Somewhere in the city, he thought as the old Mercedes approached the edge of town, somewhere, he knew that Taras would be waiting for him, and for Anna, too. He’d have left his communication at the drugstore by now. It was already two days since their meeting in the car and they had twenty-hours before he blew the whistle on Cougar’s Moscow agent.
When he’d paid off the car and found a suitably wide-open space away from buildings, he contacted Larry on the coded number Burt had given him and heard the sour tone in Larry’s voice. Logan felt his hackles rise immediately. When they met on this sticky afternoon in Sevastopol—the heavy air seemed to stretch from Greece all the way to the southern borders of Russia—Larry was terse, monosyllabic, and conveyed an almost tangible sense of disgust.
“Just pick up the message,” Larry said. “Then come straight back. And give it to me.”
“I’m to give it to Anna,” Logan replied. “Those were Burt’s orders.”
“Then they’ve changed, Logan. She’s not available. And anyway, she doesn’t want you anywhere near this.”
And so at four o’clock in the afternoon—and with fifteen hours now remaining—Larry and a surveillance team reconnoitred the street outside the drugstore on Ochakovstev. It seemed to be clear, according to the watchers’ signals.
Then one of the team entered the store and took up a position at the back as Logan entered. Logan walked to a dilapidated booth with a barred window over it and asked for the pills being held for Stanislas Lavrov, the name Taras had instructed him to say. The grouchy woman behind the counter eyed him warily and took off her glasses, as if to distance herself from the significance of what she was doing, but she handed over a packet, sealed at the top. From its sound as Logan picked it up, it seemed to contain pills. Logan paid her more than the cost and left.
He walked out onto the bright street and saw the sea arcing away below him. The warships of the two fleets were tied up against quays, or hung at anchor close to, or lay dotted in the bays that disappeared into the slight haze that deepened with distance.
And fifty miles off the coast was where the
Logan looked up the road in both directions. The watchers would be out there, but they were well concealed. He turned to the left and walked briskly down a slight hill before catching a bus to the rendezvous Larry had given him.
The holiday villa Larry had taken for two weeks under the name of Philip Ames and family lay in some hills to the east of the city. The team had all arrived there before Logan: Larry, his “wife,” a former CIA veteran called Lucy, and their two “children”—stretching it a bit, in Logan’s mind, for Grant and Adam were in their early twenties, though dressed like teenagers they could have passed for a lot less. It was Adam who let Logan in and he stepped into a sparsely furnished room with cheap red floor tiles and bars on the windows—against normal, opportunistic thieves, Logan assumed, rather than Ukrainian security agents. Larry was in a kitchen at the back, making coffee in a machine whose red light flickered on and off with the failing electric current only to receive a sharp slap from Larry when it was off. Larry turned with his hand already out and Logan hated him for the insulting peremptoriness of the gesture.
“Here,” he said, as if he couldn’t care less, and handed over the package from his pocket.
Anna walked into the room.
“You got it?” she asked.
Logan nodded. He couldn’t wait to get out of here now. The atmosphere of criticism that seemed to him to be aimed unfairly in his direction was beginning to stifle him.
Anna took the package from Larry’s hand and opened it. She extracted a small piece of paper from among the pills and held it towards the light from the kitchen window.
“It’s a number,” she said.
“Bastard.” Larry hit the coffee machine again. “He wants you to call about a meeting, not just meet.”
“It seems so,” she said.
“You’d better do it far away from here,” Larry said. “I’ll send Adam and Grant with you. Best to go up in the hills. Here.” He gave her a phone—one of many mobile phones—which he took from a cupboard. “Chuck it as soon as you’ve used it.”
“It’s okay, Larry. I know what to do.”
Anna looked at Logan now. “And you, Logan?” she said. “You’re done here. You’d better move on.”
And that was it. He was out of the villa in less than fifteen minutes after he’d arrived, the delivery boy. Lucy drove him in a hired Jeep into the town and directed him towards a square where he could pick up a taxi back to Simferol and the airport. But when Lucy had waved good-bye—the only friendly gesture he seemed to have received from any of them—Logan first put in a call to Laszlo before heading north.
28
BALTHASAR LEFT ANNA at the foot of the steps that led to the monument. The monument stood at the top of a hill at the place called Balaclava and looked out over the city and beyond it to the sea from where invaders had always come until Hitler attacked Sevastopol from land. To the left, the mouth of the Kerch Straits was at its widest before the straits entered and split the land like an ax, and separated Ukraine from Russia. To the right, the mountains descended towards the Crimean steppe as the coast turned to the north.
Anna looked down at Sevastopol’s perfect harbour. There was one long bay called Sevastopolskaya Bukhta, and then five or six perfect bays for anchorage off the main bay. In the main dockyard below her, she saw a train, loaded with submarine batteries, Balthasar had said. At the end of the dock where the train stood, the Russian aircraft carrier
It was a hot day, the air completely still up here, and there were few people who were willing to climb up the ninety-five steps to the monument.
Larry had chosen the place for Anna to meet Taras. “It’s a dead end,” he said. “Normally I don’t like that. But once you’re at the top by the monument, no one can come up easily except by the steps and the road. We can watch that.” But by now, Larry and Anna had firmly decided that Taras was acting alone. Larry and the surveillance team were out in full force to watch—and if necessary follow—anyone who decided to make the trip to the top.
Anna began the long climb up the steps. She wore a cap against the sun and carried a small pack on her back and a guidebook in one hand. But inside her jacket there was a Thompson Contender handgun. She watched up ahead as she climbed and, from time to time, glanced to the sides of the steps, looking for anything on the steep slopes that shouldn’t be there. She felt the sun on the right side of her face as it rose towards its zenith and heard only the scuff of her shoes on the stone steps and the occasional hoot of a ship’s horn from Sevastopolskaya Bukhta. Taras had said he would be waiting at the top, behind the monument, at 11:30. It was now 11:45.
It took her ten minutes to reach the top. The monument was made of a soft stone, weathered by the Black Sea winds, and the engravings in Russian Cyrillic writing had lost their knife sharpness. She turned once when she reached the top and looked back down from where she’d come, at the glittering bays and the grey warships and the black hulls of submarines. All were absolutely still in the water, as if they were two-dimensional images stuck to a diorama of the scene rather than real ships on a real sea. Then she moved carefully around and behind the monument, her hand on the butt of her gun inside the jacket and her finger poised close to the trigger.
She saw a well-built, stocky man sitting on a bench, his hair ruffled—habitually unbrushed, she thought—and his hands resting clasped but relaxed in his lap. He was looking ahead to where she appeared from the far side of the monument and the sun caught the side of his face, showing her a man with weary eyes and a patient
