Logan spoke in a thin, rasping voice, barely audible, and told the man he was on the way to hospital for an operation on his throat.
They didn’t talk on the road.
Time drifted slowly. They stopped for fuel, and Logan paid. The day never really dawned, but just hung with a mind half made up in a shallow, flat wanness that enfeebled the flat country around them. They made slow progress in the snow until it eased and were in Voronezh by the afternoon.
Logan offered to buy the driver a meal. He was starving, but he also needed one more thing from the man before he left. While they ate in silence, the man drank a few beers. When he went to the toilet at the back of the café, Logan removed the man’s wallet from a jacket hung over the back of his chair and slipped out his identity card, pocketing it. He replaced the wallet and, paying for the meal, thanked the man and told him he was going to look for a hotel.
He walked to the railway station by back routes, in the unlikely event the man would check his wallet and come looking for him. When he bought a ticket to Moscow, the ticket collector barely looked at his new card. He waited for an hour before the train pulled in.
In his exhaustion, he was elated. He felt the light-headedness of supreme, unreal optimism. He knew he would succeed.
Chapter 33
ON THE SECOND DAY of Logan’s disappearance, Burt knew what Logan was going to do. Concealed beneath his usual jovial good humour, Anna detected, if not self-criticism, then a sense of sorrow that a protégé was on the course of self-destruction. Burt had tried with his great energy and expansiveness to guide Logan away from rash, impulsive behaviour, but it seemed that even his powers had not been enough.
“Logan is a loser,” he pronounced with unusual cruelty and, as usual with Burt, brought his focus to bear on what was possible; Mikhail and, most vitally, Icarus.
Marcie, despite her months of increasing conflict with Logan, was anxious, while Larry’s only reaction seemed to be a sense of frustration that it wasn’t going to be him who dealt Logan some physical harm.
“It’s the last we see of him,” he’d said to Anna with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation.
For herself, Anna was surprised at her reaction to Logan’s disappearance, and Logan would have been pleased if he’d known. Untroubled by her night of physical intimacy with him, she felt once more a fragile link between Logan and Finn. While Finn would never have sold anyone down the river as Logan had done, let alone a small child, what seemed about to become Logan’s final act on this earth had the heroic madness that had characterised Finn’s own end.
It was Adrian who, under questioning from Burt, had given Burt the information that led to his conclusion about Logan’s aim. When Adrian, recounting their discussion on the night before Logan disappeared, told Burt that he had given Logan the identity of Finn’s killer, Burt picked out this element of their conversation alone for analysis.
Adrian was a shit, he thought privately. He’d known just what he was doing when he gave Logan the name. He had found a shattered man and driven a stake right through the defenceless cracks of Logan’s mind.
But despite his fury with Adrian, Burt dismissed Logan now, and any further discussion about him. They—everybody—was to get on with the matter in hand, and with no further distractions.
The first task was for Anna to check the dead drop that she had arranged with Vladimir. With his arms opened expansively wide in what looked like an impersonation of a variety club performer, Burt fulsomely agreed that she should leave the apartment alone to make this contact.
The drop was only a few streets away from the apartment, and he wished her to know that in this, she was free. But behind this munificence, and as always with Burt, strategy was everything. His purpose was to reassure her that in the forthcoming meeting with Mikhail—the crucial meeting—she would be equally her own master. Burt wished to set a precedent.
She arrived at the café called Ganymede late one morning when the sun was making a brief appearance through heavy clouds, which looked like they were going to win the day. The café was a student hangout, and she bought a coffee in a queue of sleepy-eyed youths carrying jute shoulder bags and with woolly hats pulled half down over their pale faces. Then she perused the rows of books in stacks by the window at the front, overlooking the street. She found the copy of Defoe, looked at the page they’d agreed, moved eleven pages on, and found a note on the page. On the back was written in pencil, “I like your invitation.” Then there was a time and a date. Vladimir’s proposal was to meet again, a week from now, and with three days added, that made ten days.
Perhaps he needed time to collect material for his initial offering to the Americans. Or maybe, she thought, it was a period for him to say good-bye to everything he knew.
Leaving the café, she returned to the apartments. There was a general air of jubilation that Vladimir, albeit the second string of their operations, was yielding fruit. Burt was particularly pleased. He seemed to take it as sign that everything else he’d planned was going to fall into place.
Mikhail had insisted that Anna meet him for the second time in Washington, D.C. It was assumed that another trip to New York was too high a risk for him.
Once again, the team was to decamp, to be flown down to another of Burt’s safe houses in the capital.
It was two days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, and Mikhail had chosen the day of the inauguration itself for their meeting.
Burt, with Dupont alone now included in the knowledge of the meeting, professed himself to be in two minds about the choice. On the one hand, the million or more people who were expected to arrive at the capital and greet the new era was cover of a kind that might well provide enough confusion for a meeting. On the other side there were hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers stacked in a ring around the central procession and presidential celebrations.
But he accepted that the meeting was set in stone, and he trusted Mikhail’s instincts.
All Anna would say was, “The focus of everyone will be inwards—the law, the FBI, the CIA, everybody.”
From this Burt guessed that the meeting would not be in the centre of the city itself, but outside the perimeter of events. Everyone, both literally and metaphorically, would be looking the other way.
The wooden house in the chic Washington neighbourhood of Georgetown was another tour de force in Burt’s collection of classic American properties. To Anna, they now seemed almost like a separate project of Burt’s, a one-man preservation society of Americana, with state-by-state attention to the detail of local nuances.
“I’m an American.” Burt laughed when she displayed her astonishment at the house’s beauty and authenticity. “I’m not a Virginian or a Texan or a Californian. I love the whole damn country in all its quirky mess.”
On the day before the meeting, just before they all sat down to lunch, Burt took her aside into another study with another fire blazing like a picture in a holiday catalogue. He wanted to run over some details that had occurred to him on the trip down from New York.
He was particularly attentive to her every need, as if she were an athlete before a race.
“I don’t like you going in unprotected,” he said.
“We’ve discussed it,” she said. “Nobody but me. Mikhail’s a fox. Any sign that what he trusts will happen has changed, and he won’t make an appearance.”
“I know, I know,” Burt agreed. “I agree with you.”
He seemed unusually nervous. Maybe it was because this was the culmination of all his plans since the end of the previous summer.