Sunday
Rome, Italy
The mobile phone rang insistently in John Westwood’s hotel room, his brain first weaving the sound seamlessly into a dream before it finally penetrated his consciousness. Then he grabbed the unit, pressed the green button, and put it to his ear.
‘Westwood,’ he said.
‘This is Richards, sir, and it’s an open line.’
‘Understood. What is it?’
‘We now know how our colleagues from the other side of the street are going to try to find our mutual friend,’ Richards said. ‘And they’re real serious about it.’
Westwood’s brain did an immediate translation. The Russians had obviously come up with some way of tracking down Raya Kosov.
‘How?’ he asked.
‘You’re familiar with the old expression “button man”?’ Richards asked.
‘Yes. I haven’t heard it for a while, but I know what it means.’
In the days of Al Capone, a ‘button man’ was a hit man, or assassin, employed by the Mob.
‘Well, they’re now claiming that our friend is a professional in that field, and that while she was in Moscow she used her talents on a senior official there. They want to talk to her real bad, so they’ve asked the locals to give them a hand. There’ll be pictures of her plastered everywhere, and teams at every airport, ferry terminal and railway station in the whole area, plus search teams covering bus routes and talking to taxi firms. Every registered hotel and rooming house in Italy will be receiving a visit, real soon. Other officers will be stationed at the toll-booths on all the autostradas in the country, and they’ll be watching or even blocking the main roads. The locals have already made this a priority one task, and they’re sewing the place up as tight as a drum. If she’s not out of Italy by now, I don’t think she’s ever going to get out.’
‘Understood,’ Westwood said again. ‘I’ll come in later this morning. Keep your ear to the ground. The first sign of our friend, I want to know about it.’
‘You got it.’
Westwood sat on the edge of the bed for a few moments, considering. Then he switched on his laptop, entered the twelve-digit password that gave him access to his files, and looked up a London phone number. He dialled it and waited a few seconds for it to be answered.
‘This is John Westwood,’ he began. ‘We discussed a certain matter yesterday, if you recall.’
‘And I told you then that we had no idea what you were talking about,’ snapped the man at the other end of the line.
‘I know,’ Westwood’s tone was mild, ‘but now I have some information that may be relevant.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘In case you haven’t already been told, our friends from the north have virtually shut down the country, with the assistance of the local people. They’re watching airports, ferries, buses and taxis, plus checking the hotels and the main roads. You might want to pass that on to somebody.’
‘Thank you. I’ve noted that, and I’ll pass it up the line. Anything else?’
‘No. But if I hear anything more, I’ll let you know.’
Piombino, Italy
Raya woke early, her eyes snapping open as the first rays of the morning sun lanced through a gap in the curtains. For a moment she had no idea where she was – the room was completely unfamiliar to her – till she glanced at the shape that lay beside her, snoring gently, and the memories flooded back.
Raya looked at her watch on the bedside table, then slid out of bed and walked into the bathroom. She emerged a few minutes later, her hair still damp from the shower, and dressed quickly. When she left the room, Mario still lay dead to the world, one arm dangling out of the bed.
Raya smiled at him, remembering the previous night, then walked out of the bedroom. She needed two things: a cup of coffee and then the cyber cafe, in that order.
Ax-les-Thermes, France
‘Just tell me again why it has to be me,’ Richter demanded.
He sat facing Simpson at an outdoor cafe near the casino in Ax-les-Thermes, with the remains of a breakfast of coffee and croissants on the table in front of them. Adamson was sitting at a table slightly to one side, taking no part in the conversation but just scanning the surrounding area to ensure that nobody was trying to listen in to what was being said. Hughes and Wallis were sitting in Richter’s hotel room, babysitting a semi-conscious Gerald Stanway, who’d been dosed with drugs to ease the pain and, more importantly, to keep him subdued until a specialist team arrived from London to take him back for interrogation.
‘Didn’t you understand what I told you?’
Richter smiled at him. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘I understand it completely, but I just like hearing you say it.’
Simpson nodded resignedly. ‘Very well, that call last night – or, rather, early this morning – was from the duty officer at SIS headquarters, Vauxhall Cross. They’d received an email yesterday evening from a cyber cafe on the outskirts of Rome, with a rather large attachment. The attachment contained a complete listing of every person employed by SIS, their names and dates of birth, and a short extract detailing the service records and thumbnail photographs of about a dozen of them.’
‘Stanway really screwed you, didn’t he?’ Richter suggested with a grin.
‘This is no laughing matter. I don’t know how long that bastard has been selling our secrets to the Russians, but he’s going to suffer for this. We’ll wring him dry and then I’ll personally ensure he dies as painful a death as we can arrange.’
‘You never explained to me why they contacted you,’ Richter pointed out. ‘I didn’t think your outfit was a part of the Secret Intelligence Service.’
‘It isn’t . . . that’s the whole point,’ Simpson said. He paused for a few moments, gazing at Richter as if deciding how much to tell him. Then he spoke again. ‘I think I need to explain a few things to you. First, have you ever heard of “The Increment”?’
‘No,’ Richter replied.
‘OK, every now and then, the SIS gets wind of something going on inside Britain that they have particular interest in, but which they can’t investigate directly because they only have a remit to operate outside the UK.’
‘I thought that was what MI5 was supposed to cover?’
‘It is, but the two services don’t have a particularly good working relationship. And often there’s some question about sources or procedures or something and, for whatever reason, SIS don’t want MI5 sticking their oar in. Or maybe the situation is somewhere abroad, but there’s a good chance it’ll all go tits-up at some point, which would embarrass SIS and, by extension, the British government.
‘So, a while ago, some desk officer at Vauxhall Cross came up with the idea of The Increment. For jobs like these, the SIS would recruit ex-military personnel, usually former SAS soldiers because they’re used to thinking on their feet. They’d assemble a team, brief them, and send them off. Then, if the shit hit the fan later, and those guys were caught or killed, SIS could simply deny all knowledge of them, and there’d be no provable link to the men involved. It would be a totally deniable operation.
‘My section is called the Foreign Operations Executive, a nicely meaningless name, and we essentially function in exactly the same way as The Increment. We take care of those jobs that the SIS thinks might turn round and bite them. If you like, FOE is a secret, and unacknowledged, covert section of the SIS – a covert outfit working for another covert outfit – and there are no direct, or at least no provable, links between the two of them. In other words, FOE is a kind of formalized and established version of The Increment.’
‘So that’s why you skulk around in the backstreets of Hammersmith instead of enjoying extensive views along the Thames from that bloody-awful-looking building by Vauxhall Bridge.’
‘Exactly. Now, a short time ago, evidence was found that confirmed there had been a penetration of the British security establishment, most likely in the SIS or possibly GCHQ, and I was tasked with coming up with a plan to unmask the source. FOE was trusted because we have no access to at least one of the computer databases known to have been compromised, so that proved that we had to be clean. If we couldn’t ourselves access the information, we obviously couldn’t have leaked it. The result, as you now know, was this deception operation you’ve got involved in. We needed you because the identities of a lot of the FOE staff are already known to SIS officers, for obvious reasons, so whoever got to impersonate the mythical defecting Russian clerk had to be a complete outsider, and not somebody the traitor could possibly recognize.
‘That worked out quite well, I think, but we now have the bizarre scenario of life imitating art. There’s a real Russian clerk on the run, and he has access to the SIS personnel files, so he, too, might be able to recognize any SIS officer we send to bring him in. And the reason he doesn’t trust us over this is that he knows the identity of the traitor who’s been leaking data to the SVR. If that traitor – obviously that was Stanway – happened to be assigned to the operation, Yuri – which is the name the clerk is using – knows that he’d never make it to first base. Stanway would simply contact Yasenevo, and a hit team would be waiting at the rendezvous to pick Yuri up.’
‘That sounds bloody far-fetched to me.’
Simpson looked over at Richter. ‘How’s your history?’ he asked.
‘Average to poor, I suppose. Why?’
‘Let me take you back to the years just after the end of the last war, and tell you a story about a man named Constantin Volkhov. He was a low-level Russian diplomat, stationed in Turkey, who wanted out of the Soviet Union and assembled a dowry he thought we’d be interested in. He talked to the British vice-consul in Istanbul, and requested asylum in the West. In return for this, he would give us information about a couple of deep-penetration Soviet agents working at the Foreign Office, and another who was a senior officer in MI5.
‘We now know, of course, that the MI5 officer was Kim Philby. What beggars belief is that, despite Volkhov’s claim that there was a traitor in MI5, it was MI5 that was given the file to investigate. That would have been bad enough, but the officer tasked with handling and interviewing Volkhov was Philby himself. It was agreed that he’d fly out to Istanbul and interrogate the Russian there. Philby took as long as he possibly could before heading out to Turkey, but of course he informed Moscow Centre immediately.
‘A KGB snatch squad was sent to Istanbul and had grabbed Volkhov before Philby even arrived there. The Russian was never seen alive again. And there’s a rumour, never confirmed, that, after Volkhov had been questioned in the cellars of the Lubyanka, his body was cremated. In stages. While he was still alive.’
Richter grimaced.
‘These are not nice people we’re dealing with here,’ Simpson said. ‘The KGB was vicious, brutal and very efficient, and nothing we’ve learnt so far about the SVR suggests that it’s any different.’
‘So you need me,’ Richter said, ‘because this Russian clerk – this real Russian clerk – who’s on the run from Moscow will only deal with somebody not included on that list of SIS personnel?’
‘Exactly,’ Simpson agreed. ‘I’ve no doubt that Yuri will be thoroughly checking out the rendezvous before he shows himself, making absolutely sure he doesn’t recognize you from the SIS personnel files. We daren’t risk trying to use any of the SIS staff because if Yuri even suspects we’re doing that, he’ll run straight to the Americans.’
‘And that would be a bad thing?’ Richter suggested.
‘Of course it would be a bad thing. It’d be fucking disastrous. If Yuri checks out – and the mere fact he can supply that personnel listing means he’s had pretty much unrestricted access to the SVR’s computer system – this could be the biggest intelligence coup of the decade. The last thing we want is to have the Yanks blundering in and buggering everything up, or Yuri handing them everything he knows about SIS.’
‘No last name, then? He’s just calling himself “Yuri”?’
Simpson nodded. ‘It’s obviously not his real name, but that doesn’t matter. It’s what he knows that we’re interested in, nothing else.’ He paused and stared at Richter for a few seconds. ‘Look, I know we’ve pulled you in off the streets, as it were, and you probably haven’t much enjoyed the last few days, but this is really important. You’re literally the only person I can use to bring this clerk in. I’m devious, yes – as I have to be, in my job – but right here, right now, I’m being completely honest with you. I’ll answer any questions you ask as fully as I can, and you’ll also have whatever resources you need to complete this tasking. Will you do it? Will you go and meet this clerk and bring him back to London?’
Richter took another sip of his cooling coffee. ‘Bring him in from the cold, you mean?’
‘Don’t go all le Carré on me, Richter. It’s the wrong style and it doesn’t suit you.’
Richter grinned at him. ‘You’re wrong about one thing, Simpson,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Oddly enough, I have enjoyed the last few days – driving round Europe, trying to figure out what the hell was really going on. I just wish you’d been straight with me from the start.’
‘I couldn’t, and I’ve explained why. So will you do it?’
‘Yes,’ Richter nodded, ‘or I’ll try to, anyway. Where am I supposed to meet him? In Italy?’
‘Probably, but we don’t know yet. The email only stated that Yuri wanted to be escorted to London by somebody with no connection with SIS. He even suggested we send out a policeman – as if we’d trust some bloody woodentop with something like this. You’re here, you don’t work for SIS and, apart from Adamson here and the two guys from Paris, nobody at SIS has any idea you even exist. Plus, you speak Russian.’
‘You told me the email was written in English?’
‘It was, but we don’t know for sure how fluent Yuri is in the language, so your linguistic ability might be a big help. Anyway, hopefully we’ll hear sometime today when and where this Russian wants to meet.’
As if on cue, Simpson’s phone rang.
Piombino, Italy
Raya Kosov walked back to the hotel from the cyber cafe that Mario had driven past the previous evening. She strolled into the bar, ordered a Coke, and took it to a window seat overlooking the bay. That last email she’d sent would have set the wheels in motion, she was sure, and although she was certain the SVR snatch-teams couldn’t possibly have traced her to Piombino yet, she knew she had to get as far north as she could, because every kilometre she put between herself and Rome would increase her chances of survival.
As soon as Mario surfaced, they needed to get back on the road. And, she realized, with sudden clarity, that there was one way she could wake him and more or less keep her side of their bargain, because she doubted that she’d still be with him that night.
She put down the half-drunk Coke and headed for the stairs, with a slight smile on her lips.
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow
Major Yuri Abramov stared at the monitor screen for a few seconds, then sat back and rubbed his eyes. He’d attempted unscrambling the text of the encrypted email using every decryption code that he and Raya had used together, but none of them had worked. Each attempt had simply changed one flavour of gobbledegook into a different type of gobbledegook.
Zharkov sneered at him from across the desk. ‘And have you succeeded yet, Major?’ he asked.
Abramov shook his head. ‘She hasn’t used any of the standard codes we’re authorized to use. It must be one she’s developed herself.’
‘So you say, Major. So you say. Or maybe there’s a much simpler explanation? Perhaps you don’t want to decipher the message because you already know what it will say. It will tell you that your treacherous colleague has evaded capture in Italy, and that the way is now clear for you to join her.’
‘Look, Colonel,’ Abramov said, his voice cracking under the fear and stress, ‘I have no idea why Raya Kosov fled from Russia but, whatever her reasons, it was nothing to do with me. I have no idea, either, why she sent me this email, and I’m as keen to see the contents of it as you are. But she hasn’t used a code that I recognize, so she must have left something on her desk, or in her office – some clue that would allow me to decrypt it.’
‘Like what?’ Zharkov demanded.
‘I don’t know. Maybe a memory stick, a CD or DVD disk, or even a handwritten note – something like that.’
‘Wait here.’ Zharkov crossed to the door and walked out into the corridor, locking Abramov’s office door behind him. He was back in less than ten minutes, holding a plastic bag in his hand.
‘This was everything I could find,’ he explained, dropping the bag on the desk in front of the major.
Abramov upended it and picked through the contents. There were several notepads, half a dozen CDs, and one memory stick labelled ‘utilities’. All but two of the CDs could be ignored, because they were genuine program-installation disks, meaning no additional data could be burnt onto them. Abramov inserted the first of the other two CDs into his desktop computer and checked the contents, but could spot nothing that looked unusual. The second CD contained a handful of utility programs. However, as soon as he inserted the memory stick, he saw that there was only a single file on it, entitled ‘decrypt’.
Abramov gestured to Zharkov and pointed out the file.
‘I’m guessing that could be it,’ he said, some of his normal confidence returning now that he felt there might be some explanation, some reason for what had happened, contained in the encrypted email. ‘Could you witness what I’m about to do?’
Zharkov pulled his chair around to the other side of the desk, and sat down beside him.
Abramov next opened the file and inspected the contents. It was a plaintext file, headed by a couple of lines of writing which Abramov read out loud.
‘“Yuri. I’m really sorry for what’s happened, but I had my reasons for doing it. When you decrypt that email, I promise you’ll understand. Raya.”’
Abramov paused and gazed at Zharkov. ‘I don’t think that makes me sound like her accomplice, does it?’ he asked.
Zharkov shrugged. ‘Just camouflage, perhaps. Now sort out that email.’
Abramov studied the remaining text of the message. The second part consisted merely of the name of one of the standard encryption/decryption programs that the section used, plus a random string of characters.
‘That must be the code she used,’ Abramov said, copying it and opening the correct program. He pasted the character string into the ‘decode string’ field, and then ran the email through the opened program.
This time the result was very different because, instead of the routine generating a stream of random characters, some clear text appeared on the screen, and both men leant forward eagerly to read it.
Ax-les-Thermes, France
‘Is all that clear?’ Richard Simpson asked.
Richter nodded. ‘Yuri wants the pick-up to take place somewhere in or near Genoa tonight, so I need to get on the road soonest,’ he said. ‘He’s given us his mobile number, and I’m to text him on that once I’ve crossed the Italian border. He’ll then text me the location for the meet itself.’
‘Right,’ Simpson nodded agreement. ‘The techies at Vauxhall Cross have checked the number, and discovered it’s a cheap pay-as-you-go mobile, bought in Rome yesterday. It’s also switched off at the moment, and has been ever since Yuri’s email arrived at Legoland.’
‘Legoland? What are you talking about?’
‘Vauxhall Cross, SIS headquarters. If you’d ever been inside the building, you’d know exactly why some wit bestowed that nickname on the place. It’s got a lot of other names as well.’
‘I’ll bet it has. And you’re sure that this guy is for real, are you? I mean, it’s not just the Russians yanking your chain for some reason, maybe running some kind of deception operation against the SIS? Or maybe even the Italian secret service, whatever it’s called, having a go at you?’
‘Absolutely not.’ Simpson shook his head. ‘The Italians don’t have either the balls or the ability to mount something like this. The data that Yuri sent us had to have been culled direct from the SIS personnel files, and that means there’s been a deep and serious penetration of the Service. I’ve already checked with Vauxhall Cross, and Stanway was in an ideal position to supply that kind of data, so – at least at this stage of investigating his treachery – we’re quite satisfied that he was the source of the leak. And we also believe Yuri is exactly who he says he is.’
‘Which is what?’
‘He’s one of the network managers at SVR headquarters at Yasenevo, where you were pretending to have worked. That means he’s had unrivalled access to virtually the entire database of the SVR.’
‘And that’s why you want him?’
Simpson nodded again. ‘That’s why we want him.’
‘Anything else?’
Simpson paused a few seconds before he replied. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘I told you to hang on to that Browning pistol you took off Stanway, because I think you’re going to need it. The moment Vauxhall Cross received Yuri’s first email from a cyber cafe in Rome, the SIS staff in the embassy there were ordered to a higher alert state and instructed to start watching the Russian Embassy and its staff. They weren’t told why, only that a “person of interest” had arrived in Rome, and that the Russians would be trying to find him.’
He paused again for a moment, apparently considering his next words. ‘Let me explain something about the way intelligence services operate. Every service watches its rivals very closely, so in London every person who enters the Russian Embassy is photographed by a team of watchers, low-level surveillance specialists, employed by MI5. That’s just in case some brainless British politician, and that means most of them, or a member of the SIS, or anyone else with access to sensitive information, decides it’s a good time to visit the Russians to offer his or her services to the opposition in exchange for large handfuls of folding money.
‘And we do exactly the same everywhere else. The only difference is that in Rome the Russian Embassy has to be watched by SIS surveillance officers, not people from MI5, because the Security Service has no remit to operate outside the United Kingdom. Besides, in Rome they’re likely to find their cameras being jostled by watchers employed by the Italian government and the Americans and the Germans and the Israelis, and God knows who else.
‘Anyway, the point is that a couple of hours before Yuri sent his email, our people in Rome had already noticed a sudden flurry of activity at the Russian Embassy. Just about every car they have was suddenly sent out of the place, each one with two or three on board. The SIS people were caught slightly on the hop, and only had a couple of mobile units immediately available. Each of these units latched on to one of the Russian cars, and followed it. One went to the airport and the other to Rome’s main railway station, and in both cases the occupants jumped out to start watching the arriving passengers. Each was carrying a sheet of paper with a photograph on it, but none of our watchers could get close enough to take a satisfactory look.’
Simpson shot a glance at a passing waiter, and the man instantly appeared beside their table – a trick Richter found quite impressive, from his personal experience of French waiters. Simpson ordered two more coffees, plus one for Adamson, and then continued with his explanation once the waiter had moved out of earshot.
‘Now, at that time nobody at SIS Rome had any idea what had happened to stir up the Russians so badly. However, the inference was fairly obvious: clearly they were looking for somebody. It wasn’t until that email from the cyber cafe arrived at Legoland that we knew exactly what was going on. Somehow, the SVR had not only already discovered that Yuri had done a bunk, but also that he’d been on his way to Rome. And we also knew that he’d slipped through the net they’d cast, simply because of the time the message was sent to us.’
‘So it’s likely that the Russian Embassy people will still be out there looking for him?’ Richter said.
‘Yes, but it’s worse than that, because SIS Moscow has since reported witnessing a lot of arguments and disputes at Sheremetievo Airport. Angry passengers were confronting airline officials about being bumped off their booked flights. Within a couple of hours, we knew that those flights were all heading to Rome and other destinations in Italy – and to some parts of France as well. So the Russians obviously weren’t relying just on their local staff to find Yuri; but were sending out specialist teams from Moscow as well. SIS Rome now estimates they’ve sent out at least fifty men to Italy.’
‘And in this context the word “specialist” means what, exactly?’ Richter asked, sitting back in his seat as the waiter reappeared with the drinks Simpson had ordered.
‘You can call them what you like,’ Simpson said a few moments later, stirring his coffee thoughtfully. ‘Snatch teams, hit squads, whatever. But their orders will be simple enough. They’ll be tasked with finding Yuri and hauling him back to Moscow, probably unconscious and strapped to a stretcher. When they get him back to Russia, they’ll stick him in a nice quiet interrogation room somewhere, then they’ll pull out his fingernails and apply other interesting techniques to ensure that he tells them what they want to know, before they finally kill him. And if there’s some reason why they can’t actually capture him, they’ll do their best to eliminate him in Italy, or wherever else they find him. The one thing we do know for certain is that the Russians are desperate to plug this leak.’
Richter stared at Simpson for a long moment. ‘And you really think there’s some chance that I can slip past all these highly trained assassins, find this Yuri and simply take him to London?’
‘Yes,’ Simpson nodded. ‘Because nobody knows who you are. You’re not a known face to the Russians, so you’ll have no trouble at all until you actually meet Yuri. Once you’re together, of course, then the risks will multiply because the Russian teams know exactly what he looks like.’
‘And then you expect me to fight my way out of trouble with just a Browning nine-mil and fifty rounds of ammunition? Fight my way past fifty-odd heavily armed Russian assassins with shoot-to-kill orders? All by myself?’
Simpson shook his head briefly. ‘Not quite by yourself. I’ve talked to Hereford, and Dekker’s been reassigned. He’s going to be your shadow, your guardian angel watching you from a distance. He’ll cover whatever meeting point Yuri chooses, and he’ll take out any opposition players he notices. Dekker’s a specialist sniper.’
‘Oh, that makes me feel much better,’ Richter snapped. ‘So now the odds are twenty-five to one instead of fifty to one. That’s a hell of an improvement.’
‘If you move carefully,’ Simpson said soothingly, ‘there’s absolutely no reason why you should even encounter any of the Russians. Italy’s a big country and, once you’ve made contact with Yuri, you should be able to just drive straight over the border into France. And once you’re here, there’s almost no chance anybody would be able to follow you. France is huge and it offers dozens of possible routes you could take back to Britain.’
Simpson leaned forward and continued. ‘You can do this, Richter. I know you can. You’re stubborn and resourceful, and you obviously think on your feet. You’ll be carrying a weapon, and you’ll have Dekker watching your back. As of now, the opposition have no idea who either of you are. I’ll give you some contact numbers for me back in Hammersmith, and I absolutely guarantee you’ll get whatever help I can provide you. Make no mistake, bringing in Yuri is vitally important, and we’ll do everything we can to make sure it happens.’
Richter grunted. ‘There’s one other thing you need to think about doing right now.’
‘What?’
‘Yuri must have a passport to get out of Russia in the first place, but that’ll be no good now because the Russians will have blocked it for every border crossing. So you’ll have to arrange a diplomatic passport for him. As soon as I meet him, I’ll email you his picture and the name he wants to use, then you’ll need to send it out here somewhere so we can pick it up. Otherwise getting him to London’s going to be difficult.’
Simpson nodded. ‘That’s already in hand. But don’t think you have to rely only on commercial transport. If it makes better sense, I can have a private plane or an RAF aircraft, something like that, on standby, ready to fly down here to pick you up, which will avoid the passport problem altogether.’
‘OK,’ Richter replied, ‘I’ll let you know.’
Simpson’s phone rang again, and he answered immediately.
Richter listened with interest to one side of the conversation.
‘What? No, I’ve heard his name. I mean, I know who he is but I’ve never met him . . . he said what? . . . how did he find out? . . . right. I’ll pass that on.’
Simpson snapped his mobile closed with an irritated expression.
‘What?’ Richter asked.
‘I don’t know exactly how it happened, but now the Americans have decided to stick their oar in the water as well. Just a short while ago, the SIS duty officer was called by a man named John Westwood. He’s CIA, and a big wheel at Langley, in fact their Head of Espionage. He’s in Rome at the moment and he called SIS yesterday to see if we knew anything about a Russian defector. Obviously the SIS officer there denied all knowledge of it, because actually only one man at Vauxhall Cross does know what’s going on, and he won’t tell anybody.’
‘So what did this Westwood guy want?’
‘To give us a warning,’ Simpson said. ‘Apparently the Russians have upped the ante and got the Italian police involved. According to Westwood, the hunt for Yuri is now overt, and the Eyeties will be watching everywhere for him – checking the hotels, the whole nine yards. You’ve got Yuri’s mobile number, so you need to send him a text message. I’ll dictate it now.’
Richter pulled out his mobile, opened up a blank SMS page, input the number he’d been given for Yuri’s mobile phone, and waited.
‘Right, here goes,’ Simpson said. ‘Tell him: “Airports, ferries, trains, buses, taxis watched. Hotels slash guest houses checked. Autoroute toll-booths watched slash main roads blocked or watched.” That’s it. I don’t know how Yuri’s travelling, but if he checks his phone for messages, at least he’ll now know what he’s up against. There’s nothing else we can do for him at the moment.’
Richter pressed the button to send the text, then looked up at Simpson. ‘I presume I’m still heading for Italy?’
Simpson nodded. ‘Yes, proceed as we discussed. It doesn’t look good for Yuri, but if he makes it out, you’ll need to be right there ready to pick him up. And there is one hopeful sign.’
‘What?’
‘The last email Yuri sent to Vauxhall Cross originated in a cyber cafe in a place called Piombino. It’s a small town on the west coast of Italy, almost opposite Elba, so that means Yuri’s already well clear of Rome. And the further out he gets, the thinner the search net will become, obviously.’
‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘I hope you’re right. Now I’d better get going. And Dekker will be following me?’
‘He should be on the road within the next half-hour. We put him on a train up to Toulouse earlier and told him to pick up a hire car there. He’s got your mobile number, and you’ve already got his. Meet him somewhere near Genoa before you rendezvous with Yuri, and then sort out how you’re going to play it.’
Simpson stood up and extended his hand.
Richter stood as well, and shook it. ‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a long way to drive, so I’d better hit the road.’
He strode across to the parking bays fronting the casino, climbed into his hired Ford, backed out and drove away, heading north towards Toulouse.
Tuscany, Italy
At almost the same moment Richter was driving north out of Ax-les-Thermes on the N20, Raya Kosov sat in the passenger seat of Mario’s Fiat Punto, waiting for him to follow her out of the hotel, after he had paid the bill for their overnight stay. She knew it was still too soon for the man the British would be sending out to meet her to have arrived in Italy, but she switched on her phone just in case. Almost immediately it emitted the double-tone that indicated receipt of a message.
As she read it, Raya paled. She hadn’t expected that level of surveillance, that quickly. She just thanked her lucky stars that she’d found Mario and managed to get out of Rome the previous night, because if she’d still been there the Russians and the Italian carabinieri would almost certainly have been able to find her. But she’d still have to be very careful, and Mario would now have to stick to the back roads.
She switched off the mobile, reached over, took a slightly dog-eared road atlas from the glovebox and started studying it.
A few moments later, Mario sat down beside her and started the engine. He drove out of the car park, and then threaded his way through the streets of Piombino, heading towards the main road which ran northbound along the west coast of Italy. Livorno, which had been the port for the Renaissance cities of Pisa and Florence, lay about fifty miles ahead of them, and Genoa over a hundred miles beyond that.
‘It’s quite a long way,’ Raya remarked, as she calculated the distances in her head.
‘Yes, but the roads are good,’ Mario replied, ‘so it shouldn’t take us too long to get there. We can take the autostrada.’
‘Actually,’ Raya said, ‘would you mind if we didn’t? This is such a beautiful part of Italy that I’d like to follow the country roads and see a bit more of the countryside.’
‘The autostrada’s much quicker,’ Mario pointed out.
‘I know, Mario, but it’s soulless and boring. Please, let’s take the prettier route.’
‘Whatever you like.’ He grinned at her. ‘But I don’t really know this area, so you’ll have to navigate, OK?’
‘No problem.’
The obvious route up to Livorno was to follow the coast road, so Raya immediately directed Mario onto a spider’s web of country roads that lay between the coast and the autostrada running right past Sienna.
They drove through tiny villages whose picturesque names evoked the spirit of Tuscany, like Frassine, Serrazzano and Fatagliano. Some were little more than hamlets, strung along roads so narrow that in some stretches the only way two vehicles could get by each other was to use special passing places.
It was a slow and sometimes irritating route because of the condition of the roads, but they didn’t see a single police officer or anything else that might give Raya any concern, and that was far more important to her than their speed of progress.
By midday they’d reached a place called Calamecca, near the town of Pistoia and north-west of Florence. There they stopped for a bite of lunch at a small cafe.
‘It’s certainly pretty, going this way,’ Mario admitted, digging his fork into a plate of tagliatelle carbonara, ‘but we could have been in Genoa by now if we’d taken the autostrada.’
Raya nodded. ‘But I’m really enjoying the journey,’ she said, ‘and I’m in no hurry.’
‘And who is he, this man you’re going to meet in Genoa?’ he probed.
‘He’s only a business associate,’ Raya said, which she thought probably sounded rather vague, but nevertheless contained an element of truth.
‘And will you want me to wait for you there, in case he doesn’t show up?’
Raya shook her head. ‘Thank you, Mario, but no. He will definitely be there.’ At least she could be sure about that. Whoever the British had decided to send would certainly turn up at their rendezvous. ‘All I ask is that you get me to Genoa, or at least to somewhere fairly close by. Then I’ll be fine, and thank you again.’
‘I just wish we could have one more night together.’ Mario gave a wistful smile.
‘So am I, and I’m sorry, but I explained all that this morning. We’ve had a great time together, and we’ll part as good friends.’
‘Will you ever come back to Italy?’
‘Maybe,’ Raya said, with a slight smile of her own. ‘Who knows?’
They were back in the car twenty minutes later, Raya planning the next part of their route north.
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow
Major Yuri Abramov leant back in his seat, still staring at the computer screen. What he’d just read – and what Zharkov, still sitting beside him, had read – was simply unbelievable.
He’d guessed that Raya’s message might contain a list of excuses, of reasons, or her personal justification for deciding to betray the SVR’s – and thus his own – trust in her, and to flee to the West. But that wasn’t what he’d read here, for her message claimed that she hadn’t actually defected at all. When Zharkov read that passage he’d snorted in total disbelief. But when he looked at the next section his brows furrowed with concern.
What Raya Kosov was claiming was that she’d fled for her life, not for asylum. She had, she said, detected the presence of a traitor within the SVR data system: somebody in a senior position who was accessing highly classified files and illegally copying them, presumably to sell the contents to Western intelligence agencies. And she believed that this unknown traitor now knew that she’d discovered what he was doing, and had already tried to kill her.
She claimed she’d been crossing the street near her apartment, when a man in a car had quite deliberately tried to run her down. The vehicle had suddenly mounted the pavement and she’d only jumped to safety at the last possible moment. She’d been far too shocked to note its registration number, only that it was a small dark-grey car – a description fitting most of the vehicles in Moscow – with a single occupant.
‘Treacherous bitch,’ Zharkov muttered.
‘You don’t believe her claim?’ Abramov asked.
‘Of course not.’ Zharkov looked at him sharply. ‘She’s just offering a lame excuse for her own defection. You’ll note that nowhere in this message does she ever mention returning to Russia. That bitch knows exactly what she’s guilty of, and she’s just trying to muddy the waters with this ridiculous and spurious claim of hers.’
‘But she’s very specific about what she claims to have found,’ Abramov gestured to the text of the email still on the screen. ‘Surely it wouldn’t hurt to at least investigate what she’s saying?’
The bulk of her message, in fact, was an extract from the security report Raya had been instructed to carry out by Abramov, and which she had placed in his safe before leaving Yasenevo for the last time. The major had instructed her to check a random-selection of a hundred files classified Secret or below, and then to inspect the access records of at least ten per cent of them. That had revealed no anomalies. But she’d also checked the access history, since the last full review, of every file classified Top Secret or above and that had thrown up an oddity which Raya claimed she’d started to investigate.
A total of fifteen Top Secret files had clearly been accessed, but all record of that access had then apparently been removed, so she had no idea which officer was responsible. She had only detected this intrusion because, on each of the files she’d checked, the date and time of the last access was recorded, and on those particular files the time stamp didn’t match the last time actually recorded in the access record – which had to mean somebody had tampered with it.
That, Raya explained in her email, didn’t really make sense, because whoever had looked at the file clearly possessed the correct security clearance, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to open it. And if he had the right clearance, why did he then try to cover his tracks? The evidence only made sense in one context: the perpetrator didn’t want anyone to know he’d looked at the files, because he was doing something with the information they contained, and that suggested some form of espionage.
Then Raya claimed to have inspected the communication records, purely as another obvious check she could carry out, and had found an anomaly there as well. Several lengthy calls had been made over the last three months from an office in Yasenevo to a Moscow number. The problem was that the office in question was unlocked, unoccupied and not assigned to anyone, so she had no idea who had been responsible for these calls. And when she then tried to run a check on the Moscow number, it was unlisted.
She’d gone into the vacant office to look around, but found nothing. As Raya had emerged, she noticed a figure at the far end of the corridor, apparently watching her, but too far away to identify. And it was that same evening, just before she got home, that the attempt on her life had taken place. Whoever was driving the car had clearly had access to her personnel records at Yasenevo, in order to have discovered her address, and that meant the treachery must reach into the highest levels of the SVR, and this was what Raya claimed had made her decide to run.
‘There’s a lot of information here,’ Abramov repeated. ‘Prudence dictates that we at least check what she’s saying.’
‘That would be a complete waste of time and effort,’ Zharkov snapped. ‘And it would also divert our attention from the main task, which is finding Kosov and dragging her back here. In this matter, “prudence”, as you put it, is whatever I decide to do.’ He jabbed a finger at the computer screen. ‘This is pure fiction, none of it ever happened. Look at the inconsistencies. She decides to look in the empty office, and the supposed traitor just happens to be in a position to see her? Rubbish. And if there really was an attempt to run her down outside her apartment, the driver obviously had to know where she lived, so why didn’t he enter the building and finish the job?
‘No, none of this is real. It’s just Kosov trying to sow doubts in our minds over her own treachery. But I promise you this. When we’ve got her strapped naked on a table in the basement of the Lubyanka, with electrodes hitched to her nipples and vagina, if she’s still able to claim that all this really took place, then I might have some further checks run.’
Abramov felt a chill run down his spine as he listened, because he knew Zharkov was absolutely serious. If his minions did manage to find her, and brought her back to Moscow alive, Raya would end her short life in one of the sound-proof cellars in the Lubyanka, begging for a quick death.
Nervi, Italy
‘This will be fine,’ said Raya, as Mario pulled the Fiat to a stop close to the centre of a small seaside resort.
They’d driven through the place once already, Raya keeping a sharp lookout for signs of hostile activity, but the village appeared totally normal and unthreatening, It was simply a typical Italian seaside community, and she just hoped that, thanks to Mario and their ‘arrangement’, she’d managed to travel further and faster than the Russian security personnel would have expected.
The large piazza situated near the centre would be ideal as a rendezvous, and all around there were plenty of cafes, bars and shops she could duck into, if she needed to.
‘Are you sure, Raya?’
‘Absolutely.’ She leant across to him and kissed him firmly on the lips. ‘Thank you for everything, Mario. It’s been a great weekend, and I’m really glad we met up. Now, please go.’
The Italian still looked unhappy as Raya grabbed her bag and opened the passenger door.
‘You’ll be OK?’ he asked. ‘This is the right place?’
‘I’ll be fine.’ Raya nodded. ‘I’ve two small final favours to ask you, though,’ she said.
‘Anything. Just name it.’
‘First, don’t believe everything you read in the papers or see on television. Second, don’t tell anyone you saw me.’
‘What?’ Mario’s face clouded. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You will, Mario, you will. Just remember what I said. Now, goodbye, and thanks again for everything.’ She closed the door firmly and stepped back onto the pavement.
The Italian stared at her for a few more seconds, his expression troubled, then he gave her a smile and a wave. As he drove away slowly down the street, Raya gave him a final wave, then she turned away, choking back a sob. Mario was a decent human being, and she just hoped that this fleeting contact wouldn’t land him in trouble with the carabinieri or, much worse, with the Russians.
She checked behind her once more, but the Fiat had disappeared. Now she had her own preparations to make. There were numerous tourist shops nearby, and she picked the largest one she could find, relying on the number of people milling about inside. As she rummaged around the racks of clothing and accessories, she was very conscious that she had extremely limited funds. But she bought a cavernous white shoulder bag to replace the one she was carrying – the same overnight bag that must have given her away at the airport.
Then she picked out a large floppy-brimmed hat that would completely overshadow her face, and the biggest and darkest pair of sunglasses on the rack. After checking the prices of the items she’d selected, she decided she could just about afford a light jacket as well. Together, these purchases would radically change her appearance – to the extent, she hoped, that nobody would be able to recognize her.
After that she walked around the town until she found a crowded cafe, realizing that safety lay in numbers. She ordered a caffè latte and took just a few sips, then headed for the toilets at the rear. A few minutes later she emerged, in a change of jacket, and with her overnight bag wadded up inside the new shoulder bag. As expected, nobody at the bar gave her transformation a second look.
When she’d finished the coffee, she opened the bag, pulled out the new hat and sunglasses and, with a muttered grazie to the barman, walked outside. On a quiet side street, she tossed her overnight bag into a rubbish bin, then walked slowly on through the neighbouring Piazza Centrale, working out the details of the crucial rendezvous.
A few minutes later she turned on her mobile and nodded when she saw a message from the British man who’d been sent to meet her. Immediately she composed her reply and pressed the Send button. When that was done, she turned off the phone, well aware that, as long as it was switched on, her position would be announced to anyone with access to the cellular service provider. With the power off, on the other hand, she was invisible.
Then there was nothing else she could do until the rendezvous time arrived, so she continued to wander the streets like a window-shopper. But all the while she was looking out for any possible problems, like a car full of carabinieri with copies of her photograph, while making sure she learned the layout of the town as accurately as possible. For her life might depend on knowing the fastest way out of it.