Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  “As do all our futures,” Burt replied.

  At ten o’clock Logan sauntered over from the guesthouse alone. He was elated. Employed by Burt in a senior position at the company, he was now going to meet the woman he’d been thinking of since he’d first looked properly at her picture in the days after he’d taken it.

  He was wearing jeans, a cowboy shirt, and boots that crumpled over at the top. His hair was long and tangled from sleep. To his surprise and even shock, he saw she was already in the kitchen.

  Nodding a shy hello to her, he poured himself a coffee. When he had drunk half the cup with a swiftness that clearly burned his mouth, he walked over to Anna and held out his hand.

  “Logan,” he said.

  “I guessed you weren’t Marcie.”

  He smiled and pressed her hand a little too long for her liking.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” he said.

  “Well, that’s good,” she replied. To Anna, he seemed like someone relaxing on the first morning of his vacation. But she thought this impression wasn’t cultivated for her benefit. It seemed genuine. Logan evidently wasn’t someone who was concerned about making impressions.

  “I think we only need to remember one thing, Anna,” Logan said, sipping his coffee and watching her.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re all on the same side.”

  “Thanks, Logan. I’ll try to remember.”

  He smiled at her. “Friends,” he said.

  “We’ll find that out, won’t we?”

  He was lazily charming, and, she saw, a watchful figure. His intense blue eyes, which he rarely offered for contact with hers, were striking. He was good-looking in an uncared-for kind of way. If he’d been a piece of furniture, she thought, she’d describe him as artfully distressed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  “I’m okay, thanks.”

  He smiled again.

  She studied him for any signs of weakness. That was what would help her in the days ahead. He couldn’t hold her gaze; that was interesting. Self-conscious? She thought so. Or was that an invention? Was this his default behaviour with a woman, or was it just with her? He was conscious of his own attraction, she observed, and maybe compensated for it by hiding behind an attitude of self-deprecation. That was how Finn had been.

  Just then, Marcie entered the kitchen, and the atmosphere changed at once. Corkscrew hair tied back with multicoloured play-school ribbon, Marcie projected an extrovert vibrancy that contrasted with Logan’s laid-back attitude. She wore a denim dress and scuffed black biker boots. Cheap and garish glass jewellery seemed to be hanging off her in various places. Striped socks rose above the boots. She had a hippieish air.

  “Anna!” she said, with boisterous pleasure. “Marcie. I’m looking forward to us getting to know each other.”

  Anna smiled back.

  “You’ve met Logan,” she said, though it was obvious she had, and it was said just to make conversation.

  “Yes.”

  “Be careful of him,” Marcie warned. “He thinks he’s God’s gift,” she added, lowering her voice, in the pretence of a private confession.

  Logan just smiled and didn’t protest.

  The relationship between Logan and Marcie would surely be part of their tactics. To appear to create small splits between them invited her to develop intimacies with each of them separately. They were a team, and were also individuals. She would have to watch the moments when apparent conflict between them encouraged her to be confessional to one or other of them.

  She decided for the time being that Marcie was the more dangerous of the two. She was superb at creating the deception of normality in the situation they were all in.

  “I’ll watch out for him,” Anna said.

  “You do that,” Marcie replied.

  Interrogation is a battle for control. To the uninitiated, it may seem one-sided. If the interrogator has domination over the life or death, pain or release from pain, of a subject, how can control be other than in the hands of the interrogator?

  Anna knew that it was not so clear-cut, however. In many exhaustive training sessions at the Forest she had learned that the object of interrogation had ways of subtle manipulation.

  At the KGB’s main training centre in Yasenevo southwest of Moscow, known as the Forest, instructors were particularly focused on interrogation and resistance to interrogation. It had been a separate course alongside self-defence, hand-to-hand combat, the making of improvised explosive devices, weapons handling, escape and rescue, recruiting an agent, and all the others.

  One vital lesson the Forest had taught her was that nobody would ever need to use interrogation—of any kind—unless ignorance and doubt were present. Principally, she’d been taught, even in situations where physical domination was overwhelming and completely one-sided, that there was still doubt over who controlled the outcome of an interrogation. Logan and Marcie had an obvious need of their subject. To begin with, they did not know what she knew. A low-level battle of wills would underlie all the ensuing days, Anna knew. It was true, of course, that no physical threat was hanging over her. There were no blazing lights twenty-four hours a day, permanently deafening noise, the threat of torture, fabricated sounds of torture, or actual torture itself. There was no coercion, let alone terror, in Logan’s and Marcie’s methods.

  Burt meanwhile spent their sessions in the study, sitting on the sidelines, and only occasionally guiding the process to lower the temperature, or guide them over any impasses with a light, deft touch.

  It was Logan who began, after the three of them had sat down on three sides of the large table in the study, while Burt took an armchair by the fire.

  “If you knew who Mikhail was,” Logan said, for once looking straight in her eyes, “what would prevent you from telling us?’

  As an opening salvo, Anna saw it contained several traps.

  “Mikhail’s security,” she replied.

  “His security,” Logan said slowly. “As a member of Russia’s elite under Vladimir Putin?”

  “That’s right.”

  Logan’s eyebrows raised. “You want to protect him from us?”

  “His security in Russia is absolutely necessary,” she said calmly, “or he’s no good to the Americans.”

  Marcie put her hand on Anna’s arm—another message intended, perhaps, to indicate the special relationship she planned to develop with her.

  “You think that we might endanger Mikhail’s security?” she said, and looked genuinely concerned.

  “I can’t know that,” Anna replied. “But—on the hypothetical basis that I knew who Mikhail was—then I would have to accept that as a possibility. Endangering Mikhail’s security not only risks his life, but also risks losing what you want from him.”

  “So you’d act on that possibility,” Logan stated.

  “Yes. The protection of a source or potential source is paramount.”

  “Yet they can’t be a source unless there’s some degree of danger to them,” Logan replied.

  Anna said nothing.

  “Why do you think Mikhail only ever communicated through Finn and nobody else?” Marcie asked.

  “Because that way he controlled contact. And of course he trusted Finn.”

  “We’re assuming Mikhail is a man, then,” Logan said. But Anna had prepared herself for this potential trap.

  “If Mikhail is as close to Putin as we all believe he is, then he can only be a man,” she said.

  Logan smiled at her, in a way that suggested he was commending her method rather than the information she was providing.

  But Anna ignored him and leaned her elbows on the table. She decided to take some small control, to disrupt the question-and-answer nature of the proceedings, if only for a moment or two.

  “What we’re attempting to do is to make contact with Mikhail,” she said. “You have to understand that’s completely different from what happened between Mikha
il and Finn. It was Mikhail who made contact with Finn, not vice versa. It was Mikhail who dictated the terms. We’re trying to reverse that. I’m not sure it can work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Mikhail is the one who does the choosing,” she replied. “That’s his past form.”

  Logan searched in his jacket for a cigarette and finally found a crumpled box. Burt stood up and turned on the exhaust. Logan knocked out a cigarette and lit it. Marcie looked at him in disapproval.

  “Okay. Let’s look at Finn,” he said. “But first of all, I’m sorry. This is bound to be difficult for you.”

  “Finn died two years ago,” Anna said. She would give him no room to feel sorry for her, if that was his approach.

  “Finn was found in the back seat of a Jeep Cherokee outside the British embassy in Berlin,” Logan recapped. “He was respectfully delivered there. I think that’s the right word. It was a friend then, or friends. Everything about the way he was found suggests that. But who? Who brought him there at considerable risk to themselves? We don’t believe it was the killer, naturally.”

  Anna was there again, on the Autobahn on that dull, cloudy October night, with the car barrelling along at speed, the junction arc lamps flashing on her face and Finn’s as she cradled him in her arms in those last hours of his life. It was Mikhail who was driving. It was Mikhail who had found Finn, and then in turn found her so she could say good-bye to Finn for the last time.

  “You were in Germany then, Anna,” Marcie said, breaking into her thoughts.

  So they knew that much, she thought. “I was in the south,” she said. “In Bavaria.”

  The past unravelled. She had found Finn’s secret house in Tegernsee, down near the border with Switzerland. Finn had given Willy instructions to find it, if he ever disappeared, and Willy had given the instructions to her when Finn didn’t return. There, in the small pink house that Finn had kept a secret even from her, she had read through all Finn’s notes, found the microfiches that proved what the British intelligence service had denied. And Mikhail had found her there. He had taken her away, moments before the house had been encircled by security forces.

  How did Burt, Marcie, and Logan know she’d been in Germany? It had been too risky to deny it. Perhaps it was a guess on their part, and now she’d provided the information.

  “But you saw Finn?” Logan said gently. “Before he died,” he added with uncompromising directness.

  “No,” she replied. “Finn was killed in Paris. I don’t know how he got to Berlin. The last time I saw Finn was two weeks before he was killed in Paris.”

  “But he wasn’t actually killed in Paris, was he?” Logan corrected her. “That was where the killer administered the nerve agent, yes. But Finn wasn’t found in the rental car in the Paris car park where the nerve agent was discovered later. It didn’t kill him in that car. He moved on after he’d been hit with it, sickening and, as we know now, dying. Somehow he ended up, after his death, in Berlin. In a different car.” Logan leaned slightly towards her. “But there are three days between those two events. Forensics established that Finn died about four hours before his body was found outside the British embassy in Berlin. So that’s three, nearly four days after he came into contact with the nerve agent. Four days of what? Who was with him? What did he do?”

  “He didn’t call me,” she said. “That’s why Willy gave me the instructions to find the house in Bavaria. We knew he must be in trouble, or he would have called. The instructions Finn left with Willy were only to be opened in an emergency.”

  “So,” Marcie said in a funereal tone of sadness, “someone took his dying body to Germany.”

  “Unless he drove there himself,” she said.

  “Why would he drive to the British embassy in Berlin?” Logan said. “Surely he’d have gone to the embassy in Paris?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna replied. “I’m as in the dark as you are.”

  “Let’s say someone drove him to Berlin,” Marcie said lightly, as if this were a sudden, bright idea. “Why? You were in Germany. Okay, you were in the south. But why would his helper take him to Germany—unless it was to reunite him with you?”

  “You think it was Mikhail,” Anna said.

  “I’m as in the dark as you are,” Marcie replied, and smiled at Anna.

  “Let’s say it was Mikhail who drove,” Logan pressed her. “He would go to Germany to reunite Finn with you. Or let’s say Finn drove himself to Germany for the same reason. You see, what I’m feeling is that Germany is not a coincidence. You were in Germany, and that’s where Finn died. Maybe you drove him yourself to Berlin.”

  “Why wouldn’t I say so if I had?”

  “Because you were not alone,” Marcie said. “It wasn’t just you who took Finn to Berlin. You drove Finn to the embassy with Mikhail.”

  “And now,” Logan concluded, “you want to protect Mikhail.”

  “It’s a good story,” Anna replied, “but it’s not what happened.”

  “You were with him,” Logan stated, and leaned in closely towards her. “You were with Mikhail the night Finn died.”

  She saw the keenness behind the blue eyes, the certainty, whether actual or contrived, she didn’t know.

  “It was both of you who delivered Finn’s body,” Logan said, quietly now. “That’s the obvious conclusion. I’m right aren’t I?”

  “No, Logan, you’re not right.” She looked at him levelly until he looked away.

  “What were you doing in that time?” Marcie said, changing tack. “In those four days?”

  “I was in the house in Tegernsee. I was collecting Finn’s research, trying to find a clue to where he might be. He’d disappeared two weeks before.”

  “But you weren’t at the house in Tegernsee when German security forces broke into it,” Logan said. “And that was around twelve hours before Finn’s body arrived in Berlin. What were you doing in those twelve hours?”

  So they’d known she was there; Anna was relieved she had told them the truth.

  “I’d gone back to France. With all of Finn’s evidence,” she said.

  “Where in France?”

  “To the place where Burt found me three months ago. Willy’s hut on the beach.”

  Logan sat in silence, so that her words refused to dissipate from the moment. There was a tense stillness in the room.

  “Who do you think delivered Finn’s body, then?” Logan finally asked her. He said it with an aghast expression in his voice that suggested outrage that anyone could doubt the obvious, let alone expect him to believe them.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Who do you think? What do your instincts tell you?”

  She didn’t reply immediately. He waited again until she saw she would lose nothing by replying and much by stalling.

  “Mikhail was the best source the British—the West—had in Russia,” she said. “They squandered him in an attempt to be friends with Putin. But that doesn’t make Mikhail any less important. Mikhail is evidently a great man of power in Moscow. So surely you can’t think that Mikhail, who is this great man of power, and is no doubt watched by Putin’s private security service, would do such a thing? Drive Finn’s body half way across Germany? It’s madness. And surely you can’t think that Mikhail, who spent so much effort to avoid detection for nearly six years, would fetch up with Finn’s body outside a well-guarded embassy in Berlin? Let me ask you something, Logan. Can you see that?”

  And Logan admitted he couldn’t. That behaviour didn’t fit his idea of what any double agent, on any side, would do for a fellow human being. But then Logan withdrew a piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket and passed it over to her.

  “If you weren’t there that night, in the car with Finn,” he said, “you won’t have read this.”

  She read it. It was short. “You betrayed him in life,” it said. “Honour him in death.”

  She felt herself drawing on her deepest reserves of calm. Her face was unchange
d, her body relaxed, but her mind raced back to that night, back to Finn dying, and Mikhail laying the note on his corpse.

  “Not your handwriting,” Logan said. “Recognise it?”

  She didn’t.

  “Was it addressed to anyone?” she asked Logan.

  “Yes.”

  They looked at each other, neither willing to give an inch to the other.

  But Logan eventually smiled, his own reserves of patience apparently infinite. “It was addressed to Adrian. You know Adrian, of course.”

  “I’m afraid so. Finn introduced us,” Anna said. “He was Finn’s recruiter, Finn’s handler, Finn’s father substitute—until he first let Finn down and then went on to threaten him and me.”

  “Finn is attacked with a nerve agent smeared on the steering wheel of his car. In Paris,” Logan went on. “Nearly four days later he’s found dead in Berlin, delivered by someone who is clearly a friend and is clearly angry at the way the British treated him. Angry at Adrian, perhaps, in particular. You must admit it, you fit the bill.”

  “So do a lot of people,” she replied. She was calm now. “Look, Logan, if you’ve done your research on Finn, you know that he had many, many friends. I don’t know who he was with in Paris, or who he called when he knew he was in trouble. Dying,” she added ruthlessly. “But he was popular—loved even—by many. There were plenty of people who would have done almost anything for him. I can give you a list if you like, but I don’t know the answer. I don’t know how his body got to Berlin, or who got it there.”

  At which point Marcie stood up. “Is Logan getting on your nerves?” she said.

  Logan smiled tolerantly.

  “There are many ways to say no,” Anna said. “I guess he just needs to hear them all.”

  “It’ll do him good,” Marcie said. “My impression of Logan is that he gets his own way too much of the time.”

  With that, she left the room. On her way out, she called back. “If you want to have a walk at lunchtime,” she said, “I’m all yours.”

  Burt looked up to the table for the first time now.

  “Let’s resume after lunch,” he said.