“And you? Are you usually watched?” she said.
“No. Not usually.”
“Then if you wish, we could meet again,” she said, and lowered her eyes to the bill under the newspaper. “On Tuesdays I go to a gym. There’s a café behind the gym. I can usually be sure to be alone for an hour. I’ll go there. There’s a fire escape at the back. I’ll come straight out of the back and be in the café. Three o’clock.”
He didn’t reply.
“But if you don’t wish to meet me,” she said, “then I’m glad I’ve had the chance to thank you for what you did. You didn’t just save my life, you saved my love of life.” She paused, as if uncertain she was saying the right thing to her former lover. “Finn always wanted to thank you too,” she added finally. “It amazed him.”
A look of anxiety crossed his face.
“They killed him,” he said.
He looked down at the table. He had saved her. But the organisation he worked for had killed the man he had saved her life for.
“I know,” she said, in a way that understood his remorse. “But don’t worry, you’re safe. Your secret will be buried with me. I’m not here to threaten you. Ever.”
He didn’t reply at first.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I’m so sorry about Finn.”
“It’s not your fault. But thank you, Volodya.” She gave him a big, happy smile that was the first genuine expression she’d worn since they’d met. “And I’m happy to see you. Really I am.”
She took out a purse from her coat.
“I’ll get this. Pasta, salad, coffees, and half a chocolate cake. Fair exchange for saving my life?”
He smiled for the first time. “Fair exchange. We’re even.”
Then he fractionally extended his hand across the table again. It was such a small gesture, she might have missed it if she hadn’t been in a state of heightened awareness of his every reaction. She laid her own hand on top of his for the briefest moment.
“I’m happy to see you too,” he said. “It was something I never dared to dream.”
She left some dollar bills on the table, and stood up.
“Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said.
“Maybe.”
She felt him watching her leave the café and knew he’d be alert for any movement behind her out on the street, anything to indicate it had been a setup. She hoped Burt’s team and anyone else from the American side were far away.
But Burt’s decision to be spontaneous, to cut out the teams of watchers from the café, had been the right one. Even as she stepped back out onto the cold sidewalk, she saw nothing.
Chapter 22
ANNA SAT AT THE end of the long wooden table at the Twenty-third Street apartments, her chin rested in one hand. Logan sat slightly slumped next to her on the right, with his elbows on the table, while Marcie was bolt upright on the other side of her, a position she always adopted when Burt was present.
At the far end of the table, flanking Burt, sat Bob Dupont, Burt’s silver-haired head of internal security, and next to him was a man in his thirties with jet-black hair and dark eyes whom Anna hadn’t seen before but whom she learned in passing, though without an introduction, was called Salvador.
On chairs around the walls outside the door and prowling the corridors outside the door were the ubiquitous bodyguards, with Larry, as ever, in charge. The bodyguards had been doubled, and then doubled again like some rampant algae, until a small army of them had grown up, as if to suck the air from any opposition to Burt’s plans.
It was now just under an hour since Anna had returned, and Burt had insisted they should meet immediately. He said this with even more than his usual sense for drama.
Anna was listening to Burt as he wound up his appraisal of her encounter with Vladimir. They all were, in their different guises of concentration—Logan, Marcie, Dupont, Salvador.
Outside the windows, which Burt commanded should be left without the blinds pulled down—against nearly everyone’s advice—the early winter New York night had descended over the city, and snow had begun to fall.
She was tired, she realised. Her mind raced back again over her recent conversation with Vladimir, as it had done repeatedly since she’d left him in the café. She was recalling each word, each expression in his face, looking for anything she might have missed—some nuance in his voice, perhaps, some hint in his eyes, or in the gestures of his hands. Was there something hidden in the silences and pauses between them? All might be indications of something that Vladimir hadn’t actually said, or of which even he himself was ignorant.
She knew the meeting with him had taken the strength out of her for the moment, and that alone shocked her. Meeting with Vladimir at all, let alone meeting him again after all these years, had been a strange experience. It had brought back the past—Finn too, as well as Vladimir himself—and most vitally, it had brought back her intimacy with both of them.
And the meeting with Vladimir had also brought her face-to-face with memories of Russia and the stark danger her old country represented to her and Little Finn. Vladimir in New York was an uncomfortable proximity to that.
But while Logan and Marcie and the others were hanging on to Burt’s detailed exposition, with its customary flattering flourishes of praise in her direction, her mind was working along parallel lines at the same time. She was weighing the fateful decision to deceive Burt.
To meet again with Vladimir, in secret from Burt’s teams of observers, at the café behind the gym was to take a dangerous step. It risked her whole, albeit tenuous, security and that of Little Finn, painstakingly won over the past months.
Nevertheless, she was already beginning to run her own storyline of her planned breakout from the twenty-four-hour-a-day scrutiny she had lived with for so long. She felt her power increase, both from her own decision to meet Vladimir in secret and as the crucial figure in Burt’s plans.
She looked up at Burt now and felt a change in his own demeanour too. Behind the natural ebullience, she detected a new unfamiliar anxiety, however faint, and she wondered if it had anything to do with the presence of Salvador.
“So we have a narrowed field of possibilities,” Burt was saying, while five floors below an ambulance screamed its siren into every corner of the city streets. “… but it’s not constricting. It helps us, in fact. What Anna has done is to reduce the sauce nicely.” He beamed at her. “She has left Vladimir with just two options; either to meet her again or to refuse contact. Whichever course he takes will tell us something.”
Logan looked up sharply. There was a frown on his face.
“What about the option of simply informing his boss at the KGB residency here?” he said, with unusual bluntness. “That’s what he’ll do, surely? And then the Russians will most likely set up a counteroperation.”
“I don’t consider that in the frame,” Burt replied abruptly, to the surprise of everyone.
There was an awkward silence in the room.
“Why not, Burt?” Marcie asked eventually.
“It is an option. We must consider it,” Logan persisted. “If anything, it’s the closest to a certainty we have.”
“And we’ll leave it out of our considerations,” Burt said, once more with the clear intention of closing this avenue of discussion altogether.
Logan took his elbows off the table and straightened in his chair, putting one hand on the arm as if intending to get up. His eyes flashed with anger, or just incomprehension. Anna read the faces around the table and saw confusion and consternation in all but Salvador’s. He seemed entirely impassive.