Terminal Black

by Adrian Magson

  Voices. More like muted chatter than a call for action. He took a deep breath and stood upright. He had to get back to the room before they returned. If Irina caught him wandering around there was no telling what she would do.

  He made his way back towards his cell, but got disorientated in the darkness and turned the wrong way. Where the hell was the big door? He risked flicking on the torch, a hand over the lens to restrict the glare, and saw a single door in front of him. He pressed his hand against it and was surprised when it moved.

  He pushed it further, wincing as the bottom scraped on the concrete floor. A rush of colder, damper air came in and his breath ghosted in front of his face. He saw a glint of night sky where a heavy cloud had shifted to reveal a lighter patch of colour. He couldn’t see much at ground level but he was guessing he was at the rear of the building. The idea of perspective gave him a lift, and he hoped he could soon use this and get away from here. Miracles, he told himself, did sometimes happen.

  More voices and a burst of laughter. They were distant sounds muffled by the walls but a reminder of the gravity of his situation.

  He pulled the door to and moved back into the dark. He flicked on the torch and saw another door. It opened into a small space with no windows and the same pervasive, dead atmosphere of every other room he’d been in. Yet there was something else: the acrid smell of burned plastic.

  He moved the torch, hoping for another way out. No furniture or fittings, but a pile of cloth in one corner. And a shoe? It looked heavy with a thick rubber sole. Almost new.

  With a sense of foreboding he crossed the room. He knew he should be out of here and getting back to his cell but something drew him on. He bent down and flicked back the nearest handful of cloth, and gagged.

  A body.

  It was the man who had brought his food on a tray. The FSB man – Alex. He wondered why he hadn’t seen him after their last talk, but things had been so unstructured, so crazy, his entire perception of time and what was happening had been thrown off course.

  Alex was lying on his back, the tattoo of the phoenix standing out clearly on the side of his neck. His head was thrown back exposing the paleness of his skin, his eyes half-closed.

  He’d been shot once in the forehead.

  Irina. Instinct told him this was her handiwork.

  Rik felt the hairs bristle on the back of his neck. He dropped the cloth back into place. Alex had been right to believe they would hurt him. But why? He was on their side, albeit FSB, if he’d been telling the truth, rather than GRU. Had they had a falling-out about something and he’d paid the price?

  He wondered why he hadn’t heard anything. This room wasn’t far from where he was being kept and sound travelled easily enough through the building. The movement of metal doors was fairly audible, so a gunshot would have been perfectly clear, unless … He recalled the bang he’d heard earlier, waking him up. He’d assumed it to be a door slamming. Maybe not.

  As he turned to leave his foot brushed against something which skittered away across the concrete floor. A flick of the torch showed a plastic bottle, partially wrapped in cloth. A hole had been cut in the base. The bottle had been crushed and part of the wrapping showed signs of scorch marks. He picked it up and immediately the bitter tang of burned plastic became stronger. The inside of the bottle from the neck down had been melted and fused by intense heat.

  He’d seen something like this once before on another training demo. It was a makeshift suppressor.

  He put it back where he’d found it and walked out of the room, his gut turning over. Was this the beginning of a clean-up operation? Had they aborted their mission and were reducing their numbers prior to clearing out? If so, what was the coach next door all about?

  He heard the distant clang of a door and a rattle of chains. He dodged down the corridor and finally found his way back to his cell. He still had no viable weapon against two fit opponents. If they had been joined by the two heavies he’d just seen outside it was pointless worrying about it. Fighting back against such odds was ludicrous.

  He closed the door and dropped onto the mattress, pulling the blanket around him just as he heard a rumble of approaching voices and the door slid open.

  The hairs on the back of his neck moved. There was silence, although he could hear the sound of someone breathing. He coughed deliberately and moaned. Eventually the door slid shut and he was alone again.

  He rolled over and stared into the darkness, thinking about what he’d just seen. The people who’d arrived on the coach must be the hacking group Kraush had boasted about. Ferried in under cover of darkness to a desolate, abandoned spot, it reeked of an operation unsanctioned by the authorities. But then, who was going to protest against the might of the people behind the GRU?

  So much for Kraush’s threat to launch a cyber attack only if Rik didn’t provide him with the information in his head. He was familiar enough with hacking operations to know that a team like this would have been briefed and trained before arriving here, ready to go on the offensive the moment they set up their equipment. Hackers worked best when they all knew what they had to do and had the means to go into action for a limited but intensive period. Hackers preferred to live in the shadows, aware that their activities would be traced if they made even a simple error. The risk of discovery was always there in every key-stroke and each newly-won connection. The moment their work was done they would be up and away, taking every trace of their presence with them.

  He felt cold and huddled inside the blanket. He was trying not to give into a sense of panic, but getting out of here with this thing round his leg was not an option. The best thing he could do was play along and hope he got some kind of break.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘I’m on the subject. He’s done exactly what we expected.’

  Colmyer signalled for his secretary to leave the room, and waited until the door closed behind her before saying, ‘Go ahead.’

  The voice on the other end belonged to Garth Perry. A twenty-year veteran of undercover work in Military Intelligence, a failure to respect the rules of the Geneva Convention while on deployment in Afghanistan had led to his dismissal. Diagnosed as a case of PTSD, Perry had narrowly escaped a jail sentence. It hadn’t stopped him registering with a company sourcing experienced staff for military contracts overseas.

  As a sleeping but not always silent partner, as he was with several businesses he was involved with, Colmyer had come across Perry’s details by chance. He’d noted the man’s past record and had quietly put him into a file of potential assets, disposable and otherwise.

  ‘Tate called at Ferris’s mother’s address in Southwark, stayed five minutes on the doorstep, then moved to Ferris’s address in Paddington where he spoke to a neighbour, before entering Ferris’s flat.’

  ‘Does that suggest recent contact?’

  ‘Possibly not. I heard part of the conversation down the stairwell. The neighbour handed him something, probably a key. He was inside for thirty-three minutes, easily time to toss the place.’

  ‘Toss?’

  ‘Search. I was going to follow him in for a look but a neighbour was hanging around cleaning her front door.’

  ‘Forget it. If Tate’s any good he’ll have found anything useful. What then?’

  ‘He went home to Islington then to an office address behind Waterloo Station. I’m pretty sure it’s an outlier unit for Thames House. He visited a hotel in Westminster, too. There’s been some activity there over the death of a guest.’

  ‘I know about that. It’s nothing to worry about.’ Colmyer wanted to swear; anything to relieve the tension he was feeling. This bloody Tate was turning into a nuisance. The decision to put a freelancer on finding Ferris was a mistake. He’d picked up on a bulletin about the death in a traffic incident of a guest registered at the Westminster hotel, but it hadn’t revealed anything useful. So what the hell had Tate found that had dragged him there? The office unit near Waterloo was a potential problem. The Inte
lligence and Security Services used cover offices all over the capital, most, he suspected, serving to blanket some of their more dubious activities and something he was determined to change. But he’d have to be careful asking questions about its function and why Tate had been there. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘At home. I’m standing by to see where he goes next.’

  ‘Very well. Stay on him at all costs – wherever he goes.’

  ‘Wherever?’

  ‘You heard. But no contact, understand? He mustn’t know anybody’s interested in him.’

  ‘Got it. What about Ferris?’

  ‘If they meet up that’s for you to deal with. In any case I’ll make a decision once Ferris is located. Keep me informed.’

  Colmyer cut the call and sat back, fighting off a rising surge of near-panic. He needed this matter dealt with, and fast. Having to wait for others to make their moves was something to which he wasn’t accustomed. And all the while he had a feeling of time and opportunity ticking away.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Clare Jardine felt sick. Her stomach was tight with nerves and she was nursing a strong desire to be anywhere but here. It was an unwelcome reminder of the job she used to do and the regular flutters that would invade her system every time she had to go on a mission. She’d never confessed it to anybody else but she knew others, more open than her, who’d suffered the same way.

  She was standing once again within sight of the arrivals door from the planes, watching passengers, workers and security personnel merge and part like schools of fish, the first group on their own individual journeys and, for the most part eager to be through immigration and out of here. Outside it was dark save for the security lights flooding the aircraft parking spots.

  She shivered in spite of the warm air from the ventilation ducts overhead, and wished she could turn around and go home. Three hours ago she had received a text message that had turned her day upside down.

  Passenger Tate H arriving 18.00 BEL 852. Sorry, no pic. K. x.

  She hadn’t wanted to believe it, not after all this time – and especially after seeing Ferris here, too. Was it already five years ago since they had last met? Seeing the message had been enough to get her into her car and heading for the airport as fast as possible, grabbing her security pass on the way. One eye on her rear-view mirror and a map unreeling in her head showing exit routes and places where she could disappear if she had to, was a measure of how time had not diminished the ingrained training that followed her everywhere like a bad dream to which she was forever chained.

  She caught sight of her reflection in a polished metal screen. She looked pale and drawn after a late night ferrying two visiting Ukrainian army officers and their minder around the city, neither of them troublesome save for an insistence on getting mortally drunk. But at least she looked very different to what former MI5 officer Harry Tate – if it was him – would remember.

  She tried to conjure up Tate’s face and found it unclear; a shifting mirage. But she’d know him if she saw him. If it wasn’t him on the plane it would doubtlessly be some engineering salesman from Sheffield touting for business in the brave new world that included large swathes of Eastern Europe.

  Using her security position, Katya had put in place a daily scan of passenger lists not long after Clare had arrived here, largely so that she could rest easy in knowing that her past wasn’t about to come back to haunt her. The murder of her MI6 boss, Sir Anthony Bellingham, had been a just retribution in her view. Bellingham had been one of the architects of her eventual dismissal from SIS and the cause of more than one death. Unfortunately not everyone shared that opinion, and she had lived under a cloud for the past few years expecting to find herself the subject of a snatch squad or worse.

  But now a specific name, one of several Katya had fed into the system, had popped up. It might be a duplicate, some innocent Tate H on normal business because there was only so much specific data that could be fed into a system without arousing the interests of the eagle-eyed wonks who watched for bugs, malware, hacks and other anomalies. And if Tate was here as an instrument of the state, would he really travel under his own name? Time would tell. There were ways of making a definite identification, including seeing a passport, although documents could be falsified, stolen or replicated. The most reliable method was surveillance. Seeing a face, the body outline, the walk, even the voice if she got close enough to hear it, were no-brainers.

  Out of habit she kept an eye on her surroundings. Watching her back took time but it was another habit she hadn’t been able to cast off completely. And while she was reasonably certain that none of the local security agencies had any interest in her, and the tag around her neck would keep anyone from asking awkward questions, only a fool took the passing of time for a dimming of memory. In the minds and annals of security departments the world over, time was a fluid concept that had no run-out point or statute of limitations.

  She resumed her study of the arrivals, a slow-moving snake with a gradually diminishing tail, only to be added to and swollen as another flight of eager incomers caught up with them. She wondered if Tate H had already gone by, an unknown face with a similar name, or he’d stopped to make a phone call.

  Or maybe he’d hung back to merge with the next group, a tradecraft move to confuse any watchers.

  Then she felt a jolt go through her chest. A glimpse, that was all she had. A brief snatch of a face behind a group of four bulky men in suits and carrying briefcases. Then the face was gone as the group flexed to allow a cleaning trolley go by. She stayed absolutely still. Up here she was fairly sure she was invisible, but caution made her freeze all the same. If it was him, he’d be alert for any movement that looked suspicious because that was the kind of man he was.

  She got another glimpse, first of the face, then the walk. Shit. It was Tate! She almost thought her Tate but denied the term. There was nothing possessive or matey about their knowing each other. They’d been fellow-travellers, that was all, along with Rik Ferris and a handful of others; not in any ideological or collaborative sense, but trapped in a nightmare that three of them at least, had been fortunate enough to get out of in one piece.

  She searched for him again as the crowd shifted and a luggage tractor went by. There he was, drifting along as if he hadn’t a care in the world, blending in without conscious thought, using others as cover against cameras with the insulting ease born of instinct. She ticked off the familiar list: sturdy build, somewhere in his forties, brown hair in a brush cut peppered with hints of grey. Looking older of course, because he was, but then weren’t they all? Harry bloody Tate in the bloody flesh. Former soldier, MI5 spy hunter, bulldog, general boy-scout and, the last she’d heard, security gun for hire. And now he was here.

  He began to turn his head and she eased back behind a pillar. He’d have been scouting the place all the way through from the plane, she told herself. Eyes on invisible stalks, noting cameras, personnel, doorways and choke points, the way he’d been trained – the way they’d all been trained. That kind of skill, once ingrained, never left you, not entirely. It might dim a little through lack of use, as it had with her, the same way soldiers lost the ease with which they handled weapons after a while. But bits still stuck like barnacles on a boat’s hull.

  She kept her eyes on him, just as she had watched Ferris earlier. She took out her phone and dialled a number.

  ‘Balenkova.’ The voice of her partner was clear, authoritative, yet to Clare, the most welcome and comforting sound in the world.

  ‘It’s him,’ Clare said. ‘Tate. He’s just arrived.’

  ‘Coincidence?’

  ‘I don’t know. First Ferris, now him. I doubt it. There must be something going on.’

  ‘Could they have joined up for an assignment?’ Katya being logical, reasonable in the face of concern. ‘You said they were working security together, no?’

  ‘Maybe. But why not arrive on the same flight?’ The only reason she could think of was if Tate
had called Ferris in to help on an assignment he was undertaking, or if they had travelled days apart to avoid being noticed. It made a kind of sense. Seeing one former MI5 man going through here was unlikely to cause a second look, even given the paranoia towards the west. That’s if anyone even recognized him. It might be viewed as odd, even unlikely, but not a cause for alarm. Seeing two together would, in some eyes, smack of an operation in progress.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Katya’s voice sounded calm enough but there was an underlying hint of concern that made Clare feel a warmth run through her. She still hadn’t got used to someone being worried about her, especially someone who was a former member of the Russian FSO.

  ‘I’m not sure. Find out why he’s here, probably.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I could ask him.’

  ‘Don’t. Milaya, you don’t know what you might be getting into. If he’s on an official assignment he won’t be pleased to know you have seen him.’

  Clare hesitated, the use of the endearment a confusion, albeit welcome. She wasn’t sure why she felt that way until it came to her with a start: she was in operational mode. Without fully realizing it, she had slipped from normal – in other words a life not actively pursuing someone because that was no longer her job – to a status level she had long left behind.

  Bloody Tate, she thought. What the hell does he want? Am I just being paranoid? Anyway, she reminded herself, how the hell would he know I was here? She had dropped off the radar completely after their last meeting, partly to recover from her wounds but also to draw a thick curtain over her previous life.