It was a beautiful September day in Moscow: mild, windless and with bright sunshine – no hint yet of the chills of winter to come. Bruno Mackay was sitting in the coffee shop on the ground floor of the smart new block where he had taken an apartment. He was unrecognisable with his floppy blond hair now brown and fashionably short, horn-rimmed spectacles hiding his eyes – once blue, now green – and trendy stubble and smartly casual clothes instead of his usual suits. As he sipped his coffee and consulted his latest-model iPhone, he looked the perfect hedge fund executive, which was what he was pretending to be. He felt as comfortable as an MI6 officer undercover in Moscow can.
He was confident that his back story would stand scrutiny. There was an Ireland-based office of Quoin Capital Management, staffed by a competent young woman with a degree in Modern Languages from Warwick University. She spoke fluent French and Russian and was well briefed to answer any questions about the company or about ‘Alan Urquhart’, currently in Moscow researching investment opportunities. The office in Dublin was Bruno’s communication link with Vauxhall Cross, and with the MI6 Station in the Moscow Embassy, with whom he had no overt contact at all.
Bruno’s job was to try to get alongside Mischa’s brother. He was under strict orders to do no more at present; he was to do his best to get acquainted with the brother, but he was to make no move at this stage towards a recruitment pitch. The CIA Station and the MI6 Station, working together, had managed to identify Mischa and his brother as Mischa and Boris Bebchuk. Mischa was in the army, Boris an FSB officer working at FSB HQ in Moscow. Further work had also produced an address for Boris and the location of the school attended by his six-year-old son.
In his first couple of weeks in Moscow, Bruno had lived in a hotel and under the pretext of flat-hunting had got to know the district where Boris and his family lived. Once or twice he just happened to find himself outside the school at going-home time, and he observed those waiting to pick up the children – young women mostly, nannies and mothers and the occasional grandma. A few children were picked up by a uniformed driver or an obvious security guard, for this was a pretty opulent area of town. He didn’t know which one was the Bebchuk boy but he noticed that several of the children lived in a small group of new, expensive-looking apartment blocks a short walk away from the school. So it was in one of those that he had taken a flat, and he had chosen the one with the coffee shop on the ground floor.
It was quite in keeping with his cover story that he should spend a couple of hours most mornings in the coffee shop, having breakfast and working on his laptop and his phone. Quoin Capital Management had no office in Moscow; Alan Urquhart was there to decide if there were sufficient business prospects to justify setting one up. For the moment, the smart coffee shop could credibly serve as his office. But it also served as his observation post. He had noticed that some of the mothers regularly stopped in the coffee shop after they had deposited the children at school. Most sat in a group chattering loudly in Russian, but in the second week of his vigil his eye had fallen on a woman who always sat by herself. After a couple of days, he’d greeted her with a friendly ‘Good morning’ in Russian. She’d smiled and replied in heavily accented Russian, so he’d asked where she was from, only to discover that she was Parisian. This was a stroke of luck for Bruno, who spoke fluent French, having served in the MI6 Station in Paris for several years.
Bruno, at his most charming, soon had her talking freely about herself. As luck had it, she was lonely and unhappy. Her name was Michelle. Separated from her husband, she was forced to carry on living in Moscow, which she hated, because he was blocking all her efforts to get a divorce and take her one child to live in Paris. He was a wealthy oil man with enough money and know-how to work the legal system to his advantage. He didn’t care what she did and was quite happy to pay for her very comfortable lifestyle, she said, but he wanted the child, even though he only saw them at the weekends.
From then on Bruno and she met regularly in the mornings and sometimes for a leisurely lunch in one of the nearby restaurants. Bruno was beginning to feel that he must capitalise on this relationship before it turned into a full-blown affair. She was clearly very willing, but he needed to avoid any chance of getting involved in a divorce suit or even getting a bullet in the back from one of her husband’s henchmen. So one day after lunch Bruno suggested he should walk with her to pick up her child since he had a later appointment in that direction.
Michelle smiled at him, a little surprised. She touched a strand of her blonde hair, which she had trimmed – and coloured, Bruno cynically concluded – every week at the chic local salon frequented by oligarchs’ wives. She said, ‘That would be very nice. I have told my son all about you. Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
It was the scene Bruno had observed when he was recceing the area before he moved there. Mothers and nannies, some on foot already waiting, others sitting in massive four-wheel-drive vehicles and large saloons, several with chauffeurs wearing peaked caps, and a smattering of dark-suited security guards with dark glasses and earpieces.
A car pulled up next to them. It was far less grand than the others – a modest Lada that stood out for its normality. But when the driver got out – a tall man with dark slicked-back hair, wearing a knee-length leather coat – Michelle poked Bruno in the ribs. ‘Mind your manners,’ she said, and gave a small laugh.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The man who just got out of the car…’
‘What about him?’ asked Bruno, looking at the man more carefully. He seemed self-assured, confident, as he lit a cigarette and leaned casually against the bonnet of his car, smoking and watching the entrance to the school. ‘Isn’t he one of the parents?’
‘That’s not all he is. The mother of one of my boy’s friends told me he’s a spy.’
‘Really?’ Bruno didn’t have to feign surprise.
Michelle nodded knowingly. ‘She told me he is an officer in the FSB.’
‘FSB?’ asked Bruno, as if he had never heard the acronym before.
‘You know, the secret service. What the KGB used to be.’
‘How does she know that?’
‘She’s friends with his wife. The wife told her that she wasn’t very happy with her husband. Apparently, he drinks.’
‘That’s awful!’ said Bruno, with a grin. They had just shared a bottle of wine over lunch.
‘No, I mean really drinks. Shouts at her until he passes out.’
‘He must be pretty senior if he’s got children at school here. It has to cost the earth.’
‘There’s only one child,’ said Michelle. ‘The apple of his eye, apparently. They live very simply, so they can pay the fees.’
‘Maybe Mrs Godunov has money of her own.’
‘Godunov?’ She looked at Bruno, then smiled when she realised he had just made the name up. ‘That’s not their name,’ she said. ‘Though the real one sounds just as silly.’
‘What is it?’
She laughed. ‘He’s called Boris Bebchuk.’
He laughed too, trying to disguise the adrenalin he felt coursing through his veins. He knew his orders: get as close as you can without raising any suspicion, while Liz Carlyle gets what she can out of the brother. Bruno had to play his next cards very carefully. If he got it wrong and this guy Boris got suspicious, MI5 would lose their source. Mischa would panic and disappear. But a piece of good fortune like this didn’t land in your lap very often and when it did you had to pick it up.
So he said, ‘I’ve been thinking of having a drinks party to meet some people – I don’t know anybody here yet really. Perhaps you’d like to invite your friends from the school and maybe ask them to bring a friend or two.’
He waited slightly nervously while Michelle thought about this. Had he pushed for this too quickly? But then she said, ‘I think that is a marvellous idea. And I know just the caterer for you.’