“And who do you believe?” Balthasar replied. “Her or me?”
“Her visit was unexpected. Yours was not. I have to think it over.”
“There’s no hurry,” Balthasar said.
“Tell me,” Irek asked him, “do you yourself really know what is behind this offer of help you bring? Or are you just the messenger?”
Balthasar considered what he knew. He saw that all he really knew was what he’d been told by his bosses in Department S, his father included. “We want these people on our side,” his father had said. “That’s the reason for help.” Why did it come from Department S, then? Balthasar thought. Why not as part of an aid package from the government? But he didn’t communicate his misgivings to the old man.
“Is she returning?” he asked Irek.
“She said in three days.”
As he walked down through the camp, the smell of long-cooked vegetables wafted across the hill. Over and above it was the smell of intense, but temporary, human activity, of fleeting lives, but that was not a smell in the conventional sense. It was a sense. It was something only Balthasar could feel.
He walked easily through the creaking shanties, avoiding pitfalls and the structures themselves. Children approached him without fear. He held a small boy’s hand. Nobody challenged him. He attracted reverence from the men, the women cast their eyes down. The boy looked occasionally up at the blind man as if trying to ask a question that never came. Balthasar left him at the end of the camp and pressed some Ukrainian banknotes into his hand, small denominations. “Buy some sweets for your friends,” he said and turned down the hill and onto the bulldozer tracks. The old smell of burned-out wreckage from the destruction of the previous shantytown hung in his nostrils until he reached the meadow. He walked steadily down towards the town.
24
TARAS SAT IN A WOODEN SWIVEL CHAIR in his office on Deribasya Street and looked curiously at the list that lay on the pale, peeling veneer of the desk. Outside, though he couldn’t see much from the office window that overlooked the tiniest of courtyards, Kiev was bathed in spring sunshine. Soon the heat would be demanding air-conditioning, but so far that was beyond the reach of Ukraine’s intelligence services.
He finally had a list he felt he could work from, and one name on it stood out, to his way of thinking, in any case, that was screaming every kind of alert. To be more accurate, it wasn’t so much the name, which was evidently a false one, but the profile of the woman behind it that he had now constructed loosely in his mind. It was more of an X-ray than a full portrait.
From back in January, in the three days that led up to the killings of the two Russian KGB officers and the arrest of Masha, Taras had been able to positively identify thirty-four foreign women who had almost certainly entered Ukraine alone, but he knew this didn’t include any women who had entered apparently accompanied—in other words, using a man as a cover. That was something he would never be able to ascertain. But he believed anyway that a courier would have arrived alone—and so he concentrated on the thirty-four women.
Of these, twenty-nine had flown from various parts of the world into the capital, Kiev. And Taras had by now decided that—whoever the woman was whom the Russians had been expecting at the barn—she must have entered through Odessa, not Kiev. Everything pointed to that; the first of the killings took place there, and the second in the Crimea where, presumably, she was making her way to Sevastopol for the pickup. Why would she have come through Kiev? It made no sense for a courier to enter the country so far away from a pickup when time and the speed of exit would be of the essence. So, for the purpose of his more focused enquiries now, he was looking at five women who had entered Odessa, apparently unaccompanied. And only one of these had entered the country on the day itself, January 16.
Taras picked up the list from the desk and thrust it into a briefcase. He shouldn’t have brought it in here to the office, he knew that. Everything had to be concealed from his chief for now, at least until he’d worked out what was going on, until he had a thesis of some kind that would help Masha. He took the list out of the briefcase again. There was always the possibility of having it searched on the way out of the building. He screwed it into a tight ball and jammed several chewed bits of gum into the squashed paper, then closed the paper over them. Then he thrust it casually into the pocket of his jacket—his chewing gum disposal. He decided this would be the last day that he used his office to pursue the woman.
The second question that still preyed on his mind was Masha’s boss in Moscow, Volkov. The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d reached the conclusion that her boss had used Masha to deliver a package to a Western intelligence service. Therefore Volkov was a double agent working for some Western agency. That was useful to know and might, perhaps, be of paramount importance if he needed leverage in Moscow at some future date. It might also be extremely dangerous for him to possess the knowledge.
But in the present, part of him was enraged that his cousin had unwittingly been made a part of such an operation by her boss, while another side of him—once his anger had subsided—began to think of what use Volkov might be to him, and indeed to Masha and her eventual freedom. She was undoubtedly in the safest place for now, even though her imprisonment, on top of her self-inflicted wound, was making her more ill by the week. But if she left now, her life would certainly be forfeited by her boss. For that reason, Taras knew he had to devise a way to let Volkov know that she wasn’t the only person he would have to kill, that he, the Moscow agent for some Western interests, was blown unless he played ball with Taras.
The woman his mind now focused on was named in her American passport as Natalia Simmonds. She had passed through Odessa’s border control at 7:35 on the morning of January 16. Eight hours later a KGB officer was found dead and jammed behind some builder’s material in an alley off Odessa’s boulevard. The time of death was estimated at somewhere between an hour and two hours after the woman’s arrival. Sometime later that day the body of another KGB officer was found at the side of a remote road in the Crimea near Vinogradovo. Taras had ascertained that a youngish woman travelling alone had been on the bus from Odessa to Sevastopol that morning, but had gotten off at a stop past Nikolayev. So she could have been in the vicinity of where the second body was found, too. Later, on the evening of the same day, the senior Russian intelligence officer at the barn had shouted, “It’s not her,” when he’d seen Masha.
Taras considered the possibilities as he walked down the corridor and poured himself his third coffee of the morning from the machine that was leaking the thin sludge onto the linoleum floor.
A female courier arrives by boat from Turkey. But whoever Natalia Simmonds was, she was evidently more than just a run-of-the-mill courier. The Russians know about her arrival, she is pursued, perhaps? At any rate, she kills two of her pursuers or watchers and makes her way to the barn by that evening. When everything goes wrong she nevertheless finds the crook in the tree where Masha had hidden the package before she reconnoitred the barn. The woman Simmonds takes the package. And then she disappears. Two Russian spies dead, a pickup achieved successfully from the jaws of defeat and in extreme danger—and all the while the Russians knew she was expected and had her in their sights.
Taras returned to his office and sat and sipped the foul-tasting coffee. He wanted a cigarette and, opening the window onto the courtyard, he leaned out and against regulations lit a cheap Eastern European–manufactured Marlboro.
Somehow this woman going by the name of Natalia Simmonds had left Ukraine while never leaving Ukraine. For there was no customs record of her departure. She’d arrived on a week-long visa, with a return boat ticket, also of a week’s duration, and then she had disappeared. There was only one likely solution. Unless the Russians had subsequently apprehended or killed her, she had left the country by clandestine means. Possibly even the same night that she picked up the package. If not, it would have been the following night or the one after that. One thing he was certain of was that the woman was no longer in Ukraine.
Taras sucked on the stale-tasting tobacco. Who was this woman? he wondered. To enter Ukraine pursued by the KGB, kill two of their officers, pick up a package that wasn’t left at the assigned place, and then disappear…that took some balls, let alone skill. An immense amount of skill. Whoever Natalia Simmonds was, it was clear she was a professional. And probably a native Russian speaker who could move with ease without attracting attention—if you discounted the Russian intelligence services who’d known anyway she was entering the country.
