by Alex Dryden
The waves crawled up and back on the shingle beach with a monotonous regularity that began to make her sleepy again. There was hardly any moon, the sea was dark in the small bay and beyond. And then she saw it: an object darker than the water that nudged up against the shore at the corner of the cove where the wave motion was broken by an outcrop of rock that shielded it from the sea.
Anna kept to the top of the beach and crept slowly towards the object as it gingerly approached the beach, until she saw the black prow of a rubber boat. There were three figures in it. One stepped over the side as it came in close and pulled the boat a little further on to the shore, just to keep it from being dragged back, no more. Then a light flashed. A torch on the boat flickered twice, a pause, then three times and a pause, then twice again. Anna flashed the torch three times, then a break, then three times again, and repeated it. She was only thirty yards away now. It was them, she was sure of that. But she drew both the guns she had taken from the dead men and waited for a few seconds. With one gun aimed at the figure in the centre of the boat, and the other ready to fire in any direction necessary, she walked at an angle across the pebbles until she could see the men’s outlines clearly. They wore balaclavas. The man in the centre removed his and she recognised Larry. Nobody spoke.
As she reached the sea’s edge, Larry hauled her into the rubber boat. Then the two other men pushed the boat sluggishly away from the shingle and it crept away from the shore with muffled engines. Once they were clear of the shore they crossed the bay at speed and headed out to sea. Still, no words were spoken.
In just under an hour from the rendezvous the boat pulled up beside the rusting hull of a small Nigerian-registered freighter and a ladder was dropped. Anna went up first, feeling the package pressing into her chest as she climbed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GOLDEN FLEECE nightclub on Odessa’s waterfront was not a regular haunt of Taras Tur. In fact, no nightclub anywhere on the planet was even an irregular haunt of his. He wouldn’t have been here at all if it weren’t for his cousin Masha. It was her suggestion that they should meet here. That was supposed to have been yesterday evening. She was a day late – not at all an unlikely event for Masha – and so he’d decided to return here a second time in the hope that tonight she would arrive. Nevertheless, her non-appearance troubled him.
The choice of venue he put down to her youth. She was younger than he was by a decade and she still liked the nightclubs even now that she was married. As for him, even in his youth Taras had never enjoyed places like the Golden Fleece. He thought about this for a moment and decided that he simply didn’t believe in them. Taras was not an escapist. He liked to know what was what and, until he’d met his wife ten years before, his previous girlfriends had either become hurt and angry by his organised, rational mind or teased him for it.
He looked at his watch again. It was nearly ten o’clock and she had said she’d be here by nine the evening before. Well, that was Masha. She’d told him by phone from Moscow a week ago that she would be in Odessa the previous afternoon. She was arriving from Russia the day before that – that would be two days ago – then making a brief and, he assumed, nostalgic visit to the farm outside Sevastopol. She should have taken the plane from Simferol to Odessa yesterday afternoon. It had all sounded quite organised for Masha, in fact. But she wasn’t answering her mobile, a whole day later, and the feeling of unease crept over him again.
Taras looked around at the dressed-up girls and women in the club and guessed that Masha was probably in some cheap hostel in the town, still choosing what to wear, putting on make-up – whatever young women like her did before going out for the night. And he felt a moment of fondness for his young cousin.
He took another sip of cold Czech beer and settled in again for the wait with his elbow on the bar. He didn’t intend that they would stay here if and when Masha arrived. He would steer her to a quiet bar behind the port where they could talk.
A stockily built, handsome man of thirty-five, Taras’s angular face reflected the sickly, pulsing shades of the club’s multicoloured lights. He’d worn street clothes rather than the gaudy outfits Odessa’s youth had dressed up in for their usual Saturday night of hedonism. His face, freckled in youth, had now absorbed the freckles into the background as he’d got older so that his face was slightly darker than the rest of him, as if he spent a great deal of time in the open air. He had broad shoulders and a big frame which, on close inspection, was made up principally of hard muscles and which came from the rigourous training of his job, but also from regular games of squash. He was the SBU squash champion. His expression – even outside situations like this one that he found a little strenuous – reflected life’s knocks. There was a lived-in look in his eyes, exaggerated by a dolefulness from his heavy eyelids that slanted downwards towards the outside. They gave him a seen-it-all look. But the pupils were hard points that seemed to bore into whatever took his attention.
He wasn’t on duty tonight and had arrived wearing a ski jacket, now hung on the stool beneath him, a blue sailing sweater and jeans. But he suspected he still stood out as being a cop, even though that was only half right. He was an officer in the SBU, Ukraine’s intelligence service, with a stalled career due to his father’s murky business dealings, and a stalled ambition to match. But perhaps cops, security officers and spies all looked the same to the carefree crowds of youth at the Golden Fleece.
Despite not being on duty, he still looked at the faces and studied the attitudes of the club’s occupants. There was a workmanlike look about him, as if he’d come straight from an office. But his square jaw, heavy hands and stern expression suggested a man who took life rather more seriously than the young crowd at the Golden Fleece did. They were all just ordinary young people, mostly in their late teens, out for an evening of drinking and dancing at the clubs that were putting on special shows on this pre-election night.
Looking around him now at the relaxed groups of Odessa’s youth flailing in the flashing lights, there was one persistent thought that wouldn’t leave Taras’s mind: they’d all been too young to vote in 2004. When the Orange Revolution had swept through Ukraine, toppling Viktor Yanukovich from an illegal election victory, and installing Viktor Yuschenko, the current incumbent, most if not all of the club’s occupants had been barely teenagers. And yet though the Orange Revolution was only six years ago as far as the youths in the club were concerned, it might just as well have been half a century ago. The Orange Revolution was something remote to them, like a black-and-white film or a pop song that was now derided for its old-fashioned, museum quality and – let’s face it – naivety.
The world and his own country with it had moved on with astonishing speed and the kids in the club had grown into their voting years under the shadow of the failure of that revolution. What they knew about politics, if anything, was the disappointment of those expectations; the continued corruption, the economic failure and – as the inevitable consequence of that – the political exclusion of Ukraine from the European Union and NATO. There was a sense of national humiliation which came from Ukraine being defined by the outside world for its faults.
Taras had been brought up from childhood in Odessa, but in his teens his father had bought the farm outside Sevastopol in the Crimea. But that was the reason he and Masha decided to rendezvous in Odessa rather than in Kiev where he worked. His father, now dead, had been a buzinessman in the early years after the country’s independence. Taras didn’t know exactly how that had happened, but remembered one night how the house they’d lived in next to Odessa’s Ilyich Park by the Provoznaya Market had suddenly become full of boxes of electrical equipment brought in from Turkey: almost-the-latest computers, some of which worked, hi-fi, kitchen goods – anything, in fact, his father had been able to get hold of. The whole thing seemed to have taken off in a few days when the rules were relaxed. His father was suddenly at the centre of affairs, just like that.
Odessa had always been a great trading c
ity, but within a few months in 1991, Taras’s family had moved to the Crimea, into the farmhouse outside Sevastopol, and the Odessa residence became his father’s office. By that time, his father had warehouses in Odessa and other offices in Kiev, thanks to payments in the right places. The family – minus his father – had moved out from the fringes of Odessa to a place his mother loved and where, Taras suspected, his father was only too happy to keep her out of the way. It was for their protection, as his father had put it, and after that the family hardly saw him when the business took off.
How had his father done it? Connections, of course. His father had also been with the SBU and was able to capitalise on the looser commercial rules quicker than most. From being a company man in the SBU he had elided into another, this time commercial, company with ease but one which consisted of business entrepreneurship. His father, however, had a natural talent for rising in the new economy that had made him rich where others with the same opportunities squandered them.
It was his father who had eased Taras’s way into the country’s intelligence services, but he’d failed to interest him in making money. From the elite school of intelligence, his father had created what he’d hoped would be a place in the elite school of business – and a dynastic continuity. But Taras had found himself more interested in working for his new country than stacking up money. Money for what?
And then his father had died, shot on the streets of Berlin in 1994. He was murdered by the Chechen mafia, voices at the SBU had said. Creditors had arrived. And then all Taras had left was the farmhouse outside Sevastopol and his job. He had no interest in, or talent for, business.
He looked around his surroundings now and thought that he’d come about as far as he was ever likely to go in the intelligence world, too. Even without the suspicion with which he was regarded by the intelligence agency after his father’s murder, he feared that he lacked ambition. And he certainly lacked the greed of his fellow officers for turning his privileged position into cash.
Tonight the Golden Fleece nightclub in Odessa was summing up all he didn’t like about the quest for money. He casually looked at the cocktail card on the bar top. The kind of place that served cocktails with names like ‘Blow Job Shooter’ wasn’t his kind of place of all.
Taras was by nature as well as by profession a student of the subdued, the grey and the nondescript. God knew, he had spent enough evenings like this one, propping up bars in various states of repair – both himself and the bars – and waiting for someone who might, but more often than not didn’t, show up. But the Golden Fleece nightclub was like no other meeting place he had ever been in his career so far.
No venue that Taras could recall – no billionaire’s club, no flashy joint or grubby dive or bootlegger’s den he had ever visited – had achieved anything quite approaching the individual mix of astonishingly vulgar wealth openly on show with the extreme, outlandish kitsch that the Golden Fleece displayed on this particular January evening.
He looked around with a cool expression of disinterest that bordered on disapproval at the mass of humanity writhing on the dance floor. It was no place for an intelligence officer to be, of that he was sure. It screamed public ‘excess’ and ‘display’ at him which he found uncomfortable in the extreme.
From the snaking menace of the reflective aluminium bar top, dotted with flashing diamonds of light, which disappeared some indeterminate distance away from where he stood into clouds of purple and magenta dry ice; to the walls of glass that changed colours in giant banks of plastic green, yellow, orange, red and blue; to the glass dance floor, ringed with small explosions of fireworks and similarly flashing livid circles of coloured light from below; and then right on up to the cages suspended above the dance floor, Taras looked for some relief from the brightness and the hideously unnatural tones that bore no relation to anything he recognised in nature. And all of these eye-numbing, brain tissuescarring sensations that besieged his brilliant, meticulous, though underused mind assaulted him before he could even begin to take in the ear-splitting cacophony of techno-funk to which the bodies and the lights and the artful, flashing explosions of glittering fireworks that flanked the dance floor paid homage.
Not for the first time his eyes lingered for a moment on the cages that hung from a ceiling too far above him to see. Inside each cage writhed a mostly – no, looking more closely now – an entirely naked girl. They were even more beautiful than the Kiev girls. The designer topiary of their pubic hair was apparently adorned with real gold dust, mined from the gold fields that belonged to Viktor Aaronovich, the billionaire Russian oligarch from eastern Siberia and the owner of the Golden Fleece. At least, that was what it said on the club’s website.
For a moment the massed gold dust of contorting female pudenda above his head, which – indelicately, he thought – gave the Golden Fleece its name, made him feel giddy and slightly sick. He looked down swiftly, only to be met once again by the writhing bodies on the dance floor, the rich and extremely rich of Ukraine’s youth who were here to dance and drink and drug and – who knew – probably fuck, until dawn. Lucky them, he thought – though Taras wondered about the truth of that. In any case, there was no way he could possibly put himself in their thousanddollar shoes and therefore imagine what it would be like to be them, lucky or not. His family had nothing left apart from the farmhouse after his father’s death. Mysterious creditors had arrived and they’d had no respect for his position as an intelligence officer in the new Ukraine.
In the midst of this deafeningly glitzy freak-beauty show of Ukraine’s gilded youth – and in the case of the girls in the cages, literally gilded – Taras drank stolidly from the bottle of beer.
He thought about the meeting in Kiev with Logan Halloran that he’d almost forgotten to cancel. Halloran was a strange figure. He’d been sacked by the CIA, according to his research at the office, then had worked as a freelance. And now he was working for an outfit called Cougar whose annual returns the year before were counted in the billions of dollars. Halloran seemed to him a peripatetic character, however, rarely at ease, always striving for something he didn’t have. He was too hungry, Taras thought, that was his problem. But he had a soft spot for Halloran, after their two or three meetings. Perhaps it was because few people in the intelligence world in Kiev seemed to like him. Taras wondered if he just liked him out of pity, or if he was really interested in the inevitable offer he expected Halloran to make him. He knew Halloran’s interest in him wasn’t out of friendship.
He looked in the mirror behind the bar and casually surveyed his appearance as closely as he dared. As someone who rarely looked at his reflection, he was surprised. Instead of the slightly formless creature he took himself to be, he saw a well-built man who was only let down – in here at at any rate – by his clothing. When he looked back at the crowd of mostly girls at the bar he decided that they weren’t grimaces of contempt after all, but smiles, some of which now seemed quite seductive and enticing. It was his clothes that were weird, not the club itself, he decided, and they were making him the most noticeable figure in the entire place. That was what unnerved him as much as anything. He wished Masha would arrive and they could go somewhere else. He liked to remain in the background. The small bar he had in mind, somewhere behind the port, would suit him better.
He turned towards the barman and ordered another beer and noted the man only spoke Russian, not Ukrainian. Unless he was refusing to speak the national language.
Taras sipped from the neck of the bottle. Always a bottle, and opened in front of him, that was the rule. You never could tell what else might be tipped into a glass.
At least no one tried to talk to him. He was gratifyingly shunned. He was stationed at the end of the aluminium bar, at the appointed spot nearest to the entrance – which he preferred to think of as the exit. He wondered briefly how he had even been allowed into the Golden Fleece in the first place. If anyone was designed to be rejected by the thugs on the door, who exercised the strict
feis kontrol that excluded the uncool and the obviously unattractive, as well as the gangsters, from such elite nightclubs, it was him. He knew that, and he didn’t care.
As he drank the straw-coloured beer he looked up from his thoughts to the huge wall that stretched the width of the club behind the dance floor. Once again, the whole wall had turned a pale white. The blur of thumping noise and flashing light was interrupted every half-hour by what was, Taras considered, the most bizarre apparition of all on this January night in 2010 – the night before the first round of the much-awaited presidential elections. Either at some pre-determined, computerised moment, or at the whim of the club’s billionaire owner seated invisibly somewhere in a private room, the glass walls would fade to white. And then, across one side of the entire club, a back-projected face would appear, fifty feet by fifty feet – the extraordinary and extraordinarily beautiful face of Yulia Timoshenko. Tonight in the club – and in the previous few weeks more behind the scenes than he was in here – Viktor Aaronovich was repeatedly flaunting his support for her bid to be the next president of Ukraine.
There, up on the wall, the face now appeared and would remain for some minutes, and the cheers from the dance floor at this apparition almost exceeded the noise of the techno-funk.