by Alex Dryden
Taras had been brought up from childhood in Odessa, but in his teens his father had bought the farm outside Sevastopol in the Crimea. That was the reason he and Masha decided to rendezvous in Odessa rather than in Kiev where he worked. His father, now dead, had been a buzinessman in the early years after the country’s independence. Taras didn’t know exactly how that had happened, but remembered one night how the house they’d lived in next to Odessa’s Ilyich Park, by the Provoznaya Market, had suddenly become full of boxes of electrical equipment brought in from Turkey: almost-the-latest computers, some of which worked; hi-fis; kitchen goods—anything, in fact, his father had been able to get hold of. The whole thing seemed to have taken off in a few days when the rules were relaxed. His father was suddenly at the centre of affairs, just like that.
Odessa had always been a great trading city, but within a few months in 1991, Taras’s family had moved to the Crimea, into the farmhouse outside Sevastopol, and the Odessa residence became his father’s office. By that time, his father had warehouses in Odessa and other offices in Kiev, thanks to payments in the right places. The family—minus his father—had moved out from the fringes of Odessa to a place his mother loved and where, Taras suspected, his father was only too happy to keep her out of the way. It was for their protection, as his father had put it, and after that the family hardly saw him when the business took off.
How had his father done it? Connections, of course. His father had also been with the SBU and was able to capitalise on the looser commercial rules more quickly than most. From being a company man in the SBU he had elided into another, this time commercial, company with ease but one which consisted of business entrepreneurship. His father, however, had a natural talent for rising in the new economy, which had made him rich where others with the same opportunities had squandered them.
It was his father who had eased Taras’s way into the country’s intelligence services, but he’d failed to interest him in making money. From the elite school of intelligence, his father had created what he’d hoped would be a place in the elite school of business—and a dynastic continuity. But Taras had found himself more interested in working for his new country than stacking up money. Money for what?
And then his father had died, shot on the streets of Berlin in 1994. He was murdered by the Chechen mafia, voices at the SBU had said. Creditors had arrived. And then all Taras had left was the farmhouse outside Sevastopol and his job. He had no interest in, or talent for, business.
He looked around his surroundings now and thought that he’d come about as far as he was ever likely to go in the intelligence world, too. Even without the suspicion with which he was regarded by the intelligence agency after his father’s murder, he feared that he lacked ambition. And he certainly lacked the greed of his fellow officers for turning his privileged position into cash.
Tonight the Golden Fleece nightclub in Odessa was summing up all he didn’t like about the quest for money. He casually looked at the cocktail card on the bar top advertising a “Blow Job Shooter,” whatever that was.
No venue that Taras could recall—no billionaires’ club, no flashy joint or grubby dive or bootlegger’s den he had ever visited—had achieved anything quite approaching the individual mix of astonishingly vulgar wealth openly on show with its extreme, outlandish kitsch.
From the snaking menace of the reflective aluminium bar top, dotted with flashing diamonds of light, which disappeared some indeterminate distance away from where he stood into clouds of purple and magenta dry ice; to the walls of glass that changed colours in giant banks of plastic green, yellow, orange, red, and blue; to the glass dance floor, ringed with small explosions of fireworks and similarly flashing livid circles of coloured light from below; and then right on up to the cages suspended above the dance floor, Taras looked for some relief from the brightness and the hideously unnatural tones that bore no relation to anything he recognised in nature. And all of these eye-numbing, brain tissue–scarring sensations that besieged his brilliant, meticulous, though underused mind assaulted him before he could even begin to take in the ear-splitting cacophony of techno-funk to which the bodies and the lights and the artful, flashing explosions of glittering fireworks that flanked the dance floor paid homage.
Not for the first time his eyes lingered for a moment on the cages that hung from a ceiling too far above him to see. Inside each cage writhed a mostly—no, looking more closely now—an entirely naked girl. They were even more beautiful than the Kiev girls. The designer topiary of their pubic hair was apparently adorned with real gold dust, mined from the gold fields that belonged to Viktor Aaronovich, the billionaire Russian oligarch from eastern Siberia and the owner of the Golden Fleece. At least, that was what it said on the club’s Web site.
For a moment the massed gold dust of contorting female pudenda above his head that—indelicately, he thought—gave the Golden Fleece its name, made him feel giddy and slightly sick. He looked down swiftly, only to be met once again by the writhing bodies on the dance floor, the rich and extremely rich of Ukraine’s youth who were here to dance and drink and drug and—who knew—probably fuck, until dawn. Lucky them, he thought—though Taras wondered about the truth of that.
In the midst of this deafeningly glitzy freak-beauty show of Ukraine’s gilded youth—and in the case of the girls in the cages, literally gilded—Taras drank stolidly from the bottle of beer.
His mind turned to the meeting in Kiev with Logan Halloran that he’d almost forgotten to cancel. Halloran was a strange figure. He’d been sacked by the CIA, according to his research at the office, then had worked freelance. And now he was working for an outfit called Cougar whose annual returns the year before were counted in the billions of dollars. Halloran seemed to him a peripatetic character, however, rarely at ease, always striving for something he didn’t have. He was too hungry, Taras thought, that was his problem. But he had a soft spot for Halloran, after their two or three meetings. Perhaps it was because few people in the intelligence world in Kiev seemed to like him. Taras wondered if he just liked him out of pity, or if he was really interested in the inevitable offer he expected Halloran to make him. He knew Halloran’s interest in him wasn’t out of friendship.
He looked in the mirror behind the bar and surveyed his appearance as closely as he dared. As someone who rarely looked at his reflection, he was surprised. Instead of the slightly formless creature he took himself to be, he saw a well-built man who was only let down—in here at any rate—by his clothing. When he looked back at the crowd of mostly girls at the bar he decided that they weren’t grimaces of contempt after all, but smiles, some of which now seemed quite seductive and enticing. It was his clothes that were weird, not the club itself, he decided, and they were making him the most noticeable figure in the entire place. That was what unnerved him as much as anything. He wished Masha would arrive and they could go somewhere else. He liked to remain in the background. The small bar he had in mind would suit him better.
He turned towards the barman and ordered another beer and noted the man only spoke Russian, not Ukrainian. Unless he was refusing to speak the national language.
Taras sipped from the neck of the bottle. Always a bottle, and opened in front of him, that was the rule. You never could tell what else might be tipped into a glass.
At least no one tried to talk to him. He was gratifyingly shunned. He was stationed at the end of the aluminium bar, at the appointed spot nearest the entrance—which he preferred to think of as the exit. He wondered briefly how he had even been allowed into the Golden Fleece in the first place. If anyone was designed to be rejected by the thugs on the door, who exercised the strict feis kontrol that excluded the uncool and the obviously unattractive, as well as the gangsters, from such elite nightclubs, it was him. He knew that, and he didn’t care.
As he drank, the huge wall that stretched the width of the club behind the dance floor had turned a pale white. The blur of thumping noise and flashing light was interrupted every ha
lf hour by what was, Taras considered, the most bizarre apparition of all on this January night in 2010—the back-projected extraordinarily beautiful face of Yulia Timoshenko. Tonight in the club—and in the previous few weeks more behind the scenes than he was in here—Viktor Aaronovich was repeatedly flaunting his support for her bid to be the next president of Ukraine.
There, up on the wall, the face now appeared and would remain for some minutes, and the cheers from the dance floor at this apparition almost exceeded the noise of the techno-funk.
It was a face that said not just “purity,” but “Ukrainian purity”; not just success, but highly glamorous success; not just money, but shiploads of the stuff. Her pale cream-coloured facial skin drawn over high cheekbones was crowned by a halo of corn-coloured hair plaited severely yet entrancingly over her fine head. It was a look, a hair arrangement, that Halloran had told him was described in the New York Times: “It curls around her head like a golden crown, a rococo flourish that sets her far apart from the jowly men she has challenged.” It was a face—and a body to match—that had appeared on the cover of Ukrainian Elle magazine. A Ukrainian woman’s beauty was judged by the thickness of her braided hair, “like wheat,” he’d explained to Halloran, and this effect had certainly reached its apogee in Yulia Timoshenko. Even to Taras, a happily married man who was sexually satisfied by his wife, she seemed like the Corn Goddess, the Goddess of Fertility, the divinity who would make Ukraine and Ukrainians fertile, rich, and maybe even more sexually appealing.
In what was sure to end up as a two-way election, Yulia Timoshenko was undoubtedly the glamorous choice, but she was not only that. She was also by far the richest of the three main candidates. On both counts she was a natural for the wealthy, fashionable, thrusting youth of Ukraine now cavorting on the dance floor—if anyone in the Golden Fleece this evening bothered to vote at all. Her beauty could be clearly seen, at face value, and during one interview with a cheeky Western press corps, she had even let her hair down when it was suggested that the corn braid was a hairpiece. She had made her fortune in the energy sector back in the 1990s, then joined the political arena during the Orange Revolution of 2004 that saw off the Russian-backed candidate in favour of the current, Western-looking president.
But now, in 2010, she stood against both the failed president from those heady days, with whom she had once been linked, and the returned Russian-backed challenger, the éminence grise of the previous six years who had waited in the wings and was still supported by the Kremlin. Against both this Putinist would-be president and the current incumbent, Yulia Timoshenko’s credentials were immaculate. She was a highly successful businesswoman, she wore the badge of a democratic revolutionary from 2004, and on top of everything she was also a goddess—all this rolled into one. How could she possibly fail? Taras wondered. She’d get the western Ukrainian vote, yet it was looking bad for her in the country as a whole.
The apparition faded once more, like some ethereal being in a science fiction movie, and Taras looked at his watch: 11 P.M. He would wait another half an hour, though he was sure that Masha would not make an appearance now. She must have missed her connection.
A little too relaxed after six beers in a couple of hours, he idly glanced around the waves of throbbing bodies clad in Gucci, Prada, and other, hipper labels he was unfamiliar with.
Would he even notice Masha, if she did arrive? he wondered.
Taras looked towards the exit a few feet from his end of the bar and, for a moment, he, Taras Tur, was the only person in the Golden Fleece who felt a wave of impending doom. It washed over him suddenly and unexpectedly. What was it that he’d seen? Nothing. It was, he realised, something he hadn’t seen and that should have been there. The four thugs on the door who picked out the prettiest girls and the richest, cutest boys had disappeared. All four of them. That was impossible. He looked at his watch a second time: 11:20 P.M. And he decided that now he would go. Something was wrong. That was what his mind was telling him loud and clear.
But he swigged from the bottle another time—finish it, why not?—and tried to collect his thoughts. Then he glanced towards the door again in the hope that his unexplained fear would be placated. But the thugs were still not there.
At that moment he went deaf and began to lift into the air. Or maybe it was a second later. Maybe he heard the roar of such extraordinary ferocity it could be heard a mile away—in any case, maybe he heard it for just the split second before it deafened him. He could never quite tell later whether he’d heard it or not. Maybe he saw the ball of flame and the sheets of glass and jagged metal struts that erupted through the dance floor and shot forty feet into the air, first licking up into the cages where the beautifully clipped golden crotches writhed, and then engulfing them completely. Or maybe the blindness, like the deafness, overtook him at once. Again, later, he could never quite tell. But for another split second nothing seemed to happen. The moment froze. And then, movement and sensation returned like a film reel freed from some obstruction in the projector, and he found himself being hurled upwards at great speed, and at the same time blasted backwards by some horrific force, then smashed over the aluminium bar and finally dumped down on its other side with an agonising thud behind a massive refrigerator. Then the refrigerator seemed to explode upwards and disappeared, the bar that protected him caving in completely and seeming to dematerialise, simply vanishing into nothing.
Visions of hell began to swim through all this blindness. A hell beyond anything he had ever experienced. Body parts—that was what the newsmen always called them, using the antiseptic language of the hospital. But amid the crash of falling beams, the explosions of glass, the roar of flame and high explosive, and the screams of people, what he saw was nothing so antiseptic as “body parts,” but severed limbs, ripped chunks of bodies, torched feet and hands freed from their usual places, flaming torsos, flesh-stripped skulls, and, once, a severed head that flew with such force from the direction of where the dance floor had once been that the force of it killed the lone, standing barman stone dead.
As the post-blast furnace began to cook, then melt the club and its occupants, Taras crawled out from behind where the fridge had once been. He felt air on his face—the exit—and began to drag himself blindly towards it. One side of his face was hanging off, he thought. But he carried on, smoke choking his lungs, the heat scorching his back. He’d never get past feis kontrol looking like this, he thought dimly. He reached a once-red velvet curtain that swayed from a collapsed rail, and he felt the roar of angry flame behind him reaching, like him, for the air in the street. A siren in the distance, screams subsiding, new screams beginning, the roar of fire, the fizzes and bangs of cracked pipes, the tearing sounds of structural wreckage—they all swam through his fractured consciousness as he gained first the lobby, then the outer entrance, then an open door and the pavement. Still he crawled. He saw feet around him, feet in heavy fire boots and thankfully attached to legs, and then he saw fire hoses. He dimly glimpsed flashing lights—blue, orange—and he heard shouting, before he slumped finally against a wall and felt a hand place an oxygen mask over his mouth.
He lay, dazed, leaning half to the left against the wall, like a drunk. He felt burned, torn, fractured, frozen—all at once. Terror, he thought, that was what we call a terror attack. Terror, the crasher at the party, the vengeful handmaiden of a modern election. But whose terror? he wondered through the haze of his shattered mind and through the smoke that poured from a hole in the wall to his left. The Russians? Or was it factional, a Ukrainian terror? Or perhaps terror committed by one of the mafias on either side, Russian or Ukrainian? Who knew? And did it matter? Terror was just terror, wasn’t it? Terror terrorised as much by its anonymity as by the exploding bodies that resulted from it. Now, it seemed, it was always terror, the only game in town. Terror that stalked democracy as if both had a compulsive need of each other; terror, against which, in the twenty-first century, freedom was now defined. The alternative to freedom was no lon
ger confinement, it was terror. But terror was also freedom’s corollary. They had joined the same coin, were stamped at the same mint, and apparently were now the world’s only means of barter.
And then he rose from the pavement and found that the pools of blood surrounding him weren’t his own. He walked unsteadily away from the club, declining offers of help and removing the oxygen mask. Thank God Masha hadn’t arrived.
8
A FEW HOURS BEFORE Taras Tur entered the Golden Fleece nightclub—and at roughly the same time that Anna was making her escape from the field behind Sevastopol and Logan was holding his meeting at the American embassy—Laszlo Lepietre stepped out of the French embassy at number 39 rue Reterska in the country’s capital, Kiev. An embassy car that had been waiting inside the gates for an hour was now idling its engine a hundred yards from the building’s entrance. Those had been the driver’s orders.
As he walked towards the black Citroën, Laszlo watched for any interest that his exit might have aroused from watchers on either side of the street. But this was only from habit. He didn’t expect to attract much attention from the Ukrainian secret services on the night before the first round of the presidential elections. But he watched in any case and he knew his backups would be sweeping the pavements behind and ahead of him and checking for any vehicles that might follow the Citroën. The watchers had been trebled for his exit from the embassy. For whatever happened this evening, he couldn’t afford to be followed.
Thomas Plismy, the head of the Russian desk in Paris, at the French foreign intelligence service, or DGSE, had insisted—after an unusually swift analysis, Laszlo thought—that this evening’s meeting was a genuine dangle, not a hoax. Having been dragged over the coals the year before for losing a valuable KGB colonel—and a beautiful female one at that—who was under French protection and on French soil, Plismy was now looking for something juicy to boost his damaged reputation.