The Blind Spy (39 page)

And that was it. He was out of the villa in less than fifteen minutes after he’d arrived, the delivery boy. Lucy drove him in a hired jeep into the town and directed him towards a square where he could pick up a taxi back to Simferol and the airport. But when Lucy had waved goodbye – the only friendly gesture he seemed to have received from any of them – Logan first put in a call to Laszlo before heading north.

B
ALTHASAR LEFT ANNA at the foot of the steps that led to the monument. The monument stood at the top of a hill at the place called Balaclava and looked out over the city and beyond it to the sea from where invaders had always come until Hitler attacked Sevastopol from the land. To the left, the mouth of the Kerch Straits was at its widest before the straits entered and split the land like an axe, and separated Ukraine from Russia. To the right, the mountains descended towards the Crimean steppe as the coast turned to the the north.

Anna looked down at Sevastopol’s perfect harbour. There was one long bay called Sevastopolskaya Bukhta, and then five or six perfect bays for anchorage off the main bay. In the main dockyard below her, she saw a train, loaded with submarine batteries, Balthasar had said. At the end of the dock where the train stood, the Russian aircraft carrier
Moskva
was moored broadside against the quay.

It was a hot day, the air completely still up here, and there were few people who were willing to climb up the ninety-five steps to the monument.

Larry had chosen the place for Anna to meet Taras. ‘It’s a dead end,’ he said. ‘Normally I don’t like that. But once you’re at the top by the monument, no one can come up easily except by the steps and the road. We can watch that.’ But by now, Larry and Anna had firmly decided that Taras was acting alone. Larry and the surveillance team were out in full force to watch – and if necessary follow – anyone who decided to make the trip to the top.

Anna began the long climb up the steps. She wore a cap against the sun and carried a small pack on her back and a guidebook in one hand. But inside her jacket there was a Thompson Contender handgun. She watched up ahead of her as she climbed and, from time to time, glanced to the sides of the steps, looking for anything on the steep slopes that shouldn’t be there. She felt the sun on the right side of her face as it rose towards its zenith and heard only the scuff of her shoes on the stone steps and the occasional hoot of a ship’s horn from Sevastopolskaya Bukhta. Taras had said he would be waiting at the top, behind the monument at 11.30. It was now 11.45.

It took her ten minutes to reach the top. The monument was made of a soft stone, weathered by the Black Sea winds, and the engravings in Russian Cyrillic writing had lost their knife sharpness. She turned once when she reached the top and looked back down from where she’d come; at the glittering bays and the grey warships and at the black hulls of submarines. All were absolutely still in the water, as if they were two-dimensional images stuck to a diorama of the scene rather than real ships on a real sea. Then she moved carefully around and behind the monument, her hand on the butt of her gun inside the jacket and her finger poised close to the trigger.

She saw a well-built, stocky man sitting on a bench, his hair ruffled – habitually un-brushed, she thought – and his hands resting clasped but relaxed in his lap. He was looking ahead to where she appeared from the far side of the monument and the sun caught the side of his face and showed her a man with weary eyes and a patient expression which seemed to hold the expectation of nothing very much. He didn’t move his head when she appeared, but looked into her eyes without fear.

‘So you’re the great Anna Resnikov,’ he said softly. ‘The great
Colonel
Anna Resnikov.’

He made no move to get up and, once Anna had checked the slopes that fell away behind the bench where he was sitting, she sat down, an arm’s length away from him.

In the previous hours between her phone call to Taras and this moment, Balthasar had discreetly run checks in Moscow on several SBU officers, including Taras Tur some way down on the list. The Russians had a note in the FSB archives of Taras’s father and his murder in Berlin. They also had a mark against Taras as a ‘Ukrainian nationalist – to be discussed’. Balthasar interpreted this as the KGB’s obsessive listing of possible enemies in Ukraine and its anxious distinction between pro- and anti-Russians in the Ukrainian secret service, but he’d said that this distinction was crude and not necessarily to be trusted. Taras might be a Ukrainian nationalist, that was true, but that did not mean he would necessarily act against the Russians. He might also fall in Russia’s direction, depending on the alternative. It was known that Taras – using his father as an example – had no great respect for the harsher capitalist practices in the West – and Cougar was likely to be viewed by him as the unacceptable face of capitalism. But most of all, anyone – Russia or the West – whom he perceived to be interfering with Ukraine’s sovereignty – was likely to be viewed by him with distaste at best, and, at worst, as an enemy.

‘There’s a great reward out for you in Moscow,’ he said.

That too was considered to appeal favourably to Taras’s general distaste for Moscow’s politics.

‘Burt Miller would like us to work together,’ she said softly. ‘For the good of Ukraine.’

Taras gave a short laugh. ‘It’s good to know we have such a great friend in the West,’ he said, but it was without the harshness she’d expected. ‘But it’s me who’s here to help Burt Miller – not the other way around,’ he added. He turned to her, his body language unthreatening, his upper body pulling slightly away from her on the bench. ‘They say you killed two KGB officers in Odessa and the Crimea on the sixteenth of January,’ he said. ‘Me? I’ve never killed anyone. Neither has my baby cousin who’s now lying in a prison hospital cell down there’ – he indicated towards the city – ‘with part of her face blown off and a posse of interrogators who want to know what she was delivering and aren’t afraid to ask.’

So that was how he’d worked it out, she thought. The woman was a Russian relation of his. He’d pieced together her story, found out the name of her boss in Moscow, and worked out that the package was being delivered, not within Ukraine, but to someone in the West. Therefore the woman’s boss was a traitor in Moscow. Smart of him, she thought.

‘What’s your cousin’s name?’ she asked.

‘Her name is Masha. She’s twenty-three years old, she’s caught up in a scheme devised by Ukraine’s friend, Burt Miller, and executed by you. If she isn’t handed over to the Russians and dispensed with after they hollow her out, body and soul, she’ll probably meet the same fate in Ukraine. Either way, if she lives she lives with a beautiful face destroyed by a bullet and an innocent mind destroyed by people who only wished to use her.’

‘Maybe she shouldn’t have joined the KGB,’ Anna said and looked him directly in the eye. She saw him reel slightly, astonished perhaps by her directness or lack of sympathy. Then his face hardened and he gripped the back of the bench until his knuckles whitened and she saw him trying to control his anger.

‘What Masha left were blueprints of the development of the port of Novorossiysk that came from the Naval Ministry in Moscow,’ she said, without allowing him to respond. ‘They show that Russia never had any intention of moving their Black Sea fleet there. Now your new president has given them Sevastopol for another twenty-five years anyway. Your new Moscow-friendly president Yanukovich has handed the facilities to Russia for nothing except some price concessions on gas that will bind Ukraine closer economically to Russia than before. Even with the same hand that gives, the spy elite in Moscow also takes. That is their way. There is no stick and carrot, just the stick. A concession from them is merely another chain around Ukraine’s neck. So they have the port and now they also have a tame Ukraine bound to them more closely with economic ties. I was betrayed when I came to Ukraine in January. That is how they were waiting at the barn and how they caught Masha. That is why I killed two of their operatives. And I’ll kill more of them if they get in my way.’

‘Fighting on the side of the right now, are you?’ Taras replied mockingly.

She stared him in the eyes and he felt the cool, blue gaze penetrate his mind and throw him off balance, but this time it wasn’t anger that welled up in him but a kind of blank astonishment. He seemed to see only her face, her eyes. The whole world around him, the hill on which they sat, the city below and the sea and the ships were beyond his concentration. There was only her.

‘When I defected from Russia,’ she said, ‘I thought it was for love, but even then I knew in my heart that love was the excuse for doing what I’d wanted to do anyway. Does that make my love for my husband any less? I don’t think so. But he’s dead now, murdered by the KGB. He let himself be killed because he couldn’t, finally, step away.’ Her eyes bore into his. She sat perfectly still, with a relaxation that belied her readiness to use any method necessary to defend herself. ‘Don’t believe that when I defected I thought my friends lay in the West. I’m not naïve. All I knew was where my enemies lay and that was in Russia, in the Kremlin, in the KGB and Department S, where I worked so successfully for so long. And even my own father. The question is – or was then for me – not Who are my friends? but Who are my enemies? When that was clear, as it had been becoming clear for many years, I knew what I had to do. And for you too, Taras, that is the question. I don’t offer you Burt Miller’s friendship – let alone the West’s. I could not do that and, in any case, I don’t consider I have either of them myself. The question for you is the same as it was for me. Who are your enemies? And what do you stand for that makes them your enemies?’

‘Alas, I have no one to love in the West to give me the thin excuse you had to make so fateful a choice,’ he replied.

‘The choices, all the major choices you make in your life, are emotional ones,’ she replied. ‘How you apply those choices later to reality is rational. You don’t need someone to love to make an emotional choice. That was just how it was for me.’

‘I have the name of Miller’s agent in Moscow. I also have a cousin who is a prisoner and whose life is in danger. What can you do for me?’

She looked down at her hands and then up towards the panorama of city and sea and ships below. This time she didn’t look back at him. ‘If your emotional life is bound to your family and your cousin and your country, and all three are, I believe, the case with you, then I can show you something and you can make your choice. I’m not here to prevent you revealing the identity of Miller’s agent. That is up to you. But I can show you another side of the picture.’

‘You’re playing a very dangerous game,’ he replied.

She looked back into his eyes again. ‘And you are, too. You are acting alone, aren’t you? Your bosses know nothing of this.’

‘They’re only a phone call away,’ he said.

‘Perhaps you’ve left it too late for that. They’ll wonder why you didn’t report to them earlier.’ She paused. ‘You know what they’re like as well as I do. They won’t trust anything you say.’

‘And you expect me to trust you.’

‘If I thought you wanted money, Miller has plenty of it.’

‘No. No, I don’t want Miller’s money,’ he replied.

‘I want to introduce you to someone,’ Anna said. ‘Do I have your permission?’

Taras fell silent.

‘He is someone who will make the picture of Masha’s predicament more clear. He is someone who will make your country’s endangered position more clear. He’s Russian. Like me in another life, he works in Department S.’

‘Why is he to be trusted any more than you?’

‘I’m just asking you to listen to him.’

‘Just one man?’

‘Just one.’

Taras thought for a moment.

‘Here?’

‘Yes.’

He stayed with his thoughts for a while longer. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘And then?’

‘If you agree with what he has to say, we can help Masha together.’

She stood and walked around the monument. He didn’t see the gesture she made. But after she’d returned and they’d waited for ten minutes, a man appeared. He walked around the monument and sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the bench. Balthasar began to tell the story of the Kremlin’s plans for Ukraine and of Qubaq.

L
OGAN STOOD IN a room at the Kerch hotel. It looked out over the bays that spliced the city like a badly stitched wound. It was twenty-four hours since he had picked up Taras’s coded message at the drugstore and he had returned to Sevastopol, against orders, undecided, caught between conflicting emotions that threatened to destroy his fragile state of mind.

By now he should have returned to the
Cougar
, as Burt had told him to do, and then moved on to join Theo’s and the Russians’ assault team in Burgas. But he’d stayed behind and, as at many times before in his life, he found himself in the soulless limbo of a foreign hotel room, in the no-man’s-land of a decision not made and, free floating in this non-state of disconnection, he felt caught in a kind of purgatory of his own making in which he wished for a decision to be made for him, but also hated the fact that he was helpless himself to make it. He had his orders, he knew the path he should be walking on, but this knowledge embittered him. He was a man trapped in the impossible bind of wishing to possess personal control over his future and at the same time wishing for some divine or semi-divine purpose that would absolve him of that responsibility. Neither satisfied him and both now filled his head with a painful confusion of motive, ambition and fear. But what he hated most was the fear that stripped him of all but his humanity, and this hatred he projected outwards to all the people he held responsible.

Behind him, sitting on the edge of the worn and scraggy sofa which had lost its once-green colour many years before, Lazlo waited patiently. It was he, Logan, who had invited the Frenchman down here from Kiev. The reason he had done so, Logan could only put down to the compulsion that possessed him now, and had done throughout his life, never to close down any option – but the option he had left open in asking Laszlo to Sevastopol was one too fateful for him now to act upon. Not with clarity, in any case. He felt constrained by the choices that he had let unfold before him rather than liberated by them.