by Alex Dryden
‘A man has been arrested,’ Logan said.
‘Then a conviction will be certain,’ Burt replied. ‘The Russians are being very clever indeed,’ he said.
Logan cleared his throat and sat forward in his seat. ‘Burt,’ he said and stared into the big man’s eyes, ‘Theo said that Cougar also needs to stand down in the area. After we do the recce of the ship, Cougar needs to stand down. Those were his words.’
‘And he sent you to tell me, rather than tell me himself.’
‘He knew I was coming here,’ Logan replied amicably. ‘It’s just convenient.’
‘Everything about this is a little too convenient, wouldn’t you say, Logan? Evidence from the Kremlin. Islamic terrorists. Sevastopol handed over on a plate. Double agents with their heads removed. And all the rest. It’s all convenient. And now the CIA and the KGB are linking up to fight this new manifestation of the people we fear the most, the people who have inspired our war on terror. The CIA and the KGB are buddies again, just like in the nineties.’ He looked at Mikhail now. ‘All very convenient, wouldn’t you say, Mikhail?’ Then he looked back at Logan. ‘Everything is convenient here, isn’t it? Everything except Cougar. Cougar is inconvenient.’
‘Why the sarcasm, Burt?’ Logan interjected. ‘Look at the evidence. Then say the evidence is not good enough for you.’
‘What evidence, Logan?’ Burt replied, and everyone around the table saw the hard vein of granite beneath the regular bonhomie. ‘Evidence from the spies in the Kremlin? OK, so I’ve agreed with Theo’s request to second you, Logan, to a CIA team working with the British. You’ll shadow and assess this so-called terror ship. I hope that’s fine by you.’
‘And then Cougar’s finished in Ukraine?’ Logan asked. ‘Theo wants to hear it from you.’
‘Thank you for relaying that,’ Burt said. ‘There’s a boat waiting at the port of Burgas in Bulgaria. You’ll be on it, in command, as will some boys from the CIA and a British special forces team.’
‘And the Russians too,’ Logan said implacably. ‘Theo’s agreed to have them come along.’
‘Well, I think that’s a good idea,’ Burt replied. ‘As many of you on board Cougar’s spy ship the better. Let’s have the Russians on my ship.’
Logan sat back in his chair and looked back at Burt. There was a new fearlessness in him; an idea that it was he who was making the play, not the great Burt Miller any more.
‘While you trash the idea of Qubaq being a terrorist organisation, Burt, don’t forget that it was you who sent me to Kiev in the first place. The whole point of the meeting with Sam MacLeod was that I float Qubaq with the CIA station there. That was your plan, not mine, not Theo’s, not the Russians’. So why is it you who’s now pouring cold water on it?’
Logan sat forward in his chair and leaned on his elbows. He recalled that in the report he had delivered to Sam MacLeod, the name of Qubaq had been explicitly left out. That had bothered him then, and it bothered him now. Burt had made the reference to the organisation only verbal.
‘I wanted to see where everyone would jump,’ Burt replied. ‘And you’ve all jumped the same way, haven’t you, Logan? You, Theo – and consequently our own president – and, of course, the Russians too. All of you have seized on what you call the terror ship and all of you have seized on Qubaq. Coincidence? No, I don’t think so. It’s exactly what the Russians wanted us to do.’ He looked around the table. ‘We’re being led by the Kremlin,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see how easily the CIA would fall in with their lead. Nobody wants to help Ukraine, that’s the truth of it. And now the CIA will actually help the Russians get what they want there.’
Logan looked down at his hands. All he could think was that it was him Burt had assigned to encourage such disinformation – if that’s what it was. He would never have asked that from Anna.
CHAPTER TWENTY
TARAS WALKED DOWN a long airless corridor on the third floor of Sevastopol’s naval military hospital, turned left past more armed guards, and continued along another identical stretch that traversed the front of the building. Neither the occasional view through barred and sealed windows of the port on a sunny morning in spring, nor the antiseptic cream of the hospital floors and pale yellows of the walls did anything to soothe the confusion in his mind.
As his chief evidently suspected, Taras knew that his cousin Masha was involved in some subterfuge and it was now he, as her relation, who had been despatched to find out what it was she had been doing at the barn. His confusion seemed to be without a solution. If he succeeded, then Masha would undoubtedly be in worse trouble than she was in already. But if he failed, they would send in the proper interrogators again, this time to force it out of her.
There were the unanswered questions he had turned up in his investigations so far; was there a connection between his cousin Masha’s predicament and the murders of two KGB agents on the very same day that she’d been wounded and then arrested three months before? His chief clearly thought so and Taras had to admit that the coincidence seemed too great to ignore. The Russians were angry at the loss of two men on Ukrainian soil but were angrier still, apparently, at Ukraine’s refusal to hand Masha back to them. But still the SBU were jumping to fulfil all their other demands. It was a tightrope – to please Russia and to retain some semblance of independence. And then there was the question of the gun she was carrying and why she had used it if she were merely on a vacation.
Two nurses walked past him without looking at him. He stepped aside as a trolley with tubes attached to it was wheeled past by an orderly. Everything in this area had the appearance of a normal hospital, but this was an illusion. He was now in the prison wing. There were guards in the corridors and at every junction, as well as outside the elevators and on the stairs, and there were bars on all of the windows. He’d had to show his pass five times already. Security was tight and the guards were nervous and imperious at the same time, despite his security clearance to enter.
He reached the final, prison door to the ward and hospital cells. There was an officer here, as well as two more regular soldiers from the Ukrainian army. The officer checked Taras’s identity papers, took a scan and shone a thin torch into his eyes. He studied the special pass that had allowed him into the prison wing with a deliberate slowness that made Taras’s face twitch with irritation, and then he made a call to Kiev. Eventually satisfied, he handed Taras’s papers back to him and a guard opened the locks on the door and let him and the officer inside.
Were the guards there to prevent escape, Taras wondered, or to guard against the intrusion of outsiders? What was Masha most in danger from – kidnap? assassination? or both? The security in the hospital was on Red, his chief had told him, but he hadn’t explained why. The only certainty was that his little cousin – an innocent, as far as he was concerned, whatever she was involved in – was currently its most precious inmate.
The officer had personally been waiting for him to arrive and accompanied him through a ward as he heard the door slammed and locked behind them. There was no one in any of the six beds in the ward and they passed through to another locked door and on down another corridor that was distinctively a prison now, not a hospital. Bare concrete floors, one solitary high window at twice the height of a man, with more bars. Cells lined this corridor on either side, and were equipped with minimal comforts, judging from the open door into one of them that was empty. Three others had their peepholes shut and he didn’t know if anyone occupied them. There were two guards on the inside of the final door, sitting slumped in hard wooden chairs with the varnish peeled away. Like all guards, they were evidently bored, until they sprang to attention at the sight of the officer. Then Taras and the officer proceeded to the last cell on the right.
One of the guards who’d followed them jangled keys until he found the right one and opened the cell.
Taras looked inside into a harshly lit cell that had no window. Against a wall, Masha lay on a bare cot, a grey blanket pulled over her. Tar
as stopped in shock before he could enter. He hardly recognised her. She looked terribly thin and pale. The wires had been removed from her jaw but one side of her face was heavily bandaged. Her eyes were filled with fear.
He turned to the officer. ‘That’ll be fine,’ he said.
Grudgingly, the officer closed the door behind him and locked it. Where did they think this terrified, wounded twenty-four-year-old girl was going to flee? Taras wondered. There were three locked doors behind them already.
Alone with her now, he looked again. They’d weakened her beyond her wound, he could see that, once he was closer to her. She was deliberately underfed, he thought. The bare light bulb with its high-watt power glared down from the ceiling at her and he knew they would leave it on round the clock. He knew too that she’d been interrogated by others in the past fifteen days, ever since she’d been able to speak for the first time.
He tore his eyes away from her and looked around the cell. Eight feet by six, there was a concrete toilet in a corner that stank. Otherwise just the cot. No table or chair, no window, airless. At least it wasn’t a concrete bench she had to sleep on, he thought. He looked up at the ceiling and saw a camera behind him above the door that covered the whole cell. The cell would be wired too. Did they think he could get something out of her that others couldn’t, when both he and Masha knew that other ears would be listening anyway? But his chief had said that she was more likely to talk openly with him. Whatever coercion they’d used so far clearly hadn’t worked. Before they tried anything stronger, his chief had told him – as if to threaten him with the fact that he held the fate of his cousin in his hands – they would try this softer approach. So Taras knew he had to make some progress with her in order to make this meeting worth another one. And he felt the burden crushing his hopes of being able to help her.
‘Hello, Masha,’ he said.
She was silent, staring up at him, the fear in her eyes the same as when he’d entered.
‘It’s Taras,’ he said.
She stared back. Then he saw her eyes flicker a little and tears forming. Her desperately thin body shook spasmodically and then quietened.
‘Taras,’ she said finally.
‘We’ll soon get you out of here,’ he said breezily, but heard the encouragement in his voice had a hollow ring to it. He looked down, embarrassed now by his inability to really help her. ‘How are you feeling?’ he said, and didn’t need an answer. None of the soothing phrases you heard in a normal hospital were any good in here.
Carefully, he sat down on the cot very close to her head so that his back was between her upper body and the camera. He judged that his body would obscure her from the lens. But she flinched at his closeness and a noise came from her mouth that sounded like inarticulate terror.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. He bent down slowly and kissed her forehead, feeling the bandage on her face brush his cheek. Then he sat up slowly again. Her right arm was by her side, he saw, and the left one she’d moved slightly, so that it crossed over her stomach and made room for him when he’d sat on the narrow cot. He gently picked up her right hand in his and moved it away from her side in front of his body and out of sight of the camera. It was a simple gesture of affection, a straightforward holding of hands. But he didn’t know if this was going to work, even if she complied. At least she’d let him move her hand.
‘It’s spring,’ he said. ‘The flowers are all out along the mountains. The trees are their wonderful new green. You remember?’
She seemed to nod slightly.
‘At the farm this was our favourite time of year,’ he said lightly. ‘New life, the end of winter, warmth. My mother would start to cook properly again after all that tinned food we used to eat over the winter. I remember the first spring you came to the farm. You’d never seen so many flowers, never seen a southern spring.’
The farm. The barn at the farm where she’d been ambushed by Russian intelligence and tried to kill herself.
‘It wasn’t a good time to visit in January, darling Masha,’ he said. ‘What on earth were you doing?’
He’d read the transcripts of their interrogations so far. All she’d said, repeatedly, was that she was visiting an old place from her childhood, where her cousin Taras’s family spent their summers.
He thought back to her one statement which he knew in his heart was the only place any hope for her lay. It was a statement from the Russian officer who’d led the ambush party. ‘It’s not her,’ the Russian officer had shouted that night in January at the barn. ‘It’s not her.’
In her interrogations at the hospital in the past fifteen days, all she’d been able to say, apart from repeating the nostalgic reasons for her visit, was this phrase of the Russian officer. ‘They must have been waiting for someone else,’ she’d told her interrogators so far. ‘Or why would he have said it? I just happened to be in the way.’ Was it a really chance in a million – her visit – Taras wondered? Was it a case of mistaken identity? Not necessarily the same answer applied to both questions. Her reason for entering the barn was thin, at most. And if the Russians had been waiting for someone else, who was it? In his own mind – though thankfully his chief didn’t seem to have considered the possibility so far – another person could only be the person making a pick-up. The barn was a dead letter box, chosen because ... why? Because Masha had a reason, an alibi, to visit it. And that made his cousin right in the frame for making the drop. A surveillance team had found a strip of tape on the inside wooden frame of the only door to the barn. They were treating it as a signal sight.
But then there was the most damning evidence of all: her possession of the gun and her subsequent attempt to use it on herself. They all but knew – his chief included – that Masha was there for a specific purpose – even if she herself didn’t know what that was. That was the only approach Taras could think of developing – that Masha was unknowingly caught up in something, that she was an innocent bystander.
Now as he sat and held her hand he lifted his arm slowly, just enough to gently slip a two-by-three-inch notepad out of his sleeve with a pencil following it. It slumped off the end of his hand on to the grey blanket beside their joined hands. As he did so, he continued talking to her. ‘I know how much you love the place,’ he said. ‘But January, for God’s sake! And on your own! I’d have come with you, Masha. We could have stayed the night, opened up the house, built a fire, eaten some of those tinned “rations” together.’ He tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a grunt. ‘Why the devil didn’t you call me?’ He smiled down at her, a big wide smile that he realised was the first genuine facial expression he’d managed to make since he’d entered the cell.
Then suddenly she spoke. Her voice was weak, faraway, as if she were at the farm back then, ten years or more ago. ‘I remember the spring there, Taras,’ she said, and her deep grey-blue eyes in the sunken face never left his.
He loosened his hand from hers a little so that her fingers were free. ‘Tell me, Masha, what took you there in January?’
She didn’t reply at first. Then slowly she picked up the pencil and spoke at the same time. ‘I was unhappy, Taras,’ she said.
‘Unhappy?’ He felt her fingers turn the pencil round in her hand so the lead faced the right way.
‘Yes. I was unhappy in my marriage. I needed to be on my own. I needed a place of safety.’ She laughed a hollow, ironic laugh that rattled in her thin chest.
‘But you’ve only been married for a few months, darling Masha,’ he said and laughed so that the movement in his shoulders covered the slight withdrawal of his hand. ‘You haven’t made a mistake, have you?’
‘I was very unhappy, Taras. It wasn’t what I thought. He changed as soon as we were married.’
‘Your husband. Has he tried to visit you here? Has he contacted you?’
‘He’s filed for divorce. As soon as he heard I was in trouble. He’s afraid for his career.’
Everything she’d said until the last sentence he saw had
been a lie. She hadn’t been unhappy. She was unhappy now. Her husband had deserted her, threatened perhaps in Moscow with his connection to her. But her unhappiness he saw in her new tears was that he was leaving her, that her marriage had so easily been thrown away as soon as she really needed help.
‘You want that? A divorce?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she replied, but he saw in her tears it was the last thing she wanted and that her husband was the last hope she’d had in this cell. At the same time, he felt her fingers brush his as she began to scrawl on the paper. But her eyes still never left his.
‘The reason I’m here is to help you,’ he said. ‘So you were unhappy. That’s why you came to Sevastopol?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I was lost. My husband wasn’t the man I’d thought he was. I was in turmoil. I couldn’t go to my parents. They would have taken his side, told me not to be so stupid, that he was a good man, et cetera, et cetera. I felt so lost, Taras,’ and he saw her tears were genuine, though they weren’t for the reason she was giving, but for its opposite. ‘I wanted to connect with something I was sure of, a happiness, a happy memory, something to secure me from back in the past. That was the time I spent with you at the farm.’
‘So you went to the farm, yes?’
‘Yes, but it was all locked up for the winter and I just went to explore around it. The places where I used to play. You remember, I used to jump off the straw bales in the barn, high up from the piled-up bales down on to the loose straw on the floor.’
‘I remember,’ he said and felt her slide the notebook and the pencil back inside the cuff of his jacket. He fixed her with his eyes now. ‘I need you to help me, Masha. It’s not that I don’t believe your story, but just that it’s awkward to believe it. It’s awkward for them,’ he said, and indicated his superiors with a throw of his head. ‘You can see that. It’s awkward because of what happened. We know what you do, we know about your job, and your husband’s too. We know about your FSB graduation – everything, you see. It’s awkward that you just happened to be there, on that occasion, because of all those intelligence connections in your life. And the gun ...’