The Blind Spy f-3

by Alex Dryden

  “Why, Burt? It’s the question we’re all asking, not just me. Why did you let it happen? If you’d listened to any of us—any of us—Logan wouldn’t be dead but maybe running one of his own nasty little operations out of harm’s way.” She stared at Burt’s face and saw he couldn’t meet her eyes. His face was losing its paleness and taking on a livid red colour. “Logan is dead because he teamed up with some French intelligence officer from Kiev and his accompanying thugs to kidnap me. Again. A second time, Burt! You let it happen. You endangered all our lives. For what? You’re smart, Burt, but in this you were a fool. Why?”

  In the confined space, the only sound was Burt’s harsh breathing. Everyone but Balthasar was staring at him. Finally it was Balthasar who spoke. “Why don’t you just tell them?” he said. “It’s finished now.”

  Burt breathed deeply. The others were silent and the anger that flowed from Anna, Larry, and Lucy was as palpable as a monkey wrench. In the sub, descended now to the limits of its operating depth in the blindness of the Black Sea, Burt wrung his hands and his head seemed to sway. Finally he looked up and faced his accusers. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted him to come around to good. I thought I could make him come around to good. I thought if I gave him my trust, he would change. I thought I could make Logan. Logan was my son.”

  Before dawn, the submersible entered the dry dock of the Cougar and the ship set course for the Mediterranean.

  EPILOGUE

  THE VIEW FROM THE PARADE-GROUND-SIZE SITTING ROOM at Burt’s ranch in New Mexico took in the low mountains to the northwest and, in the foreground, a stretch of scrubby mesa of cactus and sagebrush that petered out in the red-rock foothills. Any observer who admired the grandeur of the sweeping panorama would see that, and would also see the low hangar half a mile distant, where one of Cougar’s jets simmered in the eighty-degree heat. They might pick out the perimeter fence nearly a mile away and, on closer inspection, spot the guards and watchtowers at the entrance to the vast compound. And they would undoubtedly be awed by the richest blue of a sky that domed this corner of the world in what was, to some, a spiritual embrace. But would they have seen the trillions of details that existed in this brief landscape that led to the line between mountain and sky?

  “Between here and that peak,” Burt said, without turning from the window, “the insects alone can be counted in the billions.”

  Anna didn’t reply.

  Burt finally turned towards her. She sensed that he’d been building up for some time to making the explanation he was about to make.

  “Intelligence—and the people engaged in it,” he stated flatly, “are only feeling their way in near-perfect darkness. The great intelligence operator is the one who is concerned with the greatest number of hypotheses. The person who has only one cherishes and promotes that one of his own, and is blind to its faults. That fatally limited hypothesis means he observes very little—almost nothing, in fact—and therefore his crucial observations are marred by prejudice. And the triumph of truth is postponed.”

  Burt picked up a bottle of Krug ’87 champagne and nipped the edges of the foil until he could untwist the wire and open it, gently and purposefully towards an antique champagne flute on a fine antique Persian marquetry table. He picked up the glass and placed it on an identical table next to where Anna was sitting before pouring himself a glass.

  Burt raised his glass and drank.

  “Lish’s mistake,” he said, and she noted that it was now “Lish,” not Theo, no longer the friend and colleague of thirty years’ standing. “Lish’s mistake,” Burt repeated, “was to be the latter, the man with a single hypothesis. The blind spy. Yes.” Burt seemed to gaze into the distance. “Lish is the blind spy.” Then his mind focused again on Anna, in front of him. “But Lish’s mistake is a mistake every agency makes, including, thankfully, the KGB. Lish is the perfect bureaucrat. No wonder that he found such common cause with the Russians.”

  “You mean—?” Anna began, but Burt cut her off.

  “No, no, I don’t mean that Lish is a traitor,” he said. “Not in the big sense, anyway. But we’ll come to that in a moment. What I mean is that he feels more comfortable with any bureaucracy, even the dead hand of the Kremlin machine, than he did with me, with Cougar. He’s a man who hides behind the safety of organisations.” Burt sighed expansively. “But now that he’s hanging upside down from a piano wire in Washington, I guess he’ll be thinking about his mistakes.”

  Anna saw that this was one of Burt’s melodramatic figures of speech. The Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington didn’t yet, as far as she knew, interrogate their intelligence chiefs that way.

  “And you, Burt?” Anna said. “You kept all the hypotheses in your head at the same time?”

  Burt looked at the floor. “All of them but Logan,” he said. “Right up to the final days, I was prepared for my own prejudices to be proved wrong. But at least I left the opportunities alive in my head until the last.”

  “Except for Logan,” she said.

  “Logan was always a project,” he said quietly. “I wanted to make him in my image. It was a deep personal failure of mine. I will think about that mistake for a long time. For the rest of my life.”

  “He betrayed me once,” Anna said. “Then he betrayed me a second time in Odessa back in January. And then you gave him the opportunity to betray me a third time. And now he’s dead. But it could have been me.”

  He looked up at her sharply. “It wasn’t Logan who betrayed your trip to Odessa to the Russians,” he said.

  “Oh no?”

  “That’s what I meant a moment ago,” he said. “About Lish and treason. Lish didn’t commit treason against his country. He committed it against me, and, by extension, against you. It was Lish. He told Logan, but Logan didn’t take it to the Russians, Lish did. I have the documentary evidence to prove it and we’ll see before this enquiry is over that it will be the final nail in Lish’s coffin.”

  Anna sat, silent. She was stunned that Burt’s man at the CIA, the boss himself, could have betrayed her.

  “You see, what I also failed to see was Lish’s fundamental resentment towards me. His deep-seated jealousy. He wanted to damage Cougar. Now it’s the CIA that’s damaged. The Pride of Corsica was ultimately registered to a letter-box company in Omsk with KGB connections. The Russians set the whole thing up. The CIA go off on some Russian-inspired wild goose chase in the Black Sea and end up killing their own former colleagues on an empty ship. The British, too. It’s not just a PR disaster, it has deeply damaged the relationship between the CIA and the military in my country. No doubt in Britain, too. Adrian will shortly be looking for a job, I don’t doubt.” Burt paused. “On the plus side, all that’s happened in the Crimea will, in time, add another billion or so to Cougar’s government contracts.” He looked at her. “And you, Anna, you should have a stake in that.”

  “That’s your motive, Burt, not mine.”

  “And you? Dear Anna, what are your motives?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “The Senate Intelligence Committee is very pleased with Balthasar’s damning evidence against the KGB. They don’t intend to use it—as long as the Russians play ball. As long as the Russians drop their plans to implicate Qubaq in the events at Sevastopol, we’ll keep the world from knowing what those plans were. You’ve read the newspapers. The Kremlin is talking about a rogue group of special forces soldiers of their own who went on a psycho rampage in Sevastopol’s harbour. All good. They can’t go back on that now, even if we didn’t hold the cards against them that Balthasar brought.”

  Anna picked up the glass on the table next to her for the first time. She drank half of it.

  “And who will you put forward to be the next head of the Agency?” she said.

  “I’ll wait until I’m asked.” Burt grinned.

  “I’m not sure you’re going to find anyone who doesn’t end up resenting you and wanting their freedom from you,” she said. “You don’t give so
meone their freedom, they resent you. It’s written in stone.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t help what other people think.”

  To see and not to know, to know and not to see. Anna thought of Balthasar.

  “Because you were right?” she asked. “Is that why you’re so full of yourself?”

  “I think you know I’m always full of myself.” Burt guffawed, then he became serious. “Every time I’m right,” he said, “I get richer and more powerful. But every time I’m right it also becomes more difficult to be rich in hypotheses. Being right—or just thinking that—is an open invitation to prejudice. That’s what I try to guard against in every waking minute.”

  As Anna rode away from the ranch house, the sun was dimming to the west. She opened the throttle of the bike on the straight, brown-grey road until the wind tore at her eyes and all she could see were the road’s edges and still she increased her speed. She rode blind until she thought she sensed where the track led up into the mountains—it was maybe two miles, maybe more, during which she had seen nothing but light. She closed down the throttle and stopped. The track to their cabin was to her right, not far off. She wiped the tears away that the wind had wrenched from her eyes and turned up the canyon that disappeared into the red rock. Balthasar was waiting for her.

  About the Author

  ALEX DRYDEN is the pseudonym of a British writer who worked for the British security services. He has had extensive firsthand experience with Russia for many years. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Red to Black and Moscow Sting. The Blind Spy is his third novel.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Other Books by Alex Dryden

  Moscow Sting

  Red to Black

  Credits

  Cover design by Base Art Co.

  Cover photographs: St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow © by Bjorn Vinter/Getty Images; Communist Medal © by Mode Images/Alamy

  Review

  “It’s boots on the ground in Ukraine, considered the cradle of Russian civilization, in this chilling novel that reminds us that the Cold War may never be over; third in a knockout series.”

  —USA Today

  “His thrillers are an extended clarion call to arms, despite their spy-thriller guise. And as guises go, Dryden’s books are doozies. They’re exceptionally intelligent examples of the genre. The American publication… is particularly timely….. Brace yourself, Mr. Dryden. You’re likely to be a busy writer for many years.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Anna Resnikov is the kind of spy a reader can learn to like. A lot…. Alex Dryden’s thriller presents Anna’s combat skills, her spy-smarts and a chess match involving the top spies of the United States and Russia.”

  —Albuquerque Journal

  “The unbelievable becomes believable…as we wade through scenes of terror, and scenes of terrifying ordinariness that serve to add to the tension.”

  —Suspense magazine

  “Anna is a refreshing addition to the traditionally male-dominated role of spy. She’s believably crafted… simultaneously exhibiting strength and intelligence…. [Witten] with rich, distinct characters and timely subject matter. The time invested in reading The Blind Spy is definitely time well spent.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “A story almost literally ripped from the headlines… gripping, smart adventure that crackles with authentic modern spycraft—an absolute must-read for fans of John le Carré, Alex Berenson, Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series… and for any readers interested in what’s really going on in the ‘new Russia’.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “With a plot as current as today’s headlines, Dryden’s latest is as good as his previous two novels…[but] while Anna’s past matters, this exceptional novel stands on its own. Aficionados of spy thrillers will want.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Another tantalizingly plausible plot…. Dryden is building an impressive list of post–Cold War espionage fiction, and [there is] much to enjoy in his latest.”

  —Booklist

  “The pseudonymous Dryden’s… fine third entry (after 2010’s Moscow Sting) in a series grounded…in the twisting intellectual gamesmanship that makes the shadow world of espionage so compelling…. Russia’s plan to take over Ukraine lies at the heart of… this intricate and deadly struggle for international domination.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The first two Resnikov novels, Red to Black and Moscow Sting, got some rave reviews, and the author’s experience in both British intelligence and as a journalist gives his work depth. Don’t miss for thriller fans.”

  —Library Journal

  About the Publisher

  Australia

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  http://www.harpercollins.com.au/ebooks

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  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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  http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

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  http://www.harpercollins.com

  Copyright

  First published in the UK by Headline Publishing Group in 2010.

  THE BLIND SPY. Copyright © 2012 by Alex Dryden. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST U.S. EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-208808-6

  ePub Edition © MARCH 2012

  ISBN: 9780062088093

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