by Alex Dryden
“It’s been over twenty years,” he said at last.
“How did you know?” she replied. “How did you know the colours? How is it done?”
“I’d know you,” he said. “You have the same smell as when you were five years old,” he continued. “But you’re right, it’s more than that. Seeing colour without eyes is a simple trick. At least to me.” Then he turned and she felt his face on hers and she turned towards him, too. He was apparently looking at her, if you didn’t know he was blind. “Maybe I can teach you sometime, Anna,” he said.
“Are you alone?” she said, looking into his face, which flickered with amusement in the soft glow of a fire to their left.
“Apart from a couple of hundred Tatars,” he said.
“Why are you here?” she said.
“I might ask you the same thing,” he replied good-humouredly. “But there are other things first. I want to hear about you. I see your mother from time to time, but she doesn’t see me. I know she hates the KGB. Maybe she always did, even when she was married to your father and living at the KGB station in Damascus. So I don’t embarrass her by visiting.”
“You know all about me,” she said. “I’m a wanted traitor. They’ve tried to take me back to Russia at least twice. You must know about me.”
“I know those things,” he said vaguely. “But what is it you’re doing with your life? What is the picture you are painting? Avenging your husband, Finn? You think you are going to bring down the regime in Moscow, perhaps? What about your boy?”
She stiffened.
“Why have you chosen this life for yourself?” he said. “There are better things in the world for a woman like you.”
She paused. “I have a whole life to clean out before I can begin again,” she said. “I made my choices and now my choices are changing again.” She looked at him. “And you, Balthasar? What choices are you going to make? You can be a great hero by bringing me back.”
He laughed. “I’m already a great hero,” he said. “And it’s the heroes they don’t trust most of all.” He paused and bent his head towards the ground. “If we ever truly make choices, it’s not for a long time,” he said. “We have to be rid of the automatic, the compulsive, the careless, the stupid—then we can make choices if we can at all. So I, too, am at a turning point in my life.” He turned his head towards her. “You are pleased to see me?” he asked, and the question came at her from out of the blue.
She didn’t need to think, but she paused anyway. “Yes,” she said finally. “I’m pleased to see you, Balthasar.” That was all she could say for now. She felt a confusion in her mind, seeing this blind man whom she hadn’t seen since they were both children. She didn’t understand the confusion. But against it, she felt that everything she was doing here, in Ukraine, for Cougar, paled in comparison.
They sat in silence for a moment, then she spoke again. “The reason Finn died is because he forgot how to act in his own best interests. He forgot he could choose.”
They squatted in the dim light of the distant fire. Above the camp, the waxing moon was three days away from its fullness.
“We must decide in the next few minutes how it’s going to be with us,” he said finally.
Without speaking they stood and walked side by side to Irek’s home.
Balthasar pushed back the flap of the tent opening and beckoned her to enter. His arm pointed her towards the rugs and the paraffin lamp that swung slightly with the movement of the sheet flap and the light breeze that followed it. She bent and walked into the hut and saw Irek sitting in the same position where she had left him three days before. She looked around to check for any other presence, but could see nothing. The woman who had been in the closed-off section of the home and had brought tea was absent. Irek was making a pipe, patiently filling the bowl and lighting a charcoal fragment in his hands. He didn’t look up as they sat down on the cushions in front of him.
“Enemies or allies?” he said and, when neither of them replied, he said, “How does a poor people like ours—the poorest of peoples—become mixed up in the world’s affairs? We have no voice, no place that is home, no living to make, and, maybe, no future. Yet here we are, with supplicants from America and Russia who perhaps both wish to engineer our final destruction.” He looked at them, leaning his pipe against a crate next to him. “We have nothing to give you and we are wary of your gifts, whether of money or information.”
Balthasar leaned forward and took the pipe, as if he were an equal to the man whose house they were in. Then he handed it effortlessly to Irek. “Let’s smoke,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you what we can do.”
Irek lit the pipe, took several puffs, and then passed it to Balthasar who did the same. Finally, Anna sat and smoked. It was stronger than the time before and she felt her head swim. The small space seemed to sway in front of her eyes before she could focus again. She wondered if soon the flap of the entrance would be thrown back and Russian spetsnaz would drag her from here and she fought down her fear.
Finally, it was Balthasar who spoke. “I have been instructed to offer you money,” he said to Irek. “The purpose of the money is for you to build a mosque, a school—later some houses, perhaps.” He paused. “But that is not the real purpose.”
Anna turned to study his face. It was completely at peace. She saw the face of someone who had made his choice.
“The real purpose is to implicate you in some Russian action against Russians in Ukraine,” he said calmly. “Then you will be blamed first. After that the Ukrainian government will be blamed for not protecting Russian interests here. I know all this, but I wasn’t told it,” he added. He looked at Anna. “The lady is right, Irek. She and this company she works for by the name of Cougar have found the purpose behind this offer from the Russians.”
Anna looked at him and felt a wave of astonishment. This was the moment of truth. If the whole game with Irek and Qubaq, and Balthasar’s presence, was simply to capture her, it would be now. But there was no movement that she could detect outside the shanty and inside all three of them were completely still. It was as if breathing had stopped.
“Why do you tell me this?” Irek said at last.
“Perhaps we can stop it happening,” he said simply.
26
TARAS DECIDED TO MEET LOGAN HALLORAN at a roadside café restaurant called Karmaliuk twenty-five miles east of Kiev. It was a place owned by a reliable friend of his wife’s from schooldays and who Taras knew well. He and Sasha occasionally went fishing together and, more often, left the rods in the car and stayed drinking in the yard if it was summer or by the fire at the rear of the café where Sasha kept a private room for friends. Mainly it was sufficiently far outside Kiev, where he was afraid he might by chance be spotted meeting Halloran.
He was early, parked his wife’s car at the rear, away from the road, and was enjoying a cold beer when Sasha told him that an American had come into the bar. Taras downed the half glass that remained and walked through to the front.
“Follow me,” he said, without greeting Logan. “I’ll meet you in the front. A blue Fiat.”
Taras drove around to the front and watched as Logan pulled out behind him onto the road. He kept his eyes in the rearview mirror and slowed twice to allow vehicles to overtake him. When he was satisfied that Logan had come alone, he chose a dirt track off the road to the left that wound along the banks of a small river and through two villages before Taras turned again to the left and up to the edge of a wood. He cut the engine and stayed in the car. He watched Logan in the mirror as he slammed the door of a hired Toyota Land Cruiser and walked slowly up behind him. The American was twirling the car keys round and round his forefinger and, to Taras, looked altogether too relaxed.
When Logan stepped into the passenger seat and had shut the door, Taras began to talk without letting him speak first. At the same time he patted down the American, turning out his jacket pockets and looking for wires or mikes.
“We want your help
before I can give you anything,” Taras said. “Whatever it is you want, I’ll give you information for an agreed fee paid into a bank in Austria, details to be provided, either on a monthly basis or as a one-off, depending on the type of information you require.” He finished checking Logan and was satisfied. Then he looked ahead of him straight out of the car’s windscreen. “That’s my side. But before I commit to anything, I want something from you.” Taras kept looking straight ahead, as if he was embarrassed by what he was saying. And he supposed that he was. Despite the insincerity of the offer he was making to the American, he still felt dirty doing it. But now he turned and faced Logan. “That’s the deal, no negotiation, no questions, nothing—until you give me what I want. And I have to see the results of what I’m asking before I commit to helping you or Cougar. Either way, we don’t meet again. We set up a drop if we’re to do business.”
He sat back, realising his shoulders and back had been tensed as soon as Logan stepped into the car. He felt his back was rigid and a heat was coming from inside him. He didn’t know if the American was going to laugh in his face, if Halloran’s interest in him had never been about anything other than some lonely social reason. Maybe he was just a foreigner in Kiev, a spy with a knack for making contacts who might help him. Halloran’s background, Taras knew, suggested otherwise, however. For a moment, Taras didn’t understand why someone of Burt Miller’s calibre ever employed Halloran. He seemed a busted flush. So, either the American wanted something from him for his own reasons, some private game he was playing—and that was highly likely in Taras’s opinion—or he had been assigned by Cougar to befriend Taras and make an approach.
Logan sat in silence. The silence lengthened and Taras tried to remain cool, but he felt this heat inside him intensifying. He wanted to open the car’s windows, but he knew it had nothing to do with the temperature. He thought of Masha and the risks he was taking. He thought of what he would do even if he managed to free her. They would never let her go voluntarily, he knew that. And he knew the most likely outcome was that—once they’d gotten everything out of her they thought she knew—they’d make a deal with the Russians and hand her over. And then it would all begin again for his cousin.
“I can do that,” Logan replied languidly, at last. “Even if I don’t know what the answer you’re looking for is.”
He looked at Taras and Taras turned away, uncomfortable in the company of Halloran. It was going against all his better instincts to be talking to the American at all.
“If you don’t know, then it’s no deal,” he said. “If you don’t know, find out or get out.”
“You’d better ask me, then, Taras,” Logan replied, and smiled at the Ukrainian.
“What was Resnikov picking up in the Crimea in January? Outside Sevastopol?”
Logan was taken aback, but he sat completely still, maintaining an expression of relaxed calm. How did Taras know about Anna? Even he knew only because Theo Lish had told him. Logan had become closer to Theo since he’d begun to give the CIA chief some oddments about Cougar’s operations. “Blueprints,” he said. “Blueprints of extensions to the port of Novorossiysk.”
“Did she get them out of the country?”
“As far as I know, yes. Burt Miller seemed pleased that they showed the Russians weren’t serious about expanding the port sufficiently to take their Black Sea fleet.” Logan’s mind was racing. He felt a rush of power giving away this information. He felt it redressed some kind of balance he’d lost in Burt Miller’s considerations.
“Why was he pleased?” Taras asked.
“Because Miller has a theory the Russians are never going to leave Sevastopol. That Sevastopol is some kind of beachhead for their further encroachment into Ukraine.” Logan shrugged. “That’s not the American view,” he said. “The CIA view.” Logan was at the centre of power, giving Taras not just Miller’s but the CIA’s opinion. His face flushed with excitement in the dark car.
“She came into Ukraine a second time,” Logan volunteered. “I’m not sure for what. And I think she’s in the country again,” he added.
“Where?” Taras said.
Logan looked at him. “Come on, Taras, that’s information the Russians would pay a lot of money for. You don’t think that even if I knew I’d just give it away.”
“The Crimea?” Taras pressed him.
“Probably. That’s where Miller sees the Russians making their move. If they intend to make a move at all,” he added dismissively.
“What identity is she travelling under?”
“I don’t know. And anyway, if you want to hand her over to the Russians, why would I tell you?” Logan answered. “Whatever it is you can give me, it won’t be worth as much as that.”
“It doesn’t sound like you care one way or the other what happens to her,” Taras replied, and this time he turned and looked at Logan and didn’t like at all what he saw.
Logan sat with his hands in his lap, the fingers gently crossing each other. Did he care what happened to her? he wondered. For a long time, he’d been ambivalent about her.
“She’s already killed two KGB operatives in the Crimea,” he said. “I’d be careful of her, if I were you, Taras.”
“I know what she’s done.”
Taras felt a fury rise up in him. The American worked with this woman and evidently couldn’t care less what happened to her. It reminded him of Masha’s boss in Moscow, casually using someone to pass on highly dangerous information she knew nothing about. He felt the prospects of Masha hanging on to life diminish in the face of such cynicism.
“Tell Burt Miller,” he said, “that I know who his source is in Moscow. At any rate, the source who provided the blueprints. Tell Miller that I’ll reveal this source to the Russians unless I have his help. And unless I get to see Resnikov. Here. In Ukraine. Tell him I’ll leave a message for Resnikov at the drugstore on Ochakovstev Street in Sevastopol. If I don’t hear from her in three days, I’ll reveal his man in Moscow.” He looked at Logan and handed him a scrawled note. Logan read it, then screwed it into a ball and put it in his pocket. Instructions. He’d dispose of them later.
“Now get out,” Taras said.
27
THE FIRST THING LOGAN NOTICED from the launch as it crossed the harbour was that a surface-to-air missile system had been fitted to the stern deck of the Cougar. Burt Miller’s vessel lay at anchor—and apparently at peace—in deep water on the fringes of the port of Piraeus.
But as Logan stepped off the launch and onto some steps dropped specially for him, he noted that the crew appeared to be in a state of readiness to depart. He guessed the Cougar would be leaving before nightfall, as soon as his meeting with Burt was completed. Rumour on land at the harbour master’s office—which Logan had taken his usual meticulous care to discover before he stepped onto the launch—suggested that Istanbul was the vessel’s next port of call and from there, he assumed, it would be heading up through the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea. If that was the case, then Burt was breaking his agreement with Theo Lish.
As his ambitions grew and his formless resentment served as fuel for that growth, to Logan everything was information now, and all knowledge might—at some point—be used to his own advantage.
It was an unseasonably hot and sultry afternoon at the back end of April, but the sea breeze made the boat an infinitely pleasanter place to be than on land in the port itself. He came up the steps and arrived onboard the Cougar and looked across the blue haze that joined the sea to the sky. Logan paused on the deck, admired the gleaming missiles, observed the crew going about their business, sniffed the breeze as if there might be some useful message in that, too, and then descended stairs towards the operations room.
It was less than twenty-four hours since he’d made the meeting with Taras and the time for making a decision was running out. There were now just forty-eight hours before the Ukrainian said that he would hand Cougar’s Moscow agent to the Russians. But if Logan had anticipated Burt being in
a state of anxiety at having a possible spoiler thrown in the works to upset his plans—whatever they were—he was proved wrong.
Now, from across the huge, polished wood desk in the deck-wide operations room of the Cougar, Burt stood, hands in the pockets of immaculately ironed white trousers, a cigar blowing its occasional, arcane signals from an anchor-shaped ashtray next to him, and with the air of a man who directed events rather than being directed by them.
Logan had been urged by a butler to sit in a chair on the far side of the table where he now half slouched, sipping a glass of water and contemplating how this approach from Taras Tur had suddenly and perhaps fortuitously, put him at the centre of events. Burt turned from studying some papers Logan couldn’t see and rested his eyes for a minute on his brilliant, if sometimes wayward, operative.
“Do you believe him?” Burt asked mildly. “That’s what I want to know. What does your instinct tell you, Logan? How could this SBU officer possibly know the identity of our agent?”
As Logan looked back into Burt’s eyes he saw they contained an expressionless stare that was unusual for him, but there was none of the hostility he’d received at their last meeting. Burt was the picture of calm, his genial self apparently unruffled by the prospect of time trickling away towards the deadline.
“I don’t know if we can afford not to believe him,” Logan replied. “It seems he has all the cards. We disbelieve him at our peril.”
“But that isn’t the same thing,” Burt replied with what seemed to Logan a deliberately exaggerated patience, like a long-suffering schoolteacher’s. “It’s not the answer to the question I asked you, in fact. Never mind ‘affording not to.’ Do you believe him?” he repeated. “That’s what I most want to know. You were there, my boy. As always, I value your judgement of human character.”
Logan thought for a moment about his meeting with Taras and the two times he had met the Ukrainian before. If you forgot he worked for a foreign intelligence service, Taras was an honest man, at least in Logan’s opinion. He found he liked him, despite his recent—and out of character—aggression towards him at the meeting in the car. There was a quality of innocence in Taras that, perhaps, reawakened some lost innocence of Logan’s own. But if it did, he drove it underground again; it was too painful to look in the face. Nevertheless, Taras’s obvious sincerity had made Logan feel connected in a way that he hadn’t felt when he’d met Taras on previous occasions. In fact, in his opinion—now that he thought about it more closely—Taras seemed to be operating at a personal level rather than being the dumb automaton of the SBU. Logan didn’t understand why he thought that—or why the Ukrainian would be acting outside the parameters of his job at all. It was just an instinct. There was something about Taras’s brand of anxiety in the car that went beyond the regular strictures of a job and into the realm of the personal. It was a fine distinction, but it made all the difference.
