The Blind Spy by Alex Dryden Page A

followed. She continued to walk purposefully up the short hill, leaving the boat and its passengers behind her. She looked neither right nor left nor behind her. She didn’t need to see the tail yet. She was only thinking of one thing at this moment; that it always made things more straightforward once a potential assassin – or maybe there was more than one out there in the city’s undergrowth – came to you.
    Throughout the voyage from Istanbul she had remained mostly in her cabin, emerging only very early in the morning at the restaurant for breakfast or in the quiet hours after midnight below decks, behaving in a manner that any observer would, perhaps, have described as pacing or even prowling. Otherwise she’d had food and drink sent down to her first-class accommodation. A storm had lashed the Black Sea for the duration of the crossing – it had been an uncomfortable voyage – and, like her, many of the passengers had stayed out of sight. Her absence wasn’t noticeable. The upper deck, the sea deck, had anyway been put out of bounds by the captain due to the storm, and the regular partying and drinking that was a common feature on the crossing to Odessa was muted.
    At the top of the short hill that led from the harbour she came to an intersection of the cobbled lane with a main thoroughfare and she crossed to the other side. Even bending her head and now covered with a long hooded jacket that came halfway to her knees, she was a commanding figure compared to the other pedestrians. On this crowded boulevard her height was distinctive. But it was the way she walked that drew attention as much as anything else. She walked with a smooth stride as if on a long trek, and she seemed to insinuate herself along the pavement, as if her feet barely touched the ground. Hers was a cat-like walk. Prowling was not a bad description.
    Bare trees, their branches carefully pruned back to the trunks, lined this second boulevard on both sides. She looked curiously to left and right. She hadn’t been in Odessa for several years, from before the time she’d defected from the KGB. But Odessa was as she remembered it had always been: a stylish city, its pride deriving from its past first as a Russian imperial naval base, then from its heroic Soviet resistance against the Nazis when much of the whole city had been destroyed. More recently, since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, this proud history had come to be mixed with modernising influences that sought to bring the city into the twenty-first century. A civic pride that actually derived from the city’s military standing bloomed here, publicly on the streets, more than in most post-Soviet cities.
    Despite her commanding presence, she lost herself head down in the crowds of pedestrians. The clean, swept streets were busy at this time of the morning. People were going to work. Like her they also walked head down in the rain, and those who passed her on the pavements were huddled up in coats and hats. It had started to rain as she got off the boat but now it was coming down harder. She pulled the hood of her jacket further over her forehead. She walked along the busy morning pavement quickly.
    It was time to take matters into her own hands. If they hadn’t stopped her at the border post, it was a virtual certainty that her observers were not from the SBU, the Ukrainian secret service. In which case, they must be Russian. Of that she was sure now. They would need to conceal their activities from the sovereign, Ukrainian guards, on whose sovereign territory they were conducting their operation. She decided she would find a narrow, uncrowded space now. That way it would be easier to identify her tail.
    As soon as she saw an alley that led off to the left between two nineteenth-century buildings – two of the few that had survived the Nazi onslaught in the Great Patriotic War – she turned into it and quickened her pace, feeling the eyes upon her. She walked fast, still not looking