Manhunt

Captain Raya Kosov had arrived at work early that morning. The telephone call from Valentina had started the clock, and she knew she had a maximum of two days before she would have to start running.

Her window of opportunity was very small, and for one very simple reason. Raya Kosov had already said her final goodbye to her mother on her last home leave, three months previously. The call from Valentina had actually informed her that Marisa was dead, not sick, and she knew that the hospital authorities in Minsk would be advising her employer, the SVR, as a matter of routine within the next day or two.

Hopefully it would not alarm Major Abramov if he heard about it before end of work on Friday, because Raya had already told him her mother was very sick. It would not be particularly surprising if she had died shortly after the call Raya received, but he would undoubtedly be suspicious if he checked the time of death and found it actually occurred earlier than the time of his conversation with her.

And the SVR, like the KGB before it, liked to have a lever: a way of keeping all its employees in check. Once Raya’s mother was dead, that lever would vanish, and the very least Raya could then expect was greatly increased surveillance and checking of her movements. Once that happened, her chances of getting safely out of Russia were considerably reduced, and she might not be able to manage it at all.

By Friday afternoon she needed to have completed everything she had to do, and early on Saturday morning she would have to leave her apartment and be en route to the airport. Even if Abramov did try and fail to contact her, just to advise her that her mother had died, he would just assume that she had already left for Minsk. But on Monday morning, when she failed to notify the Minsk SVR office that she was in the city, as Abramov had instructed, the alarm bells would start to ring. And she guessed the hunt would be under way no later than Tuesday.

Richter was up and dressed by seven-thirty, and on the road again an hour later. He picked up the A4 autoroute just south of Verona and turned right for Milan. He planned to avoid Milan itself, but stay on the autoroute circling to the north of the city, then pick up the E62 link running north-east, to join up with the northbound A26.

There were no direct routes from Milan to Geneva, due to the inconvenient obstruction of the Alps, but he had calculated that taking the A26 and then route 33 from Mergozzo would probably be the quickest way. That would take him northwards to Brig, and west to Sierre, where he would rejoin the autoroute system. Then he would continue through Martigny and around the north side of Lac Leman, passing through Montreux and Lausanne to enter Geneva from the north.

The phone rang just as Stanway was about to leave for work. He strode across the lounge and picked it up. ‘Yes?’

‘I wonder, sir, if you have ever considered the benefits of installing full double-glazing in your property?’ a male voice said. ‘If I could just take five minutes of your time, I can—’

‘No, thank you,’ Stanway snapped, and replaced the telephone handset. He had no idea if his phone line was tapped, though in view of what Holbeche had said it quite probably was, but he was sure that incoming call would have been safe enough. After all, everyone received junk phone calls in the same way everyone received spam emails. He had kept the line open only long enough to hear the actual number the caller had given as part of the spiel: ‘five minutes’.

That was another simple code that Lomas had instructed him to remember, right at the start of their professional relationship. Each of the digits from one to ten had a different meaning. ‘Five’ was perhaps the simplest, signifying ‘no change, no news, or nothing to report’, so obviously Lomas hadn’t found out anything from Moscow overnight.

In this case, no news, Stanway mused, might well be good news. Moscow knew exactly how valuable he was to the SVR, and he was quite sure that if anything had happened that could threaten his position at Vauxhall Cross, they would very quickly do something about it. Also they would be certain to keep his case officer, Lomas, fully informed.

In any case, Stanway knew Lomas would be getting back to him soon, and that this time they would have to actually talk. It would take more than a brief exchange of written messages in a third-rate Indian restaurant, but Stanway realized the strong possibility that he, and everybody else employed in the higher echelons of SIS, would soon be under physical as well as electronic surveillance, if not already. He felt reasonably certain that he hadn’t been followed to the Indian restaurant the previous evening but, until the present situation was resolved, any further direct physical contact between himself and Lomas would be extremely ill-advised.

The best option was the telephone but for obvious reasons not his home landline or his regular mobile. When he had visited the newsagent the previous evening, he had also purchased a cheap pay-as-you-go mobile phone. That was ideal: no name, no address, no contract, just a phone with a number that only he knew. The SIM card inside the phone was good for twenty-five pounds’ worth of calls and, once he’d used up that credit, he could top up the card at almost any newsagent. Or he could simply buy another phone.

Lomas had two unlisted contact numbers that Stanway had memorized and, once he knew Lomas had received a reply from Moscow, he would be able to call him without any danger of interception because nobody in the British security establishment had any idea that Lomas even existed. Stanway knew that for a fact, because he himself was in the ideal position to know.

Of course, he wouldn’t be so stupid as to call Lomas directly from his apartment. As well as bugging his telephone line, it wouldn’t have surprised him if ‘The Box’ had also managed to sneak an infinity transmitter into his property somewhere, which would relay all his conversations, not just his telephone calls, to a nearby surveillance vehicle. If they had, the last thing he would do was try to find it and remove it, since that, to the suspicious eyes of the Security Service, would be tantamount to an admission of guilt.

He would just wait and act perfectly normally, and obviously for the moment Moscow would have to wait for any further data from him. In fact, Stanway wondered if it might now be time to call a halt to his operations, at least on a temporary basis. He had already ransacked the SIS database, picking out files dealing with any matters Lomas had told him the SVR had an interest in, and his production of the file structure of the London Data Centre System-Three computer had seemed the next logical step.

As a Deputy Head of Department, who was subject to positive vetting every two years, as well as an annual polygraph check, all of which he had invariably sailed through, he enjoyed virtually unrestricted access to all files on the linked databases maintained by GCHQ at Cheltenham, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the London Data Centre and, of course, the SIS. He could even access a limited number of files on the Security Service database, which he did on a regular basis merely to ensure that no hint of Andrew Lomas’s existence had been detected.

The actual mechanism he used for copying the files was as simple as it was elegant. Because of his position as a Deputy Head, his personal computer at Vauxhall Cross was not subject to keyboard logging or other forms of detailed surveillance. The machine itself was pretty much a standard IBM. At Vauxhall Cross the electronic security is embedded in the building itself, which is essentially a huge Faraday Cage, allowing no electronic emissions either in or out. The computer was fitted with a DVD-ROM drive – a read-only unit – but not a CD or DVD burner which would facilitate the copying of data, a serial port, one parallel printer port, one Firewire and two USB ports.

When Stanway had first begun copying classified files on behalf of the SVR, he had used a number of different ways of getting the copies out of the building, all of them somewhat risky, but with improvements in technology had come a safer and more reliable method. Stanway only wrote with either a fountain pen or a pencil and, just over three years earlier, Lomas had presented him with a new pen specially created to a most unusual design.

Slightly longer and fatter than most pens, it somewhat resembled a Mont Blanc. Above its 18-carat gold nib was a chamber designed to hold a normal ink cartridge, revealed by unscrewing the nib assembly, and above that was another chamber which was wide enough to accommodate three other ink cartridges at the same time. This was accessed by unscrewing a cap at the top of the pen, which would allow the cartridges to be tipped out. It was of a somewhat eccentric design but still a fully functional pen, though it had one modification not visible to the naked eye.

Stanway had taken the pen with him to Vauxhall Cross, and had walked through the entry and exit scanners every day for two weeks, and the machines had detected nothing unusual. The second day of the third week, he had made one slight alteration to the pen while still at home, but again had found himself able to enter and exit Vauxhall Cross without problems. That evening Stanway had sat at home by himself, as usual, and in celebration had drunk half a bottle of Chateau Lafitte – arguably one of the best red wines that the vineyards of Bordeaux have ever produced, which was not so usual – while the pen sat innocently on the coffee table in front of him.

The invisible modification to the pen was a thin copper sheath positioned underneath the outer plastic, and which enclosed both the internal chambers. This addition effectively screened the inside of the pen from most scanning devices, and the reason Stanway had been celebrating was that he had, that same morning, removed the three spare ink cartridges and replaced them with a single short rod-like object with an oblong socket at one end. It was a tight fit inside the pen, but the two had been designed to slot together. The rod-like object was a specially manufactured solid-state USB drive with a capacity of thirty-two megabytes. To put that into perspective, one full-length novel would occupy only around one megabyte.

That had been three years earlier, but the USB drive that Stanway had been using for the last six months – and which, as a precaution against discovery during any random search of his apartment, he was going to put in his safe-deposit box at his local bank on his way to Vauxhall Cross – was a device with a capacity of four gigabytes, or four thousand megabytes.

To copy files, Stanway merely plugged the drive into one of the vacant USB ports on the back of his system unit. The computer’s operating system automatically recognized the drive, and all he then had to do was use Windows Explorer to drag the selected files to the USB drive. And doing everything by using the mouse ensured that there were no keystrokes to be recorded, even if a keystroke logger had been loaded on his machine without his knowledge.

Once the drive was full, he removed it from the port, tucked it away inside his special pen, and left it in one of the dead-letter drops – what the Russians call ‘duboks’ – on his way home from Vauxhall Cross. Lomas would collect it later that evening, and leave an identical, but empty, drive in the same location, which Stanway could collect at leisure.

The pen was now back in the pocket of Stanway’s suit jacket, but holding three ink cartridges in the second chamber instead of the USB drive.

He picked up his briefcase and his new mobile phone, still in its box, and took the lift down to the ground floor of the building. There was a small utility room there, adjacent to the lift. Stanway put his briefcase on the floor, reached into his pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys. He selected one and unlocked the door.

He stepped inside, put the mobile phone box on a small workbench that ran along the left side of the room, opened the box and removed the phone and its charger. He plugged the charger into the wall socket, connected the other end of the lead to the phone itself, switched on at the socket and checked that the phone was charging properly. Then he took the box, crushed it beneath his feet to flatten it, and slid it into his briefcase. He would dispose of it somewhere convenient on his way to work.

He was, he realized, perhaps being a little overcautious. After all, there was nothing illegal in owning a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, but he knew that the Security Service would see that as suspicious, not least because he already possessed a mobile. That was why he had decided to charge the phone here in the utility room, just in case somebody from ‘The Box’ was planning on visiting this building while he was out at work. They might well decide to search his apartment, but he doubted that they would bother searching the rest of the building.

He would just wait them out, he decided, as he re-locked the utility room door and pocketed the keys. Once Lomas had either confirmed that a clerk had run from Moscow, and could compromise him, or discovered that the whole story was a fiction – simply an operation designed to flush him out by making him panic and run – then Stanway would decide what he had to do next. And if there was some frightened little clerk skulking around Europe clutching a bag of papers that could incriminate him, Stanway knew exactly what he would have to do to eliminate the threat.

Holbeche had reached his office late, having been due to leave Vauxhall Cross for an off-site meeting at nine-thirty that morning, but after he’d taken a look at two classified files, flagged ‘Flash’, he decided to delay his departure by half an hour and called Simpson just after nine-forty.

‘There’s been no approach to the Moscow embassy,’ he announced, after getting through on the secure line.

‘I wasn’t expecting one,’ Simpson replied. ‘Whoever our mole is, he’s probably a reasonably experienced intelligence officer, not to mention an experienced spy, and there’s no way someone like that is going to ring up the embassy just to ask if the story about the clerk is true. He would be certain that we’d have taps on all the lines out of Vauxhall Cross, and he would hardly try to use his home phone either. You have already placed taps, I presume?’

‘Yes,’ Holbeche replied. ‘Arkin has arranged for taps to be placed on the home phones of all SIS officers, apart from those belonging to the most junior grades, who simply don’t have the access needed.’

There was a lot of misinformation in the public domain about telephone tapping in Britain. The official position, trotted out every time anybody asked the question, was that whenever the Security Service MI5 wished to install a telephone tap, the request had to be submitted to the Home Secretary in person, who would read it and then, if he approved, sign the authorizing warrant. The SIS was required to follow a similar procedure, but their requests were submitted instead to the Foreign Secretary. Each warrant was subject to a monthly review, and a further or extended warrant would only be approved if the requesting organization could manage to convince their particular Secretary that continuing the surveillance could be justified.

The physical installation of telephone taps and other bugging devices was carried out by a security division within British Telecom, and taps would not be installed unless a proper warrant was produced. This rule might be relaxed if it could be demonstrated that the case was extremely urgent or had grave security implications – for example, if the phone is believed to be currently used by active terrorists – but, even then, the authorizing warrant had to be submitted to British Telecom within forty-eight hours of the tap being placed.

Comforting though the above procedures might be to the innocent citizens of Great Britain, the reality of the situation was somewhat different.

First, the Echelon monitoring system – a joint automated-surveillance system operated primarily by the intelligence services of Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – monitored every international telephone call that originated in, terminated in, or passed through any of the participating countries. It also monitored emails and faxes within the same broad geographical area.

Second, and rather more worrying to anyone with the slightest interest in personal liberty and freedom of speech, Special Branch, which was the executive arm of the Security Service, had the authority to request the installation of a tap or a bug on a telephone line of a suspected criminal without reference to the Home Secretary, just by applying to a senior British Telecom official. Special Branch officers, even without specific direction from the Security Service, were perfectly capable of interpreting the term ‘suspected criminal’ in its loosest possible sense. Practically speaking, therefore, MI5 could actually tap the telephone of pretty much anyone they wanted to, for as long as they wanted to, without the Home Secretary or anyone else even being aware of it.

‘Cheltenham has reported some slightly unusual signal traffic between London and Moscow this morning on the usual circuits.’

‘No,’ Holbeche replied. ‘It was a single message in a high-level cipher that has never been broken, but which is frequently used for extended-length transmissions to Moscow.’

‘As I said, this cipher is normally used for high-volume traffic, long transmissions which GCHQ has always presumed was just the usual diplomatic waffle. But this message was really short, just a few groups, according to Cheltenham.’

Simpson remained silent for a few moments. ‘Maybe,’ he then said slowly, ‘just maybe Cheltenham’s take on this is wrong. The short message could have been a simple request for confirmation of the missing-clerk story from Moscow Centre. If it was, that means two things. First, it means that our mole . . . our file on this breach is “Egret Seven”, and we’ve code-named the source of the leak “Gecko” by the way. It means our mole has attended one of the briefings already given, which means he’s a very senior officer indeed, and much more dangerous than we thought. Second, it suggests that the previous high-volume traffic might not just have been a bunch of diplomats exchanging off-colour jokes and party invitations. Instead, it might have been stuff that the London SVR rezident has already received from the mole, and which he was then transmitting to Moscow. In which case—’

‘In which case,’ Holbeche finished it for him, ‘we’re not looking at a new security breach. This bastard could have been sending stuff to Moscow for months, or perhaps years.’

There was a silence on the line as both men absorbed the implications of this suggestion.

Simpson roused himself first. ‘It’s circumstantial, of course,’ he said, ‘but it does seem to hold together. And, until something breaks, there’s not a great deal we can do. I would suggest tasking GCHQ with tackling that cipher, though if they’ve had no success so far, that’s probably a waste of time. But it might be instructive to find out when this particular cipher was first used because, if our guess is correct, that could give us an indication of the scale of the breach.’

‘I’ll ask Cheltenham to check the logs and provide us with a breakdown,’ Holbeche concurred.

‘Good. Perhaps the reason the System-Three directory structure was being sent as hard copy to Yasenevo by courier was because it might have been too difficult to convert it into a format that could be sent in signal form.’

‘You could be right and, in that case, we’ve been incredibly lucky. If that Russian hadn’t collapsed, we might never even have known about the mole.’

‘Exactly,’ Simpson added. ‘I would love to find out for sure if that single message this morning was a request to Moscow Centre for confirmation that some SVR clerk actually has skipped.’

‘So would I, Simpson. So would I,’ Holbeche replied, before ending the call.

Andrew Lomas wasn’t worried, but he was definitely concerned, for Stanway was getting decidedly jittery. That was proved by the emergency summons to the meet in the Indian restaurant, one of five emergency rendezvous places and times indicated by different types of chalk mark scribbled on the church wall.

When he had first started working with Stanway, the Englishman had appeared surprised at Lomas suggesting they indicate their meeting places by means of chalk marks or similarly archaic devices. What was wrong, he had asked, with using pagers, mobile phones or even call boxes?

Lomas had been firm, however, since his training in Moscow had been thorough and specific. The problem with using any telephone, whether fixed or mobile, was that with the right equipment the call could be monitored and both the calling and contacted numbers identified. Besides, as a matter of routine, the Security Service monitored all the public telephones located close to Vauxhall Cross and to most of the other buildings occupied by sections of the British intelligence establishment, as well as the phones adjacent to all the foreign embassies.

That was a ‘just in case’ precaution based on the somewhat tenuous assumption that any British intelligence officer wishing to pass classified information to a foreign power would simply nip out of Vauxhall Cross during his lunch break and call the appropriate embassy from a phone box on the street nearby. And although this blanket surveillance had so far never led to the detection of any serious breach of security, there was some logic to it; for anyone wishing to make a call without being overheard would tend to opt for a public phone, and a phone box that was conveniently located.

But Lomas had firmly refused to let Stanway make any routine contact by telephone, and had insisted that he learn and use the simple codes that Lomas had devised. And, as a result, for years their contact had remained almost entirely impersonal. Stanway would deposit the USB drive, containing the files he had copied, in a dead letter box; Lomas would collect it and replace it with a blank drive. And about once every three or four months the two men would meet, but always briefly and always a long way from home.

Of course, Lomas could understand why his contact was now concerned. If some clerk genuinely had run from Yasenevo carrying documents that could identify Stanway, it was a potential disaster. But Lomas was reasonably sure that if such an event had occurred, Moscow Centre would have already told him about it. That left the possibility – or perhaps even the probability – that it was some sort of operation being run by MI5 to flush out a suspected traitor.

He had contacted the Russian Embassy in London as soon as possible after leaving the Indian restaurant, requesting a thorough check. And the response he’d received by encrypted email in the early hours of the morning had puzzled him. The decoded message read:

No defection reported. Assume ‘missing clerk’ story bogus. Immediate action: Advise source Gospodin no news. Follow-up action: none. Await decision on further response from Moscow Centre.

It was the final sentence that had puzzled Lomas. If there was no defecting clerk and the whole story was just a device, then Stanway was perfectly safe. Of course, he would have to curb his activities for a while, at least until the witch-hunt had died down. So what other possible ‘further response’ were the wheels at Yasenevo considering?

By mid-afternoon, Richter had reached Geneva. In fact, he’d driven through the city and out the other side on to the A40 autoroute, entering France in the process, but he’d only driven as far as the first junction. There he’d turned north off the autoroute, and had stopped at a small town called Bons-en-Chablais. It was only about fifteen miles outside Geneva, so he knew he could easily reach the city centre within about an hour. That should be close enough for whatever Simpson had in mind.

He’d already filled the Ford’s tank at a garage, in preparation for whatever the morrow might bring, and had tried three hotels before settling on a small Logis de France establishment more or less in the centre of the town. It had lockable garages, an attractive dining room and only eight bedrooms.

Once he’d unpacked his meagre possessions, Richter reserved a table for one in the dining room at eight that evening, purchased a café alongé – straightforward black coffee – in the bar, and took it outside to one of the tables overlooking the small square where the hotel was located. Only then did he call Simpson on his mobile.

‘I’m about fifteen miles from the centre of the city, but I’m actually in a small town just over the Swiss border, in France.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ Simpson said, recognizing Richter’s reluctance to divulge his exact location. However, as long as his mobile phone was switched on, Simpson knew he’d be able to pinpoint Richter’s position to within a few yards by triangulation, using the cells the phone was in contact with. Always assuming, of course, that he could persuade the Frogs to play ball, and that was never a foregone conclusion. ‘We’ve still no news, so leave your mobile switched on, and be prepared to move at very short notice.’

‘Right.’ Richter ended the call and settled back in his seat to enjoy the coffee and to watch whatever activity there was in the square.

‘That’s it,’ David Adamson said, looking up from the map, and pointed to the right just as Colin Redmond Dekker steered the French-plated Renault Laguna over the narrow stone bridge at the southern end of the town of Cahors. The bridge spanned the River Lot, and perhaps a quarter of a mile along it, on the south bank, was a small hotel.

‘You’re sure?’ Dekker asked. Adamson had already called and booked two rooms there while they were still on the road, up in the Dordogne.

‘Yes. The directions they gave me were quite clear. There’s a roundabout at the end of the bridge. Turn right, and just beyond that there’s a narrow road running along the river itself. That leads straight to the hotel, and there’s a car park right outside.’

A couple of minutes later, Dekker parked in the closest vacant slot to the main entrance, as he wanted to leave the vehicle in as visible a location as possible. The two men plucked their overnight bags and briefcases from the boot and headed inside. The receptionist’s English was workable, though Adamson had been picked by Simpson because he spoke fluent French, and so check-in took no time at all. Dekker spoke hardly a word of the language, but he had other skills that Simpson thought he might need. The two men reserved a table for dinner, in the dining room overlooking the river, then took the lift up to the second floor.

‘Let’s get unpacked first, then we’ll go down and have a drink at the bar,’ Adamson suggested. He stepped back and examined the door of his room and the ancient lock on it. ‘This isn’t the most secure accommodation I’ve ever stayed in,’ he added, ‘so I think we’d better keep the weapons with us from now on. I’d hate to come back up here after dinner and find that some French tea leaf had broken in and walked off with the shooters. Simpson would go ballistic. Just make sure nobody can spot the holster under your jacket.’

In their separate rooms, the men unpacked what they might need for the night, then Dekker carried his heavy briefcase into the room opposite. Adamson first checked that the door was securely locked, then snapped open the locks on his own briefcase. Inside were two leather shoulder holsters and two locked pistol cases, each of them containing a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol with three magazines and a box of fifty rounds of 9-millimetre Parabellum ammunition.

Then the two men performed exactly the same sequence of actions. They first loaded all three magazines, then pulled on a shoulder holster and slid two of the magazines into the specially designed loops. The third magazine went into the weapon itself, which each man secured in his holster. Adamson finally locked the virtually empty briefcase and slid it under the bed.

‘Right.’ Dekker picked up his own bulky briefcase and headed for the room door, waiting there for Adamson to unlock it.

In the corridor outside, the two men studied each other for a few seconds, checking that the weapons remained invisible under their jackets. Once satisfied, they walked off towards the lift.

‘Order me a beer, will you?’ Adamson said, as they stepped out into the lobby. ‘I’d better go and tell our esteemed leader that the eagle has landed, so to speak.’

Outside the hotel, Adamson pulled out his mobile phone and dialled an unlisted London number.

A couple of minutes later he walked into the bar and sat down opposite Dekker, who had picked a table up against the wall, with the briefcase jammed into the space beside his chair.

‘And how is that poisonous, balding, short, pink bastard?’ Dekker asked, sliding a glass of beer across the table.

‘You seem to have nailed his personality, then, and he’s pretty much as you’d expect. He was surprised that we’d only got this far, but I told him that, with the time-scale he’s given us, this was as far as we needed to get today – and that seemed to shut him up. And I explained to him that it had taken us a bit longer than anticipated in getting to the Paris embassy to change cars.’

That had been an important component of Simpson’s plan, as he’d guessed that a British-plated car would be more instantly noticeable in Ax-les-Thermes than a French vehicle. So he’d arranged for the pair to leave their British Ford at the Paris embassy, on the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré, and then complete their journey in one of the embassy’s own vehicles.

Adamson glanced round the bar, which was still empty at that time of day. ‘Anyway, it looks like it’s still a go for tomorrow, though there’s been nothing from Vauxhall Cross, or anywhere else, to suggest that anyone’s swallowed the bait.’

Chapter Seven