Manhunt

Richter got up fairly late, had a shower and shaved, then headed down to the hotel dining room for a typical French breakfast of coffee, bread and pastries.

Once finished there, he walked into the hotel lounge and sat down, placing the briefcase on the low table in front of him. He checked his mobile phone, which he’d left on charge all night. It had a fully charged battery and a good strong signal. Until Simpson called him, he had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and all day to do it in.

He unlocked the briefcase, pulled out one of the three novels he’d bought at Heathrow, and settled down to read.

Almost as soon as he reached Hammersmith, Simpson called Holbeche, but the SIS head had nothing useful to report.

There had been no results so far from their operation to flush out the traitor, and no suspicious telephone calls had been made or received by anybody currently under surveillance. No one had failed to report for work, who wasn’t genuinely sick, and no staff member at any of the target establishments had requested taking leave at short notice. It was as if their assumption was wrong, and that the deep-cover mole simply didn’t exist. Except that they knew he did.

‘Yes, I talked to the Head of Station this morning and told him exactly what’s going on.’

‘I think so, Simpson, yes. I’m not sure he could even access the System-Three directory listing from the Paris holy of holies, but the reality is that the breach must have occurred on this side of the Channel. If somebody in France had obtained it, a Russian courier would have taken it direct to Moscow from there. It certainly wouldn’t have been sent over to London first. No, I’m happy to believe that he’s not involved.’

‘I’ve told him to brief two of his officers – their names are Richard Hughes and David Wallis – to fly down to Toulouse tomorrow afternoon, and then drive on to Ax-les-Thermes. As far as they’re concerned, the whole operation is on the level. They’ll be told they’re being sent down there just to interview this Russian defector, and to assess whatever information he’s carrying. Once they’ve done that, they’ll report back to Paris with a straight recommendation of yes or no.’

‘They can be, if you want, but that might raise eyebrows. This is supposed to be a routine assignment.’

‘No, and I’d rather they weren’t armed. I just want to know who’s likely to be carrying, so I can brief my own people.’

‘I’ve sent him to Geneva. He’s in a hotel just outside the city, but on the French side of the lake,’ Simpson said.

‘No particular reason. It just seemed fairly central, and he can easily get to the rendezvous position in about six hours.’

‘When will you send him down? I mean, what’s your take on this, bearing in mind we’ve so far seen no response at all from anyone within the security establishment?’

‘That hasn’t surprised me,’ Simpson replied. ‘Whoever Gecko is, he’s going to play it cool, and that means no sudden illnesses, dying relatives, or requests for unpaid leave. My guess is that, once he knows where this defector from the SVR has gone to ground, he’ll hop on an aircraft – or more likely just get in his car and drive down to the south of France.

‘But, to answer your question, I’m going to send this man down there today – his name’s Paul Richter, by the way – because I want him in place no later than this evening. That will give Gecko two clear days over this weekend to sort him out, and still let him be back in his office on Monday morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and eager to hear the latest news about the Russian cipher clerk.’

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Simpson said. ‘I’ve only met him once. We picked him because he matched all the basic criteria we agreed – no immediate family, unemployed, Russian speaker and with a military background. He actually speaks good Russian, which is a bonus – he took an advanced course while he was in the Navy. The other reason I chose him was because, frankly, we couldn’t find anybody else suitable in the time available. His service record showed him to be somewhat insubordinate, but also stubborn and resourceful, and I thought he would fit the bill. You’ll appreciate that we couldn’t do a full check on him, simply because of the timescale, but I have to confess he’s not the order-following patsy I assumed he would be. In fact, ever since he arrived in Vienna, he’s done very little but disobey almost every instruction we’ve given him.’

‘Absolutely. He even told me he trusted me about as far as he could spit a rat – which I presume is an expression they use in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. He’s also deeply suspicious about his tasking, and doesn’t believe I’ve told him anything like the truth about why he’s in Europe.’

‘It sounds like he’s got your number, Richard,’ Holbeche chuckled. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’

‘No. It doesn’t matter what he thinks, or even what he does, as long as he eventually goes where I tell him. And once Gecko catches up with him, he’ll either live or he’ll die, and it really doesn’t matter either way. We’ll have got our mole, and Richter will have died in a car crash or a climbing accident, or whatever else we decide to arrange in order to get rid of his body. Or maybe he’ll walk away from this alive. And if he does walk away, I might even offer him a job. I like the way he thinks.’

‘Yes, though I suggest you do it this morning. That will give Gecko plenty of time to make whatever arrangements he needs for the weekend.’

‘Definitely. In fact, it would be worse than that. It would be counter-productive. You can’t watch every officer, and Sod’s Law states that if you do try to put some surveillance in place, either Gecko or somebody else is bound to spot it. Word will get around, and then he’ll guess that this whole thing is just a deception operation, and that will then be that. We’ll be right back at square one with no idea of Gecko’s identity, and no easy way of finding out.’

‘If this was a long-term operation, I’d agree with you. But if you’re expecting Gecko to act this weekend, within the next two days, I don’t see how he could manage to detect any surveillance in such a short time.’

Holbeche paused before replying. ‘No, I suppose not. Very well, then, I’ll arrange for the information to be released this morning.’

‘No, I think we’ll keep it low-key. I’ll just have it sent round the internal email system, as a routine update. Look, there’s a lot riding on this, Richard, so how sure are you that it’ll work?’

‘I’m not,’ Simpson confessed, ‘but I still think it offers us our best chance of winkling out this bastard without having Five and Special Branch crawling all over Vauxhall Cross, and anywhere else he might be employed.’

‘By this afternoon. They crossed the Channel yesterday – couldn’t fly because they’re carrying weapons – and had reached Cahors by last night. They checked in with me after they’d found a hotel, and they plan on getting to Ax no later than four this afternoon.’

In his office in Hammersmith, Simpson glanced at his watch. ‘Early this evening, I should think. I’ll be giving him his instructions in about an hour, and he’s got further to drive than my other two men. That should be time enough, though. It’ll take Gecko at least five hours from leaving London to get to the location, even if he flies straight to Toulouse, and my guess is he won’t be flying because he’ll want to take a weapon with him. I think he’ll either drive or go by train, and that means he won’t get there until sometime tomorrow.’

‘So the timing should work out well,’ Holbeche said. ‘Let’s hope everything else does.’

In her fifteenth-floor office, Raya Kosov gazed out of the window towards Moscow for what she guessed would be the last time. She then turned her attention to a handwritten list – each entry apparently innocuous – lying on the desk in front of her. She was being as methodical in her approach to her defection as in everything else she had ever done at Yasenevo.

Beside the list sat an official voucher for a return airline ticket to Minsk, made out in her name. Abramov had organized that for her, and her eyes had again welled with tears when he had handed it to her. Not, in this case, from grief, but simply because she knew exactly how much trouble he was going to be in as soon as her crime was discovered. She just hoped her boss would survive the subsequent purge.

Also on the desk was her passport, obtained nearly five years earlier for a brief holiday on the Black Sea, and which she’d only ever used on that one occasion, and beside it was her SVR identity card. She would need the passport to get onto the aircraft, while the identity card should help smooth her path if she met any obstacles. Like the KGB before it, the SVR was regarded with a mixture of fear and awe by most Russian citizens, and its officers were very rarely impeded.

She had already packed a small case ready for her journey, and that was waiting for her in her tiny Moscow apartment, along with her precious store of euros and American dollars. She’d accumulated those meagre funds as carefully and inconspicuously as she could, buying the hard currency from a handful of black-market traders in exchange for roubles, and paying – she was perfectly certain – well over the odds for it.

As well as clothes, her bag also contained a portable CD player. Somewhat similar to a Sony Walkman in appearance, but much more bulky, it had emerged from the production line of a minor Russian factory about five years earlier, and Raya had immediately seen its potential. She’d bought the unit, which had only worked intermittently from new, and then spent some hours modifying it, with the result that it no longer worked at all. In fact, the only thing that did operate as the manufacturers had intended were the push buttons, and all they did was illuminate. But it was Raya Kosov’s prize possession, and would definitely be accompanying her on her final journey out of Russia, together with a few music CDs inside their cases.

Raya looked back at the list and had, she decided, covered almost everything. She’d done a handful of the security checks Abramov had instructed her to perform, and written out a normal report just as if she’d completed all of them. In fact, the report wasn’t entirely normal. Under the strictly numerical section – the filenames, numbers and directories she’d checked – she’d added another paragraph headed ‘Possible improper access’, in which she’d listed a number of files that appeared to have been accessed by somebody here at Yasenevo, identity unknown. She appended a note stating that she was continuing to investigate the matter.

Abramov was out of the office until Monday, and the report, stamped Sekretno at the top and bottom of every page, was securely inside his locked safe. He’d given Raya the combination weeks earlier, which broke SVR rules, but Abramov had decided it was worth taking this risk because he was depending more and more on his subordinate, and was out of the office so frequently.

When she’d put the report inside Abramov’s safe, Raya had also removed a key. As network manager, the major was required to hold a master key that would open every office door in the building, even those of the most senior staff officers, just in case some kind of a computer problem required one particular workstation to be switched on – or off – when the occupant of that office was away from the building.

She’d also taken another voucher for an airline ticket, applied Abramov’s official stamp to it and scrawled a reasonable facsimile of the major’s signature across the bottom. But the destination she had inserted on this voucher wasn’t Minsk, or indeed anywhere else in the Confederation of Independent States.

Back in her own office, she’d locked the door, opened a small program on her computer – a program she’d written herself – and then used it to dial a Moscow number. The moment the call connected, her program gave her access to the call diverter she’d been using to transfer files to her own computer, a small but quite powerful laptop tucked away in a corner of the bedroom in her own apartment. First, she permanently deleted all the call records held in the diverter, then she looked up a number on the Yasenevo database and copied that to the call diverter. Then she deleted that number as well, but ensured it remained in the diverter’s log, and inserted a different Moscow number. She wouldn’t be calling the device again, and doubted if anyone else would, but when the call diverter was discovered, as she knew it would be, it wouldn’t take an SVR technician long to identify both the number it was set to dial and the previous number as well. In fact that was an essential part of her plan.

When she’d originally worked out how she was going to accumulate her ‘dowry’ for the defection, she’d decided to keep things as simple as possible. It seemed to her almost poetic to be able to use the same hardware mechanism to both copy the files she wanted, and also to fatally implicate her target.

That had been the easy bit. The next thing would be much more difficult, but she knew she had to do it, and as soon as possible, because the clock was already ticking. She first looked at her watch, then accessed the master workstation record on her computer. That listed the time when every user on the network logged on and off each day. She scrolled through a number of pages, but paused for a few extra moments on one in particular, just long enough to check a single entry, then she returned to her home page.

Raya stood up and opened the top drawer of an unlocked filing cabinet standing against one wall. From there she took a zipped pouch containing an electronic technician’s toolkit that included screwdrivers, pliers, chip extractors, earthing wristband, assorted screws and other bits and pieces. She also removed a small cardboard box that held a dozen or so anti-static envelopes containing RAM chips of various types, since there were several different computer models, with different motherboards and memory slots, attached to the SVR network. She put both into a briefcase and moved back to her desk.

Raya opened one of the drawers and took out an unopened box of pencils, another of ballpoint pens, a pair of scissors, and a new reel of clear sticky tape, and slid them all into the pockets inside her briefcase. Then she took out a box of medical plasters, selected two short ones, and stuck one on the end of her right forefinger and the other on her right thumb. The last item she selected was a small rubber bulb with a fine brush attached: it looked almost as if it could be an item of make-up, but it wasn’t.

Finally, she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out two different Yale-type keys, each wrapped in tissue paper. She had prepared these the previous evening by scrubbing them in a strong solution of the most powerful cleaning fluid she could find, and then boiling them in a pan on her stove. She’d repeated the process three times and, at the end of it, she was as sure as she could be that no trace of her fingerprints remained. She checked that the tissue paper still covered them completely, then replaced the keys in her pocket.

She made a final check that she now had everything she needed, opened her office door and stepped out into the corridor, locked the door behind her and strode off, towards the SVR senior officers’ floor.

‘Hang on.’ Richter opened the briefcase and pulled out a notebook and ballpoint pen. ‘OK, fire away.’

‘We need you to get to Ax-les-Thermes as soon as possible, and certainly no later than this afternoon.’

Richter did some swift mental calculations. It would be a six- or seven-hour drive, he guessed, and offered no problem unless he hit unusually heavy traffic or experienced some kind of mechanical difficulty with the car.

‘The same routine, Richter. Go to the Hostellerie de la Poste and book in there for two nights. This time that is where you’re going to be staying because if this is going to work at all, I need to know exactly where you are. Use the name Markov for the booking and, if anyone asks, you’re a Russian on holiday in France. So talk to the people at the hotel in schoolboy French, or in Russian. If you have to speak English, make sure you put on a heavy accent. You really do speak Russian, don’t you?’

‘Yes, and I suppose that’s also why the papers I collected in Vienna have Sekretno stamped all over them?’

‘Of course I opened the packet. And if it had been full of drugs, or something I didn’t like the look of, I’d have dumped it in Austria, orders or no orders. I like to know what I’m carrying, Simpson.’

‘Your reporting officers were right, Richter. You are an insubordinate bastard. But I presume you’ve no scruples about carrying Russian documents classified Secret?’

‘No, because I’ve already read them. Technically, they may be classified at that level, but there’s almost nothing we don’t already know about the Victor III, and there’s certainly nothing contained there that was news to me. Don’t forget I was an ASW Sea King pilot until I saw the light and switched to Harriers, and in the Navy we were required to know exactly what the opposition’s capabilities were.’

‘Right,’ Simpson sounded almost resigned, ‘apart from the extract from the Victor manual, there should also have been a smaller envelope in that packet. I presume you opened that as well?’

‘Why am I not surprised? Inside it you should have found a briefing paper about the SVR – which is the Russian foreign intelligence service.’

‘I do know what the initials stand for,’ Richter replied. ‘And there was also a small plastic card with my photograph on it. What’s that for?’

‘You’ll find out later. In the meantime, just check in to that hotel at Ax and wait for instructions. While you’re there, read the briefing paper. I need you to be reasonably conversant with the structure and functions of the SVR by tomorrow morning, just in case.’

‘As I said, Richter, you’ll find out later. Somebody might contact you at the hotel tomorrow, or perhaps Sunday. Any other questions?’

Richter had several, but none that couldn’t wait. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You want me to call you when I get there?’

Finishing the call, he took another sip of coffee and opened the briefcase again. He extracted a route-planning map of France and studied it for a few minutes. It looked like an easy drive, most of it on autoroutes. Richter finished his coffee, picked up the briefcase and walked back into the hotel.

Twenty minutes later, he’d packed his bag, paid the bill and was nosing the Ford out of the hotel car park.

She’d been studying the routine followed by this particular colonel for several months, simply by looking carefully at his workstation usage records. Every Friday morning that he was in the building, he logged off the network at around ten-thirty, and logged on again about an hour later. This, she knew, was because the Head of the Section convened a weekly meeting in his office. If canteen gossip was to be believed, this meeting first featured briefings from all his subordinates regarding their current projects, followed by the consumption by all concerned of a considerable amount of alcohol, as a kind of a liquid finale to the rigours of the working week.

It was just before ten-forty. So, unless the colonel’s routine had changed, there should be no reply. A few seconds later she knocked again, with the same lack of response. Raya glanced up and down the corridor, just in case he was anywhere in sight, perhaps returning to his office to collect something he’d forgotten, but it remained deserted. She took a deep breath, pulled the pass-key out of her pocket, opened the door and stepped inside.

She walked straight over to his desk and looked down at the computer. The screensaver was displayed, and Raya knew this machine would be password-protected. She could of course have accessed her master password list before she left her office, but she had no interest in what was on the hard drive: all she needed to do was shut the computer down. She bent down, eased the computer system unit out of its slot beside the desk, then reached behind it to pull out the power lead.

Immediately the screen went blank, and the fans inside the system unit stopped whirring. Raya opened her briefcase, pulled out the toolkit and selected a cross-head screwdriver. She swiftly removed the six screws that secured the unit’s cover, and lifted it off. The next logical step was to insert the new RAM chips, but there were a couple of things Raya needed to do first. The removal of the cover would provide her with an unarguable reason for being in the man’s office.

Standing upright again, she gazed down at the desk. There were no papers or files on it, but Raya would have been amazed if there had been. Two telephones flanked a simple desk set comprising vertical pen and pencil holders as well as shallow trays holding paper clips, staples, erasers and other oddments. The only other thing on the desk was a water glass, half full. She looked carefully at the pens and pencils, and smiled in satisfaction.

Raya selected two pencils and a single ballpoint pen from their holders and placed them in a pocket in her briefcase, taking care to only touch them with her plaster-covered finger and thumb. She carefully opened the new packets she’d brought with her, and replaced the two pencils and ballpoint with new ones.

Then she turned her attention to the water glass. She took the rubber bulb, puffed some fine grey powder on to the glass, brushed it gently and looked at it carefully. Three or four slightly smudged fingerprints were revealed. She pulled a length of sticky tape off the roll, taking care to only touch the very ends of it, and carefully applied it to the glass, before lifting off three of the prints.

Raya reached into her pocket and pulled out the two keys contained in tissue paper, unwrapped them and dropped them on the desk. She pushed the keys into position with the plaster-covered tip of her right forefinger, then laid the tape over the keys, sticking them firmly to it. Still holding the tape by the ends, she knelt down beside the desk, rolled over on to her back, and slid underneath. She reached up and stuck the tape at the back of the lowest desk drawer. She wriggled out, reached into her briefcase for the scissors and carefully cut off both ends of the tape where she had touched it.

Only then did she remove the plasters from her finger and thumb and put them in her pocket, and use a tissue to clean the powder off the water glass. She next looked inside the computer system unit, to check the type of RAM chips fitted there. She slipped on the earthing wristband, opened the box of memory chips, selected the correct type and expertly slotted it into place. In less than three minutes, she’d replaced the cover and packed everything she’d brought with her back into the briefcase. She then reconnected the power lead and switched on the computer. As usual, the operating system began a scan of the hard drive, because the computer hadn’t been shut down properly. Raya checked to ensure that it had started up, then took a pencil and scribbled a note to advise the colonel that she had upgraded his computer. She left the paper prominently in the middle of the desk, and took a last glance around to ensure she’d left nothing else in the office. Finally she let herself out into the corridor, locked the door behind her and walked away.

The computer on Gerald Stanway’s desk emitted a soft double-chime, to indicate receipt of an email message. Normally he ignored such alerts, preferring to check his messages every half-hour or so but, since news of the defecting Russian had reached London, he’d started reading each email as soon as it arrived, just in case it contained any new information.

Opening his email client, he scanned the latest arrival in his in-box. The message was internal, its origin Holbeche’s office at Vauxhall Cross, and it was the first communication Stanway had seen that gave him any additional information about the clerk. The email was classified Secret, had a limited distribution – Heads and Deputy Heads of Departments only – and for the most part didn’t provide a great deal more information than had already been disseminated. But what it did contain was more or less what Stanway had been expecting, and fearing.

SECRET

LIMDIST – HODs and DHODs only

Subject: Defecting Russian cipher clerk – code name ‘Roadrunner’. Update 1.

Summary

Latest intelligence from Moscow Station, confirmed by technical support services, is that Roadrunner has left Austria and is now in southern France.

Narrative

Roadrunner established telephone contact with Moscow embassy before leaving Vienna and requested a meeting near Toulouse with SIS officers no later than Sunday. If we fail to comply, Roadrunner has stated verbally that he will approach the CIA.

Two Russian-speaking officers will leave Paris Station tomorrow to travel to Toulouse by air with authority to offer Roadrunner asylum in the UK provided they are satisfied with his bona fides. Assuming the defection is sanctioned, Roadrunner will be flown from Toulouse by UKMILAIR (HS-146 on four-hour notice to depart Northolt) to UK, accompanied by SIS handlers, for extended debriefing.

All contact with Roadrunner, apart from his visits to the British Embassies in Moscow and Vienna, has been by mobile telephone. He apparently purchased a pre-paid unit in Austria, and technical services – assisted by France Telecom and the French mobile service providers – have identified his exact location each time he turned on this mobile. As well as the Moscow embassy, Roadrunner also made four other calls to numbers in Russia, the recipients unidentified to date but possibly family or friends.

Continuous tracing action was not possible because Roadrunner switched off the mobile after he’d made each call, and apparently removed the battery, so preventing remote activation and tracking of the unit through the Echelon system. But the calls he made have provided a fragmented record of his route from Vienna to France, and his last known location is at the northern end of the town of Ax-les-Thermes, south of Toulouse.

Conclusion

The probability is that he will remain in this location until the requested meeting with SIS officers. This meeting will take place somewhere in Ax-les-Thermes, precise location to be decided later.

SECRET

He glanced at his watch. It was early Friday afternoon and, if the update was accurate, he had until Sunday to recover this situation. He knew he’d have to do something about it himself, because it was clear, from what Lomas had told him, that Moscow either knew nothing about this defecting clerk or, more likely, knew exactly who the man was but wasn’t planning on doing anything about him.

It was, of course, certainly possible that the defecting clerk knew nothing about Stanway, or might not even exist – for it was conceivable that SIS or The Box, having received intelligence suggesting there was a mole somewhere in the security establishment, were using the story of a defecting clerk as an attempt to flush out the traitor. But Stanway wasn’t prepared to take that chance.

He sat silently at his desk for a few moments, working out possible timings and routes. He would have to travel by car, simply because he would definitely need to carry a weapon. Getting a pistol onto an aircraft was possible if you knew what you were doing, especially something like a disassembled Glock because of its mainly non-metallic construction, but it was always dangerous. Driving through one of the channel ports in a car, especially for a traveller leaving the United Kingdom, was as near risk-free as made no difference, the English authorities taking almost no interest and the French less.

Stanway was too cautious to do anything more than read the email. If Holbeche had set some kind of a trap, his keystrokes – and those of every other senior SIS officer – would be scrutinized. If the courier was real, and Stanway’s plans for the weekend came to fruition, the same process would be applied after the event.

But he had a Filofax at the back of which were several maps, none particularly detailed, but the one covering Western Europe was clear enough to show him where Ax-les-Thermes was located, and the size of the symbol suggested it was a fairly small town. Hopefully, finding the clerk wouldn’t be all that difficult: after all, how many renegade Russians could there be hiding out in a small French spa town?

Raya Kosov cleared her desk and checked out of Yasenevo as early as she could, catching the first available coach back to Moscow. She got out at her usual stop, near the Davydkovo station in south-west central Moscow, and headed off towards her small apartment, as usual. But the moment the sound of the coach’s noisy diesel engine had faded, she retraced her steps, crossed the road and descended into the Moscow underground system.

When the train arrived, Raya entered a half-empty carriage. She ignored the empty seats and stood beside the door, because she didn’t have far to go. As the train moved off, accelerating rapidly into the tunnel, she pulled a pair of thin leather gloves from her pocket and slipped them on.

Two stations later she stepped out, climbed back up into the streets of Moscow and walked a few hundred yards down the road to a small apartment building. She glanced around briefly, took out a keyring and unlocked the street door. There was no lift, but the apartment was on the first floor, at the rear, so it was only a single flight of stairs.

Raya unlocked the door and entered. An estate agent would probably have described the flat as furnished, but that was stretching the truth. There were some chairs, a table and a bed, but that was pretty much it. The bed was unmade, and in fact there was no bedding anywhere in the apartment. Or towels, clothes, crockery, or cutlery, for that matter. Absolutely the only thing that suggested occupation was a desktop computer resting on the plain wooden table pushed up against one wall. Incongruously perhaps, bearing in mind the air of desertion in this apartment, the PC was switched on, its system unit humming quietly though the screen was blank. Power cables were connected to a socket on the wall, and a thin cable ran from the modem to an adjacent telephone point.

Raya pulled a chair up to the table, moved the mouse and pressed a button on the front of the screen. She waited until it had flickered into life, navigated to a particular directory and opened it, checked the names of the files listed, and then switched off the monitor.

She opened her briefcase, laid the pencils and ballpoint pen she’d taken from the office at Yasenevo on the desk, and stood up. She glanced carefully around the apartment, checking that she’d not left anything behind, then walked out, locking the door behind her. Less than three minutes had elapsed since she’d first entered the building.

Half an hour later, Raya was sitting in her own apartment, mentally running through her checklist for the very last time. The following morning she’d be leaving Moscow, and she anticipated that, no later than forty-eight hours after that, the dogs would be let loose to find her and haul her back.

The Hostellerie de la Poste stood at the northern end of the town of Ax-les-Thermes – which was actually more like a big village – where the N20 road runs briefly through the countryside before entering the smaller community of Savignac-les-Ormeaux.

Richter arrived there early in the evening and found the establishment without difficulty, mainly because the road ran right beside it. A comfortable-looking stone building, probably about two hundred years old, the hotel was set back a little way from the road, a terrace running along the front and faded shutters adorning the windows above it. Some kind of plant which Richter thought might be wisteria – but his knowledge of botany was virtually nil – was making a determined effort to reach the roof on the right-hand side.

There was a car park at the rear of the building, accessed through a stone archway guarded by tall steel gates. Their paint flaking and metal rusty, they now stood wide open. He swung the Ford through the entrance and parked it in a vacant space immediately behind the hotel itself.

Richter unlocked the boot, pulled out his bag, headed through to reception and checked in. He first tried out his Russian on the proprietor, to no avail, then switched to very basic schoolboy French. The hotel sleeping accommodation was on two levels, and he chose a room at the rear on the first floor and overlooking the car park. There he dropped his bag on the end of the bed and glanced round. The room could only be found in France, for the wallpaper, in a spectacularly garish floral pattern, covered not only all four walls but also the ceiling, and was also virtually a match for the counterpane on the small double bed. But it was clean, at least, and a quick exploration of the bathroom proved that everything worked there and the water was hot.

Dinner was already being served so, without unpacking his bag, he washed his face and hands, and went downstairs to the dining room. He chose the menu touristique, because it offered a cassoulet as one of the main courses, ordered a bottle of still water, and settled back to enjoy it.

After he’d finished eating, he picked up his coffee and found a seat on the terrace outside. After checking that nobody could hear him, he pulled the mobile phone from his pocket and dialled the number Simpson had given him earlier.

‘Nothing else today, and it’s still not clear exactly what’s going on. There’s been no further contact with the man we were expecting you to meet, so, while we’re waiting, we’ve decided you can assist us in a training exercise. Tomorrow you’ll be contacted by two officers from our Paris embassy. I’ll call you again in the morning and give you a verbal briefing.’

‘A training exercise? I could have flown down here if that’s all that’s going to be happening. And what about afterwards? Do you still want me to carry on driving round Europe like some hopeless tourist?’

‘Just do what I tell you, Richter,’ Simpson snapped. ‘You’re not exactly flavour of the month right now, based on your performance to date. Don’t do anything else to piss me off.’

Chapter Eight