by Mark Dawson
The feed from the camera was displayed on a screen that had been installed on the bureau where the television used to be. Stepanov saw motion on the screen, and, as he watched, two men came into view. They exited the elevator lobby, made their way down the corridor and paused outside the door to 1022. The man whom Stepanov had seen that afternoon knelt down and started to work on the lock. He was efficient, and it didn’t take him long; he stood, opened the door slowly and carefully, and went inside. The second man followed.
The curtains were drawn and the room was dark. Pope pulled out his suppressed Sig and took a moment to allow his eyes to adjust; it was a suite, with a bathroom off to his left and a sitting area ahead and to the right. The bedroom was ten paces ahead of him. He could hear the sounds of breathing, the rhythmic ins and outs suggesting that Timoshev and Kuznetsov were fast asleep.
Twelve pulled his own pistol and, before Pope could stop him, stepped around him and went farther into the room. Pope could see the shape of two people in the king-size bed. Twelve aimed the pistol at the nearest body and pulled the trigger twice. The body jerked, enough to wake the second sleeper, but too late. Twelve aimed and fired two more times. The second body spasmed and then it, too, was still.
Pope wanted to curse, to rail at Twelve for his presumption, but he gritted his teeth. Not now. Later. He switched on the bedside lamp, took out his phone and took quick photographs of the man and woman so that their identities could be confirmed later. He nodded to Twelve, and they made their way back to the door. Pope reached for the door handle, pulled it down and checked that the corridor was empty. He stepped outside, held the door for Twelve, then closed it with a quiet click. They made their way back to the service lift.
“What the fuck?”
“I was following orders,” Twelve said.
“Not my orders. I told you I was the senior—”
“No, not yours,” Twelve said. “Control’s. The job’s done. Take it up with him if you have a problem.”
Twelve stood quietly and, as Pope looked at him in the mirrored wall of the car, he thought he saw a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. Pope intended to take it up with Control. It was all he could do not to punch Twelve out.
They went down to the staff entrance and made their way to the men’s room. They changed back into their street clothes, took the hotel uniforms with them and then exited onto the street. Twelve zipped up his jacket and headed south, crossing the road and slipping into a side street. Pope found a taxi and told the driver to take him to Domodedovo. He was booked on the 07.15 JAL flight to Narita where he had a connecting ticket on the Emirates flight to Heathrow. He would have a few hours to kill at the airport. He doubted that Timoshev and Kuznetsov would be found in time to trace either him or Twelve before they had left, but he knew that he would have to be careful. He would only be able to relax once he was on his way.
62
The taxi pulled up in the drop-off area outside the terminal at Vnukova International Airport. Milton paid the driver, stepped out of the car into the early morning chill, and held the door for Ross.
“Ready?” he asked her.
“How long do we have?”
“The flight leaves in an hour. Plenty of time.”
They made their way into the terminal. It had been a busy few hours, and there had been no time for much more than a few snatched moments of sleep. A small team had been assembled to put together their legends and itinerary. The embassy’s travel department had assessed their options for getting to Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The city was in the Russian Far East and was not a simple task to reach from Moscow. It was possible to take a train, but the eight-thousand-kilometre journey would have taken six and a half days, and they knew that they didn’t have the luxury of time. Driving was out of the question for the same reason, and it had been decided that they had no choice but to fly. SAT Airlines flew direct from Moscow to Komsomolsk, but that route was only twice-weekly and the next flight was two days away. The best that they could do was to fly on an Aeroflot 777 to Vladivostok, put up with a twelve-hour layover and then take the Aurora flight to Komsomolsk. It would take a day to complete the trip. They would be in time to make the meet with Anastasiya Romanova, but there would be precious little time for preparation. Ross had asked if that would be a problem; Milton said that it wasn’t ideal but assured her that they would be able to manage.
Their new legends had them as a married couple: Richard and Amy Burns. They were photographers visiting the Far East after being commissioned by an architectural magazine to shoot the Neo-renaissance buildings that were still present in the city centre. The legends were impressively thorough, especially given the limited time the staff had had to adorn them. They were presented with phones that had been carefully preloaded with evidence to back up their stories: there were full email histories, including copies of the correspondence with the commissioning magazine, and photographs from the other stops on their trip, including touristy shots that showed them standing outside the Kremlin and St Basil’s Cathedral and the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. Their contract with the magazine was given extra ballast thanks to payments that had been made into their fake bank accounts to represent their fee and expenses. They knew it was possible that the authorities would access their accounts if they conducted a full check, and, if they did, they would find transactions that evidenced the couple’s flight from Paris to St Petersburg and then on to Moscow, payments for their hotel stays, and the meals and drinks that they had enjoyed.
Their legends were tested for the first time as they passed through security. An officious-looking functionary examined their passports and tickets, asked cursory questions about the nature of their trip, and then waved them through. The guards at the security booth were similarly inquisitive, and asked Milton to open their carry-on after it had slid through the scanner. He did, taking out the cameras that the embassy had provided. The guard insisted that he hand them over, and Milton made a show of his anxiety as the woman roughly examined the kit. She grunted her satisfaction, dumped both cameras on the metal bench and left Milton to repack them.
There was a bar in the departure lounge and Ross led the way across to it. She ordered two bloody Marys, and, without asking if Milton wanted one, slid a glass across the pitted surface of the bar and waited until he picked it up.
“Cheers,” she said. “Here’s to unexpected trips to places no one should be asked to visit.”
There were no other travellers within earshot, and Milton forgave her the indiscretion. He touched his glass to hers, put it to his lips and knocked the drink back in one thirsty gulp.
Ross did the same, then set the glass back on the bar and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Another?”
They had forty-five minutes before they needed to go to the gate and Milton knew that a drink would help him to sleep on the plane.
He was tempted, sorely so, but raised his hand. “Too early for me,” he said, thinking back to the meeting in Islington and knowing that there was no way on earth he could ever share with them the circumstances of this latest temptation. And then, thinking about that, the prospect of another became difficult to dismiss and, with the surety that this would be the last, he changed his mind, told her “Why not?” and waited for the bartender to prepare a second round.
Aeroflot Flight SU 6281
63
The Aeroflot flight took off on time. Ross put on her eye mask, reclined her seat and went to sleep.
Milton was tired, too, but not quite ready to follow her example. He opened his carry-on and took out his tablet. He opened his mail server and selected the encrypted file that he had requested from Ziggy Penn before they had left the embassy. It was Jessie Ross’s MI6 personnel file. Milton was uncomfortable that he knew so little about her. They were travelling to an isolated area with limited consular assistance, and he wanted to understand her better. He would have preferred to travel alone, but, despite his misgivings, he could see the good sense in having
her along. She spoke perfect Russian and had experience travelling in the area. Just as importantly, being part of a couple with reason to be there made it slightly less likely that he would attract the attention of the authorities.
He read. Ross had been born in Portsmouth. Her father was a gas fitter and her mother worked in the reception of a local accountancy firm. Ross had studied at a local comprehensive, where she had developed a particular aptitude for languages which had, in turn, led to her taking a degree in Russian. She reported that she had enjoyed the course, and especially the year she had spent at the British Council in St Petersburg. The year had allowed her the latitude to travel across the country, from east to west; her Russian had become more natural and she had learned about the culture and expectations of Russia that were to become important later in her career.
She had graduated and taken a job as a researcher at Cambridge University. Transcripts of her interview with the SIS recruiter were appended to the report. She had said that she found academic work to be too dry for her tastes, and she’d found it difficult to acquire the funding to make the trips back to Russia that would enable her to further her practical research. After she had been turned down for a grant that would have allowed her to study for a year in Moscow, she had decided that she would leave and look for a job in management consultancy. It was a fortunate coincidence that she had seen the advertisement for SIS intelligence officers as she was looking around. She had applied, and, after a comprehensive background check—the fruits of which Milton was reading now—she had been accepted.
Her first posting had been as a report officer with responsibility for Russia and the former Eastern Bloc countries. R-Officers were tasked with meeting agent runners, often in the field, to discuss the intelligence that had been provided by their agents. She was required to assess the quality of the intel, corroborate it by way of second sources, and contextualise it for onward delivery to her superiors and politicians. She had developed a solid reputation and was quickly fast-tracked and given responsibility for briefing ministers on Russian affairs.
Milton flicked on and found, to his surprise, that there was a blot on her otherwise immaculate copybook. It was reported that she had had an affair with the private secretary of the foreign secretary. The man was married, and, it was reported, had chosen his wife over his mistress. The wife had found Ross and had instigated a brawl that had led to the wife’s eye socket being fractured. The police had been called and Ross had been arrested. Her career, although tarnished, was her saviour: she was heavily involved in analysis of a failed Islamic plot to bomb the New York subway and it was decided at a ‘senior level’—Milton knew that euphemism most likely meant the management tier at VX, perhaps even Benjamin Stone himself—that she should be released so that she could continue her work. The story of the affair had been kept out of the newspapers and Ross had been put back to work.
Milton flicked on. Ross had applied to become an agent runner. The psychiatrist who had assessed her suggested that the reasons for her desire to switch roles were obvious: she wanted the chance to prove herself after the reprimand that she had earned thanks to the affair. Furthermore, her former lover was now being groomed for high office, with much of his success being attributed to his reputation as a loving husband and doting father. Ross was asked about her feelings for the man during her psych evaluation and had replied that she was disgusted by his duplicity and the willingness of the government to cooperate in the pretence. She said that she wanted to get as far away from him as possible, and that “Russia was a long way from Whitehall.”
Ross had been given a diplomatic legend and was assigned to Moscow Station. She had taken over the running of existing agents and developed new ones, including several promising leads into the lower levels of the Kremlin. And then she had returned to London. The affair had left her pregnant; she had given birth to a son and said that she wanted to bring him up at home. She had replaced Leonard Geggel, taking on the responsibility of looking after the defectors who had come to the United Kingdom for sanctuary during and after the fall of the Wall.
Milton was impressed. He glanced over at her, sleeping in the seat next to his. She had only just turned thirty, and she had packed a lot into her career so far. This, though, was something that she had never done before. Running agents was one thing; not without danger, but nothing compared to the risks that the agents themselves took. Ross didn’t have the insulation of diplomatic protection now. She was not riding a desk at VX, nor even in the protected environment of Moscow Station. This was an active operation, conducted in one of the most heavily surveilled countries in the world, against an opponent with thousands of agents in the field, an enemy that already had blood on its hands. This was real, and dangerous, and with an outcome that Milton could not predict.
Vladivostok International Airport
64
Ross stretched out her legs. She and Smith had found two empty seats in the Laguna Lounge. They had already been waiting for four hours, and there was another eight still to go. There was a TV on the wall and it had been tuned to RT, the Russian state broadcaster that could be relied upon to run the government line. They had watched three hourly bulletins so far, and each had opened with footage from Southwold. Ross had translated for Smith, explaining that the anchors were decrying the slanderous accusations being made by the British government, and suggesting that they look nearer to home for the guilty parties. Smith gave a weary shrug, said that he wouldn’t expect anything else and then concentrated on the copy of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit that he was reading on his phone.
Ross looked at her watch and then levered herself off the bench, stretching out the kinks in her back. “I’m going to freshen up,” she said, pointing to the sign for the showers.
“I’ll be here,” Smith said.
Ross made her way to the cabanas.
Ross paid for a cabana and went inside. She turned on the shower so that it would be audible from outside and waited. Two minutes passed and then she heard a light tap at the door. She slid the bolt and opened the door; a man was standing there. He was nondescript, wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a light olive jacket. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him and then slid the bolt through the lock.
“My name is Stepanov,” he said. “I work for the deputy director.”
“We need to be quick,” Ross said. “The man I’m with is sharp. He’ll be suspicious if I’m away for too long.”
“It won’t take long. Just a few questions.” He spoke quickly and quietly, the sound of his voice muffled by the hissing of the shower.
“Go on.”
“The rendezvous with Romanova. Are the details still the same?”
“As far as I know. Tomorrow at midday at the railway station. What’s going to happen?”
“I will be there,” he said.
“Not on your own?”
“There will be two of us.”
“And then? What will happen?”
“We will wait for Romanova to show herself, and then we will arrest her and the British agent.” He paused. “But you must get away. As soon as you see us, start to run.”
“Primakov explained. I get it.”
“There is a river terminal in Komsomolsk, at the end of Oktyabrskiy Prospekt, right by the beach. You can take a hydrofoil to Nikolaevsk. It will take twelve hours. There is a small airport there. Get a flight to Sakhalin, then south to Japan.”
She committed the route to memory. “Is there anything else?”
“The agent must not suspect anything. You must—”
“I’ve been fooling men like him for years,” she said, cutting across him. “It’s not going to be a problem.”
“Of course,” he said.
He was carrying a small bag. He unzipped it and took out a lipstick.
“What is this?” she asked.
“This is an elektricheskiy pistolet,” he said. “A lipstick pistol. It has been in use for many years, but Line T have improved the design
. It is a single shot pistol, with one 4.5mm Makarov round. You twist the base, here, and it will fire. It is accurate to two metres. We think you should carry it. You will need to defend yourself if something goes wrong.”
“Nothing is going to go wrong,” she said. “And if he goes through my purse and sees this—”
“He will see a lipstick,” Stepanov interrupted. “Please. You are a valuable asset. We do not want you to be undefended.”
“Fine,” she said, dropping the lipstick into her bag. “Anything else?”
“No,” Stepanov said.
She looked at her watch. “I need to shower. He’s sharp, like I said. If my hair doesn’t look wet he’s going to be suspicious.”
Stepanov went to the door, slid the bolt, opened the door a crack and looked out.
“Good luck,” he said, turning back. “I will see you tomorrow.”
He opened the door all the way and disappeared into the corridor. Ross closed the door behind him, locked it again, and undressed. She stepped under the tepid water and scrubbed it over her skin, tipping her head back so that it could run through her hair. She took a moment to assess how she felt and found—still—that she wasn’t nervous. It was true what she had said: she had been doing this, working under the noses of Raj Shah and everyone else at the River House, for years. None of them suspected her. They underestimated her; they always had. They had no idea.
She twisted the tap to turn off the water, stepped out of the cubicle and towelled herself down. No, she thought. No idea at all. Smith might have been sharp, but she knew that she was more than his match.
