The Moscow Sleepers

by Stella Rimington

  ‘All I can tell you at present is that at three thirty yesterday afternoon Dieter Nimitz threw himself under a train at Blankensee station. He was identified by the documents in his wallet. When police went to his house to inform his relatives, they found Irma dead on the floor of the kitchen with her throat cut; she had bled to death. It is clear that her husband killed her. His prints were on the knife they found in the kitchen beside her body. The pathologist reckons she died many hours before he did.’

  By now Lamme was speaking more calmly and rationally but then his tone switched back to agitation. ‘I am being called now to go to the ministerial meeting. I will tell the government that I have your assurance that the British have not passed information about German citizens to the press or to the Americans.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charles, his fingers tightly crossed. ‘Please do.’ He put down the phone, let out a long heartfelt sigh of relief and left to go to the ambassador’s morning meeting, while Sally poured herself a cup of coffee and picked up the phone to speak to Peggy Kinsolving in London.

  42

  One week after Bruno had unceremoniously leapt from Michelle’s car in the park in Moscow, leaving her and her son open-mouthed with astonishment, he was standing in the booking hall of Beijing railway station waiting for a car from the Embassy to pick him up.

  He had not remained long in the muddy BMW that had collected him in the park. A quarter of an hour later, in a shady street in a Moscow housing estate, he had transferred to a high-powered silver Mercedes SUV containing two men and a woman. According to their passports, the men, Bill and Dave, were both Canadians and the woman was French, though in fact there was only one Canadian in the car and he had lived and worked in England for the last ten years. The Frenchwoman did indeed have a French mother but she also lived and worked in London. Bruno had his Canadian passport, having left his British passport and his other British identity documents with his initial rescuers in the BMW.

  The Mercedes had driven steadily out of Moscow, heading eastwards in the direction of Kirov and Perm. The two men took it in turns to drive; Bruno’s offer was firmly rejected. He was told to sit in the back and get some rest; he was clearly the parcel for delivery and not expected to take part in the delivery process. The Frenchwoman, whom they called Maddy, seemed to be in charge of security and it was she who kept an eye on the traffic, looking out for familiar patterns of movement that might indicate they were being followed.

  They had food for two days on board so they stopped only occasionally in small towns to fill up with petrol and buy coffee to keep them going. There were long stretches of boredom, especially during the night when there was very little traffic on the road, but also moments of tension and one of sheer panic. The last came on the outskirts of Kirov when they rounded a corner to be met by a battered-looking lorry heading fast towards them on their side of the road. By sheer bravado and fast thinking, Dave had avoided the lorry, whose driver must have been drunk or asleep, and they had driven on unharmed but shaky.

  The moment of tension came when they were stopped at a checkpoint as they were leaving Perm. A large uniformed man with a gun over his shoulder and a cigarette in his mouth strolled out and asked for their documents. Just as beads of sweat were beginning to break out on Bruno’s forehead, it turned out that Maddy was not only beautiful and French but also spoke excellent Russian, was very charming, and perhaps most importantly had a couple of packs of French cigarettes in her pocket that she decided she didn’t really need. So the moment passed with best wishes and smiles all round.

  Their destination was Yekaterinburg, where Bruno was to join a tourist train on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Bruno didn’t know who had invented this long escape route. Maddy had hinted that much thinking had gone on in the Operational Security Department; the obvious route via the Finnish border had been too well publicised by the successful exfiltration of Oleg Gordievsky in the 1980s.

  Though it proved a long slog, this method had worked, and they had arrived safely in Yekaterinburg quite late in the evening on the day before the train was due. Three interconnecting rooms had been booked in a hotel and Bruno had slept peacefully in the middle one with his minders in the rooms on each side. In the morning he had been delivered safely to the railway station. The waiting room had been full of tourists of various nationalities including, by luck or design he never knew, a group of Canadian engineers who had been working in a natural gas plant near Lake Baikal and were taking a scenic trip before flying home.

  Bruno had been relieved to discover he had a two-berth compartment to himself and breathed a thank you to Geoffrey Fane who must have authorised the extra expense. For the first couple of days he’d spent most of his time in his compartment, glad to keep his distance from the Canadian engineers, who seemed a dreary bunch. Just short of the Mongolian border, Russian officials came aboard, and he’d been visited in his compartment by a passport officer who’d leafed slowly through his document’s pages, looking at the many stamps it held from all over the globe with more longing than suspicion. After he’d handed the passport back and left, Bruno was starting to relax – only for another tap on the door. A small gnome in a cap and khaki uniform came in – the Customs representative, it seemed, for he peremptorily ordered Bruno to open his suitcase. No problem there, thought Bruno.

  But he soon noticed that the gnome was glowering. What was wrong? Then Bruno remembered that he’d put a pint bottle of whisky that he’d brought from Moscow flush in the middle of the neatly pressed shirts and folded underwear and socks that the escape team had provided. He cursed himself for the oversight. Was he really going to be busted for a contraband bottle of booze? It seemed absurd, but also alarming. He envisaged himself taken off the train and put into a small windowless room, where he would face an interview that would be hard to survive unscathed. What was the purpose of your trip last year to São Paulo? Tell us about your family, Mr Anderson? Do you have children? What do they do? You say you are married, Mr Anderson – what is the date of birth of your wife?

  A tiny trickle of sweat started to crawl along the back of his neck. Then inspiration came. Reaching down Bruno lifted the bottle of whisky, then looked away, blindly offering the bottle to the gnome. For a moment nothing happened. Then he felt the man take the bottle from his hand, and when Bruno turned round the deed was done – the whisky bottle tucked unobtrusively into the side pocket of the gnome’s jacket. The little man stiffened his shoulders, nodded curtly, and left the compartment.

  After this it had been plain sailing. As the train worked its way through Mongolia and then on to Beijing, Bruno had stayed in the safety of his compartment and tipped a conductor to bring him his meals on a tray, along with a bottle of expensive red Bordeaux. Now as he waited for a colleague from the Beijing Station to pick him up, he breathed another silent thank you to Geoffrey Fane for getting him safely out of Moscow. He still had no idea why he had been withdrawn so precipitously, but assuming he had been in serious danger he could only be grateful to have been rescued in such style.

  43

  ‘Peggy,’ said Liz, ‘you’ve got to go.’

  ‘They’ll understand. They know operations come before everything. They can meet another day.’

  ‘They won’t meet again for another year. They’re all busy people and there’ll be an outsider there as well. The dates for these things are fixed well in advance. If you’re not there this afternoon they’ll think you’re not interested. They’ll also think that you imagine you are indispensable and don’t understand the principles of delegation and teamwork.’

  It was the morning of Thomma’s escape from Bartholomew Manor and they were arranging who should go to Suffolk to interview him. In normal circumstances, it would have been Peggy, as it was she who had interviewed Miss Girling and given her the number that Thomma had rung for help. Liz had only met Miss Girling when she had shown Liz around the school. But Peggy was up for promotion and the board was meeting that afternoon. Liz had strongly recomme
nded Peggy and was anxious that she should not miss her chance.

  Silence fell. Peggy looked downcast.

  ‘Come on, Peggy,’ said Liz gently. ‘It’s my reputation on the line as well as yours. If you don’t turn up, they’ll think I got it wrong. I’ve written you up in a big way, you know. I’ll cope with Thomma. Your account of your interview with Miss Girling is very clear, and I’ll read it again before I go. Also, I need to look again at your note about the call from the Berlin Station telling us about Irma and Dieter Nimitz’s deaths. Let me have the file of photographs, and make sure it includes everyone involved, right from the start of all this. I have a feeling there are links here that we haven’t yet made. And why don’t you spend this morning at Grosvenor, briefing Miles Brookhaven on recent developments? Then go to the Promotion Board this afternoon and sock it to them.’

  Peggy’s face brightened and she smiled. ‘All right. I’ll go to the beastly board and do my best,’ she said, standing up to go.

  ‘Of course you will. And you’ll wow them. You’ll see. I just hope I’ll do as well in Suffolk.’

  As she emerged from Ipswich station Liz was not surprised to see a police car waiting for her. She was surprised, however, to see the Chief Constable sitting in the back seat.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘I was expecting Inspector Singh.’

  ‘When I heard you were coming I thought I’d come myself,’ Pearson replied with a smile. ‘I hope that isn’t a disappointment.’

  ‘I’ll get over it,’ Liz said teasingly. ‘And actually I’m delighted to see you, because I think this case is beginning to look more complicated than we initially thought.’ She spent the hour of the drive explaining what had been going on in Germany and trying to make the connections with Suffolk. She found it helped her to go over it, but it clearly left Richard Pearson pretty confused, and neither of them knew quite what to expect from the young man they were on their way to interview.

  The desk sergeant was expecting them, and it was obvious that someone had recently cleaned and tidied up the reception area of the small police station in the housing estate on the edge of Southwold. The floors were sparkling and there were flowers in a vase on the reception counter.

  ‘Good morning, sergeant,’ said Pearson. ‘Where’s the young man then?’

  ‘I’ll show you along, sir. Good morning, ma’am,’ he said with a nod to Liz. ‘He’s in an interview room down the hall. One of our young family officers is looking after him.’

  ‘Excellent,’ replied Pearson. ‘Let’s go.’

  The sergeant unlocked a door and led them down a corridor to a room that looked like the sitting room of a small house, containing a couple of armchairs, a sofa and a table at which a teenage boy and a young woman PC in uniform were sitting looking at a laptop and laughing. The boy was small and thin and Middle Eastern in appearance. He was dressed in jeans and a grey hoodie that was too big for him, and looked like countless boys seen every day on the streets of London and other English cities. But he had none of their bravado. As he looked up from the screen when Pearson and Liz came into the room, his face grew tense and he looked frightened.

  ‘This is PC Norton,’ said the desk sergeant, ‘and young Thomma.’

  ‘Good morning, sir, ma’am,’ said the young woman, jumping to her feet. ‘We were just playing a game on the computer.’

  ‘Great,’ said Pearson warmly. ‘I expect you were better than Miss Norton at that,’ he said, addressing Thomma.

  Thomma seemed too frightened to reply, but PC Norton said with a smile, ‘Yes, sir. He was beating me hands down.’

  As the desk sergeant and PC Norton left the room, Liz said, ‘Come and sit down over here, Thomma,’ motioning to the sofa. She sat down next to the boy and Pearson took one of the armchairs opposite them.

  Pearson said, ‘First, the most important thing is: did they give you some breakfast and, as it’s nearly lunchtime, are you hungry now?’

  The boy smiled hesitantly and replied, ‘No, thank you, sir. I had bread rolls and jam for breakfast and I have just had a sandwich and a coke for lunch.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Liz. ‘Now perhaps you could tell us why you ran away from the school.’

  The boy thought for a moment. ‘I was scared.’

  ‘What frightened you?’

  ‘It was when I heard the other boys talking. About Miss Girling.’

  ‘What were they saying about Miss Girling?’

  ‘They said she was dead. She was going to take me to church with her. But she didn’t leave a note, so I thought she had forgotten.’ The boy bit his lip and frowned, then said, almost angrily, ‘I know she is dead, but the other boys said she killed herself. I don’t believe that. Something bad happened to her.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because she wanted me to phone her if I didn’t hear from her. Why would she say that if she was going to kill herself?’ He explained how she had first found him when he’d been upset because the other boys laughed at him for being Christian; how she had comforted him, then offered to take him to the local church service.

  ‘Who would have harmed her, do you think?’ asked Liz.

  ‘Cicero,’ he said without hesitation. ‘He came looking for me when I left this morning. I think he would have harmed me, too.’

  Pearson interjected, ‘You mustn’t worry about that. We’re not going to let anyone come anywhere near you.’

  Thomma nodded. He no longer seemed the fragile boy of a few minutes before. Seeing his confidence rise, Liz asked, ‘Can you tell us a bit more about the school at Bartholomew Manor? What were you studying there?’

  ‘Computers, miss.’

  ‘Yes. But was it just computing in general?’

  ‘Oh no, we’ve all had the basic training before. This is specialised.’

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you originally come from and how did you get here?’

  ‘And,’ added Pearson, ‘how do you come to speak such excellent English?’

  So Thomma told a story which he had probably recounted many times before – how he had been born and brought up in Aleppo in Syria. His father had been an English professor at the university and had taught his children to speak English. They were Christians. When the fighting started, his father had decided they must leave but he couldn’t find a country that would take them. So the family, his parents and his two sisters and Thomma, travelled to the coast. His father paid people smugglers to ferry them to Italy. They paid a lot of money, said Thomma, to get a better boat than the unsafe inflatables. But when the boat came it was old and rickety and had no life rafts. When they were in sight of the Italian coast a storm blew up and the boat capsized. In the chaos that followed he lost sight of the rest of his family. He swam for as long as he could and was eventually washed up on the shore all alone.

  He had managed to evade the government officials who would have put him in a refugee camp and joined a group who were walking across Europe. It took him about two months to reach Germany, where they were very kind and found him temporary foster parents. He had to take some tests to decide which school he should go to, and he got very high marks. So he was put in a school outside Hamburg that specialised in maths and computing. During his third year he had been chosen to join a group of boys going to England for specialised training.

  ‘What is the school in Hamburg called?’ asked Liz.

  ‘The Freitang.’

  ‘And the name of the head teacher?’

  ‘Frau Nimitz.’

  Liz took a folder of photographs out of her briefcase and selected one. ‘Is this the Head?’

  Thomma nodded. ‘Yes. That’s Frau Nimitz.’

  ‘Tell us about your journey here, Thomma,’ asked Richard Pearson. ‘Did you come by plane?’

  ‘Oh no. It was like when we came from Syria only this time the boat was better. I don’t know why we came that way. All the boys were asking why we had to travel at night and land on a bea
ch in the dark.’

  ‘What did the people in charge say?’

  ‘They said it was cheaper and there was not much money for educating immigrant children. That did not make us feel good.’ He went on to describe the regime at the school, which sounded more like a prison camp than an educational establishment.

  ‘Tell us about the lessons. What were you being taught?’

  ‘We were not really taught, sir. Mr Sarnat – he’s the Head – believes you learn by doing. That’s what he likes to say.’

  ‘I see. Tell me what you were doing then.’

  ‘We were divided into groups, four of us in each one. I was assigned to Computer Defences.’

  ‘What did that mean exactly?’ asked Liz.

  ‘We were developing programs that companies could use to protect themselves against hackers.’

  ‘Did you try and use the software against attackers?’

  ‘There aren’t any attackers at present.’

  ‘Then how did you know the software would work?’

  Thomma looked surprised. ‘We didn’t,’ he said innocently. ‘Instead, we tried to get into other sites. That way we could see where their weaknesses were, and find ways to make those sites stronger.’

  It was a touchingly naïve assessment of what was going on. To Liz, it was perfectly clear that Thomma and his fellow students were being taught how to hack, not how to prevent it. She said, ‘Did you practise on real companies then?’

  ‘Not real ones,’ said Thomma. ‘That’s next week.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Liz casually. ‘What are they?’

  ‘We are going to test something called jaysee browncow.’

  ‘What is that?’ asked Liz, puzzled.

  ‘It’s a meat company and it runs refrigerated lorries. They have a computer program that tells the lorries where to go. If someone hacked the program they could send the lorries somewhere else and steal the meat.’

  ‘J.C. Brown and Co,’ murmured Pearson. ‘Big meat suppliers.’