The Blind Spy

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.”

“And then?”

“Singleton called our embassy sweepers in right away. We kept the head in the freezer until it could be put on a NATO bus that was flying into Kiev from Afghanistan for refuelling that morning. It was here twenty hours later. Left as a decoration on a snowman on Thursday night—in this laboratory here by today at six A.M.”

“And if you know who the man is,” Burt said, “what’s the purpose of Anna’s presence? What’s she here to identify?”

He looked at her again to find she was tracing the man’s scar with her finger, not quite touching the flesh, and her face only an inch or two from the head. Then she stepped back for another overall reappraisal. Burt was keen now to head for lunch, but it looked like that was some way off.

“He goes by the name of Yuri Saltyakov,” Lish explained. “He approached one of our operatives in Kiev three weeks ago saying he had ‘information.’ We checked him out on all the Agency photo-and databases. No tags. Nothing. Nothing in London either. Adrian was very obliging. No match to anyone we know. His story was that he had information on work being carried out at the Novorossiysk port on the Russian side of the Kerch Straits, opposite the Crimea. He was a dockworker there, according to him. Wanted to sell us his story. But we never received any of the information about the port. His main interest to us was that he seemed to have quite detailed information about a ship called the Forburg. He described it as a ‘terror ship.’ We never got out of him what he meant about that either; was it carrying nuclear fissile material, nuclear triggers, other high-grade weapons, anthrax…who knows? We don’t. We tracked the Forburg, however, having eventually picked it up on the WorldView satellite off the coast of Burgas, in Bulgaria, to the western end of the Black Sea. The Forburg seemed to be heading for the Bosphorus, then presumably the Mediterranean, unless Istanbul was its destination, or it turned off early.” Lish paused, perhaps embarrassed by what he then had to say. “Because then,” he finally continued, “God knows how, but we lost the damn ship. That was three days ago. Radio contact disappears, somehow the satellite loses it. Presumably, again, it goes into port and reappears under a new guise, or more probably does all that changeover at sea under cover of cloud, night, a giant mosquito net—all three…I’ve no idea. But it does disappear. Twenty-four hours later the head of the man who gave us the information turns up.”

Burt watched Anna. She was curling back one of the thick lips from the opened mouth. She was peering inside the mouth. Then she spoke for the first time. “Russian dental work,” she said without looking at either of them.

She was, as always, Burt thought admiringly, completely unimpressed by anything or anyone, even here at the Agency’s HQ.

“That’s what we concluded,” Lish agreed. “But we assume his name isn’t Yuri Saltyakov and we have no other leads. That’s why we wanted you to come in, Anna. On the off chance.” He looked at Burt. “Thank you for being so prompt.”

“Happy to oblige, Theo,” Burt said magnanimously, allowing the implication of Cougar always being there, ready and helpful, to get the CIA out of a spot of difficulty to hang gently in the air.

“He’s Russian,” Anna said. “But they left just the head because his hands would show he wasn’t a dockworker. And a head is easier to transport. So it probably came from the south of the country. Not Kiev, but the Crimea itself, perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” Lish said uncertainly, slightly fazed by an analysis he hadn’t, so far, received from any of his own team. “Do you recognise him, Anna? Anything you can help us with?”

“No,” she replied. “I’ve never seen him, or a picture of him, before.” Her voice measured, giving nothing away. You would never penetrate her thoughts, Burt told himself, unless she wanted you to.

Burt looked at her quizzically. “Sure?” he said.

“Yes. Sure.” She was looking at the place where the neck had been cut. “It’s not a Russian execution,” she said. There was a long pause in the room. “Or, at least, it’s not meant to look like a Russian execution,” she finally added.

Burt looked sharply at her this time, but he didn’t want to pursue the implications of these appended words in front of Lish. That would be something for he and Anna alone, later.

“What kind of an execution is it?” Theo Lish enquired.

“It’s like something the Chechens do,” she replied. “It’s a specifically Islamic execution. Or that’s how it’s meant to look,” she added, reinforcing the doubts she had already expressed.

Lish enquired no further.

They went upstairs in a warm elevator to the ground floor and all three loosened their coats until they’d warmed up enough to remove them.

“I’m going to have a chat with Theo,” Burt said to Anna. “Do you mind waiting?”

She didn’t mind. She never minded what was happening, Burt thought. It was his view of the world exactly. All that’s important is what’s happening. Forget the rest.

In an office on the fourth floor, which was not Lish’s but which he cleared of two young men in crisp white shirts and ties, Lish sat in a swivel chair and offered Burt a comfortable-looking sofa that was more suited to his bulk.

“Do you have a decent cognac?” Burt asked, without a great deal of hope.

“I don’t think we do, Burt,” Lish replied with a softly apologetic tone, and Burt felt satisfactorily confirmed in his decision to leave the CIA ten years before, after a glittering career, in order to set up a private intelligence company awash with decent cognac and, more important, awash with government contract money.

He’d served with Lish in the Agency for many decades, more than three, anyway. They’d joined together back in the sixties—Burt, the maverick operative, Theo, the meticulous bureaucrat. Then Burt had left, sensing new opportunities for intelligence gathering in the modern world. Three years into Cougar’s existence, the company was turning over two billion dollars a year in the wake of 9/11, on the basis of several healthy government contracts. And then he’d lured Lish away from a senior Agency position in order to head up Cougar’s Eastern European section. Three years after that, Cougar was turning over twice that sum, nearly four billion dollars. Two years after that, Lish had returned to the CIA, with Burt’s blessing, as its director, its chief, the Agency’s main man who had the president’s ear on all foreign security matters. But now he was Cougar’s main man, too, at the pinnacle of the government-run intelligence establishment that filled D.C. like an undigested meal. After Lish became CIA director, government contracts to Cougar increased and Cougar became the largest private intelligence agency in the world. And into the bargain Cougar quickly made itself indispensable to the CIA.

Burt settled comfortably into a pile of cushions. “Ukraine,” he said. “Cougar has a watch on Ukraine, Theo. Upcoming elections. As it happens, I was already sending Anna over there, anyway—down to the Crimea, too,” Burt announced. “We have some other business to conclude in Ukraine’s southeastern sector. Crimea is its Achilles heel, if you like. And now it sounds like we have new work to do.”

“Why on earth send her?” Lish said, aghast. After the KGB’s attempt on her life in Washington just over a year before, it was clear she wasn’t even completely safe in America, and under Cougar’s