Illegal Action

by Stella Rimington

  “Would you?” asked Pennington, looking grateful.

  “Happy to,” said Fane shortly, and stood up. “If the Russians are still in the planning stage, we’ve got a little time. Leave it to me for now.”

  10

  Liz was just beginning to think about going home when she looked up from the papers on her desk to find Peggy Kinsolving standing in the doorway of her office, with a carry-on bag in one hand and her briefcase in the other. Her hair was up in a severe bun, and she was dressed in a smart rose-coloured suit. The effect was to make her look older, but there was something youthfully eager about the excited expression on her face.

  “Hello there,” said Liz. “Have a good trip?”

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Come on in,” said Liz.

  Still holding her cases, Peggy advanced into the room. “The Germans and the Norwegians think there’s been a Russian Illegal in Norway. They’ve followed the support officer there from Germany and now he’s coming to London, so they think the Illegal’s moved here,” she said breathlessly.

  “Why don’t you put your bags down?” said Liz gently. “Take a seat, and tell me all about it.”

  When ten minutes later Peggy finished recounting Beckendorf’s and Karlsson’s story, she looked at Liz and asked, “What do you think?”

  Liz tapped the desktop pensively. Then she said, “It seems a bit thin. It’s based on a lot of assumptions. Have they tried to detect any communications to or from this Illegal? I thought in the Cold War it was radio transmissions that pinpointed the existence of Illegals. Even though we couldn’t read what the messages said, didn’t we know where they were coming from and broadly where they were directed to?”

  “Herr Beckendorf is a complete expert on this,” Peggy replied. “He was working on it for years during the Cold War and he says they’re using encrypted computer messages now. They bounce them through countless network nodes so it’s very difficult to detect the ultimate destination.”

  “All right,” said Liz, now into full investigative mode and not noticing that Peggy’s face had fallen at her sceptical reception of this news. “But why does he think this Ivanov kept going to Norway at all? The whole point of Illegals surely was that they never met their support officer.”

  “I wondered about that too,” said Peggy. “Perhaps the Illegal needed something that he couldn’t get for himself. Documents perhaps. Or maybe his communications had broken down and he needed a spare part,” she added desperately, looking increasingly troubled by Liz’s lack of enthusiasm.

  “Maybe,” said Liz thoughtfully.

  “Whatever it’s about,” said Peggy, “if Ivanov’s going to visit here, don’t we have to follow it up?” She seemed troubled by Liz’s lack of reaction.

  “Of course we do,” said Liz. “What else came up?”

  “Oh just that the Germans think Rykov, that SVR officer in the Trade Delegation here, is a complete incompetent.”

  “Rykov?” exclaimed Liz. “That’s interesting. Just a few minutes ago Wally Woods from A4 came in to tell me he’d seen Rykov meeting someone on Hampstead Heath. I’ve asked him to write a detailed report.” She paused and looked out the window for a moment. “Do you remember, at the meeting Brian was saying that he thought it was odd that the Maples case had been handled by someone as inexperienced as Nysenko? Now we’re being told Rykov’s no good.”

  “That’s what Herr Beckendorf said,” interrupted Peggy. “I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.”

  “I’m sure he does too,” replied Liz thoughtfully. “Hampstead Heath’s a pretty obvious place to have a covert meeting in broad daylight, isn’t it?” She stopped again and gazed at Peggy. “Maybe all this adds up somehow—but differently from the way it looks. After all, the Russians are professionals. They’ve been at this game for years and they’re in a league the terrorists can’t dream of. Well,” she concluded, standing up and starting to put away her papers, “at least they’re making us think!”

  11

  Wally Woods of A4 had been proud of his discovery of Rykov, apparently having a covert meeting on Hampstead Heath, but the wind was quite taken out of his sails when Liz told him that the Germans thought Rykov’s tradecraft was pathetic. Now, this Wednesday morning, out with his surveillance team following Rykov, Wally found himself having to agree with the Germans.

  Liz had decided that to try to identify Rykov’s contact A4 should follow him exactly two weeks after the meeting that Wally had observed. If Rykov was as incompetent as the Germans judged, he would stick to a predictable meeting pattern and two weeks was a typical interval. On the first occasion nothing had happened. So, a week later, when she found that a couple of A4 teams were unexpectedly available, she decided to have another go. Now one team was staking out the bench on Hampstead Heath, while Wally and his team followed Rykov, code name Chelsea 1, through his morning agenda.

  Peggy Kinsolving had been doing some research into Rykov’s activities and had discovered that whatever actual intelligence work he was doing seemed to come second to a voracious appetite for food and drink. All his meetings, and there were many, were in ritzy bars and expensive restaurants. He made no effort to conceal any of this and there was no sign that he either knew or cared that MI5 might be aware of his activities.

  So, thought Liz, as she looked in on the A4 Operations Room in the early afternoon, what did that say about the man on the bench? Why had their meeting been so different from the usual pattern? She hoped to find out today.

  Reggie Purvis, in charge in the Ops Room, brought Liz up to date. After a long lunch at Kensington Place with a journalist from the International Herald Tribune, Rykov was walking slowly up Kensington Church Street, stopping to examine the windows of the antiques shops, with Wally and two A4 colleagues on either side of the road behind and in front of him. Others in cars were nearby. Suddenly, with a crackle of static, Liz heard Wally announce, “Chelsea 1 has hailed a cab. Heading north.” Liz sat down on the worn leather sofa that was provided for visiting case officers to the Operations Room.

  On Notting Hill Gate, Maureen Hayes, parked at a meter outside an estate agent’s, put down the Evening Standard and turned the ignition of her grey ten-year-old BMW 318i estate. “Ready and waiting,” she said.

  As the taxi emerged from the top of Kensington Church Street and turned right, Maureen gave it five seconds, then sidled out into the traffic and took up a position two cars behind. Various other anonymous vehicles pulled out from their parking places and slotted into the traffic. Rykov, sitting in the back of the taxi, was reading a newspaper, giving no sign at all that he was alert to possible surveillance.

  He must just be going home to the Trade Delegation in Highgate, mused Liz to herself, as the taxi proceeded up Albany Street, through Camden Town and Kentish Town to the bottom of Highgate West Hill.

  “Bravo team alert,” called Reggie Purvis over the microphone, “Chelsea 1 is coming your way.”

  Nothing obvious changed on Hampstead Heath, but a scruffy young man sitting beside the boating pond shifted position imperceptibly and higher up the hill, from a small plantation of trees, a couple strolled out towards the open ground.

  At the foot of Highgate West Hill, where the buses turn round, Rykov’s taxi stopped and he emerged and walked slowly on to the heath and up the hill towards the bench, under close scrutiny from the A4 team. At almost the same time, a tall, powerfully built young man in a windcheater emerged from the trees and started walking down the hill.

  “Chelsea 2 is here and about to make contact,” came over the loudspeaker in the Ops Room.

  “Tell them to stick with him and leave Rykov alone,” said Liz to Reggie Purvis.

  The instruction was radioed out. “Roger that,” came back from the heath.

  For fifteen minutes there was silence in the Ops Room, then the radio crackled. “Targets are moving. We’re taking on Chelsea 2.”

  And for the next ten minutes radio messages went
back and forth as the unknown man repeated his movements of two weeks before, leaving the heath on the south side. Again he waited at the bus stop, until a C2 bus appeared. As he got on and walked towards the stairs leading to the upper deck, he passed A4’s Dennis Rudge, already on the bus, sitting downstairs by the window at the front. The bus itself was followed patiently by Maureen and her A4 colleagues in their nondescript cars, as it worked its way south, down into London’s West End.

  When Chelsea 2 got off the bus outside Liberty on Regent Street, along with half a dozen other passengers, Dennis Rudge stayed on board, watching as the young man crossed Regent Street and cut down a side street, followed by three A4 colleagues who had emerged from nearby cars. By the time the procession entered Berkeley Square, Maureen in the BMW was parked at yet another meter, and she had a clear view as their target walked to the southern end of the square, entered a large office block and disappeared.

  “Can they find out which floor he goes to?” asked Liz, by now warming to the chase.

  Purvis relayed the request. “I’ll have a go,” said Maureen.

  Liz and Reggie waited tensely, sitting silently, for almost five minutes until Maureen’s voice came through the speaker on the table.

  “Fifth or sixth,” she declared. “Multiple occupants and a security guard on the desk.”

  “Okay. Leave it now,” said Liz. “We’ll sort it from there. Please say thanks to everyone.”

  “Stand down all teams. Well done,” said Purvis.

  “Roger. Out,” came back from the heath and Berkeley Square.

  12

  By the standards of his earlier career, it was not an exotic view. On Geoffrey Fane’s first posting abroad, in Syria twenty years ago, his office had overlooked the souk, noisy with its milling crowds, quiet only at prayers. Later, in New Delhi, he had watched labourers arrive on bicycles, wearing flip-flops and shorts as they went to work in the liquid heat, erecting a flamboyant new Middle Eastern embassy building across the road.

  Here in Vauxhall Cross, high in the office block that sat like a postmodernist Buddha on the south bank, there was nothing so dramatic. Just the heavy, comforting presence of the Thames as it swept from Vauxhall down to the Houses of Parliament. He liked to think its colour reflected the changing seasons—or was it just his mood? Today at low tide the water was steely grey, the colour of old flint.

  There was a tap at the door and his secretary stuck her head in. “Liz Carlyle is downstairs. Shall I go and collect her?”

  “Please,” he said. He checked the knot of his tie and brushed his jacket lapel automatically. He cared about his appearance; his ex-wife, Adele, had accused him of vanity, but that had been just before they separated, when she’d accused him of a lot of things. It was Adele who had insisted on his buying only Hermès ties. It was she who wanted people to think he was important, and she who had taken all too literally his offhand remark, made over a second Armagnac in a Burgundy restaurant many years before and subsequently much regretted, that if all went well one day she might be Lady Fane.

  Adele had never accepted that in his line of work any success had to be private—fame for someone like Fane was an infallible indicator of failure. His reward came from knowing his work was important, rather than from public recognition.

  When he’d left his meeting with Pennington at the Foreign Office, he had considered carefully who to approach at MI5. If he stuck to Service etiquette, Brian Ackers should be his first port of call, but the problem there was simple: Ackers instinctively distrusted MI6, considering its officers louche individuals who at best were soft on Communism, at worst were secret sympathisers to the Islamist cause. This meant he would view Fane’s approach with distrust and reject any suggestion about how to proceed in what Fane already thought of as the “Adler Plot.” And though Fane didn’t think he could entirely control the investigation, he was damn well going to keep a strong, guiding hand on it. The last thing he wanted was MI5 running amok, pursuing Brian Ackers’ anachronistic obsessions and creating the kind of diplomatic “incident” Henry Pennington was so scared of.

  If only Charles Wetherby were the director in Counter-Espionage rather than Counter-Terrorism: they had worked together well enough in the past. But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since Wetherby’s wife was reportedly terminally ill and he was on extended leave.

  It was then he had thought of Elizabeth Carlyle, Wetherby’s talented junior, and remembered that she had been moved to Counter-Espionage after the mole affair. She had poached that young researcher, Peggy Something or Other, whom he had lent to them, but he could only muster a superficial resentment at this, since he knew that in her shoes he would have done the same.

  Theirs was not an altogether happy history—there had been an episode in Norfolk Fane would sooner forget—but he determined now to enlist her in sorting out the truth of Victor Adler’s story. Whatever small resentment she might still be nursing, he was sure she could get over it. Elizabeth Carlyle had impressed him in the past with her professionalism. She was intelligent, without needing to demonstrate it, and decisive when it mattered. What’s more, she seemed tactful and discreet. Right now those were the qualities he needed most.

  The door opened again and she came in, a woman in her mid-thirties, with light brown hair in a neat bob and a slim figure, which made her look taller than she was. There was a calm watchfulness about her, but her grey-green eyes were striking and alert. As always, Fane found her attractive, the more so because she didn’t make a show of it. She was dressed simply, in a blue skirt and pearl satin blouse. How unlike Adele, he thought, remembering his ex-wife’s weekly trips to that extremely expensive hairdresser in Knightsbridge, and its showy results. As well as her countless shopping expeditions to Harvey Nichols.

  “Elizabeth,” he said, standing up and coming out from behind his large desk to shake her hand. He motioned her to sit on the sofa on the other side of the room and himself took the armchair opposite. “How very nice to see you.”

  She declined tea or coffee while he made small talk. “Congratulations on your new position,” he said. “I hope you’re enjoying it.”

  “I am, thank you,” she replied, “though it’s only a lateral move.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he protested, then stopped. He’d always sensed the resolute independence that accompanied her unflappable, professional façade. The last thing to do was to patronise her. “I was sorry to hear about Charles’s situation,” he said, changing the subject. “It must be grim for him.”

  “Yes,” she said simply, gazing back at him with a level expression.

  He changed tack. “How’s that young woman getting on?” he asked. “I wasn’t very happy to lose her, you know.”

  Liz acknowledged this with the faintest hint of a smile. “Peggy’s been transferred to Counter-Espionage as well.”

  “Ah. I’m sure she’ll prosper there.” He paused a beat, then said casually, “You’ve got my boy working for you too now, haven’t you?”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  He waited, toying with a cufflink, but she said nothing beyond this, and something in her expression made him feel unable to ask anything else. He wished for once she could let down her guard. She’s wary of me, he thought, and decided to move to business. He leant forward in his chair. “Well, let me explain why I wanted to see you. Does the name Victor Adler mean anything to you?”

  “Only vaguely,” she said. “Banking?”

  “Among many other things,” said Fane, rubbing his palms together gently.

  As he talked, he sensed that Liz was watching him intently. His own eyes strayed occasionally towards the window as he gave a précis of Adler’s story. From time to time he looked straight at her but it was impossible to gauge the effect his account was having. He found her inscrutability intriguing. And slightly irritating.

  When he finished he sat back again. “I hope that makes sense.”

  “I think so. But why are the Russians so worr
ied about a bunch of London émigrés, however rich they are? Surely there’s not much harm they can do from here. Why would they risk killing one of them in London? Not after the Litvinenko business. The press would have a field day and if it was known to be an official operation, the political fallout would be immense.”

  “Yes,” agreed Fane, “you’re right. But they’ve done it so often before. They regard assassination as an acceptable form of defence.” He thought of Markov, the Bulgarian exile, stabbed by a stranger’s umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in 1978. Even at the time, the height of the Cold War, his claim he’d been attacked had seemed fantastic. But then Markov had died from ricin poisoning and it had emerged that the umbrella had injected him with a poisoned pellet. All because he was criticising the Bulgarian president.

  “I can’t see it myself,” said Liz. “The criticism would be worldwide, worse than Litvinenko. At least he was an ex-KGB officer, so he was seen as, in a sense, all part of the murky world. But as far as I know these oligarchs aren’t. They’re just men who got very rich in rather dubious ways.”

  “And yet…,” said Fane, looking out his window thoughtfully, “don’t forget they recently introduced a new law allowing their security services to kill Russia’s enemies abroad without court authorisation.”

  Earlier in the morning, mist had hung over the Thames like bonfire smoke, then it had suddenly cleared, though dense cloud still covered the sky. In the distance Vauxhall Bridge Road stretched monotonously north towards the office blocks of Victoria. “And now we have this story of Adler’s. His information has always been A1 in the past.”

  “Maybe. But from what you say his source admitted he didn’t know the full facts. He may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Or maybe there isn’t a stick at all and the Russians are just using him for some purpose of their own.”