now, somewhere out there in the water. They were slowly surrounding her position.
When the men had formed almost a complete circle around her she realised that now their firing line went directly through her and towards each other. In any exchange of fire they would be firing at each other as well as at her. It was a brief moment of advantage, perhaps the only one she would get. Her other advantage was that they didn’t know what was happening and, if there was a trap laid for them, how many opponents they had. But now she also saw a way to confuse them.
Making no noise, she put a round into the barrel and fired a single shot into the water where she believed some of the others to be. She then fired in the opposite direction, up the hill, a direct shot that entered the cheek of one of the crawling men and came out through the back of his skull.
She unscrewed the silencer and now fired two more rounds at the water and the hill. The sudden explosion of noise without the silencer blew apart any pretence of her position. She thrust the gun and one grenade into the waterproof pack. Then she lobbed the second grenade towards the water, waited for the explosion, then slid off the bank like a snake and disappeared under the freezing surface.
Despite their training, the men reacted with an instant display of fire that they swiftly realised was dangerously close to becoming a firefight between the two groups. The guns went silent almost immediately. In the distance, over by the Ukrainian border posts, a searchlight came on and panned across the sky.
Anna swam under the water and bumped a half-submerged body above her. She kept swimming until she felt the bottom of the first craft. She felt her way underneath it and came up for air behind the second craft. The men were all behind her now, she supposed. But whatever happened in the next minute or two, she knew that the remainder of the men would, at some point, return to their cache of smuggled goods. She retreated behind the cover of the second craft, and then realised her muscles were seizing from the icy water.
She didn’t know how long she could survive in the water. Her body was becoming completely numb. Soon her muscles would be useless. Most worryingly, her hands were almost frozen now and her finger wouldn’t be able to clamp around the trigger. She had to get out of the water to stand a chance of survival.
She broke away from the craft and swam into another bank of reeds behind it. She could barely move her arms and legs. She crawled into the reeds, found the bank jutting out inside them, and dragged herself onto it. She began to rub her arms and legs. It took five minutes for any feeling to return, and still none of the men had returned.
She took the binoculars and found a gap in the reeds where she could get a view up to the wood. The cart was still there, the horse harnessed to it. There was no sign of the men. She wondered how many she had killed in the water with the grenade and what their fallback position would be. There were, she thought, still three men out there somewhere, but no more. She also wondered how long it would take for a border patrol, alerted by the firing and the explosion, to reach the remote spot. At that moment she saw twin headlights approaching from maybe a mile away, then another pair, and another.
She crawled into the water towards the craft again. With the knife, she cut away the straps that bound the boxes from one of them. She picked up one box. It was heavy, the contents packed tightly. But it fit in her pack. She was sure now that the men who were left alive wouldn’t risk returning to the craft, not with the patrol approaching. They would have another means of escape.
As the lights approached from far away, she began to crawl up the hill to the shelter of the wood. She would have very little time before her now-exposed figure would be picked up, either by any of the smugglers who remained or by the fast approaching patrol itself. She stood and began to run. A shot fizzed into the earth behind her. Then another. It wasn’t coming from the border patrol vehicles, but from somewhere behind her. She reached the wood and continued running in pitch-blackness as the lights of the patrol swung towards the lake and picked out the two craft beached in the reed bank.
12
TWO DAYS AFTER THE FIRST ROUND of the elections, at just before nine o’clock on the Tuesday morning, Taras walked down the short street that led to the SBU offices. They were contained in a large building, described as “the Annex,” which was a short walk from the much smaller building in Volodymyrska Street that was the public face of the SBU. He hesitated, then stopped at the outside gate to exchange comments and a cigarette with the guards about the two remaining presidential candidates who would run against each other in three weeks’ time.
“So it’s between Yanukovich and Timoshenko,” Taras grunted, inhaling the smoke from a Ukrainian-made Marlboro.
“And Yanukovich will win,” one of the guards said—with a sense of triumph, Taras thought.
“You think so?” Taras drew heavily on the cigarette to avoid reacting angrily and swept his eyes around the yard inside the gate, anywhere to avoid literally facing the opinions of the guard.
“Of course he will. He should have been president six years ago,” the guard continued. “If it hadn’t been stolen by the revolutionaries.”
The second guard was silent, Taras noted. Like Taras, he was avoiding comment. It seemed that those who supported the Moscow-backed candidate talked openly about victory, while the democrats inside the security service were embarrassed to express an opinion, including himself, he was forced to admit. He ground out the cigarette under the toe of his shoe and bid them good morning.
Though he worked for the SBU Taras liked to think he was unlike either his father or his uncle Boris in Moscow, and he was in most ways correct to think so. Despite the failures of the past six years, despite the forgotten promise of the Orange Revolution, he believed in a new, independent Ukraine, tied in with Western Europe and NATO, speaking its own language instead of Russian, and able, at last, to stand on its own feet after centuries of Russian rule. But his intelligence family here at the SBU didn’t all share these views. Even within some Ukrainian families the country’s right to be independent from Russia was disputed. And so he kept his nationalist feelings from all but a very few close friends at the SBU headquarters who, like himself, believed in Ukraine for itself and not for the Kremlin.
Taras passed through the internal security screens, and was patted down—unusually—by a heavily armed soldier. Then he entered the building and walked past some worn wooden reception desks into a long corridor lined on the ceiling with an unbroken line of strip lights and on the floor with worn brown and yellowish linoleum the colour of ancient nicotine stains. In general, the building had a colourless air about it, as if all of nature—and all joy—had been sucked out of it completely. He almost felt an approaching pallor wash over his face to match the surroundings.
But he was too worried this morning to give the surroundings his usual feelings of contempt and headed straight to his office on the third floor. His cousin Masha had evidently disappeared. There was no other conclusion. He’d heard no word from her since her planned arrival on Saturday evening—and that was nearly three days ago now.
Walking down several corridors towards the stairs at the rear of the building, he greeted one or two colleagues, and finally turned left at a T junction in the warren of passageways. Then he walked another thirty yards on more faded and broken yellow linoleum before reaching the broad well of stone stairs. He wanted movement rather than taking the lift. As he walked up the steps two at a time, he deliberately stretched the muscles in his legs as if it were a training exercise. He noted the grey walls, the bland cheap paint chipping here and there, and thought that the spy buildings were like hospitals. Perhaps the difference was simply that their aim was to anaesthetise the truth and operate on the soul rather than the body; the spy buildings existed to fix the ills of the body politic. But to whose advantage?
He entered his office with a spring in his step that came from a decision to find Masha. And he would do what his usual decorum usually prevented him from doing in personal matters; he would use his position and all the resources at his disposal that his position gave him. He refused to allow the familiar grey of the room to dishearten him: dusty paper blinds on the windows; a plain desk and a chair, another wooden chair for visitors that looked like it had come from a car boot; a shelf of books—manuals and regulations; a shabby lamp and the ubiquitous strip lights in the ceiling. It was more like a cell than an office, he thought. There was just the bare minimum—enough to
