Cold Black

by Alex Shaw

  “What is wrong with him?”

  “He is, how can I say this, ‘tired’.”

  The officer looked harder at the card then at Sverov who lolled against Fox’s shoulder. “Tired?”

  Fox slowly passed the bottle of Johnny Walker to Snow, who handed it to the man in uniform. “Please officer; this could be a very embarrassing situation if his wife were to find out. I’m sure Director Sverov would appreciate your discretion.”

  Eyes falling on the bottle, a smile formed on the officer’s lips. “I understand.” He returned the documents to Snow who placed the bottle in his outstretched hand.

  “Thank you, officer.”

  “Go.” The officer skilfully put the Whiskey bottle into the pocket of his oil skins, turned and pointed at the next car.

  Snow gently pulled away and re-joined the traffic, as both he and Fox breathed out heavily.

  CIA Interrogation Centre, Undisclosed location

  “Let him have it.”

  The agent nodded and plunged a needle into Sverov’s upper arm. Immediately the KGB director opened his eyes.

  “W...where am I?” He asked in Russian.

  “Sorry Mr Sverov, I don’t speak Russian but I hear you speak pretty good English?”

  Sverov stared at the American. “Who are you?”

  “You can probably guess. Now I have a few questions that I’d like to ask you.”

  “I am the Director of the KGB and I order you to release me.”

  “You are free to walk out of here, if you can.”

  Sverov tried to stand but his legs wouldn’t move. What had they done to him? “You’ll learn nothing from me Mr CIA.” He tried to spit the words but his mouth was still not quite working. He sounded drunk.

  “Bravo director, good guess. I am ‘Mr CIA’ and you are in Langley Virginia.”

  Sverov’s mouth fell open. He tried to make sense of what the man had told him and moved his head to look around the room. There was a CIA plaque on one wall and a wall planner in English on another. On a small table, next to the wall, stood a couple of cans of Coke.

  “But this can-not be. I demand you release me immediately.”

  “Well Mr Sverov, I will do that. I’ll release you directly to your embassy. No doubt you’ll want to lodge an official diplomatic complaint after you have answered a few questions for me. I need to find someone and I know that you can help me.”

  Sverov suddenly felt as though he was floating and his mind was not quite his own. “You are wasting your time, I don’t know his name.”

  Casey pulled up a chair and sat in front of the Belarusian. “Whose name Director? Did I ask you for a name?”

  Sverov was aware that he was thinking and that his thoughts were being verbalised and that he couldn’t stop it. “The man you want to find. The Russian, I can’t tell you his name because I don’t know it”

  Casey nodded. “Well I am sorry about that but I am sure that we can work around it. Just so I don’t get confused, are we talking about the same man? I want information about the Russian who gave you orders to attack Saudi Arabia. The man who ordered you to plan the kidnapping of British citizens.”

  “That is the man I meant.” Why was he talking? “Why am I talking?” He couldn’t stop.

  Casey nodded. “Well it does no harm to talk. Seems to me, if our leaders talked a whole lot more, we could solve the problems of the world. Now I have a few pictures here I’d like you to look at. Can you tell me if the Russian you met with is any of these men?”

  Sverov looked at the sheet and his eyes went wide when he reached the third image. “Yes. That is the Russian.”

  SBU Headquarters, Volodymyrska Vulitsa, Kyiv, Ukraine

  Dudka sipped his first work coffee of the day and looked at his mountain of post. Two weeks away had been too long. He’d spend the rest of the day clearing his backlog. His office door opened and Zlotnik entered, he was holding a file. He sat without offering a greeting.

  “Did you murder Investigator Kostyan?”

  Dudka was impressed that his boss was being so blunt. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Dudka sipped his coffee. “Yes. I did not murder Investigator Kostyan as he does not exist. I murdered Konstantin Voloshin.”

  Zlotnik’s face went red. “You assassinated a Belarusian agent!”

  “And they say that there is no justice.”

  Zlotnik was lost for words. He had thought that he had made his message clear to the old fool, but Dudka had done the unthinkable and not only located the killer but eliminated him. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then say nothing.” Dudka took more coffee. “Biscuit?”

  “What?”

  “Would you like a biscuit?”

  “What I’d like is to arrest you for murder. But I’ll settle for your immediate resignation Dudka.”

  “No.”

  Zlotnik started to shake. “NO?”

  “That’s right. No. I am not going to resign and you cannot make me.”

  “You murdered a Belarusian national!”

  “You, General Director, aided a Belarusian assassin to murder a Belarusian national.”

  Zlotnik’s mouth opened but he managed to hold his tongue. It was true. He had assisted Kostyan when he thought he was a real investigator. He regained his voice. “You…but you…”

  Dudka stood. “No don’t thank me. I have a lot of work to catch up on so if you have finished, I would appreciate it if you left my office.”

  Zlotnik pointed his finger at Dudka, he snarled. “You have gone too far.”

  “And you haven’t gone far enough. Go away.”

  Balling his fist and unable to speak any further, Zlotnik left the room and slammed the door.

  CIA Interrogation Centre, Undisclosed location

  The pain in his head woke him. A hammer blow, that seemed to strike with each heartbeat. Sverov opened his eyes and shut them quickly. The light in the room was blinding. He opened them again, this time shielding his brow with his right hand. Sverov sat up and realised that he had been sleeping on the floor. He blinked and found that his vision was blurred, he was suddenly nauseous. Sverov managed to turn his head just in time before he vomited.

  Rolling away he steadied himself against the wall and stood up. The hammering in his head intensified. The room slowly came into focus. He suddenly remembered where he was. In the CIA headquarters, Langley…His hands shook and he moved along the wall until he reached a small table. On it there was a can of coke. He opened it and drank half of it in one long gulp. The two men in his apartment they had injected him with something and then he had woken up here. An American had then questioned him about…He almost fell. He had given them everything. Voloshin’s name, the Russian orders, the payment schedule from Russia and he had also identified the Russian’s face. Sverov shook with fear. He, director Sverov of the Belarusian KGB, had turned traitor.

  He retched again and brought up the coke. This time it splattered on his feet. Slippers? He was still wearing his slippers? He wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve and drank the remainder of the coke, an acrid taste in his mouth. There was a noise from beyond the door. Something that shouldn’t have been there, a car horn... He frowned. Something was different about the room, something was wrong. But what? He then realised that the CIA crest had been removed.

  Warily he moved towards the door and tried the handle. It opened, easily. He took a deep breath and walked through. Darkness. There were no CIA agents, no long corridor and no walls. He was standing inside a large empty apartment. A rumble of traffic came from outside. Sverov opened the apartment’s front door moved down the hall towards the exit. He opened the communal front door and the noise of traffic hit him. He stepped outside and was on a Minsk city street staring at the morning rush hour traffic.

  FIFTEEN

  American Embassy Minsk, Belarus

  “Ms Knight, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you. I have of course heard a lot about you.” The secure lin
k to SIS in London was up.

  “And me, you, Mr Casey.”

  In London Patchem rolled his eyes, given half a chance Casey would wine and dine Brezhnev’s own mother. “So, Vince?”

  “We have a name to go with the face Director Sverov gave us. Maksim Gurov.”

  “Why don’t we have anything on him?” Knight raised an eyebrow.

  “Because, Ms Knight, he’s been cold in the ground since the mid-nineties. We don’t tend to tail the dead.”

  “So either he’s not our man or he’s not dead.”

  “Those are the only two options Jack.”

  Patchem ignored the sarcasm. “So, what do we have Vince?”

  “Well I’m sure SIS has its own image data base, but on ours he’s been seen with old Vladimir on a dozen occasions in the last five years. Each time either alone or in the presence of Privalov’s known close associates.”

  “Who is Gurov, Mr Casey?”

  “We don’t know who he is now, but we know who he was. He was in the First Chief Directorate of the Soviet KGB. Within that he commanded a clandestine Special Forces group called ‘Vympel’.”

  Patchem thought back. Vympel had been a name that had been whispered during Soviet times. What little intelligence ‘The West’ had about the unit was alarming. It suggested that Vympel cells would be activated in time of war for acts of sabotage, covert action and espionage to be carried out on enemy soil. In other words, State sanctioned terrorists. Even amongst Spetsnaz units Vympel, was a name said with fear. “I thought it had been disbanded?”

  “It was, as they say in business, ‘re-organised to meet market needs’ around 1995 and became a police unit known as ‘Vega’. Apparently the majority of the officers resigned. This was just after Gurov was reportedly K.I.A. in Chechnya.”

  Knight looked puzzled. “Why would the KGB want to hide its personnel?”

  “I’ve thought about that. My theory is, as Yeltsin was responsible for their disbandment, the KGB wanted to form a more secretive group that was loyal to itself, or in this case the next President, Privalov.”

  “Vince, have we got any proof of this?”

  “Absolutely none whatsoever except that Gurov appears to be alive, well and counselling the current Premier Minister.”

  “So let’s cut through this.” Knight hated getting side-tracked. “Do we have our link to the Russian government? Is this something we can take to them?”

  “We have intelligence gathered with err... unconventional methods that links the Russians to this.”

  Knight looked at Patchem; she knew no details of the operation in Belarus and for reasons of plausible deniability, did not want to know. “Jack?”

  “Take it to the Foreign Secretary. The Prime Minister can then be honest with the Russians. Present them with the facts, that we have identified the other voice on the tape as Maksim Gurov, and believe that he is not acting in the best interests of the Russian Government.”

  Knight nodded. “Agreed...but I still…”

  In Minsk there was a sudden knocking on the door, Casey turned around surprised, as an embassy staffer entered with a note.

  “Excuse me.”

  Casey moved away from the camera and read the note. The link was silent for a minute or so as Casey could be seen working at a computer terminal. His face registered disbelief. He then returned to his seat and spoke into the camera.

  “Someone has posted video footage of the Sverov/Gurov meeting on the internet and it’s been picked up by the major news networks.”

  Patchem raised his eyebrows. “What?”

  Casey continued. “Your GCHQ will have it no doubt, as will the BBC and SKY News. I’ve sent you the link.”

  An email arrived on Patchem’s desk top. He clicked. “Video?” But the tapes only had audio?”

  Knight and Patchem watched the footage in London as Casey did so in Minsk. The video, clearly taken with a concealed camera, jerked as the cameraman entered a room and shook hands with Director Sverov in front of a large fireplace.

  “Stop. Did you both see that? Vince, rewind your copy to eleven seconds.”

  Knight squinted, she should really wear glasses. “What are we looking at?”

  “This.” Patchem re-wound their copy and put his finger on the screen. “A reflection in the mirror.”

  “I see it too Jack.”

  Knight now found it. The face of the cameraman appeared momentarily in the mirror above the fireplace. “Gurov?”

  Knight’s mobile phone rang. She retrieved it from her bag and saw that it was the Foreign Secretary. She didn’t pick up. “So what does this mean?”

  “It means that in addition to the audio recordings the other party made his own video.”

  “That’s not Gurov!” Patchem stared at the frozen image. “It looks like Valentin Nevsky; he’s a deputy director of the FSB.”

  “How certain are you?”

  “Abigail, he’s my opposite number. I’ve met the man; he’s very close to the Russian Premier Minister.”

  There was a pause then Casey said adamantly. “This tape is a fake.”

  Knight looked up at the screen showing the CIA officer. “Can you be sure?”

  “Absolutely. The method we used to get the intelligence from Director Sverov has a 100% success rate.”

  Knight held up her hand. “Ok Mr Casey, please don’t tell me any-more. If we presume that our intelligence is correct we know this tape to be a ‘fake’. Someone wants us all to accept this tape as genuine. Setting these authenticity issues aside, what is their motive for releasing this tape?”

  “To get the Russians to stop?” Patchem was still peering at the screen.

  “What if we have been looking at this whole situation from an entirely incorrect perspective?”

  Casey Shrugged. “Which is Ms Knight?”

  “Well, what if the primary objective of the attacks were not to destabilise Saudi Arabia but to discredit and in doing so destabilise Russia? The release of this tape squarely points the finger at them.”

  Casey leant back in his chair and let out a deep sigh. “That’s a big assumption.”

  “Mr Casey, thank you Jack, make sure our lab analyses a copy of this tape. Specifically checks the voices against the existing tape and also cross checks against any audio we have of Nevsky.” Knight’s phone rang again. “I’ll have to take it this time.” She stood and left Patchem’s office.

  “Shit happens eh Jack?”

  Patchem stretched. He was mentally and physically drained. “Regularly Vince.”

  Ukrainian - Belarusian Border Crossing Point

  Snow and Fox had spent a tense night held up in the woods until rush hour when they had driven back the way they had come to the border with Ukraine. It was early afternoon by the time they reached the crossing to leave Belarus. The Ukrainian number plates had once again been attached and the relevant passports were on hand. To his relief, Snow noticed that the same two border guards were on duty as when they crossed from Ukraine.

  “Good afternoon officer.”

  The border guard looked at the occupants of the car. “Passports, please.”

  Snow once again placed the documents into the hand of the guard’s outstretched.

  The guard looked at them “Please step out of the car, both of you.”

  Snow again translated the request into English. Both he and Fox got out.

  The second guard now joined the first. He recognised the pair and nodded at Fox. “It is you, the Irishman?”

  “Yes Officer, it is me.”

  “You try drink, Belarusian Vodka?”

  “I did.” Fox gave a ‘thumbs up’.

  “Next you must to try Belarusian girl!”

  The first guard gave his colleague a stern look and said something in Belarusian before speaking to Snow.

  “O.K. Come to the office and we will stamp his exit visa.”

  They left the car and walked to the two story concrete building. A third border guard, their superior,
was sitting in front of a computer. He had a telephone to his ear. The first guard held up the passports then put them on the desk before returning to the road leaving his younger, more talkative, colleague to stand with the foreigners.

  Fox looked around the ‘office’. It was hardly impressive with a garish calendar on one wall of a women in Belarusian national dress, a portrait of the President on another and several badly photocopied wanted notices on a large white painted wooden notice board, steps at the far end led up to the first floor.

  The Chief guard replaced his handset. “You are Irish?”

  “Yes I am sir.” Fox used his best smile and accent.

  The guard tapped his keyboard and checked the passport numbers. He then pointed at Snow. “You are his interpreter?”

  “Interpreter and driver.”

  “You wait a moment, please.” More tapping then the guard spoke quickly in Belarusian to his junior. Fox tensed, he recognised the tone. “Your passports have not been registered.”

  “I don’t understand?”

  “It is a requirement for all foreigners to register with the local police when they book into a hotel. A zerox copy of your passport is taken for registration.”

  “I’m sorry. We were in Minsk for two nights. Perhaps the system is a little slow?”

  The senior officer looked up at Fox, his expression showing that he had heard it all before. “No. All registration happens immediately. It is the law of Belarus. Which hotel did you stay at?”

  “The Hotel Minsk.”

  You must wait there while I call ‘Minsk’.” The officer pointed at several seats by the stairs.

  They sat, with no choice but to wait and hope that the registrations had been taken care of by one of Casey’s ‘assets’. Snow saw the body language of the chief guard change as he spoke in quick fire Belarusian on the antiquated light green soviet era desk top telephone. Snow nudged Fox as the expression of the younger guard changed. The guard looked at Snow and Fox before quickly looking away, too quickly. His chief said something and he nodded.

  The chief guard made eye contact with Snow. “There are some irregularities. You will have to stay with us until they have been investigated.”