The Blind Spy

 
 
 

 
The Blind Spy

 

 
ALEX DRYDEN

 
 
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Copyright © 2010 Alex Dryden

 

 
The right of Alex Dryden to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

 

 
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

 

 
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

 

 
All characters in this publication – apart from the obvious political figures – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 

 
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

 

eISBN : 978 0 7553 7336 9

 

 
This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

 

 
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Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

To Mia, I love you anyway

‘Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.’

Joseph Stalin, April 1945

‘You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state.’

Vladimir Putin to George W. Bush, April 2008

 

L
IEUTENANT VALENTIN VIKTOROV walked carefully and with evident hesitation through the labyrinth of Aleppo’s covered souk. A keen-eyed observer perhaps might have described him as being lost, but, lost or not, it was clear that he had his mind on things other than his surroundings.

He was a tall man with short-cropped fair hair and an athletic build. His face was so finely shaven, his skin so smooth, that he looked almost too young to be shaving at all. He certainly looked far younger than his twenty-seven years, and gave off an appearance of youth that a teenage Russian army conscript on leave might have done, rather than the seasoned KGB intelligence officer that he was.

Despite the fact that he was not on official assignment on this summer morning, he was operating as he always did for KGB undercover work when he was outside the secret, closed and protected spaces of the Soviet spy elite, places like the embassy compound in Damascus from which he had set off before the sun came up. In other words, if anything went wrong, he was unprotected. He carried no identification from the embassy that would get him out of trouble if that was what he was heading into.

But the difference between a normal undercover operation and his activities this morning was that this was a personal mission – the KGB had no part in it. It was his own solo, private operation, and one that would have drawn deep disapproval from his boss, should he have known of it, possibly bringing an end to his career altogether. He had no back-up for what he was about to do.

Dressed in the drab civilian clothes of Soviet Russia he seemed, like Russia itself, drained of colour and bereft of joy. In this he was clearly distinguishable from the bustling and colourful Arab throng in the souk. Not just his clothes and his height, but also his pronounced Slavic features set him distinctively apart from the Arabs.

He was distinguishable too – though more subtly so – from the few, mostly Western tourists who might look like him with their Caucasian features, but that was where the resemblance ended. Unlike Valentin, they were all staring wide-eyed at their surroundings and carrying armfuls of cheap souvenirs which they would be taking back home with them. Unlike nearly all of these other visitors to the souk that morning, Valentin seemed unimpressed by his surroundings and he carried nothing that was visible.

Only the thick packet concealed in his buttoned-down shirt pocket and the small emergency pistol tucked away beneath the waistband of his trousers accompanied him.

But there was something about his urgently controlled movements, the hard muscles of his body visible through the shirt and his alert and watchful eyes that anyway suggested he was something altogether other than a tourist. He didn’t seem to belong in the souk, even as a visitor. He looked like a man prepared, and preparing, for some kind of sudden action that was in another order of things than merely a shopping expedition. There was, too, a sense of latent violence about him; his toned and muscled body appeared to reach out for a reason to be employed to the full. He was a pumped-up sportsman, a human missile ready to go off. He certainly didn’t look like a tourist sponge soaking up the wonders of the place. He was a part of his surroundings, while also being apart. And unlike the tourists, he spoke fluent Arabic.

Valentin paused with the minute attention of a bookkeeper at the cupboard-sized shops on either side of the narrow alley. But he didn’t really look at their contents. If his eyes were focused at all on what was around him, he looked without seeing. There was a nervousness about him, which expressed itself in small, tense movements. He repeatedly brushed his short-cropped fair hair with one hand and occasionally touched the buttoned-down pocket of his white shirt with the other. It was an anxious gesture made as if to reassure himself that the package was still there. The muscles of his lean jaw twitched every time he felt the package and after each contact with it he thrust his hands back into the pockets of his grey trousers as though to physically restrain them from the obsessive checking of the pocket.

Valentin walked on, blindly surveying the over-filled alcoves crammed up against the alley that was wide enough for a donkey loaded with panniers to pass by, but not much bigger.

What separated him too from the other visitors to the souk was that he looked at these little shops one by one, without any of the discernment of the real, dedicated shopper. It was as if he were seeing them for the first time, even though that was far from the truth. Anyone who watched him closely would have said that he wasn’t truly looking for anything, in fact; that he wasn’t a potential customer at all, and that his mission was actually elsewhere than in the souk. The souk and its multitude of variegated delights were there to slow him down, to delay an arrival of some kind. And in his heart, he knew that he was stopping deliberately. And he knew that the reason for these pauses was in order to postpone his purpose – they were not the purpose itself.

The traders and hawkers who crowded the souk’s alleys on either side of him were volubly selling their jute sacks of multicoloured spices, green and mauve soaps piled up like sweet-smelling brick walls, lurid meats that dripped blood from hooks and butchers’ blocks and which ran thickly away into the runnel along the centre of the stone alleyway. And then there were other shops that sold the red and white
keffiyehs
the Arabs wrapped around their heads, the silk and nylon dresses in gaudy gold and green, the striped woollen
jellabahs
, the sheepskins that betrayed the rancid smell of under-curing, the vegetables piled high in pyramids, the tin and brass lamps and lanterns ... On it went, fifteen kilometres of covered market in all, a warren of commerce that sold produce from China and central Asia, the Levant, the Arab countries, Russia – even the West – in this place, Aleppo, the world’s oldest of trading cities.

And in every direction in which Valentin flickered his sharp, electric-blue eyes, what he saw were the photographs of the Soviet Union’s ally, the stern president of Syria, Hafez al Assad, which, whether faded or new, looked down on the commerce and haggling, the conversation and coffee-drinking, like a looming superstition that threatened reprisal of some kind, rather than a figure of flesh and blood. Valentin was accustomed enough to the threatening faces that gazed down from walls back in his own country to hardly notice this one.

He stepped aside for a man with a frayed stick who was driving a donkey laden with baskets of green leaves along the covered narrow alley. The man, like all the Arabs, barely looked at him and, when he did – and then only briefly – it seemed to be done deliberately without curiosity. Was it fear of contact with foreigners that kept their eyes cast aside after the briefest of glances? No, he thought, the foreigner – whether a casual tourist or one of the Russian military and intelligence personnel like himself – was irrelevant to their daily lives. These people simply went about their business, that was all.

Not for the first time, Valentin was shocked by the freedom and social detachment which commerce brought to the people even under a dictatorship like Syria’s – and which was absent in his own country where commerce was a dirty, even a criminal word.

In a moment of reflection that suddenly brought him into the moment, Valentin pondered that he was leaving all this behind him now anyway. He was well into the last week of his posting to Syria. Three years it had been since first he’d been sent down from Moscow. He’d graduated from the KGB school at Balashiha-2 in The Forest outside Moscow, then he’d spent two years behind a desk. He’d learned Arabic and was taken under the wing of a rising star in the KGB’s foreign intelligence department. This senior officer had then requested Valentin’s transfer to Damascus, where this mentor had been made head of station. And now, in just over five days, Valentin would be returning to Moscow again for another posting, to another Arab country, he supposed – or maybe it would be just a desk job at the KGB’s highly secretive Department S, in the Arab section, of course.

But it wasn’t nostalgia brought on by his departure from the country that had drawn him up from the KGB station in Damascus to Syria’s second capital, Aleppo. He hadn’t come to say goodbye – not to the country, at any rate, or even just to Aleppo. He was perfectly aware that his slow progress through the souk was purposeful in its delay for another reason entirely. The private reason he had made this trip to the north of the country was hard for him to accomplish and he was postponing the moment a little longer. He was neither savouring it – this particular end – nor fearing it. Nevertheless, why he had come to Aleppo contained a finality that he wished to put off.

He turned to the left down another alley in the neat grid of the souk. Like all the others in this maze, it was filled with the conflicting sights and smells of spice and skins and alimentary produce. The sounds of an Arab lute came and went from a record player in a carpet shop. He stopped briefly at the shop and fingered some Kurdish kelims, but he didn’t truly see them, either. His mind was elsewhere and as soon as the shopkeeper tried to get him to buy something he walked on, stiffly smiling a thank-you, and pretending he couldn’t speak their language. He fingered the packet in the buttoned-down pocket of his shirt once more to make sure that it was still there. The gun was cool against his skin and a constant heavy presence.