Moscow Sting f-2

by Alex Dryden

  There were four bodyguards in the Porsche in front of the Mercedes and three guards in the Porsche behind. The fourth guard who had entered the club with Bykov stepped into the front of the Mercedes, next to the driver.

  They drove in convoy down towards Pushkinskaya and across the square.

  The stretch limousine had windows between the nearly eight-foot interior where he and Bykov sat and the driver’s area. There were curtains, opened now, but which Logan assumed were there for when Bykov wanted to molest some female in the back seat. There was a television and a bar, a phone and fax machine, an office in fact. Bykov enjoyed showing off to Logan the communications systems, which included some kind of advanced satellite imaging system.

  Bykov switched on the TV and flicked through DVDs of extreme pornography, children’s cartoons, the Australian Tennis Open, and then on to a video link with his clubs and properties. He finally chose a soccer match played the previous weekend between Spartak Moscow and Lokomotiv.

  Logan sat with the crutches on his left side, away from Bykov, and slowly unscrewed the bolt that connected the two halves of the one closest to him.

  They had travelled a mile from Patriarshiye when Logan made a suggestion.

  “Why don’t I show you my company’s prospectus?” he said. “Then we can discuss exactly what I’m looking for.”

  “Why not?” Bykov said, sounding bored. Perhaps prospectus was a word that didn’t figure in his usual way of business.

  “I can pick it up from the hotel,” Logan said.

  “Which hotel?”

  The game on the TV flowed up to the goal Spartak were defending, and there was a roar from the crowd as a shot hit the bar. Bykov was only half listening to Logan.

  “The Kempinsky,” Logan said.

  Bykov grunted. He didn’t like others to make plans. Then, as if it had been his own idea, he switched on an intercom that connected them to the driver. “Kempinskya,” he ordered irritably. Then he flicked the switch to off.

  He turned to Logan. “It’s on the way, why not?” he said.

  The driver looked in the mirror, acknowledging the order, and turned to the bodyguard, who radioed the two vehicles in front and behind them with the new instructions.

  As the driver indicated a right turn into Okhotnyy, Bykov sat back in his seat. He fiddled with the volume control, and as he did so, Logan cut his windpipe with the Damascus steel blade gripped in his left hand. Then he withdrew it and drove it in under Bykov’s ribs and up into his heart.

  There was little sound, except for the noise of the soccer match. But there was going to be a lot of blood.

  With his other hand Logan pressed the button that closed the curtain to the front. He turned up the TV’s volume as Bykov gurgled, pumping pints of blood, and finally slumped sideways.

  Logan saw that his hand and lower arm were covered in Bykov’s blood. He slipped into his coat in preparation for getting out of the limousine. Then he propped Bykov up in the seat next to him, as they crossed the bridge over the Moskva River. The Kempinsky was just on the other side.

  Logan’s last act inside the limousine was to rifle through Bykov’s pockets, careful to avoid the blood, until he found a photo ID, which he put in his coat pocket.

  The limousine drew up under the arced, porticoed entrance to the Kempinsky Hotel. Logan stepped out with his crutches at the same time as the bodyguard stepped out from the front seat. The two Porsches were up ahead and behind him as he shut the car door and hobbled away inside the lobby.

  Just inside the lobby, he laid the crutches against a wall and headed, as fast as he thought was unremarkable to any observer, out to the left and towards the restaurant.

  Within thirty seconds he heard shouting behind him, and he ran blindly now, across the restaurant’s wide carpeted floor and out of the exit onto a street that was part of the hotel and joined it to a complex set of under- and overpasses that connected it to the bridge.

  He ran to the right, away from the bridge and the majority of cars, and he didn’t stop running. He’d never run so fast. But it was the slowest half hour of his life.

  Chapter 37

  ON A CLEAR BLUE morning in late May, Anna walked back down from the high mesa towards the log house. From time to time she held Little Finn’s hand and, when he was tired, hoisted him up onto her good shoulder.

  Snow still lay in drifts in the shadow of the forest above the house, and it would cover the high mountains that circled the valley until July. But as they descended to the cabin, spring was evident. Yellow sego lilies, red Indian paintbrush, and mauve lupins dotted the pasture, and, to Little Finn’s delight, the horses were back.

  Larry walked up towards them, picked up Little Finn, and put him on his shoulders.

  “See any bears?” he said.

  “Lots,” the boy said.

  Anna laughed and shook her head at Larry out of sight of her son. They walked in silence down through the pasture and into the house.

  “Burt called,” Larry said when they’d removed their coats and Little Finn had run into the kitchen.

  She didn’t reply.

  “He’s coming down this evening. Wants us all to go to the ranch. It’s Friday, remember.”

  She didn’t remember. The days of the week had become irrelevant up here in the mountains.

  “Can’t he come here?” she said.

  After two operations on her shoulder in Washington and three months recuperating up here at the cabin, Anna realised she’d become comfortably—even lethargically—tied to the place. She’d watched winter change to spring with precise slowness. She’d spent most of every day with her son, and the rest of the time she’d read books, slept, and done the exercises needed to restore the muscles in her shoulder. She didn’t want to go to the nearest village, let alone to Burt’s ranch, fifty miles away.

  “Okay,” she said, when Larry didn’t reply. “I suppose we’d better go.”

  “We’ll leave in a couple of hours,” he said.

  Anna went up to her room and lay down. It was a long time since she’d been released from the events that ended in her wounding at the park. First, because of her injury, she’d been excused from attending the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing. Then her presence was not required anyway. Either Burt had got her off the hook, or she was disbarred from attending for security reasons.

  But Burt was still in the thick of it, up in Washington, parrying the questions of the committee day after day.

  She fell asleep and dreamed of Finn.

  In a high-backed leather armchair at the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Burt faced the committee for the eleventh day running. Today being Friday, they were going to break early, with just one session after lunch. They were on the home lap before the weekend.

  The number of committee members and cross-examiners had shrunk this afternoon to just seven; the chairman, three senators from the Intelligence Committee itself, an attorney representing the director of the CIA, another attorney for the director of the FBI, and a director of the National Intelligence Agency.

  On Burt’s side of the table were Bob Dupont and Cougar’s senior attorney.

  Burt, as usual comfortable in any surroundings, fielded questions from friend and foe alike with equanimity. He was enjoying himself, “even in there,” as Bob Dupont would say later.

  “We can now turn to the representative for the director of the CIA,” the chairman said. “Mr. Ronald Sabroso.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Sabroso replied and looked across the expansive table at Burt. “I’d like to pick up on a couple of points from your testimony of May twentieth,” he said, addressing Burt. “The Russian known as ‘Mikhail’ made an approach to you on what date exactly?”

  “He didn’t make an approach to us,” Burt said smoothly. “He made an approach to one of my employees, the former KGB colonel Anna Resnikov.”

  “Who should have been a national asset,” Sabroso said acidly, “not an employee of your company
.”

  “The former directors of the CIA and the NSA are now both working for private intelligence companies,” Burt said. “Ask them where their loyalties lie today.”

  “Can we get back to the question, please?” the chairman interjected.

  Sabroso sucked his teeth. “Given the national security risk ‘Mikhail’ represented, why did you or your company not inform the Central Intelligence Agency about him?”

  “Firstly, Mikhail was not a security risk to the United States of America,” Burt said. “He was a security risk to his own country, on our behalf. He was—or would have been—a highly valuable asset.”

  “Would have been?” the chairman interjected.

  “Mikhail is still in intensive care, Mr. Chairman,” Burt replied. “It’s not known if he’ll regain consciousness and, if he does, whether he’ll be of any use.”

  “And secondly?” Sabroso said.

  “Secondly,” Burt replied, “Mikhail made clear that he would only speak to former colonel Resnikov. He stipulated that anyone else, the CIA included, would result in a complete breakoff of contact on his part.”

  “Which resulted in a shoot-out in a park a stone’s throw from where we sit,” Sabroso said. “And the probable loss of Mikhail as useful source at all.”

  “The reason for the events in Glencarlyn Park, as I stated in my testimony, was that Mikhail had made a sudden decision to defect that morning, at that meeting. He was effectively on the run. Colonel Resnikov was meeting him at his request in the belief that she was simply making a first contact.”

  “They’d never made contact before?” Sabroso asked.

  “Only once. In Germany. Back in 2007.”

  Burt stared straight back at Sabroso, daring him to challenge the statement. But Sabroso was unaware of anything concerning Mikhail outside what Burt admitted to. And Burt knew he could be confident too about Adrian keeping his mouth shut. The whole affair—Icarus, and then the blowback in the park—was principally the fault of the British. Their source, their mistake—though Burt was also sanguine enough to admit to himself that he’d fallen for Icarus too.

  “If the CIA had been given knowledge of this meeting. And the FBI,” Sabroso said, nodding in the direction of his fellow attorney, “then proper backup would have been provided at the park.”

  The senator for Wisconsin, an ally of Burt’s and lobbyist for Cougar, broke in. “I think Mr. Miller has already stated that the CIA’s involvement in any way would have ensured that there was no possibility at all of gaining access to Mikhail,” he said. “At least, thanks to the operation of Mr. Miller’s, we still have that possibility.”

  “And three people dead,” Sabroso said. “And a behind-the-scenes row with Russia’s government.”

  “The three dead provoked the incident in the first place,” another of Burt’s supporters said.

  The mood of the committee, even when it was fully attended, was clearly on Burt’s side. He, unlike the CIA or FBI, had taken great care to nurture its members, in particular the senators themselves. That was normal business. “Casting the lens backwards,” as one of the senators had said at an earlier session, “we have to be very careful how much we can trust the CIA.”

  That had infuriated Sabroso and, when he was informed, the director of the CIA himself.

  After the session broke up at just after three o’clock, Burt took two of the senators aside before he headed for the airport and his private jet to the south.

  They walked away from the committee room and out of the building, onto the warm May lawns on Capitol Hill.

  “It’s pretty much there,” one of them said to Burt. “You’ll be found clean.”

  “We’ll get the all-clear soon, then,” Burt said.

  “Yes, I’m sure. It’s this other business that’s really taking up their anger. This terrorist assassin debacle is causing great problems on the Hill. One of our own intelligence companies hiring an assassin to do his business on American territory! That overshadows just about everything. The Intelligence Committee are only going through the motions with you. They’re saving their wrath for your rival.”

  “I agree with you,” Burt said. “But we must go through the motions.” He lit a cigar and puffed contentedly across the green expanse. “And we need to be as transparent as we can be,” he added, and paused. “For future good relations with Procurement.”

  “There’ll be no problem with that,” the senator replied. “These days the government knows they have to use you guys. They don’t have a choice. Next year it’s predicted more than seventy percent of all intelligence work carried out by the United States will be contracted out to private companies. The state just isn’t capable anymore.”

  “And the bad boys from the company that hired this assassin?” Burt asked. “What’s going to happen to them?”

  “Jail for certain, and for a very long time. It’s pretty much established that they hired this assassin. Two murders in Europe, just to establish a threat. He was a Serbian, apparently, not a Russian as they claimed. And it’s pretty much established that they hired him for the sole purpose of creating mayhem and then supposedly ‘catching’ him.”

  “What they did,” Burt said, “was all about a smallish intelligence contract company that wanted to get big in a hurry. They were creating a threat. An artificial threat from Russia. And they did it in order to be the first in line for funding when they ‘uncovered’ it.”

  “It may cause problems all around,” the senator agreed.

  “I always said intelligence contracting would lead to the false creation of a threat,” Burt said. “It was inevitable.”

  The senator looked taken aback. “So how does that square with your company?” he said.

  “With Cougar?” Burt said. “If private contracting exists, then I won’t just be there, I’ll aim to be the biggest. But once the state has a dependency on companies like mine, it will attract every kind of cowboy. The money’s too good.”

  Burt sighed and drew on his cigar before turning and asking the senator, “So now, because this threat was artificial, what does the committee think? Does it consequently believe there’s no threat from Russia?”

  “That, unfortunately, is the knock-on effect,” the senator replied. “They think that if a threat needed to be created, there can’t be much of a threat in the first place.”

  “Just as I feared,” Burt said. He looked at the senator. “Then may Mikhail revive,” he said. “Because Mikhail’s the real thing. He knows.”

  The gathering at Burt’s ranch five hours later was the first time Burt had seen Anna since he’d debriefed her in the hospital room. To her surprise, he flung his arms around her, the only time he’d done so since they’d met on the beach in the south of France.

  As ever, he took her aside before dinner for a private talk. They went into his study.

  “Last fire of the winter,” Burt said as he threw more wood into the blaze. “Even the nights are getting warmer.”

  He poured her a glass of wine and a whisky for himself, then sat down on a chair on the opposite side of the fire.

  “Cheers,” he said, and they both drank. “How’s the shoulder?”

  “Nearly okay,” she said.

  “Good.” They were silent for a while. Then he looked at her directly. “I have someone who wants to see you,” he said. “But only if you agree to see him.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “It’s Logan,” he said. “He has something to say to you. He’s staying in one of my guest houses, but he’s not a guest. Not tonight, in any case.”

  Anna put down the glass carefully.

  “I didn’t know he’d made it.”

  “No. I’ve been keeping it away from you while you recover. But as I told you, he’s one of the best I ever had.”

  “What does he want?”

  “That, you’ll have to ask him,” Burt said. “But you don’t have to see him at all.”

  But she knew she had to see Logan, to settl
e the matter once and for all. She followed Burt out into the darkness, and he pointed at a light in a cabin beyond the paddock at the back of the house.

  “Follow the lights along the path,” Burt said. “They’ll take you there.” He turned to go inside and left her on the path.

  Anna walked up the winding path and entered the small cabin without knocking. Logan was standing at the far end of the room, texting on his phone. He looked up in surprise.

  “You’ve got some nerve, Logan,” she said. “I could feed you to the rats.”

  He put the phone down and walked to the centre of the room, where he stopped.

  “Will you listen?” he said. “Will you sit down and listen. Just for a minute.”

  She hesitated. Then she moved towards the fireplace and took a chair away from the light.

  Logan sat down opposite her, underneath the arc of a lamp so strong it whited out his features. He was the interrogated now.

  “You don’t need to tell me why you sold pictures of me and my son to the Russians and everyone else,” she said. “The reason’s clear. It’s the same reason that another man, a Russian, killed Finn. For money, prestige, power. How does it feel to win it that way, Logan?”

  “It feels shit,” he said.

  “That’s it? You want my forgiveness?”

  “Yes. That’s what I most want in the world.”

  Anna remained silent and looked at Logan. It was easy to forgive someone for whom you’d lost respect, she thought. It meant nothing.

  “So what happened?” she said. “In Russia? I didn’t expect to see you again.”

  Logan got up out of his chair and went to the table where he’d been standing when she arrived. He picked up something and returned. Hovering on the edge of the light from the lamp, he threw it gently at her feet.

  She saw it was an identity card, on what looked like a gold chain. She picked it up and saw the photo, the name. It was the man Burt had told her about, the member of Russia’s parliament and Finn’s killer.

  “He’s dead? You got him?”

  “Yes.”