One week after Bruno had unceremoniously leapt from Michelle’s car in the park in Moscow, leaving her and her son open-mouthed with astonishment, he was standing in the booking hall of Beijing railway station waiting for a car from the Embassy to pick him up.
He had not remained long in the muddy BMW that had collected him in the park. A quarter of an hour later, in a shady street in a Moscow housing estate, he had transferred to a high-powered silver Mercedes SUV containing two men and a woman. According to their passports, the men, Bill and Dave, were both Canadians and the woman was French, though in fact there was only one Canadian in the car and he had lived and worked in England for the last ten years. The Frenchwoman did indeed have a French mother but she also lived and worked in London. Bruno had his Canadian passport, having left his British passport and his other British identity documents with his initial rescuers in the BMW.
The Mercedes had driven steadily out of Moscow, heading eastwards in the direction of Kirov and Perm. The two men took it in turns to drive; Bruno’s offer was firmly rejected. He was told to sit in the back and get some rest; he was clearly the parcel for delivery and not expected to take part in the delivery process. The Frenchwoman, whom they called Maddy, seemed to be in charge of security and it was she who kept an eye on the traffic, looking out for familiar patterns of movement that might indicate they were being followed.
They had food for two days on board so they stopped only occasionally in small towns to fill up with petrol and buy coffee to keep them going. There were long stretches of boredom, especially during the night when there was very little traffic on the road, but also moments of tension and one of sheer panic. The last came on the outskirts of Kirov when they rounded a corner to be met by a battered-looking lorry heading fast towards them on their side of the road. By sheer bravado and fast thinking, Dave had avoided the lorry, whose driver must have been drunk or asleep, and they had driven on unharmed but shaky.
The moment of tension came when they were stopped at a checkpoint as they were leaving Perm. A large uniformed man with a gun over his shoulder and a cigarette in his mouth strolled out and asked for their documents. Just as beads of sweat were beginning to break out on Bruno’s forehead, it turned out that Maddy was not only beautiful and French but also spoke excellent Russian, was very charming, and perhaps most importantly had a couple of packs of French cigarettes in her pocket that she decided she didn’t really need. So the moment passed with best wishes and smiles all round.
Their destination was Yekaterinburg, where Bruno was to join a tourist train on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Bruno didn’t know who had invented this long escape route. Maddy had hinted that much thinking had gone on in the Operational Security Department; the obvious route via the Finnish border had been too well publicised by the successful exfiltration of Oleg Gordievsky in the 1980s.
Though it proved a long slog, this method had worked, and they had arrived safely in Yekaterinburg quite late in the evening on the day before the train was due. Three interconnecting rooms had been booked in a hotel and Bruno had slept peacefully in the middle one with his minders in the rooms on each side. In the morning he had been delivered safely to the railway station. The waiting room had been full of tourists of various nationalities including, by luck or design he never knew, a group of Canadian engineers who had been working in a natural gas plant near Lake Baikal and were taking a scenic trip before flying home.
Bruno had been relieved to discover he had a two-berth compartment to himself and breathed a thank you to Geoffrey Fane who must have authorised the extra expense. For the first couple of days he’d spent most of his time in his compartment, glad to keep his distance from the Canadian engineers, who seemed a dreary bunch. Just short of the Mongolian border, Russian officials came aboard, and he’d been visited in his compartment by a passport officer who’d leafed slowly through his document’s pages, looking at the many stamps it held from all over the globe with more longing than suspicion. After he’d handed the passport back and left, Bruno was starting to relax – only for another tap on the door. A small gnome in a cap and khaki uniform came in – the Customs representative, it seemed, for he peremptorily ordered Bruno to open his suitcase. No problem there, thought Bruno.
But he soon noticed that the gnome was glowering. What was wrong? Then Bruno remembered that he’d put a pint bottle of whisky that he’d brought from Moscow flush in the middle of the neatly pressed shirts and folded underwear and socks that the escape team had provided. He cursed himself for the oversight. Was he really going to be busted for a contraband bottle of booze? It seemed absurd, but also alarming. He envisaged himself taken off the train and put into a small windowless room, where he would face an interview that would be hard to survive unscathed. What was the purpose of your trip last year to São Paulo? Tell us about your family, Mr Anderson? Do you have children? What do they do? You say you are married, Mr Anderson – what is the date of birth of your wife?
A tiny trickle of sweat started to crawl along the back of his neck. Then inspiration came. Reaching down Bruno lifted the bottle of whisky, then looked away, blindly offering the bottle to the gnome. For a moment nothing happened. Then he felt the man take the bottle from his hand, and when Bruno turned round the deed was done – the whisky bottle tucked unobtrusively into the side pocket of the gnome’s jacket. The little man stiffened his shoulders, nodded curtly, and left the compartment.
After this it had been plain sailing. As the train worked its way through Mongolia and then on to Beijing, Bruno had stayed in the safety of his compartment and tipped a conductor to bring him his meals on a tray, along with a bottle of expensive red Bordeaux. Now as he waited for a colleague from the Beijing Station to pick him up, he breathed another silent thank you to Geoffrey Fane for getting him safely out of Moscow. He still had no idea why he had been withdrawn so precipitously, but assuming he had been in serious danger he could only be grateful to have been rescued in such style.