MASHA SHAPKO EXITED from Sevastopol’s rail terminus and followed orders. First she took a taxi into the centre of town. She carried a battered black leather bag with its colour fraying down to the bare leather where it had been bent from use and she wore a thick-padded pink coat that had faded with age and Moscow’s harsh weather. On her head she had a black rabbit-fur hat. She was dressed in clothes which had been appropriate for her departure from Moscow two days before. It had been twenty degrees below zero when she’d boarded the train at the Kursky railway station.
Next, she was to catch a bus towards the western end of town then walk a few miles until she reached the outskirts of the town. But on the way to the drop, her boss had told her, find the time to stop, to look, to watch. So when the taxi dropped her off on the central boulevard, she stopped at shop windows as she strolled towards the heart of the town. First she entered a secondhand clothing shop, then she bought a coffee at a café in the square and sat away from the window. And all the time she watched for any familiar face from the train or from Sevastopol’s rail station. Satisfied at last that she wasn’t being followed, she finally moved on to join a line for the local bus.
She was late—nearly a day late, in fact. The train had been held up for twenty-four hours as it entered the turbulent regions of the south, where separatists were detonating bombs with regularity. “A terrorist threat” was the announcement on the train and they’d stayed at a halt on the line and watched the OMON police and local FSB walking beside the tracks, then questioning people on the train. She’d been afraid they’d discover what she was carrying, but her papers were in order, her father was a prominent figure in Moscow’s KGB, and she, too, carried an FSB card of her own. They gave her only a cursory check. Four other passengers, without their papers in order, she assumed, had been handcuffed and removed from the train.
Her orders were not to contact her boss under any circumstances. But she knew that the delay was cutting it very close. Whoever was making the pickup would be expecting to do so this evening, in a few hours’ time, in fact. She knew it was touch and go as to whether she would make it and, if she did, whether there would be a risk of crossing over with the person, her opposite number. But all she could do now was try, she supposed. Her orders hadn’t factored in a twenty-four-hour delay.
She had been well trained in various institutions of the KGB inside Moscow and outside at the Forest. She was still a rookie, certainly, but she’d completed all the basic training required to enter the lowest-ranking echelon of officer recruits from two years before when she’d passed into the intelligence agency with flying colours. She had been top of the class, in fact. After she’d finished school, she’d been educated at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, intending to become a manager at the national electricity grid. But then, while she was looking at the options, she had been approached by a friend of her KGB father to make an application to join Russia’s security services. She was inducted into the FSB after eighteen months of training.
At just over twenty-four years old, she had married a fellow officer recruit two months before. This was her first solo operation and she was proud to be serving her country, without having any idea of what it was she was doing. She had been given no indication of what was concealed in her bag.
She had a small, delicately pretty face with fine features and grey-blue eyes with the depth and intensity of deep ice pools; so her new husband had told her. They were eyes like an Arctic animal’s, he’d said, and she assumed the description was one of admiration.
She’d been chosen for this mission, her boss Volkov informed her, for several reasons. One important factor for her cover was that she had family in Ukraine. The family owned a farmhouse outside Sevastopol and that’s where the barn was located. It was cover of sorts. And so the ostensible reason for her trip was established as a visit to a cousin, Taras. Though he lived in Kiev, it had been arranged that she would actually meet Taras at a club on Odessa’s waterfront by the name of the Golden Fleece. The reason she was going south, to the Crimea, rather than straight to Kiev, she’d worked out with her boss after she’d told him about Taras’s family’s farmhouse. Her cover would be that she was first of all visiting the place of her childhood holidays when she’d stayed with Taras’s family outside Sevastopol. Taras’s father had bought the farmhouse there as a holiday place, in the 1990s, after some post-Soviet business deal. So the trip to the Crimea was to be a detour of fond nostalgia before heading to Odessa and spending a few days with her cousin.
But there were reasons other than the convenience of the farmhouse for her being picked for the mission. Her boss had also lavished praise on her as an up and coming intelligence officer of a new generation whose rise was guaranteed, he said, not just because of her family connections in the security services, but also due to her own skills and intelligence. Her performance to date had been favourably noted, and Volkov flattered her enough so that she didn’t question that she’d been chosen. “Promotion”—that had been the word her boss had used finally to catch her with. And now, as she sat on the bus that crawled westwards out of the town, she knew she’d certainly like the money promotion would bring. “It’s an easy drop, straightforward,” her boss had told her. “Just the thing for your first assignment.” The drop was intended as a little help for “our friends in Ukraine,” he’d said. These “friends” were Russian patriots like her and though, technically, they were of Ukrainian nationality, they shared hers and Moscow’s interests. These “patriots” saw no difference between Russia and Ukraine, he’d said, and rightly wished to return the country to Mother Russia. The Kremlin would know of her mission, her boss finished with a flourish of patriotic fervour. Her mission would therefore be a small feather in her cap, but a feather nevertheless. And Masha had ended up feeling proud to be chosen out of her whole graduating class and to be doing something for the new motherland.
But no operation is ever without risk, her boss had added. She had been issued a gun, a GSh-18 military pistol, the latest one the GRU, the military intelligence people, used. Just a normal precaution, he’d said, but whatever happens, you will avoid being taken alive, he told her gravely. In those circumstances we’d kill you quickly if we could, but they’ll take a lot longer, he’d added grimly. They’ll want information and they’ll never believe you don’t know more. That was the nature of torture, he’d said, and it had frightened her, as he’d intended it to.
She felt the gun in the pocket of her coat now. So the gun was only there to use on herself.
The city bus crawled up from the central square, stopping regularly. Mostly there were people getting off. Fewer and fewer boarded as they got closer to the end of the line. Masha held the leather bag close to her, on her lap. She had no idea what it contained, only that a thick, sealed plastic envelope was buried in a small, sealed plastic bag of garden fertiliser inside the case. It was to be left in a barn, so that made sense.
When the bus reached her stop, the end of the line, she was the only passenger left. Masha alighted and walked for half a mile. Then she saw the road she was to take, to the right and twenty yards ahead. It turned up a steepening rise in the hillside away from the main road. She followed her orders to the letter. It led up past a row of houses and then turned into a track that wound away into deserted countryside. The fog seemed to have crept lower, or maybe it was simply that she’d come up higher, but it didn’t matter. Darkness had almost arrived.
Masha suddenly felt afraid now. The excitement of her mission evaporated as darkness fell. She thought about her husband and their small apartment off Gruzhinskaya Bolshaya. She began to feel that she wasn’t up to even a task as small as this. She felt panic rising inside her. And a regret that she’d ever imagined she was suitable material for an intelligence officer. She wanted to get it over with, then reassess her whole life. She wanted to be someone small, insignificant, and she wondered what on earth had gotten into her to make her believe she was fit to face danger. But she forced herself on, the shame of failure greater than the fear.
Once on the track she walked with a false determination up the hill until she reached the shed she’d been told about. She was pale with fear now. The shed was some way behind the houses, far enough away for it not to be seen. As she pulled open a broken wooden door, she saw she was about a hundred yards below the copse of trees. Everything was exactly as it should have been. She entered the shed and, trembling, she quickly took off her coat, fumbling the buttons in her haste, then opened the leather case. She removed the sealed bag of fertiliser and some old agricultural clothes stuffed in around it. She placed her pink coat and black fur hat to one side and put the farm clothes over the clothes she wore. Then she screwed up the pink coat and put it and the hat into the leather case and tucked it behind a pile of broken boxes that looked like they’d been there for years. “The shed isn’t used anymore”—the words from her briefing repeated themselves in her head, but her head was also a jangle of the other things there and suddenly she hated the gun she was carrying.
But Masha was now glad of her orders. They were suddenly the only thing that kept her focused. They were imprinted in her memory and she ran through them again as if they were her friendly companions and a talisman against failure. “Lose the leather case in the shed, change into the clothes, then head up the hill. Once you are at the top of the hill, first leave the plastic fertiliser bag in a safe place, half a mile or so before you reach the drop. The barn. That’s when you reconnoitre the barn itself. In that way, if you’re intercepted—God forbid—if anything does go wrong at the barn, you won’t have anything compromising in your possession. Then, when you’ve seen that all is well at the barn, return with the fertiliser bag.” The drop-off was a niche in the wall inside the barn, under the third beam from the rear, on the right-hand side. She felt the heat of fear, rising towards panic.
Masha left the shed and took a circular route through the fields behind the houses, taking her away from the drop at first, then she followed the curve of her own circle, past the copse, until she came up behind and above the barn, a little over half a mile from it. By now the sky was dark and night had come. She looked at the time that glowed on a cheap watch on her wrist. It read 6:35 P.M.
She removed the small bag of garden fertiliser from inside her tattered work coat. Then she looked for somewhere high off the ground, above the sight line of the humans or dogs who might look for it. That was the procedure, leave it up high. Perhaps she could quell the fear by concentrating on procedure.
There wasn’t much she could see in this bare hill landscape. But standing against the skyline a hundred yards away to her right and at the same height as where she stood on the hill, she saw a lone tree, its branches bent and gnarled by the wind. She walked towards it and saw a crook in the trunk ten feet above her where four branches began their angular reach towards the sky. Climbing up onto a knot in the trunk, she could just reach the crook with her outstretched hand. Her hand trembled as she pushed the fertiliser bag into the crook. Then she climbed back down from the tree, returning to a spot directly above the barn. As she descended the hill, she suddenly felt cold, as if she had a fever. But this was it, she told herself. It was nearly over. She vowed she would resign as soon as she returned to Moscow. She couldn’t face something like this again. She thought about after the operation. Her mind focused on Taras and the club where they were meeting. She felt an overwhelming sense of love for her cousin. She would take the flight to Odessa from the Crimea’s capital, Simferol—just inland from Sevastopol—and meet with him, a day late perhaps, but soon she would be there.
When she was twenty yards from the barn, she stopped once and listened. She was completely exposed against the open hill but felt protected by the darkness. When she heard nothing she set off again, covering the remaining ground to the entrance of the barn in less than a minute.
There was only one tall, broken wooden door remaining in the arched stone wall of the barn. It creaked slowly in the wind. The other door was missing. It was just as her boss had told her. She entered the dark interior through the gap and, when her eyes had become accustomed to the almost pitch-blackness inside, she began to make out darker shapes against the feeble light of the night sky entering from a hole high up in the wall where a window had once been. She switched on a small torch with a fine narrow beam that shed no light to the sides. In the light of the torch, she picked out the edges of straw bales, a beaten mud floor, and cobwebs close to her. As she played the torch along a beam to the left, following the wall of the barn, she saw the third roof beam from the end. The beam of the torch came down to reveal the niche beneath it, itself a tangle of cobwebs and dust. All was well. It was time to leave and then return with the plastic fertiliser bag.
As she began to turn, there was a small bang, like an explosion, which she realised a second later was an engine suddenly bursting into life. She felt her heart thump violently and almost stop. Even without the shock it gave her, the sound of the engine was suddenly deafening in the small space that before had been so silent. And with the engine came a light, just a split second later. Standing in the centre of the barn she was suddenly illuminated by blinding washes of floodlights that must have come from arc lamps up on the roof beams. It was a generator, she thought dimly, the engine was a generator and the lights came on automatically with the generator. She was blinded, her senses confused. And then she heard a single voice.
“It’s not her,” a man shouted, and this was followed by a curse in Russian.
Masha followed orders. It seemed to take the men inside the barn completely by surprise. She drew the handgun from inside her jacket, pointed it towards her head, and pulled the trigger.