‘The weapons,’ Richter said, pointing towards the chair. ‘I suppose you brought them here with you?’
‘That would have been difficult and unnecessary,’ Jackson replied. ‘Because of the polar bears, rifles and pistols are readily available to rent, or you can buy them if you’re a resident, and most of the regulations here only relate to the minimum calibres that you are allowed to carry outside the settlement for personal protection. For a rifle, that’s .308W or 30-06, and for a pistol it’s .44, and almost everybody chooses a bolt action for the long weapon and a revolver for a handgun. In this climate, with these temperatures and the sort of weather you can get here all year round, you definitely need to be able to rely on your weapon of choice, because a big bear might come calling. We just hired them for the duration.’
‘So what have you got?’ Richter asked.
‘Two rifles, both Savage Model 116 Alaskan Brush Hunters,’ Mason said. ‘They’re in .375 Ruger calibre, and the pistols are both Smiths. Mine’s a Model 29 in .44 Magnum, and Steve here carries a Model 500.’
‘That’s the half-inch revolver, the .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum, isn’t it? A serious piece of kit.’
Barber simply nodded.
‘Believe me, a hungry male polar bear is about as serious a predator as you’ll find anywhere, on any continent,’ Mason agreed. ‘And you need an equally serious weapon if you have to stop him.’
‘Richard Simpson – he’s my boss back in London – told me that pretty much everyone up here was armed to the teeth, but he didn’t tell me why. Now it makes perfect sense.’
‘Obviously there are rules about what you do with the weapons here in Longyearbyen, and normally people don’t carry them unless they’re leaving the settlement. You’re also not supposed to take them into the bank and places like that. We’ve been given a certain amount of dispensation because of what we’re doing up here, and we’re keeping these weapons with us at all times.’
At that moment, two things happened almost simultaneously. Richter’s mobile phone emitted a double tone, and a couple of seconds later the laptop open on the table in front of Barber sounded a barely audible sequence of musical notes.
Richter slid the tip of his forefinger across the screen to read the message, though he had already guessed who it was from and what it was likely to say.
‘Simpson?’ Jackson asked.
Richter nodded.
‘He’s asked the same question again, but this time he’s added a dozen question marks after it, so I think he’s getting irritated. Or worried. I’ll send him a quick reply and just tell him I’ve met an old friend.’
As Richter tapped away on the screen of his smartphone, Jackson turned her attention to the email that had just arrived on Barber’s laptop.
‘It’s from Langley,’ Barber said, looking at the screen and waiting for the decryption application to convert the gibberish into plaintext. He read the message quickly, twice, and then glanced up at Jackson, who nodded. ‘OK, the bureaucratic bullshit is out of the way, and they’ve opened up Burdiss’s locked files. Now we know how to find George. And we also know why Burdiss told him to fly up to Svalbard.’
Chapter 14
Thursday
Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Archipelago
Dmitri Ivanovich Pavlov lay on the single bed in his room in the small private guesthouse on the outskirts of Longyearbyen, the door locked and with a chair wedged under the handle and the curtains firmly closed. He appeared relaxed, his hands behind his head, and staring at the ceiling, but in reality he was as taut as a drum. He hadn’t left the building – the cheapest accommodation he’d been able to find in the settlement – since the American he had come to know only as ‘Richard’ had failed to appear at the agreed rendezvous a few days earlier.
At first, he had assumed there had just been a miscommunication or a delay or something of that sort. He had arrived at the rendezvous at 17 minutes past the hour, only amateurs arranging covert meetings on the hour or half hour, and had waited there for the prescribed eight minutes – the time ‘Richard’ had insisted upon – and had then left, seeing nobody anywhere near the chosen site. The fall-back rendezvous had been 97 minutes later and on the other side of Longyearbyen, and Pavlov had immediately made his way there, slowly and very carefully, checking constantly for anyone following him. The fall-back rendezvous ended nine minutes after he reached it and, having seen no living creature apart from a wandering male husky that gave his left leg a cautious sniff before proceeding elsewhere on business of his own, Pavlov had returned to his spartan accommodation, avoiding the main streets of the settlement and taking a circuitous route around the outskirts. There had been no other rendezvous positions and times, Richard presumably believing that one plus a single fall-back would be enough, and Pavlov had no idea what to do next.
Late the next day the news about the mutilated corpse found out on the tundra had reached him, secrets being difficult to keep at any time in Longyearbyen. Pavlov had no idea if William Duke, the name by which the corpse had been identified, was the American he knew only as ‘Richard,’ but the circumstances of his death and the no-show at the two rendezvous positions made it seem more than likely. And the implications of that were frankly terrifying, because it meant that the hunters must have arrived on Svalbard, a location ‘Richard’ had chosen because it was remote and sparsely populated, within a matter of hours, certainly within a day, of his own arrival. He had hoped that using the Norwegian passport that ‘John,’ the American official Pavlov had first approached in Moscow, had given to him would have muddied the waters enough to have completely obscured his movements. He’d done his best to shield his face from the cameras at Sheremetyevo, but there had been no way to miss them all, and he had followed to the letter the instructions ‘John’ had given him to avoid leaving an easy trail to follow when he’d reached Bergen.
That route, Helsinki to Bergen, then by train to Oslo and buying a last-minute ticket to Longyearbyen for cash, had been insisted upon by ‘John’, and he had simply been passing on the most explicit instructions issued by ‘Richard.’ Pavlov had not understood why the American had picked Svalbard as a destination. The place was small and remote, with a limited population, and he had presumed that any new arrivals here would stand out, which would increase the chances of him being detected by the Russian security forces. But Pavlov also knew that the Americans offered him the only possible sanctuary and chance for a life outside Russia, and so he hadn’t questioned his instructions, simply obeyed them.
And the result was a long way from what he had expected and hoped for. Instead of being on an aircraft en route to America with his dowry, his precious digital recordings – he had all the original SD cards and three additional copies he’d made on memory sticks – or perhaps even already on American soil, he was stuck in a Norwegian frontier town while highly trained assassins from the Russian security organizations prowled the streets looking for him. The man he had expected to escort him safely to America had been, according to most of the reports he had overheard while taking hasty meals in the dining room in the place he was staying, torn to pieces by a polar bear some 20 miles outside the settlement, which made no sense on any level. ‘Richard’ should never have been outside Longyearbyen, as far as Pavlov could see, and he had no doubt at all that while a polar bear might have been involved, the predator responsible for the American’s death walked on two legs and was far more dangerous than any bear. His only other contact was ‘John’, and he was presumably still back in Moscow and completely out of reach.
Pavlov genuinely had no idea what to do next. He was going to keep out of sight, because to do anything else, like try to get to the airport, would almost ensure his pursuers would spot him. The only other thing he could do was keep the burner phone he had bought in Oslo fully charged and wait for a call or text in the hope that ‘Richard’ might have arranged some kind of emergency back-up plan that could be implemented to recover the situation.
&
nbsp; Not for the first time, as he lay on the bed, Pavlov wondered if he had done the right thing in offering his services to the Americans. If he hadn’t, then he would still be safe, but he would also still be working as a lowly GRU trooper with almost no prospect of his career improving significantly, and still living in that tiny apartment in Moscow.
He had read about the ideological traitors, the people like Philby, Burgess and Blunt, people who knew absolutely nothing about life in Russia, but still felt that it was a more utopian ideal than the comparatively free democracy of Great Britain, and had then done their best to betray the country of their birth to Russia. In some ways, Pavlov rationalized it to himself, he was an anti-ideological traitor, a man who had seen communism from the inside and had realized that it was a lie, and had always been a lie, and that the post-glasnost corruption and wholesale looting of Russia’s natural resources and industrial muscle by politically-connected oligarchs was no better. And he had also known that the only way he could ever get out of the system was to conform, to keep his nose clean and to do exactly what was expected of him, until an opportunity of some sort came along.
He was not a stupid man. In fact, he was highly intelligent and very competent, two facts that he took some pains to conceal from his superiors, because any overt display of his ability would most probably end up with him being investigated as a possible security risk, or being kicked out of the GRU.
He had recognized almost immediately, simply because of status of the participants who had arrived at the dacha for the first meeting when he’d been on watch, that the guard duty detail he had been assigned to offered a probably unique opportunity for him to get out of Russia with enough money to live in comfort for the rest of his life. The level of secrecy and security being applied meant that whatever the men in the locked room were discussing, it would undoubtedly be of importance to a foreign power.
Both intellectually and emotionally, Pavlov had no liking for the country of his birth. An only child, his parents had lived in one of the poorest areas on the fringes of Moscow, his father a low-level government official who would periodically explain to his son the ultimate supremacy of the communist ideal and its guaranteed success in the Soviet Union, fostered and implemented by a series of government-directed plans. But Pavlov could see what his father could probably also see but would never have acknowledged, that the three-year plans and the five-year plans and the ten-year plans and everything else were not working and could never work for a variety of reasons, most of them blatantly obvious. The grinding poverty which was the norm in the Pavlov household was itself proof of that. If a government official in full-time employment could barely manage to provide enough money to support his wife and his only son, what chance was there for an ordinary citizen of the country?
The final straw had been the abject failure of Russian medicine to save Dmitri Pavlov’s mother’s life when she contracted a low-level infection. With her death, his father Ivan had seemed to just give up and had followed her to his own grave a few months later. Dmitri had been lucky to be able to hang on to the family apartment, and it was only because he had just joined the GRU, one of the feared intelligence organs of the Russian state, that he had been able to exert enough pressure to avoid being evicted.
A diet of American films and material he had later found on the Internet had convinced Pavlov that the land of opportunity was the United States, and ever since he’d been a teenager he’d been looking for a way to get across the Atlantic on a permanent basis. But that was only one factor. Money was the other part of the equation: he didn’t want to be poor in America. He wanted to be rich there, or at least comfortable, and he recognized that the opportunity to do so had suddenly been handed to him by, somewhat bizarrely, the government that he so much despised.
He had never heard of any project in Russia that involved so many different organizations and was attended by such obvious and all-encompassing secrecy, the participants apparently not even being allowed to hold meetings in any official government building. That, and the specific security check he and the other GRU men had been subjected to, a check that he had sailed through as the son of a government employee and with an unblemished service record, convinced Pavlov that he had inadvertently stumbled upon something of crucial significance. And, more importantly, something of such significance that the Americans would be prepared to pay good money to find out more about it.
All he had had to do was make contact with them and offer his services, which had sounded easy, but because of the almost blanket surveillance of Americans and other foreigners in Moscow, he had expected to be very difficult.
Oddly enough, the key had turned out to be his current tasking, and an unexpected spin-off from the security check he had been subjected to before being approved to start work on the detail. The enhanced clearance level he had acquired not only allowed him, but actually required him, to view certain photo-recognition files containing images of declared and undeclared American intelligence personnel in case any of these potential enemy agents were seen in the vicinity of the dacha. It had apparently not occurred to anyone in the higher echelons of the GRU that the system could work in reverse and allow a potential traitor to identify a known or suspected American agent who would be extremely receptive to a potential approach.
Trying to contact one of these people at or near the American Embassy would never have worked because of the high level of surveillance mounted there, so Pavlov, who had a particularly good memory for faces, had identified and then followed at a distance one of the men whose details he had seen, checking all the time for any signs of surveillance by the SVR or his own organization. The first man he had selected had a small team of watchers from some part of the Russian government trailing him, and Pavlov knew it would be too difficult and dangerous to approach him. But the second man had been almost ideal, attracting the attention of only a two-man team of Russian counter-intelligence agents, who appeared to follow him each evening from the American Embassy to his apartment building and then leave him to his own devices. Pavlov had followed the team following the American on three successive afternoons when the man had finished work for the day, and the routine never varied.
Two days later, when the American walked in through the unlocked doors of his apartment building, Pavlov had been nervously waiting inside, ostensibly reading through a collection of notices pinned up on a cork board at the rear of the lobby. As the American approached him, heading for the lift, Pavlov had turned round, checked that there was no one else in the lobby, and then pulled out his GRU identification, holding it up to the man’s face, but ensuring that his fingers covered his name.
He had been rewarded by a flicker of fear in the American’s eyes – the man had probably been trying to work out what he had done to attract the attention of someone in the Russian military intelligence organization – but then Pavlov had smiled, replaced his identification in his pocket and handed the American a folded piece of paper.
‘I think you must have dropped this,’ he had said, in English. ‘Good evening.’
And then he had left, leaving the American staring at his back as Pavlov walked out of the building through the rear door.
The note he had passed over contained four pieces of typed information: a date two days hence; a time in the early evening; a place, a small bar about half a mile from the apartment building; and a note of what Pavlov would be wearing – blue jeans, white shirt and a black leather jacket – in case the man the Americans sent was not the person he had so briefly contacted.
In the event, it was the same man – who called himself John, a very obvious alias – and that meeting had been followed by two others, each involving a second American as well, a man who had listened carefully to what the Russian was saying but who had contributed little, and who was clearly of a higher rank than Pavlov’s initial contact. During the third meeting, the second American had handed over a small cardboard box containing the digital recorder, half a dozen SD cards, and o
perating instructions written in Russian and English. He had told Pavlov to find a suitable hiding place at the dacha, to start the recorder running before each meeting when he was in the building, but to remove it afterwards. It was small enough to fit into one of his pockets, and at home he could recharge the internal battery and insert a new memory card ready for the next session. He had twice emphasized the importance of not getting the memory cards mixed, because that would over-record the data. Then he’d shaken Pavlov’s hand and left.
At this same meeting, Pavlov had laid down his own terms for his betrayal of Russia, none of which appeared to overly concern either American.
‘If the data you provide is as important as you think it is,’ the senior American official, who had introduced himself simply as Richard, had assured him, ‘then we’ll guarantee to meet your terms, no question. But first we’ll need to analyse the take. This will all absolutely depend on results. On what you can bring to us.’
When the third man had left, Pavlov was given verbal instructions about the next meeting, the where and the how. The when was entirely in the hands of the Russian. Both Americans had made sure that Pavlov knew there was no point in any further contact between them until after he had obtained a first recording of the events that took place inside the locked room in the dacha. Until they knew what they were dealing with, the grade of intelligence and obviously the subject matter, they could not go forward.
Understrike Page 13
