by Alex Dryden
More or less in parenthesis, Burt then told Lish, in detail, what he wanted from the CIA and he eventually received a nod of agreement from the CIA boss – and his former employee. Lish’s eyebrows, it seemed, could go no higher without taking leave of his head altogether.
CHAPTER THREE
Saturday, 16 January 2010
THE MOMENT SHE stepped off the boat, Anna Resnikov knew that she was being followed. They must have been tailing her when she’d boarded the ferry in Istanbul. One man, maybe more than one, she wasn’t sure. But her conviction that she was observed came neither from belief nor suspicion, both of which were to her subtle distractions that she swiftly discarded in any analysis. She either knew something or she didn’t, and in this case she knew.
She reached the foot of the clanking, rusted metal steps that led from the upper deck of the Kalydonia ferry to the dock and then waited in line with the other passengers on the windswept quay at Odessa’s customs and border post.
It was 16 January. Tomorrow would be the first round of the presidential elections in Ukraine. That was a mere coincidence, as far as she was concerned. She had come to the country for another reason. She had come to make a contact.
There would be a prearranged drop-off, and then, if all went well, she would make the pick-up. If things went according to plan then it would be a two-to four-day round-trip for only a few minutes of active engagement. Her assignment was to return with documents – they were military blueprints, Burt Miller had told her. In any case, they were the kind of documents that could only be delivered by hand and not electronically, even if that were advisable in the porous world of electronic communication. The provenance of the documents she was to pick up was an agent of Burt’s company Cougar Intelligence Applications, in Moscow. He was someone senior at the Naval Ministry, she’d been told. Someone high-up, she’d worked that out, and a former naval man, Burt had said, as well as a core KGB officer who had turned against his country and now supplied information to Cougar. But it wouldn’t be the agent himself who made the delivery. The agent would have a courier and he or she would be making the drop.
Anna cast her eye around her fellow passengers in a noncommittal way as she waited in the line on the quay. There were mostly Ukrainians and Russians who had been on the boat’s manifest, returning from temporary jobs in Turkey or from shopping at the duty free malls in Istanbul with their greater choice of international brands. There were also a few Turks who, no doubt, had business of one kind or another in Odessa. Odessa had once belonged – way back in its history – to the Ottoman empire, the Porte of the Sultan, and the Turks still plied their trade here. But there were no tourists on the boat at this time of year. Odessa was a seaside holiday destination that burst into life in the spring and summer. Now, in January, the boat was only half full.
After taking a casual look at the passengers nearest to her, Anna didn’t look around any further to spot who it was who was tailing her. She just waited quietly in the line. She’d seen nobody observing her on the boat but, nevertheless, she knew now. The line shortened and she neared the front – and the border post. She wondered if they would act now before she was through. Most likely they would wait, she thought. Those would be their orders, she was now sure of that too.
At just under six feet in height, and with long legs that might easily give the impression she was an athlete or a dancer, she was taller than most of the others in the line. And she was evidently a lot fitter, more alert. Any other person feeling they were being watched would have been nervous, would have looked around, wanting to be sure, to see the evidence. But Anna didn’t just act the part of unconcern – she was supremely aware of the danger of her situation – she actually was unconcerned. In her core, she knew any anxiety now would interfere with the clear passage of her thoughts. Hers was a cold awareness.
She distrusted belief and suspicion. They were the crevices into which the credulous and ignorant fell. For an operative, they might easily prove fatal and for a long time Anna had left such things to others. Belief-and disbelief, for that matter – she viewed as a decadent luxury for those free from imminent threat. And suspicion was just another fallible mental process that confused fact with fear. Fear was the enemy, in any walk of life, but particularly in hers.
Now, as she reached the head of the line, the Ukrainian border guard almost snatched her false American passport, then studied it closely and made a great play of staring at her face. It was a face that men stared at without such an excuse; a face with a pronounced bone structure that took the eye from her curved, full mouth over a fine Slavic nose to the high cheekbones on either side, and then to her eyes, deep blue and penetrating, so that the guard found he could not look back into them for very long. She had blond hair, cut to the top of her shoulders, and it hung in a single thick fold. She stared back at him and, for a moment, he felt as if it were she who was deciding whether to admit him in to her country, rather than the other way around.
But though she stared back at him, she barely noticed him. The danger – if any existed at this moment – was behind her, not from the guards at the post. They would be Russians behind her and who were watching her, not Ukrainians. Hers was now a purely animal reaction, tensed, ready for action. It was a sense that existed somewhere beyond her five regular senses, that bypassed unreliable mental processes and was hard-wired to certainty. Someone was watching her and they were watching her, not like the guard, for how she looked, but because they were under orders to follow her.
After much exaggerated raising of his eyebrows and rocking back in his seat, without a smile the border guard finally allowed her through and on to the territory of Ukraine.
She casually slung her backpack over her shoulders and looked ahead towards the town. Beyond the border post, there was a wide boulevard that ran perpendicularly along the whole length of the quay. On the far side of the boulevard, she saw a small cobbled lane that ran up a hill through the old port and into the town. She crossed the boulevard and entered the lane.
With the knowledge that she was being watched came a sort of calm. She now let her mind relax and her tensed muscles followed. She continued to walk purposefully up the short hill, leaving the boat and its passengers behind her. She looked neither right nor left nor behind her. She didn’t need to see the tail yet. She was only thinking of one thing at this moment; that it always made things more straightforward once a potential assassin – or maybe there was more than one out there in the city’s undergrowth – came to you.
Throughout the voyage from Istanbul she had remained mostly in her cabin, emerging only very early in the morning at the restaurant for breakfast or in the quiet hours after midnight below decks, behaving in a manner that any observer would, perhaps, have described as pacing or even prowling. Otherwise she’d had food and drink sent down to her first-class accommodation. A storm had lashed the Black Sea for the duration of the crossing – it had been an uncomfortable voyage – and, like her, many of the passengers had stayed out of sight. Her absence wasn’t noticeable. The upper deck, the sea deck, had anyway been put out of bounds by the captain due to the storm, and the regular partying and drinking that was a common feature on the crossing to Odessa was muted.
At the top of the short hill that led from the harbour she came to an intersection of the cobbled lane with a main thoroughfare and she crossed to the other side. Even bending her head and now covered with a long hooded jacket that came halfway to her knees, she was a commanding figure compared to the other pedestrians. On this crowded boulevard her height was distinctive. But it was the way she walked that drew attention as much as anything else. She walked with a smooth stride as if on a long trek, and she seemed to insinuate herself along the pavement, as if her feet barely touched the ground. Hers was a cat-like walk. Prowling was not a bad description.
Bare trees, their branches carefully pruned back to the trunks, lined this second boulevard on both sides. She looked curiously to left and right. She hadn’t been in Od
essa for several years, from before the time she’d defected from the KGB. But Odessa was as she remembered it had always been: a stylish city, its pride deriving from its past first as a Russian imperial naval base, then from its heroic Soviet resistance against the Nazis when much of the whole city had been destroyed. More recently, since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, this proud history had come to be mixed with modernising influences that sought to bring the city into the twenty-first century. A civic pride that actually derived from the city’s military standing bloomed here, publicly on the streets, more than in most post-Soviet cities.
Despite her commanding presence, she lost herself head down in the crowds of pedestrians. The clean, swept streets were busy at this time of the morning. People were going to work. Like her they also walked head down in the rain, and those who passed her on the pavements were huddled up in coats and hats. It had started to rain as she got off the boat but now it was coming down harder. She pulled the hood of her jacket further over her forehead. She walked along the busy morning pavement quickly.
It was time to take matters into her own hands. If they hadn’t stopped her at the border post, it was a virtual certainty that her observers were not from the SBU, the Ukrainian secret service. In which case, they must be Russian. Of that she was sure now. They would need to conceal their activities from the sovereign, Ukrainian guards, on whose sovereign territory they were conducting their operation. She decided she would find a narrow, uncrowded space now. That way it would be easier to identify her tail.
As soon as she saw an alley that led off to the left between two nineteenth-century buildings – two of the few that had survived the Nazi onslaught in the Great Patriotic War – she turned into it and quickened her pace, feeling the eyes upon her. She walked fast, still not looking behind her, betraying no anticipation, let alone fear, until the alley dog-legged to the right and she could stand out of sight from her pursuers behind a stone-porticoed entrance from where mildewed steps led down to a dank basement filled with bags of uncollected rubbish.
She carefully watched back up the length of the alley towards the boulevard from where she had turned off. She could just see the boulevard now, framed by the narrow entrance to the alley. And there in the frame she saw there were two men who had entered the alley and whom she could just see only from the edges of their flapping coats. They’d stopped, she saw. No doubt there would be others out there. Six or more, maybe up to twelve in a full-blown operation and, for the prize of having her, the KGB might just be throwing in everything.
She craned further out from behind the pillar. The men were talking to each other, not facing down the alley towards her. One of the men wore a grey cap and a khaki coat and his black hair came out over the collar. The other had a longer, black raincoat and wore a fur hat. The men were talking urgently, one also into a mobile phone, and then the one with the fur hat finally turned down the alley in her direction. Anna descended the steps to the basement and waited.
Less than a minute later she caught the sound of the man tailing her as his raincoat swished in the downpour that was now hitting the alleyway above her head. She heard his shoes slapping against the wet paving stones. She emerged from the cover of the basement on to the steps. From the back as he passed, she saw his coat flapping back over itself in the wind and the fur hat spotted with rain. He had passed her by.
One of these two men whom she’d seen on the street would be on the bus later, or maybe they would send a third man who hadn’t been exposed in the street. She decided now to lower the odds against her.
She left her pack in the basement and climbed back up. Emerging from the steps that led up from the dank basement, she walked behind the man, closing the distance rapidly. The alley ahead narrowed between two high buildings so that it was only wide enough for one person. She looked behind her for the first time. There was no one else in sight. She saw the man hesitate where the alley narrowed, wondering perhaps whether to continue through the narrowed passage or to contact his colleague first. He came to a halt and, as he started to turn – perhaps sensing a presence behind him – she put her left hand around his eyes, digging her fingers into them, and her right forearm into the nape of his neck. Preoccupied with the agony in his eyes – and before he could struggle enough to dislodge her – in a swift, jerking motion she had bent his neck back over her forearm and snapped it with a dull sound like the breaking of a damp stick.
She quickly dragged the body into another basement, hauling it down more moss-covered and mildewed stone steps, and dumped it behind some ancient piles of building material leaning up in a corner, which were disgorging their contents of solidified plaster and cement. Then she rifled through the pockets of the man’s jacket beneath the black raincoat. There was an FSB identity card. They were Russian intelligence, as she’d assumed. She took the card and a gun that was loose in the inside jacket pocket and then carefully mounted the stairs. She was glad of the gun. The way she had come into the country through a legal border post meant that it had been impossible to be properly armed. She looked both ways up and down the alley. There was still nobody visible. She picked up her backpack from the first basement and then she walked back up the alley from where she had come and back again on to the boulevard.
She knew she should abort the assignment now, save herself as best she could. That would have been what Burt would have ordered. He hadn’t wanted her to take the assignment in the first place. It was too dangerous, for her in particular – a former KGB colonel and a defector on the KGB’s most wanted list – to go anywhere near the territory of Russia. But she’d insisted on it, threatening to resign and leave the employ of Burt’s intelligence company, Cougar. Burt didn’t want to lose her from this vast intelligence organisation – an empire that now challenged the CIA in its breadth and influence – and she’d banked on that. She knew Burt wouldn’t have dared to risk her leaving Cougar. He didn’t want another agency – the CIA itself had courted her regularly – to gain her talents, and so he’d reluctantly acquiesced.
But, in any case, Burt wasn’t here, in Odessa. She calculated the risks. She accepted at once that either they would follow her to the bus, or they already knew she would be taking it. They’d known she would be on the boat, that was for sure. If they knew, too, that she was heading for the bus, then there was unmistakably a leak, and she faced greater danger than she was in already. But if they’d known she was on the boat, there was probably a leak anyway.
Suddenly she felt an unwelcome memory returning. It was the first time she had been this close to Russia since her defection four years before. A memory of why she had left back then began to surface in her mind – of her father, the retired General Resnikov, and her hatred of him; of the spies with whom she’d once worked and who had now once again taken control of the country she loved; of the evil nexus of the spies and their mafia allies who sought to subjugate the Russian people under their jackboot. And then she thought of her grandmother who had died two years before, and of her mother who had finally left her father and was working for the Sakharov Foundation. Women – it was usually women – who seemed to be the good people. But then she repressed the memories that threatened to divert her from her task.
The bus station was situated at the side of the railway terminus where trains departed for Kiev to the north. A few dilapidated buses stood with their engines running, rain pouring down the windscreens. The rain was now cascading in rivers along the sloping gutters and there was a huge pool where a drain must have been blocked. She watched the ticket office, cast her eyes across the expanse of concrete, looked for the destination signs, and then saw the bus that would take her to Sevastopol. For a second time, she questioned the wisdom of going through with it now. Her arrival was blown, but was the pick-up in Sevastopol compromised also? Would she be able to evade her pursuers? Or did they know about the pick-up too? And then, decided, she walked across several lanes, past the waiting buses to the ticket office, and bought a return ticket.
The slow, ancient bus departed twenty minutes late for the twelve-hour journey and wound its way out of Odessa to the east. Low grey cloud hung over the mountains until the country was closed in by its embrace. Beneath the clouds a fine spray of mist came in off the sea. There was no view either of the sea or the land. Everything existed at close quarters. Her mind similarly ratcheted down to the immediate: a field outside Sevastopol, with coordinates provided and memorised, just beyond the edge of the town; a stone barn that stored root vegetables and perhaps the odd piece of agricultural equipment; and a courier she would never see, the agent’s cut-out who would make the drop.
She took a seat near the driver in order to be the first out, knowing that behind her was a watcher, and perhaps more than one. The bus’s heater wheezed, and pumped a mixture of engine oil and stifling air into the enclosed space. They wouldn’t make a move yet – her watchers – she knew that now. They would want to know why she was here in Ukraine. The real prize for them was certainly her. The KGB had been obsessed with finding her for more than four years. But first they would want to discover who she was meeting and what she had come to find. She would have to lose them once the bus reached Sevastopol – unless she lost them before her destination. Above all she had to protect the courier, their link with the agent. But that was twelve hours away over the long slow bus route to and then across the Crimea.
The seats were small and the bus full. She was squeezed on the window side next to a man in a thick padded jacket and workman’s boots. He fell asleep almost immediately. On the seats directly across the aisle were two plump women. She guessed from their rural appearance that they came from a village along the way. They talked purposefully to one another, never pausing. She didn’t look behind at anyone else seated on the bus. For a while she pretended to doze, but she remained alert for any movement in the aisle. Time stood still.