by Alex Dryden
As the lights approached from far away, she began to crawl up the hill to the shelter of the wood. She would have very little time before her now-exposed figure would be picked up, either by any of the smugglers who remained or by the fast approaching patrol itself. She stood and began to run. A shot fizzed into the earth behind her. Then another. It wasn’t coming from the border patrol vehicles, but from somewhere behind her. She reached the wood and continued running in pitch-blackness as the lights of the patrol swung towards the lake and picked out the two craft beached in the reed bank.
12
TWO DAYS AFTER THE FIRST ROUND of the elections, at just before nine o’clock on the Tuesday morning, Taras walked down the short street that led to the SBU offices. They were contained in a large building, described as “the Annex,” which was a short walk from the much smaller building in Volodymyrska Street that was the public face of the SBU. He hesitated, then stopped at the outside gate to exchange comments and a cigarette with the guards about the two remaining presidential candidates who would run against each other in three weeks’ time.
“So it’s between Yanukovich and Timoshenko,” Taras grunted, inhaling the smoke from a Ukrainian-made Marlboro.
“And Yanukovich will win,” one of the guards said—with a sense of triumph, Taras thought.
“You think so?” Taras drew heavily on the cigarette to avoid reacting angrily and swept his eyes around the yard inside the gate, anywhere to avoid literally facing the opinions of the guard.
“Of course he will. He should have been president six years ago,” the guard continued. “If it hadn’t been stolen by the revolutionaries.”
The second guard was silent, Taras noted. Like Taras, he was avoiding comment. It seemed that those who supported the Moscow-backed candidate talked openly about victory, while the democrats inside the security service were embarrassed to express an opinion, including himself, he was forced to admit. He ground out the cigarette under the toe of his shoe and bid them good morning.
Though he worked for the SBU Taras liked to think he was unlike either his father or his uncle Boris in Moscow, and he was in most ways correct to think so. Despite the failures of the past six years, despite the forgotten promise of the Orange Revolution, he believed in a new, independent Ukraine, tied in with Western Europe and NATO, speaking its own language instead of Russian, and able, at last, to stand on its own feet after centuries of Russian rule. But his intelligence family here at the SBU didn’t all share these views. Even within some Ukrainian families the country’s right to be independent from Russia was disputed. And so he kept his nationalist feelings from all but a very few close friends at the SBU headquarters who, like himself, believed in Ukraine for itself and not for the Kremlin.
Taras passed through the internal security screens, and was patted down—unusually—by a heavily armed soldier. Then he entered the building and walked past some worn wooden reception desks into a long corridor lined on the ceiling with an unbroken line of strip lights and on the floor with worn brown and yellowish linoleum the colour of ancient nicotine stains. In general, the building had a colourless air about it, as if all of nature—and all joy—had been sucked out of it completely. He almost felt an approaching pallor wash over his face to match the surroundings.
But he was too worried this morning to give the surroundings his usual feelings of contempt and headed straight to his office on the third floor. His cousin Masha had evidently disappeared. There was no other conclusion. He’d heard no word from her since her planned arrival on Saturday evening—and that was nearly three days ago now.
Walking down several corridors towards the stairs at the rear of the building, he greeted one or two colleagues, and finally turned left at a T junction in the warren of passageways. Then he walked another thirty yards on more faded and broken yellow linoleum before reaching the broad well of stone stairs. He wanted movement rather than taking the lift. As he walked up the steps two at a time, he deliberately stretched the muscles in his legs as if it were a training exercise. He noted the grey walls, the bland cheap paint chipping here and there, and thought that the spy buildings were like hospitals. Perhaps the difference was simply that their aim was to anaesthetise the truth and operate on the soul rather than the body; the spy buildings existed to fix the ills of the body politic. But to whose advantage?
He entered his office with a spring in his step that came from a decision to find Masha. And he would do what his usual decorum usually prevented him from doing in personal matters; he would use his position and all the resources at his disposal that his position gave him. He refused to allow the familiar grey of the room to dishearten him: dusty paper blinds on the windows; a plain desk and a chair, another wooden chair for visitors that looked like it had come from a car boot; a shelf of books—manuals and regulations; a shabby lamp and the ubiquitous strip lights in the ceiling. It was more like a cell than an office, he thought. There was just the bare minimum—enough to remove any colour from its occupant and render him a grey servant of the grey state. He flicked open the blinds to allow some low, winter light into the room and found an unwashed coffee cup on the bookshelf. Nothing is as it seems, he thought, but he didn’t know what made him think that or what the thought even meant.
He walked out of the office and down the corridor to the coffee machine. The dark brown liquid filled the cup, and he put two heaped spoons of sugar into it and stirred it with a dark-stained spoon. Then he returned to listen to the messages blinking on his internal phone. There were three messages, nothing on the outside line from Masha or anyone else, and all the messages turned out to have been left by Kuchin, the chief of counterintelligence, demanding that he come upstairs immediately.
Taras delayed. Before he went to see Kuchin, he wanted to run over what he’d discovered so far. Two days after the aborted meeting with Masha at the Golden Fleece—and once his hearing had begun to recover from the effects of the explosion—he’d put in a call to the airline Masha was taking from Simferol to Odessa. There’d been only one person left in the airline offices, despite the fact that it wasn’t even four o’clock in the afternoon. But he’d told the man who he was and there was a five-minute pause while the official checked with SBU headquarters. When he came back on the phone, he asked Taras for a code. When he was satisfied Taras was who he’d said he was, the man told him that Masha Shapko had been on none of the flights from Simferol to Odessa in the past five days. That was when Taras had begun to feel that something bad had happened. She hadn’t called him, she was off the map. Masha had disappeared.
Taras now picked up the phone, dialled Kuchin’s extension, and got his secretary. “Tell him I’m on my way,” he said. “He’s there?”
“He’s waiting for you,” she answered. Taras thought he heard an amused tone in Yelena’s voice, something he’d noted before and put down to a flirtatiousness on her part. Whether it was for him or for anyone Kuchin had it in for, he didn’t know.
Taras sat down and sipped the scalding coffee, which burned his mouth, until the urgency of Kuchin’s order overcame his need for caffeine. It wouldn’t do to take the coffee up to Kuchin’s office. So he burned his mouth some more before putting down the half-full cup. Then he left his office once again to take the lift this time, to the fifth floor.
He wasn’t kept waiting more than a minute in the room with Yelena, which was highly unusual—almost unprecedented, in fact—and, when he entered Kuchin’s office, he saw there were three other men in the room as well as Kuchin, who was sitting bolt upright behind a large desk with a Ukrainian flag on it. Behind him on the windowsill was a photograph of Viktor Yanukovich, the Kremlin’s choice for president.
“Sit down,” Kuchin said abruptly. “Where have you been?”
“It’s nine fifteen in the morning,” Taras replied. “I’ve been on my way to work.” He wondered why, if this was so urgent, they hadn’t called him on his mobile.
Kuchin unfolded a piece of paper and then dropped it on top
of another sheet as if to hide it from Taras’s eyes.
“What were you doing on Saturday night?” Kuchin demanded without preamble.
“Several things,” Taras replied.
Kuchin’s eyes flared for a moment then settled into an expression of dull antagonism. “Between seven fifteen and ten thirty in the evening,” he said.
“I was in a club in Odessa,” Taras replied. “A bomb went off.”
“Why?”
No sympathetic concern, Taras noted. It was simply a pedantic question. But Kuchin was never either subtle or sympathetic.
“I was drinking and waiting for someone,” he answered.
“Waiting for whom?” Kuchin said.
“My cousin.”
Kuchin looked at some notes. “Two days later you made a call to the airline offices at Simferol airport,” Kuchin said. “They checked with us here. The shift security told them what to ask you and what reply they should expect. Then you gave them the correct code for the day.”
Kuchin looked hard at him.
“Yes, that’s right,” Taras replied.
“You asked for travel details on one Masha Shapko, a Russian citizen.”
“My cousin, yes.”
Kuchin at last leaned back in his chair, as if he’d had a steel rod removed from his spine, and an exhalation of air seemed to empty his chest. It appeared that he’d been holding his breath all this time.
“Your cousin…?” he said. It was something they didn’t know, Taras realised.
“Yes, she’s my cousin. She’s supposed to be visiting me. I was meeting her at the Golden Fleece. But she didn’t turn up and she still hasn’t turned up.”
“Yet she was in Sevastopol.”
“That’s right. Then taking the Simferol flight to Odessa.”
“Why?”
“She’d decided to go to the country outside Sevastopol before coming to Odessa. My family has a house down there,” Taras replied.
“So she was visiting your family.”
“My father’s dead,” Taras replied, “as you know. Masha wanted to see the house. There’s no one there right now. It’s a summer house.”
“So then why was she going there?”
“She wanted to go and see it for old times’ sake before coming to Odessa to meet me.”
“Why?” Kuchin said.
“She used to holiday there with us in summer. Fond memories of childhood. Maybe she just wanted a holiday, too.”
Taras recalled the first time he had met Masha, his mother’s sister’s daughter. He’d liked her from the moment they’d met the summer after his father’s death. He’d been more like an uncle to her than a cousin. His little cousin from Moscow, twelve years younger than he was, had been fun to have around. After that first holiday she’d come every summer to get away from the heat of Moscow and spend a few weeks by the sea. Her mother had married a Ukrainian, Boris Shapko. Shapko had been stationed in Kiev with the KGB, but their home was always in Moscow and he had become a naturalised Russian back in the 1980s. Masha’s father, Boris, was now a firm Russian nationalist, a loud supporter of Putin’s United Party, and a member of the Duma, the lower Russian parliament. Masha’s father—like the whole male side of the family, it seemed—was rooted in the intelligence world. And like others who originally came from the Soviet republics, Boris Shapko had become more Russian than the Russians, perhaps to prove his loyalty. Boris believed that Ukraine itself was part of Holy Russia and not an independent country at all.
“A holiday?” Kuchin said, interrupting his thoughts. “In January?”
“It’s the only time she was free. She’s working now, in Moscow.”
“Yes, we know what she does.”
“Her father is a KGB officer and a member of the Russian Duma,” Taras said openly. “And she’s also worked in the security services in Moscow for the past two years.”
Taras wanted another cigarette. He now looked at the other men in the room for the first time. Kuchin’s intense questioning had kept him focused on his boss. Two of them looked like internal security people. Grim faced, single-minded, unspontaneous. They were professionally humourless men, whether they were in here “guarding the state” or swinging naked from chandeliers, he imagined. “I’m still trying to track her down,” Taras said. “Has something happened to her?”
“Yes,” Kuchin replied. “Something has happened to her.” But he wasn’t going to say anything that might alleviate Taras’s concern.
“Why else would your cousin go to Sevastopol?” one of the internal security monkeys snapped at him.
“That’s the only reason I know of,” Taras replied. “She loves the place and she particularly loves our house there. The first time she went there she was twelve years old and she’d never seen the sea. It has a kind of magic for her, I guess.”
“She’s gotten herself into trouble,” Kuchin said mysteriously.
“That sounds like Masha,” Taras replied, deliberately avoiding an overreaction to Kuchin’s insinuating tone of voice. “What sort of trouble?” he enquired. The third man was Ukrainian special forces, he was certain of that now, and the other two were in civilian clothes. Undoubtedly internal security people. Spies who watched the spies. He wondered who watched them, and who watched the people who watched them. No level of paranoia would be too great, of that he was sure.
“Why was she carrying a gun?” Kuchin said. “If she was going on holiday.”
So. They knew her whereabouts. Perhaps they were holding her. “I’ve no idea,” he replied. “Maybe she carries one because she’s allowed to.”
“It’s the latest GRU pistol.”
“Well, she works for Russian intelligence. Why do any of us carry guns?”
“We don’t take them across the border into Russia without notifying the authorities.”
“I can’t help you, Colonel,” Taras answered. “All I know is that she was coming to Odessa after she’d visited our place in Sevastopol. Where is she now?”
Kuchin paused, for a moment disoriented by being asked a direct question himself. He turned to the man in Ukrainian special forces who was sitting closest to the desk.
“Lieutenant-colonel Babich,” he said, “tell Tur what you know.”
Babich put his arms on the desk and looked at Taras with the neutral expression of someone who has been brought in to a situation he doesn’t like.
“We picked up information that a team of Russian soldiers, who we now know were from the FSB and special forces, were heading out of the city. Sevastopol, that is. It was suspicious because they hadn’t notified us as they should have. That’s the agreement we have with the Russians. So we put a tail on them and when we saw where they’d regrouped, we sent our own team, of which I was the leader. There was an uncomfortable standoff at a barn outside the city. They were very tense, threatening. So we called up reinforcements and eventually they backed down. It was a close thing. Then we saw they were holding someone. This Shapko. Your cousin, apparently.”
“Check it,” Taras said angrily, and then regretted his outburst. But Babich ignored him.
“She was in the back of one of their trucks,” Babich continued smoothly. “We demanded they hand her over. They said she was a Russian citizen and we told them they were in Ukrainian jurisdiction on Ukrainian territory and had no rights outside the militarised zone around Sevastopol harbour. When our reinforcements arrived, we effectively forced them to hand her over. She’d apparently tried to shoot herself, but we don’t know for sure. She hadn’t made much of a job of it. The bullet had gone through her cheek and smashed her jaw before exiting fairly harmlessly. She was alive, in any case,” he said harshly. “But much longer, and she might have been dead from loss of blood.”
Taras stared back at Babich.
“What makes you think it was her who’d fired the shot?” he said eventually.
“The Russians told us she had. But, to be honest, that’s what it looked like. Not a good attempt.”
&nbs
p; “Where is she?” Taras asked.
“She’s in hospital. She’s stabilised.”
“In Sevastopol.”
“Yes.”
Taras suddenly liked Babich. He was just telling what he knew.
“So that’s why you didn’t meet your cousin,” Kuchin said. “She was involved in something other than a nostalgic visit to your family house.”
“Is she conscious?” Taras asked, but to Babich.
“In and out, when I last saw her.”
“The question is,” Kuchin said impatiently, “what was she doing attracting the attention of Russian special forces? We have to work with them. We don’t like going up against them like this. It causes trouble at the highest levels.” He looked angrily at Babich.
Babich didn’t comment.
“Do we know it was her who was attracting their attention?” Once more Taras looked at Babich. “Maybe she just got caught up in something. If all this happened at the farm.”
“That’s a good point,” Babich said reasonably. “One of the Russians made a slip, perhaps. He told me, ‘It wasn’t her.’ I’m certain he meant they were expecting someone else.”
“But why did she try to shoot herself if she was innocent?” Kuchin snapped, evidently either disagreeing with this interpretation or merely wanting things to be neat, tidied up and off his desk. “She was involved,” he added.
“Maybe,” Babich conceded. Kuchin glared at him for his lack of full support.
13
JANUARY 22
“COALITION INTEROPERABILITY” WAS NOT an expression that Adrian Carew was likely to find anything other than blindly stupid. It was American, of course, he told himself. The multilingual NATO intelligence committee conducted its business in American—or an “international” version of English, as they called it—and that didn’t help his mood. But in his view this sort of jargon was generally typical of the way the English language had become so hopelessly mauled that it was now being used either to cosh the listener senseless, or to obfuscate a situation to the point of meaninglessness. Incomprehensible language had become a substitute for clarity, and in Adrian’s opinion a lack of intelligent decision making was bound to follow. But worst of all, the language bored Adrian in the same way that reading the excruciatingly translated instructions on a Chinese-made vacuum cleaner might have done.