hills fringing the town. Anna told the driver to leave her just over a mile, she guessed, past the track that led up to the barn. By the time he dropped her she was nearer the centre of town than the barn. She would walk back once the man had gone.
He turned the van around without a word of good-bye and headed back in the direction from which they’d come. Once he’d disappeared, Anna returned back up the road and walked fast until she found a break between a row of houses. This was the place. She walked behind the houses and, once she was through, she studied the approach to the barn. Then she walked up through the fields beyond the houses until she found a small copse of trees. It was a shelter of sorts, both from the weather and from unfriendly eyes. Later, for the approach, the fog higher up the hill would be good cover. And soon darkness would fall anyway. She decided she would wait until then.
4
MASHA SHAPKO EXITED from Sevastopol’s rail terminus and followed orders. First she took a taxi into the centre of town. She carried a battered black leather bag with its colour fraying down to the bare leather where it had been bent from use and she wore a thick-padded pink coat that had faded with age and Moscow’s harsh weather. On her head she had a black rabbit-fur hat. She was dressed in clothes which had been appropriate for her departure from Moscow two days before. It had been twenty degrees below zero when she’d boarded the train at the Kursky railway station.
Next, she was to catch a bus towards the western end of town then walk a few miles until she reached the outskirts of the town. But on the way to the drop, her boss had told her, find the time to stop, to look, to watch. So when the taxi dropped her off on the central boulevard, she stopped at shop windows as she strolled towards the heart of the town. First she entered a secondhand clothing shop, then she bought a coffee at a cafe in the square and sat away from the window. And all the time she watched for any familiar face from the train or from Sevastopol’s rail station. Satisfied at last that she wasn’t being followed, she finally moved on to join a line for the local bus.
She was late—nearly a day late, in fact. The train had been held up for twenty-four hours as it entered the turbulent regions of the south, where separatists were detonating bombs with regularity. “A terrorist threat” was the announcement on the train and they’d stayed at a halt on the line and watched the OMON police and local FSB walking beside the tracks, then questioning people on the train. She’d been afraid they’d discover what she was carrying, but her papers were in order, her father was a prominent figure in Moscow’s KGB, and she, too, carried an FSB card of her own. They gave her only a cursory check. Four other passengers, without their papers in order, she assumed, had been handcuffed and removed from the train.
Her orders were not to contact her boss under any circumstances. But she knew that the delay was cutting it very close. Whoever was making the pickup would be expecting to do so this evening, in a few hours’ time, in fact. She knew it was touch and go as to whether she would make it and, if she did, whether there would be a risk of crossing over with the person, her opposite number. But all she could do now was try, she supposed. Her orders hadn’t factored in a twenty-four-hour delay.
She had been well trained in various institutions of the KGB inside Moscow and outside at the Forest. She was still a rookie, certainly, but she’d completed all the basic training required to enter the lowest-ranking echelon of officer recruits from two years before when she’d passed into the intelligence agency with flying colours. She had been top of the class, in fact. After she’d finished school, she’d been educated at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, intending to become a manager at the national electricity grid. But then, while she was looking at the options, she had been approached by a friend of her KGB father to make an application to join Russia’s security services. She was inducted into the FSB after eighteen months of training.
At just over twenty-four years old, she had married a fellow officer recruit two months before. This was her first solo operation and she was proud to be serving her country, without having any idea of what it was she was doing. She had been given no indication of what was concealed in her bag.
She had a small, delicately pretty face with fine features and grey-blue eyes with the depth and intensity of deep ice pools; so her new husband had told her. They were eyes like an Arctic animal’s, he’d said, and she assumed the description was one of admiration.
She’d been chosen for this mission, her boss Volkov informed her, for several reasons. One important factor for her cover was that she had family in Ukraine. The family owned a farmhouse outside Sevastopol and that’s where the barn was located. It was cover of sorts. And so the ostensible reason for her trip was established as a visit to a cousin, Taras. Though he lived in Kiev, it had been arranged that she would actually meet Taras at a club on Odessa’s waterfront by the name of the Golden Fleece. The reason she was going south, to the Crimea, rather than straight to Kiev, she’d worked out with her boss after she’d told him about Taras’s family’s farmhouse. Her cover would be that she was first of all visiting the place of her childhood holidays when she’d stayed with Taras’s family outside Sevastopol. Taras’s father had bought the farmhouse there as a holiday place, in the 1990s, after some post-Soviet business deal. So the trip to the Crimea was to be a detour of fond nostalgia before heading to Odessa and spending a few days with her cousin.
But there were reasons other than the convenience of the farmhouse for her being picked for the mission. Her boss had also lavished praise on her as an up and coming intelligence officer of a new generation whose rise was guaranteed, he said, not just because of her family connections in the security services, but also due to her own skills and intelligence. Her performance to date had been favourably noted, and Volkov flattered her enough so that she didn’t question that she’d been chosen. “Promotion”—that had been the word her boss had used finally to catch her with. And now, as she sat on the bus that crawled westwards out of the town, she knew she’d certainly like the money promotion would bring. “It’s an easy drop, straightforward,” her boss had told her. “Just the thing for your first assignment.” The drop was intended as a little help for “our friends in Ukraine,” he’d said. These “friends” were Russian patriots like her and though, technically, they were of Ukrainian nationality, they shared hers and Moscow’s interests. These “patriots” saw no difference between Russia and Ukraine, he’d said, and rightly wished to return the country to Mother Russia. The Kremlin would know of her mission, her boss finished with a flourish of patriotic fervour. Her mission would therefore be a small feather in her cap, but a feather nevertheless. And Masha had ended up feeling proud to be chosen out of her whole graduating class and to be doing something for the new motherland.
But no operation is ever without risk, her boss had added. She had been issued a gun, a GSh-18 military pistol, the latest one the GRU, the military intelligence people, used. Just a normal precaution, he’d said, but whatever happens, you will avoid being taken alive, he told her gravely. In those circumstances we’d kill you quickly if we could, but they’ll take a lot longer, he’d added grimly. They’ll want information and they’ll never believe you don’t know more. That was the nature of torture, he’d said, and it had frightened her, as he’d intended it to.
She felt the gun in the pocket of her coat now. So the gun was only there to use on herself.
The city bus crawled up from the central square, stopping regularly. Mostly there were people getting off. Fewer and fewer boarded as they got closer to the end of the line. Masha held the leather bag close to her, on her lap. She had no idea what it contained, only that a thick, sealed plastic envelope was buried in a small, sealed plastic bag of garden fertiliser inside the case. It was to be left in a barn, so that made sense.
When the bus reached her stop, the end of the line, she was the only passenger left. Masha alighted and walked for half a mile. Then she saw the road she was to take, to the right and twenty yards ahead. It turned up a steepening rise in the hillside away from the main road. She followed her orders to the letter. It led up past a row of houses and then turned into a track that wound away into deserted countryside. The fog seemed to have crept lower, or maybe it was simply that she’d come up higher, but it didn’t matter. Darkness had almost arrived.
Masha suddenly felt afraid now. The excitement of her mission evaporated as darkness fell. She thought about her husband and their small apartment off Gruzhinskaya Bolshaya. She began to feel that she wasn’t up to even a task as small as this. She felt panic rising inside her. And a regret that she’d ever imagined she was suitable material for an intelligence officer. She wanted to get it over with, then reassess her whole life. She wanted to be someone small, insignificant, and she wondered what on earth had gotten into her to make her believe she was fit to face danger. But she forced herself on, the shame of failure greater than the fear.
