by Alex Dryden
Taras sucked on the stale-tasting tobacco. Who was this woman? he wondered. To enter Ukraine pursued by the KGB, kill two of their officers, pick up a package that wasn’t left at the assigned place, and then disappear…that took some balls, let alone skill. An immense amount of skill. Whoever Natalia Simmonds was, it was clear she was a professional. And probably a native Russian speaker who could move with ease without attracting attention—if you discounted the Russian intelligence services who’d known anyway she was entering the country.
There were several things that bothered Taras about this scenario. The main question in his mind was why the Russians had waited for her to get to the barn rather than simply killing her when they could. But other questions spun out of this one. How did they get two of their operatives killed? What did they gain by waiting for her to reach the barn, since it appeared that it was she they were waiting for? Perhaps they wanted her alive—but why? What was her importance beyond being a courier picking up a package? Taras couldn’t think of an answer, or at least the answer was somewhere buried inside the confusion in his head and he hoped it would surface later, like a bloated corpse from the bottom of a river.
He left the office and the building. Nobody challenged him to open the case. They were too sloppy, the internal security people, he thought. First he walked, deep in thought, working out his next move. When he found he was near Slavi Park, he entered and saw the first of the spring leaves scattered on the branches, like a magical picture of summer emerging from the blank sheet of paper that was winter.
He took the list from the bag and put it into a waste bin behind some toilets, then dropped a match on it. It flared a little but there was nothing else in the bin to catch fire and only a small plume of smoke that rapidly disappeared announced the list’s destruction. Only the blackened gum remained.
Then he went home, still on foot. The question he needed to work out now was how to make contact with Volkov, Masha’s boss. It was far too dangerous to go to Moscow—it was dangerous enough to bring pressure on him from Kiev. He was a powerful man. But Taras knew he would only find more answers by applying pressure to Volkov. A high-risk strategy certainly and he would have to think of a way that distanced him from Volkov as much as he could. A third person, a cutout who could threaten Volkov, or an anonymous communication, another drop arranged for Volkov to communicate with him. But he could think of no one he could trust. Either way, he would to some degree have to put himself in the firing line.
When he’d walked for half an hour, he took a bus to the west of the city and walked again to the small apartment he shared with his wife and two children. He was just reaching to put the key into the lock when he felt his phone vibrate. He lowered his hand from the door and answered it. It was a message from Logan Halloran. Just a suggestion for a drink, Logan was in Kiev—unexpectedly, he said. But nothing about Logan—nothing in a sense about any of this—was unexpected. Logan wanted something from him, even if the American didn’t really know what it was he wanted. And perhaps—now that he thought about it—Taras wanted something from Logan, too, but he knew what that was.
Taras turned away from his own front door and took a bus back into the centre of the city. He went to an Internet café near the cathedral and opened an account. Then he googled the American company Cougar. There were tens of thousands of sites. He scrolled down through pages of information, official sites, unofficial blogs, news reports, comments and attacks on the American security company, and began to read some twenty pages further on, a small, official announcement from two years earlier. No names, no details—just the carefully controlled information that concerned the “defection,” as it was called, of a female Russian colonel in the KGB who was in some way connected to Cougar and the CIA.
He closed and erased the account and walked swiftly back to his office. He would need SBU search engines to find out more. He walked through security and upstairs to his office. One message from his boss. Come to the fourth floor.
Taras opened his computer and logged in to search for wanted persons on the SBU list. Nothing there. He looked at requests from Moscow from two years before asking for help with “missing” Russian nationals. Then he put in “Logan Halloran” and came up with what they knew of his CIA background in the nineties when he was stationed in Bosnia. Nothing of interest that he hadn’t seen before. Finally, he found a small note from two years ago that concerned an approach Halloran had made to the KGB station head in Montenegro. Halloran was offering the whereabouts of a KGB defector for money. The KGB had alerted their friends in the SBU and the security agencies in other Eastern European countries who looked with favour on Moscow. Money had been paid, but the woman had evaded capture. The Montenegro station head had been recalled and replaced. A high-level colonel—the youngest colonel in the KGB—whose father had been the station head in Damascus in the seventies. He could have checked that, but then the name of the woman came up, under strict red security alert: Anna Resnikov. There was a photograph attached. Taras stared at her picture for a long time.
Then he closed the computer, took two packets of cigarettes from the drawer, and descended to the exit without responding to his boss’s order. When he was clear of the building, he texted Halloran and arranged to meet in the bar where they had arranged to meet three months before, when Taras was in Odessa and had to cancel. He detoured from the direct route to the bar, stopped at the railway station, and bought a ticket for the night train to Odessa.
25
THERE WERE THREE TENTS pitched in the canyon. Anna casually watched the three groups who were occupying them. It seemed they were all travelling youths from Western Europe, talking in Western European languages. One group was building a fire in a pit near the river and looked like they were preparing to make something to eat as the day drew to a close. A guitar played from somewhere behind one of the tents. It was just after five o’clock in the evening. The sun had disappeared behind the high walls of the deep canyon but it would be light for another few hours.
It had taken her a while to follow the forest track that began in foothills some distance behind the city of Sevastopol and led into the mountains. The campsite was a little too far from the city, but here at least she would pass unnoticed by the forest rangers, or by anyone else who might be inquisitive.
She walked over to a group of Swedes—two men and two women—and asked if they had any milk. She told them she would bring some back from the city in the morning. To the other campers around the tents, she was just another backpacker, waiting for her boyfriend to arrive. But she wanted to establish an easy relationship with them. It might be necessary to link up with them if her “boyfriend” didn’t arrive.
She decided to forego making herself something to eat. She was heading into the city, she told them. Long before it was dark and while they were becoming enthralled by their own experiences of the lonely place, helped by the quantities of beer that seemed to take up a large part of their travelling equipment, she would leave them and walk back towards the city. Where the track emerged from the mountains, she would find a vehicle that, for a small fee, would act as a taxi and take her to the hill right above Sevastopol that looked down over its bays. If she timed it right, she would be able to reconnoitre the shantytown while there was still enough light and then approach if she judged it safe. It was three days since she’d seen Irek.
At just before five thirty she began the walk back up the canyon. It was gloomy down here now, but there the sky was still bright above the canyon’s edges where the sun lit it as it slowly began to sink towards the west. By the time she entered the forest, you couldn’t have seen that there was light anywhere. When she was well away from the camp, she ran for four miles until she came to the small dirt road that led along the edge of the mountain. It connected a few farms and small holdings above the city. Below her, Sevastopol’s bays glittered in patches of white light from the sun, which was now heading for the horizon. It looked like there would be another great orange sun
set that filled the sky and turned the sea below into a flame of water.
She turned to the right and walked along the track. It was unlikely she would find a lift here, but as she was set for another two-mile walk, she heard a vehicle bouncing along the road behind her and finally saw it coming in her direction. She crossed to the other side and waited with her thumb out.
With a grinding of gears and hissing from its overheated engine, the truck drew up alongside her and she looked through the open window on the passenger side. The driver was a farmer. There were hay bales in the open truck bed and two dead chickens hanging upside down from a metal bar.
“I’m going to the east of the city,” she said. “Ten dollars?” It was a sum that she knew would divert anyone along this road from their course. He nodded and leaned over to open the door, which was impossible to open from the outside.
They drove in silence for a mile or so. But he kept looking sideways at her and eventually his curiosity needed an answer.
“Tourist?” he said.
“Yes. From America.”
“You speak Russian well.”
“My mother emigrated.”
“Are you alone?” His voice expressed concern rather than unwelcome curiosity.
“No. I’m with a party of friends. I went for a walk and got lost. I’m meeting them back in town.”
“You shouldn’t go into the mountains alone.”
“I won’t make the same mistake again. I thought I was going to be there for the night.”
The outskirts of the city began with potholed roads and grubby houses. Away to the east, she knew, was the shantytown, a mile or so from here. She looked across the wide seat.
“And you? Are you Russian?”
“Half and half. Maybe quarters or eighths.” He laughed. Then they reached the main road into the centre of town.
“Please drop me here,” she said. “There’s a bar where we’re meeting.”
He didn’t seem to mind about her safety now that they were on the edge of the city. She took a single ten-dollar bill from her trousers and gave it to him before they reached a small intersection on Shovkovychna, where he pulled into a truck park.
“Down that way,” he said. “You’d better find your friends. You attract too much attention.”
She climbed out of the cab without a word and turned down the hill.
When he was gone, she turned back up the hill again and ran towards the rising ground that looked down on the shantytown. Away from the road now and invisible from it, she found herself on a rise that gave her a view in both directions—back to the city and ahead to the shantytown below the hill where she was. She took binoculars from inside her jacket and laid them on the grass. Various bird-watching society badges in different states of disrepair hung from the straps. Burt’s boys had done a good job with all her equipment. She unscrewed one of the long lenses from the binoculars and extracted a small, powerful scope with a night vision lens and opened it up. There was still some light but the night lens would make the faces down below her clearer. She was about a quarter of a mile from the shanties. Around her were thick coarse grasses and a single granite rock behind which she crouched, out of sight.
First she swept the area from below the shantytown down towards the road she had walked up three days before and that led to the city. She was looking for unmarked vehicles parked or waiting with running engines, but the road contained only a few cars mostly heading in the direction of the centre of the city. Then she trained the scope onto the slopes above the shanties. Up in this direction she was looking for human signs; no vehicles could make it above the shanties. The ground was too steep.
They would be in a group, if they were waiting for her at all, or perhaps individuals who would be scattered at intervals above the shantytown.
After ten minutes studying the landscape, she saw no movements, but it was possible that any reception committee could be concealed by the rocks. She would check again a second time and maybe a third.
Then she swept the sides of the camp, first on the far side up towards the stream that the women used for washing and then back in the direction on the side of the camp from where she was looking. She saw nothing that caused her any alarm.
Finally she began to study the shantytown itself, dividing it into sectors that were defined by the area of the scope. She trained the scope steadily on each area, watching the movements of the mainly men and children going about their business or playing in the failing light. Each section of the camp showed the same sluggish, purposeless movement of a people caught in limbo. They were Tatar faces, some mixed Russian and Tatar, and these she watched more closely. It was possible that any special forces squad would simply intimidate the inhabitants of the shantytown in order to infiltrate men disguised as residents. That would be harder to gauge. Ultimately, it would be impossible from this distance to be sure.
Finally she focused the scope on Irek’s hut. She held it absolutely steady for more than five minutes, seeing no movement around it. Then she rolled over on her back, rested her eyes for a few minutes, and began the whole process again.
On the third sweep of the camp she saw a man emerge from the entrance to Irek’s makeshift home. He was taller than most of the men and had a similar dark skin colour, though it was hard to see colour now in the fading light. The man had more of a Middle Eastern look, she thought, than the Tatar faces around him. But it was something else about him that arrested her attention. He carried himself with an air of complete calm—a restfulness and self-containment that was alien to the other men she observed. He stood still, seeming to observe without observing, sensing rather than seeing. And she knew then the man was Balthasar.
She descended from the hill back in the direction from which she’d come. It was time to leave Larry a sign. She’d decided by now to go in. Out of sight of the shanties, on the far side of the hill, there was an ancient, broken wooden fence that ran along a field near the road at the foot of the hill. On the fourth post away from the road she left a piece of black tape stuck on the side not facing the road. Larry would be somewhere near, perhaps even observing her, but the black tape was the sign that she would enter the camp. Green was the sign for postponement. Then she walked back up the hill and took another sweep of the shantytown. There was nothing that caused her any more suspicion than before and she waited behind the rock until darkness had fallen completely.
At just before nine o’clock she skirted around above the shanties, keeping at least a quarter of a mile away and in the shadow of the hill, until she reached more rocky ground above the camp where it was easier to conceal herself. She put a shawl around her head that reached below her waist and changed her shoes for some cheap, broken, plastic sandals of the kind the women wore. She took a gun from her pack and wedged it in her waistband and covered her upper body and the gun with the shawl. She stuffed the pack into a crevice between two rocks. Then she began to pick her way down a steep rocky slope towards the edge of the Tatar encampment.
In the darkness, it was easy to enter the fringes of the camp without being observed. But Anna was past the first few dilapidated homes when she had the sensation of being watched. She didn’t turn or look up, keeping her head bent with her eyes looking where the light of open fires illuminated the rough ground. It was a male voice that challenged her, but she walked on, and either the man couldn’t be bothered to challenge her again or his curiosity was satisfied.
Ahead she could see Irek’s home, a paraffin burner inside catching the edges of the plastic sheet at the entrance and its glow penetrating a tentlike roof. She stopped and squatted on the ground so that her heartbeat became calm and she could allow herself to blend in with the surroundings and let the scenes around her become normal to her.
She must have been there for more than ten minutes during which she’d taken in everything in the camp she could see by the light of the small fires. She was aware of the presence she had seen from the hill earlier. He seemed to have a life force
about him that dominated the pallid energy of the camp. Either that, or she was in a state of heightened consciousness herself at his proximity. She hadn’t thought about him for over twenty years, since she was a child, yet suddenly he seemed very vivid in her mind, very close to her, as if they were old friends rather than childhood acquaintances, someone she had seen maybe a hundred times.
She stirred herself to get a different perspective on the camp and heard a footfall nearby.
“You are wearing blue this evening,” came a soft Russian voice. The voice came from behind her, to the side and about twenty feet away. He was keeping his distance, she thought, so as not to alarm her. But what dominated her mind was that beneath the shawl she wore a blue sweater and blue jeans. She could feel his presence strongly now and, turning her head, she saw a pair of boot-clad feet some way to her left.
“And you?” she asked without turning round again. “What are you wearing, Balthasar?” She felt the gun digging into her stomach and moved her right hand beneath the shawl and around the butt.
She felt him approach. He squatted down beside her and, looking straight ahead and not at her, said, “I’m wearing jeans, too, a black smock, wool hat, also black. It’s okay, you won’t need the gun. Not now, anyway,” he added.
She looked sideways at his profile and he still didn’t turn. She saw a soft smile playing around his lips. Then she looked ahead, as he was doing.
