by Alex Dryden
When she was twenty yards from the barn, she stopped once and listened. She was completely exposed against the open hill but felt protected by the darkness. When she heard nothing she set off again, covering the remaining ground to the entrance of the barn in less than a minute.
There was only one tall, broken wooden door remaining in the arched stone wall of the barn. It creaked slowly in the wind. The other door was missing. It was just as her boss had told her. She entered the dark interior through the gap and, when her eyes had become accustomed to the almost pitch-blackness inside, she began to make out darker shapes against the feeble light of the night sky entering from a hole high up in the wall where a window had once been. She switched on a small torch with a fine narrow beam that shed no light to the sides. In the light of the torch, she picked out the edges of straw bales, a beaten mud floor, and cobwebs close to her. As she played the torch along a beam to the left, following the wall of the barn, she saw the third roof beam from the end. The beam of the torch came down to reveal the niche beneath it, itself a tangle of cobwebs and dust. All was well. It was time to leave and then return with the plastic fertiliser bag.
As she began to turn, there was a small bang, like an explosion, which she realised a second later was an engine suddenly bursting into life. She felt her heart thump violently and almost stop. Even without the shock it gave her, the sound of the engine was suddenly deafening in the small space that before had been so silent. And with the engine came a light, just a split second later. Standing in the centre of the barn she was suddenly illuminated by blinding washes of floodlights that must have come from arc lamps up on the roof beams. It was a generator, she thought dimly, the engine was a generator and the lights came on automatically with the generator. She was blinded, her senses confused. And then she heard a single voice.
“It’s not her,” a man shouted, and this was followed by a curse in Russian.
Masha followed orders. It seemed to take the men inside the barn completely by surprise. She drew the handgun from inside her jacket, pointed it towards her head, and pulled the trigger.
5
IN THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY that Anna Resnikov entered the country at Odessa’s port and Masha was crossing over from Russia, a meeting was taking place in the capital, Kiev. The four men and a woman sat around a smoked-glass table in a safe room at the American embassy on Mykoly Pymonenka Street. Being the night before the presidential election not everyone present was in an agreeable mood to have their time taken up with nonelection matters.
They were not diplomats or trade representatives or visiting senators and congressmen. In fact, all of them worked for the CIA station attached to the embassy, except for one of the men, Logan Halloran. And it was Logan—backed by the might of Cougar—who had summoned the CIA on this Saturday evening, not as one might expect, the other way around.
Sam MacLeod, the CIA station head, was the most senior figure at the table—at least officially—but orders from the CIA’s director in Virginia, Theo Lish, had requested—this was the careful word used—that MacLeod make every effort to accommodate Cougar’s wishes. Cougar “had something that needs conveying at once,” was the opaque way that Lish had put it to his station chief. In his usual, cunning way, Burt Miller had introduced a question in his meeting with Lish three days earlier that now hung in the air unanswered, but that Lish knew had to be investigated with the greatest of vigour.
A suave, close-shaved, and neatly tonsured man in his late fifties who wore impeccably cut pin-striped suits, MacLeod was visibly irritated before the meeting had even begun and his irritation stemmed from being summoned by, of all people, Logan Halloran. Simply put, he didn’t like Halloran and he didn’t intend to even look Halloran in the face, despite the fact that they were sitting directly across the table from each other.
Halloran himself was unmistakably MacLeod’s sartorial opposite. Despite Burt’s efforts to make him appear like the corporate figure he was, long, thick, light brown hair flowed erratically over Logan’s shoulders, and was perhaps not as clean as it could have been. He wore a crumpled, faded, pale green suit that had seen much better days and the collar of his shirt was open, with tufts of chest hair emerging from the neck—“like some eighties pop star,” MacLeod had witheringly told his second in command, Sandra Pasconi. On top of Logan’s insultingly dishevelled appearance, MacLeod couldn’t help noting, despite his determination not to engage in eye-to-eye contact with him, that Halloran had a deep tan in the middle of the Ukrainian winter. A fake tan was something that MacLeod, a traditionally down-to-earth Texan, found profoundly unmasculine. It didn’t occur to him that Halloran had been lying on a tropical beach only a week before. But either way, to Sam MacLeod, a man’s appearance was either respectful or the reverse—there was nothing in between—and to him Halloran demonstrated a casual approach that smacked of disrespect.
It wasn’t so much his physical appearance, however, that riled MacLeod the most, nor the gross inconvenience of it being a Saturday night and the fact that he was just on his way out to a preelection cocktail party. Nor was it that he should suddenly find himself at the beck and call of a private intelligence company—albeit one that commanded almost the same level of resources as the CIA itself. It was Logan Halloran’s past life that was topping the list of the affronts that irritated MacLeod this evening. Apart from his slovenly appearance, with an attitude to match, Halloran had once been a CIA officer in Bosnia back in the 1990s until he’d been fired by the agency many years back now. Yet here he was practically giving orders to one of the CIA’s station heads in one of the world’s intelligence hot spots and on the CIA’s own ground to boot.
Was it Burt Miller’s idea of a joke to send Halloran? Probably, MacLeod thought. At any rate, he wouldn’t put it past him. Burt Miller walked the corridors of power in Washington with effortless ease, thanks to Cougar’s generous dispensation of lobbying fees. He operated like some private satrap at the heart of power. Since 9/11, Cougar had grown from a regular intelligence outfit into Washington’s most influential intelligence hub, with the power and money to show for it. And, if he knew little else about Burt Miller, MacLeod understood how Miller enjoyed flaunting this power and wealth.
But MacLeod also knew that Cougar’s power on this particular evening at the embassy in Kiev was now replicated in other American embassies around the world. Cougar was now able to issue orders on more than an occasional basis at CIA stations throughout the world and it made MacLeod almost visibly seethe with indignation.
The others sitting around the table consisted of MacLeod’s junior officers, all in their mid-twenties to early thirties. Younger than MacLeod, they were more overtly angry at this indignity. Sandra Pasconi, the only woman present, was the senior of these three young spooks and she spoke first, as arranged beforehand. Macleod had dictated before the meeting that he wanted to stay in the background, as befit his position, and not stoop to liaising directly with Halloran. He affected a position of not acknowledging that Logan was in the room at all.
“Isn’t it a bit premature to have this meeting the night before a presidential election?” Pasconi asked acidly. “We don’t know what Ukraine’s going to look like yet. The election tomorrow is just narrowing it down to two candidates. Then there’ll be a runoff in three weeks’ time. That’s when it’s appropriate, if ever.”
Logan smiled back at her without replying. He felt supreme self-satisfaction that the CIA was at his bidding after his mistreatment at their hands. He still had scores to settle with his old organisation over his dismissal. The resentment he felt towards the agency looked like it would never die and he now felt a dangerous desire to rub their noses in it. Yet at the same time, if you were to study Logan’s erratic motivation—something he didn’t do himself with any great zeal—he had a great need for acceptance by his old employer at the same time as he nurtured resentment against it. He wanted them to recognise their mistake in ever dismissing him. He wanted to extract love from humilia
tion.
“But we all know what the result of the election’s going to be, don’t we, Sandra?” Logan replied. “The current president is out. It’s between Yanukovich and Timoshenko now. That’ll be decided in three weeks. And we all know Moscow’s favourite, Yanukovich, is going to win. It’s practically a done deal. The Orange Revolution is over. Russia holds the cards.”
Pasconi bristled at the use of her first name. “Look, Halloran,” Pasconi continued, “we know just how important you are—or Cougar is, in any case,” she almost sneered, “so you don’t have to throw your weight around, okay?”
Logan was delighted by her angry response. Hostile, that was what Logan had expected, and that was what Burt had told him to expect. “Let them be hostile.” But Logan wanted to exacerbate that hostility. It only made his enjoyment at their predicament all the greater. He’d already noticed that MacLeod refused to look at him, while the other two younger men seemed to be waiting on the edge of their chairs with an eager fixation in his direction, like terriers ready to rip his throat out. He smiled benignly, but in his heart he felt the old anger surfacing.
Logan paused to let the sarcasm in Pasconi’s tone of voice dissipate into a flat silence that had the effect of leaving the tone, rather than the words themselves, hanging in the air.
“The question is,” he said smoothly, “what is Ukraine going to be in three weeks’ time? Burt Miller sees it this way,” he said quietly. “He believes that Ukraine is moving to the top of our concerns. Your boss in Washington apparently agrees with him,” he added. “Miller’s convinced him that this is priority, red alert. And he simply wants the agency to be fully in the picture.”
“Our instructions are to listen to what you have to say,” Pasconi said. “That’s all. There’s nothing here about Mr. Lish agreeing or disagreeing with Miller’s thesis on Ukraine.”
Logan leaned back in his chair before replying and delayed his reaction, like a sportsman who lowers the pace of his game in order to upset the urgency of an opponent. “Cougar sees it that the Ukraine will soon become a front line of sorts,” he said finally. “More so than it is now. Ukraine is an independent, democratic, pro-Western country under threat from its more powerful, belligerent, and antidemocratic neighbour. Soon it will have a pro-Russian president. Yanukovich has made that clear enough. And Cougar sees it that Russia’s geopolitical intentions may be viewed most clearly through the prism of Ukraine. It’s not just about Ukraine, it’s about all the former Soviet republics.” Logan leaned in. “Moscow wants them back and Ukraine is the jewel in the crown.”
“That doesn’t explain why now, why this evening of all times,” Pasconi snapped and Logan felt that she was flailing in the wind. “It’s damned inconvenient,” she added. “Pointless, I’d go so far as to say.”
Logan opened the file he’d brought with him—the same file he’d distributed to the others in the room and which they had studiously kept unopened. “We didn’t think it should wait,” he said flatly, with a trace of contempt and without acknowledging Pasconi’s hostility. “Intelligence is coming in all the time and it’s of a very disturbing colour.” He looked up with what passed for a helpful expression on his face, but everyone else saw it as merely arrogant. “Cougar is very conscious of the fact that our embassies around the world want to know anything with any terrorist implications immediately. They want to know like the day before yesterday. And, naturally, the terrorists are aware that our defences are most likely to be lowered on occasions like a presidential election in a foreign country, as well as on our own national holidays.” He paused. “We want to set the agenda here, not allow them to. Cougar didn’t want our embassy here to be caught napping.” He leaned towards Pasconi. “We’re just trying to help.”
The nerve of this approach was lost on none of the others in the room. Pasconi bristled again, her face contorted in an ugly grimace, but she stayed silent. MacLeod himself was feeling a deep resentment at the incursion of Cougar on his territory, never mind that it had been endorsed by his chief. The implication that, without Cougar, the agency—and his station, in particular—would be caught napping now infuriated him and he struggled to retain his studied aloofness.
Logan watched a similar struggle competing on all of their faces. But he was following Burt’s instructions exactly. Mention terrorism right at the top, Burt had told him. Then they can’t afford to ignore you. The potential blowback is too risky for them.
“When you care to take a look at this,” Logan continued smoothly, indicating the file, “you’ll notice that Russia has been ramping up its hostile, or potentially hostile, actions in Ukraine over the past few months. And they were high enough already. You have all the facts, I’m sure. But Cougar also has evidence that smuggling across the—”
“Smuggling what?” Pasconi loudly demanded to know. “Smuggling terrorists!”
“Perhaps. And it could very well be so. But I’ll get to that later. Right now I’m talking about the smuggling of matériel. And what kind of matériel is something that Cougar is currently investigating,” Logan replied, unruffled by the interruption.
“So you’re saying the KGB could be smuggling paper towels, or pork fat, or spare parts for jeeps.”
“Unlikely,” Logan replied. “Unless Russia’s spetsnaz—specifically the Vympel division—have fallen on very hard times.”
There was a prolonged silence this time. Then Pasconi, who seemed to be the only other person in the room with a voice, spoke.
“What’s the evidence? What’s the threat? What have Russian special forces got to do with terrorism—even if we could disengage that from their normal activities?”
Logan paused, a change of pace again. “We have satellite pictures from our own hardware, and we’ve also had a piece of luck. Or what Burt Miller, in his great wisdom, calls a dodo.”
Logan enjoyed watching the expressions around the table change from hostility to bemusement. He was getting into his stride now; a pleasantly nasty thought crossed his mind that, if he didn’t pass on Burt’s instructions, they might all, like he had once, lose their jobs when some crisis blew up. But he continued in a relaxed voice.
“A dodo, according to Burt, is the reappearance of something that you thought doesn’t or couldn’t possibly exist. In this case, the dodo is a face recognition from satellite pictures of one of the officers who took part in these border missions. This KGB officer is leading the smuggling operation. He’s a colonel in the Vympel group who was jailed two years ago for atrocities committed in Chechnya in the late 1990s. His jail sentence was one of Moscow’s regular transparent attempts to make us believe they are abiding by the rules of international law. However, this colonel served only five months for the murder and torture of Chechen civilians in Russia’s last war there. His release was kept secret from everybody. But one of our senior analysts and field personnel recognised him.”
“You mean Resnikov,” Pasconi demanded.
“I can’t reveal who,” Logan said. But everyone around the table knew that only Anna Resnikov would be able to recognise a colonel in the spetsnaz Vympel group from a satellite picture.
“What else?” Pasconi said, evidently unwilling to be denied an answer a second time.
“Burt Miller is setting up an operation on the ground with the intention of intercepting one of these border smuggling operations.”
“Resnikov again,” one of the terriers said triumphantly.
Logan looked at the young officer with pitying contempt. “So you have a tongue that doesn’t just hang out,” he replied, and received an evil look in return. Then he turned back to Pasconi.
“We hope to have evidence from on the ground in the next two weeks,” Logan continued. “In view of any terrorist implications, Cougar is requesting that the CIA offers its help. But with or without your help, we believe the Russians are preparing something from across their border with Ukraine.” He leaned in now. “The background to this leads in one direction only, Miller believes. For years th
e Kremlin has been interfering with oil and gas supplies that have to come through Ukraine before they can get to Western Europe. Threatening western European energy supplies, in other words. On top of that—and in another theatre of their Ukrainian operations entirely—there are tensions in the south, mainly in and around the Crimea. These tensions are deliberately being raised by Russian actions on the ground. The Russians’ provocation of the Ukrainian border police there, and even the Ukrainian military, is on the rise. Russian foreign intelligence teams have been on the increase in this southern sector, too. While this is going on, up in the northeast of the country—in the Donetsk region—there are reports of weapons caches and planned artificial labour strikes. Some of these reports suggest that these preparations are being made in order to disguise an armed uprising against the government in Kiev. A labour strike followed by a ‘spontaneous’ armed rebellion.” He paused to let this sink in. “It seems the Russians are throwing a bewildering number of different strategies at Ukraine in order to destabilise the country.” Then he dropped his voice so that the two terriers in black suits had to lean closer from the end of the table to hear him. This was his coup de grâce, and it was the real reason Burt had called the meeting together this evening. This is what they really want to hear, was the way Burt had put it. Logan looked at MacLeod directly as he spoke. “But we believe the most alarming aspect of all of this Kremlin-inspired provocation is the ongoing information we’re receiving that suggests an al Qaeda-backed group in the Crimea is being armed by the Russian foreign intelligence service for an attack on the Crimean parliament.”
