Revenger

84

London had been a crucial base for American intelligence for more than seventy years. In 1942, the newly created Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, set up an office of its Secret Intelligence Branch, or SI, in London, from which more than a hundred agents were sent into Nazi-occupied Europe. For decades afterwards, the extraordinarily close, if sometimes fractious, relationship between British and US intelligence led to almost constant communication between the two nations’ agencies.

Many CIA personnel, based among the diplomats at the US Embassy in London, were entirely open — within the profession at least — about their jobs. They were well-known to their British counterparts — or ‘cousins’ as the two nations’ spies referred to one another, with heavy, knowing irony. Others, however, were undercover, for one of the dirty little truths about espionage is that one spies on one’s allies quite as much as one’s enemies.

One of these undercover CIA agents was Trent Peck the Third.

When he got to the US Embassy he slipped into the office of the CIA Head of Station, John D. Giammetti, for a quiet conversation. As he recounted the story of Alexandra Vermulen’s call to him, her plea for help and her arrival in his apartment, Giammetti was searching through the files on his desktop computer.

‘Well, I gotta say, Trent, you can pick’em,’ he said, when Peck had come to the end of his story.

‘Yeah, she’s pretty hot,’ Peck said, assuming Giammetti was referring to a photograph of Vermulen.

‘I wasn’t talking about her looks. You know she’s Russian, right, by birth? Ex- KGB, in fact.’

‘Jesus! That explains how she got out of that hotel without being caught by Scotland Yard’s finest. But how did she ever get citizenship?’

‘Marrying a retired US Army general, I guess. Don’t worry, she’s been checked out. Far as anyone can see, she had a brief career as a young woman, doing all the things that hot young women in the KGB used to do, you get my drift. Looks like she quit the trade once the Soviet era ended.’

‘Ha!’ Peck exclaimed. ‘There’s no such thing as ex-KGB.’

‘That’s not what the file says,’ Giammetti insisted. ‘She’s been clean for a long, long time. The Bureau kept a watch on that lobbying business she runs for a while, but they couldn’t find too much to worry about.’

‘Well, that may change. She’s dating some Limey called Samuel Carver. And get this: he’s the Second Man.’

‘What? From the Lion Market Massacre?’ said Giammetti, incredulously.

‘One and the same. He’s got every cop in London after him. And from the way the Prime Minister’s been talking, they’re treating him like the second coming of Osama bin Laden.’

‘Yeah, well, that tells you what’s wrong with this friggin’ country. Guy risks his life to save two helpless women and some Asian shopkeepers, blows a bunch of douchebag rioters to pieces, and they think he’s a criminal. Back home he’d already have his first movie deal and an invitation to lunch from the mayor.’

‘She said this guy is some kind of personal buddy of the President’s, though. Is that for real?’

‘Let me have a look,’ said Giammetti, consulting his screen. He gave a low whistle. ‘OK… So, this Carver dude is ex-British special forces. Did some work for the Secret Service a few years back. They hired him to test the security precautions at Roberts’s private compound down in Carolina. Carver staged some kind of phoney attack.’

‘Why did they get a Brit to do it? Why not use the SEALs or Delta Force?’

‘Dunno, it just says he was hired on account of his “specialist professional expertise”.’

‘Does that mean he’s some kind of hitman? Makes sense of the way he behaved last night.’

Giammetti scratched the back of his head. ‘You know what? I think you did a smart thing coming to talk to me. And I’m going to do another smart thing and cover all our asses. Time to talk to our cousins.’

Giammetti pressed a speed-dial number on his desk phone. ‘Hi, honey,’ he said when the call was answered. ‘Your boss available? Oh, OK… well, when he gets out of the meeting tell him John Giammetti needs to talk to him. And yeah, I would say it is kinda urgent.’

‘So who did you call?’ Peck asked.

‘Grantham,’ Giammetti said. ‘You wanna get something done, it’s best to go straight to the top. Now, do me a favour: head back to your apartment and make sure your house guest is being a good little girl.’

Alix’s presence in Trent Peck’s apartment was also attracting considerable interest in Moscow. The FSB were, of course, well aware of Peck’s status as an undercover CIA operative. The fact that he was now sheltering the former agent Petrova provided even greater potential for causing massive embarrassment to both the British and American governments than anyone had anticipated. Novak had been parked in an FSB property in North Kensington and told to wait for her next orders. It was not yet time for her to proceed against both Petrova and Peck. But that time was not far away.

‘Tell her to make her way to Peck’s property,’ said Gusev. ‘She should coordinate with our people on the ground there, but she must not do anything beyond that. There are still further characters to arrive on the scene. But there is no need to be impatient. It will not be too long before they make their entrance.’

It took almost an hour for Grantham to reply to Giammetti’s call. His morning schedule had been blown to pieces by the need to cope with the fallout from the police’s arrival at the flat where Carver had spent the early hours of the morning. He’d expected them to put two and two together, of course, but not quite this quickly. Not before Carver could be safely got out of the way.

Faced with the combined forces of Scotland Yard and the Home Office, not to mention MI5, hanging around the affair like hyenas waiting for some nice, dead prey to feast on, Grantham had been hard-pressed to keep them all at bay. He’d been forced to resort to a blank, outright denial of any Secret Intelligence Service involvement, pleading total ignorance of how the suspect had managed to find his way into the safe house. But that line wasn’t going to hold for long.

Then he called Giammetti and an already lousy day took another turn for the worse.

‘Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,’ Grantham replied after the CIA man had said his piece. ‘The woman Vermulen — she’s run for shelter to one of your guys. Now, she’s a US citizen, and Adams has already vouched for her presence at the O2 and subsequently at dinner with him for the entire evening. So unless Adams was behind the whole riot, which I dare say is possible, and she was involved in that in some way, I don’t see that she has anything to worry about. It’s not an offence to be a murderer’s girlfriend. And it’s equally acceptable for a citizen of a foreign country to seek help from one of their own nation’s diplomats.’

‘Well, I’m glad you see it that way.’

‘On the other hand, your president may soon be exposed as being best buddies with a man who killed forty civilians in a London supermarket. If you ask me, John, that’s where your problem lies.’

Grantham put the phone down, feeling certain that he’d taken care of Giammetti. He’d be fully occupied getting on to his bosses at Langley and warning them of the massive embarrassment that could be coming the President’s way. But that still left Grantham with a world of troubles of his own to solve.

He did not regret his decision to have Carver killed. The logic of the situation demanded it. Either he would be caught by the police, in which case there was always a chance that embarrassing, not to say career-ending, information might emerge. Or, far more likely, Carver would escape capture and dedicate himself to uncovering, tracking down and killing whoever was responsible for the riot. Since Grantham did not want to die at Carver’s hands, he had to get to him first. And in a situation of such extreme urgency, he’d been left with little option but to reach for an operative he knew would be keen to take the job. He’d acted in haste, and had been repenting it ever since.

There were worrying signs that Novak had gone rogue, or — even worse — was playing a double game, working for someone else too. He’d tipped the police off to Carver’s whereabouts and given Novak an ideal killing zone in which to take him out. He was virtually certain that she had gone as planned to the abandoned building site. According to the Met’s latest information, three vagrants had been found dead in a basement there, and one of the unfinished houses was peppered with .22 rounds. But there was no indication that anyone had been hit. Carver’s body certainly wasn’t there. Nor was Novak’s, come to that. It was barely believable, but somehow two of the planet’s most dangerous inhabitants had fought one another without either suffering any damage. And that made Grantham suspect that there had been a third party in the mix somewhere.

He’d been a bloody idiot to call Zhukovskaya. They’d worked together in the past, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t sell him out in a heartbeat. And he knew exactly who she’d call. The Russians were getting in on the act somehow, and anything Giammetti knew, they’d know too. Alix might as well have sent out change-of-address cards. If Novak was getting help to track her down, she’d go straight to Peck’s place, and suddenly there’d be US diplomats with CIA connections and women who were personal friends of the President getting blown away on Grantham’s patch. Not good.

He tried to get to Novak and tell her to forget Alix and concentrate on Carver, but she’d gone off-grid. Probably just as well. He had to assume that any calls to her, Peck or Alix were being monitored. If he got back to Giammetti, he’d only be giving the whole game away. He’d have to sort this out the old-fashioned way: go there in person and get Peck and Alix out of the flat while he still had the chance.

Grantham buzzed his secretary. ‘Something’s come up. I’ve got to leave the office. So cancel the rest of my appointments for the day. I could be gone some time.’