“Do it” I said, “he’s too stupid to talk. You wouldn’t want him to breed.”
Baburin looked at us, teeth gritted, “you’ll both die watching your families raped, this I promise!”
Alisa shook her head and held the red-hot tip of the knife to Barburin’s scrotum, gently puncturing the skin. I smelt burning hair and flesh. He yelped and writhed in agony, his eyes white and round like a cornered dog. I found a tracksuit top and jammed it in his mouth.
“What is this, little Misha? No more threats?” spat Alisa, “why, I’m only getting started.”
I gave the Russian gangster a sympathetic smile. “Baburin you might walk away from this. Well, hobble. And you might still have a cock at the end of it too.”
The torture and morphine finally hit him, and I could see him give up. Everybody does eventually. I know I have. He nodded, and I took the gag out of his mouth.
“Don’t” gasped Baburin, head bowed, “but please, I don’t understand.”
“Go on” said Alisa, moving the knife away from his balls.
“The Spetzgruppa is here, OK? They have been here six weeks. But why are you going on about Sergei Belov?”
“He’s the target” I said.
“No. I don’t know of any plan to kill Sergei Belov” said Baburin quickly, his eyes glazed from the opiates and the pain of the gunshot wound, “you must believe me!”
I sat on my haunches near his head, “who is the target?”
Baburin gulped then fell back onto the threadbare carpet “the target is the South African internet guy, Van Basten.”
Alisa Turov’s eyes narrowed, “where and when?”
“Some big English house in the countryside” he coughed, “in two or three days, maybe?”
The SVR officer sheathed her knife “tell us everything, Misha.”
Baburin pulled himself up, his back against the sofa and told us that a team of six undeclared Russian FSB men had arrived before Christmas. His orders were to provide them with accommodation, vehicles and cover. They’d been dropped off on the coast by a rigid inflatable, launched from an Estonian freighter coming into Harwich. Baburin picked them up and took them to his farm on the coast nearby.
“Black Hall farm is clean” said Baburin, “I bought it five years ago. I used it as a cannabis farm for a while, but the Musors started sniffing around. Now I just party there at weekends sometimes, use it as my home when I’m not in London. It’s nice and quiet. I’ve built myself a gym, a place to keep my cars.”
He wisely decided to have as little to do with the FSB Spetzgruppa as possible. Their leader was a man who called himself Ruslan. “Ruslan is a hard guy, you can tell. From his accent I would say he was from the South, maybe Kharkov. He would spend all day either training or going out into the countryside looking at the target. The other men worship him. I’ve looked after a few FSB jobs here, but this is the heaviest – top secret. These guys are like ghosts – they don’t exist, no papers, no records …”
“Weapons?” said Alisa.
Baburin swooned, as if he was going to faint. I passed him another ampoule of Morphine and he nodded his thanks. He expertly pricked his arm and sighed as the ultra-powerful dose entered his blood-stream.
Stress, shock, and morphine would screw with a prisoner, disorient him. Misha Baburin would feel fear and pain, ecstasy and comfort in equal measure.
“They brought their tools with them” he said woozily, “on their little boat. Serious tools, AKs, sniper rifles, RPGs, grenades and explosives. Shit like that. It was like they were going to start a war. I told them my life here was good and that they should be careful. They just laughed, like I was joking. Everybody would think it was terrorists, they told me.”
Then, finally, he passed out. I looked at the torn muscle and cartilage on what was left of his knee and shook my head at Alisa. “He’s never going to walk out of here, or anywhere else for that matter” I shrugged.
“No problem” she said quietly. Grunting, she turned him over, lying face-down. Pulling the suppressed Glock she shot him in the back of the head twice. She checked his pockets and retrieved his iPhone and keys. Then she pulled a small card from a clear plastic bag in her pocket and left it by Baburin’s corpse.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the card. Printed on it was a grinning skull surrounded by four small black crosses. I started picking up spent bullet casings. I suspected the Ops Support body-shifters were likely to refuse this one. Three corpses, multiple firearms and eight trafficked prostitutes wasn’t my idea of an ideal night’s cleaning work either.
“This? It’s the calling card of a Mafia group from Georgia. When he was in prison, Baburin knifed one of this group’s members and killed him. They have always promised revenge: it is on Baburin’s criminal record.” The SVR officer looked at the body and shook her head, “we might as well give your police something to investigate, even though I doubt Moscow will be doing much to help Scotland Yard investigate an FSB covert asset.”
I picked up the pistol Baburin had dropped, a 9mm Browning Hi-Power. I called up the stairs “Oz, have you finished with that creature?”
“Yeah” he said, pushing the terrified pimp in front of him, “he’s got nothing to say. He just begs for his life and keeps pissing himself. Apparently the girls up there are happy to be chained up all day and screwed by complete strangers. He’s the misunderstood kindly uncle type, y’know?”
“Alisa, turn the music up.” I motioned for Oz to get out of the way. Picking up a cushion from the sofa I pushed it against the pimp’s head, feeling him shiver and sob. Sometimes, at moments like these, I can almost feel the karma. When I was in hospital, after Iraq, my shrink hated this admission the most. But I can’t help but think that if you want to avoid being murdered by a gunman in a balaclava, don’t traffic teenaged sex slaves.
I stuffed Baburin’s pistol as far as I could into the fabric of the cushion, pinning the pimp’s head to the wall and pulling the trigger. The bang was muffled, his body collapsing in the doorway to the sitting room. A trail of dark red goo dripped from the back of the cushion. I tossed the Browning onto the sofa.
“Good” nodded Alisa, “Release the girls. Don’t let them see your faces, then let’s go.”
I stepped over Baburin’s carcass “Turov, how many dicks have you really cut off?”
She stopped to think for a moment. “Three,” she said.
“I thought that was just to scare him.”
She shrugged and headed for the door.
On the radio the narrator of Peter and the Wolf was still at it:
But Peter tied the other end of rope to the tree, and the wolf’s jumping only made the rope round his tail tighter.
CHAPTER TWELVE
We slipped out of the house and split up. Oz took the van, Alisa headed off to her car and I hailed a cab a safe distance away on the Holloway Road. We agreed to speak the next morning, after I’d spoken to Harry. The cabbie dropped me at Paddington, where I jumped on the tube home.
I got back to my apartment just after ten. I showered, scrubbing myself raw with a nail brush to get rid of firearms residue. Then I put on the 24 hour news. There was nothing about the shooting yet, but there would be by morning. The terrified Eastern European girls, still drugged, had wandered off like zombies into the night and would be found sooner rather than later. Baburin’s story, about Van Basten being the real FSB target, rang true. As I sat in front of the TV nursing a beer, I reasoned that meant that Volk’s target must be Belov: two targets and two teams. It made some sort of sense.
But why not get Fyodor Volk to eliminate both?
In any case, we had to travel to Black Hall farm and take out the FSB team.
Harry answered the phone on the third ring. “SITREP please,” he barked. I heard the sound of a keyboard rattling in the background.
“We found Baburin” I yawned, still knackered from a night on Alisa’s sofa. My ribcage ached. “He was in a brothel. He’s dead. We’ve al
so got two other collateral targets.”
“Who are the collaterals?”
“Pimps,” I said, “they were trafficking young girls.”
“No dramas. God’s work is God’s work, even by accident. What about the clean-up?”
“I think the scene was too risky for Ops Support” I replied, “it’s forensically sound and we weren’t identified.”
The Handler sucked his teeth as he thought about it. “Dump your weapons.”
“Sure, but we need suppressed kit for the job on the farm Harry. I want it to be low-key.”
“Roger” he said, “anything else?”
I explained Alisa’s trick with the calling card, linking the shooting to the Georgian mafia.
“Good” he said, “I like the cut of her jib, for a Russian.”
“What’s the problem with Russians?” I said.
“I fought the fuckers in the ‘Stan in 1981, with the Muj” he said, “but I didn’t tell you that, OK?”
“Sure.”
I updated him about Baburin’s story, that Van Basten was the target of the FSB commando cell.
“Shit” barked Harry, “do you believe him?”
I sipped my beer and sighed, “yes. The attempts on my life and Sergei’s were made by vagrants of one type or another, not Special Forces.”
“OK, well we still need to deal with what we’ve got. Hit the farm first then we move onto Volk.”
“Why, in case Baburin was lying about who the target is?”
“Partly, but mainly because the men from the FCO have been back in touch” said Harry, “orders have changed: now we’re working for two masters. Belov is to be kept alive at all costs, as is Pieter Van Basten. They especially want to know where Van Basten keeps his servers and hard drives. So he’s my priority.”
I walked over to the fridge and popped open another beer. “Harry, this is going to get heavy. The police are going to be sniffing around the shooting tonight. What sort of top-cover are we getting?”
Harry laughed. “Don’t get all fucking soft on me Cal. Apparently some spook has signed a bit of paper that covers you.”
“Bollocks to that. What’s the point of having the Regiment?” The SAS had a team specifically set up for this sort of drama, specifically counter-terrorism support to the civil power. “There’s me, Andy and Oz to deal with this and we’ve got to worry about getting nicked too?”
“I’m sure the regiment are more than up for it” said Harry defensively, “but you know how it works. It’s politics.”
“It might be to you Harry, but to me it’s thirty to forty years in Belmarsh.”
“You’re going to get surveillance and intelligence support, imagery of the plot, equipment, safe exfil and decompression facilities abroad” he said, “it’s not all bad. Our instructions are to take out the FSB team within twenty-four hours from midnight tonight.”
“Shit.”
“Think about the money” said Harry, “I always do.”
“I’ll be back in touch when we’re on the start line. Let me know about weapons and stores.”
“Sure. Oz will deal with it, I’ll contact him direct.”
“I’m on it” I said.
“I’ll be in touch” he grunted, ringing off.
I sent a coded text message to Oz and Andy, asking them to meet me at Oz’s cottage the following morning. They both messaged back within the minute confirming the meet.
I slept badly.
The US warplanes were strafing my platoon, the Iraqi desert burning like a vision of hell. As my men died, they morphed into the homeless servants of Fyodor Volk, and I had to kill them too. When I ran out of ammunition I clubbed them to death with the butt of my rifle. Colonel Petrovych, who I had murdered in 2008, sat huddled and frozen in his greatcoat. His dead face was frozen, and he laughed at me, worms wriggling in his empty eye sockets
I woke up soaked with cold sweat, panting. The bed-sheets were sodden. I trembled and fell out of bed, moaning. Stumbling into the living area, I pulled a clean blanket from the airing cupboard. Then I took some tranquilizers and collapsed on the sofa. Anything, even unconsciousness, was better than this.
The buzzer to my front door rang. The tritium dial on my watch read 04:00.
Pulling myself to my feet, I pulled on my dressing gown and picked up my Walther, “Yeah?” I groaned into the entry-phone.
The tinny voice had an unmistakable Scottish accent. “Winter? It’s Marcus.”
“Marcus?”
“From the … FCO” he murmured, “and it’s bloody freezing out here! Can I come in?”
“I thought you weren’t authorised to speak with me.”
“I’m bloody well not laddie, so just open the door before somebody sees me.”
I pressed the buzzer and let him in.
Marcus appeared, grey doughy face obscured by a silly waxed hat, sleet dripping from the brim. He smiled gently, looked me up and down. “Having a bad night, Calum?”
“I don’t sleep well,” I shrugged.
He looked at my pistol and raised an eyebrow. “Yes, it says that in your file.” He squeezed past me and stood in my sitting room, water pooling around his sturdy black shoes.
Everybody had a file on me. Why wasn’t I flattered?
I went to the fridge and opened a can of Coke, emptying it into a beaker of ice, “drink?”
“Yes please, coffee if you have it” he said, looking at the gleaming coffee machine approvingly. Espresso, perhaps?” the intelligence officer took his hat and coat off, his dark eyes roaming around the apartment.
I fixed his coffee. He nodded happily and drained it.
“Go on then,” I said, “what is it? I’ve a busy day ahead, slotting Russians for you lot.”
Marcus glanced back at the Gaggia and I made him another brew.
We stood in silence for a moment. Marcus sipped his second cup, “your handler doesn’t know I’m here. Is that a problem for you, Cal?”
“Only if he finds out” I grunted, draining my cola. I crunched an ice cube between my teeth, spat it into my palm and rubbed it on my clammy forehead, “where’s your partner, the ex-army bloke?”
“Chris?” said the MI6 officer, “he hasn’t a clue I’m here either. He’s a good sort, but he’s a military attachment. He’ll be going back to his regiment in the spring, he’ll be happier marching about and riding horses or whatever it is they do up at Windsor Castle.”
“The suspense is killing me” I said.
“There are things you need to know about this operation” he said quietly, “is this apartment swept regularly?”
“Weekly” I nodded, “for bugs at least, I only hoover monthly.”
“Can I sit down?”
“No” I said, “I’d be grateful if you spat out whatever it is you want to say, then fuck off.”
A baggy pouch of flesh twitched at the corner of his mouth, making a smile as thin as he was fat. “It’s the way of things, in my experience, that men like you don’t have much time for men like me. You do the wet-work. I sit in an office, get a pension and an MBE. It’s entirely understandable.”
I grunted my agreement. I wanted to get on the road to Oz’s place.
“That’s good espresso” said Marcus. “In any case, I shall get to the point. The material the FSB sent to Pieter Van Basten must never see the light of day. Not by SIS, the Security Service, Police, Media … absolutely not by anybody. Do you understand?”
“Not really.”
Marcus allowed a gentle sigh to escape his lips. “Suffice it to say that the rogue Russian official who leaked it was sufficiently highly-placed to release historic agent details going back to the late 1950’s and up to 1991. I really must sit down, Cal, my leg is killing me.”
“If you must,” I said.
He winced and half-collapsed onto my sofa. “Thanks. We know that hidden amongst the data sent to Forbiddenfacts.net was a series of off-the-record archives called Zamok. We know that the original copies of Zam
ok were destroyed in Moscow in the early nineties.”
I knew that zamok was Russian for castle. Opening another soda I sat opposite Marcus. “How do you know they were destroyed?”
“Because, Calum, I was the SIS officer who put the hard copy files in an industrial shredder. I took them to an office in Saganka and did the deed in 1991. The UK Government paid two-and-a half million dollars for them.”
I laughed. “So some sly bastard must have scanned them first, right?”
“Yes, that’s precisely what happened,” chuckled the spy “Zamok was the ultra-secret KGB and, later, FSB index of off-the-book European agents. If you saw the names on it, the famous political and cultural figures that spied, agitated and sympathised for the Soviets, or after the collapse of Communism went on to pull financial tricks for the Kremlin … and now I have to assume that Zamok has been updated to the present day.”
“I thought all that Cold War stuff was out in the open?”
The spy rubbed his knee and winced, “no, not by half! This isn’t guff like the Cambridge Spy Ring? Anthony Blunt? What, some doddery old queen, preaching Communism in his Pall Mall club? No. This is about people still up there in the Establishment stratosphere. There’s a serving Major-General, twelve MPs, some surprising elements of the Labour Party, a Tory ex-Minister of State, a couple of High Court judges, a retired Chief Constable or two …”
I sipped my Cola. “I’m still not managing to work up enough energy to give a shit. Sergei Belov, on the other hand, is offering me a shed load of cash.”
Marcus smiled, “of course, there’s other peripheral material in there since 1991, reports separate from Zamok: stuff relating to The Firm, possibly your adventures for the Yanks. You probably didn’t know that we knew about NEOPHYTE. Suffice it to say, Cal, almost everybody in our world has an interest in not allowing these archives to see light of day. Try to enjoy your riches in prison. We’ll make sure it’s the secure unit, with the paedos, terrorists and bent cops …”
I yawned. The early morning visit was starting to make sense, “and I suppose there’s dirty secrets about you in that file too, Marcus. Which is why you’re here, right?”
The Ninth Circle Page 11