by Alex Dryden
“Bit over the top for a merchant ship, wouldn’t you say?” the skipper said quietly.
“They’ve got a Russian Helix helicopter on the deck,” Holyoake said, looking through a telescope. “You can see its coaxial rotors. No markings. Probably bought on the open market. Armed with Aphid missiles. That’s what the sensors are picking up. They’re fixed.” He turned away from the telescope as Logan moved beside him and put his eye to it.
“Are they locked on?” Logan asked, and the skipper relayed the message belowdecks, receiving a reply in the negative.
At that moment, a ship-to-ship communication crackled over the radio. “To fishing vessel Mira. To fishing vessel Mira. This is the commercial freighter Pride of Corsica. This is the commercial freighter Pride of Corsica. Over.”
“Reading you, Pride of Corsica. This is Mira. Over.”
“We request you alter your course immediately. We are carrying toxic materials. Over.”
Logan put his hand on the skipper’s arm. “Don’t reply,” he said. “Not yet.”
There was a silence that seemed like an age, but it probably lasted no more than a minute. Then the communication crackled again over the Mira’s radio. They were just over half a mile from the Pride of Corsica now.
“This is Pride of Corsica calling Mira. Alter your course immediately. Immediately. Over.”
“Take her a couple of degrees off,” Logan ordered the skipper. “No more.”
The Mira didn’t seem to alter course unless you looked closely at the bow. They would now miss the Pride of Corsica by a hundred yards or so.
“This is Mira to Pride of Corsica. This is Mira to Pride of Corsica. We have altered course and will be passing on your port side. Have a good day. Over.”
There was a short pause, then the radio crackled back at them. “Pride of Corsica to Mira. This is the final request. Repeat. This is the final request. Alter your course by at least ten degrees. Over.”
They were six hundred yards from the Pride of Corsica now and Logan, Philip Holyoake, and the skipper saw men on the stern of the vessel that the Mira was approaching. One of the Russians and one of the Americans joined them on the bridge.
“They’re wearing balaclavas,” Logan observed.
“Against identification from satellites,” Holyoake said. “Nothing to do with us.”
Logan picked up the radio that connected the bridge with the hold below. “Are they locked on?”
“No… no… Wait. They’re locked on now. Something on the deck.”
“The Aphid missiles on the chopper,” Holyoake said.
Logan looked at him. He seemed completely calm, as if they were enjoying a day out game fishing.
“How long have we got?” Logan said, and felt a sweat break out on his forehead.
They were four hundred yards from the Pride of Corsica.
Suddenly there was an explosion from the vessel ahead and a spout of water shot up almost simultaneously about fifty yards to the right of the Mira.
“Pride of Corsica to Mira. Pride of Corsica to Mira. The next firing will be aimed at you. Over.”
“Turn away now,” Logan said and the skipper swung the wheel sharply to the left until they were far to the left side of the Pride of Corsica and passing between it and the distant mountains. Logan found himself trembling. When he looked at Philip Holyoake, he was amazed to see a small smile playing around his lips. Holyoake clapped the skipper on the shoulder.
“Beers all round, Rick,” he said.
23
BALTHASAR STOOPED TO COME OUT from beneath the hanging plastic sheet that served as a porch. The heat through the plastic roofs in the shantytown was intense, even now in early spring. It must be unbearable in high summer. Once he was outside, he straightened up and stood for a moment, welcoming on his face the cool air that came in from the sea. He stayed still for a moment, listening to the sounds around him from the encampment on the hill, orienting himself. The speech of the inhabitants was a mix of Tatar and Russian, a sort of pidgin language that owed a great deal to the Russian language after centuries of rule from Moscow.
Balthasar heard a man shouting about a missing goat, then a boy replying, who in turn was told finally to go and find it. He picked up the sounds of pots and pans jangling together on a woman’s back, on her way to the stream for cleaning. An old motor was turning over and over, sounding less healthy each time, until it died—a Neva jeep, he decided. There were random shouts of men, a kick against something metal. Tinny music was playing on a radio, an old Tatar folk song.
But what he sensed over and above the smells and sounds of the shantytown on the hill was the deep air of resignation, which was occasionally ignited by anger, then doused again by despair. The river of the camp’s collective psyche contained little else in its flow but these three elements. He turned to his left, away from the lean-to, and went to find Irek. When he found the old man’s home, he stooped again under more plastic and entered.
“How long ago was she here?” Balthasar asked when they were sitting on cushions and facing each other.
Irek looked up at the sightless eyes of the man opposite him. It was true what their mutual friends in Ingushetia and Chechnya had said about this man. He saw more than the seeing did.
“Around four hours,” he replied. Then not being able to completely believe the man could have known of her visit without some information, he said, “Someone told you she’d come?”
“I felt her. I feel her now,” Balthasar said. “She sat here, on this cushion where I’m sitting.”
“You know her well?”
“Once. But not for many years. Not for decades.”
They sat in silence for more than a minute. Balthasar sipped water from a metal cup, a round copper mug without a handle, not the tin cup that Irek had served the tea in four hours earlier. Balthasar was in no hurry.
“My acquaintances said you are a Muslim,” Irek said finally. “Yet you come on behalf of Russians. Which Russians?”
“Money is money, old man,” Balthasar replied. “What does it matter which Russians?”
“Maybe it matters a great deal.”
“We are offering to build you a mosque,” Balthasar continued. “But that’s just the beginning. There will be more mosques, madrassas for learning. Eventually, we’ll get you out of this camp and into proper homes. My sponsors wish this to remain anonymous.”
“The woman said you would offer us good things,” Irek replied.
“Did she? What is her interest in what we offer you?”
But Irek didn’t answer his question.
“Why are you making gifts?” he said at last.
“Why? We are all Muslims. We should all stand together. We understand the treatment of your people. It was the same with us.”
“But you…?” Irek said quietly. “I don’t think you are a religious man.”
Balthasar stirred, shifting slightly on the cushion, and put down the copper cup, very precisely but with an ease of purpose, onto the small level space beside the rug.
It is as if he sees everything, Irek thought. Sometimes he wondered if this man Balthasar was even blind at all.
“Religion is just man’s imperfect attempt to see God,” Balthasar replied. “But religion doesn’t always look in the right places.”
“Then you and I are similar in our views of religion,” Irek replied. “But that doesn’t explain why you wish to finance mosques for us. What we want is homes. First homes, then we can see where religion fits in.”
“My sponsors who are providing the financing are offering mosques and schools,” Balthasar said. There was a pause, as if he was waiting for Irek to show his gratitude, but none was evident. “You haven’t reached the age of ninety, I see, by believing what you’re told without doubting its truth. It’s the woman, isn’t it? She has made you wary.”
“Everything has made my people wary,” Irek replied.
“You’re concerned about the origin of the money,” Balthasar
stated.
Irek was silent. This man could see inside his mind, he thought.
He reached for the hookah and flaked apple tobacco into the bowl, lighting it with a piece of charcoal that he put in place with his hand though it was burning. He took two or three puffs, then passed it to Balthasar without putting a different mouthpiece onto the pipe as he had for the woman. Balthasar received it easily and took a long draw and the water in the glass bowl bubbled. Then he exhaled slowly, tilting his head upwards to the roof of the dwelling. A dog began to bark outside, then squealed and fell silent; a kick or a stone must have been aimed at it. In the pecking order of human anger there’d always be someone or something to beat up that was less than you, he thought. Even these people who were fixed by history and circumstance in the drainage system of humanity needed something to oppress, something to feel superior to.
“What did she tell you?” Balthasar said. “No. Wait. First, tell me how she appears.”
“Physically?” Irek said.
“What is your impression of her? How does she present herself? And what is her disguise, if you could penetrate it? Then, yes, you can tell me what she looks like if you wish,” he added, as if that was not important.
Irek told Balthasar what Anna had told him earlier, that she represented an American company with business interests in Ukraine. For those business interests to be successful, the Americans needed Ukraine to be free, or at least not a vassal of Russia’s. Her disguise? What did the blind man in front of him mean by that? “She didn’t tell me everything,” Irek continued, “if that’s what you mean. And neither do you,” Irek added. Then he finished by saying, “She is a beautiful woman whose beauty seems to be irrelevant to her. Maybe she even feels it gets in her way. Maybe she’s met too many men who don’t see beyond her physical beauty.”
Balthasar smiled. To Irek, it was unexpected. Did the blind man not know that she’d warned him against Balthasar?
As if to answer his thoughts, Balthasar spoke through the smile that hadn’t left his lips. “She knew about me, didn’t she.” It was a statement and Irek saw he was still smiling.
“I don’t know. All she said was that someone would offer to help us. That money would be given.”
“And not to trust this offer of friendship?” Balthasar said, the smile still playing around his lips. “This money?”
Irek wasn’t afraid to say the truth. “She said it would link us to terrorism,” he said flatly.
“And who do you believe?” Balthasar replied. “Her or me?”
“Her visit was unexpected. Yours was not. I have to think it over.”
“There’s no hurry,” Balthasar said.
“Tell me,” Irek asked him, “do you yourself really know what is behind this offer of help you bring? Or are you just the messenger?”
Balthasar considered what he knew. He saw that all he really knew was what he’d been told by his bosses in Department S, his father included. “We want these people on our side,” his father had said. “That’s the reason for help.” Why did it come from Department S, then? Balthasar thought. Why not as part of an aid package from the government? But he didn’t communicate his misgivings to the old man.
“Is she returning?” he asked Irek.
“She said in three days.”
As he walked down through the camp, the smell of long-cooked vegetables wafted across the hill. Over and above it was the smell of intense, but temporary, human activity, of fleeting lives, but that was not a smell in the conventional sense. It was a sense. It was something only Balthasar could feel.
He walked easily through the creaking shanties, avoiding pitfalls and the structures themselves. Children approached him without fear. He held a small boy’s hand. Nobody challenged him. He attracted reverence from the men, the women cast their eyes down. The boy looked occasionally up at the blind man as if trying to ask a question that never came. Balthasar left him at the end of the camp and pressed some Ukrainian banknotes into his hand, small denominations. “Buy some sweets for your friends,” he said and turned down the hill and onto the bulldozer tracks. The old smell of burned-out wreckage from the destruction of the previous shantytown hung in his nostrils until he reached the meadow. He walked steadily down towards the town.
24
TARAS SAT IN A WOODEN SWIVEL CHAIR in his office on Deribasya Street and looked curiously at the list that lay on the pale, peeling veneer of the desk. Outside, though he couldn’t see much from the office window that overlooked the tiniest of courtyards, Kiev was bathed in spring sunshine. Soon the heat would be demanding air-conditioning, but so far that was beyond the reach of Ukraine’s intelligence services.
He finally had a list he felt he could work from, and one name on it stood out, to his way of thinking, in any case, that was screaming every kind of alert. To be more accurate, it wasn’t so much the name, which was evidently a false one, but the profile of the woman behind it that he had now constructed loosely in his mind. It was more of an X-ray than a full portrait.
From back in January, in the three days that led up to the killings of the two Russian KGB officers and the arrest of Masha, Taras had been able to positively identify thirty-four foreign women who had almost certainly entered Ukraine alone, but he knew this didn’t include any women who had entered apparently accompanied—in other words, using a man as a cover. That was something he would never be able to ascertain. But he believed anyway that a courier would have arrived alone—and so he concentrated on the thirty-four women.
Of these, twenty-nine had flown from various parts of the world into the capital, Kiev. And Taras had by now decided that—whoever the woman was whom the Russians had been expecting at the barn—she must have entered through Odessa, not Kiev. Everything pointed to that; the first of the killings took place there, and the second in the Crimea where, presumably, she was making her way to Sevastopol for the pickup. Why would she have come through Kiev? It made no sense for a courier to enter the country so far away from a pickup when time and the speed of exit would be of the essence. So, for the purpose of his more focused enquiries now, he was looking at five women who had entered Odessa, apparently unaccompanied. And only one of these had entered the country on the day itself, January 16.
Taras picked up the list from the desk and thrust it into a briefcase. He shouldn’t have brought it in here to the office, he knew that. Everything had to be concealed from his chief for now, at least until he’d worked out what was going on, until he had a thesis of some kind that would help Masha. He took the list out of the briefcase again. There was always the possibility of having it searched on the way out of the building. He screwed it into a tight ball and jammed several chewed bits of gum into the squashed paper, then closed the paper over them. Then he thrust it casually into the pocket of his jacket—his chewing gum disposal. He decided this would be the last day that he used his office to pursue the woman.
The second question that still preyed on his mind was Masha’s boss in Moscow, Volkov. The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d reached the conclusion that her boss had used Masha to deliver a package to a Western intelligence service. Therefore Volkov was a double agent working for some Western agency. That was useful to know and might, perhaps, be of paramount importance if he needed leverage in Moscow at some future date. It might also be extremely dangerous for him to possess the knowledge.
But in the present, part of him was enraged that his cousin had unwittingly been made a part of such an operation by her boss, while another side of him—once his anger had subsided—began to think of what use Volkov might be to him, and indeed to Masha and her eventual freedom. She was undoubtedly in the safest place for now, even though her imprisonment, on top of her self-inflicted wound, was making her more ill by the week. But if she left now, her life would certainly be forfeited by her boss. For that reason, Taras knew he had to devise a way to let Volkov know that she wasn’t the only person he would have to kill, that he, the Moscow agent for some Western
interests, was blown unless he played ball with Taras.
The woman his mind now focused on was named in her American passport as Natalia Simmonds. She had passed through Odessa’s border control at 7:35 on the morning of January 16. Eight hours later a KGB officer was found dead and jammed behind some builder’s material in an alley off Odessa’s boulevard. The time of death was estimated at somewhere between an hour and two hours after the woman’s arrival. Sometime later that day the body of another KGB officer was found at the side of a remote road in the Crimea near Vinogradovo. Taras had ascertained that a youngish woman travelling alone had been on the bus from Odessa to Sevastopol that morning, but had gotten off at a stop past Nikolayev. So she could have been in the vicinity of where the second body was found, too. Later, on the evening of the same day, the senior Russian intelligence officer at the barn had shouted, “It’s not her,” when he’d seen Masha.
Taras considered the possibilities as he walked down the corridor and poured himself his third coffee of the morning from the machine that was leaking the thin sludge onto the linoleum floor.
A female courier arrives by boat from Turkey. But whoever Natalia Simmonds was, she was evidently more than just a run-of-the-mill courier. The Russians know about her arrival, she is pursued, perhaps? At any rate, she kills two of her pursuers or watchers and makes her way to the barn by that evening. When everything goes wrong she nevertheless finds the crook in the tree where Masha had hidden the package before she reconnoitred the barn. The woman Simmonds takes the package. And then she disappears. Two Russian spies dead, a pickup achieved successfully from the jaws of defeat and in extreme danger—and all the while the Russians knew she was expected and had her in their sights.
Taras returned to his office and sat and sipped the foul-tasting coffee. He wanted a cigarette and, opening the window onto the courtyard, he leaned out and against regulations lit a cheap Eastern European–manufactured Marlboro.
Somehow this woman going by the name of Natalia Simmonds had left Ukraine while never leaving Ukraine. For there was no customs record of her departure. She’d arrived on a week-long visa, with a return boat ticket, also of a week’s duration, and then she had disappeared. There was only one likely solution. Unless the Russians had subsequently apprehended or killed her, she had left the country by clandestine means. Possibly even the same night that she picked up the package. If not, it would have been the following night or the one after that. One thing he was certain of was that the woman was no longer in Ukraine.