by Tom Bradby
‘Good!’ Julie said. ‘What a mess. I should have listened to you. He proposed to me last night.’
‘What did you say?’
‘No! Of course! I told him I was not the marrying kind and never would be. He burst into tears and said he was heartbroken and he would now be on his own for the rest of his life and . . . Oh, my God, I thought he was never going to leave. He just cried and cried like a baby.’
‘That doesn’t really strike me as a normal kind of reaction.’
‘Well, I’m not normal, am I? Maybe I pushed him to it.’
‘Is that what he said?’
‘No. He was pathetic, rather than angry. But that always makes it worse.’ Julie nodded towards the Ladies in the corner. ‘What’s the deal with her? One minute she’s really engaging and good fun and the next she’s a monster.’
‘That might be a bit of an exaggeration.’
‘She told me she was investigating you.’ Kate frowned. ‘Yeah, exactly,’ Julie went on. ‘There’s nothing like actually announcing you’re the snake in the grass. She said she didn’t think Stuart was Viper and that she’d been given permission to open the investigation. She said she’d narrowed it down to a choice between you, me, Ian and Sir Alan. I replied that as career strategies went, I thought she was on to a guaranteed winner – all three of her bosses and one of her juniors. That should see her floating in the River Thames fairly soon.’
‘I think she might be getting carried away.’
‘She can really get in the way, that’s for sure.’
Suzy came back. They sat in awkward silence for a moment. ‘Have you been talking about me?’
‘Of course not,’ Julie said.
‘Is it true you’re having an affair with Ian Granger?’ Suzy asked.
Julie looked as if she’d been punched in the face.
Kate gasped. ‘I really don’t think—’
‘Given the work I need to do,’ Suzy said, ‘it would be better for me to know.’
‘This would be the investigation you’ve just been told to park by the leader of our organization?’ Kate asked.
‘It’s just that I heard he’d left his wife and was having a relationship with someone else in the organization. One of my colleagues thought it was Julie. I really feel that’s something I should be made aware of.’
‘Well, if you’re really desperate to know,’ Julie said, recovering some of her poise, if not shedding her anger, ‘then, yes, we had a brief affair. It was just sex. His marriage was breaking down anyway. He has now left his wife. We are not going to be together. Our relationship is over. Would you like to know what sexual positions we preferred?’ Suzy’s face was reddening. ‘Isn’t that the kind of information you find important at the Security Service?’
‘There’s no need to talk like that. It was a legitimate question.’
The food arrived, just in the nick of time, and conversation really flew along after that.
Kate was grateful to get back to her room. She brushed her teeth, took another double dose of zopiclone and crawled beneath the sheets. The last thing she recalled of that night was a message from Julie that said simply, What a bitch.
12
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Kate was awake early after a short, disturbed and not very restful sleep. She made herself a cup of tea from the kettle in the corner of the room and sat on the balcony outside with a thick oversized coat on her lap.
She glanced at her phone. She opened and closed WhatsApp, flicked through Instagram, then depressed herself with a few minutes on Twitter. She mostly followed politicians and political journalists, and the rage these days was disheartening. It felt like the place everyone went to shout at each other.
She forced herself to put her phone in her pocket and leave it there, which was always surprisingly hard when she was on her own. The sky over the Tiergarten was a brooding, portentous grey, with only the faintest lick of dawn light. The silence felt oppressive. Once upon a time, trips abroad had been accompanied with the regular buzz of the phone in her pocket relaying messages from Stuart, just the everyday frustrations – and sometimes pleasures – of a man left alone to look after his children. And of love. For the first time since his departure, she was aware of truly missing him: his laugh, his smile, his episodic thoughtfulness and concern for her, not to mention the physical affection and warmth.
She wondered when she would next have sex. Before she died? When she was eighty?
Kate finished her tea and was about to get up when her phone buzzed. It was a WhatsApp message from Sergei. How are you?
She stared at it. Was he telepathic? She messaged back, Am good. Are you in London? Her heart raced with the same kind of force as it had in the days when they had almost become lovers as students in St Petersburg, a world and half a lifetime away.
No, at home in St Petersburg. Be great to see you sometime.
Kate looked at that for a long while. What was he up to? What was it about? She couldn’t think straight. She hadn’t seen him since a meeting at the US ambassador’s party in London at the height of Operation Sigma. And she hadn’t heard from him since she’d travelled to his family’s dacha in the Gulf of Finland, north of St Petersburg, expecting to have everything explained – his role in the GRU, the reason for tipping her off about the meeting of the Russian intelligence elite on Igor’s super-yacht, the identity of the secret mole, Viper, in MI6 – along with confirmation that the prime minister really was working for the Russians.
Instead, she’d found Stuart waiting on the beach, with confirmation that he was Viper, and it was all over.
Except nothing was over. In her more troubled moments, she thought the game the Russians were playing might only just have begun.
She put the phone into her pocket and immediately took it out again. How? she typed. Where?
But there was no reply. She opened the photograph attached to his feed. It was of him smiling against the backdrop of a long beach and the Gulf of Finland, his family’s dacha just visible in the distance. She waited and waited – and then could contain herself no longer. Are you there? she asked.
He didn’t answer.
Eventually Kate forced herself from the chair and went to shower. She had to resist the temptation to look at her phone while she dressed, but when she could stave it off no longer, there was still no reply from Sergei.
The sense of anxiety, of dread, even, wrapped itself around her, but she forced herself through it, as if in a fog, and found herself the first at the breakfast buffet. She filled her plate and went to a remote corner table. She ordered coffee and drank it too fast. She didn’t feel like eating. She wondered how Fiona and Gus were getting on at home. She called Rose’s mobile, but got no reply there either.
Neither Julie nor Suzy made it to breakfast, so they met at eight forty-five in the lobby as agreed. Kate had her earpiece in and she set off on the route they had all arranged in advance with Danny.
She walked through the centre of the Tiergarten, skirting the Rose Garden, and then under the Brandenburg Gate to allow Danny and his team time to assess whether she was being watched and followed by members of any foreign intelligence service, most notably, of course, the Russians.
The idea was to move from crowded areas to open ones and back again, while officers on the streets worked behind her to get a sense of what they might or might not be up against. Danny, meanwhile, monitored the electronic activity in the immediate vicinity of her progress to check for any spikes that might suggest hostile officers communicating with each other while in pursuit.
Kate was halfway down Unter den Linden when the tiny microphone in her ear came to life with Danny’s calm, steady voice. ‘Take a turn into Bebelplatz.’
She did so, ambling slowly to the centre of the famous square, in which the Nazis had burnt books, to look through the glass window in the cobbles at its centre, which afforded a view of the library built in memorial beneath.
She returned to Unter den Linden and continued on pa
st Museum Island to Alexanderplatz, which still had the bleak air of the square in east Berlin it had once been.
Despite her leisurely pace, Kate reached the corner of the square early and Danny instructed her to carry on beyond it. ‘Need a bit more to be sure,’ he said.
She walked on under the S-Bahn and swung left into Münzstrasse. Halfway down it, she turned into a vintage shop, where ‘The Eton Rifles’ by The Jam was playing on an old turntable. It was a pick-and-weigh store, where your choices were measured by the kilo, full of ripped jeans, denim shorts, leather belts, bags and jackets, sunglasses and every kind of hat that might have been fashionable in the sixties, seventies or eighties.
As she stepped back on to Münzstrasse, Danny’s voice rang in her ear: ‘Clear. Go back to the meet point.’
Kate retraced her steps, past the homeless people sleeping beneath the underpass, until she was standing by the bus stop in the corner of Alexanderplatz.
She waited. Julie had slipped a packet of cigarettes into the pocket of her jacket before she’d left the hotel and she lit one now to pass the time.
It started to spit with rain, so she joined the bus queue beneath the shelter. An old woman in front of her waved away the smoke.
A phone rang in her pocket. It was not her own. She took out an old-fashioned Nokia and answered it. She had not felt anyone place it there. ‘I said come alone,’ Mikhail said.
‘We’re not at the stage yet where I’m prepared to take that risk.’
‘Go to the S-Bahn station. Head for Westkreuz. Keep the phone with you.’
Kate put the Nokia back into her pocket and crossed the road. ‘He’s asked me to get on an S-Bahn train to Westkreuz,’ she whispered quietly into the microphone hidden inside the lapel of her jacket. ‘How the hell did someone get a phone into my pocket?’
‘Sorry, Kate,’ Danny replied. ‘We didn’t see anything.’
Kate bought a ticket and walked up the stairs to the platform on the floor above, which was shielded from the elements by a grand semicircular metal and glass roof. The station was crowded for this time of day, a large group of French schoolchildren moving slowly along it. Kate walked on beyond them to where a young man was circling on a battered scooter.
A train pulled in and she got on to it. The students boarded with her and she listened idly to the meaningless chatter of someone else’s children. The train pulled out. Grey buildings slid by beyond a rain-splattered window. The burner phone buzzed in her pocket. She answered it. ‘Get off at the next stop. Don’t end the call.’
The train rattled slowly into the station at Hackescher Markt. As the doors slid open, Kate did as she had been instructed. The voice at the other end of the line was silent. She waited. ‘Get back on. End the call.’
She did, just as the doors closed. The train pulled out. ‘I don’t know if I like this,’ she whispered into her lapel.
‘Let’s stay with it.’ It was Suzy, who must have been assigned to the makeshift control room. ‘We’re sticking with you, not far behind.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Kate muttered. The train rolled on, past Museum Island and across the canal. The phone rang. ‘Get off at Friedrichstrasse. There is a coffee shop on the platform called Cuccis. Buy a coffee and wait.’
Kate was on the cusp of telling the voice at the other end of the line where he could stick his meeting, but he ended the call before she had the chance.
In the coffee shop, she ordered a black coffee and stood drinking it as the platform emptied, then slowly filled again.
The minute hand on the station clock crawled around the dial. Five minutes became ten, then turned into fifteen and finally twenty. ‘I’m crying off,’ Kate said.
‘It’s your call, boss,’ Suzy said, to which Kate very nearly replied, Of course it’s my bloody call. But with the same uncanny sense of timing, the phone rang again. ‘Go down the stairs, cross Friedrichstrasse and head east.’
‘Is this leading anywhere? I’m close to calling it off.’
‘You were followed.’
The call was ended. Kate gritted her teeth. She did as she’d been told, emerging again into the spitting rain on the cobbled street the far side of Friedrichstrasse. She followed its passage east, past a series of down-at-heel cafés and restaurants.
She stopped to drop money into a busker’s hat. ‘Talk to me, Danny,’ she said. ‘He says I’ve been followed.’
‘We don’t know what he’s on about, Kate. We think you’re still clean.’
Kate walked on. She reached the end of the road, where the S-Bahn bridge crossed the canal. She lit another cigarette and turned around. There was nowhere she could sensibly proceed to without further instructions, so she paced and smoked with choking unease. ‘Fucking hell,’ she muttered. ‘This isn’t right.’
The phone rang. ‘Get out of there,’ Mikhail said. ‘We’ve been compromised. Get out of there now.’
Kate threw away her cigarette. Two men emerged from the shadow of the S-Bahn bridge. One blocked the road she had come down, the second a potential escape route to her left. She instinctively turned right, only to be confronted by a car that screeched into view and swung around in the middle of the street. Kate was cornered, with her back to the canal, both men armed with thick steel bars. ‘I’ve got trouble,’ she whispered. ‘Big bloody trouble.’
Kate glanced behind her. To swim or try to run?
She faced the men again. One was short, stocky and bald, with tattoos that climbed from his neck up either side of his shaved skull. The other was surprisingly slight, with a thin moustache and the kind of wispy half-beard you’d normally see on a teenager. He was the more dangerous.
The short guy got out of line, came on too quickly and swung with too much force. Kate stepped aside, tripped him and smashed his skull on to the top railing of the fence by the canal. He collapsed with a low grunt.
Two more men had got out of the car and were advancing towards her. One had a knife, but her immediate concern was the guy who looked like an overgrown adolescent. He advanced with stealth. They circled each other for a moment.
He feinted one way, then brought the bar down in a vicious arc towards her skull. She swerved, but only just in time – she felt the tremor in the air as it passed her cheek.
He tried again too swiftly and this time she caught his arm, blocked his leg and used his momentum to send him tipping over the rail and straight into the canal.
But the other two men had split up, blocking any realistic chance of escape. Besides, one was now armed with a pistol. Kate edged along the fence as they closed in. The man she’d sent into the canal was yelling at his colleagues in Russian.
There was no way out of here. Kate wondered how Rose would cope with the children and whether Fiona’s fragile state of mind would deal with the death of her mother as well as the loss of her father.
There was nowhere to run and no place to hide. And even if by some miracle she could disarm the man with a knife – a hundred times more difficult in real life than they ever made it look in films – a single bullet from the other advancing thug would end this encounter in a heartbeat.
She had all but given up and resigned herself to her fate when she heard a single cry: ‘Kate!’
The man with the pistol turned, but he was not quick enough. Suzy pushed his arm up so that a shot pinged harmlessly off the metal strut of the bridge above, then slammed the heel of her palm into the brachial nerve on the side of his neck.
Danny and his colleagues were only half a pace behind her, so that the thug with a knife, who had seemed so menacing only seconds before, now found himself surrounded by four men and a female officer with a pistol trained at his chest. He didn’t need any further warning: he ran for his life.
They all watched him go. Kate leant back against the rail. Suddenly she felt very faint. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered. No one seemed to have heard her. ‘Thank you, Suzy,’ she said. ‘All of you.’
13
KATE TOOK THE decisio
n to make a swift exit from the scene to avoid any operational fallout with the German police and their intelligence colleagues, whom they had deliberately chosen not to inform of their plans.
She went straight to her room once they had got back to the hotel, washed her face and sat on her bed. She noticed her hands were shaking violently. Her phone rang: C. She didn’t answer it, but as soon as it rang off, he called again. ‘Yes, boss?’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t really know. We stuck to the plan. Danny and his team allowed plenty of time for the covert surveillance and he was confident I was clear. Somehow Mikhail got a burner phone into my pocket. I don’t know where or how – I didn’t spot that and neither did the ops team. He called and said I’d been followed. He instructed me to get on to the S-Bahn and off again at Friedrichstrasse. He directed me to a spot under the S-Bahn bridge that did feel as if it had been deliberately designed for an ambush and then . . .’ Kate gathered herself. ‘I thought I was done for, to be honest. Suzy came out of the darkness at them like a wild cat. I wouldn’t be here without her.’
‘Who betrayed you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Get back here and we’ll work it out.’ Sir Alan ended the call. Within a few seconds, her phone lit up again. This time it was Ian. But hearing his reproachful analysis was the last thing she needed, so she ignored him entirely.
She lay on her bed, but that didn’t help. She made herself a cup of tea, but that had no positive impact either. Eventually, she used the in-house service to send a message to Julie and Suzy, instructing them to book everyone on to an evening flight, the operational teams included.
She went back out into the Tiergarten and walked fast, the events of the morning and all their possible implications churning in her mind. As she passed the Rose Garden for the second time, she pulled out her phone and sent Sergei another message. You there?
She still did not get an answer.
Kate continued on autopilot until she emerged from the Tiergarten just opposite the Holocaust Memorial. She made a point of visiting it on every trip to Berlin, and perhaps its unconscious allure today was a connection with something bigger, of greater importance.