Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  Make a reasonable request for the hood Grigory Bykov’s extradition? There was nobody reasonable left in power in Russia.

  Outside the window of the car, the rain was backing off a little. The day was heading into night without ever having put in a real appearance. The SIS car turned off the main road and ran the few miles to the airport along country lanes clogged with mud and excrement left by a herd of cows being moved to a new field.

  High winds battered and shoved the twin-engine converted reconnaissance plane across the North Sea as the temperature outside plummeted. Adrian rubbed his hands, more from nostalgia for the old days than from the cold. It was good to feel he was on a mission, even a mission he had little respect for, rather than sitting behind a desk. As they descended onto Helsinki’s military airfield, the snow was driving down hard, and he spotted the lights of the snowploughs at the end of the runway. An embassy car met him, and he sped away without formalities.

  The meeting was to take place in a rooftop conference room at the Heikinen Hotel. The high windows in the long room framed a fine view of Helsinki’s marketplace and the twinkling lights of the waterfront beyond, through the driving snow. Distant sounds of splashing and shouts from a hot tub permeated the otherwise silent venue. A party of loud, naked Finns were disporting themselves, then rolling in the rooftop snow, exiting to a sauna, and finally coming back for more—all lubricated with several bottles of vodka.

  The Russian, Sergei Limov, had refused to come to the British embassy, and Adrian had rejected the Russian offer of “hospitality,” for obvious reasons. The Heikinen conference room was hastily swept for bugs by both sides.

  Now Adrian sat opposite the huge figure of Sergei Limov. The heavy-lipped, frowning multibillionaire owner of oil transportation and shipping companies was a trusted servant of Vladimir Putin from the old days, and KGB to the core. In the Soviet 1980s, Adrian recalled, Limov had been the chief Soviet trade representative in western Europe. But he had morphed since those days of Russia’s atrophied economic policies to become one of the world’s richest men, due partly to his own cunning, but mainly to his KGB and Mafia sponsors.

  There were two bottles of Finnish mineral water and a bottle of Finnish vodka, neither of which they had touched so far, on the table.

  Briefly, Adrian presented the case against Bykov and thrust a file of backup documents across the table, which Limov ignored and looked as if he planned to continue ignoring. Now Adrian waited for the ritual slap in the face, but his anger was directed more at Teddy Parkinson than at the Russians. The request itself, his own presence, and the cap-in-hand nature of British policy in general towards the Russians seemed designed to humiliate him.

  “What have you got for us in return for Bykov?” Limov said at last, leaning back in the seat that was too small for him, and fiddling with the diamond-encrusted gold Rolex watch on his right wrist as if he had more important things to do. Adrian noted all this with growing fury.

  So they wanted a trade. What did Limov—or Putin—want? Adrian wondered. Did they expect the Russian assets of British Petroleum to be handed over to the Kremlin on a plate? The Houses of bloody Parliament, perhaps?

  “It’s not a deal, Sergei,” Adrian replied smoothly. “It’s a matter of international law. The one you’re signed up to. A Russian citizen has murdered a British citizen.”

  “Ah, justice,” Limov said, as if it were something stuck to the sole of his shoe.

  “Call it what you like,” Adrian said generously. “As I say, it’s a matter of international law. Either Russia obeys what it’s signed up for, or it doesn’t.”

  He could see Limov blanch at the word obey, just as he’d intended.

  Limov leaned across the table and picked up the bottle of vodka and two glasses with one huge hand. He poured Adrian a glass and then one for himself.

  But Adrian withdrew a silver flask from the inside pocket of his silk suit and poured himself a nip of Scotch into the silver cup that served as a lid. He raised it towards Limov.

  “You can’t be too careful these days,” he said, and drank it.

  “What are we drinking to?” Limov said, as Adrian helped himself to another shot.

  “Why don’t you choose, Sergei?” he said.

  “To justice,” Limov replied, and roared with laughter. He drank the vodka in one gulp, placed the glass on the table as if making a winning chess move, and leaned in.

  “What we want is Resnikov,” he said. “That’s the deal.”

  So. That was the quid pro quo, Adrian thought. They wanted Finn’s woman, Colonel Anna, their beautiful but vanished KGB defector who had given the Russians, the British, and all the rest of them the slip.

  “As far as I know,” Adrian said with icy calmness, “she hasn’t murdered anyone.”

  “Worse. A lot worse,” Limov replied.

  “So this is a refusal to give us Bykov to face a trial,” Adrian stated, and he realised that this was what he’d hoped for all along. He wanted Bykov dead, on his orders, not in court.

  “We want her,” Limov replied simply, without being drawn into Adrian’s refusal scenario. “Then you can have your justice.”

  “I’ll convey the Kremlin’s thoughts to London, in that case.”

  “When we have the woman, we can give you Bykov,” the Russian said. “With pleasure,” he added.

  In the car that drove him through the now softly falling snow back to the embassy where he was staying overnight, Adrian thought of two things. The first was that the Kremlin would happily give up a Hero of Russia in return for what they wanted. Their cynicism was boundless. It outstripped even his own.

  But the second, unexpected piece of information was that the Russians didn’t have her. Colonel Anna was still free; she was still out there somewhere, an asset to be won by whoever got there first. And with her would surely come the main prize itself, the source he had been instructed to reinstate: code name Mikhail.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  AUGUST 2008

  LOGAN HALLORAN IDLED ALONG the narrow pavement in the Marais district of Paris, glancing in the shop windows. Stopping in a shaded doorway, he noticed in the reflection that he had shaved. He didn’t shave regularly. He did nothing, in fact, with regularity. He was, it occurred to him, an “irregular” in every way and had always been, even when he’d had what people called a proper job.

  At thirty-six years old, he’d been described as having a face with a “lived-in quality,” a little more than his age justified. But his reflection in the windows ironed out these details, showing an athletic, rangy figure, encased loosely in an old off-white linen suit. The reflection didn’t show his rich tan, or his intense deep blue eyes, or the faded scar on his forehead. Neither did it show his natural expression of amused interest in the world around him.

  Logan checked his watch. He was early.

  He looked into the shop with a kind of admiration that never decreased, no matter how many times he visited Paris. The French knew about commerce; small, specialised commerce, quality, not quantity. Finely complex chocolate sculptures seduced his eyes through the window of the chocolaterie. As he walked farther along, the rich smell of tobacco filled his nostrils from a tabac next door. There were foxhunting clothes on mannequins in the shop after that; its windows looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned since Louis XVI hunted the fields of Versailles.

  It was a street of variegated delights, he observed, not a mall, not a grey mush of globalised names. Each had its own identity.

  He stepped off the narrow pavement to allow two laughing women to pass. They were in their early twenties, Logan guessed; his own kind, Americans—and tourists, a rarer sight in Europe in the past few years. Logan recognised the accent of his home state of Pennsylvania.

  The women’s eyes lingered slightly longer than necessary on the man who’d moved aside for them. Logan was smiling easily at them, apparently to encourage their laughter.

  They returned his smile with a lack of c
onstraint that, if he hadn’t been on his way somewhere, might have encouraged him to say something that backed up the invitation of his smile.

  But he walked on.

  The street was full of tourists. Paris was emptied of Parisians now that it was August, and replenished with visitors. The older, established restaurants were closed for the French vacation, and the waiters left behind to serve the visitors in pavement cafés—as a punishment, they seemed to think—were surlier than usual, the heavy heat sweating out tempers that were short enough at the best of times.

  Identity hung for a moment in Logan’s thoughts. Perhaps it was triggered by the individual nature of the shops he was passing. But introspection never troubled Logan for long. He was a watcher, a listener, a man who looked outwards rather than in; a highly trained expert in visual observation who could spot the faintest movement of an enemy on a distant hillside.

  Logan could also analyse the mood and even the intentions of friend or enemy in seconds. He possessed the knack of ruthlessly forming in his mind a usually accurate critique of others. He knew how to elicit the responses he wanted from people—like the women he’d just passed.

  Logan’s start in life—born into a wealthy family who’d lived three generations in southern Pennsylvania—and his own natural talents had promised great things. If anything, his many advantages—on the sports field, in the classroom, in social circles, and particularly with women—had threatened to be so diverse and successful that they could have led, as his father had warned, to his being spoiled for choice. But he had somehow kept all the balls in the air and progressed smoothly to Harvard, where, in the course of earning a summa cum laude law degree, he had been approached by the CIA, in the person of his recruiter, Burt Miller.

  For Logan, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. Everything had come so easily for him that all that piqued his interest were new challenges. Burt Miller’s huge personality and Logan’s own lack of direction had made the decision for him.

  Was that his identity? he wondered now on this Paris street in this late, bright August afternoon. One that was laid over him by Burt Miller and the many other gurulike figures in his childhood—not to mention the numerous women of his adult years? Other people thought Logan had a superb mind—and they were right—but they didn’t see this unwillingness to look inside himself. There was an unexplored place there.

  He continued up the street, weaving past the carefree tourists.

  For nearly ten years now he’d been walking streets like this. They may not have had the style, the panache, of this one, but still the weariness of the footpad, the watcher, now welled up in Logan. In his old haunts in Bratislava, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Podgorica, with occasional visits to London, Paris, or New York, he had paced and apparently idled while what he was really doing was waiting and observing; the man on the outside looking in, the man who went to others, not they to him.

  Since his disgrace—and subsequent exit from CIA employment—Logan’s lot had been that of the freelancer, but not to create newspaper stories. Logan was a freelancer of secrets.

  For a moment he looked up at the faded red shop front of a fabrics atelier and imagined, in gold lettering, the words “Logan Halloran—Purveyor of Secrets” written on the cross beam. It would be a perfect fit in this street of specialists.

  He turned off the rue du Temple toward the place where he would meet his contact, deciding to walk rather than take a taxi. It was hot, the sun still blazing at six in the evening, but in the narrow streets he could pick the shady side when the heat became oppressive.

  The man he was to meet in half an hour was a former and potential source for him and, like him, a denizen of the secret world.

  Thomas Plismy had spent most of his working life inside the French foreign intelligence service, the DGSE. Plismy had been a contact of Logan’s ever since the glory days when Logan was an agent under the guiding hand of the CIA station in Belgrade, the days when he was known by colleagues as “Lucky Logan.” But that had all gone wrong, and now, unlike Logan, Thomas still had the security of a government job. Logan’s thoughts were at once pricked by the long bitterness that memory contained.

  Some once called Logan the best intelligence officer the CIA had in Europe’s southeastern sector, the “Balkan beat,” as the British called it. But then a deskman somewhere in Washington or Virginia had saved his own skin by flaying Logan’s, and he became the fall guy for someone else’s mistake in the Serbian war.

  And so, at thirty-six years old, Logan had nearly a decade behind him doing what he was doing this evening, meeting contacts like Plismy, looking for a niche, an entry point, like a lone mountaineer on a sheer rock face. Logan was searching for a handhold of a different sort—some piece of information he could develop and add value to. And then sell.

  Since his fall from grace, he’d sold secrets to anyone; to his former masters in America first of all, then to anyone else who had the cash. He often sold the same secrets more than once, to opposing sides in the world’s many secret intelligence wars.

  Logan wondered, as he often did these days, how much longer he could go on chasing shadows. As so often, when this loneliness began to take him over, he thought of the life that he might have had, of his daughter Angelica and her mother, who he’d married when he was twenty-two years old. She had gone on to marry another man, a lawyer as it happened, and he hadn’t seen his daughter in six years.

  But this evening was going to be different. Plismy was a kind of friend, he supposed. Logan vaguely thought he liked him better than most he dealt with. They would drink first, then dine somewhere Plismy knew that soared in quality above the tourist miasma—such places could be found, even in the dog days of August. Then they would go to a club, looking for paid girls. Plismy knew a lot of good places for that, Logan remembered.

  But even though the meeting was more social than usual, Logan was working just the same. He was always working, he thought. That was the lot of the freelancer. No hours, no boss, no routine—it all sounded good until “no hours” turned into “all hours” and “no boss” into “no structure” and “no routine” into “chaos”; until work became life and vice versa.

  The basic skill he deployed in all his meetings was to delude his contacts into believing that he was there simply to enjoy their company. Quite simply, he fielded what was perhaps his greatest skill and curse—his charm. Logan was everybody’s friend, and nobody’s. By this artifice Logan made people like Plismy freer in their speech, more indiscreet with him than they would otherwise be. Plismy, in particular, was always good for gossip.

  Logan loped up past the Pompidou Centre and down the rue de Rivoli, into an office district a walk away from the Tuileries. The tourists were absent here; there were no shops, just hidden courtyards with ancient paving behind huge old wooden doors that abutted the modern office fronts slapped onto the same old stone.

  Down one of these silent streets, he saw the bar sign, L’Algérien, a hundred yards away.

  He stepped into the gloom of the small, neat establishment, which sold beer and wine. Simple wooden chairs and round tables with plastic cloths dotted a chipped Islamic tiled floor in faded green. The bar counter was made of polished, gleaming zinc, in the old-fashioned French style.

  He saw Plismy sitting at the far end of the counter, sipping a coupe de vin.

  It was an odd choice of Plismy’s, this bar, Logan thought. Forty years before, Plismy had been yanking out the fingernails of Algerians like the one who served behind the zinc counter. He’d fought France’s secret war on the ground and in the torture chambers of Algiers against the country’s independence. Yet this was his favourite bar in Paris, he’d once told Logan.

  Did he come to gloat? France had lost the war. No, he thought. Plismy took a sadistic glee being in such close proximity to a man like those he’d tormented and who now had to serve him.

  But it was a good bar too, he thought, an old bar of the type you could find everywhere back in the days of th
e Fourth Republic. Maybe a more decent nostalgia for those days played a part too, who knew?

  Plismy was a large man with a pitted face like a cactus with the thorns extracted. That was his nickname at the DGSE. Cactus. The Frenchman’s oily face gleamed, and his thinned hair was flattened to his skull by sweat. His dark southern eyes bored into you. The vinous paunch that took decades to create, unlike a beer drinker’s, rested comfortably—naturally, Logan thought—on a black leather briefcase worn bare in numerous places, trapping it in its fold. With his thick neck, thick hands, and thick thighs that filled ample light grey trousers, Plismy was like a French rugby prop who’d seen better days.

  Logan watched the Frenchman look to his right, toward a wall mirror with a lime green frame, so that he could see Logan approaching from his left. When he was sure it was Logan, Plismy turned to face him.

  “Good. Now we can get a bottle,” Plismy said, grateful for his companion’s arrival. “You’re still allowed to drink in America, I suppose?”

  He grinned and showed a set of smoker’s teeth that turned darker brown the closer they approached the gums.

  “In the privacy of your own Dumpster,” Logan replied.

  Plismy laughed. It was a staccato noise that contained no humour. Then, as he nodded abruptly to the Algerian, his smile evaporated, replaced by a scowl. The stooped Algerian barman didn’t need to be told, Logan noticed. He was used to Plismy treating him like a dumb animal, knew what he wanted, and didn’t expect any courtesy.

  “I didn’t expect to find you,” Logan said. “What are you doing in Paris, Thomas?” He took the high stool next to Plismy. “Why aren’t you on the Côte d’Azur? Getting a tan.”

  “The Anglo-Saxons destroyed it years ago, that’s why. And now the Slavs are scoffing up the leftovers like the dogs they are.”

  “Jews and blacks are off the hook this time, then,” Logan replied.

  “This time.” Plismy laughed. “I’m an uncomplicated man, Logan.”