The Blind Spy

by Alex Dryden

  Anna stayed on the stool. She knew Burt and knew she was expected to join the little dramas in which he chose to perform. But to her, the drama of the plans in front of them seemed overblown. They were plans of a relatively minor Russian naval military installation and commercial port on the far side of the Kerch Straits and across the Black Sea, to the east of the Crimea on Russian territory. Novorossiysk was just a Russian port, that was all, across the water from its old possession, Ukraine. She wondered how the plans could possibly have been worth the death of a courier, an innocent, deceived courier at that, not to mention her own near capture and the execution that would inevitably have followed back in Moscow.

  ‘Well?’ Burt said almost gleefully.

  She got up from the stool now and, walking up to the table, leaned forward to study the drawings.

  ‘They’re architectural engineering plans that show proposed extensions to what’s already there at the port,’ she said. ‘The proposition seems to be a deepening of the harbour. Most of the quays and loading facilities look like they’re being upgraded, there are new oil storage tanks, two new roads leading in to the port, and upgrade of the rail track.’ Anna looked more closely. ‘I guess it’s an expansion of the port by maybe twenty per cent.’

  ‘Exactly. Twenty, maybe thirty, per cent,’ Burt said. ‘And that’s not enough, is it?’ He beamed at her triumphantly.

  ‘Enough for what?’ she said.

  But Burt wasn’t going to be drawn on this point, not yet in any case. He ran his finger down the lines of the drawings as if he were studying some old masterpiece and trying to judge its origins. He was a collector of art, mainly modern British art in the past few years. That suited his general anglophilia, which he had developed over forty years before as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. But at his other homes in the United States, Anna remembered seeing a Picasso sketch hanging in a bathroom, a Turner on a staircase and one old master she couldn’t recall in a study somewhere that was reputed to have cost Burt sixty-five million dollars.

  ‘Tell me about Novorossiysk, Anna,’ he said.

  Anna returned to her seat on the stool and gave him a brief description. ‘It’s a southern port of Russia’s on the Black Sea. A warm water port, one of very few Russia possesses, and therefore strategically important. Russia’s and, before that, the Soviet Union’s Mediterranean fleet has used it more or less in its present form for more than fifty years, though it was always second to Sevastopol in Ukraine. Sevastopol’s always been the big base. Until the Soviet Union collapsed, Sevastopol had a hundred thousand men stationed there. Now it’s more like forty thousand. The Russian Mediterranean fleet has been largely inactive since the 1990s. Many of its ships are going out of date, rusting away, and being decommissioned. But now Putin wants to expand it again, to patrol the Mediterranean, go up against America’s Sixth Fleet once more. Novorossiysk was – is – mainly a commercial port, with some Russian navy facilities. In the days of the Soviet Union, it was the main exporter from the southern republics. But oil and gas was its main export. And that’s been on the increase. Oil and gas from the Caspian. Now that’s being diverted into pipelines, so the importance of Novorossiysk will undoubtedly decline. There isn’t much else that Russia exports from there. Some timber, foodstuffs from the southern republics. That’s about it.’

  ‘It’s in decline as a commercial port, then,’ Burt said. ‘And as an alternative? Is it an alternative to the Russian Black Sea fleet’s base in Sevastopol?’

  ‘It could be, but unlikely.’

  ‘After the upgrade that these plans demonstrate, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, but it would need more development than these plans show. Besides, Sevastopol has a natural deep-water harbour, bays five miles deep. It’s one of the best harbours in the world.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Burt said again. ‘And that’s what makes these plans so interesting. They’re just what I expected.’

  Anna got up from the stool again and walked to the far end of the room. She looked out at the Thames through one of the wide panoramic windows, two of which flanked the porthole that was really just for show, it seemed. She began to tot up what Burt had spent on this operation in the previous days: the freighter which was presumably hired, Larry and the others in the boat, a helicopter to Turkey, then the private flight to London. And herself, of course. She didn’t take into account the death of the courier, it was unquantifiable. Yet all this money and the girl’s death had been for a few drawings of port improvements at Novorossiysk. None of it made a great deal of sense to her.

  ‘Larry treat you all right?’ Burt said.

  ‘He was on time,’ she replied.

  ‘He’d never be late for you, Anna.’ Burt grinned. ‘Even on a windswept beach in the Crimea. None of us would be.’

  He seemed to enjoy her coolness, she thought. The perfect complement, perhaps, to his own flamboyance. He’d as good as said so when he’d made her a director of Cougar. As a former KGB colonel in special forces and in the highly secret Department S, she’d caused quite a stir inside Washington’s beltway. Specialist magazines had wanted to write her profile, though largely, it appeared, in order to show pictures of her. Burt paid them not to by taking several large and expensive corporate advertising spots.

  ‘It was a wise move to come out off the beach,’ Burt continued. ‘Much better than risking the border posts.’

  Was this remark disingenuous? she wondered. Did he really think she’d have risked so much in order to rendezvous with a boat on hostile territory? She turned towards him, but all she saw was his big beaming expression.

  ‘It was the only choice,’ she replied. She looked across the room at him and held his eyes. He looked back at her with a quizzical expression now. ‘There’s a leak, Burt,’ she said. ‘They were following me from Istanbul. On the ferry. They also knew about the pick-up. They had the barn staked out. That’s why the courier killed herself.’

  Burt raised his eyes and looked at her. ‘You didn’t mention this to Larry.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you still got the goods,’ he said in admiration. He always focused on the positive, sometimes to the point of foolish optimism, she thought. Once again, the courier’s death went unmentioned.

  ‘There’s a leak, Burt, perhaps at Cougar,’ she repeated firmly. Then she looked straight into his eyes until he could no longer return her gaze with equanimity.

  ‘They were there? On the boat from Istanbul?’ he said, seriously now.

  ‘More importantly, they were there at the barn. They knew everything about my movements from the start. It was only because they wanted me alive that I got out at all. They could have taken me any time.’

  Burt picked up a phone and immediately connected with a switchboard. ‘Get me Bob Dupont. In here.’ He replaced the phone. ‘We’ll see what Bob has to say. I had no idea, Anna. This is serious. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Never be sorry,’ she said, repeating one of his own maxims.

  He grinned at her.

  Bob Dupont, Burt’s head of internal security, entered the operations room a few minutes later. Tall, silver-haired, his running joke at Cougar was that he was the only person in the company who was older than Burt. He greeted Anna, nodded at Burt, and came over to the table. He looked down at the drawings. Burt poured him a glass of champagne which he didn’t touch. Dupont didn’t drink, Burt knew that perfectly well. Sometimes Anna thought that Burt just liked to have two glasses available for himself, even though he didn’t drink them. Life is about expansion, he liked to say.

  ‘I went to Novorossiysk over forty years ago,’ Burt said as Dupont studied the plans. ‘Twenty-eight years old, just married, and working for the agency.’ He grinned at Anna’s questioning look. ‘Before you were born,’ he said to her. ‘The height of the Cold War.’

  ‘These are what Anna’s returned with?’ Dupont asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Burt answered. ‘And only I knew what the delivery consisted of. Not even Anna.’ He walked ov
er to stand beside Dupont. ‘But how many people in Cougar knew of Anna’s assignment, Bob? The details. And who outside Cougar?’

  ‘The three of us. And Larry – but none of the other boys with him.’

  ‘Did you tell the Russians, Bob?’ Burt said mischievously.

  Dupont looked momentarily wrong-footed, before realising that this was Burt’s usual line of humour. He didn’t respond.

  ‘The three of us and Larry,’ Burt said. ‘Who outside?’

  ‘You informed the CIA,’ Dupont pointed out.

  ‘But not the times or dates, just the general outline.’

  ‘The general outline, but they could have looked more closely if they’d wished. They might have been checking out the hiring of the freighter, I suppose, and found it was ours. We disguised it, of course, but you never know. They might even have been tracking Anna. It’s possible.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Professional jealousy, that’s the only reason. You know how the agency feels threatened by Cougar. And you also know, Burt, how they like to know everything.’

  ‘Lish is our man,’ Burt said.

  ‘But who knows if he passed it on to anyone. Watching us, or Anna, is in the normal run of things for the agency.’

  ‘Get him on the phone.’

  Burt picked up the cigar from the ashtray and champed it between his teeth.

  ‘Why are you asking this?’ Dupont said.

  ‘There’s been a leak. Anna could have lost her life.’

  ‘And the courier was killed,’ Anna reminded him.

  Dupont looked shocked. Against Burt’s easy acceptance of the status quo he was visibly disturbed.

  ‘Don’t get in a state about it, Bob. Let’s just deal with what’s happening.’ Burt’s mantra was always the same, familiar refrain to Cougar employees and, before that, to CIA recruits whom Burt had once taught at the CIA’s training centre, known as The Farm, in Virginia. ‘The only thing that matters is what happens’ – no regrets, no self-chastisement, no anxiety – just act in the frame of what happens, that was Burt’s time-honoured method. ‘What happens is King, God, and all you need to know.’

  ‘You want to talk with him in here?’ Dupont asked.

  ‘Yes, call Theo from the dedicated phone. I want to get him right away, give him no time to consider it.’

  And so Dupont put a call through to Langley from Burt’s yacht and the CIA chief, Theo Lish, came to the phone after a minute or two. When Burt took the phone from Dupont, he walked away from the table towards the stern of the ship and spoke to him from the far end of the operations room. After a five-minute conversation he returned, handing Dupont the phone as if he were unable to put it down himself.

  ‘I have my own ideas about this,’ he said, but he didn’t expand, nor did he relay the contents of the conversation he’d just had with Lish. ‘Now, let’s have an early dinner. You must be tired, Anna, and there’s something else I want you to do before the NATO meeting next week.’

  It was the reason for Burt’s presence in Europe, a meeting of NATO intelligence chiefs in Brussels that took place every few months and to which Cougar was now invited. Burt’s influence had brought him to the national level of intelligence consultation and, in truth, Cougar rivalling the CIA in importance carried considerably more weight in the international intelligence spectrum than many of the sovereign states in NATO.

  ‘By the way, I want you at that meeting, Anna,’ he said. ‘Alongside me.’

  Dupont looked questioningly at him.

  ‘Not this time, Bob. This time I’m taking Anna. She’s going to make a presentation.’

  He looked at her, expecting a question, but she wasn’t going to give him the easy satisfaction and, once again, she saw he liked her self-contained coolness.

  They dined on board the ship. The Cougar, as well as the ranch in New Mexico and half a dozen other possessions of importance to him, had a crew of forty-five, and eight of them were chefs. ‘It’s the best food in the City of London,’ Burt boasted, though clearly without intending anyone to believe him. Burt’s world was one of endless positive beliefs. He was the epitome of positive thinking no matter what the situation was.

  Throughout the three-course meal, with the usual accompaniment of excellent wines, he regaled Dupont and Anna with stories of his youth in the CIA, stories both of them had heard before but which Anna listened to each time in order to spot the occasional inconsistency. Burt liked to elaborate – or fabricate – much of his experiences in the field. She doubted, in fact, that he had ever been to Novorossiysk at all.

  After dinner, Dupont left the ship and Burt suggested that Anna should stay and sleep on the Cougar, instead of at the company apartment. She readily agreed. Pouring himself a brandy in the saloon, Burt sat in a large armchair.

  ‘You were too young to have worked in the days of the Cold War,’ he said.

  ‘I joined the KGB in 1990,’ she replied.

  ‘And now the world is reshaping itself again,’ he said. ‘Who will come nearer to the top of the pile and who will drop back?’

  She didn’t reply this time, knowing that these conversational brushstrokes were his way of getting to the point.

  ‘The new Cold War is different from the old one only in terms of geographical location,’ he said. ‘Once it was worldwide; arming African and South American potentates, spreading our rivalling ideologies thinly across the globe. Now the new Cold War is being fought in the former states of the Soviet Union. In central Asia it’s about oil and gas supply, as well as Russian and American military bases in countries like Kyrgizstan. American wars in Afghanistan and no doubt beyond Afghanistan before long require us having bases there. The Russians see our soft spot and try to exploit it. In the Caucasus, Russia invaded Georgia to prevent NATO expansion there. And then there’s Ukraine, Russia’s soul. That’s where we must look now.’

  ‘Endless conflict,’ Anna murmured.

  ‘We find out who our enemies are in times of conflict,’ he said. ‘And that is why we need conflict. Conflict cleans out the stables, reveals what lies underneath history’s layers. Conflict is necessary to see the enemy.’

  ‘Haven’t the Americans had enough conflict?’ she said. She got out of her chair and poured herself a brandy.

  ‘America has made mistakes,’ he answered. ‘America always sees the obvious at the expense of the obscure. It waited until it was attacked before it addressed the jihad. Now it talks of wars of prevention, of pre-emption – as if that were a new concept, but it’s always tried to pre-empt. Central and South America are one long, and generally disastrous, episode in America’s preemptive struggle against its enemies. But they were small fry. Deposing the odd dictator in the Third World doesn’t even sharpen the teeth. No. America has got scared of its real enemies. Maybe it always has been. Maybe it has only ever reacted against its real enemies, rather than acted. The Cold War was one long reaction.’

  ‘What are you saying? That they should have nuked Moscow?’

  Burt laughed. ‘No, nothing of the sort and you know it.’

  ‘There were enough proxy wars to fill an encyclopaedia,’ she replied. ‘What else could America have done?’

  ‘I’m not interested in history, let alone potential history,’ Burt said. ‘History never taught anyone anything. I’m interested in flushing out our enemies now. And I want you to pursue this theme for Cougar. In the field, if you insist. Though I’d rather you were directing operations.’

  ‘You know the deal. I’ll only work in the field. That’s where I’m best.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘And you mean against Russia.’

  ‘Yes. But the purpose is two-fold. Russia is becoming the enemy again. But of equal importance, I want to know who are Russia’s appeasers in the West. I want to flush out Russia’s intentions but also find which way certain other countries in Europe will jump. With us – with America – or with Russia.’

  ‘What has this got to d
o with Novorossiysk?’

  ‘Maybe something. But that’s for down the line a little. I need to send someone into Ukraine again. If it’s you, you need to leave tomorrow in order to be back in Brussels in time.’

  ‘Is it important that I come to Brussels?’

  ‘I’d like you to be there.’

  She didn’t enquire why.

  But for once Burt explained. ‘I think you’ll have something bang up to date from your trip – if you decide to go.’

  And then Burt stood and withdrew a set of maps from a chart desk. They were aerial and satellite maps, as well as regular ones for roads and terrain.

  ‘These are the interesting ones,’ Burt said and pointed at a pile of satellite photographs which came with the maps. ‘From Cougar’s own satellite in the past two weeks. And this one from the US World View satellite.’

  She didn’t ask him how he’d obtained the latter but stood and looked down on a faux chart table on which Burt had placed the maps. The maps were high-definition studies of Ukraine’s border with Russia, but to the north of the country, far away from the Crimea from where she’d just returned. They focused on the Kursk area on the Russian side and Sumy on the Ukrainian side. In each of the satellite pictures, two unmarked military trucks, in various states of magnification, were shown proceeding towards the Ukrainian border from the Russian side and by various roundabout routes.

  ‘The interesting thing’, Burt said, ‘is that they seem to be receiving privileged passage on the Russian side from Russia’s border patrols. They go unmolested by small roads and tracks to a mile from the border. Then they stop.’ He looked at her. ‘What I want to know is what are the intentions of the men inside them? Satellites can’t tell us that.’