“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.”
PART THREE
Chapter 23
ALONE 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.