between the rocks and saw a tiny ledge. Below her and the ledge she saw the white crests of the waves rolling onto the beach. It looked like a sheer drop, but she edged out along the ledge and then saw that the lighter streak widened down below. There, ahead of her, she saw a snaking, sandy-looking area that might indicate a way. It seemed to wind past other rocks and stones and that was a good sign.
She crept ahead using the narrowest of footholds, in almost complete blindness. The sound of the waves was beating in time with the blood in her head. But once she’d reached the farthest point of the ledge she saw a step off it on to small stones where nothing grew. She looked down on to another almost sheer drop. Below her, another lighter-shaded and twisting shape of what seemed to be a path wound around the near-vertical cliff face. In the darkness it was like a loop that appeared and disappeared in oxbow curves. This must be it, she decided, but even a goat would have trouble traversing it.
She slid and climbed, mostly backwards and using her hands against the cliff face, for over an hour. She clutched the jagged edges of rocks when she felt herself going, until finally she stepped out onto a shingled beach. The salt smell of the sea hit her first and then the smell of seaweed and tar filled her nostrils. She slumped down on the pebbles, exhausted suddenly. Her heart was racing. She didn’t know how she’d made it.
Her watch said it was eighteen minutes after midnight. She wanted to sleep. She was hungry. But she put away her fear. Fear was the enemy. From a pocket in her jacket she withdrew a key-size plastic tool and flipped a switch. A tiny beam lit beyond the edge of the beach where the water broke. She flashed it three times in a south- southwesterly direction, then three times in a south-southeasterly direction. She repeated it twice more and sat down to wait. If the Russians or the Ukrainian coastal patrols were looking for her out there, they would see it, too. She was getting colder. And she wondered if she’d be able to get back up the track if Burt’s team didn’t come.
As she waited, she cast her mind back to the scene at the barn once again. There’d been the shot. She’d thought about that at first, wondered who had fired it, until she’d seen what followed. For before the Ukrainian jeeps had arrived and before she’d turned up the hill to escape the soldiers, she’d watched a body being carried from the barn, two soldiers, one holding the arms, the other the legs. She’d seen the courier’s long hair—a woman’s hair—hanging down and dragging along the earth. She’d looked like a dead deer being carried on a pole. It could only be that the woman had killed herself. They would certainly have wanted her alive. But she was certainly dead from the way they carried her like a hunted animal, and if she was dead, it meant the agent was safe. The courier had sacrificed herself to save the agent, even though she didn’t know it. Anna wondered if the Ukrainian officer had demanded to look inside the truck and what he would do when he saw the body of the courier.
As Anna sat, numb, and listened to the surf, she wondered for the first time about the courier; she’d been a young woman. Anna thought about her young life, her past, what the mission had meant to her. It seemed she’d been a novice from everything Anna had seen. Perhaps it was her first time. Anna felt a deep, wrenching sadness at the waste of life. And she wondered what it was the agent had told her to ensure that she’d kill herself: that this was a KGB operation, certainly; that it was for her country, for the new Russia—that would have been his message to disguise the truth. It was not for the courier to know that she was delivering material that might damage her country. The young woman undoubtedly believed she’d been delivering a package for her bosses in the KGB, not for a Western intelligence agency.
The agent had deceived her well—so well that she was dead by her own hand.
Unlike the detached, clinical thoughts she’d had about the two men she’d killed the previous day, Anna now felt a deep compassion for the young woman, duped by all sides, and a friend to no one. She’d been everybody’s fool. Something Finn had once said to her came to mind. “If there were no spies, there’d be no need for any spies.” It was true. The facet of espionage that troubled her most was that it existed entirely for itself and was self- fulfilling. Finn, too, had died for that, for the pursuit of an uncertain goal in a world of illusions.
The waves crawled up and back on the shingle beach with a monotonous regularity that began to make her sleepy again. There was hardly any moon, the sea was dark in the small bay and beyond. And then she saw it: an object darker than the water that nudged up against the shore at the corner of the cove where the wave motion was broken by an outcrop of rock that shielded it from the sea.
Anna kept to the top of the beach and crept slowly towards the object as it gingerly approached, until she saw the black prow of a rubber boat. There were three figures in it. One stepped over the side as it came in close and pulled the boat a little farther onto the shore, just to keep it from being dragged back, no more. Then a light flashed. A torch on the boat flickered twice, a pause, then three times and a pause, then twice again. Anna flashed the torch three times, then a break, then three times again, and repeated it. She was only thirty yards away now. It was them, she was sure of that. But she drew both the guns she had taken from the dead men and waited for a few seconds. With one gun aimed at the figure in the centre of the boat, and the other ready to fire in any direction necessary, she walked at an angle across the pebbles until she could see the men’s outlines clearly. They wore balaclavas. The man in the centre removed his and she recognised Larry. Nobody spoke.
As she reached the sea’s edge, Larry hauled her into the rubber boat. Then the two other men pushed the boat away from the shingle and it crept sluggishly away from the shore with muffled engines. Once they were clear of the shore they crossed the bay at speed and headed out to sea. Still, no words were spoken.
In just under an hour from the rendezvous the boat pulled up beside the rusting hull of a small Nigerian- registered freighter and a ladder was dropped. Anna went up first, feeling the package pressing into her chest as she climbed.
7
THE GOLDEN FLEECE NIGHTCLUB on Odessa’s waterfront was not a regular haunt of Taras Tur. In fact, no nightclub anywhere on the planet was even an irregular haunt of his. He wouldn’t have been here at all if it weren’t for his cousin Masha. It was her suggestion that they should meet here. That was supposed to have been yesterday evening. She was a day late—not at all an unlikely event for Masha—and so he’d decided to return here a second time in the hope that tonight she would arrive. Nevertheless, her nonappearance troubled him.
The choice of venue he put down to her youth. She was younger than he was by a decade and she still liked the nightclubs even now that she was married. As for him, even in his youth Taras had never enjoyed places like the Golden Fleece. He thought about this for a moment and decided that he simply didn’t
He looked at his watch again. It was nearly ten o’clock and she had said she’d be here by nine the evening before. Well, that was Masha. She’d told him by phone from Moscow a week ago that she would be in Odessa the previous afternoon. She was arriving from Russia the day before that—that would be two days ago—then making a brief and, he assumed, nostalgic visit to the farm outside Sevastopol. She should have taken the plane from Simferol to Odessa yesterday afternoon. It had all sounded quite organised for Masha, in fact. But she wasn’t answering her mobile, a whole day later, and the feeling of unease crept over him again.
Taras looked around at the dressed-up girls and women in the club and guessed that Masha was probably in some cheap hostel in the town, still choosing what to wear, putting on makeup—whatever young women like her did before going out for the night. And he felt a moment of fondness for his young cousin.
He took another sip of cold Czech beer and settled in again for the wait with his elbow on the bar. He didn’t intend that they would stay here if and when Masha arrived. He would steer her to a quiet bar behind the port where they could talk.
A stockily built, handsome man of thirty-five, Taras’s angular face reflected the sickly, pulsing shades of the club’s multicoloured lights. He’d worn street clothes rather than the gaudy outfits Odessa’s youth had dressed up in for their usual Saturday night of hedonism. His face, freckled in youth, had now absorbed the freckles into the background as he’d gotten older so that it was slightly darker than the rest of him, as if he spent a great deal of time in the open air. He had broad shoulders and a big frame that, on close inspection, was made up principally of hard muscles that came from the rigorous training of his job, and also from regular games of squash. He was the SBU squash champion. His expression—even outside situations like this one that he found a little strenuous—
