The Moscow Sleepers

by Stella Rimington

  ‘Who else knows?’ asked Peggy. ‘Does Miles?’

  ‘I don’t think he does. I’m not sure about Langley. I assume the Director of Counter Intelligence and his most senior staff do. Even Geoffrey wouldn’t dare keep this from them. And of course their Head of Station in Moscow and the head people in the Ops Directorate. There’ll be an indoctrination list soon but so far you are the first people to know in your outfit.’ He looked at Liz. ‘Given your dealings with Mischa, you clearly need to be in the picture.’

  ‘I appreciate your telling us.’ But she was uneasy about keeping a secret about a secret, and was puzzled that Bruno Mackay was going behind Fane’s back. She added, ‘Let’s hope Geoffrey decides to tell us officially before too long.’

  As they walked back to Thames House across Vauxhall Bridge Liz said to Peggy, ‘Something must have happened to Bruno. He used to be so difficult, but just now he couldn’t have been nicer. It’s hard to believe he’s the same man.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s in love,’ said Peggy, and laughed.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Liz, unconvinced. ‘If he is, long may it last.’

  6

  The little plane landed with a teeth-jarring bump and bounced along the runway. Special Agent Harry Fitzpatrick opened his eyes. He hated flying in small planes. They seemed to swirl about like kites, swooping and soaring with every thermal or breeze. He could cope with big planes; they seemed robust enough to survive turbulence, but propeller planes with just sixteen seats such as these were to his mind obviously unsafe. As soon as the plane had juddered to a halt he unclipped his seatbelt and stood up, anxious to be out of the flimsy little cabin as soon as possible.

  As he climbed down the steps he saw a large, dark-haired man in a navy-blue suit and dark glasses standing on the tarmac. This must be Boyd, the local Agent who had alerted him to activity in what Fitzpatrick thought to be a dead duck case. When the first lead had come in from the British that there was a Russian Illegal in the States who had been hospitalised with a serious illness, it seemed important to quickly identify the man in case he recovered and became active again.

  It had taken a good few months to locate the man and he had sometimes wondered whether he was justified in using the resources on a case that looked as though it would go nowhere. Eventually, after extensive searches involving dates and nationality, age and type of illness he had decided that the Swede Petersen was the best fit, however unlikely it seemed. By the time he had got on to him, however, Petersen had been moved from the large hospital where he had been having treatment to a small hospice.

  Since then Petersen hadn’t moved from his bed, and apparently no one had been in touch with him; it looked as if when he died, the case, if it ever was a case, would die too. But a couple of days ago Boyd’s report had come in, and now it seemed possible that there was just the smallest of threads to unravel. And to Harry Fitzpatrick that was irresistible.

  As Boyd drove them both to the hospice where Petersen had died he outlined the arrangements he had made for Fitzpatrick’s visit. After the hospice they would go to the rented house where Petersen had lived for the last five years and then on to the university to interview the head of department where Petersen had worked. ‘I got a key to the house from the realtor who manages the rental,’ Boyd said, ‘but I haven’t been in. Thought you’d want to see it as he left it.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ said Harry. ‘Has the realtor been in?’

  ‘No. I told him not to.’

  At the hospice, Nurse Sarah Burns showed them Room 112 where Petersen had spent the last four months.

  ‘We haven’t moved anything, except to strip the bed,’ she said, looking at Boyd.

  ‘Has anyone else been in here except you and your colleagues?’ asked Fitzpatrick. She shook her head. ‘So this is all the stuff he had in here?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking over at the things on the top of the dressing table. A few books, a wallet, small change and some car keys. ‘His clothes are in the closet.’

  Fitzpatrick stood with his hands in his pockets, looking around him. ‘Those are his keys?’ he asked eventually, pointing to the dressing table.

  ‘Yes. Car keys and house keys.’

  ‘I can see the car keys. But where are the house keys?’

  Sarah walked across the room to look. ‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘They were always there – with the car keys. Where have they gone?’ She paused, frowned. ‘I wonder if Mr Ohlson took them.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ agreed Fitzpatrick. ‘Could you ask the nurse who was here when Mr Ohlson left whether he mentioned the keys? And did Mr Ohlson say how he learned Mr Petersen was dying?’

  ‘No. I assumed he’d heard from someone else – I didn’t have the impression he’d heard from Petersen himself.’

  ‘But this “someone else” didn’t visit Petersen?’

  ‘No. He didn’t have any other visitors. When he first came in someone from the university was with him but they never came back. No one else came. I’m sure of that because we insist anyone visiting signs the book.’

  ‘How long was Ohlson with the patient?’

  ‘I think it was no more than half an hour. He was still here when I went off duty but Emily – that’s the night nurse – said he’d left shortly after she came on. I thought it seemed a long way to come for such a short visit, especially as he knew he’d probably never see Mr Petersen alive again.’

  ‘Are you sure he knew how ill Petersen was?’

  ‘Yes. I pretty much told him that he was dying.’

  Fitzpatrick nodded. ‘Did anything else seem unusual about this visitor?’

  The nurse thought it over for a moment. ‘Not really. He was Swedish, but then so was Petersen.’ She paused, and Fitzpatrick could see that she wanted to be careful in what she said next. ‘I guess if anything did strike me, it was the sense that they were talking confidentially.’

  ‘Why did you think that?’

  Nurse Burns looked a little embarrassed. She said reluctantly, ‘I stood outside the door to the room for a minute after I left Ohlson in there. I was trying to hear what they were talking about,’ adding defensively, ‘I thought the Bureau might want to know.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Fitzpatrick reassuringly. ‘And what did you hear?’

  She laughed awkwardly. ‘Nothing really. I suppose I was silly to think I would as they must have been speaking in Swedish. There was just what sounded like a lot of questions from Ohlson and murmured replies from Mr Petersen. It was all very calm and quiet.’

  After the visit to the hospice, Boyd drove Fitzpatrick to the brick ranch house on the outskirts of the city Petersen had rented for the last five years. The landlord lived in Florida and the letting was managed by a local agent. From what Boyd had gathered, little was known about Petersen. There was no one still working at the agency who’d been there when Petersen had first taken on the tenancy, but from the file it seemed he had done it without seeing the house. They did a lot of lettings for the university and that was not unusual. No one currently working in the office had ever met him and they had never had cause to go into the house since he took up residence. He paid the rent punctually from an account at his bank in Burlington.

  Boyd parked in the drive. The front lawn had not been mown or the front borders weeded, but once inside, the house was tidy, almost clinically so.

  ‘He lived alone, right?’ asked Fitzpatrick, pulling on thin cotton gloves. ‘So why’s there no dust?’

  Boyd nodded. ‘Looks as though it’s been professionally cleaned – and very recently. They didn’t mention a cleaner at the agency.’

  In the study there was a wall of books, mainly sets of contemporary fiction. ‘I guess they’re part of the fittings,’ said Boyd.

  A filing cabinet contained folders of academic papers – student recommendations, student grades, applications for grants. ‘I can’t see much of interest here,’ said Fitzpatrick, ‘but we’ll have to get it taken back to HQ to check. No sign of a
ny private papers – no will, not even any bills.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll find them at the university.’

  Fitzpatrick scratched his head thoughtfully. ‘What do you make of this Petersen, Tom?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What sort of guy do you think he was?’

  Boyd looked bemused by the question, but eventually he said, ‘I guess if I had to use one word to describe this man it would be boring. There’s nothing unusual about him at all.’ He saw Fitzpatrick’s expression and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s so much boring as unreal. I think someone has been in here very recently and removed any sign of a real person. This place is like a stage set after the play is over. Tidied up and dusted and all the props put safely away. I bet Mr Ohlson has been in to make sure no trace of Petersen was left. I guarantee that when we get the labs boys in here there won’t be a single fingerprint they can lift. Not one.’ He exhaled in frustration. ‘You know, when I flew up today I had real doubts about whether we’d got the right man. Now I’m sure we have. But what the hell was he doing here?’

  7

  At the University of Vermont, Boyd parked in a half-empty lot. They walked slowly through the afternoon heat towards a gothic sandstone building that loomed over the university green below it.

  ‘The students are all away and a lot of the academic staff as well,’ said Boyd. ‘We’re seeing the deputy head of Computer Sciences – that’s the department Petersen worked in. Her name’s Emerson.’

  Angie Emerson looked about seventeen. She was small and slim and wore a faded red T-shirt, jeans, flip-flops and large horn-rimmed spectacles pushed on to the top of her head. Her hair was dyed a dayglo blonde and pinned up in a loose bun from which strands were escaping. As they came into her office she leaped up from her chair and held out a thin brown hand, smiling broadly and talking quickly.

  ‘Do come in,’ she said, pushing some journals on to the floor to clear a couple of chairs. ‘It’s not every day I get to meet the FBI. I understand you want to talk about Lars Petersen. I was so sorry to hear that he’d died; not that I knew him very well. I knew he was ill but I didn’t know it was terminal.’

  She paused briefly while Fitzpatrick and Boyd sat down, then continued: ‘I’m sorry the chairman of the department isn’t here. He’s on vacation with his family – giving his kids a cultural tour of Europe.’ She smiled. ‘My partner and I haven’t got kids, so I look after things here during the summer. We go away in winter – skiing, not culture, for us.’

  ‘It’s good of you to see us,’ Fitzpatrick said, thinking he’d better try and get to the point or they’d be there all day. ‘I’m eager to hear anything you can tell us about Petersen. We think he may not have been quite who he said he was.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Angie Emerson in surprise. She scratched her head with the end of her glasses. ‘Who do you think he was then?’

  For a moment Fitzpatrick wondered whether she was being sarcastic. He said mildly, ‘We think he may have been working for a foreign intelligence service.’

  Angie Emerson seemed genuinely taken aback. Fitzpatrick went on, ‘I’d like you to tell me whatever you can about his work here. What was his academic specialty, for example? Did he have a social life? Who was close to him? And we’d like access to his office. My colleague Tom Boyd here will send someone to take away any papers he’s left behind.’

  ‘I’m not going to be an awful lot of help,’ she said, ‘but I’ll tell you what I know. His own work was on statistical pattern recognition, algorithms and image analysis. It’s not my area at all, but he was well regarded – I do know that. As for his private life, I don’t know much about it. I can’t think of anyone who would. You see, he kept himself to himself. He wasn’t one to frequent the bars – not that I am either – and we don’t do a lot of socialising in this department; we’re quite geeky. If he had a partner I never met her – or him.’

  She paused, thinking. Then she continued, ‘One thing about him was that he seemed to be around all the time. If he had family back in Sweden he can’t have seen much of them; he didn’t go away for the summer vacation. I know that because he used to teach the students at the summer school. It’s a big thing here – we run summer schools in lots of disciplines, arts and sciences. They’re for high school kids – teenagers, mainly juniors and seniors, though in our department we often get them younger: fifteen or even fourteen sometimes. Kids with a real flair for computers develop it young. There’s a class going on at the moment. I’ll walk you along to Lars’s office and we’ll pass the lecture room.’

  As they left her office, Emerson carried on: ‘We’re very proud of what we do. These are not kids from privileged backgrounds. We give bursaries for poor kids and for kids from developing countries and war zones, if we can reach them. It’s amazing how talented some of them are, even though they’ve had very little formal teaching. And they’re so keen.’

  By now they had reached the lecture room door and she stopped to let Fitzpatrick look in through a large glass panel. He saw a room full of children, boys and girls of all races and nationalities it seemed, sitting at computer benches. At the front a young man was writing out lines of code on a white board.

  ‘How long do they stay?’ he asked.

  ‘About a month usually,’ she replied, opening the door of a small office. ‘This was Lars’s place.’

  ‘Thank you for all your help,’ said Fitzpatrick, stepping into the room with Boyd.

  There was a note of dismissal in his voice, and Emerson took the hint. ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said, looking slightly disappointed. What had her late colleague been up to?

  Fitzpatrick had intended to hire a car and drive up to Montreal to see how the Canadians were getting on with their inquiries into the mysterious Ohlson. However, when they returned to Boyd’s office to arrange the car hire there was a message waiting for him. The Canadians had established that Ohlson had flown into Montreal from Helsinki on a Swedish passport the day before he turned up in Burlington. He had stayed the night at the Marriott hotel at Montreal International airport and had hired the blue Volkswagen Passat there the following day. The car was recorded crossing into the United States at 15.30. It returned across the border at 21.40 and was photographed parking at the Marriott at 23:37.

  Ohlson returned the car to the rental agency at 10.30 the following morning, checked out of the hotel at midday and flew out of Montreal airport on a flight to Copenhagen that left at 15.35. Photographs, a copy of the passport, copy of the credit card used at the hotel and driving licence were all on their way to FBI HQ in Washington.

  ‘Well,’ said Fitzpatrick when he’d finished reading, ‘it seems there’s no point my going to Montreal. Ohlson’s flown the coop.’ He looked at Boyd and shook his head. ‘This case is weird and getting weirder. One man’s dead and his supposed “childhood friend” has disappeared. Call me old-fashioned, but it would be nice to meet someone involved with this in the flesh.’

  8

  Liz was hanging up her wet raincoat on the back of her office door when her young colleague from the mail room walked in.

  ‘Lovely day again,’ he remarked. ‘There’s two for you.’ He dropped two brown envelopes on to her desk.

  ‘Thanks, and it isn’t,’ she replied. She knew what would be in the envelopes. Ever since her visit to Tallinn to meet Mischa the year before, she had been receiving fliers from the hotel she had stayed at, advertising unmissable weekend breaks at knockdown prices. She had used a cover address to go with her cover identity – she had been Liz Ryder, a former schoolteacher whose mother had recently died after a long illness. She had not given the hotel an email address so they were sending all their publicity by mail to the address she had used, where it was forwarded to her at Thames House.

  She opened the first envelope; sure enough it was an advertisement for a Christmas break – full Christmas dinner with party hats and crackers, champagne and wine with
dinner included. A tour of Tallinn to see the illuminations, plus carol service by candlelight in one of Tallinn’s famous churches. Liz shuddered at the idea and chucked the whole lot in the waste basket.

  She slit open the next envelope expecting more of the same but this envelope felt different. Inside it was a picture postcard. The picture on the front of the card wasn’t of Tallinn. It was of a building she had never seen; it looked like an enormous glasshouse – examining it closely she saw it was an enormous glasshouse. When she turned the card over and read the caption, it turned out to be the main tropical greenhouse of the Botanical Gardens of Berlin – or strictly speaking, the Botanischer Garten.

  Intrigued, she read the message written on the card in dark ink with slashing strokes:

  I thought this looked a bit like St Olaf’s. M

  St Olaf’s had been the church in Tallinn where she had met Mischa. But why was he sending her this picture? It didn’t look at all like St Olaf’s church. What was he trying to tell her? Was he in Berlin? That’s where it appeared to have been posted. And how had he got this address?

  The last question was the easiest to answer – he could have quite easily found which tour group she was in, found which hotel they were staying in, and it wouldn’t have been too difficult to blag some unsuspecting receptionist to give out the name and address.

  But what did this message mean?

  The only thing written on the card, other than her name and address, were some numbers at the top, which she had at first taken to be the date the card was written. She looked at them more closely and suddenly understood that they were indeed a date and a time. Four days from now – that was the date. And 09:45 was the time. He was asking for a meeting, and it must be in this building – the greenhouse. Still staring at the card, she noticed that a small squiggle underneath the M, which she had taken to be part of the signature, was in fact a tiny drawing of a cup and saucer. So the meeting must be in the café.