Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  He wanted to be at Alès before lunchtime to set the first stage of his plan, and he drove the Peugeot into the old coal-mining town at the edge of the Cévennes just before midday. Removing all signs of the rental company, he threw them in a municipal dump at the edge of town and drove into a small mechanic’s shop situated up a dusty side street, which the Michelin guide said was open on a Saturday.

  The shifty-eyed owner in this one-man operation had just withdrawn on a wheeled trolley from beneath a car and was cleaning his hands on a rag before returning home to lunch. He waved Logan away, but the American persisted.

  The clutch was giving him trouble, he said, and he couldn’t go any farther. Without examining anything, the man shook his head, telling him he was shut, and nothing was possible until Monday. Logan asked whether he could leave the Peugeot there until Monday, then, and whether the man had another car he could hire for the weekend. He had money, he explained. It was urgent; he was desperate. This arrangement finally suited the man, and Logan headed eastwards in an old red Renault van with the side panel advertising a local baker’s shop in chipped and fading cream lettering.

  He parked at the edge of the market town of Uzès, on a piece of waste ground that doubled as a car park on Saturday market day, and walked into the medieval square for a beer and a ham and cheese baguette. He watched the stalls being dismantled and the crowds of shoppers thinning away. After lunch, he strolled around the outside of the square and found a digital electronic announcement board near the main entrance to the square, which had no announcements written in its dotted yellow writing, other than “Samedi, 16 août 2008.”

  He bought a local map and found Fougieres a little to the north of town, up on the high plateau of the garrigue.

  When he felt relaxed and ready, he walked back to the van and checked his camera and film for the second or third time that morning. Then he headed out of town along a plane-tree-lined road that climbed up onto the plateau in a series of curves and switchbacks. He smelled the wild rosemary growing along the side of the road and saw the scrawny vines of the region that produced much of France’s undrinkable—and heavily subsidized—wine.

  The little village was very ancient and partly walled—where the stones hadn’t been dismantled for building houses. A small square at the centre contained the mayor’s office, with a tricolour above the entrance, hanging flatly in the windless air. A manor house that had seen better days and was now a bed and breakfast stood opposite the mayor’s office, and various other less seigneurial habitations with wrought iron gates, with views that stretched for fifty miles to the high mountains of the Cévennes, randomly dotted the open space.

  Logan parked behind a stone barn, which housed the office and weighbridge used for the grape harvest. It was after three o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a sleepiness about the village that perhaps, he thought, never left it.

  He walked back up into the square. He caught the sound of splashing and noticed the unnatural blue of a swimming pool behind the hedge of the bed-and-breakfast manor house. He would ask there.

  There were two men sunbathing beside the pool, and the door to the house was wide open. He walked up the path between shocking pink bougainvilleas and called down a dark, flagstoned corridor until a man wearing an unconvincing wig appeared.

  He was a visitor, Logan explained, come to see the new resident in the village, the foreign lady.

  “Avec l’enfant?” the man enquired.

  Yes, the one with a child, he agreed, though Plismy hadn’t mentioned that.

  The man with the wig gestured generally up a small lane and mentioned a house with a palm tree in the garden, before dismissing Logan by turning his back and walking away. He was busy with something. That was good. It might mean he would forget their encounter.

  Logan didn’t walk straight up the lane, however, but took a more circuitous route, through a horse’s meadow and past a tumbledown wood barn with a portable sawmill outside. The palm tree was visible, higher than the surrounding houses.

  He crossed the lane. Heavy iron gates barred the entrance to the house—electrically operated, he noticed. That kind of security was nowhere else to be seen in the village. Through a crack in the join of the gates, he saw a light blue Mercedes parked in a dusty yard. That was what he needed.

  Turning swiftly away, he walked round the other end of the village, away from the horse’s field and away from the bed and breakfast where the man had given him the directions. Behind the barn the red van was cooking in the sun where he had left it.

  Now was the time to wait. He turned the van around, still concealed behind the barn, and pointed it towards the route down the winding hill to Uzès.

  At six thirty, after nearly three hours in the sweltering car, with brief walks down into the vineyards to cool himself a little, he saw the blue Mercedes begin its descent to the flatter ground below the plateau and onto the straight road with the plane trees. Switching on the engine of the van, he began to follow it from a distance of about half a mile.

  It was twenty-four hours since he’d met Plismy in Paris, and he felt the eagerness of the chase, the excitement of new momentum.

  When they reached Uzès, he drove slowly around the road that circled and concealed the square behind old, high stone buildings. He finally caught sight of the blue Mercedes, parked at the side of the street. Its two occupants, he now saw, were a woman in a baseball cap and a small boy. They were going through the process of preparing to get out, the boy strapped in, the woman forgetting it, then the boy urgently needing some small toy from the floor of the car.

  When they finally climbed out, the woman pressed the key fob for the car alarm as Logan passed without looking at them. He glimpsed through the corner of his eye the woman taking the boy’s hand on the pavement.

  Logan kept going in the direction the two were walking until he was out of sight. He pulled the van into a parking space on the same side of the road, jumped out, and made for a café whose pavement tables led into a darker interior. He hoped they wouldn’t turn off before the café. They didn’t.

  A few minutes later, he watched from the interior of the café as they drew level. The boy had stopped and was tugging the woman’s arm. He had dropped his plastic toy, and she turned back to pick it up. Logan saw them illuminated in the sunlight from the darkness of the bar.

  She was in her mid- to late thirties, he guessed, and wore tight jeans and a green T-shirt. Her hair, which had been tucked under the cap, was now free and came halfway down her back. It was a rich brown and gold colour. Her face, as far he could tell in the bright sun, and in the brief moment he caught sight of it, had high cheekbones, smooth-skinned.

  It was a face that startled him—a beautiful face. But then she stooped, picked up the toy, and gave it to the boy.

  Logan left a few euros on the counter and took his coffee to a pavement seat, where he sat and watched their backs slowly retreating. The boy seemed to be constantly stopping and pointing, asking questions, trying to pick some object of interest up from the pavement, tugging his mother’s hand continually. And she was patient with him. They made slow progress.

  A hundred yards ahead of them, Logan noted, if they stayed on the same path, was the electronic sign with the day’s date written on it.

  He finished his coffee, picked up the map, and unfolded it, leaving it half open, as if he’d just been studying it. Then he crossed the street, twenty or thirty yards behind them, and walked along the far side, his camera slung over his shoulder and the map carried loosely by his side. He overtook them easily.

  The two of them, he saw, as he flicked through a revolving postcard stand, were still making slow progress. She seemed in no hurry, and the relaxed fluidity of her movements, for a moment, mesmerised Logan. She seemed to him to walk like a dancer.

  He checked the position of the electronic sign. Then he saw an alley with another café, its white plastic tables and chairs shaded by the buildings. Taking a seat, Logan produced the cam
era from its case and tested the light and the distance to the sign.

  They arrived in stops and starts; the boy seemed to be singing absently and was now waving a twig with some wan leaves attached to it that he must have picked up from one of the trees that shaded the road.

  As they drew level with the electronic sign, the woman seemed distracted. She was leaning down at the boy and saying something. The boy responded crossly. She gave him the baseball cap, and he seemed satisfied. Then she stood up, and as she did so, Logan pressed the shutter.

  He developed the film later that night in a hotel room in Marseille. He didn’t know if the woman was a KGB colonel, an expat British divorcée, or the Queen of Sheba for that matter. But the photograph, he was relieved to see, gave a clear picture of her face, and those who wanted her would know. He made four copies of the picture, including one for himself. The other three were for his intended customers.

  Then he fell asleep, exhausted, and dreamed of a terrified Plismy, surrounded by all the people he hated in the world, like some Benetton or Coca-Cola poster, but with the reverse message—a congregation of all the ethnic groups and religions in existence, closing in on the source of their persecution.

  At eleven thirty the following morning, Logan mailed two copies of the picture, the first to the CIA station in Paris, the second to the SIS in London. He put a price on each picture of half a million dollars—in return for which he would reveal the location of its subject.

  It was a high price. But if Plismy was right—and Logan sensed he was—then information about the woman was worth a lot of money.

  Then he boarded an afternoon flight to Belgrade, to meet his third potential customer. As he took his seat on the plane, he opened up the Sunday edition of Midi Libre and read the headline: “Magnate Russe assassiné à Londres.”

  He fell asleep, not waking until they touched down in Belgrade two and a half hours later.

  Chapter 4

  ADRIAN CAREW STEPPED INTO the chauffeured car outside his London apartment on Chelsea Green. It was a Sunday morning, and he usually only stayed here during the week.

  He wished his driver Ray good morning in a way that suggested it wasn’t, and his demeanour dissuaded further conversation. Rarely in London at any time over a weekend, let alone on a Sunday, he was very irritable that he’d been called back from Hampshire.

  At weekends, Adrian liked to be at his and Penny’s country home—or the Wine Cellar, as office wits referred to it—on the duke of Wellington’s estate in Hampshire. Only a crisis brought him back to London. But during the week he lived here, in Chelsea Green near the Barracks. It was an area of multimillion-pound homes and, like the country house, his apartment was courtesy of Penny’s private fortune. But this wealthy corner of London had been tiresomely invaded in the nineteenth century by a development for the homeless, put there by a do-gooder charity foundation. Adrian wasn’t a person who admired the efforts of other human beings to haul their way out of predicaments he didn’t share. Without giving it a great deal of thought, he instinctively condemned them—the alcoholics, the homeless, a wide range of such groups—for being in that position in the first place.

  And now, as the black Mercedes pulled out of the side street, he noted with distaste the idling group of alcoholics who stood smoking cigarettes in the thin sunlight outside the housing project across the road. Normally he saw them on a Monday morning, for their meeting at seven thirty, he supposed. He now assumed they must also meet on Sundays at the same god-awful hour.

  “JIC, Ray,” he said. His chauffeur had been sufficiently sympathetic to his mood not to ask where they were going.

  A special session of the Joint Intelligence Committee was just what he didn’t need, not this weekend, not any weekend. The Russian Anatoly Semyonovich was dead, but why did they need to have a bloody Joint Intelligence meeting about it? It was first of all a job for Scotland Yard and the National Criminal Intelligence Service—maybe MI5 at a pinch—but not a matter for MI6, to which he had recently been appointed head, with a knighthood to match. Not at this stage anyway.

  As he willed himself over the effects of too much excellent claret the night before, he vaguely supposed they wanted to pick his brains about Semyonovich the billionaire; Semyonovich the asset predator; Semyonovich the Kremlin stooge.

  They would want his special knowledge of the Russian’s connections both inside and outside Britain, which Adrian had on a few occasions discussed with his opposite number at MI5. He would explain the web of obscure and secret shell companies of which the Russian’s business apparatus largely consisted. But mainly Adrian’s role would be to reveal Semyonovich’s closeness to those who ruled in the Kremlin.

  Find the killer, that was Adrian’s prerequisite for delving into the whole bad business.

  And then his mind turned to what really preoccupied him.

  While his son had been at the game yesterday afternoon, Saturday, in a friend’s merchant banker father’s private box (“Enjoy it,” Adrian had told him, “the bloody bankers won’t be able to afford boxes for much longer”), the Russians had finally made it clear, through their London ambassador, that they wouldn’t be extraditing Grigory Bykov for Finn’s murder, not under any circumstances.

  So now Adrian was going to insist that his original plan, to take Bykov down in retaliation for the assassination, must go ahead. The time for negotiating was over. They had nothing to exchange for Bykov. The KGB colonel Anna’s whereabouts were still unknown, even if she was a bargaining chip, which it seemed she wasn’t any longer. An impasse had been reached. Now Adrian wanted Bykov’s head. That was the way of the secret world, and the Russians knew it.

  But first he was going to have to deal with the party now being gathered at the JIC. Only afterwards would he be able to collar Teddy Parkinson, its head, to make this special request.

  As the black Mercedes cruised down through Victoria and onto Parliament Square, Adrian decided to have a cigarette, in his government-issue car, and damn the rules.

  Adrian’s son had returned home eight hours after the end of the match the previous evening. That was how long it took for the police to sift through the football crowd at the exit turnstiles, and search all 35,000 of them. And of course they’d found nothing. That should have been obvious, Adrian thought. Nobody would risk trying to kill Semyonovich with a sniper shot from inside the ground. It took a real pro to kill a man like Semyonovich—he had thirty-five regular bodyguards, all ex special forces and many from Adrian’s old regiment, plus eight armour-plated vehicles—and that was just for his London encampment.

  Then there were the other 35,000 people in the ground, who might just have noticed if a man with an assault rifle took careful aim from the seat beside them.

  The Mercedes entered Whitehall and pulled up outside the building with the JIC operations room in the basement. Adrian, ostentatiously smoking as he stepped out of the car, told Ray not to wait. He was going on to lunch after the meeting, with Teddy Parkinson at his country home. That, he told himself, not this meeting, was the point of the day, and he cheered up a little.

  There were six of them around the long table. Teddy Parkinson (Sir), the head of Joint Intelligence, sat at the head; then there was Foster from the Yard and Evans (Sir) from MI5, on either side; Crudwell (Commander) from NCIS and Adrian himself (newly Sir) at the opposite end of the table; and finally Trevor Lewis, the prime minister’s private secretary (Scum of the Earth).

  They’d finished discussing the method of the killing by nine o’clock. The type of weapon used for the kill seemed to have been narrowed down to about half a dozen, all sniper weapons known to Adrian and used by various national special forces. But they were readily available if you knew where to look. The distance was enormous—up to a mile and a half, forensics reckoned, beyond even what Adrian had assumed.

  It was all he could do not to say, “Bloody good shot.”

  The identity of the assassin was anyone’s guess; which left the motive and the fall
out—the implications. Adrian’s time to contribute.

  “Adrian,” Teddy Parkinson, the JIC head, addressed him at last. The ponderous preamble that looked into the nooks and crannies of events on the ground had finally been wound up. “The prime minister received a call from President Medvedev last night, a few hours after the killing. The Russian president was expressing concern.”

  So that was why they’d been called together this morning for this emergency meeting, Adrian thought. Jump to it for the Russians.

  Lewis the private secretary nodded overenthusiastically. Nobody had yet asked for his opinion about anything.

  “Why, Adrian?” Teddy Parkinson followed up. “Why a call from the Russian president?”

  “Semyonovich was very close to the Kremlin,” Adrian replied. “He helped put Putin into power at the end of the nineties. He’s worth around thirty billion dollars, but worth a lot more to the Kremlin. He was spearheading the Kremlin’s policy of acquiring strategic foreign assets—energy companies in the West, metals combines, you name it. All over the world, but particularly our world.”

  “So he had a lot of money that the Kremlin used as if it were its own?”

  “That’s about it. All those Russian multibillionaire tycoons are now arms of the state—covert ambassadors with bottomless pockets. That’s why Medvedev called; Semyonovich was like an undercover representative of the Kremlin. The deal is, men like Semyonovich get to keep their private wealth, as long as they put it into the service of the Kremlin and its cronies.”

  Adrian knew that Teddy Parkinson was perfectly aware of all this. He was just explaining for the benefit of the others.

  “What else? Anything we should know about?”

  “We have good intelligence that Semyonovich was caretaking bank accounts on behalf of Putin and other siloviki types; Ivanov, Sechin—”