Girl Who Fell 1: Behind Blue Eyes. Offbeat Brit spy series-cum-lesbian love triangle. Killing Eve meets female James Bond meets Helen of Troy returns (HAIL THE QUEEN series)
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Not up to dealing with her sarcasm, he let his eyes run down her Vetements cross-cut skinny Levis, to her signature Jimmy Choo Myren Flat over-the-knee boots (which C and everyone else called her fuck-me boots).
‘New boots?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Felicity. ‘I got them in Paris. Scattered Crystals finish.’
‘Very chic. The firearm, please,’ he said.
He held out his hand for the 321. She handed it over, and he confirmed it was empty.
‘The other one?’ he said.
Felicity leaned forward, once again skil ful y displaying her breasts, and pul ed out the pistol. Arms examined it.
‘ Safety on, OhZone 7!’ he snapped and then pul ed out the
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clip. ‘Your colleagues chamber these for 9mm Luger, or point 357. Why d’you have a larger calibre?’
Felicity put on her seductive face.
‘I intend to make an impact.’
And a bigger hole when it comes out, she confided to Hebe.
‘Look at this,’ she added.
She bent over further and reached into her purse, removing a sheet of paper and handing it to him.
‘It gives me official permission.’
Arms unfolded it. The MI6 memo was signed ‘C,’ in green ink.
Re. Testing of point 45 Depleted Uranium Rounds
Chief Firearms Officer Marians,
Newly appointed agent ℧ 7 is hereby authorised to use the above for test purposes, with immediate effect.
‘So you’ve got C’s blessing,’ Arms said. ‘Wel , I still decide the operating hours down here, and we’re shutting down for the day. Don’t you have a husband to go home to?’
‘I’m running Cloud Nine tonight,’ Felicity ran her tongue over her lips. ‘Come along to the bar.’
‘I don’t have the time. And how come you’re running the Wonder Bar? You only got back from Paris yesterday.’
‘I’m popular.’
‘You’re trouble. …Anybody ever told you that?’
‘Yes. But it didn’t seem to bother them. In fact, I think they rather liked it.’
Felicity stepped close enough to envelope him in her fragrance.
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‘La Bombe,’ Arms said. ‘That about sums you up.’
‘Isn’t that what a man wants?’ Felicity continued. ‘A little trouble just to spice things up?’
She wrapped her fingers around the barrel of the pistol, and lifted it from his hand.
‘I can stay a little longer. Where’s the harm? I was hoping you’d give me private lessons.’
‘You’d need extra-thick sandbags for depleted uranium rounds.’
‘I know you’ve got extra-thick. I’ve been watching you.’
With a certain amount of chagrin, Arms could feel his resolve crumbling.
‘Man’s gotta be a fool,’ he said. ‘You not a little trouble, you’re a whole lot of trouble.’
Felicity smiled.
‘But you can handle it, just like the uranium rounds.
Wouldn’t you like to handle it? If we can’t do it now, I’m running Cloud Nine again on Sunday night. We can chat, then come here later.’
Arms took a deep breath, ‘Al right, Robinson,’ he said.
Felicity put the gun back in his hand and, just before she turned away, said.
‘Rest up. Sunday might be your lucky night. And remember the sandbags, extra thick.’
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Major Grinin
A cheerful little station, very much like any other provincial railway stop: a small square framed by tall chestnuts and paved with yellow gravel. And now the guards are being posted along the rails, across the beams, in the green shade of the Silesian chestnuts, to form a tight circle around the ramp.
1945, TADEUSZ BOROWSKI –
THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
— 4 YEARS EARLIER —
Zürich, Switzerland.
Zoologischter Garten, District 7.
The Novichok Metapox weapon.
I n summer of 2011, Blanka Maguire’s interest in animal conservation took her to Zürich Zoo for a week-long conference. On the third day, a woman, whose voice gave her away as obviously Russian, telephoned Blanka from a burner*
[* disposable prepaid cel phone] that she had bought for cash
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an hour before.
‘My name is Diana Grinin,’ the woman said. ‘You may have heard of my husband.’
In espionage circles, her husband, Major Grigori Grinin, was known as the head of the shadowy Novichok Institute in Moscow, and inventor of the deadly Metapox virus.
And, Blanka knew, he was the man who had saved her mother’s life in St Petersburg—when Kitty was in pursuit of the Fatima Secret. He was also a Nobel laureate and chess grandmaster.
‘Yes,’ she replied, in her best diplomatic voice. ‘I know who he is.’
‘I have been told you would be a person to contact if…’
Blanka waited a few seconds. When the other side of the line continued to remain silent, she spoke again.
‘Yes, I know Major Grinin is a master of chess. We have excel ent players in my country too. I myself play from time to time. Are you cal ing to perhaps arrange a match?’
‘Yes, yes, he would like to have a match arranged.’
The words tumbled out of Diana Grinin. Blanka sensed the relief in them.
‘Perhaps a match in England? I know a number of people who would jump at the chance to play him. Would you like to have a match arranged in London? Is that why you’re cal ing?’
‘Yes. To arrange a match,’ Diana said emphatical y. ‘In London. He very much wishes to play in London.’
‘I assure you that can be arranged,’ said Blanka.
‘Thank you,’ came the reply at the other end.
Blanka wondered how much effort it had cost Diana to make that cal .
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Blanka knew that Grinin was architect of a new generation of smart chemical and germ warfare weapons. If she contacted the powers that be in MI6, would they accept a defection and protect him? Or would they jail and torture him after false promises? And there was always the chance they would simply kil him. The easy solution.
Blanka seriously wondered if she should even speak further to his wife. Diana didn’t want to meet face to face, but over the next two days they had several phone discussions in which she relayed the terms for Grinin’s defection to London. What Blanka remembered most from the phone conversations occurred at the end of the second cal , when Grinin’s young wife tried to explain why her husband was defecting.
‘He has had a change of heart,’ she said.
Complex passwords and recognition codewords (often question-answer-confirmations) are used everywhere in Intelligence, and are called paroles.’
During the winter nights, an agitated Grinin—her hulking brown-eyed KGB husband—drilled Diana on their approach to Blanka and MI6, so they wouldn’t fall into anybody’s trap.
A distant relative of the Jewish writer Boris Pasternak, hiding and escape from persecution ran in Diana’s blood.
Such was the importance that MI6 placed on Grinin’s defection that the Russia Desk deployed 30 field agents on counter-surveil ance at Heathrow, Helsinki and Zürich airports.
Operation Zoo Time was led by assistant Russia Desk director, Jude Robinson—Felicity’s husband, and the younger of a pair of Australian brothers who were both agents.
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Blanka had nicknamed the pair after English novels she liked. The older Robinson, Crusoe, had joined OhZone at the same time as her. Later, she christened the younger brother after Thomas Hardy’s 1894 novel, Jude the Obscure, because Jude Robinson seemed older than his 30 years, with the burdens of his love-life—in the form
of Felicity—wel exceeding his ability to triumph.
As the day scheduled for the Grinins’ ‘Christmas shopping trip’
to London approached, Blanka made another trip to Zürich.
Jude and Nearby had ridden shotgun as far as central Zürich.
At that point Jude staked out the Swiss RailAway station, while Nearby visited James Joyce’s grave at Fluntern. Blanka got a taxi via the FIFA headquarters in the wooded hil s of Zürichberg; her rock band’s Roads to Moscow played in her head as she gazed at the trees zipping by.
Under hazy sunshine, Blanka made her way through the tourists at Zoologischer Garten carrying a battered knapsack.
Although she had flown into Switzerland as a 35-year-old Helsinki businesswoman, she now appeared as the 60-year-old South African round-the-world traveller, Britt Potgeiter, in spectacles and a gray wig.
On her highly detoured train journey from Zürich-Kloten airport through central Zürich to Zoo Zürich in the Fluntern Quarter of District 7, Blanka had stopped for refreshments or the rest room no less than eight times. She changed her clothes and her wig twice, and eventual y changed a black Samsonite carry-on case for the knapsack.
She tore herself away from the Asian elephants swimming underwater and walked towards the tigers. A rare pair of Sumatran tiger twins had just come on display at the zoo.
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It was there that Blanka met Diana in the flesh for the first time. She stood beside Diana, and studied her surreptitiously.
We could almost be related, Blanka thought, I have Russian ancestors. Our deep blue eyes mark us out. She’s quite beautiful with the white rose in her hair.
Blanka took a step closer, and spoke the parole, quietly, in perfect German.
‘Was ist in einem Namen?’ [What’s in a name?]
Diana replied, in broken German.
‘That which we cal a rose by any other word would smel as sweet.’
As sunlight fell on Diana’s face, Blanka watched her eyes sparkle. Then she completed the parole.
‘So Romeo would, were he not Romeo cal ’d, retain that dear perfection.’
Which he owes without that title, thought Diana.
They looked closely at the tiger cubs and smiled natural y.
‘Everything is agreed,’ Blanka said, under her breath.
‘Is River Heights central?’ whispered Diana.
Blanka nodded, and then glanced at Diana’s abdomen.
Hidden by Blanka’s contact lenses—engineered to mask emotion in her AI eyes—a soft violet tint washed over the lenses.
It was something that happened whenever an OhZone processed new information or strong emotion.
‘You’re pregnant,’ she said, with a broad smile. ‘And with twins!’
‘Jesus!’ Diana said, astonished. ‘Your AI doesn’t miss a trick.’
Blanka tapped her eyes.
‘OhZone vision comes in handy. When are they due?’
‘March,’ Diana answered.
Diana took the white rose from her hair—held it so they could both smel it—the aroma of angels, remembered Blanka, rarefied and pure—and handed it to her.
Then Diana walked away, having picked up the knapsack.
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Blanka lingered with the Sumatran tigers, admiring their strength and dignity, even in captivity.
She thought of her own animals; not just her horses, and her cat, but the hundreds of endangered wild animals that she used her wealth to protect.
Arriving at the nondescript suburbs of District 7 again, Diana gazed out the window of the RailAway train. She quickly retrieved two empty attaché cases from a luggage locker at the SBB terminal in District 1, and then went dry cleaning to reveal any tails she might have on her.
One hour, one bus, one discarded knapsack, and no tails later, Diana crossed west over the River Limmat again, now on a tram. She stepped off it, with the attaché cases, at Bahnhofstrasse, the most expensive retail property in Europe, and strol ed into number 9—the main office of the quiet canton bank, Zürcher Kantonalbank.
In a plush basement office, she was served a Rosabaya coffee.
The attaché cases beside her contained one hundred mil ion dol ars from the British Government.
It was the sweetener Blanka had brought for Major Grinin to bring his Novichok expertise to the West.
Diana furnished the bank official with her husband’s safe deposit box number, and showed him the worn bronze key.
At his first appearance on the Steve Wright in the Afternoon radio show, Major Grinin summed up their defection by saying:
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‘We decided to defect to the West End. We came to London Christmas shopping, and never went home.’
On Wednesday 14th March 2012, on the seventh floor of St Thomas’ Hospital (half a mile along the South Bank from MI6), on Nightingale Ward, Diana gave birth to healthy identical twins.
She had opted to labour in water. And because her father, the renowned Moscow professor of obstetrics, was to attend in addition to the usual St. Thomas’ team, the maternity unit had agreed to its first birth of a twin in water.
‘Baby A’, Emma, was the long water birth and weighed 5 lbs 4 oz.
‘Baby B’, Olga, was delivered 30 minutes later by Caesarean section and weighed 4 lbs 6 oz.
Later, Diana proudly listened to Grinin quote her on Radio 2.
‘Water, my beautiful wife has explained to me, encourages you to relax, and can make your contractions feel less painful.’
She loved her husband with typical Russian passion.
Grinin told the Radio 2 audience how pleased he was that his daughters were born at the hospital where Florence Nightingale (the hero of the Crimea, the last war between Britain and Russia) founded the first school of nursing.
Blanka, who was with Diana in the hospital, whispered to her, ‘Florence Nightingale’s one of my heroes. I have her book Cassandra. ’
On the day that they were born, Emma and Olga became citizens of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the Borough of Lambeth. Four days later, when Blanka drove the baby girls and Diana home to River Heights, they became residents of Westminster.
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— THE PRESENT —
Tuesday, March 10, 2015.
London.
Lamb’s Conduit Street, WC1.
MI6’s treatment of Grinin since his defection had been far from what Blanka and Diana had hoped for.
They were horrified at C’s attempts to force the Nobel Laureate microbiologist to manufacture Novichok Metapox for Britain. Blanka tried to minimize C’s interference, but she soon learned how far he was wil ing to go.
A street robbery C had arranged as a warning had been clumsily done; the contractors had not counted on the old Russian’s strength and agility. The bear-like Grinin refused to be robbed, and had punched one of the men unconscious. In the confusion, another fired, hitting Grinin in the right arm. The bul et had done so much damage that what was left of his arm below the elbow had to be amputated. Though the public believed the story about the Russian KGB being responsible, no one in Intelligence was fooled. When an MI6 director challenged C about the robbery, C retorted:
‘He came to London all smiles, thinking it’d be an easy number. I bet he’s not grinin’ now.’
In theory, C answered to the Foreign Secretary: the minister in charge of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (the
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equivalent of the State Department). When Lucien Barker Johnson was promoted to the post, Blanka dubbed him, L.B.J. , after the American who took office when President Kennedy (J.F.K.) was assassinated. C was responsible for Grinin, so the British Prime Minister, Jermaine Corduroy, summoned C
together with L.B.J.
With the 2015 General Election only eight weeks away, Mr Corduroy was grasping at straws to boost his popularity.
To C’s intense displeasure, the P.M. loudly commended Grinin’s radio appearances, saying he wanted to bring the public health service, politics and the Arts closer together. As C followed L.B.J. out of number 10 Downing Street that day, two words buzzed in his head: piss and artists.
To keep in contact with Grinin, Blanka had adopted the Jericho Café in Bloomsbury as an off-the-grid rendezvous. It was a chess cafe with a French menu, far from MI6 headquarters across the river, but only yards from Holborn Police Station.
She had friends in the Metropolitan Police, and regarded the Old Bill as less dishonest than spies.
The Grade II listed pub, The Lamb, favoured by writers Charles Dickens, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, was at the top of the road. Less than half a mile from Hitler’s chosen London headquarters, the Jericho was also on Grinin’s regular route from his penthouse on Victoria Embankment to the British Library, where he spent much of his free time.
While his arm was healing, Grinin had a lot of time to think, and so did Blanka. Too many things were going wrong: Felicity’s promotion to OhZone 7, Grinin’s mutilation, Oxberry’s diagnosis of her kidney disease, and now being tied to a dialysis machine. Then there were the dreams, the visions—Blanka wasn’t sure what to cal them—that had emerged with increasing
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frequency since she started the dialysis, hitting her when she was most vulnerable.
In the middle of her weekly chess game with Grinin, Blanka found herself contemplating one of the MI6 field agents guarding her Russian friend: a woman in the window seat of the café.
To disguise themselves in the physical world, spies dressed in wigs and appropriate attire. As women were more distracting and less likely to be suspected, the majority of field agents were female.
The woman in the window, Nearby, was dressed as an academic type in spectacles and hippy-chic clothes, a disguise not far from her true nature. Though not a typical MI6 agent, Nearby now resembled the star of the original Charmed, Rose McGowan* but with freckles, auburn-hair, and glasses to boot. [* the very first actress to accuse Harvey Weinstein. Rose McGowan said: ‘Hol ywood is built on sickness. It operates like a cult.’]
Nearby was one of five agents carrying out Grinin’s covert counter-surveil ance and protection (CCSP). The third, Adele Wasson of the CIA, was parked down the street in a Grensons delivery van. In the back was one of OhZone’s technical officers, a young man nicknamed Farringdon—after the part of London where he lived—surrounded by blacked-out monitors and counter-surveil ance equipment.