The Blind Spy by Alex Dryden Page B

fertiliser bag.
    As she began to turn, there was a small bang like an explosion, which she realised a second later was an engine suddenly bursting into life. She felt her heart thump violently and almost stop. Even without the shock it gave her, the sound of the engine was suddenly deafening in the small space which before had been so silent. And with the engine came a light, just a split second later. Standing in the centre of the barn she was suddenly illuminated by blinding washes of floodlights that must have come from arc lamps up on the roof beams. It was a generator, she thought dimly, the engine was a generator and the lights came on automatically with the generator. She was blinded, her senses confused. And then she heard a single voice.
    ‘It’s not her,’ a man shouted, and this was followed by a curse in Russian.
    Masha followed orders. It seemed to take the men inside the barn completely by surprise. She drew the handgun from inside her jacket, pointed it towards her head, and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER FIVE
    I N THE EVENING of the same day that Anna Resnikov entered the country at Odessa’s port and Masha was crossing over from Russia, a meeting was taking place in the capital Kiev. Being the night before the presidential elections not everyone present was in an agreeable mood to have their time taken up with nonelection matters, particularly here. The four men and a woman sat around a smoked-glass table in a safe room at the American embassy on Mykoly Pymonenka Street and the atmosphere was not friendly.
    They were not diplomats or trade representatives or visiting senators and congressmen. In fact, all of them worked for the CIA station attached to the embassy, except for one of the men, Logan Halloran. He was an employee of Burt Miller’s tauntingly named Cougar Intelligence Applications, the multi-billion dollar American private intelligence corporation. And it was Logan – backed by the might of Cougar – who had summoned the CIA on this Saturday evening, not as one might expect the other way around.
    Sam MacLeod, the CIA station head, was the most senior figure at the table – at least officially – but orders from the CIA’s director in Virginia, Theo Lish, had requested – this was the careful word used – that MacLeod make every effort to accommodate Cougar’s wishes. Cougar ‘had something that needs conveying at once’, was the opaque way that Lish had put it to his station chief. After his meeting with Burt three days earlier, Lish had requested that they make every effort to accommodate Logan. In his usual, cunning way, Burt Miller had introduced a question that now hung in the air unanswered, but that Lish knew had to be investigated with the greatest of vigour.
    A suave, close-shaved and neatly tonsured man in his late fifties who wore impeccably cut pinstripe suits, MacLeod was visibly irritated before the meeting had even begun and his irritation stemmed from being summoned by, of all people, Logan Halloran. Simply put, he didn’t like Halloran and he didn’t intend to even look Halloran in the face, despite the fact that they were sitting directly across the table from each other.
    Halloran himself was unmistakably MacLeod’s sartorial opposite. Despite Burt’s efforts to make him appear like the corporate figure he was, long, thick, light-brown hair flowed erratically over Logan’s shoulders, and was perhaps not as clean as it could have been. He wore a crumpled faded pale green suit that had seen much better days and the collar of his shirt was open, with tufts of chest hair emerging from the neck – ‘like some eighties pop star’, MacLeod had witheringly told his second in command, Sandra Pasconi. On top of Logan’s insultingly dishevelled appearance, MacLeod couldn’t help noting, despite his determination not to engage in eye-to-eye contact with him, that Halloran had a deep tan in the middle of the Ukrainian winter. A fake tan was something that MacLeod, a