‘You’ve got to be young and fit. Is he?’
‘I heard in his day he was pretty good in the field.’
‘Alright,’ Tallis said. ‘So say Fazan is doing the killing for reasons we haven’t even begun to work out, but would he seriously have a crack at the Prime Minister?’
Darke let out a sigh. ‘No, I agree with you. That doesn’t tally. Besides, he’d be easily identified at such a public gathering.’
‘Which brings me to my next question,’ Tallis said. ‘Why go to Asim in the first place, why involve me?’
‘To make it look good. Puts him on the side of the angels.’
‘But he didn’t need to. He could have orchestrated the hits and simply left it at that. The Chechens are always getting the blame. By sending me to find you, he was actually drawing attention to you and taking a risk of exposure. He must have known there was a chance I’d actually defy the odds, find you and bring you back.’
‘And point the finger in his direction.’
‘Precisely. Back to square one.’
‘Do you think your contact, Asim, is on the level?’
In this business, you had to trust someone, and Tallis trusted Asim implicitly, which was why he felt as if Asim were sending some kind of coded message when he talked about them coming in. Then there was the whole business of those mysterious calls from Shobdon. Had the operation been compromised right from the start? His thoughts went immediately to Blaine Deverill, the spooky Walther Mitty character who’d quizzed him in the canteen.
‘Know how to pilot a helicopter?’ Tallis asked Darke.
‘No, why?’
‘We’re flying to Berlin.’
Orlov wasn’t happy. Since Tallis had proposed the idea he’d been chain-smoking cigars like a laboratory-tested beagle. ‘What if you don’t come back?’
‘I will, I promise,’ Tallis said.
‘What if you don’t? What about my helicopter?’
‘I’ll have it delivered.’
Orlov blew another gust of smoke into the atmosphere. They were in Chaikova’s large sitting room, maps and military paraphernalia on one wall, iconic pictures of 1950s starlets on the other. Tallis, Darke and Orlov’s pilot were bent over a map, working out a route. Orlov cast Tallis one of his curious smiles. ‘I think you’re really James Bond, Tallis.’
James Bond, Jason Bourne, how come I don’t get the girl, then? Tallis wanted to say. Katya’s luminous face briefly materialised in front of him. He bent over the map again, redoubled his thinking. The distance from Moscow to Berlin was approximately a thousand miles. Taking into account a wind speed of twenty knots, travelling at one hundred and fifty miles an hour, he reckoned they should average three hundred miles in two hours. If they could refuel with the rotors running, they’d arrive in Berlin in roughly eight hours, and if he radioed ahead to Asim, transport from Reinsdorff to the British Embassy could be laid on. However, he was still feeling jittery about making an approach.
‘Where can we pick up Av-Gas?’ Tallis asked Orlov’s pilot.
‘Minsk, Brest, Warsaw.’
Darke glanced up at Tallis. ‘What about a flight plan?’
‘We’ll fly outside the zones—means dropping to a lower level. I’ve done it before. It’s not a problem.’ Except last time he’d been refreshed and healthy and rested. Last time it had been a bit of fun.
‘Here,’ Chaikova said, striding towards them, looking like Rambo. He’d spent the last ten minutes rooting in the armoury. ‘In case you run into trouble,’ Chaikova said, dumping a cache of weapons on the table in the middle of Poland.
‘My God, what sort of trouble?’ Orlov coughed, obviously alarmed his nice expensive helicopter was going to be turned into a sieve.
Nobody took any notice of him.
‘Bloody hell! Is this what I think it is?’ Darke picked up a gun, handed it to Tallis who studied it with professional interest and handed it back.
‘Heavy sniper rifle,’ Darke said, weighing it in his hands. ‘And the cartridge is a brute. My guess it’s a silent semi-automatic.’ He looked up at Chaikova. ‘Val Silent Sniper. Good to blast through body armour even at ranges of four hundred metres or more.’
Chaikova grinned, his eyes disappearing into one of the seams in his face. ‘And for you,’ he said, picking out a Heckler and Koch MSG90 military sniping rifle and passing it to Tallis. In common with its close cousin, the PSG1, the rifle was outstanding for its accuracy. It had a range of settings to twelve hundred metres.
Orlov let out a groan and bit down hard, almost severing his best Havana.
Clean, fed and watered, and starting to feel slightly more human, Tallis and Darke took to the skies shortly before eleven. The weather, which had started that morning with crisp clean sunshine and puffy white clouds like dandelion clocks quickly deteriorated to a universal grotty grey.
‘Visual is critical so keep a lookout,’ Tallis said, rubbing his eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep.
‘What, in case you nod off?’
‘If I do, give me a prod, but make it gentle,’ Tallis flicked a smile. ‘No sudden movements.’
They were sixty miles north of Smolensk, flying over the Przhevalsky National Park when Tallis clocked something to his port side. Fuck, he thought. Wasn’t a transport helicopter, or the search-and-rescue model, this was the real deal—armed, armoured and fitted with built-in machine-guns and six external weapons racks with S-5 rockets. These guys weren’t out for a jolly. ‘Spot on,’ he let out, praying that they hadn’t detected him. Jolted into action, Darke reached for his rifle as Tallis manoeuvred the helicopter into cloud cover. Perhaps they’d simply go away, Tallis thought. Perhaps they were looking for someone else. If they’d seen him, or picked him up via his transponder, and already launched a missile they were doomed. Probably too late, he quickly flicked off the transponder.
‘What do you reckon?’ Darke said, alert. For safety reasons he’d been travelling with the safety catch on. Now he depressed it for fire. ‘Any way I can take a shot at them?’
‘Only if I get up on the blind side. I don’t want to risk it unless they have hostile intent.’ No point trying to attack simply for the hell of it, he thought. They had overwhelming firepower on their side. The best course of action was outrun and outrange.
‘Might be too late by then.’
Tallis privately agreed. He thought about radioing them to see what their game was but was reluctant to blow his cover. Emerging from the cloud, he decided to drop low, making him a more difficult target. As soon as he did so, the Russians exploded from behind a bank of cloud, hot on his tail.
‘Shit,’ he cursed, sweat erupting from his brow. Seeing the missile launch, he peeled off and turned in sharply so that he was facing his attacker and flying at a perpendicular angle towards the enemy. The missile hit where they had been rather than where they were. Hanging out of the machine, Kumarin was bellowing orders. So that’s where it all went pear-shaped, Tallis realised. Kumarin, Grigori Orlov’s engineer and the guy responsible for negotiating the helicopter deal, had been in on the act right from the very start. With a dull shudder he wondered about Orlov. It would be rational to suspect his involvement, too, except Tallis didn’t quite buy it. Orlov had bent over backwards to help him.
Darke let off a round, forcing Kumarin to dodge back into the cockpit, singed, maybe, but unharmed.
‘Motherfucker! Might as well be armed with a peashooter.’
‘Hang on. I’m dropping low.’ At least there was no sunshine to reveal their shadow, Tallis thought, and even though the enemy helicopter was swooping down after them, it would have more difficulty with locking onto a low-flying target. His idea was to get as much terrain between them and an incoming missile. Failing that, they’d have to get sneaky. And lucky.
‘How far to the border with Belarus?’ Darke said.
‘About a hundred and twenty miles.’
‘Pity. If we can fly there, the military will soon sort them out. They might be
more Soviet than Stalin, but they’re fiercely nationalistic even against the Russians.’
‘What makes you think they won’t sort us out?’ Tallis said, tracking along the river Dnepr at less than six hundred feet, temporarily vanishing inside some low-lying mist. Good, he thought, no sign of the enemy. ‘Looks like a gully ahead,’ he said. ‘We’ll land, wait for them to pass over and get behind them.’
He switched off the engine, allowing the helicopter to glide down gracefully, quiet and serene, before switching it back on, the engine immediately kicking into life as the helicopter went into a hover. On landing, Tallis kept the rotors running.
‘I’m climbing in the back,’ Darke said. ‘It will give me more manoeuvrability.’
Sure enough, a minute later the Russian helicopter flew overhead. Tallis counted to twenty then took off again, raising the collective control, increasing the power and pitch on the blades so that enough air was pushed downwards to lift the Agusta.
‘Fuck me, where are they?’ Darke let out, scanning the skies, his finger light on the trigger.
Playing cat and mouse, Tallis thought. No sooner had he climbed to two thousand feet than he saw the Russians behind him on his starboard side. In seconds they’d be above and on six o’clock. Curtains, he thought, then watched with amazement as Kumarin, his face blown away by a silent shot from Darke, tumbled out of the open door and plummeted thousands of feet. The attack helicopter immediately began a tight turn in response.
It was the diversion he needed. Spotting the forest of Katyn ahead, he moved the collective control once more to decrease altitude and let the Agusta plunge down towards the trees. Like most of Russia, the forest had an unsavoury history. The earth was saturated with the blood of thousands of Poles shot by the NKVD, predecessor of the KGB, and Russian prisoners of war massacred by Nazis.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Darke shouted out.
‘Playing chicken,’ Tallis called back. Let’s see who’s got the biggest balls, he thought.
As predicted, the Russians, having peeled away, also dropped down. Gritting his teeth, Tallis increased speed and headed for a narrow country road on the edge of the forest, forcing the helicopter down almost to ground level, the rotors skimming the tops of hedges. The enemy was playing the same game, except that the machine wasn’t as responsive as it ought to be. It was dipping and rising dangerously, like a bucking bronco. Either too old, or too knackered, or, Tallis thought, hope rising, with his passenger decorating the landscape, the pilot had lost his bottle. If it came to it, a wellflown fully operating helicopter was every bit a match for a badly piloted wreck of an attack machine.
He turned minutely and glanced at Darke. Neither of them spoke. Nerves had taken over.
They were at the entrance to the forest. The path ahead was roughly the same width as the rotors. If that suddenly narrowed, Tallis knew he was done for. Bracing himself, he flew into the sea of green, the Agusta’s paintwork perfect camouflage. With the Russians continuing the pursuit, Tallis adjusted the throttle and increased power, his eyes straining to see a way ahead.
The path widened out into a clearing. Seizing the opportunity, the attack helicopter speeded up, lining up for a kill shot. Tallis blinked, taking his last breath, waiting for a fast single fare to eternity. But nothing happened. Something was wrong. The system must have jammed or bust. Suddenly the trees began to close in, the path ahead funnelling. When Tallis abruptly rolled sideways, peeling up and away, the Russians’ rotors clipped the trees. The pursuing helicopter seemed to buck one last time before ploughing straight into the ground, where it exploded in a ball of flame.
They were refuelling at Warsaw when Asim’s voice suddenly crackled over the radio. His tone was dry and cynical.
‘You wouldn’t happen to know anything about a Russian attack helicopter coming down over Katyn, would you?’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ Tallis said, cool.
‘The undeniable fact you were in the vicinity?’
‘Coincidence. What happened to you earlier? You sounded a bit odd,’ Tallis said, deftly changing the subject.
‘I was in a meeting with C.’ The head of the Secret Intelligence Service? Tallis ignored a worried glance from Darke. ‘There’s been a fresh development.’
‘Yeah?’ Tallis said.
‘Where are you heading?’
‘Berlin.’
‘The Embassy, I trust.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I’ll have you collected soon as you touch down on German soil.’
Tallis gave the co-ordinates.
‘Darke here,’ Graham burst in. ‘Like to tell us what the hell is going on?’
‘Good afternoon,’ Asim said smoothly. ‘A Russian professor by the name of Dr Turpal Numerov was scheduled to give a series of lectures in Berlin at Humboldt University. This morning he walked into the Embassy, claiming political asylum. Apparently, he says he worked for the FSB.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THEY were collected in a lithe black Mercedes-Benz S-class. Two officers got out, searched and disarmed them: standard procedure. Tallis sank back into the huge interior and closed his eyes. Darke, preoccupied, sat beside him. He must have dropped off for, in what felt like no time at all, they’d pulled up outside the bollarded entrance to Wilhelmstrasse, where German police minutely examined the driver’s credentials. Their papers in order, the bollards were electronically lowered and they were waved on.
The Embassy was a modern construction designed, to Tallis’s mind, by a three-year-old. The outside was big yellow sandstone blocks. It had a blue glass frontage and part of the building was a bright purple curve.
Following another search, Tallis and Darke were shown into a meeting room with cameras in all four corners. Christian Fazan was waiting to meet and greet them. He was bigger than Tallis had expected and could easily pass for a Russian, he thought, watching Fazan’s genuine pleasure and relief at seeing Darke while also observing shock in those dark brown eyes at the scarring on Darke’s face. It seemed to Tallis, in that moment, that Fazan’s emotional make-up was tempered by something else, though what he couldn’t say. Fazan obviously hadn’t forgotten the intelligence with which he’d been supplied, even though it had been wrong.
‘Good to have you back, Graham,’ he said, shaking his hand and clapping Darke on the back. ‘Sorry for springing you so unceremoniously.’
‘We need to talk about that,’ Darke said coolly.
‘We do, indeed.’ Fazan smiled, breaking the tension, turning his attention to Tallis, who he shook warmly by the hand. ‘Fantastic job. Asim was absolutely right about you. ‘Drink?’ he said, moving with agility towards a cabinet from which he took out a bottle of Chivas Regal and three glasses. He was left-handed, Tallis noticed. No wedding ring on his finger. Tallis glanced across at Darke, almost expecting him to refuse the alcohol—for the best part of a decade he’d lived as a devout Muslim—but Darke accepted, raising the glass, and took a healthy gulp. Darke was right about where his loyalties lay, Tallis thought—to the security service first and foremost.
‘I’m not sure whether you’re familiar with the drill,’ Fazan said, looking at Tallis.
‘You want to debrief both of us,’ Tallis said, feeling the alcohol throbbing pleasantly through his bloodstream.
‘And separately.’
‘What about Numerov?’ Tallis said, recalling Asim’s conversation and his revelation about the Russian professor who’d claimed asylum.
Fazan issued a smile, short and businesslike. You’re new to the spy game, aren’t you? his expression implied. ‘How did you come by that information?’
Tallis felt himself flush. He hadn’t wanted to drop Asim in it. With no convincing way out, he told Fazan the truth.
‘I see,’ Fazan said, curt. ‘Despite what you may think, a genuine turn-coat from the former Soviet Union is extremely rare. It will take many months in a safe house to see whether he can be trusted. The Russians place a great deal o
f importance on agent infiltration. They have a well-documented history of sending their people over feigning a desire for Western ideology and disillusionment with the current regime.’
‘And supplying misinformation,’ Darke said, a slightly surly note in his voice.
Fazan said nothing. He knew what Darke was getting at, Tallis thought, but wasn’t going to apologise until after the debrief. The fact was, Tallis didn’t envy Fazan one little bit. Basically, the man had made the wrong call. He should have been more cautious regarding the quality of information supplied about Darke. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a measure of sympathy. It wasn’t very nice to have one’s professionalism called into question at such a high level. ‘I thought all that finished with the fall of the Berlin wall and break-up of the Soviet Union,’ Tallis said, trying to lower the emotional temperature in the room. It suddenly occurred to him that Fazan and Darke had something in common: both were proud men.
‘The focus has switched from Eastern Europe to the Middle East,’ Darke admitted. ‘But assets are still cultivated, agents recruited, betrayal their currency.’
‘The world hasn’t changed so very much,’ Fazan agreed with a smile, looking pointedly in Tallis’s direction. And none of this is your concern, was what he meant, Tallis thought, studying the man over the rim of his glass. ‘So, if you’ve finished, gentlemen,’ Fazan added with what appeared to be old-school charm, ‘let’s get started.’
Tallis didn’t think they had the facilities, but he was wrong. He was escorted one way through the building, Darke the other. In a room with padded walls and without a window, he gave a full and calm account of his time in Russia to two colourless intelligence officers with Home Counties accents. He spoke of his dinner-party conversation with Andrei Ivanov, his foray into Chechnya, where he’d stayed, with whom he’d stayed and who he’d travelled with, his meeting with the rebels and his part in the attack on a Russian police station. He talked of his flight back through Chechnya and his interrogation and torture by a wing of the FSB. He passed on Darke’s intelligence about Akhmet’s intended meeting with Hattab, more to corroborate Darke’s story than to gain any brownie points.
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