by Alex Dryden
The Blind Spy
ALEX DRYDEN
www.headline.co.uk
Copyright © 2010 Alex Dryden
The right of Alex Dryden to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011
All characters in this publication – apart from the obvious political figures – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978 0 7553 7336 9
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
To Mia, I love you anyway
‘Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.’
Joseph Stalin, April 1945
‘You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state.’
Vladimir Putin to George W. Bush, April 2008
PROLOGUE
August 1971
LIEUTENANT VALENTIN VIKTOROV walked carefully and with evident hesitation through the labyrinth of Aleppo’s covered souk. A keen-eyed observer perhaps might have described him as being lost, but, lost or not, it was clear that he had his mind on things other than his surroundings.
He was a tall man with short-cropped fair hair and an athletic build. His face was so finely shaven, his skin so smooth, that he looked almost too young to be shaving at all. He certainly looked far younger than his twenty-seven years, and gave off an appearance of youth that a teenage Russian army conscript on leave might have done, rather than the seasoned KGB intelligence officer that he was.
Despite the fact that he was not on official assignment on this summer morning, he was operating as he always did for KGB undercover work when he was outside the secret, closed and protected spaces of the Soviet spy elite, places like the embassy compound in Damascus from which he had set off before the sun came up. In other words, if anything went wrong, he was unprotected. He carried no identification from the embassy that would get him out of trouble if that was what he was heading into.
But the difference between a normal undercover operation and his activities this morning was that this was a personal mission – the KGB had no part in it. It was his own solo, private operation, and one that would have drawn deep disapproval from his boss, should he have known of it, possibly bringing an end to his career altogether. He had no back-up for what he was about to do.
Dressed in the drab civilian clothes of Soviet Russia he seemed, like Russia itself, drained of colour and bereft of joy. In this he was clearly distinguishable from the bustling and colourful Arab throng in the souk. Not just his clothes and his height, but also his pronounced Slavic features set him distinctively apart from the Arabs.
He was distinguishable too – though more subtly so – from the few, mostly Western tourists who might look like him with their Caucasian features, but that was where the resemblance ended. Unlike Valentin, they were all staring wide-eyed at their surroundings and carrying armfuls of cheap souvenirs which they would be taking back home with them. Unlike nearly all of these other visitors to the souk that morning, Valentin seemed unimpressed by his surroundings and he carried nothing that was visible.
Only the thick packet concealed in his buttoned-down shirt pocket and the small emergency pistol tucked away beneath the waistband of his trousers accompanied him.
But there was something about his urgently controlled movements, the hard muscles of his body visible through the shirt and his alert and watchful eyes that anyway suggested he was something altogether other than a tourist. He didn’t seem to belong in the souk, even as a visitor. He looked like a man prepared, and preparing, for some kind of sudden action that was in another order of things than merely a shopping expedition. There was, too, a sense of latent violence about him; his toned and muscled body appeared to reach out for a reason to be employed to the full. He was a pumped-up sportsman, a human missile ready to go off. He certainly didn’t look like a tourist sponge soaking up the wonders of the place. He was a part of his surroundings, while also being apart. And unlike the tourists, he spoke fluent Arabic.
Valentin paused with the minute attention of a bookkeeper at the cupboard-sized shops on either side of the narrow alley. But he didn’t really look at their contents. If his eyes were focused at all on what was around him, he looked without seeing. There was a nervousness about him, which expressed itself in small, tense movements. He repeatedly brushed his short-cropped fair hair with one hand and occasionally touched the buttoned-down pocket of his white shirt with the other. It was an anxious gesture made as if to reassure himself that the package was still there. The muscles of his lean jaw twitched every time he felt the package and after each contact with it he thrust his hands back into the pockets of his grey trousers as though to physically restrain them from the obsessive checking of the pocket.
Valentin walked on, blindly surveying the over-filled alcoves crammed up against the alley that was wide enough for a donkey loaded with panniers to pass by, but not much bigger.
What separated him too from the other visitors to the souk was that he looked at these little shops one by one, without any of the discernment of the real, dedicated shopper. It was as if he were seeing them for the first time, even though that was far from the truth. Anyone who watched him closely would have said that he wasn’t truly looking for anything, in fact; that he wasn’t a potential customer at all, and that his mission was actually elsewhere than in the souk. The souk and its multitude of variegated delights were there to slow him down, to delay an arrival of some kind. And in his heart, he knew that he was stopping deliberately. And he knew that the reason for these pauses was in order to postpone his purpose – they we
re not the purpose itself.
The traders and hawkers who crowded the souk’s alleys on either side of him were volubly selling their jute sacks of multicoloured spices, green and mauve soaps piled up like sweet-smelling brick walls, lurid meats that dripped blood from hooks and butchers’ blocks and which ran thickly away into the runnel along the centre of the stone alleyway. And then there were other shops that sold the red and white keffiyehs the Arabs wrapped around their heads, the silk and nylon dresses in gaudy gold and green, the striped woollen jellabahs, the sheepskins that betrayed the rancid smell of under-curing, the vegetables piled high in pyramids, the tin and brass lamps and lanterns ... On it went, fifteen kilometres of covered market in all, a warren of commerce that sold produce from China and central Asia, the Levant, the Arab countries, Russia – even the West – in this place, Aleppo, the world’s oldest of trading cities.
And in every direction in which Valentin flickered his sharp, electric-blue eyes, what he saw were the photographs of the Soviet Union’s ally, the stern president of Syria, Hafez al Assad, which, whether faded or new, looked down on the commerce and haggling, the conversation and coffee-drinking, like a looming superstition that threatened reprisal of some kind, rather than a figure of flesh and blood. Valentin was accustomed enough to the threatening faces that gazed down from walls back in his own country to hardly notice this one.
He stepped aside for a man with a frayed stick who was driving a donkey laden with baskets of green leaves along the covered narrow alley. The man, like all the Arabs, barely looked at him and, when he did – and then only briefly – it seemed to be done deliberately without curiosity. Was it fear of contact with foreigners that kept their eyes cast aside after the briefest of glances? No, he thought, the foreigner – whether a casual tourist or one of the Russian military and intelligence personnel like himself – was irrelevant to their daily lives. These people simply went about their business, that was all.
Not for the first time, Valentin was shocked by the freedom and social detachment which commerce brought to the people even under a dictatorship like Syria’s – and which was absent in his own country where commerce was a dirty, even a criminal word.
In a moment of reflection that suddenly brought him into the moment, Valentin pondered that he was leaving all this behind him now anyway. He was well into the last week of his posting to Syria. Three years it had been since first he’d been sent down from Moscow. He’d graduated from the KGB school at Balashiha-2 in The Forest outside Moscow, then he’d spent two years behind a desk. He’d learned Arabic and was taken under the wing of a rising star in the KGB’s foreign intelligence department. This senior officer had then requested Valentin’s transfer to Damascus, where this mentor had been made head of station. And now, in just over five days, Valentin would be returning to Moscow again for another posting, to another Arab country, he supposed – or maybe it would be just a desk job at the KGB’s highly secretive Department S, in the Arab section, of course.
But it wasn’t nostalgia brought on by his departure from the country that had drawn him up from the KGB station in Damascus to Syria’s second capital, Aleppo. He hadn’t come to say goodbye – not to the country, at any rate, or even just to Aleppo. He was perfectly aware that his slow progress through the souk was purposeful in its delay for another reason entirely. The private reason he had made this trip to the north of the country was hard for him to accomplish and he was postponing the moment a little longer. He was neither savouring it – this particular end – nor fearing it. Nevertheless, why he had come to Aleppo contained a finality that he wished to put off.
He turned to the left down another alley in the neat grid of the souk. Like all the others in this maze, it was filled with the conflicting sights and smells of spice and skins and alimentary produce. The sounds of an Arab lute came and went from a record player in a carpet shop. He stopped briefly at the shop and fingered some Kurdish kelims, but he didn’t truly see them, either. His mind was elsewhere and as soon as the shopkeeper tried to get him to buy something he walked on, stiffly smiling a thank-you, and pretending he couldn’t speak their language. He fingered the packet in the buttoned-down pocket of his shirt once more to make sure that it was still there. The gun was cool against his skin and a constant heavy presence.
At the end of the alley, or perhaps it was at the end of the one after that, he saw daylight and headed towards it. He took a deep breath. He was approaching the moment. It was time to finish his business here and get back to the capital before he was missed. He certainly didn’t want to have to answer questions from his station head, the truculent and volatile KGB Colonel Resnikov, and account for his time of absence from Damascus. He needed to be out of here within the hour and back to the capital. Suddenly he began to think more clearly, to take a grip on his usually incisive mind in order to carry through what he had come to do.
And then at last he emerged into the blinding white light of a busy street. The thick heat from which the covered market had protected him hit him like a suffocating mask, wrapping him in its intensity with a physical sensation that was almost like a dull, dryfisted blow. With a muscular forearm bared from the rolled-up sleeve of his white shirt, he wiped his forehead as if to ward off the sweat that hadn’t appeared yet. The heat was an insistent presence that demanded your attention, he thought, took over your thoughts.
He looked up and down. The street was a cacophony of horns and shouting. It was full of donkey carts with car tyres for wheels, and with the occasional cars and trucks that by some miracle still functioned vaguely as they were built to do. Exhaust fumes from a vegetable truck up from the country choked him as the driver pressed down on the throttle and its engine squealed agonisingly by him. The man should check his fan belt, he thought automatically.
The café he was looking for was a few hundred yards away. That was the venue they’d told him, the starting point for his real purpose this morning. He could just see it from the souk’s exit. The men would take him from there. It was their own proposition, this meeting place, to which he’d agreed.
He stopped under a shaded awning before committing himself finally. He had come here against all good regulations, let alone good sense. What if something happened now? What if the men in the café had another agenda? They might try to stick a knife in him, he supposed. But most likely they’d let him go once he gave them the packet in his shirt pocket. It was his conscience, as well as his curiosity, that had brought him here and that was bad trade craft – no trade craft at all, in fact. He was going right out on a limb.
He saw them, three of them, sitting at the edge of the café – they were at a table nearest to the road. He knew only one of them, but guessed the other two were also her brothers. When he approached, warily, they didn’t greet him, but they didn’t look hostile either. Blank faces, cold, dark eyes. Neither trusting nor distrusting. But here they were in a public street. Maybe it would be different when they had him in some hidden place. He trusted, however, that they would take what they could get from him and that they wouldn’t dare to harm a Russian from the embassy. He inspired respect from his physical presence, but at least they knew of his position – despite no actual identification – and it was that which inspired fear. Without a word, the men stood as he approached and indicated that he should follow.
The four of them walked for more than half an hour, away from the market and the ancient citadel of Abraham, past the hammams and the khans behind their old wooden doors, beyond the poor restaurants and bike repair shops, away from the commercial centre and on to the outskirts of the city.
Once they were clear and had reached a chronically poor residential neighbourhood, they finally turned up a small alley of mud houses and he guessed that it was here where the family house would be. But it was only a guess. Valentin had never been here before. He’d only met the woman once, in fact, that one time when she’d been dancing at the restaurant back in the direction from where they’d walked. She’d been a sudden a
ttraction – he twenty-seven, she nineteen.
She’d danced for the three of them, all Russian intelligence officers up from Damascus for the weekend. When the others had left, he’d stayed, infatuated, lost, overturned by her beauty or by her movements or by the drink and the music – or all of those things.
He remembered now how it had been back then. One minute he’d felt like he’d been walking quietly and relatively enjoyably through life – albeit an Intelligence life of suspicion and paranoia – and the next, he was metaphorically hanging upside down from a tree with a noose around his foot. That had been her effect, he remembered. She’d turned him upside down without warning. He remembered her eyes now, eyes that drew him into a whirlpool that was more of his own imagination than from any physical attribute of hers. She was a professional, after all. She was paid to use her eyes like that, as well as her body. Her charms were directed at everyone she danced for, not just at him. But it was he who had fallen for her.
They’d had sex in a room at the back of the restaurant which she and the other dancers used for changing. It was very sudden, unexpected, they’d hardly removed their clothes. He hadn’t gone to the manager enquiring about her with sex in mind. He’d just wanted to see her. It was a vague, rudderless desire that was more about his fear of never seeing her again than anything else. He was infatuated. But the manager had let it happen either because of the money Valentin had given him to keep quiet, or because he was afraid of these Russians. And the woman – the dancer – why had she let it happen? He didn’t know. She’d been a virgin. Most probably she’d seen in him some kind of salvation from the narrow and ever-shrinking opportunities of her life. And he didn’t even know her name, he realised afterwards. Maybe sex with him had been some desperate throw of the dice on her part, an attempt to change her life for ever.