knife-edge existence on donations, his early lessons in Damascus thirty-eight years before had consisted of bypassing the visible into what some, overmystical people in his opinion, called another dimension; the dimension, however, was simply understanding what was in other people’s minds. That was not a dimension or, to him, a mystery. It was a skill that he’d developed by necessity and that had once been common to everyone. In Balthasar’s belief, in fact, anyone could do it—if they believed they could and if they weren’t distracted.
And somehow these developed skills of his had led to his current incarnation—for many years now—as an officer in the most secret department of Russian intelligence. It seemed incredible to many of his colleagues, and yet nothing that happened was anything other than credible. Why did the mind insist that someone else’s normality wasn’t normal? It was because the world operated on a system of comparison, Balthasar considered. It was a ruthless and inefficient system, in his opinion. People compared their own lives with other people’s whom they perceived as more “normal” than their own. Some kind of default mechanism. Their purpose in doing so was simply to feel better about themselves when they perceived another as less well off than they were, or to harbour resentment and aspiration if they perceived the opposite. It all led to conflict, and somehow his life’s path had been at the hard centre of the conflict between people and nations. Had he now reached a time in his life when he could break his own pattern, be free of his masters?
And now Balthasar’s thoughts had arrived at the present moment. His mission to Ukraine was straightforward—to implicate a group of people of Islamic faith in some strategic, Russian atrocity. He decided to make it his purpose, however, to also find what atrocity it was his masters were trying to conceal. In good time. For now, he would pursue his mission, but he would look for an alternative this time. And then perhaps this one would be his final assignment. Perhaps this would be his swan song. Whether it was done his way or theirs depended on how events unfolded. But whichever way the assignment went—whichever way he decided it would go—this was the end.
It was not so much a decision as just something that had come to him in the unfolding logic of his fate, and whatever took place in the coming days or weeks was something that he accepted. He had no idea what the future would bring, no plans, no specific exit strategy. Either he would complete this mission as his controllers wanted him to, or not. That, too, was undecided. It depended on a number of things, what his masters were implicating these Muslims in, for one. He was no longer theirs to point in any direction they liked. But also it depended on the woman, Anna, and who she had turned out to be after nearly forty years. That was a concrete consideration certainly.
His thoughts of her cast his mind back to the beginning, or almost to the beginning. Up to the age of sixteen he had remained at the orphanage. The women and few men who worked there were unquestioningly kind and even loving. He had been given an education, he had played the few sports available outside in the cramped concrete yard, despite his blindness. He recalled a man who had been on the Syrian basketball team who had taught them basketball—the KGB’s favourite game as it turned out later—and who was especially attentive to him. He had excelled academically and was considered to be a startling and intelligent pupil. But the children at the orphanage were also taught a practical education—weaving or jewellery making, wood and metal work, basket making, tailoring, pottery—whatever each child felt was his metier or simply interested him or her. The purpose was that they would be able to provide for themselves in the wide world outside the orphanage. At sixteen they were let go, supervised up to a point in their new life on their own, but set up in a small way with their skills out there in the capital, Damascus. Many of them, it turned out, were better prepared for a life lived on their wits than children who had been brought up in the protective custody—or crushing vice, depending on your point of view—of the Syrian state.
And there had been only one contact with the outside world throughout all that time. He wouldn’t have wanted any other, now that he thought about it. She was a Russian woman, Natalia Resnikova, who had visited him from the beginning, with her daughter, Anna, who had visited him regularly from the age of five. He suspected the Russian woman had made small financial contributions to the orphanage. Hers was a kind of adoption, he’d been told by one of the women at the orphanage, and that no doubt meant some financial contribution, no matter how small. The Russians weren’t rich after all. But the Russian woman Resnikova told him she was always there for him, a surrogate mother, as long as her husband remained in Damascus. Her little girl, Anna, had played with him, hugged him, even told him he was her brother on one or two occasions. The two of them had visited him once a week, when Anna was old enough and unless something prevented their arrival.
In his own mind, through them, Balthasar had come to possess a family of sorts. When he was fifteen years old he thought he loved the girl Anna. And then she’d disappeared. Her mother still visited him after that, but she told him that Anna had gone to live in Moscow with her grandmother. Resnikova told him about Moscow, painted a picture of the dacha where Anna lived with her grandmother. She’d painted these pictures in his mind and Balthasar had never forgotten them or her.
Then one day, just before his sixteenth birthday, a man had arrived at the orphanage. He was a very important man, he’d been told, and a Russian, too. He was a general, the women had told him, and he was Balthasar’s father. General Viktorov. He made a gift to the orphanage, quite a substantial one, Balthasar gleaned from the mind of the head of the orphanage. This man seemed interested in him, not just because he was his son but because of what the teachers told him about his abilities. They called them his “abilities.” The ability to see without seeing, to know things, like the colour of a dress that he couldn’t possibly have seen. Or the weather for the next day. But these were just cheap tricks to Balthasar, a conjuror’s basic tools. What was not any kind of trick was his ability to know what someone was thinking, or the size and position of objects in a room. Many such things. His teachers spoke, fearfully it seemed, of a third eye. But to Balthasar all the hushed talk of his “gifts,” his “abilities,” even superstitious talk of a third eye, was just a normal aspect of his existence.
The man who came—his father, for what it was worth—took a greater and greater interest in him the more he witnessed Balthasar’s behaviour. Viktorov had only intended to make a donation to the orphanage and then leave, but when he’d heard about Balthasar’s gifts, and then seen them for himself, he had formally adopted his own son. They returned to Moscow together, a frightening time, Balthasar recalled. And there a new and unpleasant education had unfolded that treated his gifts as just something for others to use. He was confined in a kind of mental hospital at first, then a scientific institute outside Moscow, and he became the object of scientists’ experiments. He was put through a series of tasks with the application of increasing stresses, physical and mental, to test his endurance and the endurance of his gifts. After two years, when they’d deemed that the tests were apparently successful, he’d been inducted under his father’s wing into the highly secret department of the KGB, Department S. The year was 1989. President Gorbachev was in power and within two years the Berlin Wall would fall and the Soviet Union collapse.
And by now, in 2010, he had been of great use to his organisation. His Arab looks and speech were simply an added advantage, on top of his far more important powers. There’d been the wars in Chechnya in which Department S had played a most secretive role. There’d been the relentlessly perennial Middle Eastern blowups; and there’d been the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the subsequent American push into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Central Asia. Balthasar had been a bit-part player throughout the Caucasus and the Middle East. And now here he was on another mission, this time to Ukraine. It was not his usual area of operations, and indeed it was a mission so secret he had been briefed by his father alone and told very little even then. But there was still one secret Balthasar possessed that his masters at the KGB didn’t know and hopefully never would. It was his contact with the spy and traitor “Mikhail” who had now fled to America.
Balthasar turned over in his mind his new assignment once again. “Reports are coming in…tensions along the border…” The stock phrases from the morning’s radio news programme in Kavkaz reverberated in his mind. It was as if the low-level stubble fire along the Russian border with Ukraine that had flared and backed down to a glow for twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed was finally on course for an all-out conflagration. Isolated hostile words and actions—from the Kremlin’s threat to seize the Crimea for Russia, to Russia’s disruption of oil supplies into Ukraine and on to Western Europe (and even the detention of fourteen Ukrainian circus camels at the border) seemed to be coalescing into a single course for military conflict. The new Ukrainian president Yanukovich made preposterous objections to Russia, but in reality—as Balthasar knew—these objections were just for the consumption of Ukrainians and the West. He did nothing to face down Russia.
Ukraine and Russia, he thought, were entering another fateful dance between two mutually loving and equally loathing partners. They were, it seemed, historically united, even if that unity was primarily one of conflict. Balthasar turned the phrase over in his head. From a psychological point of view, an embrace between the two countries could only be under arms, he believed, like wrestlers.
And now, with a few weeks to go before Ukraine had announced it was to deport all Russian secret service
