The Blind Spy

by Alex Dryden

  But what he sensed over and above the smells and sounds of the shanty town on the hill was the deep air of resignation, which was occasionally ignited by anger, then doused again by despair.

  The river of the camp’s collective psyche contained little else in its flow but these three elements. He turned to his left away from the lean-to and went to find Irek. When he found the old man’s home, he stooped again under more plastic and entered.

  ‘How long ago was she here?’ Balthasar asked when they were sitting on cushions and facing each other.

  Irek looked up at the sightless eyes of the man opposite him. It was true what their mutual friends in Ingushetia and Chechnya had said about this man. He saw more than the seeing did.

  ‘Around four hours,’ he replied. Then not being able to completely believe the man could have known of her visit without some information, he said, ‘Someone told you she’d come?’

  ‘I felt her. I feel her now,’ Balthasar said. ‘She sat here, on this cushion where I’m sitting.’

  ‘You know her well?’

  ‘Once. But not for many years. Not for decades.’

  They sat in silence for more than a minute. Balthasar sipped water from a metal cup, a round copper mug without a handle, not the tin cup that Irek had served the tea in, four hours earlier. Balthasar was in no hurry.

  ‘My acquaintances said you are a Muslim,’ Irek said finally. ‘Yet you come on behalf of Russians. Which Russians?’

  ‘Money is money, old man,’ Balthasar replied. ‘What does it matter which Russians?’

  ‘Maybe it matters a great deal.’

  ‘We are offering to build you a mosque,’ Balthasar continued. ‘But that’s just the beginning. There will be more mosques, madrassas for learning. Eventually, we’ll get you out of this camp into proper homes. My sponsors wish this to remain anonymous.’

  ‘The woman said you would offer us good things,’ Irek replied.

  ‘Did she? What is her interest in what we offer you?’

  But Irek didn’t answer his question.

  ‘Why are you making gifts?’ he said at last.

  ‘Why? We are all Muslims. We should all stand together. We understand the treatment of your people. It was the same with us.’

  ‘But you ...?’ Irek said quietly. ‘I don’t think you are a religious man.’

  Balthasar stirred, shifting slightly on the cushion, and put down the copper cup, very precisely but with an ease of purpose, on to the small level space beside the rug.

  It is as if he sees everything, Irek thought. Sometimes he wondered if this man Balthasar was even blind at all.

  ‘Religion is just man’s imperfect attempt to see God,’ Balthasar replied. ‘But religion doesn’t always look in the right places.’

  ‘Then you and I are similar in our views of religion,’ Irek replied. ‘But that doesn’t explain why you wish to finance mosques for us. What we want is homes. First homes, then we can see where religion fits in.’

  ‘My sponsors who are providing the finance are offering mosques and schools,’ Balthasar said. There was a pause, as if he were waiting for Irek to show his gratitude, but none was evident. ‘You haven’t reached the age of ninety, I see, by believing what you’re told without doubting its truth. It’s the woman, isn’t it? She has made you wary.’

  ‘Everything has made my people wary,’ Irek replied.

  ‘You’re concerned about the origin of the money,’ Balthasar stated.

  Irek was silent. This man could see inside his mind, he thought.

  He reached for the hookah and flaked apple tobacco into the bowl, lighting it with a piece of charcoal that he put in place with his hand though it was burning. He took two or three puffs, then passed it to Balthasar without putting a different mouthpiece on to the pipe as he had done for the woman. Balthasar received it easily and took a long draw and the water in the glass bowl bubbled. Then he exhaled slowly, tilting his head upwards to the roof of the dwelling. A dog began to bark outside, then squealed and fell silent; a kick or a stone must have been aimed at it. In the pecking order of human anger there’d always be someone or something to beat up that was less than you, he thought. Even these people who were fixed by history and circumstance in the drainage system of humanity needed something to oppress, something to feel superior to.

  ‘What did she tell you?’ Balthasar said. ‘No. Wait. First, tell me how she appears.’

  ‘Physically?’ Irek said.

  ‘What is your impression of her? How does she present herself? And what is her disguise, if you could penetrate it? Then, yes, you can tell me what she looks like if you wish,’ he added, as if that were not important.

  Irek told Balthasar what Anna had told him earlier; that she represented an American company with business interests in Ukraine. For those business interests to be successful, the Americans needed Ukraine to be free, or at least not a vassal of Russia’s. Her disguise? What did the blind man in front of him mean by that? ‘She didn’t tell me everything,’ Irek continued, ‘if that’s what you mean. And neither do you,’ Irek added. Then he finished by saying, ‘She is a beautiful woman whose beauty seems to be irrelevant to her. Maybe she even feels it gets in her way. Maybe she’s met too many men who don’t see beyond her physical beauty.’

  Balthasar smiled. To Irek, it was unexpected. Did the blind man not know that she’d warned him against Balthasar?

  As if to answer his thoughts, Balthasar spoke through the smile that hadn’t left his lips. ‘She knew about me, didn’t she?’ It was a statement and Irek saw he was still smiling.

  ‘I don’t know. All she said was that someone would offer to help us. That money would be given.’

  ‘And not to trust this offer of friendship?’ Balthasar said, the smile still playing around his lips. ‘This money?’

  Irek wasn’t afraid to say the truth. ‘She said it would link us to terrorism,’ he said flatly.

  ‘And who do you believe?’ Balthasar replied. ‘Her or me?’

  ‘Her visit was unexpected. Yours was not. I have to think it over.’

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ Balthasar said.

  ‘Tell me,’ Irek asked him, ‘do you yourself really know what is behind this offer of help you bring? Or are you just the messenger?’

  Balthasar considered what he knew. He saw that all he really knew was what he’d been told by his bosses in Department S, his father included. ‘We want these people on our side,’ his father had said. ‘That’s the reason for help.’ Why did it come from Department S, then, Balthasar thought? Why not as part of an aid package from the government? But he didn’t communicate his misgivings to the old man.

  ‘Is she returning?’ he asked Irek.

  ‘She said in three days.’

  As he walked down through the camp, the smell of longcooked vegetables wafted across the hill. Over and above it was the smell of intense, but temporary human activity, of fleeting lives, but that was not a smell in the conventional sense. It was a sense. It was something only Balthasar could feel.

  He walked easily through the creaking shanties, avoiding pitfalls and the structures themselves. Children approached him without fear. He held a small boy’s hand. Nobody challenged him. He attracted reverence from the men, the women cast their eyes down. The boy looked occasionally up at the blind man as if trying to ask a question that never came. Balthasar left him at the end of the camp and pressed some Ukrainian bank notes into his hand, small denominations. ‘Buy some sweets for your friends,’ he said and turned down the hill on to the bulldozer tracks. The old smell of burned-out wreckage from the destruction of the previous shanty town hung in his nostrils until he reached the meadow. He walked steadily down towards the town.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  TARAS SAT IN a wooden swivel chair in his office on Deribasya Street and looked curiously at the list that lay on the pale, peeling veneer of the desk. Outside, though he couldn’t see much from the office window that overlooked the tiniest of
courtyards, Kiev was bathed in spring sunshine. Soon the heat would be demanding air conditioning, but so far that was beyond the reach of Ukraine’s intelligence services.

  He finally had a list he felt he could work from and one name on it stood out, to his way of thinking, in any case, that was screaming every kind of alert. To be more accurate, it wasn’t so much the name, which was evidently a false one, but the profile of the woman behind it which he had now constructed loosely in his mind. It was more of an X-ray picture than a full portrait.

  From back in January, in the three days that led up to the killings of the two Russian KGB officers and the arrest of Masha, Taras had been able to positively identify thirty-four foreign women who had almost certainly entered Ukraine alone, but he knew this didn’t include any women who had entered apparently accompanied – in other words using a man as a cover. That was something he would never be able to ascertain. But he believed anyway that a courier would have arrived alone – and so he concentrated on the thirty-four women.

  Of these, twenty-nine had flown from various parts of the world into the capital, Kiev. And Taras had by now decided that – whoever the woman was whom the Russians had been expecting at the barn – she must have entered through Odessa, not Kiev. Everything pointed to that; the first of the killings took place there, and the second in the Crimea where, presumably, she was making her way to Sevastopol for the pick-up. Why would she have come through Kiev? It made no sense for a courier to enter the country so far away from a pick-up, when time and the speed of exit would be of the essence. So, for the purpose of his more focused inquiries now, he was looking at five women who had entered Odessa, apparently unaccompanied. And only one of these had entered the country on the day itself, 16 January.

  Taras picked up the list from the desk and thrust them into a briefcase. He shouldn’t have brought them in here to the office, he knew that. Everything had to be concealed from his chief for now, at least until he’d worked out what was going on, until he had a thesis of some kind that would help Masha. He took the list out of the briefcase again. There was always the possibility of having it searched on the way out the building. He screwed it into a tight ball and jammed several chewed bits of gum into the squashed paper, then closed the paper over them. Then he thrust it casually into the pocket of his jacket – his chewing gum disposal. He decided this would be the last day that he used his office to pursue the woman.

  The second question that still preyed on his mind was Masha’s boss in Moscow, Volkov. The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d reached the conclusion that her boss had used Masha to deliver a package to a Western intelligence service. Therefore Volkov was a double agent working for some Western agency. That was useful to know and might, perhaps, be of paramount importance if he needed leverage in Moscow at some future date. It might also be extremely dangerous for him to possess the knowledge.

  But in the present, part of him was enraged that his cousin had unwittingly been made a part of such an operation by her boss, while another side of him – once his anger had subsided – began to think of what use Volkov might be to him – and indeed to Masha and her eventual freedom. She was undoubtedly in the safest place for now, even though her imprisonment, on top of her self-inflicted wound, was making her more ill by the week. But if she left now, her life would certainly be forfeit by her boss. For that reason, Taras knew he had to devise a way to let Volkov know that she wasn’t the only person he would have to kill, that he, the Moscow agent for some Western interests, was blown unless he played ball with Taras.

  The woman his mind now focused on was named in her American passport as Natalia Simmonds. She had passed through Odessa’s border control at 7.35 in the morning of 16 January. Eight hours later a KGB officer was found dead and jammed behind some builder’s material in an alley off Odessa’s boulevard. The time of death was estimated at somewhere between an hour and two hours after the woman’s arrival. Sometime later that day the body of another KGB officer was found at the side of a remote road in the Crimea near Vihogradovo. Taras had ascertained that a youngish woman travelling alone had been on the bus from Odessa to Sevastopol that morning, but had got off at a stop past Nikolayev. So she could have been in the vicinity of where the second body was found too. Later, on the evening of the same day, the senior Russian intelligence officer at the barn had shouted ‘It’s not her’, when he’d seen Masha.

  Taras considered the possibilities as he walked down the corridor and poured himself his third coffee of the morning from the machine that was leaking the thin sludge they called coffee here on to the linoleum floor.

  A female courier arrives by boat from Turkey. But whoever Natalia Simmonds was, she was evidently more than just a runof-the-mill courier. The Russians know about her arrival, she is pursued, perhaps? At any rate, she kills two of her pursuers or watchers and makes her way to the barn by that evening. When everything goes wrong she nevertheless finds the crook in the tree where Masha had hidden the package while she reconnoitred the barn. The woman Simmonds takes the package. And then she disappears. Two Russian spies dead, a pick-up achieved successfully from the jaws of defeat and in extreme danger – and all the while the Russians knew she was expected and had her in their sights.

  Taras returned to his office and sat and sipped the foul-tasting coffee. He wanted a cigarette and, opening the window on to the courtyard, he leaned out and against regulations lit a cheap Eastern European-manufactured Marlboro. But the woman didn’t leave his mind for a second. Somehow this woman going by the name of Natalia Simmonds had left Ukraine while never leaving Ukraine. For there was no customs record of her departure. She’d arrived on a week-long visa, with a return boat ticket, also of a week’s duration, and then she had disappeared. There was only one likely solution. Unless the Russians had subsequently apprehended or killed her, she had left the country by clandestine means. Possibly even the same night as she picked up the package. If not, it would have been the following night or the one after that. One thing he was certain of was that the woman was no longer in Ukraine.

  Taras sucked on the stale-tasting tobacco. Who was this woman, he wondered? To enter Ukraine pursued by the KGB, kill two of their officers, pick up a package that wasn’t left at the assigned place, and then disappear ... that took some balls, let alone skill. An immense amount of skill. Whoever Natalia Simmonds was, it was clear she was a professional. And probably a native Russian speaker who could move with ease without attracting attention – if you discounted the Russian intelligence services who’d anyway known she was entering the country.

  There were several things that bothered Taras about this scenario. The main question in his mind was why the Russians had waited for her to get to the barn rather than simply killing her when they could. But other questions spun out of this one. How did they get two of their operatives killed? What did they gain by waiting for her to reach the barn, since it appeared that it was her they were waiting for? Perhaps they wanted her alive – but why? What was her importance beyond being a courier picking up a package? Taras couldn’t think of an answer, or at least the answer was somewhere buried inside the confusion in his head and he hoped it would surface later like a bloated corpse from the bottom of a river.

  He left the office and the building. Nobody challenged him to open the case. They were too sloppy, the internal security people, he thought. First he walked, deep in thought, working out his next move. When he found he was near Slavi Park, he entered and saw the first of the spring leaves scattered on the branches, like a magical picture of summer emerging from the blank sheet of paper that was winter.

  He took the list from the bag and put it into a waste bin behind some toilets, then dropped a match on it. It flared a little but there was nothing else in the bin to catch fire and only a small plume of smoke which rapidly disappeared announced the list’s destruction. Only the blackened gum remained.

  Then he went home, still on foot. The question he needed to work out now was how to make con
tact with Volkov, Masha’s boss. It was far too dangerous to go to Moscow – it was dangerous enough to bring pressure on him from Kiev. He was a powerful man. But Taras knew he would only find more answers by applying pressure to Volkov. A high-risk strategy certainly and he would have to think of a way that distanced him from Volkov as much as he could. A third person, a cut-out who could threaten Volkov, or an anonymous communication, another drop arranged for Volkov to communicate with him. But he could think of no one he could trust. Either way, he would to some degree have to put himself in the firing line.

  When he’d walked for half an hour, he took a bus to the west of the city and walked again to the small apartment he shared with his wife and two children. He was just reaching to put the key into the lock when he felt his phone vibrate. He lowered his hand from the door and answered it. It was a message from Logan Halloran. Just a suggestion for a drink, Logan was in Kiev – unexpectedly, he said. But nothing about Logan – nothing in a sense about any of this – was unexpected. Logan wanted something from him, even if the American didn’t really know what it was he wanted. And perhaps – now he thought about it – Taras wanted something from Logan too but he knew what that was.

  Taras turned away from his own front door and took a bus back into the centre of the city. He went to an Internet café near the cathedral and opened an account. Then he googled the American company Cougar. There were tens of thousands of sites. He scrolled down through pages of information, official sites, unofficial blogs, news reports, comments and attacks on the American security company, and began to read some twenty pages further on, a small, official announcement from two years earlier. No names, no details – just the carefully controlled information that concerned the ‘defection’, as it was called, of a female Russian colonel in the KGB who was in some way connected to Cougar and the CIA.