Gray Salvation

by Alan McDermott

  That was enough for Thompson.

  ‘Give the officer your contact details. I may need to speak to you again.’

  She left Fletcher and climbed into her car, calling Ellis to confirm that they were on the right track. ‘Put the names on the no-fly list as soon as you can, and notify all seaports and private airfields. These guys don’t leave the country.’

  She fired up the engine and sped off down the driveway, throwing up a shower of gravel as she took the turn onto the main road. For the first time, they had positive identification of the enemy, and she wanted to be back at Thames House when the sightings came in.

  Traffic was light by the time she hit the M40, and she ate up the miles quickly. A set of roadworks temporarily slowed her progress, but she still made it back to headquarters in record time.

  It was after seven in the evening when she entered the office. Howes and Solomon were engrossed in their work, and Thompson could see Ellis in conversation in her glass-walled office. She knocked on the door and entered just as the director put down the phone.

  ‘Any sign of them?’

  ‘Anatoly Potemkin and nine others boarded a chartered flight from Heathrow. It took off for Moscow thirty minutes ago.’

  ‘Can we call it back?’ Thompson asked.

  ‘We tried that,’ Ellis said. ‘Air traffic control instructed them to turn around and land, but the pilot isn’t acknowledging.’

  ‘Then send a couple of fighters after them and force them to land.’

  Ellis sighed and sat back in her seat. Thompson thought she suddenly looked a lot older than her fifty years.

  Losing a couple of agents will do that to you.

  ‘I just got off the phone with the home secretary,’ Ellis said. ‘The MOD won’t scramble jets until we have concrete proof that Andrew is on that flight, and according to the flight manifest, he isn’t. I even had Elaine check every passenger at the boarding gate against facial recognition, but no hits on Andrew.’

  ‘But surely placing Potemkin at the farm is enough,’ Thompson protested.

  ‘It’s enough for the home secretary to start extradition talks with the Russians, but not to send the air force after them. I tried explaining that Potemkin is our main lead to finding Andrew, but apparently the PM prefers to take this one through diplomatic channels. Tensions with Moscow are already strained to breaking point, and interfering with a legitimate flight is not going to make matters any better.’

  Thompson knew the director general was just regurgitating the message passed down by her superiors; she could almost hear Ellis choking on the words.

  ‘I say we bring Bessonov in and lean on him until he tells us where Andrew is.’

  Ellis stood and folded her arms, pacing behind her desk. ‘Bessonov is not to be touched,’ she said, anger evident in her tone. ‘I tried ruffling his feathers earlier today, and the message from on high is that unless we have evidence that he was on the scene at the time of Andrew’s disappearance, we are to cease harassing him.’

  Thompson put both hands on Ellis’s desk. ‘Are you serious? Bessonov and Potemkin are our only leads, and we can’t get to either of them?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s the situation as it stands.’

  ‘Can you see it changing anytime soon?’

  Ellis shook her head.

  Thompson sighed and stood back. ‘So what is the team working on?’

  ‘Tracking the movements of the minibus Potemkin used. Andrew must have been dropped off somewhere before they caught their flight. We’re checking every camera along the route.’

  There was little else the team could do right now, not with Bessonov enjoying his diplomatic protection and Potemkin homeward bound. Thompson contemplated going home, but with Andrew missing, she knew she would drive herself crazy with worry.

  ‘I’ll go and see how they’re getting on with the search.’

  Chapter 12

  21 January 2016

  Andrew Harvey tried to swallow, but his parched mouth struggled to produce any saliva. His tongue felt like sandpaper against the roof of his mouth, and when he tried to move his head, blinding pain warned him to remain still.

  He cracked open one eye, then the other, and found himself in unfamiliar surroundings. Paint was peeling off the once-white ceiling, and grey cinderblocks formed the walls of a room barely bigger than a walk-in closet. Opposite him, a metal door broke the symmetry of the brickwork.

  Something tickled his cheek, and when he tried to swat it away, he found his arms unable to move. The restraints felt like leather, and he soon discovered that his feet had been similarly shackled.

  The pain in his head continued to pound, and he closed his eyes, welcoming the slip back into unconsciousness.

  When he woke again, the headache had subsided a little, but the thirst remained. He tried to remember what had happened, but all he could recall was being tied up in the farmhouse and sitting opposite Scarface.

  Had they taken him to another location to work on him? The farm smell was no longer evident, so he assumed they must have. He had no idea if it was night or day. There were no windows to give him any clues as to his whereabouts, only a single bare light bulb bathing the small room in its yellowish glow.

  His stomach demanded food, but Harvey ignored the rumblings and instead tried to free his hands. He tried pulling and twisting, but all he managed to do was anger the skin on his wrists. He decided to save his strength. He couldn’t escape his bonds, and even if he managed to break free, he could see no doorknob, which meant it must be locked from the outside.

  Harvey lay still and closed his eyes. Memories began to rush back in, and he saw the English doctor with his leather bag.

  Why had they felt the need to drug him? Had they taken him through a populated area and knocked him out to prevent him from raising the alarm? If they had, there was a good chance he was back in London. Ellis was sure to be turning over every business owned by Bessonov, and it was only a matter of time before she found him.

  With renewed hope, he relaxed a little, though the lingering possibility of torture still niggled away at him.

  The faint sound of voices drifted into the room, at first incomprehensible. But as they drew near he realised they were talking a foreign language. Harvey’s attempts at becoming multilingual had ended when he’d dropped French as a subject in high school, so he couldn’t be sure if they were speaking Russian, Polish or even Romanian. Probably the former, he told himself, as metal scraped and the door opened outwards. A man walked in, and if he’d been wearing a red suit, Harvey would have sworn he was Santa Claus. Instead, the man sported combat fatigues fashioned from Disruptive Pattern Material, topped off with a grey fur hat.

  ‘Mr Harvey, I am Colonel Dmitri Aminev.’ The man smiled broadly. ‘Welcome to Hell.’

  Chapter 13

  21 January 2016

  Veronica Ellis swiped her security card through the panel next to the door and walked onto the main floor. The scattered desks were mostly empty, just a couple of night shift operatives on watch, which was about what she expected at six in the morning.

  She glanced over to the right-hand side of the open-plan office and saw Sarah Thompson at one of the hot desks.

  ‘Have you slept?’

  Thompson blinked a couple of times and looked up at her through red-rimmed eyes. ‘I think I nodded off for an hour.’

  Thompson looked like shit, but Ellis decided not to share such unladylike thoughts.

  ‘Manage to find anything?’ she asked instead.

  ‘The minibus was a bust. It stopped off at some services but they were within camera shot the whole time. All they did was dump something in the trash can and drive off.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Ellis frowned. ‘Any idea what they threw away?’

  ‘Weapons,’ Thompson said, stifling a yawn. ‘I had a local unit check it out. And they found ten assorted automatic and semi-automatic handguns. Forensics are working them up as we speak.’

/>   Ellis looked at the computer screen and saw a set of blueprints on display. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I took over from Gareth, checking out all of Bessonov’s businesses to see if any of them have basements. I know it’s a long shot, but there isn’t much else to go on.’

  Ellis could see genuine anguish behind the tired eyes. Harvey’s disappearance had been a personal blow to his colleagues and her, but the pain must be magnified tenfold for Thompson. Ellis had never pried too far into their relationship, but Harvey had been like a man reborn over the last twelve months, so she’d assumed it must have been going well. Seeing Thompson pull an all-nighter and sift through probably worthless data only showed that she cared for him equally.

  ‘The team will be back in at seven,’ Ellis said. ‘Go and get some sleep.’

  The words sounded hollow as they left her mouth, but Ellis needed Thompson fresh and alert when they finally got a lead.

  Thompson gave in to a yawn and nodded. ‘I’ll send this lot across to Gareth and head home for a couple of hours.’

  ‘You do that. And make sure you call a taxi. You’re in no fit state to drive.’

  Ellis left her to collate the data and entered her own office. She dug the laptop out of her bag and mated it with the docking station, then went to make a coffee while it booted up. She came back to find the login screen waiting, and she entered her password and waited for the network to authenticate her credentials.

  Once in, Ellis clicked the icon to open the internal mail client and once again entered her password. She was rewarded with the news that she had ninety-three new emails to deal with.

  A typical Thursday morning.

  She began going through them, moving weekly reports into the designated folder and deleting the offer of revolutionary penis-enhancement drugs that had slipped through the spam filter. By the time she’d pigeonholed the last of the emails, no new wars had broken out and, apart from the continuing threat from ISIS, no new terror organisations had popped out of the woodwork overnight.

  Ellis returned to the weekly reports folder and printed each one, preferring hard copies to reading from a screen. As she dealt with each one, she visited the internal portal and added her electronic signature to sign them off.

  She was halfway through the last one when her desk phone buzzed.

  ‘Veronica, it’s Gayle.’

  ‘What brings you in so early?’

  ‘I got a call from the night watch,’ the Russian section leader said. ‘It’s something you need to see.’

  Ellis promised to be down in a couple of minutes. She locked her computer and took the stairs down one level.

  Cooper’s door was already open, and she invited Ellis to take a seat before hitting the remote control for the wall-mounted television.

  ‘This is a recording of a news item that played on Tagrilistan’s national news channel early this morning.’

  The screen showed a man in his fifties wearing a plain grey jacket over a shirt and tie. He was speaking Russian. Ellis asked for a translation.

  ‘The Russian separatists in the country want to do a prisoner swap,’ Cooper said as she paused the playback. ‘They are willing to exchange their recent captive for the ninety-four Russian prisoners of war in Tagrilistan. They also want Milenko to cancel the signing of the trade agreement on the twenty-ninth.’

  ‘Hardly earth-shattering news,’ Ellis said.

  ‘Wait until you see who the prisoner is,’ Cooper said, and hit the Play button.

  A battered face under tousled hair appeared on the screen to the right of the talking head. One eye was swollen, and heavy bruising had puffed up the lower lip.

  Ellis’s hand covered her mouth as she recognised the man on display.

  ‘Andrew!’

  ‘They claim he’s a British spy caught operating illegally in their country, and they’ve set a deadline of five days,’ Cooper said. ‘If President Milenko doesn’t agree to their terms by next Tuesday . . .’

  There was no need to finish the sentence.

  ‘I’ll let the home secretary know,’ Ellis said, trying to gather herself. ‘Send me a copy of the recording and a transcript in English.’

  ‘There’s more,’ Cooper said. ‘We’ve got indications that the Russian withdrawal of troops back across the border appears to be nearly complete.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘They could be paving the way for talks,’ Cooper said.

  ‘I thought Milenko was staunchly anti-Russian.’

  ‘He is, but if he were no longer in charge of the country . . .’

  It fit in with the assassination theory they’d been exploring, but Ellis wondered aloud why they would go to the trouble of kidnapping Harvey if they already had plans in place.

  ‘Contingency?’ Cooper offered. ‘Or it could be that they know Milenko’s stance. He’ll refuse to negotiate with the terrorists, which puts a British citizen in harm’s way. Just another way of destabilising the upcoming talks in London.’

  Ellis didn’t like the way things were playing out. Harvey was being used as a pawn in Moscow’s game, a token to be discarded once it lost its strategic importance. She thanked Cooper for the input and hurried back up the stairs and onto her own floor, almost bumping into Thompson as she barged through the door.

  ‘Sorry, Veronica. I was miles away. I’m heading home now.’

  Ellis considered telling her the news, but decided it would be counterproductive. Thompson desperately needed sleep, and she wouldn’t get that if she knew her lover was being held hostage in a war zone three thousand miles away.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Ellis said, and held the door open for her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Thompson asked, and Ellis knew her face was betraying her.

  ‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘I just hate to see you like this.’

  Thompson seemed to accept the answer, and put her hand over her mouth as yet another yawn escaped. ‘I’ll be fine. See you this afternoon.’

  Ellis watched Thompson leave and felt bad for not levelling with her. But her focus was on getting the powers that be to heap pressure on Milenko to secure Harvey’s release. She walked into her office and dialled the home secretary’s mobile.

  ‘Maynard,’ she heard the familiar, no-nonsense voice say.

  ‘John, it’s Veronica. I have news about Andrew Harvey.’

  She brought the minister up to speed on the situation in Tagrilistan.

  ‘How the hell did he end up there?’ Maynard asked. ‘I thought you said they were holed up with him in Oxfordshire.’

  ‘That’s what we thought, but somehow they managed to get him out of the country. I’m working to establish exactly how they did it, but in the meantime I need you to ask the foreign secretary to put pressure on Milenko to accept their offer.’

  ‘I’ll mention it,’ Maynard said, ‘but don’t get your hopes up. This deal has been two years in the making, and the PM isn’t going to jeopardise it just because one of your boys got careless.’

  Ellis could barely contain herself. Careless? Careless was dropping your phone. She desperately wanted to tear into Maynard for the insensitive remark, but she needed him as an ally, not an enemy.

  ‘Andrew Harvey risked his life investigating the murder of one of his colleagues.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ Maynard said, ‘but I’m just letting you know how things stand. I’ll take your request to the PM, but ultimately it’s his call.’

  Ellis thanked him and asked him to contact her as soon as a decision was made. She disconnected, knowing a political resolution was out of her hands, but there were other options to weigh up.

  She walked quickly back down to Cooper’s office and knocked as she entered the room.

  ‘My team will be here in half an hour,’ Ellis said. ‘As soon as they arrive, I need you to do a presentation on Tagrilistan.’

  ‘Sure. What do you need?’

  The events leading up to the conflict were well known to anyone with a television or
smart phone, so Ellis told her to skip that and go straight to the current state of play. ‘I need to know which areas are controlled by the Russians, and your best guess as to where they might be holding Andrew.’

  ‘The first part’s easy,’ Cooper told her, ‘but we’re talking about an area almost the size of England.’

  ‘They must have a command centre. Start with that, then expand it to other possible sites.’

  Cooper looked worried. ‘Are you thinking about a military incursion?’

  Ellis pursed her lips and gave the slightest shrug.

  ‘That’s not my call, but it might be our only option.’

  Sarah Thompson stirred in a fitful sleep and reached over to Andrew’s side of the bed. When her hand hit empty bedding, she cracked open an eye and looked around the room.

  It took her a couple of seconds for the events of the last thirty-six hours to come flooding back, and she grabbed the spare pillow and hugged it, the faint scent of Harvey’s cologne still lingering on the pillowcase.

  She stayed like that for a few minutes until the alarm on her phone told her it was three in the afternoon. Time to get up, shower and return to the office to resume the search for the man she loved.

  Half an hour later, she climbed into her car and stopped off at a garage on the way to top up with fuel and grab a couple of sandwiches to keep her going. She had no intention of leaving the office for at least the next twelve hours, longer if they found no leads.

  Thompson arrived at the office after four and was disappointed not to see a hive of activity. Her new teammates were sitting quietly, looking at satellite images and making notes.

  ‘Anything new?’ she asked Elaine Solomon.

  In response she got a look of utter sorrow and knew immediately that something had gone dreadfully wrong.

  ‘Ellis said to send you in as soon as you arrive,’ Solomon said, looking over to the boss’s office.

  ‘What is it?’ Thompson asked.