Once on the track she walked with a false determination up the hill until she reached the shed she’d been told about. She was pale with fear now. The shed was some way behind the houses, far enough away for it not to be seen. As she pulled open a broken wooden door, she saw she was about a hundred yards below the copse of trees. Everything was exactly as it should have been. She entered the shed and, trembling, she quickly took off her coat, fumbling the buttons in her haste, then opened the leather case. She removed the sealed bag of fertiliser and some old agricultural clothes stuffed in around it. She placed her pink coat and black fur hat to one side and put the farm clothes over the clothes she wore. Then she screwed up the pink coat and put it and the hat into the leather case and tucked it behind a pile of broken boxes that looked like they’d been there for years. “The shed isn’t used anymore”—the words from her briefing repeated themselves in her head, but her head was also a jangle of the other things there and suddenly she hated the gun she was carrying.
But Masha was now glad of her orders. They were suddenly the only thing that kept her focused. They were imprinted in her memory and she ran through them again as if they were her friendly companions and a talisman against failure. “Lose the leather case in the shed, change into the clothes, then head up the hill. Once you are at the top of the hill, first leave the plastic fertiliser bag in a safe place, half a mile or so before you reach the drop. The barn. That’s when you reconnoitre the barn itself. In that way, if you’re intercepted—God forbid—if anything does go wrong at the barn, you won’t have anything compromising in your possession. Then, when you’ve seen that all is well at the barn, return with the fertiliser bag.” The drop-off was a niche in the wall inside the barn, under the third beam from the rear, on the right-hand side. She felt the heat of fear, rising towards panic.
Masha left the shed and took a circular route through the fields behind the houses, taking her away from the drop at first, then she followed the curve of her own circle, past the copse, until she came up behind and above the barn, a little over half a mile from it. By now the sky was dark and night had come. She looked at the time that glowed on a cheap watch on her wrist. It read 6:35 P.M.
She removed the small bag of garden fertiliser from inside her tattered work coat. Then she looked for somewhere high off the ground, above the sight line of the humans or dogs who might look for it. That was the procedure, leave it up high. Perhaps she could quell the fear by concentrating on procedure.
There wasn’t much she could see in this bare hill landscape. But standing against the skyline a hundred yards away to her right and at the same height as where she stood on the hill, she saw a lone tree, its branches bent and gnarled by the wind. She walked towards it and saw a crook in the trunk ten feet above her where four branches began their angular reach towards the sky. Climbing up onto a knot in the trunk, she could just reach the crook with her outstretched hand. Her hand trembled as she pushed the fertiliser bag into the crook. Then she climbed back down from the tree, returning to a spot directly above the barn. As she descended the hill, she suddenly felt cold, as if she had a fever. But this was it, she told herself. It was nearly over. She vowed she would resign as soon as she returned to Moscow. She couldn’t face something like this again. She thought about after the operation. Her mind focused on Taras and the club where they were meeting. She felt an overwhelming sense of love for her cousin. She would take the flight to Odessa from the Crimea’s capital, Simferol—just inland from Sevastopol—and meet with him, a day late perhaps, but soon she would be there.
When she was twenty yards from the barn, she stopped once and listened. She was completely exposed against the open hill but felt protected by the darkness. When she heard nothing she set off again, covering the remaining ground to the entrance of the barn in less than a minute.
There was only one tall, broken wooden door remaining in the arched stone wall of the barn. It creaked slowly in the wind. The other door was missing. It was just as her boss had told her. She entered the dark interior through the gap and, when her eyes had become accustomed to the almost pitch-blackness inside, she began to make out darker shapes against the feeble light of the night sky entering from a hole high up in the wall where a window had once been. She switched on a small torch with a fine narrow beam that shed no light to the sides. In the light of the torch, she picked out the edges of straw bales, a beaten mud floor, and cobwebs close to her. As she played the torch along a beam to the left, following the wall of the barn, she saw the third roof beam from the end. The beam of the torch came down to reveal the niche beneath it, itself a tangle of cobwebs and dust. All was well. It was time to leave and then return with the plastic fertiliser bag.
As she began to turn, there was a small bang, like an explosion, which she realised a second later was an engine suddenly bursting into life. She felt her heart thump violently and almost stop. Even without the shock it gave her, the sound of the engine was suddenly deafening in the small space that before had been so silent. And with the engine came a light, just a split second later. Standing in the centre of the barn she was suddenly illuminated by blinding washes of floodlights that must have come from arc lamps up on the roof beams. It was a generator, she thought dimly, the engine was a generator and the lights came on automatically with the generator. She was blinded, her senses confused. And then she heard a single voice.
“It’s not her,” a man shouted, and this was followed by a curse in Russian.
Masha followed orders. It seemed to take the men inside the barn completely by surprise. She drew the handgun from inside her jacket, pointed it towards her head, and pulled the trigger.
5
IN THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY that Anna Resnikov entered the country at Odessa’s port and Masha was crossing over from Russia, a meeting was taking place in the capital, Kiev. The four men and a woman sat around a smoked-glass table in a safe room at the American embassy on Mykoly Pymonenka Street. Being the night before the presidential election not everyone present was in an agreeable mood to have their time taken up with nonelection matters.
They were not diplomats or trade representatives or visiting senators and congressmen. In fact, all of them worked for the CIA station attached to the embassy, except for one of the men, Logan Halloran. And it was Logan —backed by the might of Cougar—who had summoned the CIA on this Saturday evening, not as one might expect, the other way around.
Sam MacLeod, the CIA station head, was the most senior figure at the table—at least officially—but orders from the CIA’s director in Virginia, Theo Lish, had requested—this was the careful word used—that MacLeod make every effort to accommodate Cougar’s wishes. Cougar “had something that needs conveying at once,” was the opaque way that Lish had put it to his station chief. In his usual, cunning way, Burt Miller had introduced a question in his meeting with Lish three days earlier that now hung in the air unanswered, but that Lish knew had to be investigated with the greatest of vigour.
A suave, close-shaved, and neatly tonsured man in his late fifties who wore impeccably cut pin-striped suits, MacLeod was visibly irritated before the meeting had even begun and his irritation stemmed from being summoned by, of all people, Logan Halloran. Simply put, he didn’t like Halloran and he didn’t intend to even look Halloran in the face, despite the fact that they were sitting directly across the table from each other.
Halloran himself was unmistakably MacLeod’s sartorial opposite. Despite Burt’s efforts to make him appear like the corporate figure he was, long, thick, light brown hair flowed erratically over Logan’s shoulders, and was perhaps not as clean as it could have been. He wore a crumpled, faded, pale green suit that had seen much better days and the collar of his shirt was open, with tufts of chest hair emerging from the neck—“like some eighties pop star,” MacLeod had witheringly told his second in command, Sandra Pasconi. On top of Logan’s insultingly dishevelled appearance, MacLeod couldn’t help noting, despite his determination not to engage in eye-to-eye contact with him, that Halloran had a deep tan in the middle of the Ukrainian winter. A fake tan was something that MacLeod, a traditionally down-to-earth Texan, found profoundly unmasculine. It didn’t occur to him that Halloran had been lying on a tropical beach only a week before. But either way, to Sam MacLeod, a man’s appearance was either respectful or the reverse—there was nothing in between—and to him Halloran demonstrated a casual approach that smacked of disrespect.
It wasn’t so much his physical appearance, however, that riled MacLeod the most, nor the gross inconvenience of it being a Saturday night and the fact that he was just on his way out to a preelection cocktail party. Nor was it that he should suddenly find himself at the beck and call of a private intelligence company—albeit one that commanded almost the same level of resources as the CIA itself. It was Logan Halloran’s past life that was topping the list of the affronts that irritated MacLeod this evening. Apart from his slovenly appearance, with an
