The Kompromat Kill

by Michael Jenkins

  The suited hotel man looked Sean in the eye, but he continued to meander towards the exit, taking a cigarette from his Rothmans packet. The doorman opened the huge glass door and Sean popped out into the still air of the night, watching a black Porsche Cayenne glide to a halt in a layby on the mosaicked roadway. He drew on the cigarette, telling himself he was sober and could make this work. He simply needed an escape. Time spent on recce was seldom wasted he told himself, knowing he was now under full surveillance.

  Chapter 25

  Raffles Hotel, Istanbul

  Sean tossed his cigarette into a sand-filled container and made his way back to the lobby, making sure his swaying gait was that of an inebriated man, just as he had done coming down from the hotel suite.

  The men didn’t seem to have any radios or earpieces, which told him they were more likely to be local thugs told to do a job on him rather than pros from an agency. Surveillance more than attack, he thought. He made a mental note not to use his credit cards again, and to rely solely on the wads of cash he had in his rucksack. The lift was open and ready to go so he stepped in quickly, prepared if one or both of the hoods followed him. They didn’t.

  He arrived at the fifth floor fully expecting the third hood to be stood bowlegged, lurching around and picking his nose with boredom. Sean exited the lift, turned right and walked straight up to the man, who was now gazing out of the window, admiring the Istanbul vista, with his hand down his jeans scratching his arse. Sean tapped him on the shoulder.

  The bowlegged man turned with a jolt.

  Sean smiled harshly at him, keeping just the right distance in case he reacted aggressively. Sean waved a handful of dollars in the man’s face. ‘Listen, whoever has paid you, I’ll pay you more. Do you savvy?’

  The man had retrieved his hand from his backside and was stood in partial shock, mouth slightly open and with a gait that told Sean he was indeed an amateur. ‘It’s pretty simple really, no one will ever know I’ve paid you. You just say you missed me leaving the room, but the door was left open, so you entered to see if I was in there with the women who you saw turn up earlier.’

  The man said nothing but gazed oddly. Sean could smell a mix of cannabis and stale odour on him. He seemed lifeless and partially stoned. He wasn’t an intelligence officer for sure, nor a military man. But Sean wanted to find out who he was, the languages he spoke and who he was acting for. This was a man who was used to taking instruction, not acting with initiative, and one ruled by money and drugs.

  ‘Ty panimayesh?’ Sean asked in Russian.

  ‘Da, spaciba.’

  ‘Harasho. Good. Come with me and we’ll fix this’ Sean replied, pushing some notes into his jacket pocket.

  Sean steered him by the elbow, knowing full well the man understood a little English but didn’t quite know how to respond in a language that was so foreign to him when he was in shock.

  As Sean nudged the man into his suite, he smiled knowingly at the two women who had started to undress and parade around the room in matching black knickers and bras, just as Sean had requested on the telephone. One of them immediately handed the Russian a glass of champagne and began touching his balls. She encouraged him to text his friends to say he was fine, and that Sean was in his room with the girls.

  ‘Yours for the next couple of hours if you want them,’ Sean uttered in Russian. A glaze of joy came across the Russian’s face. ‘Let’s have some fun,’ Sean said to the girls, pointing to the champagne on the round glass table. He’s a bit of a novice but very eager and willing.’

  Thirty-five minutes later, Sean and the two women left the room, exiting via the western stairwell, pushed a fire-exit door open and jumped into the black Porsche Cayenne. Sean made sure he smashed the fire alarm on his way out and the mayhem of the hotel evacuation began within seconds. Sean and the two hookers had left the Russian strapped naked to the balcony railings of the suite overlooking the Bosphorus river, complete with a marble facsimile of the Blue Dome dangling from his penis.

  As Sean drove past the exiting crowds of the Raffles Hotel he caught a fleeting glimpse of Samantha and Swartz stood by a silver BMW.

  Chapter 26

  The Black Sea

  Sean walked with a limp up the gangway of RMS Crystal, which had been booked for the two-day voyage of one of the largest luxury travel conferences in the world. It was a conference held only every four years and the second time the international organisers had chosen to run it on a cruise liner. More than five hundred people from all over the world walked up the gangplanks that morning to a welcome from the ship’s officers within the lavish surroundings of one of the world’s finest cruise experiences. Sean entered separately, retaining his covert guise.

  Sean was moody and had remained quiet for most of the journey to the ship. He really didn’t feel like opening up to Swartz, who knew he was in a bad place. Sean had spent a day recovering from his hangover in a cheap Istanbul hotel, having endured a tortuous night before he finally plucked up the courage to give Swartz a call.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing Sean?’ Swartz had answered. ‘Jack and Samantha are going spare at what you left behind at Raffles. Some poor Russian bastard was superglued to the rails for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Yes, well. It was just a bit of fun, nothing more. Listen, I think those guys were sent by Nadège just to keep an eye on me. They weren’t Spetsnaz or anything so handy. If it wasn’t Nadège, then we have a leak somewhere. That could be fatal.’

  ‘OK, what’s your plan now then? They’ve got the CIA and every Tom, Dick and Harry looking for you. Jack is shit-scared you’ll blow his operation apart with the state of mind you’re in.’

  ‘My mind’s fine mate. I just needed a good blow out to get it out of my system.’

  ‘That was probably not the right thing to do mate, you’ve pissed everyone off. I don’t even know what caused you to go off the rails?’

  ‘All in good time. Now, I need a favour. You need to get me on a ship and go and buy me a couple of suits.’

  Sixteen hours later, Sean was sat in a car with Swartz, heading towards the port and the cruise liner that Nadège was due to sail on.

  ‘Come on mate, give me an idea at least,’ Swartz said empathetically. ‘You know it helps to talk mate.’

  Sean remained quiet, ignoring Swartz’s offer of support. Sean rarely showed emotion. He liked to think things through before he did. And it had to be with someone he trusted implicitly. Too many years of being shafted had made him a cautious man.

  ‘It’s a bit complex, and bloody confusing,’ Sean said wearily. He turned to face Swartz in the car and let rip. ‘I’ve just found out who killed my mother back in 1986. I had no idea she was murdered, and it was quite brutal by all accounts. I need to find out what happened.’

  Swartz gazed at him in astonishment. Nothing more was said for a while, but Sean could see Swartz’s mind was trying to compute what he’d just disclosed. Despite them being the best of friends, Sean had never ever talked about his family to Swartz. He felt shamed by it all.

  ‘Sean. Listen, I’m really sorry to hear about this. Will you be OK?’

  ‘It’s fine. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘There’s always some mad thing going on in your life and I’m here to help, you know that. What did you find out?’

  Sean explained how D had found out about his mother’s murder and described the hazy phone call with Melissa, who was investigating the disappearance of the FCO diplomat. Sean didn’t know the full extent of the linkage between the diplomat and Barrington, but Melissa was delving into every aspect of Barrington’s life to unearth the clues.

  ‘Something’s not right at all with this, Swartz. Melissa found out that this CIA guy who murdered my mother had previously served as the CIA station chief in Bosnia-Herzegovina.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was back in 1995. He was also operating from the American HQ based in Tuzla during the Bosnian War. Melissa found out that Duff was out there too.’<
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  ‘Might be nothing though. Lots of us who served on operations in far-flung wars have stayed in touch with each other.’

  ‘I know, but what’s curious is that the FCO bloke was a political liaison officer for the American HQ in Tuzla. And…’ Sean paused to think through his words. ‘…there were some dodgy goings-on at Tuzla with the local Bosnian mafia. I’m not sure how, but Melissa found out that some of the Tuzla officers were caught doing deals with local gangsters.’

  ‘Wow. How has Melissa found all this out?’

  ‘She has some pretty good contacts in the world of journalism.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Might have been protection, drugs, I don’t know. One or two got the sack, and the files relating to the cases have disappeared. I remember the Russians were also based at Tuzla as part of the US Division. They were always up to no good in the town.’

  ‘Still. It might be nothing Sean. That sort of stuff happened in the Brit areas and in Sarajevo too you know. Christ, most of the United Nations police officers in Sarajevo were knocking off local prostitutes. There was big money being exchanged when NATO and the International Police Task Force went in.’

  ‘I know. I remember it well. When NATO went in the local gangsters saw a market for selling anything at a price. But when I sense something isn’t right it’s normally the bloody case mate. This bastard has got blood on his hands, and Jack had an inkling he was operating as a double agent. Knowing his ilk, he was probably up to no good in Bosnia too, which is where the link with him and Duff comes in. Whoever nicked this FCO diplomat might be using him for some sort of extortion.’

  ‘What for though?’

  ‘I’ll find out. No one in London has heard a dicky bird about any ransom demand, unless Jack is holding stuff back from me.’

  ‘Well, he’s pretty cute in running these types of ops. Can’t blame him for that mate.’

  ‘Well we’ll see about that. The bastard has a way of using us to make things happen in Whitehall. Something is very odd here. I need to get to Barrington at some point and get the bastard to talk. I’ve got an idea or two forming.’

  ‘Why don’t you call it a day on this job then? Get back home and find out more about how your mum was killed.’

  Sean thought long and hard on that question. He thought it might be the better way. By the time he’d arrived at the transfer point where a taxi would take him the final mile to the dockside, he’d dismissed the notion.

  Swartz had done a sterling job with creating Sean’s disguise to get him on-board the cruise liner. He’d been told that two CIA officers would be monitoring those who boarded, whilst Samantha had been tasked to conduct surveillance on Nadège during the conference cruise. Sean was now fully bejewelled as a wealthy Hasidic Jew, complete with a kippah, wearing a long black suit reminiscent of Polish nobility in the eighteenth century and sporting a scraggly brown beard. The art of disguise had been taught to him by an expert held on the books of The Court on a part-time basis. A former MI6 officer, she had become the master of disguise during the early stages of the cold war and had been charged with helping soviet spies defect to the West undetected. She was known only as Pearly. Sean had been taught the skills of disguise by Pearly when she visited his bolt-hole in Italy to help keep his identity shrouded from the SVR agents and proxies who had been paid to track him down. She was also charged with helping current-day Russian defectors who lived in Britain with the many forms of disguise.

  ‘The trick, Mr Richardson,’ she had said, ‘Is to imagine someone wrote a list of your own features and provided them to the police. You'd need to create a disguise that was completely the opposite of those features. You have grey flecked hair. Not anymore. You walk with your feet open. Wrong. You have a scar over your left eye. Not with good make-up.’

  Sean remembered how she had told him some amazing stories. Pearly had served in MI6 for twenty-five years, traveling to Russia, South America, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and places she said she still couldn't reveal to Sean. She had specialised in exfiltration - getting friendly people out from behind the Iron Curtain.

  Pearly had retired in 1997. The cold war was long over and she spent her days writing walking guides in The Cotswolds. She never assumed that The Court would come knocking on her door in retirement, she had told Sean in long discussions on her past. ‘I thought I'd be forgotten about and lost in time,’ she said. ‘Spying and helping spy's was satisfying. But never expect any reward young man. Ever. Take your satisfaction from the good work you do, and steer yourself to a life you want. Not what they want.’

  Sean admired her humble ways recalling her wisdom. ‘Being someone else is easy, if you take away every little bit of you.’ Those words kept ringing in Sean’s mind as he made his way with a walking stick up the gangplank.

  Sean was shown to his cabin by a petite Bulgarian steward and gave her a twenty-dollar tip. He placed his suitcase on the bed and waited for Samantha to arrive, enjoying the anticipation of the sense of shock she would have when seeing an elderly Jew sitting in her cabin. He wagered that her first words would be an apology for being in the wrong cabin, before reprimanding him for being a twat when she found out. A cheeky grin began to grow.

  The knock on the door came twenty minutes later, followed by the key being turned to open it. Samantha glided in and placed her suitcase on the bed, noticing that there was already a black carry-on suitcase on it. Sean stepped from the bathroom and watched her jump. She shook with fright.

  ‘What the fuck?’ she exclaimed in her haughty Home Counties accent. ‘Who are you? Oh, I’m sorry… am I in the right cabin?’

  ‘You are, mademoiselle,’ Sean said meekly, taking off his long brown beard.

  ‘Sean! You twat.’

  ‘Yes my lover, how are you?’

  ‘Fuck off. You’ve been a right prick the last forty-eight hours and now you’ll get me in the shit.’

  ‘You really don’t need to tell Jack you know. Just you and me on a romantic cruise for two with the biggest double bed I’ve seen on a boat.’ Sean played to her inner desires.

  ‘You really are a mad bastard you know. Your mother would not have been impressed with your behaviour – Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…’

  A silence. And a sad look from Samantha.

  ‘That’s OK, don’t worry. I’m fixed up now. Anyway, how the fuck did someone know I was at Raffles last night and put a bunch of hoods on me?’

  ‘Nadège had someone following her all the time at a distance – a stand-off minder to report back to her if she was being followed. He was taking pictures of you all the way to the mosque and outside it. That’s how they tracked you down. She probably has most of the hotel security managers in the city well and truly in her pocket.’

  ‘OK, well let’s get down to business. We’ve got a lot to sort out for this trip. I’m going to approach her again, but first off we need to know who she’s meeting on-board.’

  ‘Might be someone they’ve replaced you with – another weapons dealer.’

  ‘Not sure, but this boat is now packed with some of the wealthiest captains of industry as well as corrupt government officials from across the globe. It’s a spy’s paradise.’

  Sean chatted about his plan with Samantha, who had now calmed down. He’d talked her into remaining onside and not blowing it with Jack just yet.

  ‘I warn you though Sean, if this ends up going nowhere I call Jack, and get you lifted out of the country, right?’

  ‘Deal. Give me a shot at it though at least. You know it will be worth your while,’ he said with a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘It bloody better be,’ Samantha said, placing an arm on her hip to accentuate her curves. ‘You’ve deserted me for far too long, so yes you can have a shot you naughty bastard.’ Samantha walked to the cabin door, dropped the deadlock and turned on her toes. Sean caught a slash of her thigh as she undid a button on her blouse, partially revealing her ample cleavage. Sean breathed in deeply. He had t
o think quickly on his feet to avoid her being intimate with him again.

  Sean had always been shocked at the intensity of their lovemaking, remembering how wild it used to be when they were close friends many years ago. It was always intense and dramatic with Samantha always wanting more. She was not one to hold back. But this was not a time for deviation, he had a job to fulfil. A mission. He couldn’t go back. He turned and started to check his communications equipment, conscious of the loud tut he heard behind him.

  ‘Come on, we’ve got some serious work to do today. We don’t have much time right now.’

  Sean ignored the noise of Samantha slamming her palm on the table and muttering loudly. He swore he heard a foot being stamped too. After a lengthy silence, he eventually shifted her attention to the task in hand despite the glum look on her face. He began to explain how he would lure Nadège into trusting him enough to give him a shot at supplying the illicit materials.

  He asked Samantha to find out where Nadège was quartered on the ship and who she had met or had discussions with. He knew if Nadège was here on business it involved espionage. And he bet they weren’t the only ones involved in spying at this conference. Conferences were normally rife with national spy agencies looking to recruit potential high-grade targets from multiple countries. He knew from experience that the importance of a conference wasn’t measured just by the number of A-listers or Nobel prize-winners it attracted, but by the number of spies. US and foreign intelligence officers flock to conferences because they make the best hunting grounds. While a university campus might have only one or two professors of interest to an intelligence service, the right conference with the right level of the elite could have dozens. Sean had done his fair share of recruiting at overseas conferences in the past, and he remembered the words of his intelligence mentor in the old War Office in Whitehall: ‘Every intelligence service in the world works conferences, sponsors conferences and looks for ways to get people to conferences.’