looked at her. “Before you entered the barn, did you see anyone else? Anyone around our farm, or on the land? Anyone near the barn?” He stared at her, willing her to understand his meaning.
She watched his face and seemed to think deeply about his questions. Then she spoke. “I saw a woman,” she said. “She was walking along the road, up from the centre of the town, then she turned up through a gap between some houses towards where the farm is.”
That was good, Taras thought. She’d understood. The Russian officer had said, “It’s not her.” So they’d expected a woman, another woman, and Masha had supplied him with a fictional one, but it was more than she’d said to the interrogators who’d come before him. It made Taras seem useful.
“What was she like?” he said.
“I don’t remember much,” Masha replied. “She was just a woman I happened to see.”
“What was she wearing?”
“A black coat. I remember that. And a wool hat, but I don’t remember the colour.”
That was good, a description, but not a description that suggested she was looking hard at anyone, that she was making an observation.
“Did you see her afterwards?”
“No. I just saw her turn up towards the farm. I was already on my way back before I decided to look in at the barn.”
She’d helped him, Taras thought, and he hoped it was enough to justify another meeting with her.
As he walked back through the corridors of the hospital, he took care to thank the officer, so that he would remember him, on what he hoped would be another visit. When he was clear of the area surrounding the hospital he walked for a while, down towards the port. He saw a cafe and entered. He ordered a coffee. Then he went to a toilet that was lit by a wan lightbulb and dropped the notebook from his sleeve and read what she’d written in the dim light. It was hard, not just because of the light, but because she hadn’t been looking at the pad when she wrote and her scrawl was bad, falling off the side of the paper twice. He made out a name, “Volkov…my boss. He gave me a package.” Then he finally managed to decipher the only other words. “A tree,” it read. “400 metres above the barn.” He tore the paper and flushed it down the toilet.
When he left the cafe he took a taxi to the centre of town. He decided to be open, on the assumption that they might be watching him. He took a bus up to the western end of town and then walked the route Masha had told him she’d seen the woman walking until he came to the farm. He let himself in with a key and opened up the locked shutters and then the windows. In the kitchen he found an old jar of coffee and boiled some water and piled five spoons of sugar into a cup, before going outside and sitting on the porch in the sun, sipping the hot coffee where anyone could see him. When he’d finished, he put the cup down and walked towards the barn a quarter of a mile away. That would be normal.
He reached it. Surveillance and forensic teams had already turned the place over several times. He glanced at the door jamb where the single rotten door hung loosely and saw the lighter shade where the signal sight had been left in the form of a strip of adhesive tape. He walked around the barn and then turned to the left, heading up the hill behind him. He saw the tree, but sat down halfway to it and looked out over the bay and the Black Sea beyond, taking the sun in on his face as he lifted it up towards the sky. But all the time he watched for eyes.
He walked the remaining part of the way to the tree in a roundabout way, giving no hint that it was where he was heading. When he reached it, he swung his leg onto a knot in the trunk and hauled himself up into a crook and sat again, as if to get a better view of the town below and the sea beyond. But he noted the two sets of footprints that had been left when the ground was wetter. They’d stopped at the foot of the tree, then one set headed up the hill—the woman’s he supposed—and the other set, Masha’s, led down the hill towards the barn. But there was nothing in the tree. The woman, whose steps he saw before they disappeared in the harder ground above, must have picked up whatever Masha had been carrying. Someone good, then, someone who could work out what a courier would do. Someone who looked at the possibilities and saw that a courier really had only one place to lodge a package while she reconnoitred the barn. Someone highly professional.
Back in the centre of town, Taras took a taxi to the Simferol airport for the flight to Odessa. He turned over in his mind the scenario that seemed most likely to him. Masha had been asked to make a drop. Another woman had been making the pickup. Two KGB officers had been killed on the same day, one in Odessa, the other on a remote road in the Crimean peninsula. Had the woman been the killer? He suspected so.
And then his mind went to where his chief’s hadn’t gone—not yet, in any case. If the Russians were sending something secret into Ukraine—which her boss, Volkov, evidently was—they wouldn’t have used something so obscure as a drop in a barn. Something so small that Masha could carry it and that would have been brought in on a military vessel from the Russian side, and then handed over in a more straightforward way in the town. So that suggested to him that the woman making the pickup wasn’t from Ukraine at all and that the message or whatever it was that was being transmitted from the Russian side was intended for a person or people or organisation outside Ukraine. Ukraine was just the drop. And if it was intended for someone outside Ukraine, that must mean it was intended for someone from the West. Her boss, Volkov, was sending something to the West. Was he a double agent, then? Everything suggested that.
As he sat on the plane and watched the coast of the Crimea unfolding beneath him towards Odessa, he knew what he had to do. Check the entry points, the airports, the ports in southern Ukraine on that day, January 16, and the days before, and identify a woman travelling on her own, a woman who had killed two Russian intelligence officers and then disappeared, presumably with the package.
21
UP ABOVE THE CITY, in an area of desolate waste ground, there were signs of bulldozer tracks. Anna paused at the side of the dirt road and looked at where they crisscrossed the landscape, gouging the earth and ending in piles of smashed wreckage that were once makeshift shanties. Then the tracks were reversed in order to continue their destructive work. She turned and gazed down the hill behind her from where she’d come. A solitary lark was singing above a green meadow immediately below the stripped landscape and a few brown- and-white cows grazed on a slope. Beyond the meadow, the city of Sevastopol lay in its long bay, with other bays that branched off it. The blue waters reflected the clear, deep colour of a cloudless sky.
She turned again and looked up ahead in the direction she was walking. There were green-tinted mountains, rising beyond the waste ground, that were topped with tooth-shaped crags. She was near the new shantytown now, and saw how hastily it had been erected after its predecessor had been destroyed by the bulldozers. The waste ground was dotted with the shacks and shanties made from odds and ends found in the city’s dumps or on the beaches. The scrawny habitations had an unmistakable impermanence about them. They looked like the scum and refuse left by a falling tide. The bulldozer tracks marked where the inhabitants of the shacks had last put up their bedraggled homes and where the homes had been unceremoniously crushed a few weeks before. Twelve weeks, she’d heard, that was how long the people here were left unmolested before the bulldozers arrived again. The length of time had nothing to do with leniency, it was merely the time the creaking bureaucratic machine of the Crimea parliament took to grind into its destructive action.
She walked on again and, as she approached the first of the shacks, she saw it was made up of mostly cardboard boxes, a torn awning consisting of a plastic sheet that probably came from the city’s waste dump nearby or had been washed ashore from a freighter, and bits of twisted iron pipe that supported the rickety structure. Two dark-skinned boys were playing outside, rolling a metal wheel hub along with a stick. One of the boys was naked, the other wore a pair of torn and filthy shorts. There was no water or electricity up here on the detritus-strewn land. The inhabitants had to walk half a mile across the hill and take their water from a stream in plastic cans that had been washed up on the beaches. As a refinement of the bureaucrats’ cruelty, each time they bulldozed the shanties they moved them farther from the water source. And it must get very cold up here in winter, Anna thought.
A woman stared at her from what passed for a doorway in the jumble of boxes and crates. There was no greeting, just a blank, narrow stare that concealed, perhaps, fear or suspicion, or both. Anna had the Slavic features of the persecutors who bulldozed the shantytown’s Tatar inhabitants from their homes. Unusually for children, the
