Here, in a tiny village in the Eastern Urals, it was her, Dimitri, three scalpels, two forceps, a drip and some morphine. And a young woman working beyond herself to keep them all sterilised. And she couldn’t use the morphine before the child was out, as she needed the woman to push.
But the woman didn’t push. Because she didn’t last more than two minutes on the table. She had lost too much blood. Sabine had put a drip in as soon as she could, but it was too little, too late.
She lost the child too. But that also wasn’t due to Sabine’s ineptitude.
That was because the child was dead on delivery.
Once the drip was up, Sabine checked the woman’s vagina. The baby’s head was showing. Where the blood had smeared clear of the scalp, she could see a tinge of blue. She had no time. The woman was close to death, or dying. Or dead. She was incapable of helping Sabine with the delivery. Her body had given up.
The baby was in the same state.
Sabine had no choice. She had to cut.
She cut so much she could, just about, get leverage on the baby’s head with her bare hands. After a few seconds of monumental effort, the baby was out. It was so slippery, she almost dropped it. She immediately brought her ear to the poor thing’s chest to listen for a heartbeat. But there was nothing. She listened some more.
Still nothing.
Sabine knew the baby was gone.
She lifted her head, the red slime of afterbirth and blood dripping from her ear. She looked at the blue and red bundle in her hands and followed the umbilical cord to the child’s mother, who lay motionless on the table, her pelvic region a mess of blood and flesh.
And then she noticed it.
The baby.
The blue and red lifeless baby.
The blue and red lifeless baby that had stumps for arms.
Tsandera Street, Moscow
As Sam approached the offices of Moscow Talks she noticed a young woman locking a metal and glass door. The medium-height woman wore a knee-length, lemon-coloured wool coat. One of her hands was turning the key in the lock, the other held several files and a handbag.
Sam stopped short of the entrance and took in the scene. A two-storey, narrow office front. A single door, which probably led straight into a stairwell. And an adjoining, metal-framed window which started close to the pavement, finished at the ceiling and ran the length of the frontage.
But it wasn’t a window. It was an ex-window, now boarded up inexpertly with cheap plywood. The wood looked new. The break was recent.
Sam glanced at the upper floor. Both windows were intact, off-white net curtains preventing onlookers across the road from gawping in. If Sam didn’t know it was the home of Moscow Talks, she would have guessed at a private investigator’s office. Or those of a street lawyer.
The woman finished locking up. As she turned away from the door, she registered Sam. She gave a half-jump, as if Sam was someone who had come back with a large piece of concrete intent on smashing the remaining windows.
Or to break something more vulnerable.
She shook her head, clearing her fright, and took off in the direction of the Ostankino TV tower, which rose in the middle-distance above northern Moscow, like a giant upturned golf tee.
Sam kept pace with her.
‘Hi. My name is Elena. I’m a friend of Alexei.’ Sam’s accent was perfect.
Sam had four Russian aliases. All of them supported by the necessary paperwork. She always carried Elena’s with her. She liked Elena. She was an office-worker from St Petersburg. She was in Moscow visiting her sick mother. Her mother, who was 84, lived in a grubby apartment in Bibirevo District, north of where they were now. She was dying of lung cancer.
Actually, the apartment was an SIS safe house. Her mother would be pleased.
The pursued woman picked up the pace.
‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’ She spat out the words. ‘I have a lot to do. If you continue to follow me, I shall call the police!’
Sam avoided a grey bin that was blocking her route and re-joined the woman after her detour.
‘I know Alexei is dead. I was due to meet him when the explosion happened. I want to find out why.’ No harm in the truth.
The woman stopped abruptly. Sam was caught off guard and skidded to a halt. She turned to face the woman, who had tears in her eyes.
‘You’re no friend of Alexei’s.’ Venom was ever present. ‘I have known him all my adult life. He never mentioned an Elena. In any case, you saw the front window of the offices. And you say you saw the explosion. It’s over!’ She was breathing shallowly, as if they’d sprinted to where they were now. ‘Leave – me – alone!’ She was half-shouting now.
Even though the light was fading, Sam could see the woman’s eyes clearly. Her pupils had dilated. She was scared. Glancing down, Sam could see the woman’s hands shaking.
She wasn’t scared. She was terrified.
Sam raised her hands in submission.
‘I’m sorry. I am. But I must find out more. I work for Russian Liberation.’ Sam was making it up as she went along. ‘We think Alexei was onto something important. My meeting with him…’ Sam’s sentence trailed off as the woman turned sharply and started walking again, quickening her pace. Introducing the infamous, anti-government, underground movement had been a poor choice. The wrong lie at the wrong time.
Oh well.
Sam quickly caught up with her.
‘Go away!’
But Sam wasn’t giving up. She spoke at the woman as they both trotted along the pavement.
‘Help me. Please. Give me something. Something or somebody…’ Sam avoided a lamp post, ‘that Alexei has seen or spoken to recently. Please. This could be so important.’
They both had to stop at a junction, the pedestrian traffic light was showing a stationary red man and, on a separate screen, red numbers were counting down from 45. In front of them was a major road. Back-to-back cars plied their way up and down the main thoroughfare. The woman looked straight ahead. Stationary, Sam had a chance to study her face in more detail. Behind the austere pout, she was beautiful – there was no other word for it. Short dark hair in a bob, high cheekbones, pale complexion, just enough red lipstick and a pointy nose. A modern-day, Russian, Audrey Hepburn.
The woman turned her head toward Sam, who was momentarily embarrassed for staring.
Almost in a whisper. ‘If I give you one name. Will you leave me alone? And…’ she raised an index finger and pointed it at Sam accusingly, ‘you find the bastards who did this to Alexei!’
Sam blew out, her cheeks expanding and her shoulders dropping as she did.
‘Yes, I’ll do my best.’
I really will.
The woman faced the front again. The lights had changed, the walking green man now illuminated. She strode off, Sam matching her pace-for-pace. They followed the minor road in the direction of the TV tower. The frontages of the buildings had changed – businesses giving way to accommodation. Both sides of the road were packed with parked cars.
The woman’s pace didn’t slow. She stared straight ahead. As Sam caught a glance, she noticed the woman’s lips moving imperceptibly, as if rehearsing something. Sam was watching her so intently she caught her left hip on the wing mirror of a rather smart black Mercedes.
Bugger! That hurt.
‘Professor Grigori Vasiliev. He lectures at Moscow University. Oil, I think.’
The woman stopped. Her red lips tight, her expression a frown.
‘Now, will you leave me alone?’
Sam studied her face one more time. She was beautiful, that was true. But Sam now saw something more than the fear she’d picked up earlier. It was grief. A real depth of feeling at having lost someone very close.
Were she and Alexei…?
Sam had been there with her first love, Chris. She’d experienced the same terror in Afghanistan – a terror that had taken his life and destroyed hers; physically and emotionally. As she looked into the film-star ey
es of the woman in a yellow woollen coat, she could see it now. This beauty and Alexei were an item. Yesterday’s explosion had damaged Sam; she had a scar on her cheek for life to prove it. The same explosion had destroyed the woman in front of her. Sam knew that she would never fully recover from the experience. Sam knew. And that hurt like hell.
‘Yes. I promise you, I will do everything in my power to find the people who killed Alexei.’
Prechistenskiy Road, Moscow
Sam hadn’t bothered to go back to the office. It was well past 7pm by the time she came out of her local metro station. She’d checked her secure emails remotely, using SIS’s encrypted smartphone. Frank had come back with nothing on ‘Blue Suit’. But he wasn’t giving up. There was a short acknowledgement from Julie that their agent was nicely holed up in the compound in Herat, where the drugs were currently piled high. And the op was still on for Friday, the day after tomorrow.
And she had Googled Professor Grigori Vasiliev. Sure enough, he lectured on oil exploration at Moscow State University. She would do some more remote research on him at her desk tomorrow before, she thought, paying him a visit.
She also ran through all the possibilities as to why and who had killed Alexei. Until this evening there was lingering doubt in Sam’s mind that he (and she?) were the bomber’s main target(s). Sure, Russian politicians had immediately blamed Chechen rebels for the attack and, as a result, scores of hapless immigrants had been rounded up, accompanied by a circus of media. ‘Another vicious attack on Muscovite freedom’, was this morning’s headline in the broadsheet, Izvestiya.
But seeing the boarded-up front window of Moscow Talks, and the fearful state of one its reporters, Sam was clear that the bomb was designed to kill Alexei. He was onto something that someone else didn’t want exploited.
Could the State be behind this? Were her colleagues in the Lubyanka building capable of murder? There was no hard SIS evidence (that she was aware of) that the FSB murdered political opponents. They had no need to. The Russian premier had such power that anyone who wilfully opposed him was arrested. Trials took forever, by which time the issue had gone away.
Organised crime, hidden superficially by big business – that was a different thing altogether. Oligarchs with more power and money than they could afford to lose, were capable of anything. Most were above reproach, but a few – a number of whom were under the watchful eye of some of her colleagues at the Embassy – operated lawlessly; bribing a Moscow political elite who enjoyed the privileges that the money could buy.
But, what was the connection between Alexei and the professor? A connection so damning that the former was dead. He, and now she, were onto something. She knew it.
Sam was 50 metres from her apartment, a five-room, reasonably decent pad on the fifth floor of the next-but-one block of flats. She could hear the glass of Malbec calling her.
As she turned half-right to cross the street between two parked cars (a battered Toyota Previa and a very old Lada Riva – always alert; she couldn’t stop herself), she sensed something wasn’t quite right. It was a peripheral thing. A combination of movement out of the corner of her eye, a non-mechanical sound, and an almost imperceptible increase in pressure. She almost managed to stop herself from crossing the road, but the momentum of her original pace kept her moving.
That’s when the car hit her. It must have been traveling at around 30 miles an hour; easily enough to kill. She was just out from between the parked cars, but her sense of something not being quite right gave her a fraction of a second to react. A fraction of a second to propel her body upward, so that she went over the top of the car, rather than underneath it. She started to leap like a Fosbury-Flop high jumper: back arched, bum high, legs bent. And she had done some gymnastics at school. So, she remembered how to land – fingers, then palms, then the back of the head, bent forward to allow the shoulders to take most of the impact. And finally, a roll to enable the body’s inertia to run its course.
A half-jump and a landing; the combination of both had turned what could have been a bad accident, into an opportunity.
As Sam came out of the roll she instinctively looked for the tailgate of the car speeding off into the distance. It must be a hybrid. Driving on electric only? It if had been burning fuel she would have heard it long before she had started to cross the road.
But it wasn’t a hybrid. It was a Tesla Model S.
All electric.
No noise. Ahh – that makes sense!
And it was maroon (or blue; the light wasn’t great).
And she had the number plate – indelibly etched onto her brain.
Now they weren’t expecting that.
Chapter 3
Fourth floor, British Embassy, Moscow, Russia
‘What’s wrong with you, Green?’
Simon Page knew he was an unreasonable man. Until recently he’d managed to keep his disdain for his fellow human beings well and truly hidden. But, with his wife back in the UK on a temporary ‘separation’, and neither of his grown-up children really talking to him, he was struggling to keep his frustration with life unchecked. And his newbie, Sam Green, was an easy target.
He didn’t like her. There were a couple of things. First, she was ex-Army. That really got his goat. SIS didn’t generally target ex-Services people, because most of the good ones stayed in and got promoted to at least one rank above their competence. The ones they did employ had a misplaced self-assuredness that comes from a large dose of operational experience. Iraq and Afghanistan had a lot to answer for in his book. He loathed their self-confident air. And they all dressed the same, like something out of a Barbour catalogue. All wax-jackets, gilets and cords. No imagination. None of them.
Green was worse. She wasn’t even a commissioned officer. An ‘other-rank’, and just an ex-sergeant at that. What was Vauxhall playing at? Yes, she was bright and sparky enough. He’d read her training course report. It was unremarkable, but solid. No obvious weaknesses. But, and it was a big ‘but’ in his book, she was a state school ‘laddess’. Not Oxbridge. Not even from a Red-Brick university, or a tertiary qualification to her name. Down the pub she probably joked of having ‘a degree from the University of Life’. Pathetic.
And she was a lesbian. It was obvious. She dressed more like a man than a woman. Doc Marten boots (huh?), jeans and a heavy jumper; no make-up and unkempt auburn hair. She was pretty, in her own way, and fit – she was always down the gym; another sign that she ‘batted for the wrong side’. But Page knew who wore the trousers in Green’s relationships. She was definitely the dominant one.
Actually, it was the whole of SIS that had gone down the pan. Over the last ten years much of the old order had been stripped away. It was now all ‘open-plan spaces’ and ‘hot-desking’. He, thankfully, had his own office – and his own desk. And he kept his door well and truly shut. First-name terms? What was wrong with being called ‘sir’? And, for Christ’s sake, what was ‘multi-agency teams’ all about? In the halcyon days of the Iron Curtain, MI6/SIS were top-dog. You looked down on your MI5 colleagues. There’s no way you’d countenance sharing intelligence with the Metropolitan Police, let alone brushing shoulders with the SAS. Now, it was all tiger-teams: identify a problem, find a space in the office, call in your ‘pals’ from CID, MI5, the SAS and GCHQ, and then pull together a plan. ‘Sharing’ was the new ‘secret’. It wasn’t his game.
Nowadays, it was about data – overwhelmingly so. Phone and email intercept, breaking into the dark-web, pixel resolution on images shot from space, video-cams and CCTV. Whatever happened to dead-letter boxes and running agents? Gathering HUMINT was a skill beyond the comprehension of many of these puppies. And Green was the greenest of them all (I like that). But, he didn’t like her. Her and her kind.
She had asked to see him first thing.
Green walked awkwardly into the office, limping slightly, as if carrying an injury. Her face was redder than normal, and she had stitches in her cheek. She’d looked a mess the night b
efore last. She didn’t look any better this morning. It was probably that time of the month.
‘Someone tried to run me over last night. I clocked the number. “Cynthia’s” running the details now. I should know in ten minutes if we have a match.’
Page snorted. What was this girl playing at?
‘What do you mean, “someone tried to run you over”?’
Green seemed to look through him and out of his window. She didn’t seem fazed by his aggressive approach. She was nonchalant. That made him dislike her more.
She sighed.
‘I was heading back to my flat at about 7.30 last night. I stepped out onto the road between two parked cars and a Tesla crept up on me. I went over the bonnet and landed on the other side of its boot. It was a clear attempt to take me out. It’s as though they hadn’t finished the job from the day before yesterday.’ She paused as if expecting a comment. He let her continue. ‘I’m happy to pursue this on my own, but I thought I should let you know.’ Her matter-of-fact tone further irritated Page.
What do you say? The girl’s been here 15 minutes and she thinks she’s a female Jane Bond. Page found himself caught between chastising her and dismissing her. Or both.
He closed his eyes in thought.
All of a sudden, he felt very tired. And very old. He was 58. Two years to retirement and a full, very fat, pension. And he had his nest egg – he couldn’t forget that. He’d seen numerous Greens come and go. Straight out of training, into the field. A spook around every corner. Overcome by the glamour of it all. God’s answer to protecting the nation. Their ambition and energy wore him out.
He didn’t like her, that’s for sure. But he couldn’t afford a discrimination case against him. Not at this stage. He needed to rein back; a bit.
The Innocence of Trust Page 5