by Alex Dryden
“So how do you know she took anything on?” Burt said.
“Our teams have pictures,” Adrian said, and Archie brought them to the surface of the paperwork on the table. “Wooden boxes, three in all,” Archie said. There were pictures of large wooden crates, big enough to hold two men, and well insulated by the look of them. They were being lifted onto the deck and then dropped down into a hold out of sight.
“Something small and valuable, then,” Burt said.
“We think so.”
“And then there are the bodyguards,” Adrian chipped in. “What are they there for?”
“What indeed?” Burt said. “So, Theo, what then?”
“She returns by a roundabout route back eastwards again, across the Med. Docks in Piraeus first of all, then at Tartous, on the Syrian coast. Then she turns north to the Bosphorus again, enters the straits—”
“And is now?” Burt interrupted.
“Our teams have her pinpointed at Lat 44.53, Long 32.65,” Adrian replied crossly.
“Around fifty miles off the coast of the Crimea,” Burt said, to both Theo’s and Adrian’s astonishment.
“I didn’t know you were so familiar with the Black Sea,” Theo said. “Or with the exact coordinates in the area, for that matter. You didn’t know this all along, did you, Burt? I haven’t been wasting my time?”
“No, Theo. Just what you and Adrian have told me.”
It didn’t look like either of them believed him.
“So what’s the thesis?” he pressed on.
“That’s what we now need to pursue,” Theo replied.
Burt thought for some moments. Then he walked away from the table so he could get the maps and pictures and names and numbers out of his head, and think. Finally he turned around.
“Kind of an obvious trail, isn’t it?” he said.
“Not at all, Burt,” Theo replied primly. “It’s just that we have the capabilities to follow it. Simple as that. We’ve got every smart device known to man trained on this ship. Plus the British teams,” he nodded in Adrian’s direction. “Celebrate our ingenuity, Burt, don’t cast suspicion on it.”
So that was it. We’re cleverer than they are, Burt thought. We’re smarter than the Russians. Somehow he doubted that. Nevertheless, what the Forburg or Yekaterinburg—or now the Pride of Corsica—was actually doing was as obscure to him as to the other two men.
“What’s your take, Adrian?” he asked.
“The ship picked up something in Libya. Something small, something valuable, and, most likely, something deadly,” Adrian replied. “Now she’s standing well off the coast of the Crimea. We can perhaps assume the two are connected.”
“What are we doing to discover her cargo?” Burt asked Theo.
“It’s difficult,” Theo admitted. “We have agents on the ground in Libya, of course. They’re doing the best they can, but it’s not exactly easy. The whole loading operation took place in a well-guarded and separate part of the port. Plus the fact that we think there was a special army loading team on the case, not the usual dockworkers. And it’s not exactly a friendly environment in which to be asking sensitive questions.”
“But they are,” Burt said. “Asking sensitive questions, I mean.”
“As best they can,” Theo replied, awkwardly, Burt thought. Even Theo Lish, the CIA chief, found human intelligence difficult to factor in these days.
“Well, good luck to them,” Burt replied.
Outside in the unusually warm spring air of Harper’s Crossing, Burt took Adrian aside and invited him to lunch. They took a limousine that had been waiting for Burt and travelled in towards Langley and a restaurant named Rocco’s where Burt seemed to be well known enough to be given a prime table by the window and receive the attention of half a dozen waiters. When they had sat down, Burt didn’t wait.
“What do you make of it, Adrian?” he asked.
“I think it fits in with other intelligence,” Adrian replied. “Dangerous stuff coming over the border from Russia into Ukraine that you’ve detected. The only difference is that this is aimed from the sea.”
“If only we knew what ‘this’ was,” Burt said.
“We’re treating it as high priority,” Adrian replied. “The highest. Just as the CIA is.”
“Then it must be important,” Burt replied drily.
17
BURT AND ANNA WERE TO TAKE a Cougar executive jet from Washington Dulles airport for the flight south. Larry was at the wheel of a Porsche four-by-four as they drew up outside a hangar at the private end of the airport and she saw the plane gleaming in the early spring sunshine.
She saw that, like all Burt’s fleet of planes, it had been highly polished. It looked like an outsize model ornament destined for a giant mantelpiece, or a sculpture belonging to a proud collector and which only needed a pedestal to mount it on. The jet had the cleanliness of an anaesthetised surgeon’s knife, nothing like the dirty, oiled, mechanised tool that was a commercial plane. And that was how Cougar liked to present itself to the world, she thought: as a clean, pure white, and beautiful instrument. Like Cougar—like Burt—the plane was a thing of ideological and even moral certainty.
Larry unloaded the bags from the car and carried them onto the plane. Burt turned to her before they stepped out: “How is Little Finn? Enjoying life, I trust,” he said.
She nodded. “He misses seeing Larry and the boys, I think, more than he misses me.”
Burt looked at her. “But he’s in the right place, you’re sure of that? Anything more we can do?”
“Oh yes, he’s in the right place,” she replied easily, but she betrayed none of the hollowness that her visits to him always left her with. And Burt didn’t press her, as he never did, about anything. “He’s very well,” she added unnecessarily, more to convince herself than him, and then she looked away, out of the window across the tarmac.
“He’ll always be your son, Anna,” was all he said.
They boarded the plane, Larry chatted to the pilot, and then they took off into a startlingly blue sky that seemed as if it had been designed by Burt to receive his pristine jet.
Burt was relaxed as ever on the journey. Never a care in the world, a world which to him, anyway, it seemed to her, was like a Roman circus prepared for his own carefully planned shows and games, rather than the dangerous and inconsistent place it was to others and which forced its constantly changing flux on them. Burt, the ruler of the world; a plump Caesar who this morning wore bright yellow slacks, a blue blazer, and expensive suede loafers. And as always puffed on a half-smoked cigar.
When they were settled at their cruising height and food had been served, Anna turned to him. “What will you do when you’re too old?” she asked him. “Who’s going to run Cougar then?”
“We train youth teams.” He beamed. “Just like the football clubs.”
“But there’ll never be anyone else like you,” she said. “You are Cougar, aren’t you?”
“And Cougar will therefore change,” he replied. “It’ll become a bureaucracy like the CIA, perhaps, with all the dead hand that implies.” He smiled broadly at her. “A company can only be as good as its leader. And it can only be a dictatorship like Cougar when you have a benevolent dictator,” he said, and laughed his rolling laugh. “And that’s true. There’ll never be another Burt Miller.”
It was an honest assessment, she saw, rather than simply smug self-satisfaction.
He looked at her seriously for a moment. “Anna, I’ve offered Logan the Russian and East European Desk. What do you think?”
Anna felt a chill of bewilderment, then astonishment. Logan wasn’t management material at all, in her opinion, let alone the right person to be put in charge of Cougar’s second-largest division. Over and over again, he’d shown himself to be unreliable, not even completely loyal. Burt knew this and she didn’t understand. Burt continued to give Logan chances which he always saw that Logan wasted. She found she couldn’t reply.
“It’
s okay. He turned it down,” Burt said.
“Why?”
“No reason. What do you think, Anna? What do you really think?” Burt asked again.
It was unusual for Burt to ask for advice about something outside another person’s area of expertise. It was out of character and Anna’s interest was always piqued when someone—particularly someone in Burt’s all-powerful position—behaved out of character. She wondered whether to tell him what she thought, but knew that Burt only and always wanted honesty, no matter how difficult it was to hear.
“If someone rejects a part of something, it often means they want the whole,” she said. “Logan fits that model. To me anyway, Burt.”
He didn’t reply, but grinned at her, just to show he didn’t take offence. But she saw he’d filed away her remark and that it conflicted with something in him outside the logic of his usually clear thoughts.
On a wide circular table in the centre of the plane, Burt unfolded an old copy of the Wall Street Journal at the page which detailed the results of the final round of the Ukrainian elections. There was the Russian-backed candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, with his arms raised in victory. He had beaten Yulia Timoshenko by three percentage points for the presidency. There were pictures of him with a grim face even in victory—just like the politburo used to look, Anna thought. And underneath were pictures of Timoshenko with her corn-braided hair wrapped tightly, like an ornamental towel, around her head. Her face was set in defeat but she said she would contest the results. Yanukovich had received a warm welcome from the Kremlin, however, and was already forming a cabinet, with an economics minister who spoke only Russian and had no Ukrainian.
“Theo says we can take our eyes off Ukraine now,” Burt said. “It’s almost a relief to the CIA that the Kremlin stooge has won. They’d rather have a Russian proxy president than a democrat who might raise Russia’s ire.”
She didn’t reply, but read the article and saw that most of eastern Ukraine nearest Russia had voted for Yanukovich, while most of the western part of the country had voted for Timoshenko.
“Theo reckons that this result will lower tensions between Ukraine and Russia,” Burt said. “Their man got in, so that’s it, Theo says. And—wonder of wonders—they were declared free and fair elections, according to international electoral monitors. Timoshenko protests but doesn’t have a leg to stand on.” He looked across at her. “What do you think, Anna?”
She looked away and out of the window at the endless, intense blue of a sky that seemed to share nothing with events in Eastern Europe. Then she turned to him. “Why does the CIA think that?” she asked.
“Theo reckons the Russians have gotten what they want in Ukraine now. The Kremlin can relax. And therefore so can we.”
“For now, maybe. But it’s just the beginning,” she said. “A temporary respite at most, in my opinion. But what then? When the dust settles, Yanukovich may prove to be not just their ally in the Kremlin but also their Trojan horse in Kiev.”
He looked at her questioningly.
“I don’t agree with Lish and the CIA,” she said simply.
“Neither do I,” Burt replied. “I agree with you, Anna. A Trojan horse—I like it. But we’ll discuss it—the three of us—when we see Mikhail,” he said.
They were flying southwest and Anna slept for the rest of the journey. She was used to sleeping when there was any window of opportunity. In just over three hours after they’d set out they landed on the long runway at the edge of Burt’s vast ranch in northern New Mexico.
Cougar emblems decorated the watchtower—a mountain lion rampant, like some medieval jousting symbol—and they drove away from the strip towards tall Spanish-style gates that announced an intensely guarded area at the centre of the ranch. Security guards were everywhere in evidence, a small private army in the semidesert.
There were discreet, concentric circles of defence around the hundreds of thousands of acres of land, and the circular defensive lines shrank in size eventually to a sort of fortress climax at the centre, though even this was still discreet. Another Cougar emblem reared its raised paws in bas-relief on a giant bronze tableau at the inner ranch gates. And Burt’s private army, increased in size for the purpose of guarding his most prized asset—Mikhail—wore embroidered cougars on their shoulders, but were otherwise armed more effectively with MP5N machine guns. Any further Russian attempt to wrestle Mikhail from his chosen exile at Burt’s ranch was not anticipated, but, nevertheless, planned for. Burt liked to “futurise for all the eventualities,” as he put it, like a seasoned general before a battle.
They walked across the high desert gardens that separated the parking area from the house. There was snow on the distant mountains and there was a scattering down here on the mesa. A frost gripped the land and it was two degrees below zero. The desert plants and cacti, like bristling steel gun emplacements, were dug in, biding their time for the short and almost invisible burst of growth that would begin in June.
Burt withdrew an envelope from the inside of his blue, silver-buttoned blazer and held it casually in the hand that also clutched his cigar. The sun was bright in the sky, but made little difference to the temperature in the depth of winter.
He hadn’t shown Anna the message from the man who called himself “Rafael” and which he had received from the American embassy in Kiev two months before, but he had it in the envelope he was holding now and the way he held the envelope showed off its wax seal of a bird, bright red and firmly imprinted in the dried wax that had flowed outwards at its edges before it had solidified. Something told him that Mikhail—as well as providing insights into the developing situation in Ukraine—might have something to say about it.
They found Mikhail sitting on a verandah at the rear of the sprawling ranch house. The verandah was heated by a line of gas heaters, like an outdoor restaurant.
Burt’s staff were everywhere in evidence; wheeled trolleys with coffee and cold drinks stood within Mikhail’s reach; uniformed maids appeared to be polishing windows inside a drawing room behind them; and gardeners were covering the roots of shrubs with further mesh and straw against frost that lasted as late as June up here in the mountains.
Anna looked at the two gardeners who were working in her sight and saw the bulges beneath their arms. Burt didn’t just have armed guards, he had armed gardeners, too.
Mikhail was sitting in the wheelchair he’d been confined to for a year and a half now, ever since the KGB’s assassination attempt against him in a Virginia park, across the river from Washington, D.C. Anna, too, had been wounded in the firefight, the attempted abduction of Mikhail and of herself by the KGB. She’d taken a bullet in the shoulder, but, unlike Mikhail, she had made a full recovery. Despite the attention of the best doctors Burt’s bottomless fortune could provide, however, it was by now conceded—not least by Mikhail himself—that the effect of the Russian bullet that had entered his spine on that day in 2008 would not now be reversed. Only Burt’s faith in the ever-developing and banned medical technology of stem cells allowed the question to remain open. Burt never gave up his endless optimism for the prospect of Mikhail’s improvement and full recovery. Mikhail never gave up hope regardless of any situation he found himself in—whether he was to remain permanently crippled or cured—and his injury seemed to concern him less than it did Burt. It was a mere detail for Mikhail. It didn’t interfere with his brain, and that was all that seemed important to him.
They pulled up cushioned leather seats next to Mikhail. Anna kissed him on both cheeks, three times in the Russian way, and Burt raised his hand casually as if in some Hollywood Indian greeting.
“What news from the front?” Mikhail said. “Where is the front these days, anyway?”
He was a tall man; even in a wheelchair it was possible to see that. His once thick black hair had turned to grey in the eighteen months since he’d been shot. But his face was finely cut, like soft and weathered stone, and his eyes were piercing and dark. He had several newspapers opened
on tables surrounding him, including the Journal.
“I believe the front is still Ukraine,” Burt said. “Never mind that Yanukovich won. But I’m apparently in a minority. At least out there.” He waved his hand vaguely at the world. “The CIA disagrees.”
“The Kremlin’s choice has won, that’s true,” Mikhail said. “How will that make the spies in Moscow feel? And will it tame the monster? I’ll tell you, Burt. If the monster gets one square meal, it won’t think they’ll come regularly, on time, every day, believe me. The Kremlin won’t view this victory as satisfying its ambitions in Ukraine. It’s only the beginning. It will just want more. It will see the Yanukovich victory as a sign of weakness among its adversaries, not as a sign of its own strength. And that is always an indication of the most dangerous of predators. The paranoia of the self-pitying and wounded animal always looks to its opponents’ weaknesses, it never enjoys its own strengths.”
“Then the three of us agree,” Burt said.
Anna looked into the eyes of the old spy and wondered if Mikhail was sliding into becoming like other exiles and defectors from the KGB she’d met in the West—an intransigent, hectoring, and bitterly entrenched mind that would always see the Kremlin from now on as a two-dimensional enemy. But what she saw was his old intelligence and farsightedness that could only come from calm contemplation. Neither his injury nor his exile, she realised, would ever blunt that. He spent most days entirely alone, Burt had told her, despite Burt’s attempts to entertain him with arranged visits from friends and colleagues. Some made the trip down from Washington or Virginia for three days in order to meet the West’s greatest double agent for a generation, and left without ever seeing Mikhail. He devoted his time, it seemed, to solitary contemplation. He was like a monk. But did he think of the past, his past as the West’s great source in the Kremlin? Or was it contemplation of the future? Anna guessed the latter.
“Anna says this victory might just give the Kremlin what she calls a Trojan horse inside Ukraine,” Burt said. “That far from being the end, it’s the beginning.”
