The Blind Spy

She passed the hookah back to him and he took another draw.

“Why should I believe this?” he said when he had finished.

“I’m not from the American government,” she replied, and he laughed out loud for the first time.

“People don’t usually boast that they are,” he said.

“I’m not from any government. The people behind me are a private group of Americans,” she replied, fixing him with her eyes. “They have the interests of a free Ukraine in mind. It is also in their own interest.”

“What is their interest?”

“Business in Ukraine. Peace in the Crimea is important for the peace in Ukraine. The Crimea is Ukraine’s weak spot. That is why the trouble is beginning here. We believe that Qubaq has been identified by certain forces who don’t have Ukraine’s interests as an independent nation at heart. You will be blamed for acts of terrorism not committed by you. That will provide an excuse for…intervention by these forces.”

“By Russia,” he said.

She leaned in towards him. “You, or someone close to you, has been approached. Or maybe you soon will be approached. The purpose of this approach is to offer you, the Tatars and Qubaq, funding. It will be said that it is to build you proper homes, educate your children, provide work…whatever they say, it will be appealing, perhaps couched in humanitarian terms, or coming from a charity.”

“And?” Irek, too, now leaned in towards her.

“But when the money trail is examined by governments who are fighting terrorism, as it will be, it will be found to lead not to any humanitarian or charity organisation but to known terrorist accounts.”

Irek lit a cigarette.

“We don’t know what exactly these malevolent forces are planning, only that they are intending to use you as cover.”

“That’s what you have to offer,” Irek replied. “What is the favour you wish?”

“I’m looking for a blind man,” Anna said. “He may be the man who approaches you or one of your religious leaders.”

Irek didn’t reply.

“I will come back in three days,” Anna said.

Anna descended the hill from the shantytown, down into the meadow, and sat on a knoll that gave a good view of the bays and Sevastopol’s harbour and dockyard. There were nearly a hundred warships of various kinds, either at anchor in Sevastopol’s bays or on the quays or under repair in dry dock. It was an ageing fleet. In an agreement in the nineties, the Russians had bought most of the Ukrainian half of the split Soviet fleet, but none of the ships she could see was less than twenty years old and most of them were far older and heading for the scrap heap. What she was staring at was, according to Burt, the touch paper to set off a conflagration intended to destabilise the whole country, yet the ships she looked at were a sorry sight and a pale comparison to the once mighty Soviet Black Sea Fleet. She stood up. She wondered if, for once, Burt had gotten a crossed “line to God.” Russia had what it wanted now—a pro-Kremlin leader in Kiev who had extended the lease at Sevastopol to Russia’s fleet for another twenty-five years. There was nothing, so it seemed to her, that could advance Russia’s position further, nothing that the Kremlin could want more than that. With a friend in power in Kiev, surely Moscow would now exert its influence by stealth, not confrontation.

Above her, the lark hovering stationary over the field continued its trilling song.

22

THE BULGARIAN-REGISTERED TRAWLER MIRA was motoring at a steady eight knots eastwards, on a course of 85 degrees. The vessel was around twenty-five miles from the Crimean shore.

Logan stood on the foredeck. He was dressed in a thick sweater and dungarees, over which he wore seaman’s oilskins against the cool sea air. Despite the sun in the clear blue sky it was still only April.

Behind him, he saw the other “fishermen,” dressed like himself and going through the motions of preparing nets on the stern deck. They stood against a deep blue background of water that stretched away to the invisible coastline of Bulgaria, two days’ journey behind them and the dim purple outlines of the mountains of the Crimea on the boat’s port side.

Ahead of him he watched the bow of the Mira cut through the water, sending up gouts of spray around his head that were caught by the sun in an endless display of sparkling motion. He turned finally, tearing himself away from the comforting motion and the dancing water, and checked the bridge. Although on the roof of the trawler’s bridge there was displayed a regular radar that was slowly turning in dutiful observation of the empty sea, beneath the decks a whole array of sensors, imaging equipment, infrared monitors, and computers were set up in the holds that would normally have held the day’s catch. The Mira had been converted to a regular spy vessel of the old, Cold War type.

Burt Miller had fallen out with Theo Lish on the significance of the Pride of Corsica and its unknown cargo. Burt’s protege was making a stand and he, Logan, knew which way he would leap if it came to it. The CIA chief saw in the mysterious movements of the Pride of Corsica an incipient threat to stability in the Crimea. Lish was adamant that the “terror ship” must be positively identified as such and, if necessary, boarded by force. Burt had been defeated, as Logan saw it, at a high-level meeting in Washington between the Intelligence Committee, with Theo on its side, and Cougar.

And so the Mira was to be the first contact with the terror ship, the probe that would bring more conclusive evidence. Though Burt disagreed on the subject of the ship’s importance, he had nevertheless laid on this entire operation. That was mysterious, too, to Logan’s mind. To him, Burt wasn’t a man who wasted Cougar’s resources on operations he disagreed with, and the speed and ease with which he’d done so made it doubly suspicious. In Logan’s opinion, Burt’s agreement to lend the vessel to the CIA therefore couldn’t be taken at face value. But the CIA had no such ship at its disposal anywhere near the Black Sea. Burt was perhaps showing his generosity in defeat, Logan thought. But this didn’t exactly fit with how well he knew Burt Miller. Burt had suddenly come up with a fully equipped spy ship of Cougar’s in the Bulgarian port of Burgas, which he’d offered to provide. The equipment was already installed—and the CIA had brought a few more state-of-the-art accessories of its own. And now, here they were, steaming across the Black Sea.

Burt’s openness about lending the vessel was, as ever, irrepressible. Lish had been concerned about getting too close to the Pride of Corsica, but Burt urged an all-but-actual physical contact with the ship. “Charge it,” he’d advised Logan. This was to be for the purpose of “provocation” only, Burt had argued. A spy ship was now a less relevant piece of equipment to a nation’s intelligence arsenal with the ever-increasing development of satellite technology, and the WorldView satellite could see everything the Pride of Corsica had on show without the need of such a close-up encounter. So the point of the operation was to test the Pride of Corsica’s defences. Provoke a reaction. See what hardware would be brought to bear against the Mira.

“Let’s see what cannons they point at us,” Burt had told Theo Lish in an ops. room in Harper’s Crossing. “That way we’ll have an idea of the worst they can do if you need to make an assault. It will help your boys in that event.” Burt was handing the whole operation over to the CIA, lock, stock, and barrel. And with the Russians added to the manifest at the last minute.

“The worst they can do is blow us out of the water,” Lish replied anxiously. “What do we do then?”

Burt had erupted in laughter. “Then you can send in the marines, Theo,” he replied and added, in order to dampen Lish’s alarm, “Don’t worry, Theo, they won’t attack unless you attempt to board. They’ll just warn you off for now.”

And so, at Burt’s request—and the more Logan thought about it, the more Burt’s sudden helpfulness was odd—Logan was hosting a party of the CIA, as well as British, French, and Russian “observers” on “one of Burt’s Cruises,” as Burt jokingly called it.

Why the Brits and the French had to be invited, Logan didn’t have a clue either. It was to be a joint operation, as Theo described it. But that, too, seemed odd to Logan when he’d thought about it, though he’d dismissed his