“That is hard to say. He’s an extremely dangerous man. That I do know. A fanatic himself of sorts, perhaps, but a fanatic who is not attached to any cause, just to his own genius. Perhaps he is a mystic, I don’t know. I do know that he is still deep in the black heart of Department S and that if he’s coming to Ukraine, there is a deeply black purpose to it.”
“Why does he tell me he’s coming?” Burt said.
“That’s the question,” Mikhail replied. “Is it a trap or is he genuinely putting out a feeler, trying to establish contact for other reasons?”
There was a prolonged silence.
“Why come to me?” Burt repeated. “To Cougar?” And then he turned to Anna. “Is this another Russian ploy to get their hands on you?” he said.
“Perhaps Balthasar knows that it is Anna who will respond to his overtures, yes,” Mikhail agreed immediately.
“So Balthasar is just the latest in their attempts to abduct her.”
Mikhail turned to look at Burt. “Maybe. But only maybe,” he said. “That is the risk. It’s possible that it’s true and it’s possible the opposite is true—that Balthasar is testing the waters. That he’s finished. And that Anna is the only person he trusts. In my opinion, yes, he wants to meet with Anna, but whether as a trap for her or as a way out of Russia—that’s impossible to say.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Anna said.
“No,” Burt said. “I can’t have you taking that risk.”
“But I will,” she replied. “And with or without you, Burt.”
PART TWO
18
APRIL 22
THE PASSENGER FERRY
It was a clear day in early spring, and cool, but the sky reflected onto the water the deep blue of the coming summer. The mostly Ukrainian passengers, returning from visits to relatives in Russia, seemed to sense that a long winter had come to an end. They were chattering, breaking open bottles of vodka, and unwrapping Caucasian cheese bread as if they were going on a long voyage rather than the few miles back home across the straits. Ahead of them, spring meadows beneath the towering cliffs of the Crimea were greening and there were yellow daffodils in bloom, a flower the party of orphans on a vacation from the Russian Far East had never seen and would later mistake for onions and attempt to eat.
It was a brief trip from Port Kavkaz on the Russian side to Port Krym on the Ukrainian shore. After the ten- hour flight from frozen Magadan in the east to Moscow, and then another six hours from Moscow to the Black Sea, the children, so it seemed to Balthasar, only now sensed their vacation was beginning, with the ferry’s departure from Russian soil.
He had accompanied the orphans from the starting point in Magadan. That was his cover and it had been thought best that he should be known to them—and to their real teachers—for a period of time before meeting at the ferry terminal. Already an easy relationship had developed between him and the children at any rate, even if their teachers might suspect he was not who he was meant to be—a teacher with experience of orphans and also of the country to which they were travelling on holiday—and they consequently kept a discreet, if polite, distance from him.
And though accompanying the orphans, Balthasar himself stayed apart from the others. He stood leaning against the guard rail on the port side, away from the other passengers in general as well as the excited children. Leaning on the rail, he felt the gentle breeze of the boat’s motion on his face, smelled the salt air and the diesel fumes and sawn timber, and listened to the bow wave’s continual break, along with the cries of children and seagulls. Eleven children—he already knew that—and five seagulls, he was sure of that.
He felt the proximity and even the individual natures of other passengers farther along the deck, as well as sensing a fishing boat nearly a quarter of a mile away and heading out to the Black Sea for its catch. And though he could not see any of these things—his dark, unseeing eyes flickered meaninglessly—he was as acutely aware of his surroundings as the prehistoric fish that hunt and eat their prey in the pitch-black canyons of the deepest ocean. His other four regular senses were highly tuned. But his predominant sense overrode all these and, despite the scepticism of some scientists, it was this sixth sense that afforded him a picture of people of which others were deprived. His own perceptions left others with perfect eyesight in the dark.
As he stood on the deck and felt the cool breeze running over his face, he reflected on why he was here, on this boat from Russia. Like so many journeys before, this one was for the purpose of another mission, dozens— maybe even hundreds, he’d lost count—that had sent him from his adopted country abroad. Each had its own fine- tuned purpose, each made some small adjustment to affairs that related to Russia, and most of the time each resulted in death and injury, the sowing of instability and fear and distrust among Russia’s enemies. He was the most decorated officer in the history of Department S. And now that he contemplated this mission, as always he wondered whether it would be his last. But this time, this thought did not come to him just because of the dangers that lay ahead, but also because maybe it was this mission that he, Balthasar, would choose to be his last. Maybe this time he would end the cycle of betrayal and mayhem that he usually left behind. Maybe this time he would choose to follow this life no more.
On the breezy deck of the ferry he also contemplated his journey from his birth in Syria, to an orphanage there, to the discovery of his Russian roots and the meeting with his real father, and finally to his covert work for Department S. But to Balthasar these events and actions were manifestations of himself and his identity that he considered to be the paint on the wall of his person, not the wall itself. In other words, what he had done and what he represented were of little consequence to him compared to the inner life which his sightlessness had afforded him and which was a richer realm of truth than anyone could imagine.
Perhaps that was why he liked the sea so much. His world was as invisible to other people as the world beneath the sea was. His was another life, another world entirely, and it was as colourful and rich as the regular vision of normal people was grey and drab.
It always surprised him how other people’s eyes gave them only so much, just enough to make errors of judgement; some facts about their surroundings, perhaps, but even then the facts could be tricked. The camera could, after all, lie. Earlier in the winter, he recalled, he’d been present when the Russian 14th Army was placing inflatable tanks along the border with Lithuania in an exercise designed to intimidate the small country. Satellite pictures had shown them as if they were real. Warnings rumbled from Washington and the European Union, and the government of Lithuania began to take defensive measures. And in Balthasar’s mind the eyes of the world’s satellites and its actual eyes deceived all too easily. Eyes without awareness depicted only a tiny proportion of a world. Eyes were tools, not knowledge.
He held on to the guardrail that ran along the deck and sniffed the salt in the breeze once more. His normality was simply being without eyes. There were fewer distractions if you couldn’t see and if you saw it like that. That was how he’d begun to discover his own powers, simply not being distracted by the ability to see things. It was a valuable lesson in solitary detachment.
Having no parents and no roots had afforded him even further detachment from the cruder, visible world than his own increasingly refined one. Brought up from scratch in an impoverished orphanage that depended for its
