by Tom Bradby
‘We’ll come straight back for you.’
He glared at her. For the first time she thought that what she saw in those eyes was fear. ‘If that plane takes off without us,’ he said, ‘we are dead. And so are your children.’
‘I’ve told her the same thing,’ Ian said, but Igor Borodin continued to ignore him, his gaze locked on Kate.
‘I’ve spoken to the chief,’ she said, as much to Ian as to Igor. ‘I have the authority to make a decision. I can’t take off with you onboard. If you can wait here in Tbilisi or close to the border, I give you my word we will return for you as soon as I know my children are safe.’
Igor took her arm, led her roughly away. Ian followed. ‘Stay there!’ Igor bellowed at him. He dragged Kate to the corner of the terminal building, so that they were out of earshot. ‘Your children are safer with us onboard,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’
‘I can’t take that risk.’
‘You have no choice.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s my call. You would do the same.’
Igor’s gaze never left her face. ‘Your prime minister works for us,’ he said. ‘I recruited him myself in Kosovo. If I don’t get on that plane, you will never prove it and the truth will die with me here in the Caucasus.’
‘I understand that.’
‘You have a duty to your country to take us with you.’
Kate shook her head. ‘Let me talk to Ian for—’
‘No!’ Igor gripped her arm furiously again. ‘That joker. You want to know how we have been aware of your every move? The operation in Andros? Your deputy Rav on a plane to Geneva?’ He gestured contemptuously at Ian, who was dancing from one foot to the other in a bid to contain himself. ‘Because that useful idiot is so desperate to be C, he tells your prime minister everything and always has, even when he was foreign secretary. And what Ian told him, James Ryan passed on to us.’ He shook his head. ‘There was no other source, as you have been wondering, but just your superior’s relentless ambition and loose tongue.’
Kate felt dazed. ‘But I never told Ian I was coming to St Petersburg and—’
‘Come on, Kate. Wake up! The GRU has known for a long time your Russian lover Sergei was leaking material. It was all we could do to get you off that train in one piece. I saved your life. Now you must do the same for me and my family.’
Kate looked back at Ian. Of course. It explained so much. How could she not have imagined he would do anything – anything at all – to make it into Sir Alan’s chair? ‘I can’t.’
Igor leant closer. His cheeks were bright red now. ‘This is your last chance, or the truth dies with me.’
‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’
‘You’re a fool!’ Igor spun away from her.
‘Mr Borodin,’ Ian pleaded, as he stormed off. ‘I will call the prime minister . . .’
But Igor paid him no more attention. He stalked towards the plane and, moments later, he, Mikhail and the rest of their group hurried back towards the terminal. ‘For God’s sake, Kate,’ Ian said. ‘I need to speak to the PM. This is a catastrophe.’
Kate called Danny. ‘I need you,’ she said. ‘We’re in the private terminal.’
Kate climbed back onboard. She ignored Ian, who was in a state of advanced panic, swinging wildly between fury at her, feigned concern for her children and fear as to the impact of this debacle on his career.
Danny arrived and, from then on, Kate entered a narrow tunnel, the intense terror that gripped her giving everything she said and did vivid focus. They started by pulling up the CCTV all around her house in Battersea as the plane took off.
Danny broke into the closed-circuit system of the newsagent on the corner and they all watched as Rose, Fiona and Gus were bundled into a grey van. Julie and Ian – who had given up flapping around and was now sitting on the floor beside them, his own laptop open – started tracking its progress through the road and traffic cameras all over the country. Suzy spoke to the Metropolitan Police to enlist their support and kept an open line between their ops room and SIS headquarters in Vauxhall.
They called out its progress. ‘Wood Green,’ Julie said.
‘Enfield,’ Ian added. ‘Now Harlow.’
‘Stevenage,’ Julie called back. ‘Where the hell are they going?’
‘Luton,’ Ian answered. ‘They’re in Luton.’
Kate had her eyes fixed on Danny’s laptop. He’d closed in on the men marching her children to the van in the dawn light. One had a snake tattooed on the back of his right hand.
So Danny was now working through all the databases at his disposal, from those at SIS to those kept by the Met, MI5 and the National Crime Agency. Only in the last did he get a match, and the file it connected them to made Kate want to throw up.
Arlind Sadiku, the man with the snake tattoo, was an Albanian gangster renowned for his control of the London cocaine trade and a penchant for extreme violence.
The last road camera the van had passed was on the way into Luton. The process of tracking it beyond that grew more complicated as Danny was forced to hop from one private CCTV system to another. Julie, Ian and Suzy joined him in the work and they eventually located the van in a car park outside a nondescript warehouse.
By now, the entire machinery and power of the British state were hurtling towards this small group of Albanian thugs. Sir Alan had been as good as his word and they were told that a team from Hereford was on standby.
Ian, who had picked up the role of point man inside the plane, wanted to know that he had Kate’s authorization for the SAS to go in. She nodded. What choice did they have?
They waited. Ian and Danny tracked the progress of the rescue through the SIS ops room, which was taking a video feed from SAS headquarters in Hereford. ‘Helicopters airborne,’ Ian said.
‘Three minutes,’ Danny said.
And then they counted down. Two. One. Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten.
‘Roping down,’ Ian said.
‘Blowing doors,’ Danny added, a few seconds later.
‘Dogs in.’
There was silence. How long did it last? Ten seconds, twenty, a minute?
It felt as if it would never end.
And then, from Ian: ‘No one there. Damn. They’ve flown. They’ve gone. Jesus. How did they get away?’
There was no time for recriminations or doubt. They returned to leapfrogging the CCTV systems. Somewhere, somehow, they’d missed something.
The plane eventually landed at Northolt. Danny and Kate were still gazing at his laptop as they boarded a helicopter on the tarmac, bound for a Cobra meeting in London.
It was MI5 who eventually found the missing link: CCTV footage from a dry cleaner revealed that, just by a roundabout, the gangsters had pulled over a for a few seconds to perform a very slick changeover, switching their cargo – now prostrate in body bags – into the back of a lorry. ‘They’re dead,’ Kate shouted, against the noise of the helicopter.
‘Unconscious,’ Danny said. ‘They wouldn’t move them any other way.’
They began the process of tracking them again, this time to an industrial park on the outskirts of Luton. It was Danny who got there first, just before they ran from the helicopter to a waiting car at Battersea heliport.
Danny got into the back beside Kate. Julie was in the front, Ian in a car behind with Suzy. ‘We can’t risk a rescue,’ Danny whispered to Kate, as the car roared away.
She looked at him, confused.
‘The moment they hear the rotors, they’ll kill them.’
Kate’s phone buzzed. She opened a video from Fiona’s WhatsApp account. It showed her daughter’s terrified gaze for only a moment, before her face was pushed down. Someone held up a huge blade and began the process of beheading her.
Kate screamed, dropped the phone.
Danny picked it up. ‘It’s fake,’ he yelled, above the sound of the rotors. He gripped Kate’s shoulders, looked her in the eye. ‘They’re screwing with us. It’s fake!’
‘No .
. . No . . .’
‘Look at it. Look at the quality of the pictures. I told you! There’s a weird sheen to those images.’
Kate could not bring herself to examine the footage. Julie turned. ‘What about the sewers?’ She put her computer on Danny’s lap. On it was a planning application that detailed the sewage arrangements for a huge industrial park.
Danny nodded. ‘They’ll expect another airborne rescue. They probably left someone behind to see what happened at the place the other van went to.’
‘I’ll text Ian.’
Kate was too paralysed to think straight. ‘I don’t know . . .’
‘It’s the best way, Kate.’ Julie turned to her again, vivid green eyes staring into Kate’s own: firm, friendly, certain. She radiated steel and confidence. ‘We have your back.’
They reached Whitehall and were whisked down the stairs towards the Cobra room in the Cabinet Office. But as they reached the last security barrier, Ian turned to her. ‘You can’t come in, Kate.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They are your children. We can’t allow you to be in the meeting.’ His manner was kindly, reassuring. ‘We’ll do everything we can. Julie’s idea is a good one. The director of Special Forces is looking into it right now.’
‘No, I have to be in there—’
‘You can’t be. You know that.’
‘But—’
‘Please trust us.’ Kate had never seen Ian like this before. There was a calm sincerity to his demeanour that was entirely surprising.
But still she rebelled against it. ‘I can’t just sit here.’
‘We’ll get the car to take you back to the office. Julie can go with you.’
‘No, no—’
‘Or we can drive you up to nearer the scene.’
‘I’ll stay here.’ She nodded. ‘Tell me as soon as you hear anything – anything at all.’
Ian squeezed her arm once more and handed his phone to the security guard, who checked his name against the list and allowed him through.
Kate leant against the wall and sank to the floor. She placed her head in her hands.
A few minutes later, she looked up to see the prime minister standing over her. ‘Are you all right, Kate?’
She started to get up. ‘Stay where you are,’ he insisted, but she stood anyway. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘This is a bloody awful business. I just wanted to say we’re doing everything we possibly can.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I know how terrifying it must be.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sir Alan, the Special Forces chaps, everyone is very confident, so I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. You know how good they all are.’
‘Of course.’
There was an awkward silence. ‘Look,’ he said eventually. ‘Why don’t you come in? I know it’s against all protocol, but, as prime minister, I can probably overrule that.’
The PM nodded at the guard, who let them both through the barrier.
Everyone was in the anteroom, grouped around a screen that carried the video feed from Hereford.
The lead soldier was charging the rear of a building. A man alongside him blew out the lock with a Hatton round, and then they were inside a cavernous warehouse, full of pallets stacked with cement and other building materials. Agitated warnings in Albanian bounced off the tin roof and echoed around the building. A man rounded the corner with an Uzi and was instantly silenced with two rounds from a Sig 556 high-velocity rifle.
They were into a corridor. Kate held her breath as the lead soldier – with the camera on his head – passed one open door, then another.
They reached the last room. The soldier moved forward as he and the man next to him ‘sliced the pie’, covering the room in an arc with their weapons as they moved through the doorway.
Gus and Rose lay on the floor, bound and gagged but conscious, their faces frozen in a grimace of pure terror. But between Kate and her children stood a nervous young Albanian gangster, tattoos all over his arms, who was using Fiona as a human shield. The lead Special Forces soldier did not hesitate, delivering an instant double tap – two shots – through the lower jaw to the part of the brain that controls the spinal cord. The gangster dropped immediately.
And there, in the middle of the screen, was the face of her bound, gagged daughter, whose mouth was wide open in a silent scream.
Epilogue
IN OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, Kate might have cracked a smile at the sheer irony of it.
How many weeks had it been since she had sat in that same corner office interviewing Suzy Spencer for the role as her deputy? Four? Five? And yet here she was being questioned in return, their roles – even their seats – neatly reversed.
Alongside Suzy loomed the tall, angular, lugubrious Shirley Grove, the cabinet secretary, a woman so devoid of charisma she might have merged with the wallpaper. Kate was learning too late that these were the most dangerous mandarins of all.
‘So, if we could recap,’ Grove said. ‘In the beginning, you thought Sergei tipped you off about the original meeting on Igor’s super-yacht out of . . . friendship?’
‘Yes.’
‘Though you considered it possible he was also acting on behalf of his bosses in the GRU?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘As a result of a power-tussle at the heart of the Kremlin, as they tried to gain the upper hand on their rivals in the Foreign Service, the SVR?’
‘Yes.’
‘In other words, a win-win for Sergei. He pleased his bosses and the woman he loved?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You therefore thought the conversation you recorded on Igor’s super-yacht genuine?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘And that James Ryan was the Russian spy or agent of influence?’
‘Yes.’
‘So when you were later told that the GRU were coming out on top in this power struggle and that Igor wanted to defect, in return for bringing you hard evidence of the prime minister’s treachery, that seemed perfectly credible?’
‘Yes.’ Kate wondered how long this history lesson was going to last.
‘You were further convinced that Stuart was Viper, the agent mentioned in that original overheard conversation?’
‘I don’t think there’s much doubt that Stuart was working for the Russians.’
Grove nodded. She turned the page, moving on. The issue of whether there was another Russian mole at the heart of Whitehall was a much more open question, of course, but Kate wasn’t going to raise that now. Her priority was to get out of there fast, with the minimum chance of any recall.
‘The foreign secretary was reluctant to accept Igor Borodin’s defection at face value,’ Grove went on. ‘She wanted more evidence. That was why you went to St Petersburg and then Moscow in search of Sergei?’
‘Yes.’
‘He confirmed your supposition at the time, that Igor was losing the power struggle and needed to get out of Russia?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you believed Igor Borodin killed Sergei to prevent any potential interference with his planned defection?’
‘Not immediately, but I came to that conclusion shortly after it went wrong.’
‘Why?’
‘It was the only explanation that made sense to me.’
‘At the time.’
‘At the time, yes.’ Kate would dearly have loved to find a way to make Igor pay for Sergei’s murder. But it was too late for that.
Grove turned another page. ‘When Mr Borodin told you on the tarmac at Tbilisi airport that the prime minister was definitely working for Moscow and that Ian had unwittingly passed on information to our enemies by keeping him informed at every turn, you believed that too at the time?’
‘I did, yes.’
‘So, in short, when you took off from Tbilisi, you were firmly of the view that the PM was a traitor and that Ian Granger was, at best, an indiscreet and ambitiou
s fool who had unwittingly assisted him.’
Kate glanced out of the window at Ian, who was pacing the corridor. ‘Yes.’
‘You have not heard anything from Igor Borodin since that conversation on the tarmac?’
‘No one has. Not us, not GCHQ. He and his family have vanished off the face of the earth.’
‘Where did you think they had gone?’
‘I assumed that, if the GRU had won the power struggle and he was caught in the act of defecting, he and his family were probably in a Siberian gulag or dead already.’
‘I see,’ Shirley Grove said, without emotion. She turned over another page and cleared her throat as she approached the climax of this charade. ‘And yet you now say that everything you once believed in relation to this case was wrong?’
‘That’s correct.’ Kate met her deputy’s flinty glaze. How slow she had been to realize that Suzy’s true purpose – as instructed by Grove and her master, the prime minister, no doubt, and, of course, aided and abetted by Ian – had not in fact been to open up the Operation Sigma file but to find the means and the method to ensure it remained closed. For ever.
‘So to be clear,’ Grove went on, ‘you are now saying it was a set-up, right from the start. A great big Fabergé egg of a fake. Far from being rivals, the GRU worked with the SVR to sell us – to sell you – the mother and father of all intelligence dummies. The prime minister was never working for the Russians, the sex video was a fake, Stuart was the only agent working in Whitehall – and he was easily expendable in the cause of creating terrible chaos, confusion and mistrust at the heart of our democratic system?’
It was a moment before Kate realized Grove was expecting an answer. She certainly was exacting her pound of flesh. ‘Yes,’ Kate said. ‘Absolutely.’
If the price of escaping all this was to flip everything she really believed on its head, she might as well do it with conviction.
‘Sergei was killed just in case he blurted out the real truth to you on the train – that you had been deceived and manipulated right from the start?’
‘Yes,’ Kate said again, with excessive conviction. ‘That is correct.’
Grove tapped her pen on the file. ‘A cynic might note, Mrs Henderson, that you have announced you wish to leave the service with immediate effect. This way, the case is conveniently closed. There will be no committee of inquiry, no torturous, complicated, draining search for the truth. Just closure. The prime minister recovers his reputation, the Service can move on and you . . . well, you walk away, with your reputation and references intact. Free as a bird, one might say.’
