The Blind Spy (21 page)

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Babich,’ he said, ‘tell Tur what you know.’

Babich put his arms on the desk and looked at Taras with the neutral expression of someone who has been brought in to a situation he doesn’t like.

‘We picked up information that a team of Russian soldiers, who we now know were from the FSB and special forces, were heading out of the city. Sevastopol, that is. It was suspicious because they hadn’t notified us as they should have done. That’s the agreement we have with the Russians. So we put a tail on them and when we saw where they’d regrouped, we sent our own team, of which I was the leader. There was an uncomfortable stand-off at a barn outside the city. They were very tense, threatening. So we called up reinforcements and eventually they backed down. It was a close thing. Then we saw they were holding someone. This Shapko. Your cousin, apparently.’

‘Check it,’ Taras said angrily, and then regretted his outburst. But Babich ignored him.

‘She was in the back of one of their trucks,’ Babich continued smoothly. ‘We demanded they hand her over. They said she was a Russian citizen and we told them they were in Ukrainian jurisdiction on Ukrainian territory and had no rights outside the militarised zone around Sevastopol harbour. When our reinforcements arrived, we effectively forced them to hand her over. She’d apparently tried to shoot herself, but we don’t know for sure. She hadn’t made much of a job of it. The bullet had gone through her cheek and smashed her jaw before exiting fairly harmlessly. She was alive, in any case,’ he said harshly. ‘But much longer, and she might have been dead from loss of blood.’

Taras stared back at Babich.

‘What makes you think it was her who’d fired the shot?’ he said eventually.

‘The Russians told us she had. But, to be honest, that’s what it looked like. Not a good attempt.’

‘Where is she?’ Taras asked.

‘She’s in hospital. She’s stabilised.’

‘In Sevastopol.’

‘Yes.’

Taras suddenly liked Babich. He was just telling what he knew.

‘So that’s why you didn’t meet your cousin,’ Kuchin said. ‘She was involved in something other than a nostalgic visit to your family house.’

‘Is she conscious?’ Taras asked, but to Babich.

‘In and out, when I last saw her.’

‘The question is,’ Kuchin said impatiently, ‘what was she doing attracting the attention of Russian special forces? We have to work with them. We don’t like going up against them like this. It causes trouble at the highest levels.’ He looked angrily at Babich.

Babich didn’t comment.

‘Do we know it was her who was attracting their attention?’ Once more Taras looked at Babich. ‘Maybe she just got caught up in something. If all this happened at the farm.’

‘That’s a good point,’ Babich said reasonably. ‘One of the Russians made a slip, perhaps. He told me, “It wasn’t her.” I’m certain he meant they were expecting someone else.’

‘But why did she try to shoot herself if she was innocent?’ Kuchin snapped, evidently either disagreeing with this interpretation or merely wanting things to be neat, tied up and off his desk. ‘She was involved,’ he added

‘Maybe,’ Babich conceded. Kuchin glared at him for his lack of full support.

 

‘
C
OALITION INTEROPERABILITY’ WAS not an expression that Adrian Carew was likely to find anything other than blind stupid. It was American, of course, he told himself.The multilingual NATO intelligence committee conducted its business in American – or an ‘international’ version of English, as they called it – and that didn’t help his mood. But in his view this sort of jargon was generally typical of the way the English language had become so hopelessly mauled that it was now being used either to cosh the listener senseless, or to obfuscate a situation to the point of meaninglessness. Incomprehensible language had become a substitute for clarity, and in Adrian’s opinion a lack of intelligent decision-making was bound to follow. But worst of all, the language bored Adrian in the same way that reading the excruciatingly translated instructions on a Chinese-made vacuum cleaner might have done.

‘Do you mean “working together”?’ he interrupted and his lips tightened as if they were gripping a straw. He had a sudden notion that, as head of the British intelligence service, good English usage – or any other damn language for that matter – was the prerequisite for good international relations.

Most of the other figures around the large, perfectly oval, polished cherry wood table – it had reportedly cost over fifty thousand euros – looked at him as if it were he who had just uttered sounds in some as yet undiscovered language. Osvald Kruger, the head of the BND, Germany’s spy agency, in particular looked like he was completely at home with ‘Coalition Interoperability’. It was simply the norm. It was international English, his raised eyebrows seemed to say – at least they seemed to say so to Adrian. There was an uncomfortable pause.

‘It’s not, actually, exactly the same thing, Adrian,’ the CIA head Theo Lish said at last in a patiently hushed voice, and then gave a little cough, either from a sense of linguistic superiority or simply from awkwardness. He had been drawing to the close of a complex exposition of the latest NATO strategy for combating cyber warfare and had now lost his thread.

‘I know it’s not
exactly
the same thing, Theo,’ Adrian retorted. ‘But at least everyone understands what it bloody means. It’s Anglo-Saxon English, not some bureaucratic bloody gobbledegook.’

Lish now reddened in anger.

Only one of the thirty or so figures sitting around the table wasn’t remotely ruffled by this disturbance. And he announced himself with his trademark loud guffaw from the opposite side of the table to Adrian. Whether from the loudness of the laugh or from its diversionary opportunity, the small explosion afforded an exit from the momentary impasse Adrian had created. Burt Miller banged the table with his chubby pink hand as a sort of percussion accompaniment to his boom box laugh, and looked around the table with a twinkle of mirth in his eyes.

‘The Brits never agree on the wording,’ he announced to the assembled espionage chiefs and with a broad grin on his face. ‘That’s the way they’ve lied their way around the world for five hundred years.’

This time it was Adrian who reddened. He looked across the table at Burt with a mixture of fury and concealed admiration that contorted his expression for a brief moment into something resembling a squashed cartoon.

Adrian then saw that the head of France’s DGSE, Thomas Plismy, was obviously enjoying his discomfort and actually had a slight but deliberate smirk on his face.

Next to Burt, as always these days, Adrian noted, sat the Russian woman, the former KGB colonel Anna Resnikov. She had remained expressionless throughout Adrian’s encounter with Lish and now looked across the table at Adrian with a level stare. The contrast between Adrian’s rough and claret-tinged face and her smooth, finely textured features was like two Renaissance paintings, one of a bawdy house in downtown Venice, the other a pastoral Elysian idyll. The cool terrain of her personality seemed to wash over Adrian in an attempt to extinguish him with a single glance. On top of everything – for some reason this crossed his mind – she was taller than him by an inch or two. He searched her face for any sign of contempt, caught himself doing it, and felt angrier than before.

The consultative meeting between national security chiefs of the NATO countries was a regular event that took place several times a year and was held either in Washington or, more usually, as this time, at NATO headquarters in Brussels. The thirty-one nations sent their spy masters to confer, compare notes, pursue the alliance’s common aims – and, with familiar regularity, to hide, withhold or obscure anything from each other that was considered by their respective governments to be of greater national importance than something to be shared between notional allies. It was a forum of supposedly common aims and strategies, but where conflicts of interest were everywhere and everyone knew it, no one openly mentioned them.

In recent years the get-together included not just the heads of the thirty-one national intelligence services of NATO countries. Occasionally a few very select intelligence gurus, like Burt Miller, who owned their own private spy companies were also invited. There were one or two of these companies which had become indispensable to the American national effort and therefore to NATO. Burt headed up the biggest private intelligence-gathering organisation on earth and was here because his company now competed on more or less an equal footing with the CIA. Indeed, it was almost a branch of the CIA, some said, and one that in the past year controlled a budget nearly as large as the CIA’s own. It had become the tail that wagged the dog, in Adrian’s opinion. A kind of reverse takeover had taken place. Directors and officers left the CIA, joined companies like Cougar, then turned around and gave the CIA advice and even, on occasion, instructions. Then, when they’d served their time at Cougar, they would rejoin the CIA at the highest level and award Cougar intelligence contracts. Lish was just one of them. It was practically a protection racket, as far as Adrian was concerned.

But the other side of Adrian wished for himself the wealth that private intelligence gathering had sumptuously bestowed on Burt.

The woman, Anna Resnikov, only rubbed salt in this particular wound. A year before, she’d been under the threat of extinction. It seemed that somehow, inevitably with Burt’s help, she had effortlessly turned that around. After her brilliant coup de grâce in the previous year when she had exposed a KGB spy ring in Washington and nearly been killed for her pains, she’d become some kind of a hero to the Americans. She was now Burt’s associate vice-president – another meaningless expression which, to Adrian, was just Burt’s method of getting her to accompany him on trips across the Atlantic like this one. In a year, Adrian seethed, she’d probably earned more from Cougar than he’d earned in two or three as deputy, and now head, of MI6.

With a finality in his voice, Burt looked up the table at Theo Lish. ‘Damn fine run-down of the situation,’ he said supportively, as if the cyber warfare question was now done with. ‘Let’s get back to the table refreshed for the afternoon session.’

As the meeting broke for lunch, Burt singled out Adrian.

‘We’re going to the Trois Couleurs,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you join us?’

What did he mean by ‘we’, Adrian wondered. ‘We’ve only got an hour,’ he grunted, however. ‘It’ll take fifteen minutes to get out there and it’s the most expensive restaurant in Brussels.’

‘And the best,’ Burt replied. ‘What’s more, it’s pre-ordered and on me.’ He grinned. ‘We’ll eat the best food in this town – some of the best in Europe – and be back here only a few minutes late.’

 

Outside the NATO building, a large, black, armoured limousine awaited Burt. He ushered Anna first into the long back seat – as if she were the bloody Queen, Adrian thought – and then stepped in himself, leaving Adrian to follow. There was nobody else invited, Adrian saw.

The pre-ordered lunch was brought to the table in the time it took them to be escorted by the maître d’ from the entrance of the restaurant to their seats at a private table in a room at the rear. A bottle of Pomerol 56 had been decanted and was now poured. Burt waved aside the opportunity to taste it and the sommelier smiled as if in complicity with Burt’s apparently transcendental appreciation of the vintage and its quality.

‘Expect it to be good, and it will be good, eh, Adrian?’ Burt said, and raised his glass.

Adrian was nonplussed. Burt’s curious combination of earthiness and, to Adrian, fanciful, airy-fairy, New-Age remarks like this one never failed to confuse him. ‘To lunch!’ Burt toasted, ignoring Adrian’s demurral and, tucking a four hundred-count linen napkin somewhere into his chins, he began to enjoy the
boeuf en croûte
.

To Adrian’s surprise, the conversation was minimal and he began to wonder what was behind this invitation after all. Indeed, why were they in a private room if they weren’t here to talk? But Burt seemed intent on enjoying the
dégustation
and in no mood for talk, formal or otherwise. It was only when the bill had been invisibly paid – pre-ordered and on account, Adrian supposed – and they were heading back in the limousine for the afternoon session that Burt beamed at Adrian in a way that suggested something was coming.

‘Know what’s on the agenda this afternoon?’ he said.

Of course Adrian knew, they all knew. ‘Iran. For the umpteenth time,’ Adrian replied patiently. ‘And then a general discussion about the perils of scaling down in Afghanistan. What the intelligence role in that eventuality will be.’

‘Ukraine,’ Burt said. ‘Russia and Ukraine. That’s top of my agenda.’

‘But it’s not on the agenda at all, Burt,’ Adrian protested.

‘I think you’ll find it is.’ Burt leaned slightly towards the MI6 chief. ‘And, Adrian, I know you’ll instinctively give your support for my – actually, for Anna’s – thesis. She’s been doing fine work in the past months. Particularly in the past few weeks. Work on the ground. And I just want you to know that your support will be a thing of great value to me.’

Adrian looked past Burt’s bulk at Anna, but she didn’t seem to be listening. She was staring through the side window of the limousine somewhere into the distance. The long profile of her face was caught by the sun flashing behind the trees as they drove. She seemed to cultivate an impenetrable, enigmatic identity.

Not for the first time, Adrian wondered what she was like in bed. She’d been Finn’s woman until his death, and after that she’d picked and discarded at least one other man in the past year that he knew of. Including Logan Halloran, he recalled. Unlike the girls in his office, who he felt regarded him as the leader of the herd, she gave him nothing. Once, when Finn was alive, she’d come with Finn to Adrian’s and his wife Penny’s house in the country. He’d made it clear to her what he wanted – practically in front of his wife – and she’d looked at him as if he were a piece of dirt.