remove any colour from its occupant and render him a grey servant of the grey state. He flicked open the blinds to allow some low, winter light into the room and found an unwashed coffee cup on the bookshelf. Nothing is as it seems, he thought, but he didn’t know what made him think that or what the thought even meant.
He walked out of the office and down the corridor to the coffee machine. The dark brown liquid filled the cup, and he put two heaped spoons of sugar into it and stirred it with a dark-stained spoon. Then he returned to listen to the messages blinking on his internal phone. There were three messages, nothing on the outside line from Masha or anyone else, and all the messages turned out to have been left by Kuchin, the chief of counterintelligence, demanding that he come upstairs immediately.
Taras delayed. Before he went to see Kuchin, he wanted to run over what he’d discovered so far. Two days after the aborted meeting with Masha at the Golden Fleece—and once his hearing had begun to recover from the effects of the explosion—he’d put in a call to the airline Masha was taking from Simferol to Odessa. There’d been only one person left in the airline offices, despite the fact that it wasn’t even four o’clock in the afternoon. But he’d told the man who he was and there was a five-minute pause while the official checked with SBU headquarters. When he came back on the phone, he asked Taras for a code. When he was satisfied Taras was who he’d said he was, the man told him that Masha Shapko had been on none of the flights from Simferol to Odessa in the past five days. That was when Taras had begun to feel that something bad had happened. She hadn’t called him, she was off the map. Masha had disappeared.
Taras now picked up the phone, dialled Kuchin’s extension, and got his secretary. “Tell him I’m on my way,” he said. “He’s there?”
“He’s waiting for you,” she answered. Taras thought he heard an amused tone in Yelena’s voice, something he’d noted before and put down to a flirtatiousness on her part. Whether it was for him or for anyone Kuchin had it in for, he didn’t know.
Taras sat down and sipped the scalding coffee, which burned his mouth, until the urgency of Kuchin’s order overcame his need for caffeine. It wouldn’t do to take the coffee up to Kuchin’s office. So he burned his mouth some more before putting down the half-full cup. Then he left his office once again to take the lift this time, to the fifth floor.
He wasn’t kept waiting more than a minute in the room with Yelena, which was highly unusual—almost unprecedented, in fact—and, when he entered Kuchin’s office, he saw there were three other men in the room as well as Kuchin, who was sitting bolt upright behind a large desk with a Ukrainian flag on it. Behind him on the windowsill was a photograph of Viktor Yanukovich, the Kremlin’s choice for president.
“Sit down,” Kuchin said abruptly. “Where have you been?”
“It’s nine fifteen in the morning,” Taras replied. “I’ve been on my way to work.” He wondered why, if this was so urgent, they hadn’t called him on his mobile.
Kuchin unfolded a piece of paper and then dropped it on top of another sheet as if to hide it from Taras’s eyes.
“What were you doing on Saturday night?” Kuchin demanded without preamble.
“Several things,” Taras replied.
Kuchin’s eyes flared for a moment then settled into an expression of dull antagonism. “Between seven fifteen and ten thirty in the evening,” he said.
“I was in a club in Odessa,” Taras replied. “A bomb went off.”
“Why?”
No sympathetic concern, Taras noted. It was simply a pedantic question. But Kuchin was never either subtle or sympathetic.
“I was drinking and waiting for someone,” he answered.
“Waiting for whom?” Kuchin said.
“My cousin.”
Kuchin looked at some notes. “Two days later you made a call to the airline offices at Simferol airport,” Kuchin said. “They checked with us here. The shift security told them what to ask you and what reply they should expect. Then you gave them the correct code for the day.”
Kuchin looked hard at him.
“Yes, that’s right,” Taras replied.
“You asked for travel details on one Masha Shapko, a Russian citizen.”
“My cousin, yes.”
Kuchin at last leaned back in his chair, as if he’d had a steel rod removed from his spine, and an exhalation of air seemed to empty his chest. It appeared that he’d been holding his breath all this time.
“Your cousin…?” he said. It was something they didn’t know, Taras realised.
“Yes, she’s my cousin. She’s supposed to be visiting me. I was meeting her at the Golden Fleece. But she didn’t turn up and she still hasn’t turned up.”
“Yet she was in Sevastopol.”
“That’s right. Then taking the Simferol flight to Odessa.”
“Why?”
“She’d decided to go to the country outside Sevastopol before coming to Odessa. My family has a house down there,” Taras replied.
“So she was visiting your family.”
“My father’s dead,” Taras replied, “as you know. Masha wanted to see the house. There’s no one there right now. It’s a summer house.”
“So then why was she going there?”
“She wanted to go and see it for old times’ sake before coming to Odessa to meet me.”
“Why?” Kuchin said.
“She used to holiday there with us in summer. Fond memories of childhood. Maybe she just wanted a holiday, too.”
Taras recalled the first time he had met Masha, his mother’s sister’s daughter. He’d liked her from the moment they’d met the summer after his father’s death. He’d been more like an uncle to her than a cousin. His little cousin from Moscow, twelve years younger than he was, had been fun to have around. After that first holiday she’d come every summer to get away from the heat of Moscow and spend a few weeks by the sea. Her mother had married a Ukrainian, Boris Shapko. Shapko had been stationed in Kiev with the KGB, but their home was always in Moscow and he had become a naturalised Russian back in the 1980s. Masha’s father, Boris, was now a firm Russian nationalist, a loud supporter of Putin’s United Party, and a member of the Duma, the lower Russian parliament. Masha’s father—like the whole male side of the family, it seemed—was rooted in the intelligence world. And like others who originally came from the Soviet republics, Boris Shapko had become more Russian than the Russians, perhaps to prove his loyalty. Boris believed that Ukraine itself was part of Holy Russia and not an independent country at all.
“A holiday?” Kuchin said, interrupting his thoughts. “In January?”
“It’s the only time she was free. She’s working now, in Moscow.”
“Yes, we know what she does.”
“Her father is a KGB officer and a member of the Russian Duma,” Taras said openly. “And she’s also worked in the security services in Moscow for the past two years.”
Taras wanted another cigarette. He now looked at the other men in the room for the first time. Kuchin’s intense questioning had kept him focused on his boss. Two of them looked like internal security people. Grim faced, single-minded, unspontaneous. They were professionally humourless men, whether they were in here “guarding the state” or swinging naked from chandeliers, he imagined. “I’m still trying to track her down,” Taras said. “Has something happened to her?”
“Yes,” Kuchin replied. “Something has happened to her.” But he wasn’t going to say anything that might alleviate Taras’s concern.
“Why else would your cousin go to Sevastopol?” one of the internal security monkeys snapped at him.
“That’s the only reason I know of,” Taras replied. “She loves the place and she particularly loves our house there. The first time she went there she was twelve years old and she’d never seen the sea. It has a kind of magic for her, I guess.”
“She’s gotten herself into trouble,” Kuchin said mysteriously.
