‘OK, we might be able to help. I know a guy called Piers Taylor – we meet socially as well as professionally. He’s deputy head of Section Nine of SIS.’
‘Which is?’ Westwood interrupted.
‘Responsible for Russian affairs,’ Abrahams concluded. ‘I’ll try and set up a meet.’
Cambridgeshire and London
The Jaguar driver tried to steer to the left, which was the way his car was heading anyway, then realized that was what Richter wanted, so he turned the wheel right. He was too late, much too late. The Jaguar hit the verge, metal screamed against metal, and Richter pulled away, spinning the wheel hard right. The XJ6 bounced off the verge and on to the road, but the tail of the Granada caught its offside front wing and slammed it back to the left.
Richter braked the Granada to a stop fifty yards in front, twisted round in the seat and stared back at the Jaguar. Then he slowly reversed back, ready to take off at the first sign of any hostile movement. The Jaguar wasn’t going to move under its own power for a long time. A concrete plinth housing a manhole cover had done most of the damage, and Richter could see that the radiator had gone, steam pouring from the crumpled bonnet.
The driver was unconscious, lolling forward in his seat and still belted in securely, but with blood pouring from a bad head wound. Richter guessed he’d probably hit the door pillar. There was no sign of movement from the back seat, so Richter got quietly out of the Granada, leaving the engine running and the door open, and walked cautiously towards the Jaguar. About halfway there, he picked up a good-sized rock, about six or seven pounds in weight, and took a careful grip of it with his right hand. Then he walked to the Jaguar and peered cautiously through what was left of the rear side window.
The passenger was lying on the floor, moaning softly and shaking his head. His pistol – a Colt .45 automatic – lay on the floor beside him, within easy reach of his right hand. Richter knew he’d have to act fast, before the man cleared his head and started shooting. He took a deep breath and pulled open the nearside rear door with his left hand.
As the door opened, the man inside looked up, then grabbed for the Colt, moving much faster than Richter had anticipated. He twisted round, brought up his gun hand and squeezed the trigger. But Richter had been expecting it, and the gunman hadn’t been expecting the rock.
Richter parried, the shot tore through the roof of the Jaguar, and with all the force of his right arm Richter brought the rock down on the side of the gunman’s head. He dropped, and the gun dropped too. For good measure Richter picked up the rock again and brought it down on the back of the driver’s head.
Richter backed out of the car, deafened by the noise of the shot, and shook his head slowly, then took the rock over to the Granada, where he wrapped it in a road map and put it on the floor mat in front of the passenger seat. He reached into the glove box and pulled out a pair of thin leather driving gloves and put them on. Then he took the demisting cloth, walked back to the Jaguar and wiped the door handle where he’d touched it.
Richter picked up the Colt, set the safety catch, and put the pistol in the waistband of his trousers. The man in the back seat had about thirty shells in his jacket pocket, and two spare magazines, both fully charged. From the looks of him, he wouldn’t be needing them any more, so Richter took them as well. He checked his pockets, but there was no indication of who he was. No wallet, no credit cards, no nothing. Just around fifty pounds in cash. A pro, but then Richter had guessed that already. The Colt is a weapon for a pro.
The driver was carrying a Mauser HSc in a shoulder holster, which Richter got off him with some difficulty. He had a full spare magazine in a natty pouch on the holster strap, and a dozen or so loose rounds in his jacket pocket, all of which went into Richter’s pocket. He, too, was carrying no ID. They were Russian agents, of that Richter was sure, not least because they weren’t carrying Stechkins or Makarovs or any other eastern-bloc weapons. The Russians almost never use homegrown weapons in foreign operations. This is because, with the exception of the Kalashnikov assault rifle and its variants, Russian small arms are not sufficiently good to be a weapon of choice for any assassin, so anyone found carrying one is virtually certain to be identified as a CIS agent, even if he’s not.
Richter checked the rear of the car. He found three .45 shell cases on the floor, which was probably all there were to find. Richter knew they’d fired at least five shots at him, one which broke the front and rear screens of the Granada, three when he’d reversed direction at the end of the dual carriageway and one when he’d opened the Jaguar’s rear door. The Colt was no help – the magazine in the pistol was full, apart from the single shot just fired – another indication that its former owner was a pro. Only amateurs run out of ammunition, and he’d obviously reloaded as they chased the Ford. The fourth and fifth shell cases were somewhere on the road, maybe miles back, and there was no way he was going to start looking for them.
A squawk from the front seat made Richter jump, and he saw a radio transceiver screwed to the dashboard. That suggested he’d been right about the second car, which was probably on its way towards him right then. It was time he was somewhere else. Quite apart from another carload of opposition, Richter didn’t want some officious citizen – or, even worse, a brace of woodentops in a Panda car – spotting him there and asking all sorts of questions that he really hadn’t got any answers for, so he climbed back into the Ford, put it into gear and took off.
Richter took the first side road he came to and followed it until he found a river. He stopped next to the bridge, checked that he was unobserved and then heaved the rock into the water. Richter knew that forensic experts could pull fingerprints off almost anything, and he wasn’t taking any chances. Then he got back in the Granada and drove on. Five minutes and three miles later he pulled the Ford off the road and into a wood. He sat for a few minutes in the car, breathing deeply. From the start of the chase adrenalin had kept him going, kept him concentrating on what he was doing. Now reaction was setting in. His hands were shaking slightly, and a check showed Richter that his pulse rate was significantly higher than normal.
Richter was no stranger to violence. Within days of his first meeting with Simpson, and even before he had been recruited into FOE, he had been sent deep into France with a cover story so thin that it was virtually transparent, and he had been forced to kill just to stay alive. But never before had Richter killed with his bare hands, one-to-one.
The men in the Jaguar were dead, of that he was certain. He had heard, and felt, their skulls shatter under the blows of the rock, and this time there had been no termination order, no official approval. He didn’t even know who they were. They had died because they had tried to kill him, nothing more – not much of an epitaph and possibly, Richter realized, not even much of a justification. He knew he was going to have to be careful.
Richter put the guns on the seat beside him, then had a look at the car. It was a mess, at best. The windscreen was laminated, so there was little he could do about the bullet hole, but he knocked out the shattered rear screen, keeping the glass in the car, as he didn’t want to advertise that he’d stopped there, for any reason. The driver’s door window had shattered as well, and the bits were all over the floor, which was the best place for them.
He looked at the offside of the car and found a bullet hole just below the top of the front wing, and the exit hole near the centre of the bonnet. Richter smeared some mud over the holes – a barely adequate disguise – then threw more at the side of the car. The bullet which had taken out the side window had left the car through the roof, just above the passenger door, and Richter guessed that the third shot had gone above, or perhaps in front of, the windscreen. Under the circumstances, he thought, it had been bloody good shooting.
The left side of the car was very badly bent and twisted, front and rear wings buckled beyond repair. All the lights that side had gone; headlight, sidelights and indicators. The bonnet was jammed shut, so Richter couldn’t te
ll whether the bullet had done any damage in the engine compartment, but as everything seemed to be working he wasn’t bothered.
After about twenty minutes Richter was satisfied that he had done all he could to hide the fact that he’d been involved in a running battle. He studied the map for a few minutes, and worked out a route that would get him back to Hammersmith without going anywhere near any major built-up areas until he reached the outskirts of London.
Before he set off, Richter put on the shoulder holster with the Mauser, and put the Colt into the side pocket of his jacket. The magazines and loose rounds went into his pockets. Wearing his gloves again, Richter took the three spent shell cases and dropped them down a rabbit hole near the car. He set fire to the blood-smeared road map and then trod the ashes into the ground. He tossed his gloves out of the window at fifteen-minute intervals as he drove.
An hour and twenty minutes later Richter double-parked the Granada outside his flat, went up and wrapped the pistols, holster and ammunition in a couple of old towels, and put them in a small suitcase. Then he drove to Euston Station and checked the suitcase into the left-luggage office. A man, in Richter’s opinion, couldn’t have too many guns, especially ones that couldn’t be traced to him.
The duty Pool Controller was almost incoherent when Richter delivered the remains of the Granada. He didn’t believe it. The duty driver he summoned as a witness didn’t believe it either. ‘What the bloody hell did you do to it? Look at the state it’s in.’
‘There was,’ said Richter, ‘a certain amount of unpleasantness.’
‘What am I going to tell the Transport Officer?’
Richter was getting tired and irritable. ‘I don’t give a toss what you tell him. If he’s not happy, tell him to see me.’
Richter went into his office, picked up the direct line to Simpson and waited. After ten seconds he put it down again and looked at his watch. It was after eight, and it was being unduly optimistic to suppose Simpson would still be around at that time in the evening.
Richter shrugged, locked his office door and walked back down the stairs. He called in at the Duty Room and told the Duty Operations Officer what had happened. Or rather, what Richter thought he ought to know about it. The Ops Officer said he would tell Simpson when he got there in the morning.
Chapter Ten
Wednesday
Hammersmith, London
Simpson looked very unhappy when Richter appeared in his office at nine the following morning, for two reasons. First, Richter was late and hadn’t answered his flat phone, and second, the Transport Officer had been draining all over him since just after eight. ‘Sorry,’ Richter said.
‘Stow it, Richter. Sarcasm I can do without. What happened?’
Richter told him, omitting the fact that he had removed the weapons and ammunition from the car and that he had contributed to the driver’s headache and caused the passenger’s.
‘Who were they?’ Simpson asked.
‘Pros,’ Richter replied. ‘Neither had any ID, and it looked like a very tight set-up. The reason I didn’t hang around was that I was worried about a second team in another motor.’
‘Did you see a second car?’
‘Not that I could positively identify, no, but they had a radio in the Jaguar that definitely wasn’t there to pick up the racing results on Radio Four. I took off from the crash when I heard a car coming, so that could have been it. I wasn’t prepared to take a chance.’ That didn’t sound too bad. It could have happened.
‘Who do you think they were? With reasons.’
‘I think the Russian Embassy is short two Cultural Attachés,’ Richter said. ‘Cultural Attachés who just happened to be trained assassins, who were following me in a stolen car.’
Simpson digested this in silence for a few moments, then spoke again. ‘One thing I don’t buy – why did they try a mobile hit?’
‘I don’t think they did – it was simply Russian mentality. I drove up to Brampton on the A1 – a hell of a journey, with long queues at three sets of roadworks and a major accident. So I had decided to come back a different route. I was going to cut across country and pick up the A10. But because I’d driven up on the A1, they probably presumed that I would drive back on the A1, queues notwithstanding. After all, queuing is pretty much endemic in Russia.
‘I think that somewhere on the A1 between Brampton and London,’ Richter continued, ‘there was a man with a Mannlicher or a Mauser, waiting for me to drive into the viewfinder of his telescopic sight. No professional assassin would ever try a hit from a moving car against a target also in a moving car – it’s virtually impossible to get a clean kill. He would always go for a static hit. So the mobile would have been the last-resort back-up, and they only used it because I turned left instead of right out of Brampton’s main gates.’
Simpson nodded. ‘What weapons were they carrying?’
‘The guy in the back seat had a Colt. The driver I don’t know about.’
‘Why not something heavier?’
‘Probably just prudence. Diplomatic passports or not, the plods take a dim view of foreign hoods wandering about the Home Counties carrying assault rifles or sub-machineguns. Pistols you can hide.’
Simpson nodded, apparently satisfied. He stood up and walked over to his favourite window and looked out. He fondled his cacti for a minute or so, then turned round. ‘OK, assuming for the moment that it was a Russian operation, why?’
‘I think Newman’s death must be tied in with the Blackbird flight,’ Richter said. ‘Follow the sequence. I go to Moscow, I investigate the death of an Embassy official, and a Russian hood tries to take me out before I even leave Sheremetievo. I come back here and immediately visit JARIC, where any pictures from the Blackbird over-flight would be bound to end up if we had anything to do with it. Then someone else tries to take me out. I gave up believing in coincidence when I stopped believing in Father Christmas. Those events are linked, and the sum added up, from the Russian point of view, to the elimination of Richter.
‘I was photographed on arrival at Sheremetievo, as all foreign nationals are, and my guess is that that picture matched a record in the SVR database, hence the kill attempt at the airport. There’ll be a pile of mug shots of me at the Russian Embassy here, and no doubt a directive from the Lubyanka or Yazenevo to watch and report, and obviously a kill order on me if I did certain things or visited certain places. JARIC, presumably, was one of them. The other thing you ought to be aware of,’ Richter added, ‘is that, if they have been following me, it’s quite likely Hammersmith Commercial Packers is now on their watch-list.’
Hammersmith Commercial Packers provided FOE with a thin veneer of cover. The company actually existed, and even employed a small staff to conduct a legitimate business on the ground floor of the building located just north of the Hammersmith Flyover.
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Simpson said. ‘I can confirm some aspects. The car was stolen three days ago, in London. The Embassy Watch people have confirmed that the two in it were Russians, and from our records they arrived here only the day before yesterday, together with two other new staff for the Russian Embassy, so they could be a professional hit-team. Or, rather, they could have been a professional hit-team. They’re both dead.’
‘Oh,’ Richter said.
‘Yes,’ said Simpson. ‘I suppose they were both alive and well when you left them?’
‘I don’t know,’ Richter replied. ‘They were both unconscious, certainly.’
Simpson looked at him doubtfully. ‘According to the initial report from the local police, both had suffered fractured skulls, the damage being caused by something like a large hammer or mallet. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’
Richter looked straight at him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you check the toolkit in the Granada and see if you can find any blood-stained tyre levers or anything?’
‘I already have. There was also no sign of the gun you say they fired at you.’
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br /> ‘Really?’ Richter said. ‘Well, perhaps there was a back-up team in a second car, then, and they shifted the evidence, as it were.’
‘Perhaps. And perhaps there’s a hammer in a river somewhere with your prints slowly washing off it, and a bag with a gun in it buried in a wood.’ Richter looked at him, but said nothing. ‘What’s the tie-up between Newman and the Blackbird?’ Simpson asked. ‘Do you know?’
‘No,’ Richter replied, standing up to leave, ‘but I’m going to find out. One thing – I want to draw a weapon.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if anyone else shoots at me, I want to be able to shoot back.’
Simpson was silent for a few seconds, then he nodded. ‘Yes, you can have a pistol.’ He shook a warning finger. ‘Just try to remember you’re not James Bond. Make sure you fire second, if you fire at all, and try to avoid ventilating some innocent member of the public when you do so. I’ll ring the Armoury.’
American Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London
Roger Abrahams knocked twice on the bedroom door and walked in, carrying a tray of coffee and a plate of doughnuts. He flicked on the main light and glanced across at the bed, where John Westwood was just opening his eyes. ‘Feeling better?’ Abrahams asked.
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