The Su-24 had spent an hour and a half making close-range approaches to the Donald Cook before finally retreating. The anchor said the incident showed the sensitivity of military maneuvers by both sides in the Black Sea and highlighted the possibility of an all-out conflict in the area. He said that the stakes would be raised further if reports that a US frigate, the USS Taylor, was expected to arrive in the Black Sea in the coming days proved to be correct.
“So, it seems as though the Russians were well prepared,” Johnson said. He turned to Shevchenko. “I wonder how the Kremlin could have obtained advance notice that a destroyer and a frigate and the US president were headed to the Black Sea?”
Shevchenko said nothing but made no effort to hide her smirk.
Nicklin-Donovan turned away from the television monitor. “I’ve called the head of counterterrorism command,” he said to Johnson and Vic. “They’ll be coming to fetch Bernice soon. In the meantime, we have a window to question her further.”
He led the way to a sparsely furnished interview room where Bennett and Jayne were sitting at a table with Bernice, her right arm in a sling with a blood patch showing at the elbow and her left wrist bandaged. There was a large graze down her left cheek that was still oozing a little blood, and her left eye was purple and heavily swollen. She was still wearing her black-and-pale-blue Lycra cycling gear, the leggings of which had a large rip across the right knee, exposing the skin, which was also badly cut.
After Johnson had felled Bernice’s bike, he had called Nicklin-Donovan and the two MI6 surveillance cars arrived within minutes. One of the officers was a trained first-aider, and after determining that Bernice had not broken any bones, he bandaged her up and took her to the Euston office.
Johnson stood for a few moments, eyeing Bernice. “You’re a damn fool,” he said. “I’m surprised, although maybe I shouldn’t be. I don’t know how you thought you would continue to get away with what you were doing.”
She leaned back in her chair and scrutinized Johnson with a pair of laser-like gray eyes. “You’re crazy,” she said. “I haven’t done anything. I was out for my usual cycle ride, and the next thing I know my bike is being shot from beneath me by you. Don’t you know the British have laws against using firearms in public? You’re the one breaking the law, not me.”
Johnson wasn’t going to waste his time arguing. It was true that nothing incriminating had been found on Bernice. The tool bag attached to her handlebars had been empty when he and the surveillance team had searched it.
But the video hadn’t lied. He had seen her fiddling with something in the bag before her hand had emerged with the snack bar—he was certain of it. And it had all happened in exactly the same spot where Shevchenko had been seen slowing down while driving her car. This was no coincidence.
“We’ll find the evidence,” Johnson said. She had almost certainly off-loaded a transmitter device somewhere, probably by throwing it in some bushes or the canal while fleeing on her bike. Nicklin-Donovan would be able to get police search teams to find it.
The MI6 team would also now dig up the SRAC base station they believed was buried in Regent’s Park.
“Is this a recent thing, spying for the Russians, because you were passed over for promotion?” Johnson asked. “Was it because Vic gave Neal Scales the number three job? Or have you been doing this for years, decades?”
Bernice shook her head but didn’t reply.
Johnson indicated with his thumb toward Shevchenko, who was standing next to Vic. “Did you know you were being handled by a war criminal here?” he asked Bernice. “A Cold War criminal, anyway—who together with her KGB boyfriend Yuri Severinov gave the green light to a Libyan attempt to murder a disco full of American servicemen and women and many Germans. They could have stopped it. They had control of all those terrorists who were holed up in East Berlin. But no. The attack killed three, injured more than two hundred, and indirectly caused the deaths of at least one of those injured.”
Shevchenko snorted. “You have no proof of that. It’s all lies. Now, I have had enough of this. You need to let me go—I have a flight to catch this evening, and you know very well you have no right to hold me here. It’s unlawful.”
“It’s all true,” Johnson said. He outlined the written proof he had collected from Helm’s safe-deposit box in the Vienna bank vault.
“I wonder how many other death warrants you have effectively signed over the years?” he added.
“We think we have enough to put you behind bars in Germany, and we’ll be going all out to get you extradited there,” Vic said, his arms folded, his lips pressed tight together.
“No chance,” Shevchenko said. “My president will never agree to an extradition. Anyway, that was twenty-eight years ago. A nice joke, but it’s not funny.”
“We’ll see,” Johnson said. “There’s no statute of limitations for murder in Germany, so whether it’s twenty-eight years or sixty-eight, it doesn’t matter. How do you think Germany is still prosecuting Nazi war criminals?”
Shevchenko shrugged.
“And maybe your president won’t be so amenable toward you once he discovers how you have screwed up this miserable attempt to run a spy in the CIA,” Johnson said. “He might not like the idea that he’s had an utter amateur running his British espionage operation and, what’s more, recruiting agents in the CIA who are equally incompetent.”
He pointed at Bernice. “Because she is utterly incompetent—and a traitor.”
“Get lost, you piece of monkey shit,” Shevchenko snapped.
Johnson was about to reply when there was a knock at the door. Nicklin-Donovan opened it to find three men standing there. One of them was uniformed, with neat gray hair showing beneath a peaked black police cap that had a trim of silver oak leaves. The other two were in slacks, open-neck shirts, and sweaters.
Nicklin-Donovan greeted the uniformed officer, then introduced him to the others as Commander Michael Marsh, head of Counter-Terrorism Command in the Metropolitan Police.
Johnson turned back to Shevchenko to find she had taken several steps across the room and was now standing near the table, about three feet to the right of Bernice, who was still seated.
Shevchenko was reaching into her small black handbag.
The next few seconds seemed to unfold in slow motion.
Shevchenko took her hand out of her handbag, clutching what appeared to be two silver lipstick holders.
Without pausing, she transferred one to her right hand and removed the cover before raising it, and it was then that Johnson realized what was going on.
He bellowed, “No!” Then he took a couple of steps and launched himself into a full-length dive toward Shevchenko, his arms outstretched, aiming for her midriff.
Just as Johnson made contact with Shevchenko, there was a bang, not that much louder than a champagne cork being released.
Chapter Fifty-One
Monday, April 14, 2014
London
As Johnson made contact with Shevchenko, out of the corner of his eye he saw Bernice throw up her right arm reflexively to protect herself. She screamed and then tumbled backward off her chair.
Shevchenko crashed to the floor, with Johnson clasping her around the waist. As soon as she landed, he switched his grip to her wrists, grabbing one in each hand, and pinned her to the carpet.
Within a couple of seconds, the two plainclothes policemen also reacted and piled on top of the Russian.
Johnson pried the lipstick gun from Shevchenko’s tightly clenched right fist, while one of the police officers did likewise with the other gun, which she was holding in her left palm.
Johnson hauled himself up, leaving the officers to hold Shevchenko. He looked at Bernice, who was flat on her back, yelping and holding her left arm. Blood was streaming from a circular red hole right in the center of her wrist.
Jayne immediately dropped to the floor and gently lifted Bernice’s wrist, which had an exit wound on the other side. The round had
gone straight through, but Johnson knew it could have been a lot worse: he wasn’t sure if it was his dive or Bernice’s reactive raising of her arm that had saved her, but either way, the now disgraced CIA London station chief was extremely fortunate to still be alive.
He swiftly examined the gun. He recognized it as a single-shot device of the type that had occasionally been deployed by the Russians during the Cold War period. Vic had once showed him a photograph of a similar weapon that had been handed to the CIA by a defector. He assumed it had to be used at very close range, hence why Shevchenko had stepped closer to Bernice.
Johnson looked down at the sprawl of bodies at his feet. Jayne removed a handkerchief from her pocket, wrapped it around Bernice’s wrist, and pressed it tight to try and staunch the blood.
Vic, who was standing behind Johnson, let rip with a stream of curses and then slammed his fist down on the table. “Why the hell wasn’t that damned woman searched?”
“She was,” Johnson replied. “The surveillance team went through her bag and didn’t see a gun or a knife. But they obviously didn’t check her lipsticks. Let’s save that discussion for later, Vic.”
But Vic swore again, his face now a deep pink.
Commander Marsh’s two police colleagues, who had been holding Shevchenko down on the floor, hauled her upright.
“Take her to the other room,” Commander Marsh told them. “Then one of you radio for an ambulance, quickly.”
The two men frog-marched Shevchenko out the door. They didn’t handcuff her, but they might as well have—she had one officer immobilizing each arm. Johnson assumed that the protocols of diplomatic immunity did not allow cuffs to be used.
Over the next half hour came a rapid-fire round of emergency conference calls involving Nicklin-Donovan, his boss C at MI6, Marsh, the Foreign Office, and the Home Office, which was responsible for law and order.
They agreed that the civil servants and the politicians would now have to work out the process by which Shevchenko would be expelled in due course. This would almost certainly involve a statement by the British prime minister in the House of Commons. But for the time being, Shevchenko was to be returned to the Russian embassy. The Russian ambassador was being notified.
At the same time, it was agreed that a search for Bernice’s missing SRAC device would begin immediately, with a focus on the area along the Regent’s Canal bank and the streets leading to the apartment building where Johnson had shot her off her bike.
Despite loud squawks of protest from Shevchenko, Johnson accessed her phone by forcibly pushing her thumb onto the fingerprint recognition pad and then disabling its auto-lock facility. If that caused a diplomatic issue, it would have to be dealt with later.
Johnson handed the phone to an MI6 technical officer, who quietly downloaded the contents of the device onto a flash drive and sent a copy of the call register to GCHQ for analysis.
Meanwhile, four more officers from Marsh’s team had arrived, as had an ambulance.
Two paramedics treated Bernice’s bullet wound. The round had damaged ligaments in the wrist but had narrowly missed her bones. They stemmed the flow of blood and, after applying a swathe of bandages and giving her painkillers, placed her on a stretcher to take her to the ambulance, accompanied by three of Marsh’s men.
As they prepared to carry Bernice away, Johnson stepped up to her stretcher. “I will be coming to talk to you later, once you’ve been patched up,” he said. “But I just want to say that you have brought this on yourself. I suspect you have put American lives in danger, or worse, you’ve already caused deaths. All in return for a few bucks. Or if it’s because you were passed over for the role at Langley, then there was a reason for that, and I’m guessing it was because you’ve got character flaws that have now been stripped bare for everyone to see.”
Bernice looked up at him. “You’ve no proof of anything. You’re wrong.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Johnson stepped back and let the paramedics carry her away.
In the neighboring room, Vic was busy on a series of phone conversations with the director at Langley, Arthur Veltman, and the US ambassador at Grosvenor Square, Louise Bingham. Both were deeply shocked and angry but agreed that they would prime diplomats to begin the necessary processes to deal with Bernice once the medical experts had treated her.
It wasn’t quite the sequence of events that Johnson had envisaged.
Clearly the prospect of Bernice revealing in minute detail in a United States federal court how she had been recruited and run by Shevchenko had been unthinkable for the Russian, Johnson assumed. There was a high probability that, under questioning, far too many secrets would be given away about technology, processes, methods, and perhaps even the identities of others in the SVR’s espionage food chain.
Hence the assassination attempt.
But despite Bernice’s injury, he expected the ultimate outcome to be similar. She would end up being dispatched back to Washington, DC, to face trial under the Espionage Act in a US federal court of law, followed by a very lengthy spell in prison.
Johnson inwardly shook his head.
Marsh told his two colleagues to take Shevchenko down to the unmarked police car waiting outside the MI6 offices. The two men hoisted Shevchenko out of her chair, holding her so tightly that her feet were hardly touching the ground.
Johnson took a step toward Shevchenko. He needed to have a last word before she disappeared. “You are just as inhuman as your boyfriend Severinov—and mark my words, I am going to nail both of you,” Johnson said.
He hoped it didn’t sound like an empty threat, because right then, he had no idea how he was going to make it reality. He also knew he should tone it down and keep the conversation professional, but now his emotions were getting the better of him.
“You can run back to Moscow,” Johnson continued, “but you can’t hide. Maybe your president won’t like it when there is a wave of news coverage across the world about how his former KGB colleagues assisted in the bombing of La Belle.”
All this seemed to strike a raw nerve. Shevchenko’s face flushed red, then went a slight shade of purple. “Ublyudok,” she hissed. “You bastard. The targets in Berlin were American—and they deserved it. You will now be my target, and you will be Yuri’s target too.”
“At least you admit what you did, then,” Jayne said. “That’s a step forward.”
Shevchenko turned her head to look at Jayne, then back to Johnson. “Your girlfriend will also be my target.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
London
Johnson woke to find Jayne’s hand resting on his chest, rising and falling gently in time with his breathing. He turned his head. She was asleep, her dark hair tousled and her lips slightly parted.
He grinned to himself. This was strange yet not strange. He had very occasionally stayed at her apartment over the past three years when his work brought him to London, but always in her spare room, with its sunny yellow bedspread and modest furnishings.
Now, waking here, it felt like revisiting an old favorite place—knowing it and yet rediscovering new things about it at the same time.
Jayne’s body hadn’t changed all that much, as far as he remembered. She was still slim and still had that lithe, catlike way of moving that had attracted him in the first place. There was no doubt that, despite his attempts to run and keep fit, he had gained more pounds in the wrong places than she had.
After they had kissed in Hyde Park, it seemed inevitable that this would happen, that they would end up in bed together at some point. Johnson thought it probably would have happened sooner if they hadn’t been working so late and so hard through the past few long, exhausting days.
But with Bernice now on her way to jail and Shevchenko being expelled from the UK, their task was largely complete. When they had arrived back at Jayne’s apartment the previous evening, they had worked their way through a bottle and a half of red Chât
eauneuf-du-Pape and Chinese takeout. Afterward they had kissed again on the sofa.
After a while, Jayne got up, saying she needed a shower, and disappeared into her bathroom, while Johnson poured himself another glass and sent both his children a text message to let them know he would be home soon.
Twenty minutes later, he had heard the squeak of Jayne’s bedroom door opening. He had looked up to see her leaning against the wall, arms folded, legs crossed, wearing a skimpy nightgown that left little to the imagination.
“I was wondering if you’d like to join me?” Jayne had asked.
And he had.
Now the morning sunlight was glinting in through a small gap in the wooden venetian blinds that covered her bedroom window as the distant, ever-present hum of London’s traffic sounded in the background.
It seemed that everything had changed. Maybe it had.
At the back of his mind, he still had worries. He was unsure about the practicalities of working professionally with Jayne while also being intimate with her. There was also the distance: he had deep roots in Portland, three and a half thousand miles away from this apartment, where he had two teenage children to look after. What would his kids make of it? They were still his priority and would be until they were old enough to look after themselves.
Somehow, though, he had felt this was the right thing to do, just as he had felt it was right to expand his business from small-town investigations to international war crimes investigations. He had not looked back.
It remained to be seen whether this would be a similar positive change. Deep down inside, he hoped so.
Jayne’s hand moved on his chest, and he felt her stir, edging closer to him, her knee grazing his thigh beneath the duvet. She leaned over and kissed him, then raised herself up and smiled.
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