third man who hadn’t been exposed in the street. She decided now to lower the odds against her.
She left her pack in the basement and climbed back up. Emerging from the steps that led up from the dank basement, she walked behind the man, closing the distance rapidly. The alley ahead narrowed between two tall buildings so that it was only wide enough for one person. She looked behind her for the first time. There was no one else in sight. She saw the man hesitate where the alley narrowed, wondering perhaps whether to continue through the narrowed passage or to contact his colleague first. He came to a halt and, as he started to turn—perhaps sensing a presence behind him—she put her left hand around his eyes, digging her fingers into them, and her right forearm into the nape of his neck. Preoccupied with the agony in his eyes—and before he could struggle enough to dislodge her—in a swift, jerking motion she had bent his neck back over her forearm and snapped it with a dull sound like the breaking of a damp stick.
She quickly dragged the body into another basement, hauling it down more moss-covered and mildewed stone steps, and dumped it behind some ancient piles of building material leaning up in a corner, which were disgorging their contents of solidified plaster and cement. Then she rifled through the pockets of the man’s jacket beneath the black raincoat. There was an FSB identity card. They were Russian intelligence, as she’d assumed. She took the card and a gun that was loose in the inside jacket pocket and then carefully mounted the stairs. She was glad of the gun. The way she had come into the country through a legal border post meant that it had been impossible to be properly armed. She looked both ways up and down the alley. There was still nobody visible. She picked up her backpack from the first basement and then she walked back up the alley from where she had come and back again onto the boulevard.
She knew she should abort the assignment now, save herself as best she could. That would have been what Burt ordered. He hadn’t wanted her to take the assignment in the first place. It was too dangerous, for her in particular—a former KGB colonel and a defector on the KGB’s most-wanted list—to go anywhere near the territory of Russia. But she’d insisted on it, threatening to resign and leave Cougar. Burt didn’t want to lose her and she’d banked on that. She knew Burt wouldn’t have dared risk her leaving Cougar. He didn’t want another agency—the CIA itself had courted her regularly—to gain her talents, and so he’d reluctantly acquiesced.
But, in any case, Burt wasn’t here, in Odessa. She calculated the risks. She accepted at once that either they would follow her to the bus, or they already knew she would be taking it. They’d known she would be on the boat, that was for sure. If they knew, too, that she was heading for the bus, then there was unmistakably a leak, and she faced greater danger than she was in already. But if they’d known she was on the boat, there was probably a leak anyway.
Suddenly she felt an unwelcome memory returning. It was the first time she had been this close to Russia since her defection four years before. A memory of why she had left back then began to surface in her mind—of her father, the retired general Resnikov, and her hatred of him; of the spies with whom she’d once worked and who had now once again taken control of the country she loved; of the evil nexus of the spies and their mafia allies who sought to subjugate the Russian people under their jackboot. And then she thought of her grandmother who had died two years before, and of her mother who had finally left her father and was working for the Sakharov Foundation. Women—it was usually women—seemed to be the good people. But then she repressed the memories that threatened to divert her from her task.
The bus station was situated at the side of the railway terminus where trains departed for Kiev, to the north. A few dilapidated buses stood with their engines running, rain pouring down the windscreens. The rain was now cascading in rivers along the sloping gutters and there was a huge pool where a drain must have been blocked. She watched the ticket office, cast her eyes across the expanse of concrete, looked for the destination signs, and then saw the bus that would take her to Sevastopol. For a second time, she questioned the wisdom of going through with her mission now. Her arrival was blown, but was the pickup in Sevastopol compromised also? Would she be able to evade her pursuers? Or did they know about the pickup, too? And then, decided, she walked across several lanes, past the waiting buses to the ticket office, and bought a return ticket.
The slow, ancient bus departed twenty minutes late for the twelve-hour journey and wound its way out of Odessa, to the east. Low grey clouds hung over the mountains until the country was closed in by their embrace. Beneath the clouds a fine spray of mist came in off the sea. There was no view either of the sea or the land. Everything existed at close quarters. Her mind similarly ratcheted down to the immediate: a field outside Sevastopol, with coordinates provided and memorised, just beyond the edge of the town; a stone barn that stored root vegetables and perhaps the odd piece of agricultural equipment; and a courier she would never see, the agent’s cutout who would make the drop.
She took a seat near the driver in order to be the first out, knowing that behind her was a watcher, and perhaps more than one. The bus’s heater wheezed, and pumped a mixture of engine oil and stifling air into the enclosed space. They wouldn’t make a move yet—her watchers—she knew that now. They would want to know why she was here in Ukraine. The real prize for them was her. The KGB had been obsessed with finding her for more than four years. But first they would want to discover who she was meeting and what she had come to find. She would have to lose them once the bus reached Sevastopol—unless she lost them before her destination. Above all she had to protect the courier, their link with the agent. But that was twelve hours away, over the long slow bus route to and then across the Crimea.
The seats were small and the bus full. She was squeezed on the window side next to a man in a thick padded jacket and workman’s boots. He fell asleep almost immediately. On the seats directly across the aisle were two plump women. She guessed from their rural appearance that they came from a village along the way. They talked purposefully to each other, never pausing. She didn’t look behind at anyone else seated on the bus. For a while she pretended to doze, but she remained alert for any movement in the aisle. Time stood still.
The bus climbed and descended the undulating land, stopping at a few villages and sometimes out in the middle of nowhere, until they reached Nikolayev. There was a stop for fifteen minutes and Anna watched the two women, but while one or two passengers boarded or got off the bus the two women stayed where they were, chatting endlessly. Then they set off again, across the Roskovsky Straits at Kherson. There was another stop there and then another stop and another leg to the bridge onto the Crimea at Krasnoperekopsk. As they entered the Crimea, they were about two-thirds of the way to Sevastopol.
After nearly two hours beyond the city of Krasnoperekopsk, and now well into the Crimea, the bus pulled into a service station at a remote crossroads that served as a stop. They would have the usual fifteen minutes, the driver said. There was a grim-looking cafe and a couple of pumps. The two women across the aisle from her picked up half a dozen heavy plastic bags and made for the door. It was their stop, she realised.
Anna put on her backpack and got off the bus quickly in order to catch up with the slow-moving women. They were now walking in a waddling motion from side to side with the weight of their bags. They were still talking without pause. A change of plan, Anna decided, a change of mind. That was a sign of intelligence, to be able to change your mind. When she drew level with the women, she smiled at them and offered to carry some of their bags. The women were struggling to keep hold of everything.
“I’ve come to visit my grandmother,” she said.
As she took three of the bags she still didn’t look behind her. She would leave them to guess whether or not she was aware of their presence.
Around the rear of the service station, there was an ancient pickup with peeling dark red paint, where the bare metal itself wasn’t showing through. It had its engine running for warmth. One of the two women indicated that the truck was where they were going. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat, Anna now saw—a brother, a husband, perhaps?
“Where are you going?” Anna asked.
“Voronki,” one of the women replied.
“I’m going to Vihogradovo,” Anna said.
“It’s not on our way, dear,” the second woman replied.
“Perhaps you could give me a ride to the Vihogradovo road?”
The women didn’t know.
The man in the driver’s seat didn’t get out or offer to help. The women opened the passenger door and put their bags in first, then one of them began to climb in ponderously over the high sill of the truck.
“I’m going to the Vihogradovo road,” Anna said to the driver.
He shrugged. “These women take up all the room.” They were squeezed onto a double seat next to the driver.
