“Everything is convenient here, isn’t it? Everything except Cougar. Cougar is inconvenient.”
“Why the sarcasm, Burt?” Logan interjected. “Look at the evidence. Then say the evidence is not good enough for you.”
“What evidence, Logan?” Burt replied, and everyone around the table saw the hard vein of granite beneath the regular bonhomie. “Evidence from the spies in the Kremlin? Okay, so I’ve agreed with Theo’s request to second you, Logan, to a CIA team working with the British. You’ll shadow and assess this so-called terror ship. I hope that’s fine by you.”
“And then Cougar’s finished in Ukraine?” Logan asked. “Theo wants to hear it from you.”
“Thank you for relaying that,” Burt said. “There’s a boat waiting at the port of Burgas in Bulgaria. You’ll be on it, in command, as will some boys from the CIA and a British special forces team.”
“And the Russians, too,” Logan said implacably. “Theo’s agreed to have them come along.”
“Well, I think that’s a good idea,” Burt replied. “As many of you onboard Cougar’s spy ship the better. Let’s have the Russians on my ship.”
Logan sat back in his chair and looked at Burt. There was a new fearlessness in him, an idea that it was he who was making the play, not the great Burt Miller anymore.
“While you trash the idea of Qubaq being a terrorist organisation, Burt, don’t forget that it was you who sent me to Kiev in the first place. The whole point of the meeting with Sam MacLeod was that I float Qubaq with the CIA station there. That was your plan, not mine, not Theo’s, not the Russians.” So why is it you who’s now pouring cold water on it?”
Logan sat forward in his chair and leaned on his elbows. He recalled that in the report he had delivered to Sam MacLeod, the name of Qubaq had been explicitly left out. That had bothered him then, and it bothered him now. Burt had made the reference to the organisation only verbal.
“I wanted to see where everyone would jump,” Burt replied. “And you’ve all jumped the same way, haven’t you, Logan? You, Theo—and consequently our own president—and, of course, the Russians, too. All of you have seized on what you call the terror ship and all of you have seized on Qubaq. Coincidence? No, I don’t think so. It’s exactly what the Russians wanted us to do.” He looked around the table. “We’re being led by the Kremlin,” he said. “I wanted to see how easily the CIA would fall in with their lead. Nobody wants to help Ukraine, that’s the truth of it. And now the CIA will actually help the Russians get what they want there.”
Logan looked down at his hands. All he could think was that it was him Burt had assigned to encourage such disinformation—if that’s what it was. He would never have asked that from Anna.
20
TARAS WALKED DOWN a long airless corridor on the third floor of Sevastopol’s naval military hospital, turned left past more armed guards, and continued along another identical stretch that traversed the front of the building. Neither the occasional view through barred and sealed windows of the port on a sunny morning in spring, nor the antiseptic cream of the hospital floors and pale yellow of the walls did anything to soothe the confusion in his mind.
As his chief evidently suspected, Taras knew that his cousin Masha was involved in some subterfuge and it was now he, as her relation, who had been despatched to find out what it was she had been doing at the barn. His confusion seemed to be without a solution. If he succeeded, then Masha would undoubtedly be in worse trouble than she was in already. But if he failed, they would send in the proper interrogators again, this time to force it out of her.
There was the unanswered question he had turned up in his investigations so far. Was there a connection between his cousin Masha’s predicament and the murders of two KGB agents on the very same day that she’d been wounded and then arrested three months before? His chief clearly thought so and Taras had to admit that the coincidence seemed too great to ignore. The Russians were angry at the loss of two men on Ukrainian soil but were angrier, apparently, at Ukraine’s refusal to hand Masha back to them. But still the SBU was jumping to fulfill all their other demands. It was a tightrope—to please Russia and to retain some semblance of independence. And then there was the question of the gun she was carrying and why she had used it if she was merely on a vacation.
Two nurses walked past him without looking at him. He stepped aside as a trolley with tubes attached to it was wheeled past by an orderly. Everything in this area had the appearance of a normal hospital, but this was an illusion. He was now in the prison wing. There were guards in the corridors and at every junction, as well as outside the elevators and on the stairs, and there were bars on all of the windows. He’d had to show his pass five times already. Security was tight and despite his security clearance to enter, the guards were nervous and imperious at the same time.
He reached the final, prison door to the ward and hospital cells. There was an officer here, as well as two more regular soldiers from the Ukrainian army. The officer checked Taras’s identity papers, took a scan, and shone a thin torch into his eyes. He studied the special pass that had allowed him into the prison wing with a deliberate slowness that made Taras’s face twitch with irritation, and then he made a call to Kiev. Eventually satisfied, he handed Taras’s papers back to him and a guard opened the locks on the door and let him and the officer inside.
Were the guards there to prevent escape, Taras wondered, or to guard against the intrusion of outsiders? What was Masha most in danger from—kidnapping? assassination? or both? The security in the hospital was on red, his chief had told him, but he hadn’t explained why. The only certainty was that his little cousin—an innocent, as far as he was concerned, whatever she was involved in—was currently its most precious inmate.
The officer had personally been waiting for him to arrive and accompanied him through a ward as he heard the door slammed and locked behind them. There was no one in any of the six beds in the ward and they passed through to another locked door and on down another corridor that was distinctively a prison now, not a hospital. Bare concrete floors, one solitary high window at twice the height of a man, with more bars. Cells lined this corridor on either side, and were equipped with minimal comforts, judging from the open door into one of them that was empty. Three others had their peepholes shut and he didn’t know if anyone occupied them. There were two guards on the inside of the final door, sitting slumped in hard wooden chairs with the varnish peeled away. Like all guards, they were evidently bored, until they sprang to attention at the sight of the officer. Then Taras and the officer proceeded to the last cell on the right.
One of the guards who’d followed them jangled keys until he found the right one and opened the cell.
Taras looked inside into a harshly lit cell that had no window. Against a wall, Masha lay on a bare cot, a grey blanket pulled over her. Taras stopped in shock before he could enter. He hardly recognised her. She looked terribly thin and pale. The wires had been removed from her jaw but one side of her face was heavily bandaged. Her eyes were filled with fear.
He turned to the officer. “That’ll be fine,” he said.
Grudgingly, the officer closed the door behind him and locked it. Where did they think this terrified, wounded twenty-four-year-old girl was going to flee? Taras wondered. There were three locked doors behind them already.
Alone with her now, he looked again. They’d weakened her beyond her wound, he could see that, once he was closer to her. She was being deliberately underfed, he thought. The bare lightbulb with its high-watt power glared down from the ceiling at her and he knew they would leave it on round the clock. He knew, too, that she’d been interrogated by others in the past fifteen days, ever since she’d been able to speak for the first time.
He tore his eyes away from her and looked around the cell. Eight feet by six, there was a concrete toilet in a corner that stank. Otherwise just the cot. No table or chair, no window, airless. At least it wasn’t a concrete bench she had to sleep on, he thought. He looked up at the ceiling and saw behind him above the door a camera that covered the whole cell. The cell would be wired, too. Did they think he could get something out of her that others couldn’t, when both he and Masha knew that other ears would be listening anyway? But his chief had said that she was more likely to talk openly with him. Whatever coercion they’d used so far clearly hadn’t worked. Before they tried anything stronger, his chief had told him—as if to threaten him with the fact that he held the fate of his cousin in his hands—they would try this softer approach. So Taras knew he had to make some progress with her in order
