by Dan Latus
I nodded. ‘In general terms. I know what was in the media.’
‘It didn’t work out too well, as you know. Ukraine lost Crimea and probably a chunk of territory in the east as well. They did manage to keep their popularly elected, pro-Western government, which isn’t as corrupt as the Russia-orientated one it replaced. That’s worth something, I suppose, but joining the EU and NATO — which they had wanted to do — is probably as far away as ever.’
He broke off to take delivery of breakfast.
‘Looks good!’ I volunteered.
The waitress smiled and poured us some coffee. ‘Jerry says there was nothing on CBC news about any trouble around Parksville. Maybe you picked up some little local station?’
‘Probably,’ I agreed. ‘It doesn’t really matter. We just wondered if we’d missed something exciting.’
‘Exciting? In Parksville? That’ll be the day!’
She laughed and took off with the coffee pot.
Harry looked at me and grimaced. ‘I should never have opened my mouth.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said again, shaking my head. ‘Anyway, you were saying?’
He sighed and resumed his account.
‘I was one of a number of people operating behind enemy lines, working against the separatists, those who wanted their part of Ukraine to be in Russia, and the rest of it oriented to Moscow.
‘You could understand that, in a way. Most of the people in those old, eastern industrial areas are ethnic Russian, and Russian-speaking. Inevitably, their cultural loyalties are to Moscow, which was their national capital until the collapse of the Soviet Union. They’d just been caught on the wrong side of the border when Ukraine became a separate country. The active separatists, though — most of the ones I encountered at least — were a nasty bunch. Violent, criminal, extremely nationalistic, corrupt — they were all those things, and more. Most of the population were not, of course, but the Seps — as we called them — ran the show. They were the ones that took up arms, established various militias and led the rebellion against the government in Kiev. Until the regular troops — the so-called volunteers — arrived from Russia, they were in charge. To be fair, the incoming Russian troops got rid of the worst Sep leaders. They were regular army guys, and they weren’t prepared to tolerate some of the criminal stuff that was going on, or the worst violence.’
‘What happened to the Seps?’ I asked.
‘Some just melted away. Others curbed their excesses. But quite a few reorganised into purely criminal gangs and carried on doing what they’d been doing. That was what happened to the militia I worked with. They got rich — became barbarian kings!’
This little history lesson was all very well, but it didn’t explain why Harry was now in so much trouble. I needed him to focus on the present.
‘So, what happened to you personally?’
‘I had become disillusioned and was getting ready to quit and pull out. The West had lost. The battle was over. In fact, it had never even got started.’ Harry shook his head at the memory. ‘From day one, Putin ran rings around the Western leaders. They had no idea how to deal with him. In fact, they couldn’t even see this new kind of warfare for what it was. They just hoped it was an unpleasantness that would go away without them having to do anything.
‘Anyway, the leader of the militia I was working with received some important information, a new battle plan. I seized the opportunity, grabbed it and ran. Henderson told me to head for Slovakia with it for a debriefing. That was the supposedly secret meeting I told you about. When I got there, I found a room full of dead people, like I told you. If I’d been on time, I would have been one of the corpses. After that, I told Henderson I was done. I was out of it.’
‘You quit? Retired, just like that?’
‘Just like that. I’d had enough. And he needed to get that damned leak plugged.’
We ate in silence for a while after that.
‘How’re the eggs?’ Harry asked at last.
‘Good.’ I was surprised I had any appetite, but I was enjoying the breakfast. ‘These are sunny-side up. So, what other ways can you have fried eggs?’
‘Easy over. Hard over. Depends how you like ’em.’
‘I’ll have to try them all. Harry, there’s still something I don’t understand. Why are the Seps chasing you?’
‘Offended pride,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Thirst for revenge. Who knows?’
‘Offended pride? They would come all the way out here for that?’
‘Well . . .’ he said, scraped his plate clean and reached for a slice of toast.
‘Revenge?’ I pressed. ‘That doesn’t sound right either, not when they’ve got a war going on back there in Ukraine.’
‘Well, not only that.’
‘No? What else then?’
‘I told you. I have something I took from them. They want it back.’
‘This battle plan? They must want it pretty badly.’
He didn’t say anything to that.
‘Have you thought of just giving it to them?’
He shook his head.
‘It must be pretty damned important!’
‘Leave it, Frank. When I can tell you more, I will.’
‘Make it soon, Harry. I’m getting tired of all this.’
‘It’s not one-sided, Frank,’ he said sharply, pointing a knife loaded with red jam at me. ‘They have something I want back.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Kiev, Ukraine. August 2018.
Twice a day she would do an intensive workout. It used up a couple of hours. She had to do something. This was her way of staying on top, keeping control. Some things she couldn’t change right now, so she brushed them aside and focused instead on what she could control.
Both mind and body benefited. She was in charge. She decided what she would do. That kept her spirits high and made her feel better about herself. Besides, if she were ever to leave this place, which she was absolutely determined to do, she had to be fit and strong enough to seize whatever opportunity came her way.
And opportunity would come. She truly believed that. Always, but always, something did turn up. You couldn’t live the kind of life she and Harry had lived for so long without believing that. You just had to be ready.
She heard the key rattle in the door and broke off from her thoughts. She sat down and waited anxiously. Would it be Petrov this time, come to make good on his promise?
It was one of the two men who alternated in bringing her food. He didn’t speak as he put down a plate of bread and cheese, and she didn’t speak to him. The door clanged shut again as he left. She listened to the sound of the key turning in the lock. When all was quiet again, she relaxed. Again, Petrov hadn’t come.
She returned to her thoughts. Although she spent a lot of time weighing up various possibilities of escape, in the end she always came back to the same thing. If she was ever to leave this cell, ruling out building collapse, it would be via the only way in and out of it: the door. She needed to concentrate on that.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Vancouver Island, September 2018.
We emerged from the diner into low cloud and incessant drizzle. Our waitress had been unduly optimistic with her weather forecast.
‘I can’t see any sign of sunshine,’ I remarked as we climbed into the truck.
‘Me neither.’ Harry looked over his shoulder and began reversing out of the parking bay. ‘But that’s no surprise.’
‘No?’
He stopped and engaged first gear. ‘It always rains up here. This end of the island is famous for it.’
‘That why you chose to live here?’ I asked with a grin.
‘No, Frank. It isn’t.’
I waited, but he didn’t say anything more.
Out on the highway we soon got up to speed. There was still very little traffic. Apart from a laden logging truck going in the opposite direction, we didn’t see another vehicle for a long stretch, making me wonder if exte
nding the road this far had been economically justifiable.
No cops either, I was relieved to see. Not so far, at least.
‘I thought we might have hit a police road stop by now.’
Harry shook his head. ‘They’ve got nothing on us.’
‘The motel has a record of the plates on the truck.’
‘You think?’
I stared at him until it clicked. ‘You changed them?’
He nodded. ‘Last night, after it got dark.’
‘How very foresightful of you.’
‘Old habit. Leave nothing to chance.’
I wondered how many sets of licence plates he carried. It wasn’t a habit I’d ever got into, but I could see it might make sense in Harry’s world.
What I didn’t do was tell him about a precaution I had taken myself while he’d been in the rest room back at the restaurant. He didn’t seem concerned about leaving a trail of dead bodies behind us as we fled the scene, but I was. It had seemed a good time to tell the man who might be able to help us out.
* * *
Henderson answered immediately, making me wonder if he’d been sitting with the phone in his hand for the past forty-eight hours or so. Perhaps he had.
‘What have you got for me, Mr Doy?’
‘I’ll have to make this brief.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Harry picked me up after I left Victoria to travel north. I was followed. Russians from Ukraine, he says. During the night we were attacked in a motel by three hitmen. It finished with one of them dead, another just about dead and the third with broken legs. We got out immediately afterwards, without waiting for the police or the hitmen’s back-up to arrive.’
Henderson took it in his stride. ‘Any injuries to either of you?’
‘No. But I’m thinking this would be a good time for you to call in any favours your contacts over here owe you. Harry doesn’t want us to deal with the police, but somebody must. They won’t be able to turn a blind eye to what happened at the motel.’
‘Leave it with me, Mr Doy.’
Harry returned soon after I had put the phone away. We paid our bill, left, and got rolling again.
‘I came to live here,’ Harry said conversationally, as if we had been talking about it just a moment ago, ‘partly because I wanted somewhere safe where I could relax and take the pressure off. So it had to be somewhere a long way from where I’d ever been working. Here is pretty darned remote, I grant you, but remote was an attractive word in my lexicon back then. It still is.’
‘Remote, eh? Well, you got that right, Harry.’
‘I did, didn’t I?’
He started laughing. I did, too, caught up in the moment. Everything seemed absurd after the night we’d just had.
‘How do you reckon the Seps found you here?’ I asked eventually, when we’d settled down again.
‘Well, I might have said leaks. Traditionally, that’s generally been the best way of finding people and things, although these days computer hacking probably deserves top billing.’
‘Is that a “but” I hear?’
‘It is. On this occasion, I told ’em myself, more or less.’
That was even more absurd. I was beginning to feel like Alice must have done when she stepped into the rabbit hole.
* * *
Harry pulled off the road into a small parking area overlooking a view of water and islands. I could see he wanted to tell me something important, or complicated.
‘I’m going to have to tell you things no one else knows, Frank. You’ve earned the right after last night. You’ve shared the risks.’
‘So tell me. I’ve been asking long enough.’
He took a deep breath and began.
‘I was alongside a militia in Donbass. The boss man there is a guy called Petrov, Dmitri Petrov. I was like a volunteer, a sympathiser. Gradually, he came to trust me, and confide in me.’
‘Trust you?’
Harry shrugged. ‘That can be part of the job, getting people to trust you.’
‘And it’s no doubt easy for you, Harry,’ I said with a grin.
‘What? Oh, yeah. Joke, right? My winning personality. Well, you’ve got that right, I suppose. It’s not easy, but I can do it. So, Petrov trusted me, largely because he couldn’t trust any of his colleagues. They didn’t trust him either, and with good reason. He’s a nasty piece of work. But I was an outsider, something different. One day the opportunity arose for me to get hold of something he had that would be important to NATO — the new battle strategy I told you about. Losing it, I knew, would also blow him out of the water with Moscow. So, I took it.’
Harry shrugged. ‘That was how it started. Since then, he’s been looking for me, without getting anywhere close, apart from the near miss in Slovakia I told you about. The situation changed when I had to contact him about something he had of mine. I offered him a deal, which he turned down. The upshot is he now knows I’m here on Vancouver Island, but not exactly where.’
What a convoluted tale! And how much of it did I believe?
‘Two questions, Harry. This battle plan you keep mentioning — what’s it for? And, secondly, what has he got of yours?’
‘What I’ve got is the battle plan for a Russian occupation of Estonia, along the lines they’ve used in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Actually, I’ve also got the Russian plan for a cyber attack on Western Europe, but the main thing is the Estonia battle plan.’
‘On a flash drive? A memory stick?’
Harry nodded. ‘But better than that, I’ve also got a printout Petrov made from what he was given. It’s a numbered copy of the plan, for the eyes of the intended recipient only. Coding all the way through means that if a copy goes astray, there’s no doubt about who to blame.’
‘Why was he given it?’
‘The militia he heads up has been identified as a good one to use in Estonia, which is another country with a big Russian population.’
‘Another career opportunity then?’
Harry nodded. ‘But he needs to get the blueprint back. Otherwise, his days are numbered. Moscow will disown and discard him, or worse. Worse, probably. Hopefully.’
I mulled it over and then asked the other obvious question.
‘So that’s what you’ve got of his. But what has he got of yours?’
‘A woman.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘A woman?’ I repeated, laughing and shaking my head. ‘Harry, I’ve got news for you. You don’t own women in this day and age. Not in the modern world, you don’t. Where have you been living?’
Harry laughed too. He was loosening up quite a bit since he’d decided to talk to me.
‘Forgive the figure of speech, Frank. I just meant I’ve got something he wants back, and in retaliation he’s abducted someone I want released — a woman called Johanne Erickson.’
‘What is she to you? A colleague, or . . . ?’
‘More than that. She is a colleague, but we’ve also been partners for several years. We set up a home here together.’
‘On the island?’
He nodded.
A romantic entanglement. That was something I hadn’t anticipated. I didn’t suppose Giles Henderson had either.
I sighed. ‘My God, Harry,’ I said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. ‘All this for a woman?’
‘What did you think I was doing it for, Frank? Money?’
‘Well . . .’ I was still trying to overcome the shock of it. ‘OK. You’d better tell me about her.’
He reached for the ignition. ‘Let’s just get going. At least you know now.’
We swung back out onto the highway. Heavy drizzle had started up again after a brief interlude and cloud was down to the treetops on either side of the road. Harry switched the main beams on and settled down to drive carefully, keeping within the speed limit for once, out of respect for the now greasy surface.
Despite the conditions, he seemed happier, calmer. I can’t say I was. He might have d
ivested himself of some of the load he was carrying but I was having trouble working out the implications of what he had just told me.
‘Presumably Petrov knows you and this woman are an item?’
‘Possibly not. He might think she’s just another NATO spy.’
‘Meaning it could just be a coincidence that he’s lifted her?’
Harry didn’t reply.
It seemed most unlikely to me. Harry wasn’t naïve but excessive optimism, or plain wishful thinking, was leaving him unable to face reality. I thought it highly likely that this Petrov character did know the connection between them, and that was why he’d abducted this particular woman.
Given his position, Petrov would be crafty as a fox, savage as a wolf. He would know all sorts of things. By mixing business and pleasure, Harry seemed to have given him an ideal opportunity to get even. Once again, though, I bit my tongue. It would have done no good to spell out what I thought.
‘What about Henderson? Does he know?’
Harry shook his head. ‘No one knows. It’s a relationship we’ve taken care to keep hidden.’
‘Hard to keep something like that a secret.’
He laughed cheerfully, maddeningly. ‘Frank, we live in a world of secrets! It’s second nature to us to conceal what we’re doing.’
How could he laugh? It was really annoying, and I wasn’t at all amused. In fact, I was thoroughly pissed off. This was not the type of situation I’d thought I was getting into.
On the other hand, I reflected ruefully, what had I thought I was getting into? The picture never had been terribly clear. At the end of the day, I was supposedly here to help Harry survive, and I still wanted to do that.
At the same time, I could now see another reason for Harry wanting me, rather than Henderson’s people, alongside him. Professional spooks would be all business in their approach to the job. They would want to get their hands on the battle plan and to hell with anything else. Anyone unlucky enough to get in the way, like this woman, would be collateral damage. Unfortunate, but a fact of life.