by Tom Bradby
‘Probably not. They’ve already robbed me of everything I care for, so I don’t mind what else they do to me and they know that.’
A gust of wind whipped the snow into Kate’s face and she brushed it from her cheeks before she leant in to kiss him. ‘Bye, then,’ she said. Stuart gripped her, wrapping his great arms around her and pressing her to his chest. It brought tears to her cheeks again and, as soon as she was free of him, she brushed them away.
‘I’ll be thinking about this journey for weeks,’ he said. ‘A pretty strange turn of events.’
Kate tried to smile at him. Without another word, she walked to her own car, got in and drove away. She did not look back. And, within minutes, she was crying so hard she had to pull over to the side of the road and press her aching forehead to the steering wheel. She cursed softly, took out a face-cleaning cloth from her bag and wiped her eyes. She glanced at herself in the wing mirror and attempted to apply some lipstick and mascara. But no amount of touching up was going to magic away the impression of complete exhaustion.
She pulled herself together and drove off before Stuart could come along and ask her what was wrong. She was grateful for the comforting sight of his headlamps behind her. She could still see no sign of any other tail.
There was only a short queue at the border crossing, but as she edged towards the barrier, Kate had only one thought: if they had put out an alert for her after discovering Sergei’s body, then her image would already be plastered up on the wall in every exit point all over Russia. Tail or no tail, was there really any chance they would let her leave?
23
THE BORDER GUARD either had a keen wit or no sense of irony at all. ‘Why do you want to leave Russia?’ he asked.
‘I’m sure I’ll be back,’ Kate said, though she doubted it.
‘They say it rains in Ireland all the time.’ He was a lugubrious man, in his forties or fifties, with large spectacles and cheeks like a bloodhound’s. He stared at her passport and scanned it into his computer. Kate watched the snow twist and turn in tight eddies just the other side of the barrier.
She wondered what would happen if she had to hit the accelerator and drive for her freedom. She turned around to see if Stuart was still behind her, but he had disappeared. ‘Irish?’ the guard asked, as if genuinely challenging the evidence in front of him.
‘Yes.’
‘I went to Dublin once, and Belfast.’ His English was remarkably good. ‘I don’t remember much about it.’
‘That’s often the way.’
He stared at the screen beside him. ‘What have you been doing in Russia?’
‘I was just in St Petersburg, seeing the sights.’
‘Did you go on to Moscow?’
Kate hesitated a moment too long. ‘No.’
There was a long silence. He was evidently waiting for some instruction from his computer. Kate leant closer to the windscreen and peered ahead into the gloom. They’d open fire on her if she drove for it, that’s for sure, but it was only a hundred yards at most. She looked at the guard by the barrier, his assault rifle idling at his hip.
‘You are free to go.’ The guard smiled at her. ‘Come back soon.’
‘I will,’ Kate said. The barrier went up and she drove on with a heavy sigh of relief and still more questions. It had felt as though the guard was waiting for a specific instruction but, if so, why would it have been to let her go?
Julie was waiting for her in a beaten-up old Volvo saloon just beyond the barrier. Kate didn’t get a chance to ask how long she’d been there before Julie threw her arms around her. ‘Fucking hell, Kate.’ She released her, held up her phone. ‘I had literally just decided to give you ten more minutes before I pressed the nuclear button.’
‘I’m sorry. It took a lot longer than I thought.’
‘There’s been hell to pay from London. Ian guessed the truth immediately, as did Sir Alan.’
‘It’s all right. I’ve got enough to make it worth it.’
‘What the hell happened?’
‘I’ll tell you in the warm.’
Kate glanced at Julie’s car. ‘I hired it for cash from a guy I met in a bar in Kotka. It’s quite the place, as it turns out. I have to drop it back so I’ll see you in the café by the quay.’
Kate followed her and, by the time a few rays of sun finally burst through the morning clouds, they were both slipping into a corner table for breakfast. ‘You want caffeine or nicotine first?’ Julie asked.
‘Nicotine.’
They stepped back on to the quay and watched a long line of students walking up the gangplank to the tall ship. The sun shimmered through its rigging. Julie lit up and gave the cigarette to Kate before producing another for herself. Kate sucked the smoke deep into her lungs and exhaled into the sky above. ‘Shit, that feels good.’
Julie watched her. ‘You going to explain, or am I going to have to wheedle it out of you?’
‘What happened in London?’
‘Ian claims to have kept the dogs in MI5 at bay by quoting operational security. But he says he’s going to enjoy firing you when you get back. Now, spill the beans. Did you meet Sergei?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘He was travelling to Moscow, so I went with him on the night train. It was the only way I was going to be able to see him.’
‘And?’
‘We talked. I told him the truth about what we’d been offered and why, and asked him whether he thought what Mikhail had said to us about his father was true.’
‘How did he respond?’
‘That it was.’ Kate took a last drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out beneath her shoe. She’d thought of little else but what she would say to Julie since they’d left St Petersburg, and at no point on the journey had she come to a firm conclusion to tell this exaggerated version of what Sergei had really said, but what purpose would the truth serve?
Either the video and the accompanying financial evidence that Mikhail and Igor offered was real or it was an incredibly convincing fake. They would never know until they got it to London and ran all the appropriate tests.
Sergei had, in truth, offered her nothing conclusive on the political ups and downs of Moscow’s intelligence elite, only that some kind of internal civil war was under way. So why burden Julie, Sir Alan or still less the foreign secretary with further doubts? What they wanted was certainty. So she had resolved, on instinct, in this moment, to give it to them.
‘Christ,’ Julie said. ‘So it’s all on the level. For sure?’
‘Nothing is for sure. I told him what Mikhail had said, and he agreed that it was in line with the rumours he’d heard. That is as good as we’re going to get.’
‘What will you tell London?’
‘Exactly what we agreed. I came here to Kotka to meet Sergei. It took him a few days to get across the border and I stayed out of communication because I didn’t wish to compromise his security. But he made it over, I met him here for an hour – and he told us what we needed to know. We don’t have to admit that I went into Russia.’
‘You think it will be enough?’
‘As I understand it, from Sir Alan, the issue now is mainly about removing the foreign secretary’s excuses. We need to line it all up for her so she has no choice. This is the last piece of the jigsaw.’
Julie threw away her cigarette and they went inside to warm cold hands with hot coffee. ‘What are you not telling me?’ Julie asked.
‘About what?’
‘I don’t know. You’re holding something back. To do with Sergei, I would guess. Did what I think happened finally take place?’
Kate didn’t answer. She hadn’t liked lying to Julie in the first place and had no wish to compound it with further evasions, half-truths or outright falsehoods.
‘You’ve waited long enough,’ Julie went on. ‘So I guess you slept with him.’
‘I was followed after I got off the train,’ Kate said, changing the subject. ‘I managed
to lose the tail in the subway, but it spooked me. Moscow is a long way from home. I weighed my options and decided my best bet was to call Stuart and ask him to drive me straight to the border.’
‘And he agreed.’
‘Guilt goes a long way.’
Julie shrugged. ‘I’m not sure I entirely believe you, but it’s your business so I’ll let it go.’ She looked directly into Kate’s eyes. ‘Just so long as you’re absolutely on the level about what Sergei told you.’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Then why are you not meeting my gaze?’
Kate looked up into her friend’s eyes. She could feel her cheeks colouring. ‘There are things you don’t know and don’t need to. In fact, for your own sake, it’s much better that you don’t. It was my decision to go in there and mine alone. I knew the risks. So if there is any fallout, I’ll face it alone. All you do need to be sure of is that we have little choice but to accept this defection and face the consequences. I cannot go the rest of my life knowing we allowed a cowardly set of politicians to wriggle out of the implications. If we’re going to do that, we might as well all pack it in and work in the City.’
‘If that speech was meant to reassure me, I should probably tell you it was a total failure.’
‘I got what I needed. That’s all you have to know.’
‘Well, maybe,’ Julie said. ‘Whatever happened in there, you’re an absolute fool to keep it to yourself.’
‘We go back to London with one clear message, as I have outlined. Agreed?’
Julie gazed right back at her, those big green eyes full of doubt, fear, possibly even suspicion. But, eventually, she nodded. ‘Agreed, boss. For better or for worse.’
They spoke little for the rest of the journey to Helsinki airport. After turning in the hire car, Kate suggested Julie contact Sir Alan and Ian to give them the basic agreed outline of what had happened and to arrange the necessary meeting with the foreign secretary so she could sneak home on their return to London.
She found Fi and Gus eating dinner with Rose at the kitchen table. They all seemed very pleased to see her.
They chatted idly for a few moments before Rose said she needed to get back to Simon and quietly slipped out. ‘We missed you,’ Fiona said, as soon as she’d gone. ‘I mean, Rose is lovely, but we’ve been really looking forward to you coming home.’
It was enough to have Kate reflecting once again on the strange shifting currents of teenage emotions, but the warmth of her own response perhaps explained her spontaneous decision to share more than she’d intended. ‘I saw Dad,’ she said.
‘My God, where?’ Fiona asked.
Kate had her son’s rapt attention now, too, and their evident devotion to their father touched another chord within her. ‘In Moscow.’
‘What were you doing there?’ Gus asked.
‘I had to go into Russia for work. Things didn’t go quite the way I’d planned, so I had some time on my hands. I called Dad and we agreed to meet up.’
‘Where?’ Fi asked.
‘I went to his flat in Moscow, which is, in all honesty, a very depressing place. It’s tiny, cramped, soulless and on the umpteenth floor of a grim Soviet apartment block.’
Gus was staring at the table, as if he was about to burst into tears. But Fiona could sense her mother had more to impart.
‘I don’t want you to get your hopes up unduly, but it was clear to me that this was not a reasonable way to go on for any of us.’
‘What do you mean?’ Gus asked.
‘You miss him. If I’m completely honest, I miss him, too. And he’s miserable.’
There was a stunned silence as the pair absorbed the implications of this. ‘So what are you saying?’ Fiona asked eventually.
‘That, in the first instance, I want to get him out of that terrible place to somewhere he can be much happier and you – we – can visit him.’
‘Like where?’
‘He suggested France.’
There was another silence as they registered what she’d said. Kate got up and went to get a glass of wine. There was half of an open bottle of rosé in the fridge, so she helped herself and returned to the table.
‘Where in France?’ Fiona asked.
‘That’s up to him. Somewhere he can get a job and make a life for himself – and that’s easy to reach from London.’
‘So we could visit him, like, every weekend?’ Gus said.
‘I think every weekend would be stretching our resources a bit thin now. He doesn’t have a job and may struggle to find one. He doesn’t speak much French, so far as I know. But every other weekend, perhaps.’
‘You said “we”,’ Fiona chipped in.
‘Like I said, I miss him, too.’
Fiona and Gus looked at each other, bewildered, their hopes and fears fighting for traction. ‘Are you going to get back together?’ Gus asked.
Kate worried that she had gone too far – much too far. But seeing the hope in his eyes – and perhaps it was, after all, only a reflection of her own – she didn’t quite have the courage, or will, to row back. ‘I’d rather not say that, because the truth is I don’t know. I think it’s unlikely. His betrayal hurt terribly and I’m not sure I can ever feel the way I did before.’ She gulped some wine. ‘But I miss him. I’d like to see him – not as a wife, or partner in the first instance, but certainly as your mother. I think we can find our way back to friendship. I don’t know yet whether more than that is possible.’
‘But the door is open?’ Fiona asked.
Kate hesitated. Was it? Was that really true? ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It might be.’
As soon as she uttered the words, Fiona burst into tears and left the room. ‘Yes,’ Gus said, standing and punching the air. ‘Yes! I fucking knew it.’
‘Language,’ Kate said, though she was struggling to wipe the smile from her face.
She followed Fiona upstairs and knocked softly on her bedroom door. ‘Not now,’ her daughter replied, but Kate thought that, for once, she could probably get away with ignoring her. She slipped in quietly and sat beside Fiona on the bed. ‘It’s all right, Mum.’
Kate put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, my love,’ Kate said.
‘For what? There’s nothing to be sorry for.’ Fiona straightened, wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her baggy sweater. ‘You have no idea how much Gus and I have prayed to hear those words.’ She looked at her mother. ‘I hope you meant it. Neither of us could take being let down again.’
‘I told you how I felt. That’s not the same as promising any kind of outcome. I can’t say that we’ll be together again as a couple, much less that we can recreate what we had before. But I think we can, with enough goodwill, be friends, and that would greatly improve all our lives, wouldn’t it?’
Clearly, it wasn’t what Fiona wanted to hear. Like her brother, she yearned for what they’d once possessed. ‘It’s enough,’ she said. ‘For now. But how will it work? I thought Dad wasn’t able to stay in Europe except for very brief visits.’
Kate stood and moved towards the door. ‘Dad is guilty of treason. If he ever sets foot in this country again, they’ll put him on trial and he’ll go to prison for a very long time. But that would also come with an avalanche of bad publicity for the Service that it would be keen to avoid. I negotiated them turning a blind eye for that trip to Venice. It’s possible I could do the same for a longer period – perhaps indefinitely – so long as he agreed never to return to the UK.’
‘So he can’t ever come home?’
‘Never.’
Fiona’s gloom seemed to return at being reminded of this fundamental truth and she took to staring at her hands.
‘I have to go to the office briefly,’ Kate said. ‘Would you mind holding the fort here with Gus?’
Fiona looked up and gave her a broad smile. ‘Of course not.’ And, as she walked down the stairs, Kate tried to recall the last time she had seen her daughter smile like that. A long while ago, that was for su
re.
24
IT WAS JUST past eight by the time Kate reached SIS headquarters in Vauxhall, and the third floor was deserted. She walked through to her office in the corner, switched on the desk lamp but not the overhead light and fired up her computer. She logged on, pulled up the electronic version of the Operation Sigma file and punched in the passcode.
She read through it slowly, methodically, trying to view it through fresh eyes. If Stuart was telling the truth about the relative paucity of the material he’d passed on to his handlers, that left two possibilities: either the Russians had stumbled upon Lena’s presence on the yacht through luck rather than judgement, or Sergei was right and they had a much more important source than Stuart in or close to London Centre.
Kate checked through the timeline carefully once more. It was possible that someone in Athens had spotted her coming through the airport and alerted the Russians. But why would they have immediately scrambled a wet team from Moscow?
She went backwards again to the original operation to get Lena and the electronic bug on to the yacht in Istanbul. She stared at the screen. It had long troubled her that the Empress had departed her buoy close to the Kempinski Hotel in the middle of the night. Why would the captain have done that, unless they had been alerted to something amiss?
She pulled up the phone logs, which Suzy had attached, and tracked her own movements. After returning from Istanbul, she had entered the SIS building that day at 15.58. She had gone straight to the meeting with Ian and Sir Alan. There had been plenty of time in the course of the evening for someone to have alerted Moscow.
Kate stared out of the window into the darkness. Did she actually believe Stuart, or did she just want to believe him?
She went back to the file and continued scrolling through it. She read the coroner’s report on Rav’s death. Verdict: suicide.
There was no sign of foul play and no indication anyone had entered his apartment on the night he’d died.
It was a conclusion that had appeared to suit everyone, including his partner, Zac, who seemed determined to blame himself. And although Kate did not believe the verdict for a single second, she had the uncomfortable sense it might have suited her, too, as she wrestled with the collapse of her marriage.
