The Blind Spy

Laszlo stood and pocketed the piece of paper. He walked over to the window. Standing right next to Logan, he looked sideways at the American. “And I thought you only worked for money,” he said.

Logan felt the crushing effect of this deliberate insult reach into the pit of his stomach like a knife. He summoned up what remained of his tattered opinion of himself and looked back at the Frenchman. “I expect a different sort of reward from your people,” he said. “And from the Russians.”

“And what is that?” Laszlo said sarcastically. “The Legion d’honneur? Hero of the Russian Federation?”

Logan wanted to scream “Respect!” back into the Frenchman’s face, but all he saw in Laszlo’s eyes was contempt.

“Why not?” was all he replied. “But you won’t find her on your own,” he added. “You need me.”

“Then we’ll make a deal,” Laszlo replied. “I’m sure we and the Russians will reward you financially when we hand her over to them. Very handsomely indeed.”

He stepped away from the window.

Logan drank more steadily from the glass. He felt a sense of power now that smothered everything. Maybe the drink was steadying his nerves.

“What do you need, Logan?” Laszlo said. “What can we provide you with that will ensure her delivery?”

“I’ll tell you when the time comes,” he replied. “In the meantime, don’t scare them away from the address I gave you. Put up a watch, not the Russians, but the French. We don’t want the Russians taking all the glory, do we? She’s smart and very deadly. I’ll tell you when the time is best to take her.”

He had taken the first step, but he hadn’t given her away. That power still lay in his hands.

Laszlo sat down again on the bed and made a call. He decided he couldn’t leave Logan alone now. The man needed watching. He had the feeling that Logan wasn’t being entirely open and that once he was out of his sight he might even change his mind. The American’s skittering motives were evident in his every movement, and in the partial revelation he’d just made.

He spoke fast into the mobile and Logan listened to him ordering up a surveillance team from Kiev to be despatched at once to Sevastopol. He then called Paris and Logan heard him talking briefly to Plismy, and heard Plismy’s growl in the background. “Every urgency” was how Laszlo left it. Then when he’d clicked the phone shut, the Frenchman looked up at him and smiled his smooth smile.

“Why don’t we have some lunch sent up here?” he said. “We have until this evening before we can stake out the house.”

Logan didn’t reply.

30

THE NEWS THAT LOGAN had gone missing was conveyed to Larry and the team within hours of his failing to show up at the Cougar. The ship was by now lying at anchor in the Dardanelles, waiting for permission to pass through the Sea of Marmara and then into the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.

Later, according to Bob Dupont, it was as if Burt seemed to have factored in Logan’s disappearance. “He almost seemed to welcome it,” Dupont reported to the Cougar internal affairs committee after the events that were to follow. “It was as if a decision was now made, written in stone, and there was no turning back.”

Burt personally put through the call to the villa in Sevastopol. The message was curt. Using the code name for Logan, Burt told Larry that Logan had “gone on holiday” and it was likely “he wouldn’t be back.” Larry was furious. After the call, he stormed around the villa, cursing Logan—and Burt for ever trusting him in the first place —“and again, for Chrissakes!” until Lucy pointed out that they had no time for displays of emotion.

Larry, Lucy, Adam, and Grant had cleared out from the villa within twenty minutes of Burt’s call. The house was swept of prints, the garbage and any extraneous possessions burned, until no trace remained of their visit. The team was now heading up towards the mountains behind the city where they would be out of contact with the Cougar except for two times a day, morning and evening, when one of them went back into the city to make or receive a report. But it added to the strains and difficulties of the operation and made Larry madder with Logan than he had ever been. “I should have broken him two years ago,” he commented, “when we found out what he’d done to Anna back then.”

But before they had left the area’s mobile network and entered the first of the canyons, Burt put through another call to Larry who had by now mastered his fury.

Again in code, Burt conveyed the message he had apparently been waiting to receive before the Cougar entered the Black Sea. It held an importance for Burt that was a mystery to Larry and even to Dupont who, as ever, concealed his frustrations with Burt’s methods. The message was simple, just a date. “It’s the first of May,” Burt told him. And it was the date of the planned assault on the Pride of Corsica. “This has great significance,” Burt added to impress Larry in an unusual outburst of explanation. “I believe it is the day we, too, need to act.” But act in what way, Burt did not reveal. His explanation of the significance alone was judged by him to be enough. “Just tell Anna,” Burt said, and abruptly ended the communication. There were to be no questions.

It was afternoon by the time the four members of the team, kitted out now as campers, entered the canyon that Anna had made her base. When they arrived, it was agreed they should move on, a change of camp every two days. That way they would keep apart from others and the curiosity they might conceivably arouse. Larry also judged that, in order to avoid the park rangers who occasionally came into the park to check whether campers had the correct licences, they should decamp to a more remote place where there were no footpaths. On a satellite map provided by Cougar he’d already found a narrow defile, with a seasonal stream, that was difficult to reach and even more difficult to negotiate. But it was far enough away from anywhere that they would be able to have a fire here. The nights were still cold in the mountains and the temperature had gone below freezing two days before.

When Larry informed Anna of the date of the assault, she walked away from the new camp for half an hour to be on her own. She seemed to be calculating the time between now and the assault—just three days—and to need this time now, alone, before making a decision that would turn out to be irrevocable.

“What’s so important about the date?” Larry asked her when she returned.

“I don’t know yet,” she replied. “Just that it’s when they’ll make their move.”

“The Russians?” Larry asked, and took her silence to be an affirmative.

But she explained no further and when she announced in the early evening that she was going to the city, and that she was going alone, Larry guessed that it was to rendezvous with Balthasar.

“I should be there,” he said. “There’s too much risk. We don’t know if he’s sincere.”

“He’s had the chance to betray me,” she answered.

“That doesn’t mean he won’t now,” he replied. “We know nothing about him.”

“I know enough,” she replied. Then added, “I have to take the risk. There’s no time left.”

And whether Anna had any loss of nerve beneath her cool exterior, Larry couldn’t tell. “It’s as if she dares them to take her,” he said to the others after she’d left, and as he settled into a night of wakefulness and tension that he didn’t share with her. He took on, in a closely adoptive way, the anxious feelings he thought she should have in the current circumstances, and he tramped around the perimeter of the camp until dawn rose. “Worrying makes him calmer,” Lucy said to the others. “He wouldn’t know what to do without anxiety. It fills some hole in him.”

By the time Anna descended into the city, darkness had fallen. She walked away from the embankment by the city’s harbours and kept to the smaller roads above it. She was unwittingly within two hundreds yards of Logan’s hotel at one point and she continued up the hill to a small cafe bar that was her rendezvous with Balthasar at 9:25 every evening if they could both make it.

She saw Balthasar sitting in an alcove at the far end of the bar. He looked as composed as she felt, sipping occasionally from a cup of coffee, a local newspaper opened in front of him, the pages of which he turned as if he was reading it. He was like the other occupants of the bar, just another solitary man at the end of a day’s work and comfortable with being alone. She sat down in a seat opposite him and ordered a coffee.

“The date is the first of May,” she said.