by Tom Bradby
‘Do it,’ Kate said. ‘But tell them to keep their distance. Maximum discretion.’
Danny spoke into the microphone on the desk, then fiddled with his laptop and maximized the feed from a camera listed as Bravo Four. The screen was suddenly filled with the image of a lone figure disappearing rapidly down an alleyway in the gathering darkness. It was just about possible to make out that it was Lena.
‘Where the fuck is she going?’ Kate asked. ‘Come on, Lena, don’t do this to me.’
‘Look.’ Danny pointed at the neighbouring monitor. Igor’s yacht was now making a tight arc as it headed towards the harbour mouth.
‘Something’s wrong here,’ Kate said. ‘Where the fuck are you going, Lena?’
They turned back to the Bravo Four feed, but the guy carrying it had stopped dead. ‘She went into that door on the right,’ Danny said. ‘The one at the end.’
Kate’s heart was thumping. ‘Get someone around the back!’
On the largest of the screens, the Empress was now steaming towards the spot where the sun had almost sunk into the sea.
Danny brought up another feed: Bravo One. ‘Back door,’ he confirmed.
‘Sure?’
He was studying a map of the town. ‘Yup. Has to be.’
There was no sign of life in either shot. No lights, no people passing.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Kate said. ‘Go in.’ She started towards the door. ‘Go in hard, both sides.’
As Danny gave the instruction to the team on the ground, Kate sprinted towards the hotel entrance, Rav and Julie half a pace behind her. At the bottom of the slope, they swung into the cobbled alley leading off the quayside. Rav had fired up Google Maps on his phone: he was trying to look at the screen and run at the same time.
It took them less than a minute to locate the house. It wasn’t difficult: the front door was hanging off its hinges. The surveillance team were already combing through the place. ‘Where is she?’ Kate asked Ralph, a slight five feet ten of Scottish skin and bone whose appearance belied his strength and agility.
‘No sign of anyone.’
Kate doubled back. ‘Spread out,’ she told Rav and Julie, then called over her shoulder, ‘All of you.’
She hurried up to a nearby square, where a handful of tourists were eating in the lee of a church. She turned left at the top of the hill and began to work her way back down towards the water sweeping everything in the arc of her vision, one way and then the other. She could not afford to lose Lena. She was not going to lose her.
She was in deep shadow now. A solitary street lamp flickered uncertainly ahead of her. She spotted Rav beside a battered white Fiat that looked as if it had been recently abandoned, its rear doors and boot thrown open.
The shutters of a nearby apartment block banged in the wind. Kate moved towards it. She held up a hand when they were a couple of metres short of the entrance. She and Rav stopped in their tracks.
Kate pushed open the door with infinite care and stepped inside. A hint of movement and the glint of gunmetal at the periphery of her vision prompted the response that had been second nature since her training at Fort Monckton all those years ago. Her swiftly raised hand sent the silenced round up the stairwell. She grasped the barrel and reversed it against her assailant’s wrist until she was able to rip the pistol – a Sig Sauer P226, complete with suppressor – from his grasp. She fired twice into his groin and was about to give his knees the same treatment as he went down when a fist cannoned into the back of her hand and launched the weapon into the shadows.
The second man had a blade, and she slammed herself into the wall only just in time to avoid his thrust.
She and Rav backed away, then darted up the stairs. It was virtually impossible to disarm a trained killer with a knife, and neither of them was about to try.
Rav wrenched a fire extinguisher out of its wall bracket as they arrived on the landing, and sent a chunk of plaster tumbling down the way they had come. They turned and stood their ground. It was pitch black, except for a sliver of moonlight, so they had to rely upon the sixth sense that had saved them from a bullet in the head moments before.
Kate strained her ears for the slightest sound above the distant howl of the wind.
They waited.
It was two against one, but the odds were still with him. Kate and Rav needed him to commit, to make the first move.
The air molecules in the stairwell were momentarily rearranged as the knifeman lunged forward. Rav blocked him with the fire extinguisher and Kate swung behind him, wrapping her right arm around his neck.
He knew exactly what she was doing and tried to reverse the blade and thrust it towards her, but she’d planted her elbow between his shoulder blades and was beginning to close down his carotid artery.
Rav feinted at his chest and brought the canister down on his wrist, but the man had been swiping at thin air by then, confused as to whom he should have been targeting. His weapon skittered across the floor, and five seconds later, he dropped like water.
They stood over him, breathing hard. Rav felt for the pulse in the man’s neck, but they both knew it was a formality. She heard him run his hands through every pocket, sensed rather than saw the shake of his head, then followed him down to the ground floor to retrieve the pistol.
As he stepped back towards the shaft of moonlight that was forcing its way between the leading edge of the door and its frame, she saw that something was troubling him. He stopped and seemed to sniff the air for a potential attacker. Kate froze as the shaft suddenly widened and a third man burst into the hallway, weapon raised, muzzle in the aim, with her as its prime target. But Rav had already raised the Sig, and double-tapped the intruder, centre mass, before the man’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness.
They stepped back into the shadows and listened. ‘You mustn’t keep saving my worthless neck,’ she muttered eventually. ‘It’s getting embarrassing.’
‘No, it’s not,’ he whispered. ‘It’s the only way I know right now of persuading myself I’m not completely useless.’
Kate selected the torch app on her phone and they circled the building. If Lena had ever been there, Kate had to acknowledge that she wasn’t now. She sat down on the stairs. ‘Now what?’
Rav shook his head.
‘Kidnap, murder?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We’ll have to talk to Athens.’
Rav pointed at the corpses. ‘They’ll go mental.’
Kate stood. ‘Let’s go.’
When they got back to the hotel, she called the MI6 station chief in Athens. He sounded miffed not to have been told of the operation and said the Greeks would be furious when they discovered it was being conducted on their soil without their knowledge. But Kate was the ranking officer and she cut him dead. ‘We need to find her,’ she said. ‘So please just do it.’
They found Julie again on the quay. ‘You’ve cut your face,’ she said.
‘They were waiting for us.’
Julie glanced at the blood on Rav’s right hand. ‘Yours?’
He shrugged. ‘Possibly. Possibly not.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘In a stairwell. Do you have anything?’
She shook her head, trying, Kate thought, to keep last night’s demons away. ‘She’s vanished. Like a ghost.’
‘She can’t have vanished!’ Kate insisted.
‘Ralph and the team have been over every inch of the town and of the house. They must have bundled her into a car by the back door before we could get the camera there.’
‘Talk to GCHQ and the CIA. See if there was any satellite cover.’
Kate and Rav retreated to Danny’s ops room and reviewed the footage from the main cameras in forensic detail, then the feeds from each member of the surveillance team. They all told the same story. Lena appeared on the deck of the Empress. She did not look distressed or concerned. She climbed down onto the launch and came ashore. She walked towards the awning of a caf�
�, then disappeared. No more than sixty seconds later, they picked up her receding figure in the darkened alley, heading towards that doorway.
And then nothing.
They reran the alley sequence again and again.
Lena’s hair. Lena’s clothes. Lena’s shoulder bag. Lena’s walk.
But they only ever saw her from the back. It would take painstaking motion-capture analysis to be sure it was her.
Kate glanced at her watch. It was almost eleven o’clock. About four hours since Lena had climbed aboard that launch. Her phone rang. It was the Athens station chief. ‘The Greeks are raging. It’s going to take me a few hours to calm them down enough to help.’
‘We don’t have a few hours.’
‘I’m doing my best, Kate.’ He was called Nick and they’d met once, at an unarmed-combat refresher course at Fort Monckton five years before.
She hung up. The phone rang again. This time it was Ian. She didn’t answer.
‘I’m going to take a shower,’ Kate said. She turned to Julie. ‘Would you mind dealing with the police? You can’t miss the building. It’s full of dead Russians. And there’s a white Fiat Punto outside with its doors open.’
‘Always supposing they were Russians,’ Rav said. ‘They didn’t say anything, even when we got up close and personal. And they were sterile.’
‘Couldn’t you smell them?’ Kate said. ‘They were Russian all right.’
Kate didn’t get into the shower immediately, though she badly needed to wash off the blood and the unmistakable odour of failure. Maybe if she just sat on the bed for a while she could persuade herself that Lena had found another great place for ice-cream, then nipped back for a fun evening with those nice people on board the Empress.
She glanced at her phone. There was a missed call from Stuart, but she couldn’t face getting back to him now. Besides, her hands were shaking so badly she’d probably press the wrong button. It was a long time since she’d killed a man, but it didn’t get any easier.
She looked around the room, searching for distraction. Then she got up. Something wasn’t right. The rug had been moved. Its edge was no longer quite parallel with the floor tiles. And the tiles were cleaner than they had been that afternoon.
Housekeeping didn’t operate in the evening.
She went into the bathroom, but nothing there seemed to have been disturbed. She studiously avoided catching sight of herself in the mirror above the sink. Instead, she went back to the bedroom and pulled open the wardrobe door. There, against the wall, staring at her sightlessly, was Lena’s body, naked and covered with blood.
15
At eleven o’clock the next morning, Kate stood in a gloomy basement room with peeling green paint and four rickety air-conditioning units. The Greek capital’s Forensic Science Centre in Antigonis Street was some distance from state-of-the-art.
If Lena looked at peace, she knew it had much to do with the sympathetic attentions of Dr Minakis and her assistant. The senior pathologist was a woman of around Kate’s age, with a warmth and passion for life that Kate had learnt, perhaps counter-intuitively, to associate with those in her profession. She looked at Kate over her reading glasses. ‘Nothing complicated. They drugged her.’
She pointed at the needle mark in Lena’s upper right arm. ‘We don’t yet know what they used, but will do as soon as we have run the tests. I will let you know, of course.’
Dr Minakis lifted Lena’s right wrist. ‘They bound her. I don’t know why. I don’t think she was in a position to struggle. We have found dog hair beneath her nails, perhaps from the boot of a car. There might be something for you there.’
‘We’ve found the car,’ Kate said. In the middle of the night, the CIA had come back with the requisite satellite coverage. It showed Lena being bundled out of the back of the building they had seen her entering and into a grey Renault Espace. They had killed her in the car, then driven straight to the hotel, where two men could be seen depositing the body in Kate’s room. They drove on to a beach a few miles further down the coast where a dinghy was waiting to take them to a fast boat that returned them to Athens. They boarded a private jet at the airport. It had filed a flight plan to Georgia, but had rerouted once it was close to Russian airspace.
It had all been planned with the kind of ruthless efficiency of which the Russians so often showed themselves capable.
‘The rest you can see. They cut her throat. We can all be thankful that she died swiftly.’
‘Thankful’ wasn’t the word that echoed in Kate’s head. The sight of Lena’s lovely young face, the clear blue eyes and unblemished complexion, was almost harder to take than the livid gash beneath her beautifully sculpted chin. She was haunted by the contrast between her own privileged daughter and this girl who had come from nothing and been forced into taking a risk she hadn’t sought to try to save her sister and make something of her own life.
Forced by Kate.
It had been her call. Her idea. Her operation from the beginning. Irrespective of the findings of an inquest, she was in no doubt about who deserved the blame. She had witnessed death often enough. She had ordered it, and seen the whites of its eyes. But she knew she would never be able to wash the taste of this one out of her mouth.
She became aware that Dr Minakis had stopped talking, and was looking at her sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
Kate nodded, and had some difficulty swallowing. Not for the first time, she took momentary refuge in procedure. ‘I’d like to know what drug they used, Doctor.’ Kate gave her a card with a Foreign & Commonwealth Office cover but an email account that was routed through to her via a number of digital blind alleys.
She saw herself out. Rav and Julie were waiting on the street. ‘How did you get on?’ she asked.
‘They’re still mightily pissed off that we didn’t let them know we were here,’ Rav said, ‘but they’ll get over it. They’re even more worried about the Russians than we are.’
‘Have they found anything else on Andros?’
Julie had been liaising with the local police and the coast guard. ‘You want me to get an Uber? We could make the afternoon flight to London.’
Kate squinted against the late-morning sun. ‘Please. I’m tempted to find somewhere I can bury my head in the sand, but I need to go home and face the music.’
‘Two minutes,’ Julie said.
Too tired to talk, Rav and Julie shared a cigarette. Kate stepped back into the shade and leant against a wall.
‘Don’t stare at me like that,’ Julie said.
‘Like what?’ Kate said.
‘Like you’re wondering why I look so shit.’
‘There are quite a few things I can’t get my head around right now, but that’s not one of them.’
‘Good. Because I haven’t been crying. It’s just the smoke.’ She held up her Marlboro and managed a weak smile. ‘Gets in my eyes.’
Kate insisted Rav and Julie go straight home from Heathrow, and wished she could do the same. Ian was waiting for her in his office, blinds drawn and the lights down low. He looked like thunder. ‘Have a seat,’ he muttered. ‘Coffee? Tea?’
‘Coffee might help. I haven’t had a lot of sleep.’
‘Suzy’s gone home, so I’ll get it myself.’
He vanished before she could offer to go.
Kate glanced at his books. Nearly all non-fiction, politics or history. Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs. Andrew Roberts on Napoleon. Le Carré’s novels occupied one entire shelf. Who did Ian think he was? George Smiley?
A framed photograph of him dressed from head to toe in Lycra and holding a bike above his head at the top of a mountain pass took pride of place on the far wall. The not-completely-spontaneous shots of the family in the Alps, on Mustique and at the Monaco Grand Prix alongside it sent a message that was rather easier to decode. His desk was covered with snaps of his wife and three teenage boys. As he never tired of reminding anyone who came within reach, he and Ella had met at Oxford. S
he ran her own internet retail business, now reputedly worth a fortune. Ella dutifully attended all office functions, but she looked a little wearier each time. After a throwaway comment a few years back – ‘Show me one middle-aged couple who has sex any more’ – Kate had begun to appreciate why she might turn a blind eye to her husband’s many office affairs. He was spectacularly unsubtle about it, so she couldn’t possibly have missed the signs.
Ian returned with her coffee. ‘Two sugars,’ he said. ‘Thought you might need it.’
‘Thank you.’
He sat on the sofa opposite her, tugging his trousers up a little above the knee – another of his annoying habits – then crossed his legs, as if this was a languid philosophy tutorial rather than the dissection of an operation that had led to the death of a girl in her charge.
She expected a barrage of questions about every twist and turn of the Andros mission, and every decision she had taken along the way, but Ian was a lot more clinical. ‘We started work as soon as you called last night. Thank you for the rapidity of the heads-up, by the way. I appreciate it. I brought in a team and we began by looking at traffic through Athens airport.’
He flipped open the file on the coffee-table in front of him and pushed across a selection of CCTV images from the immigration hall and photographs of five men from their own files. ‘Recognize them?’
She tapped three. ‘They were the guys who ambushed us in the stairwell.’
‘One of their specialist wet teams,’ Ian said. ‘I’m afraid the Serbian girl never had a chance. And the fact that you got the better of them does you great credit.’
Kate left the pictures where they lay.
‘Check out the time stamp on the CCTV grabs,’ Ian said.
11.27.
‘They hired a speedboat in Rafina for cash and were on your island less than an hour later.’
Kate continued to stare at the pictures. ‘So they knew.’
‘Someone must have alerted them that you were on your way to Andros.’
‘But we didn’t take the decision to go until … well, early evening the previous day. I’d have to go over the timeline, but—’
