The Blind Spy

“I can sit in the truck bed.”

He stared at her.

“I’m here to visit my grandmother. She’s dying.”

“We’re all dying,” the man said.

“Not so quickly, I hope,” she replied.

He didn’t take his eyes from hers. “You want to sit in the rain?” he said as though he couldn’t care less. Then he shrugged again. “It’s up to you,” he said and looked away.

She threw her pack into the back of the truck before he could change his mind and climbed in using the wheel as a step. As the truck pulled away, she looked back for the first time. The second man she had seen in the alley near the boulevard was now talking into a mobile phone. She saw the grey leather cap and the black hair coming out at an angle over the khaki collar. They had lost one man and now they had no backup on the bus but him. Perhaps there was a vehicle following the bus, but for now he was alone. Like her, they would have to improvise. The man didn’t look at her but she knew it was him.

As the truck pulled away from the main road and up into the hills, the thin mist turned to fog.

The road wound its way through villages and across moorland. The journey was slow, the old truck dropping to low gears for the slightest climb. Two vehicles passed them, though she couldn’t identify who was in them. And then after nearly an hour she saw a car, far enough behind them to be tailing the truck. The truck was so slow the car should have overtaken them, but it hung there, emerging then disappearing, as the fog rolled across the hills. An hour later the truck she was in came to a crossroads high up in the Crimean peninsula.

The red truck stopped. She glanced back at the car. It had pulled over, just visible where the fog was closing on the road. She looked around for an escape, but she could only see less than a few hundred yards. The land absorbed the colourlessness of winter, but the rain had eased, leaving a dampness that hung in the air. The truck was going straight ahead across the road. Anna had told the driver she was going along the road to the left, that was the way to Vihogradovo. She climbed down and the woman sitting nearest the window opened it.

“Thank you,” Anna said.

“It’s another twenty-five kilometres,” the driver replied.

“How will you get to Vihogradovo?” one of the women asked.

“I’ll get a ride. If not, I’ll walk.”

The driver wasn’t going to offer her a ride.

“Good luck,” one of the women said and patted her arm through the open window. The truck pulled away and disappeared over a ridge and into the fog.

She stood alone at the crossroads and looked back. She saw the car pulling out onto the road behind her and watched it approaching slowly. The moment of truth. She saw now that there was only one person inside it. She had upset their plans, confused her pursuers. She waited by the road where it turned to the left on the way to Vihogradovo and the car turned, too, and began to approach. The man would have to make a decision, drive on by and risk losing her, or stop. If he didn’t kill her in the opening few seconds, it would be fatal for him. And she knew they wanted her alive. She was to be paraded at the Forest before her interrogation began. That they wanted her alive was now their biggest and most deadly weakness.

She put out her hand in the pretence of hitching a ride and the car hesitated. The man was there to watch her, she knew, not to come into contact with her. But then the car pulled over towards the verge and crawled the few yards to where she stood before it stopped. It was the man with the black hair that came over his collar. He wasn’t wearing the grey cap now, she saw it on the passenger seat. Through the window, she could see indecision in his eyes. He needed help, orders, this was beyond his knowledge. He didn’t want to act alone, or maybe he couldn’t. Her approaching him—that was not in the book—she was supposed to be running from him, leading him to her secret destination. There was no preparation for this. It seemed that it was suddenly too big for him. And then she saw in his eyes the possibility of personal glory, to be the officer who captured Anna Resnikov.

She opened the passenger door. “Sevastopol,” she said. “I’m going to Sevastopol.”

He stared at her and she saw confusion, then fear.

“Can I get in?”

He looked at her wide eyed, as if she were a bomb that was about to go off.

She got into the passenger seat. The other man’s gun that she’d taken was hard to draw in the confined space. She slid a knife down her arm invisibly from inside her jacket and into her left hand and, in the same movement, thrust it with the precision of a butcher under the man’s ribs, on the side of his body farthest away from her, where his heart was. Then she forced it upwards, driving the honed blade into the centre of his heart. He rocked back then forward violently. His fisted hand flailed at her and struck her hard in the face, drawing blood. But his life was already leaving him.

Anna withdrew the knife and climbed out of the car. She wiped her bloodied hand and the blade on the grass and put the knife back into her sleeve. She checked that the road was empty and then she hauled the dead body across the seat and out of the open door. She turned out the pockets of his coat: a wallet with an FSB identity card, another gun that she gratefully took, some money, and keys. She took the money. Then she dragged the body a few yards onto the grass and left it, deliberately visible from the road. She got back into the car, in the driver’s seat, put the car in gear, and pulled away.

She drove fast along the road until she saw a farm track a mile or so away and to the left. There were deep tyre marks on the track, from a tractor most likely, and she drove with the car’s wheels in the tyre tracks until she found a cutting in the hill to the side where she could conceal the car from the road. She pulled over into the cutting, double-checked that the car couldn’t be seen from the road, and closed the door. The man’s phone on the dashboard had started to ring. When they found the body, they would look for the car. Their first assumption would have to be that she was driving it towards Sevastopol. She opened the door and disabled the phone, flinging the batteries into a pool of water. Now they couldn’t locate the car from his phone.

As soon as she’d gotten clear of the car, she began to run, up towards a ridge that was slowly forming above her through the fog. She kept running, up through soggy grass meadows and into the hills that rose to the north. It was a long climb that finally took her over a high ridge and down into a valley on the other side. There was a village there, sufficiently far from the road they’d travelled along, away from any pursuit. And she knew they would look for the car first.

Just over an hour after she had been dropped at the crossroads by the truck, she entered the single street of the village. There was a store, a service station with a single pump, some bedraggled scavenging dogs that combed the gutters and doorways. But she saw few people. She entered the service station and inside found a boy, fourteen or fifteen years old, she guessed. She asked him how far it was to Sevastopol.

“Four or five hours if you’ve got a decent car. There’s no bus from here.”

“I need a ride. I’ll pay.”

The boy shouted into the back and a man she took to be his father emerged. He wore oily overalls and looked like he’d been fixing a car. He had a bad-tempered expression and said something abrupt to the boy. The boy repeated her request to him, then disappeared into the back, and the man stared at her.

“I can give you a hundred dollars,” Anna said in Ukrainian. “My grandmother is sick.”

“How did you get here?”

“Friends brought me this far.”

The man looked at the mud on her trousers and at her wet hiking boots. “Make it a hundred and fifty,” he replied too quickly.

Half an hour later, and having paid in advance, she was on a small rural road that would take them eventually to Sevastopol. The man drove fast and in silence, as if he was unwilling to earn the money, or just disapproved of being paid by a woman.

After driving for nearly five hours, the city of Sevastopol lay in cloud below them. Mountains soared to the north and east. The great natural harbour, gouging eight kilometres into the land, was once the Soviet navy’s warm-water port. Now it was the naval base for the Russian Black Sea fleet that shared the facilities with their Ukrainian naval counterpart. She saw ships at anchor out in the sea lanes and in the near harbour itself. Other naval vessels were up against the quays or in dry dock. The two nations now shared the port with an ill grace that was growing by the month into something uglier.

The drop was outside the city, just beyond the outer limits, a barn in some unfenced fields that climbed the