The two men look at each other. Then, very slowly, Billy nods, Lance shrugs his shoulders, and for the first time since their arrival Eve senses a flicker of common purpose.
“So,” Billy says. “This lead you mentioned.”
As Villanelle runs, she feels her body relax into the familiar rhythm. Her back and thighs are still sore from the previous afternoon’s ju-jitsu session at the Club d’Arts Martiaux in Montparnasse, but by the time that she’s completed the circuit of the lake and the Auteuil racecourse, the stiffness has vanished. On her way home, she picks up a takeaway sushi order from Comme des Poissons and a copy of the financial paper Les Echos.
Back at the flat she showers, runs a comb through her dark-blonde hair, and pulls on jeans, a T-shirt and a leather jacket. Sitting on her balcony, she eats the sushi with her fingers and works her way through Les Echos. By the time she’s finished the last mouthful of tuna, she’s scanned every page and processed the information she needs.
Looking out over the city, she checks her phone. But there’s no text from Konstantin. No new target. Turning on the Grundig shortwave radio, as she is required to do at least twice a day between actions, Villanelle keys in a search code. As usual, it takes a moment or two to find the number station, which tends to skip from frequency to frequency. Today it’s broadcasting at 6840 kHz. There’s a faint crackle, followed by the first fifteen notes of a Russian folk song, whose name Villanelle once knew but has long forgotten. The music’s electronically generated, with a thin, tinny sound that’s at once sad and faintly sinister. The notes repeat for two minutes, and then a woman’s voice, distant but precise, begins to recite a five-digit Russian number group.
This is the call-up code, identifying the individual for whom the message is intended, and the voice has repeated the numbers three times—“Dva, pya’, devyat’, sem’, devyat’…” Two, five, nine, seven, nine—before Villanelle realises that the call-up code is her own. The shock momentarily takes her breath away. A number station call-out entails immediate action. She’s been checking in with the station for more than two years without ever hearing her number.
The call-up repeats for four minutes, then six electronic chimes announce the message. Again, this consists of five-digit groups, each voiced twice. Then the chimes again, the opening notes of the folk song, and the hiss of empty air. It takes Villanelle ten minutes to decrypt the message using the one-time pad that she keeps, along with a SIG Sauer P226 automatic and 10,000 in high-denomination notes, in a concealed safe. It reads:
17NORTHSTAR.
Re-locking the safe, Villanelle grabs a baseball cap and sunglasses and leaves the flat. Location seventeen is the heliport at Issy-les-Moulineaux. Taking the ring road as fast as the traffic allows, whipping from lane to lane in the silver-grey Roadster, she makes it in fifteen minutes flat. At the entry gate to the car park, two men in high-visibility vests are waiting. They look vaguely official, and as Villanelle slows to a halt one of them holds out a placard printed with the words NORTH STAR. When Villanelle nods he beckons her out of the Audi and takes her car keys, then the second man leads her up an unmarked side road to a rectangle of tarmac enclosed by warehouses. At its central point, an Airbus Hummingbird helicopter is waiting, rotors idly turning.
Villanelle climbs into the seat beside the pilot, straps herself in, and places a noise-reducing communications headset over her baseball cap. She is carrying no luggage, money, passport or identifying documents.
“OK?” asks the pilot, his eyes invisible behind mirrored sunglasses.
Villanelle gives him a thumbs-up, and the Hummingbird lifts off, hovers for a moment above the heliport, and swings eastwards. Below them, briefly, is the serpentine glitter of the Seine, and the crawl of traffic on the Périphérique. And then the city falls away and there’s just the thrum of the engine. Only now does Villanelle have time to wonder why she’s been called out via the number station. And why there’s been no word from Konstantin.
It’s late afternoon by the time they touch down at Annecy Mont Blanc airfield in south-eastern France, where a lone figure is waiting on the tarmac. Something about her severely cropped hair and over-tight suit tells Villanelle that the woman is Russian, and this is confirmed when she speaks, directing Villanelle towards a dusty Peugeot parked fifty metres away. The woman drives with brisk efficiency, making a fast half-circuit of the airfield before pulling up with a screech of brakes in a hangar beside a Learjet bearing the North Star insignia.
“Inside,” she orders, slamming the car door, and Villanelle climbs the steps into the Learjet’s climate-controlled interior and straps herself into a seat upholstered in arctic-blue leather. Following her, the woman retracts the steps and seals the exit door. The engines start immediately. There’s a flare of late-afternoon sunshine at the window as the jet exits the hangar, and then, with a muted roar, they’re airborne.
“So where are we going?” Villanelle enquires, releasing her seat-belt buckle.
The woman meets her gaze. She’s got broad, high-cheekboned features and eyes the colour of slate. Something about her is familiar.
“East,” she says, snapping open an overnight bag at her feet. “I’ve got your documents.”
A passport, Ukrainian, in the name of Angelika Pyatachenko. A worn leather wallet containing a driving licence, credit cards, and a reception pass identifying her as an employee of the North Star corporation. Crumpled receipts. A wad of ruble notes.
“And clothes. Please change now.”
A leather-look jacket, limp angora sweater, and short skirt. Scuffed ankle boots. Underwear, much washed. Cheap tights, new, from a Kiev department store.
Conscious that she’s being scrutinised, Villanelle takes off her cap and sunglasses and begins to undress, laying her clothes on the blue leather seat. When she removes her bra, the other woman gasps.
“Shit. It really is you. Oxana Vorontsova.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I wasn’t sure to begin with, but…”
Villanelle stares at her blankly. Konstantin promised her that the cut-out was total. That nothing like this could ever happen.
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t remember me? Lara? From Ekaterinburg?”
Fuck, it can’t be. But it is. That girl from the military academy. She’s cut her hair off, and looks older, but it’s her. With a supreme effort of will, Villanelle keeps her face expressionless. “Who do you think I am?”
“Oxana, I know who you are. You look different, but it’s you. I thought I recognised that little scar on your mouth, and I knew for sure when I saw that mole on your breast. Don’t you remember me?”
Villanelle considers the situation. Denial isn’t going to work. “Lara,” she says. “Lara Farmanyants.”
They met, just a few years earlier, at the university games, when they were competing in the pistol-shooting. It had become clear that Farmanyants, representing the Kazan Military Academy, was going to be very hard to beat, so the night before the final Oxana slipped into her rival’s room, and without speaking a word, stripped naked and climbed into bed with her. It didn’t take the young cadet long to recover from her surprise. She was, as Oxana had guessed, badly in need of sex, and returned her kisses with the desperation of a starved animal. Later that night, dopey from hours of fervent cunnilingus, she whispered to Oxana that she loved her.
That was the moment when Oxana knew that she had won. Early the next morning she crept back to her own room, and when she saw Lara at breakfast in the canteen looked straight through her. Lara tried to approach her several times that morning, and each time Oxana blanked her. When they lined up at the target range, Lara’s broad features registered hurt and bafflement. She tried to compose herself for the competition, but her aim wavered, and the best she could manage was a bronze medal. Oxana, shooting straight and true, took gold, and by the time she climbed onto the team coach to return to Perm, Lara Farmanyants had been deleted from her thoughts.
&nbs
p; And now, by some malign coincidence, here she is again. Perhaps it isn’t so strange that she should be working for Konstantin. She’s a superb shot, and probably far too smart and ambitious to waste her career in the military.
“I read in the paper that you killed some Mafia people,” Lara says. “And later, one of the instructors at the academy told me that you hanged yourself in prison. I’m glad that part wasn’t true.”
Conscious that she needs to keep Lara onside, Villanelle softens her gaze. “I’m sorry I treated you the way I did at Ekaterinburg.”
“You did what you had to do to win. And although it probably meant nothing to you, I’ve never forgotten that night.”
“Really?”
“Really and truly.”
“So how long is this flight?” Villanelle asks.
“Perhaps another two hours.”
“And will we be interrupted?”
“The pilot has instructions not to leave the cabin.”
“In that case…” She reaches out and runs a finger softly down Lara’s cheek.
The light is fading when the Learjet touches down at a small private airfield outside Scherbanka in South Ukraine. A cold wind scours the runway, where a BMW high-security vehicle is waiting. Lara drives fast, leaving the airfield by a side-gate, where a uniformed guard waves them through. Their destination, she tells Villanelle, is Odessa. For an hour they proceed smoothly through the darkening landscape, but as they approach the city, they run into traffic. Ahead of them, illuminated by the lights of the city, the clouds are a sulphurous yellow.
“I won’t say anything about you,” says Lara.
Villanelle inclines her head against the window. The first spatters of rain streak the armour-plated glass. “It won’t go well for you if you do. Oxana Vorontsova is dead.”
“A pity. I admired her.”
“You need to forget her.”
I’ll speak to Konstantin, Villanelle decides. He can deal with Lara. Preferably with a 9mm round to the back of that neatly cropped head.
On her return from China, with the help of an investigator borrowed from the City of London’s Economic Crime department, Eve attempted to chase down the lead Jin Qiang had given her: to identify who had made the bank transfer of £17 million, and who had been the beneficiary. The investigation failed to reveal the source of the funds, but led them via an intricate web of shell companies to the payee, a low-profile venture capitalist named Tony Kent.
Detailed investigation of Kent and his affairs revealed little, but one fact caught Eve’s interest: that Kent was a member of an exclusive fly-fishing syndicate that owned half a mile of the River Itchen in Hampshire. Information about the syndicate was not easy to come by, but Richard Edwards was able, after a few discreet enquiries, to furnish Eve with a membership list. This was not long; indeed, it contained only six names. Those of Tony Kent, two hedge-fund managers, a partner in a high-profile commodity trading firm, a senior cardio-thoracic surgeon, and Dennis Cradle. Eve knew exactly who Dennis Cradle was. He was the director of D4 Branch at MI5, responsible for counter-espionage against Russia and China.
Billy is crouched at the steel desk that used to be Simon’s, hacking into Dennis Cradle’s email account. The new computer hardware, now connected and running, gives off a faint hum. Lance is sitting on a plastic chair in front of the window, staring at the traffic on Tottenham Court Road. His contribution to the office decor has been a clothes rail, hung with coats and jackets that look like a job lot from a charity shop. In the teeth of all her principles, Eve has given him permission to smoke, as the pungent tang of his roll-ups masks other, worse odours.
“Did you have curry last night, Billy?” she asks, looking up from her laptop screen.
“Yeah, prawn Madras.” He shifts his buttocks in his chair. “How d’you know?”
“Call it an inspired guess. How are you getting on with that password?”
“Nearly there, I think.” His fingers dance over the keyboard as he stares at his screen. “Oh! You silly, silly man.”
“You in?” asks Lance.
“All the way. Dennis Cradle, you’re my bitch.”
“So what’ve we got?” Eve asks, a tiny flame of excitement flaring inside her.
“Cloud server data. Everything on his home computer, basically.”
“Doesn’t sound as if it’s very secure.”
Billy shrugs. “He probably thinks that because it’s domestic stuff, he doesn’t need heavy-duty authentication.”
“Or perhaps he doesn’t want to give the impression of having anything to hide. Perhaps this is what we’re supposed to see.”
Cradle shares an account with his wife, Penny, a corporate lawyer. Their emails are stored in orderly folders with names like Accounts, Cars, Health, Insurance and Schools. The inbox holds fewer than a hundred messages, which Billy copies and sends to Eve. A preliminary examination reveals little of interest.
“This is like a lifestyle advertisement,” says Eve, scrolling through the Cradles’ picture files. Almost all of the images are of family activity holidays. Skiing in Megève, tennis camp in Malaga, sailing on the Algarve. Cradle himself is a tanned, bullish figure of about fifty, who clearly enjoys being photographed in sports kit. His wife, prettyish and well groomed, is perhaps five years younger. Their children, Daniel and Bella, stare at the camera with the sulky entitlement of privately schooled teenagers.
“Twats,” says Billy.
“Have a look at their London place,” says Eve.
The street-view image shows a red-brick Georgian house, set back from the road. A pillared porch is half-obscured by a spreading magnolia. A burglar alarm is visible beside a ground-floor window.
“Where is it?” asks Lance.
“Muswell Hill. They’ve been there six years. Cost them one point three mill. Today, it’s got to be worth two, at least.”
“Surely Cradle’s not pretending to have paid for all this on his Service salary?”
“No. The wife’s the big earner.”
“Even so, they’ll have trouble explaining away seventeen fat ones.”
Eve shrugs. “I doubt they’ll have to. Assuming that Tony Kent is acting as some sort of financial intermediary for the organisation we’re targeting, I’d guess that money’s parked well out of sight of the Revenue.”
“So how do we know it’s going to Cradle?”
“We don’t, for certain. But Jin Qiang wouldn’t have directed me to Kent if he didn’t know I’d make the connection with Cradle. I’d asked specific questions about the possibility that members of the UK Intelligence Services were receiving large-scale payments from any unknown source. This was Jin’s answer. I think it was as far as he thought he could go.”
“So,” says Lance, “are we going to turn Cradle’s place over?”
Eve polishes her glasses. “I’d like to, but it’ll be well secured. He’s a senior MI5 officer. The shit would really fly if we were caught.”
“I’m assuming we’re not going the search warrant route?”
“No. We’d never get one, even if we said why we needed one. Which we can’t.”
“Just asking.” Lance leans in towards the screen. “That’s a dummy alarm over the first-floor window, so they’ve probably got a conventional system inside. Infra-red, pressure pads…”
“You think it’s doable?” Eve asks him.
He flicks his lighter beneath his half-smoked roll-up. “Everything’s doable. It’s a question of opportunity. Can you get the bloke’s diary up, Billy?”
“I’ve got Penny’s. He doesn’t seem to have one.”
“I need a guaranteed two-hour window. What can they offer us?”
“How about this?” says Billy. “Dinner with A & L, Mazeppa 8.00.”
Eve frowns. “But that’s tonight.”
“I can do tonight.” Lance shrugs. “I’ll cancel my date with Gigi Hadid.”
“Too soon. We need to do a proper recce. We can’t just go charging in there. What el
se have they got coming up?”
“Don’t know about Dennis,” says Billy. “But Penny’s not got anything else booked this week.”
“Fuck.” Eve searches for Mazeppa on her phone. It’s a Michelin-starred restaurant in Dover Street, Mayfair. She looks uncertainly at Lance.
“I could check the house out this afternoon,” he offers. “Park up and sit tight. Soon as they leave this evening, in we go.”
Eve nods. It’s far from ideal. And she has no idea about Lance’s skills as a housebreaker. But Richard wouldn’t have sent her a dud operative. And she needs results.
“OK,” she says.
Lara has dropped Villanelle off at a cafe in Odessa’s Bird Market, in the Moldovanka district. It’s a dingy place, with yellowish lighting, faded travel posters on the walls, and a blackboard advertising the day’s special. Perhaps half of the tables are occupied. By single men, mostly, and a couple of women who might be prostitutes, fuelling themselves for the night’s work with solyanka soup and dumplings. From time to time the men glance at Villanelle, but on meeting her flatly hostile gaze, look away again.
She’s been waiting here for twenty minutes now, sipping a cup of tea and skim-reading a copy of Sevodnya, a Russian-language tabloid, in one of the booths at the side of the room. At intervals she raises her eyes to the cafe’s rain-blurred glass frontage, and the dimly lit streets beyond. She’s hungry, but doesn’t order anything in case she has to leave.
A lean figure slips into the booth opposite her. A man she’s met before: the man who talked to her in Hyde Park the previous winter, and who spooked her.
And now here he is again. There are the patchy beginnings of a beard, and a battered leather jacket has replaced the tailored coat, but the frozen darkness of the eyes is the same. When they first met he spoke English, but now he is calling to the elderly waitress in fluent, Moscow-accented Russian.
“You’re hungry?” he asks, running a hand through rain-damp hair.
She shrugs.
“Borscht and pirozhki for two,” he orders, and sits back.
Codename Villanelle Page 16
