The Blind Spy Read Online Free PDF

were in part the authors was unclear. Not that he despised the Interior Ministry. The Interior Ministry was one of several important ministries now controlled by the Patriotiy and its chiefs shared the same aims as people like the group in the room.
    For a moment, Viktorov removed his glasses and looked across the large room. He stared hard with unfocused eyes. So it was him. He thought he’d recognised him and he’d been right.
    It was his son, Dmitry. Or Balthasar – though only the two of them knew him by the latter name. He saw that Balthasar was talking to an older man – an officer in the Alpha Group, Viktorov thought. Viktorov couldn’t take his eyes away from his son.
    Then Balthasar broke away from a brief exchange with the officer and began to make his way through the throng. He walked with expert precision around three tables and paused to nod a greeting and say a few words to two or three other men. He looked assured, smooth in his movements, somehow modern, Viktorov thought, in that his proper deference to senior men was never at the expense of his personal pride and individuality. He was a colonel – also in Department S – and was now thirty-eight years old. But in this room he was a junior.
    Viktorov watched Balthasar to see that he was clearly making his way towards him. With one hand he was lifting up a chair that was in the way, while with the other he shook greetings with colleagues. He looked directly into people’s eyes.
    Amazing – even now it amazed Viktorov. Such extraordinary power Balthasar had. Nobody who didn’t know him would ever have guessed that he was blind. And, knowing that he was blind, nobody would have dreamed that he could be Russia’s most senior and most-decorated intelligence field operative in all of the Muslim countries. Amazing, there was no other word for it. Sometimes his son’s strange abilities discomforted Viktorov – but there was no denying Balthasar’s extraordinary, if uniquely bizarre, powers. For not only did he have an unerring geographical relationship with the people around him and with his surroundings in general – sensing the chair, moving it easily, knowing precisely where there was a hand to be shaken, understanding exactly where were the eyes his own sightless ones needed to ‘look’ into – but also, despite all of this supernatural power, to Viktorov’s mind, Balthasar’s real value was not that he could ‘see’ physical objects without seeing. It was that he could do what no eye and no electronic device could do – no matter how sharp or sophisticated. He had the ability of seeing inside the minds of those he was with. He had a sixth sense and maybe – who knew – a seventh and an eighth.
    Viktorov cast his mind back thirty-nine years. The brothers of Balthasar’s mother who he, Viktorov, had rescued him from all those years ago had said he’d had a defect. They’d interpreted his blindness as being cursed by God. This ‘defect’ had turned out to be a most precious, a most unique weapon. God had given him something far greater than normal sight. As it turned out, God had blessed, not cursed him.
    Balthasar approached his father and, with the same direct accuracy, shook his hand, ‘looked’ in his eyes, and exchanged a welcome. To Vikorov, he seemed to be in some official position in this room – that was what his son’s demeanour suggested. He appeared to be at the heart of the purpose of the strange meeting. Viktorov wondered why he hadn’t known before about Balthasar’s presence. He was the chief of Department S, for God’s sake.
    So. This morning was the prime minister’s party and his own position could be, and often was, usurped by Putin and a few others. Yet what did Balthasar have to do with the message on the table? The map? Ukraine was an Orthodox Christian country. Not Balthasar’s area of operations at all. Balthasar was in Islamic operations, pure and simple. Ukraine was the birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy,