The Accident Man

67

Jack Grantham met Dame Agatha Bewley for an interagency breakfast in the Coffee Room at the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London. Housed in Charles Barry’s 1832 pastiche of an Italian renaissance palace, it had long been the traditional London meeting place for diplomats, ambassadors, and visiting dignitaries.

As an MI6 officer, Grantham was, in theory, an employee of the British diplomatic service, the foreign and commonwealth office. His Travellers membership made a useful addition to that cover, but he was not by nature a clubman and he despised the atmosphere of entrenched, inherited privilege that hung over the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall like an old London fog. He had to admit, though, that the place came in handy. He didn’t have to worry about finding restaurants or booking tables. He simply ate at the Travellers. That saved time, avoided waste, and increased efficiency. And those were principles Grantham liked.

“I was sorry to hear about your two people in Geneva,” said Dame Agatha, breaking a piece off her croissant and covering it in thick, dark marmalade. “It’s never easy to lose staff like that, particularly when they’re young. No children involved, I gather. That’s a blessing, at least.”

Grantham stuck his fork into a sausage. He’d gone for the full English breakfast, same as always.

“I suppose so,” he agreed. “Anyway, something good may have come of it all. We’re starting to get names and faces. We’re just not sure how they all fit together.”

Dame Agatha was a fastidious woman. She chewed carefully, swallowed, and then, having made sure her mouth was empty, asked, “Anything you’d like to share with us?”

Grantham had just filled his face with fried egg and bacon. “Mmm,” he managed, with a nod.

Dame Agatha put down her knife and ignored her food. She sat very still, looking at Grantham over the top of her glasses.

“Go on,” she prompted.

“You seem skeptical,” Grantham said. “Don’t be. There’s no hidden agenda here.”

“So what do you have so far?”

“Two names: an English male called Samuel Carver and a Russian female, Alexandra Petrova.”

“Where do these names come from?”

“Let’s just say Percy Wake pulled a few strings, called in some old favors. I asked him, he delivered. At this point, I don’t care how.”

Dame Agatha gave him a look that suggested she’d noted Grantham’s response but had yet to accept it.

“Carver and Petrova – what do we know about them?” she asked.

“Not a lot. Carver has to be an alias. There is no record of any UK passport in his name – not a genuine one, anyway. He has no credit cards, appears on no airline databases, and we can’t find any bank accounts. Petrova used to be a low-ranking KGB agent, Moscow-based. She started work just before the wall came down. They used her for honey traps.”

He took out a brown manila envelope, opened it, and passed a couple of black-and-white pictures across the table.

“Pretty girl, isn’t she?” said Dame Agatha.

“She certainly was when those were taken, seven years ago. She didn’t snare any of our agents, but a couple of businessmen said more than they should have.”

Dame Agatha raised an eyebrow. “Men are such simple creatures.”

“Plenty of women have fallen for that sort of thing,” Grantham retorted. “All it took was some handsome Stasi agent saying, ‘I love you,’ and half the female staff in the West German government were happily passing secrets to the East.”

Dame Agatha sipped her tea, thoughtfully. “I suppose you’re right. Human weaknesses are universal.”

“Just as well, or we’d never find out a thing. Anyway, this Petrova woman disappeared off the radar five or six years ago. She still lives in Moscow, so far as we know. But she’s not been up to any espionage activity and she doesn’t have a criminal record.”

“She sounds like a most unlikely assassin,” Dame Agatha observed.

“Either that, or a seriously good one, because she’s stayed out of the limelight.”

“Seems unlikely, though, doesn’t it? One minute she’s sleeping with her targets, the next she’s killing them. I suppose both acts require the same detachment, a callousness toward the other person. But the training required would be quite different. What makes you think she’s involved? Apart from the leak of her name, of course.”

Grantham swallowed a final mouthful of sausage, mushroom, and baked bean.

“Two days ago we received a message from a French intelligence agent, off-the-record. He said he knew where to find the people we were looking for and he’d tell us in return for half a million dollars.”

Dame Agatha laughed. “One really has to admire the French. There’s something majestic about their complete lack of scruples.”

“Yes, that’s what we thought too. We told him to get lost, of course. Then we traced his phone and set a team of agents on him. He was in Geneva.”

“Aaahh.”

“Well, anyway, our people followed the Frenchman. He met a man carrying a briefcase.”

“Containing half a million dollars?”

“I don’t know, the case was never opened. But the Frenchman must have thought the cash was there because he went off with his contact, which was a big mistake. They got into a black BMW registered to a Russian fur-importing business in Milan. There were three other men in the car. They drove to a street in the Old Town. The Frenchman was then killed. To cut a long story short, the Russians hung around the neighborhood till about nine p.m. local time, when all hell broke loose. The first Russian, the one who’d met the Frenchman, kidnapped a woman from a café, killing the owner, a customer, and both our agents in the process.”

“My God…” murmured Dame Agatha.

“I know, a total bloodbath. Anyway, we believe Petrova was the woman who was kidnapped. Meanwhile, the other three Russians were getting beaten to a pulp in a pub fight just up the road. Witnesses said they heard the man who whipped all three of them talking at the bar. They said he sounded British.”

“Is this our Mr Carver?”

“That’s what we reckon.”

“So the girl was kidnapped at the same time as this Carver fellow was getting into his fight. That sounds like someone was after them both. Sounds like a cleanup operation.”

“Exactly. But how did all these Russians get involved? Everybody’s assumed the events in Paris were planned by a British organization. I can’t yet make the connection with Moscow.”

“Do we know anything about the kidnapper?”

“Yes. He’s called Grigori Kursk. The Moscow police know him well. He’s been arrested on countless charges of assault, a couple of murders too. But the charges never stick. Citizen Kursk has powerful friends.”

“So Kursk kidnaps Petrova,” said Dame Agatha. “His men go after Carver. But Carver escapes. Where does he go next?”

“Where would you go?”

Dame Agatha smiled. “As far away as possible.”

“That would be logical,” Grantham agreed. “But look at it from Carver’s perspective. He’s spent the best part of two days in the company of a woman whose only known talent is seduction. There’s a chance she’s got her hooks into him pretty deep. What if he wants to get her back?”

“Then he goes after the Russians.”

“Except he doesn’t know who they are. He’s as confused as we are, because he got his orders from London. So if he wants to find out who’s got the girl…”

“He has to come back here.”

“Precisely,” said Grantham. “Which is why MI5 may need to get involved.”

Dame Agatha was about to reply when one of the club servants sidled up to Grantham’s chair, coughed discreetly to attract his attention, and whispered something in his ear. Grantham nodded and dismissed the man, then said, “Excuse me, Agatha. I won’t be a moment,” before following the servant out of the room.

He returned fewer than five minutes later. His mood seemed greatly improved as he sat down and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee from a silver pot.

“That was the office,” Grantham said. “We’ve just had some more information from Moscow. One of our people there thought Petrova looked vaguely familiar. So she stopped trawling through police databases and had a look at some newspaper cuttings. It turns out that Grigori Kursk isn’t the only one with powerful friends.”