‘That’s the polite way of putting it,’ Yasov interrupted. ‘What they actually did was gut him like a dead animal and then cut open his digestive system from throat to anus and spent a happy few minutes checking through the contents. These people may be incompetent, but at least they are thorough. Burdiss was not in possession of a memory card.’
‘He could have left it in his hotel room,’ the minister objected.
‘That’s very unlikely. If he had been given data of that importance – because no doubt Pavlov would have convinced him that it was intelligence material of indisputable veracity and international significance – he would never have left it in his room. If he had it, it would have been on his person somewhere. Finish it, Valery.’
‘The teams searched his hotel room as a precaution,’ Koslov said, ‘but found nothing, and that meant that their assumption had been wrong, and the meeting between the two men had either not taken place at all or, possibly, they had already met but Pavlov had not yet handed over the memory card. That was, after all, his ace in the hole, and he would have been unwilling to release it until Burdiss had agreed to extract him and provide him with a new identity in America. And then it turned out that although Burdiss had booked a seat on the next available flight out of Longyearbyen, he had in fact booked a seat on the next half dozen flights from Svalbard. He was clearly preparing to leave the archipelago, but equally clearly he was not certain exactly when he would be ready to do so.’
‘And just to finish off this sorry tale,’ Yasov said, ‘once Burdiss went missing, the predictable happened and a small CIA team – only three people, one woman and two men – arrived on Svalbard more or less on the next flight in, and whereas the GRU people have of necessity been operating in a covert manner, the Americans have obtained significant cooperation from the authorities in Norway and on Svalbard itself. Although the GRU team dumped Burdiss’s body miles away from Longyearbyen, the two CIA men managed to find it, and so they now know exactly how he died, and it won’t be difficult to work out why. Pavlov has still not surfaced, and we cannot even be sure that he is still in Longyearbyen, because the GRU team couldn’t watch everywhere. If he had more than one genuine passport, he could have flown out soon after Burdiss was snatched, so by now he might well be back in mainland Norway, or even somewhere else in Western Europe. In short, thanks to the GRU, we are a much worse position today than we were when Pavlov smashed the locks on the door and gate here in the dacha and started running.’
The minister shook his head and muttered something under his breath, then looked across the table at General’naya Yasov.
‘So what do we do now?’ he asked.
Yasov thought for a few moments, then told him.
Like everyone else around the table, the minister listened attentively while the senior SVR officer outlined the steps that he thought they should take to recover the situation. When he’d finished, there was a brief silence in the room that was broken by the minister himself.
‘You may be in command of the purely military aspects of this project, General Yasov, but let me remind you that I have been placed in a position of overall responsibility to ensure that we are successful. What you have suggested does not go nearly far enough, and you seem to have missed the obvious point.’
‘Which is?’
‘You have told us that there is now a CIA team operating on Svalbard. Clearly they are there to locate the traitor Pavlov, analyse the recordings he has illegally made, and then in all probability to spirit him away to a safe house somewhere in America. We cannot allow that to happen. You are therefore to reinforce the GRU team on site – at least double it in size – with additional personnel, ideally also Spetsnaz special forces-trained men, and the enlarged group will mount permanent surveillance of these CIA men. And the moment there is any suspicion that they have identified Pavlov, they are to eliminate the Americans and ensure that the traitor dies in the most prolonged and painful manner that they can devise in that location. Recovery or the destruction of the recordings is essential.’
Yasov stared across the table at the government minister.
‘What you are suggesting is tantamount to declaring war on the CIA,’ he said. ‘Are you sure that that is a good idea?’
‘I am perfectly aware of the implications,’ the minister replied. ‘But it would only be a small war, with perhaps half a dozen deaths, no more, in a neutral location, and we would of course deny any involvement in it if the matter became public. My guess is that the Americans would have no wish to publicise their involvement, and obviously we would not either.
‘And in any case,’ he finished, ‘we are now only a matter of a few days – perhaps a week at the most – away from completion, depending upon the weather in the Atlantic and the progress of the ship, and once this project is finished, nobody will have to listen to anything the Americans say, because the United States will be finished as a world power.’
Chapter 13
Thursday
Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Archipelago
There was a brief double tap on the door of Jackson’s hotel room, and she slid lithely out of her side of the bed and picked up a dressing gown that was draped over the chair in front of the desk. She pointed at Richter’s clothes, dumped untidily on the opposite side of the bed, and then at the door leading to the en suite.
‘You, bathroom, now,’ she murmured.
Richter gathered his clothes into his arms and walked silently across the room, pulling the door of the bathroom almost closed behind him.
He heard another double knock, this one slightly louder, and heard Carole-Anne ask whoever it was outside the room what they wanted.
Richter couldn’t hear the response, but Jackson opened the bedroom door immediately and somebody entered the room.
‘I was taking a nap,’ she said. ‘You have news, Steve?’
That tentatively identified the caller in Richter’s mind: Jackson had said that her number two was a guy named Steve Barber, and he doubted if the other member of the CIA team would approach her directly unless it was an emergency.
‘Yes, ma’am. Langley have got back to me with some information, but it will still be a while before they get access to Burdiss’s locked files. What they have got is the summary report he wrote when he got back to America from Moscow, so at least we now know who "George" actually is, even if we don’t know why Burdiss figured he was so important.’
‘Go on.’
‘His real name was Dmitri Ivanovich Pavlov, and he worked for the GRU, Russian military intelligence.’
‘A senior officer, presumably?’
‘Nope. That’s the weird thing. He wasn’t an officer at all, just a trooper or whatever the hell they call their lowest ranks. And you know as well as I do that nobody at that level would have access to any information that we’d think was important. I’m kind of wondering if maybe Burdiss was sold a pup, and this guy Pavlov has been playing him, stringing him along with a bunch of disinformation or made-up crap. Or maybe Pavlov was being run by the GRU or SVR, and Burdiss was being targeted by the Russians.’
Richter could hear the conversation clearly but not see either of the two people in the adjoining room, but at that moment he was convinced that Carole-Anne Jackson had just shaken her head.
‘That doesn’t make sense, Steve,’ she said crisply. ‘I didn’t know Burdiss, but I took an abstract of his personal file before I flew out here. He wasn’t some wet behind the ears college boy doing his first job for the Company. He’d been around the block a few times, and he knew what he was doing. If Pavlov had been feeding him stuff that wasn’t kosher, Walter Burdiss would have known about it and wouldn’t even have been talking to him, far less running him as an asset in Moscow.’
‘Then maybe this guy Pavlov had prospects,’ Barber said, sounding far from convinced, ‘and Burdiss was playing a long game, hoping to get him into some kinda sensitive position in the GRU. Making him a future source, not a current asset.’
‘That still doesn’t make sense. The only reason Walter Burdiss would have travelled all the way over to this archipelago to meet Pavlov would be because the man had information of crucial importance. Like you, I’m dammed if I can see how he could have got any useful data, but somehow he did, and that’s what Burdiss came here to recover. And don’t forget the way his killer or killers opened up his digestive system. They were looking for something, a memory card or thumb drive or something like that, and that’s why his asset was so important. And why we have to find him before the guys who sliced and diced Walter Burdiss do the same to Dmitri Pavlov. Anyway, thanks for bringing that to me, Steve. Let me know when you get anything else, and send a chaser to Langley. We need those locked files opened, and we need them opened right now. I’ll get dressed and see you in the lounge.’
Richter heard the sound of the room door closing and the key turning in the lock, and then the bathroom door swung open.
‘You heard all that?’ she asked, and Richter nodded.
Jackson looked him up and down and then smiled broadly.
‘What?’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing even vaguely attractive about the naked male body. I don’t mean you, just the male sex in general. All those bits dangling and swaying in the wind. It’s no wonder most women prefer to have sex in the dark. It saves them from bursting out laughing.’
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ Richter said, sounding hurt, ‘it’s what you do with it. And male bits don’t dangle all the time, as I demonstrated recently.’
‘That’s true. You can show me again later, but right now you need to grab a shower and then get dressed. Things to do, places to go, people to see, all that sort of stuff.’
About a quarter of an hour later, Jackson closed and locked her bedroom door and the two of them headed for the stairs. But before they got there, Richter’s phone emitted a double tone that indicated the receipt of a text message. They stopped beside the staircase and he looked at the screen, then showed it to Jackson.
‘From my boss,’ he said, and pointed. The on-screen message consisting of a single word: ‘News?’
‘Not very talkative, is he?’ Jackson commented.
‘A man of few words, most of them vulgar, as a friend of mine used to say, though that’s not really accurate. I gave him a call when I got your sealed envelope with my name written on it,’ Richter explained, ‘because I had no idea who could have known I was here on Svalbard, and I wondered if maybe Legoland had had second thoughts and had sent one of their own men up here. Either that or maybe it was enemy action. I’ll send him a quick reply when we get downstairs.’
‘Before we get there, we need to decide who you are,’ Jackson said. ‘My two guys are sharp, and if I say nothing sooner or later they’re going to realize that we know each other, and probably guess that we’re sometimes sharing the same bed. So are you going to be Paul Richter, a fellow intelligence professional working for the aristocratic spymasters who live in the building at Vauxhall Cross on the Thames and who’s up here with a watching brief for pretty much the same mission we’re on? Or are you Paul Richter, some bloke I ran into a few years ago in the Middle East who just happens to be visiting Spitsbergen to take pretty pics of puffins and polar bears and stuff? The long arm of coincidence strikes again, as it were.’
‘I don’t think I’m going to be much use to you as a wandering amateur naturalist who for whatever reason is lurking here on the archipelago,’ Richter replied. ‘Apart from anything else, you’re here to do a job and I’ve no doubt that your men would find it peculiar, at least, if you didn’t devote yourself to that full-time, and I was hoping to spend some time with you. So the easiest thing is for me to forget Legoland’s directive about not getting close and just tell your guys that I’m up here doing almost the same as you.’
‘Good,’ Jackson said. ‘That was what I was going to suggest anyway.’
In the lounge, Jackson led the way across to a corner table where two men were sitting talking. Richter immediately recognized the one on the right as Steve Barber from the description and photograph that had been supplied as part of his briefing notes from Vauxhall Cross. Lying across the seat of one of the chairs near them were two rifle cases and a pair of belt holsters each containing a large calibre revolver.
Jackson stopped beside the table, Richter a half pace behind her, and glanced round to ensure that nobody else was within earshot.
‘Anything else from Langley, Steve?’ she asked.
Barber and the other man stared at Richter with expressions that were both questioning and hostile at the same time, and neither replied immediately. Then Barber stood up and planted himself squarely in front of the newcomer.
‘Don’t think I know you,’ he said, somewhat belligerently, ignoring Jackson’s question.
‘Sit down, Steve, and relax,’ Jackson ordered, raising a placating hand. ‘I know him, and that’s what matters. This is Paul Richter. He’s English and he’s in the same game as we are, but he works for the British Secret Intelligence Service in London. Paul, the angry looking man right in front of you is Steve Barber, my number two, and the guy sitting down is John Mason, the other member of my team.’
‘And he’s here why?’ Barber’s tone was dismissive. ‘What we’re doing up here has nothing to do with the goddamned British.’
‘Oddly enough,’ Richter said, speaking for the first time, ‘we think it probably has. Your man Walter Burdiss tripped a few flags when he transited through London, and my people have a vested interest in finding out why some hoodlums up here decided to slice up his body and leave it out on the tundra. So I’m here, and this is where I’m staying.’
Barber opened his mouth to reply, but Jackson spoke first.
‘You remember what happened last year in Dubai?’ she asked. ‘The attempt to blow up the Burj Al Arab using a suitcase nuke stolen from the Russians? And the attempted bulk assassination of most of the Saudi royal family at the racecourse?’ Barber and the other man both nodded. ‘Good,’ Jackson continued, ‘because Paul Richter here is the guy who put it all together and stopped both of them. With a little bit of help from me, obviously.’
Barber’s hostile expression gave way to one of somewhat grudging respect, but he still didn’t look happy.
‘I’m not here to interfere,’ Richter said. ‘My task is to observe and report back to London, so I’m just an extra body that you can use for surveillance or investigation or whatever you’re doing at the moment. There are only three of you, so having an extra pair of hands can’t hurt, and having one more body on the side of the good guys is probably a bonus, unless you already outnumber the Russians, which I doubt.’
‘So has Langley sent us anything else yet?’ Jackson said, returning to her original question. ‘And anything you can say in front of me you can say in front of Paul. His security clearance is probably higher than either of yours.’
Barber subsided into his seat as Richter and Jackson each took one of the other chairs around the table.
‘Nothing since the summary report I told you about already,’ he said.
‘I only flew in this morning,’ Richter said, ‘so my information is limited to what I was told in London and what Carole-Anne has already explained to me. What have you managed to find out since you got here?’
‘The short answer is not very much,’ Jackson replied, because Barber clearly wasn’t going to respond. ‘As I told you, when Burdiss went missing this team was assembled real fast and we flew out here to try and pick up the pieces. Burdiss had simply vanished, and the only part of the trail we could follow started and ended in his hotel room. We got access to it fairly easily and took it to pieces, looking for any information that might help us find either him or "George", but there was nothing useful there.’
‘I take it you weren’t the first through the door?’ Richter asked.
Jackson shook her head.
‘Almost certainly not. Getting into most
hotel rooms isn’t difficult if you know what you’re doing, and his room showed the tell-tale signs of a thorough but covert search. You can take pictures with your mobile of where everything is positioned the moment you walk through the door – that’s standard procedure – but it’s very difficult not to leave traces when you’re going through every drawer and cupboard, lifting the carpets and dismantling light fittings and stuff. We’re pretty certain that the team that killed Burdiss went through his room as soon as he croaked. They probably got in using his own key, because that never turned up. In fact, when we found his body and brought it back there was nothing in his pockets at all.’
‘I gather that was you, Steve,’ Richter said. ‘How did you find him?’
‘Steve,’ Jackson said, when Barber showed no immediate inclination to answer the question.
Barber shook his head, then nodded and looked at Richter.
‘I guess mainly by a process of elimination. We checked pretty much everywhere we could here in Longyearbyen, and did the same in Pyramiden – that’s the old Russian mining town that was abandoned years ago – and in Barentsburg, down to the south-west, which is still full of Russians. We didn’t find anything, which wasn’t too surprising because if Burdiss was dead he’d start to smell real bad real quickly, so we started looking outside, in the tundra. We didn’t think he’d have been dumped in the ocean, because there’s a lot of marine traffic around the coast and his killers couldn’t risk his body being found because of what they’d done to it. So somewhere out in the tundra was pretty much the only place left to look.’
John Mason leaned forward and added his contribution.
‘This time of year,’ he said, ‘most of the island is still covered in snow, and the locals use snowmobiles to get around. If you walk round the edge of the settlement, you’ll see tracks heading in a bunch of different directions, but it’s pretty easy to work out where most of them are going. But we found a few that weren’t heading for Pyramiden or the airport or anywhere else that was obvious, so we hired a couple of scooters and sleds, sorted out fuel and weapons and ammunition and stuff, and followed them. The first two tracks didn’t lead anywhere, just joined up with some of the other routes, but the third set of tracks, made by a single snow scooter, kept on heading out into the bundu. About twenty miles out, we found what was left of Burdiss after a polar bear and probably some smaller predators had used him as a self-service diner. There was a big male bear chomping on him when we got there, but we drove him off. The body was a mess, no mistake. We took pictures of the scene, wrapped Burdiss in a tarpaulin and hauled him back here.’
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