The Blind Spy f-3

by Alex Dryden

  “What’s your cousin’s name?” she asked.

  “Her name is Masha. She’s twenty-four years old, she’s caught up in a scheme devised by Ukraine’s friend Burt Miller, and executed by you. If she isn’t handed over to the Russians and dispensed with after they hollow her out, body and soul, she’ll probably meet the same fate in Ukraine. Either way, if she lives she lives with a beautiful face destroyed by a bullet and an innocent mind destroyed by people who only wished to use her.”

  “Maybe she shouldn’t have joined the KGB,” Anna said and looked him directly in the eye. She saw him reel slightly, astonished perhaps by her directness or lack of sympathy. Then his face hardened and he gripped the back of the bench until his knuckles whitened and she saw him trying to control his anger.

  “What Masha left were blueprints of the development of the port of Novorossiysk that came from the Naval Ministry in Moscow,” she said, without allowing him to respond. “They show that Russia never had any intention of moving their Black Sea fleet there. Now your new president has given them Sevastopol for another twenty-five years anyway. Your new Moscow-friendly president Yanukovich has handed the facilities to Russia for nothing except some price concessions on gas that will bind Ukraine closer economically to Russia than before. Even with the same hand that gives, the spy elite in Moscow also take. That is their way. There is no stick and carrot, just the stick. A concession from them is merely another chain around Ukraine’s neck. So they have the port and now they also have a tame Ukraine bound to them more closely with economic ties. I was betrayed when I came to Ukraine in January. That is how they were waiting at the barn and how they caught Masha. That is why I killed two of their operatives. And I’ll kill more of them if they get in my way.”

  “Fighting on the side of right now, are you?” Taras replied mockingly.

  She stared him in the eyes and he felt the cool, blue gaze penetrate his mind and throw him off balance, but this time it wasn’t anger that welled up in him but a kind of blank astonishment. He seemed to see only her face, her eyes. The whole world around him, the hill on which they sat, the city below, and the sea and the ships were beyond his concentration. There was only her.

  “When I defected from Russia,” she said, “I thought it was for love, but even then I knew in my heart that love was the excuse for doing what I’d wanted to do anyway. Does that make my love for my husband any less? I don’t think so. But he’s dead now, murdered by the KGB. He let himself be killed because he couldn’t, finally, step away.” Her eyes bored into his. She sat perfectly still, with a relaxation that belied her readiness to use any method necessary to defend herself. “Don’t believe that when I defected I thought my friends lay in the West. I’m not naive. All I knew was where my enemies lay and that was in Russia, in the Kremlin, in the KGB and Department S, where I worked so successfully for so long. And even my own father. The question is—or was then for me—not who are my friends, but who are my enemies? When that was clear, as it had been becoming clear for many years, I knew what I had to do. And for you, too, Taras, that is the question. I don’t offer you Burt Miller’s friendship—let alone the West’s. I could not do that and, in any case, I don’t consider that I have either of them myself. The question for you is the same as it was for me. Who are your enemies? And what do you stand for that makes them your enemies?”

  “Alas, I have no one to love in the West to give me the thin excuse you had to make so fateful a choice,” he replied.

  “The choices, all the major choices you make in your life, are emotional ones,” she said. “How you apply those choices later to reality is rational. You don’t need someone to love to make an emotional choice. That was just how it was for me.”

  “I have the name of Miller’s agent in Moscow. I also have a cousin who is a prisoner and whose life is in danger. What can you do for me?”

  She looked down at her hands and then up towards the panorama of city and sea and ships below. This time she didn’t look back at him. “If your emotional life is bound to your family and your cousin and your country, and all three are, I believe, the case with you, then I can show you something and you can make your choice. I’m not here to prevent you from revealing the identity of Miller’s agent. That is up to you. But I can show you another side of the picture.”

  “You’re playing a very dangerous game,” he replied.

  She looked back into his eyes again. “And you are, too. You are acting alone, aren’t you? Your bosses know nothing of this.”

  “They’re only a phone call away,” he said.

  “Perhaps you’ve left it too late for that. They’ll wonder why you didn’t report to them earlier.” She paused. “You know what they’re like as well as I do. They won’t trust anything you say.”

  “And you expect me to trust you.”

  “If I thought you wanted money, Miller has plenty of it.”

  “No. No, I don’t want Miller’s money,” he replied.

  “I want to introduce you to someone,” Anna said. “Do I have your permission?”

  Taras fell silent.

  “He is someone who will make the picture of Masha’s predicament clearer. He is someone who will make your country’s endangered position clearer. He’s Russian. Like me in another life, he works in Department S.”

  “Why is he to be trusted any more than you?”

  “I’m just asking you to listen to him.”

  “Just one man?”

  “Just one.”

  Taras thought for a moment.

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  He stayed with his thoughts for a while longer. “Okay,” he said. “And then?”

  “If you agree with what he has to say, we can help Masha together.”

  She stood and walked around the monument. He didn’t see the gesture she made. But after she’d returned and they’d waited for ten minutes, a man appeared. He walked around the monument and sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the bench. Balthasar began to tell the story of the Kremlin’s plans for Ukraine and of Qubaq.

  29

  LOGAN STOOD IN A ROOM at the Kerch hotel. It looked out over the bays that spliced the city like a badly stitched wound. It was twenty-four hours since he had picked up Taras’s coded message at the drugstore and he had returned to Sevastopol, against orders, undecided, caught between conflicting emotions that threatened to destroy his fragile state of mind.

  By now he should have returned to the Cougar, as Burt had told him to do, and then moved on to join Theo’s and the Russians’ assault team in Burgas. But he’d stayed behind and, as at many times before in his life, he found himself in the soulless limbo of a foreign hotel room, in the no-man’s-land of a decision not made. Free floating in this nonstate of disconnection, he felt caught in a kind of purgatory of his own making in which he wished for a decision to be made for him but also hated the fact that he was helpless himself to make it. He had his orders, he knew the path he should be walking on, but this knowledge embittered him. He was a man trapped in the impossible bind of wishing to possess personal control over his future and at the same time wishing for some divine or semidivine purpose that would absolve him of that responsibility. Neither satisfied him and both now filled his head with a painful confusion of motive, ambition, and fear. But what he hated most was the fear that stripped him of all but his humanity, and this hatred he projected outwards to all the people he held responsible.

  Behind him, sitting on the edge of the worn and scraggly sofa that had lost its once green colour many years before, Laszlo waited patiently. It was he, Logan, who had invited the Frenchman down here from Kiev. The reason he had done so, Logan could only put down to the compulsion that possessed him now, and had done throughout his life, never to close down any option—but the option he had left open in asking Laszlo to Sevastopol was one too fateful for him now to act upon. Not with clarity, in any case. He felt constrained by the choices that he had let unfold before him rather than liberated
by them.

  He brushed his hand through the long, unwashed hair that hung well over his shoulders. The shutters of the room were open and a light breeze fluttered the ageing grey net curtains. Then he turned from the bright, sun-bleached view of ships and dockyards, glittering sea, and—nearer the hotel, beneath his gaze—the cacophony of small buses and trucks that stretched three deep and bumper to bumper along the waterfront as if they were an unbroken train. He had been silent for some time and had felt behind his back the Frenchman’s patience turning to irritation or perhaps confusion.

  Putting his hands back into the pockets of the rough, cream-coloured jacket that had become, he thought, like some uniform when it should have been a sign of his devil-may-care individualism, he turned to find Laszlo watching him. He saw that the Frenchman’s stare was uncertain, as if he was beginning to think he’d made a mistake flying from the capital down here to the Crimea. But Logan had told him that it was something for which his boss in Paris, Thomas Plismy, would thank him. That had been enough. Logan and Plismy went back a long way and Plismy knew that Logan could deliver if he kept himself straight. Now Laszlo waited, eyeball to eyeball with Logan, for whatever the American had summoned him here for.

  Logan tried to read his mind and all he saw in the maelstrom of his own guilt and feelings of a wasted life—and love—was another human being exercising yet further criticism or control over him. He suddenly felt desperate, suicidal, and he wanted to sleep, to forget who he was, but most of all to excise the why. Why did he feel like he did? Why was he alone? Why was he lost and why had he always been lost from the very beginning? But he found no answer.

  Laszlo cleared his throat slightly. “My government will be very grateful for something that helps to advance Franco-Russian relations,” he said smoothly. “That, I understand, is why I’m here, why you called me.” He paused and smoothed the lapel of an expensive dark blue blazer that didn’t need his attention. “There are contracts to be signed imminently between our two countries. Ten-year, twenty-year contracts that will put France in a very favourable position in Europe. A symbiosis of Russian raw materials and French technical expertise that will guarantee our energy needs, amongst other things. To bring a little gift to the Russians at this time would be opportune, Logan—for me, my boss, our government, and, of course, for you. To bring a big gift”—he exhaled sharply through pursed lips—“well, that would bring great advantage to everyone concerned. What is it you have for me? Do you want money?”

  He looked carefully at the man in front of him and wondered whether, under the washed-up, frightened, and bitter exterior he saw there was anything that Logan possessed apart from his own delusions. Maybe it had been a mistake for him to come here? But his boss, Plismy, had told him Logan could deliver and he had insisted Laszlo make the journey. Laszlo felt safe in that the result of his trip was comfortably out of his hands. He was following Plismy’s orders, that was all.

  “Why don’t we have a beer?” he suggested.

  Logan looked back at him. “Whisky,” he replied.

  When a waiter wearing a stained waistcoat and trousers that were too short for him had brought up a tray containing a cold Czech beer and a bottle of Scotch, and left the room with a hefty tip, Laszlo first poured Logan two fingers of Scotch and then delicately half filled a glass with beer for himself. As he raised his glass to Logan and watched the American down more than half the measure, he asked himself—not for the first time—how a man like Logan Halloran had ever found his way into the circle of Burt Miller. He seemed so obvious, he lacked so much finesse—and he was clearly a man who had worn the thread that attached him to any clear, guiding purpose very thin indeed. In some respects he was ideal, in fact, from Laszlo’s point of view. He was a shell, an empty vessel who put his value only on what he could give, on what knowledge he possessed and on how well he could impress his peers. He was a man Laszlo viewed as satisfactorily on the edge—but this only mattered if he possessed anything of value.

  Logan sloshed some more whisky into the glass and glanced briefly back through the window as if looking for an answer in the bustle below or in the deep calm of the sea beyond. But he looked back at once and drank greedily. The information he possessed, which should be making him feel like some master of the universe, only made him feel ill, hollow. He suddenly wished Burt was here and not this Frenchman, whom he didn’t like, but he was afraid, too, of his own feeling of being less than Burt. And Theo had as good as said that he would restore Logan to his once important and highly respected role within the CIA. So perhaps that was his goal today.

  As if his self-loathing hadn’t dragged him low enough already, he summoned up the masochistic thoughts of Anna that had plagued him now for two years and they tugged him still lower. He’d betrayed her once, was it so difficult to betray her again? Feelings of desire and disgust, anger and inadequacy swirled in his mind, as they always did when he thought of her, so confident, efficient, so effortlessly cool—and so cold towards him. He turned to Laszlo.

  “Miller is conducting an operation here. In Sevastopol,” he said.

  “What is the operation?” Laszlo asked.

  “I don’t know. The Ukrainian secret service is involved. And so is Anna Resnikov.” He’d said it. He felt a temporary wave of relief come over him.

  “Resnikov?” Laszlo said, and Logan saw that he had caught the Frenchman’s interest. “Here? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “She would be a fine gift for our friends in the Kremlin.”

  Logan walked over to the table by the bed and scribbled with a pen he took from his jacket pocket on a sheet of hotel paper. “There,” he said, giving it to Laszlo. “That’s where Burt Miller’s team is holed up. It’s to the east of the city.”

  “She’s there?”

  “I’ve seen her only briefly, from a distance. But that’s where Cougar’s people are.” He drank and filled the glass, but he felt the drink was doing nothing to help him.

  Laszlo stood and pocketed the piece of paper. He walked over to the window. Standing right next to Logan, he looked sideways at the American. “And I thought you only worked for money,” he said.

  Logan felt the crushing effect of this deliberate insult reach into the pit of his stomach like a knife. He summoned up what remained of his tattered opinion of himself and looked back at the Frenchman. “I expect a different sort of reward from your people,” he said. “And from the Russians.”

  “And what is that?” Laszlo said sarcastically. “The Légion d’honneur? Hero of the Russian Federation?”

  Logan wanted to scream “Respect!” back into the Frenchman’s face, but all he saw in Laszlo’s eyes was contempt.

  “Why not?” was all he replied. “But you won’t find her on your own,” he added. “You need me.”

  “Then we’ll make a deal,” Laszlo replied. “I’m sure we and the Russians will reward you financially when we hand her over to them. Very handsomely indeed.”

  He stepped away from the window.

  Logan drank more steadily from the glass. He felt a sense of power now that smothered everything. Maybe the drink was steadying his nerves.

  “What do you need, Logan?” Laszlo said. “What can we provide you with that will ensure her delivery?”

  “I’ll tell you when the time comes,” he replied. “In the meantime, don’t scare them away from the address I gave you. Put up a watch, not the Russians, but the French. We don’t want the Russians taking all the glory, do we? She’s smart and very deadly. I’ll tell you when the time is best to take her.”

  He had taken the first step, but he hadn’t given her away. That power still lay in his hands.

  Laszlo sat down again on the bed and made a call. He decided he couldn’t leave Logan alone now. The man needed watching. He had the feeling that Logan wasn’t being entirely open and that once he was out of his sight he might even change his mind. The American’s skittering motives were evident in his every movement, and in the partial re
velation he’d just made.

  He spoke fast into the mobile and Logan listened to him ordering up a surveillance team from Kiev to be despatched at once to Sevastopol. He then called Paris and Logan heard him talking briefly to Plismy, and heard Plismy’s growl in the background. “Every urgency” was how Laszlo left it. Then when he’d clicked the phone shut, the Frenchman looked up at him and smiled his smooth smile.

  “Why don’t we have some lunch sent up here?” he said. “We have until this evening before we can stake out the house.”

  Logan didn’t reply.

  30

  THE NEWS THAT LOGAN had gone missing was conveyed to Larry and the team within hours of his failing to show up at the Cougar. The ship was by now lying at anchor in the Dardanelles, waiting for permission to pass through the Sea of Marmara and then into the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.

  Later, according to Bob Dupont, it was as if Burt seemed to have factored in Logan’s disappearance. “He almost seemed to welcome it,” Dupont reported to the Cougar internal affairs committee after the events that were to follow. “It was as if a decision was now made, written in stone, and there was no turning back.”

  Burt personally put through the call to the villa in Sevastopol. The message was curt. Using the code name for Logan, Burt told Larry that Logan had “gone on holiday” and it was likely “he wouldn’t be back.” Larry was furious. After the call, he stormed around the villa, cursing Logan—and Burt for ever trusting him in the first place—“and again, for Chrissakes!” until Lucy pointed out that they had no time for displays of emotion.

  Larry, Lucy, Adam, and Grant had cleared out from the villa within twenty minutes of Burt’s call. The house was swept of prints, the garbage and any extraneous possessions burned, until no trace remained of their visit. The team was now heading up towards the mountains behind the city where they would be out of contact with the Cougar except for two times a day, morning and evening, when one of them went back into the city to make or receive a report. But it added to the strains and difficulties of the operation and made Larry madder with Logan than he had ever been. “I should have broken him two years ago,” he commented, “when we found out what he’d done to Anna back then.”