The Blind Spy

by Alex Dryden

  Anna reached down to the floor and picked up a metal case. She placed it carefully on the table and opened the locks. From inside, she carefully lifted out a small aluminium flask and placed it on the table.

  ‘This was picked up just over the border from Russia, inside Ukraine. It was part of a smuggled consignment of a dozen flasks like this one. Their origin is the KGB laboratories in Moscow’s Leontevsky Pereulok.’

  ‘That’s the actual canister?’ Lish said.

  ‘No. This is a dummy. The actual canisters are contaminated.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘That’s what we’re finding out. But it’s some kind of poison, type unknown.’

  When it came to the vote, the Eastern nations didn’t, as Burt had hoped, vote as one. The Czechs, Poles and Romanians voted for sharing intelligence where it concerned Russia’s borders with Ukraine and the Crimea in its entirety. Others dithered and finally came down on their side. Hungary voted against.

  The deciding vote was left to Britain. For a moment, Adrian considered upsetting Burt’s plans. Later it would be said that this was the key decision Adrian made in his entire career, from his younger days as an SAS officer to becoming head of British Intelligence. Burt looked on calmly. Adrian fiddled with the new sheet of paper dealing with the Ukraine issue and weighed his power over Burt’s. It wasn’t often that he found himself in a position to overturn Burt’s aims – nor in a position to extract a quid pro quo in return for Burt’s gratitude, for that matter. He cast his mind over what he would demand from Burt in return for his support and then, finally, he cast his vote in favour of the East – and of Burt – who beamed proudly at him as if he’d just won a race.

  There were those in London who would whisper later that Adrian had crossed the Rubicon, finally putting his own interests – a foot in the door at Cougar and the wealth which that promised – ahead of his country’s.

  And although the meeting of intelligence chiefs was a consultative one only, it was accepted that each service would report back the views of the committee to their respective governments with a strong recommendation.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  9 February

  ANNA ASKED LARRY to drop her at the foot of the farm’s earth driveway. There was some old bare and knotted wood rail fencing that stretched either side of a sagging gate and disappeared to the right over a rise in the land. She would walk up from there, she told him, and then arranged for him to return in three hours’ time.

  ‘Enjoy him,’ Larry said.

  She watched him go. Larry liked her son, had looked after him in the safe house in New Mexico two years before, and would have liked to have seen him. But the time was too precious and she wanted him all to herself.

  She turned and looked towards the farm. To the right of her was paddock with around a dozen horses bunched up together with the car’s arrival. A small circular pen was attached to the paddock for separating them out. Bales of hay were split and scattered near the fence and she saw a horse trough in which ice had been broken and was now floating in thick wedges on the surface. It was cold up here and recent snow still lay in patches on the fields. The horses stood and watched her, heads up, eyes wild, huffing big breaths from flared nostrils in the cold morning air.

  Then they tossed their heads and began to canter around the paddock in a group, kicking up their back legs in celebration of a new morning.

  There was a pond in the paddock to the left of the gate. Ice had formed there too, thick enough to walk on, she thought. The driveway ahead climbed a hill between the two fields to a wooden house a quarter of a mile in the distance and, behind that, woodland surrounded the top of the farm on two sides and ascended a high hill to the north. A stream flowed out of the wood down through the field to the pond and then on below to a river they’d crossed in the car.

  As she always did when she visited her son in his new home, Anna thought it was a good place for him to grow up, to begin a new life. She’d seen many times now how much he loved the place and how he had fitted so easily into his new family.

  Before she began the walk up the drive, she paused to take in the view. It was a beautiful place, the kind of rural paradise that brought on a wave of nostalgia for the simplicities of lost childhood. Though the country was nothing like the dacha in the forest where her grandmother had brought her up, Anna was reminded whenever she came here of that life. Anna thought of Dostoyevsky’s reflection that there was nothing higher and stranger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some memory of childhood, of home.

  But this was a working farm, too, and that made it more than just a pretty picture or a vague, rural dream. Little Finn loved the animals in particular. There were mainly cows on the farm, which were now shut up in barns until the winter ended. Then there were the long sheds on wheels she could see higher up and that housed the chickens. The farmer moved the sheds around the fields so that the land was fertilised naturally. Some pigs rooted in the woods. And there were the horses, which the family used for their own recreation and which, in the summer, became a riding school under the tutelage of the farmer’s wife.

  Little Finn’s new family had three small children of his own age. The farmer and his wife were in their mid thirties and had retired young from Cougar, deciding on a new life away from the secret world and its normal business targets and promotional ladders and the expectations of others. They’d bought the organic farm with Burt’s help – she suspected it was Burt’s way to smooth Little Finn’s transition too – and were now supplying local communities within a twenty-five radius with meat and milk. It was a physically hard living, offered little money, and the two of them were content in the choice they’d made.

  Anna waited until she felt still inside. It was necessary for her to arrive composed and quiet, to calm her generally turbulent emotions about the visits she made here. She had come to this farm in Connecticut more than a dozen times before, but even so she always felt the same way; a flutter of anxiety, a yearning, maternal connection that fought the physical disconnection between her and her son. Sometimes she felt she shouldn’t come at all, that her visits to him were a source of confusion to him. He had this new family now. She feared she was becoming like a distant relation to him, rather than his mother. But always Burt urged her to cast these thoughts aside; it was important that he had a real contact with his mother, Burt said, and to know about his dead father, Finn.

  But what good could it do him, she wondered, to be presented with a second, visiting mother, even though she was the real one? However things worked out she was satisfied she had brought him to the right place to live his early life. He had a new name, a new identity and was safe – that was all that was important.

  But as she continued up the driveway, she felt the same hollow feeling in her stomach that she always felt when she came to visit the boy. Burt had decided – and she’d agreed – that for his own safety her son should be given protection against the threat of KGB retaliation. Her own life – as witnessed in a KGB attack on her in Washington two years before – was in danger and, if they couldn’t reach her, they would find the boy an ideal hook with which to reel her in. So it was decided, after great heartsearching, that Little Finn would be given a new life. But it meant that she would lose him. One day, she knew, this family would become his own family and she would be his mother only in name. If not today, then one day, he would look on her as a virtual stranger.

  She arrived at the top of the drive and walked up two wooden stairs and tugged the bell pull. Her presence hadn’t yet been noted by the family inside, thanks to leaving the car at the foot of the drive. That was the way Anna preferred it. The door was opened by the farmer’s wife Naomi who greeted her as always with a welcome whose fulsomeness seemed intended to forestall any doubts on Anna’s part. Though neither of them had ever broached the subject, it was silently understood between them that Anna’s visits were a strain to her most of all and Naomi went out of her way to welcome her as part of
their family. Perhaps she could empathise with her position, Anna thought. Perhaps any mother could.

  They went into the kitchen and Naomi began to make coffee.

  ‘The children are playing outside somewhere,’ she said. ‘They’re probably with Tom.’

  ‘I’ll have a coffee first,’ Anna replied. ‘Thank you.’

  Normal conversation was never a choice. She couldn’t talk about her job, what she’d been doing – even who she was. Naomi and her husband didn’t even know she was Russian, let alone that she’d defected and was hunted by the KGB. All they knew was that her son had needed a change of identity and that was enough.

  The small talk between Anna and this family circled around and avoided the subject of herself, focusing only on the farm and its progress, the seasons, and the children.

  ‘How is he?’ Anna asked.

  ‘He’s fine. As I always say, he’s added something to the family, Anna,’ Naomi replied. ‘He’s bright and, to be honest with you, I’m grateful to have him with us. The others love him, they all get along well.’

  It was the same in all her previous visits. She’d seen before how Little Finn adapted quickly to new surroundings when they’d been at the safe house. Now he was easily adapting to his new family. He wasn’t plagued with thoughts of loss. He wasn’t even making the best of it, she thought, he just happily accepted what was good. There seemed to be no clouds at all in his life, and she was grateful for that, despite the fact that it could only mean a widening distance between the two of them.

  They walked up into the fields after they’d finished their coffee.

  ‘They’ll be up near the wood,’ Naomi said. ‘Tom is doing some coppicing up there. If he’s not keeping an eye on them, I am,’ she reassured her.

  But the only thing in Anna’s mind was that Little Finn would be four years old in three weeks’ time. That made her think of Finn, as well as her son. Finn’s death at the hands of the KGB, just over four years before, nudged itself into her mind whenever she saw their son.

  They found the children where Naomi had said they’d be, playing up near the wood where the stream emerged. It was a beautiful cold winter’s day, the few white clouds had cleared and the sun stood still in the sky, as if frozen itself.

  When Little Finn saw her, he stopped what he was doing and stared at her, as if he wasn’t quite sure. Then he leapt up from the stream bank and ran towards her and she caught him in her outstretched arms.

  ‘He’ll always be yours, Anna,’ Naomi had told her many times and at moments like these she dared to believe it.

  Little Finn immediately tugged at her arm and pulled her towards the stream where the other three children were playing. He showed her a small earth bank they were building ‘to catch fish’, he explained seriously. They played together by the bank until it was time for breakfast and then all of them walked back to the house. Tom kissed her on the cheek and squeezed her arm like a brother, as if he, too, knew the difficulty of her situation.

  Over breakfast, Anna took out Little Finn’s birthday presents and all four children gathered round to watch him open them. She’d bought him a few useful things – clothing mostly – and then the big prize, a farm set with animals and tractors. Suddenly she felt foolish to have bought him a replica of the real place where he was living. But he was interested in it – interested in everything – and the children went off to a playroom solemnly carrying all the pieces one by one and began to put it all together. He was absorbed, his thoughts only with his new family, and she didn’t follow immediately.

  ‘Is there anything you need?’ she asked Tom and Naomi.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. We have everything,’ Tom replied. ‘We’ll let you know if he needs something,’ he added. The tension of demonstrating he was well-provided for and at the same time allowing her to feel involved was never absent.

  ‘We love him very much,’ Naomi added, and there was a sudden awkwardness in the air, as if his own mother couldn’t provide this element of his upbringing, but only material things.

  Before she left, Anna went into the playroom and sat with him. They hugged each once and he showed her how they’d put the farm together. But already he was eager to be off. He’d seen his mother and now he had more important things to do. She let him go with a kiss and a Russian blessing. Then he scampered off back up into the fields with Tom and the other children. She felt bereft, forgotten and guilty. But, by leaving him, she knew she’d done the right thing for him, the only right thing.

  ‘Come whenever you can, any time,’ Naomi said before she left. ‘You must come and stay. You know you’re always welcome here, Anna.’

  Always welcome in her son’s new home. She fought down a painful feeling at the irony of that. But she knew that this was how it would always be. Little Finn was safe, that was all that really mattered, she knew that.

  ‘I’d like to do that very much,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  Larry was waiting at the foot of the drive, the engine running.

  ‘How is he, Anna?’ he said with his broad, uncomplicated grin.

  ‘He’s good,’ she said.

  The car swung back down to the road and Larry took her to the small private airfield nearby where one of Burt’s smaller planes waited to take her to Washington.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  20 April

  ‘THE TERROR SHIP Forburg left the port of Novorossiysk for the second time on the first of April,’ the CIA chief explained. ‘We’ve found her.’

  Theo Lish nodded to one of his fresh-faced assistants from the Threat Matrix team, an extremely tall and close-cropped Harvard graduate and basketball player who looked like he might also do toothpaste commercials on the side, and who went by the name of Archie. Unnecessarily, to Burt’s mind at least, Archie indicated the port of Novorossiysk with a wooden cue, despite the fact that its name was marked in three-inch-high letters on the electronic map that took up half a wall. Perhaps a metal cue would have caused an electrical short-circuit, Burt mused, and brought the whole bunker complex to a complete halt, leaving America defenceless.

  The port of Novorossiysk was on the right-hand side of the back-projected electronic map on which red lights were blinking here and there to indicate something or other. On closer inspection, the flashing red dots now seemed to be ports on the Black Sea, as far as Burt could see, though due to the overall ponderousness of Theo’s explanation, his mind was wandering and he wasn’t willing to display a great deal of interest. He was already way ahead of Theo’s analysis, in fact, and knew roughly what was coming.

  Otherwise on the map there were cream-coloured, glowing lines of light that appeared to track the ship’s movements out of Novorossiysk, and which extended slowly across the Black Sea as if driven solely by Theo’s explanation rather than the ship’s own engines. As Theo grew into his dissertation on the ship’s movements, Archie from Threat Matrix moved across in front of the map with his cue, like an agitated spider, as if he were directing armies into battle. It was too much empty excitement for Burt’s mind.

  They were down several floors below ground level, in a wellappointed nuclear bomb-proof bunker at the CIA’s Threat Matrix centre at Harper’s Crossing, Virginia; Theo, Burt and Adrian – the CIA, Cougar and MI6 – in that order. Theo Lish had made this order clear to Adrian in an unnecessary emphasis of the line of command that was guaranteed only to irritate Adrian’s sensibilities.

  For his part, Adrian was still seething at having been asked to strip down to his underpants in order to enter this holy of holies in the first place. He, Adrian Carew, head of MI6, had been requested with much polite deference and many apologies by two armed, uniformed and highly polished special forces soldiers to strip off!

  ‘But I’m head of the British Special Intelligence Service, for Christ’s sake!’ Adrian had protested. ‘Your bloody boss has invited me here!’

  But it was all ‘I’m sorry, sir’, ‘Regulations, sir’, ‘We all have to do it these days, I’m afra
id’, and ‘It won’t take a minute, sir’. If this was how the Yanks treated their allies, no wonder the world was full of their enemies, Adrian had thought. And for a moment, Adrian wondered if Burt had been made to go through this ritualistic humiliation. He somehow doubted it and that only made him angrier.

  The room was decked out with the sort of deep leather armchairs that induced a pleasant afternoon nap in old-fashioned libraries, but other than the leather chairs it flashed its high-tech purpose over everything else, including the other furnishings which were all curved aluminium and glass. It was 20 April, more than three months since the first departure of the Forburg had been noted by the agency’s Ukraine source whose head had wound up later on a snowman and which still lay in a frozen drawer at Langley. And it was more than three months since the ship had disappeared.

  Burt looked at the huge electronic chart and considered – not for the first time – that the whole set-up at Harper’s Crossing was more like the world’s best computer game than real life, and that its abstract nature merely distanced those of them in the room – and anyone else, for that matter – from the actual events on the ground.

  ‘But now she’s not called the Forburg,’ Theo intoned with a triumphant note in his voice. ‘She’s called the Yekaterinburg.’

  ‘How do you know it’s the same ship?’ Burt asked, considering that asking the obvious question would help him to endure the process by calming his mind.