by Henry Porter
‘It’s got everything?’
Instead of answering her, he said, ‘Let’s start at the beginning. What was your role at GreenState? I assume you were investigating Jonathan Mobius, but had little knowledge of the other strands of your father’s inquiry into Mila Daus, the person he had seen in Berlin and Mobius’s stepmother.’
‘And lover.’ She unhooked her leg. ‘You have to understand that for a long time we were looking for a way in. My father realised that we needed an entry point and that had to be GreenState, which of course is a front.’
‘For gathering data?’
‘Sure – Mila’s a data junkie, but what’s important about GreenState is that it’s like a hidden dimension and she moves in it without anyone knowing she’s there. And it’s structured so that all these harmless souls beavering away to save the planet have no clue about what’s really going on. You saw them! I mean, they’re kind of pathetic. And, by the way, when you did your little searches about the company they picked that up straight away and it was a real help because, right then, just before my father was murdered, I thought they might be on to me. So you drew some fire there, which was great. I realise now that in those last few weeks my father understood that they would be getting close. That’s why they put you in there, and I’m grateful for that, and to you because I know they twice tried to kill you. So, yeah, you have my thanks, Mr Samson.’
‘Part of the service,’ said Samson. ‘What precisely were you doing?’
Rudi suddenly got up and announced, ‘Ich bin echt müde.’ He was going to bed.
‘Oh, okay. You want to sleep here. I’ll see you in a bit.’ She watched him go. ‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he?’ she said when they heard him on the stairs. ‘We have a lot in common, and now it turns out both our fathers were killed by Mila Daus and her associates. Dad always said he thought she was ultimately behind the death of Rudi’s father.’
‘At GreenState, what were you doing?’ repeated Samson.
‘We needed to access Jonathan Mobius’s communications and follow the trail to Mila Daus, as well as work out the relationship between different entities in her empire and, in some cases, prove ownership, or control. She’s like a fucking mobster. She’s into everything, and her influence goes way beyond her companies and GreenState. And yet there’s no trace of her. You’ve tried looking her up on the internet, right, and you found that she doesn’t really exist out there?’
‘How did you obtain that access?’
‘Firstly, I had to get a job in GreenState, which is easy enough, but we had to put a lot of work into Ingrid Cole and eliminate from the Web as much as we could of my wild years. There are people who can do this for you. Denis paid for it. I had to win their trust at GreenState, which wasn’t that hard. I’d done some advertising work and I’m pretty good at data analytics. Eventually, we placed spyware on Mobius’s devices and in the GreenState server, all designed by Naji and Rudi. Then we just had to wait and collect the information. Jonathan Mobius is really security conscious and he’s always fucking travelling, so that took the best part of nine months.’
‘You accessed his phone and computers?’
‘Yes, he has a vulnerability.’
‘Meaning?’
‘A weakness for chicks, plus he’s a real bastard, which means he uses them then drops them. Likes S&M, too. Likes to hurt people.’
‘So you dated him?’
‘Jesus, no! We fixed him up. We put someone in his way that could really take care of herself and she slept with him and she got inside his phone. She’s a friend of Rudi’s. So, once we got access, my work at GreenState was to download as much as I could from inside the organisation, because they had good firewalls and it was just a bit simpler from inside the building. But we had to go gently, and of course I had my bloody job to do.’
‘Had you completed the work when your father was killed?’ Samson asked quietly.
‘Not quite – there was a lot of checking and assimilation to do.’
Samson thought for a few moments. ‘So, the belief that Denis Hisami had material in his briefcase that he was preparing to reveal must be wrong.’
‘I don’t know. Mr Hisami and Dad were making those decisions.’ She looked down and started stroking her knee nervously. ‘I really loved my father, you know. Maybe the only person I’ve actually loved in my life, though Rudi comes close.’ She stopped. ‘He told me he was going to die. That’s what made it so hard being in London. But I had to see it through for him. It meant a lot that he trusted me with it.’
‘He knew you’d got what it takes.’ He stopped. ‘Your tradecraft is pretty good, Zoe.’
‘Gave you the runaround, did I?’ She smiled for the first time, and Samson began to like her.
‘You did.’
‘If Rudi hadn’t been in London, I couldn’t have done it.’ She stopped, and their eyes met. ‘We went to the cabin because we both wanted to be where Dad lived his last months. He was murdered there, but that wasn’t the point. You probably know that Rudi treated him as his father and loved him, too. We wanted to feel his presence, see the light he painted, that kind of thing. You understand?’
‘I do. What did you burn out there? I saw ashes in the fire.’
‘Notes that Rudi kept from London. Nothing important.’
‘Ah! What about the structure of this operation? How did it work?’
‘There were four teams: Pearl, Pitch, Aurora and Saffron. Dad mimicked the cell structure that Mila had in place. Then there was Berlin Blue, which was run by Mr Hisami and Dad, because that was the apex. The reason we were all there.’
Samson pulled his laptop towards him and read out, ‘Jonathan Mobius, Erik Kukorin, Chester Abelman and Elliot Jeffreys.’
‘So, it is all in the book,’ she said.
‘Yep. And each of these men was running agents or people who’d been compromised by Mila Daus,’ he said, and handed her the piece of paper. ‘Ulrike just discovered this in your father’s book.’
She took it and ran her eyes down the names. ‘Yes, these people. But there are more, some we have only just found out about. I see the Special Adviser in Number Ten is here.’
‘In Number Ten!’
‘Yeah, Anthony Drax. Totally Mila’s man.’
‘That explains a lot. Did your father think that MI6 knew about Drax? The name meant nothing to me.’
‘Yes, my father thought MI6 had their suspicions. The last time I saw him he was wondering whether to tip them off, but then the whole operation would have been blown, and he had no love for his former employer. There are bigger fish in the States. They have someone who works for the Director of Intelligence and a senior person in the National Security Council. Naji knows everything. We’d better pray he gets here. Now, can I look at the book?’
At first light Anastasia got out for a pee. The ground was wet with dew. There was a red stripe of rising sun beyond the trees and a remarkably loud dawn chorus. She returned to the car. Naji was awake and staring up at the sky through the windshield.
‘Shall we go?’ She handed him the water bottle. ‘You okay?’
He nodded. ‘I need to do what you just did.’
‘Sure. It’s four thirty. We can make it in an hour or so and then we just walk over the border.’
He shambled out and stood listening to the birds for a moment before urinating against the wheel of one of the nearest trailers. Why do men always do that? she asked herself.
He returned to the car, got in and slammed the door.
‘Something wrong?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Naj, what is it?’
‘We are going to a funeral of a good man. I liked Mr Harland. A lot! We talked like with my father.’
How could she be so blind? Of course, Harland was a substitute for the father he’d lost before he set off on his journey int
o Europe in 2015. ‘Yes, I saw you together. I know you’re going to miss him badly.’
He nodded. ‘I miss Ifkar, too. Sometimes we go out into the forests and listen to the birds like this. “The birds are the friends of the stars.” That is what Ifkar says. It is sentimental, but I like it.’ He turned to her. ‘I like Ifkar very much.’ What was in his eyes was love, not mere affection. She said nothing but held his gaze. He nodded. ‘Yes, Anastasia, in that way. And he likes me like that way. Is this wrong?’
‘Of course not.’ She kissed his brow and stroked his hair. ‘Wherever a person finds love, that’s good.’
‘But it is bad. Ifkar thinks it may be bad.’
‘Of course it isn’t – it’s how you both are. It’s the most natural thing in the world.’
‘Like you and Samson?’
She banged her hands on the wheel. ‘Do you mind if we don’t go there? I mean, it’s, well . . . it’s very awkward.’ She started the engine. ‘And I do love my husband. He’s a courageous man.’ She stopped and shook her head with frustration. ‘Let’s go. We have to crash that border.’
‘Want me to drive?’
‘No.’
She drove faster than she had the night before. Naji sat with his knees up, murmuring to himself in Arabic and English. They met no other vehicles on the way, which made them feel conspicuous. On the outskirts of Valga, he straightened and looked up Alko 1000 on his phone. ‘There are two and they are both near to border,’ he said, and showed her the map on the phone.
They decided on the one in the centre of town, a supermarket surrounded by a large car park about two kilometres away. Naji retrieved her phone from his backpack and waited for the network to show at the top of the screen.
Valga was a dreary place with waste ground between the houses. There was little sign of life at that hour, although they saw one or two pickups and tractors loaded with produce heading in the same direction as they were. They went slowly, feeling their way to the supermarket. Naji spotted a coffee stand on one of the deserted cross streets. It was open and serving labourers and farm workers who had parked their vehicles chaotically around the cabin. He suggested they grab something while they waited for her phone to begin sending their location. She still had no signal. ‘We need to speak to them before we move,’ he said.
She reluctantly agreed, and he hopped out at the stand and bought coffee and sweet pastries. The early workers in a gaggle around the cabin window immediately parted, believing, perhaps, that a young Arab in their town meant some sort of trouble. He returned, grinning, with two coffees and a pastry for himself and handed her a cup. Back in his seat, he unstuck the pastry from its paper wrap and looked over at her phone: it still had no reception. ‘Turn it off then turn on again,’ he suggested, with his mouth full.
‘I hate waiting here,’ she said, putting her takeaway cup into one of the holders. ‘Shall we just get to the supermarket and leave the car? I’d feel happier.’ She started the engine, but Naji insisted on finishing his coffee before they moved off, so she did, too.
They reached the supermarket – a long, low building, almost certainly a converted cinema – and circled the block before rolling into the south side of a car park where a man was loading flattened cardboard boxes on to a trolley. He stopped and looked up with interest, then away to the far side of the car park, where there were about half a dozen vehicles. Now messages began flooding into her phone. A glance told her they were from Samson and all more or less said the same thing. KaPo had intercepted phone calls and texts that suggested three separate teams were looking for them. They knew the model, colour and registration of the car and they were aware of the arrangement to leave it at the supermarket. Her only thought, as she slammed the car into reverse, was that the Russian teams may have staked out the larger Alko 1000 to the north of the town on the A3, because maybe that was where they had been meant to leave the Passat.
Naji had the map on his phone. ‘Go right!’ he shouted.
She dropped her phone in her lap and accelerated away, just as a silver saloon appeared in her mirror. At least one member of the Russian team had been waiting in the car park. They had no distance to go, but the pursuing car was already hard on their tail, trying to nudge the rear of the Passat so as to send it out of control on one of the grassy areas on either side. She anticipated the manoeuvre and braked sharply, letting a Mazda with two men inside – the passenger on a phone – shoot ahead of them. ‘Where do I go? Which way?’ she shouted.
‘Left at the end.’
She took off across the grass, causing the Passat to leap into the air when its wheels met a hidden bump. Yet this didn’t stop them, and she was able to cross the rough ground and rejoin the road before a row of lime trees. Now the street was more confined, with buildings on both sides. Another car, a black Mercedes SUV with alloy wheels and darkened glass, appeared from their right and aimed straight for them. She swerved and steered round the back of the SUV. Naji let out a whoop of admiration.
‘Doesn’t feel like there’s a border near here!’ she shouted.
They reached a group of one-storey Communist-era apartment blocks. Naji shouted ‘Left! Left! Left!’ But a third vehicle was heading towards them from the right and she lost concentration for a split second, hitting the kerb and causing the front near-side tyre to burst with a loud pop. But they had momentum still, and there, not a hundred metres away, was a gull-wing canopy straddling the road and a lowered barrier. She put her foot down. The tyre made a rumbling noise, but she reached a good speed. They flashed past three low white brick buildings from which men issued, some with guns, all of them running towards the border post. On the Latvian side of this normally sleepy crossing they knew nothing of what was occurring, however the menace of the three cars in pursuit and the distress of their quarry were plain and they raised their guns. The barrier was two seconds away. Suddenly it rose and the Passat sailed through and came to a halt a few metres on. It was immediately surrounded by men with guns pointing, not at Naji and Anastasia, but across the border to the cars that had pulled up in a line about twenty metres away, all of which was to the astonishment of an elderly tractor driver in a straw hat who had just crossed over from Estonia with a ram tethered to the front bar of his trailer.
Anastasia rested her forehead on the wheel and took deep breaths. Naji rubbed her shoulder. ‘That is last time I am your passenger,’ he said, echoing her complaint of the evening before. ‘Here, you have missed calls.’ He handed her the phone.
Samson had phoned. She called him back. ‘We’re through,’ she said.
‘I’m relieved. Tomas Sikula is there to meet you.’ He paused. ‘You’ll need rest before the funeral. Conversation may not be such a good idea.’
‘Of course,’ she said. She understood exactly what he was saying.
The second call was from Dr James Carrew. He’d just sent a text. ‘Emergency surgery in progress to correct heart irregularity. Situation became critical – we had to move quickly.’
She rang him, but got his message service, and there was no assistant at his office number.
Chapter 26
Funeral in Tallinn
Samson arrived at the headquarters of Kaitsepolitseiamet promptly at 10.30 a.m., an appointment that allowed Tomas Sikula time to travel by helicopter from the border with Anastasia and Naji, change and shower before arriving at the offices just outside Tallinn’s old town. It was typical of Sikula to look as fresh as the morning dew after a sleepless night and also to choose not to mention the incident at the border, but that was because he’d probably drawn a blank with Naji and Anastasia, neither of whom Samson had seen. They were already resting at the Harlands’ little green house, filling it to capacity. Naji, he had gathered from Anastasia’s text, was more interested in the helicopter than anything Sikula had to say.
Samson was already in a suit and tie and clutching a bag with the sketchbook and Har
land’s last painting, which KaPo’s director, Aaro Sollen, said he would very much like to see. Samson drew it out of the bag and rested it against the wall on a glass table in the conference room. They said nothing. The beauty of the study of a burst of light far out to sea overwhelmed the significance of the bullet hole at the bottom of the canvas, and that is the way Harland would have wanted it. It was his last painting – that was all – and it was magnificent. Samson told them it would be framed and placed in the exhibition for the opening later that day.
They sat down. ‘There are formal requests from the British government for your arrest,’ said Sollen. ‘But since we are talking to a citizen of Hungary named Norbert Soltesz, I don’t think we have to pay much attention to that.’
‘They’re behind events,’ said Samson. ‘Whatever happens will happen without the British government having the slightest influence.’
Sollen nodded.
‘What is going to happen?’ asked Tomas.
‘I cannot say. Denis Hisami owns this information, but he’s just had an emergency heart operation. I’m here to look after the interests of Harland’s widow and Mr Hisami’s wife. They should have increased security over the next forty-eight hours and, obviously, Ulrike needs looking after long term.’
‘They will have everything they need. That part of town will be in lockdown. No one will get near the church or the gallery. Our President will be attending, so there would be security in any case, but we guarantee the safety of each one of you while you are in Estonia and, of course, we have Ulrike’s best interests at heart. Is that satisfactory?’
Samson pulled out the Nomenclature of Colours. ‘This is what Robert Harland gave his life for. There are seventeen names here, and each one is working for Mila Daus, a Russian asset who started her career in the Stasi and has since become a very powerful figure in the United States.’ Sollen allowed a puzzled look momentarily to cross his face. ‘It’s unlikely that you’ve heard of her. But she’s responsible for the kidnap of Anastasia Hisami nearly three years ago, the support of numerous far-right, racist organisations, the death of Robert Harland, the use of nerve agents in Congress and countless other deaths, which include all the suspects on the initial team of hit men.’
