by Alex Dryden
He had read the paper from cover to cover and drunk two more short coffees before his elation at the thought of the forthcoming meeting began to be replaced by a feeling of anticlimax. He’d looked around the café from time to time. There were three high school girls sitting at a table. They looked at him, spoke in whispers, laughed occasionally and self-consciously in his direction, then returned to their own affairs. A man in a slightly grubby black suit sat in a far corner. There were two other men still wearing their hats and coats as they sat at the counter, and other, scattered groups dotted elsewhere who seemed to have no plans for the evening. But by 9 p.m. the café was beginning to thin out. Everyone who had any plans was heading off for their evening’s entertainment. In half an hour, only the lonely would remain, and then the café would close anyway.
It was not, Laszlo thought curiously, a good place for a meeting anyway; it was too bright, too sparsely populated, too public. And the small window in time for the meeting was unusual too. There was just a half-hour in which it could take place before the café closed; 8.45 until 9.15 was the time the contact had dictated. For a moment Laszlo felt unnerved, uncertain about his hopes for the evening.
He reviewed once more what they knew about the proposed contact on this evening, 16 January 2010. That he was a contact from the Russian side, Plismy seemed to be sure this was the case – though why he was sure was anyone’s guess. Codename: Rafael (chosen by the contact, not by them, not by Paris – the contact had insisted on that). Sex: male. Age: in his late thirties or early forties. Nationality: Russian, Middle Eastern or from one of the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus mountains. This seemed unnecessarily vague, though agents often obfuscated details of their identity, for obvious reasons. Usefulness: unknown, but rumoured to be in possession of some highly sensitive information regarding the Kremlin’s intentions in Ukraine. Purpose of contact: find out those intentions. In other words, clear-cut, straightforward and simple. At least, that was what it should have been, Laszlo thought. All he needed was for the damned contact to actually show up.
Laszlo now sat half-turned towards the entrance to the café, willing ‘Rafael’ to enter in the dying moments left. To his vague surprise, at just after 9.15 p.m., he saw a face he recognised. The man was walking head down, almost obscuring his identity, along the wet pavement outside the rain-streaked window. Laszlo had exchanged information with this man before – the man worked in the intelligence communications section at the Italians’ Kiev embassy. Behind him, at a distance of some twenty-five yards, Laszlo now saw a Romanian intelligence officer he also recognised. Coincidence? Possibly. Was the one following the other? Likely, he supposed.
Kiev seemed to have become a front line of sorts for the world’s intelligence agencies, and in particular those of Western Europe. The whole country was crawling with spies – officers, agents, informers ... Kiev appeared to have become what Vienna had once been in the Cold War. It was bang up against Russia, as Vienna had once been before the Soviet collapse and the Russian retreat from Eastern Europe. And now, after twenty years of its own form of capitalism, Russia now transported its energy supplies at great profit to Western Europe’s hungry nations. And with its vast network of pipelines, Ukraine held the key to Western Europe’s energy needs. Without Ukraine’s willingness, or ability, to transport Russian oil and gas, the EU countries were beggared. That was why Russia’s meddling in the country was of the greatest interest to all.
The two men passed outside the window and out of sight. Laszlo turned away, back to his study of the wall two feet away. A plasticised picture of the Orange Revolution met his gaze, a kind of photographic negative, tinged in orange. It seemed almost quaintly out of date – after only six years.
France’s view, he knew, was to bypass Ukraine’s interests and befriend Russia. Soon, anyway, there would be pipelines directly from Russia underneath the Baltic that would curtail Ukraine’s importance as a go-between. But France had its own, and possibly unique policy. The Anglo-Saxons seemed intent to keep the two countries separate, to keep Ukraine independent of the Kremlin. Good luck to them, Laszlo thought – but in his opinion, that wasn’t going to happen. The forces against it were too great. So the intelligent thing to do – France’s secret policy – was to prepare for the eventuality of Ukraine’s return to Russian rule – direct or indirect was unimportant – after more than twenty years of the country’s independence.
By 9.30, the last moment for the meeting had passed. Now that no one had showed up and when he was alone in the café with only the two men in coats and hats, Laszlo realised that his expectations for the evening were not going to be met. The café was closing. There was no fallback venue, that was odd, too. It was over, at least for tonight. The contact, he guessed hopefully, must simply have been delayed.
Laszlo paid now, for his three coffees in an hour, and he left the café just as a woman with a broom swept up the day’s detritus from beneath the chairs and tables. He decided to walk and ended up back at the theatre where he retrieved his coat.
The non-appearance of the man who called himself Rafael was a recurrent theme in Kiev on that night of 16 January, and not just in Kiev. In other towns and cities across Ukraine – not to mention one proposed meeting by a lakeside near the Russian border which the unfortunate head of intelligence at the Chinese embassy pointlessly attended – Ukraine’s spy community was coaxed to attend meetings that never took place. Rafael turned out to be a chimera. In total, the embassies of fourteen different countries sent out their intelligence officers on this wild goose chase. Rafael had spun his web so effectively that none of those contacted knew any more by the end of the night than what Rafael had chosen to give them – which was very little and even that, it was assumed, would turn out to be false.
But with the intelligence community living on top of itself in the city and though meetings between the officers of different agencies were largely covert, soon the rumour began to pass around the watering holes and restaurants of Kiev that everyone had fallen for Rafael whom Rafael had contacted. It started with an apparently innocent question from an intelligence officer at the German embassy to his opposite number at the Spanish embassy: ‘Come across a source who calls himself Rafael?’ was the casual remark. Then the question was repeated in bars, until it left the street talk of the spies and graduated to informal chats between the chiefs of the different national agencies involved.
At first there was reluctance. Nobody wanted to admit they’d been fooled until someone else admitted it first. At first nobody even admitted to knowing anything about anyone called Rafael. But soon everyone grew to the understanding that they had all been set up, equally and with no shame, and then the discussions between rival and allied agencies became more open. Rafael made it on to the agendas of inter-agency meetings, he was tagged by NATO, and he was openly discussed now in the bars and restaurants of Kiev whenever any two officers from different countries crossed paths, either by design or by accident. Rafael was an embarrassment, then he became a joke, an anecdote, until finally he was filed away at the very back of the fine minds who’d been taken in, to be forgotten at the earliest possible convenience. Why did he do it? Whoever this Rafael was. It was generally assumed that he was just some clever student who, instead of hacking his way into national computer networks, preferred a more earthy approach in order to mess around with the world’s intelligence efforts. And so, finally, Rafael was laid to rest, and the world moved on.
On the following day, a Sunday, all eyes in Kiev and in the political world at large were anyway focused on the first round of the elections. Of the eighteen candidates who were standing, by the end of the first round two remained for the run-off in three weeks’ time – Yulia Timoshenko and Viktor Yanukovich, the man who had benefited from the fixed elections in 2004 which had led to the Orange Revolution. He was Russia’s preferred candidate for ultimate victory, it was noted, while Ms Timoshenko appeared to be available for wooing by all sides, west and east.
> At the American Embassy in Kiev, at number 6 Mykoly Pymonenka Street, the Rafael affair, or incident – or spoof, as it was commonly known – caused a similar confusion, and then an irritation, as it had caused elsewhere. Sam MacLeod, the CIA’s station head had, in fact, despatched a relatively junior officer to a meeting with Rafael at a small town in the Carpathian Mountains – a day trip that was enjoyed by the officer despite its lack of success. And, as elsewhere in Kiev’s intelligence community, Rafael was swiftly relegated to an elaborate prank by the Americans.
But on that very morning of the elections, 16 January, however, a letter had been delivered to the embassy, sealed in a quaintly old-fashioned way with red wax, on which there was an impression of a bird. The letter was addressed not to anyone at the embassy, but to Burt Miller, head of Cougar Intelligence Applications, which had foisted Logan into MacLeod’s presence. Burt Miller was known throughout the CIA community at a national level. A senior ex-CIA officer himself, then a director at the CIA, he could now be said to call the shots on certain matters of national intelligence, due to the enormous wealth of Cougar, as well as the expertise and the ensuing government contracts that Cougar netted annually. And in the East, from Kiev to the Tajik border with China – including the vast landmass of Russia – Burt’s name was very well known indeed in certain circles. It was here in the empty regions of central Asia that had been his original stamping ground. As a man in his early twenties he had begun his explosive intelligence career over forty years before in the great central Asian plains and mountains.
Because of his – and Cougar’s – importance to the CIA and general good regard from its chief Theo Lish, the unopened letter was put on a morning plane to London, where Burt Miller was meeting with the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Adrian Carew, before they both attended a meeting of NATO intelligence chiefs in Brussels in the following week. During a brief break in his talks with Adrian Carew, Burt carefully slit the top of the envelope, avoiding causing damage to the seal, and withdrew a single sheet of paper. On it he read, ‘Rafael will not be meeting tonight’. He stared at the message for a long time and then replaced the sheet back into its envelope.
When he returned to the meeting with Adrian, Burt hadn’t the slightest clue to the meaning of the six words, or of who Rafael might be – if anyone. But Burt Miller was a man who allowed his instincts full rein, and they were usually good. On this occasion he felt a growing sense of excitement that these instincts – this time for an intelligence coup of some importance – told him was genuine. This instinct, he regularly told his juniors in briefing sessions, and using the third person to describe himself like any autocrat would, was ‘Burt’s line to God’.
CHAPTER NINE
Sunday, 17 January
THE VIEW BEYOND the table and through the porthole from aboard Burt Miller’s 302 foot yacht Cougar was of Tower Bridge and the City of London. Anna looked through the round glass and saw the skies were a uniform battleship grey. A light rain was spattering the glass of the porthole and the wide panoramic windows on either side of it in a needling sort of way. The irritable flecks of rain glancing off the glass seemed to be an insistent reminder that London’s monochrome winter wasn’t going away.
Inside, however, the artificial lighting in the sumptuous operations room of the ship was almost too bright by comparison and was particularly focused over the large, square mahogany table. It was almost the size of a small room in itself and stood with a kind of magnificent defiance right at the centre of the deck-wide space. Burt Miller was standing by the table, while Anna sat to the side on a high upholstered stool and pensively drank from a cup of coffee.
Burt grinned at her as he made a great ceremony of opening the plastic envelope she had delivered. There was a boyish glint in his eye as if it had been a birthday present Anna had given him and she was his lover rather than an employee of Cougar Intelligence Applications who had brought him secret intelligence documents.
He finally drew out a sheaf of folded papers and carefully opened them up until they could both see there were three large, light-blue sheets in all, each four feet by three feet in dimension. Burt triumphantly laid out the three photocopied sheets of what would have been, in the original, drawings on architectural white paper. He placed them on the mahogany desk in a row, one after the other. Burt surveyed the plans with an air of satisfaction. Then he looked at her and grinned a second time.
‘Plans for the port of Novorossiysk,’ he said triumphantly and looked back at them as if they were a map of buried treasure. ‘Or the development of the port of Novorossiysk, shall we say. Highly secret. Very restricted. Our agent has done very well to obtain them.’ Then he looked at Anna. ‘And you, my dear, had an even more difficult task, I hear from Larry.’ He beamed his wide grin that creased the flesh of his face upwards until his eyes were almost invisible. ‘You are the best there is.’
Anna was sitting on the high stool that gave her a view from higher up on to the table and the plans. She’d arrived at the yacht only an hour before and it had been just over ten hours since they’d picked her up off the beach in the Crimea. With Larry alone, she had been helicoptered off the Nigerian-registered freighter to Ankara, where one of Burt’s private jets was waiting to take them both to London. She’d slept little on the flight and then Burt had wanted to see her immediately. She would have been happy to send Larry with the delivery without her. She’d done her job. She took pride in being just a field operative. But she knew Burt wouldn’t leave her alone until she agreed to share with him the contents of the package. As with most things in his life, Burt enjoyed the ritual, the ceremonial element, and her company was an essential ingredient for both things.
Now he stood in a pair of navy-blue trousers and an extravagantly tailored Gilbert and Sullivan-style yachting blazer that seemed to her to be a deliberate mockery of maritime pomposity. Perhaps it was. Burt liked dressing up – it was playacting – she knew that. She’d seen him in many such incongruous situations and disguises and the yachting paraphernalia was undoubtedly a disguise and one that he had donned simply for his own amusement. On this ship, he was the eccentric Edwardian billionaire owner. When he was at his mansion in Connecticut he was the English gentleman in tweeds and plus fours who owned his own fox hunt, had his clothes made to measure in London’s Savile Row, but he couldn’t actually ride a horse. At his vast ranch in New Mexico he dressed in the manner of a nineteenth-century American cattle baron. And in the corridors of power in Washington he was the ultimate flamboyant corporate owner in silk suits and hand-made shoes. Wherever he was, it seemed he simply enjoyed living any dream he felt like living, and which his enormous wealth could effortlessly make a reality.
His big, round face glowed like a ripe apple and his rotund, well-fed form seemed itself to stretch the imagination. There was nothing too big for Burt, apparently. At least that was the effect of his outsize physical presence and the outsize personality that kept in lock-step with it. Now he smoked a large cigar, a Churchill, another almost permanent accessory in his props cupboard, and which, for the moment, was fuming quietly on its own in a large bronze ashtray shaped like an anchor. There were other half-smoked or quarter-smoked cigars of great commercial value that could be found discarded wherever it was that Burt was currently passing through life and Anna could see at least three of them now lying like unexploded ordnance in various ashtrays around the room.
She didn’t respond to his knowing enquiry. Burt’s questions and interrogatory remarks were in general of a declamatory nature and usually didn’t require a reply.
But Burt wanted to relish the moment, to extract the maximum amount of suspense from the presence of the architectural plans and, before he took a close look at them, he went over to a refrigerator, plucked out a bottle of Krug champagne and opened it. Another largely ceremonial gesture, as he would drink perhaps half a glass at most.
A big man – though at just under five feet eight inches he seemed bigger than he w
as – Burt was, to Anna, exuding his usual warmth and confident bonhomie this afternoon, though it was tinted as always with a subcutaneous level of granite. The geological strata of Burt began on the surface with a sunny, welcoming, friendly terrain, while underneath it the bedrock was absolutely unyielding. And his smile usually left room for this hard power to be always visible behind it.
The combination of the two effects – the sweet and sour of Burt – would have been equally appropriate in a mafia boss attending his daughter’s wedding, or a casino owner welcoming a high net-worth client. Welcome to my World, was Burt’s usual modus operandi and he treated others largely as if they were present for his own entertainment.
Burt handed her a glass and raised his own.
‘To a great partnership,’ he said. ‘I have everything to be grateful for that I ever came across you.’
‘Thank you, Burt.’ She drank. ‘You know we lost the courier. I believe she shot herself.’
‘Larry told me.’
‘Apparently in order to save the agent,’ Anna said. ‘He must have trained her well.’
Burt allowed a moment of silence, more to allow the evaporation of the awkwardness of the news than in respectful memory of the girl.
‘We have to protect our agents,’ he said simply. Then he looked back at the table and the event was forgotten.
‘Let’s see what we have here,’ he said, beamed, and put his glass down on the table. He fingered the left-hand sheet and read the title, which Anna had already studied while he was displaying his relaxed self-assurance and opening the champagne. ‘This one, the sheet on the left, is what exists already. Port facilities, refuelling capacity, open water anchorages, quays and dry docks, as well as land transportation to and from the port.’ He walked eighteen inches or so to the right and the next the page. ‘And these two,’ he read the Russian Cyrillic writing on the legend at the top of the second and third sheet, ‘these two are the proposed developments, signed and sealed by the Ministry of Defence in Moscow, approved by the navy and the security services, rubber-stamped unseen by the Russian parliament and ultimately ordered by Czar Vladimir Putin. So what do we see?’