did for KGB undercover work when he was outside the secret, protected spaces of the Soviet spy elite, places like the embassy compound in Damascus from which he had set off before the sun came up. He carried no identification from the embassy that would get him out of trouble if that was what he was heading into. If anything went wrong, he was unprotected.
But the difference between a normal undercover operation and his activities this morning was that this was a personal mission—one that would have drawn deep disapproval from his boss, should he have known of it, possibly bringing an end to his career altogether.
Dressed in the drab civilian clothes of Soviet russia he seemed, like russia itself, drained of colour and bereft of joy. In this he was clearly distinguishable from the bustling and colourful Arab throng in the souk. Not just his clothes and his height, but also his pronounced Slavic features set him distinctively apart from the Arabs.
He was distinguishable, too—though more subtly so—from the few, mostly Western tourists. Unlike valentin, they were all staring wide eyed at their surroundings and carrying armfuls of cheap souvenirs that they would be taking back home with them. Unlike nearly all of these other visitors to the souk that morning, valentin seemed unimpressed by his surroundings and he carried nothing that was visible.
Only the thick packet concealed in his buttoned-down shirt pocket and the small emergency pistol tucked away beneath the waistband of his trousers accompanied him.
But there was something about his urgently controlled movements, the hard muscles of his body visible through the shirt, and his alert and watchful eyes that suggested he was something altogether other than a tourist anyway. He looked like a man prepared, and preparing, for some kind of sudden action that was in another order of things entirely separate from a shopping expedition. There was, too, a sense of latent violence about him; his toned and muscled body appeared to reach out for a reason to be employed to the full. He was a pumped-up sportsman, a human missile ready to go off. And unlike the tourists, he spoke fluent Arabic.
Valentin paused with the minute attention of a bookkeeper at the cupboard-size shops on either side of the narrow alley. But he didn’t really look at their contents. If his eyes were focused at all on what was around him, he looked without seeing. There was a ner vousness about him, which expressed itself in small, tense movements. He repeatedly brushed his short-cropped fair hair with one hand and occasionally touched the buttoned-down pocket of his white shirt with the other to reassure himself that the package was still there. The muscles of his lean jaw twitched every time he felt the package, and after each contact with it he thrust his hands back into the pockets of his grey trousers as though to physically restrain himself from his obsessive checking.
Valentin walked on, blindly surveying the overfilled alcoves crammed up against the alley that was wide enough for a donkey loaded with panniers to pass by, but not much else.
Anyone who watched him closely would have said that he wasn’t truly looking for anything, in fact; that he wasn’t a potential customer at all, and that his mission was actually elsewhere than in the souk. The souk and its multitude of variegated delights were there to slow him down, to delay an arrival of some kind. And in his heart, he knew that he was stopping deliberately. And he knew that the reason for these pauses was in order to postpone his purpose—they were not the purpose itself.
The traders and hawkers who crowded the souk’s alleys on either side of him were volubly selling their jute sacks of multicoloured spices, green and mauve soaps piled up like sweet-smelling brick walls, lurid meats that dripped blood from hooks and butchers’ blocks and which ran thickly away into the runnel along the centre of the stone alleyway. And then there were other shops that sold the redand-white
And in every direction in which valentin flickered his sharp, electric-blue eyes, what he saw were the photographs of the Soviet Union’s ally, the stern president of Syria, Hafez al Assad, which, whether faded or new, looked down on the commerce and haggling, the conversation and coffee drinking, like a looming superstition that threatened reprisal of some kind, rather than a figure of flesh and blood. Valentin was accustomed enough to the threatening faces that gazed down from walls back in his own country to hardly notice this one.
He stepped aside for a man with a frayed stick who was driving a donkey laden with baskets of green leaves along the covered narrow alley. The man, like all the other Arabs, barely looked at him and, when he did—and then only briefly—it seemed to be done deliberately, without curiosity. Was it fear of contact with foreigners that kept their eyes cast aside after the briefest of glances? No, he thought, the foreigner—whether a casual tourist or one of the russian military and intelligence personnel like himself—was irrelevant to their daily lives. These people simply went about their business, that was all.
Not for the first time, valentin was shocked by the freedom and social detachment that commerce brought to the people even under a dictatorship like Syria’s—and which was absent in his own country where commerce was a dirty, even a criminal word.
And valentin suddenly felt how close he was to his own country. He was well into the last week of his posting to Syria. Three years it had been since he’d first been sent down from Moscow. He’d graduated from the KGB school at Balashiha-2 in the Forest, outside Moscow, then he’d spent two years behind a desk. He’d learned Arabic and was taken under the wing of a rising star in the KGB’s foreign intelligence department. This senior officer had then requested valentin’s transfer to Damascus, where this mentor had been made head of station. And now, in just over five days, valentin would be returning to Moscow again for another posting, to another Arab country, he supposed—or maybe it would be just a desk job at the KGB’s highly secretive Department S, in the Arab section, of course.
But it wasn’t nostalgia brought on by his departure from the country that had drawn him up from the KGB station in Damascus to Syria’s second capital, Aleppo. He hadn’t come to say good-bye—not to the country, at any rate, or even just to Aleppo. The private reason for this trip to the north of the country was hard for him to accomplish and he was postponing the moment a little longer. He was neither savouring it—this particular end—nor fearing it. Nevertheless, why he had come to Aleppo contained a finality that he wished to put off.
He turned to the left down another alley in the neat grid of the souk. Like all the others in this maze, it was filled with the conflicting sights and smells of spices and skins and alimentary produce. The sounds of an Arab lute came and went from a record player in a carpet shop. He stopped briefly at the shop and fingered some Kurdish kelims, but as soon as the shopkeeper tried to get him to buy something he walked on, stiffly smiling a thank you and pretending he couldn’t speak their language. He fingered the packet in the buttoned-down pocket of his shirt once more to make sure that it was still there. The gun was cool against his skin and a constant heavy presence.
At the end of the alley, or perhaps it was at the end of the one after that, he saw daylight and headed towards it. He took a deep breath. He was approaching the moment. It was time to finish his business here and get back to the capital before he was missed. He certainly didn’t want to have to answer questions from his station head, the truculent and volatile KGB colonel resnikov, and account for his time of absence from Damascus. He needed to be out of here within the hour and back to the capital. Suddenly he began to think more clearly, to take a grip on his usually incisive mind in order to carry through with what he had come to do.
And then at last he emerged into the blinding white light of a busy street. The thick heat from which the covered market had protected him hit him like a suffocating mask, wrapping him in its intensity with a physical sensation that was almost like a dull, dry-fisted blow. With a muscular forearm bared from the rolled-up sleeve of his white shirt, he wiped his forehead as if to ward off the sweat that hadn’t appeared yet. The heat was an insistent presence that demanded your attention, he thought, took over your thoughts.
He looked up and down. The street was a cacophony of horns and shouting. It was full of donkey carts with car tyres for wheels, and with the occasional cars and trucks that by some miracle still functioned vaguely as they were built to do. Exhaust fumes from a vegetable truck up from the country choked him as the driver pressed down on the throttle and its engine squealed agonisingly by him. The man should check his fan belt, he thought automatically.
The cafe he was looking for was a few hundred yards away. That was the venue they’d given him, the starting point for his real purpose this morning. He could just see it from the souk’s exit. The men would take him from there. It was their own proposition, this meeting place, to which he’d agreed.
He stopped under a shaded awning before committing himself finally. He had come here against all
