Lord of the Swallows

by Gérard de Villiers

“I wanted to keep a low profile. What can I tell him?”

  “The truth: that you’re here on a matter that doesn’t concern the cousins.”

  “That won’t satisfy him. I don’t want MI5’s Section A3 people on me. You know, taking my picture and breaking into my hotel room.”

  “You’re right,” said Spicer. “Cornwell’s a friend. Tell him part of the story. That we’re trying to uncover a Russian network operating in the United States.”

  They were sitting in the embassy’s small cipher room, which was equipped with several encrypted telephones. Spicer alerted the switchboard of their presence and at exactly three o’clock—ten a.m. in Washington, D.C.—a blinking red light on line three signaled an incoming call.

  Spicer picked up and, after a few seconds, handed the phone to Malko.

  “Irving wants to talk to you,” he said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Good morning,” said Malko. “Was the name I gave you of any interest?”

  “Are you kidding? It rocked Langley to its foundations. Do you have any idea who Rem Tolkachev is?”

  “No.”

  “He’s the most senior and the most secretive member of the entire Russian espionage establishment. No photograph of him exists. Yet according to the very few defectors who have mentioned him, he’s been on the job for more than fifteen years.”

  “What agency is he with?”

  “That’s just it: none of them. Tolkachev is his own agency, though he has contacts with the KGB, the GRU, and now the FSB.”

  “So who is his boss?” asked Malko.

  “Vladimir Putin himself. Tolkachev has an office in the Kremlin, and he handles only special matters on the president’s behalf. In other words, he’s Putin’s go-to guy for anything tricky and very secret. From decoded messages, we think he called the shots in the Litvinenko poisoning. In short, he’s an extremely important person.”

  “Given that, does the fact that Zhanna Khrenkov gave us his name strike you as significant?”

  “More than significant,” said Boyd.

  “Why? After all, she and her husband lived in Moscow until 2008. They could have heard about Tolkachev.”

  “That’s not very likely. The only defectors to ever mention him in debriefings were very high ranking, at least general officers. The others didn’t even know his name.”

  “So you think Zhanna Khrenkov’s story might be true?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Meet with Mrs. Khrenkov again and get her to put her cards on the table,” said Boyd.

  Malko found himself hovering between skepticism and despair.

  “Irving, if she really works for Tolkachev, what makes you think she would sell him out?”

  “She’s not the one who works for him; it’s her husband,” said Boyd. “I talked with some of our profilers yesterday. The psychologists think that unconsciously, jealousy is driving her to take revenge on her husband.”

  “Does that mean I can say the Agency will kill her husband’s girlfriend in exchange for giving us the network?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” said Boyd with a sigh. “You know very well that killing the Marsh woman is out of the question. When you see Mrs. Khrenkov, convince her that we take her seriously and try to work something out.”

  “I honestly don’t see what good that would do,” said Malko. “Zhanna’s a tough cookie. We can’t sell her a bill of goods.”

  “I’ll leave it up to you. But I want to emphasize that we take this very seriously. President Obama has already been briefed on it.”

  “Listen, Irving, the SVR is already spying on the United States. Isn’t that’s enough? It’s a big agency.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t think their agents are very good,” said Boyd. “Mikhail Fradkov is the head of the SVR. He’s a former prime minister, but he doesn’t know beans about intelligence. He’s never even visited his rezidenturas. Besides, his people aren’t especially motivated, because the FSB gets all the goodies when it comes to budgets and bling. So we really need to know how Tolkachev’s network operates.”

  Boyd paused, then said:

  “Just do the best you can.”

  So that was it. All Malko could do was to approach Zhanna again, without even knowing what he could offer her.

  —

  Alexei Khrenkov was taking a hot bath, trying to relax. After leaving Lynn Marsh, he had returned to the Grosvenor Place apartment feeling deeply shaken.

  He hadn’t checked to see if his Petropavlovsk “guardian angels” had noted his meeting with Lynn Marsh, but it was likely they had. Which meant that they also knew she had seen the CIA agent again. From Moscow’s standpoint, her motives didn’t matter: she was now “polluted,” and Khrenkov was sure to be ordered to break off all contact with her. Moscow, in the person of Rem Tolkachev, wasn’t sentimental. As the lord of the swallows, Khrenkov had to be kept away from any possible security breach.

  His cell phone, which was on the edge of the bathtub, beeped: an incoming text.

  It was very short: I love you. Lynn.

  Khrenkov stared at it for a long time, feeling torn.

  He couldn’t believe Lynn had let herself be picked up by another man. She was a straightforward, uncomplicated woman. Linge must have targeted her because he’d learned of Khrenkov’s clandestine activity. But from whom? Aside from Tolkachev and Zhanna, no one knew their role in the secret network.

  And then it hit him: Zhanna!

  She hated Lynn. Could she have approached the CIA agent as a way to make Alexei break up with her?

  Khrenkov felt a cold rage rising, but it subsided when a much more serious possibility occurred to him.

  Within hours, the Kremlin would know about Lynn’s contact with Malko Linge. At which point she would represent a serious security risk in Tolkachev’s eyes. And ever since Stalin’s time, that kind of problem was always solved the same way, by applying his famous maxim: “No man, no problem.”

  Lynn Marsh was in mortal danger.

  And if Khrenkov tried to intervene, he would automatically come under suspicion himself.

  He couldn’t imagine abandoning her to her fate. He should at least try to buy her some time. He got out of the tub, dried himself, and carefully typed a text message:

  Must return to New York. Will call you as soon as I’m back.

  When he pressed “Send,” he felt as if he were stabbing himself in the heart. But for the moment it was the only way to shelter the young woman from a danger she didn’t even suspect she was facing.

  —

  Zhanna’s pulse sped up when the spa hostess handed her a sealed envelope in her name, but she waited until she was in the changing room to open it. The message was very short:

  We should meet again.

  A wave of euphoria washed over her. The CIA had taken the bait! So her idea wasn’t as crazy as all that. Now things would get dicey.

  Before going into the sauna, she quickly texted Malko:

  Be in the barbershop near the spa at 7.

  The barbershop was right across the hallway, so she could get to it from the spa without anyone seeing her.

  Zhanna had no illusions. She knew she and Alexei were under round-the-clock surveillance. If the Kremlin learned that she’d contacted the CIA agent, Tolkachev would react instantly. And this time, she would be targeted as a potential traitor—not an enviable situation.

  —

  Vladimir Krazovsky worked out of a small cubicle at the Petropavlovsk office. On paper, the head of the Khrenkov security detail was listed as an accountant.

  A military intelligence and Spetsnaz veteran, Krazovsky had never been outside Russia before this assignment, so he hadn’t been identified by any Western security services. A shadowy nationalist who wasn’t especially interested in money, he had a visceral hatred for Mikhail Gorbachev, who he felt had dug the Soviet Union’s grave.

  Krazovsky resigned from the GRU in 1991, but inste
ad of going to work in business like many of his fellows, he applied to the Kremlin administration.

  He spent a decade in low-level Kremlin positions before coming to Rem Tolkachev’s notice. When the spymaster called him into his little office, the two men quickly discovered how much they had in common. Tolkachev realized he had found a diamond in the rough.

  That was the period when the spymaster decided to recruit the Khrenkovs to head the swallows network. He knew he was taking a chance. Alexei was what the Russians call a “legal thief,” and his wife, Zhanna, was little better. Tolkachev felt deep contempt for them and their lack of the patriotic fervor that might keep them from temptation. But for now, he needed them.

  The spymaster’s solution was to build a wall around the pair, to keep them in line. Their cover was perfect in the Americans’ eyes, but a slipup could always happen. Which is why he assigned Krazovsky to guard them. His task was to make sure the couple had no contact with anyone suspicious.

  Krazovsky worked with a dozen fellow Spetsnaz veterans, some of whom had also never traveled outside Russia. All were given iron-clad “legends”—false identities that would survive investigation—and sent to New York and London in the guise of Petropavlovsk employees. Outside of their surveillance shifts, the men lived very simple lives, with few outside contacts and no friends. Every day, their coded surveillance and observation reports were sent to Moscow, hidden in the steady flow of Petropavlovsk’s commercial traffic.

  One of the three cell phones in front of Krazovsky rang. It was Gleb Yurchenko, the agent following Malko Linge. He reported that the CIA agent had just entered the Dorchester. Krazovsky noted the time on a sheet in front of him, comparing it to the movements of Zhanna Khrenkov, who had arrived at the Dorchester an hour earlier.

  The conclusion was easy to draw, but that wasn’t his job. He was just an ordinary silovik carrying out a specific mission: keep the swallows program from pollution.

  —

  After strolling through the Dorchester gallery as far as the bar, Malko took the elevator to the basement. He passed the entrance to the spa and went down the steps to the barbershop. There were no other customers, and he was greeted with open arms. He had twenty minutes to kill before meeting Zhanna Khrenkov.

  “I’d like a shampoo, please,” he said.

  —

  Feeling upset, Lynn stared at Alexei’s text message. When she’d left her lover a few hours earlier, she’d been in seventh heaven. She really was crazy about him. They hadn’t made any plans, but she expected that he would soon announce that he was getting divorced.

  He phoned several times a day, made love to her all the time, and was forever giving her presents. The most recent one was the gray Mercedes she found parked at her doorstep one morning.

  Khrenkov often traveled on short notice, but this sudden trip to New York struck Lynn as odd. Especially since he hadn’t phoned. Her intuition told her that something was amiss.

  Her dinner with the Austrian prince came to mind. She realized she’d been wrong to hide it from Alexei. But it was only a white lie: she had no designs on her tablemate and had only accepted his dinner invitation for a change of pace after a long day.

  Besides, how would Alexei find out? It wasn’t as if he were having her followed, after all.

  She quickly sent him a text, asking him to call her right away. She had already left a couple of voice mails, but in vain. He wasn’t picking up his cell, whereas he usually answered on the first ring when he saw her name displayed.

  Lynn buttoned her white lab coat. She had one last patient waiting for her.

  She earned a good living, which gave her the independence to only go out with men she liked. And she liked Alexei Khrenkov a lot.

  Just the same, she realized she knew very little about him.

  —

  Zhanna appeared at the door just as the barber was drying Malko’s hair. Catching sight of her in the mirror, he saw her smiling at him ironically.

  Leaving a ten-pound tip, he stepped out into the hallway.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the mezzanine,” she said. “There’s never anyone there.”

  They took the elevator up. Zhanna was right; the mezzanine, with its display cases of luxury goods, was deserted. They sat down on a bench, and she gave him a sharp look.

  “So where do we stand?”

  “The Agency has checked on Rem Tolkachev, and feels you are sincere. Of course, just the fact that you know who he is doesn’t mean you work for him.”

  “Never mind that,” she said, dismissing the objection. “What is your proposal?”

  Malko expected the question, but for now could only answer with a bluff.

  “We will agree to get rid of Lynn Marsh in exchange for your telling us about the network in the United States.”

  Malko saw Zhanna’s features first tense, then relax. In a low voice, she asked:

  “So when are you going to kill the bitch?”

  Chapter 12

  This is where things get sticky, thought Malko.

  “There may be a less extreme way to fix your problem that will work just as well,” he suggested.

  Zhanna Khrenkov visibly stiffened.

  “What do you mean?”

  She sat there, a solid block of distrust.

  “Dobre,” Malko began, unconsciously shifting to Russian. “Dr. Marsh is very much in love with your husband—or the person she thinks he is, a rich businessman. My idea is very simple: tell her the truth. That not only is Alexei a swindler on the run from the Russian authorities, but he’s also a spy. I’m sure she would drop him immediately, as a matter of ethics. And your problem would be solved.”

  From the look in Zhanna’s eyes, he could tell this wasn’t a winning tactic. She remained silent for a few moments, then said:

  “Even if you’re right, why should she believe you?”

  “Because the information wouldn’t come from me. It could come from a British Home Office representative. A kind of formal heads-up.”

  “How could you arrange that?”

  “The CIA has a very good relationship with British intelligence, and MI5 would be delighted to help roll up a Russian espionage network, even one that doesn’t affect them directly.”

  Zhanna didn’t respond, then stood up.

  “I don’t like the idea, but I’ll give it some thought.”

  “Naturally you’ll have to give us some useful information before we get involved,” said Malko, standing up in turn. “Assuming you have any, that is.”

  She whirled on him like a cobra about to strike.

  “I know all the dead drops in the United States we use to communicate with the network,” she snapped. “And don’t get ahead of yourself. I haven’t agreed to your suggestion.”

  She was already at the elevator, apparently not tempted by Malko’s offer.

  Just the same, he felt he was making progress. At least Zhanna hadn’t broken off negotiations.

  —

  Gwyneth Robertson was wearing a slightly faded tweed suit, its jacket parted on a mauve satin blouse that allowed her breasts to swing freely. Malko stood to greet her and lightly put his hand on her hip. Under his fingers he could make out the snaking curve of a garter belt. With the beautiful former CIA case officer, all the surprises were good ones.

  The waiter had already brought them a bottle of champagne. It was the witching hour, when the Library Bar came to life.

  They were seated on a small sofa near the entrance of the second room and could see all the new arrivals. Malko began to relax at last. This strange mission demanded a lot of adrenaline. Partly due to Zhanna Khrenkov’s prickly personality, but mainly because of the high stakes in play. He was now convinced that the spy ring in the United States actually existed. If his mission succeeded, it would be the first network to be uncovered since the end of the Cold War, twenty years earlier.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Gwyneth.

  “What I pla
n to do to you later,” said Malko with a smile, putting his hand on her tweed skirt and pulling it up a little, baring her thigh. That would hardly shock anyone in that setting. The bar’s usual fauna was drifting in: dazzling Eastern European prostitutes with Botox and silicone on draft, wearing outfits so skimpy they proved that less is more. Also a few couples, usually consisting of a very rich toad with a gorgeous woman on his arm, her manners modest only in appearance.

  Truth be told, there were few honest women in the bar aside from Gwyneth.

  She yawned.

  “You can do whatever you like, but you have to feed me first.”

  “I know a good Japanese place on Half Moon Street: Kiku.”

  “I said I was hungry!” she said with a pout.

  “In that case, how about Alain Ducasse’s place at the Dorchester?”

  At that, her eyes lit up. She leaned close and ran her tongue lightly over Malko’s ear, giving him a tiny, pleasant shiver.

  “It’ll cost you a fortune,” she murmured, “but you won’t regret it.”

  —

  Washed down by a Château Latour 1992, the dinner was a marvel. Ducasse well deserved his reputation. Everything was perfect, from the sautéed foie gras to the lamb with ginger. When she was finished, Gwyneth licked her lips like a satisfied cat.

  “The minute I get a raise, I’m coming back here!”

  As Malko paid the huge bill—thank you, CIA—she said:

  “Want to go do a little dirty dancing to help settle our dinner?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Let’s drop by Peter Stringfellow’s Angels, that nasty club in Soho. Some clients introduced me to it. We don’t have to spend the whole night there.”

  “Vamos!” said Malko.

  In the cab, he couldn’t resist slipping his hand under Gwyneth’s tweed skirt, moving to the top of her stocking. She squeezed her legs tight.

  “Stop it! You know how sensitive I am down there.”

  Located at the end of Wardour Street, Peter Stringfellow’s was nasty indeed. Disco balls hanging from a black ceiling, reddish lighting, widely spaced booths full of men with bar girls, and a small dance floor where couples did the bump and grind. Malko’s eye was drawn to a woman in a thigh-high orange dress who was holding her blond chignon in both hands and leaning back, joined to her partner only at the crotch.