The Blind Spy (26 page)

Cougar emblems decorated the watchtower – a mountain lion rampant, like some medieval jousting symbol – and they drove away from the strip towards high Spanish-style gates that announced an intensely guarded area at the centre of the ranch. Security guards were everywhere in evidence, a small private army in the semi-desert.

There were discreet, concentric circles of defence around the hundreds of thousands of acres of land and the circular defensive lines shrank in size eventually to a sort of fortress climax at the centre, though even this was still discreet. Another Cougar emblem reared its raised paws in bas-relief on a giant bronze tableau at the inner ranch gates. And Burt’s private army, increased in size for the purpose of guarding his most prized asset – Mikhail – wore embroidered cougars on their shoulders, but were otherwise armed more effectively with MP5N machine guns. Any further Russian attempt to wrestle Mikhail from his chosen exile at Burt’s ranch was not anticipated, but, nevertheless, planned for. Burt liked to ‘futurise for all the eventualities’, as he put it, like a seasoned general before a battle.

They walked across the high desert gardens that separated the parking area from the house. There was snow on the distant mountains and there was a scattering down here on the mesa. A frost gripped the land and it was two degrees below zero. The desert plants and cacti, like bristling steel gun emplacements, were dug in, biding their time for the short and almost invisible burst of growth that would begin in June.

Burt withdrew an envelope from the inside of his blue, silverbuttoned blazer and held it casually in the hand that also clutched his cigar. The sun was bright in the sky, but made little difference to the temperature in the depth of winter.

He hadn’t shown Anna the message from the man who called himself ‘Rafael’ and which he had received from the American embassy in Kiev two months before, but he had it in the envelope he was holding now and the way he held the envelope showed off its wax seal of a bird, bright red and firmly imprinted in the dried wax that had flowed outwards at its edges before it had solidified. Something told him that Mikhail – as well as providing insights into the developing situation in Ukraine – might have something to say about it.

They found Mikhail sitting on a verandah at the rear of the sprawling ranch house. The verandah was heated by a line of gas heaters like an outdoor restaurant.

Burt’s staff were everywhere in evidence; wheeled trolleys with coffee and cold drinks stood within Mikhail’s reach; uniformed maids appeared to be polishing windows inside a drawing room behind them, and gardeners were covering the roots of shrubs with further mesh and straw against frost which lasted as late as June up here in the mountains.

Anna looked at the two gardeners who were working in her sight and saw the bulges beneath their arms. Burt didn’t just have armed guards, he had armed gardeners too.

Mikhail was sitting in the wheelchair he’d been confined to for a year and a half now, ever since the KGB’s assassination attempt against him in a Virginia park, across the river from Washington, DC. Anna, too, had been wounded in the fire-fight, the attempted abduction of Mikhail and of herself by the KGB. She’d taken a bullet in the shoulder, but, unlike Mikhail, she had made a full recovery. Despite the attention of the best doctors Burt’s bottomless fortune could provide, however, it was by now conceded – not least by Mikhail himself – that the effect of the Russian bullet which had entered his spine on that day in 2008 would not now be reversed. Only Burt’s faith in the everdeveloping and banned medical technology of stem cells allowed the question to remain open. Burt never gave up his endless optimism for the prospect of Mikhail’s improvement and full recovery. Mikhail never gave up hope regardless of any situation he found himself in – whether he was to remain permanently crippled or cured – and his injury seemed to concern him less than it did Burt. It was a mere detail for Mikhail. It didn’t interfere with his brain, and that was all that seemed important to him.

They pulled up cushioned leather seats next to Mikhail. Anna kissed him on both cheeks, three times in the Russian way, and Burt raised his hand casually. Here down at the ranch, Burt would shortly adopt another of his many disguises, this time as a nineteenth-century cattle rancher – despite the fact that he had never sat on a horse.

‘What news from the front?’ Mikhail said. ‘Where is the front these days, anyway?’

He was a tall man; even in a wheelchair it was possible to see that. His once thick, black hair had turned to grey in the eighteen months since he’d been shot. But his face was finely cut like soft and weathered stone and his eyes were piercing and dark. He had several newspapers opened on tables surrounding him, including the
Journal
.

‘I believe the front is still Ukraine,’ Burt said. ‘Never mind that Yanukovich won. But I’m apparently in a minority. At least out there,’ he waved his hand vaguely at the world. ‘The CIA disagree.’

‘The Kremlin’s choice has won, that’s true,’ Mikhail said. ‘How will that make the spies in Moscow feel? And will it tame the monster? I’ll tell you, Burt. If the monster gets one square meal, it won’t think they’ll come regularly, on time, every day, believe me. The Kremlin won’t view this victory as satisfying its ambitions in Ukraine. It’s just the beginning. It will just want more. It will see the Yanukovich victory as a sign of weakness among its enemies, not as a sign of its own strength. And that is always an indication of the most dangerous of enemies. The paranoia of the self-pitying and wounded animal always looks to its opponents’ weaknesses, it never enjoys its own strengths.’

‘Then the three of us agree,’ Burt said.

Anna looked into the eyes of the old spy and wondered if Mikhail was sliding into becoming like other exiles and defectors from the KGB she’d met in the West – an intransigent, hectoring and bitterly entrenched mind that would always see the Kremlin from now on as a two-dimensional enemy. But what she saw was his old intelligence and far-sightedness that could only come from calm contemplation. Neither his injury nor his exile, she realised, would ever blunt that. He spent most days entirely alone, Burt had told her, despite Burt’s attempts to entertain him with arranged visits from friends and colleagues. Some made the trip down from Washington or Virginia for three days in order to meet the West’s greatest double agent for a generation, and left without ever seeing Mikhail. He devoted his time, it seemed, to solitary contemplation. He was like a monk. But did he think of the past, his past as the West’s great source in the Kremlin? Or was it contemplation of the future? Anna guessed the latter.

‘Anna says this victory might just give the Kremlin what she calls a Trojan Horse inside Ukraine,’ Burt said. ‘That far from being the end it’s the beginning.’

‘If the Russians want to repossess Ukraine – really repossess it like in Soviet times,’ Mikhail said, ‘then Yanukovich can be their useful fool, yes. He can weaken the structures from the centre – from the inside – in line with the Kremlin’s plans.’

Burt didn’t reply or acknowledge Mikhail’s remarks for now, but simply turned over the envelope he’d taken from his blazer pocket as they walked to the house and put it on the table in front of Mikhail. ‘Take a look at it too, Anna,’ he said. ‘Your two heads are better than an army.’ Anna got up out of her chair and stood behind the wheelchair, looking over Mikhail’s shoulders.

But before either of them could comment, Burt explained the provenance of the envelope and the antics of its sender, the ghost who called himself Rafael, in summoning most of the world’s intelligence agencies who had a presence in Kiev to meetings that never took place. ‘As far as I know,’ Burt said, ‘I’m the only one who received a message from the mysterious Rafael that said there would be no meeting. Even though there had never been a meeting in the first place.’ He poured himself a glass of squeezed orange juice and took another Havana cigar from a leather case in his jacket pocket, even though the one he’d been smoking wasn’t yet half-finished. Then he sat back in a semi-reclining position and appeared to be tanning himself, fully clothed, under the heater, eyes closed, while puffing at the cigar and sipping from the glass at regular intervals.

Mikhail and Anna read the six words of the message. ‘There will be no meeting tonight’. And then Mikhail put the envelope on top of it, its back facing up, and with the seal facing him and Anna. The bird had a longish beak and long legs, a water bird, it looked like.

‘It’s a snipe,’ Mikhail said. ‘In Russian we call it
bekac
. In French it’s
becasse
.’ He looked up at Burt. ‘They emigrate from Russia to Western Europe – for the winter.’

‘I thought it was some kind of snipe,’ Burt said. ‘Good to eat then, if we can catch it. So. Who sends wax impressions of snipe through the mail accompanied by arcane messages? It was mailed in Novorossiysk, by the way. Not that its geographical origins have much to bear on the situation, I’m sure.’

‘Maybe they do in this case. It’s the ferry terminal from Russia to the Crimea,’ Mikhail said. He handed the envelope to Anna with the seal facing her. ‘Have you ever seen this before, my dear?’ he asked. ‘Recognise it?’

She looked again. ‘No, Mikhail. But the message is in the seal, yes?’

‘Yes.’

Mikhail sighed. ‘It’s a message that he’s coming West,’ he said slowly, and all the time his mind seemed to be working, thinking of the implications. ‘Like the bird migrating. And it was sent to you via your embassy in Ukraine?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Coming West?’ Burt said. ‘You mean he’s defecting?’

Mikhail thought for a long time. ‘I don’t know, but I doubt it’s as simple as that,’ he said finally. ‘I think we can assume, perhaps, that he’s coming there, only as far as Ukraine. Only that far West. For the time being, in any case. Maybe he’s keeping his options open.’

‘And maybe he’s luring us to believe that he’s open to our offers,’ Anna said. ‘Maybe it’s a sting.’

‘That’s also possible,’ Mikhail replied. ‘We have to be very careful.’

‘The snipe is coming West, to Ukraine,’ Burt said in the mock dramatic tones of someone delivering a badly coded sentence. Then he laughed robustly. ‘So what do we do? Shoot it? Eat it? Put it in a cage?’

Mikhail looked sideways at Burt, but he didn’t – and rarely did – enjoy Burt’s easy mirth. ‘No. We do none of those things. We should give it a feather bed,’ he said. ‘We should guard it with our lives. The snipe might bring us good luck, or at least insight. For you, for us. And it might bring us very bad luck indeed. It depends on the circumstances.’

For Burt, luck was something you used, not something that used you. ‘It depends, as always, on what happens,’ Burt said, and repeated his favourite dictum: ‘What happens is the only God there is.’

‘You’re a pagan, Burt,’ Mikhail said and Burt roared with laughter. He surveyed the mesa with its mysterious rock formations that contained the petroglyphs of ancient Indian cultures. ‘Out here it’s a good place to be a pagan,’ he said.

Mikhail leaned back against the wheelchair and left the envelope on the table without taking any further interest in it. Then he looked at Burt again and patted Anna’s arm. He was the only man from whom she ever seemed happy to receive such casual physical contact, Burt noted.

Mikhail was the friend of her former Brit husband, the MI6 officer Finn, who was now dead. Finn had been murdered by the KGB four years ago now. Little Finn’s father. Perhaps that was it, the friendship between Mikhail and Finn. But Finn had also been Mikhail’s closest and indeed only direct contact with the West in the years when Mikhail had acted as a double agent inside the Kremlin. Finn had been the only person Mikhail allowed to know him when Mikhail was still at the top in Russia. Finn had been Mikhail’s handler and so there was a bond with her dead husband through Mikhail.

‘My guess is’, Burt said slowly, ‘that you know who the snipe is, Mikhail.’ And his eyes – slits at the best of times – narrowed slightly.

Mikhail sighed and leaned back in the wheelchair. Now he, too, let his eyes wander over the jagged rock bluffs behind which the sun was turning a burning red in the freezing atmosphere and starkly illuminating their eerie profiles against the sky.

‘I’m cold,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go inside.’

Anna wheeled Mikhail inside and Burt came out from under the heater and followed them. There was a roaring fire in the sitting room with its floor-to-ceiling windows that gave them as good a view of the mountains as if they’d been outside. Burt threw more wood on the fire and asked a member of staff to bring champagne. Anna sat on a sofa away from the fire while Mikhail wheeled the chair closer to it. Burt seemed impatient and didn’t sit.

‘There’s a man called Dmitri Respin,’ Mikhail began. ‘Dmitry Viktorov – and many other names he goes under. He, I believe, is the bird on the seal. A truly unique intelligence officer. In fact, he’s one of very few non-Russians at the heart of Department S – he’s half-foreign anyway – our most secret foreign operations unit in Russia. He was recruited from outside Russia originally and then was brought to Moscow and trained as would have been normal, initially in the Foreigners’ Area of The Forest. His training was regular – for the purpose of conducting operations back in his own country. It consisted of sabotage, mostly. That’s what we trained the foreigners to do back in their own countries. That and terrorism too.’ The champagne arrived and was opened. Burt insisted on pouring it into glasses and politely dismissed the woman who’d brought it.

Mikhail sipped from his glass before continuing. ‘But then his obvious qualities and his half-Russian ancestry elevated him to Department S, where he came under my watch at the start of the nineties.’ He paused. ‘But I get ahead of myself.’ Mikhail pulled himself up against the back of the wheelchair and took another sip from the glass of champagne. ‘He – this Dmitri Respin or Viktorov – was educated from the age of sixteen at Vishka – The Tower – in the The Forest.’ He looked up at Anna. ‘The same place you were educated for the KGB,’ he said. ‘And the place where I have so far failed to achieve my own greatest ambition, the defeat of Putin’s Russia. Like you, my dear, I was a part of Department S, but as we all know now, in the nineties I went on to control all of our agents in Western Europe. The apogee of my double career.’