Double Agent

by Tom Bradby

  But just when Kate’s thoughts had wandered inexorably back to Sergei’s stricken face, Ian turned to her. ‘Have you been in touch with our man?’ He glanced around them to check they were not overheard.

  ‘Yes. He’s here.’

  ‘What about his father?’

  ‘I assume so, but I didn’t ask.’

  ‘Where are we going to meet?’

  ‘He said he would set the venue, but to be ready to move at ten a.m.’

  ‘No. I’m not having that. We’ll set the meet point.’

  ‘I tried to insist, but he said it was his backyard and they would pick the venue.’

  ‘Then tell him different. We have the whip hand.’

  Kate could tell Ian was trying to show off to Suzy, but she wasn’t in a mood to indulge him. ‘We have to be careful. We don’t know what their agenda is, we don’t know what they’re dealing with from their side, and we don’t know who else they have been talking to—’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you were them, wouldn’t you have cast the net wider than just us? If we delay, or prevaricate, or muck them about in any way, there’s a chance they’ll bolt and pull the lever somewhere else.’

  ‘Doesn’t that sound a lot like the operation that went so badly wrong in Berlin?’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t have a choice.’

  ‘We’re not the ones trying to escape a lifetime in a Russian prison, or worse. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if we were setting the parameters.’ Ian shook his head to underline his disapproval. ‘Have you discussed this with Danny?’

  ‘Not yet. I was going to talk to him when we get back to the hotel.’ Danny and his team were staying at the Marriott, just a short walk down Rustaveli Avenue. They’d come in via Istanbul earlier in the day.

  ‘All right. Julie will go with you.’ He was pointing at Kate. ‘I want both surveillance teams deployed. I’ll play quarterback.’ Ian rolled up his sleeves. ‘What about the plane?’ It was directed at Suzy.

  ‘It arrives the day after tomorrow. We’ve told the Tbilisi authorities we’re picking up a film location crew. We’ve filed a flight plan direct to London for eight p.m., but we can change that. We can push back by about twenty-four hours, but after that we start to have issues with the pilot.’

  ‘What have you told Sarah?’

  This was directed at Julie, who had been instructed to liaise with Sarah Creaven, SIS’s Tbilisi station chief. She left her reply just long enough to make her insolence felt. ‘That we need to extract someone and it’s conceivable there may be issues, but we didn’t want to inform the Georgians and hoped it would pass off smoothly.’

  ‘Did she guess?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask her.’ Kate nudged Julie under the table.

  ‘Does Mikhail know there’s a time constraint on the plane?’ Ian asked Kate.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You should tell him.’

  Kate wasn’t enjoying being given direct instructions on what had been her show from start to finish. ‘They’re in a hurry to get to London. I don’t think they need to be told that we’re keen to get it over and done with too.’

  Ian nodded. ‘We’re in good shape,’ he said, then ordered more wine and embarked on a long soliloquy about how Georgians made theirs differently.

  Kate took another double dose of zopiclone when she got back to her room in the hotel and undressed quickly. She asked herself when she would next dare to attempt to sleep without chemical assistance, but knew that this was neither the time nor the place.

  Her head had been down barely five minutes when an argument broke out down the corridor. She heard Julie’s voice and hauled herself out of bed to intervene.

  Julie was in the doorway of her room, leaning against the frame in a black, see-through nightgown. Ian stood before her still fully clothed, part supplicant, part bull in a china shop. ‘Ian!’ Julie shouted.

  He had his foot in the door. ‘I just want to talk,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Hey,’ Kate said. ‘Come on . . .’ It was like her friend to answer the door without bothering to put on a dressing-gown just to provoke him. She felt a flash of resentment at having to be the grown-up in this equation.

  ‘I’ve told him a hundred times,’ Julie said. ‘He just won’t listen.’

  ‘We owe it to each other to talk,’ Ian said, ignoring Kate entirely.

  But Julie kept her eyes on her friend. ‘You tell him!’

  ‘Keep your voices down, both of you,’ Kate said. ‘This is not the time or the place—’

  ‘Why does she answer the door like that, if not to make a point?’

  ‘Ian,’ Kate said. ‘No woman is required to dress in one way or another when you bang on her door in the middle of the night.’

  ‘It’s only just past ten.’

  ‘Go to your room.’

  ‘After everything that has passed between us, it’s just bizarre she won’t agree to sit down and talk things through for a few—’

  ‘What do you mean, “everything that has passed between us”?’ Julie asked. ‘You mean sex, normally in the missionary position, which is about as far as your imagination ever seems to stretch.’

  ‘For God’s sake . . .’

  ‘Stop it, Julie.’ There was steel in Kate’s voice now. ‘I mean it.’

  ‘I’m going straight to HR when I get back from this trip. I’ve told him a hundred times I do not wish to talk to him about this ever again. I don’t know what part of his tiny brain can’t grasp—’

  ‘You think I give a damn if you report me? You can stick a copy of your complaint in the post to King Charles Street and Downing Street as well for all I care! All I am asking for is a bit of respect. Like it or not, we have been in a relationship for more than a year and—’

  ‘It was just fucking sex, Ian, and lousy sex at that.’

  Ian looked as if he was about to explode. Or cry. Or both. But they were saved by Suzy’s appearance. She’d taken off her make-up erratically and her cheeks were stained with mascara. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

  There was a brief silence, before Ian pulled himself together with lightning speed. Perhaps it was the potential loss of professional respect from the newcomer, or that he’d already identified her as his next conquest, but he managed a very quick turnaround. ‘All fine. Still debating who sets the meet point tomorrow. I was uncomfortable with the way we left things, as you know, but . . . I can see we have no choice. Goodnight.’

  He walked away, down the corridor. Suzy retreated in the opposite direction. ‘He’s a cunt and she’s welcome to him,’ Julie hissed, so that both of them could hear, before she closed the door without ceremony.

  28

  KATE AND JULIE sat on the plush velvet sofa in the Rooms Hotel reception area. ‘You nervous?’ Julie asked her.

  ‘A bit.’ And she was, too. But then, when had the stakes ever been higher?

  Mikhail’s text came in bang on time. Kate showed it to Julie and they left the hotel. ‘The Peace Bridge,’ she said quietly, into her lapel microphone. ‘We’ll walk.’

  ‘Get a cab,’ Ian barked. But she ignored him. She got a greater feel for things on foot. She offered Julie some chewing gum and they strolled down Rustaveli Avenue easily, past the buskers and the beggars, the restaurants open on to the street and the market stalls selling quite sophisticated tourist memorabilia. They took the underpass beneath Freedom Square, where Julie pointed out, with a smile, a shop selling handguns, and came up at the corner of the old town.

  Julie had been in charge of mastering the topography, so Kate let her lead the way down towards the river. It was hard not to be impressed by the crumbling splendour of the centuries-old city that Ian had been so enthusiastically lecturing Suzy on. This section was like a microcosm of the country, with pockets of sophistication, style and wealth cheek by jowl with evidence of the neglect and decay of the Soviet years. Painted balconies on old houses, with delicate Moorish latticework, or Ottom
an yoke arches, stood side by side with crumbling bricks and ugly Russian iron staircases.

  It had started to rain, and as they reached the incongruous glass and metal Peace Bridge, they took shelter under a tumbling vine in a street full of boutique hotels, stores and restaurants aimed at Tbilisi’s ever-expanding tourist trade. Julie lit a cigarette and shared it with Kate. They didn’t need to tell their watchers where they were, or that the waiting was dragging out. Kate’s phone buzzed. She glanced at it. Walk away down Erekle II Street. Keep going. She showed the message to Julie, who nodded. ‘You need to look it up?’ Kate asked. Julie shook her head.

  They started moving again, walking across a car park, then beneath a line of cypress trees as they passed a section of the old city wall. This was the heart of the tourist old town, the houses newly painted and the restaurant tables sheltered beneath plants overhanging from shady terraces. They passed a church and found themselves in a square with Tbilisi’s famous clock tower. Kate’s phone throbbed again: Go down to the river, get a taxi to the Dry Bridge.

  Kate called him via Signal. He answered immediately. ‘I’m not doing this again,’ she said.

  ‘The Georgians have been watching me here in Tbilisi. I have to make sure they are not following you.’

  Kate ended the call. ‘Moving to the Dry Bridge,’ she said quietly. Julie was still checking this on her phone as Kate was relaying the instruction to a taxi driver on the quay. He seemed to understand.

  It was only a short journey and the taxi disgorged them into what looked like a flea market that stretched along the riverbank. Kate and Julie browsed the stalls in the morning sunshine. It was as if every citizen of the capital had assembled every piece of junk that had ever been in their possession to sell to tourists. There was a stall offering plugs, adaptors and every kind of electrical accessory, another selling old tools. An old man had a huge selection of knives laid out on a long table, a woman next to him a ten- or fifteen-feet-wide section selling old crockery. Behind them both was an old Lada so full of debris there was no possibility of even a cat squeezing inside it.

  Kate and Julie kept walking. They found an old man selling Soviet film posters, another offering medals and Soviet badges. Julie lingered on the posters. ‘I love these,’ she said.

  A new black four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser roared up. Mikhail was in the passenger seat. ‘Get in,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’ They did as they were told. He leant behind him. ‘Turn off your packs,’ he said. ‘They’re going off grid, whoever is listening. We know where you are and we’ll contact you when we are ready to leave.’

  ‘We can’t go off grid,’ Kate said.

  ‘It wasn’t a suggestion. My father’s order. I think you will concede he knows this part of the world better than any of you are ever going to.’

  ‘Do not agree to go off grid,’ Ian instructed in their earpieces.

  ‘Now,’ Mikhail said.

  Kate glanced at Julie. She nodded and they both switched off their packs. ‘And your phones.’ They took them out and powered them off. Mikhail nodded with satisfaction and Kate couldn’t quite suppress a moment’s pleasure at the thought of Ian’s reaction. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked Mikhail.

  ‘Out of town. My father will cross the border tonight. We have a house nearby. You will meet him. In the morning, we will make the run for the airport.’

  ‘How far out of town?’

  ‘Not far.’

  Mikhail nodded at the driver and he roared off again. They lapsed into silence as they spun past the hard evidence that this ancient city had not escaped the depredations of the Brezhnev-era central planners, with concrete housing, block after block, leavened only by the occasional splash of colour.

  If the Soviet Union had succeeded only in making every one of its citizens poor, independence had clearly made a tiny number of Georgians rich. They passed a Porsche garage and one for Jaguar Land Rover, as well as a smart- looking shopping mall, with the French supermarket Carrefour advertising its wares with a giant sign on the roof, but the overall impression was of poverty and neglect.

  Eventually the housing blocks petered out, to be replaced by shabby single-storey dwellings, and then they were out of the city altogether, following the foaming waters of the River Terek. ‘How far are we going?’ Kate asked.

  ‘A few hours. Three, perhaps. It depends.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Relax.’ He turned and smiled at her. ‘Have you ever been to the Caucasus?’

  ‘We’re not here to take in the sights.’

  ‘I told you, these are our lands. We are safer here.’

  But safer seemed a distant prospect. They were following the Georgian Military Highway, the long single-track road that had allowed the Russians to dominate this southern republic for two centuries. It was full of potholes and packed with lorries, all of which made glacial progress, so the driver felt compelled to dice with death at every turn in the long and winding road.

  By the time they reached the Jvari Pass, the weather had closed in, reducing visibility to only forty or fifty yards in the sleeting rain. That didn’t deter the driver from overtaking at will, so they were frequently forced to duck back in to avoid a lorry or truck coming the other way with only inches to spare. ‘Does he always drive like this?’ Kate muttered, but Mikhail did not answer and neither did Julie, who was gazing out of the window.

  They passed the Gudauri ski resort, which looked like a drab construction site lost in the mist, and then the Russian-Georgian friendship mural at the highest point in the path, which had been made in 1983 to celebrate the long relationship between the two countries, and ignored by every Georgian since.

  They started to descend again and it wasn’t long before they broke through the dense cloud into a wide, lush valley. This was the landscape that had so inspired Russian writers from Lermontov and Tolstoy to Pushkin and Gorky: rich green valleys linking rugged mountains that reached for a dramatic cobalt sky.

  The sun danced off a reservoir nearby, bringing an even greater majesty and grandeur to the landscape. Kate and Julie stared out in silence all the way down to the village of Kazbegi, or Stepantsminda, as it had been renamed, which had the air of a modern-day Klondike, mining the new gold rush that was international tourism.

  They swung off the main road, past guesthouses, cafés and tin-roofed shacks with market gardens, and roared on up the hill to a long wooden building that appeared to have been newly restored. ‘Check in here,’ Mikhail said, as they came to a halt at its entrance. ‘I will pick you up later. Do not switch your phones on. I will find you.’

  Kate and Julie got out and walked into one of the strangest places Kate had ever seen. It turned out to be the sister establishment to the Tbilisi hotel they’d stayed in, a former Intourist site that had been the subject of a dramatic makeover to turn it into a kind of Soho House in the Caucasus. Only the Intourist poster by the lift – Welcome to the Soviet Union – had survived its past, as the interior was an open, stylish expanse of wood and leather all the way up to the bar at the far end of the room. Large brass binoculars on stands by the floor-to-ceiling windows gave guests the chance to gaze up at the wonders of Mount Kazbegi, which towered high above its surroundings on the far side of the valley.

  Kate and Julie agreed to share a room, but went straight out to order coffee on the wide wooden deck in front of the hotel. They sat in silence for a while, watching the clientele, who seemed to represent a rainbow coalition of different nationalities, from the blond Norwegian family sitting next to them to a large group of Chinese tourists and two Iranian women in the niqab. If Georgia had always been a melting pot, it seemed determined to turn that heritage into the widest possible flow of visitors and tourist dollars.

  ‘Is it too early for cocktails?’ Julie asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  They ordered Diet Coke and sat soaking up the sun. A crisp wind whipped away the last remnants of cloud to reveal the summit of Mount Kazbegi, the legendar
y heart of the Caucasus, to whose flanks Prometheus had allegedly been chained.

  Gergeti Trinity Church, which sat atop the hill directly opposite, was bathed in sunlight, the landscape a riot of brilliant green meadow. ‘This may very well be the most beautiful place I have ever been,’ Julie said.

  ‘It is awe-inspiring,’ Kate agreed. They ordered food, which appeared promptly. ‘You shouldn’t provoke Ian,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not my mother.’ Julie was eating an enormous slice of traditional Georgian cheese bread, as if it was set to be her last meal on earth.

  ‘No, but I am your boss.’

  ‘I didn’t ask him to come to my room in the middle of the night.’

  ‘And you definitely shouldn’t be answering your door in a see-through nightie.’

  ‘If he’s going to shag Suzy, I might as well remind him of what he’s missing.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t care.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well, you sound as though you do.’

  ‘No, I’m just being mean. Given what a twat he is, I’m entitled to punish him.’

  ‘It’s beneath you.’

  ‘It so bloody isn’t and you know it. Besides, wouldn’t you relish the chance to rub Stuart’s nose in it?’

  Kate thought about this. The complexity of Julie’s emotional landscape was a challenge much too far for Ian’s schoolboy simplicity, though perhaps that had been why he’d fallen for her so hard. She could be quite cruel when she wanted to be, and Kate wondered if Danny knew what he was getting into.

  She watched Julie finish off the last of the cheese bread. ‘I need some pudding,’ she said.

  She ordered Soviet cake and Kate sat back, stared at the mountain and thought about what her friend had just said of Stuart. With the benefit of some distance – geographic and with the passage of time – she had started to regret her recent commitment to Stuart and the children. She was by no means convinced she wanted to give her marriage another try or would be able to. She thought of Ian’s childish petulance last night, the plaintive cocktail of wounded ego and bruised pride. How was it so many men seemed not to have progressed beyond the emotional maturity of small boys? Were they just spoilt, mollycoddled, smothered?