by Alex Dryden
She hurried along the quay through the drizzle and beyond the line of people who shuffled forward the space of another human being. She felt elated, she had the job, a way was free to her as far as Igarka.
Away from the quay now, she felt the heavy gaze of the foreman Ivan vanish. Behind the docks, in a side street whose surface was holed by frost-made craters that made it look like an urban battlefield, was the cheap room, which she’d hired from the old baba at black market rates three nights before. It was where she’d left her bag, minus the gun and ammunition. Eleven hours. She would return to Zhenya’s apartment, take a coffee with the old lady, do some shopping for food for the journey and then return to pick up her bag for the voyage north. Maybe sleep a little until the ship left.
But as she turned the corner on to Sverdlovsk Street, she stopped dead. It was a barely perceptible pause to anyone watching, even someone who was studying her closely. For she at once broke into step again and walked slowly to the left of the building on the far side of the street from it, so that anyone observing her would have hardly noticed a gap in her steps.
What she had seen switched her mood of elation from moments before to a cold, dark readiness. An automatic preparation for action.
She kept her head down as she passed by on the far side of the street, staying as far away from the block where her bag was as she could. She walked on in a transparent haze of oblivion, though with her mind entirely alert to a challenge, one more shuffling human. Her reflexes were taut, her consciousness raised to the maximum.
What she’d seen outside the block was a police tape and beyond that a ring of Ministry of Interior troopers and their MVD investigators who surrounded the entrance and the alley to the side of the building. The double-eagle insignia of the MVD imprinted itself, then became magnified in her sharpened mind.
CHAPTER SIX
AN AGENT ON foreign soil is essentially alone, and it is an aloneness all the more bleak for the presence of the mass of humanity all around in a hostile territory, any one of whom might be the one to betray, or simply to notice and report an inconsistency of behaviour. But Anna Resnikov was not running completely solo in Krasnoyarsk. That was not how Burt Miller would have done it, not how any intelligence agency, private or government, would have conceived of such a complex and high-risk operation. Burt had been meticulously preparing her mission for nearly a year.
First there had been the slivers of ‘information’, hearsay and mere guesswork that had filtered into Cougar’s worldwide intelligence stations for many months; each tiny particle of which was isolated and protected like a precious collection of individually useless pottery shards that are sealed in bags by careful archaeologists. It was certainly only the few, Burt chief among them, who got to see and eventually connect them all. Perhaps, indeed, it was only Burt himself who knew the full picture that slowly began to emerge. The information came from Burt’s own company officers scattered across the globe, as well as from other, government, agencies that sold their secrets to Cougar. But Burt’s eyes and ears seemed to be everywhere and they included individuals too. There were people – sources – as diverse as a disgruntled KGB operative overlooked for promotion and farmed out to a dead-end post in Lima; a Pakistani nuclear physicist who had been extensively questioned by the CIA itself under suspicion of selling nuclear technology – but who, according to Burt, had not even himself realised the importance of some fragment of detail he possessed and so had not thought to impart it to his CIA interrogators. Then there had been a German oil pipe manufacturer with a contract in eastern Siberia who, under threats and coercion – and finally the sight of photographs of himself in a foursome in a Moscow hotel room – had divulged something of complete insignificance on its own. A Canadian Arctic geologist; a Danish timber merchant with connections and trade in the northernmost wilderness of Siberia; an operative of India’s foreign intelligence service, RAW, stationed in Moscow; another KGB intelligence officer – this time in Burt’s pay – who worked out of the Federal Security Service’s, the FSB’s, economic department; the boss of a high-end Moscow escort agency, later murdered by a bullet straight through the top of his head and fired from a bridge below which he was walking – all of these and more had provided the shattered pieces of the hoped-for priceless intelligence amphora that Burt was trying to construct. And finally there’d been another German – this time a nuclear physicist – who Burt had made a point of befriending at the annual, secret Bilderberg conference of world leaders and their guests. Burt had later wined and dined the portly, bespectacled German and offered his personal financial support for research work, as if the man were his closest friend. It was this German, by the name of Bachman, a one-off guest at the Bilderberg, who according to those closest to Burt at Cougar, had put a different light into Burt’s eye. After several meetings with Bachman, they said, it was as if Burt had seen the construct he had been building so painstakingly, then lost it, and then seen it again. The ghost of an intelligence objective seemed to flit before Burt’s vision. He himself said that it was like seeing a computer image of a building though with none of the hardware that made the building real. But, certainly, it was after a month of private dinners and lavish financial research grants to Bachman that Burt finally ordered his troops into action. The picture came and went, and now he wished to find the evidence that would make it real, three-dimensional, indissoluble. And the light in his eye now, those close to him said, was the prospect of an intelligence coup that would at some future date be placed at the apex of his life’s achievements. The golden cupola of Burt’s giant life. But for this to occur an agent had to be put into Russia itself.
And so from this point, it became an operation. The forgers at Cougar were suddenly hard at work, each one kept separated from the other so that no one should know it was Anna whose identity, whose fiction, was being created. Agents on the ground in Mongolia, Finland, and Russia itself, came up with routes, itineraries, likely problems and their solutions. An uninhabited island off the far north coast of Finland was acquired for Anna’s extraction from Arctic Russia. It was a three-day journey from this island to the mouth of the Yenisei River, where it was decided she would be picked up, but it was the best they could do. Extracting her from Russia’s Arctic coastline would be hard enough simply on its own. Then Larry himself was stationed with three others at the Mongolian gorge for three weeks before Anna’s infiltration. And all the while, back in America at Burt’s 93,000 acre New Mexican ranch, Anna herself was plumbed for information which only a former KGB colonel would know, and then tutored in how to use it once she was on the ground. She was, perhaps, the only person other than Burt who knew the whole story.
And last of all, there were three Cougar operatives who were moved undercover into Russia, and whose job it was to watch her, guard her back, die for her if necessary – at least for as long as they could before she disappeared into the northern wilderness where they could not follow. These were the watchers on the ground, here in Krasnoyarsk, and so – for a time at least – Anna would not be entirely alone.
The team of Burt Miller’s who had monitored her movements in the city since her arrival, by a system of prearranged dead-drops, were also watching events unfold at the block on Sverdlovsk Street as the MVD investigators arrived. They had observed them before Anna returned from the docks and before she had seen them herself.
They’d spotted the cop first, a militsiya guy, then a cop car arrived with a younger man at the wheel, and then the first cop making a mobile phone call that apparently resulted in the arrival of the MVD. Why the MVD? That was the greatest shock to Anna’s watchers. MVD involvement indicated something far bigger than an ordinary crime. Did it then indicate Anna’s discovery? But after that the watchers had seen the MVD troops take a dead body from an alley beside the block and their initial fears were allayed – only to be replaced by others.
The two men in the team, Clay and Sky, and the one woman, Eileen – all pre-assigned to Anna’s protection in the
lead-up to her mission – had been tracking her progress in the city for three days now, since her arrival. They had themselves arrived nearly a week before that. Now, as the block was ringed by MVD troops and the hatchet-faced MVD investigators first examined and then took away the body, the implications were lost on none of the three. The Interior people would be questioning the block’s inhabitants next. It was surely simply a matter of time before the name ‘Valentina Asayev’ became known to them, the name of an itinerant woman who must come under suspicion.
As far as it was possible to achieve in the heart of enemy territory, the diligent and highly trained back-up team had lain low in the city for a week and were pretty sure Anna, let alone anyone hostile, hadn’t spotted them. They reported back to Burt Miller personally, as well as to an operations centre at Miller’s ranch in New Mexico, set up for the single aim of her mission. Apart from the ‘dark’ period when she was necessarily lost to them – from the border to the city itself – they had seen her arrive, watched as she had engaged the old lady at the market – and then as she’d rented a room in the block on Sverdlovsk Street. They had kept up their surveillance of her when, as planned, she went to the docks looking for work downriver and they watched from afar as she went on brief expeditions to buy food, or to check their prearranged dead-drops around the city.
The team’s relief when she’d arrived in Krasnoyarsk had been immediately relayed to America and simultaneously to Miller’s emergency ‘agent ex-filtration base’, as it was known, situated on the island in the north of Finland closest to the Russian Arctic. And now this team in Krasnoyarsk was watching with growing anxiety how events would unfold at the block on Sverdlovsk Street and wondering how they could warn her.
For a group of watchers, Sverdlovsk Street and the block where Anna had found a room for rent had represented something of a nightmare. It was a hard place to watch without their own surveillance being itself surveyed. There were no cafés across the street for a team to change in rotation while sipping filthy coffee or twice-brewed tea; no shops in which a person could loiter with a reason, however thin; no market stalls where a man might buy a paper and smoke a cigarette and discuss the day’s events with other idle jobless individuals. There was no street furniture of any kind, in fact – a laughable notion in itself for a place like Sverdlovsk Street. The block where Anna had lodged was a towering monument to Soviet brutalism in decay, and it stood on a wasteland of the damned. There was no cover for a watcher but to simply stand and stare until you were either arrested for vagrancy or were knifed by a passing thief.
Nor, unless you were in the sort of deep cover Anna was in, and dressed in the clothes of a Russian worker, was there the possibility for the watchers to rent another room across the street, in a block of such decayed exactness to hers that it seemed like a bad Soviet joke.
For, unlike Anna, her watchers were not Russian, but Americans who spoke the language too perfectly. Clever Americans, certainly; Americans with the highest training you could receive in covert work. But language skills were never enough and in order to run a covert operation you had to have cover in the first place. The two men and one woman who comprised the team would have aroused suspicion swiftly if they had attempted to rent a place, especially in an area as poor as this one.
Clay and Sky were deceptively boyish adults, both educated in the arts of observation, close and distant combat, and code work. Eileen was their leader, in charge of watching the watchers themselves. Her skills lay in keeping them and their true identities secret, unnoticed. Eileen was an artist of transparency but there was nowhere transparent for a watcher in Sverdlovsk Street.
They’d been travelling through Russia under the cover of postgraduate students, joyfully released from their studies. Krasnoyarsk was just another place with a history along the Trans-Siberian railroad. Lenin had stayed there once, on a boat on the river. In Soviet times, the military industrial complex had been closed to foreigners. The city’s pre- and post-revolutionary status was of interest certainly, but it was the tourist ferry that went down the Yenisei River which was their principal aim. Once Anna had departed downriver, assuming she could secure the work at Igarka, the ferry was the only plausible way for her watchers to keep track of her. At least that far. After that, she’d be on her own.
For the three of them it had been a twisting and turning journey to Russia. There’d been a roundabout flight to Moscow from Athens, a few days sightseeing in the capital, then a reserved trip along the Trans-Siberian railroad on the route that ended eventually in Beijing, their stated destination. They’d bought tickets that allowed them to break the journey at places of interest across western Russia and then on through Siberia. The cover of a postgrad tourist trip was low-key, believable; a final fling before depositing their lives with wives or, in Eileen’s case, a husband, as well as jobs, kids and adult responsibilities.
And so, like proper tourists, they’d visited the places they’d be expected to visit. After Moscow, they took a trip to Nizhni-Novgorod for its fine churches, then turned south and walked the estate grounds at Tolstoy’s home of Yasnaya Polyana, then on to Ekaterinburg, the now booming city which, a century earlier, had been the place of assassination of the last Czar and his family, and then on further east, rejoining the Trans-Siberian railway to Novosibirsk where Siberia began.
They’d collected souvenirs from the places they’d visited, lit votive candles in old, restored or unrestored and near-derelict Orthodox churches, sent postcards home to fictive parents and friends, taken steam baths in the open air, under stars, or in the great city banyas – and all the time they’d watched the endless steppe unfold towards Siberia with its awesome flat vastness broken only by the Ural mountains, and its occasional picturesque onion-dome churches poised on the iced land now emerging into spring that looked like fairy-tale mirages in a cold desert. The three of them had thus slowly made their way towards central Siberia and arrived finally in the city of Krasnoyarsk.
Krasnoyarsk was one of the major junctions on the Trans-Siberian railroad. There was a rail line that went south-east to the Chinese border – and Beijing – but then there was the river, the great river that flowed north to the Arctic Circle and beyond. It was the river that interested them, the only route that went north.
And so as an excuse to stop for any length of time in Krasnoyarsk – and as a major detour – their general cover in the city was to get permits and tickets for the tourist ferry up the Yenisei. Norilsk and the areas north of Norilsk were closed areas and needed special permits, but they could go part of the way towards it. All had been granted and sold to them by bona fide travel agents in Holland before they’d left Europe, but once they’d arrived in the city a week before Anna, a further walk through Russian bureaucracy – to give it its proper name, bribery – had been necessary to secure the berths they’d already paid for. Corruption, as ever, was the saving grace for anyone operating in a clandestine way in Russia. Corruption was the Achilles heel of a system that otherwise crushed its own citizens, let alone foreign tourists, with the gigantic weight of mass surveillance. But this delay, as they found their way with dollars through the bureaucracy, suited them well. They needed to keep pace with Anna Resnikov, day for day, or Burt Miller would have their scalps.
But Sverdlovsk Street had been a major problem from the beginning that nobody had foreseen. How to watch her, how to guard her back, how to observe other possible observers, when there was no way the watchers could even walk unnoticed through such an area.
Finally, Clay – a 27-year-old special forces officer who had operated in Afghanistan before Burt Miller plucked him out – came up with the only idea that might work. He had bought an iron brazier from an itinerant who was upping sticks and leaving the city after the winter, and going in search of work elsewhere. The three watchers then found an angle of sight from where they could observe Anna’s block from nearly a quarter of a mile away. It was in a park dotted with sickly trees, otherwise bare except for a graffitied
statue of Lenin, still intact, still in place on its pedestal. The iron revolutionary’s left hand was either beckoning its watchers to their doom or guiding them to a promised land, depending on your point of view, and the old revolutionary’s studious-looking book was tucked inside the wrist of his other arm.
In vagrant’s clothes which the watchers had pieced together from remnants in second-hand shops or, in one case, dug out of a pile of trash for the purpose, they had agreed that at least two of them would man the brazier at any one time, lighting a small fire at night to keep warm. The third, meanwhile, was headquartered at the Business-Hotel Kupechesky, as befitted well-heeled international student travellers, and, in fact, they all had rooms there.
It was an improvisation that couldn’t possibly have lasted for more than a few days – even if they were lucky. There was the ever-present danger of questioning by the militsiya, not to mention the dangers posed by other actual tramps and addicts in the area. But it had seen them through – just, and with a few narrow scrapes. Now, however, what Clay and Eileen, who were on duty on this early June morning at the brazier, saw from the Lenin park was first a militsiya cop arriving at the block on foot, then another ment in a cop car screaming up with its light flashing and finally, a little under twenty minutes later, four MVD cars descended on the place like arrows to a target.
The two of them watched for a while with increasing dread. Anna would be back at some time early in the morning, either hired or not for the work in Igarka. She would walk straight into a nest of MVD troops.
What the watchers did next was all pre-planned. Such eventualities had been rehearsed for months. Every danger had been anticipated – as far as possible. So when they saw the Interior Ministry forces arrive at the block they went into automatic action. First, Clay and Eileen left the park in the opposite direction from the block. Eileen was deputed to remain between the block and the docks in order to head off Anna. She and Clay had watched her walk to the docks earlier when dawn was already up around at just after 5 a.m. Anna was safe for now at least, away from the block, and that was something. But they had to prevent her from walking into a trap.