The Blind Spy by Alex Dryden

Author:Alex Dryden [Dryden, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-06-01T14:00:00+00:00

17

BURT AND ANNA WERE TO TAKE a Cougar executive jet from Washington Dulles airport for the flight south. Larry was at the wheel of a Porsche four-by-four as they drew up outside a hangar at the private end of the airport and she saw the plane gleaming in the early spring sunshine.

She saw that, like all Burt’s fleet of planes, it had been highly polished. It looked like an outsize model ornament destined for a giant mantelpiece, or a sculpture belonging to a proud collector and which only needed a pedestal to mount it on. The jet had the cleanliness of an anaesthetised surgeon’s knife, nothing like the dirty, oiled, mechanised tool that was a commercial plane. And that was how Cougar liked to present itself to the world, she thought: as a clean, pure white, and beautiful instrument. Like Cougar—like Burt—the plane was a thing of ideological and even moral certainty.

Larry unloaded the bags from the car and carried them onto the plane. Burt turned to her before they stepped out: “How is Little Finn? Enjoying life, I trust,” he said.

She nodded. “He misses seeing Larry and the boys, I think, more than he misses me.”

Burt looked at her. “But he’s in the right place, you’re sure of that? Anything more we can do?”

“Oh yes, he’s in the right place,” she replied easily, but she betrayed none of the hollowness that her visits to him always left her with. And Burt didn’t press her, as he never did, about anything. “He’s very well,” she added unnecessarily, more to convince herself than him, and then she looked away, out of the window across the tarmac.

“He’ll always be your son, Anna,” was all he said.

They boarded the plane, Larry chatted to the pilot, and then they took off into a startlingly blue sky that seemed as if it had been designed by Burt to receive his pristine jet.

Burt was relaxed as ever on the journey. Never a care in the world, a world which to him, anyway, it seemed to her, was like a Roman circus prepared for his own carefully planned shows and games, rather than the dangerous and inconsistent place it was to others and which forced its constantly changing flux on them. Burt, the ruler of the world; a plump Caesar who this morning wore bright yellow slacks, a blue blazer, and expensive suede loafers. And as always puffed on a half-smoked cigar.

When they were settled at their cruising height and food had been served, Anna turned to him. “What will you do when you’re too old?” she asked him. “Who’s going to run Cougar then?”

“We train youth teams.” He beamed. “Just like the football clubs.”

“But there’ll never be anyone else like you,” she said. “You are Cougar, aren’t you?”

“And Cougar will therefore change,” he replied. “It’ll become a bureaucracy like the CIA, perhaps, with all the dead hand that implies.” He smiled broadly at her. “A company can only be as good as its leader. And it

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