Free The Blind Spy by Alex Dryden Page A

woman.
    After driving for nearly five hours, the city of Sevastopol lay in cloud below them. Mountains soared to the north and east. The great natural harbour, gouged eight kilometres into the land, was once the Soviet navy’s warm water port. Now it was the naval base for the Russian Black Sea fleet which shared the facilities with their Ukrainian naval counterpart. She saw ships at anchor out in the roads and in the near harbour itself. Other naval vessels were up against the quays or in dry dock. They were the Russian and Ukrainian fleets which now shared the port with an ill grace that was growing by the month into something uglier. It was inevitably a source of tension between Russia and its former possession. Ukraine had won its independence two decades earlier and the Kremlin didn’t like it.
    The drop was outside the city just beyond the outer limits; a barn in some unfenced fields that climbed the hills fringing the town. Anna told the driver to leave her just over a mile, she guessed, past the track that led up to the barn. By the time he dropped her she was nearer to the centre of town than to the barn. She would walk back once the man had gone.
    He turned the van around without a word of goodbye and headed back in the direction from where they’d come. Once he’d disappeared, Anna returned back up the road and walked fast until she found a break between a row of houses. This was the place. She walked behind the houses and, once she was through, she studied the approach to the barn. Then she walked up through the fields beyond the houses until she found a small copse of trees. It was a shelter of sorts, both from the weather and from unfriendly eyes. Later, for the approach, the fog higher up the hill would be good cover. And soon darkness would fall anyway. She decided she would wait until then.

CHAPTER FOUR
    M ASHA 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 pink padded 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 Kursky railway station.
    She followed her orders to the letter: a taxi to the centre of the town, then she would catch a bus towards its western end, then a walk of 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 second-hand 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 that went to the western end of town.
    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