by Alex Dryden
“If anything,” Plismy, the French chief, said acidly.
The historical precedent of a female, former KGB officer addressing an internal NATO intelligence committee did not intimidate all of them and Plismy was one of them. Plismy was her enemy, too, now. She’d run from French protection two years before—“protection” that had almost gotten her killed after she’d fled from Russia—and into American arms in the person of Burt and Cougar. The French were unlikely to forgive her.
“Do we get to see the evidence of this clear picture you talk about?” the head of Spain’s National Security Service, Jorge Barrius, enquired.
“All the satellite evidence is available. Reports on the ground and from KGB sources are, of course, source protected.”
“How can we assess its reliability?” This time the objection came from Ton Van Rijn, the head of the Netherlands intelligence agency, a trim man in his early sixties with a small moustache and sensible shoes, like a schoolteacher’s or a policeman’s.
“As it’s material that originates from Cougar, you can expect it to be of the usual high standard,” she replied smoothly. “We have networks of agents in Russia and Ukraine that national agencies and the rest of the world would envy.”
Burt grinned amiably. Anna paused to invite further questions, but none came.
“First,” she continued, “Russian interior ministry officers are handing out passports to citizens of Ukraine near the Russian border, as well as in the Crimea. This was a tactic they employed in Georgia and subsequently used as a reason for the invasion there: the defence of Russian citizens. Second, unusual movements of small numbers of military vehicles on the Russian side of the border in the Kursk sector seem to be connected to smuggling activities into Ukraine. Third, there is an obvious flashpoint for Russian anger to spill over into violence inside Ukraine, or result in direct military action. That flashpoint is on May twentieth. On that day, the Ukrainian government is expelling all Russian intelligence officers from the Crimea. Up to now, the port of Sevastopol has played host to the Russian Black Sea fleet and its Ukrainian counterpart. That arrangement is set to continue until 2017. But by constant provocations on the ground, in and around Sevastopol, the Russians have finally forced the Ukrainian government to take a strong line. Hence the forthcoming expulsions. Again, provocation and a replay of the Georgian war. In my opinion, we in this room should be looking at offering our services to Ukraine’s government, whoever becomes president. And Europe and America should be ready to draw a line in the sand. That line should be to prevent Ukraine from becoming another Georgia, or worse. In other words, to stand up to Russia.”
She paused, knowing that questions would come.
“But that’s a political point,” Kruger, the head of Germany’s BND, objected eventually. “Our remit is to look at intelligence matters only.”
Everyone looked at Burt, expecting him to come to his protégée’s aid. But he just sat back, apparently enjoying the show.
“The role of intelligence is principally to prevent conflict by knowing what our enemies are doing. It is also to provide our governments with the necessary ammunition to expose our enemies’ intentions. Third, it is to help our allies. Ukraine is an ally of Europe and of America.”
“Are you saying Russia is our enemy?” Thomas Plismy said. “We import half of our energy resources from Russia.”
“We buy oil from Iran, too,” Anna replied. “But Ukraine is closer to home. If Russia were to invade or effectively annex Ukraine in some other way, it would cause a split inside the European Union. East versus West. With good reason, the Eastern nations view Russia’s intentions with greater concern than the Western nations do. They have a history of Russian domination and they note Russia’s threatening stance towards them today with increasing alarm. In 2005 Putin stated that the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nations to the east don’t take such remarks lightly. But any Russian move against Ukraine can be preempted, perhaps—certainly disrupted—by pooling our intelligence resources to expose whatever it is the Kremlin is planning to do. Revealing its hand will go a long way toward preempting any plans it may have to destabilise Ukraine.”
As ever with questions of Russia, there was a deep division between Eastern and Western Europe, as Anna herself had expressed. There were twelve Eastern members of NATO, all formerly subjugated to the Soviet Union, and fourteen Western members, including the United States and Canada. Standing united, the Western members would always outvote those from the East. But Burt had successfully persuaded the CIA head to put America behind the Eastern vote, levelling the score, and now everything rested on Adrian. Despite Cougar’s power, Burt did not have a vote at this international level.
Evidence was passed around the table, including the satellite pictures that Anna knew—and knew they all knew—were inconclusive. Russia could move its own military vehicles—unmarked or not—wherever it wanted to on its own territory. Evidence of Russian ministry officials naturalising citizens of Ukraine with Russian passports was provided, but this, too, provided a glimpse only. As the intelligence chiefs looked at the pictures and written evidence, Anna further explained the developing crisis in Ukraine.
“The situation in Sevastopol has been spinning out of control for some time. There are the small things, like the street fights between Russian and Ukrainian sailors whose fleets share the same port. But full-scale Russian intelligence activity there has been increasing enormously in the past two years. Their agents and intelligence officers are everywhere. The policy from the Kremlin seems to be one of provocation. And the Ukrainians, provoked, predictably react. Their military personnel hold up Russian convoys that use the port for refuelling and rearming. In turn, the Russians react angrily. The heat is raised, the ratchet is tightened. That is why Ukraine has made the momentous decision to expel all known Russian intelligence personnel. What will the Russians do when that happens?”
Anna reached down to the floor and picked up a metal case. She placed it carefully on the table and opened the locks. From inside, she lifted out a small aluminium flask and placed it on the table.
“This was picked up just over the border from Russia, inside Ukraine. It was part of a smuggled consignment of a dozen flasks like this one. Their origin is the KGB laboratories in Moscow’s Leontevsky Pereulok.”
“That’s the actual canister?” Lish said.
“No. This is a dummy. The actual canisters are contaminated.”
“With what?”
“That’s what we’re finding out. But it’s some kind of poison, type unknown.”
When it came to the vote, the Eastern nations didn’t, as Burt had hoped, vote as one. The Czechs, Poles, and Romanians voted for sharing intelligence where it concerned Russia’s borders with Ukraine, and the Crimea in its entirety. Others dithered and finally came down on their side. Hungary voted against.
The deciding vote was left to Britain. For a moment, Adrian considered upsetting Burt’s plans. Later it would be said that this was the key decision Adrian made in his entire career, from his younger days as an SAS officer to becoming head of British Intelligence. Burt looked on calmly. Adrian fiddled with the new sheet of paper dealing with the Ukraine issue and weighed his power over Burt’s. It wasn’t often that he found himself in a position to overturn Burt’s aims—or in a position to extract a quid pro quo in return for Burt’s gratitude, for that matter. He cast his mind over what he would demand from Burt in return for his support and then, finally, he cast his vote in favour of the East—and of Burt—who beamed proudly at him as if he’d just won a race.
There were those in London who would whisper later that Adrian had crossed the Rubicon, finally putting his own interests—a foot in the door at Cougar and the wealth which that promised—ahead of his country’s.
And although the meeting of intelligence chiefs was a consultative one only, it was accepted that each service would report back the views of the com
mittee to their respective governments with a strong recommendation.
15
FEBRUARY 9
ANNA ASKED LARRY TO DROP HER at the foot of the farm’s dirt driveway. There was some old bare and knotted wood rail fencing that stretched on either side of a sagging gate and disappeared to the right over a rise in the land. She would walk up from there, she told him, and then arranged for him to return in three hours’ time.
“Enjoy him,” Larry said.
She watched him go. Larry liked her son, had looked after him in the safe house in New Mexico two years before, and would have liked to see him. But the time was too precious and she wanted him all to herself.
She turned and looked towards the farm. To the right of her was a paddock with around a dozen horses bunched up together with the car’s arrival. A small circular pen was attached to the paddock for separating them out. Bales of hay were split and scattered near the fence and she saw a horse trough in which ice had been broken and was now floating in thick wedges on the surface. It was cold up here and recent snow still lay in patches on the fields. The horses stood and watched her, heads up, eyes wild, huffing big breaths from flared nostrils in the cold morning air. Then they tossed their heads and began to canter around the paddock in a group, kicking up their back legs in celebration of a new morning.
There was a pond in the paddock to the left of the gate. Ice had formed there, too, thick enough to walk on, she thought. The driveway ahead climbed a hill between the two fields to a wooden house a quarter of a mile in the distance and, behind that, woodland surrounded the top of the farm on two sides and ascended a high hill to the north. A stream flowed out of the wood down through the field to the pond and then on below to a river they’d crossed in the car.
As she always did when she visited her son in his new home, Anna thought it was a good place for him to grow up, to begin a new life. She’d seen many times now how much he loved the place and how he had fit so easily into his new family.
Before she began the walk up the drive, she paused to take in the view. It was a beautiful place, the kind of rural paradise that brought on a wave of nostalgia for the simplicities of a lost childhood. Though the country was nothing like the dacha in the forest where her grandmother had brought her up, Anna was reminded whenever she came here of that life. Anna thought of Dostoyevsky’s reflection that there was nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some memory of childhood, of home.
But this was a working farm, too, and that made it more than just a pretty picture or a vague, rural dream. Little Finn loved the animals in particular. There were mainly cows on the farm, which were now shut up in barns until the winter ended. Then there were the long sheds on wheels she could see higher up and that housed the chickens. The farmer moved the sheds around the fields so that the land was fertilised naturally. Some pigs rooted in the woods. And there were the horses, which the family used for their own recreation and which, in the summer, became a riding school under the tutelage of the farmer’s wife.
Little Finn’s new family had three small children of his own age. The farmer and his wife were in their mid-thirties and had retired young from Cougar, deciding on a new life away from the secret world and its normal business targets and promotional ladders and the expectations of others. They’d bought the organic farm with Burt’s help—Anna suspected it was Burt’s way of smoothing Little Finn’s transition, too—and were now supplying local communities within a twenty-five-mile radius with meat and milk. It was a physically hard living, offered little money, and the two of them were content in the choice they’d made.
Anna waited until she felt still inside. It was necessary for her to arrive composed and quiet, to calm the turbulent emotions the visits here unleashed in her. She had come to this farm in Connecticut more than a dozen times before, but even so she had begun to realize that her yearnings for her son, her frustration, sadness, and anger at the loss of his father, would never happily coexist with the rationality of her decision to effectively give him away for his own safety. Sometimes she felt she shouldn’t come at all, that her visits were a source of confusion. He had this new family now. She feared she was becoming like a distant relation to him, rather than his mother. But always Burt urged her to cast these thoughts aside; it was important that he had a real contact with his mother, Burt said, and to know about his dead father, Finn.
But what good could it do him, she wondered, to be presented with a second, visiting mother, even though she was the real one? However things worked out she was satisfied she had brought him to the right place to live his early life safe from the reaches of the KGB who would use him to get to her. He had a new name, a new identity, and was safe—that was all, she reminded herself, that was important.
As she continued up the driveway, she felt the same hollow feeling in her stomach return. One day, she knew, this family would become his own family and she would be his mother only in name. If not today, then one day, he would look on her as a virtual stranger.
She arrived at the top of the drive and walked up two wooden stairs and tugged the bellpull. Her presence hadn’t yet been noted by the family inside, thanks to leaving the car at the foot of the drive. That was the way Anna preferred it. The door was opened by the farmer’s wife, Naomi, who greeted her as always with a welcome whose fulsomeness seemed intended to forestall any doubts on Anna’s part. Though neither of them had ever broached the subject, it was silently understood between them that Anna’s visits were a strain to her most of all, and Naomi went out of her way to welcome her as part of their family. Perhaps she could empathise with her position, Anna thought. Perhaps any mother could.
They went into the kitchen and Naomi began to make coffee.
“The children are playing outside somewhere,” she said. “They’re probably with Tom.”
“I’ll have a coffee first,” Anna replied. “Thank you.”
Normal conversation was never a choice. She couldn’t talk about her job, what she’d been doing—even who she was. Naomi and her husband didn’t even know she was Russian, let alone that she’d defected and was hunted by the KGB. All they knew was that her son had needed a change of identity and that was enough. The small talk between Anna and this family circled around and avoided the subject of herself, focusing only on the farm and its progress, the seasons, and the children.
“How is he?” Anna asked.
“He’s fine. As I always say, he’s added something to the family, Anna,” Naomi replied. “He’s bright and, to be honest with you, I’m grateful to have him with us. The others love him, they all get along well.”
It was the same in all her previous visits. She’d seen before how Little Finn adapted quickly to new surroundings when they’d been at the safe house. Now he was easily adapting to his new family. He wasn’t plagued with thoughts of loss. He wasn’t even making the best of it, she thought, he just happily accepted what was good. There seemed to be no clouds at all in his life, and she was grateful for that, despite the fact that it could only mean a widening distance between the two of them.
They walked up into the fields after they’d finished their coffee.
“They’ll be up near the wood,” Naomi said. “Tom is doing some coppicing up there. If he’s not keeping an eye on them, I am,” she reassured her.
But the only thing in Anna’s mind was that Little Finn would be four years old in three weeks’ time. That made her think of Finn, as well as her son. Finn’s death at the hands of the KGB, just over four years before, erupted in her mind whenever she saw their son.
They found the children where Naomi had said they’d be, playing up near the wood where the stream emerged. It was a beautiful cold winter’s day, the few white clouds had cleared and the sun stood still in the sky, as if frozen itself.
When Little Finn saw her, he stopped what he was doing and stared at her, as if he wasn’t quite sure. Then he leapt up from the stream bank and ran towards her and she cau
ght him in her outstretched arms.
“He’ll always be yours, Anna,” Naomi had told her many times, and at moments like these she dared to believe it.
Little Finn immediately tugged at her arm and pulled her towards the stream where the other three children were playing. He showed her a small earthen bank they were building “to catch fish,” he explained seriously. They played together by the bank until it was time for breakfast and then all of them walked back to the house. Tom kissed her on the cheek and squeezed her arm like a brother, as if he, too, knew the difficulty of her situation.
Over breakfast, Anna took out Little Finn’s birthday presents and all four children gathered round to watch him open them. She’d bought him a few useful things—clothing mostly—and then the big prize, a farm set with animals and tractors. Suddenly she felt foolish to have bought him a replica of the real place where he was living. But he was interested in it—interested in everything—and the children went off to a playroom solemnly carrying all the pieces one by one and began to put it all together. He was absorbed, his thoughts only with his new family, and she didn’t follow immediately.
“Is there anything you need?” she asked Tom and Naomi.
“No, I don’t think so. We have everything,” Tom replied. “We’ll let you know if he needs something,” he added. The tension of demonstrating that he was well provided for and at the same time allowing her to feel involved was never absent.
“We love him very much,” Naomi added, and there was a sudden awkwardness in the air, as if his own mother couldn’t provide this element of his upbringing, but only material things.
