Moscow Sting f-2

by Alex Dryden

  “Burt says he was sacked. Something to do with the Balkan war. Weren’t you out there too?”

  “After the war, yes. I was working with the UN. Before that I was a teacher in New York, then I took a psychology degree. Then I studied conflict resolution at military academy. That’s where I started this kind of work. Joined the CIA. Life progression,” she laughed.

  “And now you work for Burt’s company,” Anna said.

  “For the moment. Burt’s a good employer, I guess. He inspires.”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “I can see that.”

  “But I’m not sure I’m going to get on too well with Logan,” Marcie said.

  “Why not?”

  “We’re sharing the guesthouse, you know? I guess it’s his attitude to women. He’s predatory, he has assumptions. He thinks he doesn’t need to try.”

  “With women?” Anna said.

  “Or anything else.”

  “Do you want him to try with you then, Marcie?”

  “God, no!”

  “Sounds like the perfect partnership, then,” Anna joked. “A guy who doesn’t like trying, and a woman who doesn’t want him to.” But again Anna didn’t believe the rift Marcie seemed keen to project between herself and Logan. It was a trap Anna was intended to fall into. Marcie was developing her role as a safe place for divulging confidences—Marcie and Anna against Logan.

  They walked on in silence for a few minutes, before Marcie spoke.

  “Tell me about Finn,” Marcie said.

  And so Anna told someone else for the first time about her relationship with Finn. But she did it, not to unburden herself, only to play the same game of artful intimacy that Marcie had begun.

  Back at the house, Logan greeted them both with a smile. Burt was nowhere to be seen. Marcie went up to the guesthouse, and Anna and Logan were left alone in the kitchen.

  “Ready for another grilling?” he said.

  “I don’t think I’m doing anything else this afternoon,” she replied.

  They paused while Logan drank from a cup of coffee.

  “East Coast,” she said at last. “Private school, followed by Harvard, and then in the footsteps of your father into the agency.”

  “Eight out of ten,” he replied with a grin. “My father was a banker, not a spook.”

  “Retired?”

  “He died. In a car crash.”

  “That’s bad luck.”

  Not “Sorry,” Logan noted, just “Bad luck.” She was a tough bitch. But he inclined his head in acknowledgement. “And you?” he said.

  “What is there you don’t know about me, Logan?” she replied.

  “Not a lot from your own lips,” he answered.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about Finn.”

  “Everybody wants to know about Finn.”

  “I’d like to think this isn’t all about sitting on different sides of the table,” Logan said. “It looks like we’re going to be spending a while together.”

  “Let’s just stick to the script,” she said. “We’re just two people who happen to be working together.”

  “Whatever you say,” he replied amiably. “I guess it’s time to move anyway.”

  “Afternoons aren’t my favourite time,” she said. “I’m a lot better in the mornings.”

  “That’s a shame.” He grinned and looked at her directly for once. “I prefer the nights.”

  Burt was already sitting in the study when Marcie returned and the three of them walked in, Anna first, then Marcie, with Logan some way behind.

  But it was Logan who began the questioning again. Burt hardly looked up.

  Logan gave her a file first of all, which he asked her to open and read. She saw it contained a list of Russian names, but with no explanation of what or who they were.

  “Recognise any of them?” he said casually.

  She ran her eye down the list. There were twenty-seven names altogether. She read the list a second time, but this time it was to compose herself, to avoid making eye contact. All were KGB, in one form or other. But there were two names she recognised very well indeed. Near the top of the list was an old friend and former lover whom she’d known since school days. But three from the bottom of the list was the name that really shocked her. Vasily Dubkov. It was Mikhail’s real name.

  “Yes,” she said with a touch of bored interest. “I recognise several. What’s the significance?”

  “Tell me first what you know about the ones you recognise,” Logan said smoothly.

  She knew twelve of the twenty-seven, some well, others remotely. Then there was Vladimir, her old school friend and lover. But at the bottom of the page, Mikhail’s name seemed to burn a hole in her consciousness.

  She outlined the details—background, rank, and experience—of each. She didn’t do it in the order they were written on the page, but as she remembered or knew of them. That way, she could better conceal Mikhail rather than leave him until last, when she knew it would be more difficult. There were no names beneath his that she recognised.

  But Marcie was interested in Vladimir.

  “So how long have you known Vladimir?” she said. “Since you were children? How old were you? Did you stay in touch?”

  What did they know about her and Vladimir? Anna saw no reason to conceal anything.

  “Vladimir, like me, was from an SVR family. We were at school together from the age of ten. We trained together at Yasenevo, at the Forest, in the early nineties. Vladimir spoke out against the abuse of privileges by KGB officers. We were encouraged to voice our thoughts in those days. But he was the only one who fell for it. He was exiled to the KGB residency in the Cape Verde Islands for ten years. I met him again when I was assigned to watch Finn.”

  There was a silence in the room.

  “Still friends?” Marcie said at last.

  “We were always friends. My father wanted me to marry him.” Anna laughed. “There was never any chance of that. My father wanted the union of two great SVR families. But I wanted a career—not to be married to a careerist.”

  “Like your mother was,” Marcie said.

  “Yes. My mother gave everything up for my father’s career. They separated in the nineties when my father completed his posting in Damascus and went back to Moscow. My mother saw a way out eventually.”

  “This could be good,” Burt said, stirring from the armchair. “Vladimir could be very good indeed.”

  But none of them explained why.

  “What’s the purpose of the list?” Anna asked a second time, but they weren’t prepared to tell her yet.

  They went through each name that she said she recognised. She filled in the details of whatever she knew. Then they went through the list from top to bottom, in order, in case she’d forgotten anything.

  “All KGB?” Burt asked. “The ones you know?”

  “That, or close to the Putin administration,” she said.

  “Good,” Burt replied.

  Then Logan began to fillet the twelve names she knew once more. He was interested in those who weren’t simply KGB officers. Two of these were government officials. One of them worked in the Kremlin administration, and one of them was Mikhail. She knew she had to be extremely careful now, to be as open about him as she was about the others.

  “This Vasily Dubkov,” Logan said at last. “What about him?”

  They’d left Mikhail last of all.

  “He’s a time-serving figure in the administration,” she answered. “As I remember, he was the Russian deputy railways minister.”

  There he was in front of her on the page, with a low-key job that kept him away from the public eye. But unknown to all outside the highest echelons of the KGB elite, the deputy railways minister was also the SVR’s secret controller of all Russia’s foreign agents in Europe. Vasily Dubkov was there from the beginning, when Putin came to Petersburg from his KGB posting in East Germany. He was as close to Putin as it was possible to get. And he was Mikhail
.

  Anna kept her eyes fixed to the list and ran them down it twice more. Once she was confident her expression wouldn’t betray her and her breathing was under control, she put the list on the desk. Then she looked Logan in the eye.

  “So?” she said.

  But it was Burt who answered.

  “This is a list of appointments the Russians have made in the past year to their embassy in Washington, their New York consulate, and the UN in New York,” he revealed.

  Anna was aghast. Mikhail was in America. Vladimir, Burt went on to say, was part of the Russian delegation at the UN. But Burt believed he was running the KGB residency in New York.

  “There’s been a big turnover of personnel in the past year,” Logan explained. “Both at the Russian embassy and at the Russian UN delegation. It’s unusual. Very unusual, actually.”

  “We’d like you to take your time with the list,” Marcie said. “You may remember other things.”

  For the rest of the day, they left her in the study, and she wrote down all she knew but the one vital piece of information. Mikhail’s face came into her mind constantly and faded away again.

  Over the next two days, Logan and Marcie were determined to seize control of the routine in small matters, the specific times they wanted formally to sit her down in the study, rather than walk in the forest, or ride the horses up to the ridge before the snow became too deep in December.

  These small things were a ready-made battleground between Anna and her inquisitors. To disrupt their desired routine in minor ways was a tactic she used from the moment of their arrival. In the small ways, ways that weren’t possible to identify, she could to some degree set her terms, her control, however minor it seemed.

  But in the big ways, the control of information itself, she knew she held all the cards. And their weakness was that they didn’t know she knew who Mikhail was.

  Covering all the bases, she weighed up the effect of telling them about Mikhail—who he was, how to make contact with him, his background, his relationship to the Kremlin and to Putin, everything. It certainly occurred to her to tell them. But, she told herself in these opening days, Mikhail needed protection too. She owed him that, and she didn’t trust her handlers, even the silk-gloved approach of Burt, not to blunder all over Mikhail, destroy his cover, and in the process destroy him.

  He deserved to be the one to make the approach to the Americans, the British, whoever he wanted to. It wasn’t for her to reveal his secret. She also knew that if she told them about Mikhail, she and Little Finn would be free.

  Mikhail was also her talisman, her protective amulet. Mikhail was her wandering exile’s deeply hidden stash of gold that could be used only once, and then only in the eventuality of extreme danger to herself and to Little Finn.

  They sat in the study for longer and longer periods, broken up by walks, a horse ride with Logan, playing with Little Finn. Sometimes Logan and Marcie only seemed interested in the names on the list that she didn’t know. At other times they wanted to extract anything further about the ones she did know. And then they’d return to the night Finn died.

  “What about this guy?” Logan would ask. Or, “You must have come across this guy? Are you sure? Think again, Anna.” They then showed her photographs of each of the men on the list, in turn, just in case the face had been given another name, and she might recognise that instead.

  On the third day, they were sitting in the study in the early afternoon. She was tired, and felt her concentration was lower than usual. Logan suddenly brought the name of Vasily Dubkov into the room again. They’d been over it several times before, but the name had never been pulled out of the hat in as startling a way as it was now.

  She had no expression on her face, no inflection in her voice. The deputy railways minister was, she had rehearsed to herself in bed at night, just one more name. She treated Mikhail the same way as she had treated the others.

  “This guy Dubkov,” Logan said. “He doesn’t seem right.”

  “You say he’s not KGB,” Marcie said.

  “I don’t whether he is or not,” she replied. “In all likelihood he is. But I don’t know. I only know of him. He’s a minor public figure, I suppose. I never met him.”

  “There’s something odd about his appearance on the list,” Logan said. He had his hand on his jaw and was apparently staring at his copy of the list.

  Anna didn’t respond.

  “He was transferred to the Russians’ Washington embassy—its cultural division actually—seven months ago. That’s five months after Vladimir was assigned to the United Nations in New York and, we suspect, became head of the KGB residency there.” He looked at her intently.

  “What’s odd about it?” she said.

  “I can see why Vladimir’s on the list,” Logan replied. “He’s KGB—not just verified by you, but by others. And the other names you’ve been able to identify as having various different backgrounds in domestic and foreign intelligence services. But why would the Kremlin transfer Dubkov to their cultural centre in Washington? He’s a deputy railways minister. He’s a nobody.” Logan looked at her as if the answer, in its obviousness, barely needed stating.

  “I guess because he’s not just a deputy railways minister,” Anna replied.

  “Exactly. So who, or what, is he?”

  “We can guess he’s KGB,” she said, “but look—I don’t know for sure.”

  “Do you know what his background is?” Marcie asked. “Before he got the railways job, I mean?”

  “That’s another interesting thing about him,” Logan interrupted. “He seems to have no background that we can trace.”

  “No, I don’t. Where’s he from?” Anna said.

  “We’re fairly sure Saint Petersburg,” Logan replied. “We almost know that for a fact.”

  “When? What’s the timing?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “If he’s close to Putin, it’s a sure thing he goes back to around 1990 or 1991,” Anna said. “Back then Putin turned up in the city and became deputy mayor. Then Putin moved all his Petersburg friends to Moscow when he went there to take over the top job at the KGB in 1999, before he became president.”

  “Probably that’s right, yes,” Logan answered. “Maybe he and Putin knew each other back then, if not before then.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Maybe.”

  Marcie looked up at Anna. “Maybe Dubkov goes back to when Putin was stationed in Dresden, East Germany, back in the eighties before the Wall fell,” she said.

  “It’s possible,” Anna agreed.

  “But you don’t know,” Logan asked, and his question had a hard edge to it.

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Nothing comes up on him,” Marcie said. “No name, no photo match, nothing in the records at all about him.”

  “That’s odd,” Logan repeated. “He has no traces. Why would a deputy railways minister have no traces?”

  Anna said nothing.

  Logan looked at her hard. “There should be something, some backstory. He can’t just turn up—even in an insignificant job with the railways—without some kind of background. And he certainly can’t be posted to Washington without one.”

  She shrugged. “I would guess so.”

  “What else does your guesswork tell you?” Marcie said, and there was only innocence in her voice.

  Anna paused to think. “It’s possible he just did someone a favour back in Petersburg in the early nineties, some relatively small thing, and that got him the railways job. It was a small reward. Maybe he has no actual record. There are hundreds of thousands of KGB active reservists out there. They’re all people waiting for the call. Most of them probably don’t have any record that you could get your hands on.”

  “Except for one important difference between him and the hundreds of thousands,” Logan said, with a slight acidity in his voice. “This guy is assigned to Washington. That’s a big leap from nothing.”

  She had to agree.


  He reached into his pocket and took out a stiff photo envelope.

  “I want you to look at this picture again,” he said and handed it to her.

  She pulled the photo from the envelope and felt Logan watching her intently all the time. She moved neither slowly nor fast, the most difficult pretence of all—to be absolutely normal.

  When she turned the photo the right way up to look at it, she saw Mikhail’s face again. She studied it closely. It was the only picture they had of him. It had been taken in Washington the week before. There was only one picture of Mikhail in the public arena, even in Russia. And that wasn’t conclusive unless you knew it was him.

  Back in 2000 when Putin became president, a picture was taken at a very special religious service in the Kremlin’s chapel. It was presided over by the Orthodox archbishop who had publicly proclaimed when Putin came to power, “God creates everything. And so he created the KGB to care for us. God bless the KGB.”

  At this service, the picture was intended to show only Putin, thus demonstrating that he cared for the people’s religion. But in the pew behind him—a place of honour—was the left side of Mikhail’s face, Dubkov’s face, hardly more than his ear and his jaw. It was unmistakable—if you knew it was him.

  “Recognise it now?” Logan said.

  At first she acted like she thought she might. But then she shook her head.

  “No. I thought it was someone… someone who looks quite like him. But it isn’t who I thought.” She looked directly at Logan. “Sometimes you can try too hard to see what you want to see,” she said.

  “My perennial problem, apparently,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  ON THE DAY BEFORE Adrian was to arrive, Burt gave them all what he called a day off, though Logan was detailed to stay with Anna throughout the day. Marcie was going “into town,” as she put it.

  Anna and Logan decided to follow a herd of elk that Larry had seen up on the ridge, and maybe bring one down. Burt had a cupboard full of rifles at the house.

  They walked off up the meadow at nine in the morning and onto a path into the forest. When they emerged on the far side through the trees, they were on top of the ridge. Logan looked through binoculars and then handed them to her.