Tuesday
Hammersmith, West London
At Simpson’s insistence, Raya Kosov’s initial debriefing was held at the FOE building in the backstreets of Hammersmith. The reason, as he explained when Richter phoned in that morning, was because he wanted the location to be both totally secure and completely under his control. Although FOE had access to safe houses in several different parts of London, nowhere else would offer the same level of security and, until the second traitor working for the Russians within the SIS was identified, and apprehended, he was unwilling to place Raya at risk by meeting anywhere else.
Actually, that suited Richter just as well. Despite Simpson’s abrasive manner, sarcasm and frequent rudeness, he still believed his short-term boss was straight – or at least as straight as anybody else in the murky business he had become involved with. Richter would rather Simpson controlled the situation from his Hammersmith offices than take the risk of involving officers or facilities from any other branch of the British intelligence machine.
They arrived just after nine-thirty by taxi, and were ushered through the main entrance by two bulky security guards. Richter’s Browning semi-automatic created a Christmas tree of lights as he walked through the metal detector situated a short distance inside the building.
‘I’ll take that,’ one of the guards announced, stepping forward.
‘In your dreams,’ Richter snapped. ‘I’m hanging on to this pistol. If you don’t like it, call Simpson and get his approval.’
While his companion watched the two new arrivals carefully, the guard picked up an internal phone and held a short conversation. Then he nodded and turned back to Richter.
‘Right,’ he snarled, clearly irritated. ‘Follow me, both of you.’
He led the way to an inner hallway, and across to a pair of lifts with silver grey doors. The right-hand lift was already at their level, with the doors open, and the guard immediately stepped inside, Richter and Raya following close behind. He pressed the button for the third floor, and a few moments later they stepped out of the lift again and he escorted them down a narrow, cream-painted corridor towards a set of double doors at the far end.
He knocked twice and opened the door. Inside the room was a long table, around which were arranged about a dozen chairs. Two of them were occupied by men Richter had never seen before, both of whom stood up as he and Raya entered. On the table were sheets of writing paper and pencils, and a high-quality digital recorder to which were connected two microphones on table stands. There were also several cups and mugs, three insulated coffee pots, and a couple of plates displaying a somewhat limited selection of biscuits.
‘You must be Raya Kosov, right?’ one of the men said, extending his hand, and Raya nodded. ‘My name’s David Walters. We were really glad that you managed to get out of Italy.’
‘I had some help,’ Raya explained, glancing at Richter.
‘And you’re Richter, obviously,’ the other man said. ‘You’re the guy who’s been causing our boss such grief, not to mention leaving a trail of devastation halfway across Europe. I’m Masterson, by the way, Jeff Masterson. We’re the debriefing officers, at least for the first phase of this operation, because both of us speak and read Russian.’
‘I think “trail of devastation” is putting it a bit strongly,’ Richter protested, shaking hands with both men. ‘About all we did was blow a few tyres off a handful of police cars, though in fairness we did wreck an expensive chopper.’
‘How did you do that?’ Masterson asked.
‘We had an SAS sniper with us, watching our backs, who popped a bullet down one of the engine intakes. That was all it took, so I think maybe the French need to take another look at the design of the Eurocopter, if they’re ever expecting it to survive a real live firefight.’
‘OK,’ Walters said briefly, ‘why don’t you both grab a seat, pour yourselves a cup of coffee, and then we’ll get started.’
A few minutes later, he started the recorder going, and made an opening statement.
‘My name is David Walters and my colleague is Jeff Masterson. This is the debriefing of Raya Kosov, formerly in the employment of the Russian SVR, who has voluntarily sought asylum in the United Kingdom. Also present is Paul Richter, who is currently on attachment to this unit.’
He paused and glanced at his notes but, before he could say anything else, the door of the conference room swung open. Richard Simpson marched in, nodded to the four people already seated there, and took a seat at the far end of the table.
‘Carry on, Walters,’ he urged. ‘I’m just here as an observer.’
Walters leaned towards to the microphone again, and added: ‘Also now present is Richard Simpson, Director of Foreign Operations.’
He checked his notes once more, then gazed across at Raya. ‘Let me just explain the way this is going to work,’ he said. ‘This is just an initial interview, the first of many, so today all we’re going to do is cover the basics. There will be in-depth interviews later, to discuss specific aspects of whatever you tell us. Basically, we have to do three things.
‘First, we need to establish that you are who you claim to be. To do that, we’ll ask you a number of questions about the SVR and about Yasenevo in particular. We’ll also discuss your career and your precise employment in Moscow.
‘Second, we have to satisfy ourselves that you are a genuine defector. As I’m sure you’re aware, in the past the GRU and the KGB, and latterly the SVR, have occasionally sent one of their employees to the West as a purveyor of disinformation. Obviously, we have to be sure that this is not the case here. Only when we have satisfied ourselves on these first two points can we then look confidently at the information you’ve brought out with you, and analyse its worth to us. Do you understand all that?’
Raya nodded.
‘And, thirdly, would you be prepared to submit to a polygraph examination – a lie detector check?’
Raya nodded again. ‘I have no problem with that.’
‘Good. Now, are there any questions you’d like to ask me or my colleague before we begin?’
‘No, I’m happy to start right away.’
For the next ninety minutes or so, Walters and Masterson alternated in firing questions at Raya, and took copious notes of her answers to supplement the recording. Two things quickly became obvious to Richter: the level of British knowledge of the internal workings of the SVR was quite extensive, but Raya Kosov very clearly knew an awful lot more than either of them.
‘Now, Raya, obviously we’ll need to run some further checks on your statements over the next couple of days, but personally I’m satisfied with your knowledge of Yasenevo,’ Walters conceded. He looked towards the far end of the table, where Richard Simpson was still sitting in silence. ‘Have you any questions, sir?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Simpson shook his head. ‘You two are the experts and if you’re now convinced she’s the real deal, then I’m happy with that assessment.’
‘Fine,’ Walters said. ‘Let’s take a short break and then start on phase two.’
He ordered fresh coffee and, as soon as it had arrived, the questioning started again.
‘So far so good, Raya,’ Masterson began. ‘I think we’re agreed so far that you were the Deputy Computer Network Manager at Yasenevo. What we have to do now is find out why you’re sitting here in West London instead of working at your desk on the outskirts of Moscow. This is a very simple question, but I suspect the answer might be quite complex. Why, exactly, did you defect?’
‘Actually,’ Raya replied, ‘the answer is just as simple as the question. I did it for revenge.’
Walters looked up with interest. ‘Revenge for what – and against what? Do you mean you were rebelling against the state itself, or just against the SVR?’
Raya shook her head. ‘A bit of everything, really. I was trying to hit Mother Russia, I suppose, because of the totalitarian system there. To use the SVR as a tool seemed almost poetic, because that organization essentially applies the system. But, most of all, I was seeking revenge against one man – one who to me represented an instrument of that system.
‘I wanted that man to suffer for what he once did to my family, and the weapon I decided to use against him was the SVR itself. Let me explain. In 1989 the KGB burst into our apartment to arrest my father. He wasn’t a criminal, a terrorist or even an anti-Communist. All he had done was to voice mild criticism of a local Party official. Unfortunately, somebody overheard him, and registered an official complaint. They sent six men to make the arrest, in the middle of the night.
‘They broke down the door, pulled my father from his bed, then beat him so severely that he died within hours – apparently even before he reached their headquarters. My mother and I were forced to watch, and I think both of us then realized it would be the last time we would ever see him alive. I was a mere child at the time, but in my memory I can still replay everything that happened that terrible night. My mother remembered the name of the officer in charge, who had directed the beating, and we vowed there and then that someday, somehow, we would make him pay for what he did that night.’
Raya paused and looked at the faces of the four men sitting around the conference table. They stared back at her, none of them making any comment.
‘I deliberately chose to study languages and computer science, because I believed those skills would make me a more attractive prospect for recruitment into the SVR. By the time I’d finished my education, I had already been offered employment by the SVR. I’ve worked at the Lubyanka and Yasenevo ever since.’
‘There are two obvious questions that need asking,’ Masterson began. ‘First, does this man who killed your father still work for the SVR? And, second, how come their entrance security checks didn’t reveal the fact that your father had died as a suspected dissident? If that information had been available, I doubt if the SVR would have taken you on. Tainted blood and all that.’
Raya nodded. ‘Yes, that vicious little Georgian bastard is now a colonel in the SVR. The second question is more complicated to answer. When my father died at the KGB headquarters or in the back of the car on his way there, the squad which had arrested him must have realized they were in trouble. They’d been sent out to bring in a middle-aged man for questioning about a minor offence, and they’d returned with a bloody corpse. I don’t know exactly how that Georgian bastard, then a captain, managed it, but we were told a few days later that my father had died in a traffic accident, and the arrest record simply vanished. And in those days, nobody questioned anything that the KGB told them.’
‘But this captain who’s now a colonel,’ Masterson persisted. ‘Surely he might have recognized your name and checked into your background?’
Raya shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘because as I expect you know Russian names are complicated. Let me explain. The tradition is that a girl’s first name is simply given to her. That’s the easy bit. Her middle name is a feminized version of her father’s first name, and her last name is a feminized version of her father’s last name. My father’s name was Pavel Ostapenko, so my full name as a child was Raya Pavlovna Ostapenka, and my mother’s name was Marisa Hohlova Ostapenka.
‘The year after my father was killed, my mother married a distant cousin. It was a marriage of convenience, purely to allow me to take a different name. The cousin’s name was Alexander Kosov, so my mother became Marisa Hohlova Kosova, and I followed tradition and changed my name to Raya Alexandra, but I preferred “Kosov” as a last name, rather than “Kosova”. Of course, any detailed search would have shown my previous name, but with the arrest warrant missing and my biological father tragically killed in a car crash, there would have been nothing to find. The only person who might have made the connection was the Georgian and, as far as I know, he never looked.’
‘And does he have a name, this Georgian?’ David Walters asked.
‘Yes,’ Raya replied shortly. ‘His name is Yevgeni Zharkov, and by now, with any luck at all, he’ll be sitting in a cell at Yasenevo or the Lubyanka, staring at the wall and wondering just what the hell has happened to his life.’
Moscow
The SVR search team arrived in one car, and the armed troops in another. The searchers parked some distance down the street and waited for the building to be checked and the apartment secured. A few minutes later, two carloads of Moscow police appeared as well, to help control the scene.
Abramov peered through the car window at a small apartment building, which the Moscow police had identified earlier as the location of the other number he had managed to extract from the data contained on the call diverter. The building itself was undistinguished and anonymous: just another small block of flats in a street that contained little else.
The police officers set up a cordon, diverting all traffic away from the vicinity, then surrounded the building to ensure that nobody could leave it without having their identity confirmed. Then the armed SVR troops advanced towards the street door and took up positions on both sides of it. One officer stepped forward and inserted a key in the lock. Or rather he tried to, but the key wouldn’t fit, so he slipped it back into his pocket and tried a second key. This one slid in smoothly, and moments later the door was open, whereupon the SVR team streamed inside the building and was lost to sight.
Abramov waited patiently in the car, expecting confirmation either that the apartment was empty or that any occupants had been arrested. After three or four minutes, a junior SVR officer emerged from the building, and walked across to the car.
‘The apartment is empty, sir, and it doesn’t look as if it’s been occupied for months. There’s only some very basic furniture inside, but there’s a computer on a table in the main room, and it’s switched on.’
Abramov immediately climbed out of the car. ‘Order your men not to touch that machine,’ he instructed. ‘It might hold vital clues regarding this investigation.’
Moments later, the major was himself standing in the tiny living room of the first-floor apartment, and looking round. As the young officer had explained, on a plain wooden table, which was pushed up against one wall, sat a fairly basic desktop computer. The power light was glowing on the front of the system unit, though the screen itself was blank. Abramov deliberately touched nothing, but he checked the cables and connectors. As expected, the PC was attached to a modem plugged into a telephone point.
He took a handkerchief from his pocket, carefully covered the ends of his fingers to avoid leaving prints, and then powered up the screen. When he saw a standard screensaver running, he touched the space bar on the keyboard to clear it. He was surprised to note that the unit wasn’t password-protected, which would certainly make the job of examining the contents of the hard disk a lot easier.
‘Right, Captain,’ he said, opening up his briefcase which he had placed on the table beside the PC. ‘Witness this, please. I’m about to make a copy of the contents of this computer’s hard disk, then we can shut the machine down and take it back to Yasenevo for full examination.’
Abramov connected a high-capacity external disk drive to one of the USB ports on the front of the system unit, then carefully – still using his handkerchief to prevent leaving prints on the keyboard or mouse – he initiated the copy routine. The dialogue box which now appeared suggested that it would take at least half an hour to completely copy the disk’s contents.
‘Why could you not do that at Yasenevo?’ the captain asked.
‘Because even though the screensaver wasn’t password-protected, it’s possible that the operating system itself might be. The last thing I want to do is shut the machine down and then find it takes us months to bypass the password in order to access the hard drive.’
The captain nodded. ‘While we’re waiting, I’ll have my men collect everything here that might have retained fingerprints,’ he said.
‘Good idea,’ Abramov replied. ‘And you can start with these.’ He pointed to a few pencils and a ballpoint pen which lay on the table beside half a dozen sheets of blank paper. ‘Whoever was using this computer would almost certainly have left his thumb and forefinger prints on some of those.’
Hammersmith, West London
‘As I said before, Raya,’ David Walters reminded her, ‘today is really more or less just an introduction. This discussion enables us to get to know you a little better, and hopefully will allow you to feel more comfortable talking to us.’
Raya nodded. ‘I understand.’
‘Right,’ Walters went on, ‘we’d now like to take an initial look at the material you brought out with you. I gather from Richard Simpson that you made copies of certain SVR files before you left Moscow, and that those files are held on some form of electronic data storage. Is that correct?’
‘Exactly right. I couldn’t risk leaving Russia carrying a laptop computer. Not even my SVR credentials would have enabled me to board an aircraft out of Russia carrying a laptop, so I brought out my personal CD player instead.’
Raya opened her handbag and pulled out an old and fairly battered battery-powered CD player, along with three or four CD discs.
Walters looked confused. ‘You mean you copied the data on to those CDs?’ he asked.
‘No, the CDs are simply camouflage.’ She opened one of the CD cases and slipped the disc into the drive slot on the player. A light illuminated on the front of the unit, but no sound emerged from the speaker. ‘I removed almost all the internal workings of the unit to make enough space to install a hard disk,’ she said. ‘It’s that hard disk which contains the data.’
‘That’s clever,’ Masterson acknowledged. ‘So how can we access it? And how big is this hard drive?’
‘I just need a screwdriver, and a USB lead with a small terminator at one end, plus a computer to connect to the other end of the lead. The drive itself is half a terabyte, which was the biggest I could find that would fit into the available space inside that CD player.’
‘That’s really ingenious,’ Walters acknowledged. ‘I’ll go and organize what you need.’
He stood up and left the conference room, returning a couple of minutes later with a laptop under one arm and a small toolkit in his other hand. He passed the toolkit to Raya, then plugged in the laptop and switched it on.
Raya opened the toolkit, selected a screwdriver, and removed a small plastic panel on the side of the CD player. Walters then passed her a USB lead. She inspected the terminator at one end, nodded on finding that it was the correct size, and plugged it into the female socket that was revealed after removal of the panel. Then she leant back in her seat and waited for the laptop to power up.
‘If you pass me that lead,’ Walters said, ‘I’ll just plug it in.’
But Raya shook her head. ‘Not quite so fast, Mr Walters. These negotiations have been a little one-sided so far. You’ve asked me questions and I’ve done my best to answer them, but I’m about to provide you with access to half a terabyte of SVR files classified at top-secret level and above. What nobody has confirmed so far is whether or not I’m being granted asylum here. Before you even take a look at the directory listing contained on this hard disk, I want a positive assurance that I’ll be able to stay in this country.’
Walters shook his head. ‘The problem is, Raya, that until we see what you’ve brought us, we can’t assess its value. And because of that—’
‘Before you go any further down that route,’ Raya interrupted, ‘you should know that I’ve already had a firm offer of asylum from the CIA. So if you try and fuck me about, I’ll be on the next flight out of Heathrow across the pond. And if that happens, my data goes with me.’
Masterson glanced from Raya to the modified CD player, and smiled. ‘Managing that,’ he said, ‘might not be as easy as you think. Right now, we’ve got custody of both you and the hard drive.’
As a threat, it was somewhat less than subtle.
Richter looked at Raya, wondering if he should now intervene, but then he eased himself back in his chair and relaxed, because she seemed in complete command of the situation.
‘Yes, you’ve got the disk, but you won’t get the data,’ she said simply, ‘because the whole drive is protected, as is each individual file. Essentially, the data has been scrambled and, without the master password, that’s the way it will stay. I wrote the program myself, and I’ve also incorporated an auto-destruct sequence which is triggered if an incorrect password is entered more than three times. So if you’ve got some idea about hooking my disk up to one of the Cray supercomputers in the basement of the Doughnut out at GCHQ, you’re going to be disappointed when you try to crack it.’
Both Walters and Masterson stared at Raya with a mixture of irritation and respect, then Walters glanced down the table at Simpson, who gave him a nod.
‘You’ve kind of painted us into a corner,’ Simpson declared, ‘but we’ve no wish for you to go and talk to the Americans. So let me suggest a compromise. Pick any file you like from the data you’ve accumulated, decrypt it – or whatever it is you have to do to make it readable – and let Walters and Masterson take a look at it. If they’re satisfied that it’s both genuine and valuable, then you’ll get your offer of asylum. You have my personal guarantee on that.’
Raya looked at Simpson, then glanced behind her towards Richter. ‘Is this man trustworthy, Paul?’ she asked him.
‘Buggered if I know,’ Richter replied. ‘Personally I don’t trust him, but I do think he’s straight. By which I mean that if he guarantees you asylum, he’ll do everything in his power to make sure that happens. But ultimately, Raya, this is your life and your decision.’
‘That was a somewhat backhanded compliment, Richter,’ Simpson snapped irritably.
‘It’s all you’re going to get.’
There was silence for a few seconds, then Raya nodded. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘I’ll let you see just one file.’
‘Make it a good one,’ Walters suggested, as he turned the laptop so that Raya could view the screen.
Raya plugged in the hard drive, opened up a program, checked to make sure nobody in the room could see exactly which keys she pressed, and swiftly entered a password. When the directory listing appeared, she worked her way down until she found the file she was looking for. She double-clicked on the icon to open it, decrypted it, and made a copy which she pasted onto the laptop’s hard drive, before encrypting her own directory again. Before sliding the laptop back across the table to Walters, she disconnected the USB cable.
‘That’s one file that might be of interest,’ she suggested.
Walters read the first few lines of the Cyrillic text, then looked up at Simpson and nodded. ‘This is classified Sov Sekretno, Top Secret,’ he said. ‘It’s an analysis of the state of battle-readiness of the Russian Northern Fleet, so if this file is representative of the rest of the data on that hard disk, it’s dynamite. Grade-one intelligence, straight from the horse’s – or rather the Bear’s – mouth.’
‘Right, Miss Kosov,’ Simpson announced, ‘you’ve got yourself a deal.’