There were four bodyguards in the Porsche in front of the Mercedes and three guards in the Porsche behind. The fourth guard who had entered the club with Bykov stepped into the front of the Mercedes, next to the driver.
They drove in convoy down towards Pushkinskaya and across the square.
The stretch limousine had windows between the nearly eight-foot interior where he and Bykov sat and the driver’s area. There were curtains, opened now, but which Logan assumed were there for when Bykov wanted to molest some female in the back seat. There was a television and a bar, a phone and fax machine, an office in fact. Bykov enjoyed showing off to Logan the communications systems, which included some kind of advanced satellite imaging system.
Bykov switched on the TV and flicked through DVDs of extreme pornography, children’s cartoons, the Australian Tennis Open, and then on to a video link with his clubs and properties. He finally chose a soccer match played the previous weekend between Spartak Moscow and Lokomotiv.
Logan sat with the crutches on his left side, away from Bykov, and slowly unscrewed the bolt that connected the two halves of the one closest to him.
They had travelled a mile from Patriarshiye when Logan made a suggestion.
“Why don’t I show you my company’s prospectus?” he said. “Then we can discuss exactly what I’m looking for.”
“Why not?” Bykov said, sounding bored. Perhaps prospectus was a word that didn’t figure in his usual way of business.
“I can pick it up from the hotel,” Logan said.
“Which hotel?”
The game on the TV flowed up to the goal Spartak were defending, and there was a roar from the crowd as a shot hit the bar. Bykov was only half listening to Logan.
“The Kempinsky,” Logan said.
Bykov grunted. He didn’t like others to make plans. Then, as if it had been his own idea, he switched on an intercom that connected them to the driver. “Kempinskya,” he ordered irritably. Then he flicked the switch to off.
He turned to Logan. “It’s on the way, why not?” he said.
The driver looked in the mirror, acknowledging the order, and turned to the bodyguard, who radioed the two vehicles in front and behind them with the new instructions.
As the driver indicated a right turn into Okhotnyy, Bykov sat back in his seat. He fiddled with the volume control, and as he did so, Logan cut his windpipe with the Damascus steel blade gripped in his left hand. Then he withdrew it and drove it in under Bykov’s ribs and up into his heart.
There was little sound, except for the noise of the soccer match. But there was going to be a lot of blood.
With his other hand Logan pressed the button that closed the curtain to the front. He turned up the TV’s volume as Bykov gurgled, pumping pints of blood, and finally slumped sideways.
Logan saw that his hand and lower arm were covered in Bykov’s blood. He slipped into his coat in preparation for getting out of the limousine. Then he propped Bykov up in the seat next to him, as they crossed the bridge over the Moskva River. The Kempinsky was just on the other side.
Logan’s last act inside the limousine was to rifle through Bykov’s pockets, careful to avoid the blood, until he found a photo ID, which he put in his coat pocket.
The limousine drew up under the arced, porticoed entrance to the Kempinsky Hotel. Logan stepped out with his crutches at the same time as the bodyguard stepped out from the front seat. The two Porsches were up ahead and behind him as he shut the car door and hobbled away inside the lobby.
Just inside the lobby, he laid the crutches against a wall and headed, as fast as he thought was unremarkable to any observer, out to the left and towards the restaurant.
Within thirty seconds he heard shouting behind him, and he ran blindly now, across the restaurant’s wide carpeted floor and out of the exit onto a street that was part of the hotel and joined it to a complex set of under- and overpasses that connected it to the bridge.
He ran to the right, away from the bridge and the majority of cars, and he didn’t stop running. He’d never run so fast. But it was the slowest half hour of his life.
Chapter 37
ON A CLEAR BLUE morning in late May, Anna walked back down from the high mesa towards the log house. From time to time she held Little Finn’s hand and, when he was tired, hoisted him up onto her good shoulder.
Snow still lay in drifts in the shadow of the forest above the house, and it would cover the high mountains that circled the valley until July. But as they descended to the cabin, spring was evident. Yellow sego lilies, red Indian paintbrush, and mauve lupins dotted the pasture, and, to Little Finn’s delight, the horses were back.
Larry walked up towards them, picked up Little Finn, and put him on his shoulders.
“See any bears?” he said.
“Lots,” the boy said.
Anna laughed and shook her head at Larry out of sight of her son. They walked in silence down through the pasture and into the house.
“Burt called,” Larry said when they’d removed their coats and Little Finn had run into the kitchen.
She didn’t reply.
“He’s coming down this evening. Wants us all to go to the ranch. It’s Friday, remember.”
She didn’t remember. The days of the week had become irrelevant up here in the mountains.
“Can’t he come here?” she said.
After two operations on her shoulder in Washington and three months recuperating up here at the cabin, Anna realised she’d become comfortably—even lethargically—tied to the place. She’d watched winter change to spring with precise slowness. She’d spent most of every day with her son, and the rest of the time she’d read books, slept, and done the exercises needed to restore the muscles in her shoulder. She didn’t want to go to the nearest village, let alone to Burt’s ranch, fifty miles away.
“Okay,” she said, when Larry didn’t reply. “I suppose we’d better go.”
“We’ll leave in a couple of hours,” he said.
Anna went up to her room and lay down. It was a long time since she’d been released from the events that ended in her wounding at the park. First, because of her injury, she’d been excused from attending the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing. Then her presence was not required anyway. Either Burt had got her off the hook, or she was disbarred from attending for security reasons.
But Burt was still in the thick of it, up in Washington, parrying the questions of the committee day after day.
She fell asleep and dreamed of Finn.
In a high-backed leather armchair at the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Burt faced the committee for the eleventh day running. Today being Friday, they were going to break early, with just one session after lunch. They were on the home lap before the weekend.
The number of committee members and cross-examiners had shrunk this afternoon to just seven; the chairman, three senators from the Intelligence Committee itself, an attorney representing the director of the CIA, another attorney for the director of the FBI, and a director of the National Intelligence Agency.
On Burt’s side of the table were Bob Dupont and Cougar’s senior attorney.
Burt, as usual comfortable in any surroundings, fielded questions from friend and foe alike with equanimity. He was enjoying himself, “even in there,” as Bob Dupont would say later.
“We can now turn to the representative for the director of the CIA,” the chairman said. “Mr. Ronald Sabroso.”
“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Sabroso replied and looked across the expansive table at Burt. “I’d like to pick up on a couple of points from your testimony of May twentieth,” he said, addressing Burt. “The Russian known as ‘Mikhail’ made an approach to you on what date exactly?”