He paused. Peggy held her breath, waiting.
Al scratched under his chin. ‘He said he’d driven down from Canada and he was in a car with Canadian number plates. All we’ve learned so far from the Canadians is that he hired the car the day before he turned up at the hospital. He showed a Swedish passport and gave the address of a hotel in Montreal. He’s not there any longer and the Canadians are trying to trace him. We’ve sent a guy up there to work the case. Someone with a lot of counter-intelligence experience. He’ll be very discreet.’
Peggy said, ‘If Petersen was the Illegal, what was he doing in Vermont? Is there anything special there to interest the Russians?’
‘Couldn’t it be the same thing as the two you caught here?’ mused Al.
Peggy shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t think so. The pair we caught here probably had a general brief to begin with – to stir up trouble in whatever way they could, back protest movements, foment disruption and anti-government feeling. Standard disruption stuff.’
‘But rural Vermont?’ asked Miles. ‘That’s not where you’d plant an Illegal with such a general brief.’
Peggy nodded. ‘No. That kind of stuff could only be effectively done in the capital or in a major city like New York.’
Al looked at them both. ‘And why is this new guy in Montreal? Is he a replacement for Petersen? What happens in Montreal that also happens in Vermont? And would be of value to the Russians?’
It was Peggy’s turn to shrug. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Better in fact,’ she added with a grin. ‘I’ve never been to Vermont or Montreal.’
‘Perhaps he’s not based there,’ suggested Miles. ‘Maybe he just used it as a base to visit Petersen.’
‘Took him long enough,’ said Costino. ‘That guy was dying for weeks.’
The three of them sat in silence for a moment. Finally, Al Costino spoke. ‘Well, folks, thanks for your time. I guess I’ve given you something to think about. Questions but no answers.’ Turning to Peggy he said, ‘My HQ asked me to say that they’d be grateful for your cooperation on this one. As the Service with the most recent experience of this sort of activity, we’d really appreciate your input. And could you also brief your colleagues in MI6 in case they have any sources who might be able to give a steer on what is going on? And we’ll keep you informed, of course, if we learn anything more.’
With that, he unfolded his long legs, heaved himself up from the sofa and with handshakes all round left the room. After he’d gone Peggy and Miles sat down again and looked at each other. They knew they were both thinking the same thing.
‘Mischa?’ said Peggy.
‘Exactly,’ replied Miles.
‘Is he contactable?’
‘I believe our Station in Kiev still has an emergency method of communication. But they’ll have to agree to do it. He’s their source and they are responsible for his security. I’ll contact them and see what they say.’
‘Meanwhile I’ll brief Liz and Six about the mysterious Mr Petersen and his visitor from Montreal,’ said Peggy. Gathering up her now dry umbrella, she set off into the rain with a spring in her step.
4
It was one thirty and Liz Carlyle was walking to work. Her enjoyment of the walk was not dampened in the least by the rain. No more gloomy Northern Line tube journeys for her, she reflected, just a stroll through Pimlico and along the river. A few months ago, at the end of a very stressful period both at work and in her private life, she had sat down and thought about what changes might make her happier. She had often thought how much better it would be if she lived nearer to Thames House, where she worked in MI5’s head office. So she had taken the plunge, stepped into the local estate agent and put her flat on the market.
It had turned out that her particular part of Kentish Town was a lot more desirable than she realised, and the asking price the estate agent suggested had amazed her. But before long she had a firm offer. She’d hesitated for two days before accepting it, thinking of how thrilled she had been to be able to buy her flat in the first place and of all the happy times she had spent there. But finally she had shrugged her shoulders, told herself it was time to move on and accepted the offer. Within a few weeks she had found and fallen in love with a top-floor flat overlooking the gardens of St George’s Square in Pimlico. What really sold it to her was the small roof terrace, which had a tremendous view over the rooftops of Westminster Cathedral in the distance.
She had moved in a week ago and had woken every morning looking forward to the mile or so walk to work. The fact that it had rained almost every day had not depressed her in the least. Today she had taken the morning off to take delivery of a large, comfortable sofa and was feeling particularly pleased with her choice and how well it fitted in to the sitting room.
Up in her small office in Thames House she hung her dripping raincoat on the back of the door and sat down at her desk. As she did so she reflected how lucky she was to have an office, however small, in these days of open-plan floors and hot-desking. When the building had been repartitioned to form large open floors to accommodate the increase in manpower – first after 9/11, then again in the wake of the 7/7 bombing of the London Underground – something had gone slightly awry and some odd corners had been left out of the open plan. Some were big enough to form small meeting rooms, though Liz’s space wasn’t big enough for anything except a small office with just enough room for a desk and two chairs. But it did have a window and the window looked over the Thames. There wasn’t much to see at present, since the steady rain distorted the view until it flickered like a television on the blink. But Liz liked her own space and even when the weather was bad she liked the outlook too.
As she sat down at her desk Liz wondered how Peggy was getting on at Grosvenor. She had delegated the liaison role with the Americans because she was busy running her counter-espionage team and also because she thought it was time to give Peggy some extra responsibility. Peggy had originally joined MI6 as a researcher, having become bored by her first job after leaving university in a small private library in the north of England.
She and Liz had first met when Peggy was seconded to MI5 to work with Liz on a particularly delicate case involving both their Services. Liz had been impressed with Peggy’s talent for research and her tenacity and Peggy had admired Liz’s drive and operational skills. When the case was concluded, Peggy had decided that the domestic service would better suit her abilities than MI6 and, encouraged by Liz, had transferred to MI5. Since then she had worked closely with Liz, moving with her from the Counter-Terrorism Branch to Counter-Espionage.
During that time Peggy had developed from a rather shy, scholarly young woman who hid behind her hair and her glasses. She had turned out to have considerable operational skills, particularly in extracting information from unsuspecting people. To Liz’s, and her own, surprise, she had become highly talented at role-playing and had successfully transformed herself into, among other things, a social worker, a census official and a debt collector. Liz felt a little like a proud mother hen as she watched and encouraged her junior’s development.
Recently, Peggy had suffered something of a blow, however, when Tim, her partner of several years and a lecturer in seventeenth-century English Literature, had go himself into trouble – by behaving like the spineless erratic geek Liz had always suspected he was. His behaviour had come as a shock to Peggy, who had seen only the gentle, scholarly side of Tim. The revelation of this other side had upset Peggy greatly and their relationship had broken up.
It was partly to take Peggy’s mind off all this that Liz had asked her to be the main contact point with Miles Brookhaven at the CIA Station in the US Embassy. But there was another reason too. When Miles had been posted to London several years earlier, he had asked Liz out, sent her flowers and behaved like a lovestruck teenager. Though Liz had been amused by Miles, she had found his romantic attentions entirely unwelcome; when she heard that Miles was returning as Head of Station she had tried to avoid a rep
eat of his failed courtship by appointing Peggy as liaison.
In fact, she needn’t have worried. The Miles who arrived in London this time round was a much more mature character. Liz found they could now meet as friends and colleagues without any embarrassment. Miles was still unmarried, however, and was undoubtedly attractive – something Liz noticed Peggy had recognised as well. Half of Liz hoped that Peggy would get over her breakup with Tim and start a relationship with Miles; the other half worried that an American CIA officer, however Anglophile, might not be the right choice for Peggy.
Liz was mulling over this when Peggy herself appeared in the doorway of her office. Her coat was soaking wet but her face was glowing.
‘Heavens, Peggy, you look chirpy for such a rotten day. How did you get on at Grosvenor?’
‘It was fascinating,’ said Peggy. ‘Do you mind if I just dump my coat for a minute? I need to check my emails, then I’ll come back and tell you.’
In a few minutes she was back. ‘Have a chair,’ said Liz. ‘And fill me in. I hope it’s good news.’
‘Well, I don’t know about good. But it’s certainly interesting.’ She told Liz what Al Costino had reported about the Swedish lecturer in Vermont and his mysterious visitor from Canada.
‘They seem pretty certain that the Petersen man who died was the Illegal that Mischa said was in America. Now the Bureau is pulling out all the stops to find out about his visitor. He called himself Ohlson.’
‘Another Swede.’
‘Yes. He claimed to be a childhood friend of Petersen. Anyway, Al Costino said his HQ in Washington asked if we and Six had any source that could help. Miles and I both thought of Mischa.’
‘Mischa?’ asked Liz thoughtfully. Her mind went back to the church in Tallinn last autumn. Mischa was a Russian army officer, a specialist in sophisticated weaponry who had taken a degree at Birmingham University. He had been in Ukraine with the Russian forces when a Malaysian passenger aircraft had been brought down by a Russian surface-to-air missile. Disgusted by this, and by the denials of any involvement immediately issued by the Kremlin, Mischa had made contact with the CIA’s Kiev Station through an American journalist who had been at the crash site. Mischa had rapidly become a paid source of the Kiev Station, providing information on Russian military activity in Ukraine. Then, out of the blue, he had asked to meet a more senior officer of the CIA, and Miles Brookhaven had gone to Ukraine from London to see him.
It was Mischa who had provided the first information about the Russian Illegals operations in Europe and the US. His source was his brother, a middle-ranking officer in the Russian intelligence service, FSB, who was working on the Illegals programme in Moscow and liked to boast about it when he was drunk. Mischa’s information, though tantalising, had not been sufficiently detailed to act on, and it was not until months later when he had resurfaced in Tallinn, asking to meet a contact from the British Special Services, that Liz had met him. She had gone out to Tallinn under the cover of a recently bereaved schoolteacher who had joined an academic-led tour group.
He’d provided her with enough information for MI5 to locate and the police subsequently to arrest two Russian Illegals working in Britain. After the excitement of the operation to round up the Illegals working in Britain was over, Liz had occasionally wondered whether there had been any repercussions for Mischa or his brother. There must have been an investigation in Moscow to try to find out how the Illegals had been discovered. She was curious whether Mischa’s brother had come under suspicion and if so whether the suspicion had spread to Mischa himself. Nothing further had been heard from Mischa, and no information had come from the MI6 Station in Moscow – not that she had heard anyway – though she knew they had made some effort to find out who Mischa’s brother was, as he sounded like a possible recruit.
‘Do the Americans have a way of contacting Mischa?’ she asked Peggy.
‘Miles is going to find out. He thinks the Kiev Station may have an emergency arrangement.’
‘It’d better be a secure one,’ replied Liz. ‘I would imagine the FSB grew very suspicious once we wrapped up two of their Illegals.’
‘Shall I set up a meeting with Six? They don’t know anything about the American Illegal yet and I said we’d inform them and ask if they have any useful sources.’
‘Yes, do,’ replied Liz. ‘And then we can see what they think about contacting Mischa.’
5
‘Contact Mischa?’ exclaimed Geoffrey Fane after Peggy had reported on the meeting with Miles and his FBI colleague at the American Embassy. ‘What on earth are the Americans thinking of? There’ll be a full-scale FSB enquiry going on in Moscow as we speak into how we got on to their people here. If the Americans want to land their man in prison, and his brother too, that’s the way to do it.’
They were sitting in Fane’s office on an upper floor of Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s London Headquarters. Liz always enjoyed a visit to Fane’s office, unchanged in all the years she had known him. Through all the structural changes in the Vauxhall Cross building in recent years to accommodate the explosion in manpower, Geoffrey Fane had somehow miraculously managed to hang on to this large room with its tall windows and river view.
He had also managed to acquire a large nineteenth-century wooden desk, a couple of button-back chairs and a leather Chesterfield sofa thrown out from the Foreign Office in some refurbishment programme years before. To these he had added an antique coffee table left to him by his grandmother and the Persian rugs, picked up for a song by clever bargaining, so he claimed, on his various posts in the Middle East. To Liz they epitomised Geoffrey Fane: elegant, discreetly flamboyant and out of date.
‘I think everyone agrees that it’s very risky,’ said Peggy mildly, ‘but it seems they have no other assets in a position to throw light on what’s going on in Vermont. They did want to know if you had any sources who could help.’
Fane looked at the fourth person in the room, his colleague Bruno Mackay, who merely shook his head. The behaviour of the two men struck Liz as distinctly odd. She had known Bruno Mackay for years; when they were both much younger he had been a thorn in her side. She had found him irritatingly self-satisfied, with his Savile Row suits, unruly straw-coloured hair and skin tanned from postings in exotic countries. But age and experience had rubbed the raw edges off both of them. Liz herself had recently suffered a personal tragedy, while it was rumoured that on a recent posting in Libya something very unpleasant had happened to Bruno. Whether it was as a result of their experiences or merely because they had grown older and kinder, both seemed to find it easier now to work together.
But today Liz had a strong feeling that something was hanging in the air; something was not being said and she wanted to know what it was. She waited, saying nothing herself.
Peggy broke the silence. ‘Miles thinks their Kiev Station has an emergency contact arrangement set up with Mischa and he’s getting clearance from Langley to activate it.’
‘Oh. I see,’ said Fane. ‘So Langley haven’t given clearance yet? I can tell you, they’re not going to, either.’
It was obvious to Liz that Geoffrey Fane had something going on with the Americans that she didn’t know about. She wondered whether Miles Brookhaven knew what it was, although it sounded unlikely. Peggy, seemingly oblivious to the undercurrent in the room, said, ‘The FBI are desperate to know what can link Petersen in Vermont with Ohlson and Canada.’
‘I can see their point,’ said Fane, ‘but it’s not going to happen.’
Peggy looked about to argue, but catching Liz’s warning eye said nothing.
Liz reached for her bag and stood up. ‘Thanks for your time, gentlemen. We’ve done what we were asked to do and brought you up to date, and we’ve passed on the Bureau’s request for help. So we’ll leave you to it.’
Fane and Bruno both stood up too. Peggy, scrabbling to get her papers together and retrieve her bag from the floor, was the last to rise.
‘I’ll see you out,’ said Bruno, h
olding the door open. He came out into the corridor with them and said quietly to Liz, ‘Have you got a minute? There’s something I’d like to discuss.’
‘Sure,’ said Liz, curious. When the lift arrived, Bruno got in with them and pressed the button for the second floor.
‘Do you want me to wait downstairs?’ Peggy asked when the lift stopped.
‘No, you come too, please,’ said Bruno. ‘It won’t take long.’
He led them into a small windowless meeting room across from the lift. ‘Do sit down,’ said Bruno. He took a seat at the end of the room’s table. ‘Sorry to be so mysterious, but there’s something I need to tell you. I thought Geoffrey was going to, but you know what he’s like: he can’t bear to give away any information when he doesn’t have to. He’d have told you eventually, but I think you need to know now, because it affects how we handle this new business with the Bureau.’
Bruno paused as if hesitant to come clean. Liz waited patiently and finally Bruno went on again. ‘I’m being posted to Moscow. I’ll be there under cover, not diplomatic. The cover is being worked on now so I can’t tell you any more than that. But I’ve got one task and that is to get alongside Mischa’s brother. Our Station has been working with the Americans out there and they have identified the brother, Boris, and know quite a lot about him and his lifestyle. We’ve given him the codename “Starling”. I’m to try to recruit him and keep him in place.’
He exhaled nosily, seemingly revealed to have spilled the beans. ‘You can see why Geoffrey is nervous about initiating any contact with Mischa. If it went wrong, it would compromise this operation – and Starling is a much bigger prize than his brother. He’s at the heart of the FSB.’
‘Well,’ said Liz, reeling slightly from this disclosure, ‘it goes without saying, if there’s anything we can do to help…’
‘At the moment you can just look surprised when Geoffrey tells you. Which he will. When he’s ready.’
The Moscow Sleepers Page 2