—
“That’s terrific,” said Spicer, delighted to be pulled out of an interminable meeting. “As soon as you know where they’re meeting, we’ll arrange their protection, assign bodyguards.”
“Don’t get your hopes up yet,” Malko replied. “It’s already a miracle that we have a contact with Khrenkov. Lynn Marsh isn’t about to let herself be manipulated.”
“I thought you were able to seduce every woman you met.”
“Not her,” he said soberly.
—
Lynn eagerly drank the flute of Taittinger Brut that the waiter set before her. She was wearing her weekday uniform, the white wool suit and black stockings.
Malko had spent nearly an hour in her waiting room and begun to think she’d stood him up when she came out of her office, breathless and apologetic: the work on her last patient had been particularly difficult.
He discreetly signaled the waiter to refill her glass. The Library was very animated, and Lynn watched curiously as the female escorts came and went, each more beautiful than the last.
“Are they prostitutes?” she asked.
Malko smiled.
“Let’s not cast the first stone. They’re almost all Cold War refugees, and they haven’t had an easy life.”
Lynn turned her attention to a beautiful black woman in a clingy outfit that made the most of her assets. She was draped around a fat man with a mustache, who was letting his hand drift from her waist down toward the forbidden fruit.
“What about her?” she asked. “Did she come in from the cold too?”
“Life in Africa isn’t easy, either,” he said.
After Lynn had taken another sip of champagne, he asked:
“What did Alexei write, exactly?”
She pulled out her iPhone, swiped her finger across it, and held it out to him. When he saw Khrenkov’s message, he practically whooped with joy.
“Did you answer him?”
“No.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Because I don’t plan to ever see him again.”
Malko thought he had misheard, but Lynn Marsh’s jaw was set, and she wouldn’t look at him. For some unknown reason, his lovely plan had just collapsed.
Chapter 22
Like a boxer staggered by a body blow, it took Malko a moment before he could go back on the offensive.
“I thought you were in love with him,” he said. “He’s apparently still crazy about you.”
“That’s true, but I’ve decided I can’t go on like this,” said Lynn, shaking her head slowly. “I’ve done a lot of thinking since getting his text. Your world scares me, and now Alexei scares me, too. If we get back together, I’ll be frightened all the time. It’s too much for me.
“You pressured me, and I shouldn’t have agreed to contact him. I want a different life for myself. Just a quiet, ordinary existence until I meet somebody new.”
“So you’re not going to answer him?”
“I will, but I’m going to say I don’t want to see him again. For my own good.”
She finished the rest of her champagne.
“Please don’t insist,” she said, though Malko hadn’t spoken.
Accepting her decision as gracefully as he could, he stood up and kissed her hand.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” he said. “You’ve gotten into this without realizing it, but you won’t be able to get out so easily. You’re in serious danger, otherwise Scotland Yard wouldn’t be protecting you. And you’re still a target for our Russian friends, even if you never see Alexei again.”
She gave him a little wave, as if to dismiss his concern, and stood up to leave.
Next to them, the black woman’s plunging neckline displayed three quarters of a bosom that proved that silicone had reached African shores.
—
Josefa Svoboda handed her passport to the Heathrow immigration officer sitting in his glass booth. She was so gorgeous, he had to make an effort to focus on the Czech document and its collection of British visa stamps. Josefa came to London regularly for fashion shoots. A slender six-foot model with cobalt blue eyes, she didn’t go unnoticed. The officer watched as she joined the other travelers heading for the terminal exit. He would never get to sleep with a girl like that, he thought sadly.
Josefa gave the taxi driver the address of the Helen O’Brien Agency, the company that usually handled her bookings. She was in London for only forty-eight hours.
—
As he did every evening, the MI5 agent in charge of guarding Lynn Marsh picked up a photocopy of her appointments for the following day. This was a routine precaution, made easier by the dentist’s cooperation. She highlighted her regular patients’ names to avoid wasting time checking them.
The MI5 computers at Thames House scanned the new patients for links to a foreign intelligence service. Badly burned by Zhanna Khrenkov’s murder, the British were taking the young dentist’s protection very seriously.
—
Malko and Spicer were having breakfast in the CIA station chief’s office. The mood was somber.
Malko had just related Lynn Marsh’s decision not to renew her relationship with Khrenkov, concluding:
“Now we’ll have to locate him ourselves.”
Spicer raised his eyebrows.
“Oh, great! We don’t know where he is, and even if we find him, he doesn’t have any reason to cooperate with us anymore.”
“There’s still the problem with his passport,” said Malko. “If he wants to escape the Kremlin’s hoods, he has to be free to travel.”
“That’s not enough of a reason to betray the Russians,” said Spicer. “If he gives us the swallows network, he can be damn sure they’ll track him to his dying day. His wife is dead, and his girlfriend won’t see him. He must be feeling pretty low.”
“So what do we do?”
The station chief took a sip of the warm swill his office passed off as coffee.
“The only thing I can think of is getting Lynn Marsh to change her mind,” he said. “If she won’t contact Khrenkov, I can’t ask MI5 to go on protecting her forever. They’re putting a lot into this surveillance, you know—half a dozen A4 watchers.”
Malko knew Spicer was right, and said nothing. Once the young dentist’s connection with Khrenkov was broken, she would be less of a target for the Russians.
Maybe.
He was about to get up when the intercom buzzed.
“Sir William Wolseley on line two,” the secretary announced.
Spicer took the call, and after listening for a moment, hung up and turned to Malko.
“We’re going to Thames House; there’s news. MI5 has spotted someone suspicious among the patients coming to see Dr. Marsh today.”
—
“Josefa Svoboda is the daughter of Jan Sejna,” said Wolseley. “He was the deputy head of the First Directorate in charge of StB foreign operations.”
The StB was the Státní bezpečnost, Czechoslovakia’s secret police under communism until it was dissolved in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the Cold War, the StB was overseen by Department 11 of the KGB First Directorate, in charge of espionage outside the Warsaw Pact countries.
“We spent a lot of time fighting the Czechs,” Wolseley continued. “They were very active during the Cold War, and they did us a lot of damage. We know the Russian SRV and GRU have been contacting old StB veterans—reactivating them, in a way.”
“What happened to Sejna?” asked Spicer.
“He died five years ago, in 1997.”
“Do you think his daughter has any connection with the secret services?” asked Malko. “It says here that she’s twenty-four, so she was only four when the Wall came down.”
Wolseley sipped his tea before answering.
“That’s true, and she often comes to London,” he said. “She’s a model and very beautiful. I don’t think she’s connected to an intelligence agency.”
“So why did yo
u alert us?” asked Spicer.
The Englishman smiled.
“While we were screening her, we thought we’d see why she was in London this time. And we discovered that she has a booker here, a certain Helen O’Brien, who runs a modeling agency.”
“Is she Irish?”
“No,” said Wolseley, shaking his head. “She was born Elvira Moscovici. She’s a Romanian political refugee who came to England in 1985. She married an Irishman and later divorced him.”
“Has she been up to anything suspicious?” asked Malko.
“Not as far as we know. Romanian defectors told us that Moscovici belonged to the Securitate, but since that was dissolved when Ceaușescu died, there didn’t seem to be any further risk. We stopped our surveillance in 1990. This is the first time her name has appeared in a sensitive matter.”
“Seems a little far-fetched, doesn’t it?” asked Spicer skeptically.
Wolseley’s left eyebrow shot up.
“You know the Russians always take the long view, Richard. You also know that they’ve tried to reconnect with the old Warsaw Pact agents. So finding two suspicious names among Lynn Marsh’s patients demands a second look.”
“You’re quite right,” said Malko. “What do you plan to do?”
“Take a few precautions,” said Wolseley. “We don’t want another Litvinenko affair.”
—
Alexei Khrenkov stared at his cell phone, as if willing it to speak. It had been forty-eight hours since he texted Lynn Marsh. To allay his anxiety, he’d gone through every possible explanation, but the fact remained that she hadn’t answered him.
And the more time passed, the greater his anxiety. Unable to stand it any longer, he banged out a new message, ending it with:
Darling, I love you, I need you, I want you.
A note of passion.
When his butler knocked on his office door, Alexei leaped to his feet, sending the Sig at his waistband crashing to the polished parquet floor. He kept forgetting he was carrying it. He picked up the gun and went to open the door.
“I fixed you a light lunch,” said the butler. “A filet of sole and some fruit salad.”
Khrenkov forced himself to smile.
“Thanks, Boris, but I’m not hungry. Later, maybe.”
Until he got an answer from Lynn, he didn’t feel able to eat a thing.
—
Standing at her dressing room mirror, Helen O’Brien adjusted the brooch on her jacket lapel and stepped back to see how it looked.
Studded with fake diamonds, the brooch had been bought at Harrods and then slightly modified. An almost invisible hole had been drilled in its center, to which a slender plastic tube was fitted. Its other end ran to a spray bulb like the one on a perfume bottle, hidden in O’Brien’s right jacket pocket. Squeezing the bulb fired a spray of pulverized cyanide that would paralyze the victim’s nervous system and kill within seconds.
An unknown Russian man had delivered the device to O’Brien two days earlier. He explained how it worked and gave her ten thousand pounds in hundred-pound notes.
That was just a down payment.
Since immigrating to Britain, O’Brien had been listed in the records of the Securitate, and later those of the SVR. Russian intelligence had contacted the most promising assets of the Romanian espionage establishment, to which she belonged.
A committed communist, she had never renounced her beliefs and was glad to be working for the Russians. Besides, without the SVR’s discreet financial support, she would have closed up shop long ago. The modeling agency earned barely enough to pay the rent.
So when approached with a proposal by a stranger who knew the secret Securitate recognition code, she hadn’t hesitated. It required one last favor, after which O’Brien would be brought to Moscow. There, the SVR would finance a modeling agency where she would manage the most beautiful women in Russia.
Added to the bank account that the SVR had regularly replenished since 1990, it made for a promising future.
O’Brien left her dressing room. To Josefa, who was waiting in the small room the agency used for casting, she said:
“Let’s go!”
The young model eagerly stood up. O’Brien had suggested she get crowns on three of her teeth, and promised to cover the expense. They would see one of London’s most popular young dentists, she said.
The two women went out into Fleet Street and hailed a taxi.
—
As usual, the waiting room was full. It served two dentists, and there were often a dozen patients there. John Bradwell, the resident MI5 agent, was reading the Times. He merely glanced at the two women who had just come in. He had memorized their faces and didn’t need to study them to make what the Service called a “positive identification.” He went back to reading the newspaper.
A half hour later, the secretary looked up and announced:
“Miss Svoboda.”
The Czech model went into Lynn Marsh’s office, closing the door behind her. The consultation took about twenty minutes, at which point Josefa appeared at the door and waved Helen O’Brien over.
“Come on in,” she said. “Dr. Marsh can spare you a few minutes.”
Josefa had explained that her booker needed a quick estimate for the treatment of some loose teeth.
O’Brien stood up, and Josefa took her seat. Bradwell watched as the women traded places, then crossed his legs and went back to the Times.
—
O’Brien sat down in the reclining chair as the dentist washed her hands and put a gauze mask over her nose and mouth.
“Open your mouth, please,” she said.
O’Brien did so.
“Well, there’s a lot of work to be done. If you’re prepared to invest a couple of thousand pounds, I’ll ask my secretary to write up an estimate.”
“This one on the right especially bothers me,” said O’Brien, pointing to a molar.
To see better, the dentist leaned closer, her face now just inches away.
O’Brien grasped the bulb hidden in her pocket and squeezed, firing a jet of cyanide out the hole in the brooch. It passed through the gauze mask and sprayed the dentist’s nose and mouth. She staggered back, automatically ripping off her mask as she did. By the time O’Brien was out of the chair, she lay on the floor, unable to breathe.
Wasting no time, O’Brien calmly walked to the door and opened it. Then she turned around and said loudly:
“Thank you very much, Dr. Marsh.”
Josefa was already on her feet, and the two women left the office.
Bradwell folded his newspaper. At last, he thought, he would be able to go to the loo.
For the next three or four minutes, nothing happened. Eventually, the secretary got curious as to why Dr. Marsh hadn’t called the next patient and went to look through the office door.
From inside the bathroom, Bradwell heard a woman scream, and he rushed out, fumbling to zip himself up.
Reaching under his jacket for his gun, he raced out into the office. The dentist lay sprawled facedown on the floor in her white lab coat.
Chapter 23
By the time John Bradwell came out onto Queen’s Gate, the two women had disappeared. Pistol in hand, the MI5 agent ran to the Special Branch car parked on the median.
“Did you see two women come out?” he yelled.
“Sure,” said his colleague. “They turned west onto Cromwell Road. Why?”
“They killed Inspector Hill!”
The officers in the car leaped out, and they all sprinted to Cromwell Road. The police car caught up with them there and drove as far as West Cromwell, but without seeing anything.
The women had vanished.
While one of the men called in an all-points bulletin with their descriptions, Bradwell returned to the dental office.
The patients had been evacuated, and a sheet draped over the body on the floor.
Lynn Marsh looked as pale as a ghost, and her features were drawn and haggard.
“We don’t know exactly,” said Bradwell, “but one of the women sprayed a deadly gas at Inspector Hill. She died instantly.”
Lynn felt her legs failing her and had to lean on her desk so as not to collapse. When MI5 had suggested that a police officer who knew dentistry take her place to treat the two suspicious patients, she’d thought the idea ridiculous.
The woman, Inspector Jane Hill, wore an ultra-light bulletproof vest under her white lab coat, but it hadn’t been enough to protect her.
Brief blasts of a siren could be heard outside, and in minutes the office was invaded by policemen in uniform and plain clothes. Two burly officers came to stand on either side of the dentist.
“Dr. Marsh, you’re coming with us. We’re in charge of your protection.”
She allowed the two men to lead her away. An unmarked police car was waiting downstairs, and they headed for Thames House.
Lynn wasn’t able to think straight but would never forget the sight of the woman lying on her office floor, having died in her place.
She could hardly believe that people really wanted to kill her. Zhanna Khrenkov’s death had seemed somewhat abstract. But here it was different, even if she hadn’t faced the killer herself. Her hands clasped between her knees and her gaze vacant, Lynn wondered how she would get free of this nightmare.
The car stopped in front of a large black door that slid away to reveal a garage full of police cars. They had arrived at Thames House.
The officers escorted her to the small office of a woman who introduced herself as Inspector So-and-so—Lynn didn’t catch her name. Someone brought them tea, and the policewoman set about trying to question the frightened young dentist.
“This is an extremely serious affair,” she began. “We need to know absolutely everything that can help us.”
Lynn nodded silently. The hot tea was doing her good.
But then she said, “I don’t think I know anything.”
—
Two floors higher, in the conference room next to William Wolseley’s office, a half dozen men had gathered at the request of the MI5 chief of staff. Aides constantly brought in documents. A Special Branch representative sat glued to his cell phone, taking notes.
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