“That sounds like Masha,” Taras replied, deliberately avoiding an overreaction to Kuchin’s insinuating tone of voice. “What sort of trouble?” he enquired. The third man was Ukrainian special forces, he was certain of that now, and the other two were in civilian clothes. Undoubtedly internal security people. Spies who watched the spies. He wondered who watched them, and who watched the people who watched them. No level of paranoia would be too great, of that he was sure.
“Why was she carrying a gun?” Kuchin said. “If she was going on holiday.”
So. They knew her whereabouts. Perhaps they were holding her. “I’ve no idea,” he replied. “Maybe she carries one because she’s allowed to.”
“It’s the latest GRU pistol.”
“Well, she works for Russian intelligence. Why do any of us carry guns?”
“We don’t take them across the border into Russia without notifying the authorities.”
“I can’t help you, Colonel,” Taras answered. “All I know is that she was coming to Odessa after she’d visited our place in Sevastopol. Where is she now?”
Kuchin paused, for a moment disoriented by being asked a direct question himself. He turned to the man in Ukrainian special forces who was sitting closest to the desk.
“Lieutenant-colonel Babich,” he said, “tell Tur what you know.”
Babich put his arms on the desk and looked at Taras with the neutral expression of someone who has been brought in to a situation he doesn’t like.
“We picked up information that a team of Russian soldiers, who we now know were from the FSB and special forces, were heading out of the city. Sevastopol, that is. It was suspicious because they hadn’t notified us as they should have. That’s the agreement we have with the Russians. So we put a tail on them and when we saw where they’d regrouped, we sent our own team, of which I was the leader. There was an uncomfortable standoff at a barn outside the city. They were very tense, threatening. So we called up reinforcements and eventually they backed down. It was a close thing. Then we saw they were holding someone. This Shapko. Your cousin, apparently.”
“Check it,” Taras said angrily, and then regretted his outburst. But Babich ignored him.
“She was in the back of one of their trucks,” Babich continued smoothly. “We demanded they hand her over. They said she was a Russian citizen and we told them they were in Ukrainian jurisdiction on Ukrainian territory and had no rights outside the militarised zone around Sevastopol harbour. When our reinforcements arrived, we effectively forced them to hand her over. She’d apparently tried to shoot herself, but we don’t know for sure. She hadn’t made much of a job of it. The bullet had gone through her cheek and smashed her jaw before exiting fairly harmlessly. She was alive, in any case,” he said harshly. “But much longer, and she might have been dead from loss of blood.”
Taras stared back at Babich.
“What makes you think it was her who’d fired the shot?” he said eventually.
“The Russians told us she had. But, to be honest, that’s what it looked like. Not a good attempt.”
“Where is she?” Taras asked.
“She’s in hospital. She’s stabilised.”
“In Sevastopol.”
“Yes.”
Taras suddenly liked Babich. He was just telling what he knew.
“So that’s why you didn’t meet your cousin,” Kuchin said. “She was involved in something other than a nostalgic visit to your family house.”
“Is she conscious?” Taras asked, but to Babich.
“In and out, when I last saw her.”
“The question is,” Kuchin said impatiently, “what was she doing attracting the attention of Russian special forces? We have to work with them. We don’t like going up against them like this. It causes trouble at the highest levels.” He looked angrily at Babich.
Babich didn’t comment.
“Do we know it was her who was attracting their attention?” Once more Taras looked at Babich. “Maybe she just got caught up in something. If all this happened at the farm.”
“That’s a good point,” Babich said reasonably. “One of the Russians made a slip, perhaps. He told me, ‘It wasn’t her.’ I’m certain he meant they were expecting someone else.”
“But why did she try to shoot herself if she was innocent?” Kuchin snapped, evidently either disagreeing with this interpretation or merely wanting things to be neat, tidied up and off his desk. “She was involved,” he added.
“Maybe,” Babich conceded. Kuchin glared at him for his lack of full support.
13
JANUARY 22
COALITION INTEROPERABILITY” WAS NOT an expression that Adrian Carew was likely to find anything other than blindly stupid. It was American, of course, he told himself. The multilingual NATO intelligence committee conducted its business in American—or an “international” version of English, as they called it—and that didn’t help his mood. But in his view this sort of jargon was generally typical of the way the English language had become so hopelessly mauled that it was now being used either to cosh the listener senseless, or to obfuscate a situation to the point of meaninglessness. Incomprehensible language had become a substitute for clarity, and in Adrian’s opinion a lack of intelligent decision making was bound to follow. But worst of all, the language bored Adrian in the same way that reading the excruciatingly translated instructions on a Chinese-made vacuum cleaner might have done.
“Do you mean ‘working together’?” he interrupted and his lips tightened as if they were gripping a straw. He had a sudden notion that, as head of the British intelligence service, good English usage—or any other damn language for that matter—was the prerequisite for good international relations.
Most of the other figures around the large, perfectly oval, polished cherrywood table—it had reportedly cost over fifty thousand euros—looked at him as if it were he who had just uttered sounds in some as yet undiscovered language. Osvald Kruger, the head of the BND, Germany’s spy agency, in particular looked like he was completely at home with “Coalition Interoperability.” It was simply the norm. It was international English, his raised eyebrows seemed to say—at least they seemed to say so to Adrian. There was an uncomfortable pause.
“It’s not, actually, exactly the same thing, Adrian,” the CIA head Theo Lish said at last in a patiently hushed voice, and then gave a little cough, either from a sense of linguistic superiority or simply from awkwardness. He had been drawing to the close of a complex exposition of the latest NATO strategy for combating cyberwarfare and had now lost his thread.
“I know it’s not
Lish now reddened in anger.
Only one of the thirty or so figures sitting around the table wasn’t remotely ruffled by this disturbance. And he announced himself to Adrian with his trademark loud guffaw from the opposite side of the table. Whether from the loudness of the laugh or from its diversionary opportunity, the small explosion afforded an exit from the momentary impasse Adrian had created. Burt Miller banged the table with his chubby pink hand as a sort of percussion accompaniment to his boom box laugh, and looked around the table with a twinkle of mirth in his eyes.
“The Brits never agree on the wording,” he announced to the assembled espionage chiefs with a broad grin on his face. “That’s the way they’ve lied their way around the world for five hundred years.”
This time it was Adrian who reddened. He looked across the table at Burt with a mixture of fury and concealed admiration that contorted his expression for a brief moment into something resembling a squashed cartoon.
