Alex Dryden: Death in Siberia

Through the gloom of evening and the murk of the driving rain which the cold was now turning to sleet on this night at the start of June, he knew he was lost in this dreadful city.

He looked up and saw rail yards in the far distance, lit by high orange arc lights. Maybe he should head for the light? But the fear that had gripped him for nearly an hour as he’d tried to make it to the hotel when he couldn’t get a taxi at the airport had addled his thoughts.

‘When you reach Krasnoyarsk, get to the hotel immediately,’ Vasily’s man had told him, ‘the big, American hotel. Then call your embassy in Moscow’ – that was the second part of his instructions after the ones about the spare pair of shoes. To get his own embassy’s protection. But where was the hotel?

He put his hand into the pocket of his coat and felt his mobile phone. But who could he phone?

Then he saw a man step out ahead of him. There were two men now, ahead and behind him. He crossed the street, slipping on some mud in the gutter. He fell and felt a sharp pain in his hand. He sobbed with the humiliation of it. Scrambling to his feet, he looked at his right hand. Something sharp, broken glass perhaps, had sliced his flesh. His clothes were drenched and coated with slime and mud. His beautiful raincoat.

He wondered again if he were hearing things; if he had been hearing things all along. But slumped in the gutter, he saw behind him, from the corner of his eye, a man, his head shaven to the skull, and hands that were holding a chain. On the end of the chain was a brute of a dog.

Professor Bachman scrambled up, gripped his case, and hurried across the street, blood pulsing from his wounded hand. Then he thought he heard the man and dog step into the road’s gutter. And ahead he saw the second man who stared at him from under a broken street light. He realised he’d lost his phone. He must have dropped it when he’d fallen. He felt a sweat break out all over his body.

Before darkness had begun to fall he’d kept to the river where Vasily’s man had said it would be more open. There would be other people and cars – even police cars – which would provide some protection. And it was the riverside that led to the American hotel; lights, a cocktail bar, muzak, people with smiles on their faces, a phone line to the German embassy.

But he’d left the riverside to escape his pursuer. Maybe he should end it here, turn and face his own death. Better to look it in the face than be struck down in some fearful surprise attack.

He began to sob. Now, Bachman knew he would have turned himself in, confessed everything, betrayed his friend and erstwhile colleague Professor Vasily Kryuchkov, begged Russia for forgiveness, handed over the shoes with the incriminating evidence in them, gone to jail. If only he could have found a cop, or even one of the thugs from the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or a fully fledged KGB officer – anyone to whom he could divest the evidence of his guilt. Bachman would have given them anything, anything to escape; his own daughter, his wife.

He stopped and turned and caught the glint of the dog’s chain crossing under another flickering street lamp and the boot-shod feet of the shaven-headed man behind the beast. Bachman could hardly breathe. He shuddered, tripped and almost fell again. Then he felt an enormous explosion in his chest; he staggered on a few steps further, but fell to his knees, groping on the concrete.

He turned from his kneeling position, feeling the agony spread across his chest, and saw the eyes of evil at the level of his own. The dog was straining to get at him, its yellow teeth bared. Bachman thought he heard a man’s laugh.

He felt something else, something cold and metallic pressing into the back of his neck. But he never felt the second explosion after the one in his chest. It blew his atlas bone to pieces, severed his spine from his brain stem and ended all his hopes of greater glory, along with his life. Professor Bachman fell forward and his stricken face smashed into the gutter.

FOUR DAYS BEFORE Professor Gunther Bachman knelt, unprompted, for his execution, three men and a woman were approaching the steeply mountainous Russian border from the Mongolian side. Five hundred miles to the south of the city of Krasnoyarsk, the border presented its usual forbidding obstacle to anyone foolish or brave enough to attempt any crossing, let alone an illegal one. The woman, Anna Resnikov, was certainly brave enough.

Now, as May broke into June, the snow had gone from the waving sea of the lower grasslands of northern Mongolia but the night air was still icy and the soaring Tuva mountains, snow capped throughout the year, were a perfect natural fortress against incursion.

But Anna Resnikov’s was no ordinary illegal crossing. It was not a smuggling operation bringing cheap Chinese electrical goods into Russia, or a hunting party looking for rare wild animals whose body parts were destined for the Chinese medicinal markets, or even just the casual to-and-fro of Mongolians clandestinely visiting their ethnic relations across the border in Russia. This was a fully fledged act of espionage and for that an illegal crossing was of necessary importance. Anna Resnikov – formerly KGB Colonel Anna Resnikov until her defection to the West five years before – was on a mission into the heart of Siberia. It was an operation that was conceived, planned, financed, and concealed even from his CIA friends, by Burt Miller, the flamboyant multi-billionaire, one-time CIA agent, and now head of the world’s largest private intelligence company, Cougar Intelligence Applications. It was said of Burt Miller in some intelligence circles that he’d started out working for the CIA until it ended up working for him. Those in Washington who feared or hated him said that the CIA had become just an adjunct to his own mighty, private intelligence agency and military hardware supplier, Cougar. By this particular night, Anna had worked for Miller for over three years and their partnership, professional in her case, but also personal in his, was the talk of the Washington political and spy elite. Some said Anna simply reminded Miller of the huge, if reckless, success he’d enjoyed in his own youth, a youth spent as an American spy in Central Asia. Others said that Anna was more like a favourite daughter to him, even his heir. Others still, more cynical perhaps, sneered that her unparalleled skill and knowledge had become just another gold seam that Burt was so famous for exposing. But those closest to Miller pointed out that Anna Resnikov was simply the best covert agent Burt had ever met in more than fifty years of intelligence work; and that his admiration for her was as one of the few, if any, human beings, who had managed to put the great man himself in the shade.

They were still crossing the northern Mongolian grasslands but all the time they were coming closer to the mountains. The way ahead was clear of border patrols, at least on this, the Mongolian side. The recently fitted Mercedes engine in an ancient jifeng Chinese army truck was having no difficulty driving its way along the military road. The dirt track on which the truck was bumping along now was passing just to the east of Lake Uvs. Apart from pools of water with a thin layer of ice that lay sluggish in the road’s deep potholes and glinted silkily in the thin sliver of moonlight, the road was dry enough.

The track flowed up and over small hills and rose not far from the lake to the east. It would disappear altogether into darkness where a grassy bump rose in front of the truck. In the back of the truck were two special forces Americans hired by Cougar, while in the front cab sat Anna and Larry, her minder, general worrier and secret admirer for three years now. Larry was Burt Miller’s only trusted guardian of Anna. In his late thirties, the same age roughly as she was, he’d been a Navy Seal, then an intelligence officer in the field for the CIA, until Miller had plucked him out of government service to work for Cougar, as he had done with so many others. And they were always the best ones, as Miller’s admirers and critics both agreed on.