Fatal Ally

by Tim Sebastian

  Lydia shivered. ‘I would not wish to meet such a man.’

  Yanayev kept his eyes on the path and said nothing. Moscow had plenty of Ahmeds, deployed around the world. Men who were trained in what they called ‘exhibition violence’. Violence, designed as much to shock and intimidate, as to wound and kill. Violence that carried a message way beyond the act itself.

  It was better that Lydia remained ignorant of such things.

  MOSCOW

  Arkady sat very still in the apartment, but his thoughts wouldn’t leave him alone.

  How do I spend my last hours here, who are the friends I should like to hug, where are the places I love that I will never see again …?

  He stared through the window onto Leninsky Prospekt. Hours earlier, a thick grey daylight had flooded in over Moscow, sealing in the cold. At this time of year the Russian capital would be dark by mid-afternoon, just as he’d be travelling to the airport at Domodedovo – his final journey across the city where he’d been born.

  In the bottom of his suitcase, he had hidden the only picture that would travel with him: a small black and white photo of his parents, taken when he was six, on a beach by the Black Sea. He had found it days earlier, wedged between the pages of an old schoolbook, and for a second or two had even wondered who the figures were – his father in baggy trousers and an ill-fitting shirt, mother in the usual, awful, striped shift and the little boy that he’d been, wearing nothing more than swimming trunks and a silly smile.

  The sun had been so bright that they had all squinted into the camera, leaving the impression of excruciating pain.

  It was the only holiday Arkady could remember. His parents had been killed just before his seventh birthday, by a drunken truck driver who had veered out of control on an icy hill in Moscow and slammed them against a stone wall.

  There had been no more pictures after that. And certainly none of him at State Orphanage No.63 in Yugo-Zapadnaya, where every object that he had ever touched belonged to someone else.

  Strange never to have owned anything at all – not even a toothbrush – until the day he had left the building, aged eighteen, with a cheap, tenth-hand jacket, far too small for him, and a pair of trousers with an eclectic collection of immovable stains down the left leg.

  He let the memories wash through him. Today it would, perhaps, have been appropriate to visit his parents’ grave – but no one had ever told him where it was and, truth to tell, he had never asked.

  He tried hard to think about the few years of family life that he’d experienced before the State had taken him over. But the pictures in his mind were faded or missing entirely. Fifty years had slunk past him, without so many of the emotional milestones that mattered to other people.

  When he thought of his mother it was in disjointed fragments: the rubber band in her hair, the striped skirt, a laugh that had embarrassed him once on the crowded metro, a chocolate bar that she had passed him, like an exotic jewel, for his birthday.

  Not her warmth or her kisses. Because he no longer knew if they were real or if he had imagined them.

  So I’m taking just a few scraps of my history, and I leave behind a woman who was married to me and didn’t love me – and a dog who did.

  Pack your bag, said a voice inside his head.

  I’ve done it, he replied. I’m ready to go.

  WASHINGTON DC

  Harry Jones sat waiting for his phone to ring. If the Russians located Mai, it would ring twice and he would get in his car and go direct to Nathan’s Bar in Georgetown. And hand Yanayev the name and itinerary of Arkady Mazurin.

  Seemed so simple.

  And yet if there was no news in the next four hours it would all be too late. Mazurin would have left Russia and the bargaining chip would be worthless. Mai would be irretrievably lost.

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  He wondered how many other national security advisers had sat in the same White House office, planning and executing operations that were morally questionable or downright illegal?

  But that wasn’t the right question. You took the position, you did the job.

  No point moaning about betraying people – betrayal was Washington’s currency. Look no further than the political quicksand on Capitol Hill or the snakepit out at Langley. Betrayal was business.

  He got up, paced the pannelled room and sat back down again.

  When he closed his eyes, he could see Mai’s face in painful detail, feel the energy she had lent him, see the lightness of her movements.

  Passive faces held no depth, told no stories, offered no glimpses of life lived or life to come – but hers did. The perpetual motion of the eyes, the mouth that opened so slowly to give – or shut tight like a trap.

  And wherever she’d been and wherever she was going, Harry wanted to be there.

  Sometimes her hard edge would appear without warning, like a knife drawn from its sheath – and maybe hours later the softness would return. No little girl stuff, nothing mannered or contrived but a gentleness that men would always wage wars to win.

  Each time she went away, she would put something small into his pocket; a coin, a bookmark, a button or a badge. ‘Keepsakes,’ she said.

  ‘So you do care about me?’ he’d asked her once and instantly regretted the question.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Curiosity.’

  ‘Harry …’ Her voice had hardened. He could see the trap closing.

  ‘Let’s leave it,’ he’d said.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t want to leave it. Fact is I care about lots of things. What’s happening in Syria, the country I grew up in, the death and destruction. I care about my friends and the people I’m close with – and yes, you’re on the list too. But don’t ask me to tell you where. It’s a long list and’ – she pointed an index finger at him – ‘you have a pretty long list too.’

  ‘Which means what, exactly?’

  She had smiled and taken his hand. ‘You’re a clever man, Harry Jones. You work it out.’

  The White House was quiet as a church. Last to leave the building had been the interns – or ‘slaves’ as the staffers called them – hurrying out into the snow to grab their Saturday night and swing it by the tail.

  But he wouldn’t have changed places with them. He didn’t want their ‘fun’ or their bar chat. He had wanted to be important – to play big games with big stakes – Harry Jones in his tweed suits and bow ties and wispy grey hair. They had no idea of the ambitions that he harboured or the random and exceptional stupidity with which he had thrown them away.

  Harry wasn’t the first official in this building to have fallen in love with a woman outside his marriage. Nor was he the first to misuse his power and his office.

  And as he knew, far better than most, he wasn’t by a long chalk the first to betray an ally.

  But he realized with pin-sharp clarity that if the big game went wrong this time and Mai didn’t make it home, life, as he had come to understand and value it over the last weeks and months, life, written in big, bright letters, would simply be over.

  MOSCOW

  Moscow was in darkness when she reached the hotel. From her window she could see pockets of the new bling: garish neon lights, hoardings that shouted western brand names, fast cars. But the rest of the city lay grumpy and dismal, as it always did, beneath the freezing snow.

  You could never fall in love with Moscow, she thought. But there was a magnetic pull that was hard to ignore.

  Unlike the West, Russia seemed unfettered by procedures and committees and legal restraints. Its power was raw and available for immediate use. Its options unlimited.

  In the distance she could see the staggering beauty of the Kremlin against the rolling night-time clouds. Inside it, the silent, secretive heart of a gigantic beast.

  And wherever you went in the city you could hear it beating.

  Arkady Mazurin was a brave man to betray it.

  She didn’t unpack her suitcase, j
ust lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. Two or three miles across the city Arkady would be waiting to make his move.

  In a few hours, she too would head for the airport and make hers.

  WESTERN SYRIA

  The contact awoke startled.

  ‘Come outside – quickly. Don’t wake your friend.’ The beard pointed to where the policeman lay inert and snoring in the corridor.

  They stumbled outside onto the rough tarmac.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’ The contact could hear the desperation in his own voice.

  The man looked up and down the street and spoke in a rapid whisper. ‘I talked to a colleague. There’s been some unusual traffic on the mobile phone networks.’

  ‘What, for God’s sake? I need facts, details.’

  ‘Talk of a foreigner. I think it’s a woman. Nothing specific yet.’

  ‘Where? Where is this talk coming from?’

  ‘Radius of thirty kilometres. Thirty-five maximum.’

  ‘I need more. Go back.’

  Inside the doorway, the contact lit a cigarette and sent Ahmed a message.

  ‘First sign of life,’ he wrote. ‘More soon.’

  WASHINGTON DC

  For a moment Vitaly Yanayev stared at the phone in disbelief, as if unable to accept that it was buzzing in his hand.

  His secretary was on the line. Same bored voice as ever. Same Foreign Ministry robot. ‘You have a cable, Ambassador. It’s very urgent.’

  ‘Send it round immediately to my residence.’ He cut the call. Could she not have thought to despatch it by herself?

  Within five minutes, he had it in his hand. Moscow had not bothered with details. They would follow later. The American woman appeared to be alive after all in Syria. They were trying to pinpoint her position. When they did, extraction would follow.

  He read the last sentence twice because his hand was shaking and he wanted to be a thousand per cent sure, and because this was the biggest thing he had ever undertaken in the whole of his long and often spectacularly tedious career: ‘Imperative you complete transaction immediately.’ There was no room for misunderstanding.

  He sent Harry Jones a text from his unlisted phone and ordered his car sent round.

  Outside, the temperature had dropped but Vitaly Yanayev was sweating heavily as he lowered himself into the passenger seat.

  MOSCOW

  At dawn Margo left the hotel and took a taxi to the British Embassy.

  Her cover story had been a meeting with consular staff to agree new procedures.

  But instead she had been taken straight to the Station Chief Robert Evans.

  A camp bed beside his desk told its own story.

  She had met him a year earlier at a gathering of section chiefs in Vauxhall Cross. They were all so different. At one of the sessions they had all confessed their out-of-hours pursuits and discovered, to general amusement, that they had nothing whatsoever in common.

  One sang in an amateur jazz group, another drove souped-up hatchbacks in local rallies.

  Evans, by contrast, was a committed Christian, ordained as a Church of England vicar in his early twenties, and recruited into the Service after deciding the devil should be fought on the streets, not in the pulpit. At weekends he still played the organ.

  And yet, none of that, she reflected, had prevented him from becoming the most ruthless and determined of agents.

  Shortly before midday he left to keep watch outside Arkady’s flat.

  ‘I need you there till he gets on that plane,’ she had told him. ‘No last-minute surprises.’

  Evans nodded. ‘You think he’s up to this?’

  ‘You know him better than I do.’

  ‘He’s rusty but let’s not forget who he was. Top-rank KGB. They weren’t made of sugar, were they?’

  Margo looked at her watch and wondered if Arkady was also counting the hours and minutes. Evans was right. The Russian had been one of Moscow’s prized possessions, spying his head off in America for years and never getting caught.

  He’d have known all the risks, been trained in the ways to mitigate them. And yet there was always another dimension. She knew that herself. Always something that you hadn’t heard, didn’t know, failed to factor into your perfect plan.

  She thought back to the great pile of approvals and signatures for the dozens of operations she had conducted over the previous twenty years.

  They had all been magnificent – each one of them – utterly magnificent. Right up until the day when they weren’t.

  She arrived early at the airport. Plenty of time to get noticed by the security cameras and then ignored. They’d be concentrating, as always, on the people who hurried, the last-minute travellers, the young and the agitated. A businesswoman in black business suit, with papers in hand and an easy smile would be no one’s idea of a threat.

  She took a seat in the coffee shop, chatted to the woman behind the counter, even dropped a few papers on the floor. A business prospectus, some spreadsheets, printed and designed for the purpose at Vauxhall Cross. She laughed at her clumsiness, a man got up to help her.

  Don’t overact, she thought. Be friendly and open – and if you can remember what it feels like, be normal. You’ve had a business trip. Major deal in the pocket. You’re happy to be going home. That’s all anyone will see.

  They wouldn’t know that she had left a black VW Passat on the diplomatic concourse outside the terminal, with its key in the ignition. Or that a miniature earpiece connected her directly to Robert Evans.

  She swallowed a double espresso and clasped her hands together under the tiny coffee table. No one had ever seen her nervous. She was determined to keep it that way.

  Evans had seen the taxi pull in outside Arkady’s block, but his eyes scanned backwards and forwards along the rest of the road. The snow had been piled several feet high along the pavement.

  Five minutes passed. Ten. Had the Russian overslept? Had he taken a phone call?

  ‘He’s late,’ he told Margo. He could hear the sounds of people milling around her. ‘No wait, I see him, coming out now. It’s him.’

  ‘Let him leave, keep watching his building.’

  Evans didn’t move. He saw the figure ease himself onto the back seat of the saloon and watched it nose slowly into the traffic. He couldn’t see the point of waiting around, but his job wasn’t to argue.

  On the seat beside Arkady was a single case. Inside it: a suit, three shirts and some underwear. Everything else he had left behind and was glad of it.

  After all, mementos meant nothing. Especially if you wanted to forget. They cluttered your life and impaired your judgement. You spent years buying and minutes disposing. What was this human fascination with collecting? It had all been so pointless.

  And lastly there was a pair of old leather gloves – one in each coat pocket. They were worn and scuffed and would attract no attention. Inside each of them were tiny strips of film, cut into little bundles and sewn into the linings. Their hiding place for more than thirty years.

  The film from Leningrad that would buy him his freedom and his retirement in London.

  The night before, Arkady had checked the flat a final time, trying to picture how the security men would force their way in. Would they pick the lock and creep around, sifting and sorting? Or would they smash down the door and destroy as much as they could? Rumour had it that the younger officers enjoyed that best, armed themselves with baseball bats, clubbing and shattering any object they could find. Perhaps they’d also pocket a few things for themselves when no one was looking.

  But it didn’t matter. Things didn’t matter. Nothing belonged to him now except the future.

  I should have gone years ago.

  The mantra he kept repeating as the taxi headed south from the city centre.

  As always the ring road was crowded with late shoppers and people heading for their weekend dachas.

  What a quaint image, he thought, but so unlike the real Russia! Oh yes, they
drove out in their hundreds of thousands to their retreats – anything from shacks to country estates – but they all did the same when they got there: drank themselves senseless, only to return with dead eyes and blotchy skin from a weekend they could barely remember.

  No wonder so many died early.

  The driver was from one of the new taxi companies – smart, but thankfully disinterested in conversation.

  They inched in silence through the outer suburbs. Arkady paid no attention.

  From now on, Moscow would be mentioned only as history – all memories of it grey and faded. Perhaps one day, he could shut them in a box and throw it away.

  He remembered that he still had his mobile phone in his pocket. Now that too could go. He opened the window next to him, as if to get fresh air, and threw it out into the street.

  Ahead of them, he glimpsed the first, bright blue signs for the airport.

  Just a few kilometres to go.

  He felt a surge of energy.

  WASHINGTON DC

  As soon as he entered, Yanayev could see Harry at the end of the crowded bar. Not the kind of Harry he had met before. This one was in jeans and pullover, face unshaven.

  ‘You want to go outside?’ Harry raised a hand in greeting. The noise was deafening.

  ‘No time, Harry. I’ve got news and I need a quick answer from you.’

  Yanayev sat on the stool beside him and leaned in close to his ear. ‘Your package is alive. We have an approximate location. As soon as it’s confirmed, we’ll get her.’

  Harry didn’t move.

  ‘You heard what I said?’

  ‘Yes. I just couldn’t …’ He seemed to pull himself together. ‘Where is she? Can you get to her?’

  ‘I’ll give you all the details. Right now, I need you to fulfil your side of the bargain. We’re running out of time. May already be too late. You need to tell me who it is that’s defecting from Russia? Now, Harry. This minute, flight details, everything you know. Otherwise, there’s no deal.’