Alex Dryden - The Blind Spy

It was time to take matters into her own hands. Since they hadn’t stopped her at the border post, she was now completely certain that her observers were not from the SBU, the Ukrainian secret service, but that they were Russian. They would need to conceal their activities from the Ukrainian guards, on whose sovereign territory they were conducting their operation. She decided she would find a narrow, uncrowded space now. That way it would be easier to identify her tail.

As soon as she saw an alley that led off to the left between two nineteenth-century buildings—two of the few that had survived the Nazi onslaught in the Great Patriotic War—she turned into it and quickened her pace, feeling the eyes upon her. She walked fast, still not looking behind her, betraying no anticipation, let alone fear, until the alley doglegged to the right and she could stand out of sight from her pursuers behind a stone-porticoed entrance from where mildewed steps led down to a dank basement filled with bags of uncollected rubbish.

She carefully watched back up the length of the alley towards the boulevard from where she had turned off. She could just see the boulevard now, framed by the narrow entrance to the alley. And there in the frame she saw there were two men who had entered the alley and whom she could just see only from the edges of their flapping coats. They’d stopped, she saw. No doubt there would be others out there. Six or more, maybe up to twelve in a full-blown operation and, for the prize of having her, the KGB might just be throwing in everything.

She craned farther out from behind the pillar. The men were talking to each other, not facing down the alley towards her. One of the men wore a grey cap and a khaki coat and his black hair came out over the collar. The other had a longer, black raincoat and wore a fur hat. The men were talking urgently, one also into a mobile phone, and then the one with the fur hat finally turned down the alley in her direction. Anna descended the steps to the basement and waited.

Less than a minute later she caught the sound of the man tailing her as his raincoat swished in the downpour that was now hitting the alleyway above her head. She heard his shoes slapping against the wet paving stones. She emerged from the cover of the basement onto the steps. From the back as he passed, she saw his coat flapping back over itself in the wind and the fur hat spotted with rain. He had passed her by.

One of these two men whom she’d seen on the street would be on the bus later, or maybe they would send a third man who hadn’t been exposed in the street. She decided now to lower the odds against her.

She left her pack in the basement and climbed back up. Emerging from the steps that led up from the dank basement, she walked behind the man, closing the distance rapidly. The alley ahead narrowed between two tall buildings so that it was only wide enough for one person. She looked behind her for the first time. There was no one else in sight. She saw the man hesitate where the alley narrowed, wondering perhaps whether to continue through the narrowed passage or to contact his colleague first. He came to a halt and, as he started to turn—perhaps sensing a presence behind him—she put her left hand around his eyes, digging her fingers into them, and her right forearm into the nape of his neck. Preoccupied with the agony in his eyes—and before he could struggle enough to dislodge her—in a swift, jerking motion she had bent his neck back over her forearm and snapped it with a dull sound like the breaking of a damp stick.

She quickly dragged the body into another basement, hauling it down more moss-covered and mildewed stone steps, and dumped it behind some ancient piles of building material leaning up in a corner, which were disgorging their contents of solidified plaster and cement. Then she rifled through the pockets of the man’s jacket beneath the black raincoat. There was an FSB identity card. They were Russian intelligence, as she’d assumed. She took the card and a gun that was loose in the inside jacket pocket and then carefully mounted the stairs. She was glad of the gun. The way she had come into the country through a legal border post meant that it had been impossible to be properly armed. She looked both ways up and down the alley. There was still nobody visible. She picked up her backpack from the first basement and then she walked back up the alley from where she had come and back again onto the boulevard.

She knew she should abort the assignment now, save herself as best she could. That would have been what Burt ordered. He hadn’t wanted her to take the assignment in the first place. It was too dangerous, for her in particular—a former KGB colonel and a defector on the KGB’s most-wanted list—to go anywhere near the territory of Russia. But she’d insisted on it, threatening to resign and leave Cougar. Burt didn’t want to lose her and she’d banked on that. She knew Burt wouldn’t have dared risk her leaving Cougar. He didn’t want another agency—the CIA itself had courted her regularly—to gain her talents, and so he’d reluctantly acquiesced.

But, in any case, Burt wasn’t here, in Odessa. She calculated the risks. She accepted at once that either they would follow her to the bus, or they already knew she would be taking it. They’d known she would be on the boat, that was for sure. If they knew, too, that she was heading for the bus, then there was unmistakably a leak, and she faced greater danger than she was in already. But if they’d known she was on the boat, there was probably a leak anyway.

Suddenly she felt an unwelcome memory returning. It was the first time she had been this close to Russia since her defection four years before. A memory of why she had left back then began to surface in her mind—of her father, the retired general Resnikov, and her hatred of him; of the spies with whom she’d once worked and who had now once again taken control of the country she loved; of the evil nexus of the spies and their mafia allies who sought to subjugate the Russian people under their jackboot. And then she thought of her grandmother who had died two years before, and of her mother who had finally left her father and was working for the Sakharov Foundation. Women—it was usually women—seemed to be the good people. But then she repressed the memories that threatened to divert her from her task.

The bus station was situated at the side of the railway terminus where trains departed for Kiev, to the north. A few dilapidated buses stood with their engines running, rain pouring down the windscreens. The rain was now cascading in rivers along the sloping gutters and there was a huge pool where a drain must have been blocked. She watched the ticket office, cast her eyes across the expanse of concrete, looked for the destination signs, and then saw the bus that would take her to Sevastopol. For a second time, she questioned the wisdom of going through with her mission now. Her arrival was blown, but was the pickup in Sevastopol compromised also? Would she be able to evade her pursuers? Or did they know about the pickup, too? And then, decided, she walked across several lanes, past the waiting buses to the ticket office, and bought a return ticket.

The slow, ancient bus departed twenty minutes late for the twelve-hour journey and wound its way out of Odessa, to the east. Low grey clouds hung over the mountains until the country was closed in by their embrace. Beneath the clouds a fine spray of mist came in off the sea. There was no view either of the sea or the land. Everything existed at close quarters. Her mind similarly ratcheted down to the immediate: a field outside Sevastopol, with coordinates provided and memorised, just beyond the edge of the town; a stone barn that stored root vegetables and perhaps the odd piece of agricultural equipment; and a courier she would never see, the agent’s cutout who would make the drop.