The Blind Spy by Alex Dryden

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 graduate 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 with a gun, a GSh-18 military pistol, the latest one the GRU used, the military intelligence people. 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 a panic rising up 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 got 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 to 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 – and just where it should have been. 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 any more’ – the words from her briefing repeated themselves in her head, but her head was also a jangle of 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