TARAS DECIDED TO MEET LOGAN HALLORAN at a roadside café restaurant called Karmaliuk twenty-five miles east of Kiev. It was a place owned by a reliable friend of his wife’s from schooldays and who Taras knew well. He and Sasha occasionally went fishing together and, more often, left the rods in the car and stayed drinking in the yard if it was summer or by the fire at the rear of the café where Sasha kept a private room for friends. Mainly it was sufficiently far outside Kiev, where he was afraid he might by chance be spotted meeting Halloran.
He was early, parked his wife’s car at the rear, away from the road, and was enjoying a cold beer when Sasha told him that an American had come into the bar. Taras downed the half glass that remained and walked through to the front.
“Follow me,” he said, without greeting Logan. “I’ll meet you in the front. A blue Fiat.”
Taras drove around to the front and watched as Logan pulled out behind him onto the road. He kept his eyes in the rearview mirror and slowed twice to allow vehicles to overtake him. When he was satisfied that Logan had come alone, he chose a dirt track off the road to the left that wound along the banks of a small river and through two villages before Taras turned again to the left and up to the edge of a wood. He cut the engine and stayed in the car. He watched Logan in the mirror as he slammed the door of a hired Toyota Land Cruiser and walked slowly up behind him. The American was twirling the car keys round and round his forefinger and, to Taras, looked altogether too relaxed.
When Logan stepped into the passenger seat and had shut the door, Taras began to talk without letting him speak first. At the same time he patted down the American, turning out his jacket pockets and looking for wires or mikes.
“We want your help before I can give you anything,” Taras said. “Whatever it is you want, I’ll give you information for an agreed fee paid into a bank in Austria, details to be provided, either on a monthly basis or as a one-off, depending on the type of information you require.” He finished checking Logan and was satisfied. Then he looked ahead of him straight out of the car’s windscreen. “That’s my side. But before I commit to anything, I want something from you.” Taras kept looking straight ahead, as if he was embarrassed by what he was saying. And he supposed that he was. Despite the insincerity of the offer he was making to the American, he still felt dirty doing it. But now he turned and faced Logan. “That’s the deal, no negotiation, no questions, nothing—until you give me what I want. And I have to see the results of what I’m asking before I commit to helping you or Cougar. Either way, we don’t meet again. We set up a drop if we’re to do business.”
He sat back, realising his shoulders and back had been tensed as soon as Logan stepped into the car. He felt his back was rigid and a heat was coming from inside him. He didn’t know if the American was going to laugh in his face, if Halloran’s interest in him had never been about anything other than some lonely social reason. Maybe he was just a foreigner in Kiev, a spy with a knack for making contacts who might help him. Halloran’s background, Taras knew, suggested otherwise, however. For a moment, Taras didn’t understand why someone of Burt Miller’s calibre ever employed Halloran. He seemed a busted flush. So, either the American wanted something from him for his own reasons, some private game he was playing—and that was highly likely in Taras’s opinion—or he had been assigned by Cougar to befriend Taras and make an approach.
Logan sat in silence. The silence lengthened and Taras tried to remain cool, but he felt this heat inside him intensifying. He wanted to open the car’s windows, but he knew it had nothing to do with the temperature. He thought of Masha and the risks he was taking. He thought of what he would do even if he managed to free her. They would never let her go voluntarily, he knew that. And he knew the most likely outcome was that—once they’d gotten everything out of her they thought she knew—they’d make a deal with the Russians and hand her over. And then it would all begin again for his cousin.
“I can do that,” Logan replied languidly, at last. “Even if I don’t know what the answer you’re looking for is.”
He looked at Taras and Taras turned away, uncomfortable in the company of Halloran. It was going against all his better instincts to be talking to the American at all.
“If you don’t know, then it’s no deal,” he said. “If you don’t know, find out or get out.”
“You’d better ask me, then, Taras,” Logan replied, and smiled at the Ukrainian.
“What was Resnikov picking up in the Crimea in January? Outside Sevastopol?”
Logan was taken aback, but he sat completely still, maintaining an expression of relaxed calm. How did Taras know about Anna? Even he knew only because Theo Lish had told him. Logan had become closer to Theo since he’d begun to give the CIA chief some oddments about Cougar’s operations. “Blueprints,” he said. “Blueprints of extensions to the port of Novorossiysk.”
“Did she get them out of the country?”
“As far as I know, yes. Burt Miller seemed pleased that they showed the Russians weren’t serious about expanding the port sufficiently to take their Black Sea fleet.” Logan’s mind was racing. He felt a rush of power giving away this information. He felt it redressed some kind of balance he’d lost in Burt Miller’s considerations.
“Why was he pleased?” Taras asked.
“Because Miller has a theory the Russians are never going to leave Sevastopol. That Sevastopol is some kind of beachhead for their further encroachment into Ukraine.” Logan shrugged. “That’s not the American view,” he said. “The CIA view.” Logan was at the centre of power, giving Taras not just Miller’s but the CIA’s opinion. His face flushed with excitement in the dark car.
“She came into Ukraine a second time,” Logan volunteered. “I’m not sure for what. And I think she’s in the country again,” he added.
“Where?” Taras said.
Logan looked at him. “Come on, Taras, that’s information the Russians would pay a lot of money for. You don’t think that even if I knew I’d just give it away.”
“The Crimea?” Taras pressed him.
“Probably. That’s where Miller sees the Russians making their move. If they intend to make a move at all,” he added dismissively.
“What identity is she travelling under?”
“I don’t know. And anyway, if you want to hand her over to the Russians, why would I tell you?” Logan answered. “Whatever it is you can give me, it won’t be worth as much as that.”
“It doesn’t sound like you care one way or the other what happens to her,” Taras replied, and this time he turned and looked at Logan and didn’t like at all what he saw.
Logan sat with his hands in his lap, the fingers gently crossing each other. Did he care what happened to her? he wondered. For a long time, he’d been ambivalent about her.
“She’s already killed two KGB operatives in the Crimea,” he said. “I’d be careful of her, if I were you, Taras.”
“I know what she’s done.”
Taras felt a fury rise up in him. The American worked with this woman and evidently couldn’t care less what happened to her. It reminded him of Masha’s boss in Moscow, casually using someone to pass on highly dangerous information she knew nothing about. He felt the prospects of Masha hanging on to life diminish in the face of such cynicism.
“Tell Burt Miller,” he said, “that I know who his source is in Moscow. At any rate, the source who provided the blueprints. Tell Miller that I’ll reveal this source to the Russians unless I have his help. And unless I get to see Resnikov. Here. In Ukraine. Tell him I’ll leave a message for Resnikov at the drugstore on Ochakovstev Street in Sevastopol. If I don’t hear from her in three days, I’ll reveal his man in Moscow.” He looked at Logan and handed him a scrawled note. Logan read it, then screwed it into a ball and put it in his pocket. Instructions. He’d dispose of them later.
“Now get out,” Taras said.