Alex Dryden - The Blind Spy

Golubev’s phone rang. He walked away from Viktorov and Balthasar, who reminisced in quiet voices. When he returned, he looked only at the generals, Viktorov and Antonov.

“You’ll have to read it on the road,” Golubev said to the two generals, nodding at the document, and he clicked the mobile phone shut. “The prime minister is delayed. He asks you to come to his dacha.”

As the Mercedes swung out of the gates and took the autoroute back to the ring road, Viktorov thought that none of this—the apparently pointless trip to Balashiha, the meeting with the veterans and even the enforced shared trip with Antonov—was unplanned. Clearly he would be expected to work with Antonov, and the meeting at Balashiha was in the style of an underground regimental get-together, something like Nazi SS officers meeting in secret at inns in the depths of the Harz forest after the war. Except that here it was official and government backed. The Patriotiy were the establishment.

They were met at the imposing gates of Putin’s dacha by a Kremlin car that would take them up the drive to the dacha where Putin worked, swam, and practised judo. His family dacha was hidden farther in the forest.

Inside the high-ceilinged reception room the two generals stood. Still they didn’t talk. Finally after nearly half an hour, they were summoned to a long, lavishly furnished office the size of a small ballroom where Putin was sitting at a desk under the Russian eagle. He motioned them to seats in front of the desk, then, without preamble, leaned on his elbows with his hands clasped together and stared his blank, unblinking stare.

“We need greater cooperation,” he said. “This war between two great services has to stop.”

Viktorov shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The latest skirmish between the SVR and the GRU had occurred just three weeks before, in Germany. The SVR had betrayed two agents of the GRU to the German intelligence service. Their reason was—from the SVR’s point of view—that the GRU was transgressing on the SVR’s own patch.

“We have important work to do,” Putin said. “And I need full cooperation. Your jobs are at stake. Russia’s future is at stake.”

The generals inclined their heads. Putin didn’t seek a reply. Then he leaned in closer. “The report,” he said. “Read it closely. Elections in Ukraine take place in just over a week’s time. The final runoff is three weeks after that. But the elections are irrelevant. Whoever wins, we want to make our arrangements with our friends in Ukraine. Redress the balance.” He looked severely at them and Viktorov wondered, not for the first time, if Putin actually didn’t have any eyelids, if he was like a snake. Putin leaned back in his chair and stared at the two generals. “We all know, of course,” he said with finality, “that Ukraine is not even a state.”

THE HEAD RESTED GENTLYbetween two reinforced glass clamps on the glaring white surface of a disinfected plastic tabletop. The table had gleaming, skeletal aluminium legs protruding beneath it and its aluminium wheels were locked in place at the bottom of the legs in the unlikely event that the trolley might roll away on the perfectly level, spotlessly clean white floor.

The chill in the laboratory storage facility at the CIA’s Forensic Investigation Department in Langley, Virginia, was almost as great as the freezing winter temperatures outside the building and the two men and one woman who stood closest to the trolley table were still wrapped in the thick winter coats they’d worn for the short walk across the parking lot to the building. Three white-coated laboratory workers who stood behind them like pagan ceremonial guardians of the severed head wore Arctic thermal wear in here, for the greater freedom of movement of their arms.

The head was indeed like the graven image of some ancient god. Though it was a thing of flesh, it was not a thing of blood. Its dull, lifeless fish eyes in the grey, dead flesh seemed to bring the temperature down still lower, as if temperature were a kind of mood that fit the sombre circumstances.

The head had a plump face that showed a round-cheeked man, with bristling black eyebrows, slightly frosted from the deep frozen drawer that had contained it until the visitors’ arrival. The bloodless lips were generous, the ears looked almost enormous. There was a scar on the left cheek that looked more pronounced without any blood flowing beneath the skin around it. The neck, foreshortened by a jagged cutting instrument, was jowly and flabby and the wild thick black hair that topped the head was frozen in a concoction of swirls and curlicues, as if the head were a photograph capturing a man in a high wind.

It looks like a sculpture, Burt Miller thought, though he was thinking, not of a stone god, but of one of the modern pieces the British artist—something-or-other Quinn, he seemed to remember—made, which consisted of a plastic head filled with the artist’s own blood. But the colour of the flesh, Burt mused with an art historian’s appreciation, was more like the grey, dead-looking humanity to be found in a Lucian Freud, one of whose works he owned at a cost from Christie’s of somewhere in the region of ten million bucks.

“So, Theo,” Burt said breezily, exhaling a slightly frosted breath. “Exhibit A.”

Theo Lish, the CIA chief, drew his coat tighter around his neck. “Exhibit A to Z actually,” Lish replied moodily. “It’s all we have, Burt.”

“Not the usual headless corpse, but the less common corpseless head,” Burt said lightly and with his usual upbeat view of any situation, no matter how complex and inconvenient it was. “It’s a message, then.”

“Presumably,” Lish said with a nod. “They want us to know the man’s identity. That’s the significance.”

Burt looked to his left at Anna Resnikov. “Normally, in an identification parade, we’d have half a dozen severed heads for you,” Burt joked. “I guess the others just never turned up. You’ve got to up your fees if you want these identity parades to make a difference, Theo.”

Anna didn’t return Burt’s look. Either she wasn’t amused or she was staring so hard at the head on the table that she hadn’t heard his little witticism. That was the reason she was here, after all—to study, identify, bring her knowledge to bear. For she was not just Burt’s highly valued lieutenant in his vast private intelligence empire that went under the cheekily named Cougar Intelligence Applications, she was also a former colonel in the KGB and—until her defection—right at its dark intelligence heart, Department S.

“How did it get here, Theo?” Burt asked, looking back to the CIA chief again.

“It was delivered to the home of one of our junior embassy officers in Kiev,” he replied. “Young man, name of Bill Singleton, married, two small children.”

“What about security?” Burt shot back.

“In Ukraine all our staff houses have cameras, security alarms, early warning systems, sensors—you name it. The usual, in terms of the bare minimum. But Kiev isn’t high up on the list as far as security threats are concerned. This”—he indicated the severed head with a nod from his own living one”—this was left in the garden, actually, not the house,” he said by way of correction. “The person who placed it there was caught on camera, but set off no sensors. Not close enough to the house, apparently. The film shows a man, we presume, wearing a balaclava. He enters the garden, carefully removes the head of the Singleton children’s snowman, drops this one out of a sack, and replaces the snow head with it. The four-year-old daughter of the family found it next morning. Someone had been tampering with the family’s snowman and she was outraged—in tears.” Lish sighed. “Clearly it was delivered in that particular place because security allowed it to be. We don’t have—or need—razor-wire-topped, twelve-foot walls for all our Kiev embassy staff. But it was clearly left for us. So, yes, it’s a message. They want us to know who it is.”