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.
Chapter 24
ON THE MORNING AFTER the revelation of Mikhail’s identity, Burt and Anna alone discussed the details of her plan to contact him. It was straightforward, and beautiful, Burt said, in its simplicity.
The dagger would be sent to the Russian cultural centre in Washington, D.C., purporting to come from an elderly émigré who wished to know its provenance and value. There was a box number to reply to, and a peremptory request to return the dagger, whether the cultural centre could be of any help or not.
If Burt was surprised by Anna’s easy agreement to continue with her original plan, with his and his watchers’ oversight, he didn’t show it. For herself, Anna understood Burt’s adoption of her idea completely. It was the best way, that was all, maybe the only way to take the step into Mikhail’s awareness.
Burt had his people in the capital run a routine check on all the staff at the cultural centre, in the course of which it was established that Mikhail was actually in residence, and not on vacation or travelling for work.
When that information was nailed down, Burt and Anna sat alone, working on the message to accompany the dagger. At Burt’s insistence she wrote it in her own hand, to be typed later. She chose an awkward and old form of Russian to couch her request, in the make-believe that this émigré was an older person who had been in the West for many decades. At Burt’s direction, the address she gave to Mikhail for his reply was mailbox no. 3079 at a mail office on Fifty-fifth Street.
On one of his occasional trips from the apartment, Burt had set up the arrangement, and she realised that this was the element Burt loved most, to be an operative himself again, on the streets, as he had been in his youth.
Burt then asked one of the bewildered guards to find a typewriter—secondhand from a flea market, he insisted, but make sure it worked—and in the interests of the security around Mikhail, he personally typed her words and personally handed it to the fake UPS driver to make the delivery. Finally, the dagger itself had been bound in cardboard and bubble wrap.
“I’m having the mailbox watched,” Burt informed her. “But it’s not anyone from here—someone who’s out of the whole Mikhail loop.”
She wondered why he didn’t trust even the closest of his employees with the information, but she sensed he was right. Like her, Burt wanted nothing to impede the smooth reception of Mikhail’s contact with her.
“Why watch it at all?” she said. “Either he leaves something, or he doesn’t. Watching won’t change that.”
“It’s just to ensure that nobody opens that box apart from us,” he said. “By accident or not,” he added.
And she saw the sense in that too.
“And then what?” she asked him. “If he makes a drop?”
“Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll bring whatever he leaves straight here. Nothing happens without you.”
But maybe something can happen without you, she thought.
After lunch, Burt had checked that the package had safely arrived, accepted and signed for by a receptionist at the cultural centre, and he was in an even more jovial mood than usual, though none of his staff at the apartment knew the reason for his elation.
For them, it was a time of waiting, as they believed, for Anna’s meeting with Vladimir. Anna retired to her room to rest. But once there, she began to work out her own mission, her plan that, once again, had to be unknown to Burt.
In the evening, they all ate supper—Burt, Anna, Marcie, and Logan—and there was the desultory feeling of nothing happening among all of them but Burt.
After supper Logan suddenly suggested, in front of them all, that he and Anna go to the movies. There was nothing going on, he reasoned. With the usual security, surely a visit to the movie theatre was a good way to relax. But he didn’t suggest that Marcie accompany them.
It was completely unexpected and, Burt said, all the more welcome for that reason. They could go to see a matinee in the next few days, he said, but only if she wished to.
It was the first moment of near freedom she would have had since the last day with Little Finn at the house in France, back in August.
“Let’s see,” she said. “Sometime in the next few days I’d love to, Logan. Maybe a walk would be better, though, rather than sitting in the theatre.”
And so, the next morning, Logan, Anna, and six watchers walked “for miles in the damn cold,” as Larry complained afterwards. She and Logan stopped and drank coffee and watched the watchers as they stamped their feet outside the café, trying to look like normal people who happened to be standing in subzero temperatures in a New York street in January.
Meanwhile, inside the café, Anna found she was more relaxed than she’d been for a long time.
Deemed a success by Burt, the exercise was repeated the following day, to the consternation of the watchers, and then on the third day after the dagger had been sent, she agreed this time to accompany Logan to the movies.
Logan had asked her this time in a way that carried a suggestion of something more than just time spent in her company. She had consulted Burt about this developing relationship and about the wisdom of accompanying Logan on what looked remarkably like a date.
Burt took her alone into one of the many small ops rooms in the apartment that was vacant.
“If you’re all right about Logan, I want to ask you something,” he said.
“So I have the right to turn you down?” She smiled.
“Oh, yes. Nothing’s changed. I want you to know that. You are highly respected here, and always will be by me. More so than before, if anything. No. This is a request, Anna. I’d like you to be friendly to Logan.”
“Friendly?”
“Yes.” He looked at her and grinned. “Be sweet with him. Can you do that?”
“Sweet with him? That seems to be a role I can’t escape,” she said.
Burt paused and seemed to be deciding what to say. Then:
“It’s something about Logan,” he said eventually. “I don’t live with my mistakes. But I’m going to have to live with this one a little longer. If it is a mistake.”
“Is Logan a mistake? Is he unreliable?”
“Logan was one of the best officers I ever had at the agency. Maybe the best.”
“And now?”
“Let’s say I’m giving him a chance—a reward too—with this assignment in the past months. I’m not certain how he’s responding to the opportunity. But I know he’ll respond to you, Anna. People do. As an SVR colonel or as a beautiful woman, I couldn’t say.” He smiled conspiratorially as he turned to her. “This isn’t something I’d ask you, Anna, unless I thought it was important.”