So this man Halloran had sold her to all of them, perhaps. Who else? To the British too, as well as the Americans and the Russians? She was more a hostage than a defector, he thought. The Americans had bought her like a sack of corn.
And the Montenegro resident would no doubt have had a lot of explaining to do. Moscow wanted the female Russian colonel very badly, and he’d slipped up. A demotion in rank? Or would they put him right out in the cold, like they’d done to him, Vladimir, all those years ago with his posting to the Cape Verde Islands? Or would it be even worse for him than that?
Vladimir sat in the darkness, having pushed himself away from the pool of light on the desk. He surveyed his options. The longer he held on to the knowledge of her without informing his superiors, the worse it would be for him. If they ever found out.
Chapter 26
BURT PAUSED BEFORE A nineteenth-century clapboard house that stood about three hundred yards above the beach. A bitterly cold wind blew onshore from the direction of Greenland, and the icy waves nodded their heads onto the raked pebbles with a lethargy that, in a human being, would have been the final stage before freezing to death. A few gulls circled above their heads, screeching faintly into the wind.
He turned to Anna. Without removing his hands from the pockets of his coat, he simply nodded towards the house.
“That belonged to my grandfather,” he said. “From my mother’s side of the family.”
“So you didn’t start with nothing, Burt,” she said.
He guffawed hugely. “No. I had a great deal. A great deal. But I could have frittered it away.” He paused, as if reflecting on the possibilities of simply spending the family fortune. “He was in steel,” he added. “Out in Pittsburgh. But they all bought their summer homes in Long Island and built their country clubs in Pennsylvania for weekends.”
He walked on, and she kept in step with him, the wet stones crunching softly beneath her feet. She couldn’t see them, but she knew his scouts were out, ahead and behind them somewhere. Larry had been pacified. He’d wanted to break parts of Logan, in the wilful belief that it had been him who had led her astray.
Logan was now at the apartment with Dupont and Marcie, while Burt had brought her up here alone. They were to be questioned apart, her and Logan.
For his part, everything that had happened twenty-four hours before confirmed to Burt that he had been right. She knew what she was doing, particularly when it came to Mikhail. And since he hadn’t let her run free himself, she had devised a way of doing so. The escapade to the Mercer Hotel was brilliantly done, and he still hadn’t asked her why, what was the purpose of it. Yet he knew that it had been something to do with her and Mikhail, and nothing connected to Logan. Logan was just the wrench that opened the door.
Burt glanced sideways at her as they walked. She seemed to read him perfectly, he thought, just as she’d read Logan. How he admired her for that. Her genius for the long game lay in her bet that she could expect his, Burt’s, admiration even when—no, particularly when—she sabotaged his plans. She’d played him along for weeks, and now he was about to find out why.
Something told him now, and had told him right back at the start, that even with her vulnerable child as a pawn and an execution squad and worse waiting for her back in Russia, she would have still hardened herself to threat like tempered steel.
“You reached the hotel a few minutes before Logan,” he said conversationally. “That’s some feat. All he had to do was get there. But you did something else too, didn’t you.”
“Mikhail made contact,” she said simply. There was no reason to lie.
He didn’t ask her how Mikhail had made contact. He didn’t regret that he personally had kept her in the loop about the exact arrangements whereby Mikhail was to make contact. She was spontaneous, she worked with whatever material she had available. It wasn’t his own devious thinking or even instinct that had led him to allow her to know the mail office and box number. So it must have been, he thought with amusement, his direct line to God. He’d acted entirely without thought.
“When?” he said. “When did he make a meeting?”
“The day after I meet with Vladimir.”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“And you and you alone want to be the one who asks him what he wants.”
“Yes, Burt. That’s the only way it’s going to work. With his willingness. Neither you, nor your organisation, nor all the organisations or the full force of the American government can change that.”
“I understand.”
“I know,” she said.
He chuckled to himself. And I know you know I know, he thought. She was a gift from God, this girl.
“You want to leave the apartment alone?” he said. “Go solo. You want to meet him with no surveillance whatsoever?”
“That’s the only way this is going to work. He hasn’t survived this long inside the Kremlin, all around Europe, and now over here by being blind. He’ll know. That’s my opinion.”
“Mine too,” he said, and thought briefly that this, perhaps, was one good thing that could come out of the privacy of an intelligence operation being conducted through a contract company. If the CIA had their hands on this, they’d just lie to her. There was no way that Langley would let her off the leash on her own, not with Mikhail as the prize.
But most likely, even in the context of the private intelligence companies, he believed that only he, Burt, would have had the foresight to consider it, let alone act on it.
They walked on for a hundred yards or so. His face where the scarf didn’t quite cover it was burned from the cold.
“And you’ll trust me in this,” he said. “In letting you go solo.”
“Completely,” she lied.
It was perfect, he thought. He was taking advice, orders almost, from his own captive. For that, in truth, was what she’d been all along. The perfection of this turning of the tables filled him with a sense of contentment that was only partly due to his knowledge that she was right about Mikhail. He knew they only had one chance with Mikhail, and that was her. If she couldn’t get through to him, nobody and nobody’s legions could.
He asked her if she wanted to find somewhere warm, have a drink perhaps? But she preferred to walk, and he was happy to be outside. The more the weather threw at them, the more he enjoyed it.
“You were lucky you didn’t break my man’s leg with that damn fire extinguisher,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t.”
“He’s got an ankle the size of a football, though,” Burt said with some mirth.
“I’ll apologise.”
“And Logan?” he asked her, after they’d tramped along the beach about a quarter of a mile from his grandfather’s old house.
“None of this was his doing,” she said.
“I’m angry with him. For you, it was about something important, for him it was a whim. He could have jeopardised everything we’ve spent months working on. I had half a mind to turn him over to Larry.” Burt chuckled. “People don’t cross me unless it’s for a good reason.”
“I’ll remember, Burt.”
“You had a good reason.” He laughed. She talks to me like we’re equals, partners, he marvelled. And I guess we are, in some way. She apologises for nothing, except the guy’s damn leg. She justifies nothing. And that was another reason he had to trust her now.
“Logan’s not going to be pleased with you,” Burt said.
“I’ll have to make it up to him.”
He looked at her, but her face gave nothing away.
“Would you have gone to a room with him?” he said. “If we hadn’t got to him?”