by Tom Bradby
‘Of course.’
‘I don’t know what you were thinking, but—’
‘I’ll fall in with whatever you want to do. I’m sitting in Moscow, doing nothing. So . . .’ he shrugged ‘. . . this will be all I’m living for. And they don’t seem to care what I do or where I go.’
‘Of course they care. They’ll be watching.’
‘I doubt it. I think my days of usefulness, or at least relevance, are at an end. The only issue is cash. I don’t have much spare money, so I don’t know how frequently I’ll be able to travel around Europe.’
‘You’re surely not expecting me to—’
‘I’m not expecting anything, Kate. I deserve everything that’s coming to me.’
Tears crept from the corners of Kate’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them abruptly away. ‘My love . . .’ Stuart stepped forward. Kate raised her hand and took a pace back. ‘You know I’d do anything for a shot at redemption, right?’
‘That’s never going to happen, Stuart, and I’ll stop bringing the children to see you if you go down that road.’ She was surprised at how definitive that sounded.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.
The pain in him cut her like a knife. ‘I need to go,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in touch about how you see the children.’ She turned away.
‘Why did you come, love?’ he asked.
She faced him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You could have sent the children up here on their own or with Julie. So why did you come?’
‘I . . . I don’t know.’
‘Did you want to see my pain, to see if it looked anything like yours?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Well, if you hoped to see a ruined man, I trust you weren’t disappointed.’
‘This is perhaps going to come across more harshly than I really mean it to – since I’m still too confused to know what I think about anything – but I would say that it’s that kind of self-absorption and, indeed, self-pity that got you into this mess in the first place.’
She turned away and walked out. Julie and the children were waiting just outside the entrance. ‘He looks well,’ Kate said to Fiona and Gus. ‘You go on up.’
Kate watched them disappear inside. Despite herself, the tears began to roll down her cheeks again. Without a word, Julie linked arms and led her friend slowly back towards St Mark’s Square. They walked past the Doge’s Palace and sat by the water’s edge. Julie waited while Kate composed herself. ‘So,’ she said eventually. ‘How was he?’
‘Let’s not talk about it.’
It was a glorious spring day now, the lagoon busy with the morning traffic. They watched a glistening white cruise liner heave into view. It seemed vast, a giant from another world entering a Toytown harbour. ‘You want me to fetch you an ice cream?’ Julie asked.
‘Getting even fatter is the last thing I need.’
‘Somehow that seems to be the least of your worries.’
‘Perhaps you could explain one day how you eat so much and stay so trim.’
‘I don’t think about it.’
‘That can’t be true.’
‘It is.’ Julie was watching a shifty-looking man standing by the waterfront. He was theoretically selling leather bracelets. ‘Perhaps we should just lie in the sun and smoke something medicinal.’
Given their employer’s strictures in relation to illegal drugs – and the questions on the subject in routine positive vetting – there were many things Kate could have said to this, but she’d decided long ago that Julie’s weekend penchant for dope and possibly more had better remain off-limits. She was the most loyal friend and colleague you could wish for. ‘Could you at least pretend that you understand the rules of our employment?’
‘You think anyone cares?’
‘Yes.’
‘It would do you good.’ Julie waited. ‘All right, so what do you want to do?’
‘Drown myself.’
Julie stood. ‘Come on. That isn’t your style. It’s a beautiful day. Let’s go for a walk.’
Kate had agreed that Stuart would have Fiona and Gus for three hours, so she and Julie had plenty of time to fill. They headed for the Rialto bridge, then the Ponte degli Scalzi by the station and then to the Campo Santa Margherita, finally coming back across the Ponte dell’Accademia. ‘You sure as hell do like to walk,’ Julie observed, once they had returned to the tourist hordes in St Mark’s Square. They had intended to catch a boat across to San Giorgio Maggiore, but they were out of time and patience and opted to go for a drink in Harry’s Bar instead, which was a mistake. ‘It would have been cheaper to be mugged,’ she concluded.
Stuart had agreed he would WhatsApp Kate with a place to meet in the vicinity of St Mark’s, but at two o’clock she still hadn’t heard from him. She sent him a message, but there was no reply. ‘What’s he playing at?’
‘Did you definitely say two?’
‘Definitely.’
They left the bar and went to wait in the square. Two fifteen came and went and then the clock tower crept past the half-hour. Kate messaged again: We can’t do this if you won’t keep to your word.
At two forty-five Kate started to worry in earnest. ‘Do you think we should call the office?’ she asked Julie. Kate’s bosses at MI6 in Vauxhall had concluded a meeting between a traitor and his children was not a matter for them to worry themselves with but had agreed to allow Julie to accompany her superior ‘just in case’.
‘Not yet. Give him another fifteen minutes before we start to panic.’
They watched the clock in silence, but a few minutes later, Kate’s phone buzzed. So sorry, didn’t see the time. Just finishing pizza. Could we meet in the Chiesa San Giuliano – a couple of minutes from St Mark’s?
All right, she shot back.
It was a short walk to the church and Kate asked Julie to wait outside. The interior was chilly and her breath hung in the air as she glanced around at the church’s baroque splendour. She could see no sign of Stuart or the children, so she walked up to the front of the nave and looked up at the giant oil painting of the Crucifixion on the wall beside her, a brooding, even foreboding window to a different, more spiritual age. She turned back to face the entrance. ‘Stuart?’
As she started to retrace her steps, she swung around to confront a shadow shifting in the corner of her eye. A man in a dark raincoat was pointing a Browning at her stomach.
2
HE HAD A lean, angular face, with severely acne-scarred skin. Two colleagues emerged from the darkness to join him, pistols hanging loosely at their sides. ‘What do you want?’ Kate asked.
‘Your children are safe. Come with us and they will not be harmed.’ The men spoke Russian, of course. She cursed her complacency.
‘Come where?’
‘Do as you are told.’
‘I need to tell—’
‘No! Don’t be foolish,’ the man told her. ‘It is not worth the risk.’
They ushered her out of the side door of the church and hurried her along the smooth cobblestones of Campo de la Guerra. It was a relatively wide street that led down to the canal, lined with pastel-coloured houses, shops and cafés. It was quiet by the standards of central Venice, but there were enough people for her to make a scene if she wished to. Kate glanced over her shoulder. The men had slipped their Brownings into their pockets.
At the end, she was forced into a launch. She turned to face them. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Save your voice,’ the acne-scarred man told her.
‘My children will wonder what’s happened to me.’
‘They’re safe with your husband.’
‘Is this his doing?’
The man motioned for her to sit. She refused. The launch set off gently, motoring deeper into the heart of the city in all its rambling, faded glory, the buildings around her a patchwork of peeling paint, plasterwork and exposed brick. As they crossed under the first wrought-iron footbridge, a group of Ch
inese children watched her pass.
The canal swung to the right, opening out to the baroque splendour of the church of Santa Maria della Fava, with its ochre bridge and peaceful square, full now of tourists sheltering from the city’s busier thoroughfares.
Just beyond the church, the launch swung right again and immediately glided to a halt by a villa, with stone steps that stretched down to the water’s edge. A young man in a smart white uniform was waiting for her. He offered his hand. She did not take it. ‘Please follow me, Mrs Henderson.’
He led her through a cool, damp, spartan lobby, which looked as if it flooded when the tide was high, and up another set of stone steps to a richly furnished hall. A chaise longue upholstered in burgundy velvet lined one wall beneath what looked like a Picasso. A coffee-table stood alongside what looked like a solid gold Buddha the size of a small horse.
She followed the man up to a sitting room on the floor above, where the furnishings were lighter, to fit with the sun streaming in from full-length windows opened to the balcony. ‘Please wait here,’ the man said.
Kate stepped outside. It was very bright now, the sun warm on her face, the palms and bougainvillaea in pots curling over the lip of the iron railings. She returned to the room and walked around it, assessing the art that graced its expensive walls: a Monet certainly, another Picasso probably – no, for sure, now she looked closer – a Cézanne, Van Gogh’s self-portrait with a bandaged ear.
‘You have an eye for a master?’
Kate swung around. Mikhail Borodin stood in the doorway, six feet two of tanned, lean muscle. ‘I have an eye for value. The paintings in this room must be worth two hundred million or more.’
‘More, I think. But this is my home, my true home. And it is my indulgence. As my father says, you cannot take it with you.’
‘The art, or the money?’
‘Both. Can I get you something to drink?’
‘What have you done with my children?’
‘Nothing. They are with Stuart, as Alexei should have told you. They are quite safe and I will return you to them within the hour, however this conversation progresses. I give you my word.’
‘Your word’s not worth a great deal.’ Mikhail Borodin was the son of Russia’s former intelligence chief, Igor. They had history from Operation Sigma, and not of the good kind.
‘Well, let’s see. I am sorry for the guns and the strong-arm tactics, but I didn’t think you would come otherwise. Now, can I get you a drink?’
‘Just get on with it.’
He gestured at the sofa. ‘Please, sit . . .’
‘I’d rather stand.’
‘Come on, Kate, please . . . I am not going to hurt you.’
Kate did as she was instructed. Mikhail poured a glass of water from a jug filled with ice and fruit on the table. ‘Cigarette?’ He offered her a silver case.
‘I’m trying to give up.’
‘Wise. How have you been?’ Perhaps it was Kate’s imagination, but he seemed nervous suddenly.
‘You’ve just kidnapped me in the heart of a European city. You’re on very thin ice. So get on with it – and whatever you have to say had better be good.’
‘Oh, so it is like the time you filmed me having sex with a man I had met in a bar and then tried to blackmail me?’
Kate didn’t answer.
Mikhail swirled the water in his glass. ‘As you can probably tell, I am here on my own. My wife, my son and my father are all in Moscow.’
‘So what?’
‘Well, there is a reason for that. They are being prevented from leaving.’ He leant forward. ‘I’ll cut straight to it. There has been a coup in Moscow. The GRU has finally seduced the president and got what it has always wanted. Control.’
Kate kept her eyes locked on him. The rivalry between Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR – successor to the notorious KGB – and the GRU, the country’s military intelligence organization, was legendary.
‘Durov has been suspended,’ Mikhail said.
‘When?’ Vasily Durov had been hand-picked by Mikhail’s father, Igor, to succeed him as head of the SVR.
‘Last week. He is being interrogated at an old KGB summer camp outside Moscow. Yesterday my father was supposed to join me here with my wife and son. They were all prevented from boarding the aircraft in Moscow.’
‘Why?’
‘No reason has been given. They were allowed to go home, but they are under house arrest and are being watched around the clock.’
Kate kept her eyes on Mikhail, who was sweating now. His father was a long-standing friend of the Russian president, so she didn’t think it likely he had been suddenly cast out from his inner circle. So unlikely, in fact, was it that it might just be true, however. ‘How did Vasily and your father fall out with the president?’
‘I don’t know and neither do they. But . . . he’s an unpredictable man. Normally it has to do with money, or loyalty, the only things he cares about. You understand that. No one can ever consider themselves truly a friend, and the closer you get, the more in danger you may be.’
‘What does this have to do with me?’
‘My father has been around long enough to know that the wind has changed. They will interrogate Durov until they have squeezed everything possible out of him. They will then put him on trial for corruption. In a week, or two at the most, they will arrest my father and take him to the same place. They are not going to bother with a trial for him.’
‘My heart bleeds for you both.’
Mikhail ignored the remark. Having finished the first cigarette, he took another and pushed the case across to her. She accepted this time and leant closer so he could light one for her.
‘My father has an offer. But we would need to move very quickly. In return for residency, the guarantee of a passport, freedom of movement in America and Europe, assurance that he will be able to keep his wealth, and security protection for life, he is prepared to bring you evidence that your prime minister is a spy working for Moscow.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Kate could feel the knot tightening in her stomach. The threat, even the likelihood, that this had long been true was unsettling enough, but hard evidence would be like a nuclear device exploding at the heart of British democracy. She shuddered at the thought she might be the one to detonate it.
‘You should not make light of this.’
‘What kind of evidence?’
Mikhail leant back, dragging deeply on his cigarette, as if to allow time for his offer to sink in. ‘Payments, very large ones,’ he said. ‘Made to your prime minister, James Ryan, over many years.’
‘The evidence my friend Rav managed to find before you killed him?’
‘That had nothing to do with me – or my father.’
‘We’re not interested.’
‘Oh? And what if I said we have even more than that on offer?’
‘Such as?’
‘Kompromat.’
‘Our prime minister’s lax personal morals are legendary. There can hardly be anyone in the country who doesn’t know of his many affairs.’
‘He would not survive this.’
‘Oh, Christ, don’t tell me – animals?’
‘Your flippancy does you no credit. Underage girls.’
Kate felt the ground being cut from under her. Mikhail’s gaze was locked on her. ‘How young?’
‘Fifteen – fourteen in one instance. He can be heard asking their ages before he has sex with them.’
Kate tried to compose herself. ‘Where? He can’t have been stupid enough to do it in Moscow?’
‘Kosovo, during the war there.’
It made sense. The prime minister had once been an army officer and he had certainly served in Kosovo. Before he died, Rav had identified Ryan’s female interpreter at the time as a probable Russian agent.
‘If you always had this kind of kompromat on our new prime minister, why did you need to pay him?’
‘As well as being profoundly immoral,
your prime minister is extremely greedy. At the time, we were not certain even the kompromat was enough.’
‘How do we know the video isn’t fake?’
‘Because when you see it you will know it is not.’
‘Let me watch it now.’
‘No. Only when they have accepted our offer.’
Kate finished her cigarette, stood up and went to the window. She watched the shifting eddies in the water below. ‘You have a nerve, I’ll give you that. Why should I trust you at all? I recruited Lena Sabic. She was a blameless young girl who’d had life stacked against her. I bullied and blackmailed her to come and work for you. And you murdered her. You cut her throat and left her for me to find in Greece.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’
Kate wasn’t listening. ‘And then, when my beloved friend Rav had managed to unearth some evidence of those payments you made to our prime minister, you murdered him, too, and tried to make it look like suicide by hanging the poor bastard from the light flex in his flat.’
‘Not my decision, either.’
Kate turned to him. ‘So, just to be really clear about this, hell will freeze over before I do anything to facilitate your very kind offer.’
‘Is that so? We ask for nothing but a passport and protection in return for the greatest gift any intelligence agency has ever been offered and you turn me down flat? What would your superiors make of that?’
‘Right now, I don’t care.’
‘I don’t believe you. You want to know how your file in Moscow Centre concludes? The most conscientious – and ambitious – officer currently working for MI6 in London, tipped to be the first female head of the Secret Intelligence Service. A woman who regularly drives herself well above and beyond the call of duty, an officer who always appears to be trying to prove herself to someone or something, whose life has been dominated by the single-minded pursuit of exceptionality.’ He looked at her steadily, daring her to deny it. ‘And yet you want me to believe that this same officer is going to turn down an offer of such gravity without even passing it on to her superiors?’ Mikhail shook his head. He held himself with the poised self-confidence common to all old Etonians. And, unlike his father and many others in Moscow, he had a sophisticated understanding of Western institutions and social mores, gained while he was educated in Britain, which had been Igor’s intention.