“That’s it,” Larry said, and clicked the phone shut. “We’re on.”
With a final look of fond farewell at his glass of Laroque, Burt finished the wine in one friendly slurp.
“Internal shower,” he declared, and smacked his lips.
The three others were already up on deck, champing at the bit, as he hauled himself off the bar stool.
“No dawdling now, boys,” he barked, clambering up the steps some minute or two behind them. “Come on, it’s time to play!”
They descended into a black twenty-six-foot rib with muffled engines.
It had taken Burt a considerable amount of power from his persuasive arsenal to scale down the operation they were about to put in play. The whole team now consisted of one yacht, the Divinity—with its twenty-six-foot rib—three cars with watchers, and a backup van of his own special forces just in case. But, at Burt’s insistence, the latter were well to the rear.
Although his own company had paid the half million for knowledge of the Russian colonel’s whereabouts, the special committee on Operation Mathilda—which is what they were calling Anna—also included the CIA chief from the Paris station. Burt considered that politic.
But then the CIA had tried to impose its own methods on the operation rather than Burt’s. Burt, however, could more or less tell the CIA what to do. That was the way America’s intelligence community had developed in the past few years; former senior men like Burt had set up their own operations, and now the agency was wholly dependent on them.
“Number one,” Burt had stated at the one and only meeting of this committee so far, with a relaxed coolness that acknowledged no opposition. “We’re on foreign soil. Number two. We don’t want to scare the pants off the woman. She’s our friend. We love her, and she is lovely. We’ve come to help her, and we will. We want to welcome her to the United States of America with gifts of kindness, not Halloween wraparound shades and sidearms. That will only remind her of what she escaped from in Russia. Number three. She has French protection. They are our allies, you may remember. We are their guests.”
Burt had successfully laid out his stall. The only thing he wished to add to the operational inventory, after cutting out the small army that the committee’s CIA chief, Bob Draco, was preparing, was a truckload of watermelons.
“Watermelons?” Draco had queried.
“Yes, they have to be watermelons. And a full truck,” Burt insisted.
Burt knew he was making his demands, disguised as requests, from a position of strength. He had been picked for this delicate lift of the Russian colonel, not just because it was he whom Logan had contacted, but because he already had previous acquaintance with the target. He was in pole position over other companies like his own who wanted a piece of the action.
Back at the turn of the millennium, when his young friend Finn had gone “feral” and was pursuing his own investigations—against the explicit instructions of British intelligence—Burt had contacted Finn and offered him support, even though it could only be of a moral nature. After all, the Americans had been dissuaded of Mikhail’s usefulness by their friends in British intelligence—Adrian leading the pack—whose false assessment concluded that Mikhail was a fraud.
But Burt, whether through his contact with God or not, had always believed in Finn, known he was right, in fact, and he consequently knew that Mikhail was truly the gold seam inside the Kremlin that Finn said he was. And this was not simply because Finn said it was so; it was because Mikhail had been this gold seam in the previous eight years, during which the CIA, and Burt through his friends there, had received a steady stream of Mikhail’s intelligence from Finn, via MI6, thanks to the desire of the British to impress their American friends.
Burt had worked closely with Adrian through those days in the 1990s when Russia was struggling towards its short-lived democracy. But he had kept a Chinese wall between the working relationship with Adrian and his friendship with Finn. In fact, Adrian’s treatment of Finn—and hence of Mikhail—had earned Adrian a very black mark in Burt’s book.
Adrian had ignored what was happening, the cardinal sin in Burt’s book. And Finn had taken the ultimate fall.
But most important of all his assets in Operation Mathilda, Burt had actually met the woman, the Russian KGB colonel, Anna. Finn had uniquely—if you discounted Willy, anyway—introduced her to him at Burt’s London apartment in Mayfair. There they’d had a private supper, just the three of them, Burt’s butler hovering in the background. Anna had spoken to him that evening in confidence about Finn, and had asked him if he could really help her man.
She and Burt had hit it off, just as Finn had said they would. Burt mourned Finn’s death, almost like a son’s. He’d liked and admired him, and that was good enough for Anna.
Finn had been Logan, Burt thought, but with his idiot conscience still intact. And it was his conscience that had killed him.
And so Burt, apart from his own natural qualifications for the job, was the obvious choice in the thirty-six hours since Logan’s communication had been received. The money had been paid, Anna’s whereabouts communicated, the Russians were nowhere to be seen, at least for now, and Burt had flown from New York into Marseille.
And then there were the British. They too would no doubt be somewhere out there in the undergrowth. But so far Burt was fully confident that he was ahead of the game.
The four men climbed down a wooden ladder into the twenty-six-foot rib, which set off with silenced engines on the mile and a quarter to the beach. The yacht, in total blackout on this moonless night, had disappeared altogether by the time they were less than fifty yards away.
One of Burt’s dictums, which he had taught repeatedly at the Farm, was that if you were after someone, rather than chase them up hill and down dale, it was better to know where they were going in the first place. Burt knew where Anna and Willy were going. It was the only place they could go.
His entire plan for the night ahead was based on this—that Anna and Willy would head for Willy’s beach hut at the end of a three-mile track across the inhospitable salt pans close to Marseille’s industrial area. It was where Willy had hidden Finn and Anna. Neither the British nor the Russians knew of it. But Burt did. In a moment of revelation between them, Finn had told Burt that Willy’s beach hut was where they had stayed for a night or two when Anna had fled from Russia. And back then, Burt saw that Finn was being only partially open. It was Finn’s and Anna’s hole-in-the-wall. Burt could tell that. Willy’s beach hut was the perfect hiding place—if you didn’t know about it.
The rib crunched gently onto the beach. Larry was on the phone again.
“They’re going for exit seventeen,” he said.
“What did I tell you, boys?” Burt said. “They’re making for a spot eleven miles inland from this very beach. All the tails, all the vanloads of gun-toting CIA hoodlums like yourselves, all the watchers and all the satellites that clog up the pleasant skies above us, couldn’t tell you where they were heading. It’s Burt’s line to God that counts. Give me that phone.”
Burt placed the cell phone delicately in his large hand and spoke in clear, unmistakably authoritative tones.
“You don’t follow them, right? You stay on the tramlines. All the way down to Marseille. No more tails. Lose them.”
There was a brief pause as this settled in.
“The truck goes behind them,” Burt said. “Then it drops its load right at the foot of the slip road. Let me hear it.”