by Alex Dryden
He looked down and saw a small face with dark eyebrows, the eyes tightly shut, the fingers curled up around them. The baby would be just over twelve weeks old, he thought.
One of the other two men came over and flicked his fingers, his dark eyes angry and wary at the same time. With the relief of a job done, Valentin took the packet from his shirt pocket at last and gave it to him. The man swiftly counted the money, like a trader who is experienced at flicking quickly through bundles of banknotes and assessing their value instantly. He seemed satisfied. Then he looked Valentin directly in the eyes.
“Now you take him,” the man said to him. It was an order.
Valentin looked back at him in surprise, then alarm, and finally anger. At first he didn’t understand what the man was saying, but then he realised he’d been right in the first place. It was the man who was gripped by a misunderstanding, not him.
“You don’t understand,” he said at last, quickly. “The money I’ve given you is to care for the boy. It’s for his mother to look after him. I can’t take him with me. It’s impossible.”
The man shrugged. “Either you take him or he will be left,” he replied implacably.
Was he hearing right? Left? He meant left to die, Valentin realised with disgust. Left on the street for animals and strays to pick at. Or by the side of the road outside the city, or up in the mountains somewhere. “The money,” he repeated precisely and slowly in Arabic. “That is what it’s for. To look after the boy.” He felt himself getting angrier. He realised that he’d like to throttle the man, hit him, knock his teeth out. He felt the gun nudging him to it.
“He is cursed by God,” the man said simply.
Valentin looked back at the twelve-week-old boy. What was the man talking about? He unwrapped his son from the filthy cloths and saw a perfectly formed human being. The boy didn’t wake. He saw his tiny chest move with his breath.
“Why is he cursed by God?” Valentin said without betraying his rising anger. He believed they were going to blackmail him for more money, but he had none. It had taken all his wits to get his hands on the local currency as it was.
The man stood beside him and looked down at the boy. “He is cursed,” he said. He shrugged again. “God has cursed him,” he said, as if it was perfectly obvious that this was the reason for not wanting the child, and for killing it.
And now Valentin knew. To these people, any defect in a newborn baby meant that it had been cursed by God—and they would reject the child, reject it with the finality of death. Looking down at the boy he could see no physical defect, however. So the child’s defect must be him—Valentin—he supposed. A foreign father, and out of wedlock, too. Doubly damned. Otherwise the boy looked healthy enough.
Valentin walked back across the room. The other two men were watching him closely. They were afraid, but there were three of them and one of him, and they were in their own home, surrounded by their own people outside in the street. If he’d been on official business in this godforsaken part of the city, he would have threatened them, drawn the gun concealed under his waistband, but he was here in secret, unknown to his boss. He couldn’t afford a scandal, so he kept himself under control. “Where’s his mother?” Valentin asked finally. “I want to see her.”
“She’s not here,” the brother he’d met before snapped in reply. “That is not part of the bargain,” he added.
“Where is she?”
There was silence. He didn’t like to go where his imagination was taking him. He didn’t like to think what had happened to her, what they’d done to her in punishment. If sex with him had been a desperate throw of the dice on her part, it had certainly changed her life. But it was a change that would probably finish it for good, if it hadn’t done so already.
Valentin stopped in the centre of the room and felt the possibilities that faced him diminish. He knew he was beaten. Condemn his son to death, no, that was not possible. “What about an orphanage?” he said suddenly. “Where is there an orphanage?”
The men talked among themselves. “In Damascus. On Khalabbah Street,” one said finally.
“What about here? In Aleppo?”
The men shrugged. Either they didn’t want the boy in Aleppo, or they didn’t know.
Valentin suddenly stopped thinking. “Then I’ll take him with me,” he said.
A few minutes later he was walking back down the street carrying the live bundle of his son and when he’d reached a paved street he took a private car that willingly converted to a taxi to take him back to Damascus. He was late, later than he’d planned to be, and he told the driver to hurry. It was a long journey by road.
On the way to the capital he ran through what he would have to do. With the baby in his arms he understood this had been his only choice to save his son. But he also wanted to tell someone else, not just leave the boy abandoned at an orphanage. If one other person knew, he considered, then he would be able to leave the country with a clearer mind.
There was one person he thought he might trust—just possibly. It was crazy, he knew that. After all, he was an officer in Soviet foreign intelligence. But he knew that the only person he could trust with the knowledge of his son was the wife of his head of station in Damascus, Natalia Resnikova. She was a good woman, a caring person. He believed she might understand. She was pregnant with a child of her own, after all. It would be born less than a year after his son had been born. That is what he decided to do, no matter the risk.
Having made his decision, the only other thing that preoccupied him on the journey to the capital was that his son didn’t have a name.
When the car reached Damascus, they drove to one of the poorest parts, to the east of the city. Behind a concrete area that served as a basketball court in a flat, grey suburb on the fringe of the capital, he dismissed the driver. Then he walked until he found Khalabbah Street. The houses were new here—mostly cheap, concrete, barely functional buildings to accommodate the influx of people coming in ever greater numbers from the countryside to work in the city. There was construction work going on over the whole area; cement dust rose in a mist from the rear of a truck; a bulldozer was piling the broken remains of old, destroyed houses into a heap.
Despite the noise of construction, his son seemed capable of sleeping forever.
He saw the workmen were wearing white cloths to protect their necks against the heat, even now at six in the evening. The noise of machinery and the fumes filled the air around the waste ground they were clearing in order to put up more concrete housing blocks.
Valentin walked on through the dust until he reached an older building on Khalabbah Street made of yellowing stone. A former school or government building, perhaps? But whatever it was in its former life, it was now the orphanage. It was quieter here.
He put his son down in the shade under a portico at the entrance and took out a piece of paper. On it he wrote in Arabic: “This boy has no parents. Please look after him.” They would know it was a foreigner’s writing, and that bothered him momentarily. Then he sucked the pen for a moment and wrote again. “His name is Balthasar.” Balthasar. He hadn’t been able to think of a name throughout the journey from Aleppo, but now it had come to him in a moment. He liked the name. God protect the king. They had dramatic names and that was one of its meanings, in any case. Then he looked for some way of alerting the people inside the building. He found a bellpull made of old cord hanging at the side of the door and pulled on it. He heard a distant chime. Then he walked swiftly away. Whoever ran the orphanage would be accustomed to the ring that announced the abandonment of another child.
He walked for a mile back towards the centre of the city and finally found himself at the Russian embassy compound. The White Houses, the Russians called the compound, in an unconcealed expression of racist superiority.
His mind, he found, was blurred, vague, as if he were in a film of himself rather than being the real Valentin Viktorov. But he went straight to the house of his head of station and rang th
e bell before he lost his nerve. There was no point in delaying.
It was the maid who answered the door. He asked for Natalia Resnikova. Resnikov’s wife finally came to the door and invited him inside. She was an elegant, beautiful woman, but her eyes were usually shaded with sadness. Married to Resnikov, Valentin wasn’t surprised. He smiled nervously at her and she returned his expression with calm, uncritical serenity. Then she nodded at him sympathetically. He liked this woman and, he liked to believe, she had a soft spot for him, too.
Valentin saw at once that they were alone. He was relieved that his head of station, Colonel Resnikov, was in his study as usual, probably drinking foreign whisky. He would be able to be alone with Resnikov’s wife and she was a good woman, a good person. They sat and took tea in a shaded patio at the rear of the house. When the maid had gone, Valentin told her everything, the night in Aleppo, the woman and their child.
She didn’t reply at first. There was a silence, but it wasn’t awkward. Then she called the maid and Valentin thought that she was going to betray him, but she simply asked for her knitting to be brought. He noticed the bump of her stomach that had grown in the past month, and she saw him looking.
“They will be almost the same age,” she said simply. “I believe I will have a girl.”
“Just a year apart,” he said. “What will you call her—if she’s a girl?”
“I’d like to call her Anna.”
Valentin knew that although Natalia Resnikova was a charitable woman, her kindness drew disapproval, disgust, or even wrath from her husband. She was brave to even see him. Resnikov was a hard, bitter man who seemed to gain pleasure from nothing, even the Western whisky he somehow got his hands on.
The maid brought her knitting onto the verandah. The pregnant wife of his boss showed him what she was making. “It’s a sweater for my baby,” she said. “I’ll make another one for your son. Then they’ll have the same.”
He nodded his thanks, suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that now his son would be a real citizen of the world, with a sweater made specially for him, not just an abandoned child living off hand-me-downs.
“And when Anna is born she and I will visit your son when they are both old enough,” Natalia Resnikova said. “Until then, I will go alone when I can. I know the orphanage quite well.” She finally touched his arm. “It’s a good place. And you did the right thing.”
Such unexpected understanding made Valentin’s eyes moist with relief as well as with the grief he felt for his encounter with the doomed woman dancer and, finally, underlying all, for the birth of his son whose life or death he had held so recently in his hands.
PART ONE
1
JANUARY 8, 2010
THE BLACK S-CLASS STRETCH MERCEDES crossed beneath the Moscow ring road on Entuziastov at just after 5:30 in the morning. It was snowing harder outside the city, or maybe that was just how it seemed to the men inside the car. Away from the protection of the city’s buildings, the snow was free to hurl itself across the open landscape and a whirlwind of large, fluffy snowflakes rolled out of the eerie, monstrous white void only to disintegrate as they raced into the car’s heated windscreen.
With the ring road behind it, the official car kept up the same steady, regulation speed and moved on to the M-7 heading northeast out of Moscow in the direction of Balashiha.
There were two intelligence chiefs sitting on the soft, sweet-smelling black leather of the backseat and a military intelligence driver alone in the front. Both chiefs were the most senior generals, elevated to their positions by age, experience, duty, but most of all by the supreme skill of the Russian political intelligence class—a ruthless animal instinct for supremacy in the power struggles of the Kremlin’s internecine bureaucratic wars.
In their late sixties, they wore uniforms almost comically bemedalled from past campaigns—real wars—that made them resemble highly colourful performers from a travelling medieval pageant. These tiered ribbons of medals had been won mostly in Afghanistan after Russia’s 1979 invasion of the country, and its disastrous and debilitating war there that had finally emptied the Soviet treasury and heralded the end of the empire. They were the medals of defeat.
General Valentin Viktorov had been personally in charge of an intelligence team that, with initially magnificent success, had prepared the ground for the invasion of the presidential palace in Kabul at Christmas of that year. But those were the glory days, before the Soviet effort descended into stalemate and retreat in the subsequent years of brutal conflict.
Afghanistan. It was never far from either of the generals’ minds, even now, decades after the war had ended. Just as the Second World War—the Great Patriotic War, in Russia’s lexicon—had been the foul crucible whose hellish alchemy gave birth to Soviet might and to the greatest empire on earth, so Afghanistan was the insidious chemical formula that finally ripped the whole shaky edifice to pieces. For both the generals—as for many of the military veterans of that disastrous war—Afghanistan was the defining moment of their and their motherland’s loss of pride. Afghanistan was the fault line that severed modern Russia from its glorious past. The actual collapse—that of the Eastern European empire in 1989 and the subsequent folding of Russia’s central Asian possessions after that—was just the inevitable consequence of the Afghan defeat. And it was Afghanistan that welded the psyches of the two generals and thousands like them into an overwhelming and unified desire for the recouping of all of glorious Russia’s losses since then.
But despite this psychological link between the two generals, it was notable that they sat as far from each other as the seating allowed, each pushed up against their respective rear doors. They were rivals and, in Russia’s medievally clannish political and intelligence world, they had often found themselves working against each other. General Victorov was from the core of the SVR, Russia’s first chief directorate and the successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence department. The other veteran, General Antonov, was from GRU, Russia’s main intelligence directorate.
The two men didn’t talk and spent most of the journey looking away from each other and out of the windows on either side of the car, though the view was obscured almost completely by the white-out conditions, except for the thin, bunched-together trunks of birch and fir trees that took shape as they approached the Forest.
They also both wore tight-lipped expressions that suggested even sharing the same car was an imposition. But that was the way it had been arranged by the prime minister’s office and they hadn’t been given the choice to travel separately. It was as if this enforced journey together was a test of sorts in itself. “You’ll be working together”—that had been the order. But they had never worked together in any commonly accepted way.
The relative seniority between the two men was hard to judge—not least by themselves—but their rivalry was evident in the tension that existed between them. General Antonov deployed five or six times more agents on foreign soil than the SVR, and he personally commanded twenty-five thousand special forces troops, or spetsnaz. But it was the SVR that considered itself the elite foreign intelligence force and it was the SVR headquarters in Balashiha—the Forest, in KGB parlance—to which they were going. General Viktorov of the SVR was also a central figure in the elite of elites—the directorate’s highly secretive Department S. This inner clan of foreign intelligence officers was in charge of training foreigners to spy for the Kremlin, and then to commit terrorist acts back in their own countries. Viktorov’s highly sensitive department had achieved several important assassinations in the past year alone.
But in addition to being at the heart of Department S, Viktorov had the vital advantage of having closer personal access to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin than his rival. The two of them were actually friends outside the day-to-day business of the intelligence world, and skied and hunted together. In Putin’s baronial court where rank was often a secondary consideration after personal favour—and favours—this probably gave Viktorov t
he edge.
In the last few miles of their journey perhaps each was thinking over the purpose of this predawn meeting with Putin. But, more likely, each was thinking of his own strategy of personal preeminence when they met Putin, regardless of the purpose of the meeting. And each of them was certainly in a state of anxious speculation that the other knew more, had been briefed prior to this journey, had been taken into the confidence of the prime minister more closely. The usual fear of some loss of favour with Putin plagued them both. And that was how the Kremlin played its games. You never got used to that, Viktorov was thinking. Rule was administered through anxiety and fear, just as it had always been.
The snowplows had been out all night to keep the vital road connecting the Kremlin and its intelligence heart clearer than any other in Russia, and the car finally swung through the high gates—razor wire and gun turrets disappearing into the snow on either side. The generals’ identities were shown and logged by the guards. The Mercedes pulled up half a mile beyond the entrance, outside a long, low building, most of which was concealed beneath the earth.
It was Golubev, the special assistant from the prime minister’s office, who was there to meet them. A chivvying young man with a foolishly small moustache, Golubev was a product of the new, post-Soviet era. He was a politician-lawyer rather than a soldier—let alone an intelligence officer—and therefore the kind of bureaucratic ministry man who elicited little respect from either of the generals. His youth allowed no memory of the defeat in Afghanistan or even of the collapse of the entire Soviet Union two years later. Unlike the generals, Golubev looked to the future at the expense of nurturing the past and its humiliations. And, to the generals, he also looked to the future at the expense of redressing the balance that had been lost in the past twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed. That balance—in the dreams of many like them—was the restoration of the Russian empire.