She and Burt were left alone in silence.
Burt stayed standing and went to a sideboard, where he extracted a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He poured the liquor into them both without asking her and handed her one, while keeping the other cradled in his pudgy hand. He remained standing at the far end of the room and took a sip from the glass.
“So. Let’s proceed,” he said. “As you have just said with such admirable clarity, if Vladimir informs his chief here, Mikhail will pick it up?” He spoke smoothly. “Is that right?” He looked at her and beamed. “Or did you mean
would
pick it up? If he were in America, that is?”
She saw her mistake, remembered the voices calling her to stop, and she believed she could recover from it while knowing it was too late. Her only defence was in the semantics.
“Of course, I meant Mikhail would pick it up, if Mikhail is here,” she replied.
Burt let her explanation hang in the room, so that it became thin and then dissipated like smoke to reveal the landscape behind it.
“I think you were right in the first place,” he said. “You are careful with words, Anna. So—Mikhail won’t know unless Vladimir reveals the meeting with you to his superiors. Will he.”
It was a statement, not a question. Burt’s tone of voice was closing around her like a trap.
Anna withdrew into her thoughts but found no solace, no way out. She knew now what was coming. Burt’s artful, confusing pretence had done its work. In her effort to correct his apparent misconception about Vladimir’s options, she had overstepped her own watchfulness, the watchfulness that had safeguarded her knowledge of Mikhail.
She found she had nothing to say.
“Because Mikhail is in America, isn’t he,” Burt stated remorselessly. “So ‘will’ was the right word, not ‘would.’ That’s true, isn’t it?”
She waited for the blow.
“You know Mikhail is here, don’t you, Anna,” Burt said, leaning over the table with one hand supporting him. “You’ve known for a while. He’s on our list, isn’t he.” He pounced.
“Right then. How were you going to make contact with Mikhail?” he asked her. “Through Vladimir? Or was it in some other way?”
She felt the ground sliding from under her. “That was the way,” she said. “Exactly as Logan and myself and others were saying. By Vladimir informing his chief here, yes.”
“Oh, yes?” The apparent curiosity in Burt’s tone was flayed completely, to reveal the utter disbelief that lay beneath it. “Okay. Let’s try this, then,” he said. “Vladimir wasn’t going to inform his head of station here or anyone else, was he?”
“As I said, I’m sure he will.”
Burt stood up from his angled pose of leaning on the table. He looked at her with triumph in his eyes.
“In which case, why did you arrange to meet Vladimir, in secret, without my knowledge, at a café behind a gym? ”
She heard a sharp, involuntary intake of breath and realised it was hers. But she neither acknowledged Burt’s statement nor denied it.
Burt left the silence hanging once again.
“And if you and Vladimir were to meet in secret from me, then it was also in secret from Vladimir’s own people, wasn’t it? Both of you wanted to meet without surveillance. Which means that Vladimir wasn’t going to inform anyone he’d met you. And that means there was no way Mikhail would know you were trying to contact him. Correct?”
Her silence was the answer he was looking for.
“Your health,” he said, and raised his glass until she lifted hers. Then he drank greedily.
“You said no wires—,” she said.
Burt grinned at her, his bonhomie apparently returned in full. As ever, he was supremely pleased by his own cleverness, which was far more important to him than her attempts to deceive him. In fact, she felt that his cleverness needed her deceit in order to be exercised to the full.
“That’s what we said, yes,” he agreed, and gave his friendly chuckle. “No wires. But we had that café—and all his other regular haunts—wired so good you could hear the lettuce screaming.”
More sirens rose from outside the window—the only true voices of the city—and filled the pause like a dissonant musical interlude.
“Next stage,” Burt said, moving on now into the mopping-up operation. “Were you even intending to contact Mikhail at all? Or has this whole operation with Vladimir just been a farce from start to finish? I’d like to know that, please, Anna.”
“Yes. Yes, I was.”
“But not my way?” Burt said.
“No, not your way, not through Vladimir.”
Burt sat down.
“Okay. Good. I like this. Let’s say I believe you,” he said with flamboyant generosity. “Why not? Why weren’t you going to contact Mikhail through Vladimir?”
She didn’t answer.
“Come on, Anna. Tell me why you wanted to contact him your way?”
She collected her thoughts now at last. “Because Mikhail is too smart to be lured into making contact with me on the basis of his own side having knowledge of my whereabouts. He wouldn’t trust that. If my meeting with Vladimir reached him through Vladimir and then the KGB networks here, he wouldn’t take the risk.”
“Good, that’s very good, that’s very smart of you,” Burt said, and there was genuine admiration in his voice. “Your intuition is, as always, invaluable. So why not say that to me earlier, though? To me, Anna?” he said, as if he were hurt that his friendship and discretion were not above scrutiny. “That way, we could make a different plan. So in my way of thinking, there’s another reason for you planning to do it your way, isn’t there.”
“Yes. Yes, there is.” She looked up at him and met his eyes unwaveringly. She had found her strength, no matter what was to come.
“It’s personal,” she said. “Just how you like it, Burt. I wanted to give Mikhail the choice. Whether to work for the Americans or not. Can you understand that, Burt? I wanted that to be his decision, not something forced on him by you, the Russians, me, or anyone else.”
“Ah, choices. Choices are the chief source of confusion in the world,” Burt replied.
“No. That’s not true. Choices are freedom.”
“Then freedom is confusion,” Burt said.
“Maybe. But that’s as cynical as anything I ever heard in the KGB,” she said.
“Well, touché. But to win, you must adopt your opponent’s methods,” Burt said. “And then you must make their methods, no matter how terrible, twice as bad as they make them.”
“If you believe that, that’s where you and I fundamentally differ,” she said.
Burt smiled at her, as if he were enjoying a game.
“All right. Let’s say that Mikhail has a choice, then,” he said. “Why should I give him this choice?”
“Several reasons. For one thing, he deserves it. He’s earned it a million times. But more importantly than that, as a willing accomplice, he’s worth infinitely more to you than if he were forced. The reason Mikhail worked for the British before was that he would only work through Finn. No one else. Because he knew he could trust Finn and only Finn.”
“We think along exactly the same lines, you and I, Anna,” Burt said, in one of his customary volte-faces. “As I treat you, you treat Mikhail. We both understand that without willingness, there’s very little worth the gamble. With yours—and Mikhail’s—willingness, we can achieve everything.”
“That’s also what Finn believed,” she said.
Burt didn’t reply immediately. Then: “And will he trust you? Mikhail?” he said at last.
“I believe so. But it’s the only route anyway, as far as I’m concerned.”
“That’s as I’ve always thought.”
He came around the table and took the seat next to her.
“You’re right in everything,” he said, “and everything is right.”
“What happens—” she said.
“—is always right,” he completed. “Sometimes, through distrust comes greater trust,” he said. “And that’s what has happened here. All this has been necessary. Thank you, Anna. You’re as good it gets.”
“So where do we go from here?” she said.
Burt smiled, and she found she was smiling back at him.
“Before you tell me who Mikhail is,” he said, “what was your plan for contacting him?”
She felt free again. The truth had released her.
“I was going to play along with Vladimir as we arranged,” she said. “Improvise with him for as long as it took. Then I was going to send something by courier to Mikhail at the Russian delegation in Washington. As soon as I could make myself some time alone.”
“Perhaps after your secret meeting with Vladimir?”
“Most likely.”
“Something he would recognise?” Burt asked, “but that no one else would?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“It was a
kidjal
, a Caucasian dagger. It was something Mikhail gave to me on the night that Finn died, the only time I met Mikhail. Finn had given it to him.”
“The dagger you said was your grandmother’s—an heirloom, I believe?” Burt asked her.
“Yes.”
There was dead silence. Burt’s face gave nothing away. And then he broke the moment by smiling at her again.
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said at last. “We’ll send him this dagger.”
She looked at him, half believing it was going to be this easy.
“You were right, Burt,” she said. “Mikhail was on the list.”
“I guessed so,” Burt replied. “But I had to be sure.”
“He’s Vasily Dubkov. At the Russian cultural centre in Washington, D.C.,” she said.
“So you’ll send him this dagger as a cultural artefact to be identified perhaps?”
“Yes.”
“Just one thing, before we move on,” he said, and put his hand on her arm. “Mikhail’s identity is to remain just between the two of us. For the time being. This goes no further than you and me.”
She nodded her assent.
Then he stood up and looked down at her.
“And now, thank Christ, I can dispense with the services of Salvador,” he said. Behind the triumph in his face, she saw a kind of relief, even compassion for her. “I’m not sorry to do that,” he said. “Salvador is very effective at extracting information.”
“Your chief company enforcer?” she said.
“And a very good one too,” he replied. “Though we don’t call them that these days.”
“Strange name for an enforcer—Salvador,” she said.
“Saviour? Yes, it is, isn’t it. But it makes a kind of sense.” He smiled at her again. “In this upside-down world, at any rate.”
A
LONE IN A RENTED
apartment, in a foreign city, Vladimir slumped in a scruffy armchair he had bought for forty dollars from a refugee Somali at a flea market in the underground car park around the corner on West Eighty-eighth Street.
After his meeting with Anna, he felt cut off from his own side now, as well as from the Americans. She had driven a wedge of anxiety into his routine.
As the deputy chief of the KGB residency in New York, he had position, if less actual influence than some of his junior officers. The most ambitious of them had linked their positions in the intelligence service to the ministries and the big state energy giants, all now overseen by the KGB back home. But he had missed out, or, as he more truthfully acknowledged, had felt less motivation for the fruits of greed and power than some of his subordinates. He was still trying to work for Russia.
He reflected that while he had never had the political will—or maybe it was lust—to extend his power beyond the job, at least he was good at his job.
His own department was called Line X by Moscow Centre. Line X had produced the best, most prolific, and most profitable information in the past two years from its agents in America, outstripping all the other KGB operations. The Main Adversary, as America was still known at Moscow Centre, continued to produce a regular flow of greedy, or dysfunctional, or merely bored agents who possessed the highest security clearances—Flash and even Critical, as the Americans called them. They were sources who were happy to take the Russian dollar in exchange for, mostly technological, secrets. Line X was the KGB department responsible for technological espionage.
These Russian dollars came from the Kremlin-controlled energy companies; companies that provided a quarter of the world’s natural gas and had the world’s largest oil reserves. Control over them had made the KGB far more powerful than it had ever been during the Cold War. Russia itself might be little changed, but under Vladimir Putin, the KGB was no longer a state within a state. It had become the state, and consequently commanded the state’s money. At the KGB’s New York residency, and at the KGB residency in Washington, D.C., money was almost no object when there was a potential American agent to acquire.
The foreign service of the KGB, the SVR, to which Vladimir was attached, was the elite of the country’s intelligence power. SVR officers were paid far better than they had been in the Cold War, when the most a successful officer stationed abroad could expect were a few foreign-denominated goods to take back home at the end of his service. Now, under Putin’s regime, the intelligence services were awash with cash, siphoned off as they liked from the state energy companies, all of which were now run either by Putin’s KGB cronies or by businessmen who took their orders from the Kremlin.
Corruption had increased proportionately, of course, and Vladimir rued that. Corruption was inefficiency. The favoured officers at the KGB residence in New York, he knew, now creamed off fat percentages from their company backers in the motherland, in return for under-the-counter favours on American soil that only an intelligence officer could perform.
In person and as a spy station, the employees and the residency itself now had far more money than had ever been available. In the new cold war against the Main Adversary, operations against America’s political, industrial, and intelligence institutions were now at full throttle on the Russian side, and he, Vladimir, had been highly commended for his recruitment of American agents in the past year.
But still, as he sat now on the scruffy armchair in the darkness, at this moment he had other things on his mind. He realised he wanted to stay sitting in the chair and drink away his dissatisfaction with the present. He sat without seeing, and as so often in the past, he tried to concoct in his imagination a better future. And he bleakly wondered if that had been his mistake all along.
Walking in darkness over to the cupboard that was screwed badly to the wall and getting looser, he rummaged blindly for the bottle of vodka that was normally there. He found it, shook it in the darkness next to his ear, and heard the splash that told him there was little more than a mouthful left.
He replaced it, picked up his coat and hat from the hook on the inside of the door, and, still without switching on the light, went to the window and surveyed the street four floors below. It was lit in bands where the streetlamps traced by the angled fall of the snow washed their glow onto the wet tarmac.
On a freezing night like this, any watcher would be in a car—he was confident about that. But there were none idling their engines anywhere within his field of vision.
He left the apartment for the walk down the four flights of stairs to the street. The lift was broken again. But he didn’t mind the walk. It suited his mood to be slow.
The two questions since his meeting with Anna were continually playing across his mind. Had she been sent—assigned—to meet him by the Americans? Or was their meeting in the bookshop a genuine coincidence?
Either way, he was wishing it had never happened. He felt himself drawn towards her once again. The embers of his feelings towards her, that stretched back to school days and which he had long assumed were cold ashes, had sprung to life almost immediately.
His mind told him one thing about their meeting, and his heart another. His mind told him—loudly and clearly—that the meeting had been a setup.
But what he desperately wanted in his loneliness and loss was to believe the demands of his heart. And his need for that was stronger than his logical mind. He realised he was caught in a trap, knowing one thing and believing entirely the opposite.
He turned to the left out of the apartment block and saw the desultory Christmas lights still strung around the entrance to the seedy hotel next door. He noted the tramp with the tatty coat and blackened hands, like a burn victim, he thought, and who seemed to suck the intermittent heat from the hotel lobby whenever the automatic doors hissed open. He observed the various aimless or purposeful passersby who came at him through the snow that now fell with increasing force.
In truth, nothing was any different than it had been before the meeting. Nothing, essentially, was any different anywhere, he thought. New York, Moscow—there seemed to him suddenly no difference between the two, except perhaps in the details of their veneer. And in the past twenty years, since the Soviet Union had collapsed, Moscow had caught up a lot even in that respect.
He looked up and back again along both sides of the street, but he realised he didn’t know who he was looking for—his own side or theirs. Maybe they were just the same too.
He took a taxi uptown through Manhattan, via the Henry Hudson, and then had it drop him half a mile from the KGB residency in Riverdale. He walked a long, roundabout route, which he varied each time he came here, but stopped spontaneously at a bar on Mosholu Avenue, where he ordered a coffee, not vodka. He observed who entered and left with his usual, artful disinterest and talked to a couple of women in their thirties who were sitting at the bar, finally buying them cocktails and a frozen vodka for himself. They were single, and he was tempted to drown himself in them for the evening.
But after an hour he said his good-byes, took a phone number from the more persistent of the two, and left. He walked the remaining eight blocks, careful to note that he was alone, and entered the building with his January key.
There were two night staff there, who watched television, he noted, when they should have been checking the SIGINT machines, but otherwise the place was his own. Everyone, it seemed, was away until January 13, apart from essential staff. He walked up some stairs and entered his cramped office.
There were piles of papers and notes from before the Russian New Year, when he had last been there—reports of private conversations at the UN, suggestions from eager officers looking for promotion, complaints.
As deputy director, his own and his chief’s wider family consisted of over two hundred people, including the diplomatic representatives as well as actual intelligence staff. The Russian delegation at the UN was several hundred strong, of whom seventy-three individuals were from the various branches of the Russian intelligence services.
It was of these seventy-three that Vladimir was the clandestine deputy chief. His diplomatic status with the Russian UN delegation concealed his real job as chief of Line X, the intelligence arm of S&T, the KGB Science and Technology Department.
Line X was not just historically by far the most successful department. He had continued and expanded its role. Each year since 2000, American technological secrets stolen by Line X through its American agents had contributed over five billion roubles to the Russian economy. Secrets obtained from Russian operatives and their American agents right across the territory of the Main Adversary now accounted for just under half of all Russian weapons systems, which were adapted from this theft.
None of these great technological leaps, however, had been filtered by his political masters in Moscow through to the civilian economy. Russia was an intelligence state, not a country with its citizens at heart.
And since Putin had come to power in the year 2000, Line X funding had increased dramatically. In the past two years alone, right up to this moment when the world hovered on the brink of economic crisis, funding had increased sixfold. Putin’s orders, transmitted by him personally as president the year before to all intelligence department heads at the Washington embassy, had been that “all efforts are to be directed at recruitment, in the defence establishments, in the space exploration centres, in the defence-related technical companies and in the private intelligence companies.”
The latter, these private intelligence outfits, had blossomed across America’s intelligence since 9/11.
Recruitment of American agents, Putin had demanded, was to have no limits, financial or otherwise. Russia’s newfound wealth was to be the source of a greater intelligence assault on the Main Adversary than the KGB had ever dreamed of in Soviet times.
Vladimir picked up a dirty coffee cup at the back of his desk and, turning it upside down, read the week’s encryption keys that were disguised as a circular manufacturer’s stamp on the base. Then he entered his computer.
He picked out five code names—simple words buried in a long report about a meeting with the delegation from Equatorial Guinea at the UN in the week before Christmas—and wrote down the names as they appeared for January, in capital letters:
SOIL, RAINFALL, METAL, EROSION,
and
ZERO
. Of these, he guessed only one could help him in his current task, but he was prepared to contact two or three in case he needed to widen the net.
“Erosion” was a thirty-seven-year-old Columbia University graduate and addictive gambler who sat on the Intelligence Procurement Committee in Washington—one of several that handed out contracts to private intelligence companies—albeit in one of the lowlier positions. He was Vladimir’s most prized possession.
He encoded a message for Erosion, requesting an immediate meeting, in the next twenty-four hours it would be understood, and then he sent it by text on a cell phone registered to an electrical store in Annapolis owned by a third-generation Russian and long-term “illegal” by the name of Stan Riker.
The other two code names he had chosen out of the five, along with their contact information, Vladimir kept with him, against regulations, as he left the residency and walked towards the river.
The taxi he found eventually dropped him on the far side of the river, and he walked from there to Fourth Street, where there was another bar, other single, lonely people. It was a bar he’d never visited, and he didn’t waste time. He went through to the back and found a pay phone.
With a black-market telephone card obtained by the geeks in Communications, he called a contact, a friend, a KGB officer stationed in Geneva—one of the few people on his own side he believed he could trust. What he asked for, using the old code name for her that he hoped still worked, was a back bearing on Anna—any recent sightings, hearsay, and rumour—anything that might help him make his judgement before they met again in a week’s time.