by Alex Dryden
“If the Russians want to repossess Ukraine—really repossess it like in Soviet times,” Mikhail said, “then Yanukovich can be their useful fool, yes. He can weaken the structures from the centre—from the inside—in line with the Kremlin’s plans.”
Burt didn’t reply or acknowledge Mikhail’s remarks for now, but simply turned over the envelope he’d taken from his blazer pocket as they walked to the house and put it on the table in front of Mikhail. “Take a look at it, too, Anna,” he said. “Your two heads are better than an army.” Anna got up out of her chair and stood behind the wheelchair, looking over Mikhail’s shoulder.
But before either of them could comment, Burt explained the provenance of the envelope and the antics of its sender, the ghost who called himself Rafael, in summoning most of the world’s intelligence agencies who had a presence in Kiev to meetings that never took place. “As far as I know,” Burt said, “I’m the only one who received a message from the mysterious Rafael that said there would be no meeting. Even though there had never been a meeting in the first place.” He poured himself a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and took another Havana cigar from a leather case in his jacket pocket, even though the one he’d been smoking wasn’t yet half finished. Then he sat back in a semireclining position and appeared to be tanning himself, fully clothed, under the heater, eyes closed, while puffing at the cigar and sipping from the glass at regular intervals.
Mikhail and Anna read the six words of the message. “There will be no meeting tonight.” And then Mikhail put the envelope on top of it, its back facing up, and with the seal facing him and Anna. The bird had a longish beak and long legs, a waterbird, it looked like.
“It’s a snipe,” Mikhail said. “In Russian we call it bekac. In French it’s becasse.” He looked up at Burt. “They emigrate from Russia to Western Europe—for the winter.”
“I thought it was some kind of snipe,” Burt said. “Good to eat then, if we can catch it. So. Who sends wax impressions of snipe through the mail accompanied by arcane messages? It was mailed in Novorossiysk, by the way. Not that its geographical origins have much to bear on the situation, I’m sure.”
“Maybe they do in this case. It’s the ferry terminal from Russia to the Crimea,” Mikhail said. He handed the envelope to Anna with the seal facing her. “Have you ever seen this before, my dear?” he asked. “Recognise it?”
She looked again. “No, Mikhail. But the message is in the seal, yes?”
“Yes.”
Mikhail sighed. “It’s a message that he’s coming West,” he said slowly, and all the time his mind seemed to be working, thinking of the implications. “Like the bird migrating. And it was sent to you via your embassy in Ukraine?” he asked.
“Yes. Coming West?” Burt said. “You mean he’s defecting?”
Mikhail thought for a long time. “I don’t know, but I doubt it’s as simple as that,” he said finally. “I think we can assume, perhaps, that he’s going there, but only as far as Ukraine. Only that far West. For the time being, in any case. Maybe he’s keeping his options open.”
“And maybe he’s luring us to believe that he’s open to our offers,” Anna said. “Maybe it’s a sting.”
“That’s also possible,” Mikhail replied. “We have to be very careful.”
“The snipe is coming West, to Ukraine,” Burt said in the mock-dramatic tones of someone delivering a badly coded sentence. Then he laughed robustly. “So what do we do? Shoot it? Eat it? Put it in a cage?”
Mikhail looked sideways at Burt, but he didn’t—and rarely did—enjoy Burt’s easy mirth. “No. We do none of those things. We should give it a feather bed,” he said. “We should guard it with our lives. The snipe might bring us good luck, or at least insight. For you, for us. And it might bring us very bad luck indeed. It depends on the circumstances.”
For Burt, luck was something you used, not something that used you. “It depends, as always, on what happens,” Burt said, and repeated his favourite dictum: “What happens is the only God there is.”
“You’re a pagan, Burt,” Mikhail said and Burt roared with laughter. He surveyed the mesa with its mysterious rock formations that contained the petroglyphs of ancient Indian cultures. “Out here is a good place to be a pagan,” he said.
Mikhail leaned back against the wheelchair and left the envelope on the table without taking any further interest in it. Then he looked at Burt again and patted Anna’s arm. He was the only man from whom she ever seemed happy to receive such casual physical contact, Burt noted.
Mikhail was the friend of her former British husband, the MI6 officer Finn, who was now dead. Finn had been murdered by the KGB four years ago now. Little Finn’s father. Perhaps that was it, the friendship between Mikhail and Finn. But Finn had also been Mikhail’s closest and indeed only direct contact with the West in the years when Mikhail had acted as a double agent inside the Kremlin. Finn had been the only person Mikhail allowed to know him when Mikhail was still at the top in Russia. Finn had been Mikhail’s handler and so there was a bond with her dead husband through Mikhail.
“My guess is,” Burt said slowly, “that you know who the snipe is, Mikhail.” And his eyes—slits at the best of times—narrowed slightly.
Mikhail sighed and leaned back in the wheelchair. Now he, too, let his eyes wander over the jagged rock bluffs behind which the sun was turning a burning red in the freezing atmosphere and starkly illuminating their eerie profiles against the sky.
“I’m cold,” he said. “It’s time to go in.”
Anna wheeled Mikhail inside and Burt came out from under the heater and followed them. There was a roaring fire in the sitting room with its floor-to-ceiling windows that gave them as good a view of the mountains as if they’d been outside. Burt threw more wood on the fire and asked a member of the staff to bring champagne. Anna sat on a sofa away from the fire, while Mikhail wheeled the chair closer to it. Burt seemed impatient and didn’t sit.
“There’s a man called Dmitri Respin,” Mikhail began. “Dmitry Viktorov—and the many other names he goes under. He, I believe, is the bird on the seal. A truly unique intelligence officer. In fact, he’s one of very few non-Russians at the heart of Department S—he’s half foreign anyway. He was recruited from outside Russia originally and then was brought to Moscow and trained as would have been normal, initially in the Foreigners’ Area of the Forest. His training was regular—for the purpose of conducting operations back in his own country. It consisted of sabotage, mostly. That’s what we trained the foreigners to do back in their own countries. That and terrorism, too.” The champagne arrived and was opened. Burt insisted on pouring it into glasses and politely dismissed the woman who’d brought it.
Mikhail sipped from his glass before continuing. “But then his obvious qualities and his half-Russian ancestry elevated him to Department S, where he came under my watch at the start of the nineties.” He paused. “But I get ahead of myself.” Mikhail pulled himself up against the back of the wheelchair and took another sip from the glass of champagne. “He—this Dmitri Respin or Viktorov—was educated from the age of sixteen at Vishka—the Tower—in the Forest.” He looked up at Anna. “The same place you were educated for the KGB,” he said. “And the place where I have so far failed to achieve my own greatest ambition, the defeat of Putin’s Russia. Like you, my dear, I was a part of Department S, but as we all know now, in the nineties I went on to control all of our agents in Western Europe. The apogee of my double career.”
Anna thought back over the years to a time when Mikhail had stood behind Vladimir Putin at a small service in the Kremlin’s chapel after Putin became president in the year 2000. In the new, democratic Russia the archbishop had proclaimed “God bless the KGB,” near the end of the service. Putin was photographed inside the church looking reverently towards the altar, for the benefit of Russia’s newly enfranchised religious population who would be expected to support him in future, via the archbishop.
In the photograph,
Mikhail could be seen with only half a face in the subsequent pictures published by all the important Russian newspapers. But only if you knew Mikhail well would you have known it was him. At her interrogation by Burt, after her own defection to the West, Anna had been shown this picture, the only picture that was ever taken of Mikhail in public. When she had identified him by his known name, one of Burt’s team, Logan, had recognised the face, even though none of them knew his identity as an MI6 agent through Finn and Finn alone. Logan had asked her then, “Why is the Deputy Railways minister seated behind President Putin? Why is he there at this most important occasion—the marriage of the KGB president to the religious masses the KGB has persecuted for seventy years?”
For Mikhail’s cover in Department S had been the role of Deputy Railways minister, a position that allowed him wide access to agents across Western Europe under the guise of marvelling at its railway systems. “Why is such a lowly figure right behind the president?” Logan had asked her.
And that was the beginning of her long withdrawal from defending Mikhail’s secret identity. She had protected him as best she could. She didn’t want the Americans or anyone else to have him unless it was by his choice. And so she had met him in secret—twice—once in New York City, the second and final time in the park across the Potomac from Washington when they’d been ambushed by a KGB snatch squad. She had been shot in the shoulder, Mikhail in the spine, before Burt’s legions had rolled over the horizon and settled the fight in her and Mikhail’s favour. And that was how the Americans—in the shape of Burt and Cougar Intelligence Applications—had come into the possession of Mikhail.
Burt stamped around the room, impatient for Mikhail to continue.
“Dmitri Respin or Viktorov was highly regarded inside Department S,” Mikhail continued. “That was why Department S took him on in the first place. As I say, he was unique. He had what they call second sight. Or, at least, so they believed—and I have to agree with them.” He looked at Anna. “As you know, our psychologists, psychiatrists, and scientists were endlessly creative when it came to developing agents. It was only the rest of the country they let down with their services. Respin is about your age, Anna. A year older, I think.” Mikhail settled himself back and a member of the staff appeared and whispered to Burt that dinner could be served whenever he wanted. He waved the woman away and told her they would get their own supper this evening.
“You can all leave,” he said in dismissing her.
Mikhail drank slowly, savouring the champagne. “Loosens the tongue but not the brain,” he said to Burt.
Then he continued. “Respin was trained in every aspect of training that you’d expect for a foreign intelligence officer. He was always meant for deployment in the southern, Muslim republics, and they are the most dangerous. Many of our agents were lost there in the brutal wars we fought, and are still fighting, against the separatists. So he had to be good, the best. But his vital advantage was this so-called second sight, not just his native grasp of languages or his weapons handling and combat training, or his code work or his analytical mind. He was highly valued because he had something that no one else had.” He looked at Anna, who was now sitting on his other side. “Or rather he lacked something that everyone else in Department S did have. He lacked sight. Dmitri Respin was blind. And uniquely it was his blindness that gave him an edge. His blindness gave him a different kind of sight. He’d either had this second sight from birth or he developed it later. It was a talent for knowing things at a mental—maybe psychic—level that you and I have to see with our eyes in order to understand. And even then we see only dimly with the eyes compared to Respin’s abilities. He had something more than eyes can ever give us. Dmitri could tell what someone was thinking. A huge talent.” He looked at Burt. “As you always say, Burt, that’s something that all the satellites and technology in the world can’t achieve.”
Then he looked back into the fire. “And that was just a part of the talents that came from his blindness. Farsighted is a word you can use about the blind, and Dmitri was farsighted.” Mikhail sipped from his glass of champagne again and Burt, eager for something to occupy himself with, filled all of their glasses. “I had him working for me before I took over our agents in Western Europe,” Mikhail continued. “It was during the first Chechen War in the mid-nineties. Dmitri went into Chechnya and he was unlike any other officer of the KGB. He went into that country as a friend to the Chechens, and as someone who didn’t fear them.” He looked at Burt now. “His name is not Dmitri, of course, and he is not a Russian. At least he’s only half Russian. He was born in Damascus in 1971, the son of a Syrian dancer and a then-young KGB officer by the name of Valentin Viktorov. Viktorov worked at the Soviet embassy compound in Damascus when your father was head of station there,” he said to Anna. “His son, to whom we gave the code name Dmitri Respin, was left in an orphanage there when he was a few months old. His father, Valentin, was being posted to Moscow at the time and he took the boy away from its mother’s family and placed him in the orphanage. I think he probably saved the boy’s life by his actions.” He looked hard at Anna. “You were there, Anna, in Damascus, and a child at the same time.”
Anna’s mind reeled. It took her back to more than twenty-five years before, to the KGB compound in Damascus where she’d been brought up until the age of fourteen while her father was the KGB’s station head. After her fourteenth birthday she’d been sent to live with her grandmother in Moscow.
She recalled her old brute of a father—and then her mother, who’d been his antithesis, a kind woman who seemed in everything she did to be atoning for her husband’s sins. A kind of martyr, she supposed. Her mother’s martyrdom was the driving force for her own desire to be a strong woman, untethered to a man’s career.
And she recalled the orphanage her mother had taken her to visit in order to gain sympathy with the dispossessed and the unloved. But the blind boy she remembered hadn’t been called Dmitri.
As if reading her thoughts, Mikhail continued. “His name wasn’t Dmitri then, of course,” he said. “It was Balthasar, and probably still is. He used another name in Chechnya—neither Dmitry nor Balthasar.”
And now she remembered him. He was an uncanny child, a year older than she was but with a face that, though blind, held the wisdom not just of an adult but of an unusually intelligent adult, and beyond that he’d had a seerlike quality—so her mother had described it, anyway. Sometimes on their visits his presence was so powerful, it was as if it was he who had come to visit her and her mother, rather than the other way around. He had the kind of power that made her think she was a supplicant.
“I remember my mother telling me he had a Russian father,” she said. “And that was Viktorov? Now General Valentin Viktorov?”
“Now General Viktorov, yes. Then he was just a lieutenant or lower, I don’t remember.”
“Balthasar,” Burt said. “God protect the king.”
“That’s right. And in Chechnya, they worshipped him. They thought he was a wise man, a magician, a religious mystic. They thought he would be their saviour.”
“And he fed the KGB and the Russian military the information that led the Chechens to the slaughter,” Anna said.
Mikhail paused. “At first, yes, he did,” he said. “But then I noted—though no one else seemed to—that he was beginning to avoid doing quite the same thing. He became like a hunter who loses his taste for killing and who doesn’t shoot quite straight for fear or dislike of killing a rare or beautiful animal. He still fed information back to Moscow—back to the Forest—of course. He had to, in order to survive. But I noticed it had become much more selective. It seemed he was identifying Chechens who were as dangerous to their own country as they were to Russia, but not the true nationalists and nation builders who the Kremlin also wanted to destroy. He was giving us only the most extreme elements of the Chechen resistance—the fanatics of God, the men for whom the people are mere instruments—and I began to suspect that he was protecting
the vast majority of the rebels and their citizens in that country, the people who we Russians would run down with our tanks, murder and torture, tear up from their roots. Just as Stalin did in 1944, the innocent and the good swept into the trash with the so-called guilty.”
“And now?” Burt said. “What is Balthasar now?”
“That is hard to say. He’s an extremely dangerous man. That I do know. A fanatic himself of sorts, perhaps, but a fanatic who is not attached to any cause, just to his own genius. Perhaps he is a mystic, I don’t know. I do know that he is still deep in the black heart of Department S and that if he’s coming to Ukraine, there is a deeply black purpose to it.”
“Why does he tell me he’s coming?” Burt said.
“That’s the question,” Mikhail replied. “Is it a trap or is he genuinely putting out a feeler, trying to establish contact for other reasons?”
There was a prolonged silence.
“Why come to me?” Burt repeated. “To Cougar?” And then he turned to Anna. “Is this another Russian ploy to get their hands on you?” he said.
“Perhaps Balthasar knows that it is Anna who will respond to his overtures, yes,” Mikhail agreed immediately.
“So Balthasar is just the latest in their attempts to abduct her.”
Mikhail turned to look at Burt. “Maybe. But only maybe,” he said. “That is the risk. It’s possible that it’s true and it’s possible the opposite is true—that Balthasar is testing the waters. That he’s finished. And that Anna is the only person he trusts. In my opinion, yes, he wants to meet with Anna, but whether as a trap for her or as a way out of Russia—that’s impossible to say.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Anna said.
“No,” Burt said. “I can’t have you taking that risk.”
“But I will,” she replied. “And with or without you, Burt.”
