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IN A TERRACED HOUSE with heavy ledges in one of the most sought-after postcodes in London, a Russian émigré sat on a wingback chair and wiped his eyes. He downed another schnapps and crossed himself. Enough time had elapsed. If they were really coming for him, he’d be on the plane back by now.
He didn’t know why they weren’t. Orlov must have told them by now, surely. Somehow, God willing, though he still hardly dared entertain the thought, he’d acquired a stay of execution ...
An Aeroflot Tupolev carrying five passengers landed at the Bolshoye Savino airport in Perm Krai. A man in handcuffs exited with two officials preceding him and two following, and transferred to a ZiL chauffeured by an FSB officer. Two of the officials who had flown from London sat on the back seat with him, and they drove the hundred and forty miles to Solikamsk Prison together in silence, accompanied by a pair of motorcycles.
When they arrived, the governor explained to the prisoner that he had never officially left. He reminded him of his rights and responsibilities and handed him his chess set. The prisoner removed the lid and took the pieces out, spacing them equally for a full minute until they were all accounted for. He then replaced them unhurriedly, put the box under his arm and was marched back to his cell.
In a churchyard overgrown with daisies, knapweed and hare’s-tail grass, a middle-aged woman and a girl in a junior-school uniform laid a wreath on a grave still too fresh for a headstone. They sat on a bench and looked at the hills. They leant into each other and held hands - and clutched.
A US Army helicopter roared over Kandahar. A British soldier stood behind a dusty glass door with a young woman in a burqa. He nodded. She turned and saw them, the wife walking two paces behind her husband. She left the building and crossed the road with composure. The couple immediately flanked her then the man pulled ahead again. The soldier watched them disappear into the crowd.
On the top floor of Thames House, a diminutive black woman in a skirt suit waited with two men and an elderly white woman. Three fighter jets emerged from nowhere and performed a roll over the building at low altitude. The black woman said something about this feeling more like a defeat than a victory, and they returned to their desks.
Big Ben struck eleven. A flock of swans landed on the river and swam for a moment against the current. The sun broke from behind a cloud. On a patch of gravel a mile away, a man in a silver helmet screamed at a line of guards to maintain their swords. Beyond and around him, men and women shopped and pointed at monuments and walked to and from taxis, buses, underground trains. And Francis Walsingham sat on his throne and surveyed his empire.
If you’ve enjoyed this book, you can get the next in the series - The Girl from Kandahar – here.
This how it begins:
The Girl from Kandahar
CHAPTER 1: JOY TURNS to Sorrow
George V Restaurant, Thames House
Ruby Parker and the man who styled himself ‘Toby Copthorne’ sat opposite each other at a table by the river-view window with an A4 document wallet in between them. They hadn’t ordered lunch, nor were they intending to. The staff here were supposed to understand such things, and knew to keep their distance. She was the head of Subterranean One, a black woman in a grey skirt-suit. He might or might not have been the Blue Maiden. He looked to be in his late fifties, and his camel overcoat, immaculately ironed white shirt, navy blue tie and trimmed moustache all gave him an air of gravitas, possibly bluff or triple bluff. It was midday and six swans serenely battled the current.
She removed the inserts - a mixture of memos, reports on 80g/sqm paper and aerial reconnaissance photos - and perused them in silence. He ordered a bottle of pinot noir, largely, she calculated, as a means of maintaining his insouciance - she suddenly realised he wasn’t the Blue Maiden after all – and leaned back: yes, another affectation.
“You’re saying she’s dead?” Ruby Parker said eventually.
“I’m very sorry,” he replied.
“Talk me through it,” she said coldly.
“It’s all in there.”
“I’m very busy and, for what it’s worth, I know you’re not who you’d like me to think you are. Tell your boss you’ve still a lot to learn.”
He sat up a notch.
“Dead or missing?” she said.
“Missing presumed killed.”
“And you’re returning her to me because you want me to tell her parents, I take it.”
He looked at the tablecloth and tried to affect an air of humility. “You’re supposed to be very good at that sort of thing, yes.”
“I don’t expect you to be subtle. I know that’s not your department’s speciality, but I do need something to go with. Apart from the necessary case-transfer documents, which I’d like on my desk by this evening, please.”
“Yes – yes, of course.” He cleared his throat. “She was posing as the third wife of a village chief in Dhur al-Khanabi, Pakistan, about fifty kilometres south-east of the Durand Line. Her job was to identify high-profile insurgents and co-ordinate them for drones, or if necessary liquidate them herself. Sorry to say, well ... she proved fruitless. She made no identifications at all, not one. We – I admit this was remiss of us: I’m not sure how it happened – we temporarily lost sight of her – there are lots of things happening out there, you understand. The CIA unloosed an MQ-9 and she and her controller plus his two real wives were killed. In our defence, there were at least six high-level militants among the casualties. We’ve confirmed that through a variety of sources – militants Marciella Hartley-Brown herself probably could have identified, but failed to. But it seems that she ... herself ... didn’t survive ... the effects of what was otherwise a remarkably successful sortie.”
“When you say you ‘lost sight’ of her, I take it what you actually mean is you lost interest. That it wasn’t as if she ... wandered off.”
He swallowed. The pinot noir had arrived and the waiter uncorked it. Copthorne waved him away before he could pour anything. “No one’s underestimating the seriousness of the blunder. It’s one of the reasons we’re asking you to take charge of the family side of things. The Blue Maiden’s almost certainly for the chop.”
It was her turn to sit up. “I’d heard. I didn’t realise this was the pretext.”
“Celia Demure’s influence, partly. She’s furious. And of course, the victim was Sir Anthony Hartley-Brown’s daughter. The Secretary of State for Defence may not have heard yet – it was three weeks ago, we’ve only just joined the dots - but it’ll certainly help him come to terms with matters if he knows heads have already rolled.”
“Three weeks ago?”
“As I said, no one’s underestimating the extent of our - ”
“You say she proved ‘fruitless’. Are you sure you were even paying attention?”
“I believe there’s to be an internal inquiry. The next level down’s taking charge. If it’s any consolation, there will probably be a significant cull in Blue.”
“Actually, it isn’t.”
“It may interest you to know Celia Demure doesn’t believe she’s dead.”
She sighed. Typical Celia. “Based on what?”
“As far as we can tell, wishful thinking. I don’t know how much you know about Pashtun culture, but women tend to stay indoors. The chances of her having survived the blast when her controller and his other wives died instantly are negligible. And three weeks later she hasn’t contacted us. The Tehrik-i-Taliban certainly haven’t captured her, or we’d know about that too. Admittedly, we haven’t been able to send a forensics team to examine the debris, but it’s probably too late now. No, I’ve long experience of this sort of thing. It’s one of those times when you’re entitled to assume the worst, and anything else just prolongs the misery.”
“Couldn’t she be lying wounded somewhere?”
“First thing we considered. But no. We put a spy in two days ago to do some discreet asking around. As far as anyone’s aware, there were no wounded, only fatalities.”
“So I’m to tell her parents we know she’s dead.”
He half-shrugged, half-nodded. “That would probably be kindest. But it’s not really for me to say.”
She flicked through the documents without focussing on them. He was right. If she hadn’t been killed, she’d have found her way to Kandahar by now. The border wasn’t exactly watertight. And if there were no wounded, then that was the end of the alternatives.
But she wouldn’t tell her parents she was dead. She’d supply the details exactly as she herself had been supplied with them and let them draw their own conclusions.
Not that there was a range to choose from.
Get The Girl from Kandahar here.
General Fiction
The House of Charles Swinter
The Weird Problem of Good
The Bright Fish
Hannah and Soraya’s Fully Magic Generation-Y *Snowflake* Road Trip across America
The Original Tales of MI7
Our Woman in Jamaica
The Kramski Case
The Girl from Kandahar
The Vengeance of San Gennaro
The John Mordred Tales of MI7 books
The Eastern Ukraine Question
The Social Magus
Encounter with ISIS
World War O
The New Europeans
Libya Story
Little War in London
The Square Mile Murder
The Ultimate Londoner
Death in a Half Foreign Country
The BBC Hunters
The Seductive Scent of Empire
Humankind 2.0
Ruby Parker’s Last Orders
Poetry
The Latest Noel
Metals of the Future
Short Stories
An Evening at the Beach
Wadhurst Ghost stories
Philosophy
21st Century Philosophy
A New Theory of Justice and Other Essays
