“I told him it was better he didn’t show up this morning,” Burt said. “It seems we all have a lot of thinking to do.”
She stood up. Nothing else seemed to be immediately required. Burt was completely relaxed. He would want to examine her story later, no doubt, but with Burt it was business as usual, which meant, apparently, watching things unfold as they did so, and things always seemed to unfold to his satisfaction.
“You caused me great distress by kidnapping my son,” she said. “In the circumstances, I’ll forgive for you that. But I won’t forgive Logan.”
“I understand,” he said.
She left Burt and Dupont in the room and walked down the corridor. Marcie was waiting for her at the far end. She saw Adrian standing by the window of the conference room, looking out onto the street below, but he didn’t turn, and she didn’t acknowledge him.
She and Marcie went along to the far end of the apartments, where the bedrooms and bathrooms were, and Marcie gave her a towel and an armful of clothes.
“You ran rings around them for twenty-four hours,” Marcie said. “Congratulations.”
Then they both laughed, and Anna disappeared into the bathroom.
In the room that she had just left, Dupont remained silent.
“We’re on a home run, Bob,” Burt said. “You seem anxious.”
“What’s the deal with the British?” Dupont said.
“We share with them.”
“Mikhail?”
“Mikhail’s information. Once we have Icarus, Mikhail will prove to be a long-running bestseller. Take it from me, Bob, only Anna can achieve that. She’s the key to Mikhail, and Mikhail is the key to a very profitable chamber of secrets. Mikhail is going to be the jewel in my crown, Bob—the jewel in our crown. We’ll be the biggest game in town for a long time to come. Nobody will ever have made such profits simply by helping their country.”
“You trust Adrian?”
“Of course not.” Burt chuckled. “But I know he knows he has more chance of making a deal with me than if he blows this open and has to deal with Langley. You think Langley cares what the British want? I can carve a nice exchange with Adrian out of this.”
Dupont was silent.
“Cheer up, Bob,” Burt said. “It’s always been a game of chess. We finesse Langley out of this one, keep them away from Mikhail. There’s still work to do, but it’s loose ends, just loose ends now.”
“You know Logan ate with Adrian last night,” Dupont said suddenly.
“You don’t say!” Burt replied.
“It’s damn cheeky, if you ask me. What are the Brits doing talking to our operatives?”
“It’s a free world,” Burt said casually. But behind his insouciance, he was wondering, not why Adrian would wish to dine with Logan, but why Logan would want to dine with Adrian.
“Listen, Bob,” he said. “The only important thing in this is Mikhail. Only two people in the world know who Mikhail is. Me. And Anna. And if anything happened to me, you’re next on the list. That’s arranged under lock and key.”
“It’s need-to-know at a crazy level,” Dupont burst out.
“If the CIA know Mikhail, what do you think the security clearance will be? Five… six people, maybe more? More than three times the risk, in other words. The fewer the better, you know that’s right.”
Dupont was silent, but he assented with a small nod of the head.
“Let things ride, Bob, we’ll get there in the end,” Burt said.
Chapter 32
WHEN LOGAN RECEIVED BURT’S call at just after nine o’clock that morning, he was about to leave the service apartment. Burt’s instructions not to come in afforded him a wave of relief. He would need no excuses now.
How long did this hiatus in Burt’s requirements give him? Twenty-four hours if he were lucky. Time enough to get out of the country, in any case, and be well clear by the time the hue and cry began.
He had a plan, ill-formed but becoming clearer through the sleepless hours of the passing night.
When a triumphant Larry had shown him Anna’s note the day before, and Burt had explained that she knew, it had almost broken him. What he wanted most of all was to speak with her. But he knew also that it was impossible now. His mind raged with grief, with guilt, and with a desperation to see her and to explain. But he knew it would be useless. And so the plan had formed. It was all that came to him in the night, and its clarity was what he hung on to. In the turmoil of his rage at himself, it was the only thing he could do. It was his road to absolution.
He didn’t pack much, even in the small bag he had; he took a very expensive suit, that was all. Otherwise he took roubles that were still part of his emergency pack. Anything else, he could buy where he was going.
He put the thing he would most need in the pocket of his jacket—the spare, unused passport in the false name that would guarantee his anonymity for long enough.
Then he left the functional service apartment with its soulless air of other anonymous people like himself, other empty lives like his own who had passed through.
He walked to Pennsylvania Station and took the train northwards that linked to Toronto. There would be no record of his departure from American soil. From Canada, he could be in Moscow almost before they even knew he’d disappeared.
As he sat on the train that ground its way northwards, he made notes, to be destroyed later certainly, but for now a guide through his mind, befuddled from sleeplessness and despair.
It was the unexpected invitation from Adrian the evening before that had opened the door to his plan. Over dinner at a chic Italian restaurant uptown, Adrian—supremely confident, arrogant in his expectations—had not so gently pumped him for anything that might be useful concerning Burt’s operation. Logan had demurred on the issues that were classified, but in the course of the evening Adrian revealed to Logan the name of a man.
He was a man Adrian was after himself, it seemed, and now he was the man Logan would hunt. Adrian had given Logan the man’s current occupation—or at least one of his no doubt many occupations.
It never occurred to Logan that Adrian had deliberately given him the name of the man, for his own reasons.
And then, back at his apartment, Logan had obsessively pursued his own enquiries, while New York slept and it was daytime in the East. In Logan’s fourth phone call of four, made at just after five o’clock that morning, he had finally located an old source of his, a Russian now residing in Cyprus. This man had filled in the yawning gaps left after Adrian’s artfully imprecise description.
Logan’s target turned out to be an MP in the Russian parliament, but that was more like an honorary title than an elective post in the modern Russia. That was his reward from the Kremlin, it seemed. In truth he was no politician; he had no history at the barricades of Putinism. He was a small-time nobody, a petty crook from Prazshkaya, south of Moscow. Those, at any rate, were his origins, and they were origins from which he’d never strayed very far.
Through graft and old-fashioned violence he had made his way into more serious, organised crime. He had been inducted into the Ismailovo gang, the Mafia organisation that controlled Moscow south. Bodyguard, hit man, bagman, and finally close lieutenant to the boss, he had been entrusted with the gang’s bigger secrets—the drug runs from the southern republics and, beyond them, Afghanistan.
For ten years, when the Ismailovo mob and the KGB fought, made truces, fought again, and finally ended up as partners in crime, he had survived the hits and counter-hits. The KGB under Putin had eventually exerted its control over the Ismailovo, that was true, but it was the control of a monarch over a distant province, controllable only with the acquiescence of his subject.