Moscow, Russia
It was Evans’s second day in Moscow. The first had been pretty much a complete waste of his time. He understood why both Winter and Lindegaard had insisted he come here – it was the last place they had been able to pinpoint Logan. The problem was that everyone who had seen Logan or been with him was now dead.
All except one, that is. Lena Belenov. The FSB agent who had been central to the deal that Mackie and the JIA had been trying to broker for Logan’s release following his capture on Russian soil, back in the autumn. She was still alive. A gunshot wound to the stomach. Another in her shoulder.
She was one of the few people who really knew what had happened in Moscow. And what had happened to Logan not only during his captivity but in the days following his escape from the FSB’s jail cell.
The problem now was that she was holed up in a private hospital clinic near Taganka Square in central Moscow. Evans had done his best to scope out the facility the day before, but there was no way he was getting in there on his own. The clinic took up the far end of a sprawling four-storey building, a nondescript structure with block-like features and pale-yellow rendered walls – part of the 1930s’ constructivism architecture still seen throughout central Moscow.
Evans had walked past the clinic three times the previous afternoon. Each time, the same police patrol car had been stationed across the street from the hospital’s entrance. And each time other men had been conspicuously hanging around the entrance, either plain-clothed police or FSB, Evans guessed. Either way, it was clear the clinic wasn’t used by your average citizen and Evans could only assume that the security inside would be greater still.
So at the moment speaking to Lena Belenov was a no-go. At least until he found a friendly way in.
Belenov wasn’t Evans’s only lead, though. He hadn’t been sent to Moscow entirely without direction. He looked down and lifted the sleeve of his thick black windbreaker to check the time. Five to eleven. Five minutes before his planned rendezvous with Nikolai Medvedev.
Evans stuffed his hands back into the fleece-lined pockets of his windbreaker. When he’d left England the day before, the weather had been sunny and warm. In Moscow, it was grey and dull. Although it wasn’t cold by Moscow winter standards, there was a chilling wind that was all the fiercer for the open position where Evans was sitting: on the bank of the Moskva River, not far from the Borodinsky Bridge.
The spot that had been chosen for the meet was neither the quietest nor the busiest area around. There was always a careful calculation to be made for the location of meetings with informants. Each had its advantages and disadvantages.
To a large extent, the choice depended on how likely it was that either you or the informant would be under surveillance. The quieter and more secluded the meeting place, the easier it was to spot any lurkers. But it also made the meeting so much more obvious. Not a problem in some cases; for example, a very brief exchange or where the threat of surveillance was very low, such as meeting a low-ranking official or a simple civilian informant. Conversely, very busy places – tourist traps and the like – were much easier to get lost in, but it was also harder to spot anyone watching.
The location that Medvedev had chosen was something like middle ground. It certainly wasn’t deserted – there were plenty of pedestrians and even one or two eager tourists dotted about – but it wasn’t exactly thriving either. All in all, it felt like a comfortable spot for the meeting that was to take place. Evans, who had only been in the country since the previous day, had no reason to suspect he was being surveilled. The fact Medvedev had agreed to meet at all led Evans to assume the FSB agent felt he was in the same boat.
At the very least, the UK embassy was only a mile up the riverbank. If the meeting didn’t go to plan, if Evans needed to run, he could head there. He wasn’t sure what Medvedev’s exit route would be if he became spooked, but could only assume the experienced agent had one.
Evans looked down and checked the time on his watch again. One minute to eleven. Medvedev had never yet been late for a meeting and thoughts began to creep through Evans’s mind as to what it might mean if this time the FSB agent weren’t on time. But as he looked back up, a figure walking toward him caught his attention. Medvedev.
He was wearing casual attire: jeans and trainers, a bulky brown leather jacket, matching cotton gloves and a scarf and baseball cap. The cap was pulled down, obscuring his face, but Evans knew it was Medvedev. If nothing else, the thick white stubble covering his wide jaw was a dead giveaway.
Medvedev put his hands in his pockets as he reached Evans, who was still seated. ‘Let’s take a walk,’ he said in Russian.
His voice was husky and dry and monotonous. But Evans thought that even in the brief introduction, he had detected tension. Not unusual, given the circumstance of their meeting, but it made Evans feel anxious.
Evans said nothing but got to his feet, looking left and right. Several people were walking in each direction across the riverfront, but no one caught Evans’s eye as being out of place. No signs of surveillance. And if they kept moving, it would give them the chance to keep an eye on the people and vehicles following their direction.
‘Okay, this way,’ Evans said, turning to his left.
No other preamble, no pleasantries, no shaking of hands. In fact, in all of their meetings, they’d never once had any bodily contact or hand-to-hand exchanges at all. Unless passing documents over, a feat not undertaken lightly, the lack of contact was an absolute necessity. It had been standard protocol for years, ever since the revelations in the 1980s that the Russians were using the chemical compound NPPD to mark Americans they suspected of spying.
NPPD, routinely referred to as spy dust, had been used to identify Russian officials who had been in contact with the marked Americans. Any kind of bodily contact – a handshake, an arm on the shoulder, passing of documents or disks – would spread the dust. A Russian official who exhibited the telltale glow under fluorescent light, either on his hands, his clothes or his belongings, must have been in contact with one of the marked people.
And it was the gulag or worse for them.
In truth, many spy agencies had used similar marking techniques both before and after the use of NPPD hit mainstream media attention in the 1980s, but the implications remained the same.
‘Is something the matter?’ Evans asked.
He could sense by the edgy way Medvedev was walking, glancing here, there and everywhere, that he was on high alert.
‘There’s a lot of heat out there. I can feel it.’
Evans remained calm. ‘Heat on you or me?’
‘There’s heat on everyone right now.’
They carried on walking, slow steps, both aware of everyone around them, but Evans doing a better job of hiding his spying.
‘Were you followed?’ Evans said.
‘Usually I’d say no, for sure. Today, the answer is: I don’t think so.’
It was an unusual response. And one that drained any remaining confidence Evans had.
‘Okay. Then let’s keep this brief. We’ll walk to the next bridge and then head off.’
Evans calculated that at a slow pace, it would give them somewhere between five and ten minutes.
‘Agreed,’ Medvedev said.
Medvedev, who was in his late forties, had been an FSB agent for his entire career. He was a classic intelligence agent, the matters he dealt with largely to do with politics and diplomacy. But like many long-serving agents, he’d grown disillusioned some time ago over the shades of grey in which he found himself living.
Evans’s role at the JIA was about as close to traditional espionage as there was. Even with only a few years of field experience, he could already see how someone could be turned. After a while, the monotony of lying, deceiving and forever playing games simply grinds people down and it becomes hard to remember exactly who you really are, whom you’re working for and why.
Plus, the longer you’re an agent, the more baggage you generate, and with that baggage comes leverage that others will inevitably use against you. A combination of these factors had led to Medvedev first becoming an informant for the JIA more than five years ago.
It was MI6 who had first tapped him up. They had been profiling the FSB agent, as they did with all senior foreign officials. One day MI6 had caught Medvedev in the act of passing information to the Chinese in exchange for a not-insubstantial amount of money. That was enough leverage to bring on board an agent who was clearly already disillusioned with his own people, or perhaps just greedy. Either way, after that incident, he had been passed along the food chain to the JIA, who had been milking him ever since.
Evans had so far been the sole agent from the JIA to have met Medvedev face to face. He was Evans’s first informant and continued to be his most important, which as a result had seen Evans spend much of his time with the JIA in Moscow, deciphering and following up on the information Medvedev had provided.
That said, over the course of five years, he had only met with Medvedev seven times. Although theirs was an important relationship, it was nevertheless a fraught and dangerous game they were playing, and each of their meetings had been carefully planned and orchestrated.
All except this one, that is, which had been much more spur of the moment. Perhaps that was the reason Medvedev seemed so tense.
‘I need to get to Lena Belenov,’ Evans said.
Medvedev stopped and turned to face Evans, who stopped too.
‘Impossible,’ he said.
‘Impossible for you or for me?’
‘Impossible for you.’
Medvedev began his slow walk again and Evans followed.
‘But surely someone’s spoken to her? I need to find out what happened to her.’
‘It’s too difficult right now. Even for me.’
‘Even for you? I’m not sure how that could be true for someone in your position.’
‘It’s hard to explain. I’ve never seen the FSB like this. There’s just so much confusion right now. Trust is a word that doesn’t really exist anymore. Every move, every conversation is being scrutinised. And the FSB … we’ve lost many agents over the last few days. All because of one man.’
‘Carl Logan.’
‘Yes. He’s still the focus, as I’m sure you can imagine. They’ll … we’ll do anything to capture him again.’
‘The FSB aren’t the only ones on his back, that’s for sure. So what’s happening now? What are your leads?’
‘The whole FSB is on lockdown,’ Medvedev said. ‘The SVR too,’ he added, referring to Russia’s external intelligence agency.
‘I’m not sure I understand why,’ Evans said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Why isn’t this just a simple manhunt?’
‘It seems Lena Belenov wasn’t entirely forthcoming about her dealings with your people. At the moment, nobody knows just what deals were struck by whom. Or what damage might have been done.’
‘They could ask her.’
‘They have. But everyone is keeping tight-lipped. At least with me. And whatever answers she’s given probably don’t carry much weight. Like I said, trust is a word that doesn’t exist anymore.’
Alarm bells were ringing in Evans’s mind at Medvedev’s unusually vague answers. Evans knew that Lena Belenov had been central in the dealings between the JIA and the FSB over Logan’s release. He also knew that somewhere along the line the CIA had become involved in those negotiations. From there had sprung the catalogue of events that had led to Mackie being executed and Logan going on a gung-ho rampage to rescue Angela Grainger from under the noses of the Russians.
So Evans could understand why the FSB and SVR would be on high alert. But there was clearly more at play than this simply being the Russians out to track down Carl Logan.
What worried Evans most was that Medvedev was being so cagey as to exactly what was happening, what information they’d got from Belenov, and the theories and leads the Russians were now working on. Evans couldn’t believe that such a senior agent as Medvedev would be so completely in the dark.
Just how much did Medvedev know that he wasn’t telling?
‘Who killed Charles McCabe?’ Evans asked.
‘I don’t know. Not the FSB. We had no reason to.’
‘And not Carl Logan?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Which doesn’t leave many other options.’
Medvedev’s clear response surprised Evans. The picture of exactly who had killed Mackie and why was certainly muddy. Although Logan had initially been the prime suspect, and officially, at least, still was, Evans had got the impression from his talks with Winter and now Medvedev that all sides were now coming to a different conclusion. And Evans knew Medvedev was, rightly or wrongly, pointing the finger at the Americans. The CIA.
‘But why?’ Evans said.
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’
‘And what about Carl Logan? Where is he now?’
‘You’re asking me? He’s your agent, isn’t he?’
‘At the moment, we’re not quite sure about that. And he’s in your country. He escaped your custody.’
Medvedev winced at Evans’s words and then sighed.
‘We were tracking him. Him and the girl, Angela Grainger. But they’ve gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘They were both chipped, but the last we saw of either of them was a few hundred miles from Volgograd.’
‘What happened?’
‘We had a car following them. But when our people took a chance and confronted them, Logan and Grainger attacked them. They got away.’
The situation was a complete mess. Logan was highly trained, sure, but was it really so hard to capture one man? Or were the FSB playing their own little game here? Maybe Logan really was an asset of the Russians now and they were simply protecting their man. There seemed so many possibilities and yet none of them made full sense.
‘You said they were chipped?’ Evans queried.
‘We had a second surveillance vehicle a few hours behind the first. When they eventually caught up with the signal from the chips, the team were following a flatbed truck past Volgograd. We found the tracking chips in the back of the lorry. There was no sign of Logan or Grainger.’
Evans shook his head at the cheap trick. He’d like to think the JIA wouldn’t have so easily let Logan get away. And yet, he supposed, if what Medvedev was saying were true, the Russians had at least been following them. The JIA had literally no clue as to Logan’s movements.
‘And since then?’
‘Nothing.’
Evans wasn’t sure what to believe. Medvedev definitely knew more than he was letting on. Which worried Evans. Because the Russian agent was supposed to be his asset.
‘He’s running,’ Evans said, more to himself than to Medvedev.
There were only a small number of possibilities of where Logan was running to, given his last known location and where he had started. One thing Evans knew with confidence: by now, Logan was no longer in Russia.
After walking in silence for a few strides, Evans looked down at his wristwatch. The time was seven minutes past eleven. They were nearly upon the next bridge along the riverfront – the Bogdan Khmelnitsky footbridge, a unique glass-covered walkway across the Moskva River.
‘I’ll carry on going,’ Medvedev said. ‘You can head off here.’
‘Okay,’ Evans said, disappointed.
It felt strange to come away from a rendezvous with Medvedev with so little of value. He wanted more time. Wanted to ask more questions.
Just a few seconds later, as Evans was preparing himself to head onto and over the bridge, two men up ahead caught his eye. They were walking a few yards apart from one another. Nothing in particular was distinguishable about them – they wore plain clothes and were neither tall nor small, neither skinny nor fat. Just two very normal-looking guys. Yet something about the way they moved, ghosting along, almost without purpose, suggested they were in fact together. Trying just a bit too hard to blend in.
As soon as he laid his eyes on them, Evans had no doubt.
It was a surveillance team.
And Evans knew this would be the last meeting he ever had with Nikolai Medvedev.