officers from the Crimea, the Kremlin had set in motion a long-held plan to infiltrate a swarm of
He let go of the guardrail now and walked over to the party of orphans. Balthasar was an orphan himself and today his guise of a teacher with the party of orphans was simply a natural cover.
Standing on the deck now, he recalled Vladimir Putin’s recent words, spoken brazenly in public at last: “Ukraine is not even a state.” Everything about Russia’s intentions was expressed in those words, but would the West see it that way—and if they did, what would they do about it?
The
When the boat had docked, Balthasar joined the orphans and the teachers. He stood in line at the sign which read KONTROL and offered his passport to the border guard. The Ukrainians were making it more difficult by the day for Russian visitors, but his association with the orphan party averted the usual anti-Russian mood. They were through, Balthasar patting a small boy’s head as a teacher should.
The bus that was to take the orphans up into the green lands of the Crimea waited, belching diesel smoke. He boarded with the party. The other teachers glanced at him occasionally with a mix of awe and distrust. For once they were deep inside Ukraine, they suspected that Balthasar would be parting company with them and another man would return with the orphans at the end of their vacation. This man would have the same name and age and passport number as Balthasar. The KGB was taking the greatest precautions in the movement of its agents across the border.
19
PREPARATIONS FOR INFILTRATING ANNA into Ukraine a third time were of an even higher order than for her previous operations. Her cover identity for the first entry, into Odessa, was evidently blown and a second identity had been provided for her operation on the northern border. Now Burt provided two more passports for this third entry. One identity she would use for passing through border controls and into the country, while the other was to enable her to change identities once she was across the border—and then only in an emergency. The first passport Burt had procured was American and the second, emergency passport gave her British nationality. Adrian, in London, had been, as ever, most obliging where Burt’s requests were concerned.
Under the first American identity she was to enter the country as a tourist exploring the byways of the Crimea just as the summer season was beginning. She would be a camper, a walker, a bird-watcher, with an added interest in the ancient Greek sites along the coast and a diploma in archaeology to match. This identity was designed for someone to roam the huge national parks behind Sevastopol but principally to give her ready access to the area around its port. And she would be able, if necessary, to retreat into the mountains behind the city. In the second, British passport—to be used in dire circumstances only, and only once she was inside the country—she was an investor in tourist infrastructure representing a British hotel company that was looking for opportunities on the beaches of the Black Sea coast for developing its hotel trade. Burt gave Anna a full backup of business cards and an office address in London corresponding with a genuine tourist investment company Cougar owned and kept on the shelf for special purposes. Phone lines attached to this known company were arranged. All calls for her from the Crimea—if any checks were made by the Ukrainians—would be diverted from the company’s offices to a special command centre Burt had also arranged in Mayfair. For this identity, she would take a different set of clothes, a different mobile phone and suitable business accessories that she would bury on entering the country.
“What are we going to do when every country introduces biometric passports?” Bob Dupont commented.
It was a question that all spy agencies were wrestling with. The days of a simple change of name and profession, with a clean passport and even full sovereign government support, were coming to a close. Soon, once you had entered a country, whether as an ordinary visitor or an undercover operative, there would be no opportunity for disguise on further visits. DNA would be the means of identification.
“I guess we’ll find a way to change the human itself,” Burt said. “Create an obstacle and we always come up with a way to subvert it, you can be sure of that. Our scientists are working on it now, believe me.”
But it was the thin fallback plans should Anna make contact with Balthasar that bothered everyone the most. Burt had arranged a backup team who would also infiltrate the country, Larry in charge as always. But of necessity this backup team would have to remain in the background and steer clear of coming under observation themselves, should a meeting take place. Identities and further backup had to be provided for the backup team, too.
“There’s only so far you can be in the rear before you become completely useless,” Larry objected. “I don’t like it.”
But Anna insisted that his team should remain at arm’s length. She was certain that she needed to act in an all-but-solo fashion, or there would be no meeting at all. Balthasar was treated by everyone with respect, but by Anna most of all. They all agreed that contact with him would be extremely sensitive, at best.
“He’s used to operating in deepest cover,” she pointed out. “In Chechnya. To survive years there without detection, his antennae are the surest there are.”
The third problem was with Balthasar himself. The idea of making contact with a highly skilled operative whose main intention might be to abduct her was hard enough to prepare for. But the added significance of an opponent who knew what you were thinking—as Mikhail insisted time and again was the case—created completely unique field rules. For two weeks, with the aid of three of Burt’s company psychologists, Anna practised controlling her thoughts and even her perceptions. Her role as a camper, a tourist with the exploration of Crimea’s beautiful parks as her sole aim, had to be perfected in a way that even an operative as seasoned as she was had not anticipated. Once she made contact with Balthasar—if that was to happen—no other thought could even enter her brain that could upset the carefully designed cover they were preparing for her. For long sixteen-hour days, then seventeen-and finally eighteen-hour days, she practised this mind control until, one day, she’d asked Mikhail, “But can he tell if you’re controlling your thoughts? If he can, then all this is a waste of time.”
“I don’t know, Anna,” was all Mikhail was able to tell her.
Burt’s concentration on Sevastopol and the area around the Russian Black Sea fleet base was also a mystery to all of them except Burt himself. Why not Odessa? Both Larry and Anna asked him to no avail. And if the Crimea was the focus, why only the Crimea? What about the northern borders with Russia where she had found the canisters? But Burt was adamant, for reasons he didn’t yet divulge, that Sevastopol was the key, not just to a meeting with Balthasar, but to any Russian move into Ukraine.
“That is the weakest point,” he told them, but he didn’t explain the significance of their other discoveries of Russian infiltration into other parts of the country.
“They’re all secondary to Sevastopol,” Burt stated emphatically. “In my opinion, they’re just diversions anyway,” he added vaguely.
Then, three days before her departure, when they were meeting at a safe house of Cougar’s in the mountains of North Carolina, Burt laid out the operation itself and its background.
There were five of them in a long room in the huge, wood-boarded attic of a clapboard house that overlooked the sea: Burt, Anna, Mikhail, Larry, and Bob Dupont. Logan was explicitly excluded from the meeting. “He’ll join us later,” was all Burt said. “When we’ve discussed what we need to discuss. Logan is involved in only one aspect of the Ukraine operation. What I’m about to say is for our ears alone. And most important, Balthasar is for the ears of only those of us in this room.”
They sat at a polished oak trestle table that was more than thirty feet long. It was covered in maps; three- dimensional terrain models; maritime charts; air, train, ferry, and bus schedules for the Crimea; long-range weather reports in the northern Black Sea area; on the walls there were real-time TV screens that followed events in the Kiev parliament and news channels from Odessa and Sevastopol; and there were full moon and new moon tables and times and dates of the low-range Black Sea tides—though these last were left unexplained by Burt and, it was assumed by the assembled company, they were there just to provide any and every piece of information that could be extracted from the region.
