I slipped under the clean, warm sheets of the bed and crashed, sleeping dreamlessly. What seemed like seconds later I felt a hand on my cheek.
“Cal, wake up” said Alisa. She was wearing a baggy grey hooded top and sweat pants.
“What time is it?” I said, rubbing my eyes.
She smiled and passed me a cup of coffee, her face bruised. A cut ran down the side of her face, sutured with butterfly stitches, “it’s almost twenty-hundred. You’ve been out for six hours.”
“How do you feel?”
“Better than I thought I would,” she said lightly. “The technical expert is here, to look at Volk’s telephone.”
I swung my legs out of bed. Alisa shook her head at my nakedness as I dressed in a clean but careworn blue tracksuit. I stuffed my feet in a pair of green army socks and stood up, taking the offered coffee and draining the mug. “OK, let’s go and see him.”
A tall, balding man in his fifties was sitting at the dining room table, chatting quietly with Bailey. He wore a checked shirt and neatly-pressed jeans, a diamond stud sparkling in his right ear. A laptop computer and cabling was laid out neatly in front of him, next to Fyodor Volk’s Android phone. “Good evening. I’m Mister Rice” he said.
Alisa sat opposite him, “can you get into the phone?”
“Well” said Rice drily, “I’m not noted for my facility with small-talk, but you really take the biscuit.” He had a nasal, Midlands accent and a goatee beard, which he stroked with precisely manicured fingers. He pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and powered-up the laptop. “Happily, this device isn’t an iPhone. The new ones are a bastard to hack, ditto Blackberry.”
We sat and watched as he opened up a suite of system tools on the laptop. He slid the phone in a padded transparent bag and sealed it around the cabling protruding from it. Humming tunelessly, he attached an external hard drive to a device attached to the cable. “I’m not used to spectators while I’m working,” he said.
“Tough” replied Alisa, “people died in order to get that phone. I was tortured. It’s not leaving my sight.”
“The lady has a point,” I shrugged.
“Is the hired help always so precious in this country?” she said.
“Occasionally, now Keep quiet while I work,” grumbled Mister Rice, slipping another USB cable into the phone through the seal in the bag. His fingers click-clacked over the keyboard of his computer, his beady eyes narrowing as he worked. “Oh, so you’re playing that game, are you?” he hissed at the smart phone.
“What is it?” I said.
“Occasionally, Android phones get hacked” sighed the technician, “and infected with malware if you’re not careful. But this one has been reverse-hacked, by some sly bastard trying to fool an operator like me. It’s full of clever little digital booby-traps, designed to wipe the memory if I’m not careful.”
I looked at the phone. “Makes sense, given the people who’ve had access to it.”
“And who would they be?” said Rice.
Bailey cleared his throat, “you know the rules, Mister Rice …”
Alisa cocked her head and smiled, “no, he needs to know, Bailey. And, if he opens his mouth, I’ll cut his throat.”
Rice scratched his beaky nose with a latex-covered finger and chuckled, “that’s pretty standard in this line of work.”
“The phone belongs to a person close to Pieter Van Basten,” I said.
His eyes widened, “Van Basten, that sanctimonious prick? The pleasure will be mine, he hacked GCHQ when I worked there. Not that I’d have cared less if I hadn’t coded the anti-virus myself. Let’s see if I can return the serve …”
We sat and watched Rice work, the technician’s fingers fluttering over the keyboard as the little phone lit up and bleeped. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smart phone over-clocked before” he giggled. “The memory is bigger than you’d expect, too. This device has been completely re-engineered. Hold on I’m just trying something.”
“What’ve you got?” I said, impatient at his techno-babble.
“Bloody everything” beamed Rice, “everything!” He reached into a bag and took out another hard drive. “What are you interested in? You’ll have to do a keyword search this data because I’ve pulled 600 megabytes of text and email of here, some images too.”
“Tell us where you think the owner of this phone has gone. That’s all I need to know right now,” I said quietly.
“I can’t start messing around with telecommunications enquiries, too risky” said Rice, “but let me check the meta-data on these images.” On the laptop screen were several pictures of Pieter Van Basten by a flat, grey lake. In the distance was a wire fence. He wore a black roll neck jumper, baseball cap and a padded winter coat. A yellow device, about the size of a cigarette packet, was clipped to his breast pocket. “Meta-data is stripped off,” mumbled Rice, “let’s see if I can scrape it back from here …”
“What is that on Van Basten’s coat?” said Alisa, peering at the screen.
I joined her and studied the device. It had buttons and a small LCD screen. “Maybe it’s an MP3 player?”
Rice looked up from the smart phone and pushed his glasses back up his nose. “No, I don’t think so. It looks like a Dosimeter to me.”
“Like a Geiger counter?” Alisa asked.
“Hmmm. Sort of, but not quite” he replied, “but yes, it measures radiation.” He enlarged the picture, focussing on the device. “There you go it’s an Ecotest. Ukrainian company, they need them over there, what with Chernobyl and everything.”
Bailey broke his silence, “how do you know all this stuff?”
“What can I say,” smiled the technician, “I’m an underrated genius. You should see me at a pub quiz.”
“Shakuvo” said Alisa, “Fyodor Volk is originally from Shakuvo, where the nuclear accident happened. Could it be that’s where they’ve gone?”
“A radioactive hot zone seems like a good place to hide something” I said, “like a server, especially if you’re a crazy bastard like Volk.”
“Quite,” said Rice, tapping at the keyboard. “I’ve scraped the coordinates for this picture from a cache, very sloppy. Feed the coordinates through Google maps and voila! Eastern Tatarstan or thereabouts, I’d say. The image was taken almost a year ago. There are a dozen other deleted images that have the same coordinates, from the past six months to November last year.”
“Is there anything else on there?” I asked, looking at the satellite map of central Russia.
Rice nodded, “Yes, encrypted email traffic to and from an office, let me see if I can lift the IP address. There it is … somewhere in Kazan. That’s the capital of Tatarstan.”
“I’m Russian, you dolt” snapped Alisa icily, “I know.”
“Keep your hair on love” said Rice, “there’s also some email headers from an independent travel company in London, a bucket shop. Looks like a back-street place in Stratford. The text has been deleted, but the dates are in the last two weeks and the title relates to airline tickets from London to Istanbul.”
I took it all in as I finished my coffee, “How do we know this information isn’t there to mislead us?” I said finally. “Van Basten is a genius, these look like schoolboy errors.”
“I take your point” nodded Rice enthusiastically. He rifled about in a paper bag full of sweets and offered us humbugs, “but this isn’t Van Basten’s phone. And there was a Guttmann-level data shredder installed on this, ready to go. But I bypassed it.”
“And?” said Turov.
“Well, I’m not a gambling man, but I’d say this was the real deal.” Rice smiled and popped a candy in his mouth. “Let me have a look, say an hour or two, and I’ll see if there’s anything else on here that helps. OK?”
“Sure,” I said. I put my hand on Alisa’s shoulder, “I think we both need to make some calls, right?”
“Yes. Mister Bailey, we need un-attributable satellite phones as soon as possible,” she narrowed her e
yes as she spoke, “and Mister Rice, can I trust you with that phone?”
The technician held his hands up and grinned, “The pay for this gig is good and I’m genuinely scared of you so, yes, you can trust me.”
“That is excellent,” she said.
Bailey stood up, pulling a telephone from the pocket of his corduroys. “I can do secure comms but I need authorisation from Marcus first.”
“Do it,” I said.
Bailey left the room, his dog padding after him. I went back to my room and turned on the TV. A reporter stood in the snow. Behind her was a line of fluttering tape and a day-glow jacketed policeman. Black smoke rose from a row of trees, the sound of helis overhead.
The reporter spoke excitedly into her microphone.
I’ve just received information that a man claiming to be from the ‘Black Banner,’ a splinter-group of the Greek-based ‘Global Army Front’ anarchist terrorist network, has claimed responsibility for the incident at Sir Evan Sands’ multi-million pound country mansion. Sir Evan is believed to have been killed by an explosive device. The statement given to Reuters says that Sands’ was targeted because of his controlling interest in Bachmann Brothers, the private equity group that was responsible for the privatised takeover of Greek public sector assets. We have also just learnt that the Russian Oligarch Sergei Belov, a house guest here, has been taken by helicopter to a private hospital suffering from smoke inhalation. His Russian head of security was also arrested for illegal firearms possession by detectives from Wiltshire Police. Counter-terrorism officers are now on the scene, with the Home Secretary expected to make a statement shortly …
I switched the TV off and lay on the bed, looking at the ceiling. I’d never been involved in an operation this big in the UK, and wondered if the police would buy the cover story Volk had put in place. I was sure as I could be that Dmitri Aseyev would keep his mouth shut until Sergei sent a crack battalion of lawyers to spring him from the Paddington Green anti-terrorist nick.
Bailey hovered in the open doorway. “Here’s the satellite phone. Marcus says you can make one call, no more than five minutes. OK?”
“It’ll have to be” I said, sitting up and taking the black rubberized phone from him. After he left I punched the emergency number for Harry into the keypad. This was a phone used specifically for tits-up emergencies.
“I thought you were dead,” said Harry. I wondered if that was a hint of disappointment in his voice.
“Andy died. He was blown up with Evan Sands, trying to defuse an IED.”
“Jesus, not Andy” he said sourly, “Where are you now?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, “all I do know is that it’s an SVR safe house and I’m in this until the end.”
“What do you mean the end? Sergei Belov is alive, his attackers are dead. I think that massacre sends a pretty clear message to the Russians. Let’s take our money and plan the next phase of the operation.”
“You want the FSB file for SIS, right? Well, I’m going to get it. And I’m going to take out Fyodor Volk, for Andy.” I wasn’t going to say anything about Sam or the kids. That was my secret.
Harry’s voice dropped to an urgent whisper, “Cal, that’s not how we do business.”
“You’ve got to let me do this. OK?”
“No, it’s not OK. I’m calling you in, we reassess before we go for the FSB material.”
“Bollocks, Harry. It’ll be leaked online by the end of the week, right? That means your contract with SIS is buggered. I’m going off the grid for the time being, I’ll be in touch when it’s done.”
“Cal …” spat Harry as I ended the call.
Alisa walked in and smiled, “sounds like that went well.” She took the phone from me, winked and punched in a number, sitting on the end of the bed next to me.
“It’s me” she said in Russian, “I’m alive. I have the Englishman, the mercenary, with me. The target is Fyodor Volk, and the FSB commando team failed in their mission. Belov lives.”
I listened in on the conversation, as she told her version of Harry the story. Then she switched the conversation to Serbo-Croat, which I don’t speak. I pulled a face. She stuck her tongue out. Eventually she ended the call.
“So?” I said.
“We fly to Moscow tomorrow, if we can get to the general aviation field at Farnborough. We have a private charter booked. Oh, and I told them you want a fee of half a million US dollars, which they agreed. We split it fifty-fifty, OK?”
“Sure, all contributions to my retirement fund are gratefully accepted. But why are you so sure they’ve gone to Russia? Why not lie low here?”
“They have money and connections. With those, in Russia, anything is possible,” she said “and they just told me that SVR received signals intelligence in the past hour suggesting that Volk has contacted an old FSB colleague in Kazan - this cannot be a coincidence.”
I stood up, “and what do you want, Alisa? Belov is safe and the FSB have failed.”
“I want Volk alive for interrogation, and I want to know where Van Basten is hiding the FSB files, the same as you.”
“Yes, but I want Volk dead.”
“OK, I can live with that” she said “it’s not a deal-breaker.” She leant forward and kissed me on the cheek.
Alisa smelt of shampoo and coffee, her lips soft on my swollen cheek. I smiled, “you know that SVR and MI6 won’t share those files, don’t you? I’m meant to be getting them too.”
“You have a saying in English: we cross that bridge when we come to it. OK?” She nuzzled my ear, gently bit my neck.
I gently pushed her away, avoiding her gaze “nice try, Turov.”
The SVR officer’s shoulders shook as she laughed. “You are not so bad, Winter. It’s been a long time since I’ve been with a man, and you did save my life. A girl has to try, no?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said. I pulled her to me, kissing her hard.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I re-read the webpage again before closing down the browser on my phone.
WebpediA
The Shakuvo Disaster
The disaster at the Shakuvo nuclear power facility occurred on January 30th 1991. It was subsequently graded as Level Six on the INES (International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale) only one level less than the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents.
The town of Shakuvo is situated in the northeast of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan. It had a population of 50,521 in 1991, but is now abandoned. A 20KM exclusion zone around the town is guarded by Interior Ministry troops. Access to the site, unlike Chernobyl / Pripyat in the Ukraine, is strictly controlled due to the greater radiological risk from the reactor core. The concrete-shrouded RBMK Generation 1A reactor building is an extreme radiological hot zone, generating life-threatening levels of radiation (up to 30 Sv/hr). Radiation levels in the restricted zone vary, in some places reaching 6-10 uSv/hr.
The RBMK Generation 1A was a military-variant of the original AM-1 Soviet reactor. A critical failure of the cooling system of Reactor Three led to an explosion, damaging other systems and leading to the dispersal of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Luckily, environmental factors such as heavy snowfall and low winds localised the spread of contamination in the critical days after the initial event. However, inside the plant it is estimated that the initial level of radiation was up to 100-200 Sv/hr. All of the sixty staff inside the plant died instantly. Only rapid and heroic action by local emergency personnel, many of whom subsequently perished, stopped the radiation spreading. Infamously, the authorities had covered-up failings in critical maintenance programmes, a key factor in causing the initial explosion. The ensuing scandal rocked the government, leading to the installation of a new power bloc in the post-Soviet Kremlin …
Bailey said his goodbyes, his dog licking my hand as we jumped out of his 4 × 4. Sunshine reflected on the snow, making me squint.
The combination of pain-killers and fatigue made the next thirty-six h
ours pass in a blur: I remembered us avoiding police checkpoints, then a helicopter ride to a small, private airfield. There two ferret-faced men in leather jackets issued me a hastily-forged Russian passport, in the name of Alexander Kaverin. My dazed-looking photo stared at me from the dark red passport, which I stuffed in the pocket of the new winter jacket the two SVR men had brought me, along with some dark denim jeans, a woollen sweater and a pair of heavy black boots. We suffered a bumpy flight to Moscow on a Lear Jet leased to BASNEFT, a Russian oil company.
All the time Alisa was on her phone, ordering, persuading and cajoling people to get things done. The information Rice had sucked out of Volk’s telephone, along with the comms data the SVR had intercepted all suggested the same thing: Fyodor Volk and Pieter Van Basten were en route to Russia. The intelligence indicated that they’d flown to Turkey then used an established underground terrorist and drug-trafficking route used by Chechen separatists to make it to Tatarstan. We were ahead of them and would arrive in Kazan at least a day before. In the city Volk was linked to an ex-FSB freelancer called Arkady Vitsin.
“I have Vitsin’s details here” she said, tapping the laptop computer the SVR rezident had handed her at Farnborough. “He’s a typical snitch and drug-dealer, reports on local separatists and Muslim groups. I think Volk might have picked him up as a source in Chechnya, he was a drug-runner there on the White Heroin route.”
The leather seats of the Lear Jet were too comfortable, and I felt sleepy, “what use would he be to Fyodor Volk?”
“That’s exactly the point” said Alisa, “and what I need to find out. But he is local. He knows the region and is a smuggler.”
Vitsin lived in the south of the city, “how long to get there from Moscow?” I said.
“It should be just under an hour to Kazan, we have another plane waiting at Sheremetyevo airport that will take us there. We issue weapons and equipment at our Kazan safe house, but there are problems.”
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