The Blind Spy

by Alex Dryden

  Taras now picked up the phone, dialled Kuchin’s extension and got his secretary. ‘Tell him I’m on my way,’ he said. ‘He’s there?’

  ‘He’s waiting for you,’ she answered. Taras thought he heard an amused tone in Yelena’s voice, something he’d noted before and put down to a flirtatiousness on her part. Whether it was for him or for anyone Kuchin was dragging over the coals, he didn’t know.

  Taras sat down and sipped the scalding coffee, which burned his mouth, until the urgency of Kuchin’s order overcame his need for caffeine. It wouldn’t do to take the coffee up to Kuchin’s office. So he burned his mouth some more, before putting down the half-full cup. Then he left his office once again to take the lift this time, to the fifth floor.

  He wasn’t kept waiting more than a minute in the room with Yelena, which was highly unusual – almost unprecedented, in fact – and, when he entered Kuchin’s office, he saw there were three other men in the room as well as Kuchin, who was sitting bolt upright behind a large desk with a Ukrainian flag on it. Behind him on the windowsill was a photograph of Viktor Yanukovich, the Kremlin’s choice for president.

  ‘Sit down,’ Kuchin said abruptly. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘It’s nine-fifteen in the morning,’ Taras replied. ‘I’ve been on my way to work.’ He wondered why, if this was so urgent, they hadn’t called him on his mobile.

  Kuchin unfolded a piece of paper and then dropped it on top of another sheet as if to hide it from Taras’s eyes.

  ‘What were you doing on Saturday night?’ Kuchin demanded without preamble.

  ‘Several things,’ Taras replied.

  Kuchin’s eyes flared for a moment than settled into an expression of dull antagonism. ‘Between seven-fifteen and tenthirty in the evening,’ he said.

  ‘I was in a club in Odessa,’ Taras replied. ‘A bomb went off.’

  ‘Why?’

  No sympathetic concern, Taras noted. It was simply a pedantic question. But Kuchin was never either subtle or sympathetic.

  ‘I was drinking and waiting for someone,’ he answered.

  ‘Waiting for whom?’ Kuchin said.

  ‘My cousin.’

  Kuchin looked at some notes. ‘Two days later you made a call to the airline offices at Simferol airport,’ Kuchin said. ‘They checked with us here. The shift security told them what to ask you and what reply they should expect. Then you gave them the correct code for the day.’

  Kuchin looked hard at him.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Taras replied.

  ‘You asked for travel details on one Masha Shapko, a Russian citizen.’

  ‘My cousin, yes.’

  Kuchin at last leaned back in his chair, as if he’d had a steel rod removed from his spine, and an exhalation of air seemed to empty his chest. It appeared that he’d been holding his breath all this time.

  ‘Your cousin …?’ he said. It was something they didn’t know, Taras realised.

  ‘Yes, she’s my cousin. She’s supposed to be visiting me. I was meeting her at the Golden Fleece. But she didn’t turn up and she still hasn’t turned up.’

  ‘Yet she was in Sevastopol.’

  ‘That’s right. Then taking the Simferol flight to Odessa.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’d decided to go to the country outside Sevastopol before coming to Odessa. My family has a house down there,’ Taras replied.

  ‘So she was visiting your family.’

  ‘My father’s dead,’ Taras replied, ‘as you know. Masha wanted to see the house. There’s no one there right now. It’s a summer house.’

  ‘So why was she going there, then?’

  ‘She wanted to go and see it for old times’ sake before coming to Odessa to meet me.’

  ‘Why?’ Kuchin said.

  ‘She used to holiday there with us in summer. Fond memories of childhood. Maybe she just wanted a holiday too.’

  Taras recalled the first time he had met Masha, his mother’s sister’s daughter. He’d liked her from the moment they’d met the summer after his father’s death. He’d been more like an uncle to her than a cousin. His little cousin from Moscow, twelve years younger than him, had been fun to have around. After that first holiday she’d come every summer to get away from the heat of Moscow and spend a few weeks by the sea. Her mother had married a Russian, Boris Shapko. Shapko had been stationed in Kiev with the KGB, but their home was always in Moscow and he had become a naturalised Russian back in the 1980s. Masha’s father Boris was now a firm Russian nationalist, a loud supporter of Putin’s United Party, and a member of the Duma, the lower Russian parliament. Masha’s father – like the whole male side of the family, it seemed – was rooted into the intelligence world. And like others who originally came from the Soviet republics, Boris Shapko had become more Russian than the Russians, perhaps to prove his loyalty. Boris believed that Ukraine itself was part of Holy Russia and not an independent country at all.

  ‘A holiday?’ Kuchin said, interrupting his thoughts. ‘In January?’

  ‘It’s the only time she was free. She’s working now, in Moscow.’

  ‘Yes, we know what she does.’

  ‘Her father is a KGB officer and a member of the Russian Duma,’ Taras said openly. ‘And she’s also worked in the security services in Moscow for the past two years now.’

  Taras wanted another cigarette. He looked at the other men in the room now for the first time. Kuchin’s intense questioning had kept him focused on his boss. Two of them looked like internal security people. Grim-faced, single-minded, unspontaneous. They were professionally humourless men, whether they were in here ‘guarding the state’ or swinging naked from chandeliers, he imagined. ‘I’m still trying to track her down,’ Taras said. ‘Has something happened to her?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kuchin replied. ‘Something has happened to her.’ But he wasn’t going to say anything that might alleviate Taras’s concern.

  ‘Why else would your cousin go to Sevastopol?’ one of the internal security monkeys snapped at him.

  ‘That’s the only reason I know of,’ Taras replied. ‘She loves the place and she particularly loves our house there. The first time she came there she was twelve years old and she’d never seen the sea. It has a kind of magic for her, I guess.’

  ‘She’s got herself into trouble,’ Kuchin said mysteriously.

  ‘That sounds like Masha,’ Taras replied, deliberately avoiding an over-reaction to Kuchin’s insinuating tone of voice. ‘What sort of trouble?’ he enquired. He looked at the other three men in the room properly now. The third one was Ukrainian special forces, he was certain of that now, and the other two were in civilian clothes. Undoubtedly internal security people. Spies who watched the spies. He wondered who watched them, and who watched the people who watched them. No level of paranoia would be too great, of that he was sure anyway.

  ‘Why was she carrying a gun?’ Kuchin said. ‘If she was going on holiday.’

  So. They knew her whereabouts. Perhaps they were holding her. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he replied. ‘Maybe she carries one because she’s allowed to.’

  ‘It’s the latest GRU pistol.’

  ‘Well, she works for Russian intelligence. Why do any of us carry guns?’

  ‘We don’t take them across the border into Russia without notifying the authorities.’

  ‘I can’t help you, Colonel,’ Taras answered. ‘All I know is that she was coming to Odessa after she’d visited our place in Sevastopol. Where is she now?’

  Kuchin paused, for a moment disoriented by being asked a direct question himself. He turned to the man in Ukrainian special forces who was sitting closest to the desk.

  ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Babich,’ he said, ‘tell Tur what you know.’

  Babich put his arms on the desk and looked at Taras with the neutral expression of someone who has been brought in to a situation he doesn’t like.

  ‘We picked up information that a team of Russian soldiers, who we now know were from the FSB a
nd special forces, were heading out of the city. Sevastopol, that is. It was suspicious because they hadn’t notified us as they should have done. That’s the agreement we have with the Russians. So we put a tail on them and when we saw where they’d regrouped, we sent our own team, of which I was the leader. There was an uncomfortable stand-off at a barn outside the city. They were very tense, threatening. So we called up reinforcements and eventually they backed down. It was a close thing. Then we saw they were holding someone. This Shapko. Your cousin, apparently.’

  ‘Check it,’ Taras said angrily, and then regretted his outburst. But Babich ignored him.

  ‘She was in the back of one of their trucks,’ Babich continued smoothly. ‘We demanded they hand her over. They said she was a Russian citizen and we told them they were in Ukrainian jurisdiction on Ukrainian territory and had no rights outside the militarised zone around Sevastopol harbour. When our reinforcements arrived, we effectively forced them to hand her over. She’d apparently tried to shoot herself, but we don’t know for sure. She hadn’t made much of a job of it. The bullet had gone through her cheek and smashed her jaw before exiting fairly harmlessly. She was alive, in any case,’ he said harshly. ‘But much longer, and she might have been dead from loss of blood.’

  Taras stared back at Babich.

  ‘What makes you think it was her who’d fired the shot?’ he said eventually.

  ‘The Russians told us she had. But, to be honest, that’s what it looked like. Not a good attempt.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Taras asked.

  ‘She’s in hospital. She’s stabilised.’

  ‘In Sevastopol.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Taras suddenly liked Babich. He was just telling what he knew.

  ‘So that’s why you didn’t meet your cousin,’ Kuchin said. ‘She was involved in something other than a nostalgic visit to your family house.’

  ‘Is she conscious?’ Taras asked, but to Babich.

  ‘In and out, when I last saw her.’

  ‘The question is,’ Kuchin said impatiently, ‘what was she doing attracting the attention of Russian special forces? We have to work with them. We don’t like going up against them like this. It causes trouble at the highest levels.’ He looked angrily at Babich.

  Babich didn’t comment.

  ‘Do we know it was her who was attracting their attention?’ Once more Taras looked at Babich. ‘Maybe she just got caught up in something. If all this happened at the farm.’

  ‘That’s a good point,’ Babich said reasonably. ‘One of the Russians made a slip, perhaps. He told me, “It wasn’t her.” I’m certain he meant they were expecting someone else.’

  ‘But why did she try to shoot herself if she was innocent?’ Kuchin snapped, evidently either disagreeing with this interpretation or merely wanting things to be neat, tied up and off his desk. ‘She was involved,’ he added

  ‘Maybe,’ Babich conceded. Kuchin glared at him for his lack of full support.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  22 January

  ‘COALITION INTEROPERABILITY’ WAS not an expression that Adrian Carew was likely to find anything other than blind stupid. It was American, of course, he told himself.The multilingual NATO intelligence committee conducted its business in American – or an ‘international’ version of English, as they called it – and that didn’t help his mood. But in his view this sort of jargon was generally typical of the way the English language had become so hopelessly mauled that it was now being used either to cosh the listener senseless, or to obfuscate a situation to the point of meaninglessness. Incomprehensible language had become a substitute for clarity, and in Adrian’s opinion a lack of intelligent decision-making was bound to follow. But worst of all, the language bored Adrian in the same way that reading the excruciatingly translated instructions on a Chinese-made vacuum cleaner might have done.

  ‘Do you mean “working together”?’ he interrupted and his lips tightened as if they were gripping a straw. He had a sudden notion that, as head of the British intelligence service, good English usage – or any other damn language for that matter – was the prerequisite for good international relations.

  Most of the other figures around the large, perfectly oval, polished cherry wood table – it had reportedly cost over fifty thousand euros – looked at him as if it were he who had just uttered sounds in some as yet undiscovered language. Osvald Kruger, the head of the BND, Germany’s spy agency, in particular looked like he was completely at home with ‘Coalition Interoperability’. It was simply the norm. It was international English, his raised eyebrows seemed to say – at least they seemed to say so to Adrian. There was an uncomfortable pause.

  ‘It’s not, actually, exactly the same thing, Adrian,’ the CIA head Theo Lish said at last in a patiently hushed voice, and then gave a little cough, either from a sense of linguistic superiority or simply from awkwardness. He had been drawing to the close of a complex exposition of the latest NATO strategy for combating cyber warfare and had now lost his thread.

  ‘I know it’s not exactly the same thing, Theo,’ Adrian retorted. ‘But at least everyone understands what it bloody means. It’s Anglo-Saxon English, not some bureaucratic bloody gobbledegook.’

  Lish now reddened in anger.

  Only one of the thirty or so figures sitting around the table wasn’t remotely ruffled by this disturbance. And he announced himself with his trademark loud guffaw from the opposite side of the table to Adrian. Whether from the loudness of the laugh or from its diversionary opportunity, the small explosion afforded an exit from the momentary impasse Adrian had created. Burt Miller banged the table with his chubby pink hand as a sort of percussion accompaniment to his boom box laugh, and looked around the table with a twinkle of mirth in his eyes.

  ‘The Brits never agree on the wording,’ he announced to the assembled espionage chiefs and with a broad grin on his face. ‘That’s the way they’ve lied their way around the world for five hundred years.’

  This time it was Adrian who reddened. He looked across the table at Burt with a mixture of fury and concealed admiration that contorted his expression for a brief moment into something resembling a squashed cartoon.

  Adrian then saw that the head of France’s DGSE, Thomas Plismy, was obviously enjoying his discomfort and actually had a slight but deliberate smirk on his face.

  Next to Burt, as always these days, Adrian noted, sat the Russian woman, the former KGB colonel Anna Resnikov. She had remained expressionless throughout Adrian’s encounter with Lish and now looked across the table at Adrian with a level stare. The contrast between Adrian’s rough and claret-tinged face and her smooth, finely textured features was like two Renaissance paintings, one of a bawdy house in downtown Venice, the other a pastoral Elysian idyll. The cool terrain of her personality seemed to wash over Adrian in an attempt to extinguish him with a single glance. On top of everything – for some reason this crossed his mind – she was taller than him by an inch or two. He searched her face for any sign of contempt, caught himself doing it, and felt angrier than before.

  The consultative meeting between national security chiefs of the NATO countries was a regular event that took place several times a year and was held either in Washington or, more usually, as this time, at NATO headquarters in Brussels. The thirty-one nations sent their spy masters to confer, compare notes, pursue the alliance’s common aims – and, with familiar regularity, to hide, withhold or obscure anything from each other that was considered by their respective governments to be of greater national importance than something to be shared between notional allies. It was a forum of supposedly common aims and strategies, but where conflicts of interest were everywhere and everyone knew it, no one openly mentioned them.

  In recent years the get-together included not just the heads of the thirty-one national intelligence services of NATO countries. Occasionally a few very select intelligence gurus, like Burt Miller, who owned their own private spy companies were also invited. There were o
ne or two of these companies which had become indispensable to the American national effort and therefore to NATO. Burt headed up the biggest private intelligence-gathering organisation on earth and was here because his company now competed on more or less an equal footing with the CIA. Indeed, it was almost a branch of the CIA, some said, and one that in the past year controlled a budget nearly as large as the CIA’s own. It had become the tail that wagged the dog, in Adrian’s opinion. A kind of reverse takeover had taken place. Directors and officers left the CIA, joined companies like Cougar, then turned around and gave the CIA advice and even, on occasion, instructions. Then, when they’d served their time at Cougar, they would rejoin the CIA at the highest level and award Cougar intelligence contracts. Lish was just one of them. It was practically a protection racket, as far as Adrian was concerned.

  But the other side of Adrian wished for himself the wealth that private intelligence gathering had sumptuously bestowed on Burt.

  The woman, Anna Resnikov, only rubbed salt in this particular wound. A year before, she’d been under the threat of extinction. It seemed that somehow, inevitably with Burt’s help, she had effortlessly turned that around. After her brilliant coup de grâce in the previous year when she had exposed a KGB spy ring in Washington and nearly been killed for her pains, she’d become some kind of a hero to the Americans. She was now Burt’s associate vice-president – another meaningless expression which, to Adrian, was just Burt’s method of getting her to accompany him on trips across the Atlantic like this one. In a year, Adrian seethed, she’d probably earned more from Cougar than he’d earned in two or three as deputy, and now head, of MI6.