The Blind Spy by Alex Dryden Page A

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 – but 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 away 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 working coat. Then she looked for somewhere high off the ground, above the eye line of humans or dogs who might look for it. That was the procedure, leave it high up. 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 on to 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 above the barn, 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 away 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, covered the remaining ground to the entrance of the barn in less than a minute.
    There was only one high, 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 up 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