The Blind Spy f-3

by Alex Dryden

  “If I had to say one thing or the other,” Logan said carefully, “I’d have to say I believed him. He knows, though God knows how he knows.”

  “Good,” Burt said and stood up to his full five feet nine inches, his eyes alight with possibilities and a beaming smile fixed once more on his chubby face.

  Why the news that a Ukrainian spy knew the identity of one of Burt’s Russian agents in Moscow should make Burt content, however, Logan couldn’t fathom.

  “Good?” he queried, in genuine incomprehension. “How is it good?”

  “We know where we stand,” Burt said. “If you’re right—and I trust your instincts—we know what’s happening. Let’s say he knows exactly who our agent is. That’s very valuable to him. And it’s valuable to us that we know it about him. We can use this Taras, perhaps.”

  Logan didn’t ask Burt how he intended to do that when the boot seemed to be firmly on the other foot. Taras was in a winning position, in Logan’s view.

  “Are you going to let Anna make the contact with him, then?” he asked.

  Burt stroked his chins. “We must,” he said at last. “We must treat it as good fortune. We must see what happens when they meet.”

  “But revealing the agent’s identity is going to be a threat he’ll always be able to hold over Cougar’s head,” Logan said. “Not just this time. If we deal with him now, he can use the threat again and again.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Burt said, and he evinced an almost complete lack of concern at the prospect. Then he turned to Logan. He looked at him for a long time, until Logan began to feel uncomfortable. “Logan, I’m going to ask you something very important,” Burt said. “A change of plan. It’s something of personal importance to me, not just to Cougar’s business. I want you to go down there, to Sevastopol. I can’t withdraw Larry to brief him, he’s needed there, on the spot, looking after Anna’s back. So I want it to be you, Logan. Let’s say I want it to be you anyway, Larry or no Larry. This could be the most important assignment of your life.”

  “She won’t like it. Neither will Larry. You know that. Neither of them trust me.” Logan’s voice betrayed some bitterness, despite his attempt to be unemotional.

  “Maybe they won’t. She doesn’t trust you, that’s true. But she has her reasons. Here’s a chance to start rebuilding that trust. Look at it that way.”

  “What’s she doing in the Crimea?” Logan asked bluntly.

  “That I can’t say,” Burt replied. “It’s unimportant. It’s not relevant,” he added, correcting himself.

  “I’m not in the need-to-know loop, you mean.”

  Burt raised his eyebrows slightly, but his voice was regulated, friendly, paying Logan compliments he hadn’t paid him in some time. “Look, Logan. I’m doing everything possible to square a complicated situation. You can help me. I will value it highly.”

  “Theo wants Cougar out of the area completely. You know that. We shouldn’t be there at all.”

  “I’m glad you said ‘we,’” Burt replied slyly. “Theo will also want to be squared about the situation—and other things—shortly. But we’ll come to that later, when this is over.”

  “They’re going to board the Pride of Corsica by force,” Logan said.

  “I had heard. Who’s they?” Burt said, ignoring what the CIA chief wanted Cougar to do, to vacate the Crimea and leave it free for the CIA, the Russians, the Brits…anybody, it seemed, as long as it wasn’t Cougar.

  “Us—the CIA, the Russians, and the British. It’s going to be a joint assault team just like the recce was.”

  “Of course,” Burt said, and appeared deep in thought. “The Russians have got the CIA and the British involved in a joint operation.” He looked back at Logan. “That’s the way they’d do it,” he said mysteriously. “Do we have a date for this assault?” Burt asked.

  “No,” Logan said. “Not as far as I know.”

  “Then I’ll speak to Theo,” Burt replied. He looked hard at Logan again. “You think you can do this right?” he said. “Meet with Larry and Anna? It’s you who will pick up Taras’s message at this drugstore in Sevastopol, then relay it to Anna. I don’t want her walking into an ambush, so it has to be someone else. You’re ideal, Logan. You’ve always been one of the best.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be able to do it?” Logan said, ignoring more of Burt’s easy flattery. “It’s just being a messenger boy, isn’t it? Just the usual job of Burt’s bagman.”

  Burt leaned down to the table, putting his big hands palms down flat against the surface. “It may be the most important thing you ever do for Cougar, Logan. For me, too. And certainly for Anna. Not to mention our agent in Moscow, of course, whose life may well depend on it.” Burt surveyed Logan once again before continuing. “But it also may be the most important thing you ever do for yourself. Think about that. Understand where your best interests lie. This may well be a moment of truth for you. You understand the importance of this? It’s not just conveying a message to Anna so that she can meet the Ukrainian. It’s about the implications of the message and the actions that will follow. In my opinion, we’re nearing the point of explosion.”

  “If you say so, Burt,” Logan replied and stood up to peel off the top of a cold beer that was standing in an ice bucket.

  “At times like this,” Burt said, “we all behave in character, no matter what happens.”

  Logan had no idea what he meant by this, but he automatically felt himself under some critical glare and it made him defensive.

  “When do I go?” he asked.

  “At once,” Burt said. “Talk to our travel people, they’re expecting you.” He handed Logan a ship phone. “Get a flight to Odessa, then a flight to Simferol. A car from there.” He took out a pen and wrote a coded number on a scrap of paper. “This is Larry,” he said, indicating the number. “I’ll tell him you’re on the way.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be delighted.”

  Logan took an afternoon flight from Athens to Istanbul and then connected to a flight for Odessa. He checked into a small hotel on Odessa’s waterfront, drank at several bars along the strip that were just waking up for the summer, chatted to two pretty teenage girls who said they were dancers, slept a little, and took the first flight to Simferol on the following morning. From there it was a long taxi ride to Sevastopol.

  Somewhere in the city, he thought as the old Mercedes approached the edge of town, somewhere, he knew that Taras would be waiting for him, and for Anna, too. He’d have left his communication at the drugstore by now. It was already two days since their meeting in the car and they had twenty-hours before he blew the whistle on Cougar’s Moscow agent.

  When he’d paid off the car and found a suitably wide-open space away from buildings, he contacted Larry on the coded number Burt had given him and heard the sour tone in Larry’s voice. Logan felt his hackles rise immediately. When they met on this sticky afternoon in Sevastopol—the heavy air seemed to stretch from Greece all the way to the southern borders of Russia—Larry was terse, monosyllabic, and conveyed an almost tangible sense of disgust.

  “Just pick up the message,” Larry said. “Then come straight back. And give it to me.”

  “I’m to give it to Anna,” Logan replied. “Those were Burt’s orders.”

  “Then they’ve changed, Logan. She’s not available. And anyway, she doesn’t want you anywhere near this.”

  And so at four o’clock in the afternoon—and with fifteen hours now remaining—Larry and a surveillance team reconnoitred the street outside the drugstore on Ochakovstev. It seemed to be clear, according to the watchers’ signals.

  Then one of the team entered the store and took up a position at the back as Logan entered. Logan walked to a dilapidated booth with a barred window over it and asked for the pills being held for Stanislas Lavrov, the name Taras had instructed him to say. The grouchy woman behind the counter eyed him warily and took off her glasses, as if to distance herself from the significance of what she was doing, bu
t she handed over a packet, sealed at the top. From its sound as Logan picked it up, it seemed to contain pills. Logan paid her more than the cost and left.

  He walked out onto the bright street and saw the sea arcing away below him. The warships of the two fleets were tied up against quays, or hung at anchor close to, or lay dotted in the bays that disappeared into the slight haze that deepened with distance.

  And fifty miles off the coast was where the Pride of Corsica rode the sea lanes that led towards the south of the Black Sea and on to the Mediterranean. When he was finished here, Logan thought, it would be time to rendezvous with the teams for the assault on the ship. They were gathering at Burgas, in Bulgaria, from where the Mira had also set out. By now, Theo had arranged everything, with the Russians’ guiding hand behind it all. It was being billed in Washington as a joint, international effort in counterterrorism.

  Logan looked up the road in both directions. The watchers would be out there, but they were well concealed. He turned to the left and walked briskly down a slight hill before catching a bus to the rendezvous Larry had given him.

  The holiday villa Larry had taken for two weeks under the name of Philip Ames and family lay in some hills to the east of the city. The team had all arrived there before Logan: Larry, his “wife,” a former CIA veteran called Lucy, and their two “children”—stretching it a bit, in Logan’s mind, for Grant and Adam were in their early twenties, though dressed like teenagers they could have passed for a lot less. It was Adam who let Logan in and he stepped into a sparsely furnished room with cheap red floor tiles and bars on the windows—against normal, opportunistic thieves, Logan assumed, rather than Ukrainian security agents. Larry was in a kitchen at the back, making coffee in a machine whose red light flickered on and off with the failing electric current only to receive a sharp slap from Larry when it was off. Larry turned with his hand already out and Logan hated him for the insulting peremptoriness of the gesture.

  “Here,” he said, as if he couldn’t care less, and handed over the package from his pocket.

  Anna walked into the room.

  “You got it?” she asked.

  Logan nodded. He couldn’t wait to get out of here now. The atmosphere of criticism that seemed to him to be aimed unfairly in his direction was beginning to stifle him.

  Anna took the package from Larry’s hand and opened it. She extracted a small piece of paper from among the pills and held it towards the light from the kitchen window.

  “It’s a number,” she said.

  “Bastard.” Larry hit the coffee machine again. “He wants you to call about a meeting, not just meet.”

  “It seems so,” she said.

  “You’d better do it far away from here,” Larry said. “I’ll send Adam and Grant with you. Best to go up in the hills. Here.” He gave her a phone—one of many mobile phones—which he took from a cupboard. “Chuck it as soon as you’ve used it.”

  “It’s okay, Larry. I know what to do.”

  Anna looked at Logan now. “And you, Logan?” she said. “You’re done here. You’d better move on.”

  And that was it. He was out of the villa in less than fifteen minutes after he’d arrived, the delivery boy. Lucy drove him in a hired Jeep into the town and directed him towards a square where he could pick up a taxi back to Simferol and the airport. But when Lucy had waved good-bye—the only friendly gesture he seemed to have received from any of them—Logan first put in a call to Laszlo before heading north.

  28

  BALTHASAR LEFT ANNA at the foot of the steps that led to the monument. The monument stood at the top of a hill at the place called Balaclava and looked out over the city and beyond it to the sea from where invaders had always come until Hitler attacked Sevastopol from land. To the left, the mouth of the Kerch Straits was at its widest before the straits entered and split the land like an ax, and separated Ukraine from Russia. To the right, the mountains descended towards the Crimean steppe as the coast turned to the north.

  Anna looked down at Sevastopol’s perfect harbour. There was one long bay called Sevastopolskaya Bukhta, and then five or six perfect bays for anchorage off the main bay. In the main dockyard below her, she saw a train, loaded with submarine batteries, Balthasar had said. At the end of the dock where the train stood, the Russian aircraft carrier Moskva was moored broadside against the quay.

  It was a hot day, the air completely still up here, and there were few people who were willing to climb up the ninety-five steps to the monument.

  Larry had chosen the place for Anna to meet Taras. “It’s a dead end,” he said. “Normally I don’t like that. But once you’re at the top by the monument, no one can come up easily except by the steps and the road. We can watch that.” But by now, Larry and Anna had firmly decided that Taras was acting alone. Larry and the surveillance team were out in full force to watch—and if necessary follow—anyone who decided to make the trip to the top.

  Anna began the long climb up the steps. She wore a cap against the sun and carried a small pack on her back and a guidebook in one hand. But inside her jacket there was a Thompson Contender handgun. She watched up ahead as she climbed and, from time to time, glanced to the sides of the steps, looking for anything on the steep slopes that shouldn’t be there. She felt the sun on the right side of her face as it rose towards its zenith and heard only the scuff of her shoes on the stone steps and the occasional hoot of a ship’s horn from Sevastopolskaya Bukhta. Taras had said he would be waiting at the top, behind the monument, at 11:30. It was now 11:45.

  It took her ten minutes to reach the top. The monument was made of a soft stone, weathered by the Black Sea winds, and the engravings in Russian Cyrillic writing had lost their knife sharpness. She turned once when she reached the top and looked back down from where she’d come, at the glittering bays and the grey warships and the black hulls of submarines. All were absolutely still in the water, as if they were two-dimensional images stuck to a diorama of the scene rather than real ships on a real sea. Then she moved carefully around and behind the monument, her hand on the butt of her gun inside the jacket and her finger poised close to the trigger.

  She saw a well-built, stocky man sitting on a bench, his hair ruffled—habitually unbrushed, she thought—and his hands resting clasped but relaxed in his lap. He was looking ahead to where she appeared from the far side of the monument and the sun caught the side of his face, showing her a man with weary eyes and a patient expression that seemed to hold the expectation of nothing very much. He didn’t move his head when she appeared, but looked into her eyes without fear.

  “So you’re the great Anna Resnikov,” he said softly. “The great Colonel Anna Resnikov.”

  He made no move to get up and, once Anna had checked the slopes that fell away behind the bench where he was sitting, she sat down, an arm’s length from him.

  In the previous hours between her phone call to Taras and this moment, Balthasar had discreetly run checks in Moscow on several SBU officers, including Taras Tur, some way down on the list. The Russians had a note in the FSB archives on Taras’s father and his murder in Berlin. They also had a mark against Taras as a “Ukrainian nationalist—to be discussed.” Balthasar interpreted this as the KGB’s obsessive listing of possible enemies in Ukraine and its anxious distinction between pro-and anti-Russians in the Ukrainian secret service, but he’d said that this distinction was crude and not necessarily to be trusted. Taras might be a Ukrainian nationalist, that was true, but that did not mean he would necessarily act against the Russians. He might also fall in Russia’s direction, depending on the alternative. It was known that Taras—using his father as an example—had no great respect for the harsher capitalist practices in the West—and Cougar was likely to be viewed by him as the unacceptable face of capitalism. But most of all, anyone—Russia or the West—whom he perceived to be interfering with Ukraine’s sovereignty was likely to be viewed by him with distaste at best, and, at worst, as an enemy.

  “There’s a great re
ward out for you in Moscow,” he said.

  That, too, was considered to appeal favourably to Taras’s general distaste for Moscow’s politics.

  “Burt Miller would like us to work together,” she said softly. “For the good of Ukraine.”

  Taras gave a short laugh. “It’s good to know we have such a great friend in the West,” he said, but it was without the harshness she’d expected. “But it’s me who’s here to help Burt Miller—not the other way around,” he added. He turned to her, his body language unthreatening, his upper body pulling slightly away from her. “They say you killed two KGB officers in Odessa and the Crimea on the sixteenth of January,” he said. “Me? I’ve never killed anyone. Neither has my baby cousin who’s now lying in a prison hospital cell down there”—he indicated the city—“with part of her face blown off and a posse of interrogators who want to know what she was delivering and aren’t afraid to ask.”

  So that was how he’d worked it out, she thought. The woman was a Russian relation of his. He’d pieced together her story, found out the name of her boss in Moscow, and worked out that the package was being delivered, not within Ukraine, but to someone in the West. Therefore the woman’s boss was a traitor in Moscow. Smart of him, she thought.