had gone, Valentin told her everything, the night in Aleppo, the woman and their child.
She didn’t reply at first. There was a silence, but it wasn’t awkward. Then she called the maid and Valentin thought that she was going to betray him, but she simply asked for her knitting to be brought. He noticed the bump of her stomach that had grown in the past month, and she saw him looking.
“They will be almost the same age,” she said simply. “I believe I will have a girl.”
“Just a year apart,” he said. “What will you call her—if she’s a girl?”
“I’d like to call her Anna.”
Valentin knew that although Natalia Resnikova was a charitable woman, her kindness drew disapproval, disgust, or even wrath from her husband. She was brave to even see him. Resnikov was a hard, bitter man who seemed to gain pleasure from nothing, even the Western whisky he somehow got his hands on.
The maid brought her knitting onto the verandah. The pregnant wife of his boss showed him what she was making. “It’s a sweater for my baby,” she said. “I’ll make another one for your son. Then they’ll have the same.”
He nodded his thanks, suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that now his son would be a real citizen of the world, with a sweater made specially for him, not just an abandoned child living off hand-me-downs.
“And when Anna is born she and I will visit your son when they are both old enough,” Natalia Resnikova said. “Until then, I will go alone when I can. I know the orphanage quite well.” She finally touched his arm. “It’s a good place. And you did the right thing.”
Such unexpected understanding made Valentin’s eyes moist with relief as well as with the grief he felt for his encounter with the doomed woman dancer and, finally, underlying all, for the birth of his son whose life or death he had held so recently in his hands.
PART ONE
1
JANUARY 8, 2010
THE BLACK S-CLASS STRETCH MERCEDES crossed beneath the Moscow ring road on Entuziastov at just after 5:30 in the morning. It was snowing harder outside the city, or maybe that was just how it seemed to the men inside the car. Away from the protection of the city’s buildings, the snow was free to hurl itself across the open landscape and a whirlwind of large, fluffy snowflakes rolled out of the eerie, monstrous white void only to disintegrate as they raced into the car’s heated windscreen.
With the ring road behind it, the official car kept up the same steady, regulation speed and moved on to the M-7 heading northeast out of Moscow in the direction of Balashiha.
There were two intelligence chiefs sitting on the soft, sweet-smelling black leather of the backseat and a military intelligence driver alone in the front. Both chiefs were the most senior generals, elevated to their positions by age, experience, duty, but most of all by the supreme skill of the Russian political intelligence class—a ruthless animal instinct for supremacy in the power struggles of the Kremlin’s internecine bureaucratic wars.
In their late sixties, they wore uniforms almost comically bemedalled from past campaigns—real wars—that made them resemble highly colourful performers from a travelling medieval pageant. These tiered ribbons of medals had been won mostly in Afghanistan after Russia’s 1979 invasion of the country, and its disastrous and debilitating war there that had finally emptied the Soviet treasury and heralded the end of the empire. They were the medals of defeat.
General Valentin Viktorov had been personally in charge of an intelligence team that, with initially magnificent success, had prepared the ground for the invasion of the presidential palace in Kabul at Christmas of that year. But those were the glory days, before the Soviet effort descended into stalemate and retreat in the subsequent years of brutal conflict.
Afghanistan. It was never far from either of the generals’ minds, even now, decades after the war had ended. Just as the Second World War—the Great Patriotic War, in Russia’s lexicon—had been the foul crucible whose hellish alchemy gave birth to Soviet might and to the greatest empire on earth, so Afghanistan was the insidious chemical formula that finally ripped the whole shaky edifice to pieces. For both the generals—as for many of the military veterans of that disastrous war—Afghanistan was the defining moment of their and their motherland’s loss of pride. Afghanistan was the fault line that severed modern Russia from its glorious past. The actual collapse—that of the Eastern European empire in 1989 and the subsequent folding of Russia’s central Asian possessions after that—was just the inevitable consequence of the Afghan defeat. And it was Afghanistan that welded the psyches of the two generals and thousands like them into an overwhelming and unified desire for the recouping of all of glorious Russia’s losses since then.
But despite this psychological link between the two generals, it was notable that they sat as far from each other as the seating allowed, each pushed up against their respective rear doors. They were rivals and, in Russia’s medievally clannish political and intelligence world, they had often found themselves working against each other. General Victorov was from the core of the SVR, Russia’s first chief directorate and the successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence department. The other veteran, General Antonov, was from GRU, Russia’s main intelligence directorate.
The two men didn’t talk and spent most of the journey looking away from each other and out of the windows on either side of the car, though the view was obscured almost completely by the white-out conditions, except for the thin, bunched-together trunks of birch and fir trees that took shape as they approached the Forest.
They also both wore tight-lipped expressions that suggested even sharing the same car was an imposition. But that was the way it had been arranged by the prime minister’s office and they hadn’t been given the choice to travel separately. It was as if this enforced journey together was a test of sorts in itself. “You’ll be working together”—that had been the order. But they had never worked together in any commonly accepted way.
The relative seniority between the two men was hard to judge—not least by themselves—but their rivalry was evident in the tension that existed between them. General Antonov deployed five or six times more agents on foreign soil than the SVR, and he personally commanded twenty-five thousand special forces troops, or
But in addition to being at the heart of Department S, Viktorov had the vital advantage of having closer personal access to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin than his rival. The two of them were actually friends outside the day-to-day business of the intelligence world, and skied and hunted together. In Putin’s baronial court where rank was often a secondary consideration after personal favour—and favours—this probably gave Viktorov the edge.
In the last few miles of their journey perhaps each was thinking over the purpose of this predawn meeting with Putin. But, more likely, each was thinking of his own strategy of personal preeminence when they met Putin, regardless of the purpose of the meeting. And each of them was certainly in a state of anxious speculation that the other knew more, had been briefed prior to this journey, had been taken into the confidence of the prime minister more closely. The usual fear of some loss of favour with Putin plagued them both. And that was how the Kremlin played its games. You never got used to that, Viktorov was thinking. Rule was administered through anxiety and fear, just as it had always been.
The snowplows had been out all night to keep the vital road connecting the Kremlin and its intelligence heart clearer than any other in Russia, and the car finally swung through the high gates—razor wire and gun turrets
