Dead Spy Running

20

Spiro didn’t like the CIA sub-station in Warsaw. He didn’t like the coffee, he didn’t like the tired, 1970s hellhole of an embassy in which the Company was housed (an opinion confirmed when his driver took him past the glistening new premises of the British Embassy), but most of all he didn’t like the station chief. By rights, Alan Carter should have been fired years ago. He had messed up over the Agency’s post-9/11 rendition flights to Stare Kiejkuty, a programme based on tight cooperation between the CIA and the WSI. Its basis was total denial, but word had got out, and Spiro blamed Carter.

Now he had messed up again. Marchant’s release was in danger of sparking a three-way diplomatic row between Poland, America and Britain. Poland’s new prime minister had already been in touch, saying it had been a case of mistaken identity. His office had received reports of a Westerner at the remote airport, and a team of special forces had been sent over to take a look. When the Poles had come under fire, they had returned the compliment, and the detainee escaped. Spiro had never heard such bull-shit, but there was nothing he could do. His allies in WSI were becoming increasingly powerless, and the protocol simply didn’t exist for lodging a complaint about a deniable project such as Stare Kiejkuty, particularly as it was meant to have been shuttered.

Spiro looked around at the bank of screens in the dimly lit room at the back of the US Embassy, a team of five junior officers keeping their heads down as he made his displeasure clear.

‘Do we have eyes at the airport?’ he barked at Carter.

‘We’ve picked up a feed from CCTV in immigration,’ Carter said. ‘We’ll see him if he’s got a passport.’

‘And the Brit Embassy?’

‘Still trying. It’s pretty secure over there.’

Unlike here, Spiro thought.

‘We’re also live at the station, and most of the city’s malls,’ said another officer.

‘What have we got on him?’ Spiro asked.

A photo of Marchant and Pradeep, running side by side in the marathon, was projected onto the wall in front of the computers. In the foreground, Turner Munroe, the US Ambassador to London, was clearly identifiable.

‘Close to his target, wasn’t he?’ Spiro said. ‘Too fucking close.’

‘Sir,’ one of the youngest officers asked tentatively, looking up at Carter for support. ‘Shouldn’t London be helping us on this one?’

‘Don’t even go there,’ Spiro snapped. ‘We’re flying solo, that’s all you need to know.’ He turned to Carter. ‘Where else might Marchant be heading? Krakow? The border? Why are we so sure he’s coming to town?’

‘We have an asset in a village four miles south of Stare Kiejkuty. He says an unmarked military truck drove through the village on the main road to Warsaw at fifteen hundred hours. Our guys at the airbase raised the alarm at twenty hundred last night, approximately five hours after Marchant was freed.’

‘Five friggin’ hours? What were they doing? R and R in the waterboarding pool?’

‘Sir, they had been drugged, bound and gagged by the Poles — they were Grom, elite special forces. It’s a credit to their training that they managed to free themselves at all.’

‘Is that right? Well, it isn’t a credit to your training that we have no fucking idea where Marchant is now.’

‘We’re into the city police’s traffic cameras,’ another officer announced, hoping to bail his boss out of trouble. They worked hard for Carter, and didn’t like to see him humiliated.

‘Screen one,’ Carter said. A moment later, black-and-white images of slow-moving traffic were being projected onto the main wall.

‘Gridlock,’ Spiro said. ‘Just like Route 28 after a Red Sox game.’

‘If the truck was coming into Warsaw, it would have entered the city on the Moscow-Berlin road,’ Carter said, looking over his junior colleague’s shoulder at the computer screen again. He was avoiding eye contact with Spiro as much as he could. The screen was split into three sections: the main traffic image, a city map, and a database displaying a list of camera positions throughout the city. ‘Switch to camera 17,’ Carter said. The junior officer scrolled down the list.

A new image, less grainy than the first, was projected onto the wall. The queue of traffic leaving the city was moving slower than the cars arriving.

‘How long does it take to get from Stare Kiejkuty to Warsaw by truck?’ Spiro asked.

Carter nudged the junior officer, who looked at his map again and zoomed out from the city to an image of the north of the country. A route highlighted in red wormed its way almost instantly from the airbase to Warsaw.

‘Two hours fifteen,’ Carter said, reading from the screen.

‘Can you get us into traffic archive?’ Spiro asked him.

‘It’ll take some time.’

‘I want everything from eighteen to twenty-one hundred hours. Let’s see if that truck showed up in the city last night. We also need passenger lists from Warsaw, Krakow and Gdansk airports. And I want the names of any Brits who are even thinking about flying out of Poland; then crunch them through Langley. How many have we got up at the airport?’

‘Two units. We called in back-up from Berlin.’

‘Marchant cannot leave this lousy country, is that clear?’