Richter still simmered slightly whenever he met Richard Simpson. Two years earlier Richter had been an out-of-work ex-Royal Navy Sea Harrier pilot with a minimal pension and a gratuity that was leaching out of his bank account at an astonishing rate. He’d spent three irritating months scratching about, trying and failing to find any kind of employment that would pay his mortgage without boring him to death. Then he’d attended an interview in London for a courier job that was so intriguing that Richter had just had to take it. It had sounded too good to be true, and it had been.
Sent into France on a courier assignment that nobody, and certainly not Richter, believed made any sense, he had been set up by Simpson as an unwitting target to trap a high-level traitor in the Secret Intelli-gence Service. Richter had been considered expendable, with no family to make a fuss if he didn’t return. Against all the odds, Richter had survived the encounter, which the SIS officer hadn’t, and his performance had convinced Simpson that he was too useful to lose. The death of the SIS officer was marked ‘unsolved’ by the Metro-politan Police and the French authorities, but the file was still open, and Simpson had made it clear that if Richter ever stepped out of line, he would be only too happy to assist the police with their enquiries into the matter.
Simpson stared at Richter from the opposite side of the desk, and Richter stared straight back at him. Behind the row of cacti on his desk – the cacti were about the only things Simpson seemed to have any affection for, and there were more of them in serried ranks on all three window-sills – his face was all Richter could see, his dark, almost black, eyes unwinking. ‘Come on, then. I haven’t got all day.’
Richter opened the briefcase, took out the notebook he had been using in Moscow and put it on the desk in front of him. The other items could wait until later. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘We got the signal about Newman on Tuesday evening. I flew into Moscow – economy class as usual – on Wednesday morning and checked into the Budapesht Hotel under cover name Willis. I rang the Embassy that afternoon and got an appointment for the following morning with the First Secretary, a man called Horne, William Horne.
‘As agreed with Tactics and Equipment, I presented him with the insurance company letter and accreditation, and after a bit of grumbling he passed me on to the Fourth Under-Secretary, Simon Erroll. I inspected the car and the body that morning – the corpse was in the basement fridge – and the office and apartment that afternoon. Then I flew back to Heathrow.
‘I took an abstract from Newman’s file before I left,’ Richter continued. ‘He was five feet eleven, weighed about twelve and a half stone, had fair hair and a fair complexion. There is no mention of any distinguishing marks. The body in Moscow was about the correct height and weight, though obviously it was impossible to measure or weigh the cadaver without Erroll smelling a rat. The hair and skin colour looked correct, but the face was completely unrecognizable, and the burning of the hands had destroyed the fingerprints.’
Simpson opened the personnel file in front of him and looked up expectantly. ‘So how do you know it wasn’t Newman?’
‘I’m coming to that. When people talk about distinguishing marks, they think about scars or birthmarks. Newman had no obvious scars or marks, so they probably didn’t realize. He had had an in-growing toenail on his right foot removed about ten years ago. The body in the basement mortuary in Moscow had all ten toe-nails.’
Simpson studied the file for a few moments in silence. ‘There’s no mention here of a toenail removal.’
‘Yes there is,’ Richter said, ‘in the “Summary of Hospital Treatment”. Newman had only had three operations – removal of tonsils and draining of sinuses when he was a kid, and the toenail job. The effect on the toe is quite unmistakable. The nail never grows normally again, because the nail bed is excised, wholly or partially.’
Simpson finally closed the file with a snap. ‘Two questions. If the body wasn’t Newman, who was it? And where’s Newman?’
‘Two answers,’ replied Richter. ‘I don’t know – at least, I know what he was, but not who he was – and Newman’s dead.’
Le Moulin au Pouchon, St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France
The four men had rented the small three-bedroomed house about a mile outside the village some four months earlier, and they had all lived in the property ever since. The reason for this uninterrupted occupation was simple security – although the level of crime in rural France was commendably low, an unoccupied property was still a target and the one thing they couldn’t risk was some French low-life breaking in and stealing any of the equipment or, worse, talking about what he had seen inside.
Actually, there wasn’t very much to attract a thief to the house. No readily saleable items like TV sets or hi-fi equipment. There was a TV set, but it was at least ten years old, big and bulky, and of little or no value. Hassan Abbas had bought it second-hand from an electrical shop in Aire-sur-l’Adour, the local town where they did most of their shopping. There wasn’t even much in the way of furniture. Four single beds, two in each of the largest bedrooms, a table and four chairs in the kitchen. In the living room, two elderly sofas were pushed against opposite walls and on one wall there was a single incongruity – a clear mark showing the direction of Mecca so that prayers could be said correctly. Below the mark there were four highly decorated prayer mats.
There were no curtains at the windows, because the faded wooden shutters were always kept closed, and no signs of anything that might be described as the comforts of home. In fact, the only items of real value lay behind the door of the third and smallest bedroom, at the back of the house. The door to this room was the only one with a lock – a five-lever exterior quality Chubb which had been fitted within a week of the signing of the tenancy agreement at the agency in Aire-sur-l’Adour – and it was always kept locked unless the equipment in the room was actually being used. The room’s single exterior window was, like all the other windows, kept firmly closed, as were the external shutters. What was not visible from the outside was the steel grille bolted to the wall inside the room and which completely covered the window opening – another unofficial addition to the property which Abbas had organized.
The other invisible deterrents to a thief were the Glock 17 semi-automatic pistols always carried by each of the four men, and the two AK47 Kalashnikov assault rifles, magazines fully charged, which were kept propped up behind each of the two outside doors. They had also spent some time carefully positioning plastic explosive charges on the inside of the ground-floor doors and windows, to be actuated by trip-wires, and installing a number of high-wattage floodlights under the eaves, powerful enough to illuminate the entire grounds.
There were two reasons why the old mill had been chosen, rather than either of the two other houses that had been on the short list. The first was a unique architectural feature of the property that Abbas had stumbled on almost by accident, and which he devoutly hoped he would never have to use. Just over two miles from the house was the second reason; a small nondescript grey concrete building, it was the automated telephone exchange which served the properties in the shallow valley which opened up to the south of St Médard.
When Abdullah Mahmoud – the name in the genuine Moroccan passport carried by Hassan Abbas when he had stepped off the ferry from Tangier at Algeciras – had decided on the location of the property they needed, he had planned to have an ADSL line installed. An Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line would have provided a permanent Internet connection, but technical requirements meant that the user had to live within about four miles of the local exchange. The other two houses he had been considering were each over ten miles from their respective exchanges, hence the choice of the St Médard property.
In the event, Sadoun Khamil, who had first supported Abbas’ decision, had later vetoed the idea of ADSL, simply because it would have been an unusual request in that area and might have attracted attention. So instead Abbas had signed up for Internet access with Wanadoo, one of the Fr
ench service providers, and relied on a dial-up connection through the V92 internal modem in the 2GHz IBM desktop computer that sat on a rough square table against the wall in the locked rear bedroom of the house.
The PC had been supplied with Microsoft Windows XP, but Abbas had stripped that off because of the potential ‘spyware’ implications of the Product Activation routine, and had installed Windows ME and Office 2000 instead. The machine had come with Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, which worked well enough despite various security loopholes and which Abbas had left alone, but he had added an anti-virus suite and a firewall for safety. He’d also installed a copy of the PGP – Pretty Good Privacy – file encryption program.
Next to the computer was a small-footprint Hewlett-Packard laser printer, which was used only to print the very rare email messages intended for the group, rather than just Abbas, to see. On the floor next to the table was a large uninterruptible power supply – a UPS – which would provide back-up power to the computer for about half an hour in the event of a mains power failure. Beside the UPS was a black leather Samsonite case containing a powerful laptop computer to be used as a back-up to the IBM machine in case of some kind of major software or hardware crash, and a mobile telephone in case the landline ever failed. And apart from two upright chairs, the room contained nothing else.
Every afternoon Abbas unlocked the door of the back bedroom, switched on the computer, opened Internet Explorer and surfed the Internet for a couple of hours, concentrating on pornographic sites. This he had done ever since they had taken the house, establishing a routine that served to cloak his real activity on the web. He had no interest whatsoever in the lurid images that flashed across the screen, and barely even glanced at them. All he was interested in was one site that he himself had created and that was hosted on a low-cost server in Arizona. He had done nothing to promote the site, so very few people knew it existed, and fewer still bothered to visit it because it was, even by the low standards normally applied to sex sites, remarkably badly constructed and, frankly, boring.
One link on the site generated a 404 error – page not found – but pressing the ‘Refresh’ button three times within two seconds ran a small piece of code Abbas had embedded in the site. This action didn’t produce a new page but simply dialled the classified number of a distant mainframe computer, which Abbas logged on to at least once every week.
As well as surfing the net, Abbas had established himself on several email mailing lists, and every day had to wade through some fifty advertising messages. The majority of these he deleted immediately, but he always read the messages from one advertiser in Germany completely. Some of these messages he deleted after reading, but some he didn’t. Although the originating address was German, these emails had actually been sent from a different country, using a series of redirection sites to conceal their true origin.
That morning, Abbas downloaded the overnight messages and found only one from the German email address. He scanned through it carefully, then grunted with satisfaction. About halfway down the page were a few lines of what appeared to be corrupted text. Abbas highlighted the text and copied it into the word processor, then closed his Internet connection and shut down Outlook Express. Then he ran the decryption routine in the 128-bit PGP encryption program on the copied text, using his private key, and read the message twice. Its contents disturbed him, and he knew Khamil had to be told at once.
Abbas spent forty minutes working at the computer, composing and encoding a message for Sadoun Khamil’s eyes only, which he embedded in another advertising email, this one with a Spanish originating address. As with the incoming message, Abbas arranged for it to be bounced from server to server before finally being delivered to Saudi Arabia.
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yazenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow
It was, Sokolov thought, as he surveyed the pile of folders and files on the desk in front of him, an almost impossible task. He was not even sure that Nicolai Modin was right, that one of the records he was studying was that of a traitor. It was surely possible that the Americans had flown their spy-plane just because they wanted to photograph the weapon test site.
Time was a further problem. Sokolov checked his desk calendar; there were just three weeks to go before the implementation date of Podstava. Three weeks in which to review the records of twenty-one high-ranking officers of the GRU and SVR, many of whom were personal friends, looking for a single anomaly, a single fact or indication that might suggest that the man’s loyalty could be questioned. In fact, including Modin and himself, there were twenty-three officers indoctrinated into the project. There was also Minister Trushenko, but neither he nor Modin had the authority to investigate him.
Sokolov pressed the intercom button and ordered more of the strong black tea that he enjoyed. Then he picked up the draft action plan he had agreed with General Modin and glanced over it. Telephone taps were in place on the home and office telephone lines of all twenty-one officers – that, no doubt, was a complete waste of time, as only an idiot would use his own telephone to pass classified information to a foreign power or agent. Mail intercepts had also been ordered, but again Sokolov had no illusions about the likely results of that. If there was a traitor, Sokolov was sure that the only way he could be detected would be through physical surveillance, by watching where he went and whom he talked to or passed close to in the street or stood next to. The watchers were assigned and ready, and that, apart from scanning the personal files again, was about all that could be done.
The door opened and Sokolov’s aide entered, carrying a tray of tea and sweet biscuits, which he placed in front of the general. Sokolov nodded his thanks and picked up the next file. He glanced at the name on the cover – ‘Bykov’ – then opened it and looked down at the full-face photograph of a sharp-featured man wearing an artillery officer’s uniform.
Hammersmith, London
Simpson stood up and walked to the window overlooking the Hammersmith flyover. His small pink hands fussed among the cacti for a minute or so, a sure sign that his mind was on other things, and then he walked back to his desk and sat down. ‘Explain,’ he snapped.
‘First, the body,’ Richter replied. ‘The head injuries were extremely severe, even for a high-speed, head-on collision. According to the Russian authorities, the car ran into the back of a parked truck at about fifty miles an hour, but the other injuries to the body don’t gel. From the condition of the car, the driver must have sustained lower-limb damage if his right foot was on the brake pedal at the moment of impact. I can conceive of no circumstance in which a driver, knowing that a collision was imminent, would remove his feet from the pedals. His natural instinct would be to brake, and keep on braking—’
‘Unless he was suicidal,’ Simpson interrupted.
‘Yes, but in that case, his foot would almost certainly be on the accelerator. Same difference. No apparent arm injuries, either. And the fire that followed the crash conveniently burnt the body’s hands and forearms, obliterating the fingerprints. No, the whole thing stinks. The injuries are certainly consistent with the damage caused to the car, but with the proviso that the driver was unconscious at the time of impact.
‘As far as I can see, the only way the body could have received those injuries was by being strapped into the car, feet placed on the floor and hands and arms lying limp or perhaps on the lap. And another thing; when I was examining the corpse, Erroll pointed out a line of light bruising running across the chest, about six inches below the shoulders. At the time, I didn’t know what had caused it, but I worked it out on the flight back.’
‘What was it?’ Simpson asked.
‘When they put the man in the car, he was still alive, but unconscious. The seats on the Lada that Newman owned were very upright, and I think they found that he slumped forward instead of sitting normally in the seat. So they tied a length of string or twine around him to hold him upright.’
‘Why string? Why not rope?’
&n
bsp; ‘Too strong. What they wanted was a body that looked as if it had died in a road accident. If they’d used rope, that would have left heavy bruising on the body.’
‘OK,’ Simpson said, ‘but you’re telling me this man was alive when he was put in the car, but killed by the impact. Dead bodies don’t bruise.’
‘No, but tissue damage would still occur, and would still be detectable, and might lead to awkward questions being asked, albeit only in private. But they had a better reason for using string. They wanted the victim to die in the crash. If he had been tied upright with rope, he might possibly have survived, and then they’d have had to beat him to death with clubs or whatever to make it look as if he’d been killed in the crash. And it’s very difficult to do that without it being perfectly obvious to any reasonably competent pathologist. They must have assumed that we would give the body a post-mortem, just because of who Newman was. By using string to support him, they made sure that at the moment of impact the string would break, and the body’s head and upper torso would swing forward and downwards, and make hard – and probably fatal – contact with the steering wheel and dashboard. The bruising was caused by them tying the string a little too tightly, or maybe it was a bit too strong, coupled with the pressure the body exerted on it at the moment of impact, just before it broke.’
Simpson considered this for a minute or so, then nodded. ‘OK. Go on.’
‘It was a set-up. Having snatched Newman, they looked around and found some middle-aged Russian with a similar build and colouring. They knocked him out, dressed him in Newman’s clothing, put him in the car and then drove it, maybe by some sort of radio control, into a barrier.
‘Then they made sure the face was unrecognizable – part of the lower jaw was missing, and most of the teeth, so even dental records wouldn’t have been much help in confirming the identity – and that the body was dead, and burnt the hands and the car. And finally they called the British Embassy to impart the sad news that Graham Newman, Third Secretary and only incidentally Moscow SIS Head of Station, was dead.’
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