The Mark of the Assassin (25 page)
Michael said, “I want to talk to Drozdov.”
“You can’t talk to Drozdov. He’s off limits to you. Besides, he says he’s finished talking and wants to live out his days in peace.”
“I have a theory about the assassin who killed Yardley, and I want to run it by him.”
“Drozdov is
our
defector. We’ve shared the harvest with you. If you try to talk to him, you’re going to find yourself in serious trouble with both our services.”
our
defector. We’ve shared the harvest with you. If you try to talk to him, you’re going to find yourself in serious trouble with both our services.”
“So I’ll do it in an unofficial capacity.”
“What’s your plan? Just sort of bump into him and say, ‘Hey, wait a moment. Aren’t you Ivan Drozdov, former KGB assassin? Mind if I ask you a few questions?’ Come on, Michael.”
“I thought I’d use a slightly more subtle approach.”
“If it falls apart, I’ll deny any involvement. In fact, I’ll denounce you as a Russian spy.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
“He’s living in the Cotswolds. A hamlet called Aston Magna. He takes tea and reads the newspapers every morning in a café in Moreton, a few miles away.”
“I know it well,” Michael said.
“He’s the one with the corgis and the knotted walking stick. Looks more English than Prince Philip. You can’t miss him.”
Graham Seymour walked Michael as far as Sloane Street before saying good night and heading back to Eaton Place. Michael should have walked north, toward Hyde Park and his hotel, but instead he went south toward Sloane Square when Graham vanished from sight.
He crossed the square and drifted through the quiet side streets of Chelsea until he came to the Embankment, overlooking the Thames. The luxury flats above burned with light. The pavement shone with river mist. Michael had the place to himself except for a small bald man, who hurried past, hands rammed inside a battered mackintosh, limping like a toy soldier no longer in good working order.
He leaned against the railing, looked out at the river, then turned and stared toward Battersea Bridge, the bright lights of the Albert Bridge beyond. He could see Sarah walking to him, through darkness and mist, coal black hair pulled back, skirt dancing across buckskin boots. She smiled at him as though he was the most important person on earth—as though she had been thinking about nothing but him all day. It was the same smile she gave him every time he entered her flat, every time he met her for drinks at her wine bar or for espresso at her favorite café.
He thought of the last time he was with her. It was the previous afternoon, when he popped by her flat and found her sprawled on the floor in a white leotard, slender torso bent over long bare legs. He remembered how she rose to him and kissed his mouth and pulled her leotard off her shoulders so he could touch her breasts. Later, in bed, she confessed to fantasizing about fucking him to relieve the boredom of her stretching exercises. How it always left her terribly tense and how she always had to solve the problem alone because he was working.
He fell completely in love with her that moment. He made love to her one last time. She lay on her back, perfectly still, eyes closed, face passive, for as long as she could, until the physical pleasure became too much and she opened her eyes and mouth and pulled his face to hers and kissed him until they came together. It was this image of her, and the sight of her flowing toward him in the light of the Chelsea Embankment, that was shattered by the man with the gun.
He remembered her face exploding, remembered her body crumbling before his eyes. He remembered the killer—pale skin, short-cropped hair, slender nose. He saw again the way he drew the silenced pistol from his waistband at the small of his back, the way the arm swung straight out, the way he fired three times without an instant of hesitation.
Michael went to her, even though he knew she was dead. Sometimes, he wished he had chased her killer, though he realized it probably would have cost him his life. Instead, he knelt beside her and held her, pressing her head against his chest so he couldn’t see her ruined face.
It started to rain. He took a taxi back to the hotel. He undressed, climbed into bed, and telephoned Elizabeth. She must have sensed something in his voice, because she choked as she said good night and hung up. Michael felt a hot flash of guilt pour over him, as though he had just betrayed her.
21
LONDON
Early the following morning, Michael checked out of his hotel and rented a silver Rover sedan from a Hertz outlet north of Marble Arch. He entered the A40 near Paddington Station and drove westward against the early-morning rush. It was still dark, a gentle rain falling. Michael switched on the radio and listened to the 6 a.m. newscast on the BBC. The A40 turned to the M40 as he flashed through the northwest suburbs of London. Dirty dawn light came up as he rose into the gentle hills of the Chilterns. The complimentary Hertz map lay unopened on the passenger seat. Michael had no need for it; he knew the roads well.
Sarah’s family had owned a large cottage in the Cotswolds village of Chipping Campden. Limestone walls, covered in clematis and variegated ivy, surrounded the cottage. Michael and she spent several weekends there during the months they were together. The countryside changed her. She shed the black leather uniform of her Soho clan. She wore faded jeans and sweaters in winter and girlish sundresses in summer. In the mornings they walked the footpaths outside the village, through pastures thick with sheep and pheasant. Afternoons they made love. In summer, when it was warm, they made love in the garden, concealed by limestone and flowers. Sarah liked it best outside. She liked the sensation of Michael inside her and the sun on her fair skin. Secretly she hoped people were watching. She wanted the world to know how their lovemaking looked. She wanted everyone to be jealous.
She danced, she modeled, she read many books. Sometimes she acted; sometimes she made photographs. Her politics were atrocious and as flexible as her long body. She was Labour, she was a communist. She was Green, she was an anarchist. She lived in a Soho room above a Lebanese takeaway, strewn with secondhand clothing and leotards. She listened to the Clash and the Stones. She listened to recordings of ocean and forest noises and Gregorian chant. She was vegetarian, and the smell of grilling lamb from the takeaway made her want to puke. To cover the smell she burned incense and candles. The first time she took Michael to her bed he had the uneasy sensation of making love in a Catholic church.
She introduced him to a world he never knew. She took him to strange parties. She took him to experimental theater. She took him to readings and exhibitions. She picked out different clothing for him. She couldn’t sleep nights unless she made love to him first. She loved to look at their bodies in candlelight. “Look at us,” she would say. “I’m so white, and you’re so dark. I’m good, and you’re evil.”
His work bored her, and she never asked about it. The idea that someone would travel the world selling things seemed to confound her. She asked only where he was going and when he was coming back.
Adrian Carter was Michael’s control officer. He was obligated to tell Carter and Personnel about the relationship with Sarah, but they would dig into her past—her politics, her work, her friends, her lovers—and they might very well uncover things Michael would rather not know. He kept Sarah secret from the Agency and the Agency secret from Sarah. He feared she would leave him if he told her the truth. He feared she would tell her friends, and his cover in London would be jeopardized. He was lying to his employer and his lover. He was happy and miserable at the same time.
He was nearing Oxford. A white commercial Ford minivan had been shadowing him for twenty miles, staying three or four car lengths behind. It was possible the Ford was simply traveling the same direction, but Michael was trained not to believe in coincidence. He slowed and allowed traffic to pass.
The Ford remained in the same place.
He approached a roadside café and petrol station. He exited the motorway and parked outside the restaurant. The Ford followed and entered the petrol station. The driver climbed out and pretended to put air in the front passenger-side tire while he watched the Rover. Michael wondered who might be tailing him. Wheaton from London Station? Graham Seymour and MI6?
He went inside the café, ordered a bacon and fried egg sandwich and coffee, and went to the toilet. He collected the food, paid for it, and went back out. The Ford was still at the petrol station; the driver was preparing to put air in the rear tire.
Michael went into a public telephone and called his hotel. He told the woman at the desk that he had left a pair of valuable cuff links in the bathroom. He gave her a false address in Miami, which she dutifully took down while Michael watched the Ford. He hung up and climbed back inside the Rover. He started the engine and drove off, slipping into traffic on the motorway. He glanced in the rearview mirror while he ate the sandwich.
The Ford was there, three car lengths behind.
The car followed Michael to Moreton-in-Marsh, a large village by Gloucestershire standards, straddling the intersection of the A44 and the A429. He pulled into a carpark outside a row of shops and climbed out. The Ford parked fifty meters away. The café was next to a butcher. Dead pheasant hung in the doorway. Michael thought of Sarah, sitting across from him with a plate of rice and beans and yellow squash, glaring at him as he pulled meat from the bones of a roasted Cotswolds pheasant. He went inside the café, ordered coffee and pastry from the plump girl behind the counter, and sat down.
Michael recognized Ivan Drozdov from Agency photographs. He was bald except for a gray monkish fringe, his tall frame bent over a stack of morning newspapers. Gold reading glasses rested on the end of his regal nose, gray eyes squinted against the smoke of a cigarette poking from thin lips. He wore a gray rollneck sweater and a green field jacket with a corduroy collar. A pair of matching corgis groomed themselves next to Wellington boots caked with fresh mud.
Michael carried his food to the table next to him and sat down. Drozdov looked up briefly, smiled, and returned to his newspapers. Several minutes passed this way, Michael drinking coffee, Drozdov reading the
Times
and smoking.
Times
and smoking.
Finally, without looking up, Drozdov said, “Are you ever going to speak, or are you just going to sit there and annoy my dogs?”
Michael, surprised, said, “My name is Carl Blackburn, and I was wondering if I might have a word with you.”
“Actually, your name is Michael Osbourne. You work for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in Langley, Virginia. You used to be a field agent, until your lover was murdered in London and the Agency brought you inside.”
Drozdov carefully folded the newspaper and fed pieces of cake to the dogs.
“Now, if you’d like to talk about something, perhaps we could take a walk,” he said. “But don’t lie to me ever again. It’s insulting, and I don’t take well to insults.”
“Do you realize you’re under surveillance, Mr. Osbourne?”
They were walking along a one-lane track toward the village of Aston Magna, where Drozdov had taken up residence when the Soviet Union crumbled and the threat of assassination from his old KGB masters vanished. He was taller than Michael by a narrow head, and like many large men he stooped slightly to shrink himself. He walked slowly, hands clasped behind his back, head down as if looking for a lost valuable. The dogs walked a few meters ahead, like countersurveillance. Michael, by nature a fast walker, struggled to keep pace with Drozdov’s loping disjointed gait. He wondered how the old man had spotted the surveillance, for Michael had never seen him look for it.
“Two men,” Drozdov said. “White Ford van.”
“I spotted them on the M-Forty, a few miles outside London.”
“Does anyone know you were coming to see me?”
“No,” Michael lied. “I’m not here as a representative of the CIA, and I didn’t request permission from the British. It’s strictly a personal matter.”
“You’ve placed yourself in a rather difficult position, Mr. Osbourne. If you do something I don’t care for, all I need do is pick up the telephone and ring my handler at MI-Six, and you’ll be in a good deal of trouble.”
“I know. Obviously, as a professional courtesy, I ask that you not do so.”
“It must be rather important.”
“It is.”
“I suspect those men in the white van have a long-range microphone. Perhaps we should walk someplace they can’t follow.”
They turned onto a footpath bordering a field of dead winter grass. In the distance, hills rose into low cloud. A gang of sheep bleated at them along the fence line. Drozdov scratched the thick wool of their heads as they passed. The path was muddy with the night’s rain, and after a few paces Michael’s suede Italian loafers were ruined. He turned around and looked back. The van was heading back toward Moreton.
“I think we can speak now, Mr. Osbourne. Your friends seem to have given up the chase.”
For ten minutes Michael did all the talking. He ran through the list of assassinations and terrorist attacks. The Spanish minister in Madrid. The French police official in Paris. The BMW executive in Frankfurt. The PLO official in Tunis. The Israeli businessman in London. Drozdov listened intently, sometimes nodding, sometimes grunting quietly. The dogs tore across the meadow and scattered pheasant.
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