PART VI
Komsomolsk-on-Amur
68
Milton slept lightly, and when he awoke, it took him a moment of staring up at the ceiling before he remembered where he was. He felt the warmth of a body next to him, and when he turned over, he saw Jessie Ross lying there. She was on her front and had pushed the covers away from her body at some point in the night. Milton reached for his watch and checked the time: six. He got up as quietly as he could, padded across the room and, checking that Ross was still asleep, collected his clothes and took them into the bathroom. He took out his phone, opened the encrypted messaging app and sent a quick message. He showered and dressed with a pulse of anxiety in his gut. That was to be expected. There was no way of telling how the morning would go. He reminded himself that he had no choice, and that he should have no sympathy, either. Jessie had brought all of this on herself.
A return message buzzed onto his phone. He opened the door to the hotel hallway. A plastic bag containing a newspaper had been left on the handle. He took the bag—it felt heavier than it ought to have done—and replaced the Do Not Disturb sign. He closed the door as quietly as he could and edged back into the room.
“Morning.”
He turned to the bed. Jessie was awake, watching him through heavy-lidded eyes.
“What time is it?”
“Six fifteen,” he said.
“What’s that?” she said, nodding at the plastic bag.
Milton took the newspaper out of the bag. It was Komsomolskaya Pravda, the paper that Anastasiya Romanova had said he should be carrying when he went for the meet. He sat down and laid the bag on his lap; it wasn’t empty. He reached inside and took out a Beretta 92 with two spare, fully loaded magazines. He placed all three items on the bureau and watched as Jessie’s eyes were drawn to them.
“Where did you get that?” she said.
“I know, Jessie.”
“You know what?”
“Everything. I know it all.”
Ross sat up, reaching down to wrap the sheet around her body. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“How about by making sense?”
“You’ve been working for the SVR.” He gave her a chance to confirm it, but she said nothing. He ignored her truculent silence. “Directorate S? It doesn’t really matter—you’ll give us all the details later.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Just listen—” Milton began.
She ignored him, surging up out of the bed and trying to pass him on the way to the door. Milton got to his feet and stepped across to block her way. Ross tried to shoulder her way past but he was too strong for her; he grabbed her by the shoulders and held her in place.
“Get off me,” she spat.
“Calm down,” Milton said.
“Get your fucking hands off me!” She shook his hands off, raising her hand to strike him. Milton grabbed her wrist with his left hand and then used his right to take her arm at a point three fingers down from her elbow. He dug his thumb into the pressure point. Her face crumpled with pain and Milton used the moment to guide her back over to the bed and down onto it once again.
“Relax,” Milton said, releasing the grip.
“I’ll scream,” she threatened.
“I wouldn’t do that. Think about your parents, Jessie. Your son.”
Milton hated to have to threaten her like that, but he had no choice. He had to get through to her quickly, and she had brought everything on herself. Her face slackened as the anger drained out of it. She gaped for a moment, but then her eyes burned again.
“You bastard,” she said.
“That’s what happens when you play the game and you get caught. What do you expect?”
“My son—where is he?”
“He’s with your parents. They haven’t been approached, not yet, and the preference is that they won’t be. But that’s up to you. You get to choose what happens next.”
“Really?” She shook her head derisively. “Do I?”
“You’re lucky.” He ignored the resentment shining from her eyes. “You can offer valuable service—valuable enough, perhaps, to balance out what you’ve done. You have two choices. One is more palatable than the other.”
“Let me guess: one choice is bad for my son?”
Milton hated himself for what he had to say. “He’ll be placed into care. And life will be made difficult for your parents, too. Your father’s business will lose its export licence, for example. It will find itself in legal trouble, and then it’ll be bankrupted. It would be a simple thing to wipe them out—all it would take would be a word from the people I work for. They’d do it without thinking twice. You’ve pissed them off, Jessie.”
She stared at him, daring him.
“It’s not a bluff—none of this is a bluff.”
“And what about me? What if I don’t agree?” She looked at the gun. “You going to use that?”
Milton’s throat was dry, and he feared that if he replied he would betray the nausea that bubbled in his stomach. He hoped that Ross would see sense, and that he was not in the business of making baseless threats. His palms began to sweat.
“The other choice?” she asked.
“You work for VX—properly, this time, against the Russians.”
“Just like that?”
“It doesn’t need to be difficult. You just follow through with the operation as you planned it. We go to the rendezvous with Romanova. There will be an incident. I know that the Center is using us to get to her. They’ll have agents waiting, but I’m going to take care of them. We take Romanova and leave the country, just like we planned.”
“And then?”
“And then, once you’re back in London, you signal the Center that you’re fine, you haven’t been compromised and that you’re awaiting instructions.”
“And the Center wouldn’t think that I’ve been blown? Or that I tipped you off?”
“Why would they? You’ve never played them before. You’re an agent at VX, in the heart of the secret service. They’ll look for reasons to believe that you’re clean. You’re the golden goose. They’ll hate even the thought that they might have lost you. And why would they think you’ve been blown? They have no reason to think that you’ve been exposed. You did your part—you led them to Romanova, just like you promised, but we were wise to it. They know we have a source—they’ll think BLUEBIRD tipped us.”
“As simple as that?”
“It can be. It’s up to you—you just need to be yourself, as if nothing has happened.”
Milton knew how that would be done: she would be provided with a stream of legitimate intelligence that she could leak, nothing too compromising, yet valuable enough to keep the Center’s interest piqued. A promotion would follow, placing her in a more senior role, putting temptation in front of Russian noses, everything sharpened with the promise of more to come. The Center would be greedy, rapacious, and fed enough intelligence to ignore the nagging feeling that perhaps they should be more circumspect with their once golden girl. She would have to be convincing, but she had already demonstrated that she could do that; she had fooled British intelligence for years.
“They’re not stupid, Smith,” she said.
“You need to be persuasive. You do that, maybe things start to look a little better for you and your family.”
“What’s this?” she said, her lip curling. “A carrot to go with the stick?”
“No. SIS is going to be hard to win over. Raj Shah is unhappy. The mandarins had to be persuaded that I shouldn’t just plug you here and now. You’ve got a lot to do before they think about rewarding you. But the status quo can be maintained in the meantime. You can go home to your son. Your parents get to keep their house. The account in Zurich, the one the SVR has been paying into—VX might even consider the possibility that you can keep that. But that’s all up to you.”
She looked away and clenched her jaw. “How did you know? About me—how did you find out? Who told you?”
“Does that make any difference?”
“Was it BLUEBIRD?” she asked.
“Did the Center ask you to find him?”
“Or her,” she corrected. “They asked. But I never could.”
“How you were found out doesn’t matter,” Milton said. “You were found out.” He looked at her. “What do you want to do?”
“What choice do I have?”
Milton shook his head. “You don’t.”
She stood, gathered the sheet around her, and sat back down again. All the warmth from last night was gone now, replaced by bitterness and resentment. Milton wondered whether she ever had liked him, or whether she was just an accomplished and convincing actress. He knew: she was playing him. He was old enough and jaded enough not to take it personally, but, despite that, he still felt a tinge of regret.
“Fine,” she said quietly. “What do you need me to do?”
“I have some questions about the rendezvous this morning,” Milton said. “I need to understand what the SVR is planning to do.”
“There’s a man,” she began. “His name is Stepanov. He works for Primakov—I think he does the kind of thing you do. He’s going to be waiting. He said that he’ll have a small team. They have orders to arrest you and Romanova.”
Milton sat down in the chair opposite her. He needed to get all the information he could as quickly as possible. What happened next—whether they went ahead or bailed—would depend upon what he learned.
69
Stepanov and Mitrokhin sat in the car, both of them staring through the windshield at the men and women who made their way to and from the railway station. It wasn’t a busy station, stuck at the end of the line in a district of Russia that had very little to offer unless one worked in aviation. Stepanov was alert, fortified by a cup of strong coffee that he had bought from a vendor as he scouted the terminus on foot half an hour earlier. He watched as a family made their way through the tall doors and into the pink-painted building. Others dawdled, perhaps surprised by the heat that was unusual for this part of the country. Stepanov had started to sweat the moment he had stepped out of the air-conditioned cocoon of the car, and now his shirt was wet and perspiration ran down his forehead. It felt like bathing in warm water. He was glad to be inside again.
He looked at his watch. “Five minutes,” he said.
“Do you think she will come?” Mitrokhin asked him.
“They will,” he said. “If not today, then tomorrow. Perhaps she just watches today. Either way, if she is here, we will take her.”
Both men were armed. Their MP-443s were on the backseat, but they had chosen to carry the two SR-3 Vikhrs. The carbines offered the mix of power and portability that they needed. They did not know if the British agent was armed, but it didn’t matter; he would be badly outgunned.
Stepanov looked out of the windshield again. He picked out the other agents that he had selected for this detail. They were from Directorate S, their discretion assured. The old man in the cloth cap sitting on the bench was a retired agent. He had been picked because he had worked for Stepanov for years and because his age meant that he could blend into the background without arousing even the first shred of suspicion. The couple sitting on the grassy knoll listening to music? They had flown in from Moscow yesterday. The bum slumped against the building, seemingly drunk? He had served in the Directorate as an illegal in Greece and Macedonia. There were six of them in total, heavy coverage on the location that Romanova had chosen for the rendezvous.
Stepanov looked at his watch. Two minutes to midday.
“Come on,” Mitrokhin said under his breath, unfolding the buttstock of the Vikhr and flipping up the rear sight.
“Be patient,” Stepanov said. “She will come. We just need to wait.”
He looked at his watch again.
Milton drove the hire car to the railway station. Ross was next to him, staring out of the window and saying nothing. Milton knew that he was taking a risk. And not just a small risk. The RV point would be heavy with SVR or FSB agents, a trap waiting to snap shut as soon as Anastasiya Romanova raised her head above the parapet. His fate was now tied to Ross’s and, more specifically, to the mole within the SVR who had exposed her. He was relying on the hope that the information that had been supplied to him was accurate, and that the plan that had been concocted would work. If it did not—if BLUEBIRD had been compromised, or if Ross was preparing something unexpected—then Milton’s future would be bleak: weeks of interrogation in the Lubyanka, a show trial to demonstrate Britain’s perfidy, and then a short and unpleasant existence in a Siberian camp.
He glanced across at Ross now. She was still staring out of the window, biting down on the corner of her lip. What was she thinking? Was she weighing up the choices, assessing the benefits and disbenefits of one of them over the other? There was no way of knowing, and that made Milton uncomfortable. Ignorance was dangerous.
The Russians had mounted an elegant operation, and Ross had been at the heart of it. She had been persuasive and Milton had harboured not even the faintest suspicion that she might have betrayed them. She had shown nothing to suggest it, and the intelligence that he had received from BLUEBIRD during their layover in Vladivostok had taken him completely by surprise. But that intelligence was categorical: she had been a Directorate S sleeper ever since her recruitment as a student in Moscow ten years before. BLUEBIRD had only just learned of Ross’s treachery and he had taken a significant personal risk to deliver it in person. He had waited for Ross to leave Milton; it was ironic that Ross had chosen that moment to meet with Stepanov.
Milton thought back to the brief airport rendezvous with BLUEBIRD. No one at VX had ever seen the agent before and Milton had been surprised by his appearance; he was much younger than he would have expected for someone with the access to both the FSB and the SVR that, Milton understood, BLUEBIRD had demonstrated during the years that he had worked as a British asset. There had been no time for a conversation, and Milton would not have asked in any event, but he wondered whether it was BLUEBIRD that he had met or an emissary. His suspicion complicated matters—he would report it in due course—but, for now, there was nothing for it other than to continue as planned.
He looked back to Ross. Her hands were in her lap, her right hand massaging the joints of her left. It was difficult not to be impressed by her assiduousness. She had been working them all along. There had not been enough time at the airport for him to have been fully briefed, but Milton could read between the lines: he could see how Ross had put her head down and built up her career, how she had ensured that she was in position to take over the running of the dissidents and defectors once Leonard Geggel had retired. He knew that Geggel had been put out to pasture thanks to errors in his handling of an agent; Milton wondered whether Ross had been responsible for that, opening up a vacancy that she had been able to fill. It would all come out eventually.
Milton read the newspapers and knew about the deaths of Russian dissidents in recent years. The diplomat who had died before meeting prosecutors to discuss Russian activities in Italy; the oil tycoon and friend to a jailed dissident who had died of a suspected embolism; the oligarch who was found hanging from a cupboard rail in his Berkshire mansion; the ex-spy who had died beneath the wheels of a Tube train. Those deaths now looked much less like the unfortunate accidents that the police had categorised them as being and more like the assassinations that SIS had always suspected. Some of those men, and others who had died in similar circumstances, had been hidden from the SVR with fresh identities, supposedly put out of reach. Just like Pyotr Aleksandrov had been put out of reach. Ross had killed Aleksandrov, just as surely as if she had put a gun to his head herself. She had marked him for death, and perhaps she had marked the others, too. She had found herself in a compromised position, but she was evidently smart and ruthless. He wondered, again, whether there was another card that she still had to play.
70
They rolled into the parking lot outside the railway station. It was empty, and Smith drove across it so that he could park nearer to the buildings. Ross ran her palm over the hip pocket of her trousers. She had taken the lipstick that Stepanov had given her and dropped it inside; she could feel the hard metal tube against her leg. Using it was an option. Stepanov had said that it would be effective up to two metres. She just had to point it and twist the end and the single round would fire. Smith had no reason to suspect it; she could shoot him in the back and run. But what then? What of her son? She would never see him again. She couldn’t do it.
“Come on,” Smith said. “Let’s go.”
Ross opened the door of the car and stepped outside. Smith did the same, then reached down and collected the newspaper that had been delivered to the room with his gun. Ross looked at him and gritted her teeth at how comprehensively they had outmanoeuvred her. She had had no idea that they knew about her. She wondered how long he had hidden the knowledge. When had he been told about her? And by whom? It must have been BLUEBIRD. She knew that it was an academic question, at least for the moment. They had her on a hook now, ready to dangle her in front of Primakov and Stepanov and the rest of Directorate S, the bait to lure them into a trap that would unravel the work that she had done for them for so long.
It wasn’t that Ross’s beliefs were offended by what had been forced upon her that morning. She had no political leanings in either direction. The professor who had recruited her into the SVR had known her well enough not to try and persuade her with philosophical or ethical arguments, had not tried to sell her on the evils of the west, the purity of Russia or the benefit to the world of levelling the geopolitical playing field. No, Ross had been persuaded to work for the SVR because of a more practical motivation: money. They had offered to pay her handsomely and, as she delivered more and more valuable intelligence, they had reacted with correspondingly larger amounts. She knew that she was one of their most valuable assets, buried deep within SIS and marked for a significant career there, and, true to their word, they paid accordingly. Her Swiss account contained nearly a million pounds, and the flow of money had included the largest payment yet after she had located Pyotr Aleksandrov for them.
So, no, it wasn’t her beliefs that had been offended. It was her pride. She was upset because she had been duped. The stuffed shirts at VX had made her look like a fool, and it was that that she found so hard to swallow.
Smith left the keys in the ignition.
“Ready?” he said.
“This isn’t going to work,” she muttered.
“You’d better hope it does.”
“Or what? My life is over whichever way this goes.”
He stared at her; his eyes were the coldest, most piercing blue. “It doesn’t have to be. Make up for what you’ve done and things can be as they were.”
“Really?” she said. “You’ll excuse me if I’m not overcome with enthusiasm.”
“I don’t really care. You brought this on yourself. You’ve been given a chance to fix it.”
“Or I could give the signal and have you arrested.”
“You could. But you know what that would mean for your family. I don’t think you’ll do that.”
She shivered in his stare, but ignored him. Perhaps she could make him a little apprehensive. She had almost no influence now; she held onto the small amount that she had left.
Smith led the way across the parking lot toward the station building. Ross looked around. It was a wide space, and it was almost completely empty. There were five cars and a dirty white van parked near to the building, but that was all. There were a few men and women outside the station: a man on a bench, a couple talking animatedly to one another. She didn’t recognise any of them, although she knew that she wouldn’t. They would be FSB or SVR, trained in surveillance, practiced at hiding in plain sight, giving nothing away.
Smith walked on, and Ross turned to glance into the cabin of a car that had been parked twenty feet away from them. Stepanov was inside. He looked at her, and, for a moment, their eyes locked. She knew that all she would need to do was touch her ear and he would bring his agents out into the open, weapons drawn. Smith would be arrested but she would be blown; her usefulness to the Center would be at an end and her family would suffer. She would have her money, enough so that she would never again have to work, but she would have no life. Her usefulness to Deputy Director Primakov would be at an end. And she would be stuck in Moscow forever, a prisoner in a gilded cage.
She didn’t know whether she would be able to do it.
71
Milton held the newspaper in his hand and led the way across the parking lot. Ross followed alongside him.
“Do you see anyone?” he asked Ross.
“No,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t see anyone,” she said.
Milton felt an itch in the centre of his back, right between his shoulder blades, a sensation of exposure and vulnerability. His skin was clammy and sweat started to bead on his scalp. It was hot, but that wasn’t it.
It was the dream.
It wasn’t far away.
Michael Pope was in the back of the van. It was a GAZelle, a commercial van made by Gaz in Nizhny Novgorod. It bore the livery of a local wholesale grocery business, the logo and script barely visible beneath a layer of dirt and crud. The vehicle was parked with its rear end facing the entrance to the station, and the filthy windows in the double doors offered a view of the steps, the pedestrianised area and some of the cars that had been parked nearby.
Bryan Duffy was sitting in the driver’s seat. He had stolen the van earlier that morning. Duffy was Number Eleven. Pope had worked with him before, but knew very little about him beyond his name—Duffy had revealed it at a bar in Vienna while they worked an operation two months earlier—and his designation.
Pope and Duffy had tipped the crates of produce out of the back of the van before they had driven to the station, and now there was enough space for him, their equipment and three or four others. Pope was dressed in black, with a black balaclava covering his face. He had a UCIW on a sling that he wore over his shoulder, the automatic cradled in front of his body. The gun had the shorter barrel and Pope had screwed a suppressor onto it. He had two spare magazines in the pouches of his combat trousers and a full magazine in the weapon.
Pope saw Milton and Jessie Ross arrive in a hire car. He watched as they stepped out and made their way to the station. He scanned the other vehicles and checked out the men and women who were gathered in the vicinity of the station. He knew, of course, that some—perhaps many—of them would be SVR agents waiting to snatch Anastasiya Romanova should she dare to show her face. How many? He had no idea.
“You think she’ll come?” Duffy asked over the radio.
“I don’t know.”
“Midday,” Duffy said.
“Check,” Pope said, and then, before Duffy could speak again, he saw her. “Coming out now.”
He reached for his radio and depressed the broadcast switch two times.
Here we go.
The radio squelched twice in Milton’s earpiece and then he saw her. He recognised Anastasiya Romanova from the photograph that he had been shown. She crossed the station concourse and stepped outside, coming down the broad steps that led into the pink-painted building. She was wearing jeans and a plain white t-shirt with a sunhat shielding her eyes from the glare of the midday sun. A train wheezed as it pulled away and Milton wondered whether she had arrived on it. That would have been clever; the SVR would have expected her to arrive from the town itself, to make her way into the station rather than coming out of it. It wouldn’t have made a difference—they would have recognised her either way—but perhaps she was thinking, acting cautiously, and that would be a good thing.
She paused on the steps, looking left and right.
Milton took Ross by the elbow. “Stay close to me. Do what I tell you and I’ll get you out alive—you have my word.”
Ross didn’t reply. Milton spared her a quick glance and saw that she was pale, sweat beading on her brow. No time to worry about that now. She was resilient—a survivor—and he had no option but to hope that she had calculated her odds and come to the conclusion that she was better off with him.
Milton set off again, headed for Anastasiya. The woman saw him coming, squinting in the sunlight despite the hat. She looked down at the newspaper, then back up at him. Her face flickered with fear and uncertainty. Milton smiled at her, as if that might make a difference.
“Hello,” Milton said in English when he was close enough for Romanova to hear him.
“Are you…?” Her English was halting, and the words trailed away.
Milton spoke slowly and firmly. “I’m here to get you out. Do you have the data that you want to sell?”
She looked confused. “My English,” she said. “Not good.”
Ross spoke in Russian. Milton didn’t know what she had said, and had no choice but to hope she was playing straight. He watched Anastasiya’s face and saw understanding, and then a nod. She replied in Russian.
“She has it,” Ross said.
“Tell her we’re going to get her out,” he said to Ross.
Ross started to speak, but, before she could finish, Milton saw movement all around them. It happened at once, on command, a coordinated response. The SVR thought that their prey were in the trap, and now they were rushing to close it. An old man wearing a cloth cap stood up from the bench that he had been sitting on. A couple sitting on the grassy knoll away to the left stood up, too, the woman taking a weapon from the cloth bag at her feet. The bum slumped against the building, playing drunk, now stood up straight and took a pistol out from the folds of his rags.
Milton counted four of them, with the man in the Mercedes making five.
“Don’t move!”
The order was barked out in English and Milton turned to face the speaker. He was out of the car, a pistol in his hand aimed straight at them.
Milton raised his hands.
“Do as they say,” Milton said quietly, his instruction intended for both women. “Stand still and put your hands above your head. It’ll be all right.”
Stepanov gave the command and Mitrokhin knew that it was time to move. He opened the door and stepped out into the midday heat. Stepanov was out of the car, too, his carbine aimed at Smith and the two women.
“Don’t move!” Stepanov yelled out.
The others swept into action now, abandoning their disguises as they pulled weapons and aimed them toward the entrance to the station.
Mitrokhin lowered his Vikhr, took out the Beretta that he had been given and took a step forward so he could aim over the hood of the car. He slid his finger through the guard, sighted, and fired three times.
He couldn’t really miss. Stepanov’s body jerked as the bullets punched him in the back. He stumbled ahead, his arms splayed out wide, and then he fell to his knees.
72
Milton had seen BLUEBIRD get out of the car and knew what was about to happen. He reached out for Romanova and Ross and held onto their shoulders, drawing both closer to him as BLUEBIRD aimed his pistol and drilled Stepanov in the back. His shirt bloomed red as the bullets punched out of his chest and he fell to the ground.
Milton had seen the other SVR agents: the tramp, the old man, the couple on the knoll. The shock of the gunshots froze all of them in their tracks, their attention drawn to the body of Stepanov and then to the man who had shot him.
Distraction was what their plan had demanded. Now they had it.
Pope came out of the parked van wearing a UCIW on its sling. He aimed at the SVR agent dressed as a bum and fired a burst. The volley stitched the man in the torso and he stumbled back against the wall, sliding down it until he was slumped back against it once again. Pope swivelled and sighted the old man who had pulled a pistol from his jacket and fired again, another three-round burst. Two shots cracked into the wall, blowing out puffs of mortar and brick dust, but the third drilled the man in the cheek. His head snapped back and he went down, poleaxed, and didn’t move.
The dirty white van jerked away from the parking space, leaving rubber as the driver swung the wheel, smoke spilling out of the wheel arches until the tyres gripped and the vehicle rushed ahead. Milton held onto Ross and Romanova and moved them ahead. The van slithered to a stop; Milton opened the back door and bundled both women inside.
There was a rattle of automatic gunfire and a jagged line of holes appeared in the flank of the van. Milton ducked, drawing his Beretta and swivelling in the direction of the inbound fire. The sun was low and in his eyes, and he couldn’t make out the shooters. He ducked as the automatic rattled again, more rounds slamming into the side of the van, one of them punching through the windshield and spiderwebbing it.
BLUEBIRD had moved away from the car. He aimed at the shooter on the knoll and fired, two contained bursts, and drilled the man in the back before he could fire again. The female agent who had been part of the couple moved down the slope away from BLUEBIRD and, as a cloud covered the sun, Milton was able to draw a bead on her. He fired, two careful shots, aiming into the mass between her head and waist. Both shots found their mark. She dropped onto her back, her hands pressed against her gut.
BLUEBIRD was ten feet away.
He dropped the Beretta to the ground. Milton collected it.
BLUEBIRD’s face was calm as he gave Milton a single nod of his head. Milton raised his pistol, aimed low, and shot him in the leg. He fell to the ground, his hands instinctively clutched around the wound, blood already running between his fingers.
Milton pulled himself into the back of the van. Light spilled into the interior from the bullet holes that jagged up in a long diagonal. He slapped his hand on the side of the van and the vehicle jerked away, the doors still open. Eleven slammed on the brakes and Pope pulled himself inside. Milton closed the door as Pope yelled out that they were ready to go. The engine revved loudly, the rubber squealed against the asphalt, and Milton braced himself against the wheel arch as the van swung left and right, picking up speed. They roared across the parking space and onto the road. Milton looked back through the tinted window at the confusion in their wake, bodies scattered across the ground like ninepins.
Milton turned back to the interior. Anastasiya Romanov was sitting against the wheel arch, her legs bent and her arms around her knees, clutching them tight. Ross was next to her, her eyes wide. Neither of them spoke.
“Where are the change-ups?” Milton asked.
“Two minutes away,” Pope said.
Milton turned back to the window and looked for any sign of pursuit. There was none. The agents had no other support, just as BLUEBIRD had suggested would be the case. The SVR had allowed arrogance to get the better of them. That had been their undoing, together with the closed nature of the operation that had been insisted upon by whomever it was in the Center who wanted Anastasiya Romanova for him or herself. Milton didn’t know anything other than what BLUEBIRD had told him in the lounge at Vladivostok: that Jessie Ross had been turned and that he would be at the RV and would do his best to assist.
Milton had been given only a few hours to put the operation together, and most of his time had been circumscribed because he had been with Ross. Pope had taken the JAL flight to Narita after the assassination of the Ryans, but, instead of continuing to London, he had taken the next flight to Vladivostok where he had collected the arriving Eleven before driving north. The two of them had handled the detail, including sourcing the weapons and arranging for their exfiltration. The biggest risk was that BLUEBIRD’s involvement, although valuable, would lead to him being blown. Someone might have seen him firing on the Russians, but, Milton thought, the scene had been so disorientating that any testimony would be unreliable. The men that BLUEBIRD had killed were shot with 19mm Parabellum ammunition, rather than the Russian 39mm cartridges that the Vikhrs fired, and Milton had collected the Beretta that he had used. And then BLUEBIRD had required that he be shot in order to lend weight to the story that he would tell. Milton didn’t know whether there would be witnesses, and hoped that he had been convincing.
Milton called to Pope over the sound of the engine.
“How many cars do we have?” Milton asked.
“Two.”
“You take Romanova.”
“And Ross?”
“I’ve got her. Take Eleven, too. Romanova’s the prize. I’d rather you had the extra manpower.”
Pope looked at him quizzically, as if wondering whether to object, but he knew Milton well enough to know that he wouldn’t change his mind. “There are extra weapons in both cars. Guns and explosives. We probably won’t need them, but…”
“What’s the route for exfil?”
“Drive to Svetlaya. It’s on the coast—twenty hours if you don’t stop. There’ll be a trawler waiting there. It’ll take us out into the Sea of Japan. HMS Sutherland will pick us up and we’ll be transferred from there.”
“I’ll go first,” Milton said. “Follow a mile behind. If they stop me, you might be able to turn around.”
Pope put out his hand. “Good luck, Milton. See you in Svetlaya.”
“Good luck,” Milton said, clasping Pope’s hand.
73
Ross was jostled and buffeted as the van raced away from the station. She was sitting next to Romanova. The Russian was terrified, her knees pressed up to her chest and anchored there behind locked arms. Romanova had the wheel arch on one side and Ross on the other, bumping left and right as they progressed. Ross was frightened, too, but there was more to it than that. She had seen everything: Stepanov ordering them to be still, the man behind him—she didn’t know him, but knew it had to be BLUEBIRD—opening fire, the other agent they had left behind at Moscow Station appearing from the back of the van with an automatic rifle. Ross was frightened, but she was also angry and embarrassed.
The van swerved sharply to the left and then skidded to a stop. Smith opened the doors and hopped down. They were in a parking lot near the river terminal. There were half a dozen vehicles scattered around the lot. The others disembarked the van and the driver led the way to two scruffy rentals parked next to each other. Ross looked left and right and saw no cameras or any other security; an elderly man made his way up the steps to the terminal, but he was staring at his phone and didn’t look as if he had noticed them.
Romanova was taken to a BMW.
Smith took Ross by the wrist and led her to a Volvo.
“How lovely,” she said. “A nice drive together, just the two of us.”
“It’ll be much more pleasant if you spare me the attitude,” Smith said. “You’ll be back home in a day or two to see your son and your parents.”
“You think? We’ll never get out of here.”
Smith opened the door. “Get in.”
He held the door open for her and then went around to the driver’s side. She lowered herself into the seat and stared out of the windscreen into the bright blue sky, a wide canvas over the river and the town beyond. She put her finger to her lips and chewed on a nail. Her trousers were tight against her thighs and she could feel the lipstick in her pocket. Smith thought he had power over her. He thought that he had taken away her ability to choose. He hadn’t. She still had the elektricheskiy pistolet. She could decide what happened next.
Smith started the engine and pulled out. “You might want to get some sleep,” he said. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
68
Milton slept lightly, and when he awoke, it took him a moment of staring up at the ceiling before he remembered where he was. He felt the warmth of a body next to him, and when he turned over, he saw Jessie Ross lying there. She was on her front and had pushed the covers away from her body at some point in the night. Milton reached for his watch and checked the time: six. He got up as quietly as he could, padded across the room and, checking that Ross was still asleep, collected his clothes and took them into the bathroom. He took out his phone, opened the encrypted messaging app and sent a quick message. He showered and dressed with a pulse of anxiety in his gut. That was to be expected. There was no way of telling how the morning would go. He reminded himself that he had no choice, and that he should have no sympathy, either. Jessie had brought all of this on herself.
A return message buzzed onto his phone. He opened the door to the hotel hallway. A plastic bag containing a newspaper had been left on the handle. He took the bag—it felt heavier than it ought to have done—and replaced the Do Not Disturb sign. He closed the door as quietly as he could and edged back into the room.
“Morning.”
He turned to the bed. Jessie was awake, watching him through heavy-lidded eyes.
“What time is it?”
“Six fifteen,” he said.
“What’s that?” she said, nodding at the plastic bag.
Milton took the newspaper out of the bag. It was Komsomolskaya Pravda, the paper that Anastasiya Romanova had said he should be carrying when he went for the meet. He sat down and laid the bag on his lap; it wasn’t empty. He reached inside and took out a Beretta 92 with two spare, fully loaded magazines. He placed all three items on the bureau and watched as Jessie’s eyes were drawn to them.
“Where did you get that?” she said.
“I know, Jessie.”
“You know what?”
“Everything. I know it all.”
Ross sat up, reaching down to wrap the sheet around her body. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“How about by making sense?”
“You’ve been working for the SVR.” He gave her a chance to confirm it, but she said nothing. He ignored her truculent silence. “Directorate S? It doesn’t really matter—you’ll give us all the details later.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Just listen—” Milton began.
She ignored him, surging up out of the bed and trying to pass him on the way to the door. Milton got to his feet and stepped across to block her way. Ross tried to shoulder her way past but he was too strong for her; he grabbed her by the shoulders and held her in place.
“Get off me,” she spat.
“Calm down,” Milton said.
“Get your fucking hands off me!” She shook his hands off, raising her hand to strike him. Milton grabbed her wrist with his left hand and then used his right to take her arm at a point three fingers down from her elbow. He dug his thumb into the pressure point. Her face crumpled with pain and Milton used the moment to guide her back over to the bed and down onto it once again.
“Relax,” Milton said, releasing the grip.
“I’ll scream,” she threatened.
“I wouldn’t do that. Think about your parents, Jessie. Your son.”
Milton hated to have to threaten her like that, but he had no choice. He had to get through to her quickly, and she had brought everything on herself. Her face slackened as the anger drained out of it. She gaped for a moment, but then her eyes burned again.
“You bastard,” she said.
“That’s what happens when you play the game and you get caught. What do you expect?”
“My son—where is he?”
“He’s with your parents. They haven’t been approached, not yet, and the preference is that they won’t be. But that’s up to you. You get to choose what happens next.”
“Really?” She shook her head derisively. “Do I?”
“You’re lucky.” He ignored the resentment shining from her eyes. “You can offer valuable service—valuable enough, perhaps, to balance out what you’ve done. You have two choices. One is more palatable than the other.”
“Let me guess: one choice is bad for my son?”
Milton hated himself for what he had to say. “He’ll be placed into care. And life will be made difficult for your parents, too. Your father’s business will lose its export licence, for example. It will find itself in legal trouble, and then it’ll be bankrupted. It would be a simple thing to wipe them out—all it would take would be a word from the people I work for. They’d do it without thinking twice. You’ve pissed them off, Jessie.”
She stared at him, daring him.
“It’s not a bluff—none of this is a bluff.”
“And what about me? What if I don’t agree?” She looked at the gun. “You going to use that?”
Milton’s throat was dry, and he feared that if he replied he would betray the nausea that bubbled in his stomach. He hoped that Ross would see sense, and that he was not in the business of making baseless threats. His palms began to sweat.
“The other choice?” she asked.
“You work for VX—properly, this time, against the Russians.”
“Just like that?”
“It doesn’t need to be difficult. You just follow through with the operation as you planned it. We go to the rendezvous with Romanova. There will be an incident. I know that the Center is using us to get to her. They’ll have agents waiting, but I’m going to take care of them. We take Romanova and leave the country, just like we planned.”
“And then?”
“And then, once you’re back in London, you signal the Center that you’re fine, you haven’t been compromised and that you’re awaiting instructions.”
“And the Center wouldn’t think that I’ve been blown? Or that I tipped you off?”
“Why would they? You’ve never played them before. You’re an agent at VX, in the heart of the secret service. They’ll look for reasons to believe that you’re clean. You’re the golden goose. They’ll hate even the thought that they might have lost you. And why would they think you’ve been blown? They have no reason to think that you’ve been exposed. You did your part—you led them to Romanova, just like you promised, but we were wise to it. They know we have a source—they’ll think BLUEBIRD tipped us.”
“As simple as that?”
“It can be. It’s up to you—you just need to be yourself, as if nothing has happened.”
Milton knew how that would be done: she would be provided with a stream of legitimate intelligence that she could leak, nothing too compromising, yet valuable enough to keep the Center’s interest piqued. A promotion would follow, placing her in a more senior role, putting temptation in front of Russian noses, everything sharpened with the promise of more to come. The Center would be greedy, rapacious, and fed enough intelligence to ignore the nagging feeling that perhaps they should be more circumspect with their once golden girl. She would have to be convincing, but she had already demonstrated that she could do that; she had fooled British intelligence for years.
“They’re not stupid, Smith,” she said.
“You need to be persuasive. You do that, maybe things start to look a little better for you and your family.”
“What’s this?” she said, her lip curling. “A carrot to go with the stick?”
“No. SIS is going to be hard to win over. Raj Shah is unhappy. The mandarins had to be persuaded that I shouldn’t just plug you here and now. You’ve got a lot to do before they think about rewarding you. But the status quo can be maintained in the meantime. You can go home to your son. Your parents get to keep their house. The account in Zurich, the one the SVR has been paying into—VX might even consider the possibility that you can keep that. But that’s all up to you.”
She looked away and clenched her jaw. “How did you know? About me—how did you find out? Who told you?”
“Does that make any difference?”
“Was it BLUEBIRD?” she asked.
“Did the Center ask you to find him?”
“Or her,” she corrected. “They asked. But I never could.”
“How you were found out doesn’t matter,” Milton said. “You were found out.” He looked at her. “What do you want to do?”
“What choice do I have?”
Milton shook his head. “You don’t.”
She stood, gathered the sheet around her, and sat back down again. All the warmth from last night was gone now, replaced by bitterness and resentment. Milton wondered whether she ever had liked him, or whether she was just an accomplished and convincing actress. He knew: she was playing him. He was old enough and jaded enough not to take it personally, but, despite that, he still felt a tinge of regret.
“Fine,” she said quietly. “What do you need me to do?”
“I have some questions about the rendezvous this morning,” Milton said. “I need to understand what the SVR is planning to do.”
“There’s a man,” she began. “His name is Stepanov. He works for Primakov—I think he does the kind of thing you do. He’s going to be waiting. He said that he’ll have a small team. They have orders to arrest you and Romanova.”
Milton sat down in the chair opposite her. He needed to get all the information he could as quickly as possible. What happened next—whether they went ahead or bailed—would depend upon what he learned.
69
Stepanov and Mitrokhin sat in the car, both of them staring through the windshield at the men and women who made their way to and from the railway station. It wasn’t a busy station, stuck at the end of the line in a district of Russia that had very little to offer unless one worked in aviation. Stepanov was alert, fortified by a cup of strong coffee that he had bought from a vendor as he scouted the terminus on foot half an hour earlier. He watched as a family made their way through the tall doors and into the pink-painted building. Others dawdled, perhaps surprised by the heat that was unusual for this part of the country. Stepanov had started to sweat the moment he had stepped out of the air-conditioned cocoon of the car, and now his shirt was wet and perspiration ran down his forehead. It felt like bathing in warm water. He was glad to be inside again.
He looked at his watch. “Five minutes,” he said.
“Do you think she will come?” Mitrokhin asked him.
“They will,” he said. “If not today, then tomorrow. Perhaps she just watches today. Either way, if she is here, we will take her.”
Both men were armed. Their MP-443s were on the backseat, but they had chosen to carry the two SR-3 Vikhrs. The carbines offered the mix of power and portability that they needed. They did not know if the British agent was armed, but it didn’t matter; he would be badly outgunned.
Stepanov looked out of the windshield again. He picked out the other agents that he had selected for this detail. They were from Directorate S, their discretion assured. The old man in the cloth cap sitting on the bench was a retired agent. He had been picked because he had worked for Stepanov for years and because his age meant that he could blend into the background without arousing even the first shred of suspicion. The couple sitting on the grassy knoll listening to music? They had flown in from Moscow yesterday. The bum slumped against the building, seemingly drunk? He had served in the Directorate as an illegal in Greece and Macedonia. There were six of them in total, heavy coverage on the location that Romanova had chosen for the rendezvous.
Stepanov looked at his watch. Two minutes to midday.
“Come on,” Mitrokhin said under his breath, unfolding the buttstock of the Vikhr and flipping up the rear sight.
“Be patient,” Stepanov said. “She will come. We just need to wait.”
He looked at his watch again.
Milton drove the hire car to the railway station. Ross was next to him, staring out of the window and saying nothing. Milton knew that he was taking a risk. And not just a small risk. The RV point would be heavy with SVR or FSB agents, a trap waiting to snap shut as soon as Anastasiya Romanova raised her head above the parapet. His fate was now tied to Ross’s and, more specifically, to the mole within the SVR who had exposed her. He was relying on the hope that the information that had been supplied to him was accurate, and that the plan that had been concocted would work. If it did not—if BLUEBIRD had been compromised, or if Ross was preparing something unexpected—then Milton’s future would be bleak: weeks of interrogation in the Lubyanka, a show trial to demonstrate Britain’s perfidy, and then a short and unpleasant existence in a Siberian camp.
He glanced across at Ross now. She was still staring out of the window, biting down on the corner of her lip. What was she thinking? Was she weighing up the choices, assessing the benefits and disbenefits of one of them over the other? There was no way of knowing, and that made Milton uncomfortable. Ignorance was dangerous.
The Russians had mounted an elegant operation, and Ross had been at the heart of it. She had been persuasive and Milton had harboured not even the faintest suspicion that she might have betrayed them. She had shown nothing to suggest it, and the intelligence that he had received from BLUEBIRD during their layover in Vladivostok had taken him completely by surprise. But that intelligence was categorical: she had been a Directorate S sleeper ever since her recruitment as a student in Moscow ten years before. BLUEBIRD had only just learned of Ross’s treachery and he had taken a significant personal risk to deliver it in person. He had waited for Ross to leave Milton; it was ironic that Ross had chosen that moment to meet with Stepanov.
Milton thought back to the brief airport rendezvous with BLUEBIRD. No one at VX had ever seen the agent before and Milton had been surprised by his appearance; he was much younger than he would have expected for someone with the access to both the FSB and the SVR that, Milton understood, BLUEBIRD had demonstrated during the years that he had worked as a British asset. There had been no time for a conversation, and Milton would not have asked in any event, but he wondered whether it was BLUEBIRD that he had met or an emissary. His suspicion complicated matters—he would report it in due course—but, for now, there was nothing for it other than to continue as planned.
He looked back to Ross. Her hands were in her lap, her right hand massaging the joints of her left. It was difficult not to be impressed by her assiduousness. She had been working them all along. There had not been enough time at the airport for him to have been fully briefed, but Milton could read between the lines: he could see how Ross had put her head down and built up her career, how she had ensured that she was in position to take over the running of the dissidents and defectors once Leonard Geggel had retired. He knew that Geggel had been put out to pasture thanks to errors in his handling of an agent; Milton wondered whether Ross had been responsible for that, opening up a vacancy that she had been able to fill. It would all come out eventually.
Milton read the newspapers and knew about the deaths of Russian dissidents in recent years. The diplomat who had died before meeting prosecutors to discuss Russian activities in Italy; the oil tycoon and friend to a jailed dissident who had died of a suspected embolism; the oligarch who was found hanging from a cupboard rail in his Berkshire mansion; the ex-spy who had died beneath the wheels of a Tube train. Those deaths now looked much less like the unfortunate accidents that the police had categorised them as being and more like the assassinations that SIS had always suspected. Some of those men, and others who had died in similar circumstances, had been hidden from the SVR with fresh identities, supposedly put out of reach. Just like Pyotr Aleksandrov had been put out of reach. Ross had killed Aleksandrov, just as surely as if she had put a gun to his head herself. She had marked him for death, and perhaps she had marked the others, too. She had found herself in a compromised position, but she was evidently smart and ruthless. He wondered, again, whether there was another card that she still had to play.
70
They rolled into the parking lot outside the railway station. It was empty, and Smith drove across it so that he could park nearer to the buildings. Ross ran her palm over the hip pocket of her trousers. She had taken the lipstick that Stepanov had given her and dropped it inside; she could feel the hard metal tube against her leg. Using it was an option. Stepanov had said that it would be effective up to two metres. She just had to point it and twist the end and the single round would fire. Smith had no reason to suspect it; she could shoot him in the back and run. But what then? What of her son? She would never see him again. She couldn’t do it.
“Come on,” Smith said. “Let’s go.”
Ross opened the door of the car and stepped outside. Smith did the same, then reached down and collected the newspaper that had been delivered to the room with his gun. Ross looked at him and gritted her teeth at how comprehensively they had outmanoeuvred her. She had had no idea that they knew about her. She wondered how long he had hidden the knowledge. When had he been told about her? And by whom? It must have been BLUEBIRD. She knew that it was an academic question, at least for the moment. They had her on a hook now, ready to dangle her in front of Primakov and Stepanov and the rest of Directorate S, the bait to lure them into a trap that would unravel the work that she had done for them for so long.
It wasn’t that Ross’s beliefs were offended by what had been forced upon her that morning. She had no political leanings in either direction. The professor who had recruited her into the SVR had known her well enough not to try and persuade her with philosophical or ethical arguments, had not tried to sell her on the evils of the west, the purity of Russia or the benefit to the world of levelling the geopolitical playing field. No, Ross had been persuaded to work for the SVR because of a more practical motivation: money. They had offered to pay her handsomely and, as she delivered more and more valuable intelligence, they had reacted with correspondingly larger amounts. She knew that she was one of their most valuable assets, buried deep within SIS and marked for a significant career there, and, true to their word, they paid accordingly. Her Swiss account contained nearly a million pounds, and the flow of money had included the largest payment yet after she had located Pyotr Aleksandrov for them.
So, no, it wasn’t her beliefs that had been offended. It was her pride. She was upset because she had been duped. The stuffed shirts at VX had made her look like a fool, and it was that that she found so hard to swallow.
Smith left the keys in the ignition.
“Ready?” he said.
“This isn’t going to work,” she muttered.
“You’d better hope it does.”
“Or what? My life is over whichever way this goes.”
He stared at her; his eyes were the coldest, most piercing blue. “It doesn’t have to be. Make up for what you’ve done and things can be as they were.”
“Really?” she said. “You’ll excuse me if I’m not overcome with enthusiasm.”
“I don’t really care. You brought this on yourself. You’ve been given a chance to fix it.”
“Or I could give the signal and have you arrested.”
“You could. But you know what that would mean for your family. I don’t think you’ll do that.”
She shivered in his stare, but ignored him. Perhaps she could make him a little apprehensive. She had almost no influence now; she held onto the small amount that she had left.
Smith led the way across the parking lot toward the station building. Ross looked around. It was a wide space, and it was almost completely empty. There were five cars and a dirty white van parked near to the building, but that was all. There were a few men and women outside the station: a man on a bench, a couple talking animatedly to one another. She didn’t recognise any of them, although she knew that she wouldn’t. They would be FSB or SVR, trained in surveillance, practiced at hiding in plain sight, giving nothing away.
Smith walked on, and Ross turned to glance into the cabin of a car that had been parked twenty feet away from them. Stepanov was inside. He looked at her, and, for a moment, their eyes locked. She knew that all she would need to do was touch her ear and he would bring his agents out into the open, weapons drawn. Smith would be arrested but she would be blown; her usefulness to the Center would be at an end and her family would suffer. She would have her money, enough so that she would never again have to work, but she would have no life. Her usefulness to Deputy Director Primakov would be at an end. And she would be stuck in Moscow forever, a prisoner in a gilded cage.
She didn’t know whether she would be able to do it.
71
Milton held the newspaper in his hand and led the way across the parking lot. Ross followed alongside him.
“Do you see anyone?” he asked Ross.
“No,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t see anyone,” she said.
Milton felt an itch in the centre of his back, right between his shoulder blades, a sensation of exposure and vulnerability. His skin was clammy and sweat started to bead on his scalp. It was hot, but that wasn’t it.
It was the dream.
It wasn’t far away.
Michael Pope was in the back of the van. It was a GAZelle, a commercial van made by Gaz in Nizhny Novgorod. It bore the livery of a local wholesale grocery business, the logo and script barely visible beneath a layer of dirt and crud. The vehicle was parked with its rear end facing the entrance to the station, and the filthy windows in the double doors offered a view of the steps, the pedestrianised area and some of the cars that had been parked nearby.
Bryan Duffy was sitting in the driver’s seat. He had stolen the van earlier that morning. Duffy was Number Eleven. Pope had worked with him before, but knew very little about him beyond his name—Duffy had revealed it at a bar in Vienna while they worked an operation two months earlier—and his designation.
Pope and Duffy had tipped the crates of produce out of the back of the van before they had driven to the station, and now there was enough space for him, their equipment and three or four others. Pope was dressed in black, with a black balaclava covering his face. He had a UCIW on a sling that he wore over his shoulder, the automatic cradled in front of his body. The gun had the shorter barrel and Pope had screwed a suppressor onto it. He had two spare magazines in the pouches of his combat trousers and a full magazine in the weapon.
Pope saw Milton and Jessie Ross arrive in a hire car. He watched as they stepped out and made their way to the station. He scanned the other vehicles and checked out the men and women who were gathered in the vicinity of the station. He knew, of course, that some—perhaps many—of them would be SVR agents waiting to snatch Anastasiya Romanova should she dare to show her face. How many? He had no idea.
“You think she’ll come?” Duffy asked over the radio.
“I don’t know.”
“Midday,” Duffy said.
“Check,” Pope said, and then, before Duffy could speak again, he saw her. “Coming out now.”
He reached for his radio and depressed the broadcast switch two times.
Here we go.
The radio squelched twice in Milton’s earpiece and then he saw her. He recognised Anastasiya Romanova from the photograph that he had been shown. She crossed the station concourse and stepped outside, coming down the broad steps that led into the pink-painted building. She was wearing jeans and a plain white t-shirt with a sunhat shielding her eyes from the glare of the midday sun. A train wheezed as it pulled away and Milton wondered whether she had arrived on it. That would have been clever; the SVR would have expected her to arrive from the town itself, to make her way into the station rather than coming out of it. It wouldn’t have made a difference—they would have recognised her either way—but perhaps she was thinking, acting cautiously, and that would be a good thing.
She paused on the steps, looking left and right.
Milton took Ross by the elbow. “Stay close to me. Do what I tell you and I’ll get you out alive—you have my word.”
Ross didn’t reply. Milton spared her a quick glance and saw that she was pale, sweat beading on her brow. No time to worry about that now. She was resilient—a survivor—and he had no option but to hope that she had calculated her odds and come to the conclusion that she was better off with him.
Milton set off again, headed for Anastasiya. The woman saw him coming, squinting in the sunlight despite the hat. She looked down at the newspaper, then back up at him. Her face flickered with fear and uncertainty. Milton smiled at her, as if that might make a difference.
“Hello,” Milton said in English when he was close enough for Romanova to hear him.
“Are you…?” Her English was halting, and the words trailed away.
Milton spoke slowly and firmly. “I’m here to get you out. Do you have the data that you want to sell?”
She looked confused. “My English,” she said. “Not good.”
Ross spoke in Russian. Milton didn’t know what she had said, and had no choice but to hope she was playing straight. He watched Anastasiya’s face and saw understanding, and then a nod. She replied in Russian.
“She has it,” Ross said.
“Tell her we’re going to get her out,” he said to Ross.
Ross started to speak, but, before she could finish, Milton saw movement all around them. It happened at once, on command, a coordinated response. The SVR thought that their prey were in the trap, and now they were rushing to close it. An old man wearing a cloth cap stood up from the bench that he had been sitting on. A couple sitting on the grassy knoll away to the left stood up, too, the woman taking a weapon from the cloth bag at her feet. The bum slumped against the building, playing drunk, now stood up straight and took a pistol out from the folds of his rags.
Milton counted four of them, with the man in the Mercedes making five.
“Don’t move!”
The order was barked out in English and Milton turned to face the speaker. He was out of the car, a pistol in his hand aimed straight at them.
Milton raised his hands.
“Do as they say,” Milton said quietly, his instruction intended for both women. “Stand still and put your hands above your head. It’ll be all right.”
Stepanov gave the command and Mitrokhin knew that it was time to move. He opened the door and stepped out into the midday heat. Stepanov was out of the car, too, his carbine aimed at Smith and the two women.
“Don’t move!” Stepanov yelled out.
The others swept into action now, abandoning their disguises as they pulled weapons and aimed them toward the entrance to the station.
Mitrokhin lowered his Vikhr, took out the Beretta that he had been given and took a step forward so he could aim over the hood of the car. He slid his finger through the guard, sighted, and fired three times.
He couldn’t really miss. Stepanov’s body jerked as the bullets punched him in the back. He stumbled ahead, his arms splayed out wide, and then he fell to his knees.
72
Milton had seen BLUEBIRD get out of the car and knew what was about to happen. He reached out for Romanova and Ross and held onto their shoulders, drawing both closer to him as BLUEBIRD aimed his pistol and drilled Stepanov in the back. His shirt bloomed red as the bullets punched out of his chest and he fell to the ground.
Milton had seen the other SVR agents: the tramp, the old man, the couple on the knoll. The shock of the gunshots froze all of them in their tracks, their attention drawn to the body of Stepanov and then to the man who had shot him.
Distraction was what their plan had demanded. Now they had it.
Pope came out of the parked van wearing a UCIW on its sling. He aimed at the SVR agent dressed as a bum and fired a burst. The volley stitched the man in the torso and he stumbled back against the wall, sliding down it until he was slumped back against it once again. Pope swivelled and sighted the old man who had pulled a pistol from his jacket and fired again, another three-round burst. Two shots cracked into the wall, blowing out puffs of mortar and brick dust, but the third drilled the man in the cheek. His head snapped back and he went down, poleaxed, and didn’t move.
The dirty white van jerked away from the parking space, leaving rubber as the driver swung the wheel, smoke spilling out of the wheel arches until the tyres gripped and the vehicle rushed ahead. Milton held onto Ross and Romanova and moved them ahead. The van slithered to a stop; Milton opened the back door and bundled both women inside.
There was a rattle of automatic gunfire and a jagged line of holes appeared in the flank of the van. Milton ducked, drawing his Beretta and swivelling in the direction of the inbound fire. The sun was low and in his eyes, and he couldn’t make out the shooters. He ducked as the automatic rattled again, more rounds slamming into the side of the van, one of them punching through the windshield and spiderwebbing it.
BLUEBIRD had moved away from the car. He aimed at the shooter on the knoll and fired, two contained bursts, and drilled the man in the back before he could fire again. The female agent who had been part of the couple moved down the slope away from BLUEBIRD and, as a cloud covered the sun, Milton was able to draw a bead on her. He fired, two careful shots, aiming into the mass between her head and waist. Both shots found their mark. She dropped onto her back, her hands pressed against her gut.
BLUEBIRD was ten feet away.
He dropped the Beretta to the ground. Milton collected it.
BLUEBIRD’s face was calm as he gave Milton a single nod of his head. Milton raised his pistol, aimed low, and shot him in the leg. He fell to the ground, his hands instinctively clutched around the wound, blood already running between his fingers.
Milton pulled himself into the back of the van. Light spilled into the interior from the bullet holes that jagged up in a long diagonal. He slapped his hand on the side of the van and the vehicle jerked away, the doors still open. Eleven slammed on the brakes and Pope pulled himself inside. Milton closed the door as Pope yelled out that they were ready to go. The engine revved loudly, the rubber squealed against the asphalt, and Milton braced himself against the wheel arch as the van swung left and right, picking up speed. They roared across the parking space and onto the road. Milton looked back through the tinted window at the confusion in their wake, bodies scattered across the ground like ninepins.
Milton turned back to the interior. Anastasiya Romanov was sitting against the wheel arch, her legs bent and her arms around her knees, clutching them tight. Ross was next to her, her eyes wide. Neither of them spoke.
“Where are the change-ups?” Milton asked.
“Two minutes away,” Pope said.
Milton turned back to the window and looked for any sign of pursuit. There was none. The agents had no other support, just as BLUEBIRD had suggested would be the case. The SVR had allowed arrogance to get the better of them. That had been their undoing, together with the closed nature of the operation that had been insisted upon by whomever it was in the Center who wanted Anastasiya Romanova for him or herself. Milton didn’t know anything other than what BLUEBIRD had told him in the lounge at Vladivostok: that Jessie Ross had been turned and that he would be at the RV and would do his best to assist.
Milton had been given only a few hours to put the operation together, and most of his time had been circumscribed because he had been with Ross. Pope had taken the JAL flight to Narita after the assassination of the Ryans, but, instead of continuing to London, he had taken the next flight to Vladivostok where he had collected the arriving Eleven before driving north. The two of them had handled the detail, including sourcing the weapons and arranging for their exfiltration. The biggest risk was that BLUEBIRD’s involvement, although valuable, would lead to him being blown. Someone might have seen him firing on the Russians, but, Milton thought, the scene had been so disorientating that any testimony would be unreliable. The men that BLUEBIRD had killed were shot with 19mm Parabellum ammunition, rather than the Russian 39mm cartridges that the Vikhrs fired, and Milton had collected the Beretta that he had used. And then BLUEBIRD had required that he be shot in order to lend weight to the story that he would tell. Milton didn’t know whether there would be witnesses, and hoped that he had been convincing.
Milton called to Pope over the sound of the engine.
“How many cars do we have?” Milton asked.
“Two.”
“You take Romanova.”
“And Ross?”
“I’ve got her. Take Eleven, too. Romanova’s the prize. I’d rather you had the extra manpower.”
Pope looked at him quizzically, as if wondering whether to object, but he knew Milton well enough to know that he wouldn’t change his mind. “There are extra weapons in both cars. Guns and explosives. We probably won’t need them, but…”
“What’s the route for exfil?”
“Drive to Svetlaya. It’s on the coast—twenty hours if you don’t stop. There’ll be a trawler waiting there. It’ll take us out into the Sea of Japan. HMS Sutherland will pick us up and we’ll be transferred from there.”
“I’ll go first,” Milton said. “Follow a mile behind. If they stop me, you might be able to turn around.”
Pope put out his hand. “Good luck, Milton. See you in Svetlaya.”
“Good luck,” Milton said, clasping Pope’s hand.
73
Ross was jostled and buffeted as the van raced away from the station. She was sitting next to Romanova. The Russian was terrified, her knees pressed up to her chest and anchored there behind locked arms. Romanova had the wheel arch on one side and Ross on the other, bumping left and right as they progressed. Ross was frightened, too, but there was more to it than that. She had seen everything: Stepanov ordering them to be still, the man behind him—she didn’t know him, but knew it had to be BLUEBIRD—opening fire, the other agent they had left behind at Moscow Station appearing from the back of the van with an automatic rifle. Ross was frightened, but she was also angry and embarrassed.
The van swerved sharply to the left and then skidded to a stop. Smith opened the doors and hopped down. They were in a parking lot near the river terminal. There were half a dozen vehicles scattered around the lot. The others disembarked the van and the driver led the way to two scruffy rentals parked next to each other. Ross looked left and right and saw no cameras or any other security; an elderly man made his way up the steps to the terminal, but he was staring at his phone and didn’t look as if he had noticed them.
Romanova was taken to a BMW.
Smith took Ross by the wrist and led her to a Volvo.
“How lovely,” she said. “A nice drive together, just the two of us.”
“It’ll be much more pleasant if you spare me the attitude,” Smith said. “You’ll be back home in a day or two to see your son and your parents.”
“You think? We’ll never get out of here.”
Smith opened the door. “Get in.”
He held the door open for her and then went around to the driver’s side. She lowered herself into the seat and stared out of the windscreen into the bright blue sky, a wide canvas over the river and the town beyond. She put her finger to her lips and chewed on a nail. Her trousers were tight against her thighs and she could feel the lipstick in her pocket. Smith thought he had power over her. He thought that he had taken away her ability to choose. He hadn’t. She still had the elektricheskiy pistolet. She could decide what happened next.
Smith started the engine and pulled out. “You might want to get some sleep,” he said. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
Moscow
74
Primakov was close to panic. The rendezvous had been an hour ago and he had heard nothing from Stepanov. He had tried to call him, but his phone rang through to voicemail every time. Stepanov was usually so punctilious and now, in the aftermath of a particularly sensitive operation, to have heard nothing? It was out of character. He tried Mitrokhin’s number with the same results.
He had tried to distract himself with a new operation that he had been planning. Yehya al Moussa and Sameera Najeeb were scientists who had, until recently, been employed by the Iraq Atomic Energy Agency. They had been swept up by the Iranians following the fall of Saddam and had contributed to the recent progress that the Ahmadinejad regime had made toward the production of the first Islamic bomb. The Center had been directed by the Kremlin to provide assistance to the Iranians, and, as a part of that, a meeting had been arranged with a corporation that would be able to provide them with the zirconium they needed for their reactors. The meeting was to be in the French Alps and Primakov had activated a local sleeper to provide security. He had a pile of papers on his desk that he needed to review and he was already late.
His intercom buzzed. He reached back to the credenza and took the office phone.
“What?”
“Sir,” she said. “Major-General Nikolaevich is calling.”
He swallowed. His throat was suddenly dry.
“Sir?”
“Put him through, please.”
There was a pause and then a fizz of static as the call was connected.
“Alexei?” he said, trying to keep the uncertainty from his voice. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve just had a report from my chief in the Amur oblast,” he said. “There’s been an attack there—four men and a woman have been shot and killed at the railway station at Komsomolsk.”
Primakov felt sick. “Really?”
“Nikolai—please. Are you telling me you don’t know?”
“No,” he said. He put his hand on the desk to steady himself.
“The dead haven’t been identified yet. No papers on them. One man was still alive—Boris Mitrokhin. He’s been shot in the leg. I remembered his name. Didn’t he transfer from Vympel to work for you?”
“Yes,” Primakov said. There was no point in lying about it.
“He’s in hospital—not life threatening. I’m waiting to speak to him. But I don’t understand. What was one of your men doing in Komsomolsk?”
Primakov’s breath caught, as if a metal band had been slipped around his chest and then cranked tight. “I cannot say,” he replied, unable to think of anything that he could do other than to stonewall.
“The others? Were they yours, too?”
“There was an operation, but it is sensitive.”
“What kind of operation—”
“I have to go, Alexei,” Primakov said, interrupting him. “Thank you for bringing me the news. I need to find out what has happened. I’ll speak to you when I know more.”
“Nikolai. The president is—”
“You’ll get a full report. Goodbye.”
Primakov slammed the phone down, grabbed his jacket and put it on. He swept the al Moussa and Najeeb papers into his briefcase, stepped out of the office, told his secretary that he was going out and that he would be back later in the day, and hurried down to the garage.
He didn’t know what to do. All of his meticulously constructed plans were collapsing. His mind started to race: there would be an enquiry into whatever had happened in Komsomolsk, why Stepanov and Mitrokhin and the others had been sent there, and he was going to have to work hard to keep ahead of it. What could he say? Honesty was impossible; it would expose his lies and his attempts to cover up the consequences of Natasha’s mistakes. That would bring them both down. He would have to think of another reason for the operation, and an explanation as to why it had so evidently been bungled. And Mitrokhin… he didn’t know him as well as Stepanov, didn’t know how well he could be trusted when the investigators of Line KR got their hands on him. What would he say? He knew a lot. Too much.
Primakov took a deep breath. He could do it. It wasn’t too late. He just had to keep it together until he could get on top of the facts. He needed to speak to Mitrokhin, find out what had happened.
He saw the man as he walked toward his car. He didn’t recognise him. He was slender, in his mid-thirties, with tight curls of blond hair. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a leather jacket and he had a rucksack over his shoulder. He came out from between two parked cars and turned into his path.
“Excuse me,” the man said in lightly accented Russian.
“Yes?”
“You are Deputy Director Primakov?”
Primakov took a step back, a sickly bloom of fear welling up in his bowels. The man followed and, as he did, he took out an aerosol. Primakov noticed the smaller details: the branding on the aerosol looked like it was a deodorant and the man was wearing flesh-coloured latex gloves. He aimed the aerosol and pressed down on the dispenser, sending a jet of liquid into Primakov’s face. It was cold and wet and oily and it got into his mouth and eyes and nose. It had a metallic taste, not overpowering but distinctive: the taste of copper pennies.
Primakov bumped back against the hood of the car behind him, setting off the alarm. He tried to wipe the liquid away, but there was too much of it and he only succeeded in smearing it about.
“Proshchay,” said the man.
“What?” Primakov grunted.
“Control says goodbye.”
The man put the aerosol into his bag and zipped it up.
Primakov suddenly felt unwell. He could feel his heart beating faster, and then faster still, quickly racing out of control. He started to sweat and, as he leaned back against the car, his muscles began to tremble. He reached into his pocket for his phone, thinking that he could call his secretary to send someone down to help him, but his hand was shaking so badly that he lost his grip on the phone and it dropped down onto the concrete. The man stamped on it, breaking it into three pieces. Primakov’s heart raced faster still and he felt warm drool as it gathered in his mouth and then ran down his chin and onto his shirt. He tried to stand, lost his balance, and toppled down onto his front, scraping his face. His arms and legs spasmed helplessly.
The last thing Primakov remembered was watching the man with the pale skin and blond curls crouch down to pick up his briefcase. The man raised himself up and crossed the garage to the service exit that led out onto the street beyond. The door opened, the man passed through it, and the door swung closed once more.
74
Primakov was close to panic. The rendezvous had been an hour ago and he had heard nothing from Stepanov. He had tried to call him, but his phone rang through to voicemail every time. Stepanov was usually so punctilious and now, in the aftermath of a particularly sensitive operation, to have heard nothing? It was out of character. He tried Mitrokhin’s number with the same results.
He had tried to distract himself with a new operation that he had been planning. Yehya al Moussa and Sameera Najeeb were scientists who had, until recently, been employed by the Iraq Atomic Energy Agency. They had been swept up by the Iranians following the fall of Saddam and had contributed to the recent progress that the Ahmadinejad regime had made toward the production of the first Islamic bomb. The Center had been directed by the Kremlin to provide assistance to the Iranians, and, as a part of that, a meeting had been arranged with a corporation that would be able to provide them with the zirconium they needed for their reactors. The meeting was to be in the French Alps and Primakov had activated a local sleeper to provide security. He had a pile of papers on his desk that he needed to review and he was already late.
His intercom buzzed. He reached back to the credenza and took the office phone.
“What?”
“Sir,” she said. “Major-General Nikolaevich is calling.”
He swallowed. His throat was suddenly dry.
“Sir?”
“Put him through, please.”
There was a pause and then a fizz of static as the call was connected.
“Alexei?” he said, trying to keep the uncertainty from his voice. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve just had a report from my chief in the Amur oblast,” he said. “There’s been an attack there—four men and a woman have been shot and killed at the railway station at Komsomolsk.”
Primakov felt sick. “Really?”
“Nikolai—please. Are you telling me you don’t know?”
“No,” he said. He put his hand on the desk to steady himself.
“The dead haven’t been identified yet. No papers on them. One man was still alive—Boris Mitrokhin. He’s been shot in the leg. I remembered his name. Didn’t he transfer from Vympel to work for you?”
“Yes,” Primakov said. There was no point in lying about it.
“He’s in hospital—not life threatening. I’m waiting to speak to him. But I don’t understand. What was one of your men doing in Komsomolsk?”
Primakov’s breath caught, as if a metal band had been slipped around his chest and then cranked tight. “I cannot say,” he replied, unable to think of anything that he could do other than to stonewall.
“The others? Were they yours, too?”
“There was an operation, but it is sensitive.”
“What kind of operation—”
“I have to go, Alexei,” Primakov said, interrupting him. “Thank you for bringing me the news. I need to find out what has happened. I’ll speak to you when I know more.”
“Nikolai. The president is—”
“You’ll get a full report. Goodbye.”
Primakov slammed the phone down, grabbed his jacket and put it on. He swept the al Moussa and Najeeb papers into his briefcase, stepped out of the office, told his secretary that he was going out and that he would be back later in the day, and hurried down to the garage.
He didn’t know what to do. All of his meticulously constructed plans were collapsing. His mind started to race: there would be an enquiry into whatever had happened in Komsomolsk, why Stepanov and Mitrokhin and the others had been sent there, and he was going to have to work hard to keep ahead of it. What could he say? Honesty was impossible; it would expose his lies and his attempts to cover up the consequences of Natasha’s mistakes. That would bring them both down. He would have to think of another reason for the operation, and an explanation as to why it had so evidently been bungled. And Mitrokhin… he didn’t know him as well as Stepanov, didn’t know how well he could be trusted when the investigators of Line KR got their hands on him. What would he say? He knew a lot. Too much.
Primakov took a deep breath. He could do it. It wasn’t too late. He just had to keep it together until he could get on top of the facts. He needed to speak to Mitrokhin, find out what had happened.
He saw the man as he walked toward his car. He didn’t recognise him. He was slender, in his mid-thirties, with tight curls of blond hair. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a leather jacket and he had a rucksack over his shoulder. He came out from between two parked cars and turned into his path.
“Excuse me,” the man said in lightly accented Russian.
“Yes?”
“You are Deputy Director Primakov?”
Primakov took a step back, a sickly bloom of fear welling up in his bowels. The man followed and, as he did, he took out an aerosol. Primakov noticed the smaller details: the branding on the aerosol looked like it was a deodorant and the man was wearing flesh-coloured latex gloves. He aimed the aerosol and pressed down on the dispenser, sending a jet of liquid into Primakov’s face. It was cold and wet and oily and it got into his mouth and eyes and nose. It had a metallic taste, not overpowering but distinctive: the taste of copper pennies.
Primakov bumped back against the hood of the car behind him, setting off the alarm. He tried to wipe the liquid away, but there was too much of it and he only succeeded in smearing it about.
“Proshchay,” said the man.
“What?” Primakov grunted.
“Control says goodbye.”
The man put the aerosol into his bag and zipped it up.
Primakov suddenly felt unwell. He could feel his heart beating faster, and then faster still, quickly racing out of control. He started to sweat and, as he leaned back against the car, his muscles began to tremble. He reached into his pocket for his phone, thinking that he could call his secretary to send someone down to help him, but his hand was shaking so badly that he lost his grip on the phone and it dropped down onto the concrete. The man stamped on it, breaking it into three pieces. Primakov’s heart raced faster still and he felt warm drool as it gathered in his mouth and then ran down his chin and onto his shirt. He tried to stand, lost his balance, and toppled down onto his front, scraping his face. His arms and legs spasmed helplessly.
The last thing Primakov remembered was watching the man with the pale skin and blond curls crouch down to pick up his briefcase. The man raised himself up and crossed the garage to the service exit that led out onto the street beyond. The door opened, the man passed through it, and the door swung closed once more.
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