‘But it wasn’t sent by Richter?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Understood. Carry on.’
‘The message does not consist of complete sentences, just single words and very short phrases, a total of only nine words. In order, these read: Kotel; Freaticheskiy; Cumbre Vieja; Power shift, and Tuesday or Wednesday.’
‘Right,’ Simpson said, ‘obviously I know what Tuesday and Wednesday mean, unless there’s some arcane interpretation of the names of the days of the week that I’m not aware of, but the rest is as clear as mud at the moment.’
‘Quite,’ Baker said, then paused a moment before continuing. ‘This might make a bit more sense to you if you let me identify the sender.’
‘Go on.’
‘As you obviously guessed, he was using a codename that not only tells us who he is, but where he works.’
Baker wrote down the cipher text KBHYOKDOIVNGKRAU in big letters on a sheet of paper and placed it in front of Simpson.
‘That’s not one word,’ he said, ‘but three words. If you just start from the left-hand side and write down every other letter, on the first pass you get KHODINKA, and the two words that are left spell out BYKOV and GRU. It’s an incredibly easy cipher to break. In fact, it’s not really a cipher at all.’
‘Simple when you know how,’ Simpson said, somewhat grudgingly. ‘Are you sure that’s right?’
‘Yes. I ran it through our system downstairs, trying all sorts of permutations, and that was the only result it came up with that made any kind of sense. And we do know who Viktor Bykov is, and that he’s a general working for the GRU, and both the old and new headquarters of that particular Russian organization are located at Khodinka Airfield in Moscow. It all ties together very nicely, and I do know that Bykov has helped us out in the past.’
‘He has,’ Simpson agreed, ‘though he’s not what you might call a source or an informer. He always seems to have the best interests of Mother Russia at heart, but if he sees something happening that he believes would damage Russia in the long term – like that problem with the Foxbats in North Korea or the Russian suitcase nuke in the Burj Al Arab in Dubai – then he’s been prepared to give us a steer.’
‘And that’s where the message comes in. Richter knows Bykov, and my guess is that he gave him details of his ECS so that Bykov could securely pass on a message to us if he thought it was something we needed to know. Because the message arrived from the ECS he would know we’d take it seriously, and I think that because of his position in the Russian military he will never give us chapter and verse because of the possibility of the leak being traced back to him. He’ll just tell us something is going on, and then leave it to us to find out what and to take the necessary steps to sort it out.’
‘And the necessary steps in this case would be what?’ Simpson asked.
‘I think the expression "buggered if I know" more or less covers it,’ Baker replied. ‘When I saw that first word – kotel – I wondered if it might be something to do with Jerusalem, because the Western Wall of the Temple Mount is known as the Kotel, but that didn’t make sense as far as the rest of the message was concerned. Because the second word looked Russian, I checked kotel, and that’s Russian as well. It means a cauldron or a boiler, which wasn’t much help, but freaticheskiy sort of clarified it. The English translation is “phreatic”, which means water in an aquifer or underground lake, something of that sort, being heated by volcanic activity. To some extent, those first two words mean the same kind of thing, and there’s also a sort of link to Cumbre Vieja on La Palma in the Canaries, because that’s a dormant volcano. In fact, I suppose you could call it semi-dormant, because it erupted twice in the last century, in 1949 and 1971, and there were five other eruptions in recorded history that preceded those two, in 1470, 1585, 1646, 1677 and 1712, but it’s quiet at the moment.’
‘And what about the "power shift" and the days of the week?’ Simpson asked.
‘I have no idea. I have no clue what Bykov is trying to tell us. The FRANTIC priority has to mean it’s urgent, critically urgent, but what it is, and why and where it’s supposed to be happening, I don’t know.’
Simpson didn’t respond immediately, just stared down at the sheet of paper where he’d been making the occasional note while Baker talked. Then he looked up.
‘You said when you came in here that Richter was involved somehow. He knows Bykov better than any of us, and about all he seems to be doing on Svalbard is shagging the arse off some bit of American totty he’s found up there, so I’ll kick it up to him and see if he can make any sense of it. At least it’ll get him out of her bed for a while.’
Chapter 25
Friday
Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Archipelago
Richter’s ‘bit of American totty’ wasn’t particularly enjoying herself.
When they’d heard and then seen the police car approaching, she’d told Mason to unload the Savage, which he’d done, pulling back the bolt to eject the third cartridge that the magazine had held, and which he had chambered as soon as he’d fired the second shot, almost as a reflex action. Then he’d placed the empty magazine beside the weapon, and just stood there waiting.
While he’d been doing that, Jackson had removed the magazine from her unfired CZ 75, placed the empty weapon, its slide racked back, on the road surface and stripped all the 9-millimetre rounds from the magazine and put them on the ground beside it. Then she too just stood there waiting. She knew there’d be no point in returning the pistol to her handbag, because without doubt the police would want to search them both before taking them away to wherever they were going to be questioned. And finding a loaded pistol in the handbag of a potential murder suspect – because that was what she and Mason both were, unless she could do some fast talking and some even faster thinking – would be unlikely to improve her situation in any material way.
When the dark coloured 4 x 4 stopped on the road beside them, she and Mason both raised their hands above their heads. Two officers climbed out and looked at the scene that lay before them with something akin to incredulous disbelief.
Longyearbyen is about as crime-free a society as can be found anywhere in the world, due to its small population and isolation, a fact attested to by the six-man police department with a single holding cell, a police department that is responsible for a total land area about twice the size of New Jersey. Most of the offences committed there involve drunkenness which can sometimes lead to an exchange of blows, and the occasional bit of shoplifting. But the more serious crimes that are endemic elsewhere, like car theft, simply don’t happen, not least because there are no roads outside the settlement along which the thief could escape in his stolen property. And car theft on an island makes no sense anyway, because you can’t get away with it unless there’s a tunnel or bridge or a decent ferry service to somewhere else.
Murders never happen, but what the two officers were faced with was undeniable evidence that not one but two men had just been shot to death at virtually point-blank range by a third person armed with an extremely powerful rifle. And he, apparently, had a female accomplice who had also been carrying a loaded pistol. What they were seeing was so far outside their comfort zones that their expressions said it all.
Both Jackson and Mason were holding their CIA identifications in their hands, and as the two officers approached she made sure they could see hers.
‘I’m an American government agent,’ she said. ‘The governor knows that we’re here on Svalbard and what we were doing. I apologise for this mess.’
‘Bearing in mind that I’m looking at two dead bodies,’ the first policeman said, producing a pair of handcuffs, ‘I don’t think an apology will quite cut it, whether the governor knows or not.’
Minutes later, Jackson and Mason, each wearing a set of steel bracelets, were sitting in the back of the 4 x 4 and watching as the two police officers, now reinforced by three colleagues, studied the crime scene, taking photographs of bot
h the corpses of the two Russians and the weapons that they had been carrying, before also photographing the Savage rifle Mason had used and the unloaded pistol Jackson had been carrying. Quite a large crowd had now gathered near the Svalbard Hotel to watch the unusual activity, most of them using their mobile phones to record the event for posterity, and for probable uploading onto one or more of the various social media sites. Several of them approached the 4 x 4 and pressed their phones or cameras against the windows to take photographs of the handcuffed suspects inside. And there was nothing they could do about it.
‘This is going to look real good back at Langley when it hits Facebook and YouTube,’
Mason muttered.
‘Just keep your head down,’ Jackson instructed, ‘and remember that we’re innocent until proven guilty. We should be able to walk away from this today, even if I have to get someone back at the Company or over at State to make a few calls.’
A few minutes later, one of the police officers, a bulky Scandinavian with very fair hair who was wearing a leather jacket with rank insignia on the shoulders, returned to the vehicle, got behind the wheel and started the engine.
‘Off to the lock-up?’ Jackson enquired.
‘Not exactly,’ he said, his English fluent. ‘I’ve been told to take you straight to the governor’s residence. He’s also the chief of police.’
When they were ushered into his office, both of them still wearing handcuffs, the steadily balding and slim middle-aged man sitting behind the long walnut desk did not seem particularly pleased to see them. But what he did do, as soon as he looked up, was to instruct his officer to remove their handcuffs.
The patrolman seemed reluctant to do so and hesitated for several seconds.
‘We do have two dead bodies, sir,’ he said. ‘Shot by this man.’
‘Allegedly shot by this man,’ Jackson corrected him. ‘Unless you saw him do it.’
‘I do know that,’ the governor snapped, ‘but I’m also sure that Miss Jackson here will have a good explanation for what just happened in my town. It may even be an explanation that I can believe. In fact, it had better be.’
With the handcuffs removed, the governor invited the two Americans to sit down, and fixed his gaze on Jackson’s face.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘What happened? You told me that this would remain an entirely covert operation.’
‘That was what we hoped, sir,’ Jackson replied. ‘In fact, we were just about to implement a plan to pick up the defector today. We were going to divert the attention of the Russians who had been following us around and lead them in one direction while we told the defector to head somewhere completely different and get him off Svalbard that way. But before we could do this, the defector contacted us to say the Russians had found him.
‘The only thing we had time to do was get down to the building where he had been staying – it was one of the properties on Vei 228 – and try to recover the situation. When we got there, it all seemed quiet, but a minute or so later we saw the defector climb out of a window. Then he was grabbed outside the building by two men. They forced him to kneel down, and then one of them pulled out a pistol and was clearly going to execute him in cold blood. We were too far away to intervene directly, so John here did the only thing he could to save the defector’s life – he shot the Russian who was holding the pistol.’
‘Sounds plausible,’ the governor remarked. ‘And the second man who died?’
‘The defector managed to get away from the second Russian, but he pulled out a pistol as well, and the only way to stop him firing was to take him down first, so that was what John did. As I think I told you when we first met, sir, the Central Intelligence Agency believes that the defector may be in possession of information crucial to the security of the West, which in this context includes Norway.’
The governor waved his hand in a slightly irritated manner, as if brushing off what Jackson just said.
‘Yes, yes. I got the official message the first time you told me. No doubt your people will debrief him and let us know if anything germane to Norway or Svalbard comes up. Personally, I have my doubts. More to the point, where is the defector now? Is he safe?’
Jackson nodded.
‘An American research vessel called the Thomas G Thompson was alongside in the harbour here, and I arranged for two of my people to escort the defector to the ship and accompany him on board as bodyguards. I haven’t spoken to them but I know they accomplished this because I received a brief text message from one of my men to confirm they had already left the harbour. The ship was under orders to sail as soon as possible once the defector was on board.’
‘Two of your people? I thought you were the leader of a team of three, yourself, this man Mason here and another man named Barber.’
‘That’s true. After we arrived here we discovered that a British intelligence agent was also here on Svalbard on a related mission, and because we were outnumbered by the Russians, my people arranged with London to have him re-tasked to assist us. He was accompanying the defector because he speaks fluent Russian.’
‘Where are the other Russians now?’
‘We don’t know. We were followed to the defector’s accommodation by two of them, and during the incident we disarmed them and let them go on their way. We are virtually certain there were six of them here in total, charged with repatriating or more likely simply killing the defector, but where the other four of them are now I have no idea. But now we have accomplished our mission, albeit at a cost, I expect that they will have to return to Russia.’
‘Do you have their names?’
Jackson nodded.
‘I can give you the names they were travelling under,’ she said, ‘but not their real names. All six of them were using newly-issued German passports, probably because they wouldn’t have needed visas to pursue the defector in Western Europe with German identification. If you are planning on detaining these men, sir,’ she added, ‘please remember that they are armed and very dangerous. Remember what they did to Walter Burdiss. I know we can’t prove it was them, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they were responsible.’
‘Without solid proof,’ the governor said, ‘we can’t arrest them and hold them here because we don’t have the facilities, but we can make sure that they leave Svalbard as soon as possible. You have my email address. Send me the list of their passports as soon as you can. I will arrange to have them held and questioned when they reach mainland Norway. Which only,’ he added slowly, ‘leaves the two of you.’
Jackson said nothing, but she hadn’t missed his request for her to send him an email, something she couldn’t do if she was locked inside a prison cell. She guessed that adding anything to what she had already said would be unlikely to influence him, but if he did decide to detain them, she would immediately call Langley and request high-level intervention on their behalf. She and Mason had, after all, achieved the objective they had been given by getting the defector safely off the island, and Mason had been instrumental in saving the man’s life – twice. She hoped that her superiors back in America would be prepared to take whatever diplomatic steps would be needed to let her and Mason walk.
The governor appeared to come to a decision.
‘When we first met, Miss Jackson, I agreed to relax the rules relating to the carriage of weapons here in Longyearbyen so that you and your men could be armed at all times. I extended no such relaxation to your Russian opponents, but my officers have reported that both the men who died were carrying loaded automatic pistols. Because of that, I think any competent defence counsel could successfully argue that when Mr Mason here fired his two shots, he was acting in self-defence, or at least in the defence of an unarmed man. I presume that the defector was not carrying a weapon?’
‘Correct, sir. He was not.’
‘Good. And it’s also relevant that both you two and the two victims were only short-term visitors to Svalbard, not residents or workers here. If a resident had been involved, the s
ituation would be much more complicated. I’m also quite certain that if I did imprison you here, which would be a tight fit for the two of you in our single holding cell, not to mention inappropriate as you are of different sexes, or have you transported to the mainland, I would very soon be subjected to pressure from above to reverse my decision and let you go.’
Jackson nodded.
‘That is certainly possible, sir.’
‘And I assume that you have pressing business elsewhere?’
She nodded again.
‘There is a time to be dogmatic, but this is a time to be pragmatic. I think it’s easier for everyone if you both just go about your business. We’ll take photocopies of your passports and CIA identification documents, and I’ll require you each to sign a form undertaking to return to either Svalbard or Norway if this matter goes to court. I presume that will not be a problem?’
‘No, sir. And thank you.’
The governor summoned the police officer and issued the appropriate instructions. Less than ten minutes later, they walked out of the building and hailed the first taxi they saw. They had a lot to do in a very short time: the last flight left Longyearbyen that afternoon at 14.45, when Jackson was quite determined that they would both be on it.
At the hotel, with the taxi waiting outside, she told Mason to pack up his and Barber’s luggage, while she threw her stuff into her carry-on bag. What she was doing that, she booked and paid for two seats on the SAS flight to Tromsø, then called Richter’s mobile. The call was dropped immediately, and she guessed the ship was about to leave Svalbard’s cell-phone cover. She typed a rapid message to him, because that would be delivered as soon as he got back within range, telling him they were out of custody and would be flying from Svalbard to Tromsø that afternoon, and that she’d be in touch.
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