by Alex Dryden
It was a face that said not just ‘purity’, but ‘Ukrainian purity’; not just success, but highly glamorous success; not just money, but ship loads of the stuff. Her pale cream-coloured facial skin drawn over high cheekbones was crowned by a halo of corncoloured hair plaited severely yet entrancingly over her fine head. It was a look, a hair arrangement, that Halloran had told him was described in The New York Times: ‘It curls around her head like a golden crown, a rococo flourish that sets her far apart from the jowly men she has challenged’. It was a face – and a body to match – that had appeared on the cover of Ukrainian Elle magazine. A Ukrainian woman’s beauty was judged by the thickness of her braided hair, ‘like wheat’, he’d explained to Halloran, and this effect had certainly reached its apogee in Yulia Timoshenko. Even to Taras, a happily married man who was sexually satisfied by his wife, she seemed like the Corn Goddess, the Goddess of Fertility, the divinity who would make Ukraine and Ukrainians fertile, rich and, maybe even, more sexually appealing.
In what was sure to end up in a two-way election, Yulia Timoshenko was undoubtedly the glamorous choice, but she was not only that. She was also by far the richest of the three main candidates. On both counts she was a natural for the wealthy, fashionable, thrusting youth of Ukraine now cavorting on the dance floor – if anyone in the Golden Fleece this evening bothered to vote at all. Her beauty could be clearly seen, at face value, and during one interview with a cheeky Western press corps, she had even let her hair down when it was suggested that the corn braid was a hairpiece. She had made her fortune in the energy sector back in the 1990s, then joined the political arena during the Orange Revolution of 2004 that saw off the Russian-backed candidate in favour of the current, Western-looking president.
But now, in 2010, she stood against both the failed president from those heady days, with whom she had once been linked, and the returned Russian-backed challenger, the éminence grise of the previous six years who had waited in the wings and was still supported by the Kremlin. Against both this Putinist would-be president and the current incumbent, Yulia Timoshenko’s credentials were immaculate. She was a highly successful businesswoman, she wore the badge of a democratic revolutionary from 2004, and on top of everything she was also a goddess – all this rolled into one. How could she possibly fail, Taras wondered. She’d get the western Ukrainian vote, yet it was looking bad for her in the country as a whole.
The apparition faded once more, like some ethereal being in a science fiction movie, and Taras looked at his watch; 11 p.m. He would wait another half an hour, though he was sure that Masha would not make an appearance now. She must have missed her connection.
A little too relaxed after six beers in a couple of hours, he idly glanced around the waves of throbbing bodies clad in Gucci, Prada and other, hipper labels he was unfamiliar with.
Would he even notice Masha, if she did arrive? he wondered.
Taras looked towards the entrance a few feet away from his end of the bar and, for a moment, he, Taras Tur, was the only person in the Golden Fleece who felt a wave of impending doom. It washed over him suddenly and unexpectedly. What was it that he’d seen? Nothing. It was, he realised, something he hadn’t seen and that should have been there. The four thugs on the door who picked out the prettiest girls and the richest, cutest boys had disappeared. All four of them. That was impossible. He looked at his watch a second time; 11.20 p.m. And he decided that now he would go. Something was wrong. That was what his mind was telling him loud and clear.
But he swigged from the bottle another time – finish it, why not? – and tried to collect his thoughts. Then he glanced towards the door again in the hope that his unexplained fear would be placated. But the thugs were still not there.
At that moment he went deaf and began to lift into the air. Or maybe it was a second later. Maybe he heard the roar of such extraordinary ferocity it could be heard a mile away – in any case, maybe he heard it for just the split second before it deafened him. He could never quite tell later whether he’d heard it or not.
Maybe he saw the ball of flame and the sheets of glass and jagged metal struts that erupted through the dance floor and shot forty feet into the air, first licking up into the cages where the beautifully clipped golden crotches writhed, and then engulfing them completely. Or maybe the blindness like the deafness overtook him at once. Again, later, he could never quite tell. But for another, split second nothing seemed to happen. The moment froze. And then, movement and sensation returned like a movie film reel freed from some obstruction in the projector, and he found himself being hurled upwards at great speed, and at the same time blasted backwards by some horrific force, then smashed over the aluminium bar and finally dumped down on its other side with an agonising thud behind a massive refrigerator. Then the refrigerator seemed to explode upwards and disappeared, the bar that protected him caved in completely and seemed to dematerialise, simply vanishing into nothing.
Visions of hell began to swim through all this blindness. A hell beyond anything he had ever experienced. Body parts – that was what the newsmen always called them, using the antiseptic language of the hospital. But amid the crash of falling beams, the explosions of glass, the roar of flame and high explosive, and the screams of people, what he saw was nothing so antiseptic as ‘body parts’, but severed limbs, ripped chunks of bodies, torched feet and hands freed from their usual places, flaming torsos, fleshstripped skulls and, once, a severed head that flew with such force from the direction of where the dance floor had once been that the force of it killed the lone, standing barman stone dead.
As the post-blast furnace began to cook, then melt the club and its occupants, Taras crawled out from behind where the fridge had once been. He felt air on his face – the exit – and began to drag himself blindly towards it. One side of his face was hanging off, he thought. But he carried on, smoke choking his lungs, the heat scorching the tan blazer off his back. He’d never get past feis kontrol looking like this, he thought dimly. He reached a once-red velvet curtain that swayed from a collapsed rail, and he felt the roar of angry flame behind him reaching, like him, for the air in the street. A siren in the distance; screams subsiding, new screams beginning, the roar of fire, the fizzes and bangs of cracked pipes, the tearing sounds of structural wreckage – they all swam through his fractured consciousness as he gained first the lobby, then the outer entrance, then an open door and the pavement. Still he crawled. He saw feet around him, feet in heavy fire boots and thankfully attached to legs, and then he saw fire hoses. He dimly glimpsed flashing lights – blue, orange – and he heard shouting, before he slumped finally against a wall and felt a hand place an oxygen mask over his mouth.
He lay, dazed, leaning half to the left against the wall like a drunk. He felt burned, torn, fractured, frozen – all at once. Terror, he thought, that was what we call a terror attack. Terror, the crasher at the party, the vengeful handmaiden of a modern election. But whose terror? he wondered through the haze of his shattered mind and through the smoke that poured from a hole in the wall to his left. The Russians? Or was it factional, a Ukrainian terror? Or perhaps terror committed by one of the mafias on either side, Russian or Ukrainian? Who knew? And did it matter? Terror was just terror, wasn’t it? Terror terrorised as much by its anonymity as by the exploding bodies that resulted from it. Now, it seemed, it was always terror, the only game in town. Terror that stalked democracy as if both had a compulsive need of each other; terror, against which, in the twenty-first century, freedom was now defined. The alternative to freedom was no longer confinement, it was terror. But terror was also freedom’s corollary. They had joined the same coin, were stamped at the same mint, and apparently were now the world’s only means of barter.
And then he rose up from the pavement and found that the pools of blood surrounding him weren’t his own. He walked unsteadily away from the club, declining offers of help and removing the oxygen mask. Thank God Masha hadn’t arrived.
CHAPTER EIGHT
&nbs
p; A FEW HOURS before Taras Tur entered the Golden Fleece nightclub – and at roughly the same time that Anna was making her escape from the field behind Sevastopol and Logan was holding his meeting at the American embassy – Laszlo Lepietre stepped out of the French embassy at number 39 Rue Reterska in the country’s capital, Kiev. An embassy car that had been waiting inside the gates for an hour was now idling its engine a hundred yards from the building’s entrance. Those had been the driver’s orders.
As he walked towards the black Citroën, Laszlo watched for any interest that his exit might have aroused from watchers on either side of the street. But this was only from habit. He didn’t expect to attract much attention from the Ukrainian secret services on the night before the first round of the presidential elections. But he watched in any case and he knew his back-ups would be sweeping the pavements behind and ahead of him and checking for any vehicles that might follow the Citroën. The watchers had been trebled for his exit from the embassy. For whatever happened this evening, he couldn’t afford to be followed.
Thomas Plismy, the head of the Russian desk in Paris, at the French foreign intelligence service, or DGSE, had insisted – after an unusually swift analysis, Laszlo thought – that this evening’s meeting was a genuine dangle, not a hoax. Having been dragged over the coals the year before for losing a valuable KGB colonel – and a beautiful female one at that – who was under French protection and on French soil, Plismy was now looking for something juicy to boost his damaged reputation.
Laszlo walked outside the embassy’s wall with a light, boxer’s walk, the emphasis on the balls of the feet. A blustery wind now blew the beginnings of a sleet shower directly down Reterska Street and into his face.
At forty-one years old, he kept a trim figure, and made sure its shape was well-advertised to the rest of the world. The hard muscle tones of his medium-height body were accentuated by a cashmere coat over a tight-fitting dark suit, with a white silk scarf draped artfully low around his neck. Even the careful haircut that swept his thick blond hair in a mop to one side seemed to exist only in order to show off the lean, carved face, with its well-oiled and spa-pampered skin. His hands were recently manicured and his clear blue eyes, with their curiously expressionless gaze that bordered on the defensive, seemed to have some neutralising gauze stretched over them. His was a deadening expression, as though any hint of character or personality might upset the physical impression Laszlo wished above all else to convey.
To achieve this physical fitness that was, incidentally, beyond the call of duty, Laszlo spent his spare time climbing mountains, riding in cycle races, skiing and sailing a catamaran off the coast of Brittany. In Kiev he’d had to make do with an expensive gym. To achieve his tough but well-looked-after appearance, some colleagues suggested, required a narcissism of quite exceptional dedication.
With a final look up ahead of the Citroën to check for other parked cars, Laszlo stepped into the rear seat. The retired sous-lieutenant from French special forces who was his chauffeur for the evening pulled out into a steady stream of traffic that was headed out for a Saturday night’s entertainment in the clubs and bars of Kiev. It would be a pre-election binge, Laszlo thought with slight disgust, a brain-numbing drink-fest designed to lay to rest the disappointing inadequacy, the lack of achievement in the six years since the Orange Revolution of 2004 – and prepare the way for a hoped-for change. Drink to forget the past, that would be it. And drink to welcome the future. The King is dead, long live the King. Whoever won the election, at least there would be change, even if it only meant a few more names added to the list of corrupt Ukrainian industrialists on the new government’s books.
As the car threaded its way towards Independence Square, Laszlo wondered how his new posting to Kiev might affect his career, the only aspect of life that he devoted as much attention to as his appearance. Perhaps it would depend on the meeting tonight, he thought. Precious little else had happened since his posting to Kiev that could offer him a moment of glory. Until six months before, when he’d been posted to Ukraine, he had spent five years stationed in Moscow. There, he had made many lasting contacts who were now interested in his new posting – Russians, both buzinessmen and KGB officers to whom, unlike the Americans, the French had left an open door of communication.
Laszlo was, principally, a Russo-phile, like his boss Plismy. And Russia was the biggest game in town if you were in the east of Europe. On top of that the French had special interests in Russia that pre-dated even Napoleon’s disastrous defeat in 1812. Russia and France were natural allies, and always had been, despite the embarrassment of that distant invasion. Laszlo believed that France and Russia had a special relationship that would bear fruit now in the twenty-first century. France’s energy companies were making great headway in the allocation of contracts by the Kremlin and the Russians were favouring them over the British, let alone the Americans.
But before that, before his posting in Moscow, Laszlo had been stationed at the Outre Mer – Overseas Department – of the French Republic’s former colony of Guadeloupe. And it was there that in his twenties, as a young, ambitious and comfortably amoral intelligence officer, he had learned the merits of electionfixing. That experience, he thought as the car turned left over the Dnieper river, had served him well in Putin’s Russia and – as he fully expected – it would serve him well as the world watched the unfolding of events in Ukraine in the following three weeks, first in tomorrow’s elections and in the final run-off between the two leading candidates. At the end of which the final victor would be revealed.
For a moment, a slight sneer marred Laszlo’s otherwise blandly smooth countenance with its strange, unwelcoming eyes. The Americans and the British would be out in force tomorrow – as well as in the final vote in three weeks’ time – to ensure that the elections in Ukraine were free and fair. The Anglo-Saxons were always there to impose their hypocritical conditions, he thought. As if the American elections were free and fair! But as Laszlo knew, whichever way the Ukrainian elections were viewed in the outside world by the West’s electoral observers, behind the scenes the corruption and fixing would be of the usual gigantic proportions. And that was why this meeting tonight intrigued him. He was hoping that it would be an insight into what was really going on in and outside Ukraine to influence the elections.
‘Take a couple of turns,’ he said to the driver. He spoke little and when he did his voice was flat. The sous-lieutenant obediently went twice round Independence Square.
Laszlo had been many things in the past eighteen years besides an intelligence officer: soldier, journalist, trade representative, election observer, though all the time the underlying reasons for these diversions was his job as a DGSE intelligence officer. But he seemed to have no friends from his previous incarnations. He was unmarried. Ambition seemed to be absent from his considerations, but only seemed so. Tonight he felt that here was the moment he’d been waiting for; an opportunity for advancement. Like his boss Plismy, he sensed that he was close to something crucial, to something that would, ultimately, bring him the power that all his patience, self-control and disinterest in other human beings had prepared him for.
The driver finally turned the Citroën away from the square and it made its way smoothly, though by a roundabout route, towards the Theatre of Russian Drama not far from Kreschatik. They crossed the Dnieper river twice more, turned around in a U once, stopped to buy a magazine from a kiosk by St Sophia’s Cathedral, and stalled deliberately at a crossroads further up the street, holding up angry drivers who flattened their hands to their car horns. And on each occasion, driver and passenger observed the similarities and differences in the street landscape, without forming the conclusion that they were being tailed.
Finally, the Citroën pulled up outside the theatre. Laszlo stepped out of the car without a word to his driver. He entered the theatre, checked his coat, bought a ticket for Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, and then entered the auditorium. He saw the two fire exits on either si
de near the stage and passed down on the right side to a fire door that led to a side street. He took no notice of the young usherette who asked him where he was going. Within a minute of walking out of the theatre, he’d checked all the possibilities and concluded he was on his own.
He walked briskly, not least because of the cold. Though prepared for walking with no coat – he wore a silk thermal vest under his suit – January was not a month for an evening stroll through Kiev’s streets. First he retraced part of the Citroën’s route back in the direction of Independence Square. The billboards he passed in the capital’s streets were dominated by election themes and by the eighteen candidates for the opening round of the next day’s elections. Sixteen of them would be gone by tomorrow night and, with them, their investment. There were only two candidates who had a chance of passing into the last round.
The city had slowly filled with foreign election observers in the previous days but, unlike in the heady period of the Orange Revolution six years before, the signs of electoral interest from actual Ukrainians on the streets was minimal; there were no crowds as he entered the square, just a few minor rallies, that was all, mostly extremist groups largely made up of pensioners from the old days of the Soviet Union and a smattering of far-right nationalists with skinhead views. After six years of disappointed dreams under the incumbent president, Viktor Yuschenko, Ukrainians seemed to believe that their political views no longer made any difference.
Laszlo crossed the square and made for a café in a side street that was to be the meeting place.
He entered the Reprisa café at 8.25 and, buying a short black coffee, he retreated to the back of the orange-coloured space and took a stool screwed to the floor and against a wall. There were a dozen or so people in the café, the strip lights were shockingly bright and seemed designed to put a customer off from staying too long. He withdrew a newspaper from inside his jacket and, with his back to the rest of the café, began to reread stories he’d read earlier in the day. He was patient and seemed incapable of boredom. Life, he thought, held few surprises, even a secret life.
