Swartz indicated silently to Jim with a thumb that they were done with the kitchen. He then moved slowly in a crouched position to the next room, which had a protruding extension with bay windows on both sides and ivy leaves on the extremities of the walls. He started to stand up against the wall when suddenly a fox in the garden made an almighty screech.
‘Shit, stand still,’ Swartz whispered, as he quickly looked through his night goggles to the area of sound and saw two foxes copulating under the far hedge line, next to an old tree stump. The noise was piercing as the vixen screamed in pain and tried to release herself from the clutches of the male, whose coital tie had trapped her. Swartz and Jim froze as the screams continued for what seemed an age. They didn’t see any lights come on but remained highly alert for anyone coming out of the cottage to check on the noise. They willed the male fox to get it all over with and release his grip on the vixen.
Once the noise had subsided, they gave themselves some soak time – and did nothing for five minutes after the screaming had stopped.
Jim identified a small area in the bottom left-hand corner of the wooden window frame and used a tiny hand drill to make a small hole. He chose an area that might allow them to slip the long endoscope inside the frame, which could then be adjusted using the toggles to make it look below the curtain. The endoscope head could then be swivelled to look up and beyond into the room. Swartz pushed the endoscope in gently and kept feeding it in, turning the head until eventually he could see the wooden floors. He then turned the camera head to view directly into the room. This was risky stuff if the probe was seen from inside.
‘Damn,’ Swartz muttered under his breath. ‘There’s a chair right in front, can’t see a fucking thing.’ Jim tapped on his shoulder and directed him to move to the furthest extremity of the window and try again. Swartz nodded. ‘I can see now,’ he whispered. ‘Only two chairs and a sofa in here – it’s the lounge. Nothing seen.’
It was slow and tedious work as both teams mapped out the inside of the building. Their plans showed that there were three rooms on the lower floor: a kitchen, lounge and dining room. There were two bedrooms on the second floor and no cellar. The chill in the air began to bite as Jim started to drill the next hole, taking less than three minutes to get through the wood. This time, when Jim popped the endoscope in, he immediately saw movement in the dining room. What he saw was quite shocking.
‘Fuck, this is not good, mate.’
Chapter 38
Languedoc-Roussillon, 25 April 2016
‘I want the entire cottage rigged with booby traps,’ Natalie said firmly to Gregory. ‘I want Melissa to be well protected but killed if it all goes wrong.’
‘Exactly what I’m trained to do,’ Gregory said confidently. ‘This is right up my street now.’
‘Good – because there’s no room for error any more and nothing must be attributable to me at the end of all this. I’ll deal with Sean. You make sure Melissa goes up in smoke if I don’t get what I need. On my call.’
Natalie had instructed Gregory to protect her quarry using all necessary means to ensure any rescue attempt failed. Natalie wanted no one left alive if it all went pear-shaped, and especially if Sean decided to renege on his deal with her. The whole operation had to be carefully planned to ensure that the Russians were not implicated in this if it went wrong. It was vital that she walked away scot-free.
Gregory had enormous experience in explosives and weaponry from his background in the Russian Special Forces and he was determined to ensure that, if a rescue took place, then the whole cottage would be burnt down and Melissa killed at the same time. They had recruited three Russian thugs from Marseille to watch over the cottage and Melissa.
Gregory rigged the cottage with a number of explosive booby traps and CCTV systems that would allow him to monitor the place remotely. He placed a series of explosive incendiary charges around the cottage that he could detonate remotely in the event of the operation being curtailed or abandoned or if it failed in any way. Natalie was wary of MI5’s extensive capability to find Melissa, and also wary of any rescue attempts or assaults on the place. She was even more determined that, if everything failed, Sean and Melissa needed to be killed, and rigging the house with explosives gave exactly that opportunity. Her deep cover in Parliament was a high priority and she wanted no one left alive after this operation.
‘I want every angle covered here,’ Natalie explained to Gregory in an over-anxious manner. ‘I won’t allow this charade to go on forever and if Sean tries anything smart we take him out and kill Melissa. Simple as that.’ Natalie was increasingly nervous about failure and wanted a simple get-out clause if it all went awry.
‘I’ll give him forty-eight hours and no more,’ she shouted at Gregory. ‘Make this a fucking good job and make it work well.’ She gave firm instructions on how the Russian minders were to manage Melissa, and that they had to follow her instructions precisely in order to earn their handsome cash reward and keep their lives too.
Gregory and his agents had installed a series of security systems in the farmstead cottage, including covert cameras and electronic intruder systems, all of which could be viewed remotely on his laptop. The alarms would be diverted to his smartphone if any activity took place in specific areas of the cottage that needed his intervention. He had also installed a series of high-tech booby traps. This gave him the full capability to remotely trigger the detonators to devastate the building, burn it to the ground and kill any occupants.
Natalie had prepared a plan to ensure Gregory pressed the trigger once she had received the files and codes from Sean – and after she had killed him.
Chapter 39
The ‘Bolt-hole’, Languedoc-Roussillon, 25 April 2016
Sean sat opposite Swartz at the SAS bolt-hole as the distinctive odours of sweat and dampness spread throughout the room. He could see Swartz’s eyes were red and he wore an ugly face after a gruelling eight hours of reconnaissance.
‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen mate. It’s a well-defended target with Melissa thoroughly trapped,’ Swartz said. Sean made a face and listened in to the debriefing.
‘To be fair, I’m damned worried about what we may have missed,’ Jim, the lead searcher, said, looking at Phil ‘The Nose’. ‘We can’t just take this on blind – he’s got wiring, booby traps and movement sensors everywhere. Those incendiaries alone will easily blow and destroy the room if we make one wrong move – and we’d never get her out in time.’
Sean watched Phil wipe his brow as he added to the debate. ‘Well, my assessment tells me he’s set this up either as a victim-operated device to blow the lot up in the event of an assault or he may even have set it up to blow it remotely at a time of his choosing. It looks to me as if you wouldn’t go to all that trouble without planning to blow it all up at some stage anyway. It’s pretty fruity and we’ll need to kill some of those sensors to have any chance at all.’
Sean watched inquisitively as Phil pointed his pencil at the sketch map he had drawn. ‘Looks like we have an approach route but it’s right here that we need to penetrate and take out the sensors. If I was him, I’d also have some sort of covert camera inside covering our main entry points, so he can then see when people are in the room and then just blow it.’ Phil then sat back. He stretched a little as he paused. ‘How many bravos have we got then Chris?’ Chris put his aluminium mug down before replying.
‘Three. We have three to deal with. Ugly twats too from what I saw. Will be a pleasure to take the fuckers out. The ground team haven’t seen anyone come or go for over eight hours and we’ve captured pictures of the three bravos inside. They only seem to congregate in the kitchen and large hallway, which gives them access to the stairs. They’re all carrying pistols but no long-barrelled weapons in sight.’
The atmosphere around the table was tense and the information Chris relayed concentrated Sean’s mind on the seriousness of what they were facing. This was a high-tech adversary. Chris carried on
describing the Russian thugs in detail, the team listening intently.
‘They seem pretty gruesome but not the sharpest of characters from what I observed and listened to. They broke into Russian and French, but looked more like local hoods to me. Definitely not military.’ Jim then spoke about what he had seen in the living room and the large dining room. The boys were absorbed.
‘It seemed bizarre when I first saw it. But, given his modus operandi of wanting to destroy the place anyway, his techniques and procedures seem to fit with what you’re saying, Phil.’
‘What’s the main obstacle, then?’
‘Booby traps, and plenty of them, mate.’
‘Go on.’
‘It seems to me that the three goons can only walk in certain parts of the building, as the rest appears to be booby-trapped. That fits the assessment if he wanted to defend the main access points an assault team would use. So, he seems to have thought about how we might get to Melissa and has protected all those areas.’
‘And it’s all rigged together to be blown remotely?’
‘Yes. He’s rigged it so he can detonate it all from wherever he is in the world. He’s using the internet to transmit any alarms we set off across the net to his laptop and he’s able to watch the imagery from his cameras on a smartphone or computer.’
Sean watched Phil nod and scribble some writing in his notebook before Jim continued.
‘His Crown jewel is Melissa, and he’s protected her well. I can’t believe how he’s done it. The only access door to her in the dining room is through the lounge and, from what I saw, the Russians could only walk in a small part of the room. It’s almost as if the remaining part of the room is cut off to them and protected with some sort of booby trap along the windows and in the bulk of the room. He’s probably done the same with the dining-room window.’
‘What about Melissa?’ Phil asked.
‘Well, she has an explosive necklace on her. Only about a quarter of a kilogram – but enough around her neck in plastic tubing to take off her head and torso. I couldn’t see the wiring but it looked to me as if it was a hard-wired detonator to a trigger somewhere else in the room. Hard to tell. She’s also surrounded by infrared light beams, probably just below ceiling height, and about four feet either side of her. Walk through those invisible beams and bang, off she goes. The whole cottage would go up and her head would go through the roof with it.’
Jim didn’t exaggerate the gravity of what would happen if they triggered any of the sensors. Sean was astonished that the Russians had set up a virtual fence around Melissa in the room – an ingenious way of stopping anyone getting to her, and also stopping Melissa just getting up and walking out. Break the light beams and the explosives would detonate.
The boys looked eager to crack this conundrum as Sean watched Phil pass some pre-prepared plans of the cottage to them all. ‘OK guys. Take the time to get these drawings accurate. I want everything you saw tonight drawn in full detail and to scale. I’ll then brief Sean later this morning and see what we can do. Have we got the kit to do this?’ he asked uneasily.
‘Yes, we have,’ Barky, the kit man, replied. ‘But we might need to improvise and move quickly to get away with it. It’s also a crazy ask to get out of this with no damage to somebody.’
Barky’s assessment left a sober mood amongst the men but Sean knew he was right. There were no guarantees about who would remain alive if they took this on.
Chapter 40
London, 26 April 2016
Jack was not at all happy with Sean’s assessment and his ideas for releasing Melissa. This was now becoming too high risk and there could be huge repercussions in London if such an unauthorised mission failed. There would be loads of questions and intense probing, not to mention the death of Melissa and others too. Jack asked Sean if it was feasible to find out who had the trigger, rather than risking a full-scale assault on the farmstead cottage.
‘Virtually impossible,’ Sean replied, leaving Jack with a hell of a dilemma. He didn’t have a clue how long it would take to find Alfie, and now he had a marauding bunch of Russian agents trying to grandstand the entire operation. Jack was angry but controlled his thoughts.
He knew that Natalie would not remain patient for very much longer and Sean could not carry on buying time. Sean had some very precise timings for the assault and the aim was to have Natalie and all of the Russian team killed. But to do that they needed to get to Melissa first. Could they pull this off?
Jack pontificated quietly in his office in London and mulled the options over before agreeing – in part – to Sean’s plan. Jack remained calm, hoping to avoid any catastrophes in France and London if it all failed. There was a huge amount at stake and Dominic had been continually on his back urging a breakthrough.
He wondered if Sean was straying. Was he concocting his own deception plan? Had Natalie got the better of him? What was Sean’s motivation? What would happen if Jack made the wrong call now? He felt he knew Sean well. If Sean wanted to go through with the assault, then that meant he probably hadn’t turned and given in to Natalie’s extortion. He knew Sean would be vulnerable to taking an easy way out if Natalie had been convincing enough. But what if Sean was trying a double bluff here? Setting it up to look like an assault with a view to releasing Melissa and then providing the data to Natalie and giving him some false data? Surely Sean could now see it was fruitless to even consider such an option? It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, Jack thought, for Sean to set up a deception knowing full well that only he could give the order to mount the rescue. It was difficult to gauge from a distance exactly what Natalie had planned and how close she and Sean had come to striking a deal.
Jack concluded that it looked as if the Russians had no other intention than blowing the place up at some point and that the extortion attempt on Sean was heading only one way: total destruction of the house, Melissa killed and Sean executed when the time was right after the information had been passed to Natalie.
Time was running out if Jack was to salvage the entire operation, which was now in danger of getting way out of control. He chewed over the dilemma and realised how far this operation had come, knowing he needed to wrestle back some sort of control. This was his head on the line. He needed to look Sean in the eye. There was only one way and Jack knew Sean held all the cards. He made a couple of phone calls around London and headed for France on his own.
Chapter 41
Languedoc-Roussillon, 26 April 2016
Sean worked all through the night on his plan while Swartz’s team conducted further reconnaissance on the target cottage.
He also spent some more time looking at Alfie’s files. He went back to the one Alfie had marked QUERY. He decided to look at some of the other documents he hadn’t previously had a chance to and felt a surge of adrenalin shoot through him when he opened a file relating to the handover of the tin to FITZROY in Moscow in 2005.
This written intelligence report, classified as ‘SECRET UK EYES ONLY’, reverberated strongly with Sean, who was now engulfed with a sense of déjà vu. He sat shocked at what he had just read. And about what had happened when he was last in Moscow in 2005. It was him – he was there – and he remembered the mission well. He spent a moment or two reflecting back to that night in Moscow, standing on the bank of the Moskva river, with the city lights shining brightly in the distance. Sean had been the team commander that night.
He remembered his team throwing the sacks into the river after he had completed the month-long undercover mission when he had handed the goods over to FITZROY. The list of moles.
He looked at the findings of Alfie’s obituary. The cryptographer had found nothing he could see to decrypt so far but would try with other steganography software systems.
Sean then made sure he had enough files and information to hand to Natalie on a USB stick and also via a web-based cloud account. This was his final twenty-four hours on this operation and he had to get everything absolutely right. Nothing cou
ld be left to chance. He drafted a long operation order for Swartz to conduct, and contacted Jack with the same plan and timings. Jack, he sensed, would not be very happy but hopefully he had given him enough to convince him to agree – and to give the vital order and authority to conduct the assault. He had explained to Jack in his message that he had some files, but not all of them.
Sean made a set of duplicate files to be given to Jack and Natalie, allowing him to keep his options open and to retain the data on QUERY. His master plan involved carrying out the high-risk rescue of Melissa. His second plan was to negotiate with either Natalie or Jack to get the best deal he could in return for the QUERY files. He still didn’t know who was batting for which side and who was protecting whom. He developed his own insurance policies for both options, allowing him and Melissa to walk away from the mess that Dominic had orchestrated.
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