Alex Dryden - The Blind Spy

She opened the passenger door. “Sevastopol,” she said. “I’m going to Sevastopol.”

He stared at her and she saw confusion, then fear.

“Can I get in?”

He looked at her wide eyed, as if she were a bomb that was about to go off.

She got into the passenger seat. The other man’s gun that she’d taken was hard to draw in the confined space. She slid a knife down her arm invisibly from inside her jacket and into her left hand and, in the same movement, thrust it with the precision of a butcher under the man’s ribs, on the side of his body farthest away from her, where his heart was. Then she forced it upwards, driving the honed blade into the centre of his heart. He rocked back then forward violently. His fisted hand flailed at her and struck her hard in the face, drawing blood. But his life was already leaving him.

Anna withdrew the knife and climbed out of the car. She wiped her bloodied hand and the blade on the grass and put the knife back into her sleeve. She checked that the road was empty and then she hauled the dead body across the seat and out of the open door. She turned out the pockets of his coat: a wallet with an FSB identity card, another gun that she gratefully took, some money, and keys. She took the money. Then she dragged the body a few yards onto the grass and left it, deliberately visible from the road. She got back into the car, in the driver’s seat, put the car in gear, and pulled away.

She drove fast along the road until she saw a farm track a mile or so away and to the left. There were deep tyre marks on the track, from a tractor most likely, and she drove with the car’s wheels in the tyre tracks until she found a cutting in the hill to the side where she could conceal the car from the road. She pulled over into the cutting, double-checked that the car couldn’t be seen from the road, and closed the door. The man’s phone on the dashboard had started to ring. When they found the body, they would look for the car. Their first assumption would have to be that she was driving it towards Sevastopol. She opened the door and disabled the phone, flinging the batteries into a pool of water. Now they couldn’t locate the car from his phone.

As soon as she’d gotten clear of the car, she began to run, up towards a ridge that was slowly forming above her through the fog. She kept running, up through soggy grass meadows and into the hills that rose to the north. It was a long climb that finally took her over a high ridge and down into a valley on the other side. There was a village there, sufficiently far from the road they’d travelled along, away from any pursuit. And she knew they would look for the car first.

Just over an hour after she had been dropped at the crossroads by the truck, she entered the single street of the village. There was a store, a service station with a single pump, some bedraggled scavenging dogs that combed the gutters and doorways. But she saw few people. She entered the service station and inside found a boy, fourteen or fifteen years old, she guessed. She asked him how far it was to Sevastopol.

“Four or five hours if you’ve got a decent car. There’s no bus from here.”

“I need a ride. I’ll pay.”

The boy shouted into the back and a man she took to be his father emerged. He wore oily overalls and looked like he’d been fixing a car. He had a bad-tempered expression and said something abrupt to the boy. The boy repeated her request to him, then disappeared into the back, and the man stared at her.

“I can give you a hundred dollars,” Anna said in Ukrainian. “My grandmother is sick.”

“How did you get here?”

“Friends brought me this far.”

The man looked at the mud on her trousers and at her wet hiking boots. “Make it a hundred and fifty,” he replied too quickly.

Half an hour later, and having paid in advance, she was on a small rural road that would take them eventually to Sevastopol. The man drove fast and in silence, as if he was unwilling to earn the money, or just disapproved of being paid by a woman.

After driving for nearly five hours, the city of Sevastopol lay in cloud below them. Mountains soared to the north and east. The great natural harbour, gouging eight kilometres into the land, was once the Soviet navy’s warm-water port. Now it was the naval base for the Russian Black Sea fleet that shared the facilities with their Ukrainian naval counterpart. She saw ships at anchor out in the sea lanes and in the near harbour itself. Other naval vessels were up against the quays or in dry dock. The two nations now shared the port with an ill grace that was growing by the month into something uglier.

The drop was outside the city, just beyond the outer limits, a barn in some unfenced fields that climbed the hills fringing the town. Anna told the driver to leave her just over a mile, she guessed, past the track that led up to the barn. By the time he dropped her she was nearer the centre of town than the barn. She would walk back once the man had gone.

He turned the van around without a word of good-bye and headed back in the direction from which they’d come. Once he’d disappeared, Anna returned back up the road and walked fast until she found a break between a row of houses. This was the place. She walked behind the houses and, once she was through, she studied the approach to the barn. Then she walked up through the fields beyond the houses until she found a small copse of trees. It was a shelter of sorts, both from the weather and from unfriendly eyes. Later, for the approach, the fog higher up the hill would be good cover. And soon darkness would fall anyway. She decided she would wait until then.

MASHA SHAPKO EXITED from Sevastopol’s rail terminus and followed orders. First she took a taxi into the centre of town. She carried a battered black leather bag with its colour fraying down to the bare leather where it had been bent from use and she wore a thick-padded pink coat that had faded with age and Moscow’s harsh weather. On her head she had a black rabbit-fur hat. She was dressed in clothes which had been appropriate for her departure from Moscow two days before. It had been twenty degrees below zero when she’d boarded the train at the Kursky railway station.

Next, she was to catch a bus towards the western end of town then walk a few miles until she reached the outskirts of the town. But on the way to the drop, her boss had told her, find the time to stop, to look, to watch. So when the taxi dropped her off on the central boulevard, she stopped at shop windows as she strolled towards the heart of the town. First she entered a secondhand clothing shop, then she bought a coffee at a café in the square and sat away from the window. And all the time she watched for any familiar face from the train or from Sevastopol’s rail station. Satisfied at last that she wasn’t being followed, she finally moved on to join a line for the local bus.

She was late—nearly a day late, in fact. The train had been held up for twenty-four hours as it entered the turbulent regions of the south, where separatists were detonating bombs with regularity. “A terrorist threat” was the announcement on the train and they’d stayed at a halt on the line and watched the OMON police and local FSB walking beside the tracks, then questioning people on the train. She’d been afraid they’d discover what she was carrying, but her papers were in order, her father was a prominent figure in Moscow’s KGB, and she, too, carried an FSB card of her own. They gave her only a cursory check. Four other passengers, without their papers in order, she assumed, had been handcuffed and removed from the train.