by Alex Dryden
But then there was the most damning evidence of all: her possession of the gun and her subsequent attempt to use it on herself. They all but knew—his chief included—that Masha was there for a specific purpose, even if she herself didn’t know what that was. That was the only approach Taras could think of developing—that Masha was unknowingly caught up in something, that she was an innocent bystander.
Now as he sat and held her hand he lifted his arm slowly, just enough to gently slip a two-by-three-inch notepad out of his sleeve with a pencil following it. It slumped off the end of his hand on to the grey blanket beside their joined hands. As he did so, he continued talking to her. “I know how much you love the place,” he said. “But January, for God’s sake! And on your own! I’d have come with you, Masha. We could have stayed the night, opened up the house, built a fire, eaten some of those tinned ‘rations’ together.” He tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a grunt. “Why the devil didn’t you call me?” He smiled down at her, a big wide smile that he realised was the first genuine facial expression he’d managed to make since he’d entered the cell.
Then suddenly she spoke. Her voice was weak, faraway, as if she were at the farm back then, ten years or more ago. “I remember the spring there, Taras,” she said, and her deep grey-blue eyes in the sunken face never left his.
He loosened his hand from hers a little so that her fingers were free. “Tell me, Masha, what took you there in January?”
She didn’t reply at first. Then slowly she picked up the pencil and spoke at the same time. “I was unhappy, Taras,” she said.
“Unhappy?” He felt her fingers turn the pencil round in her hand so the lead faced the right way.
“Yes. I was unhappy in my marriage. I needed to be on my own. I needed a place of safety.” She laughed a hollow, ironic laugh that rattled in her thin chest.
“But you’ve only been married for a few months, darling Masha,” he said and laughed so that the movement in his shoulders covered the slight withdrawal of his hand. “You haven’t made a mistake, have you?”
“I was very unhappy, Taras. It wasn’t what I thought. He changed as soon as we were married.”
“Your husband. Has he tried to visit you here? Has he contacted you?”
“He’s filed for divorce. As soon as he heard I was in trouble. He’s afraid for his career.”
Everything she’d said until the last sentence he saw had been a lie. She hadn’t been unhappy. She was unhappy now. Her husband had deserted her, threatened perhaps in Moscow with his connection to her. But her unhappiness he saw in her new tears was that he was leaving her, that her marriage had so easily been thrown away as soon as she really needed help.
“You want that? A divorce?” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, but he saw in her tears it was the last thing she wanted and that her husband was the last hope she’d had in this cell. At the same time, he felt her fingers brush his as she began to scrawl on the paper. But her eyes still never left his.
“The reason I’m here is to help you,” he said. “So you were unhappy. That’s why you came to Sevastopol?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I was lost. My husband wasn’t the man I’d thought he was. I was in turmoil. I couldn’t go to my parents. They would have taken his side, told me not to be so stupid, that he was a good man, et cetera, et cetera. I felt so lost, Taras,” and he saw her tears were genuine, though they weren’t for the reason she was giving, but for its opposite. “I wanted to connect with something I was sure of, a happiness, a happy memory, something to secure me from back in the past. That was the time I spent with you at the farm.”
“So you went to the farm, yes?”
“Yes, but it was all locked up for the winter and I just went to explore around it. The places where I used to play. You remember, I used to jump off the straw bales in the barn, high up from the piled-up bales down onto the loose straw on the floor.”
“I remember,” he said and felt her slide the notebook and the pencil back inside the cuff of his jacket. He fixed her with his eyes now. “I need you to help me, Masha. It’s not that I don’t believe your story, but just that it’s awkward to believe it. It’s awkward for them,” he said, and indicated his superiors with a throw of his head. “You can see that. It’s awkward because of what happened. We know what you do, we know about your job, and your husband’s, too. We know about your FSB graduation—everything, you see. It’s awkward that you just happened to be there, on that occasion, because of all those intelligence connections in your life. And the gun…”
“It’s just a standard issue,” she replied.
“I know, but you shouldn’t have carried it with you. Not into Ukraine.”
“I’m glad I did. When the shouting started and the lights blinded me, I thought I was being attacked. It was an automatic reaction.”
Taras was silent for a moment, wondering how he could at least appear to be useful to his chief. Then he looked at her. “Before you entered the barn, did you see anyone else? Anyone around our farm, or on the land? Anyone near the barn?” He stared at her, willing her to understand his meaning.
She watched his face and seemed to think deeply about his questions. Then she spoke. “I saw a woman,” she said. “She was walking along the road, up from the centre of the town, then she turned up through a gap between some houses towards where the farm is.”
That was good, Taras thought. She’d understood. The Russian officer had said, “It’s not her.” So they’d expected a woman, another woman, and Masha had supplied him with a fictional one, but it was more than she’d said to the interrogators who’d come before him. It made Taras seem useful.
“What was she like?” he said.
“I don’t remember much,” Masha replied. “She was just a woman I happened to see.”
“What was she wearing?”
“A black coat. I remember that. And a wool hat, but I don’t remember the colour.”
That was good, a description, but not a description that suggested she was looking hard at anyone, that she was making an observation.
“Did you see her afterwards?”
“No. I just saw her turn up towards the farm. I was already on my way back before I decided to look in at the barn.”
She’d helped him, Taras thought, and he hoped it was enough to justify another meeting with her.
As he walked back through the corridors of the hospital, he took care to thank the officer, so that he would remember him, on what he hoped would be another visit. When he was clear of the area surrounding the hospital he walked for a while, down towards the port. He saw a café and entered. He ordered a coffee. Then he went to a toilet that was lit by a wan lightbulb and dropped the notebook from his sleeve and read what she’d written in the dim light. It was hard, not just because of the light, but because she hadn’t been looking at the pad when she wrote and her scrawl was bad, falling off the side of the paper twice. He made out a name, “Volkov…my boss. He gave me a package.” Then he finally managed to decipher the only other words. “A tree,” it read. “400 metres above the barn.” He tore the paper and flushed it down the toilet.
When he left the café he took a taxi to the centre of town. He decided to be open, on the assumption that they might be watching him. He took a bus up to the western end of town and then walked the route Masha had told him she’d seen the woman walking until he came to the farm. He let himself in with a key and opened up the locked shutters and then the windows. In the kitchen he found an old jar of coffee and boiled some water and piled five spoons of sugar into a cup, before going outside and sitting on the porch in the sun, sipping the hot coffee where anyone could see him. When he’d finished, he put the cup down and walked towards the barn a quarter of a mile away. That would be normal.
He reached it. Surveillance and forensic teams had already turned the place over several times. He glanced at the door jamb where the single rotten door hung loosely and saw the lighter shade where the signa
l sight had been left in the form of a strip of adhesive tape. He walked around the barn and then turned to the left, heading up the hill behind him. He saw the tree, but sat down halfway to it and looked out over the bay and the Black Sea beyond, taking the sun in on his face as he lifted it up towards the sky. But all the time he watched for eyes.
He walked the remaining part of the way to the tree in a roundabout way, giving no hint that it was where he was heading. When he reached it, he swung his leg onto a knot in the trunk and hauled himself up into a crook and sat again, as if to get a better view of the town below and the sea beyond. But he noted the two sets of footprints that had been left when the ground was wetter. They’d stopped at the foot of the tree, then one set headed up the hill—the woman’s he supposed—and the other set, Masha’s, led down the hill towards the barn. But there was nothing in the tree. The woman, whose steps he saw before they disappeared in the harder ground above, must have picked up whatever Masha had been carrying. Someone good, then, someone who could work out what a courier would do. Someone who looked at the possibilities and saw that a courier really had only one place to lodge a package while she reconnoitred the barn. Someone highly professional.
Back in the centre of town, Taras took a taxi to the Simferol airport for the flight to Odessa. He turned over in his mind the scenario that seemed most likely to him. Masha had been asked to make a drop. Another woman had been making the pickup. Two KGB officers had been killed on the same day, one in Odessa, the other on a remote road in the Crimean peninsula. Had the woman been the killer? He suspected so.
And then his mind went to where his chief’s hadn’t gone—not yet, in any case. If the Russians were sending something secret into Ukraine—which her boss, Volkov, evidently was—they wouldn’t have used something so obscure as a drop in a barn. Something so small that Masha could carry it and that would have been brought in on a military vessel from the Russian side, and then handed over in a more straightforward way in the town. So that suggested to him that the woman making the pickup wasn’t from Ukraine at all and that the message or whatever it was that was being transmitted from the Russian side was intended for a person or people or organisation outside Ukraine. Ukraine was just the drop. And if it was intended for someone outside Ukraine, that must mean it was intended for someone from the West. Her boss, Volkov, was sending something to the West. Was he a double agent, then? Everything suggested that.
As he sat on the plane and watched the coast of the Crimea unfolding beneath him towards Odessa, he knew what he had to do. Check the entry points, the airports, the ports in southern Ukraine on that day, January 16, and the days before, and identify a woman travelling on her own, a woman who had killed two Russian intelligence officers and then disappeared, presumably with the package.
21
UP ABOVE THE CITY, in an area of desolate waste ground, there were signs of bulldozer tracks. Anna paused at the side of the dirt road and looked at where they crisscrossed the landscape, gouging the earth and ending in piles of smashed wreckage that were once makeshift shanties. Then the tracks were reversed in order to continue their destructive work. She turned and gazed down the hill behind her from where she’d come. A solitary lark was singing above a green meadow immediately below the stripped landscape and a few brown-and-white cows grazed on a slope. Beyond the meadow, the city of Sevastopol lay in its long bay, with other bays that branched off it. The blue waters reflected the clear, deep colour of a cloudless sky.
She turned again and looked up ahead in the direction she was walking. There were green-tinted mountains, rising beyond the waste ground, that were topped with tooth-shaped crags. She was near the new shantytown now, and saw how hastily it had been erected after its predecessor had been destroyed by the bulldozers. The waste ground was dotted with the shacks and shanties made from odds and ends found in the city’s dumps or on the beaches. The scrawny habitations had an unmistakable impermanence about them. They looked like the scum and refuse left by a falling tide. The bulldozer tracks marked where the inhabitants of the shacks had last put up their bedraggled homes and where the homes had been unceremoniously crushed a few weeks before. Twelve weeks, she’d heard, that was how long the people here were left unmolested before the bulldozers arrived again. The length of time had nothing to do with leniency, it was merely the time the creaking bureaucratic machine of the Crimea parliament took to grind into its destructive action.
She walked on again and, as she approached the first of the shacks, she saw it was made up of mostly cardboard boxes, a torn awning consisting of a plastic sheet that probably came from the city’s waste dump nearby or had been washed ashore from a freighter, and bits of twisted iron pipe that supported the rickety structure. Two dark-skinned boys were playing outside, rolling a metal wheel hub along with a stick. One of the boys was naked, the other wore a pair of torn and filthy shorts. There was no water or electricity up here on the detritus-strewn land. The inhabitants had to walk half a mile across the hill and take their water from a stream in plastic cans that had been washed up on the beaches. As a refinement of the bureaucrats’ cruelty, each time they bulldozed the shanties they moved them farther from the water source. And it must get very cold up here in winter, Anna thought.
A woman stared at her from what passed for a doorway in the jumble of boxes and crates. There was no greeting, just a blank, narrow stare that concealed, perhaps, fear or suspicion, or both. Anna had the Slavic features of the persecutors who bulldozed the shantytown’s Tatar inhabitants from their homes. Unusually for children, the boys ignored her and she walked on. Perhaps they had learned to avoid the Slavs. The lark’s song rose above their shouts and cries as they beat the metal hub.
The density of the shanties increased as she approached the notional centre of the derelict habitation. They were all Tatars who lived here, it was a refuge for Tatars who continued to return from the lands of Central Asia and from Siberia where Stalin had exiled their forefathers. The sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of Stalin’s slaves were returning to their own land and had been returning in fits and starts since 1991 when Ukraine won its independence. Their former homes in the cities of the Crimea had long since been requisitioned or just stolen from them at the end of the Great Patriotic War in 1944. Stalin had chosen to ignore the contribution of the vast majority of Tatars who had fought in the Soviet Army and punished the whole group for the errors of the few who had joined the Nazis. They had done so in the forlorn belief that Hitler would give them an independent Crimea. Once a majority, the Tatars were now a disaffected, unwanted minority who were viewed with suspicion and hatred by those who’d stolen their land and property.
Anna came to a rough circle of shanties. Most had prayer mats laid outside them on the ground. In lieu of a mosque, this was their prayer centre where they turned towards the southeast and Mecca. A few cooking fires were burning, sullen men without work smouldered beside them. They stared blankly at her or continued to squat or whittle sticks—empty activities without a purpose. The women seemed to be inside the makeshift structures. There was a smell of stale coffee and vegetable waste that mingled together in the warm morning air.
Anna approached a group of men who were smoking and talking in low voices, leaning against a stripped World War Two truck. They looked at her with a mixture of hate and curiosity. A “white” woman never came here at all, let alone unaccompanied.
“I’m looking for Irek,” she said.
“Who shall I say is calling?” one of the men said with an insolent pretence at formality.
“A benefactor.”
The man laughed scornfully and drew on the last grains of tobacco from the cigarette that was clamped between his front teeth. He had a wild flame of black hair that fell across his face, behind which the intense whites of his eyes glittered angrily.
“What have you brought us? Bread and liberty?” He laughed harshly again and threw the cigarette end to the ground.
“Where is he?” Anna s
aid.
The man looked at her, studying her without speaking, surprised at her assurance in so hostile an environment. Then he snapped some words to a boy playing nearby, some instruction spoken in their language, and the boy raced off up the hill and disappeared behind the irrational turmoil of the shanties. Anna made no further attempt to communicate. She sat down on the ground, removed her pack, and crossed her legs. She was hot. The sun was climbing and by midday the temperature looked set to rise to a summer heat up here on the hill. By adopting this submissive position, she guessed the men would relax and ignore her.
In a short while, the boy returned and spoke to the man who’d given him instructions. The man turned to her and switched to speaking Russian, telling her to follow him. Three other men joined him, and as she got up from the ground they surrounded her and walked like a guard escort, shielding whoever they were taking her to meet at the top of the camp.
They reached a traditional, tentlike structure that had a few rugs laid out on the bare earth and two poles that supported several plastic sheets. It was a larger place than the rest of the shanties. One of the men went inside, bending beneath the low, plastic sheet that served as an entrance. From inside, Anna heard the Tatar twang, its Turkic origins dating back from when the Huns swept west and assaulted the Roman empire. Finally, the man emerged from the tent and beckoned to her.
When she entered, she saw there was an attempt at making a home of sorts. Cushions were strewn around a rug that was frayed and eaten with holes. An ancient radio that looked like it had been salvaged stood on an upturned fish crate. A couple of metal pots and some cooking utensils hung from a string. Only the old man who sat on a cushion facing the tent’s opening didn’t have a temporary look about him.