8

A FEW HOURS BEFORE Taras Tur entered the Golden Fleece nightclub—and at roughly the same time that Anna was making her escape from the field behind Sevastopol and Logan was holding his meeting at the American embassy—Laszlo Lepietre stepped out of the French embassy at number 39 rue Reterska in the country’s capital, Kiev. An embassy car that had been waiting inside the gates for an hour was now idling its engine a hundred yards from the building’s entrance. Those had been the driver’s orders.

As he walked towards the black Citroen, Laszlo watched for any interest that his exit might have aroused from watchers on either side of the street. But this was only from habit. He didn’t expect to attract much attention from the Ukrainian secret services on the night before the first round of the presidential elections. But he watched in any case and he knew his backups would be sweeping the pavements behind and ahead of him and checking for any vehicles that might follow the Citroen. The watchers had been trebled for his exit from the embassy. For whatever happened this evening, he couldn’t afford to be followed.

Thomas Plismy, the head of the Russian desk in Paris, at the French foreign intelligence service, or DGSE, had insisted—after an unusually swift analysis, Laszlo thought—that this evening’s meeting was a genuine dangle, not a hoax. Having been dragged over the coals the year before for losing a valuable KGB colonel—and a beautiful female one at that—who was under French protection and on French soil, Plismy was now looking for something juicy to boost his damaged reputation.

Laszlo walked outside the embassy’s wall with a light, boxer’s step, the emphasis on the balls of the feet. A blustery wind now blew the beginnings of a sleet shower directly down Reterska Street and into his face.

At forty-one years of age, he kept a trim figure, and made sure its shape was well advertised to the rest of the world. The hard muscle tones of his medium-height body were accentuated by a cashmere coat over a tight- fitting dark suit, with a white silk scarf draped artfully low around his neck. Even the careful haircut that swept his thick blond hair in a mop to one side seemed to exist only in order to show off the lean, carved face, with its well- oiled and spa-pampered skin. His hands were recently manicured and his clear blue eyes, with their curiously expressionless gaze that bordered on the defensive, seemed to have some neutralising gauze stretched over them. His was a deadening expression, as though any hint of character or personality might upset the physical impression Laszlo wished above all else to convey.

To achieve this physical fitness that was, incidentally, beyond the call of duty, Laszlo spent his spare time climbing mountains, riding in cycle races, skiing, and sailing a catamaran off the coast of Brittany. In Kiev he’d had to make do with an expensive gym. To achieve his tough but well-looked-after appearance, some colleagues suggested, required a narcissism of quite exceptional dedication.

With a final look up ahead of the Citroen to check for other parked cars, Laszlo stepped into the rear seat. The retired sous-lieutenant from French special forces who was his chauffeur for the evening pulled out into a steady stream of traffic that was headed out for a Saturday night’s entertainment in the clubs and bars of Kiev. It would be a preelection binge, Laszlo thought with slight disgust, a brain-numbing drink fest designed to lay to rest the disappointing inadequacy, the lack of achievement in the six years since the Orange Revolution of 2004—and prepare the way for a hoped-for change. Drink to forget the past, that would be it. And drink to welcome the future. The king is dead, long live the king. Whoever won the election, at least there would be change, even if it only meant a few more names added to the list of corrupt Ukrainian industrialists on the new government’s books.

As the car threaded its way towards Independence Square, Laszlo wondered how his new posting to Kiev might affect his career, the only aspect of life that he devoted as much attention to as his appearance. Perhaps it would depend on the meeting tonight, he thought. Precious little else had happened since his posting to Kiev that could offer him a moment of glory. Until six months before, when he’d been posted to Ukraine, he had spent five years stationed in Moscow. There, he had made many lasting contacts who were now interested in his new posting—Russians, both buzinessmen and KGB officers to whom, unlike the Americans, the French had left an open door of communication.

Laszlo was, principally, a Russophile, like his boss Plismy. And Russia was the biggest game in town if you were in the east of Europe. On top of that the French had special interests in Russia that predated even Napoleon’s disastrous defeat in 1812. Russia and France were natural allies, and always had been, despite the embarrassment of that distant invasion. Laszlo believed that France and Russia had a special relationship that would bear fruit now in the twenty-first century. France’s energy companies were making great headway in the allocation of contracts by the Kremlin and the Russians were favouring them over the British, let alone the Americans.

But before that, before his posting in Moscow, Laszlo had been stationed at the Outre Mer—Overseas Department—of the French Republic’s former colony of Guadeloupe. And it was there that in his twenties, as a young, ambitious, and comfortably amoral intelligence officer, he had learned the merits of election fixing. That experience, he thought as the car turned left over the Dnieper River, had served him well in Putin’s Russia and—as he fully expected—it would serve him well as the world watched the unfolding of events in Ukraine in the following three weeks, first in tomorrow’s elections and in the final runoff between the two leading candidates, at the end of which the final victor would be revealed.

For a moment, a slight sneer marred Laszlo’s otherwise blandly smooth countenance with its strange, unwelcoming eyes. The Americans and the British would be out in force tomorrow—as well as in the final vote in three weeks’ time—to ensure that the elections in Ukraine were free and fair. The Anglo-Saxons were always there to impose their hypocritical conditions, he thought. As if the American elections were free and fair! But as Laszlo knew, whichever way the Ukrainian elections were viewed in the outside world by the West’s electoral observers, behind the scenes the corruption and fixing would be of the usual gigantic proportions. And that was why this meeting tonight intrigued him. He was hoping that it would be an insight into what was really going on in and outside Ukraine to influence the elections.

“Take a couple of turns,” he said to the driver. He spoke little and when he did his voice was flat. The sous- lieutenant obediently went twice round Independence Square.

Laszlo had been many things in the past eighteen years besides an intelligence officer: soldier, journalist, trade representative, election observer, though all the time the underlying reasons for these diversions was his job as a DGSE intelligence officer. But he seemed to have no friends from his previous incarnations. He was unmarried. Ambition seemed to be absent from his considerations. Tonight he felt that here was the moment he’d been waiting for, an opportunity for advancement. Like his boss Plismy, he sensed that he was close to something crucial, to something that would, ultimately, bring him the power that all his patience, self-control, and disinterest in other human beings had prepared him for.

The driver finally turned the Citroen away from the square and it made its way smoothly, though by a roundabout route, towards the Theatre of Russian Drama, not far from Kreschatik. They crossed the Dnieper River twice more, turned around in a U once, stopped to buy a magazine from a kiosk by St. Sophia’s Cathedral, and stalled deliberately at a crossroads farther up the street, holding up angry drivers who flattened their hands to their car horns. And on each occasion, driver and passenger observed the similarities and differences in the street landscape without forming the conclusion that they were being tailed.

Finally, the Citroen pulled up outside the theatre. Laszlo stepped out of the car without a word to his driver. He entered the theatre, checked his coat, bought a ticket for Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, and then entered the auditorium. He saw the two fire exits on either side near the stage and passed down on the right side to a fire door that led to a side street. He took no notice of the young usherette who asked him where he was going. Within a minute of walking out of the theatre, he’d checked all the possibilities and concluded he was on his own.

He walked briskly, not least because of the cold. Though prepared for walking with no coat—he wore a silk thermal vest under his suit—January was not a month for an evening stroll through Kiev’s streets. First he retraced part of the Citroen’s route back in the direction of Independence Square. The billboards he passed in the capital’s streets were dominated by election themes and by the eighteen candidates for the opening round of the next day’s elections. Sixteen of them would be gone by tomorrow night and, with them, their investment. There were only two candidates who had a chance of passing into the last round.

The city had slowly filled with foreign election observers in the previous days but, unlike in the heady period of the Orange Revolution six years before, the signs of electoral interest from actual Ukrainians on the streets was

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