Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  He took a taxi from the centre of the town to Bar, farther down the coast, and caught the night ferry to the Italian port of Bari.

  Chapter 6

  TEDDY PARKINSON’S “COUNTRY HOME” was, in Adrian’s eyes at least, a modest, modern three-bedroom brick house on the high street of an undistinguished Surrey village. Adrian considered that it cried “modesty” to an unnecessarily excessive degree.

  But Parkinson had always been known for his low-profile tastes, and he hadn’t, as Adrian had, married into money.

  Teddy Parkinson was a safe pair of hands, which was why he’d been given the politically adroit position of head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was a man with reasonable horizons, who deferred to authority and had always kept his political masters’ self-confidence buoyant.

  He holidayed once a year in England—another example, in Adrian’s opinion, of an almost sackcloth approach to personal enjoyment.

  Adrian considered him a perfectly behaved, grammar-school-educated civil servant who knew his place, and whose main fault was in not aspiring to be more than that. But for precisely this reason, Adrian often needed him. Teddy’s support was valuable in anything that might be considered by Downing Street to be too risqué.

  Adrian, by contrast, had from the start brought a flamboyance to MI6, which had almost cost him the top job. It was only his own political adroitness, and this solely in the field of internal politics, that had beaten two other, more Parkinson-like candidates out of the running.

  To some at the Service, this new style at the top was welcome. To others—in particular those whose feet Adrian had trampled over to reach the top—he was unsuitable, even dangerous. Teddy was a useful, a necessary ally for Adrian, therefore, when he needed something that required the imprimatur of a man with a reputation for safety first.

  After lunch cooked by Teddy’s wife, Elizabeth, a self-described “English rose,” the two men decided to walk across the fields at the rear of the house and up to a small hill that looked towards the South Downs.

  But Teddy knew that Adrian hadn’t come for the lunch. Despite Adrian’s scornful, snobbish opinion of him, he was well aware of Adrian’s need—and Adrian’s own faults that propelled that need. The two were not friends, and Teddy wasn’t fooled by any pretence that they were. They’d never socialised together outside work.

  He assumed it was further information about Semyonovich Adrian wished to impart, in private, but in this at least he was to be surprised. The matter Adrian wished to discuss was nothing to do with the murdered Russian.

  “The Semyonovich business has overshadowed another development over the weekend, Teddy,” Adrian began as they left the cultivated field at the rear of Parkinson’s house and walked uphill across a rough, sun-scorched meadow. “Grigory Bykov. Remember him? The Russians have finally declared that they won’t extradite him. It’s taken them six months from my meeting in Helsinki. This is a matter that concerns us much more than the assassination of Semyonovich. It’s one of my boys that got killed, our boys.”

  “Oh, yes?” Teddy replied.

  “Yes. You remember Finn?”

  Parkinson let the name hang in the still afternoon air and continued to tramp up the field.

  “He’d left the Secret Intelligence Service, hadn’t he, Adrian?” he said finally. “By the time he was killed, he hadn’t been with us for . . . how long? Five, six years? Still on first-name terms with someone who deserted the SIS?”

  “He’s dead now, Teddy. And as you know, Finn was always my boy. When he was onside, he was one of the best officers I ever had.”

  This was a new argument of Teddy’s, he saw, different from the one he’d used back in January. Parkinson was now distancing Finn from the protection of the SIS. The politicians were moving the target as usual. It was an argument Parkinson certainly hadn’t used over their lunch at the Special Forces Club. Then, it was all about making an effort at quiet extradition first. Adrian gritted his teeth.

  “But he’d given the SIS the push,” Parkinson said. “Or we gave him the push. Both, perhaps. Either way, what do we owe him? Isn’t that the question?”

  “He turned his back on us, yes. In a way,” Adrian agreed. “He became a liability, and we had to lose him. That was back in 2000. But . . .” He paused, for a rare moment uncertain how to continue.

  They’d reached the top of the meadow, where a small copse was maintained for pheasant shooting in the winter. Wire netting and metal bird feeders were ready for the new young chicks to be reared. It was a beautifully clear day, and the view began to unfold as they breasted the hill.

  Adrian didn’t like to say what he was going to say. He rarely, if ever, admitted he was culpable. However, in this case . . .

  “It’s true, Teddy. Finn did leave us, in the sense that he rejected government policy back then. He suddenly got all hot about what was right and wrong, and so on. It became impossible for him to work any longer in the role he’d performed so brilliantly for many years in Moscow. But he left us for a reason, and that reason has come home to roost. The reason he left was that HM government was cosying up, as he saw it, to Vladimir Putin. He believed it was against the UK’s national interest. Finn’s view was out of whack back then, but now it’s become government policy. Now Putin is out in the cold with our government, as Finn always said he should be.”

  “Policies change, Adrian. It’s not our job, let alone the job of our officers, to interpret political necessities.”

  “Okay. Agreed. It wasn’t right for Finn to take matters into his own hands. The awkward fact, however, is that he was right.”

  “So?”

  “Finn was murdered by a KGB assassin for following up lines of enquiry we’d told him to drop. To drop for political reasons. Now, today, these are exactly the lines of enquiry we are pursuing. Again, for changing political reasons. He got murdered for it. And we were wrong,” he added, including Parkinson in the assessment. “In January you told me to meet with the Russians. Give them an opportunity to hand Bykov over without losing face. That’s all happened. I met Sergei Limov, as you know, seven months ago now. This weekend we learn the Russians aren’t going to hand Bykov over. That leaves us with only one option, according to SIS procedure. We take out anyone who assassinates one of ours.”

  “One of ours, yes,” Parkinson said, with heavy emphasis on “ours.”

  “To the Russians he always was one of ours. They never knew he’d left MI6. They murdered someone they believed to be a fully paid-up member of SIS. We can’t allow that.”

  “Intelligence officers aren’t paid to have political opinions,” Teddy Parkinson said, returning to his earlier theme. He sounded hard-edged now, and ignored what Adrian perceived to have been his winning throw. He was better at dealing with Adrian than Adrian knew. “They’re paid to put into play whatever they’re told by HMG and by us.”

  “Finn was disobedient. I agree with you entirely, Teddy. But although he was no longer officially on our books, he was one of us. And the Russians thought so, that’s the real point,” Adrian repeated.

  He was uncomfortably conscious that he was being far more supportive of Finn now than he’d been in the last years of Finn’s life. Honour him in death.

  “We don’t allow people to kill our officers and get away with it,” Adrian said. “It’s part of the highest ethics of the SIS.”

  “So. You want to take action.”

  “Now that the Russians have refused extradition, yes. That was your condition, Teddy, not mine. We’ve done everything the prime minister asked us to do. Foreign agents don’t murder our people with impunity. If we don’t make the point, they’ll just be encouraged, maybe to do a similar hit on another, acting SIS officer in the future.”

  Parkinson looked across the rolling hills that stretched into the haze of distance. He’d picked up a stick, Adrian noticed, and was flicking it in the air, like a headmaster wielding a cane.

  “I share your concern,” he said, without looking a
t Adrian.

  “Thank you, Teddy. So I have your support?”

  “So far as it goes,” Parkinson said.

  Parkinson observed Adrian standing impatiently on the hill beside him. Carew looked very out of place in this ordinary, unkempt, though to him spectacular countryside, he thought. He imagined that Adrian’s country estate in Hampshire, with its tailored buildings and lawns, would accommodate Adrian rather better. The man’s face had a city pallor, which accentuated the red parts of his face, but it wasn’t the ruddiness of the open air. Maybe the pallor was also the smoking, Parkinson thought.

  He noted Adrian’s blue suit and black shoes—Parkinson had changed into his gardening clothes as soon as they’d arrived. Adrian’s very stance as he stood on the top of the hill suggested to him someone deeply uncomfortable with the relentless ordinariness of nature. He was someone who needed action, for which the city was an illusory substitute, in his opinion.

  Adrian now leaned down and picked up a smooth stone from the grass, though not from any admiration for the fossil that Parkinson saw in it. It was a tool, something to play with, an accessory to Adrian’s central purpose. Adrian handled its smoothness, turning it in his palm.

  “There is an additional factor,” Adrian said suddenly.

  “Let’s walk down here and come back through the village,” Parkinson said, ignoring the remark. “There’s a very ancient Saxon monument I’d like to show you.”

  He could see the impatience flash across Adrian’s eyes as the other man said brusquely, “As you know, Teddy, Bykov has actually been rewarded for killing our officer. With a seat in Russia’s parliament. They’re laughing in our face.”

  “Well, I know, I know,” Parkinson said. “But killing MPs isn’t exactly our beat, Adrian.”

  “They don’t play by the rules, why should we?”

  “What if they retaliate?” Parkinson said. “Suppose they suddenly decide it’s open season on our MPs for instance? I say this just for the sake of argument, you understand.”

  “I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing, would it?” Adrian replied.

  “Adrian, Adrian . . .”

  Adrian smiled without apology.

  “The point I’m making is that if the Kremlin can come here and murder our people, they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it just because they turn their killers into MPs.”

  “All right, I take the point. You made the same one in January, I remember.”

  They’d reached the bottom of the hill, on the other side from where they’d walked up.

  A man and a woman were walking a pair of identical dogs. Parkinson hailed them. It was his way of saying to Adrian that they were back in the real world, a world where spies being murdered wasn’t really of much relevance to anyone.

  “We’ll have to see how this might play with the PM,” he said, when the couple had passed. They stood in front of a stile, the crossing of which, Adrian knew, signalled the end of the conversation. “Politicians, Adrian, don’t like other politicians getting murdered, even their direst enemies. And certainly not on their orders. It sets a precedent. Leaves them feeling exposed.” He tapped his stick on the stile. “And they don’t like other politicians getting murdered even if they’re fake politicians,” he added.

  “They’re all bloody fake,” Adrian said.

  Parkinson chose to ignore another of Adrian’s explosive verbal devices—EVDs, as they were known at SIS headquarters.

  “Do we have to include them in the decision, then?” Adrian persisted. “The politicians? Shouldn’t it just be an SIS matter?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to have a think about that.”

  Parkinson looked down the lane and pointed. “See that stone there? Saxon monument with a Celtic cross on it. See it? Very strange,” he said.

  “I’d appreciate it very much, Teddy,” Adrian said, ignoring the monument, “if you could back me on this.”

  Parkinson showed no sign yet of stepping over the stile.

  “Any contact with Finn’s old source in Moscow?” he suddenly said instead, looking almost in the opposite direction to Adrian, back up the hill. “High-placed, inside Putin’s coterie, wasn’t he. Someone we could do with now, I’d have thought. Mikhail, wasn’t that it?”

  It was a question Adrian would have preferred not to be asked, and Parkinson’s archly vague memory of the most important source Britain had had in living memory irritated him still further.

  “Not since Finn was murdered,” he replied. “As you know, Source Mikhail only ever communicated through Finn. That was why Finn was murdered.”

  “Pity we didn’t get through to him before Finn’s death,” Parkinson demurred.

  Adrian detected the criticism, as he was intended to, he realised.

  “That wasn’t our brief, Teddy,” he countered. “In fact, the opposite was the case. Back then we were told that Mikhail was discredited. Told by the politicians, if you remember.”

  “But he isn’t discredited now,” Parkinson said.

  “We know that, yes. Now. Come on, Teddy, you were there back then. You know we were told to lay off the information from Finn’s source as it was deemed anti-Putin. That’s why Finn left the SIS, walked out on us. He was disgusted. And he was right.”

  “You didn’t defend Finn then, I seem to remember.”

  “Nobody did. But I am now.”

  For a moment, Adrian uncomfortably recalled his last conversation with Finn, under a tree in St. James’ Park in an autumn downpour. It had been a cold, wet October day. Back then, almost three years ago now, he’d practically told Finn he was dead meat, not for leaving the SIS, but for carrying on his investigations solo. And, worse than that, he’d threatened Finn’s woman, the KGB colonel.

  As if picking up his thoughts, Parkinson said, “And the woman—his wife, wasn’t she?”

  “They married, yes,” Adrian said patiently. “After she defected from Russia.”

  “Well?”

  “Not a word, not even a whisper. She’s disappeared.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “We think the French have her.”

  “And they’re not talking.”

  “No.”

  Teddy Parkinson let the silence grow. Eventually he said, “With Finn dead, she’s the last possible hope we have of ever reviving Mikhail.” He looked steadily at Adrian. “We need that source now. Mikhail, Adrian. We really do need him now.”

  “I know that, Teddy.”

  Parkinson put his hand on Adrian’s shoulder, but it was not a gesture of friendship.

  “Find her, Adrian. And when you have, I’ll do all I can to make sure you have free rein with this Bykov. But not until you’ve found the woman. Bargain?”

  Adrian gritted his teeth in frustration.

  It was the same instruction he’d received from the damn Russian, Sergei Limov, back in Helsinki in January. Find the Russian colonel. But the bitch had disappeared.

  “Thank you,” he managed to say. “I appreciate it.”

  “Now let me show you this monument,” Parkinson said. “It really is very intriguing.” He stepped with surprising agility over the stile.

  Chapter 7

  ANNA RESNIKOV WALKED DOWN the slight hill from the house, holding her son’s hand. They paused outside the wrought iron fence at the rear of the house, behind which the tall palm tree in the garden dropped its dead fronds into the road. The boy stooped to look at something on the ground. A trail of ants were crawling up into a hole in the wall like a party of sherpas.

  They often stopped here on the two-hundred-yard journey to the square, where the boy’s crèche was situated. The place held some magic, some child’s attraction that was important to him. She let go of his hand and watched him as he squatted and stared at something in the road. Sometimes he picked up a bug that crawled slowly across their path, or just watched the ants that lived under the holm oak that had split its way up through the tarmac. She liked his curiosity. It echoed her own and his f
ather Finn’s. And it made her even more watchful herself.

  It was her birthday. She was thirty-eight. Finn would have been fifty, she thought, and she smiled at the memory of her grandmother once chiding her to find a man her own age.

  She saw her life thus far as being one of continual adaptation—most of it forced on her by external circumstances. First there’d been adapting to the lies of the Soviet state, before the Wall fell in 1989, when she was nineteen years old. Then there’d been her long efforts to fit in with her father’s demands. A senior SVR officer, he had run the Russians’ Syrian station in Damascus until his retirement. He’d wanted her to be like her mother, a quiet, compliant wife to a KGB careerist.

  But rather than obey him, she had decided to outdo him; to beat him at his own game. And she’d succeeded in that. Only to discover that she’d become a successful SVR officer for the wrong reasons—with an eye to her father’s approval, that was all. That was part of life’s trickery.

  And then there’d been Finn himself, the greatest act of adaptation of them all. First she was sent to spy on him. She’d first informed on him, then attempted to undermine his reasons for being in Moscow. Then, in the cause of Russia, she’d seduced him. And finally she’d fallen in love with him. Another of life’s humourous twists.

  But at the same moment as her professional liaison with Finn had developed into a personal one, she’d discovered that the man she’d once tried to impress, her father, was procuring girls as young as eight years old for the KGB, to be drugged and used as sexual favours for the entrapment of a Swiss banker. That was the truth about her father and about the organisation for which they both worked.

  Finn had been her way out, as well as her lover. So she’d adapted to exile—and to constant fear of the KGB, which would never forget her treason.

  And now she and her son had been in the village for just over a year, under false identities supplied by the French. She was becoming happy, she realised. She was finally beginning to feel that this little village was their home. And she knew she was dropping her guard, bit by bit.