There were several things that bothered Taras about this scenario. The main question in his mind was why the Russians had waited for her to get to the barn rather than simply killing her when they could. But other questions spun out of this one. How did they get two of their operatives killed? What did they gain by waiting for her to reach the barn, since it appeared that it was she they were waiting for? Perhaps they wanted her alive—but why? What was her importance beyond being a courier picking up a package? Taras couldn’t think of an answer, or at least the answer was somewhere buried inside the confusion in his head and he hoped it would surface later, like a bloated corpse from the bottom of a river.
He left the office and the building. Nobody challenged him to open the case. They were too sloppy, the internal security people, he thought. First he walked, deep in thought, working out his next move. When he found he was near Slavi Park, he entered and saw the first of the spring leaves scattered on the branches, like a magical picture of summer emerging from the blank sheet of paper that was winter.
He took the list from the bag and put it into a waste bin behind some toilets, then dropped a match on it. It flared a little but there was nothing else in the bin to catch fire and only a small plume of smoke that rapidly disappeared announced the list’s destruction. Only the blackened gum remained.
Then he went home, still on foot. The question he needed to work out now was how to make contact with Volkov, Masha’s boss. It was far too dangerous to go to Moscow—it was dangerous enough to bring pressure on him from Kiev. He was a powerful man. But Taras knew he would only find more answers by applying pressure to Volkov. A high-risk strategy certainly and he would have to think of a way that distanced him from Volkov as much as he could. A third person, a cutout who could threaten Volkov, or an anonymous communication, another drop arranged for Volkov to communicate with him. But he could think of no one he could trust. Either way, he would to some degree have to put himself in the firing line.
When he’d walked for half an hour, he took a bus to the west of the city and walked again to the small apartment he shared with his wife and two children. He was just reaching to put the key into the lock when he felt his phone vibrate. He lowered his hand from the door and answered it. It was a message from Logan Halloran. Just a suggestion for a drink, Logan was in Kiev—unexpectedly, he said. But nothing about Logan—nothing in a sense about any of this—was unexpected. Logan wanted something from him, even if the American didn’t really know what it was he wanted. And perhaps—now that he thought about it—Taras wanted something from Logan, too, but he knew what that was.
Taras turned away from his own front door and took a bus back into the centre of the city. He went to an Internet cafe near the cathedral and opened an account. Then he googled the American company Cougar. There were tens of thousands of sites. He scrolled down through pages of information, official sites, unofficial blogs, news reports, comments and attacks on the American security company, and began to read some twenty pages further on, a small, official announcement from two years earlier. No names, no details—just the carefully controlled information that concerned the “defection,” as it was called, of a female Russian colonel in the KGB who was in some way connected to Cougar and the CIA.
He closed and erased the account and walked swiftly back to his office. He would need SBU search engines to find out more. He walked through security and upstairs to his office. One message from his boss. Come to the fourth floor.
Taras opened his computer and logged in to search for wanted persons on the SBU list. Nothing there. He looked at requests from Moscow from two years before asking for help with “missing” Russian nationals. Then he put in “Logan Halloran” and came up with what they knew of his CIA background in the nineties when he was stationed in Bosnia. Nothing of interest that he hadn’t seen before. Finally, he found a small note from two years ago that concerned an approach Halloran had made to the KGB station head in Montenegro. Halloran was offering the whereabouts of a KGB defector for money. The KGB had alerted their friends in the SBU and the security agencies in other Eastern European countries who looked with favour on Moscow. Money had been paid, but the woman had evaded capture. The Montenegro station head had been recalled and replaced. A high-level colonel—the youngest colonel in the KGB—whose father had been the station head in Damascus in the seventies. He could have checked that, but then the name of the woman came up, under strict red security alert: Anna Resnikov. There was a photograph attached. Taras stared at her picture for a long time.
Then he closed the computer, took two packets of cigarettes from the drawer, and descended to the exit without responding to his boss’s order. When he was clear of the building, he texted Halloran and arranged to meet in the bar where they had arranged to meet three months before, when Taras was in Odessa and had to cancel. He detoured from the direct route to the bar, stopped at the railway station, and bought a ticket for the night train to Odessa.
25
THERE WERE THREE TENTS pitched in the canyon. Anna casually watched the three groups who were occupying them. It seemed they were all travelling youths from Western Europe, talking in Western European languages. One group was building a fire in a pit near the river and looked like they were preparing to make something to eat as the day drew to a close. A guitar played from somewhere behind one of the tents. It was just after five o’clock in the evening. The sun had disappeared behind the high walls of the deep canyon but it would be light for another few hours.
It had taken her a while to follow the forest track that began in foothills some distance behind the city of Sevastopol and led into the mountains. The campsite was a little too far from the city, but here at least she would pass unnoticed by the forest rangers, or by anyone else who might be inquisitive.
She walked over to a group of Swedes—two men and two women—and asked if they had any milk. She told them she would bring some back from the city in the morning. To the other campers around the tents, she was just another backpacker, waiting for her boyfriend to arrive. But she wanted to establish an easy relationship with them. It might be necessary to link up with them if her “boyfriend” didn’t arrive.
She decided to forego making herself something to eat. She was heading into the city, she told them. Long before it was dark and while they were becoming enthralled by their own experiences of the lonely place, helped by the quantities of beer that seemed to take up a large part of their travelling equipment, she would leave them and walk back towards the city. Where the track emerged from the mountains, she would find a vehicle that, for a small fee, would act as a taxi and take her to the hill right above Sevastopol that looked down over its bays. If she timed it right, she would be able to reconnoitre the shantytown while there was still enough light and then approach if she judged it safe. It was three days since she’d seen Irek.
At just before five thirty she began the walk back up the canyon. It was gloomy down here now, but there the sky was still bright above the canyon’s edges where the sun lit it as it slowly began to sink towards the west. By the time she entered the forest, you couldn’t have seen that there was light anywhere. When she was well away from the camp, she ran for four miles until she came to the small dirt road that led along the edge of the mountain. It connected a few farms and small holdings above the city. Below her, Sevastopol’s bays glittered in patches of white light from the sun, which was now heading for the horizon. It looked like there would be another great orange sunset that filled the sky and turned the sea below into a flame of water.
She turned to the right and walked along the track. It was unlikely she would find a lift here, but as she was set for another two-mile walk, she heard a vehicle bouncing along the road behind her and finally saw it coming in her direction. She crossed to the other side and waited with her thumb out.
With a grinding of gears and hissing from its overheated engine, the truck drew up alongside her and she looked through the open window on the passenger side. The driver was a farmer. There were hay bales in the open truck bed and two dead chickens hanging upside down from a metal bar.
“I’m going to the east of the city,” she said. “Ten dollars?” It was a sum that she knew would divert anyone along this road from their course. He nodded and leaned over to open the door, which was impossible to open from the outside.
They drove in silence for a mile or so. But he kept looking sideways at her and eventually his curiosity needed an answer.
“Tourist?” he said.
