Execution

FORTY-THREE

Harry had just dropped his bag in his room when his mobile rang. He expected it to be Rik telling him that Balenkova and her charges were on the move. It was Ballatyne, sounding energised.

‘Right, we’ve discovered the rat in the woodpile. His name’s Keith Maine. He’s not inside Six; he’s a senior intelligence analyst with Five. He used a loophole in a joint server to gain access to Jardine’s file in Six. We think it’s the same person who tried a while back, on a fishing trip.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to find someone inside the building to do that? Why go through Five?’

‘Actually, it wasn’t so shabby. Maine used to be with GCHQ in Cheltenham, working closely with Five. When Thames House began recruiting their own analysts with specialist experience, he requested a transfer. Said he wanted more of a hands-on challenge. They grabbed him with both hands. As for finding someone in the building, believe it or not you can’t just trawl through the faces and pick someone at random, you know. Staff get a bit suspicious at that kind of carry on.’ He sounded almost jaunty, Harry decided, at finding that the rat was at Thames House, not Vauxhall Cross.

‘What’s his history?’ Harry instinctive thought was whether the transfer had been instigated by an outside influence, to get a man inside MI5. It had been tried before more than once.

‘On the outside, he’s clean. Single — pretty much a carer for his mother until she died last year — no overt political leanings, belongs to two books groups, a small collector of first editions and other rare books. Colleagues think he’s a good guy, but boring. Good at his job, but coming up for retirement.’

Harry nearly laughed. That profile alone would fit nearly any person discovered to have dipped their fingers in the secrets drawer over the past fifty years. But it also fitted a vast number of totally innocent and hard-working members of the intelligence community.

‘The original grey man.’

‘Not to somebody, he wasn’t,’ Ballatyne murmured. ‘I doubt he was doing this out of conviction. I think he was got at.’

Harry knew what that meant. Money or a weak point, not political gain. ‘What’s happening now?’

‘The internal security heavy mob is running his entire history through the meat grinder as we speak. They’re going to town on his background, friends, where he’s been, the bookshops he visited — everything and anything. You know how it works.’

Harry knew very well. The effect of that kind of close security vetting on everybody around Maine wouldn’t be pleasant. The net result would be that he would shortly discover just how many loyal friends he had left in the world. The likelihood was, very few.

‘If he had the nous to use a back door into Six, how did he get found out?’

‘The usual thing: he got careless. He dropped a receipt from a bookshop near another officer’s terminal — an officer who’s been in Afghanistan for three weeks. Thames House knew what we were doing, so they did a deep system sweep which led to Maine’s desk. They found a twelve-digit code on the underneath of a notepad. It matched entry codes to personnel records in Six. They’ve got him lined up for a heavy chat.’

Harry frowned. There was something in Ballatyne’s voice that wasn’t right. ‘You mean they haven’t done it already?’

‘They can’t find him. He didn’t report in after lunch today and his mobile’s switched off. He logged out of Thames House for lunch, and was seen walking south across Lambeth Bridge. Last thing anyone saw of him.’

They were too late. ‘Is that normal?’

‘No. His colleagues say he keeps regular patterns, rarely if ever varying. He’s a creature of habits. Heading south across the river wasn’t one of them. That’s where the internal hunters are focussing their search.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But that’s not all.’

‘Go on.’

‘He delved into an open access surveillance log on Katya Balenkova. All agencies can check it, given the correct codes. Maine had been doing some analysis on surveillance report patterns, so he had authority to go in there.’

Harry didn’t want to ask, but had to. ‘Why is that a problem?’

‘Well, very few people knew of the link between Clare Jardine and Katya Balenkova. The techs can’t tell me how much he read yet, but whoever was running him had clearly made the connection between the two women, and knew just where to point him for maximum effect.’

‘I thought that file would be closed.’

‘It is — or was. But I think I have the answer to that. When they did an initial audit of Maine’s activities, they pulled up traces of another search he’d made. This one was closer to home, in Thames House. It was a read-only file, but it looks like that’s all he needed. He was reading up on an old friend of yours. I think Maine was looking for a smoking gun to protect himself.’

Harry knew instinctively what Ballatyne was going to say. There was one other person he could think of who knew all about Clare Jardine and Katya Balenkova

George Paulton.

In an annexe to the Russian Embassy on Reisnerstrasse, a single phone call was all it took to have a team of specialists ready and briefed to go out on the streets in force, armed with photographs of Clare Jardine and Katya Balenkova. They knew who and what Balenkova was, but none had ever met her. The tone of the phone call from a source in London left no doubts about how important this was.

‘Trace and report,’ Captain Yuri Symenko, the resident commanding officer of the FSB security detachment told his men, after handing out the photos and briefing notes. ‘Do not apprehend either of these women until I give the order. There are British spies involved and I want to scoop up all of them, you hear?’ He smiled in spite of the gravity of the situation. He had been here almost two years now, and had never witnessed anything this exciting before. British spies, for heaven’s sake! He’d never even seen one, let alone arrested one. If all went well, this could lead to a posting to somewhere far more interesting, like Paris or even New York.

‘But Balenkova’s FSO,’ whispered one of his deputies, staring at the briefing notes as if they carried the seal of the Kremlin. ‘Are you sure about this information, sir?’

‘The instructions come from an impeccable source, lieutenant,’ Symenko said loftily, waving away the officer’s concerns. Even so, he experienced a tiny moment of doubt. Arresting a member of the Federal Protective Service was unheard of, and would be like charging a member of the inner cabinet in Moscow with treason, such was their reputation. They were above reproach, vetted and trained to the highest level, especially Balenkova, of whom he’d heard. Yet he had also heard of Colonel Gorelkin and knew enough of his background to realise that arguing with him would be to bring his own career to an abrupt and painful end. It was sufficient to reinforce his decision. ‘When I give the order, separate Balenkova from her FSO colleague, Bronyev. Neutralise him if necessary but don’t harm him. He is not part of this. But above all, do it quietly. We do not want an international incident on our hands.’