Spyder Web

50

Alex Roe spent the rest of the day at Parnell’s office, attending to the details of a few of the legitimate assignments that she was working on. After locking up, she left the building and decided to have dinner in a quiet pub in a less developed part of the wharf district.

She’d walked about half the distance there when she began to feel like she was being followed. Roe looked around but failed to detect any of the telltale signs of surveillance. Still, she sensed something out of the ordinary. To ease her fears, she began running a varied pattern of movement through the area in hopes of shaking any pursuit out into the open. She made abrupt turns at random locations, ducked in and out of stores, and crisscrossed the street at random intervals. If anyone was mapping her movements, they would make no sense at all.

Just behind Roe as she made another turn, the team currently tracking her movements was having great difficulty keeping pace while remaining undetected.

‘Team two to Looking Glass, over,’ the young officer whispered into a miniature microphone.

‘Looking Glass here, team two, over.’

‘Tweedledum is running about like a rabbit. She’s all over the place. I think she’s onto us. Over.’

‘Pull back a little, and give her some room,’ the Looking Glass leader advised. ‘We don’t want to alarm her.’

‘Roger, team two, out.’

The British surveillance teams watching Roe pulled back, maintaining only the lightest contact. After a few more minutes of Roe’s chaotic trailblazing, they lost her completely. The watchers reconvened at various points in the area, hoping to reestablish contact.

Roe kept her random movements up for another ten minutes, searching the thinning crowds for any sign of pursuit; she found none.

‘Probably just imagining things,’ she reprimanded herself.

Roe’s meandering course had pulled her nearly a mile away from her original destination. Halfway there, the hairs on her neck bristled in response to a regular pattern of footsteps that had maintained a constant beat several strides behind her. Turning quickly into an empty alleyway, she heard the footsteps slow and finally stop.

Roe flattened herself against the alley wall, out of the line of sight from her pursuer. Her heart raced as she tried to rein in her imagination and focus on the situation at hand. She had to assume the worst-case scenario: Her pursuer was either official or criminal. She’d ruled out coincidence, since whoever was following her had stopped when she had turned the corner, and was now waiting at the alley entrance.

Soft footsteps echoed from the mouth of the alley, measured and confident. The footsteps didn’t rush in, but moved with patience, closing the distance between them. About ten feet from her position, the footsteps stopped. Backlit from the adjacent street, the silhouette of a slightly built man wearing a hat became visible; the figure threw a long shadow across the alley floor. The head of the shadow fell in line with Roe’s concealed position. For what seemed like hours, neither one of them moved.

The man casting the shadow finally spoke. ‘Anya, it is your old friend, Andrei. I am alone. You may come out now.’

A sudden shock swept through Alex at the sound of Yakushev’s familiar voice. She’d prepared herself to fight or run, but not to face a ghost. Her mind froze and she found that she couldn’t move.

The shadow drew closer, until the man stood before her. Half in light, he turned to face her. The harshly shadowed face was that of her mentor, Andrei Yakushev. Alex’s mouth opened, but no words formed to express the jumble of thoughts that filled her mind.

Yakushev smiled at the sight of his protégée. ‘I see that you are full of questions. I understand. Come. I believe that you were on your way to dinner. If you don’t mind, I would like to join you and get reacquainted.’

Yakushev threw his arms around the still-shocked Roe in a warm Russian greeting. Alex returned the embrace feebly, still waiting for her mind to reconnect with her body.

‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ Yakushev said jokingly. ‘I assure you that I am very much alive. Let us go now — there is much to discuss and little time before your British surveillance relocates you.’

The firmness of her mentor’s voice finally brought Alex out of confusion. Yakushev turned away and began moving back toward the street. Roe collected herself and followed. She watched Yakushev practice the expert tradecraft that had made him one of the Soviet Union’s greatest spymasters. Not since she had been in training had the two of them prowled the streets of a Western city together.

Sir Daniel Long was dining at 10 Downing Street with the prime minister when an urgent call came through for him. Excusing himself from the table, he took the call in a private study near the dining room.

‘This is Sir Daniel Long. What seems to be the problem?’

‘Eldridge, at the cottage, sir. Sorry about the intrusion, but Yakushev’s gone. We’ve searched, but he’s not anywhere on the grounds.’

Yakushev’s disappearance caused a whole host of problems to emerge in Long’s mind. ‘How long since he was last seen?’

‘Near as we can estimate, sometime early this afternoon,’ the man explained. ‘Staff at the cottage say he was feeling a bit tired and went upstairs for a rest. That’s the last they saw of him. We still haven’t figured out how he got off the grounds or where he’s gone to.’

‘I have an idea where he might be headed. Continue your search of the grounds and surrounding area and see what you can find. Call in whatever resources you feel necessary, but try to use some discretion.’

‘Right, sir,’ Eldridge replied.

Long broke the connection and dialed up the evening duty officer of the surveillance section. The line rang only once before it was answered. ‘Surveillance, Duty Officer Cain speaking.’

‘Cain, this is Sir Daniel Long.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Cain’s voice jumped to attention.

‘Cain, I need to speak with Neville Axton. See if you can ring him up.’

‘He’s off duty, sir, but I think I can reach him. Will you hold, sir?’

‘Yes,’ Long replied with some annoyance, ‘just get Axton on the line.’

Long waited as the phone went quiet. On the other end, Cain brought up Axton’s directory listing on the computer and dialed the pager number. Two minutes later, Axton called in and Cain patched him through. The line buzzed for a second and then became clear as the electronic scrambling devices adjusted themselves to the new connection.

‘Axton, we have a potential problem that you need to be made aware of. An aging defector, one that we’ve had under wraps for several years, is missing. I suspect he’s making his way toward London, if he’s not already there.’

‘Do you think he’s heading for the airport?’ Axton tried to be helpful, but he didn’t see what place he had in dealing with an AWOL defector.

‘No, I don’t expect that he’s trying to leave the country at all. I do think he may make some trouble with the Kang Fa investigation. I assume you read the notice I sent you regarding Roe’s background?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Axton remembered reading the sanitized report that blandly stated that Roe had once been a KGB deep-cover agent.

‘The missing man is Yakushev, the chap who mentored Alexandra Roe back in Russia. I confirmed the connection between the two of them yesterday. Yakushev was very close with Roe, so I expect that he’ll try to warn her. Meet me down at the office in half an hour and I’ll fill you in on the details. In the meantime, inform your teams to be watchful for an elderly man trying to make contact with Roe. I don’t know what he’s up to, but it could be a problem for our operation. If your people spot Yakushev, bring him in immediately. Oh, and Axton?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Take care with him,’ Long advised. ‘He’s very dangerous when he wants to be, but I don’t expect that to be the case here. Try to get him to come back in willingly, before he reaches Roe.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, sir.’

Long hung up the phone and made his apologies to the prime minister and the other guests. After collecting his briefcase and mackintosh, Long left number 10 and took his chauffeured car back to the office.

Damn, he thought, what does Yakushev hope to accomplish?

Yakushev had become visibly upset when he learned of Kang Fa’s involvement with Roe and Parnell. If Axton’s people were lucky, they’d find him before he reached Roe and brought the entire operation crashing down.