‘Where is Richard?’ Pavlov asked in English, perhaps intending that the switch between the two languages would confirm that his caller was not a Russian assassin. Or, alternatively, was a Russian assassin.
‘You might have heard already that Richard met with a serious accident,’ Richter said, also switching to English. ‘My friends and I have been sent here to complete the job that Richard started, and we will be making sure that you can continue your journey to the West in safety, but we are not ready to move just yet. We still have some final arrangements to make. We do not need to know exactly where you are, but can you confirm that you are still in Longyearbyen? I only ask this because when we leave we will need to know how long it will take you to reach a rendezvous position.’
‘Yes, I’m still here in this settlement.’
‘Good. Now, we would ask you to do two things for us.’
‘What two things?’ Pavlov asked, immediately sounding suspicious, which was unsurprising.
‘Nothing difficult,’ Richter replied. ‘Only these. First, make sure that the phone you are using now is always beside you or in your pocket, and remains switched on at all times, day and night, and is kept fully charged. If possible, leave it plugged in to the charger except when you need to take it into another room. We will need to be able to contact you immediately when the time comes for us to move. Second, for your own safety, do not leave your present location for any reason. Make sure that you cannot be seen from outside the building by anyone, which means keeping the doors shut and the curtains closed at all times. I presume you have supplies of food where you are staying, or some other way of being fed?’
‘Yes,’ Pavlov replied, sounding almost pathetically grateful that a man he had never met was so obviously concerned about his welfare. ‘Yes, food and drink are not a problem for me.’
‘Good. One last thing. We may have to move at very short notice, so please ensure that everything you need to take, especially the material that you obtained in the East, is packed and ready, so that you can pick it up and walk out of the building without any delays.’
‘I’m ready right now, and I’m waiting for your call. And thank you.’
‘We’ll call soon,’ Richter said, ‘and now you’ve got my number, so you can call or text me if there’s anything you need.’
He glanced around the open area once again, exactly as he had been doing while he’d been talking on the telephone, but still saw nobody within about a hundred yards.
‘I wonder where they are?’ he murmured to himself, then slipped the mobile back into his pocket and walked away, heading towards the Basecamp Hotel and his appointment there with Jackson and the others, due in less than ten minutes.
When he walked in and sat down in the bar the other three were already there, sitting around a wooden table, menus in front of them.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Were you followed? All of you?’
Barber nodded, but it was Jackson who replied.
‘You’d already walked away, but less than half a minute after we stepped out of the hotel, so did those other three guys. We split, and went off in different directions, and we each picked up a shadow, one of those three men about fifty yards behind. They weren’t subtle about it, and Steve reckons that they probably wanted us to notice them, so that we’d be intimidated.’
‘We don’t get intimidated,’ Barber responded, ‘and with a bit of luck we’ll get to show these guys exactly how un-intimidated we are.’
‘Where are they now?’
Jackson pointed towards the far corner of the bar-cum-restaurant, the room where he’d had lunch after he’d arrived that day.
‘They’re giving us the evil eye from that table over there,’ she said. ‘OK, nobody was following you, so did you make the call?’
Richter nodded.
‘Yes. I called, and he answered. I started in Russian, because I wasn’t sure how good his English was, but he switched languages immediately. I don’t know where he is, except somewhere here in Longyearbyen, and I didn’t ask, but I passed on the message and told him to be ready to leave at real short notice, and to have everything packed, especially the material he’s using as his dowry.’
‘OK. So at least we’ve got some of our beans in a row,’ Jackson said. ‘There really isn’t a hell of a lot we can do now until that ship arrives. It’s frustrating, because what I’d like to do is grab Pavlov and get the hell off this island by the fastest possible means, but there’s no way of doing that. Walter Burdiss wasn’t happy about using a scheduled flight out of here or from anywhere else, and I’m sure he had good reasons for that decision, so really all we can do is wait for the ship to arrive and see where we go from there. I just hope that Pavlov is tucked away somewhere safe and that the bad guys don’t stumble across him before we can extract him. In the meantime, let’s eat and get an early night. Tomorrow could be a very long day.’
Chapter 17
Thursday
Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Archipelago
‘So who is he?’ Vladimir Krychev demanded, his eyes following their targets as the three men and one woman walked out of the restaurant of the Basecamp Hotel. ‘Is he CIA like the others?’
One of his two companions shook his head.
‘Almost certainly not. I managed to get a look at the register here at the Basecamp this afternoon,’ he replied. ‘His name is Paul Richter, and he flew here from London today. Our people there are running checks now, but he could just be a tourist and nothing to do with our mission.’
‘If he’s just a tourist, Leonid,’ Krychev said, his voice low and dangerous, ‘perhaps you can tell me why he’s been spending all his time with three people that we know are CIA agents?’
‘He seems closer to the woman than to the two men,’ Leonid Rosov replied. ‘It’s quite possible he had a past relationship with her, and that they’ve simply met here by chance. Coincidences do sometimes happen.’
‘Not on my watch they don’t,’ Krychev snapped. ‘I don’t like the look of him. You, Sigarev, get up and follow them. Make Richter your priority. Find out where he’s staying, and if he’s sharing a room with that American bitch. Then come back here.’
Yuri Sigarev, another member of the contingent of ex-Spetsnaz heavies briefed for the recovery mission, stood up and muttered something under his breath, but obediently made his way out of the restaurant in the wake of the group of people they’d been watching for the last 90 minutes or so.
Krychev had led the original recovery team of six men, first to Norway and then further north to Svalbard, following the electronic trail left by Pavlov’s Norwegian passport, but had failed to detect any trace of the treacherous GRU man since they’d arrived on the archipelago.
The death of the American Burdiss under interrogation had been, in Krychev’s opinion, simply a matter of unfortunate timing: they had assumed the CIA man had already met Pavlov, and that he would have the digital recordings the recovery team had been told to retrieve in his possession. The torture they had inflicted had been intended to make the American reveal Pavlov’s location, which Burdiss hadn’t known. And then, far more quickly than Krychev had expected, the CIA man had suddenly died, and that had complicated everything.
His masters in Moscow had been unimpressed, but his orders had remained unchanged. His men had maintained a watch at the airport and roamed the streets of the settlement, photographs of Pavlov – quickly modified by an artist in Moscow to reflect his current appearance based on the images captured at Sheremetyevo Airport – in their pockets. When the three-person CIA team had arrived, Krychev had split his forces, watching the new arrivals as well as continuing their general surveillance in Longyearbyen. With only six people they were stretched, but at least they were able to sleep at night when the airport was shut and the streets were almost entirely deserted.
The good news, from Krychev’s perspective, was that a further six-man team was already en route from Moscow to Svalbard, which would make
the task of surveillance a lot easier and more comprehensive. To watch one man takes a team of at least three people. Even if the fourth person – the man Richter – turned out to be some kind of enemy agent, with a total of 12 people Krychev knew he could provide complete surveillance of them all. And that, obviously, would eventually lead them to Pavlov, even if they had to eliminate a few of the Americans on the way.
‘I don’t think Sigarev likes you,’ Rosov said.
‘Do I look like I care what he thinks or who he likes?’ Krychev said. ‘He’s here to do a job, just like the rest of us.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll be up at five for the first watch, so I’ll get my head down now. Wait here until Sigarev gets back. Once all the targets are in their rooms, detail two sentries for overnight surveillance, four hours each, and then make sure that you and the rest of the men get some sleep.’
Chapter 18
Friday
Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye headquarters, Khoroshevskoye Shosse, Khodinka, Moscow
It’s become something of a tradition in the British military for units to host a kind of end of the working week get-together, usually late on a Friday morning before lunch, when officers of all ranks meet in a conference room or other biggish space for an informal chat or a whinge or both, refreshment usually being either self-service tea or coffee and predictably small plates of the cheapest biscuits available. The meeting over, the participants usually spend an unproductive half-hour or so shuffling paper, surfing the web and chatting back in their offices, and then they all decamp en masse for the wardroom or officers’ mess for a prolonged and large liquid lunch, before leaving work an hour or two early. After all, in the military Friday is traditionally Poet’s Day – Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
Flying units are different, because there have been no recorded circumstances in which an intake of alcohol has improved the ability or competence of the person sitting on the flight deck of any aircraft and trying to drive the thing. So squadron pilots tend to forego the lunch, get a few more hours in the air under their belts in the afternoon, and then tie one on in a big way in the mess on Friday night.
The Russian military is not that dissimilar, but instead of coffee and biscuits being served to the senior officers on a Friday morning, the normal routine is for the doors to the conference room or wherever the event is being held to be closed after a few minutes and then for bottles of vodka and dozens of tiny glasses to make their appearance. Plates of light snacks like caviar and blinis may also be provided in an attempt to soak up some of the alcohol. Lunch only rarely follows, for reasons that are probably fairly obvious.
General Viktor Grigorevich Bykov had never been a fan of these impromptu parties, which he had first attended while working at the old GRU headquarters at Khodinka Airfield, a building commonly known as the ‘Aquarium,’ and which had continued after the organization had moved into its new and very expensive headquarters complex, right next to the old buildings. There were various reasons for his aversion, but because of the building in which he worked and the rank he carried, he had little option but to attend. He was normally one of the last people to walk in through the door, and usually just about the first to leave, having consumed as little vodka as he thought he could reasonably get away with. He was always busy, and resented what he saw as a largely complete waste of his time, though just occasionally he picked up an interesting titbit of information, something that he had not known, or had not been told in an official capacity, and which he filed away in his enormously retentive memory as being potentially useful.
That Friday was no different to any other, at least in terms of the numbers and ranks of the officers attending, though almost from the start Bykov noted a difference in the general mood. For some reason, two of the highest ranking generals there – each a colonel general or general-polkóvnik, meaning they were one rank above Bykov, a lieutenant general – seemed to be particularly buoyant, a feeling that had communicated itself to the rest of the officers present, and which immediately interested and intrigued him. As far as he was aware, nothing of particular note, no penetrations of foreign services or intelligence gathering coups of any sort, had been achieved, but the two men definitely appeared to be excited, in a professional sense.
Both senior officers had also been conspicuous by their absence from the headquarters building on several occasions over the last few weeks, with no obvious explanation being issued. Usually, if an officer was going to be absent from the building for a whole day or most of the morning or afternoon, the general diary would be annotated appropriately, with a note of where they would be and a telephone number where they could be reached in an emergency. Purely out of interest, Bykov had checked the diary a couple of times when these men had been away, and each time the entry had been only a single word – konferentsiya – with no contact details of any sort, and no indication of where these various ‘conferences’ had been taking place or what the participants had been discussing.
Bykov was far too cautious and experienced to approach them directly and ask why they appeared to be in such a good mood, so instead, rather like a lion working its way around a herd of wildebeest, he casually but deliberately manoeuvred himself round the room until he was standing with his back to the two men and talking to one of the colonels – a polkóvnik – who worked for him. But while he conducted that conversation more or less on autopilot, he was actually listening intently to the conversation taking place directly behind him.
Most of what he was hearing fitted firmly into the category technically known as ‘self-congratulatory bullshit,’ the kind of ‘we are wonderful and here’s why’ nonsense commonly spouted by politicians in the run-up to an election, the sort of stuff that people hear but never actually believe. They kept talking about the coming ‘great triumph’ and ‘the rebirth of Russia,’ phrases that Bykov was inclined to dismiss as simple hyperbole. But two sentences and two words stuck in his mind. The sentences were ‘on Tuesday or Wednesday the balance of power will change forever’ and ‘the natural world will do our job for us.’ The two words were kotel – the Russian for a ‘cauldron’ or a ‘boiler’ – and freaticheskiy, a Russian word he had never encountered before.
Back in his office, before he went for a slightly early lunch, he took a large dictionary from the bottom drawer of his desk and looked up freaticheskiy. What he found educated but did not inform him. He now knew what the word meant – it referred to the heating of water in an aquifer or other underground source by volcanic activity – but he had absolutely no idea why the word should have been used in a conversation between two senior Russian generals, when what they appeared to be discussing was some kind of instant shift in global power.
Clearly he was missing something. Bykov abandoned the dictionary and opened up his web browser. Because most of the information on the Internet is written in English, the first thing he did was translate freaticheskiy to its English equivalent – phreatic – and then began a general search for the word, which produced almost half a million hits. He scanned the results, but it was the third one on the very first page that immediately caught his eye. Bykov’s English was completely fluent, so he clicked the link to open the new page and read the text in its entirety.
Then he leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. Something in what he had read struck a chord. There had been a discussion document or an analysis or a position paper or something of that kind he had seen a few months earlier, perhaps as long ago as a year. Because of his position he saw almost everything relating to GRU operations, and he was sure he remembered something like that. But he also thought that the recommendation at the end of the paper was basically to forget it, and that no further action was to be taken.
There was one obvious way to find out. Bykov closed the browser, accessed the central registry of the building and initiated a topic-wide search for all files and documents containing the word freaticheskiy. Then he shut down his comput
er – a standard security precaution invariably applied to all unattended offices – locked the files he had been working on in his safe and walked down the corridor, making his way towards the senior officers’ dining room. The deep registry search would take some time to run, but hopefully the results would be there by the time he returned.
Chapter 19
Friday
Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Archipelago
‘Anything new from Langley?’ Richter asked, pulling out the chair and sitting down opposite Carole-Anne Jackson in the dining room of the Radisson Blu Hotel. She had already made a start on her late breakfast – it was after ten in the morning – with coffee and orange juice in front of her, the cup and glass flanking a half empty plate. Richter had made a detour to raid the buffet on his way to her table and helped himself to a black coffee from the pot as he sat down.
He had spent a couple of hours with her in her room the previous evening, again demonstrating that not all of his various bits dangled all of the time, but had then showered, dressed and left her to return to his own room at the Basecamp Hotel. This was not out of any sense of decorum or embarrassment – Jackson was an attractive adult female, and she could sleep with and/or spend the night with anyone she wanted to, as long as that person did not also work for the Company, though even that was more of a convention than a rule – and if either of her fellow CIA officers objected to what she was doing, she was perfectly capable of slapping them down.
In fact, the reason was tactical. As Richter had said to her, he wanted to walk out into the night-black streets of Longyearbyen when most people would already be in bed and asleep, just to see whether or not he could spot any watchers around the Radisson Blu, or pick up a tail as he made his way over to the Basecamp Hotel. That might provide an indication of the strength of the opposition. He was reasonably certain that they’d identified – or at least detected – three members of the Russian recovery team on the island looking for Pavlov, but he’d guessed that there had to be more of them than that, because having the entire team watching the CIA group made no sense. There had to be others out wandering the streets and looking for the Russian traitor, just in case he was stupid enough to show himself. And, Richter had added, if the Russians were still watching the Radisson Blu when he went back to the Basecamp Hotel that would give them two sites to monitor at the same time, which would inevitably mean that they were spread thinner. To watch any location where a target is holed up requires an absolute minimum of two people, and ideally three or four, because almost every building has at least two entrances and exits, and one man can’t cover every one, and certainly not constantly, because of the three basic needs of every human: food, drink and a lavatory. And as far as Richter was concerned, the thinner the opposition was spread, the better.
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