Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Yes . . .’ Figgis clasped his hands together. But there was no way he could risk compromising himself by talking to her brother. ‘And how do you propose he does that?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ She hadn’t understood him.

  ‘You led me to believe he wants to tell us about it, rather than the SBU,’ Figgis explained noncommittally.

  ‘Oh yes. In England. He will tell everything in England when you give him visa for him and his family.’

  Her red mouth set in a tight line. The gold ear hoops trembled. Figgis understood how terrifying it would be for a quiet, unassuming person like her to be thrust forward by such circumstances. She was an attractive woman. And he could see now that there was fire there, something he’d not noticed before. He rocked back in his chair.

  ‘What you’re asking is not—’

  ‘You see, it is not safe for him in Ukraine any more,’ she insisted, ignoring him. ‘They will find him – army, Mafiya. And, I think maybe it is dangerous too for me and for my daughter,’ she added opportunistically. ‘These criminals – they take away your life without second thought.’

  ‘I understand your concerns,’ he assured her. ‘But it’s not that easy.’

  This brother of hers might have done something criminal for all he knew. It could be he was on the run from legitimate law enforcement agencies rather than from some criminal gang.

  ‘Tell me, Oksana, has he spoken about this with the SBU at all?’

  ‘Pschh! I tell you, they still all like KGB,’ she hissed. ‘He does not trust. You know this. Nobody in Ukraine trust Militsia or SBU.’

  ‘I could give you a name, you know. A man at SBU headquarters on vulitsya Volodymyrs’ka – someone I’ve got to know quite well. A man I believe to be straight.’

  ‘No, Mr Figgis. My brother will not give information to SBU, because even if you know one honest man in SBU, he will tell it to other men who are not honest. Then they will kill my brother. No. He ask me to say to you he will tell everything that he knows, but only if you give visa for him and wife and daughter to stay in England. Because after he tell you everything, he can never return to Ukraine.’

  ‘You’re saying he wants to betray his country in exchange for asylum in Britain, yes?’ Figgis checked, deliberately stressing the political nature of what was involved. ‘That’s a very serious step, you know.’

  ‘Betray country? What means that?’ Oksana protested. ‘This is not betray country. Mafiya. Criminals. It is they who betray Ukraine. And our government that does nothing to stop them. No. My brother he want to give this information to countries outside Ukraine because he afraid some foreign terrorists do something very bad with what Mafiya sell them.’

  Figgis tapped his fingers together again. Oksana’s terms could never be acceptable as they stood. Before any visas could be offered they’d need to know in great detail what her brother had to tell them.

  He studied her. There was desperation in those eyes. Like so many women in Ukraine, life had ground her to a low ebb. He would have liked to help, but it just wasn’t going to work. Too many ifs in this. Her brother would have to talk to the SBU.

  And yet. Before turning her down it would probably be wise to refer it to London.

  ‘Can you give me a few moments, Oksana?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Perhaps you’d like to wait downstairs. There’s someone I’d like to talk to about this.’

  ‘Someone at SBU?’ she whispered, heart in mouth.

  ‘No. Not SBU, I promise. A colleague in London. At the Foreign Office. Would you mind?’

  He stood up and opened the door for her.

  ‘Won’t be long. About ten or fifteen minutes, then I’ll come back down for you. Okay?’

  ‘Yes. Okay.’

  He escorted her down to the reception desk, locking his door behind him. He explained to the security man that he would be talking to her again shortly. Then he returned to his office and crossed to the far side of the room to another door fitted with a coded lock. He tapped in a six-digit figure and stepped into a small, air-conditioned chamber containing racks of communications equipment. He squatted in front of the Automatic Telegram Handling System terminal and logged on, pressing his palm against the screen so the system could identify him.

  There was a message waiting for him. He read it quickly.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  He read it again, hardly able to believe the coincidence. Oksana Koslova’s story had suddenly acquired an alarming relevance.

  SECURITY CODE ALPHA

  TO: STATION OFFICER KIEV.

  EX: DEPUTY CONTROLLER GLOBAL RISKS.

  URGENT CONFIRMATION NEEDED WHETHER VIKTOR RYBKIN IS STILL EMPLOYED BY SBU. ALSO ASCERTAIN WHY HE HAS BEEN IN CYPRUS WITH ANOTHER MAN (UNIDENTIFIED, BUT PHOTO APPENDED). BOTH SUSPECTED OF MURDER OF BRITISH AGENT. MAY ALSO BE INVOLVED FINANCIALLY OR ORGANISATIONALLY IN AN IMMINENT IRAQI TERRORIST ATTACK USING BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS.

  PLEASE TREAT AS MOST URGENT.

  ‘My God!’ he mouthed.

  He already knew the answer to the first question. Rybkin had been sacked from the SBU three months ago. And as to a BW attack – Oksana’s brother was talking about a missile which could easily carry such a warhead.

  He accessed the photograph London had transmitted, copied it to disk then transferred the floppy to another PC for transmission on the link to the SBU headquarters that had been set up in recent months for the exchange of data on transnational crime. But he telephoned the SBU first. Courtesy calls were all important when dealing with an organisation still trying to slough off half a century’s suspicions about the West.

  The duty officer was a man he’d come to know well. After a few gibes about Dinamo’s lamentable performance in its last match, he requested a registry check on the silver-toothed face in the picture that he was sending on the link, and any information they happened to have about the current activities of Viktor Rybkin.

  Then he placed himself back at the ATHS keyboard and composed his response to London. Clearly Oksana’s brother would need to be seen with all speed, but SIS would have to send a deep-cover officer to handle it, so he could keep his own hands clean. He sent the telegram and left the communications room.

  Oksana Koslova had begun to despair by the time Figgis emerged from upstairs. Sitting by the reception desk she’d concluded that she’d failed her brother, failed his wife and daughter and failed herself.

  Figgis stood on the bottom stair and beckoned her to follow him. His face betrayed nothing of what he’d just learned.

  ‘It’s possible something can be done,’ Figgis told her cagily, once they were sitting in the leather chairs again. ‘You’ll be contacted within the next few hours. Not by me, you understand. Even if the voice on the phone sounds like me, it won’t be – you get me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her heart felt as if it would explode. ‘I understand. Thank you.’

  ‘Because I can’t be involved. This conversation we’re having now isn’t taking place. You understand?’

  ‘I understand. You can trust me.’

  Figgis hoped to God that he could.’

  ‘Good. You’ll be contacted to arrange a meeting with your brother. It’ll be someone from London.’

  ‘A familiar face?’ she asked on the spur of the moment.

  Her question surprised him. Who could she possibly have seen out of the handful of deep-cover agents who’d been to Kiev?

  ‘I doubt it,’ he told her. Then he remembered the drugs episode a year ago. ‘Well, I suppose it’s not impossible.’

  27

  Sunday, 6 October, early a.m.

  London

  THE PHONE RANG, cutting through what was left of his troubled sleep. Sam rolled onto his side and put the pillow over his head. His gut churned with acid, there was a brick-fight going on in his skull. He’d gone on a bender after the funeral yesterday, an attempt at obliteration which had failed. What Clare had revealed about the woman he’d loved was still like a lump in his chest.

  And no
w the ringing of the phone was chiselling at his temples.

  He decided to ignore it. There was nobody in the world he wanted to talk to. The one conversation he did want to have required a partner who was no longer reachable.

  ‘Fuck!’

  The damned phone wouldn’t stop. Some sadist at the other end. Probably that raven-haired woman wanting to come round and hammer a stake through his heart.

  He rolled from the bed and stumbled towards the door.

  ‘Shi-it!’ he yelled, stubbing his toes against the base of a chest of drawers.

  Head thundering, he hopped into the hall and made it to the kitchen. As he reached for the phone on the wall he resolved that if the caller was someone trying to sell double-glazing, he would track the bastard down and stalk him or her to an early grave.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sam!’ The voice bore the Ulster twang of Duncan Waddell. ‘We need to meet.’

  ‘Wha—? Isn’t it Sunday?’ Sam’s tongue filled his mouth like a gag.

  ‘Don’t care if it’s King Billy’s birthday, I need you at the Lodge this afternoon. Two o’clock sharp.’

  ‘What? What’s happened?’

  ‘That’s what the meeting’s for. To tell you.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s one small problem,’ Sam mumbled, brain trying to catch on. ‘My car – it’s down at the Hamble.’

  ‘Then we’ll send someone to pick you up,’ Waddell snapped, exasperated. ‘Let’s say one o’clock. And could you please try to sober up by then?’

  The line went dead.

  Hell. Something serious must have happened. Thousands dead from an anthrax attack? Packer felt like a child this morning, needing someone to tell him what to do.

  The wall clock said five to nine. He filled the kettle to make some tea to clear his head. The ‘Lodge’ that Waddell had referred to was in the Banstead hills just south of London, a safe house less convenient than the flat over the launderette in Isleworth, but more secluded.

  News. There’d be some on somewhere. He prodded the switch on the radio, switching bands and spinning the dial until he found a twenty-four-hour news station.

  Nothing. A report on some food scare or other. He left the radio on. There’d be headlines in a few minutes.

  His brain throbbing, he poured hot water onto a teabag then clasped the mug, letting the heat scorch his palms in an act of purgation. Stupid to get so plastered. Stupid to allow himself to get so wound up over a woman.

  He shook his head, still unable to believe that he’d never guessed at Chrissie’s catholic taste in sex. Even with hindsight, he could think of nothing she’d ever said or done that should have given him a clue. She’d seemed the most heterosexual creature he’d ever met.

  He’d been hurt yesterday by Clare’s revelation, as she’d intended him to be – no man likes to discover he hasn’t been satisfying a woman’s sexual needs. This morning, however, he felt no anger at the fact that Chrissie had deceived him. After all, their affair had been based on deception. What worried him more was the fear there were other revelations to come. Viktor Rybkin’s warning, the strange tattoo – there was a lot about her life that Chrissie had hidden from him.

  The Greenwich pips signal jabbed him alert. The news headlines were about storms in the West Country. There’d been no anthrax attack. No massacre of the innocents.

  He reached into the cupboard over the sink for the paracetamol bottle. If he gave the pills an hour to work and dosed himself with repeat brews of tea, he might pull through. Then, if he managed to hold down some breakfast and take a walk on the common in the chill easterly that was blowing outside, his head might even clear enough for him to work out what this meeting with Waddell was all about.

  The Lodge that Waddell had referred to was a mock-Tudor pile just off the Purley-Epsom road south of London, built in a sooty brown brick and set at the end of a leaf-strewn gravel drive that ran for some fifty metres between high banks of bolting rhododendrons.

  When FBI Special Agent Dean Burgess had arrived there, diverted on his way back to Washington from Bahrain via London, he’d had the impression the six-bedroom house was deserted, its dark lead-lattice windows reflecting the slate-grey of the overcast sky. The car that SIS had sent to collect him from the hotel near the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square dropped him at the front of the Lodge where three other vehicles were already parked. A short man with a close crop of fair hair and wearing a check shirt emerged from a path at the side of the mansion.

  ‘You’ll be Dean.’ The accent was Irish or Scots, Burgess couldn’t tell which.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Duncan Waddell. Welcome to the Lodge. There’s coffee inside, although your taste buds may not recognise it as such.’

  Waddell led the American round to the rear entrance which faced an overgrown kitchen garden and a corroding aluminium greenhouse with cracked panes. The semi-glazed back door was pushed open and they walked inside.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

  From a chair beside a scrubbed pine table in the middle of the cork-floored kitchen a grey-haired woman in her sixties stood up to greet Burgess.

  ‘This is Beryl,’ Waddell announced. ‘She and her husband look after this place for us. They both used to be staffers with SIS.’

  ‘Hi.’ Burgess shook the offered hand.

  ‘Will you take your coffee in with you, sir?’ Beryl asked politely. ‘The others have already got theirs.’

  ‘Sounds a great idea.’

  She turned towards the Aga stove on which an enamelled pot was keeping warm. She lifted it and filled a bone china cup with what Burgess could smell was a bitter, stewed brew. He already knew he wasn’t going to drink it.

  ‘Milk? Sugar?’

  ‘Don’t bother. Thanks.’

  The hall of the house was panelled in dark wood and had been hung with bleak oil paintings. The place reminded Burgess of the studio set for The Addams Family.

  Waddell pushed open a heavy door into a boardroom furnished with a long oak refectory table and a set of tubular-framed chairs that looked unsuitably modern. On one end of the table a laptop PC with a good-sized screen had been set up.

  ‘Some introductions first . . .’ Waddell offered.

  Two men and a woman were already in the room.

  ‘Jennifer Price you know already.’

  ‘Sure. Hi Jen.’

  The woman’s public title was Political Counsellor at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, but she was one of the representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency in London. In her thirties, she had short, dark hair and a no-nonsense face, and wore a formal grey business suit.

  ‘Hi Dean.’

  ‘Opposite you’ve got the rest of our team. Martin Kessler, deputy controller of Global Risks . . .’

  ‘How d’you do, sir.’ Burgess leaned forward and shook the proffered hand. Jennifer had told him earlier that it was this pale man’s wife who’d been murdered in Cyprus.

  ‘. . . and Sam Packer, who I suppose is the man we ought to blame for all of this,’ Waddell concluded, smiling at his own joke to cue the others to do the same.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Sam. Must’ve been pretty rough in Baghdad. Glad to know you’re okay.’

  Okay wasn’t exactly how Sam would have described himself at that moment. Apart from the hangover, the shock of coming face to face with Martin Kessler for the first time in his life had been considerable. When he’d arrived, the aloof grey eyes had fixed him with a look that seemed to embody both contempt and fear. They were framed today by smart new spectacles with oval lenses, very different from the smudged pebbles through which he’d watched his wife bid adieu to her lover in the open space of Barnes Common three months ago.

  Their brief and awkward conversation on his arrival was the first time he’d ever heard Kessler speak. The voice was reedy and undistinguished.

  ‘If you’d like to pitch camp next to Jennifer, Dean,’ Waddell suggested.

  Burgess placed his coffee cup on
the table.

  ‘I advise you not to touch that,’ Jennifer cautioned. ‘It contains undiluted hydrochloric acid.’

  ‘I’d worked that one out already,’ Burgess smiled.

  ‘I’m afraid the lady who brewed it only drinks herb tea herself,’ Kessler explained apologetically.

  ‘No problem,’ said Burgess.

  The quality of the coffee was the least of his worries. He’d flown out of Iraq with the rest of the UNSCOM team on Friday after the Iraqis had refused further co-operation. After some intense message traffic with Washington, he’d flown from Bahrain to London, arriving late last night, and was due to fly on home in a few hours’ time. Still dressed in the casual clothes he’d taken with him to Baghdad, he was suffering time zone fatigue again.

  ‘Shall we start?’ Waddell deferred momentarily to Kessler, who indicated quickly that he should carry on.

  ‘You all know the background,’ Waddell began, drawing this small nest of spies together with a sweep of his eyes, ‘but the story’s moved on in the last twenty-four hours. Moved a hell of a long way forward.’

  Sam was totally alert all of a sudden. This was a different Waddell speaking. A man with no doubts whatsoever about the seriousness of what they were engaged in.

  ‘The first thing I want to give you is this.’

  Waddell clicked a key on the computer. The face of Saladin flashed on the screen, the picture Sam had produced on Sophie’s PC in Cyprus.

  ‘This man – sorry about the blurry image – was photographed in Cyprus on the night Christine Taylor was murdered there.’ Sam noted Waddell’s tactful use of Chrissie’s operational surname in front of Kessler. ‘He was standing a few feet away from Christine Taylor, apparently somewhat perturbed by the conversation she was having with two Ukrainians. Sam believes this man was also the leader of the group that took him prisoner in Baghdad, right?’

  ‘I’m certain of it.’

  ‘Were they Mukhabarat?’ the CIA woman checked. ‘I don’t recollect what was said in the report filed at Langley.’

  ‘I never knew who—’ Sam began.

  ‘Actually the answer’s no,’ Waddell cut in. He tapped the computer screen. ‘You see, we’ve now got an ID on this fellow from one of our émigré sources. His name apparently is Naif Hamdan, a colonel in the Iraqi army. During the war with Iran, he held the rank of major and commanded a detachment of chemical troops on the southern front.’