Understrike

by James Barrington

  ‘So what else can you tell me?’

  ‘Pretty much everything, because I know you and I trust you, and I’d rather have you properly on side with us than standing around observing, because this situation could turn real nasty, really quickly. Right, so you know about Walter Burdiss, and you know that he’s dead, obviously.’

  Richter nodded.

  ‘I know he was found miles outside this settlement, and that his body was attacked by a polar bear, but according to the pointy heads at Legoland – the esteemed British Secret Intelligence Service – he was killed somewhere else. I also know that he was a case officer for the Company, and I assume that he was here to meet an asset or something of that sort. But that’s pretty much it.’

  ‘That’s all correct, but what you may not have heard is that he probably died of natural causes, most likely heart failure, though we can’t confirm that until we get a report from the pathologist stateside who’s doing the autopsy. The body was flown out a couple days ago.’

  Richter opened his mouth to say something, but Jackson beat him to it.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say, but just hear me out. Natural causes is what the death certificate for Burdiss is probably going to say, but what he didn’t do was die peacefully in his bed or sitting by the fire in his armchair, nothing like that. Somebody got hold of him, tied him down, and then did a number on him with a pair of pliers. The doc here reckons it was a combination of pain and shock that probably caused his heart to give out, if that was what killed him.’

  ‘You mean he was tortured to death,’ Richter said. ‘That does add an extra layer of complication, no doubt about it. Do you know what he was doing here? Had he been contacted by one of his assets for an emergency meeting or exfiltration or something?’

  ‘That’s the problem. We don’t know. Burdiss had some meetings back in London with a couple of Company reps from the Embassy, and we know from what he told the Chief of Station that one of his Moscow-based assets had requested – or rather demanded – a meeting, and all he was waiting for was confirmation the asset was on his way out of Russia so that Burdiss could decide on the date and place and time.’

  ‘Aren’t face-to-face meetings a bit old hat now? Surely the asset could have passed the information by secure email or through a website, or even used Skype, something like that.’

  Jackson nodded.

  ‘Normally, you’d be quite right. There are plenty of ways of communicating electronically that are almost completely secure and virtually impossible to intercept, and we don’t know why this asset – I can’t tell you who he is or where he was based in Moscow, because all we have at the moment is the work name Burdiss assigned to him, which is "George" – insisted on a meeting. Our best guess is that either he had information to pass that couldn’t be done electronically, or not easily anyway, something like an architect’s drawings or plans, something big and unwieldy that would lose clarity and definition if you shrank it using a scanner. Or maybe an actual piece of hardware, like a circuit board from a new weapon or radar system or something.’

  ‘Or?’ Richter prompted.

  ‘Or it wasn’t just a meeting that George wanted, but maybe an emergency exfiltration. Perhaps the asset hoped that by meeting Burdiss face-to-face and then asking for a ticket to New York or wherever, he’d have a better chance of convincing him. It’s a lot easier to say no to somebody by email than if they’re sitting right there in front of you. And as we both know, once you pull an asset out of a target country, his usefulness is pretty much at an end, so we always try to keep them in play for as long as we can. But the short and snappy version is that we don’t know exactly why the meeting was requested, or what George wanted.’

  ‘Presumably you’ll be able to find out the identity of the asset by checking on the files Burdiss would have maintained back at Langley?’

  ‘Yes, but there are a few bureaucratic hoops people have to jump through over there before they can get authorization to open up his files, so it may still be a while before we know for sure. And even when we do know who George really is, we’re not necessarily going to be any further forward. Everybody here in Longyearbyen knows that Walter Burdiss is dead, and they’ve known it since last Thursday, when my two men found his body out in the tundra and brought it in. So the asset would have known it as well, and if he had any kind of a brain, I’m quite sure he would have bought himself a ticket on the next flight out of here. So when we do confirm his identity, about all we’ll probably be able to do is find out when he left, and that isn’t going to be much help.’

  That all made sense to Richter.

  ‘So how did you get involved? And when did you get here?’

  ‘Burdiss came up here by himself, posing as a nature lover. The three main industries on Svalbard are mining – they still dig coal out of the mountains around here – scientific research, and tourism. You’d be amazed at the number of people who come up here to stare at polar bears and reindeer and seals and millions of seabirds. It must cost them a fortune, and I’m really glad I’m not paying for this room. Have you seen the tariffs?’

  Richter chuckled.

  ‘I’ve not only seen the tariff, but I’ve paid for my room at the Basecamp Hotel using my own credit card – all part of my boss’s plan for me to keep a low profile while I’m up here. Mind you, I suppose all that went out of the window about an hour ago, as soon as I met you downstairs.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Jackson continued, ‘although Burdiss was here by himself, he was keeping in close contact with both the London Chief of Station and with his boss back at Langley, so they knew where he was going, what he was doing, and when he was doing it. His last communication, sent from his mobile as an encrypted text, gave the details of the first meeting with his source, including the time when he expected it to be over and for him to be back in contact. When Langley heard nothing further from him, they waited an hour, just in case he’d got delayed, then started tracing action, first by trying to triangulate his mobile.

  ‘That didn’t work because it was switched off, so they got the local mobile service provider to do a back-trace on his phone’s position that day. They traced it leaving his hotel – this hotel, in fact – and heading towards the western edge of the settlement, and then it was just simply switched off. The three of us were given a real fast briefing at Langley, issued with an entire wardrobe of cold-weather clothing, and given return tickets to Svalbard. We’ve been here since Tuesday last week.’

  ‘Why only three people?’ Richter asked. ‘I’d have expected the Company to send a bigger team.’

  ‘Longyearbyen’s a pretty small place,’ Jackson replied, ‘and this is supposed to be a low-profile operation. Three seemed about the right number, I suppose.’

  ‘So presumably the bad guys, whoever they are, had either guessed who he was, followed him and then snatched him,’ Richter said, ‘or they’d already found George and persuaded him to tell them the name of his American case officer.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Jackson didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘There’s something else?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ Jackson said again. ‘We had the local doctor – he’s an American called Keith Novak – take a look at Burdiss’s body when we hauled it back here. He’s the one who made the initial diagnosis that it had probably been pain and shock that killed him. He didn’t do an autopsy because he’s a surgeon, not a pathologist, but he gave the body a comprehensive check and he noticed one thing that seemed out of place.’

  ‘Apart from the plier marks all over him, I presume?’

  ‘Apart from them, yes. My number two over here – Steve Barber – and my other agent, John Mason, were the people who found his body, and I was there with them when the doc did his examination. The body had been sliced open to expose the interior of the torso and the chest cavity, and we assumed that this had been done out on the tundra to ensure that the smell would attract predators very quickly. But Novak pointed out something else, something
that Barber and Mason had both missed. He saw that Burdiss’s entire alimentary canal, from his throat to his anus, had been cut open.’

  Richter hadn’t expected that, but as soon as Jackson said it, he offered the only explanation that made any kind of sense.

  ‘Whoever killed him must have thought he’d swallowed something,’ he said. ‘Something the asset might have given him, a memory stick or something like that.’

  ‘But?’ Jackson said, then just waited.

  ‘I know, I know. I’ve got it,’ Richter said. ‘You know, because of the timetable Burdiss supplied to Langley, that he hadn’t seen the asset when he disappeared. But the bad guys didn’t know that. Maybe they assumed he was on his way back from the meeting, not heading towards it. They obviously tried torture to get him to tell them who the asset was and what information he was handing over, but Burdiss couldn’t answer their questions because he genuinely didn’t have the information. And then he died, and that was that. So the guy who gutted him probably did do it to attract a hungry polar bear, but also to let him examine the dead man’s digestion system.

  ‘And that means,’ he finished, ‘that George might still be somewhere here on Svalbard, with whatever information he was trying to trade, hiding from the bad guys and maybe still looking for a ticket to America and a place in the Witness Protection Program or whatever you offer spies who come in from the cold.’

  ‘And that,’ Jackson confirmed, ‘is why the three of us are still here.’

  Chapter 12

  Thursday

  Rublevka, Zhukovka, outskirts of Moscow, Confederation of Independent States

  ‘So tell us what happened on Svalbard,’ Yasov ordered. ‘Explain how and why the GRU managed to make a complete shambles of a simple interception.’

  ‘It was not a simple interception, General Yasov,’ Koslov retorted. ‘As the minister has just said, Pavlov had obviously planned his defection with extreme care, and even when he was forced to run because his actions had been discovered, he had clearly made a plan and stuck to it. This was not some spur of the moment operation. He had obviously worked out the best way of getting out of Russia and the best route to take. This was confirmed to a limited extent by our forensic computer experts who analysed the old desktop PC that Pavlov left in his apartment. There was nothing on it that was directly incriminating, but they did discover that he had been using a web-based email account and that immediately raised suspicions that he’d been using the draft message system to avoid detection.’

  ‘I’m not familiar with that,’ the minister said, clearly acting as a spokesman for those people in the room without an intelligence background.

  ‘It’s a simple enough system,’ Koslov explained, ‘that avoids detection by most third parties, including our intelligence services. What it means is that Pavlov would at some point have set up a web-based email account and passed the account login details, the username and password, to his contact in America or wherever. When he had information to send, the traitor would compose a message and store it in that account as a draft, but not send it. Either at a prearranged time, or possibly in response to some other means of communication, Pavlov’s contact would then access the email account, read or copy the draft message, and then delete it. Deletion of the message would tell Pavlov that the information had been passed. It’s a simple system and it’s used by most terrorist groups today because we can only intercept email messages if they are actually sent; by only using drafts, information can be passed between two groups or individuals without the slightest danger of it being compromised.

  ‘As I said, we fortunately had access to the desktop computer that Pavlov had been using, and deletion of information from any computer is invariably incomplete. One of our forensic IT specialists was able to recover parts of some of the texts that Pavlov had prepared as draft messages. Analysing these, it is clear that this treacherous GRU trooper had told his contact about two weeks ago that he might have to be extracted at short notice. The remaining part of the recovered text was fragmented and unclear, but the implication was that Pavlov’s companion trooper seemed to be getting suspicious of him. The last message in the drafts folder was recovered intact. That was short and had obviously been written by Pavlov when he returned to his flat after leaving the dacha. It said simply, and in English: "Running. Rendezvous as agreed. Timing TBC." We presume that the rendezvous position was somewhere on Svalbard. We don’t know how the timing was supposed to be arranged, but the simplest and most obvious way to do it would be for Pavlov to buy a burner phone somewhere and simply call his contact on a prearranged mobile number.’

  Koslov stopped talking for a few moments and glanced around the table. He had everyone’s undivided attention.

  ‘As soon as it was clear that Pavlov had defected, I ordered a recovery team to be briefed and equipped, and placed on immediate standby, pending confirmation of the traitor’s destination. Once we knew he had flown to Norway, the six-man recovery team followed. We had taken the precaution of providing them with German passports to allow them free movement within the Schengen Area, so there was no need for visas to be obtained. When we discovered that Pavlov had flown to Svalbard, the team followed, and arrived there about twenty-four hours after him. They had copies of the photographs taken at Sheremetyevo and enlarged images from his service record, but despite this they failed to locate him. Longyearbyen is not a big place, but if he had taken a hotel room under an assumed name, or was using another passport, and then stayed in it, the team would never have been able to see or identify him. We already knew that his contact must have supplied his Norwegian passport, because there is no way that Pavlov could have legitimately obtained one himself, so it is entirely possible that he might have been provided with one or two others to give him alternative identities. And Pavlov would obviously have known that we would be following him, so he would have been taking every precaution he could against discovery.

  ‘We then received information from an unexpected source. A man we had already identified as a senior CIA officer named Walter Burdiss, simply on the basis of data accumulated by our surveillance groups operating in and around Langley, flew to England and had two meetings with the CIA officer we had already identified as the London Chief of Station. Burdiss was placed under surveillance on arrival in London by our assets there as a matter of routine, and we were alerted when he unexpectedly booked a flight to Svalbard. When we discovered that Longyearbyen was also Pavlov’s ultimate destination, it seemed obvious that we had identified the contact the traitor was intending to meet.’

  ‘And this is where it all falls apart,’ Yasov interjected.

  ‘In the circumstances,’ Koslov said sharply, ‘the action taken by the recovery team was not unreasonable.’

  ‘On that we will have to agree to differ.’

  ‘Just tell us what happened,’ the minister instructed.

  ‘Because the recovery team was playing catch-up, and had arrived in Longyearbyen the day after Pavlov and on the same day as the American Burdiss, it was at least possible that the meeting between the traitor and his CIA handler had already taken place, which would mean that the information contained on the high-capacity memory card from the recorder was already in the hands of the Americans, or at least an American. The only good thing about that assumption was that the Americans had no secure facilities they could use on Svalbard to transfer the data to Langley. Due to its sensitivity it seemed unlikely that Burdiss would use the Internet or an email system to send it, and would have to travel to a secure location, like London or Paris, to do so.

  ‘The recovery team leader ordered his men to track Burdiss wherever he went on Svalbard, in the hope that doing so would lead them to Pavlov himself, and told his superior officer here in Moscow what they were doing. Then we discovered that Burdiss had made a booking on the next flight from Svalbard back to Bergen, which implied that the meeting between the two men had already taken place, and meant that the American had been given the memory c
ard. The recovery team was ordered to grab Burdiss and recover it.’

  Koslov stopped talking, aware that he was the focus of every man in the room, and equally aware that they were not going to like what he had to say next.

  ‘When the American emerged from his hotel, the recovery team was waiting. They subdued Burdiss and took him to a location where they could question him in private. He was uncooperative from the first, and increasingly intense persuasion was applied—’

  ‘In simple terms,’ Yasov said, ‘your men tortured him to get him to talk.’

  ‘And did he?’ the minister asked.

  Koslov shook his head.

  ‘They obtained nothing useful from him. He denied being a CIA officer at all, and claimed he was just a naturalist visiting the archipelago to observe the wildlife. When they increased the pressure of the interrogation, his story began to unravel, but then Burdiss apparently suffered a heart attack and died.’

  There was a brief appalled silence, then the minister spoke.

  ‘I see what you mean, General. A complete shambles. The GRU have managed to kill a senior CIA officer, and unless I’ve missed something we still have no idea where the traitor Pavlov is hiding out, or what he’s done with the information he obtained.’

  ‘It’s much worse than that, Minister,’ Yasov said. ‘Finish the story, Valery.’

  ‘When Burdiss died, the recovery team decided to dump his body out in the wilderness where scavengers could dispose of it, which was about the only option they had left. They searched the corpse thoroughly before they abandoned it and were certain that he was not in possession of the memory card. They even checked his entire alimentary canal, just in case he’d swallowed it.’