The Blind Spy (3 page)

Despite the noise of construction, his son seemed capable of sleeping for ever.

He saw the workmen were wearing white cloths to protect their necks against the heat, even now at six in the evening. The noise of machinery and the fumes filled the air around the waste ground they were clearing in order to put up more concrete housing blocks.

Valentin walked on through the dust until he reached an older building on Khalabbah Street made of yellowing stone. A former school or government building, perhaps? But whatever it was in its former life, it was now the orphanage. It was quieter here.

He put his son down in the shade under a portico at the entrance and took out a piece of paper. On it he wrote in Arabic. ‘This boy has no parents. Please look after him.’ They would know it was a foreigner’s writing, and that bothered him momentarily. Then he sucked the pen for a moment and wrote again. ‘His name is Balthasar.’ Balthasar. He hadn’t been able to think of a name throughout the journey from Aleppo, but now it had come to him in a moment. He liked the name. God protect the King. They had dramatic names and that was one of its meanings, in any case. Then he looked for some way of alerting the people inside the building. He found a bell-pull made of old cord hanging at the side of the door and pulled on it. He heard a distant chime. Then he walked swiftly away. Whoever ran the orphanage would be accustomed to the ring that announced the abandonment of another child.

He walked for a mile back towards the centre of the city and finally found himself at the Russian embassy compound. The White Houses, the Russians called the compound, in an unconcealed expression of racist superiority.

His mind, he found, was blurred, vague, as if he were in a film of himself rather than being the real Valentin Viktorov. But he went straight to the house of his head of station and rang the bell before he lost his nerve. There was no point in delaying.

It was the maid who answered the door. He asked for Natalia Resnikova. Resnikov’s wife finally came to the door and invited him inside. She was an elegant, beautiful woman, but her eyes were usually shaded with sadness. Married to Resnikov, Valentin wasn’t surprised. He smiled nervously at her and she returned his expression with calm, uncritical serenity. Then she nodded at him sympathetically. He liked this woman and, he liked to believe, she had a soft spot for him too.

Valentin saw at once that they were alone. He was relieved that his head of station, Colonel Resnikov, was in his study as usual, probably drinking foreign whisky. He would be able to be alone with Resnikov’s wife and she was a good woman, a good person. They sat and took tea in a shaded patio at the rear of the house. When the maid had gone, Valentin told her everything; the night in Aleppo, the woman and their child.

She didn’t reply at first. There was a silence, but it wasn’t awkward. Then she called the maid and Valentin thought that she was going to betray him, but she simply asked for her knitting to be brought. He noticed the bump of her stomach that had grown in the past month, and she saw him looking.

‘They will be almost the same age,’ she said simply. ‘I believe I will have a girl.’

‘Just a year apart,’ he said. ‘What will you call her – if she’s a girl?’

‘I’d like to call her Anna.’

Valentin knew that Natalia Resnikova did good works in the city – that was why he had come to her. At least, she did good works when she could do so without drawing her husband’s disapproval or disgust, or even wrath. Resnikov was a hard, bitter man who seemed to gain pleasure from nothing, even the Western whisky he somehow got his hands on.

The maid brought her knitting on to the verandah. The pregnant wife of his boss showed him what she was making. ‘It’s a sweater for my baby,’ she said. ‘I’ll make another one for your son. Then they’ll have the same.’

He nodded his thanks, suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that now his son would be a real citizen of the world, with a sweater made specially for him, not just an abandoned child living off hand-me-downs.

‘And when Anna is born she and I will visit your son when they are both old enough,’ Natalia Resnikova said. ‘Until then, I will go alone when I can. I know the orphanage quite well.’ She finally touched his arm. ‘It’s a good place. And you did the right thing.’

Such unexpected understanding made Valentin’s eyes moist with relief as well as with the grief he felt for his encounter with the doomed woman dancer and finally, underlying all, for the birth of his son whose life or death he had held so recently in his hands.

 

T
HE BLACK S-CLASS stretch Mercedes crossed beneath the Moscow ring road on Entuziastov at just after 5.30 in the morning. It was snowing harder outside the city, or maybe that was just how it seemed to the men inside the car. For once they were away from the protection of the city’s buildings, the snow was free to hurl itself across the open landscape and a whirlwind of large, fluffy snowflakes rolled out of the eerie, monstrous white void only to disintegrate as they raced in to hit the car’s heated windscreen.

With the ring road behind it, the official car kept up the same steady, regulation speed and moved on to the M-7 heading north-east out of Moscow in the direction of Balashiha.

They were two Intelligence chiefs who sat on the soft, sweet-smelling black leather of the back seat and the military intelligence driver was the other figure in the limousine, alone in the front. Both chiefs were the most senior generals, elevated to their positions by age, experience, duty, but most of all by the supreme skill of the Russian political intelligence class – a ruthless animal instinct for supremacy in the power struggles of the Kremlin’s internecine bureaucratic wars.

In their late sixties, they wore uniforms almost comically bemedalled from past campaigns – real wars – that made them resemble highly colourful performers from a travelling medieval pageant. These tiered ribbons of medals had been won mostly in Afghanistan after Russia’s 1979 invasion of the country, and its disastrous and debilitating war there that had finally emptied the Soviet treasury and heralded the end of empire. They were the medals of defeat.

General Valentin Viktorov had been personally in charge of an intelligence team which, with initially magnificent success, had prepared the ground for the invasion of the presidential palace in Kabul at Christmas of that year. But those were the glory days, before the Soviet effort descended into stalemate and retreat in the subsequent years of brutal conflict.

Afghanistan. It was never far away from either of the generals’ minds, even now, decades after the war ended. Just as the Second World War – the Great Patriotic War, in Russia’s lexicon – had been the foul crucible whose hellish alchemy gave birth to Soviet might and to the greatest empire on earth, so Afghanistan was the insidious chemical formula that finally ripped the whole shaky edifice to pieces. For both the generals – as for many of the military veterans of that disastrous war – Afghanistan was the defining moment of their and their Motherland’s loss of pride. Afghanistan was the fault line that severed modern Russia from its glorious past. The actual collapse – that of the Eastern European empire in 1989 and the subsequent folding of Russia’s central Asian possessions after that – was just the inevitable consequence of the Afghan defeat. And it was Afghanistan that welded the psyches of the two generals and thousands like them into an overwhelming and unified desire for the recouping of all of glorious Russia’s losses since then.

But despite this psychological link between the two generals, it was notable that they sat as far from one another as the seating allowed, each pushed up against their respective rear doors. They were rivals and, in Russia’s medievally clannish political and intelligence world, they had often found themselves working against each other. One of the two generals was from the GRU, Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, the other, General Viktorov, was core SVR, Russia’s First Chief Directorate and the successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence department.

The two men didn’t talk and, indeed, the only body language between them consisted of the deliberate distance they put between themselves that strongly suggested a mutual antipathy. They also spent most of the journey looking away from each other and out of the windows on either side of the car, though the view was obscured almost completely by the white-out of driving snow. Only the thin, bunched-together trunks of birch and fir trees as they approached The Forest took shape, though dimly, through the otherwise white landscape and the snow-filled sky.

They also both wore tight-lipped expressions that suggested even sharing the same car was an imposition. But that was the way it had been arranged by the prime minister’s office and they hadn’t been given the choice to travel separately. It was as if this enforced journey together was a test of sorts in itself. ‘You’ll be working together’ – that had been the order. But they had never worked together in any commonly accepted way.

The relative seniority between the two men was hard to judge – not least by themselves – but their rivalry was evident in the tension that existed between them. The GRU general, Antonov, deployed five or six times more agents on foreign soil than the SVR and he personally commanded twenty-five thousand special forces troops, or
spetsnaz
. But it was the SVR that considered itself the elite foreign intelligence force and it was to the SVR headquarters in Balashiha – The Forest, in KGB parlance – to which they were going. General Viktorov of the SVR was also a central figure in the elite of elites – the directorate’s highly secretive Department S. This inner clan of foreign intelligence officers was in charge of training foreigners to spy for the Kremlin, and then to commit terrorist acts back in their own countries. Viktorov’s highly sensitive department had achieved several important assassinations in the past year alone.

But in addition to being at the heart of Department S, Viktorov had the vital advantage of having closer personal access to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin than his rival. The two of them were actually friends outside the day-to-day business of the intelligence world, and skied and hunted together. In Putin’s baronial court where rank was often a secondary consideration after personal favour – and favours – this probably gave Viktorov the edge.

After crossing the ring road, it wasn’t more than a few miles to Balashiha and The Forest. The snow ploughs had been out all night to keep the vital road connecting the Kremlin and its intelligence heart clearer than any other in Russia. Neither of the generals made any attempt to break the silence between them for the remainder of the journey.

Perhaps each was thinking over the purpose of this pre-dawn meeting with Putin, or perhaps they simply had little to say to each other without the catalyst of the prime minister’s actual presence and his sudden call for them to meet him. But, more likely, each was thinking of his own strategy of personal preeminence when they met Putin, regardless of the purpose of the meeting. And each of them was certainly in a state of anxious speculation that the other knew more, had been briefed prior to this journey, had been taken into the confidence of the prime minister more closely. The usual fear of some loss of favour with Putin plagued them both. And that was how the Kremlin played its games. You never got used to that, Viktorov was thinking. Rule was administered through anxiety and fear, just as it had always been.

The car finally swung through the high gates – razor wire and gun turrets disappearing into the snow on either side – and the generals’ identities were shown and logged by the guards. The Mercedes pulled up half a mile beyond the entrance, outside a long, low building, most of which was concealed beneath the earth.

It was Golubev the special assistant from the prime minister’s office who was there to meet them. A chivvying young man with a foolishly small moustache, Golubev was a product of the new, post-Soviet era. He was a politician-lawyer rather than a soldier – let alone an intelligence officer – and therefore the kind of bureaucratic, ministry man who elicited little respect from either of the generals. His youth allowed no memory of the defeat in Afghanistan or even of the collapse of the entire Soviet Union two years later, which that humiliation precipitated. Unlike the generals, Golubev looked to the future at the expense of nurturing the past and its humiliations. And, to the generals, he also looked to the future at the expense of redressing the balance that had been lost in the past twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed. That balance – in the dreams of many like them – was the restoration of the Russian empire.

With a fussiness that disguised fears of his own, Golubev brushed imaginary dust from the lapels of his jacket, smoothed its sides and then led the generals through cream-painted concrete corridors to an elevator which took them down four floors into the earth and finally into a brightly lit room the size of a tennis court. It was one of many operations rooms in this core SVR building and Viktorov knew it well. It was here that many undercover missions had been planned, from the wars in Chechnya to foreign assassinations in the Middle East and Europe. Long, identical tables were laid out in neat rows, each with a harsh light over them, and at a casual glance the whole space might have suggested a snooker club.

Golubev proceeded to a table near the centre of this space and pulled up two high chairs for the generals that offered a view down on to the high table, and then one for himself, which he never sat on.

At once, Viktorov looked at several maps that had been opened on this long table. The particular map that caught his eye – it was in the centre of the table which was at the centre of the room – was of the Soviet Union. It was a pre-1991 map, in other words, from a time before the Soviet Union had broken up. Viktorov was pleasantly surprised, as if he were looking at a recently discovered family treasure that had been uncovered in the clear-out of an old attic, and he took a greater interest. He saw another map of the period, and of equal size, next to it which was a close-up of part of the former empire. It had been titled ‘Little Russia’, but only by a scrawl on a yellow Post-it note stuck to the top. The name on the map itself, however, was ‘Ukrainian SSR’.