’ – ‘sorry’.Saturday
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow
‘What was his name and rank?’ Major Yuri Abramov demanded.
He was wearing civilian clothes, and was far from pleased at being summoned to the duty office at Yasenevo on a Saturday morning, on what he knew was a wild-goose chase.
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘You don’t know very much, do you? Somebody called you to verify the identity of an SVR officer. You have no idea of the man’s name or rank, and you don’t even know for sure if he was calling from Sheremetievo. And you think he said my officer was flying to Rome, which is ridiculous. Her travel warrant is for Minsk, and nowhere else.’
But the duty officer stood his ground. ‘No, sir. He definitely said she was flying to Rome. That much I am sure about. And if he wasn’t calling from Sheremetievo, how did he get the number here? It’s unlisted.’
Abramov stared at him for a few seconds.
‘Right, call the Border Guards Directorate at the airport, and we’ll sort this business out once and for all. While you try to track down the man who called you, I’ll collect the book of travel warrants.’
In the small suite of offices where they worked, Abramov unlocked the door of Raya Kosov’s room, and nodded. Everything was neat and tidy, exactly as it had been on every other occasion he’d looked in there. In his own office, he quickly unlocked his safe, pulled out the book he needed, locked up carefully, and returned to the duty office.
The duty officer sat at his desk, with the telephone in his hand. ‘Just a moment,’ he spoke into it, as Abramov entered. ‘The Border Guards’ office at Sheremetievo, sir,’ he informed Abramov, gesturing to the handset.
The senior officer took it and sat down. ‘This is Major Abramov,’ he began. ‘I gather you’ve been enquiring about my colleague Captain Kosov.’ As he spoke, he was flicking through the pages of the book of travel warrants, searching for the one he’d issued to his subordinate. When he found the counterfoil, he noted the number and the details he’d written there.
‘She was issued with a warrant to travel to Minsk,’ he began firmly, but then his voice tailed off as he noticed another counterfoil, from which the warrant had been detached. But, in this case, the counterfoil was blank, and Abramov had always been as meticulous in processing travel warrants as he was with every other accountable item in his charge. He would never have removed one without completing all the details.
In fact, the counterfoil wasn’t entirely blank. There was something written there, in a hand he was entirely familiar with. It was the single word ‘’ – ‘sorry’.
Until that moment, he was convinced it had all been a mistake – probably nothing more than something misheard over the telephone. But the missing warrant, and that one word written by Raya, now suggested a very different possibility.
The Border Guards officer continued saying something, his voice an irritating twitter in Abramov’s ear, but the SVR officer was no longer listening.
‘Wait,’ he interrupted, and turned back to the duty officer. ‘Get onto Minsk,’ he ordered, ‘and tell them to check which hospital Kosov’s mother is in.’ He lifted the telephone to his ear again. ‘Give me the flight details,’ he instructed, and listened for a few moments. ‘Where is the aircraft now? Can you recall it? Right, what time does it land in Rome?’
Less than ten minutes later, Abramov realized he was standing at the epicentre of a disaster in the making. The travel warrant he’d issued for a flight to Minsk hadn’t been used by Raya, or anyone else, but the other warrant from his book had been used for a flight to Rome. The Minsk SVR office had made two phone calls and confirmed that Raya Kosov’s mother was already dead, but what chilled Abramov was that she’d died the very day Raya had told him she was terminally ill, so he now knew, beyond any reasonable doubt, that his subordinate had intended to defect.
And the flight had already left Russian airspace. In fact, it had crossed the Italian border at about the time he was talking to the Border Guards Directorate officer at Sheremetievo, so there was now no way of recalling it.
All he’d been able to do was issue the most specific instructions to the SVR office in Rome, backed up by a full description and photograph of Raya Kosov. Abramov just hoped that would prove enough, because it would take time for their officers in Rome to get themselves out to the airport. And, even then, Raya probably wouldn’t be that easy to spot in the milling crowds of people there.
Ax-les-Thermes, France
Simpson ended the call and for a couple of minutes sat in thought, running over the sequence of actions in his head, mentally checking to see if there was anything he’d forgotten.
Then he dialled Adamson’s mobile.
‘It’s Simpson,’ he said. ‘Richter will be appearing at the hotel in about twenty minutes, so get yourselves into position now. Orders as stated, objective unchanged.’
‘Copied. We’ll be mobile in two, and in position in ten.’
In the Renault Laguna parked beside the road to the north of the town, Adamson started the engine and shot a glance at Dekker.
The two men were dressed very differently, for Adamson looked like a businessman, in an outfit of slacks, shirt and tie, and a lightweight jacket concealing his pistol and shoulder holster, whereas Dekker wore a pair of thorn-proof olive-green trousers and a camouflage-pattern jacket. Also, in contrast to Adamson’s polished loafers, Dekker’s feet were encased in tough boots with thick rubber soles.
‘It’s a go?’ he asked.
‘Yup, it’s a go. You got everything?’
Dekker nodded and gestured to the bulky briefcase lying on the back seat. ‘Drop me where we agreed.’
Adamson checked the road in both directions, then pulled the Renault out of the wide lay-by and turned south, back towards Ax-les-Thermes. About three hundred yards short of the Hostellerie de la Poste, he indicated and pulled the car in to the side of the road.
‘Wait,’ Adamson ordered, checking the road ahead of them, then glancing in his mirrors to see behind them. ‘All clear,’ he said. ‘Go now.’
Dekker slid out of the passenger door, opened the rear door to grab the briefcase, looked both ways and then crossed the road swiftly, to disappear through a scrubby hedge and into the field beyond.
Adamson checked that Dekker was well out of sight before driving back onto the road. He indicated when he reached a lay-by about seventy yards from the hotel, and pulled the car off the road again. He lowered the windows, took out his mobile phone and placed it on the dashboard, then picked up a cardboard folder from the back seat and opened it. Inside were printed pages covered in pie charts and diagrams, together with several sheets of text, all of it in French. It was exactly the kind of stuff a commercial traveller would be expected to carry and, as Adamson spread it out on the seat beside him, he hoped this would provide him with a plausible reason for sitting there in the car by the roadside for an hour or so, with a mobile phone constantly pressed against his ear.
The moment he was through the hedge, and out of sight of the road, Dekker crouched low and hurried away up the gentle slope leading towards a small copse of trees some fifty yards ahead of him. He was shielded from the road behind by the hedge bordering that section of the N20, and from the hotel by another, rather lower, hedge that extended across the southern edge of the field.
Reaching the trees, he straightened up and eased his way into their sun-dappled gloom. He had already selected this as being the best – and realistically the only – spot from which he could watch the rear of the hotel from cover. Dekker chose a position on the perimeter of the copse which offered a clear downhill view of the target, and crouched down beside a large shrub with fleshy green leaves. He clicked open the briefcase, studied the component parts of the sniper rifle lying in their custom-shaped recesses and then, with the ease that only comes with long practice, began the assembly process.
The weapon was one of the variants of the standard SAS sniper rifle, the British-made Accuracy International PM – Precision Marksman – or L96A1. Designed for covert operations, the rifle Dekker had chosen was the AWS, or Arctic Warfare Suppressed, model. The name was a hangover from the days when the manufacturer produced a modified version for the Swedish armed forces, a move which spawned several different models generically known as the AW range. The stainless-steel barrel was fitted with an integrated suppressor which reduced the sound of a shot to about that of a standard .22 rifle. It was a comparatively short-range weapon, because of the subsonic ammunition, effective only to about three hundred yards in contrast to other versions and calibres of the rifle, some of which were accurate at up to a mile.
Both the stock, its green polymer side panels already attached, and the barrel were a tight fit in the case, each lying diagonally across its interior. He pulled them both out, fitted and secured the barrel, and lowered the bipod legs mounted at the fore-end of the machined-aluminium chassis to support it, while he completed the assembly. Then he took a five-round magazine out of the recess in the briefcase, along with an oblong cardboard box containing twenty rounds of 7.62 x 51-millimetre rifle ammunition. Before leaving Hammersmith, Dekker and Simpson had discussed what type of bullet should be used.
‘It all depends,’ Dekker had said, ‘on whether you want me to stop this guy dead, literally, or just stop him. If I use a hollow-point or a dumdum bullet, at the ranges you’re talking about, a hit anywhere on the torso is going to kill him pretty much instantly.’
Simpson had shaken his head. ‘If we need him dead, you can put a bullet through his head, right? No, just use standard copper-jacketed rounds, and hopefully there’ll be enough left of him to talk to us afterwards.’
Dekker took five rounds out of the box and loaded the magazine, then pressed it into the slot in front of the trigger guard.
The last item was the scope. The normal sight used on the AW rifle was from the Schmidt and Bender PMII range, but Dekker preferred something slightly different. He’d chosen a huge Zeiss telescopic sight that offered variable magnification, and incorporated a laser sighting attachment which would project a spot of red laser light directly onto the target, but he probably wouldn’t need to use that, not at this range. Once he’d clipped that to the Picatinny rails mounted on top of the receiver, Dekker removed one last piece of equipment, a two-way radio comprising an earpiece and clip-on microphone which were attached to a flat black battery-cum-transceiver. He clipped the microphone to the lapel of his jacket, slid the earphone into his right ear, then attached the battery pack to his waist belt and switched it on. Finally, he closed the briefcase and slid it to one side, and out of sight.
Dekker laid himself full-length beside and under the bush, settled the butt of the rifle into his right shoulder, drew back the bolt, and then slid it forward to load the first round. Only then did he peer through the sight at the target building, which was some one hundred and fifty yards away.
Dekker was a captain in the SAS and a sniper-team commander, and had been ‘borrowed’ from Hereford for this particular mission. He was a professional sniper who was competent enough, behind a good rifle, to guarantee accurate shot placement on a man-sized target at anything up to a thousand yards’ range. At only one hundred and fifty, he would barely need the telescopic sight at all.
In his earpiece he heard a series of clicks and bursts of static, then Adamson’s voice.
‘Sierra, this is Whisky. Radio check.’
The code was simple enough, and they’d devised it before they left their hotel in Cahors that morning. Sierra was the ‘sniper’, namely Dekker, and Whisky was the ‘watcher’, or Adamson. The radio system they were using included a scrambler circuit so that if any of their transmissions were detected they would sound like meaningless static. The units were, in any case, deliberately very short-range, and the FOE techies had estimated that none of their transmissions would reach more than about two miles.
‘Roger,’ Dekker replied, a military response normally meaning ‘received and understood’ or, as in this case, ‘loud and clear’. Only amateurs resorted to hack phrases like ‘wall to wall’ or ‘five by five’.
‘Sitrep,’ Adamson continued. ‘I’m now in front of the building, with a clear view of the entrance. No activity. Confirm your position and status.’
‘Position as briefed,’ Dekker muttered. There was nobody behind him in the copse of trees as far as he knew, but a loud voice apparently emanating from a bush was the kind of thing that could attract attention. ‘I’m locked and loaded. Clear view of the target.’
In the centre of Ax-les-Thermes, Richard Simpson consulted his watch, and opened his mobile phone again.
‘Richter, this is Simpson. Get yourself back to the hotel now.’
‘I’m on my way. Oh, one last question. Are these two pointy-heads from Paris carrying weapons?’
‘Of course not,’ Simpson snapped. ‘For them, this is just a routine initial debriefing of a potential source. Neither of them will be armed. Why do you ask?’
‘The usual, Simpson. You know, a matter of mutual trust, spitting a rat, that kind of thing. I just like to know what I’m up against. If they are carrying, I might feel the need to borrow whatever it is. Just in case.’
‘They’re not carrying pistols or anything else, Richter. You have my word on that. But, even if they were, remember there are two of them, both highly trained professionals, and only one of you. So how, exactly, would you “borrow” one of their weapons?’
‘I’m a professional too, Simpson, just in a different field. And don’t worry – I’d find a way.’
Simpson lowered the phone from his ear and looked at it thoughtfully. Not for the first time since this operation began, he wondered if he was underestimating Richter, and he wished the timescale had permitted a thorough background check on this man on whom the success or failure of his plan now very largely depended.
Richter picked up his book, paid the bill for the drinks, and headed away from the Auberge du Lac, along the road leading to his own hotel. He then glanced both ways, checking for oncoming traffic, but the road was fairly quiet and he was able to cross immediately.
He strode through the front entrance of the Hostellerie de la Poste, took the stairs two at a time to his room, and tossed the book on the bed. He rinsed his face in cold water at the sink, and for a few moments just looked at his reflection in the mirror.
‘You’re a fucking idiot, Richter,’ he muttered. ‘You just know this is all going to end in tears.’
‘Sierra, this is Whisky.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Target Romeo has just entered the hotel. No other movement.’
‘Roger.’
In the copse, Dekker altered the position of the sniper rifle slightly, and scanned the bedroom windows at the rear of the hotel. He saw movement in one of the windows on the first floor, above the car park, and increased the magnification on the scope a couple of clicks. Through the high-quality Zeiss optics, the face of the fair-haired man in the hotel room sprang into view.
‘Contact,’ Dekker radioed. ‘First floor, second window from the left. Identity confirmed.’
Inside the Hostellerie de la Poste, Richter picked up the packet of ‘Secret’ papers, tucked the faked SVR pass into his jacket pocket, locked the room door and headed along the landing and down the stairs. He crossed the hall and entered the empty lounge, sitting down at a round table in one corner, which offered a clear view of the room. He ordered a Coke in halting and guttural French from the barman, since he seemed to have been drinking coffee all day and thought he could do with a change.
As the Coke arrived, so did two other men, and Richter immediately knew who they were. They were similar in appearance – about six feet tall, dark hair, solidly built, and wearing black shoes and grey suits – and ordered drinks at the bar before turning round to face Richter.
Then they walked over to stand side by side in front of his table.
‘Are you Mr Markov?’ one asked, in English.
Richter inclined his head slightly. ‘Markov, da. Anatoli Markov.’
‘Do you speak any English?’ the same man continued, very slowly and clearly.
Richter shook his head. ‘No English, no,’ he said. Let the buggers work for it, he thought.
‘No problem,’ the man said, switching smoothly into Russian with, Richter thought, just a hint of a Georgian accent. ‘My name is Richard Hughes and my colleague here is David Wallis. Do you have any identification on you? A passport, perhaps?’
Richter shook his head. ‘I was stationed in Moscow,’ he said. ‘So I had only my internal passport, and I left that in Russia.’
‘So how did you get out of the country?’ Wallis asked.
‘Friends,’ Richter said. ‘Few borders present a problem if you have friends.’
‘You worked at Yasenevo,’ Hughes said, ‘so do you still have your building pass?’
‘Yes.’ Richter reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and held up the buff-coloured plastic card. ‘You can look,’ he said, ‘but not touch.’
‘Can we take a picture of it?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good.’ The two men sat down at the table, and Hughes gestured to Wallis, who produced a small digital camera from his pocket. Richter obligingly placed the card on the table and waited while Wallis took two pictures of it, the camera flashing each time. Then Richter turned it over to allow the SIS officer to photograph the reverse side.
‘Right,’ said Hughes, pointing at the envelope on the seat beside Richter. ‘We understand you have some papers with you. Are they in that envelope, perhaps?’
‘Some are, but some I have elsewhere, in safe keeping.’
‘May we see them?’ Wallis asked.
‘No, not yet. I was expecting to be contacted here by somebody from British intelligence. I have shown you my identification, but I still do not know exactly who you two are. I will offer you nothing else until I am satisfied with your credentials.’
Wallis glanced at Hughes, then shrugged his shoulders.
‘Very well.’ Both men produced small leather wallets and placed them on the table in front of Richter, who studied them with genuine interest, never having seen an SIS officer’s identification before. He took out a pen and notebook and carefully copied down the two names. Then he slid the wallets back towards their owners, and sat back in his chair.
‘So, Gospodin Wallis and Gospodin Hughes, that tells me your names and who you work for, but I still do not know what authority you have. If you are satisfied with who I am, is either of you senior enough to offer me asylum?’
Again Wallis and Hughes exchanged glances.
‘That’s not the way it works, Anatoli,’ Hughes said. ‘I think we’re satisfied with your identity, but there’s a long way to go before we even start talking about asylum. We need to be certain that the information you have brought out with you is important enough to make it worth our while sending you to Britain, then setting up a new identity for you, teaching you English, providing enough money for you to live on – and all the rest of it. And that means we have to see the product, in order to assess it.’
‘The product?’ Richter asked, a puzzled frown appearing.
‘The papers you brought with you from Yasenevo.’
Richter looked from one to the other, then nodded in understanding.
‘I will show you the first page only,’ he said, ‘and that is all. No touching, no pictures, OK?’
The two SIS officers signified their agreement, and Richter slowly slid the first page of the Victor manual out of the envelope, and held it up.
‘This is secret information,’ Richter continued, ‘about one of our submarines.’ He pointed to the Sekretno stamps, at the top and bottom of the page, then quickly replaced the sheet in the envelope.
‘We’re not very interested in submarines these days, Anatoli. What else have you got for us?’
Richter smiled. ‘I have a lot of good hard data, including the name of the man who sent us copies of some files from your Vauxhall Cross.’
Both Wallis and Hughes leant forward. ‘That’s more like it, Anatoli,’ Hughes said eagerly. ‘Tell us about that.’
Rome, Italy
Raya Kosov cleared passport control without any problems and headed into the baggage-reclaim hall at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. She stood for a moment and watched the couple of hundred people surrounding two of the luggage carousels, which had just started moving, and above which the incoming flight numbers were displayed. Beyond this mass of jostling humanity, three other carousels were also rotating, each carrying a few pieces of orphaned luggage on endless and pointless journeys into and then out of the terminal building.
If the SVR had sent anyone to intercept her, she was reasonably certain they wouldn’t have involved any of the Italian agencies, at least not at this stage. That was partly because it would be embarrassing to admit one of their own officers had flown the coop, but mainly because, if she was picked up by the Italian police or customs officers, she could try to claim political asylum, and the resulting media storm would do nothing to help Russia’s new international image as an emerging democracy.
But Raya had no intention of being caught, and she’d already planned to do something about it. Her two most distinctive features were probably her short blonde hair – she’d had it cut in this new style the previous week – and her light blue eyes. That gave her an almost Nordic appearance, and she hoped this was what any watchers now positioned on the other side of the customs’ channels or outside the airport building would be looking for.
Raya looked around, till she spotted a ladies’ lavatory, and walked quickly across to it. She had to wait a couple of minutes for a vacant cubicle, the airport being very busy, then she stepped inside and locked the door. She took off her jacket and blouse, hung them on the hook behind the door, then sat on the toilet bowl and opened her carry-on bag, taking out a small folding compact, a make-up kit, and a tiny plastic case. Resting the bag on her knees, she opened the compact and positioned the mirror so she could see her face, before she snapped open the case and took out a coloured contact lens. Swiftly, she slipped the lens into her left eye, and repeated the process with her right eye. She then smiled at the result: her blue eyes had vanished behind the dark-brown plastic lenses.
They were completely at odds with her very fair skin, however, so she set about doing something about that as well. From her make-up case she took a tube of instant tan, squeezed some into her palm and began massaging it into the skin of her face and neck. Within a few minutes, she’d achieved an even colour, making sure she’d covered her hands and wrists, and the back of her neck, as well. She wasn’t so worried about her legs, as she’d deliberately chosen dark-coloured tights. Now, when she put her blouse back on, she was satisfied that her appearance would seem Mediterranean.
Next, Raya opened a plastic bag and took out a long, dark wig. She tucked her own newly cropped hair neatly under it and settled the wig on her head, making sure that not a single blonde strand was visible underneath.
Finally, she took out a bright-red lipstick, much brighter than she normally wore, and applied it carefully.
Raya put her blouse back on, held the compact at arm’s length, and looked critically at her image in the small round mirror. She almost didn’t recognize herself, so she hoped there was little chance any of the Rome SVR officers would either.
The very last thing she did was pull the jacket inside-out. She’d spent a long time searching for exactly the right garment to wear on this journey, and had finally chosen a lightweight reversible jacket, one side a dark blue, the other a creamy off-white. When she’d arrived at Rome, she’d been a blue-eyed blonde wearing a dark jacket. Now, leaving the Ladies, she’d be a brown-eyed brunette in a light-coloured one. A complete transformation, she hoped.
After a few more minutes in the cubicle, checking her appearance, she pulled her coat back on, opened the door and stepped out. She crossed to the washbasins and stared at her reflection for a few moments longer, then left the Ladies.
Raya had no luggage to collect, since everything she now possessed in the world was crammed into the black carry-on bag in her left hand, but she didn’t want to leave the baggage reclaim hall walking by herself. So she waited until thirty or forty new arrivals had fought their way through the scrum to the carousel and retrieved their cases, before she began making her way towards the exit.
Like almost everyone in front of her, she headed for the green channel, nothing to declare, and strode purposefully through it, at the tail-end of what seemed to be a large Italian family group. A handful of Italian customs officers in dark-coloured uniforms watched the departing passengers, their eyes flicking over each in turn with a relative lack of interest. None attempted to stop her, or even speak to her, but she could almost feel them watching her as she walked past.
Outside, the arrivals hall was an apparent chaos of crowds milling about, and with loud and, to her, incomprehensibly garbled announcements echoing from loudspeakers in rapid-fire Italian. Everyone appeared to be talking at the same time, while those unencumbered with bags were making their points in the way only Italians can, through wide and expansive gestures that had passers-by ducking and dodging to avoid their swinging arms.
And Raya walked silently through it all, her eyes darting in all directions as she constantly looked out for danger. She hoped she was home free, but if that officious little shit of a Border Guards officer had decided to run a check on her at Yasenevo, she knew that there could already be a snatch squad waiting, somewhere at Fiumicino, with orders to grab her. And if that happened, she knew she’d be on the next available flight back to Moscow, probably heavily sedated, and that she would then spend the last few days, or weeks, of her short life screaming her lungs out as she waited for death in the torture chambers under the Lubyanka.
The Russian intelligence organs implement a simple policy with regard to any employees who betray the motherland. They are almost never tried for their crimes, but simply disappear. Shortly after joining the SVR, Raya had been shown a graphic example of the way such ‘disappearances’ happened.
It was an old and scratchy film, shot possibly with an 8-millimetre hand-held camera, and it had been taken in the basement of the ‘Aquarium’ – the headquarters building of the GRU, Russian Military Intelligence, at Khodinka Airfield in Moscow.
The film showed a man wired, rather than strapped, to a metal stretcher. Within seconds of the film starting, the reason for the steel wire became obvious. For the man was being fed feet-first into a working incinerator, in which straps of any usual kind would have disintegrated quickly in the intense heat. The victim was struggling violently, his screams the more disturbing to her because of the absolute silence of the film. The two men lifting the stretcher onto the rails that led into the furnace wore body protectors, heavy gloves and heat-resistant face shields. And they appeared to be following specific orders, for the lower half of the stretcher was fed into the furnace first and then, after half a minute, deliberately pulled out again.
At that point, Raya was forced to look away, unable to bear watching the man’s agony any longer. His trousers had already vanished, burnt away to nothing, and the bones of his feet and lower legs glistened in the reddish light from the flames, the flesh on them already consumed. The stretcher was dumped on the floor, where it was left for a few minutes while some rubbish bags were fed next through the furnace door. Meanwhile the camera panned the length of the condemned man’s body, zooming in for several close-ups.
Then the stretcher was hoisted up onto the rails again and slid slowly – terribly, terribly slowly – back into the furnace, the victim screaming in agony throughout. Finally, the top end of the stretcher vanished inside, and the furnace door slammed shut behind it. The image darkened, and after a few seconds a legend appeared somewhat shakily on the screen. It read simply: ‘Death of a traitor’.
So now Raya looked everywhere – and at everyone.