Saturday
Palazzo Margherita, Via Vittorio Veneto, Rome, Italy
‘It looks as if the trail’s gone cold,’ George Edwards reported, as he re-entered the room.
Richards and Westwood were still sitting in the Chief of Station’s office, relaxing in easy chairs with a coffee pot and the remains of a plate of sandwiches littering the table in front of them.
‘Our guys are still keeping a close eye on the Russians, but they now seem to have split up their teams. They’ve kept watchers outside some of the larger railway stations, but most of them are just driving around the major streets, concentrating on the bus routes. We reckon they must have lost sight of their target, and now they’re just driving around, hoping to spot her.’
‘So you do think it’s the woman who was being chased near the Stazione Trastevere?’ Richards asked.
‘Yes, we’re now reasonably sure the Russians are looking for a woman. One of our surveillance teams managed to get a couple of good shots of the briefing pages they’re waving about, and the photograph’s definitely of a woman. We’ve tried enhancing the images as much as we can, but we can’t get a picture clear enough to resolve her features. So we still don’t know who she is.’
‘Is there anything else you can do about that?’ Westwood asked. ‘Maybe it’s time we stopped just following the Russians about and started doing something for ourselves. Like getting proactive?’
Richards stared at him. ‘You got a suggestion?’
Westwood nodded. ‘If we are assuming the Russians have a defector on their hands, this woman is presumably hoping to make contact with either us or the Brits. And since, as far as I know, there’s been no approach to us here or back at Langley, that could mean she’s already talking to the British SIS.’
‘And you think we should interfere, sir?’
Westwood grinned at him. ‘Maybe “interfere” is the wrong word. But if we can assist our British friends in handling this defector, it might turn out to our mutual benefit. And, of course, if we managed to find the woman first, and get her safely into the embassy, or on a flight to Washington, then we’d get a chance to talk to her, and maybe make her a better offer.’
‘The Brits wouldn’t like that,’ Richards said, grinning, ‘but it’d be a hell of a coup to pull off. But how could we go about it?’
‘OK,’ Westwood said, all business, ‘the first thing would be to identify the target, and find out who she is. I’m thinking maybe one of our guys runs across one of the Russian watchers, and relieves him of that data sheet with her picture on it. Like a mugging, maybe? Then maybe one of the databases at Langley can help us identify her – and tell us why she’s so important to Moscow.’
‘You still here, George?’ Richards looked up at Edwards. ‘Why don’t you go and organize a mugging?’
‘A pleasure, sir. I know just the man to do it.’
As the door closed behind Edwards, Richards swung round to face Westwood again. ‘You sure this is a good idea, sir?’ he asked.
‘It’s worth looking at,’ Westwood replied. ‘If one of your guys can get us the description sheet the Russians are using, we might know if it’s worth going any further. There’ll just be one Russian wandering about with a sore head, which is the only downside. If the girl’s just some low-level clerk or a runaway we can just walk and forget it. But if she’s important, and the Russians’ reaction so far suggests that she is, then we can get ourselves a bit more involved.’
Outskirts of Rome, Italy
Raya Kosov leant back in the passenger seat of the Fiat Punto and closed her eyes, the hum of the engine and the sound of the tyres on the tarmac road surface providing a comforting lullaby. She wouldn’t relax properly, though, until she reached somewhere she felt truly safe, which meant out of Italy altogether, and somewhere like France or Germany instead, where she’d have more freedom to manoeuvre. At the very least, she knew she had to get herself further up to the north of Italy, to somewhere like Genoa or at least Livorno. Maybe she could even persuade Mario to take her that far, but anywhere more than about fifty miles from Rome would do, because it would expand their area of search exponentially.
Mario had said goodbye to his friend as they’d left the bar, for Raya was not prepared to make an ‘arrangement’ with both of these men, and then the pair of them had walked a couple of hundred yards to where the young Italian had parked his car.
Mario chatted away as they pulled into the stream of traffic and started heading out of the city, but Raya managed to tune him out as she scanned their surroundings. She checked the crowds of pedestrians, tried to peer into every passing car, scanned the people waiting at bus stops. She saw nothing to arouse her suspicions except for a dark-coloured saloon car, with a couple of shadowy figures inside, parked a short distance from each railway station they passed. Clearly her trail had now gone cold, and the SVR officers had gone back to covering all the most obvious exit routes from the city.
Raya sank a little lower in her seat, though she knew the chances of her being noticed were slim indeed. The Punto was just another car, in an unending succession of them, with two anonymous seated figures inside it.
Mario had glanced at her curiously at this reaction, but hadn’t commented, just continued pointing out various places of interest as they passed them. However interesting they might seem to any one of Rome’s annual influx of hundreds of thousands of tourists, at the moment Raya didn’t care a jot about the Aurelian Walls or the Appian Way or the Coliseum, or anything else. All she was interested in was getting out of this city as quickly as she could. To her the only good news was that there couldn’t be enough Russian Embassy staff to cover all the roads leading out of the city.
But only when the Fiat Punto crossed the Grande Raccordo Anulare, Rome’s ring road, known simply as the GRA, and continued westbound on the Via Aurelia, heading for Civitavecchia, the port of Rome, did she finally begin to feel safe. For a few delicious seconds, she lay back in the seat with her eyes closed.
‘Thank you, Mario,’ she murmured on opening them again.
The young Italian turned to face her. ‘For what?’ he asked. ‘I’ve driven you about a dozen kilometres, that’s all.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Raya. ‘You’ve helped me more than you can ever know.’
He eased his foot slightly off the accelerator. ‘Are you . . . I mean, do you want me to stop and let you out somewhere here? Not at Civitavecchia?’
‘Absolutely not.’ Raya shook her head. ‘We have a deal . . . an arrangement, you and I, and I always keep my promises.’ She reached over and squeezed his thigh gently. ‘Actually, I’m looking forward to it.’
‘Good, so am I,’ Mario said, grinning. ‘You’re beautiful, Raya, and I feel so lucky to have you here with me.’
‘How lucky?’ Raya asked. ‘I was just wondering if we could change our arrangement slightly. How about making a weekend of it and going a bit further north? I’d love to visit the Ligurian coast, for instance.’
For a moment Mario paused, then he smiled again. ‘I don’t have to even think about it. One night with you would be fantastic, Raya. Two nights would just be twice as fantastic. You’re on.’
She settled back in her seat, feeling finally at ease.
A few minutes later she suddenly sat forward and glanced around.
‘Something wrong?’ Mario asked.
‘No,’ Raya assured him. ‘It’s just that there are a couple of things I have to do. Can you stop somewhere that might have a shop selling mobile phones, and at an Internet cafe?’
‘You can use my mobile and laptop when we get to a hotel, if you like?’
Raya shook her head firmly, as she felt in one of her pockets for the slim shape of a USB memory stick.
‘Thank you, but I need a mobile of my own – and I must use an Internet cafe. I have to send off a couple of emails, but they won’t take long. And wherever we stop for tonight, there must be a cyber cafe nearby. That’s because I’ll have to send another email first thing in the morning.’
Ax-les-Thermes, France
Adamson had managed to find a vantage point from which he could clearly see the front of the Hostellerie de la Poste. It was an area of rough ground lying about three hundred metres down the road, and was surrounded by bushes and undergrowth in which he’d been able to conceal the Renault Laguna so that it was now completely invisible from the road. The disadvantage was that it would take him a few minutes to get the car back onto the road along a rough track.
He had already spent an almost terminally boring evening, sitting motionless in the car with all the lights off, staring out at the front of the hotel through a pair of binoculars. But at least he’d had the foresight to buy some sandwiches and half a dozen cans of soft drink in the town, before finding somewhere to park. He felt guilty about Colin Dekker with each mouthful he took, but not guilty enough not to eat and drink.
The SAS officer was still in the same position, hidden up on the slope and covering the rear of the hotel with his rifle, and if Adamson was bored sitting in a comfortable car with food and drink to sustain him, God knows how Dekker was feeling.
The Hostellerie de la Poste seemed to be doing reasonable trade that Saturday night. In the early evening, about a dozen cars had turned up there to disgorge couples or families, but by nine-thirty all but one of the vehicles had departed, since the French tended to eat early. Just after ten, a couple walked out of the hotel and soon the lights of the final vehicle were switched on, and Adamson heard the engine start. Two minutes later the hotel car park was empty – apart from a small white Renault van, parked well over to one side. It had been in the same spot all day, so Adamson guessed it belonged to the owner of the hotel.
‘Sierra, this is Whisky.’
‘Go.’ Dekker still sounded bright and alert, despite his circumstances.
‘The last vehicle’s just left. The front door’s now closed, and the lights in the bar and dining room are out. Where’s target Romeo?’
‘The same place he was the last time you called. He’s up in his room. The light’s on but the curtains are still open.’
‘Is he in bed?’
‘I can’t see the bed from here,’ Dekker replied, ‘but I don’t think so. He went into the bathroom wearing just his underwear, a few minutes ago. Then he came out, but the last time I saw him he was wearing a shirt and trousers.’
‘You think he’s intending to go out somewhere?’
‘No chance. I’m sure that pink bastard Simpson’s ordered him to stay put there tonight, just to give Gecko the best chance of finding him. I doubt if Romeo knows what’s really going on, but I think he’s probably expecting trouble, and doesn’t want to get into a fight while he’s still half-naked. Wait one . . .’
There was silence on their radio link for a few seconds, then Dekker spoke again.
‘I’m beginning to like this guy,’ he said. ‘Now he’s dressed himself all in black – black jeans and a black polo-neck sweater – so he’s definitely prepping for trouble. And he’s just come to the window, opened it wide and had a look out. He stared straight towards me, waved, and then gave me a thumbs-up.’
‘He knows where you are?’ Adamson was incredulous.
‘He can’t possibly know for sure,’ Dekker replied. ‘I guess he’s just taken a good look at the terrain behind the hotel, and worked out more or less where I would have to be hidden. He may be only an amateur at this, but he’s got talent, that’s for sure.’
‘You’re still OK up there?’ Adamson asked, not that there was much he could do about it if Dekker wasn’t.
‘A piece of piss, this, compared to what we have to do at Hereford.’
‘Food and drink?’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’ve got water and chocolate, so I’ll survive. Right, the window of the room is still open, but he’s just switched off the main bedroom light. There’s a dimmer light still on – maybe the bedside lamp. He’s left the curtains open so I can still see inside the room. And the open window means that, if I do have to take a shot, the glass won’t deflect it. And I think our friend Romeo knows that, too.’
‘So now we wait,’ Adamson said.
‘Exactly. Now all we do is wait.’
Palazzo Margherita, Via Vittorio Veneto, Rome, Italy
George Edwards returned to Richards’s office just over an hour later, this time with a broad smile on his face and a sheet of paper in his hand. He strode across to the desk and laid the paper in front of his superior officer. It was creased and crumpled, but the text and photograph were clear enough.
‘Our guys mugged one of them?’ Richards asked.
‘No, sir, we used a dip – a pickpocket. The Russian never even knew he was there.’
‘So who is she?’ asked Westwood, moving over to the desk to stand beside Richards.
‘According to this, her name’s Raya Kosov,’ Richards explained, studying the photograph of a pretty, blonde-haired woman of about thirty. ‘The rest of it’s all about her physical description, but nothing about who exactly she is or where she works. Not that I would have expected there to be, of course.’
‘OK,’ Westwood said, ‘put her name on the wire over to Langley. Mark it “Flash” on my authorization, and let’s see if we know anything about her.’
The answer came back to them in under ten minutes, when Edwards returned to the office with a database printout that had just been transmitted to Rome from CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. A total of eight women named ‘Kosov’ having a first name beginning with the letter ‘R’ were listed on the CIA’s database as possibly working in the Russian government and intelligence organizations. The information had been culled from numerous sources, many of them in the public domain, and was just a small part of the regular background information every intelligence organization collects about both hostile and friendly states. Three of these women were called ‘Raya’, but the first names of the other five were unknown.
The problem, Westwood saw immediately, was that none of those eight women appeared to occupy a position of even the slightest importance intelligence-wise. Most of them were clerks or low-level administrators, and none of them worked for either the SVR or the GRU, which was the information Westwood had been hoping to find.
‘No way they’d do all this for a runaway filing clerk,’ he muttered. ‘She must be somebody else, someone who’s never popped up on our radar before.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Richards said. ‘There’s something about the dates that doesn’t fit.’
Westwood examined the printout again, and immediately saw what Richards meant. Beside the details for each woman – essentially a mini-biography containing everything known about her – were inscribed two dates. The first recorded when she had initially been identified, and the second the last time any additional information about her had been added to the file.
Beside one of the three identified as ‘Raya Kosov’, the date of the last amendment was over ten years earlier, while the details for all the others had been updated within the last two or three years.
‘Check her age,’ Westwood instructed. ‘What does it say on that sheet your man took off the Russian?’
‘Here.’ Richards passed it over.
Westwood compared the age cited there – no date of birth was given – with the details on the printout. ‘That could be her,’ he said. ‘The age is about right. So what was she up to ten years ago, when she dropped off our radar?’
‘She was a loyal Communist Party member and still at the university in Moscow,’ Richards replied. ‘Studying modern languages and computer science.’
‘That’s her,’ Westwood said decisively. ‘The reason we’ve heard nothing about her since is that she was recruited by either the SVR or GRU around that time, and they made sure she vanished from all public records. A modern languages specialist who’s also competent on a computer – that’s pretty much a definition of the ideal SVR recruit.’
‘So now what do we do? We know her name and what she looks like, but we don’t have the slightest idea where she is, or where she’s aiming to go.’
‘I know,’ Westwood admitted. ‘Let’s assume she was nearly caught by the Russians at Stazione Trastevere. Just remind me again what those eyewitnesses actually said.’
Richards picked up a couple of sheets of text and rapidly scanned them. ‘This is the statement that the Italian police reckon is the most accurate. The witness describes seeing a dark-haired woman running away from someone along a street near the Stazione Trastevere. OK, the Moscow description says she’s got blonde hair, but she could have easily dyed it, or have been wearing a wig. And Kosov would be a fool not to change her hair colour, knowing that Russian security personnel might be looking out for her in Rome.’
‘Which does raise an obvious question,’ Westwood interjected. ‘Presumably the description issued by Moscow was accurate, regarding the way she looked when last seen there, so how did their embassy men know that she now had dark hair?’
‘There must have been an earlier sighting somewhere,’ Richards said, ‘since she arrived in Rome. Somehow they discovered that she’d altered her appearance, and found out what she looks like now.’
‘Makes sense, I suppose. Now, I want to think again about what happened back at the Stazione Trastevere. According to that same eyewitness, the pursuer was closing fast on the girl. Most men can run faster than most women, especially when you consider their choice in footwear, but the fact that they’re still out searching for her means she must have managed to get away. How did she do it?’
‘That’s a very good question,’ Richards said. ‘I doubt if she’d have any accomplices over here in Italy. If she had, they would have arranged to meet her at the airport, and then the Russians would never have caught sight of her.’
‘Agreed. I don’t think anyone was waiting for her here. So about the only way she could have got away from that Russian was to use some form of transport. I don’t mean she hopped on a bus, though a taxi is still a possibility. Why not approach your police contacts and get them to canvas the taxi firms to see if any of their drivers recall picking up a female in that immediate area at the same time the incident happened?’
‘No problem.’
‘And there’s another question you can ask them. Were any vehicles reported stolen locally within the same time frame? If so, what type of vehicle, and if it’s been recovered, where was it found?’
‘You think she stole a car? Would she have had time to manage that, with some Russian thug breathing down her neck?’
‘No,’ Westwood replied, ‘but if some driver happened to stop his car with the engine running, she might have dragged him out and jumped in. Remember, she must have been desperate, running for her life, and a desperate woman is capable of astonishing things. Anyway, just ask the questions.’
Five minutes later, Richards ended a call to his contact in the local carabinieri and glanced across at Westwood. ‘That was a good call, sir,’ he announced. ‘A young Italian girl had her scooter stolen near the Stazione Trastevere, by a dark-haired woman who simply pushed her aside and grabbed it. The girl said a man was chasing the woman, and even fired a pistol at her. So far, nobody’s reported finding the scooter anywhere.’
‘So now we know how she got away from the Russian, but the real trick’s going to be finding out where she’s gone now.’ Westwood paused for a few moments, as if considering, then he nodded. ‘Maybe it’s time to start tackling this problem from the opposite perspective. Perhaps I should call up a few people I know in London, and try to find out what’s going on from their end.’
For the next twenty minutes, Westwood made some calls, and got absolutely nowhere.
‘That’s it,’ he said grimly, hanging up the phone at last. ‘I’ve called in every favour I’m owed, but nobody in London seems to know anything. Or, if they do, they’re not prepared to tell me.’
‘So now all we can do is sit here and wait?’
‘Exactly. But just let your carabinieri contact know that we’re particularly interested in that missing woman, or anything else that might relate to her.’
Piombino, Italy
They’d been making good time, passing Civitavecchia less than an hour after leaving Rome. Having witnessed some examples of Italian driving in the city, Raya was pleasantly surprised to discover that Mario was pretty competent behind the wheel. They’d stayed on the coast road for at least one hundred and fifty kilometres, catching glimpses of the Mediterranean to the left side as they headed north. Finally they abandoned the main road, and followed the signs to Golfo di Follonica.
As they’d approached the tiny coastal town of Piombino, Mario pointed to an island a short distance offshore.
‘That’s Elba,’ he’d said, and explained how Napoleon had been exiled there after his abdication in 1814, but had stayed on the island for only three hundred days. As a sop to his vanity, he’d been allowed to retain his title of Emperor and given sovereignty over the island, accompanied by his personal bodyguard of six hundred men. But that hadn’t been enough, of course, and he’d escaped back to France the following year. Rallying his forces, he was soundly defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, and this time exiled yet again, to a barren island in the South Atlantic.
This history lesson had helped pass the time, but Raya was still totally exhausted when they finally arrived at a small hotel on the outskirts of Piombino. She perked up a bit when they entered the dining room and started eating two large plates of pasta, a dish with which she was totally unfamiliar.
And then they’d gone to bed in a room overlooking the sea, and made love to the sound of the waves breaking gently on the beach below. It had been a long time for Raya, but Mario was careful and cautious and he took his time, till they finally fell asleep in each other’s arms.