by Tim Stevens
Or for a phone.
He pressed himself into the corner furthest from the door, turned his back so that the sound would be muffled further. If anyone was listening closely at the door, they’d probably hear him speaking. It was a risk he had to take.
Purkiss pulled out the phone handset, switched it on. For a heartstopping moment the screen remained blank, and he thought it must have been damaged, or its battery must be flat. But it flickered into life.
He found a single, unlabelled number in the call log.
He hit the key.
For a few seconds the silence was absolute. Purkiss felt another twinge of dread. Had the FSB shut down the connection, reasoning that it had been compromised and was no longer safe to use?
The ringing chirruped at the other end, harsh and electronic but sweet as larksong to Purkiss’s ears.
A click, followed instantaneously by an abrupt: ‘Da?’
Purkiss said in Russian, speaking rapidly, keeping his voice as low as he dared while still maintaining intelligibility, ‘This is John Purkiss. I was with Wyatt when you called him. He’s been shot dead. It wasn’t me. We were ambushed and I didn’t see who it was. The team leader, Medievsky, believes I did it and has me prisoner.’
‘What did you –’
‘Be quiet and listen,’ Purkiss cut in. ‘They’re going to discover me with this phone before long and take it away and that’ll be it. I heard you say to Wyatt something about a Tupolev that was wrecked. What were you going to tell him?’
‘You can’t expect –’
‘You have to tell me.’ Purkiss spoke more loudly than he’d intended, lowered his voice once more. ‘Your man’s dead. The only response available to you is to send in the troops. It’ll take them ninety minutes to get here, minimum. That could be too late. I’m your only hope of stopping whatever’s about to happen, because I’m here, on the ground. So tell me what you were going to tell Wyatt.’
Purkiss half turned his head. That noise outside, beyond the door... Yes, there was no doubt. Footsteps.
‘Tell me,’ he hissed. ‘They’re coming back.’
The rasp of the key in the unoiled lock.
‘For the love of God, tell me.’
At the other end, the voice said, ‘A Tupolev Tu-22M strategic bomber carrying six Raduga Kh-15 air-to-surface missiles armed with nuclear warheads was lost in the skies over north-eastern Siberia some twenty-five years ago. The aircraft was never recovered, nor were the missiles.’
Behind Purkiss, the door was flung open. He turned. Haglund charged into the storeroom, Medievsky following.
‘Son of a bitch,’ yelled Medievsky.
The rifles came up.
As if spurred on by the background noise, the voice continued, ‘We have intelligence suggesting a person or persons unknown, most likely a terrorist group, has identified the location of the lost aircraft and intends to steal the missiles.’
‘Put the phone down, Farmer.’ Haglund stepped forward, sighted down the Ruger at Purkiss’s head.
‘When and where did it crash?’ said Purkiss.
Haglund advanced another step. ‘I said put it down.’
The voice on the phone said, ‘April fifth, nineteen eighty-eight. The precise location of the aircraft is not known –’
Haglund fired, the shot singing past Purkiss’s hand, so close he felt its breath, and whined off the wall behind him.
Between clenched teeth, the Swede said: ‘The next one goes through your head.’
Purkiss laid the phone down, raised his hands once again. Haglund strode forward and rammed the barrel of the Ruger into his stomach, doubling him up. As he went down, Haglund kicked him in the side of the head with a boot. Agony exploded inside Purkiss’s consciousness.
He swam out of focus, slipping away, the date spiralling and wafting through his disordered thoughts: April 1988...
He went under, curiously content, because of course he knew where the Tupolev was.
Of course...
Twenty
‘Anna,’ Lenilko said. ‘I want you to sit down.’
Her eyes flicking up at his and then away again, she pulled the chair away from the desk and sat down quickly.
He sat in his chair across the desk from her. He’d locked the door behind her.
Lenilko paid an independent contractor to sweep his room for bugs on a daily basis. He knew even his director, Rokva, was cautious about using his own office when discussing matters of extreme confidentiality, hence their meeting that morning in the restaurant behind Red Square. Lenilko thought this was paranoia of an exaggerated, even prissy, kind.
‘Are you loyal, Anna?’
She looked up quickly, holding his gaze. ‘Yes, Mr Lenilko.’
‘To whom?’
‘To you.’
‘To me? Or to the FSB? To the Director? To the State? Which?’
Her mouth worked in confusion. ‘To... all of you.’
He shook his head, patiently rather than in exasperation. ‘Of course. You couldn’t say but otherwise. And I’ve no doubt whatsoever you’re sincere about it. You genuinely feel loyalty to multiple agencies.’ He rested his elbows on the desk, leaned forward. ‘But what if you found yourself in a situation where your loyalties were in conflict? Where the requirements of one party were at direct odds with those of another?’
She blinked, struggling. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What if one party trusted you to do something that another forbade you to do? Which side would you choose?’
She didn’t answer.
Lenilko sat back once more. ‘Anna Yaroslavna, you’re an educated woman. You read history at university. You know of the Great War. During the great battles on the so-called Eastern Front, our armies were an unstoppable, relentless force of nature. By sheer strength of numbers, they overwhelmed the Nazi forces, time and again, no matter how advanced the technology Hitler threw at us, no matter how more efficient a fighting force the German Wehrmacht was than our Red Army. And do you know why?’
No response.
‘It was because our soldiers were not permitted to fail. It was because every teenage peasant in a uniform with a rifle thrust into his hands knew, despite the terror he faced, despite the murderous, raging Nazi machine into whose jaws he was walking, that if he took so much as one step backwards, he would be shot like a dog by the NKVD officers lined up behind him. He walked forward towards likely death because he was more afraid of the certain death at his back.’
Lenilko paused. He drank coffee in the mornings, took tea in meetings. But under conditions of pressure, he consumed water, in small amounts and often. He poured two glasses full, pushed one across the desk towards Anna.
‘The Red Army destroyed Germany. Broke the back of the regime, took Berlin, ensured that half of Europe came under the influence of our country. We won, decisively, unambiguously. A great good was achieved. But tell me, Anna. If you had the facility of prescience, and you had been born sixty years earlier and were a young NKVD officer assigned to the front line... would you have aimed your rifle at the backs of those soldiers? Boys a handful of years younger than you, any of whom might have been courting your little sister at the time? Would you have found it in yourself to pull the trigger as soon as one of them peeled away from the horror of the flames and the shells, holding in your mind the knowledge that this child’s death would spur others on to help achieve the glorious victory we now know came to pass? Would your loyalty have, at that moment, been to the nation? To Comrade Stalin? Or to the poor illiterate boy whose toothless mother back home in some godforsaken hovel would be tortured by his death even as she was being dragged off to a labour camp for the crime of giving birth to a deserter?’
Anna clasped her face in her hands, her sob all but stifled, and Lenilko thought he’d gone too far. He hated this, the hard-hearted manipulative bullshit that was so engrained in the FSB’s way of doing things that his trainers had presented it in their seminars in an almost bored manner.
Lenilko drank water. He glanced at the clock. Nine minutes had passed since he’d terminated the call with Purkiss. The British agent’s voice had disappeared suddenly, or rather receded. From the clamour in the distance, Lenilko assumed the phone had been laid down somewhere. He’d killed the call himself.
‘Anna,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a complete shit. I’ve upset you, with my florid analogies, and I didn’t mean to do that. I never wanted to be that kind of bullying, arsehole of a boss. I apologise. But the situation we’re in is this. Yarkovsky Station is in meltdown. Our asset – his name is Wyatt – has been murdered. Shot dead. Our communications are gone. A terrorist cell has infiltrated the station and is about to gain possession of six missiles armed with nuclear warheads which lie in the wreckage of a plane nearby.’
She lowered her hand so that eyes were visible above her fingers.
‘Yes,’ Lenilko said gently. ‘Those are the stakes. If we don’t act, decisively, an extra-national terrorist group will have its hands on six thermonuclear weapons. We don’t know who these people are, or what their level of technological sophistication is. But in one week, in one month, in a year, six of the world’s cities may be obliterated, charred beyond recognition under a twisting radioactive cloud. It may be New York, or London. It may be Moscow itself. If we don’t act, Anna, and within the next hour... this carnage will happen.’
She lifted her hands away entirely, flattened them on the desk. It was a mannerism of his, he knew.
Lenilko pressed on. ‘You will be approached by Counter-Terrorism. By the Director himself. They will argue that this is a matter entirely inappropriate for us in Special Activities. They will say they are best equipped to deal with a threat of this nature. But do you know what they will then do, Anna? They’ll spend precious minutes reviewing the evidence, poring over transcripts, conducting crisis meetings... wasting time, while the opposition seizes the warheads and spirits them away and ensures they are lost forever. Until they are used. Used to destroy our cities, and our way of life.’
He saw something in her face, and thought he had her, but kept up the momentum to make sure. ‘Will you be that NKVD officer, Anna? Shooting a peasant boy in the back because it’s deemed the right thing for a servant of the State to do? Or will you help me stop what’s about to happen at Yarkovsky Station, even if it means disobeying orders, even if it requires you to deceive Director Rokva and Director Eshman and everybody else in this building?’
Her gaze was level, and her answer was in her eyes.
Lenilko gave the briefest of smiles.
‘Thank you, Anna. Now let’s roll our sleeves up.’
*
Lenilko had two telephone calls to make. Sharing them with Anna would save time.
When he gave her the number he wanted her to call, she blinked. That was all. At any other time, she would have hesitated, perhaps even in her mild way queried his order. Now, her commitment seemed absolute. She used the landline phone on his desk, while Lenilko paced the carpet, his cell phone held to his ear.
The PA who answered was brusque. When he gave his name and title, her voice faltered.
‘I’ll have to check, sir.’
She came back on the line in under twenty seconds. This time she sounded genuinely fearful. ‘Putting you through, sir.’
A moment later a male voice, rasping and low, said, ‘Semyon Vladimirovich. What a pleasant surprise on a Sunday morning.’
‘My apologies, General. I need your help. Urgently.’
He spoke quickly, tersely, the voice on the end of the line silent. When he had finished, the other man said: ‘You understand the implications of what you’re asking.’
General Mikhail Tsarev’s ragged voice was the result of a bullet he’d taken in the throat as a colonel leading a Special Forces – Spetsnaz – brigade against a group of Chechen militants in the North Caucasus thirteen years earlier. In early 2009, Lenilko had done him a favour. Tasked with vetting the General’s son who was considering a career with the FSB, Lenilko had discovered the young man had once been arrested as a student for demonstrating against the Chechen Wars and specifically Russia’s artillery bombardment of the capital Grozny. The blot on his record was relatively minor, as youthful indiscretions went, but its nature was enough to disqualify him automatically from consideration for an FSB post. Except that Lenilko had made the evidence disappear, judging the man to be of decent character and potentially an asset to the organisation. Somehow General Tsarev had found out what Lenilko had done. He’d requested a personal audience with Lenilko. During that meeting, he’d clasped Lenilko’s hand, and had sworn to repay him in any way he could.
Lenilko had never called on the General for assistance before now.
‘Yes, General. I understand fully what I’m asking.’
‘An operation like this, without the sanction of the Director of your own department, let alone the chief of the entire FSB...’
‘Yes.’
‘It would require the approval of the President himself.’
‘Understood.’ Lenilko glanced at Anna, seated at his desk. She was murmuring into the phone, her tone patient but authoritative. ‘I expect to obtain the necessary approval shortly.’
‘You’re using the Blue Line?’
‘That’s right.’
There was silence at the other end.
Every senior officer in the FSB, in each department, had access to the so-called Blue Line. It was a telephone number which would activate a process resulting in the Russian President being located wherever in the world he was at that moment. The President would call back, in person. It was designed as a means whereby a particular senior officer might bypass the usual chain of command if he or she believed security had been compromised. Lenilko didn’t know if it had ever been used before, by anybody. The understanding was that it was a kind of nuclear option, to be activated only in situations where the security of the State was under immediate and catastrophic threat.
It was further understood that misuse of the Blue Line would be career suicide.
General Tsarev said, ‘I’ll set things in motion, to save time. But understand that I won’t give the final order until I’ve been told to do so by the President personally.’
‘Of course. Thank you, General.’
‘Semyon Vladimirovich?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I hope to God you’ve got the balls for this.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The line went dead.
*
Seventeen minutes later, Lenilko’s cell phone rang.
The conversation he’d had with General Tsarev had been followed, eight minutes later, by one Lenilko had never in his life expected to hold. He was aware of Anna’s eyes on him and fought his fear into submission, determined not to let her see the slightest trace of it, while at the same time struggling to keep a quaver out of his voice.
He took a little under two minutes to explain the situation.
The President’s reply took five seconds.
Lenilko handed the receiver back to Anna, allowing the tension to dissipate in a long exhalation through his nose. He glanced at her, nodded.
The triumph in her face reflected, he supposed, his own.
Now he thumbed the receive key on his cell phone.
‘Semyon Vladimirovich.’ It was General Tsarev. ‘I have the go-ahead from the President.’ His gravel tone was hard to read, but Lenilko thought he detected there a trace of admiration, even awe.
The General said: ‘The force is airborne.’
Lenilko closed his eyes.
Twenty-one
Purkiss blinked, shook his head, the double vision slowly resolving. His head felt as if it had been run over, and he felt stickiness in the hair above his right ear.
He was propped up in a high-backed chair in the mess, his hands secured behind with what felt like plastic ties. His body didn’t ache as though he’d been dragged, and he suspected he’d stumbled along the corridors half
-conscious.
They were all there. Medievsky and Haglund stood directly before him, their rifles in their hands with the barrels lowered. Montrose was at Medievsky’s side.
Budian and Clement watched Purkiss from the sofa, further back. Only Avner wasn’t looking at him, slouched as he was in an armchair, his head tipped back so that the peak of his cap was aimed at the ceiling.
The details of what the Russian at the other end of the phone had told him swam in Purkiss’s consciousness. He grappled for them, trying to hold on to them before they escaped entirely.
‘Look at him,’ said Montrose. ‘Thinking of what the hell kind of bullshit story he can concoct to get himself out of this.’
Medievsky took a step forward. ‘Farmer. Can you hear me?’
Purkiss frowned, concentrating on the date he’d been given. Nineteen eighty-eight, yes. Was it April? Or was his mind filling in that particular detail because it fitted with his idea?’
‘Farmer.’ Medievsky was now six feet away. He lifted the barrel of the Ruger a fraction. ‘Pay attention. Can you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ said Purkiss. ‘I hear you.’
‘Look at me.’
Purkiss raised his head, triggering a roiling snake of pain through his neck. He wondered for a moment if he was going to vomit.
Medievsky’s face was impassive. ‘Who were you talking to?’
Purkiss stared at him, part of his mind cackling at the irony of it. I don’t know.
‘An FSB operative in Moscow. He was warning me, before you forced me to drop the phone, about an imminent terrorist action here at Yarkovsky Station.’
Montrose strode forward, pushing past Medievsky, and slapped Purkiss’s face, a hard backhand swipe that cracked his head sideways and sent a flare of agony through his jaw.
Budian stood up, her fists clenched, her arms shaking. ‘Stop it. Don’t do that. Don’t hit him.’ Her voice rose with each imprecation.
Montrose turned. ‘Why? Why shouldn’t I? He deserves it. He deserves anything we decide to do to him, the murdering, lying scumbag.’