As she fled through the rocks, she knew that if the courier hadn’t been late, it would have been her the Russians caught in their lights.
Anna smelled the sea before she saw it, and heard the persistent, low roaring noise the sea makes even in the calmest conditions. She guessed she was roughly a mile away from the rendezvous, but then there was the cliff to descend before she could make the beach and she had no idea how long that would take. It was nearly twenty-four hours since she had escaped from Sevastopol and the time for the rendezvous was approaching. But if she didn’t make the time agreed with Burt at their briefing, then Larry and the others would activate the plan to get her out off the beach on the next day, or the one after that, and at the same time.
She looked down the long slope of a hill that fell away gently to some high, sharp cliffs that flanked a small cove. She was roughly halfway between Sevastopol and Yevratoriya. In the gathering darkness, the walls of the cliffs where they curved around and away from her were a shade lighter than the fields above them and the sea below, and she knew she was in the right place, even if the GPS hadn’t told her so. There was no road to this place, that was why they’d picked it. It was isolated from people. She’d walked through the night and all that day after the pick-up. As the crow flies, it hadn’t been so bad. Tonight would be the first chance of rescue.
Overnight on the long walk away from the city, she had fished out the thick plastic envelope from the plastic bag of fertiliser, thrown the bag away, and stashed the envelope in her jacket. She had enough food for three days, maybe four if she eked it out. That was so she could go underground in the event of trouble and there’d been nothing but trouble since she’d arrived at Odessa. There was more than one opportunity for a rescue and it could be days before they felt they could come in. She looked out to sea now. The fog had lifted, that was a pity. Maybe they would wait for more bad weather to arrive. Maybe they would wait until the sea cut up again, or maybe there wouldn’t be time for that. All she could do was to make the rendezvous, then her fate was in their hands.
When it was completely dark, she descended the hill slowly, watching all the time. If her arrival had been known, and the drop itself was known, would they also know the fall-back plan for her ex-filtration from the country. It didn’t matter, either way there was no other chance now. She’d seen Ukrainian soldiers combing the outskirts of Sevastopol, and the ports and other exit points would be heavily guarded.
As she descended she thought about the stand-off between the Russian and Ukrainian military at the barn and wondered what the Russians had told the Ukrainian government – an escaped prisoner from their naval base, perhaps? But there was only the woman – a girl, really, from what she’d seen. And the Russians were unlikely to be believed in the highly tense atmosphere that existed in Sevastopol. It depended who had gained the upper hand at the barn. If it was the Ukrainians, then they would want to know the identity of the courier, once she was revealed to them, as much as the Russians did. The Russians would try to concoct a story that made the Ukrainians seek common cause with them, perhaps, or just curious enough to heed their requests for a search of the city and its environs. It depended on those few seconds at the barn – with diplomacy the Russians might have convinced the Ukrainian military to work with them. No doubt the spectre of terrorism would be invoked, the convenient lie for all unwelcome events.
She reached the top of the cliffs and now clearly heard the waves breaking two hundred feet below. There was an old path fit only for animals, she’d been told in the briefing. But nobody had actually seen it. It was said to have been there for more than two and a half thousand years, since the Greeks occupied the peninsula. Suddenly it sounded uncertain to her, unplanned. They hand’t even known for sure where it began its descent from the top of the cliffs.
She decided to walk to the left along the cliff edge first. It was pitch-dark now, the sea blacker below except where the waves broke. She didn’t know if she’d see the path even if it was there, and she couldn’t risk using a light. So she walked carefully, stopping often to study a change in the shades of darkness that might reveal the existence of the path. After an hour, examining every possible opening and once almost falling over the cliff, she thought it couldn’t be on that side. She walked back to the centre of the cliffs where she’d started and began again, this time pacing slowly to the right. She was losing valuable time just finding the path – if it existed at all. But she was calm, as she always was in any extreme situation – calmer in those circumstances, if anything. Even the prospect of being left alone on foreign soil and with half an army out there looking for her wasn’t enough to drive fear into her thoughts. Everything – as long as you were free – had a solution.
After twenty minutes searching on the other side to the right, she saw a break between two rocks. The ground was overgrown, but they’d said the path was unused. That was its advantage. Carefully, she dropped down between the rocks and saw a tiny ledge. Below her and the ledge she saw the white crests of the waves rolling on to the beach. It looked like a sheer drop, but she edged out along the ledge and then saw that the lighter streak widened down below. There, ahead of her, she saw a snaking, sandy-looking area that might indicate a way. It seemed to wind its way past other rocks and stones and that was a good sign.
She crept ahead using the narrowest of footholds, in almost complete blindness. The sound of the waves was beating in time with the blood in her head. But once she’d reached the furthest point of the ledge she saw a step off it on to small stones where nothing grew. She looked down on to another almost sheer drop. Below her, another lighter-shaded and twisting shape of what seemed to be a path wound around the near-vertical cliff face. In the darkness it was like a loop that appeared and disappeared in ox-bow curves. This must be it, she decided, but even a goat would have trouble traversing it.
She slid and climbed, mostly backwards and using her hands against the cliff face, for over an hour. She clutched on to the jagged edges of rocks when she felt herself going, until finally she stepped out on to a shingled beach. The salt smell of the sea hit her first and then the smell of seaweed and tar filled her nostrils. She slumped down on the pebbles, exhausted suddenly. Her heart was racing. She didn’t know how she’d made it.
Her watch said it was eighteen minutes after midnight. She wanted to sleep. She was hungry. But she put away her fear. Fear was the enemy. From a pocket in her jacket she withdrew a keysized plastic tool and flipped a switch. A tiny beam lit beyond the edge of the beach where the water broke. She flashed it three times in a south-south westerly direction, then three times in a south-south easterly direction. She repeated it twice more and sat down to wait. If the Russians or the Ukrainian coastal patrols were looking for her out there, they would see it too. She was getting colder. And she wondered if she’d be able to get back up the track if Burt’s team didn’t come.
As she waited, she cast her mind back to the scene at the barn once again. There’d been the shot. She’d thought about that at first, wondered who had fired it, until she’d seen what followed. For before the Ukrainian jeeps had arrived and before she’d turned up the hill to escape the soldiers, she’d watched a body being carried from the barn; two soldiers, one holding the arms, the other the legs. She’d seen the courier’s long hair – a woman’s hair – hanging down and dragging along the earth. She’d looked like a dead deer being carried on a pole. It could only be that the woman had killed herself. They would certainly have wanted her alive. But she was certainly dead from the way they carried her like a hunted animal and if she were dead, it meant the agent was safe. The courier had sacrificed herself to save the agent, even though she didn’t know it. She wondered if the Ukrainian officer had demanded to look inside the truck and what he would do when he saw the body of the courier.
As Anna sat, numb, and listened to the surf, she wondered for the first time about the courier; she’d been a young woman. Anna thought about her young life, her past, what the mission had meant to her. It seemed she’d been a novice from everything Anna had seen. Perhaps it was her first time. Anna felt a deep, wrenching sadness at the waste of life. And she wondered what it was the agent had told her to ensure that she’d killed herself: that this was a KGB operation, certainly; that it was for her country, for the new Russia – that would have been his message to disguise the truth. It was not for the courier to know that she was delivering material that might damage her country. The young woman undoubtedly believed she’d been delivering a package for her bosses in the KGB, not for a Western intelligence agency.
And then, when she’d been caught at the barn, she’d shot herself. There seemed to be no other explanation. Her captors certainly would have wanted her alive. But the agent would have made as sure as was possible that she didn’t allow herself to be taken alive. The agent had deceived her well – so well that she was dead by her own hand. Anna sat and thought again about the young woman; first deceived into delivering material that was treasonable, then deceived into taking her own life in order to protect the agent. Unlike the detached, clinical thoughts she’d had for the two men she’d killed the previous day, Anna now felt a deep compassion for the young woman, duped by all sides, and a friend to no one. She’d been everybody’s fool. Something Finn had once said to her came into her mind. ‘If there were no spies, there’d be no need for any spies.’ It was true. The facet of espionage that troubled her most was that it existed entirely for itself and was self-fulfilling. Finn, too, had died for that, for the pursuit of an uncertain goal in the small bubble of an alternative, fake world.
The waves crawled up and back on the shingle beach with a monotonous regularity that began to make her sleepy again. There was hardly any moon, the sea was dark in the small bay and beyond. And then she saw it: an object darker than the water that nudged up against the shore at the corner of the cove where the wave motion was broken by an outcrop of rock that shielded it from the sea.
Anna kept to the top of the beach and crept slowly towards the object as it gingerly approached the beach, until she saw the black prow of a rubber boat. There were three figures in it. One stepped over the side as it came in close and pulled the boat a little further on to the shore, just to keep it from being dragged back, no more. Then a light flashed. A torch on the boat flickered twice, a pause, then three times and a pause, then twice again. Anna flashed the torch three times, then a break, then three times again, and repeated it. She was only thirty yards away now. It was them, she was sure of that. But she drew both the guns she had taken from the dead men and waited for a few seconds. With one gun aimed at the figure in the centre of the boat, and the other ready to fire in any direction necessary, she walked at an angle across the pebbles until she could see the men’s outlines clearly. They wore balaclavas. The man in the centre removed his and she recognised Larry. Nobody spoke.
As she reached the sea’s edge, Larry hauled her into the rubber boat. Then the two other men pushed the boat sluggishly away from the shingle and it crept away from the shore with muffled engines. Once they were clear of the shore they crossed the bay at speed and headed out to sea. Still, no words were spoken.
In just under an hour from the rendezvous the boat pulled up beside the rusting hull of a small Nigerian-registered freighter and a ladder was dropped. Anna went up first, feeling the package pressing into her chest as she climbed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
T
HE GOLDEN FLEECE nightclub on Odessa’s waterfront was not a regular haunt of Taras Tur. In fact, no nightclub anywhere on the planet was even an irregular haunt of his. He wouldn’t have been here at all if it weren’t for his cousin Masha. It was her suggestion that they should meet here. That was supposed to have been yesterday evening. She was a day late – not at all an unlikely event for Masha – and so he’d decided to return here a second time in the hope that tonight she would arrive. Nevertheless, her non-appearance troubled him.
The choice of venue he put down to her youth. She was younger than he was by a decade and she still liked the nightclubs even now that she was married. As for him, even in his youth Taras had never enjoyed places like the Golden Fleece. He thought about this for a moment and decided that he simply didn’t
believe
in them. Taras was not an escapist. He liked to know what was what and, until he’d met his wife ten years before, his previous girlfriends had either become hurt and angry by his organised, rational mind or teased him for it.
He looked at his watch again. It was nearly ten o’clock and she had said she’d be here by nine the evening before. Well, that was Masha. She’d told him by phone from Moscow a week ago that she would be in Odessa the previous afternoon. She was arriving from Russia the day before that – that would be two days ago – then making a brief and, he assumed, nostalgic visit to the farm outside Sevastopol. She should have taken the plane from Simferol to Odessa yesterday afternoon. It had all sounded quite organised for Masha, in fact. But she wasn’t answering her mobile, a whole day later, and the feeling of unease crept over him again.
Taras looked around at the dressed-up girls and women in the club and guessed that Masha was probably in some cheap hostel in the town, still choosing what to wear, putting on make-up – whatever young women like her did before going out for the night. And he felt a moment of fondness for his young cousin.
He took another sip of cold Czech beer and settled in again for the wait with his elbow on the bar. He didn’t intend that they would stay here if and when Masha arrived. He would steer her to a quiet bar behind the port where they could talk.