The Blind Spy

by Alex Dryden

  ‘By a very complicated process of matching the lines of the original ship which were taken from our satellite photos with the current apparition,’ Theo replied. ‘It all then gets computerised and drawn up with an exactness of shape and size down to less than an inch. We’re certain.’

  ‘And now she’s the Yekaterinburg,’ Burt said, but only in order to nudge Theo on with the story.

  ‘From there,’ Lish continued, as if even he were now becoming bored by his own voice, ‘from there – from Novorossiysk – she headed west in a diagonal straight line across the Black Sea and docked at Istanbul four days later.’

  The cream-coloured line dutifully tracked across the Black Sea. Archie focused the cue on the word Istanbul in three-inch-high letters, with its corresponding flashing red dot.

  Adrian cleared his throat loudly. It’s like some early learning lesson for the educationally sub-normal, he was thinking.

  ‘The fifth of April, in other words,’ Lish continued and now pointed – with ever-increasing lack of necessity to Burt’s mind – at the huge chart of the Black Sea on the wall and then back down on to a large polished wood table between them and the wall which dwarfed the several paper charts and satellite pictures lying on it and that were also being used to track the vessel’s progress. On the paper charts, now that Burt and Adrian looked, a thin red pencil line had been drawn to indicate the ship’s progress, as if the electronic map needed any back-up, or might fail at any time.

  But the photographs from America’s World View satellite indicated a ship and then a close-up of the name Yekaterinburg. Some of the pictures were so detailed Burt could make out a moustache on one of the crew members and a scar right the way down the left-hand side of the face of another.

  Burt picked up a cue himself now, but with the grip on its handle of someone who was about to use it for breaking heads. He waved it dangerously. Adrian, he noticed, was tapping the wooden table irritably with the forefinger of his right hand.

  A British foreign secretary in the nineteenth century, Burt recalled, had once said that a study of maps could drive a man mad. Whether you were looking at satellite pictures and electronic charts in the twenty-first century or whether you had studied medieval maps adorned with sea monsters in the court of Elizabeth I, what tended to happen, in Burt’s opinion, was that the brain became disengaged – a distance developed – and the mental processes were diverted from hard internal analysis to a theatre in which objective appreciation of a situation replaced real intelligence. The ability to work out why something was happening rather than simply that it was happening was postponed, blurred and, finally, became conveniently irrelevant. Maps and satellite pictures were the toys of the back-room boys – the computer geeks, of whom, no doubt, Archie was one – whose need for the tangible was a reassurance rather than of any actual use. The fog of war began here, in the operations rooms of Washington, Moscow, London or Paris.

  ‘Russian registered, is she?’ Burt asked, waving the cue from side to side like a deranged conductor with an outsized baton. But it served to urge the process on.

  ‘So far,’ Theo replied with a deadly seriousness that made Burt want to laugh out loud. ‘But we’ll get on to that,’ Theo added mysteriously.

  ‘She left on April Fool’s day,’ Burt chortled. ‘I like it.’

  ‘They don’t actually have April Fool’s day in Russia,’ Theo replied pedantically.

  ‘They don’t have Christmas Day on Christmas Day either,’ Burt replied. ‘But that never stopped the Russians from using our calendars to perform their nefarious deeds. What then, Theo?’

  ‘She unloaded a cargo of timber in Istanbul which was loaded previously at Novorossiysk. Want to see the pictures of that?’

  ‘I think I know what the wood will look like,’ Burt said, and Archie seemed disappointed at the missed opportunity for further visual extrapolation, as well as oblivious to the sarcasm.

  ‘OK,’ Lish resumed. ‘Two days in port at Istanbul, that’s all. Then she’s off again, headed out through the Bosphorus and into the Mediterranean.’

  ‘Who’s watching her on the ground?’ Burt asked.

  ‘The British.’

  That explained the presence of Adrian, then.

  ‘We have two Special Boat Service teams tracking the ship,’ Adrian said in a clipped voice. ‘Round the clock, out of radar range.’

  ‘What makes you think the Yekaterinburg is carrying ordinary radar?’ Burt asked. ‘Or that anyone interested in her like we are – like your boys in their rubber boats – aren’t also being tracked but on someone else’s satellite? If she’s so important, if that’s what this is all about, the Russians will know just where you are.’

  ‘They keep below range,’ Adrian replied. ‘Small boats only, but I grant you there’s nothing we can do if the ship and the area around it are being tracked from space by their side. Whoever their side is,’ he added.

  ‘Dashing around the high seas in little rubber boats,’ Burt said with great enthusiasm. ‘Great stuff, Adrian.’ But in his mind he was satisfied that there was no one better for the job than the British special forces. They liked a fight.

  ‘So. What then?’ he said.

  Theo moved another chart and satellite map over the first one on the table. Archie flicked a switch on a console in the hand that wasn’t holding the wooden cue and projected a new electronic map on to the wall which now showed the eastern Mediterranean.

  ‘First stop after Istanbul is Alexandria – Egypt,’ Theo said, again pedantically to Burt’s ears.

  ‘I didn’t imagine it was Alexandria, Virginia, Theo.’

  ‘Detail’s important,’ the CIA chief said. ‘No slip-ups, no misunderstandings. Step-by-step.’

  Not this sort of detail, Burt thought. This was just flannel, stuffing, something to fill out reports with.

  ‘Pick up a new cargo in Alexandria, did she?’ he enquired, concealing his impatience with a trademark smile.

  ‘Yes, she was loaded when she left. Down to the Plimsoll line. But we don’t know what with. Or we didn’t.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘She chugs off up the coast of the southern sector of the Med. We have our Sixth Fleet now supporting the British in the area. Refuelling and so on. Rotating crews from the SBS, Britain’s Special Boat Service, sent out from the UK. She then docks in Algiers, three days later. Unloads a cargo of scrap metal, as it turns out. That’s what she picked up in Alexandria.’

  This was taking an awfully long time for Burt’s liking. So a Russian merchant vessel left the port of Novorossiysk just like hundreds of others did every year. ‘What about it?’ he said mildly, concealing a growing testiness beneath his same trademark grin which, as usual, contained all the potential of a drugged and swaying cobra.

  ‘This is where it gets interesting,’ Theo said. ‘Adrian?’

  Adrian shuffled the two or three inches available to him in order to get closer to the charts and the satellite pictures on the table. There she was again on the maps and in the photographs, the Yekaterinburg, but now she was heading west along the southern littoral from Egypt. The line of light on the wall indicated her progress. It was an entertainment, Burt thought. And then he remembered that it was the Walt Disney Corporation which had designed the CIA’s Threat Matrix centre.

  ‘She disappears,’ Adrian said. ‘That’s what happens.’

  ‘Disappears?’ Burt queried and raised a mocking eyebrow. ‘You don’t mean into thin air, presumably.’

  ‘Put it this way, Burt. Our teams are watching her. We have a four-man team on shore in Algiers and others out at sea. Supported by your Sixth Fleet, as Theo says. Our shore team can’t get into the actual port area, but they have a view, shall we say. They overlook it.’

  ‘Well done, Adrian,’ Burt said, and Adrian tried and failed to pinpoint an unmistakable tone of mockery in his voice.

  ‘On the morning of the fifteenth of April,’ Adrian continued, ‘she’s no longer alongside the dock in Algiers.
She’s vanished. That’s what I mean.’

  ‘But your teams picked up what vessels left port during the night,’ Burt said.

  ‘Yes. Five ships left overnight. Between nine p.m. and nine a.m. We think the Yekaterinburg was one of them. In fact, she must have been, and we can show it.’

  ‘That would make excellent sense,’ Burt said. ‘If she wasn’t there any more she must have either left or sunk. What’s the proposition?’

  ‘Two SBS teams at sea tracked all five ships, until they finally reduced the search to one. If it’s the Yekaterinburg – and we’re certain it is – she was re-registered overnight under the flag of Tuvalu, and re-named the Pride of Corsica. Paint job, new numbers, a few little differences to the outer appearance, but the superstructure’s the same. My watchers are experts.’

  ‘I’m sure they are,’ Burt agreed. ‘So she starts off as the Forburg in January, turns into the Yekaterinburg in April and then swiftly becomes the Pride of Corsica. Sounds rather over-elaborate, don’t you think?’

  ‘That depends on how elaborate they think it needs to be,’ Theo said. ‘Evidently concealment is of the utmost importance.’

  ‘What then?’ Burt said, and found he was now warming to the chameleon ship.

  Theo now walked away from the table as if for some oratorical effect. Then he turned. ‘So the boat we’re sure is the Forburg/ Yekaterinburg still heads west. But now she’s under a new flag and named the Pride of Corsica. This time she’s going to Libya.’

  ‘And this time we see she has bodyguards on board,’ Adrian said.

  ‘Armed guards,’ Burt murmured as a statement rather than a question, and as if in some way suddenly approving of the operation. ‘What provenance?’

  ‘We don’t know. But they’re crawling all over the deck. They must have boarded in Algiers, or just possibly under the cover of darkness out at sea. They looked like they were preparing for something.’

  ‘But not a tea party.’ Burt looked at Adrian. ‘What sort of preparations?’

  ‘A great deal of ordnance. Heavy stuff. Anti-aircraft, anti-submarine, you name it. Plus an arsenal of small arms that could bring down a small country.’

  Theo now brought up satellite pictures of the deck of the ship with a clear view of about a dozen men, Burt thought, armed to the teeth with Kriss Super Five sub-machine guns, and wearing balaclavas and combat gear. He now saw there was a sternmounted anti-aircraft emplacement, plus one in the bow. He thought he detected what Adrian had called anti-submarine devices, too.

  ‘And who’s she registered to now?’ Burt asked.

  ‘She was originally registered – when she left Novorossiysk – to a shell company in the British Virgin Islands. We traced the account numbers of this company’s bank to the BVI and then beyond. We think we have a match to a brass plate company in Omsk, Russia. Now, however, she’s registered to another company in the BVI which we’ve traced to another, brass plate company, this time in Cyprus.’

  ‘Who are the beneficiaries?’

  ‘We’re pretty certain they’re also Russian,’ Archie chipped in for the first time – as if they were nearing the kill. It filled the dramatic pause Theo had left while gearing himself up to reply and the CIA chief looked momentarily peeved. ‘It would certainly make sense,’ Archie added.

  ‘Ah. Yes, Archie, it would certainly make sense,’ Burt said.

  ‘The name of the new, Cyprus company is Fennerman International,’ Theo said. ‘Telephone number, box address. Nothing there. But behind this shadow company in Cyprus there’s yet another company, in the Turks and Caicos Islands, and behind that company there’s a further company in Cyprus.’

  ‘The mother ship,’ Burt says. ‘So who’s behind that?’

  ‘Work in progress,’ Archie said eagerly.

  ‘But you’re satisfied that this company in Cyprus – the second one – is the end of the line?’ Burt asked.

  ‘Most likely. Ultimate beneficiary is, again, a company registered in Omsk, Russia.’

  ‘Same one as before, or different?’ Burt said.

  ‘Different, but at the same address in a run-down warehouse building on the edge of town. We’ve had people take a look at it. It’s empty but for a few hundred boxes of cigarettes.’

  Omsk, Russia. Burt wished Theo wouldn’t keep insisting on giving them a geography class. More of the same kind of reportfiller, he thought, rather than useful information.

  ‘Beneficiaries,’ Adrian said. ‘What are the names behind the company?’

  ‘Don’t know that yet, Adrian,’ Theo replied.

  ‘So. She docks in Tripoli – Libya,’ Burt added in deliberate imitation of Theo’s style, ‘and then picks up another cargo there,’ he said.

  ‘Right, Burt. But this is the important thing,’ Theo replied. ‘She isn’t what you’d call laden coming out of Tripoli, if you know what I mean. Whatever she picks up there has no effect on her waterline.’

  ‘So how do you know she took anything on?’ Burt said.

  ‘Our teams have pictures,’ Adrian said, and Archie brought them to the surface of the paperwork on the table. ‘Wooden boxes, three in all,’ Archie said. There were pictures of large wooden crates, big enough to hold two men, and well insulated by the look of them. They were being lifted on to the deck and then dropped down into a hold out of sight.

  ‘Something small and valuable, then,’ Burt said.

  ‘We think so.’

  ‘And then there are the bodyguards,’ Adrian chipped in. ‘What are they there for?’

  ‘What indeed?’ Burt said. ‘So, Theo, what then?’

  ‘She returns by a roundabout route back eastwards again, across the Med. Docks in Piraeus first of all, then at Tartous on the Syrian coast. Then she turns north to the Bosphorus again, enters the straits …’

  ‘And is now?’ Burt interrupted.

  ‘Our teams have her pinpointed at Lat 44.53 Long 32.65,’ Adrian replied crossly.

  ‘Around fifty miles off the coast of the Crimea,’ Burt said, to both Theo’s and Adrian’s astonishment.

  ‘I didn’t know you were so familiar with the Black Sea,’ Theo said. ‘Or with the exact co-ordinates in the area, for that matter. You didn’t know all this all along, did you, Burt? I haven’t been wasting my time?’

  ‘No, Theo. Just what you and Adrian have told me.’

  It didn’t look like either of them believed him.

  ‘So what’s the thesis?’ he pressed on.

  ‘That’s what we now need to pursue,’ Theo replied.

  Burt thought for some moments. Then he walked away from the table so he could get the maps and pictures and names and numbers out of his head, and think. Finally he turned around.

  ‘Kind of an obvious trail, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Not at all, Burt,’ Theo replied primly. ‘It’s just that we have the capabilities to follow it. Simple as that. We’ve got every smart device known to man trained on this ship. Plus the British teams,’ he nodded in Adrian’s direction. ‘Celebrate our ingenuity, Burt, don’t cast suspicion on it.’

  So that was it. We’re cleverer than they are, Burt thought. We’re smarter than the Russians. Somehow he doubted that. Nevertheless, what the Forburg or Yekaterinburg – or now the Pride of Corsica – was actually doing was as obscure to him as to the other two men.

  ‘What’s your take, Adrian?’ he asked.

  ‘The ship picked up something in Libya. Something small, something valuable and, most likely, something deadly,’ Adrian replied. ‘Now she’s standing well off the coast of the Crimea. We can perhaps assume the two are connected.’

  ‘What are we doing to discover what her cargo is?’ Burt asked Theo.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ Theo admitted. ‘We have agents on the ground in Libya, of course. They’re doing the best they can, but it’s not exactly easy. The whole loading operation took place in a wellguarded and separate part of the port. Plus the fact that we think there was a special army loading team on the case
, not the usual dock-workers. And it’s not exactly a friendly environment in which to be asking sensitive questions.’

  ‘But they are,’ Burt said. ‘Asking sensitive questions, I mean.’

  ‘As best they can,’ Theo replied, awkwardly, Burt thought. Even Theo Lish, the CIA chief, found human intelligence difficult to factor in these days.

  ‘Well, good luck to them,’ Burt replied.

  Outside in the unusually warm spring air of Harper’s Crossing, Burt took Adrian aside and invited him to lunch. They took a limousine that had been waiting for Burt and travelled in towards Langley and a restaurant named Rocco’s where Burt seemed to be well-known enough to be given a prime table by the window and receive the attention of half a dozen waiters. When they had sat down, Burt didn’t wait.

  ‘What do you make of it, Adrian?’ he asked.

  ‘I think it fits in with other intelligence,’ Adrian replied. ‘Dangerous stuff coming over the border from Russia into Ukraine that you’ve detected. The only difference is that this is aimed from the sea.’

  ‘If only we knew what “this” was,’ Burt said.

  ‘We’re treating it as high priority,’ Adrian replied. ‘The highest. Just as the CIA is.’

  ‘Then it must be important,’ Burt replied drily.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BURT AND ANNA were to take a Cougar executive jet from Washington Dulles Airport for the flight south. Larry was at the wheel of a Porsche four-by-four as they drew up outside a hangar at the private end of the airport and she saw the plane gleaming in the early spring sunshine.

  She saw that, like all Burt’s fleet of planes, it had been highly polished. It looked like an outsize model ornament destined for a giant mantlepiece, or a sculpture belonging to a proud collector and which only needed a pedestal to mount it on. The jet had the cleanliness of an anaesthetised surgeon’s knife, nothing like the dirty, oiled, mechanised tool that was a commercial plane. And that was how Cougar liked to present itself to the world, she thought: as a clean, pure white and beautiful instrument. Like Cougar – like Burt – the plane was a thing of ideological and even moral certainty.