ahead of myself.” Mikhail pulled himself up against the back of the wheelchair and took another sip from the glass of champagne. “He—this Dmitri Respin or Viktorov—was educated from the age of sixteen at Vishka—the Tower—in the Forest.” He looked up at Anna. “The same place you were educated for the KGB,” he said. “And the place where I have so far failed to achieve my own greatest ambition, the defeat of Putin’s Russia. Like you, my dear, I was a part of Department S, but as we all know now, in the nineties I went on to control all of our agents in Western Europe. The apogee of my double career.”
Anna thought back over the years to a time when Mikhail had stood behind Vladimir Putin at a small service in the Kremlin’s chapel after Putin became president in the year 2000. In the new, democratic Russia the archbishop had proclaimed “God bless the KGB,” near the end of the service. Putin was photographed inside the church looking reverently towards the altar, for the benefit of Russia’s newly enfranchised religious population who would be expected to support him in future, via the archbishop.
In the photograph, Mikhail could be seen with only half a face in the subsequent pictures published by all the important Russian newspapers. But only if you knew Mikhail well would you have known it was him. At her interrogation by Burt, after her own defection to the West, Anna had been shown this picture, the only picture that was ever taken of Mikhail in public. When she had identified him by his known name, one of Burt’s team, Logan, had recognised the face, even though none of them knew his identity as an MI6 agent through Finn and Finn alone. Logan had asked her then, “Why is the Deputy Railways minister seated behind President Putin? Why is he there at this most important occasion—the marriage of the KGB president to the religious masses the KGB has persecuted for seventy years?”
For Mikhail’s cover in Department S had been the role of Deputy Railways minister, a position that allowed him wide access to agents across Western Europe under the guise of marvelling at its railway systems. “Why is such a lowly figure right behind the president?” Logan had asked her.
And that was the beginning of her long withdrawal from defending Mikhail’s secret identity. She had protected him as best she could. She didn’t want the Americans or anyone else to have him unless it was by his choice. And so she had met him in secret—twice—once in New York City, the second and final time in the park across the Potomac from Washington when they’d been ambushed by a KGB snatch squad. She had been shot in the shoulder, Mikhail in the spine, before Burt’s legions had rolled over the horizon and settled the fight in her and Mikhail’s favour. And that was how the Americans—in the shape of Burt and Cougar Intelligence Applications—had come into the possession of Mikhail.
Burt stamped around the room, impatient for Mikhail to continue.
“Dmitri Respin or Viktorov was highly regarded inside Department S,” Mikhail continued. “That was why Department S took him on in the first place. As I say, he was unique. He had what they call second sight. Or, at least, so they believed—and I have to agree with them.” He looked at Anna. “As you know, our psychologists, psychiatrists, and scientists were endlessly creative when it came to developing agents. It was only the rest of the country they let down with their services. Respin is about your age, Anna. A year older, I think.” Mikhail settled himself back and a member of the staff appeared and whispered to Burt that dinner could be served whenever he wanted. He waved the woman away and told her they would get their own supper this evening.
“You can all leave,” he said in dismissing her.
Mikhail drank slowly, savouring the champagne. “Loosens the tongue but not the brain,” he said to Burt.
Then he continued. “Respin was trained in every aspect of training that you’d expect for a foreign intelligence officer. He was always meant for deployment in the southern, Muslim republics, and they are the most dangerous. Many of our agents were lost there in the brutal wars we fought, and are still fighting, against the separatists. So he had to be good, the best. But his vital advantage was this so-called second sight, not just his native grasp of languages or his weapons handling and combat training, or his code work or his analytical mind. He was highly valued because he had something that no one else had.” He looked at Anna, who was now sitting on his other side. “Or rather he lacked something that everyone else in Department S did have. He lacked sight. Dmitri Respin was blind. And uniquely it was his blindness that gave him an edge. His blindness gave him a different kind of sight. He’d either had this second sight from birth or he developed it later. It was a talent for knowing things at a mental— maybe psychic—level that you and I have to see with our eyes in order to understand. And even then we see only dimly with the eyes compared to Respin’s abilities. He had something more than eyes can ever give us. Dmitri could tell what someone was thinking. A huge talent.” He looked at Burt. “As you always say, Burt, that’s something that all the satellites and technology in the world can’t achieve.”
Then he looked back into the fire. “And that was just a part of the talents that came from his blindness. Farsighted is a word you can use about the blind, and Dmitri was farsighted.” Mikhail sipped from his glass of champagne again and Burt, eager for something to occupy himself with, filled all of their glasses. “I had him working for me before I took over our agents in Western Europe,” Mikhail continued. “It was during the first Chechen War in the mid-nineties. Dmitri went into Chechnya and he was unlike any other officer of the KGB. He went into that country as a friend to the Chechens, and as someone who didn’t fear them.” He looked at Burt now. “His name is not Dmitri, of course, and he is not a Russian. At least he’s only half Russian. He was born in Damascus in 1971, the son of a Syrian dancer and a then-young KGB officer by the name of Valentin Viktorov. Viktorov worked at the Soviet embassy compound in Damascus when your father was head of station there,” he said to Anna. “His son, to whom we gave the code name Dmitri Respin, was left in an orphanage there when he was a few months old. His father, Valentin, was being posted to Moscow at the time and he took the boy away from its mother’s family and placed him in the orphanage. I think he probably saved the boy’s life by his actions.” He looked hard at Anna. “You were there, Anna, in Damascus, and a child at the same time.”
Anna’s mind reeled. It took her back to more than twenty-five years before, to the KGB compound in Damascus where she’d been brought up until the age of fourteen while her father was the KGB’s station head. After her fourteenth birthday she’d been sent to live with her grandmother in Moscow.
She recalled her old brute of a father—and then her mother, who’d been his antithesis, a kind woman who seemed in everything she did to be atoning for her husband’s sins. A kind of martyr, she supposed. Her mother’s martyrdom was the driving force for her own desire to be a strong woman, untethered to a man’s career.
And she recalled the orphanage her mother had taken her to visit in order to gain sympathy with the dispossessed and the unloved. But the blind boy she remembered hadn’t been called Dmitri.
As if reading her thoughts, Mikhail continued. “His name wasn’t Dmitri then, of course,” he said. “It was Balthasar, and probably still is. He used another name in Chechnya—neither Dmitry nor Balthasar.”
And now she remembered him. He was an uncanny child, a year older than she was but with a face that, though blind, held the wisdom not just of an adult but of an unusually intelligent adult, and beyond that he’d had a seerlike quality—so her mother had described it, anyway. Sometimes on their visits his presence was so powerful, it was as if it was he who had come to visit her and her mother, rather than the other way around. He had the kind of power that made her think she was a supplicant.
“I remember my mother telling me he had a Russian father,” she said. “And that was Viktorov? Now General Valentin Viktorov?”
“Now General Viktorov, yes. Then he was just a lieutenant or lower, I don’t remember.”
“Balthasar,” Burt said. “God protect the king.”
“That’s right. And in Chechnya, they worshipped him. They thought he was a wise man, a magician, a religious mystic. They thought he would be their saviour.”
“And he fed the KGB and the Russian military the information that led the Chechens to the slaughter,” Anna said.
Mikhail paused. “At first, yes, he did,” he said. “But then I noted—though no one else seemed to—that he was beginning to avoid doing quite the same thing. He became like a hunter who loses his taste for killing and who doesn’t shoot quite straight for fear or dislike of killing a rare or beautiful animal. He still fed information back to Moscow—back to the Forest—of course. He had to, in order to survive. But I noticed it had become much more selective. It seemed he was identifying Chechens who were as dangerous to their own country as they were to Russia, but not the true nationalists and nation builders who the Kremlin also wanted to destroy. He was giving us only the most extreme elements of the Chechen resistance—the fanatics of God, the men for whom the people are mere instruments—and I began to suspect that he was protecting the vast majority of the rebels and their citizens in that country, the people who we Russians would run down with our tanks, murder and torture, tear up from their roots. Just as Stalin did in 1944, the innocent and the good swept into the trash with the so-called guilty.”
“And now?” Burt said. “What is Balthasar now?”
