expression that seemed to hold the expectation of nothing very much. He didn’t move his head when she appeared, but looked into her eyes without fear.
“So you’re the great Anna Resnikov,” he said softly. “The great
He made no move to get up and, once Anna had checked the slopes that fell away behind the bench where he was sitting, she sat down, an arm’s length from him.
In the previous hours between her phone call to Taras and this moment, Balthasar had discreetly run checks in Moscow on several SBU officers, including Taras Tur, some way down on the list. The Russians had a note in the FSB archives on Taras’s father and his murder in Berlin. They also had a mark against Taras as a “Ukrainian nationalist—to be discussed.” Balthasar interpreted this as the KGB’s obsessive listing of possible enemies in Ukraine and its anxious distinction between pro-and anti-Russians in the Ukrainian secret service, but he’d said that this distinction was crude and not necessarily to be trusted. Taras might be a Ukrainian nationalist, that was true, but that did not mean he would necessarily act against the Russians. He might also fall in Russia’s direction, depending on the alternative. It was known that Taras—using his father as an example—had no great respect for the harsher capitalist practices in the West—and Cougar was likely to be viewed by him as the unacceptable face of capitalism. But most of all, anyone—Russia or the West—whom he perceived to be interfering with Ukraine’s sovereignty was likely to be viewed by him with distaste at best, and, at worst, as an enemy.
“There’s a great reward out for you in Moscow,” he said.
That, too, was considered to appeal favourably to Taras’s general distaste for Moscow’s politics.
“Burt Miller would like us to work together,” she said softly. “For the good of Ukraine.”
Taras gave a short laugh. “It’s good to know we have such a great friend in the West,” he said, but it was without the harshness she’d expected. “But it’s me who’s here to help Burt Miller—not the other way around,” he added. He turned to her, his body language unthreatening, his upper body pulling slightly away from her. “They say you killed two KGB officers in Odessa and the Crimea on the sixteenth of January,” he said. “Me? I’ve never killed anyone. Neither has my baby cousin who’s now lying in a prison hospital cell down there”—he indicated the city —“with part of her face blown off and a posse of interrogators who want to know what she was delivering and aren’t afraid to ask.”
So that was how he’d worked it out, she thought. The woman was a Russian relation of his. He’d pieced together her story, found out the name of her boss in Moscow, and worked out that the package was being delivered, not within Ukraine, but to someone in the West. Therefore the woman’s boss was a traitor in Moscow. Smart of him, she thought.
“What’s your cousin’s name?” she asked.
“Her name is Masha. She’s twenty-four years old, she’s caught up in a scheme devised by Ukraine’s friend Burt Miller, and executed by you. If she isn’t handed over to the Russians and dispensed with after they hollow her out, body and soul, she’ll probably meet the same fate in Ukraine. Either way, if she lives she lives with a beautiful face destroyed by a bullet and an innocent mind destroyed by people who only wished to use her.”
“Maybe she shouldn’t have joined the KGB,” Anna said and looked him directly in the eye. She saw him reel slightly, astonished perhaps by her directness or lack of sympathy. Then his face hardened and he gripped the back of the bench until his knuckles whitened and she saw him trying to control his anger.
“What Masha left were blueprints of the development of the port of Novorossiysk that came from the Naval Ministry in Moscow,” she said, without allowing him to respond. “They show that Russia never had any intention of moving their Black Sea fleet there. Now your new president has given them Sevastopol for another twenty-five years anyway. Your new Moscow-friendly president Yanukovich has handed the facilities to Russia for nothing except some price concessions on gas that will bind Ukraine closer economically to Russia than before. Even with the same hand that gives, the spy elite in Moscow also take. That is their way. There is no stick and carrot, just the stick. A concession from them is merely another chain around Ukraine’s neck. So they have the port and now they also have a tame Ukraine bound to them more closely with economic ties. I was betrayed when I came to Ukraine in January. That is how they were waiting at the barn and how they caught Masha. That is why I killed two of their operatives. And I’ll kill more of them if they get in my way.”
“Fighting on the side of right now, are you?” Taras replied mockingly.
She stared him in the eyes and he felt the cool, blue gaze penetrate his mind and throw him off balance, but this time it wasn’t anger that welled up in him but a kind of blank astonishment. He seemed to see only her face, her eyes. The whole world around him, the hill on which they sat, the city below, and the sea and the ships were beyond his concentration. There was only her.
“When I defected from Russia,” she said, “I thought it was for love, but even then I knew in my heart that love was the excuse for doing what I’d wanted to do anyway. Does that make my love for my husband any less? I don’t think so. But he’s dead now, murdered by the KGB. He let himself be killed because he couldn’t, finally, step away.” Her eyes bored into his. She sat perfectly still, with a relaxation that belied her readiness to use any method necessary to defend herself. “Don’t believe that when I defected I thought my friends lay in the West. I’m not naive. All I knew was where my enemies lay and that was in Russia, in the Kremlin, in the KGB and Department S, where I worked so successfully for so long. And even my own father. The question is—or was then for me—not who are my friends, but who are my enemies? When that was clear, as it had been becoming clear for many years, I knew what I had to do. And for you, too, Taras, that is the question. I don’t offer you Burt Miller’s friendship—let alone the West’s. I could not do that and, in any case, I don’t consider that I have either of them myself. The question for you is the same as it was for me. Who are your enemies? And what do you stand for that makes them your enemies?”
“Alas, I have no one to love in the West to give me the thin excuse you had to make so fateful a choice,” he replied.
“The choices, all the major choices you make in your life, are emotional ones,” she said. “How you apply those choices later to reality is rational. You don’t need someone to love to make an emotional choice. That was just how it was for me.”
“I have the name of Miller’s agent in Moscow. I also have a cousin who is a prisoner and whose life is in danger. What can you do for me?”
She looked down at her hands and then up towards the panorama of city and sea and ships below. This time she didn’t look back at him. “If your emotional life is bound to your family and your cousin and your country, and all three are, I believe, the case with you, then I can show you something and you can make your choice. I’m not here to prevent you from revealing the identity of Miller’s agent. That is up to you. But I can show you another side of the picture.”
“You’re playing a very dangerous game,” he replied.
She looked back into his eyes again. “And you are, too. You are acting alone, aren’t you? Your bosses know nothing of this.”
“They’re only a phone call away,” he said.
“Perhaps you’ve left it too late for that. They’ll wonder why you didn’t report to them earlier.” She paused. “You know what they’re like as well as I do. They won’t trust anything you say.”
“And you expect me to trust you.”
“If I thought you wanted money, Miller has plenty of it.”
“No. No, I don’t want Miller’s money,” he replied.
“I want to introduce you to someone,” Anna said. “Do I have your permission?”
Taras fell silent.
“He is someone who will make the picture of Masha’s predicament clearer. He is someone who will make your country’s endangered position clearer. He’s Russian. Like me in another life, he works in Department S.”
“Why is he to be trusted any more than you?”
“I’m just asking you to listen to him.”
“Just one man?”
“Just one.”
Taras thought for a moment.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
He stayed with his thoughts for a while longer. “Okay,” he said. “And then?”
