The Blind Spy

by Alex Dryden

  But no operation is ever without risk, her boss had added. She had been issued with a gun, a GSh-18 military pistol, the latest one the GRU used, the military intelligence people. Just a normal precaution, he’d said, but whatever happens, you will avoid being taken alive, he told her gravely. In those circumstances we’d kill you quickly if we could, but they’ll take a lot longer, he’d added grimly. They’ll want information and they’ll never believe you don’t know more. That was the nature of torture, he’d said, and it had frightened her, as he’d intended it to.

  She felt the gun in the pocket of her coat now. So the gun was only there to use on herself.

  The city bus crawled up from the central square, stopping regularly. Mostly there were people getting off. Fewer and fewer boarded as they got closer to the end of the line. Masha held the leather bag close to her, on her lap. She had no idea what it contained, only that a thick, sealed plastic envelope was buried in a small, sealed plastic bag of garden fertiliser inside the case. It was to be left in a barn, so that made sense.

  When the bus reached her stop, the end of the line, she was the only passenger left. Masha alighted and walked for half a mile. Then she saw the road she was to take, to the right, and twenty yards ahead. It turned up a steepening rise in the hillside away from the main road. She followed her orders to the letter. It led up past a row of houses and then turned into a track that wound away into deserted countryside. The fog seemed to have crept lower, or maybe it was simply that she’d come up higher, but it didn’t matter. Darkness had almost arrived.

  Masha suddenly felt afraid now. The excitement of her mission evaporated as darkness fell. She thought about her husband and their small apartment off Gruzhinskaya Bolshaya. She began to feel that she wasn’t up to even a task as small as this. She felt a panic rising up inside her. And a regret that she’d ever imagined she was suitable material for an intelligence officer. She wanted to get it over with, then reassess her whole life. She wanted to be someone small, insignificant, and she wondered what on earth had got into her to make her believe she was fit to face danger. But she forced herself on, the shame of failure greater than the fear.

  Once on to the track she walked with a false determination up the hill until she reached the shed she’d been told about. She was pale with fear now. The shed was some way behind the houses, far enough away for it not to be seen – and just where it should have been. As she pulled open a broken wooden door, she saw she was about a hundred yards below the copse of trees. Everything was exactly as it should have been. She entered the shed and, trembling, she quickly took off her coat, fumbling the buttons in her haste. Then opened the leather case. She removed the sealed bag of fertiliser and some old agricultural clothes stuffed in around it. She placed her pink coat and black fur hat to one side and put the farm clothes over the clothes she wore. Then she screwed up the pink coat and put it and the hat into the leather case and tucked it behind a pile of broken boxes that looked like they’d been there for years. ‘The shed isn’t used any more’ – the words from her briefing repeated themselves in her head, but her head was also a jangle of other things there and suddenly she hated the gun she was carrying.

  But Masha was now glad of her orders. They were suddenly the only thing that kept her focused. They were imprinted in her memory and she ran through them again as if they were her friendly companions and a talisman against failure. ‘Lose the leather case in the shed, change into the clothes, then head up the hill. Once you are at the top of the hill, first leave the plastic fertiliser bag in a safe place, half a mile or so before you reach the drop. The barn. That’s when you reconnoitre the barn itself. In that way, if you’re intercepted – God forbid – but if anything does go wrong at the barn, you won’t have anything compromising in your possession. Then, when you’ve seen that all is well at the barn, return with the fertiliser bag.’ The drop-off was a niche in the wall inside the barn, under the third beam from the rear, on the right-hand side. She felt the heat of fear, rising towards panic.

  Masha left the shed and took a circular route through the fields behind the houses, taking her away from the drop at first, then she followed the curve of her own circle, past the copse, until she came up behind and above the barn, a little over half a mile away from it. By now the sky was dark and night had come. She looked at the time that glowed on a cheap watch on her wrist. It read 6.35 p.m.

  She removed the small bag of garden fertiliser from inside her tattered working coat. Then she looked for somewhere high off the ground, above the eye line of humans or dogs who might look for it. That was the procedure, leave it high up. Perhaps she could quell the fear by concentrating on procedure.

  There wasn’t much she could see in this bare hill landscape. But standing against the skyline a hundred yards away to her right and at the same height as where she stood on the hill, she saw a lone tree, its branches bent and gnarled by the wind. She walked towards it and saw a crook in the trunk ten feet above her where four branches began their angular reach towards the sky. Climbing up on to a knot in the trunk, she could just reach the crook with her outstretched hand. Her hand trembled as she pushed the fertiliser bag into the crook. Then she climbed back down from the tree, returning to a spot directly above the barn. As she descended the hill above the barn, she suddenly felt cold, as if she had a fever. But this was it, she told herself. It was nearly over. She vowed she would resign as soon as she returned to Moscow. She couldn’t face something like this again. She thought about after the operation. Her mind focused on Taras and the club where they were meeting. She felt an overwhelming sense of love for her cousin. She would take the flight to Odessa from the Crimea’s capital, Simferol – just inland from Sevastopol – and meet with him, a day late perhaps, but soon she would be there.

  When she was twenty yards away from the barn, she stopped once and listened. She was completely exposed against the open hill but felt protected by the darkness. When she heard nothing she set off again, covered the remaining ground to the entrance of the barn in less than a minute.

  There was only one high, broken wooden door remaining in the arched stone wall of the barn. It creaked slowly in the wind. The other door was missing. It was just as her boss had told her.

  She entered the dark interior through the gap and, when her eyes had become accustomed to the almost pitch blackness inside, she began to make out darker shapes against the feeble light of the night sky entering from a hole high up in the wall where a window had once been. She switched on a small torch with a fine narrow beam that shed no light to the sides. In the light of the torch, she picked out the edges of straw bales, a beaten mud floor, and cobwebs close up to her. As she played the torch along a beam to the left following the wall of the barn, she saw the third roof beam from the end. The beam of the torch came down to reveal the niche beneath it, itself a tangle of cobwebs and dust. All was well. It was time to leave and then return with the plastic fertiliser bag.

  As she began to turn, there was a small bang like an explosion, which she realised a second later was an engine suddenly bursting into life. She felt her heart thump violently and almost stop. Even without the shock it gave her, the sound of the engine was suddenly deafening in the small space which before had been so silent. And with the engine came a light, just a split second later. Standing in the centre of the barn she was suddenly illuminated by blinding washes of floodlights that must have come from arc lamps up on the roof beams. It was a generator, she thought dimly, the engine was a generator and the lights came on automatically with the generator. She was blinded, her senses confused. And then she heard a single voice.

  ‘It’s not her,’ a man shouted, and this was followed by a curse in Russian.

  Masha followed orders. It seemed to take the men inside the barn completely by surprise. She drew the handgun from inside her jacket, pointed it towards her head, and pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IN THE EVENING of the same day that Anna Resnikov entered the c
ountry at Odessa’s port and Masha was crossing over from Russia, a meeting was taking place in the capital Kiev. Being the night before the presidential elections not everyone present was in an agreeable mood to have their time taken up with nonelection matters, particularly here. The four men and a woman sat around a smoked-glass table in a safe room at the American embassy on Mykoly Pymonenka Street and the atmosphere was not friendly.

  They were not diplomats or trade representatives or visiting senators and congressmen. In fact, all of them worked for the CIA station attached to the embassy, except for one of the men, Logan Halloran. He was an employee of Burt Miller’s tauntingly named Cougar Intelligence Applications, the multi-billion dollar American private intelligence corporation. And it was Logan – backed by the might of Cougar – who had summoned the CIA on this Saturday evening, not as one might expect the other way around.

  Sam MacLeod, the CIA station head, was the most senior figure at the table – at least officially – but orders from the CIA’s director in Virginia, Theo Lish, had requested – this was the careful word used – that MacLeod make every effort to accommodate Cougar’s wishes. Cougar ‘had something that needs conveying at once’, was the opaque way that Lish had put it to his station chief. After his meeting with Burt three days earlier, Lish had requested that they make every effort to accommodate Logan. In his usual, cunning way, Burt Miller had introduced a question that now hung in the air unanswered, but that Lish knew had to be investigated with the greatest of vigour.

  A suave, close-shaved and neatly tonsured man in his late fifties who wore impeccably cut pinstripe suits, MacLeod was visibly irritated before the meeting had even begun and his irritation stemmed from being summoned by, of all people, Logan Halloran. Simply put, he didn’t like Halloran and he didn’t intend to even look Halloran in the face, despite the fact that they were sitting directly across the table from each other.

  Halloran himself was unmistakably MacLeod’s sartorial opposite. Despite Burt’s efforts to make him appear like the corporate figure he was, long, thick, light-brown hair flowed erratically over Logan’s shoulders, and was perhaps not as clean as it could have been. He wore a crumpled faded pale green suit that had seen much better days and the collar of his shirt was open, with tufts of chest hair emerging from the neck – ‘like some eighties pop star’, MacLeod had witheringly told his second in command, Sandra Pasconi. On top of Logan’s insultingly dishevelled appearance, MacLeod couldn’t help noting, despite his determination not to engage in eye-to-eye contact with him, that Halloran had a deep tan in the middle of the Ukrainian winter. A fake tan was something that MacLeod, a traditionally down-to-earth Texan, found profoundly un-masculine. It didn’t occur to him that Halloran had been lying on a tropical beach only the week before. But either way, to Sam MacLeod, a man’s appearance was either respectful or the reverse – there was nothing neutral in between – and to him Halloran demonstrated a casual approach that smacked of disrespect.

  It wasn’t so much his physical appearance, however, that riled MacLeod the most, nor the gross inconvenience of it being a Saturday night and the fact that he was just on his way out to a pre-election cocktail party. Nor was it that he should suddenly find himself at the beck and call of a private intelligence company – albeit one that commanded almost the same level of resources as the CIA itself. It was Logan Halloran’s past life that was topping the list of the affronts that irritated MacLeod this evening. Apart from his slovenly appearance, with an attitude to match, Halloran had once been a CIA officer in Bosnia back in the 1990s until he’d been fired by the agency many years back now. Yet here he was practically giving orders to one of the CIA’s station heads in one of the world’s intelligence hotspots and on the CIA’s own ground, to boot.

  Was it Burt Miller’s idea of joke to send Halloran? Probably, MacLeod thought. At any rate, he wouldn’t put it past him. Burt Miller walked the corridors of power in Washington with effortless ease, thanks to Cougar’s generous dispensation of lobbying fees. He operated like some private satrap at the heart of power. Since 9/11, Cougar had grown from a regular intelligence outfit into Washington’s most influential intelligence hub, with the power and money to show for it. And, if he knew little else about Burt Miller, MacLeod understood how Miller enjoyed flaunting this power and wealth.

  But MacLeod also knew that Cougar’s power on this particular evening at the embassy in Kiev was now replicated in other American embassies around the world. Cougar – which had employed the CIA head Theo Lish until two years before – was now able to issue orders on more than an occasional basis at CIA stations throughout the world. Lish had been a board director of the CIA, then was poached by Burt Miller to be CEO of Cougar, and had now returned to the CIA as chief, apparently giving Miller access to whatever it was he wished. It made MacLeod almost visibly seethe with indignation.

  The others sitting around the smoked-glass table consisted of MacLeod’s junior officers, all in their mid twenties to early thirties. Younger than MacLeod, they were more overtly angry at this indignity. Sandra Pasconi, the only woman present, was the senior of these three young spooks and she spoke first, as arranged beforehand. Macleod had dictated before the meeting that he wanted to stay in the background, as befitted his position, and not stoop to liaising directly with Halloran. He affected a position of not acknowledging Logan was in the room at all.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit premature to have this meeting the night before a presidential election?’ Pasconi asked acidly. ‘We don’t know what Ukraine’s going to look like, yet. The election tomorrow is just narrowing it down to two candidates. Then there’ll be a run-off in three weeks’ time. That’s when it’s appropriate, if ever.’

  Logan smiled back at her without replying. He felt a supreme self-satisfaction that the CIA was at his bidding after his mistreatment at their hands. He still had scores to settle with his old organisation over his dismissal. The resentment he felt towards the agency looked like it would never die and he now felt a dangerous desire to rub their noses in it. Yet at the same time, if you were to study Logan’s erratic motivation – something he didn’t do himself with any great zeal – he had a great need for acceptance by his old employer at the same time as he nurtured resentment against it. He wanted them to recognise their mistake in ever dismissing him. He wanted to extract love from humiliation.

  ‘But we all know what the result of the election’s going to be, don’t we, Sandra?’ Logan replied. ‘The current president is out. It’s between Yanukovich and Timoshenko now. That’ll be decided in three weeks. And we all know Moscow’s favourite, Yanukovich, is going to win. It’s practically a done deal. The Orange Revolution is over. Russia holds the cards.’

  Pasconi bristled at the use of her first name. ‘Look, Halloran,’ Pasconi continued, ‘we know just how important you are – or Cougar is, in any case,’ she almost sneered, ‘so you don’t have to push your weight around, OK?’

  Logan was delighted at her angry response. Hostile, that was what Logan had expected, and that was what Burt had told him to expect. ‘Let them be hostile.’ But Logan wanted to exacerbate that hostility. It only made his enjoyment at their predicament all the greater. He’d already noticed that MacLeod refused to look at him, while the other two younger men seemed to be waiting on the edge of their chairs with an eager fixation in his direction, like terriers ready to rip his throat out. He smiled benignly, but in his heart he felt the old anger surfacing.

  Logan paused to let the sarcasm in Pasconi’s tone of voice dissipate into a flat silence that had the effect of leaving the tone, rather than the words themselves, hanging in the air.

  ‘The question is,’ he said smoothly, ‘what is Ukraine going to be in three weeks’ time? Burt Miller sees it this way,’ he said quietly. ‘He believes that Ukraine is moving to the top of our concerns. Your boss in Washington apparently agrees with him,’ he added. ‘Miller’s convinced him that this is priority, red alert. And he simply wants the agency to be fully in the pic
ture.’

  ‘Our instructions are to listen to what you have to say,’ Pasconi said. ‘That’s all. There’s nothing here about Mr Lish agreeing or disagreeing with Miller’s thesis on Ukraine.’

  Logan leaned back in his chair before replying and delayed his reaction, like a sportsman who lowers the pace of his game in order to upset the urgency of an opponent. ‘Cougar sees it that the Ukraine will soon become a front line of sorts,’ he said finally. ‘More so than it is now. Ukraine is an independent, democratic, pro-Western country under threat from its more powerful, belligerent and anti-democratic neighbour. Soon it will have a pro-Russian president. Yanukovich has made that clear enough. And Cougar sees it that Russia’s geopolitical intentions may be viewed most clearly through the prism of Ukraine. It’s not just about Ukraine, it’s about all the former Soviet republics.’ Logan leaned in. ‘Moscow wants them back and Ukraine is the jewel in the crown.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain why now, why this evening of all times,’ Pasconi snapped and Logan felt that she was flailing in the wind. ‘It’s damn inconvenient,’ she added. ‘Pointless, I’d go as far as to say.’