He walked straight into the lounge – which he was quite certain was the location the cipher group LNGXX had been indicating – and looked around. There were several small knots of people sitting in easy chairs there, most with coffee pots, cups and plates on the tables in front of them, the majority talking together and handing round cameras and tablets as they presumably displayed the photographs they had taken during the day to their friends or colleagues.
What he didn’t see was the person he had been expecting to be waiting there for him, and for a few seconds he wondered if he’d either missed the rendezvous or he’d managed to get the position wrong despite checking it twice.
Then something sharp prodded him in the middle of his back, and a familiar voice murmured in his ear: ‘You took your goddamn time getting here, Richter. I thought I was going to have to send out a search party.’
Chapter 10
Thursday
Rublevka, Zhukovka, outskirts of Moscow, Confederation of Independent States
General’naya Dmitri Ivanovich Yasov stared around, scanning the expressions on the faces of the men sitting there looking back at him, and then he settled his attention on one man, at the far right-hand end of the table.
‘You, Valery Bogdanovich. Pavlov was your man. Not everyone seated around this table is aware of what happened, so why don’t you tell us?’
Valery Bogdanovich Koslov stirred slightly in his seat. The senior GRU officer was a stocky man with Slavic features that appeared to have been carved into his face rather than having evolved naturally, with dark eyes that regarded the world with deep suspicion from under a thatch of hair so thick and black that almost everyone who met him thought the colour came out of a bottle. Which it didn’t.
‘Pavlov—’ he almost spat the name ‘—was not "my man" in any sense of the expression, General Yasov, as I am sure you are aware,’ Koslov replied, his voice firm but icily polite – he was, after all, addressing a superior officer, albeit from a different service, and the man heading the military aspects of the project. ‘He was a member of the GRU, but not a man I ever encountered in any capacity, as far as I am aware, although of course I may have seen him here at the dacha before or after one of our meetings. But he was just a uniformed guard, and I would have had no occasion to speak to him or pay him any attention at all.’
‘He has turned out to be rather more than "just a uniformed guard", in my opinion,’ Yasov pointed out, ‘but please continue with your explanation.’
Koslov nodded.
‘As I said, I did not know the man, but it is clear from his actions that he has to have been either a deep cover penetration agent – which seems unlikely, given his lowly rank – or a disaffected Russian who for whatever reason decided to betray his homeland. But his motivation is less important than his actions. For those of you who are not aware of what has happened,’ Koslov glanced at the government officials and scientists as he spoke, knowing that they would all have known there’d been a security breach, but would not have been privy to most of the details, ‘you may recall that on the day of our last scheduled conference here, less than a week ago, the meeting was cancelled at very short notice.
‘That meeting was the last in the planned series, and had simply been intended to close the books on this particular operation and to give you all a final progress report and confirm the estimated date for completion. The only other outstanding business we intended to discuss was whether or not our two geologists—’ he gestured across the table towards two of the scientists who, like everyone else in the room, were wearing plain clothes ‘—had any further and final refinements to offer regarding the precise location of the target based upon their detailed researches of the undersea topography. After the meeting was cancelled, we conducted a secure voice conference call, and no changes to the target coordinates were felt necessary.
‘Anyway, on that day, the two-man team from the SVR arrived on site to begin their watch as usual. They were a few minutes early to relieve the pair of GRU soldiers and waited outside the gates until the correct time before pressing the buzzer to be allowed inside. That delay in requesting entrance was brief and not considered to be significant.’
Koslov paused for a moment, then resumed his narrative.
‘The normal routine for the guards is to press the buzzer and wait for the men inside the compound to open the gates for them. However, each team is also issued with two keys, one for the outside gate itself and the second for the main door of the dacha. In this case, the SVR team got no response from inside, and so they pressed the buzzer again, with the same result. They waited a few minutes more, trying the buzzer at regular intervals, before contacting their superior officer by mobile telephone to explain the situation. He authorized them to use their key to open the outside gate, but ordered them not to enter the compound until he arrived. And that was when the next problem became obvious.’
‘Why was there such a delay?’ one of the government officials, the minister in charge of the project from the civilian side, which meant he was the ultimate head of the operation, asked. ‘Surely the moment the oncoming team received no response, they should have immediately opened the gate themselves to investigate?’
‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ General Yasov interrupted, ‘which provides everyone with answers to absolutely everything. Because of the importance our government has attached to this project, we have put specific rules in place to govern the actions to be taken in certain circumstances. One of those rules specified that in the event of any kind of suspected breach of security or illegal entry to the property – which could well have been the case in view of the failure of the on-watch team to respond – the duty officer was to be summoned before anyone entered the compound. Carry on, Valery.’
Koslov inclined his head towards the general.
‘Thank you. With the officer on the way, the incoming team opened the locked box inside their vehicle and took out both keys. They walked over to the steel door and tried to unlock it. But they discovered immediately that the key would not even go into the lock. They tried the other one, thinking that perhaps the key was incorrectly marked, but that one didn’t work either. Then they looked closely at the lock, and the problem became obvious. A key was already jammed into the barrel of the lock, and the end of it had then been smashed off, probably by a hammer. Later that day, a hammer was found tossed into the undergrowth a few dozen yards away from the gates.
‘It was then obvious to the two SVR men that there was a problem, but there was nothing much that they could do about it. They couldn’t open the outer gate, and there was no other way to get inside the property. That was one of the reasons this location had been chosen for the project. The duty officer was en route there, and they had his office number but not his mobile, so they couldn’t contact him directly. What they did do was ring his office again and explain that they would need a locksmith to open the gate, but getting one wasn’t quite as easy as simply making a phone call to the nearest available tradesman. Our operating procedures again specified that anyone having anything to do with this property had to have a satisfactory security clearance.’
‘Just to open a gate?’ the same government official asked.
‘These procedures were put in place for a reason, Minister. And in this event it was lucky that they were followed. I agree that almost any competent locksmith could have opened the outside gate, but when the duty officer arrived on the scene he guessed that if the gate lock had been jammed there was at least a possibility that the main door lock had received the same treatment, and nobody had any idea what the scene was likely to be inside the compound or inside the dacha itself. There was a delay while a locksmith with the requisite security clearance was identified and ordered to proceed to the compound, and obviously the on-site team had to wait for his arrival. Getting the damaged key out proved impossible, and eventually the locksmith had to drill out the barrel to allow him to get the door opened.
‘As it turned ou
t, the duty officer had been absolutely right in his assumption, because the lock on the main door of the dacha had been jammed in an identical fashion. It, too, had to be drilled out, and because the locks used were of a specialized type, the locksmith did not carry any in his van, and had to drive back to Moscow to obtain replacements. As soon as he left the premises, the duty officer stationed the two armed soldiers outside the building with instructions to let no one else enter. He called his superior, who agreed to initiate the cancellation routine for the scheduled meeting, because he still didn’t know exactly what happened, but clearly something major had gone wrong. Then he went inside.’
Koslov glanced around the table, his expression grim.
‘What he found was to some extent predictable. It had been obvious from the first that one or perhaps both of the GRU soldiers had to have left the compound illegally, jamming the locks as he went, though his motive could only have been guessed at, at that stage. In the guards’ ready room the duty officer found the body of one of the GRU troopers, shot once through the head. The other soldier who should have been there, Dmitri Ivanovich Pavlov, had disappeared. There were some signs that indicated a struggle had taken place, and at first the joint SVR and GRU investigation team who arrived later that morning assumed that perhaps there might have been a violent argument between the two men that had escalated to the extent that Pavlov had drawn his pistol and shot his companion and then, realizing the seriousness of what he had done, he ran.’
The other government official, a deputy minister, raised his hand and asked the obvious question.
‘And how do you know that that wasn’t exactly what had happened?’
‘Because we initiated a thorough search of both the dacha and the grounds, looking for anything that would explain what had passed between the two men, and had caused one of them to murder his companion. And, specifically, we know it wasn’t just an argument that got completely out of hand because of what we found concealed in that bookshelf on the far wall,’ General Yasov said, pointing towards the back of the room. Every head swivelled to look at the shelves of the bookcase, one of a pair mounted against the rear wall of the room. ‘Before we started using this building, and this room, for our meetings, we had the whole place swept for bugs, and that obviously included the two bookcases. We didn’t think it necessary to remove the books because this room was swept on a daily basis.
‘But,’ the general bestowed a somewhat wintry smile on the assembled group, ‘there we encountered one of the obvious and sometimes insurmountable problems inherent in carrying out any covert operation. Or in fact any operation. I think it was Juvenal who expressed it best in his Satires, when he said, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Which translates as something like "Who will guard the guards themselves?" If the man doing the scanning is also the man who has positioned a bugging device, then that is exactly the same as not doing the scanning in the first place.’
‘And what we found there, as the general has intimated,’ Koslov continued, ‘was a bugging device hidden inside a hollowed-out book with the microphone projecting through the binding of the spine. A small and quite sophisticated voice-activated digital recorder that stored files on a high-capacity SD card. The recorder was of German manufacture, but that is not necessarily indicative of German involvement. It was just a tool to be used in this particular operation, and we can only assume that Pavlov – or whoever supplied it – selected it because its size, battery life, the sensitivity of the microphone and the capacity of the SD card made it the right tool for the job. The recorder was still in the bookcase, with the microphone attached, but the memory card had been removed.’
‘Are you certain that what we are saying now is not being listened to by some unknown third party? Is that why you have started using that white noise generator as well as presumably having scanned this room again?’ the minister demanded.
‘Obtaining and using that machine seemed to be a wise precaution,’ the general admitted, ‘even if it is something of a stable door reaction. And again with hindsight, we should probably have used one from the very start, but this appeared to be an extremely secure location. That was why we chose it.’
The minister shook his head.
‘I said from the very beginning of this project that the safest place to conduct our meetings would have been in one of the secure briefing rooms in the Kremlin itself, where we could have been absolutely certain that our conversations would not be overheard.’
‘That is true, Minister, but irrelevant. As you are aware, we were expressly forbidden from using any official location for our meetings. That is precisely why we are now sitting here in this dacha in the western outskirts of Moscow.’
‘And the most pressing matter, which you have so far not addressed at all, General, is to tell us exactly what steps you have taken to find and eliminate this man Pavlov.’
‘We will get to that, Minister, but there is something else we need to discuss first. Valery, continue with your explanation.’
Valery Koslov nodded.
‘First, you may well have noticed that the number of support staff here has increased. Because of this breach, the general decided that the GRU would take no further part in the security measures applied here, so all the guards are now drawn from the ranks of the SVR. We have also increased the numbers on watch at any one time so that there are now three people in the building, two SVR troopers under the command of a non-commissioned officer. You may all remember the old Russian expression which claimed that faced with temptation, one man might succumb, two men might conspire, but a third man would always inform. We don’t want an informer here, obviously, but increasing the manning level to three individuals and including an NCO seemed like a wise precaution.
‘Second, one of the first priorities with any security breach is to identify the extent to which we have been compromised, and here there is some slightly better news. The only way that Pavlov could have positioned that digital recorder and set it running was if he himself had been responsible for scanning this room before one of our meetings, or if he obtained access to the room after the scanning process had been completed; otherwise the scan itself would clearly have located the recorder. That in turn means that he had to be on the premises and on watch. We have analysed the duty rosters to determine when he could have been here and positioned the device. Since Pavlov was appointed to this duty, we have held fifteen meetings here in this room, but he was only a member of the on-watch team for seven of them, just under half, in other words.’
‘That is still a major breach, Koslov,’ the minister snapped.
‘I agree, but there is another factor here. All of us in this room are well aware of what this project is intended to do. We have all known from the first the overall objective and the resources and technology we will be employing to achieve the intended result. Because of that, we do not need to discuss the general thrust of the project but only consider specific questions. All of our meetings here involve reports from our scientific colleagues on the progress in developing the technology and related matters, and from the military of their preparations for the achievement of the objective. And that means that Pavlov’s tapes, or rather his digital recordings, may be incomprehensible to a foreign power. The Americans – and obviously we must assume that they will become aware of what has happened if Pavlov manages to escape to the West, even if he first approaches the intelligence service of another country – will hear a good deal of talk about explosive yields and delivery systems and so on, but almost nothing about the target of those weapons. And that is a significant point in our favour.’
‘So you think Pavlov has already made his escape, do you?’ The minister was clearly getting annoyed.
‘Unfortunately, yes. Although it seems likely that he was detected by his GRU colleague in the act of positioning the recorder, which was why there was a struggle inside the building that ended with the murder we’ve already discussed, it is fairly clear that Pavlov already had his escape r
oute well planned. No doubt he intended to record other meetings, not realizing that the last one was the final time we would all assemble here, but for his material to have any value it would have to be transmitted or given to somebody from a foreign intelligence service, and we have to assume that he had already made contact with such an agent. It’s unlikely that the foreign spy would have prepared an escape route for him, because it would obviously be in his interest to keep Pavlov in play and obtaining information for as long as possible, but we also believe that Pavlov may have insisted upon one thing before agreeing to begin his spying operation.’
The question was obvious, and it was the minister who asked it.
‘What thing?’
‘A genuine passport issued by America or Britain or some other Western nation.’
The minister fell silent at this unwelcome piece of news, and it was one of the naval officers who responded.
‘And you know this how?’
Koslov didn’t reply directly, but continued his explanation of events as far as they had been able to reconstruct them.
‘We assume that Pavlov was probably challenged by his colleague near the start of their eight-hour shift, because the normal routine the guards followed was to check and then scan this room in preparation for our meeting as one of their first tasks, after which the room would be locked until we arrived. That assumption is supported by what else we found in Moscow. When the SVR duty officer and his men entered the compound, they discovered that the official vehicle used by the GRU guards was missing.’
‘You’ve told us that he had a passport, so presumably the traitor used the van to get to one of our airports, probably Sheremetyevo or Domodedovo, to make his escape,’ the deputy minister suggested.
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