The John Milton Series Box Set 4

by Mark Dawson

  He stopped. He hadn’t meant to be so frank. He rarely mentioned his ex-wife; it was so long ago that he hardly thought about his failed marriage at all, and, whenever he did, it always triggered a moment of wistfulness.

  “Go on,” she said.

  He took a drink of water. “Life is all about choices. Every now and again, we have a decision to make that determines how things might look further down the line. The jobs we apply for. The people we meet. I was married before I got into the thing that I do now. I think if I had chosen her instead of my work, I would have been a very different person today. Life would definitely have been different.”

  “You wouldn’t have been here?” she said.

  He shook his head. “Not a chance.”

  “And you wouldn’t have met me.”

  She looked at him as she said that, and, as Milton looked up, she held his eye and reached her hand across the table. She slid it over his and left it there for a long beat. Milton found that he was holding his breath; he exhaled, moved his hand away and forked another piece of fish, sliding it into his mouth. He looked up and saw that she was still looking at him. She held his gaze again, her eyes sparkling, and then smiled.

  Milton smiled, and then looked down at his plate. He started to think about tomorrow.

  Milton knew that he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t stop himself. They kissed in the car as soon as he parked it in the lot next to the hotel, both of them hungry for the other. They hurried inside, running their hands over one another in the lift, their mouths pressed together, each drinking in the smells and the tastes, oblivious to the impatient buzz as the elevator reached the fourth floor. They reached the room and tumbled onto the bed, tearing at their clothes, their hands clasped together as she rolled atop him, then sliding underneath the crew neck and pulling it up and over his head, revealing the litany of scars that covered his body.

  “Jesus,” she breathed, her nails tracing the raised edges of stab wounds and bullet holes, injuries that told the story of Milton’s career. She laid her palm on his mouth, stifling his retort, and then leaned down and kissed the point where a thug in Macedonia had shivved him. She kissed the burn beneath his left breast and the puckered entry point of the 9mm slug that had just missed his liver. She kissed down and down and Milton closed his eyes, loathing himself, knowing that he was betraying her and hating what he knew he was going to have to do.

  Part VI

  Komsomolsk-on-Amur

  68

  Milton slept lightly, and when he awoke, it took him a moment of staring up at the ceiling before he remembered where he was. He felt the warmth of a body next to him, and when he turned over, he saw Jessie Ross lying there. She was on her front and had pushed the covers away from her body at some point in the night. Milton reached for his watch and checked the time: six. He got up as quietly as he could, padded across the room and, checking that Ross was still asleep, collected his clothes and took them into the bathroom. He took out his phone, opened the encrypted messaging app and sent a quick message. He showered and dressed with a pulse of anxiety in his gut. That was to be expected. There was no way of telling how the morning would go. He reminded himself that he had no choice, and that he should have no sympathy, either. Jessie had brought all of this on herself.

  A return message buzzed onto his phone. He opened the door to the hotel hallway. A plastic bag containing a newspaper had been left on the handle. He took the bag—it felt heavier than it ought to have done—and replaced the Do Not Disturb sign. He closed the door as quietly as he could and edged back into the room.

  “Morning.”

  He turned to the bed. Jessie was awake, watching him through heavy-lidded eyes.

  “What time is it?”

  “Six fifteen,” he said.

  “What’s that?” she said, nodding at the plastic bag.

  Milton took the newspaper out of the bag. It was Komsomolskaya Pravda, the paper that Anastasiya Romanova had said he should be carrying when he went for the meet. He sat down and laid the bag on his lap; it wasn’t empty. He reached inside and took out a Beretta 92 with two spare, fully loaded magazines. He placed all three items on the bureau and watched as Jessie’s eyes were drawn to them.

  “Where did you get that?” she said.

  “I know, Jessie.”

  “You know what?”

  “Everything. I know it all.”

  Ross sat up, reaching down to wrap the sheet around her body. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “How about by making sense?”

  “You’ve been working for the SVR.” He gave her a chance to confirm it, but she said nothing. He ignored her truculent silence. “Directorate S? It doesn’t really matter—you’ll give us all the details later.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Just listen—” Milton began.

  She ignored him, surging up out of the bed and trying to pass him on the way to the door. Milton got to his feet and stepped across to block her way. Ross tried to shoulder her way past but he was too strong for her; he grabbed her by the shoulders and held her in place.

  “Get off me,” she spat.

  “Calm down,” Milton said.

  “Get your fucking hands off me!” She shook his hands off, raising her hand to strike him. Milton grabbed her wrist with his left hand and then used his right to take her arm at a point three fingers down from her elbow. He dug his thumb into the pressure point. Her face crumpled with pain and Milton used the moment to guide her back over to the bed and down onto it once again.

  “Relax,” Milton said, releasing the grip.

  “I’ll scream,” she threatened.

  “I wouldn’t do that. Think about your parents, Jessie. Your son.”

  Milton hated to have to threaten her like that, but he had no choice. He had to get through to her quickly, and she had brought everything on herself. Her face slackened as the anger drained out of it. She gaped for a moment, but then her eyes burned again.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  “That’s what happens when you play the game and you get caught. What do you expect?”

  “My son—where is he?”

  “He’s with your parents. They haven’t been approached, not yet, and the preference is that they won’t be. But that’s up to you. You get to choose what happens next.”

  “Really?” She shook her head derisively. “Do I?”

  “You’re lucky.” He ignored the resentment shining from her eyes. “You can offer valuable service—valuable enough, perhaps, to balance out what you’ve done. You have two choices. One is more palatable than the other.”

  “Let me guess: one choice is bad for my son?”

  Milton hated himself for what he had to say. “He’ll be placed into care. And life will be made difficult for your parents, too. Your father’s business will lose its export licence, for example. It will find itself in legal trouble, and then it’ll be bankrupted. It would be a simple thing to wipe them out—all it would take would be a word from the people I work for. They’d do it without thinking twice. You’ve pissed them off, Jessie.”

  She stared at him, daring him.

  “It’s not a bluff—none of this is a bluff.”

  “And what about me? What if I don’t agree?” She looked at the gun. “You going to use that?”

  Milton’s throat was dry, and he feared that if he replied he would betray the nausea that bubbled in his stomach. He hoped that Ross would see sense, and that he was not in the business of making baseless threats. His palms began to sweat.

  “The other choice?” she asked.

  “You work for VX—properly, this time, against the Russians.”

  “Just like that?”

  “It doesn’t need to be difficult. You just follow through with the operation as you planned it. We go to the rendezvous with Romanova. There will be an incident. I know that the Center is using us to get to her.
They’ll have agents waiting, but I’m going to take care of them. We take Romanova and leave the country, just like we planned.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, once you’re back in London, you signal the Center that you’re fine, you haven’t been compromised and that you’re awaiting instructions.”

  “And the Center wouldn’t think that I’ve been blown? Or that I tipped you off?”

  “Why would they? You’ve never played them before. You’re an agent at VX, in the heart of the secret service. They’ll look for reasons to believe that you’re clean. You’re the golden goose. They’ll hate even the thought that they might have lost you. And why would they think you’ve been blown? They have no reason to think that you’ve been exposed. You did your part—you led them to Romanova, just like you promised, but we were wise to it. They know we have a source—they’ll think BLUEBIRD tipped us.”

  “As simple as that?”

  “It can be. It’s up to you—you just need to be yourself, as if nothing has happened.”

  Milton knew how that would be done: she would be provided with a stream of legitimate intelligence that she could leak, nothing too compromising, yet valuable enough to keep the Center’s interest piqued. A promotion would follow, placing her in a more senior role, putting temptation in front of Russian noses, everything sharpened with the promise of more to come. The Center would be greedy, rapacious, and fed enough intelligence to ignore the nagging feeling that perhaps they should be more circumspect with their once golden girl. She would have to be convincing, but she had already demonstrated that she could do that; she had fooled British intelligence for years.

  “They’re not stupid, Smith,” she said.

  “You need to be persuasive. You do that, maybe things start to look a little better for you and your family.”

  “What’s this?” she said, her lip curling. “A carrot to go with the stick?”

  “No. SIS is going to be hard to win over. Raj Shah is unhappy. The mandarins had to be persuaded that I shouldn’t just plug you here and now. You’ve got a lot to do before they think about rewarding you. But the status quo can be maintained in the meantime. You can go home to your son. Your parents get to keep their house. The account in Zurich, the one the SVR has been paying into—VX might even consider the possibility that you can keep that. But that’s all up to you.”

  She looked away and clenched her jaw. “How did you know? About me—how did you find out? Who told you?”

  “Does that make any difference?”

  “Was it BLUEBIRD?” she asked.

  “Did the Center ask you to find him?”

  “Or her,” she corrected. “They asked. But I never could.”

  “How you were found out doesn’t matter,” Milton said. “You were found out.” He looked at her. “What do you want to do?”

  “What choice do I have?”

  Milton shook his head. “You don’t.”

  She stood, gathered the sheet around her, and sat back down again. All the warmth from last night was gone now, replaced by bitterness and resentment. Milton wondered whether she ever had liked him, or whether she was just an accomplished and convincing actress. He knew: she was playing him. He was old enough and jaded enough not to take it personally, but, despite that, he still felt a tinge of regret.

  “Fine,” she said quietly. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I have some questions about the rendezvous this morning,” Milton said. “I need to understand what the SVR is planning to do.”

  “There’s a man,” she began. “His name is Stepanov. He works for Primakov—I think he does the kind of thing you do. He’s going to be waiting. He said that he’ll have a small team. They have orders to arrest you and Romanova.”

  Milton sat down in the chair opposite her. He needed to get all the information he could as quickly as possible. What happened next—whether they went ahead or bailed—would depend upon what he learned.

  69

  Stepanov and Mitrokhin sat in the car, both of them staring through the windshield at the men and women who made their way to and from the railway station. It wasn’t a busy station, stuck at the end of the line in a district of Russia that had very little to offer unless one worked in aviation. Stepanov was alert, fortified by a cup of strong coffee that he had bought from a vendor as he scouted the terminus on foot half an hour earlier. He watched as a family made their way through the tall doors and into the pink-painted building. Others dawdled, perhaps surprised by the heat that was unusual for this part of the country. Stepanov had started to sweat the moment he had stepped out of the air-conditioned cocoon of the car, and now his shirt was wet and perspiration ran down his forehead. It felt like bathing in warm water. He was glad to be inside again.

  He looked at his watch. “Five minutes,” he said.

  “Do you think she will come?” Mitrokhin asked him.

  “They will,” he said. “If not today, then tomorrow. Perhaps she just watches today. Either way, if she is here, we will take her.”

  Both men were armed. Their MP-443s were on the backseat, but they had chosen to carry the two SR-3 Vikhrs. The carbines offered the mix of power and portability that they needed. They did not know if the British agent was armed, but it didn’t matter; he would be badly outgunned.

  Stepanov looked out of the windshield again. He picked out the other agents that he had selected for this detail. They were from Directorate S, their discretion assured. The old man in the cloth cap sitting on the bench was a retired agent. He had been picked because he had worked for Stepanov for years and because his age meant that he could blend into the background without arousing even the first shred of suspicion. The couple sitting on the grassy knoll listening to music? They had flown in from Moscow yesterday. The bum slumped against the building, seemingly drunk? He had served in the Directorate as an illegal in Greece and Macedonia. There were six of them in total, heavy coverage on the location that Romanova had chosen for the rendezvous.

  Stepanov looked at his watch. Two minutes to midday.

  “Come on,” Mitrokhin said under his breath, unfolding the buttstock of the Vikhr and flipping up the rear sight.

  “Be patient,” Stepanov said. “She will come. We just need to wait.”

  He looked at his watch again.

  Milton drove the hire car to the railway station. Ross was next to him, staring out of the window and saying nothing. Milton knew that he was taking a risk. And not just a small risk. The RV point would be heavy with SVR or FSB agents, a trap waiting to snap shut as soon as Anastasiya Romanova raised her head above the parapet. His fate was now tied to Ross’s and, more specifically, to the mole within the SVR who had exposed her. He was relying on the hope that the information that had been supplied to him was accurate, and that the plan that had been concocted would work. If it did not—if BLUEBIRD had been compromised, or if Ross was preparing something unexpected—then Milton’s future would be bleak: weeks of interrogation in the Lubyanka, a show trial to demonstrate Britain’s perfidy, and then a short and unpleasant existence in a Siberian camp.

  He glanced across at Ross now. She was still staring out of the window, biting down on the corner of her lip. What was she thinking? Was she weighing up the choices, assessing the benefits and disbenefits of one of them over the other? There was no way of knowing, and that made Milton uncomfortable. Ignorance was dangerous.

  The Russians had mounted an elegant operation, and Ross had been at the heart of it. She had been persuasive and Milton had harboured not even the faintest suspicion that she might have betrayed them. She had shown nothing to suggest it, and the intelligence that he had received from BLUEBIRD during their layover in Vladivostok had taken him completely by surprise. But that intelligence was categorical: she had been a Directorate S sleeper ever since her recruitment as a student in Moscow ten years before. BLUEBIRD had only just learned of Ross’s treachery and he had taken a significant personal risk to deliver it in person. He had waite
d for Ross to leave Milton; it was ironic that Ross had chosen that moment to meet with Stepanov.

  Milton thought back to the brief airport rendezvous with BLUEBIRD. No one at VX had ever seen the agent before and Milton had been surprised by his appearance; he was much younger than he would have expected for someone with the access to both the FSB and the SVR that, Milton understood, BLUEBIRD had demonstrated during the years that he had worked as a British asset. There had been no time for a conversation, and Milton would not have asked in any event, but he wondered whether it was BLUEBIRD that he had met or an emissary. His suspicion complicated matters—he would report it in due course—but, for now, there was nothing for it other than to continue as planned.

  He looked back to Ross. Her hands were in her lap, her right hand massaging the joints of her left. It was difficult not to be impressed by her assiduousness. She had been working them all along. There had not been enough time at the airport for him to have been fully briefed, but Milton could read between the lines: he could see how Ross had put her head down and built up her career, how she had ensured that she was in position to take over the running of the dissidents and defectors once Leonard Geggel had retired. He knew that Geggel had been put out to pasture thanks to errors in his handling of an agent; Milton wondered whether Ross had been responsible for that, opening up a vacancy that she had been able to fill. It would all come out eventually.

  Milton read the newspapers and knew about the deaths of Russian dissidents in recent years. The diplomat who had died before meeting prosecutors to discuss Russian activities in Italy; the oil tycoon and friend to a jailed dissident who had died of a suspected embolism; the oligarch who was found hanging from a cupboard rail in his Berkshire mansion; the ex-spy who had died beneath the wheels of a Tube train. Those deaths now looked much less like the unfortunate accidents that the police had categorised them as being and more like the assassinations that SIS had always suspected. Some of those men, and others who had died in similar circumstances, had been hidden from the SVR with fresh identities, supposedly put out of reach. Just like Pyotr Aleksandrov had been put out of reach. Ross had killed Aleksandrov, just as surely as if she had put a gun to his head herself. She had marked him for death, and perhaps she had marked the others, too. She had found herself in a compromised position, but she was evidently smart and ruthless. He wondered, again, whether there was another card that she still had to play.