The Blind Spy

by Alex Dryden

  The bus climbed and descended the undulating land, stopping at a few villages and sometimes out in the middle of nowhere, until they reached Nikolayev. There was a stop for fifteen minutes and Anna watched the two women, but while one or two passengers boarded or got off the bus the two women stayed where they were, chatting endlessly. Then they set off again, across the Roskovsky Straits at Kherson. There was another stop there and then another stop and another leg to the bridge on to the Crimea at Krasnoperekopsk. As they entered the Crimea, they were about two-thirds of the way to Sevastopol.

  After nearly two hours beyond the city of Krasnoperekopsk, and now well into the Crimea, the bus pulled into a service station at a remote crossroads that served as a stop. They would have the usual fifteen minutes, the driver said. There was a grim-looking café and a couple of pumps. The two women across the aisle from her picked up half a dozen heavy plastic bags and made for the door. It was their stop, she realised.

  Anna put on her backpack and got off the bus quickly in order to catch up with the slow-moving women. They were now walking in a waddling motion from side to side with the weight of their bags. They were still talking without pause. A change of plan, Anna decided, a change of mind. That was a sign of intelligence, to be able to change your mind. When she drew level with the women, she smiled at them and offered to carry some of their bags. The women were struggling to keep hold of everything.

  ‘I’ve come to visit my grandmother,’ she said.

  As she took three of the bags she still didn’t look behind her. She would leave them to guess whether or not she was aware of their presence.

  Around the rear of the service station, there was an ancient pick-up with peeling dark red paint, where the bare metal itself wasn’t showing through. It had its engine running for warmth. One of the two women indicated that the truck was where they were going. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat, Anna now saw – a brother, a husband, perhaps? ‘Where are you going?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Voronki,’ one of the women replied.

  ‘I’m going to Vihogradovo,’ Anna said.

  ‘It’s not on our way, dear,’ the second woman replied.

  ‘Perhaps you could give me a ride to the Vihogradovo road?’

  The women didn’t know.

  The man in the driver’s seat didn’t get out or offer to help. The women opened the passenger door and put their bags in first, then one of them began to climb in ponderously over the high sill of the truck.

  ‘I’m going to the Vihogradovo road,’ Anna said to the driver.

  He shrugged. ‘These women take up all the room.’ They were squeezed on to a double seat next to the driver.

  ‘I can sit in the truck bed.’

  He stared at her.

  ‘I’m here to visit my grandmother. She’s dying.’

  ‘We’re all dying,’ the man said.

  ‘Not so quickly, I hope,’ she replied.

  He didn’t take his eyes away from hers. ‘You want to sit in the rain?’ he said as though he couldn’t care less. Then he shrugged again. ‘It’s up to you,’ he said and looked away.

  She threw her pack into the back of the truck before he could change his mind and climbed in using the wheel as a step. As the truck pulled away, she looked back for the first time. The second man she had seen in the alley near the boulevard was now talking into a mobile phone. She saw the grey leather cap and the black hair coming out at an angle over the khaki collar. They had lost one man and now they had no back-up but him on the bus. Perhaps there was a vehicle following the bus, but for now he was alone. Like her, they would now have to improvise. The man didn’t look at her but she knew it was him.

  As the truck pulled away from the main road and up into the hills, the thin mist turned to fog.

  The road wound its way through villages and across moorland. The journey was slow, the old truck dropping to low gears for the slightest climb. Two vehicles passed them, though she couldn’t identify who was in them. And then after nearly an hour she saw a car, far enough behind them to be tailing the truck. The truck was so slow the car should have overtaken them, but it hung there emerging then disappearing, as the fog rolled across the hills. An hour later the truck she was in came to a crossroads high up in the Crimean peninsula.

  The red truck stopped. She glanced back at the car. It had pulled over, just visible where the fog was closing on the road. She looked around for an escape, but she could only see less than a few hundred yards. The land absorbed the colourlessness of winter, but the rain had eased leaving a dampness that hung in the air. The truck was going straight ahead across the road. Anna had told the driver she was going along the road to the left, that was the way to Vihogradovo. She climbed down and the woman sitting nearest to the window opened it.

  ‘Thank you,’ Anna said.

  ‘It’s another twenty-five kilometres,’ the driver replied.

  ‘How will you get to Vihogradovo?’ one of the women asked.

  ‘I’ll get a ride. If not, I’ll walk.’

  The driver wasn’t going to offer her a ride.

  ‘Good luck,’ one of the women said and patted her arm through the open window. The truck pulled away and disappeared over a ridge and into the fog.

  She stood alone at the crossroads and looked back. She saw the car pulling out on to the road behind her and watched it approaching slowly. The moment of truth. She saw now that there was only one person inside it. She had upset their plans, confused her pursuers. She waited by the road where it turned to the left on the way to Vihogradovo and the car turned too and began to approach. The man would have to make a decision; drive on by and risk losing her, or stop. If he didn’t kill her in the opening few seconds, it would be fatal for him. And she knew they wanted her alive. They’d wanted her alive in the four years since she’d defected from the KGB. She was to be paraded at The Forest before her interrogation began. That they wanted her alive was now their biggest and most deadly weakness.

  She put out her hand in the pretence of hitching a ride and the car hesitated. The man was there to watch her, she knew, not to come into contact with her. But then the car pulled over towards the verge and crawled the few yards to where she stood before it stopped. It was the man with the black hair that came over his collar. He wasn’t wearing the grey cap now, she saw it on the passenger seat. Through the window, she could see indecision in his eyes. He needed help, orders, this was beyond his knowledge. He didn’t want to act alone, or maybe he couldn’t. Her approaching him – that was not in the book – she was supposed to be running from him, leading him to her secret destination.

  There was no preparation for this. It seemed that it was suddenly too big for him. And then she saw in his eyes the possibility of personal glory, to be the officer who captured Anna Resnikov.

  She opened the passenger door. ‘Sevastopol,’ she said. ‘I’m going to Sevastopol.’

  He stared at her and she saw confusion, then fear.

  ‘Can I get in?’

  He looked at her wide-eyed as if she were a bomb that was about to go off.

  She got into the passenger seat. The other man’s gun that she’d taken was hard to draw in the confined space. She slid a knife down her arm invisibly from inside her jacket and into her left hand and, in the same movement, thrust it with the precision of a butcher under the man’s ribs on the side of his body furthest away from her, where his heart was. Then she forced it upwards, driving the honed blade into the centre of his heart. He rocked back then forward violently. His fisted hand flailed at her and struck her hard in the face, drawing blood. But his life was already leaving him.

  Anna withdrew the knife and climbed out of the car. She wiped her bloodied hand and the blade on the grass and put the knife back into her sleeve. She checked the road was empty and then she hauled the dead body across the seat and out of the open door. She turned out the pockets of his coat: a wallet with an FSB identity card, another gun which she gratefully took, some money and keys. She
took the money. Then she dragged the body a few yards on to the grass and left it, deliberately visible from the road. She got back into the car, in the driver’s seat, put the car in gear and pulled away.

  She drove fast along the road until she saw a farm track a mile or so away and to the left. There were deep tyre marks on the track, from a tractor most likely, and she drove with the car’s wheels in the tyre tracks until she found a cutting in the hill to the side where she could conceal the car from the road. She pulled over into the cutting, double-checked that the car couldn’t be seen from the road, and closed the door. The man’s phone on the dashboard had started to ring. When they found the body, they would look for the car. Their first assumption would have to be that she was driving it towards Sevastopol. She opened the door and disabled the phone, flinging the batteries into a pool of water. Now they couldn’t locate the car from his phone.

  As soon as she’d got clear of the car, she began to run, up towards a ridge that was slowly forming above her through the fog. She kept running, up through soggy grass meadows and into the hills that rose to the north. It was a long climb that finally took her over a high ridge and down into a valley on the other side. There was a village there, sufficiently far away from the road they’d travelled along, away from any pursuit. And she knew they would look for the car first.

  Just over an hour after she had been dropped at the crossroads by the truck, she entered the single street of the village. There was a store, a service station with a single pump, some bedraggled scavenging dogs that combed the gutters and doorways. But she saw few people. She entered the service station and inside found a boy, fourteen or fifteen years old, she guessed. She asked him how far it was to Sevastopol.

  ‘Four or five hours if you’ve got a decent car. There’s no bus from here.’

  ‘I need a ride. I’ll pay.’

  The boy shouted into the back and a man she took to be his father emerged. He wore oily overalls and looked like he’d been fixing a car. He had a bad-tempered expression and said something abrupt to the boy. The boy repeated her request to him, then disappeared into the back, and the man stared at her.

  ‘I can give you a hundred dollars,’ Anna said in Ukrainian. ‘My grandmother is sick.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Friends brought me this far.’

  The man looked at the mud on her trousers and at her wet hiking boots. ‘Make it a hundred and fifty,’ he replied too quickly.

  Half an hour later, and having paid in advance, she was on a small rural road that would take them eventually to Sevastopol. The man drove fast and in silence, as if he were unwilling to earn the money, or just disapproved of being paid by a woman.

  After driving for nearly five hours, the city of Sevastopol lay in cloud below them. Mountains soared to the north and east. The great natural harbour, gouged eight kilometres into the land, was once the Soviet navy’s warm water port. Now it was the naval base for the Russian Black Sea fleet which shared the facilities with their Ukrainian naval counterpart. She saw ships at anchor out in the roads and in the near harbour itself. Other naval vessels were up against the quays or in dry dock. They were the Russian and Ukrainian fleets which now shared the port with an ill grace that was growing by the month into something uglier. It was inevitably a source of tension between Russia and its former possession. Ukraine had won its independence two decades earlier and the Kremlin didn’t like it.

  The drop was outside the city just beyond the outer limits; a barn in some unfenced fields that climbed the hills fringing the town. Anna told the driver to leave her just over a mile, she guessed, past the track that led up to the barn. By the time he dropped her she was nearer to the centre of town than to the barn. She would walk back once the man had gone.

  He turned the van around without a word of goodbye and headed back in the direction from where they’d come. Once he’d disappeared, Anna returned back up the road and walked fast until she found a break between a row of houses. This was the place. She walked behind the houses and, once she was through, she studied the approach to the barn. Then she walked up through the fields beyond the houses until she found a small copse of trees. It was a shelter of sorts, both from the weather and from unfriendly eyes. Later, for the approach, the fog higher up the hill would be good cover. And soon darkness would fall anyway. She decided she would wait until then.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MASHA SHAPKO EXITED from Sevastopol’s rail terminus and followed orders. First she took a taxi into the centre of town. She carried a battered black leather bag with its colour fraying down to the bare leather where it had been bent from use and she wore a thick pink padded coat that had faded with age and Moscow’s harsh weather. On her head she had a black rabbit fur hat. She was dressed in clothes which had been appropriate for her departure from Moscow two days before. It had been twenty degrees below zero when she’d boarded the train at Kursky railway station.

  She followed her orders to the letter: a taxi to the centre of the town, then she would catch a bus towards its western end, then a walk of a few miles until she reached the outskirts of the town. But on the way to the drop, her boss had told her, find the time to stop, to look, to watch. So when the taxi dropped her off on the central boulevard, she stopped at shop windows as she strolled towards the heart of the town. First she entered a second-hand clothing shop, then she bought a coffee at a café in the square and sat away from the window. And all the time she watched for any familiar face from the train or from Sevastopol’s rail station. Satisfied at last that she wasn’t being followed, she finally moved on to join a line for the local bus that went to the western end of town.

  She was late – nearly a day late, in fact. The train had been held up for twenty-four hours as it entered the turbulent regions of the south, where separatists were detonating bombs with regularity. ‘A terrorist threat’ was the announcement on the train and they’d stayed at a halt on the line and watched the OMON police and local FSB walking beside the tracks, then questioning people on the train. She’d been afraid they’d discover what she was carrying, but her papers were in order, her father was a prominent figure in Moscow’s KGB, and she, too, carried an FSB card of her own. They gave her only a cursory check. Four other passengers, without their papers in order, she assumed, had been handcuffed and removed from the train.

  Her orders were not to contact her boss in any circumstances. But she knew that the delay was cutting it very fine. Whoever was making the pick-up would be expecting to do so this evening, in a few hours’ time, in fact. She knew it was touch and go whether she would make it and, if she did, whether there would be a risk of crossing over with the person, her opposite number. But all she could do now was try, she supposed. Her orders hadn’t factored in a twenty-four-hour delay.

  She had been well trained in various institutions of the KGB inside Moscow and outside at The Forest. She was still a rookie, certainly, but she’d completed all the basic training required to enter the lowest-ranking echelon of officer recruits from two years before when she’d passed into the intelligence agency with flying colours. She had been top of the class, in fact. After she’d finished school, she’d been educated at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, intending to become a manager at the national electricity grid. But then, while she was looking at the options, she had been approached by a friend of her KGB father to make an application to join Russia’s security services. She was inducted into the FSB after eighteen months of training.

  At just over twenty-four years old, she had married a fellow officer recruit two months before. This was her first solo operation and she was proud to be serving her country, without having any idea of what it was she was doing. She had been given no indication of what was concealed in her bag.

  She had a small, delicately pretty face with fine features and grey-blue eyes with the depth and intensity of deep ice pools; so her new husband had told her. They were eyes like an Arctic animal’s, he’d said, and she assumed
the description was one of admiration.

  She’d been chosen for this mission, her boss Volkov informed her, for several reasons. One important factor for her cover was that she had family in Ukraine. The family owned a farmhouse outside Sevastopol and that’s where the barn was located. It was cover of sorts. And so the ostensible reason for her trip was established as a visit to a cousin, Taras. Though he lived in Kiev, it had been arranged that she would actually meet Taras at a club on Odessa’s waterfront by the name of the Golden Fleece. The reason why she was going south, to the Crimea, rather than straight to Kiev, she’d worked out with her boss, after she’d told him about Taras’s family’s farmhouse. Her cover would be that she was first of all visiting the place of her childhood holidays when she’d stayed with Taras’s family outside Sevastopol. Taras’s father had bought the farmhouse there as a holiday place, in the 1990s after some post-Soviet business deal. So the trip to the Crimea was to be a detour of fond nostalgia, before heading to Odessa and spending a few days with her cousin.

  But there were reasons other than the convenience of the farmhouse for her being picked for the mission. Her boss had also lavished praise on her as an up-coming intelligence officer of a new generation whose rise was guaranteed, he said, not just because of her family connections in the security services, but also due to her own skills and intelligence. Her performance to date had been favourably noted, and Volkov flattered her enough so that she didn’t question that she’d been chosen. Promotion – that had been the word her boss had used finally to catch her with. And now, as she sat on the bus that crawled westwards out of the town, she knew she’d certainly like the money promotion would bring. ‘It’s an easy drop, straightforward,’ her boss had told her. ‘Just the thing for your first assignment.’ The drop was intended as a little help for ‘our friends in Ukraine’, he’d said. These ‘friends’ were Russian patriots like her and though, technically, they were of Ukrainian nationality, they shared hers and Moscow’s interests. These ‘patriots’ saw no difference between Russia and Ukraine, he’d said, and rightly wished to return the country to Mother Russia. The Kremlin would know of her mission, her boss finished with a flourish of patriotic fervour. Her mission would therefore be a small feather in her cap, but a feather nevertheless. And Masha had ended up feeling proud to be chosen out of her whole graduate class and to be doing something for the new motherland.