Hard Cover

by Adrian Magson

  The coach passengers were too busy piling off and grabbing their bags to be looking my way, so I stepped up close to the Touareg and leaned down as if I’d dropped something. The underneath of the vehicle was nice and clean, courtesy of the rental company, and the powerful magnet on the tracking device fixed itself in place with a soft clunk. I’d pushed it right up behind the muffler, out of sight unless they put the vehicle on a hoist or got down in the dirt and crawled around to make a comprehensive search.

  That done I returned to my room and checked my cell phone, pulling up the app for the tracker to make sure it was working. If they took off now, I’d be able to see where they went and follow. I’d been told the tracker’s battery was good for a twenty-mile range and twelve days of life, but I didn’t plan on letting them get that far or staying around that long.

  Before going to sleep, I checked in with Langley on my encrypted phone.

  ‘Go ahead, Watchman.’ It was the familiar voice of Lindsay Citera. I hadn’t seen where she worked, but I knew it would be a small space full of monitors, speakers and a whole array of computer equipment that I neither understood nor wanted to. It would be oppressive to most people, lacking natural light and air and therefore mostly sterile, but it allowed the operators to focus their entire attention on the job in hand.

  ‘I’m in place and signing in,’ I told her, and gave her the name of both hotels and the description and number plates of my car and Tzorekov’s Touareg. From this point on, Lindsay would be locked in to my moves twenty-four-seven and ready to respond. Her task was to monitor the area and the roads ahead once we were on the move, and to check news feeds and local intel chatter between the police, army and FSB. There were a few other agencies to be wary of but these were the primary causes of concern in the area I was about to enter. Any one of them might pop up on the radar, but as long as I kept my eyes open and Lindsay kept an overhead watch for traffic and movements, I wasn’t too worried. We’d worked together once before, and in this game you learned to recognize a good connection when you made it.

  ‘Likewise, Watchman. Is it bad karma to wish you luck, break a leg or stuff like that?’ I could hear the hint of a smile in her voice and figured there was nobody else close enough to hear. Maybe Brian Callahan would have approved dropping the recognized formality for a moment but I wasn’t sure some of the other stiff-necks in Langley would have felt the same way. For me, though, it was a welcome sound; I knew she would be on top of her game once we got going.

  ‘Every bit helps. Thank you. Speak soon.’

  I cut the connection and put my head down, instincts tuned to be up and on the move at a moment’s notice.

  As it happened, my instincts were on top of their game, too. Something woke me less than three hours later and I slipped out of bed and looked through the curtains. Some of the parking lot lights were out in my hotel and across the way, throwing several vehicles into patches of shadow.

  I was wondering if it was a cost-cutting exercise on the part of the hotels’ managements, when I saw movement on the sidewalk, near a patch of shrubbery.

  A group of four men were huddled together apparently in conversation. But I’d seen this kind of scenario before. The men were in pairs, each one looking past the man opposite. They were checking out the vehicles in the parking lots of both hotels.

  As I watched, one of the pair facing my hotel peeled away and walked across the parking lot. He stopped by my pickup and tried the door.

  NINE

  ‘Can we really trust this “Watchman” of yours?’

  Jason Sewell suppressed a sigh of irritation. Angela Thornbury calling yet again. He thought he’d made the situation very clear outside the meeting at the front office in New York several days ago, when Watchman had signalled his agreement to shadow Leonid Tzorekov into Russia. But she seemed to be having difficulty getting the message and had been bugging him on and off ever since. He thought they’d covered every question she had to ask, from demanding detailed information about Watchman’s background, which he’d fielded through Brian Callahan, the Clandestine Service Officer who would be running him, to seeking assurances he couldn’t give about what might happen if Watchman or Tzorekov were intercepted by Russian security forces.

  ‘I think you may rest assured that we’re OK on the trust thing,’ he said mildly, aware that this call, like all the others, was probably being recorded by Thornbury for posterity. If this venture did go wrong, there would be no shortage of names being thrown around in her risk-averse world of the civil service, with himself at the top of the blame tree. There wouldn’t be any responsibility attached to Thornbury herself, of that he was certain. Few people got to be assigned to the White House without learning ways of sidestepping trouble along the way and knowing how and when to duck out. ‘And he’s not my man.’

  ‘Well, I can’t say I’m comfortable with it.’ She sounded just as bullish as the first time he’d met her, as if all the decisions had been made unilaterally by him with no negotiation. It made him wonder who else was in the room with her right now, listening in as a useful witness if the dirt hit the fan and she wanted to show her hands were clean.

  He didn’t know Thornbury well, but he didn’t have to; he’d been around Washington long enough to recognize the signs of ambition on steroids when he saw it. She was merely preparing the ground around her like all good politicos, for a potential crash of career-ending proportions – as long it was somebody else’s career on the line.

  ‘Is it the man you don’t trust or the job we’ve asked him to do? Sorry – the job you asked us to arrange,’ he amended bluntly. Record that and swallow, he thought savagely. It was mid-afternoon in Langley, Virginia, but still too early in the day for this kind of political skirmishing, and he had too many other fights to referee to waste time on this one.

  ‘The man, if you must know. And why wasn’t I given the courtesy of being introduced to him by his real name – I assume “Watchman” is some sort of code name? I asked around and nobody’s heard of him. Frankly, I find these boys’ games a little insulting.’

  ‘Ma’am, in my line of work we often have to rely on, and place trust in, people we’ve never heard of before. It’s not called the secrecy business for nothing – something you might care to remember while you’re talking about people like him. And we don’t use his real name for the same reason. So feel insulted if you must, but that’s the rules. What’s your point?’

  Sewell wondered who she had asked and how openly. There was no shortage of back-office pretend spooks in the Washington arena, and he hoped she hadn’t bandied the code name around like yesterday’s news. Freelance operatives like Portman did their best work by staying in the shadows and not beefing up their image as some kind of celebrity action figure. Staying out of the limelight was how the good ones survived, and Portman was one of the best. Even Sewell had expressed some doubts about the man when he’d first heard of him, but he’d proved himself more than capable and reliable.

  ‘Of course. I promise, I never mentioned it outside—’ She was suddenly gabbling, taken aback by his obvious reproof.

  ‘Instead of the White House,’ he interrupted her, ‘you might like to have a word with your own people in the Truman Building.’ He wanted to tell her to get a grip and stop playing with people’s lives, but armed as she was with the undeniable authority of the White House, he was forced to bite his tongue.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Try Ed Travis. I didn’t see any reason to mention him before, but one of Watchman’s recent successes was hauling one of your colleagues out of Ukraine at great risk to himself – but I’m sure you must have heard about that.’ He was pretty certain she hadn’t; the State Department was a big place, especially once you got a foot on the glittery trail to the White House and left ordinary duties behind. The least she could have done was checked some facts before voicing her doubts.

  He fielded a couple more queries, then politely disconnected and pushed the phone away. Time to go ch
eck the troops – and put himself out of reach for a few precious minutes. He left his office with instructions to his secretary to hold calls unless it was from the president, and made his way down to the Operations Centre. At the end of a corridor, silent apart from the rush of air-conditioning, he found a smallish room where Lindsay Citera, Portman’s comms contact, was sitting surrounded by a state-of-the-art collection of computers, monitors, recording and editing equipment.

  It had been a while since he’d sat at this kind of desk and he was ready to confess that he had at best only a working knowledge of what each box of tricks did, so quickly was this technology evolving.

  ‘How is it going?’ he asked genially, and waved a hand when the young woman made to take off her headset and stand up. ‘Relax, relax – I’m just visiting, which is a euphemism for getting away from my desk and the darned phone. Any contact with Watchman yet?’

  ‘Just twenty minutes ago, sir,’ she replied. ‘He’s in the Saint Petersburg area and sitting on Counselor’s location.’ Counselor was the code name they had assigned to Leonid Tzorekov. ‘It’s—’ she glanced at a digital clock above her monitor – ‘twenty-two hundred hours over there and they’ve checked into a motel just outside the city.’

  ‘Good to hear.’ He turned as footsteps sounded in the corridor and Brian Callahan appeared. The CSO was tall and lean, grey hair cropped short and neat. He had a relaxed air about him but Sewell knew the man had a tight hold on every detail of the various missions he was directing at any one time. It had been Callahan’s early confidence in Portman and Lindsay Citera that had persuaded him to let them carry this assignment through to what he hoped and prayed was going to be a successful conclusion.

  ‘They chasing you for updates?’ Callahan asked with a knowing smile. As a long-time officer he was well acquainted with the pressures that could be brought to bear on the agency, seeking details and reassurance that often weren’t there to give.

  ‘Something like that. You got everything you need?’

  Callahan nodded. ‘We’re good to go.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. This is critical, you realize that? Call me if you have to – no matter what.’ With a nod to Lindsay, he turned and walked away back to his office.

  Callahan watched Sewell disappear down the corridor and turned to Lindsay, who was frowning. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s his style – and he’s covering our backs. If it wasn’t him it could be someone who might not be on our side.’ He studied some notes Lindsay had brought up on a separate screen. It consisted of details on two vehicles, the names of hotels and their location. ‘You got all that from a brief conversation?’

  She smiled. ‘The cars and hotel names, yes. The hotel addresses came from TripAdvisor.’

  He grunted. ‘Good thinking. You planning to follow both vehicles?’

  ‘If we can, sir, yes. The Touareg is Counselor’s car. Watchman has placed a tracker on board. It’s got a twelve-day battery and should be easy to follow from the air once they get away from the city.’

  ‘Are the Pathfinders in place?’

  ‘Yes, sir. In place and ready with the drone – and a route out across the border in case of problems.’

  She was talking about a new generation of ‘cloaked’ and near-silent mini-drone, originally designed to track devices used for monitoring animal movements in the wild. Watchman would be following the same signal from the ground, but once the target vehicle was well clear of the Saint Petersburg area and into the open country, its course would also be monitored by a pair of covert operators from the British Pathfinder Platoon, part of 16 Air Assault Brigade, who had ‘wandered’ across the border from Finland ostensibly on a wildlife photography trip. Trained in covert activity and escape-and-evasion techniques, their task was to deploy and operate the drone to lock on the signal from the Touareg. From there they would feed back data to Langley via GCHQ – the Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham, England – in case Watchman lost the signal and needed help picking up their trail again.

  ‘You haven’t told Watchman about the tracking team,’ Lindsay said.

  Callahan shook his head. ‘Not yet – and I’d rather not. He’s got enough on his plate and doesn’t need to know. Once we feel they’ve done their job we’ll tell them to pull out; they’re not there to get involved. Any questions?’

  ‘This could be pretty dangerous for him, Port– Watchman, right? Being in Russia, I mean.’

  ‘Potentially, of course.’ He gave her a searching look and sat down on a chair nearby. ‘Did I do the wrong thing, asking you to meet up with Watchman last time?’ His voice was low. Concerned.

  ‘No, sir. Of course not. What do you mean?’

  ‘It was a risk worth taking, putting you face-to-face with an operative like that. I had knowledge I wanted him to have without bringing him into the building, and you were the best person to give that to him. The fact is, Lindsay, support staff like you very rarely get to meet field operatives, and that’s for a good reason; it’s easier for them to interact at a distance, especially when the dangers are considerable, if they don’t have any … personal knowledge of each other.’ He raised a quick hand as she went to speak. ‘I don’t mean that in any unprofessional way – please don’t misunderstand me. I guess we never covered this issue before, but maybe now is the right time. If you feel … compromised or conflicted about supporting Watchman in any way, I can re-assign you without impacting on your performance or professional standing here.’

  ‘Sir, no.’ Lindsay leaned forward and said, ‘I’m good. I’m fine with this, I promise. I was just … concerned, that’s all. The same as I would be with anybody else.’

  Callahan gave a hint of a smile, his features softening. ‘Really? The same?’

  She returned the smile. ‘Well, maybe a little bit more. But that’s only because you teamed us up last time and Watchman was my very first assignment.’ She shrugged. ‘I do feel kind of … responsible, I guess.’

  ‘I did that, didn’t I?’ He stood up. ‘Fine. The partnership works. In fact it works very well.’ He walked towards the door, where he turned and said quietly, ‘Let’s keep it that way.’

  He disappeared upstairs, leaving Lindsay alone with the electronic hum filling the air and the distant murmur of other communications specialists like her, talking to their contacts around the globe. The sound made her realize once again the almost intimate nature of her work, attached by a tiny thread of electronic signals to another person so many miles away who had only himself and her skills to rely on.

  The thought instantly brought Watchman’s face to mind. As Callahan had said, it had been on his orders, in Washington. It had been a risky thing, coming face-to-face with and making real the somewhat detached human being she had been talking through the most dangerous of situations over several days. But it had been a necessary meeting to pass on some vital information. And she had found him to be very … human. She hadn’t known what to expect, having only recently gone through training with the CIA before being dropped into a situation where she had some responsibility for a man’s life. Her knowledge of covert operatives, whether special forces or spies, had been limited until then to films, books and the occasional ‘outed’ intelligence officers who hit the headlines, and the scuttlebutt from other trainees wondering what real CIA spies were like. If she had expected to meet some kind of super-agent, a robot in a nice suit and with the personality of a computer chip, she had been pleasantly surprised. Portman had been neither of those. He had been almost … ordinary, and yet possessed of some inner energy, like the quiet buzz of electricity.

  Partly because of that she felt conflicted about Callahan not telling Watchman about the two British Pathfinders. True, if Watchman knew about the two other men, and he was caught, they could end up being taken as spies. But she couldn’t help wondering if Watchman wasn’t the best judge of that. He was professional and knew the risks, as did the two other men.

  She pushed the thoughts aside and began checking
the equipment around her. No distractions, that was the rule. She’d found Watchman, or Marc Portman, as she now knew him, to be a pleasant, mildly funny and not a bad-looking man. But she also acknowledged that thinking of him as anything other than a professional operative was a strict no-no. He had his world and she had hers. And although they were connected by work for short periods of intense activity, mixing them in her own mind was something she was determined to avoid at all costs.

  She focussed on familiarizing herself with the screens. So far she had researched the area stretching from Saint Petersburg to the White Sea and the Kola Peninsula, and as far east as a line from Archangel in the north to Vologda in the south. She now had live screens showing the terrain, localized maps and all roads, with whatever military or police bases she had been able to pull off current records. The area around Saint Pete was the most complex, as she’d expected, but out to the north and east, which was heavily rural and wooded, with a spread of lakes and rivers, not so much.

  She had also pinged all known training facilities in the area where the Russian forces carried out winter survival exercises using the forests and lakes. None of them should present a problem for Watchman, but any hazards involving the Russian military were best avoided.

  That done, she dimmed the lights and went to the camp bed in the corner and lay down, one ear listening for the first indication of a contact.

  She smiled in the gloom, a thread of excitement running through her. This was her world now; a million miles away from anything she’d ever known before, in a job few of her family or friends would imagine or even comprehend. She felt an almost fierce sense of pride in working with Callahan and Watchman once more, in knowing that along the corridor, others like her were following the same procedures, harbouring the same concerns and tensions, anxious above all to not screw it all up.