The Blind Spy

“If you agree with what he has to say, we can help Masha together.”

She stood and walked around the monument. He didn’t see the gesture she made. But after she’d returned and they’d waited for ten minutes, a man appeared. He walked around the monument and sat cross-legged on the ground in front of the bench. Balthasar began to tell the story of the Kremlin’s plans for Ukraine and of Qubaq.

29

LOGAN STOOD IN A ROOM at the Kerch hotel. It looked out over the bays that spliced the city like a badly stitched wound. It was twenty-four hours since he had picked up Taras’s coded message at the drugstore and he had returned to Sevastopol, against orders, undecided, caught between conflicting emotions that threatened to destroy his fragile state of mind.

By now he should have returned to the Cougar, as Burt had told him to do, and then moved on to join Theo’s and the Russians’ assault team in Burgas. But he’d stayed behind and, as at many times before in his life, he found himself in the soulless limbo of a foreign hotel room, in the no-man’s-land of a decision not made. Free floating in this nonstate of disconnection, he felt caught in a kind of purgatory of his own making in which he wished for a decision to be made for him but also hated the fact that he was helpless himself to make it. He had his orders, he knew the path he should be walking on, but this knowledge embittered him. He was a man trapped in the impossible bind of wishing to possess personal control over his future and at the same time wishing for some divine or semidivine purpose that would absolve him of that responsibility. Neither satisfied him and both now filled his head with a painful confusion of motive, ambition, and fear. But what he hated most was the fear that stripped him of all but his humanity, and this hatred he projected outwards to all the people he held responsible.

Behind him, sitting on the edge of the worn and scraggly sofa that had lost its once green colour many years before, Laszlo waited patiently. It was he, Logan, who had invited the Frenchman down here from Kiev. The reason he had done so, Logan could only put down to the compulsion that possessed him now, and had done throughout his life, never to close down any option—but the option he had left open in asking Laszlo to Sevastopol was one too fateful for him now to act upon. Not with clarity, in any case. He felt constrained by the choices that he had let unfold before him rather than liberated by them.

He brushed his hand through the long, unwashed hair that hung well over his shoulders. The shutters of the room were open and a light breeze fluttered the ageing grey net curtains. Then he turned from the bright, sun- bleached view of ships and dockyards, glittering sea, and—nearer the hotel, beneath his gaze—the cacophony of small buses and trucks that stretched three deep and bumper to bumper along the waterfront as if they were an unbroken train. He had been silent for some time and had felt behind his back the Frenchman’s patience turning to irritation or perhaps confusion.

Putting his hands back into the pockets of the rough, cream-coloured jacket that had become, he thought, like some uniform when it should have been a sign of his devil-may-care individualism, he turned to find Laszlo watching him. He saw that the Frenchman’s stare was uncertain, as if he was beginning to think he’d made a mistake flying from the capital down here to the Crimea. But Logan had told him that it was something for which his boss in Paris, Thomas Plismy, would thank him. That had been enough. Logan and Plismy went back a long way and Plismy knew that Logan could deliver if he kept himself straight. Now Laszlo waited, eyeball to eyeball with Logan, for whatever the American had summoned him here for.

Logan tried to read his mind and all he saw in the maelstrom of his own guilt and feelings of a wasted life— and love—was another human being exercising yet further criticism or control over him. He suddenly felt desperate, suicidal, and he wanted to sleep, to forget who he was, but most of all to excise the why. Why did he feel like he did? Why was he alone? Why was he lost and why had he always been lost from the very beginning? But he found no answer.

Laszlo cleared his throat slightly. “My government will be very grateful for something that helps to advance Franco-Russian relations,” he said smoothly. “That, I understand, is why I’m here, why you called me.” He paused and smoothed the lapel of an expensive dark blue blazer that didn’t need his attention. “There are contracts to be signed imminently between our two countries. Ten-year, twenty-year contracts that will put France in a very favourable position in Europe. A symbiosis of Russian raw materials and French technical expertise that will guarantee our energy needs, amongst other things. To bring a little gift to the Russians at this time would be opportune, Logan—for me, my boss, our government, and, of course, for you. To bring a big gift”—he exhaled sharply through pursed lips—“well, that would bring great advantage to everyone concerned. What is it you have for me? Do you want money?”

He looked carefully at the man in front of him and wondered whether, under the washed-up, frightened, and bitter exterior he saw there was anything that Logan possessed apart from his own delusions. Maybe it had been a mistake for him to come here? But his boss, Plismy, had told him Logan could deliver and he had insisted Laszlo make the journey. Laszlo felt safe in that the result of his trip was comfortably out of his hands. He was following Plismy’s orders, that was all.

“Why don’t we have a beer?” he suggested.

Logan looked back at him. “Whisky,” he replied.

When a waiter wearing a stained waistcoat and trousers that were too short for him had brought up a tray containing a cold Czech beer and a bottle of Scotch, and left the room with a hefty tip, Laszlo first poured Logan two fingers of Scotch and then delicately half filled a glass with beer for himself. As he raised his glass to Logan and watched the American down more than half the measure, he asked himself—not for the first time—how a man like Logan Halloran had ever found his way into the circle of Burt Miller. He seemed so obvious, he lacked so much finesse—and he was clearly a man who had worn the thread that attached him to any clear, guiding purpose very thin indeed. In some respects he was ideal, in fact, from Laszlo’s point of view. He was a shell, an empty vessel who put his value only on what he could give, on what knowledge he possessed and on how well he could impress his peers. He was a man Laszlo viewed as satisfactorily on the edge—but this only mattered if he possessed anything of value.

Logan sloshed some more whisky into the glass and glanced briefly back through the window as if looking for an answer in the bustle below or in the deep calm of the sea beyond. But he looked back at once and drank greedily. The information he possessed, which should be making him feel like some master of the universe, only made him feel ill, hollow. He suddenly wished Burt was here and not this Frenchman, whom he didn’t like, but he was afraid, too, of his own feeling of being less than Burt. And Theo had as good as said that he would restore Logan to his once important and highly respected role within the CIA. So perhaps that was his goal today.

As if his self-loathing hadn’t dragged him low enough already, he summoned up the masochistic thoughts of Anna that had plagued him now for two years and they tugged him still lower. He’d betrayed her once, was it so difficult to betray her again? Feelings of desire and disgust, anger and inadequacy swirled in his mind, as they always did when he thought of her, so confident, efficient, so effortlessly cool—and so cold towards him. He turned to Laszlo.

“Miller is conducting an operation here. In Sevastopol,” he said.

“What is the operation?” Laszlo asked.

“I don’t know. The Ukrainian secret service is involved. And so is Anna Resnikov.” He’d said it. He felt a temporary wave of relief come over him.

“Resnikov?” Laszlo said, and Logan saw that he had caught the Frenchman’s interest. “Here? Now?”

“Yes.”

“She would be a fine gift for our friends in the Kremlin.”

Logan walked over to the table by the bed and scribbled with a pen he took from his jacket pocket on a sheet of hotel paper. “There,” he said, giving it to Laszlo. “That’s where Burt Miller’s team is holed up. It’s to the east of the city.”

“She’s there?”

“I’ve seen her only briefly, from a distance. But that’s where Cougar’s people are.” He drank and filled the glass, but he felt the drink was doing nothing to help him.