The Blind Spy

by Alex Dryden

  ‘My guess is’, Burt said slowly, ‘that you know who the snipe is, Mikhail.’ And his eyes – slits at the best of times – narrowed slightly.

  Mikhail sighed and leaned back in the wheelchair. Now he, too, let his eyes wander over the jagged rock bluffs behind which the sun was turning a burning red in the freezing atmosphere and starkly illuminating their eerie profiles against the sky.

  ‘I’m cold,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go inside.’

  Anna wheeled Mikhail inside and Burt came out from under the heater and followed them. There was a roaring fire in the sitting room with its floor-to-ceiling windows that gave them as good a view of the mountains as if they’d been outside. Burt threw more wood on the fire and asked a member of staff to bring champagne. Anna sat on a sofa away from the fire while Mikhail wheeled the chair closer to it. Burt seemed impatient and didn’t sit.

  ‘There’s a man called Dmitri Respin,’ Mikhail began. ‘Dmitry Viktorov – and many other names he goes under. He, I believe, is the bird on the seal. A truly unique intelligence officer. In fact, he’s one of very few non-Russians at the heart of Department S – he’s half-foreign anyway – our most secret foreign operations unit in Russia. He was recruited from outside Russia originally and then was brought to Moscow and trained as would have been normal, initially in the Foreigners’ Area of The Forest. His training was regular – for the purpose of conducting operations back in his own country. It consisted of sabotage, mostly. That’s what we trained the foreigners to do back in their own countries. That and terrorism too.’ The champagne arrived and was opened. Burt insisted on pouring it into glasses and politely dismissed the woman who’d brought it.

  Mikhail sipped from his glass before continuing. ‘But then his obvious qualities and his half-Russian ancestry elevated him to Department S, where he came under my watch at the start of the nineties.’ He paused. ‘But I get ahead of myself.’ Mikhail pulled himself up against the back of the wheelchair and took another sip from the glass of champagne. ‘He – this Dmitri Respin or Viktorov – was educated from the age of sixteen at Vishka – The Tower – in the The Forest.’ He looked up at Anna. ‘The same place you were educated for the KGB,’ he said. ‘And the place where I have so far failed to achieve my own greatest ambition, the defeat of Putin’s Russia. Like you, my dear, I was a part of Department S, but as we all know now, in the nineties I went on to control all of our agents in Western Europe. The apogee of my double career.’

  Anna thought back over the years to a time when Mikhail had stood behind Vladimir Putin at a small service in the Kremlin’s chapel after Putin became president in the year 2000. In the new, democratic Russia the archbishop had proclaimed ‘God Bless the KGB’, near the end of the service. Putin was photographed inside the church looking reverently towards the altar, for the benefit of Russia’s newly enfranchised religious population who would be expected to support him in future, via the archbishop.

  In the photograph, Mikhail could only be seen with half a face in the subsequent pictures published by all the important Russian newspapers. But only if you knew Mikhail well would you have known it was him. At her interrogation by Burt, after her own defection to the West, Anna had been shown this picture, the only picture that was ever taken of Mikhail in public. When she had identified him by his known name, one of Burt’s team, Logan, had recognised the face, even though none of them knew his identity as an MI6 agent through Finn and Finn alone. Logan had asked her then, ‘Why is the Deputy Railways Minister seated behind President Putin? Why is he there at this most important occasion – the marriage of the KGB president to the religious masses the KGB has persecuted for seventy years?’

  For Mikhail’s cover in Department S had been the role of Deputy Railways Minister, a position that allowed him wide access to agents across Western Europe under the guise of marvelling at its railway systems. ‘Why is such a lowly figure right behind the President?’ Logan had asked her.

  And that was the beginning of her long withdrawal from defending Mikhail’s secret identity. She had protected him as best she could. She didn’t want the Americans or anyone else to have him unless it was by his choice. And so she had met him in secret – twice – once in New York City, the second and final time in the park across the Potomac from Washington when they’d been ambushed by a KGB snatch squad. She had been shot in the shoulder, Mikhail in the spine, before Burt’s legions had rolled over the horizon and settled the fight in her and Mikhail’s favour. And that was how the Americans – in the shape of Burt and Cougar Intelligence Applications – had come into the possession of Mikhail.

  Burt stamped around the room, impatient for Mikhail to continue.

  ‘Dmitri Respin or Viktorov was highly regarded inside Department S,’ Mikhail continued. ‘That was why Department S took him on in the first place. As I say, he was unique. He had what they call second sight. Or, at least, so they believed – and I have to agree with them.’ He looked at Anna. ‘As you know, our psychologists, psychiatrists and scientists were endlessly creative when it came to developing agents. It was only the rest of the country they let down with their services. Respin is about your age, Anna. A year younger, I think.’ Mikhail settled himself back and a member of staff appeared and whispered to Burt that dinner could be served whenever he wanted. He waved the woman away and told her they would get their own supper this evening.

  ‘You can all leave,’ he said in dismissing her.

  Mikhail drank slowly, savouring the champagne. ‘Loosen the tongue but not the brain,’ he said to Burt.

  Then he continued. ‘Respin was trained in every aspect of training that you’d expect for a foreign intelligence officer. He was always meant for deployment in the southern, Muslim republics and they are the most dangerous. Many of our agents were lost there in the brutal wars we fought, and are still fighting, against the separatists. So he had to be good, the best. But his vital advantage was this so-called second sight, not just his native grasp of languages or his weapons handling and combat training, or his code work or his analytical mind. He was highly valued because he had something that no one else had.’ He looked at Anna who was now sitting on his other side. ‘Or rather he lacked something that everyone else in Department S did have. He lacked sight. Dmitri Respin was blind. And uniquely it was his blindness that gave him an edge. His blindness gave him a different kind of sight. He’d either had this second sight from birth or he developed it later. It was a talent for knowing things at a mental – maybe psychic – level that you and I have to see with our eyes in order to understand. And even then we only see dimly with the eyes compared to Respin’s abilities. He had something more than eyes can ever give us. Dmitri could tell what someone was thinking. A huge talent.’ He looked at Burt. ‘As you always say, Burt, that’s something that all the satellites and technology in the world can’t achieve.’

  Then he looked back into the fire. ‘And that was just a part of the talents that came from his blindness. Far-sighted is a word you can use about the blind, and Dmitri was far-sighted.’ Mikhail sipped from his glass of champagne again and Burt, eager for something to occupy himself with, filled all of their glasses. ‘I had him working for me before I took over our agents in Western Europe,’ Mikhail continued. ‘It was during the first Chechen War in the mid-nineties. Dmitri went into Chechnya and he was unlike any other officer of the KGB. He went into that country as a friend to the Chechens, and as someone who didn’t fear them.’ He looked at Burt now. ‘His name is not Dmitri, of course, and he is not a Russian. At least he’s only half-Russian. He was born in Damascus in 1971, the son of a Syrian dancer and a then young KGB officer by the name of Valentin Viktorov. Viktorov worked at the Soviet embassy compound in Damascus when your father was head of station there,’ he said to Anna. ‘His son, to whom we gave the code name Dmitri Respin, was left in an orphanage there when he was a few months old. His father Valentin was being posted to Moscow at the time and he took the boy away from its mother’s family and place
d him in the orphanage. I think he probably saved the boy’s life by his actions.’ He looked hard at Anna. ‘You were there, Anna, in Damascus, and a child at the same time.’

  Anna’s mind reeled. It took her back to more than twenty years before to the KGB compound in Damascus where she’d been brought up until the age of fourteen while her father was the KGB’s station head. After her fourteenth birthday she’d been sent to live with her grandmother in Moscow.

  She recalled the old brute of her father – and then her mother who’d been his antithesis, a kind woman who seemed in everything she did to be atoning for her husband’s sins. A kind of martyr, she supposed. Her mother’s martyrdom was the driving force for her own desire to be a strong woman, untethered to a man’s career.

  And she recalled the orphanage her mother had taken her to visit in order to gain sympathy with the dispossessed and the unloved. But the blind boy she remembered hadn’t been called Dmitri.

  As if reading her thoughts, Mikhail continued. ‘His name wasn’t Dmitri then, of course,’ he said. ‘It was Balthasar, and probably still is. He used another name in Chechnya – neither Dmitry nor Baltahasar.’

  And now she remembered him. He was an uncanny child, a year older than her but with a face which, though blind, held the wisdom not just of an adult but of an unusually intelligent adult, and beyond that he’d had a seer-like quality – so her mother had described it, anyway. Sometimes on their visits his presence was so powerful, it was as if it was he who had come to visit her and her mother, rather than the other way around. He had that kind of power, that made her think she was a supplicant.

  ‘I remember my mother telling me he had a Russian father,’ she said. ‘And that was Viktorov? Now General Valentin Viktorov?’

  ‘Now General Viktorov, yes. Then he was just a lieutenant or lower, I don’t remember.’

  ‘Balthasar,’ Burt said. ‘God protect the King.’

  ‘That’s right. And in Chechnya, they worshipped him. They thought he was a wise man, a magician, a religious mystic. They thought he would be their saviour.’

  ‘And he fed the KGB and the Russian military the information that led the Chechens to the slaughter,’ Anna said.

  Mikhail paused. ‘At first, yes, he did,’ he said. ‘But then I noted – though no one else seemed to – that he was beginning to avoid doing quite the same thing. He became like a hunter who loses his taste for killing and who doesn’t shoot quite straight for fear or dislike of killing a rare or beautiful animal. He still fed information back to Moscow – back to The Forest – of course. He had to, in order to survive. But I noticed it had become much more selective. It seemed he was identifying Chechens who were as dangerous to their own country as they were to Russia, but not the true nationalists and nation-builders who the Kremlin also wanted to destroy. He was giving us only the most extreme elements of the Chechen resistance – the fanatics of God, the men for whom the people are mere instruments – and I began to suspect that he was protecting the vast majority of the rebels and their citizens in that country; the people who we Russians would run down with our tanks, murder and torture, tear up from their roots. Just as Stalin did in 1944, the innocent and the good swept into the trash with the so-called guilty.’

  ‘And now?’ Burt said. ‘What is Balthasar now?’

  ‘That is hard to say. He’s an extremely dangerous man. That I do know. A fanatic himself of sorts, perhaps, but a fanatic who is not attached to any cause, just to his own genius. Perhaps he is a mystic, I don’t know. I do know that he is still deep in the black heart of Department S and that if he’s coming to Ukraine, there is a deeply black purpose to it.’

  ‘Why does he tell me he’s coming?’ Burt said.

  ‘That’s the question,’ Mikhail replied. ‘Is it a trap or is he genuinely putting out a feeler, trying to establish contact for other reasons?’

  There was a prolonged silence.

  ‘Why come to me?’ Burt repeated. ‘To Cougar?’ And then he turned to Anna. ‘Is this another Russian play to get their hands on you?’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps Balthasar knows that it is Anna who will respond to his overtures, yes,’ Mikhail agreed immediately.

  ‘So Balthasar is just the latest in their attempts to abduct her.’

  Mikhail turned to look at Burt. ‘Maybe. But only maybe,’ he said. ‘That is the risk. It’s possible that it’s true and it’s possible the opposite is true – that Balthasar is testing the waters. That he’s finished. And that Anna is the only person he trusts. In my opinion, yes, he wants to meet with Anna, but whether as a trap for her or as a way out of Russia – that’s impossible to say.’

  ‘There’s only one way to find out,’ Anna said.

  ‘No,’ Burt said. ‘I can’t have you taking that risk.’

  ‘But I will,’ she replied. ‘And with or without you, Burt.’

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  22 April

  THE PASSENGER FERRY Kerchinsky was released from its mooring lines but stayed motionless for a moment, as if unwilling to depart. Then Balthasar felt the effect of the bow thrusters pushing gently away from the quay and the boat at last slowly turned and headed out into the Kerch Straits.

  It was a clear day in early spring, and cool, but the sky reflected on to the water the deep blue of the coming summer. The mostly Ukrainian passengers, returning from visits to relatives in Russia, seemed to sense that a long winter had come to an end. They were chattering, breaking open bottles of vodka, and unwrapping Caucasian cheese bread as if they were going on a long voyage rather than the few miles back home across the straits. Ahead of them, spring meadows beneath the towering cliffs of the Crimea were greening and there were yellow daffodils in bloom, a flower the party of orphans on a vacation from the Russian Far East had never seen and would later mistake for onions and attempt to eat.

  It was a brief trip from the Port of Kavkaz on the Russian side to Port Krym on the Ukrainian shore. After the ten-hour flight from frozen Magadan in the east, to Moscow, and then another six hours from Moscow to the Black Sea, the children, so it seemed to Balthasar, only now sensed their vacation was beginning, with the ferry’s departure from Russian soil.

  He had accompanied the orphans from the starting point in Magadan. That was his cover and it had been thought best that he should be known to them – and to their real teachers – for a period of time before meeting at the ferry terminal. Already an easy relationship had developed between him and the children at any rate, even if their teachers might suspect he was not who he was meant to be – a teacher with experience of orphans and also of the country to which they were travelling on holiday – and they consequently kept a discreet, if polite, distance from him.

  And though accompanying the orphans, Balthasar himself stayed apart from the others. He stood leaning against the guard rail on the port side, away from the other passengers in general as well as the excited children. Leaning on the rail, he felt the gentle breeze of the boat’s motion on his face, smelled the salt air and the diesel fumes and sawn timber, and listened to the bow wave’s continual break, along with the cries of children and seagulls. Eleven children – he already knew that – and five seagulls, he was sure of that.

  He felt the proximity and even the individual natures of other passengers further along the deck, as well as sensing a fishing boat nearly a quarter of a mile away and heading out to the Black Sea for its catch. And though he could not see any of these things – his dark, unseeing eyes flickered meaninglessly – he was as acutely aware of his surroundings as the prehistoric fish that hunt and eat their prey in the pitch-black canyons of the deepest ocean. His other four regular senses were highly tuned. But his predominant sense overrode all these and, despite the scepticism of some scientists, it was this sixth sense that afforded him a picture of people of which others were deprived. His own perceptions left others with perfect eyesight in the dark.

  As he stood on the deck and felt the cool breeze running ov
er his face, he reflected on why he was here, on this boat from Russia. Like so many journeys before, this one was for the purpose of another mission; dozens – maybe even hundreds, he’d lost count – that had sent him from his adopted country abroad. Each had its own fine-tuned purpose, each made some small adjustment to affairs that related to Russia, and most of the time each resulted in death and injury, the sowing of instability and fear and distrust among Russia’s enemies. He was the most decorated officer in the history of Department S. And now that he contemplated this mission, as always he wondered whether it would be his last. But this time, this thought did not come to him just because of the dangers that lay ahead, but also because maybe it was this mission that he, Balthasar, would choose to be his last. Maybe this time he would end the cycle of betrayal and mayhem that he usually left behind. Maybe this time he would choose to follow this life no more.

  On the breezy deck of the ferry he also contemplated his journey from his birth in Syria, to an orphanage there, to the discovery of his Russian roots and the meeting with his real father, and finally to his covert work for Department S. But to Balthasar these events and actions were manifestations of himself and his identity that he considered to be the paint on the wall of his person, not the wall itself. In other words, what he had done and what he represented were of little consequence to him compared to the inner life which his sightlessness had afforded him and which was a richer realm of truth than anyone could imagine.

  Perhaps that was why he liked the sea so much. His world was as invisible to other people as the world beneath the sea was. His was another life, another world entirely, and it was as colourful and rich as the regular vision of normal people was grey and drab.