by Tim Stevens
Llewellyn let it go. ‘Fair enough. Our Sir Ivor hasn’t stuck to tending roses in his retirement. He’s become something of an advocate for the current Russian regime. All under the guise of cementing friendship between Moscow and the West. We need to stand together against the global terrorist threat. Blah blah. But the after-dinner talks he gives, the articles he writes for local newspapers, are all fawningly pro-Kremlin.’
‘Even so. He’s hardly a huge threat to British interests, surely. Or even any threat.’
‘True.’ Llewellyn tapped the screen of the computer. ‘But I’ll show you why it matters.’ He turned the tablet towards Calvary again.
This time he recognised the face. Not just the face, but the actual picture. There had been a few days, the year before last, when it had been inescapable. Every broadsheet, every tabloid, every TV screen had given it prominence. The narrow, wolfish face, the hair receded to a widow’s peak, the eyes those of both hunter and hunted.
Peter, or Pyotr, Grechko. Defector from the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, the KGB, in the dying months of the Cold War. Invited back into the Kremlin fold in 2000, an invitation which he very publicly turned down. Stabbed to death with a stiletto on the Albert Bridge two years ago.
‘The final straw.’ Llewellyn’s voice had gone quiet. ‘It’s time we sent the Kremlin a message.’
*
Calvary had been among the first to check in and board, and managed to secure himself a window seat. His sole piece of luggage, a holdall, stowed under the seat in front of him, he stared out at the runway while the plane began its reluctant turn, the rain blurring the orange light.
He’d wanted to go the previous evening, straight after the meeting with Llewellyn, but he’d needed a night’s sleep. Even when the jobs didn’t involve intense physical exertion as this one had, he felt utterly drained afterwards, unable to function for a day or two. He felt clean, clearheaded, after the run the previous afternoon.
Less than twelve hours, and he’d be free. Assuming Llewellyn was telling the truth.
*
He’d first met Dafydd Llewellyn on a summer’s day nearly five years earlier. Six weeks after… it had happened.
Calvary had stepped off the plane, a civilian jet from Turkey that had taken him on the second leg of his journey home, and in the customs channel he’d been intercepted smoothly by two men whom, absurdly, he’d for instant taken to be plainclothes military police. They sat him in a box of a room which smelled of the disinfectant that had been used to clear away the stink of fear-induced sweat.
After a couple of minutes the small man came in, his grin bisecting his long face. He offered Calvary coffee. His voice was beautifully modulated, the tongue lingering on the Ls and prolonging the consonants at the ends of the words.
Llewellyn came straight to the point. ‘Mr Calvary, I would like to offer you a job.’
A talent spotter in the Army — Calvary didn’t know if it was somebody in his own regiment, and Llewellyn wasn’t saying — had apparently noticed Calvary and forwarded his name to Llewellyn. Llewellyn was fully aware of what had happened six weeks earlier, and why Calvary was leaving the Army. Calvary found the fact that he still wanted to hire him, and for this particular type of work, supremely ironic.
So Calvary had come to work for the Chapel. He had never met anybody else from the Chapel but Llewellyn. He had no idea if it had offices anywhere, whether it was a subdivision of SIS or an entirely separate agency.
He knew precisely three things about the Chapel. Its existence was unknown to all but a handful of senior people in government, perhaps less than a handful. It paid on a commission basis, and very generously.
And its sole remit was the permanent elimination of enemies of the State.
*
‘We know who did it. Know, beyond the shade of a doubt, who killed Grechko. But there’s nothing we can do about it. The Kremlin refuses to let us extradite the bugger, and that’s that.’
Llewellyn had finished his lamb and was starting on a creme brulee.
‘But enough’s enough. It was murder, and it was done so blatantly that it could only have been meant to cock a snook at us. Grechko was British, and he was murdered on British soil. We need to let them know we won’t let this one go.’
‘Gaines isn’t Russian, though. And he’s in Prague.’
Llewellyn flipped a hand. ‘The match doesn’t have to be exact. There are no high-profile Brits in Moscow who’ve recently taken Russian citizenship and are agitating against the brutalities of the British state. That’s because we don’t arrest our captains of industry or murder our journalists.’
Calvary let that pass without comment.
Llewellyn went on. ‘So: A known Cold War traitor, now a vocal fanboy for the Kremlin regime, gets hit. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. But it mustn’t look like an accident either. They need to know that we know they understand exactly what it is. An assassination.’
Calvary had agreed to a glass of tap water. He drained it, steadily, watching Llewellyn over the rim.
Llewellyn laid down his spoon with a sigh and leant back.
‘Now. Let’s talk about you, Martin.’
‘There’s nothing to say.’
‘Oh, but there is. Plenty.’ He dabbed his lips. ‘Six jobs, you’ve done. You’re baulking earlier than most.’
‘What?’
‘Baulking. Everybody does, sooner or later. Unless they’re complete psychopaths, but we try not to hire those. Try to screen them out at the beginning.’
Calvary waited.
‘Oh, Martin, come on. Killing people isn’t a long-term career option. Not for a normal person. You had your reasons for taking on this work, and I know what they were, but you’ve reached the point — as I say, the point everyone reaches eventually — where you can’t go on. It isn’t a wobble, it isn’tng., it is something you can grit your teeth and get over. You said something like that back there on the street. No. You want out, for good.’ He hunched forward suddenly. Calvary saw something gristly stuck between his incisors. ‘He pleaded, did he? On behalf of his wife? His children?’
Hating Llewellyn as he’d never believed he could hate anybody, Calvary said: ‘I don’t have to say anything to you about my reasons.’
‘No, you certainly don’t.’ The gentleness was back, slipping in like silk. ‘Look, it’s a rotten situation you’re in. I do appreciate that. You’re a superb operative, one we can’t let go without getting our money’s worth. But you’re almost out. One more job, and you will be. And it’s the most significant job of all, the most useful to your country. Not that I expect you to care about that, but it’s the truth.’
‘If I don’t — ’
‘If you don’t’ — the steel cut through the silk — ‘if you refuse, or agree and then go renegade, Scotland Yard will be sent the photos the Chapel has of you leaving Abubakar Al-Haroun’s flat. They’ll find him there in all his stiffening glory, and your spoor will be all around for their lab rats to snuffle up. And you’ll be subject to one of the biggest manhunts of the decade. If, when, they catch you, you won’t be able to take refuge in the defence that you were just following the Chapel’s orders, because we don’t exist. I don’t exist. You and I never met. You’ll be locked up in maximum security for the rest of your life, for your own protection because you’ll be the target of a fatwa, having assassinated one of the most valuable recruiters Islamist terrorism had in Western Europe.’
From the way he raised a warning but friendly finger, Calvary knew a waiter had been approaching and had been put off. Llewellyn steepled his fingers and rested his long chin on the tips.
He said, sadly: ‘And I’m afraid the same applies if you fail.’
*
A northeasterly storm had slowed the flight and it took close to two and a half hours. By the halfway point, Calvary was managing to think more about the job itself than about Llewellyn. Fuelled by coffee, he absorbed the details of the street map in t
he Prague guidebook he’d bought at Gatwick, specifically the area surrounding the flat where Gaines lived. He didn’t get the same feel for the district as he would actually walking the streets, but you could never be too prepared. At the same time he went over what Llewellyn had told him about Gaines’s daily routine. Clearly the man had been under surveillance for some time.
And clearly he was a man of habit. The eight-thirty a.m. walk to the local supermarket for the newspaper was followed by a trip to the bakery a few blocks away. Gaines would disappear back into his flat until late afternoon or early evening, when he’d emerge again and catch a series of trams to various places of interest, chiefly museums and libraries. If he was near the river he’d sometimes take supper overlooking the water, followed by a lengthyd hby a le walk criss-crossing the bridges. Most of his evenings were spent alone. The rest were taken up with formal dinners when he was sometimes invited to speak. He’d lived on his own since the death of his wife three years earlier and had no children.
By the time he disembarked and strode through the customs channel at Prague’s Ruzyne Airport, Calvary had worked out how he was going to do it.
THREE
‘Two years at most, Darya Yaroslavovna. Then you’ll have to start hauling your arse outside.’
Krupina flipped a hand, sending eddies through the fug. ‘The way you go on, these will have killed me by then anyway.’ She favoured Belomorkanal cigarettes, Stalin-era stalwarts. Couldn’t get on with the local Czech brands or even the American imports she saw everywhere.
Tamarkin had been referring to the proposed ban on indoor workplace smoking in the Czech Republic, scheduled to come into force in a couple of years’ time. She peered at him where he was lounging in the doorway, tie loosened and top button undone. She sometimes wondered if permitting such familiarity in her staff was wise.
The offices were on the third floor of a run-down suite a few streets away from Wenceslas Square, the shabbiness offset by the favourable location. There was no company title above the buzzer in the street, nor any logo on the glass door on the third floor apart from the ghost of a stencil that once announced the name of a State law firm. Beyond the glass door were a tiny lobby with an empty reception desk, a shared open plan area where Tamarkin and his four colleagues worked, and the inner sanctum, Krupina’s own office.
Her desk and shelves were crammed with so much paper the room looked like a throwback to the pre-digital age. A four-year-old desktop computer was the only concession to modernity. Balanced atop a mound of yellowing documents and newspaper clippings was a tarnished ashtray riddled with butts like a chunk of maggoty steak, the whole arrangement screaming fire hazard even to Krupina herself.
‘What do you want?’ she said.
‘Mail.’ He held up a sealed manila packet.
She sat up behind her desk. The office never received mail except in a diplomatic bag through the Embassy. When it came it was always significant, because it meant the message was too important to have been sent even by encrypted email.
He stood with the packet raised, enjoying the moment. She held up the back of her hand, waggled her fingers. Arrogant little ublyudok.
‘Give.’
She took it and reached for a paper knife. When he didn’t move from the doorway she said, without looking up, ‘Double liver sausage with tomato and onions on rye. Sauerkraut on the side, and for God’s sake leave off the dumplings.’
He muttered something a›crone.
Krupina slit open the duct tape and wrestled with the packaging, her stubby fingers annoying her. The fat bubble-wrapped envelope contained a single sheet of A5 paper.
The letterhead was that of the President’s office.
Her habit was to scan a document rapidly, her vision blurring down the page, feeling for anything that might jump out. Subsequent careful reading would provide the topsoil, but the essence was in the first impression.
Her skim gave her one word, occurring twice and in capitals.
TALPA.
The Linnaean term for the genus mole.
Krupina reached over and slammed the window sash closed. She pulled her jacket lapels across her chest. Suddenly, it felt colder.
*
Darya Yaroslavovna Krupina had, in her opinion, been born at precisely the wrong time in history.
It was an opinion she kept to herself, because she feared boring people more than almost anything else. She’d been born too late to be able to make a significant contribution to her motherland’s place in history, but too early not to give a damn.
She’d been a late arrival, her conception taking place when her mother was forty-three, just after her parents had given up all hope. As was often the case. Her Leningrad childhood had been unremarkable, her university years by contrast sensational. She had graduated joint first in her class and her honours degree in political science had been celebrated, embarrassingly, by her father, a legless survivor of the Stalingrad campaign, with a cripplingly expensive bash for forty people at the Pribaltiyskaya, Leningrad’s most splendid hotel.
They had been heady times. Comrade Gorbachev had recently become Party secretary, his approach to leadership bringing a new self respect and confidence to the body politic. Darya was a Party member and her entry into the junior ranks of the KGB had been straightforward. By the autumn of 1989 she was twenty-six years old, a rising star in the field of human intelligence and with a degree of expertise in signals intelligence as well. The world was loosening up, the West was encouraging more dialogue with the socialist nations. Socialism had a foot in the door.
The next six months sent her reeling. Left her wandering in a void. One by one, Moscow’s allies capitulated, dropping all pretence of idealism and morality and damned guts. By the spring of 1990 the only holdouts were basket-case countries like Albania.
She stayed on. She was kept on, which was a sort of validation, she supposed. The KGB became the FSK, then split into the FSB, concerned with domestic security, and the SVR, the foreign s wthe foroperations agency. Boris Yeltsin’s star waxed and waned. Darya Krupina did her job faithfully, switching her attention to the nouveau riche gangster scum of Moscow and St Petersburg (the name sounded so wrong to her, compared with Leningrad) and gathering enough evidence on some of them to have the bloodsucking ghouls put away for life.
At the end of the decade Yeltsin stood down. The new president changed everything. It wasn’t quite like the Gorbachev days. The sense of purpose was less well defined. And she was thirty-seven, not twenty-two. Ageing leached zest from one’s life, there was no avoiding it.
Still, there was much to be celebrated about the new direction. Mother Russia was no longer ruled by a buffoon. She had oil, and gas. Lots of gas. The West, Europe especially, was nervous. Not scared pantsless, but on edge.
Krupina’s father had died at the age of eighty seven, six years earlier. On the mattress under the summer heat in the Petersburg apartment, he’d pulled his only daughter’s lank greying head close and whispered, ‘Look, Dascha.’ And he’d yanked up his pyjama legs and pointed at the fishbelly-pallid scars of his leg stumps and hissed: ‘The scars of a life lived well. If you can do this for your country, you can die having lived.’
He’d punctuated the melodrama with a cackle which, over the years, Darya Krupina had analysed for traces of bitterness. She’d concluded that there were none, that Yaroslav Petrovich Krupin had been genuinely proud to concede his legs for the glory of Russia.
And what had she done, Darya Yaroslavovna Krupina? Apart from graduating like a supernova in 1985, more than a quarter century ago, in another world? After eight years’ service in the FSB, she’d been transferred to the overseas arena, under the SVR. She’d carried out one major job in Western Europe. For her own protection, she was told, she’d subsequently been farmed out to the SVR’s clandestine — unofficial, illegal, non-embassy — desk, in Prague, the capital of a country that had once been one of Soviet Russia’s most robust allies but was now a member of the enemy alliance
. She was, oh joy of joys, the head of that desk. There was no Embassy support. The Embassy FSB and SVR staff despised her, tried to pretend she and her people didn’t exist. She was left with the crappy jobs, the nasty ones, the operations that the Kremlin could deny if they went wrong.
But she had her little crew. She had her boys, Gleb and Arkady, and young Yevgenia, and Lev and Oleg, the two older stalwarts whom she couldn’t exactly call boys but for whom she felt great affection nonetheless. She had an office of her own, and cigarettes. If purpose was missing from her life, had she any right to complain?
But purpose had just landed on her lap.
*
She fingered the letter, probing the expensive paper as though it were supple leather whose texture was to be savoured. She reread the words.
TALPA. The Mole. The British mole, the one they’d never been able to find. Deep in the heart of the Kremlin. In its afflin. Insoul. So deep that its influence had directed the course of history in the last twenty years.
The Kremlin’s priority target.
And somebody here in Prague knew who it was.
Krupina looked across at the ikon nailed to the wall. She was an unbeliever but her mother had been devout, discreetly so until her death in 1978 when she’d pressed the tacky crucifix into the teenage Darya’s palm and rasped: ‘Rebirth.’
Krupina lit a fresh cigarette and bounced a stream of smoke off the grey, grimy window. Forty nine years old, and deathbed life lessons from her parents all of a sudden meant something.
She picked up her mobile phone, took a moment to work out the buttons.
He answered on the second ring. ‘Tamarkin.’
‘Get in here.’
‘I’m out buying your sandwich — ’
‘Just get back in here, for Christ’s sake.’
*
Bartos Blazek’s nieces called him Uncle K without knowing why. Certain family members, and people of his inner circle who weren’t blood, called him the Kodiak. It was his size, of course, but also his beariness. He liked the idea. Hugeness, strength, cuddliness and power, combined. And, yes, he was hairy. Not so much on his head, any more. But his arms, his chest and back and legs, were pelted. He was proud.