by Mark Dawson
He dressed quickly, then excused himself and went down onto the street. He wished that he had his car, but he didn’t, and he did not want to call his driver to pick him up from the park. Instead, he followed the street to Strogino Metro station. He took out his phone as he waited for a train to arrive and read the message for a second and then a third time. It was from the Center. EUREKA had filed an urgent report to the London rezidentura earlier that evening. Vincent Beck, the agent runner responsible for the sleepers in the United Kingdom, was reported as being compromised. EUREKA’s order had been passed to Directorate S and, in his absence, his deputy had given the order to exfiltrate both Beck and the illegals who had mounted the operation against Aleksandrov. Beck was on his way to the agents now and the process to bring them out had been initiated.
Primakov put his phone away and tapped his foot impatiently. There was no knowing what the British would find if they were able to capture and interrogate Beck or his agents. He had read Beck’s zapista confirming that the operation had been successful, but the message was cursory and no substitute for the more detailed report that would follow in due course. It left him with questions: had the assassins spoken to Aleksandrov before they killed him? Had they been able to eavesdrop on any conversations between Aleksandrov and Geggel? If they had, what had they heard? Had they reported anything else to Beck? What would the British discover if they captured the old man and interrogated him? Perhaps they would find out that Aleksandrov was not selling the identities of SVR agents. Perhaps they would know that Aleksandrov was working with his daughter, and that it was the schematic of the Su-58 that Aleksandrov was dangling in order to persuade them to get her out. If the truth was ever uncovered, it would eventually make its way back to the council and the president. His lies would be revealed.
That could not be allowed to happen. There was a gust of wind as the train rumbled out of the mouth of the tunnel. Primakov waited for the doors to open and then stepped aboard.
The agents couldn’t be captured. That would herald disaster. He had to bring them home.
Winchester
23
Vincent Beck hoisted his case onto the seat next to him and gazed out at the landscape as it raced by the windows on either side of the train.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the call. The source of the information that had led to the warning was not clear. Beck had known that Mikhail and Nataliya would be compromised at some point—it was inevitable, given the nature of the work—but the call had still come as a shock. Still, he thought as he headed out of London, they had had a good run. They had been operational for ten years and they had done good work in that time. There had been a number of impressive coups for which they—and, he supposed, he—could claim credit. They had nurtured relationships with men and women inside the intelligence community; they had seduced or blackmailed senior figures within British and American corporations that had led to a flow of top-secret patents and designs; and they had been able to remove troublesome individuals who would have been better advised not to work against the Rodina. One oligarch had been funding opposition parties; he had ended up dead of a suspected heart attack. Another had opened proceedings against an oil company tied to the interests of the president; he had been killed in a fiery wreck after his supercar’s brakes had failed on the M25. Still others had been silenced after they had been blackmailed with evidence of their sexual peccadilloes and perversions, that evidence collected during honeytraps filmed in hotel rooms equipped with a barrage of secret cameras.
The assassination of Pyotr Aleksandrov had been carried out in the same exemplary manner as all of their other work. If it was to be their final operation, they could hardly have ended on a more satisfactory note. They had done what they had been asked to do and, once more, had demonstrated to anyone else foolish enough to consider working against the motherland that the reach of the SVR was long, and that nowhere was safe.
“The next stop on this service will be Winchester. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform edge.”
Beck got up, lowered his case to the floor, and made his way to the vestibule where he waited for the train to pull into the station. It had been a straightforward journey. There had been only a handful of passengers in the carriage with him, and none of them had given him any cause for alarm.
The train rolled through into the station and he saw the time on the glowing departure board that was suspended halfway down the platform: it was eleven. The train stopped, the doors opened and Beck disembarked. He went over to an empty bench and sat down, taking advantage of his age so that it might appear that he needed to take a breath. He counted ten other passengers who disembarked, but none of them had been in his carriage. None of them were repeats from earlier. He waited until they had made their way through the barriers, waited another minute, and then followed them. It was impossible to be sure, but he was as confident as he could be; he had been thorough and careful, and he had seen no indication that he was being followed.
He was black. It was safe to proceed.
There was a taxi rank outside the station, with three cars waiting to pick up passengers. Beck opened the rear door of the first car in line and lowered himself inside.
“Where to?”
“King’s Worthy, please.”
“Right you are.”
The car pulled away and Beck allowed himself to relax a little. He had been doing this for years and yet, despite his experience, it never got easier. Nervousness and anxiety were part and parcel of the work, but that was good. It was as he always reminded his agents: nerves kept you sharp. Relaxation was a symptom of complacency, and succumbing to complacency was often the final mistake an agent would make.
It was a little after eleven when the taxi arrived at the house. Beck paid the driver and waited until he had pulled away before he used his fob to open the gates. He walked up the gravelled drive to the front door, thinking about how quintessentially English this all was: the village, the ancient church, the wisteria and roses climbing up the wall of the house, the owl hooting in a nearby tree.
He knocked on the door and waited.
Nothing.
He looked through the letterbox. The hall light was lit, but, save that, there was no other sign that anyone was home. They would be conducting a thorough dry-cleaning run. They were careful, and that, usually, would have been good. Tonight was different. They needed to get out of the country as quickly as they could.
He took out his key, unlocked the door and went inside to wait.
Southwold
24
The SOCOs had finished their work at Aleksandrov’s property and Kennedy said that a small intelligence team could now go inside. Tanner stayed behind, but Milton, Ross and Shah were driven in two unmarked police cars to Wymering Road. It was a residential street, entirely unremarkable except for the fact that it had been closed, with two police cars parked nose-to-nose at one end and another two at the other. There was a tighter cordon around the Aleksandrov property and its neighbours, and the only people allowed inside were police, military and security service personnel. The crime scene technicians were gathered outside, next to a plain white van, removing their anti-contamination suits and storing the evidence that they had collected. A team of officers were removing the parts of an evidence tent from the back of a police van. It would be erected around the front door, a temporary measure until the property could be professionally secured to prevent unauthorised access.
The driver of the car told them to wait. “Let me check that they’re clear.”
Shah’s phone buzzed and he stepped aside to take the call.
Milton took out a packet of cigarettes, put one to his lips and lit it.
Ross turned to him. “Can I bum one?”
Milton gave Ross the packet. She cupped the end of the cigarette and Milton lit it for her.
“This has got to be one of the weirdest evenings I’ve ever had,” she said, blowing smoke.
“It’
s up there,” Milton replied.
“I mean, seriously—this is the last thing that you would expect to find in a place like this. I know they’ve hit people in London, but here? It’s nuts.”
“I doubt it makes much difference to them.”
She gestured over toward the house. “You think they did it? The Russians?”
“I don’t know,” Milton said, blowing smoke. “But Aleksandrov was one of theirs for a long time, and he did a lot of damage. The SVR has a long memory.”
“Have you dealt with them before?”
“The SVR?”
She nodded.
“Once or twice,” Milton said.
“And?”
“And I wouldn’t be surprised if we find their fingerprints all over this.”
Ross looked like she was going to probe him for more, but the driver said that they could go in. They went inside the front door and were led along the corridor and into the kitchen. Milton took it all in with a practiced, professional eye: it was an unremarkable room, without much in the way of personality, and distinguished only by the fact that a dead body was laid out across the floor. Milton saw the gunshot wound and concluded, from the scorch marks around the entry wound, that the weapon had been fired at close range. There was blood on the floor, already congealing across it and over the grouted lines between the tiles.
Milton looked over at Ross. She was pale and had put her hand down on the counter to steady herself.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“First time you’ve seen a dead body?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You'll get used to it,” he said.
“I’m not sure I want to.”
The police had taken the necessary photographs, but a technician was still in the room with a video camera. He focused on the body and then backed up to take in the rest of the room. Milton took Ross by the wrist and guided her back out into the corridor so that they would be out of his way.
“There’s not much for us to do here,” he said. “Best to leave it to the professionals.”
They went outside. Shah had finished his call and was waiting for them.
“Change of plan,” he said.
Ross turned to him. “What is it?”
“Leonard Geggel,” he said. “We have a lead.”
25
Ross and Milton were driven out of town in the back of an unmarked police car. The cordon was opened to allow them to pass through. A crowd of locals had gathered there to look down the High Street and they gawped into the car as the driver slowly accelerated away.
Shah had explained to them both what had happened. Geggel hadn’t answered his phone, and so a junior officer had been sent to visit his house. It was empty; Geggel was a bachelor, and there was no one inside the property that they could speak to. Shah had asked GCHQ to run a trace on Geggel’s phone and, to his surprise, they had reported that he had been in Southwold that afternoon, arriving at around two-thirty. They couldn’t be precise as to his movements, but his signal was received from a telephone mast close to the Lord Nelson pub. The signal was then detected leaving the town and was last seen transmitting from somewhere near to the junction of the A12 and the A1095.
Ross took out her phone and held it out so that Milton could see it too. She had some sort of custom mapping application and Milton recognised the topography of the area surrounding the town. A circle had been drawn around the junction of the two roads. Milton tried to work out the scale and guessed that the circle had a diameter of around three hundred feet.
“That’s where it was transmitting before it went dark,” Ross said, laying her finger over a pulsing blue light. “It stopped an hour ago. Either it ran out of battery or it was switched off.”
The officer drove them out of town and into the arable fields that surrounded it. Milton watched Ross: she was gazing out of the window, her reflection faint against the glass. She must have sensed that he was looking at her and turned to him. “This is going to be a long night.”
“Probably.”
“Jesus,” she sighed. “I’m going to need something to keep me upright. I’m done in.”
“Big night last night?”
“Drinks with friends,” she said. “Then I might have stayed out a little too late afterwards.” She smiled ruefully. “I might have a small hangover.”
“If it’s any consolation, I’ve felt better, too.”
Milton could see that she was assessing him. She was attractive. The way she wore her hair, the tattoo that he had seen on her neck when her collar had ridden down low—she was fashionable and hip, all the things that he was not. She was younger than him, too, but that was irrelevant. There was no way that she could be interested in him and, even if she were, he was too professional to allow his thoughts to run away with him.
“What?” he said.
“I wondered,” she said with a wry smile. “You have the look of someone who likes a drink.”
“I do?” he said.
“Takes one to know one,” she said.
Ross’s smile widened. She was sharp and prickly and indiscreet and Milton found that he liked her more than he’d thought that he would.
The driver interrupted their conversation. “We’re just coming up to the junction,” he called back to them.
The driver indicated left and they joined the A12. There were trees on both sides of them, with thick darkness between the tightly packed trunks. Milton looked down at the map on the phone. The land to the north ran down to a wide tidal estuary where the River Blyth meandered out to sea.
“Slow down,” Milton said.
The road was quiet at this hour; the driver flicked on his hazard lights and crawled along at ten miles an hour. Milton and Ross stared out of the windows.
“Where is he?” Ross muttered.
Milton looked down at the phone. The blue dot had almost travelled across the whole diameter of the overlaid circle and there was no sign of the car. Milton looked back to the window again. They were a hundred yards from the junction when Milton saw it.
“There,” he said.
“I don’t see any—”
“Stop the car,” Milton said.
They were adjacent to a lay-by on the southbound lane. The officer pulled over into the bay. It was separated from the road by a dotted white line, and then, on its left, by a barbed wire fence that prevented access to a stretch of scrubland fringed with trees. Temporary signs had been planted in the verge: one for production staff attending the nearby Latitude weekend, and the other advertising the Aldeburgh Festival. Milton got out of the car. He had noticed that one of the fence poles supporting the barbed wire fence had collapsed. It was lying on the ground with the barbed wire loose around it. Now that he was closer, Milton could see that tyre tracks had been left in the dusty median, continuing down the slope and into the wooded area below. He stepped over the barbed wire until he was at the top of the gentle slope. It was too dark to see anything beyond the trees. Ross joined him and looked down as he pointed.
“I think he’s down there,” Milton said.
“I can’t see anything,” she said.
Milton turned to the police officer. “Got a torch?”
The man went to the car and returned with a Maglite. Milton lit it and turned its glow onto the trees.
“Shouldn’t we wait?” Ross said.
“Call it in,” Milton said. “I’m going to check.”
“Smith—we’ve been talking about a state-sponsored assassination.”
“I’ll be fine.” Milton drew his pistol. “Just stay here and call it in,” he said. “I’ll go down and check it out.”
He stepped carefully. A vehicle had definitely been down here. Its passage had dislodged a wide swath of dried earth, and footing was treacherous. Milton planted each foot deliberately, little avalanches of grit and dirt skittering down every time he lifted his boots. He was concentrating on getting down safely when he heard steps
above him. He turned his head to see Ross following him.
“I told you to stay up there,” he said.
“Fuck that. If that’s Geggel, I want to know.”
Milton put his foot down without checking, and almost fell as loose gravel scattered. “Fine,” he said. “Just stay behind me. And don’t touch anything.”
Milton reached level ground. He brought up the torch and shone it into the trees. They were sparse here, with more than enough space between the trunks for a car to pass through. He shone the light on the ground and saw the tyre tracks again; they ran ahead, passing between two trees. He followed them, made his way beneath the canopy of leaves, and crossed a stretch of bracken that had been flattened to the ground. He walked for a minute, crossed a clearing with trees dotted around, and then saw the moonlight glittering across the surface of a body of water. It was the estuary that he had seen on the satellite map. The terrain became soft and sticky, and his boots were sucked down as he crossed the start of a wide mudflat. He swung the torch from left to right and saw the light glitter off a pane of glass. He tracked back until the beam was fixed on the object; it was the back of a car, tilted so that it was pointing up at a gentle angle.
Milton closed the distance to the car with Ross following a few feet behind him. The terrain grew boggier as he neared the water. It was obvious what had happened. The car had turned into the lay-by but hadn’t stopped; instead, it had crashed through the fence and continued down the slope and through the trees until it had come to a rest here, in the mudflats.
Milton held the Maglite against his pistol and approached the car. He maintained a safe distance as he drew alongside. The front of the car had ploughed into soft mud that fringed the water. The engine was silent; the car must have stalled when it came to a halt. Milton shone the light back so that he could look into the cabin.