Bennett shook his head. “Buses don’t use that street. They all go along Park Road that runs parallel to it, the A41, behind London Business School.”
“Taxis?”
“That’s a possibility, yes. We are keeping a separate list of the plates of all those passing the site, but I admit they are difficult to monitor.”
“What about cyclists?” Johnson asked.
“No, we haven’t actually included them in the analysis. You can’t trace them from just video. There’s no way of easily identifying them.”
“But do you have them all on video?”
“Yes, we’ve captured them all. We’ve got video clips of all of them—there’s about four or five goddamn hundred of them. But we haven’t been able to do any analysis.”
Johnson remained silent for a few seconds. “Well, if the vehicle analysis is showing nothing, and the pedestrians are showing nothing, and we can’t track the bus and taxi passengers, is it worth just looking through the cycle footage to see if we can spot anything there? I don’t want to leave any stone unturned—that’s how things slip through the cracks.”
Bennett shrugged. “I guess we can. All the clips are running at about twenty seconds long, so it’s going to take some time.”
“Let’s do it,” Johnson said.
Bennett nodded reluctantly.
“In the meantime, Jayne and I will keep a watch on the live feed as soon as it’s running again,” Johnson said, nodding toward the monitor screen on the wall. A technician was fiddling with a cable connection, which was causing a problem.
While he was waiting, he needed to check on something. He took out his phone and began a web search.
It didn’t take him very long to find a lengthy story on a Leipzig newspaper’s website about a gunfight in an apartment building near Thomaskirche. The intro to the story said that one man had died and another was critically injured in the hospital after a shoot-out involving a Russian and a second unknown gunman.
Shit, Balagula’s still alive, he thought.
But to Johnson’s surprise, as he read down the story, it stated that the man who had died was the Russian gunman, Andrei Karazamov, who had been carrying a passport but no other identification. Karazamov was obviously Balagula’s cover identity, Johnson surmised.
And the man fighting for his life in intensive care in Universitätsklinikum Leipzig—the university hospital—was Ludwig Helm, an eighty-nine-year-old former organist at Thomaskirche, who lived in the apartments.
Johnson hadn’t expected that. He continued to scan down the story, looking for any mention of himself. Near the end, he found it.
The second gunman had not been identified and had immediately fled the building, the report said. Descriptions of him were vague, other than that he was quite tall and was wearing a black beanie hat and black glasses.
Good.
Police were working on the assumption that the shootings might have been some kind of robbery attempt that had gone wrong, perhaps due to gang members fighting among themselves, but were unsure. It was thought the Russian mafia might have been involved. Investigations were continuing, the report said.
Johnson closed the app and stared up at the ceiling for a few seconds. He hated the idea of having killed someone—even a mindless murderer such as Balagula—but at the time he had no option but to defend himself. Otherwise there was no doubt he would have been in a Leipzig morgue, not Balagula.
He just hoped that Helm would pull through. It seemed highly unlikely that if he did he would turn Johnson in, not given the secrets Johnson now carried about Helm’s history in the SS.
The technician finished fixing the cable as a member of the MI6 support team brought a tray of coffees into the room. Johnson and Jayne both took one and settled on a sofa in front of the monitor screen to watch.
They had been doing this off and on all morning. The mesmeric effect of watching traffic on the same stretch of street wasn’t conducive to concentration, so the coffee was welcome. At least the picture quality from the feed was excellent—it was very high definition and made it easy to see even small details. It must have been using a huge amount of bandwidth on the local broadband networks, Johnson couldn’t help thinking.
Johnson watched the screen as a line of cars meandered northward along Outer Circle toward London Business School, with the park on their right. They were followed by a white van and a tourist coach. They were all driving at roughly the speed limit of thirty miles per hour, and the license plates were not triggering any alerts.
A couple of professional-looking female cyclists on lightweight machines and wearing branded Lycra were riding abreast of each other a hundred yards or so behind the coach. Their heads were down as they pedaled hard, clearly trying to have some sort of race with each other around Outer Circle.
Johnson and Jayne sat there for another ten minutes scrutinizing the screen carefully. Johnson checked his watch. There was little else to do for the next hour or so until they were due to have a team meeting to discuss progress and the next steps.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Jayne occasionally glancing at him.
“Concentrate on the screen, not on me.” He winked at her.
“Yes, I know,” Jayne said. “Don’t worry.”
They scrutinized the monitor for another ten minutes. Then Johnson’s eye was caught by a lone female cyclist on a drop-handle racing bike. Her hair was tied in a ponytail that hung down her back, and she was wearing tight black and pale blue Lycra. Unlike the two cyclists Johnson had seen earlier, she was riding at a sedate pace.
He watched as a green BMW overtook her. He couldn’t help thinking that her orange bike helmet looked a little garish. Then she glanced to her right and put her right hand into what looked like a small black tool bag mounted on her handlebars, typical of the type that many cyclists use.
Immediately, a loud alert went off inside Johnson’s brain.
He had seen another woman cyclist with a very similar orange helmet only quite recently and remembered thinking then that it also looked a little loud and obtrusive.
Wait. What the hell?
Johnson jumped to his feet, adrenaline now pumping, and approached the high-definition screen, watching intently.
The cyclist withdrew her hand from the tool bag. She was holding a snack bar, which she unwrapped with her teeth and proceeded to eat.
But Johnson wasn’t looking at the snack bar now but rather at the cyclist’s hair, the helmet, the athletic figure—and noting the fact that she had put her hand in the bag just at that spot. Those details all gave Johnson the same message.
Fucking hell.
“It’s Bernice,” he said in a low, unbelieving tone.
“Bernice? It can’t be,” Jayne said. She also rose to her feet.
“It damn well is,” Johnson said, his voice rising.
The woman put her hand back on the handlebar, lowered her head, and pedaled a little harder, accelerating along the street.
Johnson turned around and yelled across the room to the group hunched over their laptops at the table on the far side. “Vic, Mark. I’ve just seen Bernice Franklin cycle past the drop zone. It’s her, on some racing bike. Get one of those surveillance cars after her. Quick.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Monday, April 14, 2014
London
Bernice Franklin was as certain as she could be that she had no coverage. After a surveillance detection run that lasted two and a half hours, involving a cycle ride into central London, followed by a lengthy walk in and around shops on Oxford Street and another ride back to Maida Vale by a circuitous route, she would have wagered a large amount of money that she was clean.
Thirty of her fifty-two years had been spent with the CIA, much of it in the field and on the street, and all of that experience told her she was correct. Pressure and occasion seemed if anything to heighten her senses rather than dull them.
She had a good feel for her environment, for the str
eet, and had rarely been wrong across her career, especially when it mattered. Even on the toughest of days in places like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, and Berlin, she had performed faultlessly.
Indeed, Bernice’s excellent track record, both in the field and at Langley in more senior management roles, was a major reason for her frustration in being passed over by Vic Walter for promotion to number three in the Directorate of Operations. Since then, her focus had switched from career building to retirement preparation. And to do that she required money.
Anastasia Shevchenko had somehow appeared at the right time—although Bernice suspected that the timing of Shevchenko’s overtures had been no accident. She probably had a list of targets exactly like her: slightly disgruntled, their promotion hopes stymied for whatever reason, and more open to an approach than they might have been at an earlier, hungrier stage of their careers.
There was almost certainly a mole inside Langley who provided Moscow Center with a running list of such potential recruitment targets, although Bernice had no idea who that was.
Now, as she pedaled onward, her confidence in her black status meant she was quite relaxed about her decision to transmit the highly classified US Defense Department document detailing the president’s visit to the Donald Cook and the subsequent arrival of the Taylor.
And doing so by bike seemed to be an excellent cover. She had been a regular rider for the past twenty years, having switched from running. It had been a great way to keep fit and also helped relieve the stresses and pressures of working in a demanding job in politically tough situations.
Bernice was slim, toned, and weighed only a few pounds more than she had in her early twenties. It meant that now she looked at least ten years younger than her actual age and attracted admiring glances from men much younger than she was.
She drew satisfaction from knowing that wearing skintight Lycra while out on the road wasn’t something that many women in their fifties could get away with. Today she was wearing a black-and-pale-blue outfit and her usual orange helmet, which helped keep her visible to drivers.
Uploading her electronic files to the SRAC base station buried in Regent’s Park hardly required a deviation from her usual routine. Her rides often took her that way; she knew the streets very well.
She did not need to install any special equipment onto her bike. She always had a small black bag attached to the center of her handlebars in which she kept her phone, a couple of snack bars, and a small purse with money and a credit card. There was just enough space in the bag to add the SRAC unit.
Even if she had been unsure of her status upon arrival back in the Maida Vale area, she could easily have aborted the drop. After all, the important message had already been dispatched to Moscow Center by Shevchenko. This was just the added detail that she was now sending.
But certain that her status continued to be black, she pressed ahead.
As she cycled at a steady, undemanding pace along Outer Circle, with the green expanse of Regent’s Park on her right, she kept an eye out for the landmarks that Shevchenko had given her.
The first one as she rode northward was the right-hand bend at the junction with Baker Street, with the entrance to the park on the right.
Once she had rounded the bend, the next, on her left, was the elegant white stone colonnades of Clarence Terrace, a short row of houses and apartments with an in-and-out driveway for residents.
As she passed Clarence Terrace, the trigger point was the junction with Sussex Place on the left, just before she reached the white domes of the London Business School building.
That was where she had to press the button.
She looked to her right, where behind the hedge and beneath a clump of evergreen bushes the base unit was buried.
Bernice slipped a hand into the tool bag on her handlebars, felt for the button on the SRAC unit, and pressed it, holding for three seconds as Shevchenko had instructed her. Then she released the button. All being well, the upload had been completed. She would double-check when she got home. A green LED should be illuminated if the transfer had been successfully completed, but Shevchenko had reassured her the system was foolproof provided she wasn’t going too fast. There was no chance of that happening on a bike.
While Bernice’s hand was still in the bag, she grabbed one of the snack bars, withdrew her hand and, using her teeth and one hand, removed the wrapper from the snack, which she ate. That was her cover just in case anyone was watching, which she was certain was not the case.
She continued along Outer Circle past the northern end of the business school, now pedaling a little harder and accelerating but still going at an undemanding pace.
After about three hundred yards, as she approached the left turn she wanted to make onto Hanover Gate, she passed a row of parked cars on her right, next to the hedge. As she went by, a blue Volkswagen sedan pulled out and tucked in behind her. Since it hadn’t overtaken her, she assumed it was also planning to turn left.
No other vehicles were nearby, and apart from the hiss of her tires on the blacktop and the hum of the car behind, there was little noise.
Then Bernice heard the faint but unmistakable sound of a squelch break—a click-pssht sound from a communications radio. It was followed by another.
She jumped slightly as she pedaled.
Where the hell did that come from?
Bernice was all too familiar with how security services’ radios operated. She had used them countless times on various operations. She looked to her right. Just before the Hanover Gate junction was a lone parked car, a gray sedan, in one of the parking spots next to the hedge, it’s window partly open. Two men sat in the front seats.
There was no other possible source for the squelch breaks.
They must have come from the parked car or the car behind her.
There was no other possible source in sight.
She turned her head swiftly. The blue VW was still trailing behind her, some twenty yards back.
In that moment, her instincts flashed straight to red.
Only ten seconds before, all had looked good along that stretch of Outer Circle. Now her heart rate rocketed and a spike of alarm ran up her spine.
She cursed inwardly, still not completely sure if this was a threat or not. But there was no time to wait and find out.
If it was surveillance—and she had no way of knowing yet whether that was the case—it was time to test it. She had planned in some detail for the possibility that something like this might happen.
As she turned left onto Hanover Gate, Bernice pushed down hard on her pedals and simultaneously clicked up two gears. She accelerated hard, and the ultralightweight $7,500 Specialized carbon-fiber bike beneath her responded.
Bernice sprinted along Hanover Gate, a short street of no more than a hundred and thirty yards, then perfectly timed her right turn onto Park Road to slot between one red double-decker bus that was heading south and another that was going north.
That was neat. She glanced over her shoulder: the blue car that had followed her from Outer Circle was stuck at the junction, waiting for a line of cars and another bus to pass.
The tree-lined stretch of Park Road had two lanes in each direction.
Bernice cut straight to the left lane and continued pushing hard as she followed a black taxi.
She didn’t go far, though.
After about a hundred yards, she braked hard to a standstill at the left side of the street, jumped off her bike, and picked up the lightweight frame, then ran with it through a black metal gate with a stone pillar and down some steps.
At the bottom of the steps lay the blue-black waters of the Regent’s Canal, a waterway that ran eight and a half miles between the River Thames in east London and the Grand Union Canal that ran from London to Birmingham. En route it wound along the north side of Regent’s Park and through to Little Venice.
Bernice sprinted down the first flight of stairs, holding the bike, then along a short landing and down anot
her short flight of stairs to the concrete towpath that ran alongside the northern bank of the canal, built in the nineteenth century.
She turned and glanced upward. As she did so, the blue Volkswagen drew level with the gate that led to the street. It stopped, and a man looked out the window in her direction.
Shit.
The towpath was heavily used by pedestrians and cyclists—Bernice had often ridden along it. Now she jumped back on her bike and pedaled hard in a westerly direction beneath two ancient iron bridges that carried trains over the canal.
She had this escape route all worked out.
Bernice swerved around a couple who were walking hand in hand toward her and an old man on a rusty single-gear bike and went flat out, the murky canal waters to her left flanked by a high brick wall that ran along the far bank, with tall office buildings beyond. To her right, bordering the towpath, were bushes and trees, with industrial buildings and offices behind them.
Quickly, Bernice came to a broader section of the canal where a few dozen long residential canal barges were moored. Here the towpath was busier, with boat owners mingling with walkers. She ignored a sign instructing cyclists to dismount and pedaled onward but was forced every so often to dismount and jump over white concrete humps built on the path to stop speeding bikes. Potted plants at the side of the towpath also slowed her down.
As she reached the end of the stretch of moored boats, just before the canal and towpath passed through a tunnel beneath Lisson Grove, Bernice undid the Velcro fastening of the tool bag on her handlebars and removed the SRAC device and also the burner cell phone that she had ready to text Shevchenko once the upload to the base station was completed.
She steered sharply around a man placing plants in a large terra-cotta pot next to the last boat, continued a little farther until she thought she was out of his line of sight, and then with a discreet flick of her wrist threw both devices to her left into the canal, where they landed with a splash.
That was the best place for them. There was no way she was going to be caught with any evidence on her. And the SRAC unit and burner phone were the only items that could incriminate her. There was the camera in her apartment, but if necessary she could easily explain that she used that for CIA purposes, and there was no SD card left in it anyway.
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