WHEN BALTHASAR LEFT HER, Anna didn’t remain up on the cliff at Kalamita as they’d agreed. She watched Balthasar descend the hill, past the church, and then, some while later, she walked down the hill herself, also past Trinity Church, until she found a place where she could find reasonable concealment for herself and where she could study his return. There was a wartime memorial park halfway between the church and the embankment by the harbour. From here she would be able to see him coming back up towards Kalamita and confirm that he was alone.
At just after 11:30 she saw him ascending the road. He seemed alone but then, a hundred yards behind him, she saw three men. When they walked under a streetlight, she was certain they were special forces or KGB operatives. They wore light blue berets and shoulder flashes—VDV airborne uniforms—but she was sure they weren’t regular forces. They had the same unit patches as the Russians had worn back at the barn in January, and the patches were cover, she guessed; they were using a locally based unit’s insignia.
At first she could barely believe it—that Balthasar should have tricked her so well—but then she realised that the men weren’t following him with his approval but out of suspicion.
She saw him stop near the entrance to the park. He knew he was being followed, she saw. Then she saw, farther down the hill, the men melting into shadows away from the streetlights. He’d half turned and then she knew he was aware of their presence. To her consternation, he walked on, turning into the entrance of the park and towards a memorial stone a hundred yards from where she was concealed behind a cabin. The men were closing now behind him.
Anna drew the Contender handgun from inside her jacket and screwed a silencer into place.
When Balthasar reached the stone monument he sat down on a step and took a packet from his pocket. She couldn’t see clearly but it looked like a paper bag with food in it. He held it in his right hand and removed an apple. He began to eat the apple, still holding the paper bag and facing directly towards the entrance.
The men walked abreast now in the open space of the park. They were a yard or so apart and had evidently decided to no longer track him from a distance, but to make their approach. She saw the sides of their faces, and the positions of their heads told her they were staring straight at him. The distance closed. Balthasar sat perfectly still apart from the movement of the apple between his left hand and his mouth. He ate it in a slow, measured way, chewing each bite with great care. Down from the direction of the harbour, a bell chimed midnight. The air was still and—down here in the city—retained some of the warmth from the day even now.
Anna came out from behind the cabin and stealthily walked at an angle from behind the men and towards where Balthasar sat. There was no cover except the thin protection of a wood-and-iron park bench halfway between her and the monument. She decided to make for the bench and crouch behind it. But she knew now she was committed. There was no way back without exposing herself. Attack was possible, defence almost out of the question. She reached the bench, crouched behind the short end of it, leaving its full length between her and the men, and watched them now approach Balthasar and stand a yard from him in a semicircle that blocked his escape. He put down the apple. One of the men had asked a question and drawn a handgun. Slowly Balthasar put his hand inside his jacket and withdrew his card identifying him as an SVR colonel.
The second man took out a small torch and also received the card, which he proceeded to study in the torch’s beam. The first man held the gun, hanging lightly and looking as if it wasn’t trained anywhere in particular. The third man just stood, arms by his sides, completing the semicircle. Balthasar picked up the apple from the step and stood.
Anna watched a conversation ensue, sharp, abrupt questions from the man who still held Balthasar’s ID and slower responses from Balthasar. The third man now held a phone in his hand and was tapping a number into it slowly. Anna watched Balthasar slowly raise the paper bag in his right hand towards the man with the gun. It happened very slowly, a simple gesture, the offer of something in the bag. Instinctively, the man leaned slightly over the bag and then pulled back as if realising an instinct had gotten the better of his training. As he did so, Balthasar’s hand that held the bag shot straight up towards the man’s neck. Anna heard a strangled cry and raised the Contender onto the back of the bench.
She saw a knife flash, perhaps just in the light of the moon, its blade swinging away and the knife handle wrapped in the paper bag still clutched in Balthasar’s hand. The blade had swung upwards with great force, cutting the Adam’s apple in two and slicing the man’s neck from just above the chest to the throat. Before the man had started to topple, Anna fired a single shot at the third man, who was reaching for a gun. He dropped instantly. The one who held the ID card was suddenly distracted from drawing a gun of his own as he saw his colleague drop like a stone. In an instant, Balthasar flashed the blade sideways and sliced his neck halfway to the man’s spine.
There was a gurgling sound from the ground and one of the men thrashed his legs for a minute. Then there was absolute silence. Anna and Balthasar stood frozen in position for a second that stretched into ten before Anna stood up from behind the bench and walked towards the monument. When she arrived, she just looked at Balthasar’s face. He still held the paper bag in one hand, the knife protruding from it, and the apple in the other. Slowly he raised his left hand and took a last bite before putting the core in his pocket.
“Now I know you’re real,” she said.
“You didn’t before?”
“No. I’m not like you, Balthasar. I have to see things.”
They carried the three bodies across the grass towards a heap of composting grass from the previous year. Anna began to shovel it away and then Balthasar took the shovel. They placed the first body on the ground, the other two on top of it. Then they both shovelled the compost back over the bodies.
33
ANNA AND BALTHASAR SAT on a high rock above the canyon camp. The dawn was rising from across the Kerch Straits and Russia and, below them, the derricks lining Sevastopol’s dockyards and harbours and the superstructures of warships were catching the first light in the city. For a long while they sat in silence and watched the coastline revealed on another clear blue day.
On their exit from the city into the mountains neither spoke, but both were thinking of the implications of the dead men buried below them. There would be a massive manhunt if the Russians persuaded their Ukrainian allies in government that it was necessary.
But most of all, it was the intelligence that Balthasar had brought back with him from the bar that preoccupied their minds, the sonar in the harbours and their approaches being cut off in two days’ time and the standing down of special forces frogmen. At last, Balthasar broke the silence.
“Miller is right,” he said. “The fake attack is going to happen down there on the first of May. The payment on the second is to be the supposed reward for the attack.”
Anna looked at the hulks of warships dotting the bays. Then she paused at the aircraft carrier
“They won’t want to damage anything that’s worth something to them,” she said. “They’ll stage this attack on one of the ships that’s past its usefulness. And that will be the cause for Russian anger, their casus belli. The destruction of a useless ship.”
“Provocation followed by its reaction,” Balthasar said. “They set up the attack themselves, then say they are under attack. It’s the way things are done. Our terror experts know exactly how to make it work and how to make it look.”
“And then?” Anna said.
“Then the Kremlin will demand that Crimea become Russian again. In order to protect its own interests. After that? I give Ukraine itself a few more years at most of independence. Putin is binding the country ever closer to Russia with economic ties. It’s the end of Western ambitions for Ukraine to join Western Europe. It’s the end of Ukrainian nationalism and independence from Moscow.”
She turned to look at him. “You must get out now,” she said. “You’re the only witness.”
“And you?” he said, returning her gaze with sightless eyes.
“I have to finish things here,” she replied. “I’ve made a deal with Taras.”
He didn’t ask her what it was, the deal. He merely looked back towards the sea and felt the sun’s first
