by Tom Bradby
After that, there was nothing more of any note. At midnight, Kate stood up. ‘Okay, let’s take shifts. I’m happy to do the first.’
‘I’m all right,’ Danny said. ‘I’ve had a few weeks’ R and R. I’ll call you if anything happens.’
‘You sure you don’t want us to put a tail on Rigin?’ Rav asked. ‘We might be missing a trick.’
‘I’m sure. But let’s get a signal in place by dawn.’
Rav frowned. ‘Isn’t it a bit soon for that? I mean, she’s only just climbed aboard. It might spook her.’
‘Rigin’s presence here really is no accident. I think we’re in the right place at the right time, and need to move quickly.’
Rav shrugged. ‘You’re the boss.’
Kate slipped out to her bedroom next door to the suite. There was no message from Stuart – perhaps he’d navigated around their daughter’s desire to dress as a Swedish porn star instead of pressing the nuclear button. But as Kate turned out the light, home was far from her mind. It was always the same when you had someone out there: the sense of responsibility, of vulnerability, was like a shadow over every waking and sleeping moment.
She was awake long before dawn.
The first thing she did was check with Danny that the signal was out. The team had done its work and ensured a red T-shirt was clearly visible through an open window of the sixth-floor room they occupied at the Kempinski.
Kate breakfasted with Danny, who insisted again that he didn’t need sleep. She poured herself a coffee. Soon Julie joined her. She sat down, lit up and offered Kate her Marlboros.
Kate grimaced. ‘Not before breakfast.’
Julie held up the cigarette. ‘This is my breakfast.’
‘That’s what my dad used to say.’
‘Mine too.’
‘How’s he bearing up?’
‘Fine, considering. I sent him back up to Doncaster when I knew I was coming out here.’ Julie took a deep drag and funnelled the smoke upwards. ‘I told him about your mum.’ Julie’s mother, like Kate’s, had destroyed her family with an ill-judged affair.
‘I’m not convinced that would have helped.’
‘He doesn’t want to open the door to the possibility that she isn’t the woman he still tells himself she is.’
Kate sighed. ‘I should have warned you about that. It’s the only thing I ever really argued with my father about. Have you called your mother?’
‘No.’
‘I know I should probably shut up about it, but I still think it’s better to grasp the nettle.’
‘I’ve thought about it. And I’ll never speak to her again as long as I live.’
Kate looked at her young protégée. At times there was an unsettling intensity to her.
Rav joined them. He took a cigarette from Julie’s packet without asking. ‘I’ll do tomorrow night,’ he said.
‘Did you sleep?’ Kate asked.
‘Course not. You?’
Kate shook her head.
After a while, they went back to join Danny at the screen. The Empress seemed deserted.
At one o’clock, Kate and Rav walked towards the rendezvous near Taksim Square. They dodged the rackety trams and crowds of shoppers on Istiklal Avenue and chose a café with chairs and tables scattered along the edge of the road. Rav ordered coffee with a hookah and opened a copy of the Financial Times. They watched the flow of pedestrians for a few minutes, then Kate got up and crossed the street to the Turkish baths.
She paid her entry fee and was directed down a murky corridor to a small glass-and-wood cubicle. She undressed, wrapped herself in a towel and slipped on a pair of ungainly wooden clogs. She clip-clopped down to the central bath area, where the afternoon sun filtered through slats high in the domed ceiling and cast ridged shadows across the cool stone floor.
Kate allowed herself to be washed in hot water, scrubbed and soaped. After about twenty minutes, a young Turkish woman made her way quietly towards her. Zehra was a friend of the owner, and, more importantly, the eldest daughter of Yusuf, who had been the Service’s Istanbul station manager since the 1970s. ‘As salaam alaikum,’ she said.
‘Wa alaikum salaam.’ Kate smiled. ‘It’s so good to see you, my friend.’
‘You too.’
‘Your father is well?’
‘Convinced he’ll live for ever.’ She smiled. ‘Which is rather touching in a man of our profession.’
‘He’s done all right so far. I rather fell in love with him when we were checking out that Russian translator.’ Kate had worked with Yusuf and Zehra on one of her first operations in the Service, an attempt to assess the reliability of a young Russian KGB translator who had offered her services to the British Embassy in Istanbul during the chaotic period after the collapse of Communism. Turncoats were there for the taking, but few in London saw the need to spare the time and expense. Kate had completed the original assessment and passed the girl on to Ian but, as far as she knew, nothing had ever come of it.
‘I warned Ian about her,’ Zehra said. ‘I didn’t trust her.’
Kate frowned. ‘What do you mean, you “warned Ian”?’
‘She smelt of trouble.’
‘But I thought he passed on her.’
‘I don’t think so. But I don’t expect she did him much good.’
Kate was still frowning as Zehra turned away. The secrets of the field were best not shared with London, even with an officer you liked and trusted.
‘I’m here if you need me,’ Zehra said. ‘I’ve seen Rav. We’re well covered.’ She wandered back down the corridor.
Half an hour later Lena appeared, head up, shoulders back. She was shown to the rear of the marble partition, where Kate was waiting. ‘I have time,’ Lena said. ‘An hour’s break every day. They say I can go wherever I want.’ Her eyes were bright. ‘It is just like you said. Mikhail and Katya are really nice. Alexei is a sweet boy. They are very generous, and say I must not overwork.’
‘Did they encourage you to leave the yacht?’
‘Encourage? They say I can come and go as I want.’
‘What about Igor?’
‘He doesn’t say much. Mikhail and Katya switch between Russian and English because they want Alexei to be familiar with both languages, but Mikhail’s father only talks in Russian and is mostly on the phone.’
‘Where does he take his calls?’
‘He normally leaves us and goes along the deck to an office – he called it the boardroom. He came to eat dinner with us last night, but was only there for a few minutes. Every time he sat down, he took another call and had to go away again.’
‘Have you been in the room?’
‘No.’ A haunted look replaced the excitement in her eyes.
Kate leant forward. ‘Lena, I need you to get inside that room.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Listen to me. I think we’re on to something here. I saw you chasing Alexei around the decks yesterday. That was clever. You’ve set up your right to roam. Did he enjoy it?’
‘Yes. Very much.’
‘Well, now I want you to wait until Igor is off the yacht, or preoccupied with something else. Then suggest another game of hide-and-seek. It doesn’t matter where you think Alexei is. All you have to do is go into that room, call his name, crouch down, as if you’re looking for him, and fasten the activated microphone beneath the best piece of furniture.’
‘I can’t do it.’
Kate clasped her wrists. ‘You can. You told me that Mikhail and Katya are nice.’
‘But not the father. The father is not the same. He frightens me.’
‘You’ll be doing nothing wrong, Lena. You didn’t know that room was out of bounds. You do not know that. You’ll just be having fun with his grandson …’
Lena was smiling now. ‘You are a crazy woman. Why does it matter so much?’
‘Trust me. It does.’
‘Is Maja safe?’
‘She will be very soon.’
‘If I d
o it, will that be enough?’
‘I really hope so, yes.’
‘All right. I cannot promise, but I will try.’
Kate patted Lena’s arm, then stood up. ‘Enjoy your bath.’
She rejoined Rav at the café to update him. He folded his newspaper and got to his feet. ‘You ever worry that it’s all going too well?’ he said.
‘Like I said, I always worry.’
3
Julie was waiting for them in the hotel’s ornate lobby. She held back until the lift doors had shut. ‘Guess who just made a special guest appearance?’
‘I don’t know. God, maybe?’
‘Better than that. The Holy fucking Trinity. Markov, Barentsev and Vasily himself.’
‘You sure?’
‘They’re drinking cocktails by the pool.’
They strode out of the lift and into the top-floor suite. Danny greeted them with a megawatt smile and gestured at the biggest of the screens, where three burly Russians, jackets off and ties loosened on the hotel terrace, raised their glasses to the backdrop of the Bosphorus: Markov, head of Directorate S, responsible for agents abroad; Barentsev, head of Operations; and Vasily Durov, the all-powerful chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR.
‘Fuck …’ Kate breathed. ‘Full house.’ She couldn’t quite believe her luck.
‘Too good to be true?’ Rav said.
Kate continued to stare at the screen. He had a point. ‘So Igor’s been busy. They’re all his people.’
Another man came into the frame and shook the hands of those around the table. ‘Rigin again …’
‘So, why would Rigin be here with the big boys?’ Julie asked.
‘My money says not just for happy hour,’ Rav said. He turned to Kate. ‘If we get anything, you’re going to look like a genius.’
‘That’s because I am a genius, Rav. And we’d better bloody get something or you’re all fired.’ She sat back. The op had started as a fishing expedition. Now it was something else. Rav had ordered food and a bottle of wine, but she picked at the pizza and avoided the wine.
Half an hour later, the four Russians stood, slung their jackets over their shoulders, sauntered to the edge of the quay and boarded the launch. Igor emerged onto the bridge wing and watched them power towards the Empress. The microphone was activated and the tension in the suite ratcheted up several more notches as they saw Lena and her young charge racing around the lower deck and disappearing inside.
Igor greeted his guests with bear hugs, and ushered them below. Kate realized she was chewing her fingernails. Rav grabbed Julie’s cigarettes, lit up and went to stand by the window.
The yacht was a blaze of light, but there was no sign of anyone on deck and the microphone fed them only static. Kate could stand it no longer. ‘I’m going to the gym. Call me straight away if you get anything.’
She was halfway down the corridor to her room when she heard Rav behind her. ‘You going to level with me?’ he asked.
‘About what?’
‘Everything.’
‘Such as?’
‘C’mon, Kate.’
Kate shook her head, though she knew what was coming.
‘You insisted Igor was still more active than we knew so, all right, I bought the operation. Just. Maybe it’d be worth all the time, effort and expense, not to mention Lena risking her scrawny neck. But it looks like you’re going to win the lottery here. And that’s a bit too much of a coincidence to be credible.’
‘You mean we’re going to win the lottery.’
‘We know each other far too well for this, Kate.’
She still didn’t answer.
‘I backed your hunch. And so did the top floor. But I don’t buy that this was just a coincidence, and neither will they. You knew they were going to be here. How?’
She gazed at him steadily.
‘Are you going to deny it?’
‘Let’s just get on with it, shall we?’
‘It’s one thing keeping it from me, but if anyone on the top floor thinks you have an undeclared source of intelligence, they’ll go crazy.’
Kate went back to her room, relieved to have got away without giving Rav a straight answer. She went down to the gym and pounded the running machine for longer than she’d intended. She showered and returned to the suite where the surveillance equipment was set up. Danny shook his head to indicate nothing had changed.
Shortly before midnight, a black Mercedes van pulled up outside the hotel foyer. Half a dozen women spilt out and were shepherded through Reception to the quay beyond the pool. Rav peered at them as they waited for the motor launch. ‘Bet they don’t come cheap,’ he said.
They picked up something on the microphone feed shortly after one in the morning. Danny leant forward and adjusted the volume dial. They heard a girl laugh, then giggle and moan encouragingly. Before long, she was panting as unconvincingly as her male companion was grunting loudly.
‘Fuck’s sake.’ Julie groaned. ‘Please tell me Igor hasn’t just invited them there for a sex party.’
‘Hookers are part of Igor’s hospitality shtick.’ Kate lowered the volume. ‘But I very much doubt that’s Vasily getting his rocks off in the boardroom.’
‘Top deck,’ Rav said.
Danny maximized the close-up of the yacht’s stern. The three most powerful men in Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service had gathered there, with Vasily at the centre – but they weren’t drunk enough to have forgotten their own standard operating procedures. They kept their backs to the shore.
‘Lower deck,’ Rav said.
Danny pulled up the screen and closed in on Igor’s son, Mikhail, leaning against the rail next to a blonde hooker.
‘Go on,’ Kate said.
Danny enlarged the screen and peered closer. Lip-reading was one of his many skills. ‘She’s asking questions in English. Where does he spend his time? All over the place, he says. Mainly Moscow, these days, but he travels a lot in Europe. He’s … expecting to spend a few weeks on his father’s yacht. Paying homage, he jokes …
‘She doesn’t seem to know whether to laugh. Where is his favourite place? Zermatt. He loves skiing. She loves skiing, too. She once spent a winter in … somewhere … didn’t catch it … Oh, Cortina. She also loves Venice. But for the fucking, not the skiing. She asks … Oh, okay, what would he like to do to her? He can do anything. Anything he likes. He’s not answering. He seems shy, she says, but she likes to make sure her clients have lived out their most extreme fantasies, so she’s happy to do anything he wants. She’s—’
‘We can see what she’s doing, Danny,’ Kate said.
‘She’s asking if he’d like some Viagra. She has her own supply. He says, yes, that would be good.’
‘So would being heterosexual, maybe,’ Rav said.
‘It makes it harder, longer, better, she says. Her English is a bit stilted. I can’t quite make … Well, she’s trying to arouse him, whispering something …’
‘Is his wife still aboard?’ Julie asked.
‘Yes,’ Kate said. ‘But Igor makes it very clear that fucking hookers regularly is a fundamental duty of manhood, and a prerequisite for membership of the Mafia class. He thinks his son and daughter-in-law are dangerously Westernized already, so this is his way of reminding them of the chauvinistic imperatives of Russian power politics. Mikhail won’t dare to refuse. Katya won’t dare to object.’
The hooker led the apparently unwilling Mikhail inside. The three men on the upper deck had also vanished.
‘You should go to bed,’ Rav told Kate. ‘This could take days.’
‘With those guys on board? Are you kidding? They’re here for a reason.’
They heard the door to the boardroom open and close, then voices. They listened in silence. Even with the level of technical wizardry the Service could deploy, the microphone’s performance had been heavily compromised by its size, so the conversation came and went. To begin with, they seemed to be talking about Moscow
Centre’s internal politics.
‘Who is Kyril?’ Kate whispered.
‘Not sure,’ Rav muttered. ‘GRU, maybe.’ Moscow’s military intelligence arm had a substantial foreign operation of its own. The tension between the two organizations was notorious.
Igor was talking now. He offered the men cigars and disappeared to the far end of the room, frustratingly out of earshot for a minute or more.
When he came back, Vasily, whose voice was familiar to them all, said, ‘Now is our moment.’ He was speaking in Russian, which all of Kate’s team spoke fluently. They leant closer to the speaker on the desk.
‘What makes you so sure?’ Igor asked.
‘The Prime Minister has prostate cancer. He will resign this week.’
They could hear Igor lighting the cigars. ‘Who stands in our way?’
‘The woman in Education, perhaps. But there will be other candidates, of course.’
‘Viper can help.’
‘Yes. We will have to wait and see. But we won’t need to for long. Viper says—’
Somebody must have moved a chair or table, because there was a screech that had them all covering their ears and the voices became much fainter. Danny tried to work his magic with the dials, but to no avail.
‘Fuck,’ Kate said. She leant further forward. ‘Turn it up.’
Danny kept trying. ‘I think it’s been damaged. This is maximum volume.’
They leant even closer, but hearing anything was next to impossible.
‘It’s on record,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can get with some enhancement.’
Kate moved to the window. Rav and Julie lit up. Rav offered Kate his cigarette and she took a few puffs. ‘If the PM was sick,’ Julie said, ‘wouldn’t we know?’
‘I’ve not heard a whisper,’ Rav said.
‘But let’s assume for a moment they know something we don’t,’ Kate said. ‘They were implying they would have a dog in any leadership fight. So who’s their guy?’
‘How do we know it’s a guy?’ Julie said.