“Yes. From America.”
“You speak Russian well.”
“My mother emigrated.”
“Are you alone?” His voice expressed concern rather than unwelcome curiosity.
“No. I’m with a party of friends. I went for a walk and got lost. I’m meeting them back in town.”
“You shouldn’t go into the mountains alone.”
“I won’t make the same mistake again. I thought I was going to be there for the night.”
The outskirts of the city began with potholed roads and grubby houses. Away to the east, she knew, was the shantytown, a mile or so from here. She looked across the wide seat.
“And you? Are you Russian?”
“Half and half. Maybe quarters or eighths.” He laughed. Then they reached the main road into the centre of town.
“Please drop me here,” she said. “There’s a bar where we’re meeting.”
He didn’t seem to mind about her safety now that they were on the edge of the city. She took a single ten- dollar bill from her trousers and gave it to him before they reached a small intersection on Shovkovychna, where he pulled into a truck park.
“Down that way,” he said. “You’d better find your friends. You attract too much attention.”
She climbed out of the cab without a word and turned down the hill.
When he was gone, she turned back up the hill again and ran towards the rising ground that looked down on the shantytown. Away from the road now and invisible from it, she found herself on a rise that gave her a view in both directions—back to the city and ahead to the shantytown below the hill where she was. She took binoculars from inside her jacket and laid them on the grass. Various bird-watching society badges in different states of disrepair hung from the straps. Burt’s boys had done a good job with all her equipment. She unscrewed one of the long lenses from the binoculars and extracted a small, powerful scope with a night vision lens and opened it up. There was still some light but the night lens would make the faces down below her clearer. She was about a quarter of a mile from the shanties. Around her were thick coarse grasses and a single granite rock behind which she crouched, out of sight.
First she swept the area from below the shantytown down towards the road she had walked up three days before and that led to the city. She was looking for unmarked vehicles parked or waiting with running engines, but the road contained only a few cars mostly heading in the direction of the centre of the city. Then she trained the scope onto the slopes above the shanties. Up in this direction she was looking for human signs; no vehicles could make it above the shanties. The ground was too steep.
They would be in a group, if they were waiting for her at all, or perhaps individuals who would be scattered at intervals above the shantytown.
After ten minutes studying the landscape, she saw no movements, but it was possible that any reception committee could be concealed by the rocks. She would check again a second time and maybe a third.
Then she swept the sides of the camp, first on the far side up towards the stream that the women used for washing and then back in the direction on the side of the camp from where she was looking. She saw nothing that caused her any alarm.
Finally she began to study the shantytown itself, dividing it into sectors that were defined by the area of the scope. She trained the scope steadily on each area, watching the movements of the mainly men and children going about their business or playing in the failing light. Each section of the camp showed the same sluggish, purposeless movement of a people caught in limbo. They were Tatar faces, some mixed Russian and Tatar, and these she watched more closely. It was possible that any special forces squad would simply intimidate the inhabitants of the shantytown in order to infiltrate men disguised as residents. That would be harder to gauge. Ultimately, it would be impossible from this distance to be sure.
Finally she focused the scope on Irek’s hut. She held it absolutely steady for more than five minutes, seeing no movement around it. Then she rolled over on her back, rested her eyes for a few minutes, and began the whole process again.
On the third sweep of the camp she saw a man emerge from the entrance to Irek’s makeshift home. He was taller than most of the men and had a similar dark skin colour, though it was hard to see colour now in the fading light. The man had more of a Middle Eastern look, she thought, than the Tatar faces around him. But it was something else about him that arrested her attention. He carried himself with an air of complete calm—a restfulness and self-containment that was alien to the other men she observed. He stood still, seeming to observe without observing, sensing rather than seeing. And she knew then the man was Balthasar.
She descended from the hill back in the direction from which she’d come. It was time to leave Larry a sign. She’d decided by now to go in. Out of sight of the shanties, on the far side of the hill, there was an ancient, broken wooden fence that ran along a field near the road at the foot of the hill. On the fourth post away from the road she left a piece of black tape stuck on the side not facing the road. Larry would be somewhere near, perhaps even observing her, but the black tape was the sign that she would enter the camp. Green was the sign for postponement. Then she walked back up the hill and took another sweep of the shantytown. There was nothing that caused her any more suspicion than before and she waited behind the rock until darkness had fallen completely.
At just before nine o’clock she skirted around above the shanties, keeping at least a quarter of a mile away and in the shadow of the hill, until she reached more rocky ground above the camp where it was easier to conceal herself. She put a shawl around her head that reached below her waist and changed her shoes for some cheap, broken, plastic sandals of the kind the women wore. She took a gun from her pack and wedged it in her waistband and covered her upper body and the gun with the shawl. She stuffed the pack into a crevice between two rocks. Then she began to pick her way down a steep rocky slope towards the edge of the Tatar encampment.
In the darkness, it was easy to enter the fringes of the camp without being observed. But Anna was past the first few dilapidated homes when she had the sensation of being watched. She didn’t turn or look up, keeping her head bent with her eyes looking where the light of open fires illuminated the rough ground. It was a male voice that challenged her, but she walked on, and either the man couldn’t be bothered to challenge her again or his curiosity was satisfied.
Ahead she could see Irek’s home, a paraffin burner inside catching the edges of the plastic sheet at the entrance and its glow penetrating a tentlike roof. She stopped and squatted on the ground so that her heartbeat became calm and she could allow herself to blend in with the surroundings and let the scenes around her become normal to her.
She must have been there for more than ten minutes during which she’d taken in everything in the camp she could see by the light of the small fires. She was aware of the presence she had seen from the hill earlier. He seemed to have a life force about him that dominated the pallid energy of the camp. Either that, or she was in a state of heightened consciousness herself at his proximity. She hadn’t thought about him for over twenty years, since she was a child, yet suddenly he seemed very vivid in her mind, very close to her, as if they were old friends rather than childhood acquaintances, someone she had seen maybe a hundred times.
She stirred herself to get a different perspective on the camp and heard a footfall nearby.
“You are wearing blue this evening,” came a soft Russian voice. The voice came from behind her, to the side and about twenty feet away. He was keeping his distance, she thought, so as not to alarm her. But what dominated her mind was that beneath the shawl she wore a blue sweater and blue jeans. She could feel his presence strongly now and, turning her head, she saw a pair of boot-clad feet some way to her left.
“And you?” she asked without turning round again. “What are you wearing, Balthasar?” She felt the gun digging into her stomach and moved her right hand beneath the shawl and around the butt.
She felt him approach. He squatted down beside her and, looking straight ahead and not at her, said, “I’m wearing jeans, too, a black smock, wool hat, also black. It’s okay, you won’t need the gun. Not now, anyway,” he added.
She looked sideways at his profile and he still didn’t turn. She saw a soft smile playing around his lips. Then she looked ahead, as he was doing.
“It’s been over twenty years,” he said at last.
“How did you know?” she replied. “How did you know the colours? How is it done?”
“I’d know you,” he said. “You have the same smell as when you were five years old,” he continued. “But
