The Blind Spy

The car swung back down to the road and Larry took her to the small private airfield nearby where one of Burt’s smaller planes waited to take her to Washington.

16

APRIL 20

THE TERROR SHIP FORBURG left the port of Novorossiysk for the second time on the first of April,” the CIA chief explained. “We’ve found her.”

Lish nodded to one of his fresh-faced assistants from the Threat Matrix team, an extremely tall and close- cropped Harvard graduate and basketball player who looked like he might also do toothpaste commercials on the side, and who went by the name of Archie. Unnecessarily, to Burt’s mind at least, Archie indicated the port of Novorossiysk with a wooden cue, despite the fact that its name was marked in three-inch-high letters on the electronic map that took up half a wall. Perhaps a metal cue would have caused an electrical short circuit, Burt mused, and brought the whole bunker complex to a complete halt, leaving America defenceless.

The port of Novorossiysk was on the right-hand side of the back-projected electronic map on which red lights were blinking here and there to indicate something or other. On closer inspection, the flashing red dots now seemed to be ports on the Black Sea, as far as Burt could see, though due to the overall ponderousness of Theo’s explanation, his mind was wandering and he wasn’t willing to display a great deal of interest. He was already way ahead of Theo’s analysis, in fact, and knew roughly what was coming.

Otherwise on the map there were cream-coloured, glowing lines of light that appeared to track the ship’s movements out of Novorossiysk, and which extended slowly across the Black Sea as if driven solely by Theo’s explanation rather than the ship’s own engines. As Theo grew into his dissertation on the ship’s movements, Archie from Threat Matrix moved across in front of the map with his cue, like an agitated spider, as if he were directing armies into battle. It was too much empty excitement for Burt’s mind.

They were down several floors below ground level, in a well-appointed nuclear bomb–proof bunker at the CIA’s Threat Matrix centre at Harper’s Crossing, Virginia; Theo, Burt, and Adrian—the CIA, Cougar, and MI6—in that order. Theo Lish had made this order clear to Adrian in an unnecessary emphasis on the line of command that was guaranteed only to irritate Adrian’s sensibilities.

For his part, Adrian was still seething at having been asked to strip down to his underpants in order to enter this holy of holies in the first place. He, Adrian Carew, head of MI6, had been requested with much polite deference and many apologies by two armed, uniformed, and highly polished special forces soldiers to strip!

“But I’m head of the British Special Intelligence Service, for Christ’s sake!” Adrian had protested. “Your bloody boss has invited me here!”

But it was all “I’m sorry, sir,” “Regulations, sir,” “We all have to do it these days, I’m afraid,” and “It won’t take a minute, sir.” If this was how the Yanks treated their allies, no wonder the world was full of their enemies, Adrian had thought. And for a moment, Adrian wondered if Burt had been made to go through this ritualistic humiliation. He somehow doubted it and that only made him angrier.

The room was decked out with the sort of deep leather armchairs that induced a pleasant afternoon nap in old-fashioned libraries, but other than the leather chairs it flashed its high-tech purpose over everything else, including the other furnishings, which were all curved aluminium and glass. It was April 20, more than three months since the first departure of the Forburg had been noted by the agency’s Ukraine source whose head had wound up on a snowman and which still lay in a freezer drawer at Langley. And it was more than three months since the ship had disappeared.

Burt looked at the huge electronic chart and considered—not for the first time—that the whole setup at Harper’s Crossing was more like the world’s best computer game than real life, and that its abstract nature merely distanced those of them in the room—and anyone else, for that matter—from the actual events on the ground.

“But now she’s not called the Forburg,” Theo intoned with a triumphant note in his voice. “She’s called the Yekaterinburg.”

“How do you know it’s the same ship?” Burt asked, considering that asking the obvious question would help him to endure the tedious process.

“By a very complicated system of matching the lines of the original ship, which were taken from our satellite photos with the current apparition,” Theo replied. “It all then gets computerised and drawn up with an exactness of shape and size down to less than an inch. We’re certain.”

“And now she’s the Yekaterinburg,” Burt said, but only in order to nudge Theo on with the story.

“From there,” Lish continued, as if even he was now becoming bored by his own voice, “from there—from Novorossiysk—she headed west in a diagonal straight line across the Black Sea and docked at Istanbul four days later.”

The cream-coloured line dutifully tracked across the Black Sea. Archie focused the cue on the word “Istanbul” in three-inch-high letters, with its corresponding flashing red dot.

Adrian cleared his throat loudly. It’s like some early learning lesson for the educationally subnormal, he thought.

“The fifth of April, in other words,” Lish continued and now pointed—with an ever-increasing lack of necessity to Burt’s mind—at the huge chart then down onto a large polished wood table between them and the several paper charts and satellite pictures lying on it that were also being used to track the vessel’s progress. On the paper charts, now that Burt and Adrian looked, a thin red pencil line had been drawn to indicate the ship’s progress, as if the electronic map needed any backup, or might fail at any time.

But the photographs from America’s WorldView satellite indicated a ship and then a close-up of the name Yekaterinburg. Some of the pictures were so detailed Burt could make out a moustache on one of the crew members and a scar all the way down the left-hand side of the face of another.

Burt picked up a cue himself now, but with the grip on its handle of someone who was about to use it for breaking heads. He waved it dangerously. Adrian, he noticed, was tapping the wooden table irritably with the forefinger of his right hand.

A British foreign secretary in the nineteenth century, Burt recalled, had once said that a study of maps could drive a man mad. Whether you were looking at satellite pictures and electronic charts in the twenty-first century or whether you had studied medieval maps adorned with sea monsters in the court of Elizabeth I, what tended to happen, in Burt’s opinion, was that the brain became disengaged—a distance developed—and the mental processes were diverted from hard internal analysis to a theatre in which objective appreciation of a situation replaced real intelligence. The ability to work out why something was happening rather than simply that it was happening was postponed, blurred, and, finally, became conveniently irrelevant. Maps and satellite pictures were the toys of the back-room boys—the computer geeks, of whom, no doubt, Archie was one—whose need for the tangible was a reassurance rather than of any actual use. The fog of war began here, in the operations rooms of Washington, Moscow, London, or Paris.

“Russian registered, is she?” Burt asked, waving the cue from side to side like a deranged conductor with an outsize baton. But it served to urge the process on.

“So far,” Theo replied with a deadly seriousness that made Burt want to laugh out loud. “But we’ll get on to that,” Theo added mysteriously.

“She left on April Fool’s Day,” Burt chortled. “I like it.”

“They don’t actually have April Fool’s Day in Russia,” Theo replied pedantically.

“They don’t have Christmas Day on Christmas Day either,” Burt replied. “But that never stopped the Russians from using our calendars to perform their nefarious deeds. What then, Theo?”

“She unloaded a cargo of timber in Istanbul that was loaded previously at Novorossiysk. Want to see the pictures of that?”

“I think I know what the wood will look like,” Burt said, and Archie seemed disappointed at the missed opportunity for further visual extrapolation, as well as oblivious to the sarcasm.

“Okay,” Lish resumed. “Two days in port at Istanbul, that’s all. Then she’s off again, headed out through the