“I have been thinking we could take my father’s old escape route out of the building,” Katya said to Johnson. “He had it prepared in case of trouble and he needed to move quickly.”
That sounded promising to Johnson. Katya described a route using the service elevator down to the second basement and out through a fire door to an alleyway that formed a narrow thoroughfare between Bolshoy Prospekt and the street that ran behind and parallel to it, Malyy Prospekt.
“My car is parked along the alley, near to Malyy Prospekt. We can use that.”
“What happens if the elevator stops at street level on the way through and we find FSB guards there?” Johnson asked.
“Don’t worry. I know how to override the elevator. Now I need to make a couple of calls to arrange our escape and to speak to Timur, my brother. Please excuse me.”
“I hope your phone is secure.”
“Yes. I bought the SIM card two days ago. I change them every week. My father insisted we all do that.”
She disappeared into one of Nina’s bedrooms and shut the door. Johnson could hear her speaking in rapid Russian but could not pick up what she was saying.
This girl was resourceful, Johnson had to say. But getting out of the building safely and bypassing the surveillance that was surely in place was only a first step.
When Katya reappeared ten minutes later, Johnson asked what the escape route would be. “Using your car is good, but there is the question of where we drive to. I am now assuming that if the FSB is involved, they may have worked out my false identity. So my hotel is a nonstarter, and they will probably also have alerted the airports and railway stations. I will now be the target of a hunting pack. Basically, I need to get out of the country.”
Katya stroked her chin. “Mr. Johnson, my father—”
“Call me Joe.”
“Joe, as you might expect, my father had a plan to get out of Russia in case he was ever blown,” Katya said. “He never completely trusted the CIA’s exfiltration procedures for use in case of emergency, which involved pickups by boats on the Black Sea or the Baltic. So he devised his own alternative as well. We will follow that same route. That is what I have just been arranging on the phone.”
“What’s the route?”
Katya paused. “I will tell you as we go along.”
This one gives nothing away—she’s far too well trained, Johnson thought to himself. He was tempted to remonstrate but checked himself. Could she be trusted? He was far from certain, but right now he had no alternative options. He would have to go along with it.
“You said ‘we’?” Johnson asked. “You intend to come too? What about your mother? You will need to bury her. And what about Timur? Don’t worry—you had better stay here, and I can go alone.” He had had difficulty getting the image of Varvara Yezhova, lying dead in her apartment only just down the corridor, out of his mind, and it didn’t take too much imagination to realize what might be going through Katya’s mind.
“Yes, I said we. I will come with you. It’s dangerous for me to stay. The exit route is complicated—you won’t be able to do it by yourself,” Katya said. She sounded confident, but the frown lines that creased her forehead and her cheeks told a slightly different story. “My brother is away in Moscow right now. I have just been speaking with him. It is not safe for him to come back here, of course, so he is going to Turkey. He has an escape route he can take via the Black Sea, and he will get some friends to take care of arrangements for my mother. Don’t worry, we are used to this kind of thing. You will need me to guide you. I have the contacts. My father made sure of that. And your Russian, while fluent, would never pass for that of a native.” There was a note of finality in her voice.
Johnson swiftly thought it through. What she said made sense. He needed a quick exit from Russia, and Katya appeared to provide that possibility. She seemed very switched on and aware of the need to take rigid precautions against FSB surveillance. But that was probably what he would have expected as the daughter of a defecting CIA agent who had operated successfully for many years within the SVR. She seemed to have been taught well, and it was entirely her decision whether to stay or go.
“All right. We go at four in the morning, then,” Johnson said. “Let’s pray that those FSB animals outside are asleep by then.”
He just had to hope an early morning escape would work. It would mean his mission in St. Petersburg had failed: he was no further forward in discovering what secrets Gennady Yezhov was intending to convey to the West.
Johnson walked to the window and glanced out. As he did so, a thought crossed his mind.
“You said your father didn’t confide in you what information he was defecting with, correct?” Johnson asked. He turned and leaned against the windowsill, his arms folded.
“No, nothing.”
“But is there anyone whom he did confide in about these things? Someone I could speak to?” Johnson asked.
She looked down at the floor for a few moments, then back up at Johnson.
“There is a man. My father called him the Nazi’s son.”
Johnson jerked bolt upright and stared at Katya. “The Nazi’s son?”
“Yes. My father said that if anything happened to him or my mother, and if anyone tried to find out what information he was taking with him, I was to tell them to talk to this man. That is all I know.”
Now she tells me.
“Who is he, this Nazi’s son?” Johnson asked. “Does he live here?”
“He is an old friend of my father’s. He is not here—he’s from Germany. From Berlin, I think, although I do not know if he is still there. They knew each other years ago, when my father and mother met there. They were in the KGB, but I believe the man worked for the Stasi.”
Johnson tugged at his right ear. This sounded like a highly promising revelation. “Is he really a Nazi’s son? Can’t you give me his name?”
“I presume he is, but as for the name, we first need to get safely out of Russia. Then I will tell you.”
“Katya—”
“No, Joe. What you don’t know, you can’t be forced to tell. I cannot risk the FSB finding out about him.”
“And do you have his contact details?” Johnson pressed her.
“Only his name—in my head. I do not know where he lives—or even if he is still alive.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
London
For the fourth time in an hour, Jayne checked the GPS monitor app on her phone. The satellite map showed a blue dot that had remained stationary on Bolshoy Prospekt, St. Petersburg, for the previous few hours.
At first, she had been reassured that Johnson had reached his target address, and presumably the fact that he was remaining there for a while, rather than departing swiftly, was good news. She assumed that he had made contact with Varvara Yezhova and hopefully was making some progress.
But as the hours dragged on, her optimism turned to concern. She was certain that Johnson would intend to deal as quickly as possible with Varvara, both for his own security and hers. The longer Johnson remained “off grid” and away from the conference he was supposed to be attending, the greater the risk of discovery and intervention by the FSB.
Surely an hour with Yezhov’s widow would have been more than enough to secure the information he needed. Something had gone wrong; she was convinced of it.
Jayne had flown from Berlin to London the previous day, arriving during the afternoon, and had returned to her apartment on Portsoken Street. Since then, she had continued to work at home on plans for a special surveillance operation to be run against Anastasia Shevchenko.
She enjoyed the peace and solitude of her apartment and, two years after leaving MI6, also liked not having to go into an office each day.
Now, at half past nine in the evening, she was still awaiting the arrival of Nicklin-Donovan, who had been scheduled to arrive at seven. Her former boss at MI6 had decided to visit her on his way home rath
er than ask her to go to Vauxhall Cross. He wanted to keep her deployment on the Shevchenko and Blackbird operations as low-key as possible.
But Nicklin-Donovan had been delayed because a crisis had erupted at work over contingency planning for the conflict that was looming between Russia and Western military forces in the Black Sea.
Finally, the security buzzer mounted on the wall near her door rang.
When Nicklin-Donovan walked in, he had faint bags under his eyes and a gray pallor. He removed his jacket and immediately asked for a strong espresso.
Once he had the coffee in hand, he sat at Jayne’s dining table and listened attentively as she ran through her plan for Shevchenko involving two new surveillance teams, which she had named B1 and B2.
“Why are you calling them B teams?” Nicklin-Donovan asked.
“So they don’t get too arrogant,” Jayne said with a faint smile. “I don’t want them referring to themselves as the A team.”
B1 would replace the unit that Nicklin-Donovan had been deploying against the Russian previously. Jayne could see that the operation had been run professionally, but her suspicion was that Shevchenko had either spotted the previous incumbents, which would explain why they had so far operated empty-handed, or that they simply were not good enough.
“They need to know when to back off,” Jayne said. “We need to give her enough rope to hang herself. I don’t know how the existing team has been working but maybe they have been too tight on her.”
Nicklin-Donovan shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe it’s just that Shevchenko is bloody good on the street. She’s like a leopard looking out for poachers. The slightest whiff in the air, and she’s called off the hunt.”
The second team that Jayne proposed, B2, would keep watch on the motorbike dead drop parking location that Johnson had extracted from Schwartz, on the corner of Bread Street and Cannon Street near St. Paul’s Cathedral. The idea was that they should put a tail on anyone they saw parking the bike or depositing or collecting items from the pannier bag.
The operation would run round the clock, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the next three weeks at least, covering the period beyond Shevchenko’s scheduled departure to Moscow. Jayne’s thinking was that with new developments surfacing every day in the Black Sea, and also with the counterintelligence hunt heating up, the SVR mole who was feeding information from inside Western intelligence would effectively force Shevchenko to act very soon to get her new material to Moscow Center. Shevchenko would not be able to just sit on time-sensitive information for long. And that would be the surveillance teams’ opportunity.
Having given a broad outline of her intentions, Jayne then went over the finer details of the operation that she had strung together over the previous couple of days. She ended with her thinking that she herself would play a part in the operation but not lead it, given she was now an MI6 outsider.
Nicklin-Donovan nodded. “It looks comprehensive. Let’s firm it up and press the button. I’ve got a surveillance team in mind that we could use, and a guy named Gary Bennett to lead it. I’ll send them a message tonight and get them moving tomorrow first thing. We’ll make an early start—I’ll get a safe house prepared overnight.”
Jayne smiled, relieved that he had accepted her ideas. She had been expecting more pushback. She rose and made him another espresso.
“Thanks,” Nicklin-Donovan said as she pushed the refilled cup across the table to him.
“I suggest we keep this operation very tight,” Jayne said. “No reports circulating to anyone describing what we are doing. No update meetings, even internally at any level. We can’t afford for it to leak. I think there should be nothing written down, as far as possible.”
Nicklin-Donovan exhaled. “Agreed, even though it could get me fired if it goes wrong. We have not circulated any details of the surveillance operation on Shevchenko so far anyway, and that will continue. If anything, we’ll make it even tighter. I was already thinking along those lines.” He paused for a moment. “Listen, I will have to inform C, of course, but that will be it. I will just have to hope he backs me and that he doesn’t inform anyone else himself.”
“And is there any news from St. Petersburg?” Nicklin-Donovan asked, taking a sip of coffee. “I’m assuming you’ve not heard from Joe—otherwise you’d have told me.”
“No, and that’s the problem,” Jayne said. She showed Nicklin-Donovan the tracker app, which was still displaying a blue dot at Varvara’s apartment building, and outlined her concerns.
“Hmm. Let’s not jump the gun,” Nicklin-Donovan said, his forehead creased, as he sipped his coffee. “We don’t know for sure that something is wrong.”
Jayne shrugged. “That’s true.”
“You’re quite concerned about him, aren’t you?”
“A little. I’m sure he can look after himself, though.”
Nicklin-Donovan scratched his temple and gave Jayne an oblique glance. “Are you two getting close again?”
Her old boss knew that they had once been a couple for a short time, many years ago in Islamabad. But she hadn’t expected him to suddenly raise the topic out of the blue, and caught unawares, she felt the color rising a little in her cheeks. It was unusual for her to blush.
He would without a doubt have noticed her slight embarrassment, of that she was certain. “We’re close in terms of work, but that’s all, Mark.”
It was true in the literal sense, but she had to admit, she had increasingly been having what-if moments. She liked Johnson a lot, and after a few failed relationships she still hadn’t given up on the idea of finding someone whom she could settle down with.
Johnson was still single, nine years after his wife had sadly died. However, he lived in Portland with his two teenagers and she was based thousands of miles away on the other side of the Atlantic. Could it work? She kept asking herself the question, and always the answer came back from somewhere inside her head: if she didn’t try, she would never know. She suspected that Johnson might feel the same way, although they had both somehow avoided discussing their relationship, past and present.
For a short while, she had suspected that he might have feelings for one of his old flames, a Washington, DC–based journalist, Fiona Heppenstall, with whom he had a brief relationship a year or so after his wife had died. Johnson and Jayne had worked with Fiona on a couple of investigations. But there had been no sign that relations between them these days were anything other than professional and just friendly.
Often Jayne blamed herself for being overly independent and thus making it difficult to build lasting relationships, but she told herself that that was the way she was. She couldn’t change her personality. One thing that encouraged her in terms of Johnson was that he was an equally independent type of character. Perhaps we would fit well together?
“I hope you didn’t mind me asking,” Nicklin-Donovan said. “Just curious, that’s all.”
“It’s fine, no problem,” Jayne said.
“Good. There was something else I wanted to ask you as well.”
Oh God, now what? she wondered. “Go ahead.”
Nicklin-Donovan paused. “Are you happy working as a freelancer? You were inside Vauxhall Cross for a long time, and before you left you still seemed quite motivated.”
What’s brought this on? Jayne thought.
“There’s a difference between being happy and being motivated,” she said. “I left because I wasn’t happy. Why are you asking?”
“We’ve lost a lot of people in the past eighteen months. A lot of skills and knowledge have gone out the door.” Nicklin-Donovan raised an eyebrow. “Yours included.”
“What kind of skills do you mean?”
Is he trying to hint he wants me back?
“Putin is starting to cause a lot of concern, as you can see from the current operation we’re running and what’s going on in the Crimea and the Black Sea. C is coming under pressure from the prime minister and from Westminster, and other things hav
e been happening inside the tent that I can’t share with you. To be blunt, our Russia expertise is depleted.”
Jayne had heard on the grapevine that since her departure, MI6 had lost a few more key people, both inside Russia and at headquarters. But she shook her head. “No, I’m not coming back in. I’m enjoying my freedom too much to go back to a regular job. I like the variety.”
Nicklin-Donovan nodded. “Fair enough. If you ever want to talk, though, let me know.” He stood and put on his jacket. “I need to go. My wife will wonder where I am.”
Jayne also stood and showed him to the door.
“And I wouldn’t worry about Joe,” Nicklin-Donovan said as he reached for the door handle. “Maybe he is simply getting a bigger download from Varvara than we expected.”
“I doubt it,” Jayne said. “It just wouldn’t take that long. I know how Joe operates. He would want to be quick.”
“I guess he would,” Nicklin-Donovan said. He kept one hand on the door handle but turned to face Jayne. “But even if he is in some sort of difficulty, we can’t exactly expect Washington to send in an army helicopter to St. Petersburg and exfil him this time, can we?” It was a reference to the rescue mission Jayne had instigated for Johnson in Kabul the previous year.
Jayne shrugged but said nothing. Nicklin-Donovan was right. They might know where Johnson was, but they couldn’t easily fish him out this time. He was on his own.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
St. Petersburg
Johnson managed no more than a couple of hours sleep on the mattress on Nina’s spare bedroom floor. He woke a few times and on each occasion walked to the living room window to check whether the FSB guards were still outside the building. At one o’clock in the morning, they were still there, but by quarter past three they had gone.
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