you’re right, it’s more than that. Seeing colour without eyes is a simple trick. At least to me.” Then he turned and she felt his face on hers and she turned towards him, too. He was apparently looking at her, if you didn’t know he was blind. “Maybe I can teach you sometime, Anna,” he said.
“Are you alone?” she said, looking into his face, which flickered with amusement in the soft glow of a fire to their left.
“Apart from a couple of hundred Tatars,” he said.
“Why are you here?” she said.
“I might ask you the same thing,” he replied good-humouredly. “But there are other things first. I want to hear about you. I see your mother from time to time, but she doesn’t see me. I know she hates the KGB. Maybe she always did, even when she was married to your father and living at the KGB station in Damascus. So I don’t embarrass her by visiting.”
“You know all about me,” she said. “I’m a wanted traitor. They’ve tried to take me back to Russia at least twice. You must know about me.”
“I know those things,” he said vaguely. “But what is it you’re doing with your life? What is the picture you are painting? Avenging your husband, Finn? You think you are going to bring down the regime in Moscow, perhaps? What about your boy?”
She stiffened.
“Why have you chosen this life for yourself?” he said. “There are better things in the world for a woman like you.”
She paused. “I have a whole life to clean out before I can begin again,” she said. “I made my choices and now my choices are changing again.” She looked at him. “And you, Balthasar? What choices are you going to make? You can be a great hero by bringing me back.”
He laughed. “I’m already a great hero,” he said. “And it’s the heroes they don’t trust most of all.” He paused and bent his head towards the ground. “If we ever truly make choices, it’s not for a long time,” he said. “We have to be rid of the automatic, the compulsive, the careless, the stupid—then we can make choices if we can at all. So I, too, am at a turning point in my life.” He turned his head towards her. “You are pleased to see me?” he asked, and the question came at her from out of the blue.
She didn’t need to think, but she paused anyway. “Yes,” she said finally. “I’m pleased to see you, Balthasar.” That was all she could say for now. She felt a confusion in her mind, seeing this blind man whom she hadn’t seen since they were both children. She didn’t understand the confusion. But against it, she felt that everything she was doing here, in Ukraine, for Cougar, paled in comparison.
They sat in silence for a moment, then she spoke again. “The reason Finn died is because he forgot how to act in his own best interests. He forgot he could choose.”
They squatted in the dim light of the distant fire. Above the camp, the waxing moon was three days away from its fullness.
“We must decide in the next few minutes how it’s going to be with us,” he said finally.
Without speaking they stood and walked side by side to Irek’s home.
Balthasar pushed back the flap of the tent opening and beckoned her to enter. His arm pointed her towards the rugs and the paraffin lamp that swung slightly with the movement of the sheet flap and the light breeze that followed it. She bent and walked into the hut and saw Irek sitting in the same position where she had left him three days before. She looked around to check for any other presence, but could see nothing. The woman who had been in the closed-off section of the home and had brought tea was absent. Irek was making a pipe, patiently filling the bowl and lighting a charcoal fragment in his hands. He didn’t look up as they sat down on the cushions in front of him.
“Enemies or allies?” he said and, when neither of them replied, he said, “How does a poor people like ours— the poorest of peoples—become mixed up in the world’s affairs? We have no voice, no place that is home, no living to make, and, maybe, no future. Yet here we are, with supplicants from America and Russia who perhaps both wish to engineer our final destruction.” He looked at them, leaning his pipe against a crate next to him. “We have nothing to give you and we are wary of your gifts, whether of money or information.”
Balthasar leaned forward and took the pipe, as if he were an equal to the man whose house they were in. Then he handed it effortlessly to Irek. “Let’s smoke,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you what we can do.”
Irek lit the pipe, took several puffs, and then passed it to Balthasar who did the same. Finally, Anna sat and smoked. It was stronger than the time before and she felt her head swim. The small space seemed to sway in front of her eyes before she could focus again. She wondered if soon the flap of the entrance would be thrown back and Russian
Finally, it was Balthasar who spoke. “I have been instructed to offer you money,” he said to Irek. “The purpose of the money is for you to build a mosque, a school—later some houses, perhaps.” He paused. “But that is not the real purpose.”
Anna turned to study his face. It was completely at peace. She saw the face of someone who had made his choice.
“The real purpose is to implicate you in some Russian action against Russians in Ukraine,” he said calmly. “Then you will be blamed first. After that the Ukrainian government will be blamed for not protecting Russian interests here. I know all this, but I wasn’t told it,” he added. He looked at Anna. “The lady is right, Irek. She and this company she works for by the name of Cougar have found the purpose behind this offer from the Russians.”
Anna looked at him and felt a wave of astonishment. This was the moment of truth. If the whole game with Irek and Qubaq, and Balthasar’s presence, was simply to capture her, it would be now. But there was no movement that she could detect outside the shanty and inside all three of them were completely still. It was as if breathing had stopped.
“Why do you tell me this?” Irek said at last.
“Perhaps we can stop it happening,” he said simply.
26
TARAS DECIDED TO MEET LOGAN HALLORAN at a roadside cafe restaurant called Karmaliuk twenty-five miles east of Kiev. It was a place owned by a reliable friend of his wife’s from schooldays and who Taras knew well. He and Sasha occasionally went fishing together and, more often, left the rods in the car and stayed drinking in the yard if it was summer or by the fire at the rear of the cafe where Sasha kept a private room for friends. Mainly it was sufficiently far outside Kiev, where he was afraid he might by chance be spotted meeting Halloran.
He was early, parked his wife’s car at the rear, away from the road, and was enjoying a cold beer when Sasha told him that an American had come into the bar. Taras downed the half glass that remained and walked through to the front.
“Follow me,” he said, without greeting Logan. “I’ll meet you in the front. A blue Fiat.”
Taras drove around to the front and watched as Logan pulled out behind him onto the road. He kept his eyes in the rearview mirror and slowed twice to allow vehicles to overtake him. When he was satisfied that Logan had come alone, he chose a dirt track off the road to the left that wound along the banks of a small river and through two villages before Taras turned again to the left and up to the edge of a wood. He cut the engine and stayed in the car. He watched Logan in the mirror as he slammed the door of a hired Toyota Land Cruiser and walked slowly up behind him. The American was twirling the car keys round and round his forefinger and, to Taras, looked altogether too relaxed.
When Logan stepped into the passenger seat and had shut the door, Taras began to talk without letting him speak first. At the same time he patted down the American, turning out his jacket pockets and looking for wires or mikes.
“We want your help before I can give you anything,” Taras said. “Whatever it is you want, I’ll give you information for an agreed fee paid into a bank in Austria, details to be provided, either on a monthly basis or as a
