Oksana Ivanovna felt the first spots of rain and extracted a flower-patterned scarf from her shopping bag to cover her head. Overnight her life had changed. It was as if a hurricane had blown into the tedious monotony of her daily existence. Instead of being a woman of no consequence except to herself and marginally to her daughter, she now had three terrified people depending on her to save their lives.
She tightened the belt of her chocolate-brown raincoat and took the path that ran parallel with the highway. Horse-chestnut trees, planted when the tower blocks were built in an attempt to brighten up the harsh concrete, cast off their yellow leaves like the worn-out soles of boots. The Metro station was a five-minute walk away.
This morning the inside of her head was like a cavern of twittering bats. She felt desperately frightened by what she was about to do, but also guiltily excited by the drama that had burst into her life. It had been a shock seeing her bruised and bandaged niece when Lena and Misha had turned up with Nadya at seven that morning, all of them ashen-faced after a sleepless night on the train from Odessa. Nadya had big grey smudges under her eyes and fell asleep the moment they’d cleaned her grazed face with fresh disinfectant and settled her in her own daughter’s bed. Luba had grumbled fiercely at being turned out of her blankets so early on a Saturday.
Their arrival was expected, because Lena had phoned from Odessa late last night, but it had been impossible to prepare for. What do you do for a family fleeing for its life? Shelter them, of course, because they were flesh and blood, but also make every effort to get them out of your home again as soon as possible in case the taint to their lives threatened yours. Moving them on was what she was now trying to organise.
It had shocked her that it should be Misha who’d fallen foul of the Mafiya, always the steadiest of her two brothers and herself, never stepping out of line, never doing anything to offend. And now here he was, under threat of death from gangsters. He’d refused to explain why, saying it would be safer for her if she didn’t know.
All he’d revealed was that secret information had come into his possession which could be of considerable importance both to Ukraine and to the rest of the world. He’d told her that their own government’s authorities were too corrupt to be trusted with it and he had no choice but to pass on what he knew to a western nation. In return he hoped for a visa and asylum. And since Oksana worked as a receptionist and telephonist at the British Embassy in Kiev, it was the British authorities he’d decided to approach, counting on her to furnish him with the contacts he needed.
At the head of the steps down to the Metro, two old country women in knitted cardigans sat on wooden boxes displaying a meagre spread of vegetables to sell.
‘Pajalsta,’ one of them begged as Oksana passed.
‘Not today, babushka,’ she answered. Not any day for her, because with the family dacha an hour’s bus ride away, and she the only able-bodied family member still living in Kiev, she had all the fruit and vegetables she and Luba could possibly need.
She splashed down the steps into the station avoiding the worst of the puddles on the landings and entered the grim, concrete ticket hall. Then she held out her monthly travel pass for inspection and passed through.
The escalator to the platforms stretched into the earth like a sloping mine-shaft, its cavernous roof glazed with off-white tiles and the flat space between the up and down sides sporting lamps in the shape of flaming torches. Oksana idly watched the defeated faces on the up-staircase, knowing that their numbed misery matched her own.
Except not today, perhaps. Because today she had hope. Just a glimmer of it, something as frail as a sickly child, but hope nonetheless. Just what it was she was hoping for she wouldn’t have been able to say if asked, except that it could involve a change to her life, a life that had stagnated for years.
She reached the bottom of the escalator and directed a friendly smile at the dezhurnaya in her glass-fronted box whose day-long job was to stare upwards at the moving stairs, her hand on the stop button ready for trouble. The girl was in her twenties, with a lifeless, pointy-nosed face, its skin the pallor of a creature that never sees daylight. Still, thought Oksana, it was a job. Enough to pay for food for herself and her child if she had one.
The wide platform had a huge arched roof covered with mosaics, its grandeur a monument to the time when the Soviet Union had been something to be proud of. The train, when it came in a few moments later, was almost full. Oksana squeezed in between the bodies, trying to keep beyond the reach of any slob who might try to take advantage of the crush. She had a shape she was quite proud of, but since the death of her husband had not let any man touch her sexually. The doors closed and the train moved on, the silent, uncurious faces waiting patiently for their destinations to arrive.
It had been eleven o’clock when she’d left the apartment. She knew from past experience that First Secretary Mr Gerald Figgis dropped into the embassy every Saturday morning at around midday to pick up messages from London. And she knew, because everybody in the small embassy knew, that Mr Figgis was the representative in Ukraine of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
She left the Metro at Universytet and walked a block and a half along the wide boulevard Tarasa Shevchenka keeping the Botanical Gardens to her right, until she reached the junction with Volodymyrs’ka. In front of her loomed the classical red bulk of the Shevchenko University. She sighed as she always did, reaching this point in her journey to work, because it had been during her student days at this very university that she’d met the man who became her husband. She in the final year of an English language course and Sergeyi a bright spark in the university’s physics department, they’d been married after she graduated. Their daughter had been five years old when the Chernobyl reactor exploded in 1987 casting a pall of death over their country. As a physicist, Sergeyi had been enlisted for the clean-up team. He’d spent twenty-five days breathing the radioactive dust, then another four years waiting for the cancer to kill him.
She turned her back on the academic buildings and crossed the boulevard at the traffic lights. She could easily have walked the rest of the way to the embassy, but the bunion on her left foot was painful this morning and there was a tram drawing up at the stop on the corner opposite. She ran the few metres to reach it, her not entirely sensible heels clacking on the cobbles.
In front of her on the tram’s steps was a young couple eating imported ice-creams out of bright foil wrappers. The girl, who was pretty with long brown hair, held a baby of about nine months in her arms. All the seats on the conveyance were taken but Oksana found a handrail to grab. The tram doors hissed shut and the elderly machine lumbered up the hill towards the old town, its steel wheels clunking over the joints in the track.
An elderly woman with an official badge pinned to a woollen jacket worn over pullover and skirt was making her way back through the tram checking tickets. Oksana dug her pass out from her bag in readiness.
‘And yours?’ the woman demanded of the couple with the baby. ‘Why no tickets?’
‘Because it’s more than three months since we’ve been paid any wages, old woman,’ the young man protested. ‘It’s the law. When the government won’t pay our salary we travel free,’ he reminded her defiantly.
‘Oh yes? Too bad,’ the inspector snapped. ‘If you can afford those ice-creams you can afford a tram ticket. You’ll have to get off.’
The tram had reached its next stop and she pushed them towards the door.
‘That’s not fair,’ the long-haired girl protested.
‘Fair? Whoever said life was fair, child?’
The couple stumbled onto the pavement, still protesting.
As the tram moved on again the inspector nodded at Oksana’s travel pass and muttered, ‘Something for nothing, that’s what they want.’
Yes, thought Oksana, but it was hard for Ukrainians to feel responsibility towards the state when the state no longer showed any towards them.
At the Mykhailivs’k
a Square she got off the tram in front of the elegant façade of a nineteenth-century school. Kiev was a fine city; she knew that in some ways she would be sad to leave it. Leave it? Leave Kiev? Leave Ukraine? She was crazy. Crazy as a bird trapped in a room that sees daylight through a window and hurls itself against the glass. And yet escaping the hell of life here was what she, like so many people she knew, dreamed of. And if there was a chance that her brother with his military secrets could be given sanctuary abroad, then wasn’t it possible, just possible, the same could be done for her?
Her watch said ten to twelve. She was as nervous as a kitten today, walking up this road that she walked up every working day. She rehearsed in her head the script she’d discussed with Misha.
The British Embassy appeared in front of her. A former nobleman’s town house, the doors were locked, but she gave her name on the speaker-phone and stood back so that the guard could see her face on the security camera. The electric latch clicked and she let herself in, closing the door firmly behind her.
The small entrance hall, decorated with old prints of English hunting scenes, contained a row of chairs for waiting visitors, opposite which was a full-length mirror concealing a video camera so the guests could be studied before being let in. At the far end of the narrow hall was a thick armoured-glass window behind which she herself sat on weekdays. This morning it framed the surly face of the British security guard, who observed her approach with surprise and suspicion.
‘What’s up, Oksana?’ he asked through the intercom. ‘Leave your handbag behind or somefink?’
‘No. I must speak with Mr Figgis,’ she replied, trying to sound as if it were an audience she was used to. ‘Is he in yet?’
‘No. But soon, if he’s on schedule. Expecting you, is he?’
‘In fact not.’
‘Hmm. Well, I suppose it’s all right. But if I let you in to wait for him you’d better sit here where I can see you. Don’t go wandering about, now.’
‘Of course not.’
She bristled at his patronising manner, but pulled her bright red lips into a smile as he let her in through the steel-lined security gate. She sat in her usual chair behind the desk while the guard pottered about and told her things she already knew – that his tour of duty in Kiev was almost over and he was dearly looking forward to returning to Essex. It was a part of England Oksana had never heard of but which she began to think of as somewhere close to heaven.
She tried to think ahead to her forthcoming conversation with Mr Figgis, rehearsing her words and anticipating his responses. The man didn’t look like a spy; indeed, spying wasn’t really what an intelligence officer did these days, it had been explained to her once. His presence in Kiev was official and open, and he apparently spent much of his time in conversation with Ukrainian intelligence men at the SBU.
Occasionally Mr Figgis had visitors from England however, and some of them she’d had her suspicions about. A year ago there’d been a woman out from London whose presence in the embassy had never been explained. At the same time a man with a nice smile and a handsome face had called in three or four times and had chatted her up in a jokey sort of way while waiting for the woman upstairs to send down for him. She remembered him as being rather attractive, the sort of man who made life happen for him rather than to him. If circumstances had been different he was a type she might have shown interest in.
Another half an hour passed before Gerald Figgis walked in through the door from the street. Tall and thin with slicked-back hair, he wore jeans, trainers and a blue and red sweatshirt. When the guard let him in through the security door, he passed by the reception alcove without noticing the woman sitting there.
‘Mr Figgis.’ She rose to her feet, quaking. Her voice was husky, like a singer with a sore throat.
He stopped and half-turned. ‘Oksana. Hello. Don’t normally see you here on a Saturday.’ Then he moved forward again, heading for the stairs.
‘Mr Figgis, I . . .’
Figgis paused with one foot on the bottom tread.
‘Yes? There’s a message for me?’
‘Could I speak with you please?’ she asked, trembling.
‘Of course.’ He waited for her to start, then when she didn’t the penny dropped. ‘Well you’d better come up to my office. It’ll have to be quick. I’m due on a tennis court in fifteen minutes.’
Figgis’s room was at the back of the embassy, overlooking a garden of well-trimmed lawns and a row of garages for official cars.
‘Won’t you sit down?’ Three modern armchairs in blue-grey leather surrounded a low round table. ‘Please.’ He pointed to one of the chairs, and waited for her to sit before lowering himself into one opposite her.
Oksana had never seen him in casual clothes before. She found it disconcerting, as if the lack of a suit deprived him of his authority.
‘Now, what is it you want to tell me?’ Figgis asked crisply.
Oksana suppressed her nerves and took in a deep breath.
‘I have brother,’ she began abruptly. She spoke English quite well, but with a strong accent. ‘He is Major in army of Ukraine. But he has run away. You see, he discover something corrupt in army. When he report it to his General, they try to kill his child.’
Figgis’s eyebrows shot up.
‘I beg your pardon? Who did?’
‘As warning,’ she continued. ‘To make him not talk about what he know. Now he think they try to kill him also. So he has come here to Kiev with his wife and with Nadya his daughter. They are at my home now. They arrive this morning.’
‘Golly! This is pretty dramatic stuff,’ Figgis exclaimed, unsure how seriously he should be taking this. ‘But hang on a minute. I’m not getting this. Who tried to kill his child? The army?’
‘Not exactly. He says it is Mafiya,’ Oksana shrugged, as if it were obvious. ‘He is very afraid of Mafiya in Odessa.’
‘Mafiya? I see.’ Figgis leaned forward, poker-faced. Everyone in Ukraine feared the Mafiya. Criminals controlled the country. But he could see already this wasn’t a matter for him. The tennis court beckoned. ‘Well, look, I certainly sympathise with your brother, but I really don’t think—’
‘Please! Listen to me.’ There was desperation in her voice.
‘Well of course I’ll listen,’ he said, taken aback by her vehemence. ‘But I really think this is more a matter for your own SBU—’
‘No! Militsia, SBU,’ she protested. ‘They cannot be trusted. Please let me tell you something more. Then you understand.’
‘Go on then.’
‘My brother he says it very important what he finds out, not for Ukraine but for countries like UK. He discover there are some corrupt officers in army in Odessa who sell military equipment to Mafiya. He knows about just one weapon, but very special weapon. Something like missile, he say.’
‘A missile?’ Suddenly she had Figgis’s total attention.
‘Like rocket, he say me. And he think Mafiya they send this outside of Ukraine. He think they sell to terrorists.’
What she was saying made alarming sense to Figgis. There’d been recent intelligence of IRA men sniffing around for surplus arms in the Trans-Dniestr area of Moldova, which wasn’t far from Odessa.
‘Does he have any idea which terrorists in particular?’ he asked carefully.
‘No.’
‘I see.’
Figgis leaned back in the chair. His tennis partners were going to have to play without him.
‘Now let me get this absolutely right, Oksana. Your brother believes that the army command in the Odessa Military District is directly involved in this illegal weapons sale, yes? And that because your brother’s found out about it they’re trying to silence him?’
‘Yes.’
Figgis bored into Oksana’s frightened blue eyes, trying to decide if she really knew what she was saying. The drift of it wasn’t entirely surprising. Vast quantities of military hardware had been sold by corrupt military men in the chaos following the break-u
p of the old Red Army, but in recent years the problem had appeared to ease. Either the military’s internal security people had got a grip on the corruption as they claimed, or, more likely in his view, all the stuff with a ready market had already been sold.
From memory he recalled what it said about Oksana in the personal file which he kept on all the locally employed embassy staff. A reasonable fluency in English. A good manner with visitors and on the switchboard. But something negative too, he remembered. A tendency towards emotional instability. There’d been a husband who’d died. A Chernobyl connection. She’d been known to spout tears when things got a bit hectic downstairs. But the key point was that there’d been no hint of any connection with a Ukrainian or Russian security agency.
Figgis was suspicious, however, because he was paid to be. Suspicious and cautious. There was the potential for trouble here. Relations between Britain and Ukraine were sweet just now, both at the diplomatic and the intelligence level, the result of years of effort. If he personally got involved in the handling of a defector from the Ukrainian army it could be highly damaging. There was also the possibility he was being set up. That somebody in the highly corrupt hierarchy of Ukraine had a reason for wanting to sour relations with Britain.
And yet from the little she’d told him already, he knew he needed to know more.
‘You know, this really isn’t a matter the British authorities can get involved in, Oksana,’ he told her cautiously. ‘But you’ve certainly aroused my curiosity. D’you by any chance know exactly where all this happened? And when? And this, er, this missile – d’you know the exact type your brother was talking about?’
‘No. I cannot tell you this. But my brother he can tell you, of course.’
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