PROLOGUE

AUGUST 1971

LIEUTENANT VALENTIN VIKTOROV WALKED carefully and with evident hesitation through the labyrinth of Aleppo’s covered souk. He might have seemed lost to those moving past him quickly on their errands. 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 a young Russian army conscript on leave, rather than the seasoned KGB intelligence officer that he was.

Despite the fact that he was not on official assignment this summer morning, he was operating as he always did for KGB undercover work when he was outside the secret, 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. He carried no identification from the embassy that would get him out of trouble if that was what he was heading into. If anything went wrong, he was unprotected.

But the difference between a normal undercover operation and his activities this morning was that this was a personal mission—one that would have drawn deep disapproval from his boss, should he have known of it, possibly bringing an end to his career altogether.

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. Unlike Valentin, they were all staring wide eyed at their surroundings and carrying armfuls of cheap souvenirs that 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 suggested he was something altogether other than a tourist anyway. He looked like a man prepared, and preparing, for some kind of sudden action that was in another order of things entirely separate from 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. And unlike the tourists, he spoke fluent Arabic.

Valentin paused with the minute attention of a bookkeeper at the cupboard-size 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 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 himself from his obsessive checking.

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

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 undercuring, 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 other 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 that 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.

And Valentin suddenly felt how close he was to his own country. He was well into the last week of his posting to Syria. Three years it had been since he’d first 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 good-bye—not to the country, at any rate, or even just to Aleppo. The private reason for 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 spices 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 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.

At the end of the alley, or perhaps it was at the end of the one after that, he saw daylight and headed towards it. He took a deep breath. He was approaching the moment. It was time to finish his business here and get back to the capital before he was missed. He certainly didn’t want to have to answer questions from his station head, the truculent and volatile KGB colonel Resnikov, and account for his time of absence from Damascus. He needed to be out of here within the hour and back to the capital. Suddenly he began to think more clearly, to take a grip on his usually incisive mind in order to carry through with what he had come to do.

And then at last he emerged into the blinding white light of a busy street. The thick heat from which the covered market had protected him hit him like a suffocating mask, wrapping him in its intensity with a physical sensation that was almost like a dull, dry-fisted blow. With a muscular forearm bared from the rolled-up sleeve of his white shirt, he wiped his forehead as if to ward off the sweat that hadn’t appeared yet. The heat was an insistent presence that demanded your attention, he thought, took over your thoughts.

He looked up and down. The street was a cacophony of horns and shouting. It was full of donkey carts with car tyres for wheels, and with the occasional cars and trucks that by some miracle still functioned vaguely as they were built to do. Exhaust fumes from a vegetable truck up from the country choked him as the driver pressed down on the throttle and its engine squealed agonisingly by him. The man should check his fan belt, he thought automatically.

The café he was looking for was a few hundred yards away. That was the venue they’d given him, the starting point for his real purpose this morning. He could just see it from the souk’s exit. The men would take him from there. It was their own proposition, this meeting place, to which he’d agreed.

He stopped under a shaded awning before committing himself finally. He had come here against all regulations, let alone good sense. What if something happened now? What if the men in the café had another agenda? They might try to stick a knife in him, he supposed. But most likely they’d let him go once he gave them the packet in his shirt pocket. It was his conscience, as well as his curiosity, that had brought him here and that was bad trade craft—no trade craft at all, in fact. He was going right out on a limb.

He saw them, three of them, sitting at the edge of the café—they were at the table nearest the road. He knew only one of them, but guessed the other two were also her brothers. When he approached, warily, they didn’t greet him, but they didn’t look hostile either. Blank faces, cold, dark eyes. Neither trusting nor distrusting. But here they were in a public street. Maybe it would be different when they had him in some hidden place. He trusted, however, that they would take what they could get from him and that they wouldn’t dare to harm a Russian from the embassy. He inspired respect from his physical presence, but at least they knew of his position—despite no actual identification—and it was that which inspired fear. Without a word, the men stood as he approached and indicated that he should follow.

The four of them walked for more than half an hour, away from the market and the ancient citadel of Abraham, past the hammams and the khans behind their old wooden doors, beyond the poor restaurants and bike repair shops, away from the commercial centre and on to the outskirts of the city.

Once they were clear and had reached a chronically poor residential neighbourhood, they finally turned up a small alley of mud houses and he guessed that it was here where the family house would be. But it was only a guess. Valentin had never been there before. He’d only met the woman once, in fact, that one time when she’d been dancing at the restaurant back in the direction from which they’d walked. She’d been a sudden attraction—he twenty-seven, she nineteen.

She’d danced for the three of them, all Russian intelligence officers up from Damascus for the weekend. When the others had left, he’d stayed, infatuated, lost, overturned by her beauty or by her movements or by the drink and the music—or all of those things.

He remembered now how it had been back then. One minute he’d felt like he’d been walking quietly and relatively enjoyably through life—albeit an intelligence life of suspicion and paranoia—and the next, he was metaphorically hanging upside down from a tree with a noose around his foot. That had been her effect, he remembered. She’d turned him upside down without warning. He remembered her eyes now, eyes that drew him into a whirlpool that was more of his own imagination than from any physical attribute of hers. She was a professional, after all. She was paid to use her eyes like that, as well as her body. Her charms were directed at everyone she danced for, not just at him. But it was he who had fallen for her.

They’d had sex in a room at the back of the restaurant that she and the other dancers used for changing. It was very sudden, unexpected, they’d hardly removed their clothes. He hadn’t gone to the manager enquiring about her with sex in mind. He’d just wanted to see her. It was a vague, rudderless desire that was more about his fear of never seeing her again than anything else. He was infatuated. But the manager had let it happen either because of the money Valentin had given him to keep quiet, or because he was afraid of these Russians. And the woman—the dancer—why had she let it happen? He didn’t know. She’d been a virgin. Most probably she’d seen in him some kind of salvation from the narrow and ever-shrinking opportunities of her life. And he didn’t even know her name, he realised afterwards. Maybe sex with him had been some desperate throw of the dice on her part, an attempt to change her life forever.

He looked ahead now, along the alley that wound up a slight dirt hill. The men didn’t seem to be worrying that he wouldn’t follow them. And now the three men, and he, trailing behind them, seemed to be approaching the house that was their destination. The movements of her brothers were slowing, their walk kinked a little to the left. He stepped over a pile of loose garbage. The alley was filthy, just like all the others. The smell was high with kerosene and stale, human sweat, rotting vegetables, and open drains. Half-naked children and rib-thin cats played in the drain. The women were covered here. The secular state didn’t reach into its dark alleyways. Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to notice him. It was as if he wasn’t there.

Why didn’t he turn around now, leave this place and forget what had happened with the woman? He didn’t even know her name, he thought again with incredulity. Was it really his conscience driving him or was it something else? He knew that most of all it was curiosity. He knew deep down that he wanted just once to see the son he would never see again. And he would pay for that in cash, as if it were his conscience paying. Perhaps then he would be able to forget the whole thing.

They told him to wait outside the broken-down mud house that they’d now reached. They’d be getting rid of the women inside, he supposed, sending them somewhere into the back. Then the one brother whom he knew—or at least had met when he’d made the deal—beckoned him inside. The man didn’t waste any time and pointed into a dark corner of a bare room lit only by a shaft of intense sunlight coming through the half-open door.

“There it is,” he said. It was a deliberately brutal statement, Valentin thought, an insult.

Valentin looked to the far side of the room, across a flattened earthen floor and into the near darkness. When his eyes had adjusted from the bright whiteness of the light outside, he walked towards a small, low wooden table, the only piece of furniture in the room apart from two homemade wooden chairs. There on the table he saw a crude wooden crib constructed from a vegetable box and in the crib, wrapped in dirty white swaddling cloths, was what he had come to see: his son. “It,” the man had called him.

He looked down and saw a small face with dark eyebrows, the eyes tightly shut, the fingers curled up around them. The baby would be just over twelve weeks old, he thought.

One of the other two men came over and flicked his fingers, his dark eyes angry and wary at the same time. With the relief of a job done, Valentin took the packet from his shirt pocket at last and gave it to him. The man swiftly counted the money, like a trader who is experienced at flicking quickly through bundles of banknotes and assessing their value instantly. He seemed satisfied. Then he looked Valentin directly in the eyes.

“Now you take him,” the man said to him. It was an order.

Valentin looked back at him in surprise, then alarm, and finally anger. At first he didn’t understand what the man was saying, but then he realised he’d been right in the first place. It was the man who was gripped by a misunderstanding, not him.

“You don’t understand,” he said at last, quickly. “The money I’ve given you is to care for the boy. It’s for his mother to look after him. I can’t take him with me. It’s impossible.”

The man shrugged. “Either you take him or he will be left,” he replied implacably.

Was he hearing right? Left? He meant left to die, Valentin realised with disgust. Left on the street for animals and strays to pick at. Or by the side of the road outside the city, or up in the mountains somewhere. “The money,” he repeated precisely and slowly in Arabic. “That is what it’s for. To look after the boy.” He felt himself getting angrier. He realised that he’d like to throttle the man, hit him, knock his teeth out. He felt the gun nudging him to it.

“He is cursed by God,” the man said simply.

Valentin looked back at the twelve-week-old boy. What was the man talking about? He unwrapped his son from the filthy cloths and saw a perfectly formed human being. The boy didn’t wake. He saw his tiny chest move with his breath.

“Why is he cursed by God?” Valentin said without betraying his rising anger. He believed they were going to blackmail him for more money, but he had none. It had taken all his wits to get his hands on the local currency as it was.

The man stood beside him and looked down at the boy. “He is cursed,” he said. He shrugged again. “God has cursed him,” he said, as if it was perfectly obvious that this was the reason for not wanting the child, and for killing it.

And now Valentin knew. To these people, any defect in a newborn baby meant that it had been cursed by God—and they would reject the child, reject it with the finality of death. Looking down at the boy he could see no physical defect, however. So the child’s defect must be him—Valentin—he supposed. A foreign father, and out of wedlock, too. Doubly damned. Otherwise the boy looked healthy enough.

Valentin walked back across the room. The other two men were watching him closely. They were afraid, but there were three of them and one of him, and they were in their own home, surrounded by their own people outside in the street. If he’d been on official business in this godforsaken part of the city, he would have threatened them, drawn the gun concealed under his waistband, but he was here in secret, unknown to his boss. He couldn’t afford a scandal, so he kept himself under control. “Where’s his mother?” Valentin asked finally. “I want to see her.”

“She’s not here,” the brother he’d met before snapped in reply. “That is not part of the bargain,” he added.

“Where is she?”

There was silence. He didn’t like to go where his imagination was taking him. He didn’t like to think what had happened to her, what they’d done to her in punishment. If sex with him had been a desperate throw of the dice on her part, it had certainly changed her life. But it was a change that would probably finish it for good, if it hadn’t done so already.

Valentin stopped in the centre of the room and felt the possibilities that faced him diminish. He knew he was beaten. Condemn his son to death, no, that was not possible. “What about an orphanage?” he said suddenly. “Where is there an orphanage?”

The men talked among themselves. “In Damascus. On Khalabbah Street,” one said finally.

“What about here? In Aleppo?”

The men shrugged. Either they didn’t want the boy in Aleppo, or they didn’t know.

Valentin suddenly stopped thinking. “Then I’ll take him with me,” he said.

A few minutes later he was walking back down the street carrying the live bundle of his son and when he’d reached a paved street he took a private car that willingly converted to a taxi to take him back to Damascus. He was late, later than he’d planned to be, and he told the driver to hurry. It was a long journey by road.

On the way to the capital he ran through what he would have to do. With the baby in his arms he understood this had been his only choice to save his son. But he also wanted to tell someone else, not just leave the boy abandoned at an orphanage. If one other person knew, he considered, then he would be able to leave the country with a clearer mind.

There was one person he thought he might trust—just possibly. It was crazy, he knew that. After all, he was an officer in Soviet foreign intelligence. But he knew that the only person he could trust with the knowledge of his son was the wife of his head of station in Damascus, Natalia Resnikova. She was a good woman, a caring person. He believed she might understand. She was pregnant with a child of her own, after all. It would be born less than a year after his son had been born. That is what he decided to do, no matter the risk.

Having made his decision, the only other thing that preoccupied him on the journey to the capital was that his son didn’t have a name.

When the car reached Damascus, they drove to one of the poorest parts, to the east of the city. Behind a concrete area that served as a basketball court in a flat, grey suburb on the fringe of the capital, he dismissed the driver. Then he walked until he found Khalabbah Street. The houses were new here—mostly cheap, concrete, barely functional buildings to accommodate the influx of people coming in ever greater numbers from the countryside to work in the city. There was construction work going on over the whole area; cement dust rose in a mist from the rear of a truck; a bulldozer was piling the broken remains of old, destroyed houses into a heap.

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

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 bellpull 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 although Natalia Resnikova was a charitable woman, her kindness drew disapproval, disgust, or even wrath from her husband. She was brave to even see him. 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 onto 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.