Man on Edge

by Humphrey Hawksley

  ‘Yes. British. It is better. The Ambassador is a friend.’ Carrie took his arm. ‘Trust me. The coffee will be better.’

  ‘You are so nice, Carrie.’ Semenov smiled. ‘My niece is a clever, funny woman.’

  Carrie pointed to the river as it came into view at the end of the road. Semenov stopped again. ‘But, Carrie, they will be watching. We can’t wait in the street. They will see me. We must be let straight in.’

  She coaxed him along with another affectionate tap on his arm ‘It’ll be fine. The British know we are coming.’

  Semenov took a step. ‘OK, Carrie. I know you are brave. I trust you completely. I wanted to say—’

  He paused mid-sentence. A man stepped out from a side street just ahead. He wore a black jacket with the British flag and embassy logo on the left side. He waved enthusiastically.

  NINETEEN

  ‘Dr Walker, Admiral Semenov, I am Alan Scott, embassy security.’ He spoke in a regional English accent with a reassuring smile. ‘Come with me down here and we’ll go in the back door.’

  He gave Carrie a wink, turned on his heel, and headed back into the street marked as a dead end with uncleared piles of snow. It was dark, barely a light, a few sedans parked on each side. On their left was a bank and a vandalized cash machine, on the right, a children’s playground covered in snow, icicles hanging off the swing bars.

  Scott seemed to read Semenov’s worry. ‘Only a hundred yards down here,’ he said chirpily. ‘An alley to the left that leads us into the compound.’

  ‘That is diplomatic property,’ replied Semenov, half question, half statement.

  ‘It is, Admiral. You will be a hundred percent secure.’ Scott strode ahead reaching a thin red and white striped car barrier on the left. He pointed. ‘Just through here.’

  Beyond was a small parking lot, then a fence and hedge. Semenov shifted his hat a fraction, his hand shaking.

  ‘Admiral, you first,’ said Scott. ‘Dr Walker, you stay back to give a clear run for the facial recognition.’

  Semenov didn’t move. ‘Carrie, no.’ He turned to her, his eyes bleak.

  ‘Come on, Uncle Art,’ she cajoled. ‘We’re home free.’

  ‘No,’ Semenov repeated, this time with grit, a naval officer, no longer an uncle. A bullet slammed into his chest. Carrie saw the flash from the chamber before she saw the weapon in Scott’s hand. A burning coldness enveloped her. She fought to keep her mind. In front of her was total horror. Semenov swayed. Another round hit him, close to the first. He stumbled forward, his face creased tight, his eyes filled with despair as if his worst prediction had come true. He reached out to her as if for comfort. The fingers of his right hand curled into a fist. She had led him to his death.

  ‘Nooooo!’ she cried out.

  Scott fired a third round into his back. Carrie caught his fall. She had to tear herself from overwhelming panic. Her uncle was dying, his vital signs racing away. He was heavy. She was somewhere else, Iraq, Liberia, Libya, gunfire, shelling, urgency, wounded, life draining away. She managed to hold him, keep his head from smashing into the road. Saliva bubbled from his mouth. He clawed at her jacket before losing all strength. She sank down with him into the snow.

  ‘Move away.’ Scott spoke softly in Russian, like she would in a trauma room, something that had to be done. He knew Carrie understood. How?

  Blood thumped through her temples. She held her uncle’s head in both hands, knuckles in the wet snow, not daring to look up, not knowing how she would react. She knew about people with guns, but nothing like this. It froze her thinking.

  She laid his skull on the snow, kept her gaze down. Her hands were sticky with blood. She had to keep thinking.

  ‘I said move away,’ Scott repeated.

  Why hadn’t he shot her? A flash of relief spread through her and fear. He could kill her any time. He smiled so warmly when he greeted them. She couldn’t look at him, didn’t want to show her terror. She began to push herself up. Her muscles locked in self-protection. She had to force herself through it. Either she stood up or he would pull her up.

  What was happening? Her uncle was dead. Carrie was alive. Meaning she wasn’t on his kill list? What then? She stood up, stepped back from the body. Scott kept his eyes on Carrie, weapon ready. He ran his hands through Semenov’s jacket, bringing out wallet, cards, money, keys.

  ‘Did he give you anything?’ Scott asked.

  Carrie shook her head.

  ‘Over here.’ Scott indicated with the gun. He wanted Carrie to move out of sight of the intersection to a patch of unlit street. She stayed silent. She didn’t move.

  ‘American doctor being bitch.’ He stood up, leaving some of Semenov’s things on his body, some on the snow coloring with blood. His weapon was down. Relaxed. He carried the blankness of a man who often killed to order.

  ‘Turn out your pockets,’ he said.

  Her skin tingled with revulsion. Why don’t you fucking shoot me, then search me? She tried to shout defiance, but her mouth hung open, her throat parched.

  Scott took a step toward her. Carrie braced. She could run, and he might not shoot because he had orders not to. Could she get to the main road before he caught up with her? Should she—

  Scott’s head vanished in front of her, evaporated into a brown, maroon, and orange exploding ball. Carrie’s legs gave way. Flesh, skull bone, blood, and brain sprayed into the air. Some fell on her. She stumbled, found her balance again. Scott died silently, an explosive bullet to his skull. Carrie heard no shot. She looked for the weapon, expecting her world to go dark, too. She fought bile rising in her throat, the body’s reaction to total terror. She was alone with two fresh bodies and lightly falling snow, watched, not shot. Raw, red muscles and arteries spilled from Scott’s headless neck.

  Carrie ran.

  She fled the street, drawing ice air deep into her lungs, causing her to cough. She kept going, careful with her feet on the ice. She reached the sidewalk of the main road with traffic roar and splays of light from yellow streetlamps. A police car passed her. No siren. Two guys chatting. No alert about a double murder in a side street by the British Embassy.

  She carried Semenov’s phone in her right hand, fingers curled right around it. She looked behind her. Nothing. She reached the Novinsky intersection and slowed to a walk. She repressed rising nausea, spat out the greenish-yellow fluid. She knew that if she slowed, she would weaken. She needed to process shock by focusing on a small detail of logic, something that would make her safer. She talked to herself. I am in Russia to take my uncle to the British Embassy. But he has been shot dead … She kept walking and told the story to herself, straightforward, unemotional like a medical report.

  She needed to get help and for that she needed a new phone. There would be a phone stall in the underpass. She would call Harry Lucas and take it from there. Except. Fuck! She reached the top of the steps and made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn. Where the hell were Lucas’ watchers, the guys who were meant to have tracked her to the embassy, made sure she met up with Semenov, who should have had her back?

  Where in God’s name are you?

  Her phone vibrated, the one Lucas had given her for emergencies. Incoming call. Unknown. Russian script. Carrie pressed accept, held it to her ear, said nothing. Familiar voice.

  ‘It’s Steph, Carrie. Disappear. Don’t use us—’

  ‘Steph, what the—’

  The line cut. She felt lost, empty. For a split moment a chance of safety. Gone. She walked on, not into the underpass. She needed to stay in the open where she could run. She could stick to her plan. St Petersburg. Helsinki. Really? Back to the Intercontinental? No way? What about Harry Lucas’ fallback plan, Red Square, the GUM shopping mall, Beluga Caviar Bar from where the Brits would whisk her to safety? Except. Stephanie said: Just hide. Disappear. Fallback blown? Unsafe.

  She put Semenov’s phone in her side pocket, then realized that she could be tracked. She took off her gloves, sticky with her uncle’s blo
od. She sprang out the SIM card, dropped the phone in the bin. She doubled back into the underpass where she had seen a stall that advertised MTS, Beeline, and Megafon, the main network carriers that any tourist can get onto at the airport. Face covered with her scarf, hat unrolled over her ears, speaking in English, she used the passport of Dr Sarah Mayer to get a new phone, not the cheapest because she needed it smart and dual SIM. Not one phone, but two, just in case, with different carriers.

  She headed east along New Arbat, working a route that would take her to Leningrad Station, train to St Petersburg, where she could hide away for a day and get the plane to Helsinki, not the one booked. Another. Last minute. Except, if that rendezvous was blown, so would St Petersburg be blown. Why had Lucas pulled his guys? No way St Petersburg until she could trust Lucas again.

  Stop, Carrie. Stop. You are making yourself crazy. Her mind had nowhere to go. She walked against the traffic, looking through windscreens at impatient drivers, bored passengers, animated conversations, belches of black smoke from old engines, battered cars, lopsided trucks, dark-windowed limousines. Evening rush hour. What in hell’s name to do?

  Carrie tightened her scarf, hunched her shoulders and slid her hands into her pockets. She wanted to fold herself up, head tucked away like a porcupine. Down in her right pocket, underneath a handkerchief and loose change, she felt something small, hard and square. She bought it out, tight in her fingers. A flash drive with a USB connection. Tiny. Her dying uncle had clawed her jacket. What presence of mind! Was this it? Was this what people were dying for?

  Carrie passed two Internet cafes before choosing one which was busy, casual, and ran on a cash-operated system. She picked a workstation with no one on either side and slid Semenov’s drive into the USB port. The computer’s immediate recognition was a good sign. The drive could carry one terabyte. It was eighty-five per cent full, which was a lot of data. Files unfolded on the screen. Their titles were long numbers, like serial codes. Carrie opened one. Password protected. Another from a different folder. Encrypted. She tested more, randomly. None opened. Either encrypted, password-protected, or code appeared which to Carrie was meaningless. She took phone screenshots and left. She had been there for less than five minutes, came out and kept walking east. She imagined dangers that vanished. She ran across a red-light intersection because she saw two men in black jackets with a logo she mistook for the British flag.

  She took a sidewalk table at a large cafe, gas warmers, blankets, instant Wi-Fi. No log on needed. She needed to eat and ordered borscht soup, carrots, onions, beetroot, stewed beef cubes, potatoes, comfort food, calories, strength injection. Black coffee. She scanned the street. Her hand shook as she lifted the coffee cup. Her nerves were going wild.

  She ate the soup, chewed the beef slowly, allowing space to calm. She needed to do something, but what? How fast you died if you got it wrong.

  She swabbed gravy with a last piece of bread, pushed the plate aside, drew her coffee close and warmed her hands around the cup. There was one person. Rake whom she had let down big time, who shouldn’t give her a second thought. But they had been messaging and, on this, she would trust him completely. He was in DC. He wanted to see her. She told him she had to cancel because she was heading out but didn’t say where. He had messaged back: Where you going? Boccaccio? An Italian restaurant in Kabul. Their first date. Rake throwing intimacy into a four-word text. She transferred his email address to the local number, attached two screenshots of the serial numbers and code from Semenov’s flash drive, keyed: In danger. Please.

  She sent it, paid the bill, and wrapped herself warm again. She walked, no idea where she was going. Two men left the cafe, similar military gait to Scott. Or was she imagining it? Carrie kept on. An embassy? Swiss. Norwegian? Canadian? Yes. Canadian. That’s what she would do. Easy. Why didn’t she think of it before? Or Israel? The nationality of her fake passport. No. Lucas had set her up with it. Not safe.

  She stopped outside a brightly lit store window, mannequins draped in elegant evening dress, blacks and dark blues. The phone map showed the Canadian Embassy back the way she had come south of New Arbat close to the British Embassy. Like hell would she go back down there! Anyway, it closed in five minutes. They all would.

  Her phone beeped. Rake. Straight back to her.

  TWENTY

  The Pentagon, Arlington County, Virginia

  Rake looked at the two images from Carrie that had just appeared on his phone. He was in a crowded basement room in the Pentagon watching a live feed of a stalled FBI interrogation of the surviving member of the Russian television crew. Apart from claiming innocence, he had stayed silent.

  Carrie’s images were grainy and static, one a scroll of files identified by sixteen-digit numbers, the other yellow folders, similar to those seen on any Microsoft folder file and with shorter names. Rake had no idea what they were. They were shots taken on a phone of a computer screen. Carrie had been going out of town. Now she was in danger. But where? What danger? He sent a message back: On it. Where you? He needed to be careful. There was a reason that Carrie had only contacted Rake, a reason, too, that a Russian hit team had broken through all intelligence networks to get to him, a reason a human ear had been sewn into the carcass of a dead reindeer.

  Within minutes of the shooting, Rake and Mikki had been taken out of the building and put into an SUV that sped across the Potomac River to the Pentagon. Rake was unfamiliar with Washington. Windows blackened, he couldn’t see a thing anyway. They had slowed to go down a steep curving slope into the massive Pentagon complex, stopped in an underground parking lot with stripped overhead lighting, into an elevator, down three floors, through fingerprint, voice, and facial recognition, and to an area where there had been statements, briefings, interviews, even a polygraph, and a cell-like room to sleep. Now, a day after the shooting, Rake, Mikki, and Whyte were in a crowded communications room, not big enough for a board meeting, but not too small, government paint, functional, four chairs, only two used, two walls decked with screens and computer equipment.

  Whyte held rank but seemed to be as much in the dark as Rake and Mikki. The only person in charge appeared to be a technician, holding the fort, running through the footage of the attack, keeping tabs on the FBI interrogation, waiting for some kind of authority.

  Others were men and women from an array of agencies, unafraid to conceal suspicion of each other. Careers would ride on this crisis. Rake was army and Whyte was navy, which was why the Pentagon had prevailed over the FBI, which tried to claim jurisdiction for a federal crime committed on US soil and failed. The CIA wanted to muscle in, insisting it was a foreign intelligence issue, and might have succeeded had its intelligence stopped the gunmen before they arrived. Other agencies and units within agencies were there. For a case like this, everyone wanted to be in the room.

  Concentration focused on the FBI interrogation. The surviving team member had given his name as Dmitry Petrov, aged fifty-nine, a freelance camera operator for Moscow television stations. Petrov had checked out. He was well known in his trade, competent, workmanlike, divorced, relatively sober, and had gone to Washington because it was a high-paying foreign job. He had not worked with his two dead colleagues before. A surface investigation showed he had no links to organized crime except the usual protection and pay-offs that drew in most Russians. In his mandatory two years’ military service, he had seen no combat. He had offered his name, address, and profession like a soldier with rank and serial number. He had asked for a lawyer who turned out to be a consular official from the Russian Embassy. Since then, he had not uttered another word.

  Rake showed Carrie’s images to the technician running the computer console. He was late middle age, quiet, fast at his job, working a shift, and Rake judged he would have no skin in the career game. The technician looked at both, made a call, and put Rake on the line. ‘Thank you, Major.’ No identity for the voice. ‘We’re telling everyone to hold fire. Someone will be along in a couple of minutes to take ov
er. You need to wait outside the room.’

  The outside corridor had low ceilings, dim light, gray walls, and a smooth concrete floor. To the left, it ended with an emergency exit door. To the right, it curved round like a river.

  Round the curve came two military cops, broad, no-nonsense men, flanking someone. Rake couldn’t work out if the MPs had him under arrest or were protecting him. Seeing Rake, he moved ahead of the cops. ‘Major Ozenna. Harry Lucas. We met briefly at Bagram.’

  The MPs took up positions either side of the door. Lucas was casually dressed in jeans, a red checked denim shirt and trainers, quiet on the concrete. He carried a look of controlled impatience, a man with a puzzle where the rules kept changing.

  Lucas held out his hand. Rake grasped it. Strong fingers curled around Rake’s. ‘Those images you just received, are they from Carrie Walker?’

  Rake covered his surprise that Carrie was locked into something that reached deep into the bowels of the Pentagon. He handed his phone to Lucas, who looked at the two shots, switching them back and forth. He led Rake toward the emergency exit door out of earshot of the MPs. ‘I’m running Carrie’s operation. She was helping us with a defector, which is why she is in trouble.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Rake’s expression stayed unchanged, crow claws splaying out from the edges of his eyes that looked half-closed but were concentrating on Lucas.

  ‘Moscow.’ Lucas handed back Rake’s phone.

  ‘Why?’ A brief fury swelled that Carrie was in danger doing work she wasn’t trained for. But anger wouldn’t help. Governments did what governments did.

  ‘I will give you more details further along if necessary,’ said Lucas. ‘As far as we know, Carrie is unhurt and she’s free because she sent those screenshots.’

  ‘Why to me?’ Rake was placing Lucas, former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, a Republican, special-forces war veteran, a bad marriage to a British diplomat and rumors of drinking, although Lucas came over as composed and knowledgeable.