years of almost permanent tension, some of it bad, but most of it was good, the beautiful tension of being in constant awareness of each other.

  They’d met in a setup, an arrangement between the KGB on her side and MI6 on his.

  In 1999, he had been encouraged by his station head in Moscow to strike up an affair with her, while she in turn had been instructed by her SVR boss to do the same. Up to then, the KGB had failed at all their attempts to entrap Finn, and so she, the youngest female KGB colonel—a beauty in her own right, she was accustomed to hearing—had, much against her will, taken the job. She was no honey-trap, but a senior officer at the heart of the KGB’s foreign operations. She had worked inside the SVR, and right at the heart of the SVR itself, in the highly secret Department S.

  But after 2000, when Putin became president, she had been told why Finn had remained in Moscow for so long. There was a mole, a double agent—a traitor—close to power in Putin’s circle, and Finn was believed to have sole access to him. Find the traitor—that was her patriotic assignment.

  She recalled Finn’s last conversation with Adrian, his recruiter in London; how Adrian had threatened and cajoled and finally issued an ultimatum to Finn to stop his investigations. But Finn had pursued his own line, and met with his death in Paris, after he was betrayed.

  She looked across the table at Willy. It was Willy who had saved them, before Finn chose to take his final step. She and Finn had hidden out in a beach hut at Willy’s driftwood restaurant on the most unwanted, unattractive stretch of sand near Marseille. Only the hippies and drifters went to Willy’s beach, and even they had to be vetted by him.

  Those were the happy days, hot in summer, cold in winter, in a windswept hut hidden behind the dunes, which themselves were hidden across miles of unwelcoming salt flats. Willy had kept them successfully away from prying eyes.

  “What is worrying you, then, if your life is so good?” Willy said, interrupting her thoughts, bringing her back to the present.

  She didn’t reply, but looked into his eyes.

  “Tell me,” he said. “I see a cloud.”

  “Someone came to the house,” she answered finally. “On Saturday. A neighbour saw him.”

  She saw Willy immediately become practical; no anxiety, no sympathy, just analysis.

  “Not a caller, then?” he said.

  “No. He just looked, came right up to the gate and looked through.”

  “Maybe noting your car?” Willy said.

  “Possibly, yes.”

  “You have a description?”

  “Not a useful one.”

  “And in the village? A car? How did he get there?”

  “I haven’t asked anyone, and the man who told me didn’t know.”

  “Someone will likely ha
ve seen it,” Willy said. “In these villages, that’s what they do, look out for invaders. That’s what they’ve been doing for a thousand years. It’s in their blood.”

  “I only heard just before I came to see you,” she said.

  “You’ve told your French security?”

  “No.”

  “You should have.”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “Yes, there is. I’m coming back with you, staying there tonight. Maybe we can find out more.”

  “That will certainly set tongues wagging,” she said, and laughed.

  “Hell, we’re married! I claim my rights!” he joked. “And I want to see my little godson. I have something for him. Just a small present.”

  They drove back after lunch, across the low, olive-rich hills of the Alpilles with their neat stone farmhouses and perfect villages.

  They didn’t talk much as she drove. Willy saw she was carrying the gun and simply nodded approvingly. Anna felt tense. She realised she was anxious being away from her son with the unsolved knowledge of this unwelcome visitor. Willy spoke once, when they were nearing the village. It was as if he’d been unwilling to raise the subject.

  “Have you told them about Mikhail, Anna?”

  “Them?”

  “The French? Or anybody else?”

  “No, Willy. Mikhail is all I have to keep me safe.”

  “And all you need to get you into deep shit too,” he said.

  She didn’t reply.

  She had told nobody about Mikhail. Mikhail… Finn’s great source, who couldn’t be discredited, no matter what they said in London. Mikhail was true.

  And she had told nobody—not even Willy—that she alone knew who Mikhail really was. Alone in the world, she knew Mikhail’s identity, and only Mikhail knew she knew it. That was trust, trust on a scale that dwarfed even her trust in Willy, and in Finn himself. Mikhail was so big, so important. He walked such a narrow tightrope at the heart of Putin’s elite.

  She’d wondered more than once why Mikhail hadn’t killed her the one time they’d met, and she’d seen who he was. That was trust on a scale that was unimaginable to her.

  Back in Germany, it was Mikhail who had found Finn, when she had been unable to. She had told nobody this. And she had told nobody that after Mikhail found Finn, he’d found her too, in the pink house in Germany, so that she could see Finn one last time before he died.

  Finn had never told her Mikhail’s true identity. It was for her own protection, he said. And then, on the night of his death, she saw Mikhail.

  Mikhail was the gold seam for whoever found him; his enemies in Russia, or his so-called friends in the West. And when Mikhail had revealed himself to her, he had somehow known that she would never reveal his identity. He knew she could have had anything she wanted by revealing that, even her route back to Russia, if she’d wanted it.

  That was a trust never to be broken, even with Willy.

  When they reached the village, they saw the children playing in the sun-browned garden at the rear of the crèche. She saw her son, and her heart slowed. As they’d approached the village, she realised she’d become increasingly afraid, imagining everything.

  But he was there, falling off a red plastic structure into the sand, over and over again, laughing more and more, and urging his friends to do the same. She recalled that he’d told her in complete seriousness, three days before, that he was going to marry Amandine, aged three.

  She and Willy took him from the teachers, who were reluctant to give him up. Willy hoisted him onto his shoulders, and he waved good-bye to the women. They loved him, Anna saw. Sometimes he was painfully like his father.

  The three of them walked back up the lane to the house.

  “Call them now,” Willy said. “The first thing you do is call your security. You won’t get rid of me until they’re here.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said. But she was angry that after so many months of freedom from anxiety, it should all have washed back into her life—into their lives.

  Willy had given Little Finn an ant house. While they played with it in the garden, she called her contact in Paris.

  The man listened to her story. He didn’t seem to feel any urgency. That was how the French were, she thought. Unlike the British, who injected urgency into anything, the French sucked it out. She wasn’t sure at first if he was taking her seriously, but she’d come to know the way they worked.

  “When will you send a team down here?” she asked.

  “A team? I don’t know. But someone will come today—I promise you. We’ll take care of everything.”

  She went out into the garden. Willy went inside to fetch a bottle of wine.

  “So they don’t know,” Willy said, when he’d poured himself a glass. “Listen, Anna. If the French knew about Mikhail, they’d give you permanent security, not this excuse for it. Maybe you should tell them.”

  “I’ve already told you. No, Willy. They’ll be all over me forever if I tell them about Mikhail.”

  The afternoon idled into evening. The air was completely motionless, the trees like statues. Movement became an effort.

  “Even the weather is waiting for something,” Willy complained.

  He clumped off around the enclosed courtyard, inspecting everything for the third or fourth time. It was completely enclosed, with two-storey walls and high metal gates on three sides, and the house and high wrought iron railings where the palm tree stood on the fourth. Once again, he seemed satisfied.

  He dozed off for an hour in the evening shade of the sycamore tree.

  Anna went into the house and began to make supper. Willy appeared and began to make phone calls, until she asked him to stop. The French might be trying to reach her, she said, and there was no reliable mobile network in the village. Little Finn had gone back into the garden to play with his ant house. Anna heard him singing from time to time, and every so often she went outside, just to make sure he was there.

  At seven thirty, Willy poured them both a glass of wine. She called Little Finn in from the garden for supper. He didn’t come at first, and she sent Willy out to get him. When he didn’t return either, Anna went into the garden.

  Willy was looking under an open shed, calling the boy’s name. She felt a flutter of fear. She could see from the doorway that Little Finn wasn’t in there, so why was Willy calling for him? When he turned around, she saw the look on Willy’s face. And she saw that Little Finn had disappeared.

  Chapter 10

  BURT MILLER WAS A large, ebullient man, full of loud self-confidence. This expressed itself in numerous ways, but could be summed up by an almost profligate attitude of general largesse. He doled out ladlefuls of life to all comers, and in equal proportion to the magnanimous bounty he habitually awarded himself.

  “Life is about expansion,” he once boomed to junior recruits at the CIA training centre in Virginia, otherwise known as the Farm. And then he would point out with his trademark guffaw that his physical size had kept pace with his expansive nature, as well as with his other, more worldly assets in the thirty years since the agency had first invited him to serve his country.

  “I’m twice the man I once was,” he would proudly, and accurately, proclaim.

  Back in the 1960s, when he was a fit, agile sportsman adventurer at the age of twenty-two, he had entirely illegally entered Soviet-occupied Central Asia on foot, off his own bat. He proceeded to learn four of the local languages and cultivated local mafiosi, who twenty-five years later would become the foundation stones of Russia’s new capitalism.

  He and his then new wife, Martha, honeymooned for a year in the mountains of Afghanistan with his Pathan tribesmen friends, one of whom would, in maturity, come to control half the world’s heroin trade. Under various noms de plume, he spent his spare time writing academically entertaining articles for National Geographic.

  He swept through Central Asia like the Karaburan wind, befriending old-style Communist bosses, medieval mullahs, a
nti-Communist revolutionaries, criminals, royalty, fixers, taxi drivers, and spies with equal bonhomie.

  His world, as he would put it to the wide-eared recruits at the Farm, was the world according to Burt.

  And now, after forty years as the self-proclaimed King of the Stans, his Central Asian beat, he owned the Coca-Cola franchise for half the region, prime vineyards in the south of France, an island in the Caribbean, and a network of agents in Russia’s former territories who were not only source material for his intelligence operations but also a lucrative business partnership for his numerous commercial activities, some of which failed, but most of which succeeded.

  As he told his younger, more awestruck operatives after their graduation—when like a fairy-tale uncle he took them on clandestine CIA adventures—things usually worked out how he wanted them to; and if they didn’t, it meant he had simply been mistaken about what he’d wanted.

  “Self-belief is ninety percent of the battle in this game,” he told them. “Same as in any game. But most important to remember is this—omniscience isn’t part of the human condition,” he added with another bellow of laughter.

  And now, sitting in the plush varnished teak saloon of the yacht Divinity, which gently rolled, blacked out and brooding, off the coast of Marseille’s industrial zone, Burt, like Socrates before his students, was regaling another team of his boys, new acolytes he’d tempted away from the agency to serve in his own private company. He was giving them the world according to Burt.

  “God,” he said jovially. “God is what happens. That’s all you need to know. What happens is why we’re here. The rest is nothing.”

  And what had happened with Logan’s missive concerning the Russian colonel undoubtedly had this divine hand, perceived by Burt in any case, behind it.