Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  The oligarch’s son shrugged, his words slurring ever so slightly. “Hey, man, it’s really not—”

  “‘Not acceptable,’ I believe you were about to say, Roman Igorevich,” Vasiliev interjected, transfixing the station manager with a cold look. “What is the meaning of this, Mr. Carrick? If it’s the approaching storm, I assure you that there’s no need to concern yourself on our account. Our pilot is one of the best—if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t remain in the employ of Igor Petrovich.”

  Roman’s father. Vasiliev smiled, the unspoken subtext only too clear. Those who fail Igor Petrovich don’t remain long in any employ whatsoever.

  “No, no, no, it’s not that,” Carrick stammered, abject dismay spreading across his face. The dog, once more, feeling the sting of his master’s rebuke. An endearing trait in an animal, perhaps. Not in a man. “It’s not our decision whatsoever, I assure you—and it’s not just us. All general aviation airports within a fifty-mile radius of London are being closed down, orders of the Civil Aviation Authority. No flights, in or out.”

  “Why?”

  “National security—the nature of the threat wasn’t specified.”

  And there it was. Vasiliev’s smile vanished as quickly as it had come. “Thank you, Mr. Carrick. That will be all. Please, let us know when the restrictions are lifted.”

  It could only be the Security Service, he thought, tuning out the station manager’s continued obsequies. Reacting to the devastation he had unleashed upon them.

  Too little, too late.

  Still, this presented a problem, their course now set. Unalterable.

  He found himself touching the front of his sports jacket unconsciously, feeling the outline of the passport in its inner pocket. Kudrin had come through for him, at the last.

  If only it would be enough.

  His eyes drifted up to the northern sky, the towering cumulo-nimbus clouds now bearing down upon them like a slow-moving freight train, the rain line visible in the distance.

  More than one storm was coming for them.

  “I’m going to need you to go ahead and board the plane, Roman Igorevich,” Vasiliev announced, brushing the Englishman brusquely to one side as he took his friend’s son by the shoulder, steering him toward the Embraer’s stairs.

  “But, he said—”

  “I know what he said,” Vasiliev continued patiently, his grip on Roman’s shoulder brooking no disagreement. “The police will be here soon, and we need to be ready.”

  “Police!?!” He thought the young man’s eyes were going to come out of his skull, the panic almost comical. How was it even possible that this was Igor’s spawn? The contrast between father and son, never more dramatic “What have you done? But that can’t happen, that—what about the drugs, the cocaine in the jet? I need to get away from here, Alexei, you fool, I need—”

  “To be a man,” Vasiliev responded icily, his tone dripping with contempt. His fingers, sinking deeper into the flesh of the young man’s shoulder—smiling as he began to whimper in pain. “Now shut up and listen to me. No one is going to arrest you—no one is going to touch you—as long as you do exactly what I tell you to do.”

  4:51 P.M.

  Hayes, Bromley

  UK

  Ten minutes out, Phillip Greer thought, wincing slightly as Roth whipped the Audi into the small village roundabout, cutting off a box truck about to enter—water spraying up from beneath their wheels, the truck driver laying on the horn behind them as the pool car swept south, the little Kent village of Hayes a blur outside the window.

  “CO-19 is eight minutes behind us,” he announced, looking up from his phone.

  “That far?”

  A nod. “They’re plowing through the same traffic we faced—rolling with the pair of ARVs and a Guardian.”

  A full CT-SFO team. A sergeant and fifteen constables, all of them heavily armed. Greer glanced out the window at the rain, cursing the storm for the hundredth time. If CO-19 had been able to utilize the heliport at Battersea. . .

  But there was no point in wasting regret on the unavoidable. Only time to do what needed to be done.

  He looked over at Roth. “We’re not going to wait for them. When we reach the airport, we’re heading straight in.”

  4:56 P.M.

  Biggin Hill Airport

  Bromley, UK

  Vasiliev was standing at the foot of the business jet’s stairs as the Passat rolled to a stop less than forty feet away, the gathering wind whipping at the hem of the Russian’s sports jacket.

  The sky black as ink behind him, dark and lowering over the hangars to the northwest—the first few heavy, massive droplets of rain spattering against the Passat’s windows. Harbinger of the storm following on their heels.

  The storm.

  Norris just sat there for a long moment, seemingly frozen to his seat—unwilling to face the reality of what stepping out of this vehicle would mean. The final step in his long path of betrayal. As though he were something less than a traitor, as long as he stayed here. A desperate illusion.

  “You get out here, da?” his driver asked, glancing disinterestedly back at him. It wasn’t a question, the look in his eyes that of a man who would kill without a second thought.

  Fate. Norris shoved open the door, stepping out onto the tarmac, glimpsing Vasiliev moving to meet him even as he did so—a cruel caricature of a smile playing on the Russian’s lips.

  “It’s good to see you, Mr. Norris. Things went well in London, I trust?”

  He wanted to lie, to tell him that it had—but somehow he feared the consequences of lying to this man, more than anything else in his life.

  Norris shook his head slowly. “They stopped me before I could get the drive into their system—I had no choice but to get out there.”

  The smile vanished, an angry curse escaping the Russian’s lips as he shook his head. “Then why did you bother coming here, Simon? The task with which I’d entrusted you, still undone?”

  “I had no other choice!” Norris fairly screamed, his voice cracking with panic. “I would have been arrested by the end of the day, and you would have lost the list!”

  “You have it?”

  “Of course.” There was hope there, and Norris seized it like a drowning man clasping a scrap of flotsam.

  “Then let’s see it,” the Russian declared, gesturing to a laptop computer set up in the open back of the Mercedes SUV parked a few meters away.

  “No, I’ll show you once we’re airborne—once we’re out of this country. Then you can have the list.”

  Vasiliev smiled indulgently, the sort of smile one would reserve for a small child. The wind tousling his silver hair, raindrops falling all around them now. “What sort of fool do you take me for, tovarisch? You’ve failed me once already, why should I trust you again? Pull up the list.”

  5:00 P.M.

  Bromley, UK

  The trees beside the roadway bent and swayed in the wind as the storm bore down upon them, quiet country residences flashing past as the Audi sped down the road, seeming hellbent on out-running the storm.

  But it would catch up with them, sooner or later. All of this would, Greer thought, overcome by a sense of foreboding as dark as the storm.

  His phone rang even as he glimpsed the signs for the airport, indicating the turn-off for the Passenger & Executive Terminal.

  Almost there. It was a bad time for a call.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Greer?” a woman asked, a trace of Cockney tingeing her voice. “Sergeant Kate Thomas, CO-19. We’re seven minutes out from the airport—my team will deploy to secure the facility once we arrive on site.”

  Good. There was a moment’s pause before the CO-19 team lead continued, hesitation in her tone. “Our brief mentioned a rogue Security Service officer believed to be at the airport, sir. Are we anticipating armed resistance?”

  Greer shook his head as Roth took the turn into the airport hard and fast—the red brick control tower already visible ahea
d of them, silhouetted against the sky. Lightning carving a wicked streak across the darkness to the north, followed almost instantaneously by the tearing sound of thunder.

  The storm was here.

  “Truthfully, Sergeant. . .I have no idea.”

  5:01 P.M.

  Biggin Hill Airport

  Bromley, UK

  Norris flinched at the clap of thunder, feeling unnaturally exposed standing here on the tarmac at the back of the Mercedes. Naked.

  “Very good,” Alexei Vasiliev announced, looking up from the laptop—using the trackpad to scroll through the list displayed there on the screen. No doubt already memorizing names, but there was nothing Norris could do about that.

  Nothing he could do about any of this, now—his own powerlessness striking home, as never before. He closed his eyes, envisioning the platform of the Circus once again, the onrushing train. Oblivion.

  If only.

  “Pack it up,” he heard the Russian say, closing the laptop lid with a sharp click. The thumb drive disappearing into the man’s hand.

  “I want that back,” Norris exclaimed, feeling a surge of panic rise from deep within. “I’ve proven to you that I’ve kept my word, now I want you to keep yours.”

  “And I will, tovarisch,” Vasiliev smiled. “And the drive, for safekeeping. Trust me.”

  “It won’t do you any good! I’ve encrypted the files—you don’t have the pass, unless you take me with you.”

  Another smile, as Vasiliev handed the drive off to one of his men, reaching up to close the rear door of the Mercedes. “I wouldn’t think of leaving you behind, Simon. A man who has performed such service to the Rodina? Perish the thought.”

  Norris heard a faint, far-off drumming in that moment, looking up to see the rain line sweeping across the runway to where they stood near the hangars, steam billowing off the macadam as it came.

  There was no time to seek shelter as it hit, drenching Norris to the skin in seconds—plastering his wet hair to his scalp. He stumbled to one side of the Mercedes, nearly blinded, struggling to wipe the water from his eyes just in time to see a dark navy blue Audi swing in toward the hangars, coming to a stop not more than forty feet away.

  An all-too-familiar figure emerging from within as the door opened, walking across the tarmac toward them as the rain continued to fall all around. Phillip Greer.

  The storm had arrived.

  5:03 P.M.

  Greer drew himself up fifteen feet short of the Mercedes, favoring the man cowering there against its side with a cold, hard glance.

  “Simon Norris, I believe,” he announced, raising his voice above yet another peal of thunder—rain trickling down his weathered cheeks.

  A nod, as the man seemed to flinch at the sound of his own name—unwilling to meet his eyes. A pathetic sight, but Greer could find no sympathy for him in this moment.

  “Get in the car and we’ll go back to Thames House together.” He paused for a moment, sensing the hesitation in the man’s body language. “I’m giving you a chance, Simon—a chance not be taken back to London in chains. It’s the only chance you’re going to get.”

  “But what if he doesn’t want to go back?” an unfamiliar voice demanded—its accents unmistakably Muscovite. Greer swiveled, his dress shoes scraping against the wet macadam—finding himself face-to-face with a man somewhere near his own age, slight, almost frail of build. Thinning silver hair matted against his skull. But the eyes. . .the eyes were the same eyes which had stared out of the jacket photos he had spent so long studying.

  “Alexei Mikhailovich,” Greer breathed. He saw the flicker of surprise in those ice-blue depths, but the man recovered quickly—a smile creasing his face.

  A hard, cruel thing, that smile.

  “Perhaps it’s just as well that we know each other, Phillip,” the Russian said after a moment, his use of Greer’s first name a calculated touch. The implicit threat underscored by the quartet of men who emerged from their concealment behind the Mercedes, spreading out to flank Greer and Roth. Hard, muscled, mafiya types, in the intelligence officer’s estimation. “Less chance that we might. . .misunderstand one another.”

  “No chance.”

  A shrug. “As you prefer. Mr. Norris has requested political asylum in the Russian Federation—something about domestic surveillance here in the UK. . .I don’t know the details. I am only the messenger.”

  Another thunderclap punctuated his words, the rain continuing to fall—lighter now, yet steady. The sky ink-black above their heads, shrouding the airport in gloom.

  Once, these fields had borne witness to young men in Spitfires and Hurricanes, climbing into that very sky to defend their country against unspeakable evil. The men, the planes were gone. . .but the evil remained. A different form, a different face, but the threat never so real.

  “If Mr. Norris desired asylum,” Greer said quietly, “he should have applied through proper channels. But he hasn’t, and there’s no asylum here. You’re not leaving—none of you are. Deliver that message, messenger.”

  Another smile, this time directed at where Roth stood, a few paces behind Greer and to his left. Sizing up the former Royal Marine.

  “Who is going to stop us. . .you?”

  5:08 P.M.

  Embassy of the Russian Federation

  Kensington Palace Gardens, London

  “Then tell him that it’s important!” Valeriy Kudrin swore, glancing angrily up at the clock on the wall of his office. It was his second call in the last five minutes, and thus far, the rezident was running into a brick wall with the ambassador’s head of security.

  “Mikhail Yevgenyevich is at dinner with his wife and the Canadian ambassador,” the bodyguard replied coolly. “He left explicit instructions not to be disturbed, but I will convey your message once they have finished.”

  “Listen to me very carefully,” Kudrin began once again, acid in his voice. “I do not care if the ambassador is at dinner with the Prime Minister himself. If you do not get him for me at once, your next assignment will find you pulling private security in Damascus. Do you understand?”

  There was a brief pause, and then a mumbled apology from the man. “One moment.”

  It made one wonder how he had risen to such a high level without realizing that one did not trifle with the security services, Kudrin mused—forcing a smile to calm himself as he waited. It wasn’t a mistake the bodyguard would make a second time.

  On the wall, the moments ticked by, Kudrin’s office quiet enough to hear the movements of the clock’s hand. And then a man’s voice came on the line.

  “Mikhail Yevgenyevich,” Kudrin greeted warmly, “I am deeply sorry to have disturbed you. . .”

  5:09 P.M.

  Biggin Hill Airport

  Bromley, UK

  “I mean,” the Russian continued, taking a step closer to Greer, his cheeks wet with rain, “I know you’ve closed the airport. But. . .money can unlock many doors in this country. Perhaps it can even unlock the sky? Are you really going to stop us?”

  “If necessary,” the old spook replied, his eyes never leaving Vasiliev’s face. Sensing his men, spreading out further. Flanking.

  So this is where I die, he thought. All those years, running counter-intel against the Soviets in Eastern Europe—he’d rarely feared death. And now, here he was. . .preparing to meet his end in the fields of Kent. The world had changed, after all.

  Just not in the way Ashworth expected. The thought brought an ironic smile to his lips as he braced himself, feeling Roth tense at his side. They would go down together.

  And then, as if in a dream, he heard the sirens—saw the pair of Armed Response Vehicles swing out into the open around the edge of the hangars, lights flashing through the rain.

  A woman in the bulky, wolf-grey tactical uniform of the Met’s CT-SFO teams emerging from the lead ARV—her rifle already up as she advanced, flanked by her fellow officers.

  The easily recognizable, ambulance-like silhouette of an armore
d Jankel Guardian crossing the airfield fifty meters out to take up a blocking position on the runway—operators spilling out of the back, weapons leveled. The distinctive outline of a sniper rifle in one officer’s hands.

  Greer turned back to Vasiliev, meeting the man’s eyes. “Checkmate, Alexei.”

  The Russian took a step back, a strangely enigmatic smile playing across his features as he spread his hands, raising them in accordance with the woman’s barked order. “No, Phillip. . .only ‘check.’”

  5:14 P.M.

  Embassy of the Russian Federation

  Kensington Palace Gardens, London

  The ticking of the clock was enough to drive a man mad. Valeriy Kudrin swore softly to himself, shaking his head, the sound of his own voice somehow alien in the quiet.

  Waiting. It was a helpless feeling, all the more so since he’d been tasked with the execution of another man’s plan—not his own. An unaccustomed subordination for the rezident.

  He could only hope that the confidence Moscow seemed to repose in Alexei Mikhailovich was well-placed. Working in the security services, one always heard stories about men like Vasiliev. Men who remembered the old days.

  Who had survived the chaos of the interregnum in the ‘90s, strangely unscathed.

  Kudrin rose from his chair, walking over to the window of his office, gazing out from the chancellery over Perks’ Field to the southwest, toward Kensington Palace itself.

  From this vantage point, one could often see the royal helicopters landing on the field below, their occupants hurried toward the palace under escort. Heavy escort now, in the wake of the Balmoral attacks.

  Attacks in which Russia had itself had an unknowing hand, the rezident thought. Hoping in that moment that the stories of Vasiliev were true.