Free The Blind Spy by Alex Dryden Page B

were not to contact her boss in any circumstances. But she knew that the delay was cutting it very fine. Whoever was making the pick-up would be expecting to do so this evening, in a few hours’ time, in fact. She knew it was touch and go 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 why 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-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