“I can be friendly to Logan,” she agreed. “Is that it? Or am I watching him?”
Burt walked away from her in the windowless room and sat in a swivel chair that was too small for him. He looked as if he’d been forcibly squeezed into it.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he said. “It might help you understand Logan a little.” His rotund body fit the chair like a cushion. “Logan ran agents in the Balkans in the nineties,” Burt began. “He was involved in an operation at the heart of the Milosevic government. Running an agent inside the Tigers, you know, the organisation led by the notorious paramilitary Arkan. As I’m sure you know also, Arkan was responsible for the murder of at least twenty thousand Bosnians. He was a killer, politician, warlord, bank robber… . Logan got very close to him through one of his female agents. So the agency decided to bring Arkan down.”
Burt paused, as if unwilling to divulge what he was going to say.
“But then the CIA station in Vienna made a mistake. They confused two communications sent out from our embassy there. One of these communications was intended for Arkan himself. It was a warning, a threat. We were going to get him, and he had nowhere deep enough to hide. The warning was intended to panic him into making the mistake that would allow us to follow through with his assassination.
“The other, second message was a detailed account of Arkan’s internal operations that could only have come from his inner circle. This communication was intended for our station head in Sarajevo. The two messages got mixed up, would you believe—they were sent the wrong way round. Arkan received the CIA assessment of his own operations, clearly aided by inside sources, and our station head in Sarajevo received the threat to Arkan. Incredible, isn’t it?” he said, looking at her.
“It happens,” she replied. “I’m sure I could match you for any mistake of the CIA’s with mistakes from the Russian side. Even mistakes as crass as that.”
“There are mistakes, and there are spectacular mistakes,” Burt said. “Arkan learned everything we knew about him, and he soon found the source of this information inside his own circle.” He paused. “She was tortured to death.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
Burt paused, discomfited, it seemed to her, by this unaccustomed departure from his regular world of relentless optimism.
“And it was a ‘she,’ ” Anna added.
“Yes. Logan’s agent was also Logan’s woman,” Burt continued. “And as if that weren’t enough, Logan was made the fall guy for the whole mistake, to save someone else’s skin at the station.”
Anna said nothing, but was thinking what Burt said next as he was saying it.
“Logan became what you might call a compromised, angry, washed-up piece of emotional wreckage,” Burt said.
“Who you’ve hired again,” she said. “Not the best material for an intelligence officer. So why? Why wasn’t he pensioned off? Why is Logan working for you?”
He looked at her.
“Two reasons. The first is a personal loyalty to him. If this doesn’t bring him back,” Burt said, “I fear he’ll be lost for good. And by ‘bring him back,’ I don’t mean bring him back to this world of ours necessarily, the world of secrets, but bring him back to any kind of life at all.”
“That’s taking a big risk,” she said. “Surely your heart isn’t that big, Burt. It’s a charming thought, but not much use in our operation now.”
“The second reason may seem odd to you. But it’s important to what we’re doing. Naturally Logan hates the CIA. To me, that’s a valuable asset. In this business of private intelligence companies, the revolving door between the CIA and us contractors is constantly spinning. It’s mostly one way, CIA people coming over to our side. They can earn twice, even three times, what they earn with the government. Department heads and even heads of the CIA come into the private sector, bringing their knowledge and government contacts with them.” Burt paused. “That’s all good, or nearly all good. But we’re in a situation of concealing something from the CIA, and the revolving door can in theory go both ways. I have to be careful that former CIA employees now at Cougar aren’t talking to their old colleagues. That’s why Logan hating the CIA makes him trustworthy—at least in that.”
“It’s still a risk in other ways,” she said, “if Logan’s unstable.”
“As I say, Logan was the best, and he was allowed to take the fall for someone else. In the end everything is and everything isn’t a risk,” he said, and he grinned once again, now he’d made his way through the uncomfortable story to the other side. Then he went on. “He doesn’t have any woman close to him. He keeps his various women at a long arm’s length. For obvious reasons, I guess.”
“So you want me to look after him.”
“Just be sweet. And only if it fits for you,” Burt said. “Only if it seems to work in the context of the assignment. And nothing too intimate, unless that works for you too.”
She was silent.
“That’s fine, then.”
The next morning Anna postponed her date with Logan at the movies to another day. It would be the fourth day since the contact with Mikhail. She needed time, but the reason she gave was that she felt unwell.
In the course of that day, after her discussion with Burt, she began to make her preparations. Everything was going to have to be alarmingly spontaneous, but it was all she could do. Improvisation was familiar to her. Any trained intelligence officer could follow instructions, but only the best improvised successfully.
In the course of the day, she collected what she could find in the apartment, away from prying eyes; a large wedge-shaped doorstop made of wood that was used in the conference room, and then another one she found lying unused in one of the smaller rooms; a small hammer that was in a kitchen drawer. There wasn’t much.
After some discussion between Burt and Bob Dupont the following morning—details that related to her security outside the apartment walls—it was agreed that she and Logan could go to the movies, accompanied by the usual swarm of minders.
With the boyish enthusiasm of a teenager on a date, Logan bought tickets and popcorn and they watched the new Clint Eastwood film at a theatre on Broadway. From time to time he used a whispered comment on the film as an excuse to put his hand briefly on her knee, as if it were merely to get her attention. Anna was amused by his sudden eagerness to be physically intimate, but she didn’t respond, and he didn’t press her. He seemed pleased just to be in her company, and she found, to her surprise, that she was similarly enjoying the experience. But her mind, when it wasn’t focused on the movie, was elsewhere.
They emerged from the movie theatre at just before five p.m. onto Broadway, where the half a dozen watchers were spread out on either side along the sidewalk.
It was well below freezing, even this early in the evening. But Logan suddenly declared he didn’t want to go back to the apartment, despite the instruction that it was a movie, then back “home.”
Anna could see Larry standing on the sidewalk outside the movie theatre, clapping his hands together from the cold, but also out of impatience to get going. The other watchers were invisible, but out of some professional habit or merely for her own amusement, she began to pick them out—one standing looking at a paper, two others waiting by the street as if for a taxi, another over to the right, beyond Larry, and the sixth idling by a newsstand on the sidewalk to the left. All were ahead of her and Logan or to the side, she noted.
Behind them, in the movie theatre itself, there was no one, and what had been running through her mind in the course of watching the movie now came to dominate her next step.