Red Strike

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  Vasin tipped his head at the van. ‘Get the fire started. Then we’re leaving.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  The driver shot to his feet. He scooped up the stolen reg plates and dumped them inside the front of the Crafter. Paced back over to the panel van and peeled off the large magnetic sticker from the side, the one with the forged company logo printed on it. He carried the sticker over to the Crafter and chucked it inside the front cab too. With the original plates on display and the logo on the side removed, the Sprinter would pass for just another white van clogging up Britain’s streets.

  The rest of the team waited inside the Sprinter, guarding Volkov while the driver took out three items from the back of the van. A worn car tyre, a twenty-litre jerry can filled with petrol and a plastic bag with a change of clothes. He handed the bag to Vasin, lugged the tyre over to the police van, placed it on the floor of the main cabin and doused it in petrol. Vasin stripped out of his duty vest and uniform and changed into the clothes provided in the bag: an oversized plaid shirt, T-shirt and acid-washed jeans. He tossed the police kit into the van, stepped back and nodded at the driver.

  ‘Burn it,’ he said.

  The driver dug out a lighter from his shorts pocket, thumbed the spark wheel and applied the naked flame to the doused car tyre. The fire quickly took hold. Nothing burned as effectively as petrol-soaked rubber. Thick black smoke and flames engulfed the main cabin of the police van, licking at the seats and carpet, spouting out of the opening, eddying into the grey sky. The smell of burning plastic and rubber hung in the air as the driver and Vasin hurried back over to the Sprinter and jumped inside.

  They weren’t worried about the flames attracting local attention. They were miles from the nearest house, even further from the closest village. By the time a passing motorist or walker spotted the blazing van and called the emergency services, Vasin and his men would be far away. Besides, it was more important that they destroyed any potential DNA evidence. They would leave nothing for the police except a blackened metal shell. There would be no prints, no forensic evidence.

  Nothing to tie Vasin and his men to the attack.

  The next part of the plan was easy. Head south for two hundred miles, to a multi-storey car park on the outskirts of Coventry. Change vehicles again, switching to a rented Vauxhall Insignia. There was a go-bag stowed inside the boot of the Insignia, with everything the team would need for the final leg of their escape from the UK. Seven Hungarian passports, three thousand pounds in cash and a similar amount in local currency. Plus seven one-way tickets for a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul, with an onward connection to their final destination. One ticket for each guy on the team, plus Volkov.

  The tickets had been booked a fortnight ago, from an anonymous office in Dubai, using a secure VPN service. No way of tracing anything back to the Russians.

  He watched the police van burn for a moment. A beautiful sight. Then he turned to the driver.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  As they pulled away, Volkov watched the glow of the flames through the van’s rear window. For a few minutes they travelled along at motorway speeds, putting some serious distance between themselves and the crime scene. Engine growling, the cabin lurching this way and that as it rolled over the deep potholes in the road, rattling the guys buckled up inside. After three or four miles he heard the crunching of gears, the engine-roar dialling down to a low thrum as the van settled into a gentle cruise, rumbling through the countryside at around forty miles per hour.

  For the first time in many weeks, Volkov breathed a sigh of relief.

  The past few days had been some of the most stressful of his life.

  Volkov hadn’t wanted to go into witness protection. He didn’t believe the bullshit explanation the detectives in charge of his case had given him. This is for your own safety, Nikolai. The British police were polite and approachable, which was probably a good thing when it came to arresting drunks on a Saturday night in a market town. But they didn’t understand his world. They couldn’t protect him from his enemies.

  Nobody could.

  That had been the message behind the poisoning, Volkov knew. The assassination attempt had failed, but the message from his enemies was clear.

  We can get you anytime. Anywhere.

  Nowhere is safe.

  Volkov had lived a lonely existence in Britain. He had no friends to speak of. His old comrades in the Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, had abandoned him after he had been accused of selling state secrets to MI6. Volkov had fled before the authorities could arrest him, defecting to the UK. But that was where his luck ran out. His wife had refused to join him in England and divorced him a year later. Six months after that, his son had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Minsk. The only person he had left was his beloved daughter, Nadezhda.

  She was beautiful. Playful. Radiant. She had her father’s intelligence, her mother’s toughness and a sense of humour neither of them possessed. And Volkov had not seen her since he’d fled Russia seven years earlier.

  They had spoken almost daily before the nerve agent attack, but the police had refused Volkov’s requests to call her while he was in hospital. No outside contact, they had said.

  For your own safety.

  They assured him Nadezhda wasn’t at risk.

  Volkov knew better. He knew he had to find some way of warning her. So he had smuggled a burner phone into the safe house.

  Which had been easy enough to do. The police had allowed him to return home after his discharge from hospital to fetch some personal items. Clothes, toiletries, books. They couldn’t let him go to the safe house wearing a hospital gown.

  He had a go-bag packed in his wardrobe, ready to use in case he had to leave Swindon at short notice. An old habit, from his days as a spy. The police had searched the go-bag thoroughly before returning it to him. They had found the burner phone and the fake passport, the bundles of sterling and euros stashed inside his vintage leather wash bag.

  But they hadn’t found the additional burner phone, secreted in a hidden compartment sewn into the bottom of the wash bag.

  Volkov had memorised Nadezhda’s mobile number. During the first few days in the safe house he had sent her a stream of text messages. He would sneak into the downstairs bathroom, take out his phone from the secret wash-bag compartment, power it up and check in with her. Telling her not to worry, that he was okay, he couldn’t say where he was, but that he hoped to make a full recovery and speak to her again soon.

  He also told her to leave St Petersburg, where she had been studying acting, immediately. Get out to the countryside, he wrote. Preferably somewhere remote, where the authorities can’t find you. Don’t panic.

  Everything will be okay. Papa will fix this.

  She hadn’t replied.

  Volkov had started to get anxious. He feared the worst.

  On the fifth day, a new message came through.

  Actually, there were two separate messages. Both sent from Nadezhda’s phone. But not from her. The messages were from the people who had tried to kill him.

  The first message had said, We have your daughter. She is safe and well. If you want to see her again, do exactly as we say.

  The message didn’t say what would happen if Volkov refused. But it didn’t need to.

  The second message had been much longer than the first. Practically an essay. It had contained a detailed list of instructions for Volkov to follow. Obligations that he would be required to fulfil. They were non-negotiable, the messenger had warned. If he wanted to be reunited with Nadezhda, he would have to carry out the instructions to the letter. Any deviation from the plan would have fatal consequences.

  The messenger added that, should Volkov agree to the terms, all would be forgiven. Life could begin anew. He could go home. There would be a new job waiting for him, an unelected position in the administration. Volkov would become an unofficial spokesman for the Kremlin on
issues of national security. There would be regular paid appearances on TV and the radio. Who knows? In time he might even be selected to run for mayor someplace. Rostov, perhaps. Or Nizhny Novgorod.

  The choice facing Volkov had been simple.

  Work with his enemies, or turn his back finally and irreversibly on the motherland and suffer.

  The death of his only child, versus potentially thousands of lives lost.

  Personal sacrifice or global disaster.

  An impossible call to make.

  They gave him twelve hours to decide.

  Volkov didn’t give a damn about himself. He was sixty-three, with more miles on the clock than he had road left ahead. But Nadezhda was everything to him.

  Besides, he reasoned, his life in the UK hadn’t turned out as he had hoped. When he had first cut a deal with the British authorities they had painted him a picture of a golden future in exile. A glamorous apartment in Chelsea, a six-figure job at a Marylebone think tank, the works.

  They had lied.

  The home turned out to be a modest terraced house in an anonymous cul-de-sac in Swindon. The highly paid job never materialised. His only source of income was the occasional fee he received from MI6 for the intelligence reports he produced. Volkov made it his business to keep in touch with a loose network of exiled former agents and Kremlin officials, embittered oligarchs and investigative journalists. People opposed to the regime, those who had a personal axe to grind. Each report earned him a few grand, barely enough to pay the bills. He tried applying for a few positions but his English was poor and his computer skills non-existent. There wasn’t a huge demand for sixty-something former Russian agents.

  His only regular contact was with his local newsagent and his handler at Six. He had no future. Nothing to live for, except his daily phone call to Nadezhda.

  Volkov could have refused the Kremlin’s offer. He could have stayed put in the safe house, biding his time, waiting for the police to move him to some other town, in some other remote part of the country or overseas.

  But he would never be able to relax. He would have to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, wondering whether this was the day they would finally catch up with him.

  And he was tired of hiding.

  Twelve hours after receiving the message, Volkov had agreed to their terms.

  We’ll send a team to get you, the messenger had replied. Keep Thursday afternoon free.

  Today.

  They had triangulated the location of the safe house using Volkov’s phone. Questioned him about the officers on the Protected Persons Unit. Numbers, firepower, rounds per weapon. It had been unbelievably easy for Volkov to provide them with such information. The police, bored and with nothing else to do, had readily answered his questions.

  There had been one final task for Volkov to carry out that morning. A small but vital part of the plan.

  He had been told to send a message to a disposable number as soon as the police were ready to leave. That would be the signal for the ambush team to approach in the Crafter.

  You’ll have to find a way to delay your minders, the messenger had informed him. Give the team enough time to drive up and rescue you.

  So Volkov had hit on the idea of feigning sickness. He’d locked himself in the bathroom, made a few retching noises and pained groans. The officers had believed him, of course. They knew how ill he was. How painful his recovery had been.

  It was simply a question of waiting in the bathroom until he received the final message from the team. The one telling him that they were sixty seconds away.

  Then he’d flushed the toilet and followed the officers outside.

  They had staged the whole attack as a kidnapping. For security purposes, the messenger had explained. It would be preferable if the British believed that Volkov had been taken against his will. Otherwise they might get suspicious. Figure out that he’d been in on the plan all along.

  Now he was on his way to see his daughter.

  Before the poisoning, Volkov had learned something huge. Bigger than anything he’d uncovered during his days working in foreign intelligence. Something catastrophic, with the power to bring down both the Russian and American presidents.

  He had been on the cusp of sharing that int with his handler when the poisoning had happened. But now Volkov was glad he hadn’t spilled his guts. Because for the first time in many years, he could look forward again.

  At last, after all these years, he would be reunited with Nadezhda.

  But first, Volkov had a job to do.

  One last task, in the service of Mother Russia.

  FIVE

  John Bald, the one-time hero of the Regiment, was poring over a stack of paperwork when the squat Mexican stuck his head through the office door.

  ‘Two men for you, Mister John.’

  Bald looked up from the sheaf of papers on the desk and frowned. In front of him was the itinerary for the motorbike tour he would be leading the following day. A nine-day guided trip from Playa del Carmen to Zipolite on the Pacific coast, via the jungle of Palenque. One of the most popular deals offered by his company, Mayan Motorbike Tours. It was Bald’s usual custom to run a last-minute check before each ride. Travel arrangements, restaurants, lodgings. Making sure everything was in order. He liked to be prepared.

  ‘Who are they?’ asked Bald.

  Hector Gallardo, the twenty-year-old kid from Tulum and the sole employee of Mayan Motorbike Tours, shifted uneasily on his feet.

  ‘They didn’t say, Mister John. Just asked to speak with the boss.’

  Bald peered out through the office window at the main garage. Amid the clutter of motorcycles and spare parts he could see a couple of pale guys in loose-fitting T-shirts and baggy jeans, hands stuffed inside their front pockets. Two of the customers booked in for tomorrow’s tour, perhaps. Or tourists looking for a cheap self-hire motorbike for a few days.

  Bald gritted his teeth and sighed. ‘I’ll be right out.’

  ‘Sí, Mister. I go tell them.’

  Hector turned and hurried out of the office, grinning like the village idiot.

  Bald had inherited the kid when he’d bought out the company a few months back. He had initially been prepared to let Hector go. The kid was clumsy, getting the orders wrong at lunch, making a fucking mess or forgetting basic stuff. His grasp of English was piss poor, and he had a special knack for getting on Bald’s nerves with his gormless smile and happy-go-lucky demeanour.

  But after his first week of running the business, Bald had changed his mind. Hector was a grinning fool, but he had a natural talent for fixing up bikes and was a proper wizard when it came to using a torque wrench. Plus, he came cheap. The kid was a mechanic, tour guide, cleaner and general Man Friday, and all for less than the minimum wage back in the UK.

  The developing world. Bald appreciated it.

  He slid out from behind his desk, sweat pasting his polo shirt to his back. Ten o’clock in the morning, early March, and the temperature was already nudging past the thirty-degree mark. The prehistoric PC on his clutter-free desk was whirring noisily, the fan overhead spinning slowly, blowing down stale fan-diced air on Bald.

  Life in Playa del Carmen had its drawbacks, he thought. The local women weren’t much to look at and the food got boring after a while, endless variations of maize and meat and guacamole. But he had no complaints about the weather.

  It’s a fuck of a lot warmer than back home in Dundee.

  Bald had bought the garage six months ago from a retired German plastic surgeon called Wolfgang Wolf. The German had lost his life savings after investing heavily in a luxury development in Cancun that had gone south. Bald had heard about the guy’s financial worries over a conversation with a local moneylender and had made Wolf a lowball offer for the place, knowing that the guy needed the cash to pay off his debts. He’d acquired the garage and its inventory for a pittance.

  It was the one bit of good fortune he’d had in the past year.

/>   Nine months earlier, things had been looking up for Bald. He had a million in Swiss-stamped gold bullion, getaway funds he’d stolen from the brother of the Russian president during an MI6 op. He had a stunning Thai fiancée half his age.

  Then his Thai bride-to-be had shafted him.

  Told him she knew a guy who would buy the stolen bullion from Bald. A dealer based in Manila. Straight-shooting guy, she had said. He’ll give you a good price, no questions asked. Trust me.

  The meeting had turned out to be a set-up.

  The Filipino dealer had robbed Bald. Kamlai, his Thai princess, had been in on the whole thing. She’d done a runner with the dealer, left Bald in a crappy hotel room with his fake passport and the few gold bars he’d kept secret from her. Converted into hard cash, there was barely enough left over for Bald to start over and fly out to Mexico’s Mayan Riviera. He had no good reason for being there, other than the fact that it was hot, cheap, and very fucking far away from his troubles. He spent a month getting pissed, lying low and considering his options. Waiting for an opportunity.

  Then he’d heard the German surgeon’s sob story and he’d sunk the last of his capital into the garage. Now Bald spent his days in the workshop and his evenings sipping Modelo Negros down by the beach.

  It wasn’t the millionaire lifestyle Bald had planned for himself.

  But, hey, it was better than nothing.

  For the first time in his life, Bald was close to settling for what he had. No more big plans. No more dreams of easy money. Time to face the truth: he was nearing fifty, his glory days in the Regiment were a long way behind him, his prospects of future employment extremely limited. Maybe it was time to admit defeat. Accept that this was the best that the son of a Dundee council estate could hope for. There were plenty of others who made do with less, whose lives were shittier.

  Maybe, he thought, it was time to stop fighting the world.

  He stepped out of the back office and into the main garage.

  There was the smell of motor oil and lubricants in the air, Mexican folk music playing on the local radio station. The garage was split roughly down the middle. At the rear was the company office and the adjacent workshop where the various checks and repairs were carried out. Hector was in the workshop area, draining the engine oil from a Honda Shadow that had just made the journey to Chichén Itza and back. Several forty-five-gallon drums were lined up against the back wall, some filled to the brim with used motor oil. Once a week a guy came by in a truck and took the drums over to a processing facility in Valladolid, where it was recycled before being sold on as re-refined oil.