by Alex Dryden
PART TWO
18
APRIL 22
THE PASSENGER FERRY KERCHINSKY was released from its mooring lines but stayed motionless for a moment, as if unwilling to depart. Then Balthasar felt the effect of the bow thrusters pushing gently away from the quay and the boat at last slowly turned and headed out into the Kerch Straits.
It was a clear day in early spring, and cool, but the sky reflected onto the water the deep blue of the coming summer. The mostly Ukrainian passengers, returning from visits to relatives in Russia, seemed to sense that a long winter had come to an end. They were chattering, breaking open bottles of vodka, and unwrapping Caucasian cheese bread as if they were going on a long voyage rather than the few miles back home across the straits. Ahead of them, spring meadows beneath the towering cliffs of the Crimea were greening and there were yellow daffodils in bloom, a flower the party of orphans on a vacation from the Russian Far East had never seen and would later mistake for onions and attempt to eat.
It was a brief trip from Port Kavkaz on the Russian side to Port Krym on the Ukrainian shore. After the ten-hour flight from frozen Magadan in the east to Moscow, and then another six hours from Moscow to the Black Sea, the children, so it seemed to Balthasar, only now sensed their vacation was beginning, with the ferry’s departure from Russian soil.
He had accompanied the orphans from the starting point in Magadan. That was his cover and it had been thought best that he should be known to them—and to their real teachers—for a period of time before meeting at the ferry terminal. Already an easy relationship had developed between him and the children at any rate, even if their teachers might suspect he was not who he was meant to be—a teacher with experience of orphans and also of the country to which they were travelling on holiday—and they consequently kept a discreet, if polite, distance from him.
And though accompanying the orphans, Balthasar himself stayed apart from the others. He stood leaning against the guard rail on the port side, away from the other passengers in general as well as the excited children. Leaning on the rail, he felt the gentle breeze of the boat’s motion on his face, smelled the salt air and the diesel fumes and sawn timber, and listened to the bow wave’s continual break, along with the cries of children and seagulls. Eleven children—he already knew that—and five seagulls, he was sure of that.
He felt the proximity and even the individual natures of other passengers farther along the deck, as well as sensing a fishing boat nearly a quarter of a mile away and heading out to the Black Sea for its catch. And though he could not see any of these things—his dark, unseeing eyes flickered meaninglessly—he was as acutely aware of his surroundings as the prehistoric fish that hunt and eat their prey in the pitch-black canyons of the deepest ocean. His other four regular senses were highly tuned. But his predominant sense overrode all these and, despite the scepticism of some scientists, it was this sixth sense that afforded him a picture of people of which others were deprived. His own perceptions left others with perfect eyesight in the dark.
As he stood on the deck and felt the cool breeze running over his face, he reflected on why he was here, on this boat from Russia. Like so many journeys before, this one was for the purpose of another mission, dozens—maybe even hundreds, he’d lost count—that had sent him from his adopted country abroad. Each had its own fine-tuned purpose, each made some small adjustment to affairs that related to Russia, and most of the time each resulted in death and injury, the sowing of instability and fear and distrust among Russia’s enemies. He was the most decorated officer in the history of Department S. And now that he contemplated this mission, as always he wondered whether it would be his last. But this time, this thought did not come to him just because of the dangers that lay ahead, but also because maybe it was this mission that he, Balthasar, would choose to be his last. Maybe this time he would end the cycle of betrayal and mayhem that he usually left behind. Maybe this time he would choose to follow this life no more.
On the breezy deck of the ferry he also contemplated his journey from his birth in Syria, to an orphanage there, to the discovery of his Russian roots and the meeting with his real father, and finally to his covert work for Department S. But to Balthasar these events and actions were manifestations of himself and his identity that he considered to be the paint on the wall of his person, not the wall itself. In other words, what he had done and what he represented were of little consequence to him compared to the inner life which his sightlessness had afforded him and which was a richer realm of truth than anyone could imagine.
Perhaps that was why he liked the sea so much. His world was as invisible to other people as the world beneath the sea was. His was another life, another world entirely, and it was as colourful and rich as the regular vision of normal people was grey and drab.
It always surprised him how other people’s eyes gave them only so much, just enough to make errors of judgement; some facts about their surroundings, perhaps, but even then the facts could be tricked. The camera could, after all, lie. Earlier in the winter, he recalled, he’d been present when the Russian 14th Army was placing inflatable tanks along the border with Lithuania in an exercise designed to intimidate the small country. Satellite pictures had shown them as if they were real. Warnings rumbled from Washington and the European Union, and the government of Lithuania began to take defensive measures. And in Balthasar’s mind the eyes of the world’s satellites and its actual eyes deceived all too easily. Eyes without awareness depicted only a tiny proportion of a world. Eyes were tools, not knowledge.
He held on to the guardrail that ran along the deck and sniffed the salt in the breeze once more. His normality was simply being without eyes. There were fewer distractions if you couldn’t see and if you saw it like that. That was how he’d begun to discover his own powers, simply not being distracted by the ability to see things. It was a valuable lesson in solitary detachment.
Having no parents and no roots had afforded him even further detachment from the cruder, visible world than his own increasingly refined one. Brought up from scratch in an impoverished orphanage that depended for its knife-edge existence on donations, his early lessons in Damascus thirty-eight years before had consisted of bypassing the visible into what some, overmystical people in his opinion, called another dimension; the dimension, however, was simply understanding what was in other people’s minds. That was not a dimension or, to him, a mystery. It was a skill that he’d developed by necessity and that had once been common to everyone. In Balthasar’s belief, in fact, anyone could do it—if they believed they could and if they weren’t distracted.
And somehow these developed skills of his had led to his current incarnation—for many years now—as an officer in the most secret department of Russian intelligence. It seemed incredible to many of his colleagues, and yet nothing that happened was anything other than credible. Why did the mind insist that someone else’s normality wasn’t normal? It was because the world operated on a system of comparison, Balthasar considered. It was a ruthless and inefficient system, in his opinion. People compared their own lives with other people’s whom they perceived as more “normal” than their own. Some kind of default mechanism. Their purpose in doing so was simply to feel better about themselves when they perceived another as less well off than they were, or to harbour resentment and aspiration if they perceived the opposite. It all led to conflict, and somehow his life’s path had been at the hard centre of the conflict between people and nations. Had he now reached a time in his life when he could break his own pattern, be free of his masters?
And now Balthasar’s thoughts had arrived at the present moment. His mission to Ukraine was straightforward—to implicate a group of people of Islamic faith in some strategic, Russian atrocity. He decided to make it his purpose, however, to also find what atrocity it was his masters were trying to conceal. In good time. For now, he would pursue his mission, but he would look for an alternative this time. And then perhaps this one would be his final a
ssignment. Perhaps this would be his swan song. Whether it was done his way or theirs depended on how events unfolded. But whichever way the assignment went—whichever way he decided it would go—this was the end.
It was not so much a decision as just something that had come to him in the unfolding logic of his fate, and whatever took place in the coming days or weeks was something that he accepted. He had no idea what the future would bring, no plans, no specific exit strategy. Either he would complete this mission as his controllers wanted him to, or not. That, too, was undecided. It depended on a number of things, what his masters were implicating these Muslims in, for one. He was no longer theirs to point in any direction they liked. But also it depended on the woman, Anna, and who she had turned out to be after nearly forty years. That was a concrete consideration certainly.
His thoughts of her cast his mind back to the beginning, or almost to the beginning. Up to the age of sixteen he had remained at the orphanage. The women and few men who worked there were unquestioningly kind and even loving. He had been given an education, he had played the few sports available outside in the cramped concrete yard, despite his blindness. He recalled a man who had been on the Syrian basketball team who had taught them basketball—the KGB’s favourite game as it turned out later—and who was especially attentive to him. He had excelled academically and was considered to be a startling and intelligent pupil. But the children at the orphanage were also taught a practical education—weaving or jewellery making, wood and metal work, basket making, tailoring, pottery—whatever each child felt was his métier or simply interested him or her. The purpose was that they would be able to provide for themselves in the wide world outside the orphanage. At sixteen they were let go, supervised up to a point in their new life on their own, but set up in a small way with their skills out there in the capital, Damascus. Many of them, it turned out, were better prepared for a life lived on their wits than children who had been brought up in the protective custody—or crushing vice, depending on your point of view—of the Syrian state.
And there had been only one contact with the outside world throughout all that time. He wouldn’t have wanted any other, now that he thought about it. She was a Russian woman, Natalia Resnikova, who had visited him from the beginning, with her daughter, Anna, who had visited him regularly from the age of five. He suspected the Russian woman had made small financial contributions to the orphanage. Hers was a kind of adoption, he’d been told by one of the women at the orphanage, and that no doubt meant some financial contribution, no matter how small. The Russians weren’t rich after all. But the Russian woman Resnikova told him she was always there for him, a surrogate mother, as long as her husband remained in Damascus. Her little girl, Anna, had played with him, hugged him, even told him he was her brother on one or two occasions. The two of them had visited him once a week, when Anna was old enough and unless something prevented their arrival.
In his own mind, through them, Balthasar had come to possess a family of sorts. When he was fifteen years old he thought he loved the girl Anna. And then she’d disappeared. Her mother still visited him after that, but she told him that Anna had gone to live in Moscow with her grandmother. Resnikova told him about Moscow, painted a picture of the dacha where Anna lived with her grandmother. She’d painted these pictures in his mind and Balthasar had never forgotten them or her.
Then one day, just before his sixteenth birthday, a man had arrived at the orphanage. He was a very important man, he’d been told, and a Russian, too. He was a general, the women had told him, and he was Balthasar’s father. General Viktorov. He made a gift to the orphanage, quite a substantial one, Balthasar gleaned from the mind of the head of the orphanage. This man seemed interested in him, not just because he was his son but because of what the teachers told him about his abilities. They called them his “abilities.” The ability to see without seeing, to know things, like the colour of a dress that he couldn’t possibly have seen. Or the weather for the next day. But these were just cheap tricks to Balthasar, a conjuror’s basic tools. What was not any kind of trick was his ability to know what someone was thinking, or the size and position of objects in a room. Many such things. His teachers spoke, fearfully it seemed, of a third eye. But to Balthasar all the hushed talk of his “gifts,” his “abilities,” even superstitious talk of a third eye, was just a normal aspect of his existence.
The man who came—his father, for what it was worth—took a greater and greater interest in him the more he witnessed Balthasar’s behaviour. Viktorov had only intended to make a donation to the orphanage and then leave, but when he’d heard about Balthasar’s gifts, and then seen them for himself, he had formally adopted his own son. They returned to Moscow together, a frightening time, Balthasar recalled. And there a new and unpleasant education had unfolded that treated his gifts as just something for others to use. He was confined in a kind of mental hospital at first, then a scientific institute outside Moscow, and he became the object of scientists’ experiments. He was put through a series of tasks with the application of increasing stresses, physical and mental, to test his endurance and the endurance of his gifts. After two years, when they’d deemed that the tests were apparently successful, he’d been inducted under his father’s wing into the highly secret department of the KGB, Department S. The year was 1989. President Gorbachev was in power and within two years the Berlin Wall would fall and the Soviet Union collapse.
And by now, in 2010, he had been of great use to his organisation. His Arab looks and speech were simply an added advantage, on top of his far more important powers. There’d been the wars in Chechnya in which Department S had played a most secretive role. There’d been the relentlessly perennial Middle Eastern blowups; and there’d been the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the subsequent American push into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Central Asia. Balthasar had been a bit-part player throughout the Caucasus and the Middle East. And now here he was on another mission, this time to Ukraine. It was not his usual area of operations, and indeed it was a mission so secret he had been briefed by his father alone and told very little even then. But there was still one secret Balthasar possessed that his masters at the KGB didn’t know and hopefully never would. It was his contact with the spy and traitor “Mikhail” who had now fled to America.
Balthasar turned over in his mind his new assignment once again. “Reports are coming in…tensions along the border…” The stock phrases from the morning’s radio news programme in Kavkaz reverberated in his mind. It was as if the low-level stubble fire along the Russian border with Ukraine that had flared and backed down to a glow for twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed was finally on course for an all-out conflagration. Isolated hostile words and actions—from the Kremlin’s threat to seize the Crimea for Russia, to Russia’s disruption of oil supplies into Ukraine and on to Western Europe (and even the detention of fourteen Ukrainian circus camels at the border) seemed to be coalescing into a single course for military conflict. The new Ukrainian president Yanukovich made preposterous objections to Russia, but in reality—as Balthasar knew—these objections were just for the consumption of Ukrainians and the West. He did nothing to face down Russia.
Ukraine and Russia, he thought, were entering another fateful dance between two mutually loving and equally loathing partners. They were, it seemed, historically united, even if that unity was primarily one of conflict. Balthasar turned the phrase over in his head. From a psychological point of view, an embrace between the two countries could only be under arms, he believed, like wrestlers.
And now, with a few weeks to go before Ukraine had announced it was to deport all Russian secret service officers from the Crimea, the Kremlin had set in motion a long-held plan to infiltrate a swarm of spetsnaz troops disguised as civilians and an equally impressive battalion of foreign intelligence agents from the KGB’s Department S into the Crimea.
He let go of the guardrail now and walked over to the party of orphans. Balthasar was an orphan himself and
today his guise of a teacher with the party of orphans was simply a natural cover.
Standing on the deck now, he recalled Vladimir Putin’s recent words, spoken brazenly in public at last: “Ukraine is not even a state.” Everything about Russia’s intentions was expressed in those words, but would the West see it that way—and if they did, what would they do about it?
The Kerchinsky slid across the remaining section of the straits and entered Port Krym.
When the boat had docked, Balthasar joined the orphans and the teachers. He stood in line at the sign which read KONTROL and offered his passport to the border guard. The Ukrainians were making it more difficult by the day for Russian visitors, but his association with the orphan party averted the usual anti-Russian mood. They were through, Balthasar patting a small boy’s head as a teacher should.
The bus that was to take the orphans up into the green lands of the Crimea waited, belching diesel smoke. He boarded with the party. The other teachers glanced at him occasionally with a mix of awe and distrust. For once they were deep inside Ukraine, they suspected that Balthasar would be parting company with them and another man would return with the orphans at the end of their vacation. This man would have the same name and age and passport number as Balthasar. The KGB was taking the greatest precautions in the movement of its agents across the border.
19
PREPARATIONS FOR INFILTRATING ANNA into Ukraine a third time were of an even higher order than for her previous operations. Her cover identity for the first entry, into Odessa, was evidently blown and a second identity had been provided for her operation on the northern border. Now Burt provided two more passports for this third entry. One identity she would use for passing through border controls and into the country, while the other was to enable her to change identities once she was across the border—and then only in an emergency. The first passport Burt had procured was American and the second, emergency passport gave her British nationality. Adrian, in London, had been, as ever, most obliging where Burt’s requests were concerned.
