The Blind Spy (24 page)

The port of Novorossiysk was on the right-hand side of the back-projected electronic map on which red lights were blinking here and there to indicate something or other. On closer inspection, the flashing red dots now seemed to be ports on the Black Sea, as far as Burt could see, though due to the overall ponderousness of Theo’s explanation, his mind was wandering and he wasn’t willing to display a great deal of interest. He was already way ahead of Theo’s analysis, in fact, and knew roughly what was coming.

Otherwise on the map there were cream-coloured, glowing lines of light that appeared to track the ship’s movements out of Novorossiysk, and which extended slowly across the Black Sea as if driven solely by Theo’s explanation rather than the ship’s own engines. As Theo grew into his dissertation on the ship’s movements, Archie from Threat Matrix moved across in front of the map with his cue, like an agitated spider, as if he were directing armies into battle. It was too much empty excitement for Burt’s mind.

They were down several floors below ground level, in a wellappointed nuclear bomb-proof bunker at the CIA’s Threat Matrix centre at Harper’s Crossing, Virginia; Theo, Burt and Adrian – the CIA, Cougar and MI6 – in that order. Theo Lish had made this order clear to Adrian in an unnecessary emphasis of the line of command that was guaranteed only to irritate Adrian’s sensibilities.

For his part, Adrian was still seething at having been asked to strip down to his underpants in order to enter this holy of holies in the first place. He, Adrian Carew, head of MI6, had been requested with much polite deference and many apologies by two armed, uniformed and highly polished special forces soldiers to strip off!

‘But I’m head of the British Special Intelligence Service, for Christ’s sake!’ Adrian had protested. ‘Your bloody boss has invited me here!’

But it was all ‘I’m sorry, sir’, ‘Regulations, sir’, ‘We all have to do it these days, I’m afraid’, and ‘It won’t take a minute, sir’. If this was how the Yanks treated their allies, no wonder the world was full of their enemies, Adrian had thought. And for a moment, Adrian wondered if Burt had been made to go through this ritualistic humiliation. He somehow doubted it and that only made him angrier.

The room was decked out with the sort of deep leather armchairs that induced a pleasant afternoon nap in old-fashioned libraries, but other than the leather chairs it flashed its high-tech purpose over everything else, including the other furnishings which were all curved aluminium and glass. It was 20 April, more than three months since the first departure of the
Forburg
had been noted by the agency’s Ukraine source whose head had wound up later on a snowman and which still lay in a frozen drawer at Langley. And it was more than three months since the ship had disappeared.

Burt looked at the huge electronic chart and considered – not for the first time – that the whole set-up at Harper’s Crossing was more like the world’s best computer game than real life, and that its abstract nature merely distanced those of them in the room – and anyone else, for that matter – from the actual events on the ground.

‘But now she’s not called the
Forburg
,’ Theo intoned with a triumphant note in his voice. ‘She’s called the
Yekaterinburg
.’

‘How do you know it’s the same ship?’ Burt asked, considering that asking the obvious question would help him to endure the process by calming his mind.

‘By a very complicated process of matching the lines of the original ship which were taken from our satellite photos with the current apparition,’ Theo replied. ‘It all then gets computerised and drawn up with an exactness of shape and size down to less than an inch. We’re certain.’

‘And now she’s the
Yekaterinburg
,’ Burt said, but only in order to nudge Theo on with the story.

‘From there,’ Lish continued, as if even he were now becoming bored by his own voice, ‘from there – from Novorossiysk – she headed west in a diagonal straight line across the Black Sea and docked at Istanbul four days later.’

The cream-coloured line dutifully tracked across the Black Sea. Archie focused the cue on the word Istanbul in three-inch-high letters, with its corresponding flashing red dot.

Adrian cleared his throat loudly. It’s like some early learning lesson for the educationally sub-normal, he was thinking.

‘The fifth of April, in other words,’ Lish continued and now pointed – with ever-increasing lack of necessity to Burt’s mind – at the huge chart of the Black Sea on the wall and then back down on to a large polished wood table between them and the wall which dwarfed the several paper charts and satellite pictures lying on it and that were also being used to track the vessel’s progress. On the paper charts, now that Burt and Adrian looked, a thin red pencil line had been drawn to indicate the ship’s progress, as if the electronic map needed any back-up, or might fail at any time.

But the photographs from America’s World View satellite indicated a ship and then a close-up of the name
Yekaterinburg
. Some of the pictures were so detailed Burt could make out a moustache on one of the crew members and a scar right the way down the left-hand side of the face of another.

Burt picked up a cue himself now, but with the grip on its handle of someone who was about to use it for breaking heads. He waved it dangerously. Adrian, he noticed, was tapping the wooden table irritably with the forefinger of his right hand.

A British foreign secretary in the nineteenth century, Burt recalled, had once said that a study of maps could drive a man mad. Whether you were looking at satellite pictures and electronic charts in the twenty-first century or whether you had studied medieval maps adorned with sea monsters in the court of Elizabeth I, what tended to happen, in Burt’s opinion, was that the brain became disengaged – a distance developed – and the mental processes were diverted from hard internal analysis to a theatre in which objective appreciation of a situation replaced real intelligence. The ability to work out why something was happening rather than simply that it was happening was postponed, blurred and, finally, became conveniently irrelevant. Maps and satellite pictures were the toys of the back-room boys – the computer geeks, of whom, no doubt, Archie was one – whose need for the tangible was a reassurance rather than of any actual use. The fog of war began here, in the operations rooms of Washington, Moscow, London or Paris.

‘Russian registered, is she?’ Burt asked, waving the cue from side to side like a deranged conductor with an outsized baton. But it served to urge the process on.

‘So far,’ Theo replied with a deadly seriousness that made Burt want to laugh out loud. ‘But we’ll get on to that,’ Theo added mysteriously.

‘She left on April Fool’s day,’ Burt chortled. ‘I like it.’

‘They don’t actually have April Fool’s day in Russia,’ Theo replied pedantically.

‘They don’t have Christmas Day on Christmas Day either,’ Burt replied. ‘But that never stopped the Russians from using our calendars to perform their nefarious deeds. What then, Theo?’

‘She unloaded a cargo of timber in Istanbul which was loaded previously at Novorossiysk. Want to see the pictures of that?’

‘I think I know what the wood will look like,’ Burt said, and Archie seemed disappointed at the missed opportunity for further visual extrapolation, as well as oblivious to the sarcasm.

‘OK,’ Lish resumed. ‘Two days in port at Istanbul, that’s all. Then she’s off again, headed out through the Bosphorus and into the Mediterranean.’

‘Who’s watching her on the ground?’ Burt asked.

‘The British.’

That explained the presence of Adrian, then.

‘We have two Special Boat Service teams tracking the ship,’ Adrian said in a clipped voice. ‘Round the clock, out of radar range.’

‘What makes you think the
Yekaterinburg
is carrying ordinary radar?’ Burt asked. ‘Or that anyone interested in her like we are – like your boys in their rubber boats – aren’t also being tracked but on someone else’s satellite? If she’s so important, if that’s what this is all about, the Russians will know just where you are.’

‘They keep below range,’ Adrian replied. ‘Small boats only, but I grant you there’s nothing we can do if the ship and the area around it are being tracked from space by their side. Whoever their side is,’ he added.

‘Dashing around the high seas in little rubber boats,’ Burt said with great enthusiasm. ‘Great stuff, Adrian.’ But in his mind he was satisfied that there was no one better for the job than the British special forces. They liked a fight.

‘So. What then?’ he said.

Theo moved another chart and satellite map over the first one on the table. Archie flicked a switch on a console in the hand that wasn’t holding the wooden cue and projected a new electronic map on to the wall which now showed the eastern Mediterranean.

‘First stop after Istanbul is Alexandria – Egypt,’ Theo said, again pedantically to Burt’s ears.

‘I didn’t imagine it was Alexandria, Virginia, Theo.’

‘Detail’s important,’ the CIA chief said. ‘No slip-ups, no misunderstandings. Step-by-step.’

Not this sort of detail, Burt thought. This was just flannel, stuffing, something to fill out reports with.

‘Pick up a new cargo in Alexandria, did she?’ he enquired, concealing his impatience with a trademark smile.

‘Yes, she was loaded when she left. Down to the Plimsoll line. But we don’t know what with. Or we didn’t.’

‘So?’

‘She chugs off up the coast of the southern sector of the Med. We have our Sixth Fleet now supporting the British in the area. Refuelling and so on. Rotating crews from the SBS, Britain’s Special Boat Service, sent out from the UK. She then docks in Algiers, three days later. Unloads a cargo of scrap metal, as it turns out. That’s what she picked up in Alexandria.’

This was taking an awfully long time for Burt’s liking. So a Russian merchant vessel left the port of Novorossiysk just like hundreds of others did every year. ‘What about it?’ he said mildly, concealing a growing testiness beneath his same trademark grin which, as usual, contained all the potential of a drugged and swaying cobra.

‘This is where it gets interesting,’ Theo said. ‘Adrian?’

Adrian shuffled the two or three inches available to him in order to get closer to the charts and the satellite pictures on the table. There she was again on the maps and in the photographs, the
Yekaterinburg
, but now she was heading west along the southern littoral from Egypt. The line of light on the wall indicated her progress. It was an entertainment, Burt thought. And then he remembered that it was the Walt Disney Corporation which had designed the CIA’s Threat Matrix centre.

‘She disappears,’ Adrian said. ‘That’s what happens.’

‘Disappears?’ Burt queried and raised a mocking eyebrow. ‘You don’t mean into thin air, presumably.’

‘Put it this way, Burt. Our teams are watching her. We have a four-man team on shore in Algiers and others out at sea. Supported by your Sixth Fleet, as Theo says. Our shore team can’t get into the actual port area, but they have a view, shall we say. They overlook it.’

‘Well done, Adrian,’ Burt said, and Adrian tried and failed to pinpoint an unmistakable tone of mockery in his voice.

‘On the morning of the fifteenth of April,’ Adrian continued, ‘she’s no longer alongside the dock in Algiers. She’s vanished. That’s what I mean.’

‘But your teams picked up what vessels left port during the night,’ Burt said.

‘Yes. Five ships left overnight. Between nine p.m. and nine a.m. We think the
Yekaterinburg
was one of them. In fact, she must have been, and we can show it.’

‘That would make excellent sense,’ Burt said. ‘If she wasn’t there any more she must have either left or sunk. What’s the proposition?’

‘Two SBS teams at sea tracked all five ships, until they finally reduced the search to one. If it’s the
Yekaterinburg
– and we’re certain it is – she was re-registered overnight under the flag of Tuvalu, and re-named the
Pride of Corsica
. Paint job, new numbers, a few little differences to the outer appearance, but the superstructure’s the same. My watchers are experts.’

‘I’m sure they are,’ Burt agreed. ‘So she starts off as the
Forburg
in January, turns into the
Yekaterinburg
in April and then swiftly becomes the
Pride of Corsica
. Sounds rather over-elaborate, don’t you think?’

‘That depends on how elaborate they think it needs to be,’ Theo said. ‘Evidently concealment is of the utmost importance.’

‘What then?’ Burt said, and found he was now warming to the chameleon ship.

Theo now walked away from the table as if for some oratorical effect. Then he turned. ‘So the boat we’re sure is the
Forburg/ Yekaterinburg
still heads west. But now she’s under a new flag and named the
Pride of Corsica
. This time she’s going to Libya.’

‘And this time we see she has bodyguards on board,’ Adrian said.

‘Armed guards,’ Burt murmured as a statement rather than a question, and as if in some way suddenly approving of the operation. ‘What provenance?’

‘We don’t know. But they’re crawling all over the deck. They must have boarded in Algiers, or just possibly under the cover of darkness out at sea. They looked like they were preparing for something.’

‘But not a tea party.’ Burt looked at Adrian. ‘What sort of preparations?’

‘A great deal of ordnance. Heavy stuff. Anti-aircraft, anti-submarine, you name it. Plus an arsenal of small arms that could bring down a small country.’

Theo now brought up satellite pictures of the deck of the ship with a clear view of about a dozen men, Burt thought, armed to the teeth with Kriss Super Five sub-machine guns, and wearing balaclavas and combat gear. He now saw there was a sternmounted anti-aircraft emplacement, plus one in the bow. He thought he detected what Adrian had called anti-submarine devices, too.