The Blind Spy

opened on the fifth floor, she shot dead two of the guards of the prison wing. Taras took the keys and they entered, racing through the empty ward. The other two guards were bemused. One began to raise his gun.

“Don’t shoot!” Taras said. “There’s a terror attack down below.”

But the guard armed his gun and Anna had dropped him with a single shot by the time Larry punched the second guard and then struck him hard on the back of the head with his pistol butt.

They unlocked the second door, and this time only Taras ran down the corridor of cells. The others began to take up stations staggered outside the cells, in the ward, outside the lift, and along to the end of the corridor, where another corridor joined it.

Taras fumbled with the keys, trying first one then a second. He’d gone through five keys and the sweat was pouring off him by the time the sixth slid into the lock and he pushed the door open. He crossed the room. Masha lay staring in horror at him from the cot.

He scooped her up.

“It’s all right. It’s all right, Masha. It’s me.”

Then he heard a firefight erupt from somewhere beyond the ward. He guessed it was from the end of the corridor. Adam and Grant were holding off a concerted attack. He lifted the emaciated body of his cousin from the cot and ran out of the cell, past the others and into the ward.

The lift was waiting, its doors jammed open with a trolley. Taras saw a body at the far end of the corridor. It was Adam’s, he thought fitfully. Suddenly a loud explosion ripped the plaster from the walls of the corridor and splintered shrapnel at four hundred feet per second into the body of Grant. He fell immediately.

They couldn’t risk the lift now and they began to run down the stairs, Anna ahead, Taras in the middle holding his cousin, while Larry and Lucy brought up the rear. They cascaded down the steps rather than ran. It was a pell-mell hurtling of bodies broken only by Larry, who crouched at each turn and trained his gun back up the stairs, firing at will at their pursuers. They reached the bay, descending five floors in under a minute. By the time the ambulance pulled away, they were all present apart from their two dead comrades, and the metal curtain had been jammed shut behind them.

37

THREE AND A HALF MILES offshore from the flat coast north of Sevastopol, the navigation lights of the ancient, twenty-six-foot wooden fishing vessel Lyubimov were comfortably anonymous among the lights of a pack of other small commercial fishing boats strung out along a two-mile stretch of water. On the fourth night after the full moon, the red and green and white lights bobbed in the lazy current that drifted along the coast and the swell was gentle, unremarkable.

Balthasar leaned against a guardrail on the starboard side of the vessel facing northwards, the boat’s prow pointing out towards the Black Sea. A small sail at the stern kept the fishing boat pointing up-wind. Already he sensed that things were moving as they should. But he knew, too, that people had been lost. He felt Anna on the wind and in the salt smell of the sea. He felt her approach. He felt the invisible lines that linked him to her. The darkness was his favoured time. He felt the darkness as much as he felt the light, though neither made any difference to him. For the benefit of the rest of the world, in the pocket of his fisherman’s jacket, he held his orders from Department S that were the proof the world needed. He also kept in the same waterproof package the minutes of meetings that had started at the Forest back in January, the last time he’d seen—or would see—his father, as well as the notes from his briefing sessions with both his father and the GRU boss. The rest of the world needed to see, he thought with amusement. They needed to see because that was their impoverished version of knowledge.

He turned away from the rail and walked along the deck to the wheelhouse. A nineteen-year-old boy was reading a rock magazine in the thin light from the ceiling and listening to the radio.

“We need the channels open now,” Balthasar told him, and he heard the music stop as the boy tuned the radio to the open channel. “Start the engines,” Balthasar told him. “We’ll be heading farther out in a short while.”

This time he walked to the stern of the vessel and heard the steady hum of an engine half a mile away. It was them. But he’d sensed that, too, long before the sound became audible.

The small motorboat nudged alongside the Lyubimov and Balthasar already had the gate open in the guardrail to receive them. There were five of them, two were missing, as he’d known.

Larry lashed the motorboat to the side of the Lyubimov, Taras carried the inert form of Masha into the wheelhouse and laid her on a thin bed, while Anna and Lucy walked to opposite ends of the vessel and leaned against the rails. Anna stood next to him at the stern. They didn’t speak. Behind them they heard Larry ordering the boy to set a course of 180 degrees. Then he took the wheel and they heard the old engines grind up to full throttle.

The Lyubimov pushed through the black swell for another three miles towards the open sea where the lights from the fishing pack were left behind them and finally lost. Nobody spoke. Anna and Balthasar stood at the stern, Lucy and Taras with her now, at the bow, while Larry pulled back the throttle and cut the engines again. The silence was complete. Only Larry’s footsteps as he came out of the wheelhouse broke it briefly before he, too, stopped and scanned the sea.

It seemed a long wait to the tense party, but it was no more than twenty minutes at most. Only Balthasar seemed completely at ease. He didn’t even turn when the submersible emerged four hundred yards off their port bow and wallowed sluggishly in the rolling water. Larry walked back into the wheelhouse and called for him.

“What about the boy?” he said.

The nineteen-year-old was staring at the black shape in astonishment, then fear. He looked at Larry now and decided it was finished with him. Larry’s face was set in grim determination. But Balthasar smiled at the boy and put his hand on Larry’s shoulder.

“We leave him with the motorboat,” he said. “No radio, enough fuel to get to shore. And some money,” he added, and took out another waterproof package from a pocket of the jacket. “You did well,” he said to the terrified boy. “If we hear you’ve kept your mouth shut, in a week you’ll receive the same amount again.”

“We can’t let him go,” Larry said through gritted teeth.

“I already have,” Balthasar said.

Larry started the engines and took the Lyubimov with great care a hundred yards from the submersible and downstream from the current and the swell, while Lucy untied the motorboat and held the lines tightly so that it still kept closely to the sides. Taras carried Masha first into the motorboat then the others climbed in, Larry keeping hold of the boy’s arm tightly. He frisked him to make sure there was no hand-held radio concealed anywhere, found nothing, and cursed under his breath at Balthasar’s methods.

Balthasar descended to the engine room of the Lyubimov, opened the seacocks, and heard the seawater slowly flooding the scuppers and felt it overlap his feet. Then he climbed back up the ladder and down into the motorboat. By the time they reached the submersible the Lyubimov was wallowing low in the water and would disappear altogether in half an hour. On the submersible a hatch was opened and, to the astonishment of everyone, Burt’s bare head appeared.

“Reminds me of Cam Ranh Bay, 1969,” he said cheerfully. “But that time it was the Russians under our ships.”

Anna smiled at him despite her low-level anger. She didn’t believe that Burt had ever been anywhere near Cam Ranh Bay. But Burt’s mythologising of himself was, as ever, for his own personal entertainment. He required nobody to believe it.

Inside the submersible there was room for six, eight maximum. Burt’s presence didn’t exactly help the seating arrangements, but at least he seemed to have realised that it wasn’t de rigueur to smoke on submarines. Balthasar was the last to descend. He pushed the boy away from the submersible and told him not to start the engine for twenty minutes after the sub disappeared.

“Remember what I told you,” he said. And he felt the wave of relief in the boy’s smile. “We’ll look after you well,” he said. Then the hatch was shut and the chambers began to fill with water for the descent.