Invited by Anne-Laure to balance the numbers, Villanelle is bored senseless. The junior minister, whose knee has nudged hers more than once under the table, is questioning her about her activities as a day-trader, and she is answering in evasive generalities.
“So how was London?” he enquires. “I was there in November. Were you very busy?”
“Yes, work’s always murder. But it was lovely to be there. Hyde Park in the snow. The Christmas lights, the pretty shop windows…”
“And in the evenings?” He allows the question to hang suggestively in the air.
“In the evenings, I read and went to bed early.”
“Alone? In your Primark pyjamas?” This time it’s his hand that finds her knee.
“Precisely. I’m afraid I’m a rather dull girl. Married to my work. But can I ask you, who does your wife’s hair? That layered style looks lovely on her.”
The junior minister’s smile grows fainter, and his hand moves away. The minutes tick by, glasses and plates are filled and refilled, Élysée Palace rumours and fifty-year-old Armagnac circulate. Finally the evening winds down and the guests are brought their coats.
“Come on,” says Anne-Laure, grabbing Villanelle by the arm. “Let’s go, too.”
“Are you sure?” murmurs Villanelle, eyeing Gilles, who is corking bottles and issuing instructions to the caterers.
“I’m sure,” hisses Anne-Laure. “If I don’t get out of this flat right now I’m going to scream. And look at you, all dressed up. If ever I saw a girl who needed an adventure…”
Five minutes later, the two of them are rounding the Arc de Triomphe at speed in Villanelle’s silver Audi Roadster. It’s a cold, clear night with tiny flecks of snow silvering the air. The Roadster’s roof is lowered and Héloïse Letissier is blasting from the sound system.
“Where are we going?” Villanelle shouts, the icy wind whipping at her hair as they swing onto the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
“Doesn’t matter,” Anne-Laure mouths back. “Just drive.”
Villanelle puts her foot down, and whooping and laughing, the two women race into the glittering darkness of the Paris night.
On the penultimate day of her enforced leave, an envelope bearing Eve’s name falls through the letterbox of the flat. The writing paper is headed with the imprint of the Travellers Club, in Pall Mall. The unsigned message, handwritten in slanting italics, is short and to the point:
Please come to the office of BQ Optics Ltd. Second floor, above Goodge Street Underground station tomorrow (Sunday) at 10.30 a.m. Bring this letter with you. Confidential.
Eve reads the note several times. The Travellers Club writing paper suggests that the correspondent has Security Services or Foreign Office connections, the fact that it is handwritten and hand-delivered suggests an entirely sensible distrust of email. It could of course be a hoax, but who would bother?
At 9.30 the next day she leaves Niko sitting at the kitchen table amid a sea of pamphlets. He’s assessing the costs and benefits of converting the attic into a miniature hydroponic farm, sustained by low-energy LED lighting, and producing pak choi and broccoli.
The entrance to the BQ Optics office is on Tottenham Court Road. Noting it as she exits Goodge Street tube station, she crosses the road and watches the place for five minutes from outside Heal’s, the furniture store. The tube station and the first-floor offices are faced with brown glazed tile, and surmounted by a dingy residential block. The second-floor offices appear deserted.
But when she presses the bell at the side of the entrance, she is buzzed in immediately. A staircase leads to the first floor, the headquarters of a recruitment agency, and thence by narrower stairs upwards. The door to the BQ Optics office is ajar. Feeling a little foolish, Eve pushes it open and stands back. Nothing happens for a moment, then a tall figure in an overcoat steps into the dusty light.
“Miss Polastri? Thank you for coming.”
“It’s Mrs. And you are?”
“Richard Edwards, Mrs. Polastri. My apologies.”
She recognises him, and is astounded. Former station chief in Moscow, now head of the Russia desk at MI6, he is a very senior figure indeed in the Intelligence world.
“And the cloak and dagger. Sorry for that, too.”
She shakes her head, bemused.
“Come in, take a seat.”
She walks through. The office is unheated and dusty, its windows almost opaque with grime. The only furniture is an elderly steel desk, with two takeaway cups of Costa coffee on it, and a pair of rust-scarred folding chairs.
“I guessed milk but no sugar.”
“Thank you, perfect.” She takes a sip.
“I’ve become aware of your situation at Thames House, Mrs. Polastri.”
“Eve, please.”
He nods, his gaze austere in the dim light of the window.
“Let me save time. You are being held responsible for failing to prevent the murder of Viktor Kedrin at the hands of an unknown female. Your initial judgement was not to request Metropolitan Police protection for Kedrin, but you then changed your mind, and found this decision blocked. Correct?”
Eve nods. “Substantially, yes.”
“My information, and you’re going to have to take my word on this, is that this was not due to administrative inflexibility or departmental budget issues. Certain elements at Thames House, and indeed at Vauxhall Cross, were determined that Kedrin should be unprotected.”
She stares at him. “You’re saying that officers of the Security Services conspired to assist in his murder?”
“Something like that.”
“But… why?”
“The short answer is that I don’t know. But there has definitely been pressure brought to bear. Whether this is an issue of ideology, corruption, or what the Russians call kompromat—essentially blackmail—it’s impossible to say, but there’s no shortage of individuals and institutions who would have liked to see Kedrin silenced. What he offered was the blueprint of a new, fascist superstate, implacably hostile to the capitalist West. It wouldn’t have come into being tomorrow, but look a little further downstream, and the prospects are grim.”
“So you think those responsible might belong to some pro-Western, pro-democracy group?”
“Not necessarily. Could easily be another hard-right outfit, determined to do things their own way.” He stares at the traffic on Tottenham Court Road. “I contacted the Russian foreign minister last week via… let’s call it the old spies network. I promised him that as Kedrin was murdered on British soil, we would find his killer. He accepted this, but made it quite clear that until such time as we did so, a state of diplomatic hostility would exist between our respective nations.”
He turns to face her. “Eve, I want you to go to Thames House tomorrow morning, and offer your resignation, which will be accepted. Then I want you to work for me. Not from Vauxhall Cross, but from this office, which we appear to own. You will receive an SIS executive grade salary, a deputy, and full tech-com support. Your mission, which you will prosecute by any means necessary, is to identify the killer of Victor Kedrin. You will discuss this with no one outside of your team, and you will answer only to me. Anything you need in the way of extra personnel—watcher teams, armed backup—you will clear through me, and only through me. In effect, you will operate as if in hostile territory. Moscow rules.”
Eve’s thoughts are ricocheting all over the place. “Why me?” she asks. “Surely you’ve got—”
“To be brutal, because you’re the one person that I know not to be compromised. How far the rot spreads, I can’t say. But I’ve looked pretty closely at your record, and my judgement is that you’re equal to the task.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. This is going to be hard and dangerous. Whoever this shooter is—and there are echoes of several high-profile international kills by a woman in the last couple of years—she’s dug in deep, and she’s very, very well protected. If you take this on, y
ou must do the same thing. Dig in deep.” He looks around the bare, cold room. “It’s going to be a long winter.”
Eve stands there. She has the dizzying impression that the world has slowed. There’s a moment of intense silence.
“I’ll do it,” she says. “I’ll hunt her down. Whatever it takes.”
Richard Edwards nods. Holds out his hand. And Eve knows that nothing will ever be the same again.
3
It’s almost seven in the evening when FatPanda leaves the rain-streaked building on Datong Road. June in Shanghai is a time of sweltering humidity and frequent downpours. The roads and pavements shine, cars and trucks hiss by in a shudder of exhaust, and the heat rises in waves from the wet tarmac. FatPanda is neither a young man nor a fit one, and his shirt is soon clinging sweatily to his back.
But it’s been a good day. He and his White Dragon crew have launched a successful spear-phishing assault against a Belarusian company named Talachyn Aerospace, and have just begun the wholly satisfying business of draining the company’s data, stealing passwords and project files, and generally making merry with its most sensitive information.
In the eight years of its existence, the White Dragon crew has hit the best part of a hundred and fifty military and corporate targets. Initially in the U.S., more recently in Russia and Belarus. Like most of its victims, Talachyn has offered only token resistance. A week ago, a junior employee received an email that purported to come from the company’s director of security, inviting him to click on a link for information about a new firewall. In fact, the link contained the ZeroT downloader, a remote-access tool designed by FatPanda, giving his crew the run of Talachyn’s operational files.
Since these relate to classified fighter-jet designs they will be of particular interest to FatPanda’s superiors in Beijing. For the White Dragon group are not, as some have thought them, merely a gratuitously destructive team of hackers and anarchists. They are an elite cyber-warfare unit of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, engaged in targeted attacks on foreign corporations, military intelligence systems and infrastructure. The anonymous-looking building on Datong Road has been fitted out with banks of powerful computer servers and high-speed fibre-optic lines, all of them cooled by precision air-conditioning systems. FatPanda, the team’s leader, is Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei, and it was he who chose the crew’s title. A moon-white dragon, according to Chinese symbolism, embodies a ferocious supernatural power. It is an omen of death. A warning.
Ignoring the crowds of home-going workers and the clammy heat, FatPanda walks unhurriedly through the evening haze of the Pudong district, gazing around him with admiration at the city’s trophy skyscrapers. At the soaring glass column of the Shanghai Tower, the silver-blue sliver of the World Financial Centre, and the vast, pagoda-like Jin Mao Tower. That things are rather less spectacular at street level, where beggars rummage through garbage-bins, is not of concern to FatPanda.
He is, in many ways, a clever and even brilliant man. He is certainly a lethal cyber-warrior. But success has led FatPanda to make a cardinal strategic error: he has underestimated his enemy. While he and his crew have been rummaging through the intellectual property of foreign corporations, diverting terabytes of secret data to Beijing, the world’s intelligence agencies and private security firms have not been idle. Their analysts have been amassing their own data: identifying Internet protocol addresses, reverse-engineering the White Dragon crew’s malware, and following their actions keystroke by keystroke.
The information they’ve acquired, and the identities of FatPanda and his team, have been passed up the line. As yet, no Western or Russian administration has risked confrontation with Beijing by directly accusing the People’s Liberation Army of state-sponsored data-theft; the diplomatic fallout would be too damaging. But others have been less concerned with such sensitivities. The predations of White Dragon have cost their victims billions of dollars over the years, and a group of individuals, collectively more powerful than any government, has decided that it is time to act.
A fortnight ago, at a meeting of the Twelve at a private seafront estate near Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei was the subject of a vote. All of the fish placed in the velvet drawstring bag were red.
Villanelle arrived in Shanghai a week ago.
FatPanda proceeds through the crowds and the diesel fumes of Pudong towards the Dongchang Road ferry terminal. He has been trained in the techniques of counter-surveillance, but it has been some years since he practised them with any real assiduity. He is on his own turf, and his enemies are continents away, little more than flickering usernames behind transparent passwords. That his actions could have deadly consequences has never seriously occurred to him.
Perhaps this is why, as he steps onto the ferry, he takes no notice of the young man in the business suit, just metres behind him, who has tailed him from his office, and who speaks briefly into his phone before vanishing into the hurrying throng on Dongchang Road. Or perhaps it’s just that Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei’s mind is elsewhere. For this prince of cyber-spies has a secret of his own, of which his colleagues know nothing. A secret which, as the ferry noses into the polluted currents of the Huangpu river, charges him with a dark thrill of anticipation.
He looks ahead of him, seeing and not seeing the illuminated panorama of the Bund, the kilometre-long waterfront on which stand the landmark edifices of old Shanghai. His gaze traverses the former banks and trading houses without interest. These monuments to colonial power are now luxury hotels, restaurants and clubs, the playground of rich tourists and the financial elite. His own destination lies beyond this gilded facade.
As he leaves the ferry at the South Bund terminal FatPanda performs a cursory sweep of his surroundings, but once again fails to register the operative reporting his progress, this time a young woman in the uniform of a hotel employee. Fifteen minutes later, he has left the Bund behind him, and is hurrying through the narrow, intersecting alleyways of the Old City. This district, teeming with shoppers and tourists, fragrant with moped exhaust and the fatty tang of street-food, is a far cry from the monumental splendour of the Bund. The pinched lanes are hung with laundry and loops of electrical cable, stalls attended by squatting women are piled high with rain-damp produce, tiny shops behind bamboo-pole awnings sell fake antiques and retro-styled girly calendars. As FatPanda turns a corner a pimp on a scooter gestures towards a dimly lit interior in which rows of young prostitutes wait and whisper.
His pace urgent now, his heart pounding, FatPanda hurries past these temptations. His destination is a three-storey corner building on Dangfeng Road. At the entrance, he keys in a four-figure code. The door opens to reveal a middle-aged woman behind a reception desk. Something in the fixity of her smile suggests extensive maxillo-facial surgery.
“Mr. Leung,” she says brightly, consulting her laptop. “Please, go right on up.” He knows that she knows that Leung is not his name, but in the house on Dangfeng Road, a certain etiquette prevails.
The first floor is given over to more or less conventional sexual pleasures. As FatPanda climbs the stairs he is afforded a glimpse, through a briefly opening door, of a pink-lit room and a girl in a baby-doll nightie.
The second floor is altogether more specialist. FatPanda is met by an unsmiling young woman dressed in a crisp green and white skirted uniform. She wears a starched cap pinned to her upswept hair, a surgical mask, and a transparent plastic apron which rustles as she moves. She smells of some austere disinfectant. A name tag pinned to her chest identifies her as Nurse Wu.
“You’re late,” she says icily.
“I’m sorry,” FatPanda whispers. He’s already so excited that he’s trembling.
Frowning, Nurse Wu leads him into a room dominated by a gurney, several monitors, and a ventilator. Beneath the ceiling light, an array of scalpels, retractors and other surgical instruments gleam dimly on aluminium trays.
“Remove your clothes and lie down,” she orders, ind
icating a pink hospital gown. The gown barely reaches FatPanda’s fleshy hips, and as he takes his place on the gurney with his genitals exposed, he feels profoundly, thrillingly vulnerable.
Beginning with his arms, Nurse Wu begins to fasten a series of canvas and Velcro restraints, pulling the cuffs so tightly around FatPanda’s chest, thighs and ankles that he is completely immobilised. The final restraint encircles his throat, and with the strap secured, she places a black rubber oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. His breathing is now audible as a shallow, urgent hissing.
“You understand that all this is for your own good?” says Nurse Wu. “Some of the procedures you require are highly intrusive, and may be painful.”
FatPanda manages a faint groan from inside the mask. His panicked eyes skid around. For an instant, inches in front of his face, Nurse Wu’s plastic apron falls forward and her gown parts to reveal a plump crotch in a pair of utilitarian, possibly military-issue, knickers.
“Now!” she says, and he hears the snap of latex gloves. “You need a full bladder-flush. So I’m going to have to shave and catheterise you.”
FatPanda hears water running, feels the blood-temperature warmth as she lathers his pubic area and begins to scrape away with a surgical razor. Soon, his penis is rearing and twitching like a marionette. Laying down the razor, her eyes thoughtful above the three-ply surgical mask, Nurse Wu reaches for a pair of locking forceps from the tray. Holding them briefly in front of his face, she clamps the sharp teeth of the forceps onto the base of his scrotum. FatPanda looks up at her adoringly, tears of pain running down his cheeks. Once again, as if by the sheerest accident, he is permitted a glimpse of Nurse Wu’s pillowy pudenda. He hears the clink of metal, feels the forceps lifted, and a moment later feels a fiery sensation tearing across his perineum.
“Now look at what you’ve made me do,” Nurse Wu murmurs exasperatedly, holding up a scalpel with a red-tinged blade. “I’m going to have to stitch that.”
Codename Villanelle Page 10
