Terminal Black

by Adrian Magson

  He ate some more and looked down at the notepad. God, he hated garlic. But he was hungry. And he couldn’t deal with this weird shit on an empty stomach.

  He put the plate down and stared at the blank page as if it might conjure up something useful by magic. But all it did was give him a headache. He closed his eyes and let his head loll back, allowing the memory of the stuffy office he’d been assigned to in MI6 emerge. Might as well try to dredge up something useful, even if only to keep them happy. It was vague at first, like the image of an old school you didn’t want to think about. It began to build, along with even vaguer faces and the disappointingly mundane surroundings of the rest of the floor he was on. For MI6, he reflected, the world-renowned Secret Intelligence Service of fact, fiction and film, it was no more exciting than a trip to his local job centre, with no tough-looking agents strolling along the corridors with guns or boffins blowing up mannequins in underground workshops.

  Instead it was cubicles, phones, drab lighting and drabber people. An ant factory with secrets.

  He took a series of deep breaths. He had to come up with something, even if only to delay the inevitable. Delay it for what, he hadn’t a clue, but he recalled Harry once saying that if you gave up trying to find a way out of sticky situations, you might as well roll over and die.

  Screw that. He thought instead of some familiar words; something to get the brain working, made up of remembered passwords, networks, encryption codes and firewalls.

  He and a handful of other high-clearance IT personnel on loan to MI6, had been given administrator access to a set number of archives on the database. The material was too sensitive to be handed to outsiders, the female supervisor had explained, as if trying to convince them how special they were. But they all knew different: it was because budgets had become overstretched and bringing in outsiders from Five was cheaper.

  Unfortunately, Rik was soon outpacing the supply of material. The supervisor monitoring him had soon got into the habit of sneaking off for regular cigarette breaks with a male colleague down the corridor. By her flushed demeanour when she did return, he concluded that the ‘break’ involved more than sharing a smoke, and boredom began creeping up on him like a siren call.

  Intrigued by references to special forces support team assignments going back years, he began reading further. The teams were usually two to four strong, depending on the posting, and operating on a rota basis providing security and back-up for intelligence personnel in British embassies around the world. From a few dips into the files he saw a pattern emerge. Most of the reports were mundane, little more than form-filling to satisfy some pinhead in headquarters that everyone was doing their job. But occasionally he stumbled on one that was different, where an assignment had turned ‘hot’, requiring a rapid evacuation of an individual across a border into a friendly or less-hostile environment. Rik had soon begun to recognize these by the file size and zero in on SAS, SBS or other special force assignments.

  Unfortunately for him, the canoodling supervisor was replaced one day by a humourless buzz-kill who made it his duty to run an audit trail and install some hidden alarm systems among the files Rik and the others were working on.

  Although Rik had taken early precautions not to leave any evidence of his illicit dips into the archives, he’d become careless. Within days he was called in and presented with the evidence of his misdemeanours.

  The nightmare scenario of being escorted out of the building and quarantined under guard were scenes he didn’t like to dwell on. Instead he forced himself to think about the files themselves and examine what Kraush and his bosses could possibly get from them.

  The result was a blank. What the hell would they get from a few reports of intelligence-gathering missions that had gone wrong? Or details of MI6 heavies dragging a compromised officer or agent out of hostile territory and bundling them across a border to safety? By now it was all old news. After a while fatigue took over and he rolled onto his mattress and went to sleep.

  TEN

  Forty kilometres away, on the outskirts of the city, Clare Jardine had drawn another blank. On leaving her charge, the well-behaved if enigmatic Heinrick Debsen, back at the airport after he cut short his trip by a full day due to a family crisis, she had been unable to drop the sighting of Rik Ferris from her mind. Ferris was somewhere he shouldn’t be, she told herself. Belarus was foreign and therefore hostile territory to the former MI5 IT geek. The fact that she herself was in some danger here was something she chose to ignore; she had a free pass under Katya’s protective wing. The situation might change one day, and they had both prepared for it with a plan to decamp fast if needed. For now, though, they were living below the Belarus security forces’ radar by silent agreement of an influential friend of Katya’s. The authorities here had more than enough to worry about already with their giant neighbour to the east. Relations with Moscow had deteriorated recently, with both sides taking opposing positions and the Belarus President Lukashenko making ominous sounds about Moscow’s plans to absorb the smaller country into a greater Russia. If that happened, all bets would be off and she would have to decide where to go next.

  As for Ferris, she had drawn a blank. Airports were usually a fund of information about lone travellers, who often left details of themselves in their wake like scattered confetti. Talking to bored cafeteria staff while in transit elsewhere with too many hours to spare; discarded or lost boarding passes; purchase receipts at the duty-free kiosks; lost luggage; hotel, cab and rail bookings for onwards journeys.

  Nothing.

  Although, that wasn’t entirely correct. A trawl through the line of cab drivers outside the main terminal had found one man who recalled speaking to an Englishman.

  ‘He dressed like a Russian pop star,’ the man had said disapprovingly, and mentioned a rock band Clare had heard of. ‘I don’t think he had much money.’

  ‘Sounds like him,’ Clare agreed, hiding her cynicism. Some of the cab drivers operating at the airport were known to charge extortionate fares from gullible foreigners, and if you looked as if you couldn’t hand over a huge tip as well, they’d lose interest fast. ‘Where did you take him?’

  ‘I didn’t. I had a pre-booked fare, so I told him to get the bus from gates five and six.’

  She knew the airport bus dropped passengers at the main terminal in the city. From there Ferris could walk in any direction or catch a cab. It would be like hunting a ghost. But she had to try or risk it bugging her for days.

  She drove into the city and parked near the Tsentralny – the bus terminal. She found a few bored looking cab drivers gathered at a refreshment stand nearby and began asking questions. One by one they shook their heads. No Englishman. Not for a long time. Then one man walked in and overheard her question.

  ‘I remember him,’ he said. ‘Wild hair and great T-shirt. I wanted to buy it but I don’t think he understood. He asked to go to some place near Stepyanka.’

  ‘Do you remember the address?’ She slipped him a couple of notes which vanished in an instant.

  ‘Some shitty apartment block beyond the Beltway,’ the man replied. ‘The only one left. I dropped him outside. I told him it wasn’t a good place to go but he ignored me – or maybe he didn’t understand that, either. He gave me a good tip, though.’ He showed his teeth and turned away, the limit of his help reached.

  Stepyanka. She’d been there a couple of times, but always within the Minsk Beltway, the M9 encircling the city. According to eager house-hunters, inside the Beltway was good, outside not so much. Inside was part of the new revitalized city, an area of smart, tree-lined streets and high-rise residential buildings where the newly wealthy middle classes could live the dream. But just a short distance away on the other side of the motorway lay a small, desolate area still largely untouched by the hands of construction workers.

  She went back to her car and drove east until she found a narrow road leading from the new area and dipping beneath the motorway towards the old. The mouth of t
he tunnel was partially blocked by makeshift barriers, but she threaded her way through them and entered a darkened space filled with a light mist. There were no lights, and when she rolled down her window, she caught the acrid smell of wood smoke. Further on she saw the flicker of flames and a trail of what she at first thought was rubbish bunched up against the curved side walls. But when she switched on her headlights she saw a face appear from beneath a fold of cardboard followed by another, and a brazier with several figures gathered around it, heads wreathed in smoke. More figures appeared, no doubt drawn from beneath their make-shift shelters by the sound of the car’s engine and the glare of lights. She heard voices raised in protest and the bang of something hitting the side door of the car.

  A squatter camp.

  She put her foot down and closed her window, checking all the doors were locked. Stopping here would be tantamount to committing suicide. She reached instinctively towards the glovebox in the door panel in case she needed to take drastic action. This was the unadvertised side of a modern Minsk, where the unfortunates and outsiders gathered, where drugs and arms were rumoured to be traded and only those with a known reputation or a back-up squad dared to step outside their vehicles.

  She emerged into the open air into a desolate patch of mean, ancient housing and crumbling buildings. In the middle sat a single apartment block, solid and ugly, like an obstinate reminder of the old days. Weather-worn and scarred by years of neglect, with grimy windows behind large balconies, it rose seven floors up, towering over the few surrounding buildings. The area in front of the block showed signs of having been cleared, the brutal scrape trails of bulldozers plain to see. But that was all, as if having laid down their first markers, the planners had departed to allow things to settle before they returned in force.

  She stopped the car and turned to look back across the Beltway, where the smart new high-rises seemed to gleam deliberately in the weak light as if taunting the residents here with their new, modern look.

  Half an hour later she was no wiser. She’d parked behind the block out of sight of the people in the tunnel, and knocked on many doors. But so far she’d spoken to just three people, all elderly women in big coats and colourful scarves. They were pleasant enough, if wary, but it was clear that if Ferris had been here, nobody had seen him.

  Or if they had they weren’t saying.

  ELEVEN

  After leaving the Englishman Irina walked through the complex to a nearby room where they had a few stores set aside for the prisoner. The man who had delivered the tray was there, splashing water over the plastic plate he’d picked off the floor.

  He hadn’t heard her, and seemed focussed on the simple task. She knew him only as Alex and had never really taken to him. A former FSB man who’d suffered some kind of trauma, he’d been foisted on them by Control for low-level duties, such as being the wheel-man for the London operation, a city he apparently knew well. But since completing that task and coming to this place where he’d been posted as a perimeter guard and general runner, he’d been making noises about wanting to go back to see his girlfriend in the UK where he’d worked as a security guard on Russian facilities in and around London. In Irina’s opinion he’d become soft, grown too fond of the British capital and the easy-going lifestyle, and saw himself as a bit of playboy. And that meant he was a risk.

  ‘Why did you look at the prisoner?’ she demanded, grabbing his arm and spinning him round, causing a bottle of drinking water to crash to the floor and smash. ‘What were you trying to do – send him a message?’

  ‘What?’ He looked startled by her approach. ‘No. I wasn’t doing anything.’

  ‘We told you, do not even make eye contact. You know the rules.’

  ‘I looked up when he spoke but not at him – I swear. Anyway, what’s the problem?’

  For an answer, she reached behind her and pulled out an automatic pistol. She thumbed off the safety and pointed it at his head. He went white and shrank away, reminding her that they’d been told he should not be given any action-service roles other than driving due to his nerves. It made her wonder what possible use he could be to them if he was frightened of his own shadow. Why the hell they had been told to use him was a mystery. FSB and GRU didn’t often mix, but when she’d been called into the GRU site off Komsomolsky Prospekt in Moscow, her mind had been too filled with excitement at the new mission to question who else was in the team.

  ‘The problem is, you cretin, you disobeyed an order.’ Her knuckles went white as her finger tightened on the trigger.

  ‘What is happening?’ The voice came from behind her. It was Kraush, his presence filling the room. She turned. He was holding a mobile phone and frowning. ‘Irina?’

  She lowered the gun and re-engaged the safety. ‘This idiot got too close to the prisoner,’ she explained. ‘I’d told him not to have any contact.’

  Kraush looked at the driver and shook his head. But it was to Irina that he spoke. ‘You need to calm down,’ he said. ‘You think a gunshot here would go unnoticed?’ He looked at the driver. ‘You, go about your business and clean up this mess later. First check the perimeter and make sure there are no snoopers.’

  ‘I was dealing with him,’ Irina hissed, after the man had gone. ‘I don’t need talking to like a school kid in front of the hired help.’

  ‘I know perfectly well what you were doing. You were about to blow his brains out.’ He waved his phone to forestall further discussion. ‘No matter. I’ve had a call from headquarters. They have received information from London that the intelligence authorities have begun tracking Ferris out of the country. An operative has also been following Tate to see where he goes.’

  Irina frowned, instantly pushing the disagreement aside. This news was far more urgent. She could press the matter of Alex later. MI5 being on the case was only to be expected, but was a worrying development this soon into the project. They had been counting on Ferris not being missed for a while yet. ‘Perhaps we should get rid of him,’ she said.

  ‘Him, too?’ Kraush snorted. ‘Is that your solution to every problem? If we do that we will never find out what he knows.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the point: he might not know anything. He was clearly a low-level operative in their IT section.’

  ‘That’s not for you to decide. We have to keep questioning him, increasing the pressure but being careful. Sooner or later, he’ll crack. It could be that he did see something, but doesn’t realize it.’

  ‘If that’s the case he would not have said anything when he was debriefed by the British. If we get rid of him now it will go no further. Win, win.’

  Kraush studied her in a way she had come to dread. They were not equals, she knew that, and standing up to him was a high-risk tactic with little chance of success. But she was determined to show that she wasn’t merely a camp-follower just because she was a woman. His eyes held an almost translucent, dreamy quality that she knew some women would find distracting, even seductive. What they didn’t realize was that behind the eyes was nothing but a well-trained and highly focussed operative who didn’t know the first meaning of the word seduction. All he knew was following orders.

  ‘Perhaps I should talk to him,’ he said at last. ‘Nicely to begin with. Now we know they are after him, time is shorter than we thought.’

  ‘I doubt the British will find us here. How would they know where to begin?’

  ‘Because they’re not stupid. One picture from a CCTV camera, one airport watcher who spots a familiar face or name and they’ll come running. We cannot take the risk.’

  ‘What will you tell Ferris to get him to cooperate?’

  ‘As much as I think is necessary.’ The smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Who knows, I might even appeal to his better nature.’ It was as if he were talking to himself, a facet of his nature she was finding hard to accept. Almost as if she weren’t there, a piece of furniture.

  ‘He does want to go outside,’ she said, to fill the void. ‘He says he needs exerci
se. And his music player.’

  ‘Not an unreasonable request, I think. It might convince him to help us. We will have to limit his movements, of course.’

  ‘How? We would have to be with him every step of the way.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ He smiled. ‘I brought a little something with me for this very possibility.’

  ‘What – a Dragunov?’ She grinned at the idea. She’d used the sniper rifle herself, but never on a human. She fancied the idea of bringing down a running man to see the reaction.

  ‘Something much more efficient. Don’t worry – I’ll show you.’

  ‘And him?’ She nodded towards the door where the driver had disappeared. ‘He’s a weak link and I don’t trust him. We should get rid of him before he lets us down.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  She hesitated. Suggesting dumping a team member was tantamount to disloyalty, even a distrust of the superiors who had given them this assignment. But she’d gone too far now to pull back.

  ‘He’s battle-damaged,’ she said, choosing the term with care. ‘In London he was very jumpy and showed a lack of moral fibre. When the time came to approach the target he nearly lost control … and even questioned our mission orders.’

  ‘Well, you did kill the woman. It was messy.’

  ‘It was a risk worth taking – and we couldn’t leave her to talk to the British.’

  He nodded. ‘I understand.’

  Emboldened, she said, ‘I think he’s a liability. I don’t trust him.’

  Kraush pursed his lips, eyes on her as he reflected on what she’d said. Eventually he said, ‘How do you propose we deal with him? We can’t simply send him back; he was assigned to this mission by Control and they would assume we were questioning their judgement.’ He turned and began flicking through a box of mixed foodstuffs.