When they began to get cold again, they crawled beyond the rocks, until they were in the shadow of the ridge, where they couldn’t be seen. Then they stood and walked slowly up until they reached the far ridge she had spotted earlier. She’d been right—it was 250 yards or so from the herd. The elk were still there, in the shelter of the trees.
She took the rifle from her back and removed it from its cover. Then she put one shell up the barrel, the other five in her pocket. She looked back at Logan and, crouching down again, began to crawl to the rim of the ridge.
He watched her reach the top and bring the rifle round, lying flat in the snow, legs splayed, and then begin to take aim. He waited for nearly a minute of dead silence. Then he heard the crack of the shot, the echo that chased around the valley and up to the mountains, and the silence that returned deeper than before. He saw her standing and waving him up.
They walked together up to the edge of the forest. Thirty yards inside the trees they found the elk, killed immediately from a shot to the right of its foreleg and straight to the heart.
“Okay shot,” Logan said. He grinned at her. “For a KGB colonel.”
She knelt by the animal and carefully cut its belly with a thin-bladed knife; the stomach sac spilled out into the snow.
“How are we going to get it back to the house?” she said. “We’ll never drag it up the ravine.”
“Something for the boys to do,” Logan replied. “They’ll bring a mule. I think they’ll be happy to have a job.” She watched him scrape some snow from the forest floor until he’d made a bare patch. Then he walked farther into the trees and returned, carrying tinder for a fire.
When he’d got the fire going and they were sitting warming themselves, Logan retrieved some bacon and eggs and an old pan from his pack. He propped the pan up on some stones and put the bacon in first, for the fat, then broke the eggs and tipped them carefully in afterwards.
While the food was cooking and they’d been silent for some time, he asked her a question so casually that it put her on her guard once more. The freedom of the morning evaporated.
“You still miss Finn, Anna?”
“What difference is it to you, Logan?”
“Well, put it this way, it’s not of national importance,” he said, without rising to her response.
She didn’t reply at first, and he poked the bacon over with a fork.
“So,” she said finally, “it’s not work, then?”
“On a beautiful day like this, it’s all one as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
“Why don’t you tell me about you?” she said. “Why you were thrown out of the agency?”
“Who told you that?”
“It’s true, then.”
“Marcie?”
“Touchy about it?”
“The best people get thrown out of intelligence services,” he said. “Finn included, I understand.”
She sat back against a tree and took the bacon and egg sandwich he was offering.
“I don’t think about Finn,” she said, “or miss him—not as a lover or a husband, not anymore. Does that answer your question?”
“I find that hard to believe,” he said.
“And you, Logan? Who do you think about? Tell me about the women you’ve betrayed,” she joked.
He looked startled.
“No wife and kids when the job’s over?”
“No longer a wife, and one daughter I never see,” he replied.
“What’s her name?”
“Angelica,” Logan replied.
“Your wife made the wrong choice, or did you?” she asked.
“She did, since you ask. She left me about ten years ago. We were married in our early twenties, we were young, and we were still young when it was over. Then—” He didn’t go on.
“Why did she leave?” Anna said.
“It wasn’t what she’d expected, I guess. We began to fall out. Small things, bigger things. Neither of us seemed prepared to make the effort. And I was away a lot.”
“The job was more important?”
“I lost the job. That was the end.”
“So your wife left you, and after that—or maybe before that—it was one in every port,” Anna said. “That was Marcie,” she added and laughed.
“Oh, not just the ports,” he replied, smiling in return.
When they’d finished, he refilled the pack. They descended into the ravine and up the far side to the ridge above the house.
“What’s the best way of getting to know someone, do you think?” he asked suddenly.
The innocence of the question reminded her of something that Little Finn might have said. And then she realised it reminded her of Finn himself.
“Sitting in a study asking personal questions all day not enough for you?” she replied.
“I find I’m enjoying getting to know you,” he replied.
“Better be careful then, Logan. There’s a string of dead spies behind me.”
He was shocked by her casual reference to Finn.
They walked out of the forest and into the meadow in front of the house. He stopped, took her arm, and faced her.
“I know you know who Mikhail is,” he said suddenly. “So Burt must know too.”
“Well, just don’t tell anyone else, Logan,” she said mockingly. And then she pulled away from him. She walked back to the house twenty or thirty yards in front.
When they reached the house, they found that Burt had left, and Marcie wasn’t back.
“Marcie won’t be back until the morning,” Frutoza told Logan. “She and Mr. Miller left in a helicopter.”
Frutoza cooked dinner for the two of them, and afterwards they settled into the sitting room to watch a movie. She didn’t particularly want to watch the one Logan chose, but said nothing. What she wanted was to observe Logan with as few barriers between them as possible, to see what he was like when he was doing what he wanted to do.
Afterwards, she decided to have a whisky before they said good night. Not to her great surprise—she had grown used to it—he let his eyes linger a moment too long on her.
“Good night, Logan,” she said, and walked to her bedroom at the back of the house.
When she’d switched the shower on and was about to undress, she was aware of someone and turned to find Logan in the doorway. He hadn’t entered the room, but leaned against the jamb of the door. He was fiddling with an ornamental dagger she carried with her and had put on the table by the door. It was a gift from Mikhail. Finn had given it to him, and he had passed it to her the night that Finn died.
“What’s this?” he said. “You used it on the mountain.”
“It’s a gift from a friend,” she said.
“Where’s it from?”
“It’s Caucasian. From Chechnya. My grandmother gave it to me.”
“It’s a very beautiful thing.”
“Was that it?” she said. “I’m going to bed.”
He paused.
“Why not come over to the guesthouse?” he said.
She stopped and looked at him. He was smiling, relaxed.
“What for, Logan?” she said. “To play Scrabble?”
There was a moment of tense silence.
“Sure. Okay, sure. I’m sorry, Anna,” he said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for, Logan. It’s been a nice day.”
Chapter 19
ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Anna was reading on her own in the sitting room while Larry was showing Little Finn how to sit on a horse. Logan hadn’t appeared. She heard the distant sound of an engine, and as it came closer, she saw it was the helicopter. She glanced up, but saw that Larry was removing Little Finn from the saddle. He’d heard it too.
She stood and looked out of the study window, watching it touch down on a pad at the bottom of the meadow. She could make out three figures descending before it took off again. Burt, Adrian, and Marcie moved up across the meadow, talking closely.