Moscow Sting

by Alex Dryden

  “Siloviki?” Lewis the private secretary interrupted.

  “Men of power,” Adrian said. “In Russian,” he added caustically.

  “So . . . but a call from President Medvedev would rather highlight that, wouldn’t it?” Lewis leaped into the gap he’d been waiting nearly an hour to fill. “It would draw attention to the Kremlin’s unhealthy—covert interest, you called it—in Semyonovich. Surely they wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “The Kremlin,” Adrian said carefully, though without disguising his distaste at being even on the same planet as Lewis, “. . . the Kremlin doesn’t care what the world thinks. In fact, it has taken a delight in recent years in demonstrating openly that it couldn’t give a shit. You may have noticed that it invaded Georgia last month. And since then it’s not taken a blind bit of notice what the rest of the world says or thinks.”

  “Diplomatic channels are working with the Russians on that,” Lewis said confidently. “The EU—”

  “But they haven’t got anywhere, have they?” Adrian interrupted with icy patience. “That’s the point.”

  “This is another matter,” Teddy broke in smoothly. He knew from old that Adrian was spoiling for a fight. “Who would want Semyonovich dead?” he asked baldly.

  “There’s a long list.” Adrian shrugged. “Some individual, or clan, from the Kremlin itself, perhaps. The internecine power struggles in the Kremlin don’t exactly represent one voice. Then there’s a string of businessmen whose toes and other vital extremities Semyonovich has crushed over the years; there are Chechen bandits and other ne’er-do-wells with a grudge. Not to mention the owner of Manchester United,” he added facetiously.

  “Why the Kremlin? Why would they murder one of their own? If he looked after their cash?” Lewis demanded.

  “As I tried to explain, the Kremlin isn’t one entity, one single interest. It’s a snake’s nest of competing interests, with Putin prefering to keep it that way. Divide and rule, it’s called. That’s why Medvedev, the nominal president, is just a Putin clone, running the place on behalf of Putin’s clan, which happens, at this moment, to be in the ascendant. We don’t know why anyone in the Kremlin might want Semyonovich dead, but certain interests there, which want to damage Putin’s clan, might well use the murder of Semyonovich as a lever to exert their power.”

  Adrian relaxed into his exposition.

  “Alternatively, maybe Semyonovich had outlived his usefulness with his actual supporters there, Putin included. Maybe he’d got too big for his boots. Maybe he was bucking orders from Moscow. Maybe it’s pour encourager les autres. There’s a lot of possibilities. We don’t know. And that’s just the possible Kremlin involvement. There’s a bloody long list of people with motive outside the Kremlin, that’s what we do know.”

  “Here in Britain?” Lewis demanded.

  “Everywhere,” Adrian said.

  “And the repercussions,” Teddy said, “from Moscow—assuming he was still on the inside over there?”

  “They’ll be very angry indeed,” Adrian acknowledged. “They’ll look for someone to blame. They’ll reel off a whole lot of guff about ‘lawless Britain.’ The usual hypocritical crap. Who knows, they might even try to blame us.”

  “Us?” Lewis repeated.

  “The Kremlin will see what damage it can cause, and then try to cause it,” Adrian replied.

  “If we assume for a second that it’s not a Kremlin hit, what’s their reaction?” Parkinson said.

  “If it’s not a Kremlin hit, I should think it will worry them a great deal,” Adrian said, suddenly thinking about this aspect for the first time. Yes, it was, in its way, a momentous murder. It could have very far-reaching implications. “Anatoly Semyonovich had an extremely complex business empire,” he continued. “It has a real reach. It’s very important to the Kremlin’s foreign economic policy. And the way the Russians do things, Semyonovich would be the only figure who really knew what was going on inside it. It’s not like a Western business model, where the head drops off—in this case Semyonovich’s—and things carry on as before. In the West, there’d be plenty of people, competent boards of directors and so on, who know exactly what the company consists of. If the boss drops off his perch, it all goes on more or less uninterrupted. But that’s not the Russian way. The Russians have an imperial attitude to business, with a single godhead who is all-seeing, all-knowing.”

  He looked up at Teddy. “There’ll be chaos, I should think. The stock prices of his companies are going to take a real hit. He, personally, was very much identified with the success or otherwise of his assets. The value of Semyonovich Inc. will plummet when the markets open tomorrow, you’ll see. And that will directly harm the Kremlin.”

  Adrian looked around the room, warming now to this theme.

  “But that’s just for starters,” he said. “We don’t know exactly what secret partnerships are woven into Semyonovich’s business empire—outside the stuff on his company nameplates, I mean. What else was he doing for his masters in Russia? We think he may have been running arms on the Kremlin’s behalf to Caucasian separatists, for example. Disrupting little pro-West republics like Georgia. Maybe he was funding East European, pro-Kremlin opposition groups? Particularly in Ukraine. That’s a possibility. But we’ll find out, you can be sure of that.”

  “There’ll be a lot of collateral damage,” Teddy said.

  “That’s about it,” Adrian agreed. “Semyonovich was a key figure for the Kremlin. He was in many ways a bellwether for their commercial expansion in the West. We’ll need to watch the Kremlin’s reaction in the coming weeks, as well as seeing what unravels elsewhere from Semyonovich’s death.”

  After the meeting had broken up, Teddy Parkinson unnecessarily repeated his offer to Adrian to come for lunch at his country home in Surrey, as if he’d just thought it up.

  Never mind the assassination of Semyonovich, Adrian was caressing the idea of an assassination of his own, and he needed Parkinson’s support. With the Russian refusal to extradite Bykov, there were no other options.

  He thought of the note addressed to him and pinned to Finn’s dead body outside the embassy in Berlin two years before.

  “Honour him in death,” it had ended. No matter how things had been left with Finn before he met his end, the SIS wasn’t going to let him down after it. Adrian would see that he got his revenge.

  Chapter 5

  LOGAN WALKED SLOWLY BETWEEN the rows of plastic reclining chairs planted twenty deep along the beach. They were all either occupied or claimed by towels, magazines, half-empty bottles of wine, picnic baskets—all the detritus of the summer tourists.

  He’d taken a taxi from the industrial capital Podgorica, after his connection there from Belgrade and Marseille, down along Montenegro’s Adriatic coastline.

  Halfway to his destination, he’d paid off the taxi and taken a bus for the remaining twenty-five miles or so. It made slow progress along a winding road that traced the rocky shore broken with bays of fine curved beaches and dotted with islands where yachts were moored—some the second or even third vessel belonging to the Russian industrial barons.

  It was ten years since he’d last made this journey. The country was very different now from the time he’d been stationed in the Balkans. Prosperity had arrived in Montenegro, in the form of Russian money. Billions of Russian dollars had first sucked up the local production enterprises of any value to the Kremlin, then turned to tourist development.

  While the West was aiding the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, of which the tiny state of Montenegro was part, and notionally shoving it towards democracy, it was Russia that had then stepped in, first with its state-backed industrial giants who’d taken over the profitable parts of Montenegro’s industry, and then with its real estate developers who bought most of the country’s two-hundred-mile coastline.

  The Kremlin was advancing into western Europe through the back door of the Balkans, its historic hunger for warm-water ports, backed with its huge new wea
lth, bringing it closer than it had ever managed under communism. A fledgling new country like Montenegro, barely able to fly, had been swiftly gobbled up by Russian cash.

  Logan was looking away from the sea now, up at the cafés along the waterfront. He finally found the one he was looking for. It was called Slovenskja, named for the Slovenians who had made this little medieval Montenegrin town a popular resort in the 1920s.

  It was a Sunday, and all the locals had joined the tourists on the beach to create one complex, almost geometric puzzle of oiled, heaving, semi-naked humanity, beneath which “one of the world’s ten most beautiful beaches” was invisible.

  That it was a Sunday was of some importance to Logan. The man he was to contact would be stretched for backup. The day after he’d developed the photographs in Marseille, Logan was going to make the third and final delivery of the woman’s picture to the most dangerous and unpredictable of his freelance connections.

  Stefan Stavroisky, SVR chief in Montenegro and protégé of Putin’s from the days when he was deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, had been stationed in Belgrade during the Serbian war. And that’s where Logan had originally made contact with him. In the thaw between the West and Russia, the KGB and the CIA had fraternised, at least on a personal level. When Boris Yeltsin was Russia’s president, both sides had been keen that the Balkan wars didn’t develop into an American confrontation with Russia.

  Logan had known Stavroisky well back then, in the late 1990s. NATO forces were pressurising the Serbs at the end of the war, and Yeltsin’s Russia made protests on the Serbs’ behalf that weren’t backed up by any serious threat of Russian military involvement. But the war had remained a deeply humiliating snub for Russia, and later, under Putin, the resentment it caused had aided Putin’s call to nationalism—the protection of fellow Slavs—when he’d become president in 2000.

  Logan and Stavroisky had worked, sometimes together, sometimes in opposition, during those times. There had been some cooperation between the KGB and the CIA, both to limit the damage and to pursue a closer relationship after the war ended. When NATO had accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, Stavroisky was one of those who had silently worked to calm the situation, and the Americans had been grudgingly grateful.

  Stavroisky was Logan’s age and had attached himself to Putin’s cause early on in Putin’s rise to power. He’d made the right choice, and had swiftly advanced through the ranks of Russia’s foreign service.

  Stavroisky was also meticulous in the cause of his own advancement. Like Putin, he was a fitness fanatic and took care to enjoy the sports Putin enjoyed. He was a keen fisherman and a judo black belt. He had played for the KGB’s volleyball team, Logan remembered.

  “What’s the transfer market like?” Logan had joked to him one evening over a drink. But Stavroisky drew the line at jokes about the KGB.

  Logan and Stavroisky had struck up a form of friendship, had met on maybe a dozen occasions, drunk together, whored together, and until Logan’s recall and dismissal, it might have seemed they were even working together during those times.

  Now, Logan heard, there was no fraternisation between the CIA and the KGB anywhere, let alone here. The Balkans were a new frontline of sorts. It had all reverted to the status quo ante 1989.

  It being a Sunday, Logan figured that Stavroisky would have fewer resources to call on; August weekends would draw out significant numbers of his operatives to the beach, to yachts, to bars and restaurants, their mobile phones out of range or quietly switched off to evade his summons.

  And he had given Stavroisky just an hour and a half’s warning to be at the café, against the Russian’s protests that it wasn’t possible to get there in time.

  “I have something with me that will make your masters very happy,” Logan had told him. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Stefan,” he’d said. “Promotion for you, maybe one of your Russian awards, certainly money,” he’d said. “Certainly, lots and lots of money for you.”

  “Tell me on the phone,” Stavroisky had told him. “I’m busy.”

  “It’s a photograph,” Logan had said. “Somebody your side wants very badly. I’ll need payment within twenty-four hours. Be there by four, at the café Slovenskja, or I’ll take it elsewhere.”

  The Russian would know that by “elsewhere” he meant the Americans, or maybe a European intelligence service, and maybe guess that Logan would do that anyway. Speed was essential.

  “I can’t make it in that time,” Stavroisky protested. “I’m over sixty miles away.”

  “You’re the head of the SVR in Montenegro, Stefan,” Logan replied. “If anyone can make it, you can.”

  Logan decided he’d give Stavroisky until four thirty anyway.

  “And make sure you’re alone, Stefan,” he’d added. “I’ll be watching. Any sign of company, you can forget it.”

  Now, Logan looked away from the café and out to sea. Even with depleted Sunday resources, he knew that Stavroisky would not come alone if he could avoid it. He knew, fairly certainly anyway, that the SVR chief’s backup would come from the sea, where it was less easy to detect a presence. There were dozens of small boats coming in and out, to and from the beach. Anyone in them could be at the café in a few minutes, if Stavroisky gave the signal.

  Logan took out the photograph, wrapped up in its waterproof plastic cover, from inside his jacket and rolled it into a tube, tying it finally with a rubber band. Then he found a wastebin, behind a toilet cubicle and out of sight. It was thirty or forty yards from the Slovenskja. He thrust the rolled package deep inside the bin until he felt the bottom underneath the cans and paper cups that were overflowing from its upper edges.

  Satisfied it was safely concealed, he walked up the beach towards the town. Just behind the beach, he turned away from the town and climbed past the medieval houses up towards a cliff, where there was another café, with a telescope for tourists.

  But rather than the ancient monastery on the island in the bay, or simply out over the placid turquoise sea, the telescope also offered him a fine view of the Slovenskja café and the surrounding area. He settled in for the wait.

  At 4:48, he saw Stavroisky approach the café in too much of a hurry for an experienced operative.

  Stefan Stavroisky was a tall, fit man with thick black hair cut short. He had the manicured look and the consciously honed figure of a vain man suddenly aware that his age was beginning to tell. Logan watched him closely. The Russian was wearing a grey suit, the jacket slung over his shoulder, and black leather shoes. He looked incongruous—and very visible—next to the semi-naked bodies on the beach.

  Through the magnification of the telescope, Logan saw that the Russian was in an agitated state. Swivelling the telescope, he studied the bay. There were too many boats to be certain, but he detected three or four that seemed to be approaching in time with Stavroisky. It could be any one of them—or none at all.

  But the SVR chief had at least arrived at the café alone. Logan had watched him from the moment his BMW drew up by the café, and he’d parked in a handicapped space. No other cars seemed to be trailing him. If Stavroisky had only just managed to get here himself, then there was a good chance he would have no backup—at least for a while.

  Logan dialled the number and watched Stavroisky open his hand and flick open the cell phone clenched inside it. “Where the hell are you, Logan?” the Russian demanded.

  “Leave the café. Walk right, out of the entrance on the sea side, along the beach for around thirty-five yards. There’s a blue-and-yellow sun awning. Behind that there’s a toilet. And behind that there’s a wastebin. At the bottom of the bin you’ll find a black plastic waterproof package. You’ll need to dig a bit. It’s dirty work, Stefan.”

  “Where are you?” But the line had gone dead.

  Logan watched Stavroisky looking around the beach, then up into the town and finally out to the water and the sea. He looked angry. But then he stepped out and began to walk in the d
irection Logan had indicated, an irritable figure whose office attire drew one or two catcalls from the sun worshippers.

  Logan saw him stop at the blue-and-yellow awning and then go to the right, as if to the cubicle, but he disappeared behind it at the last minute. He was out of a sight for a minute or so, but reemerged holding the plastic package. He didn’t look up, and Logan took that as a sign that he wasn’t making contact with anybody.

  Then, from the corner of his vision, Logan saw a black van moving slowly along the beachfront. It looked too commercial to have any business in the town on a Sunday, and it was moving too slowly for his liking.

  He observed it for a whole minute. It was not stopping, either outside the Slovenskja or anywhere else, just trawling along as if watching or waiting for an instruction or—more likely—trying to pinpoint his cell phone transmission.

  At that moment, his phone rang and he swivelled the telescope back to the café. There was Stavroisky, apparently calling for a drink and with his phone to his ear. He carried the package carelessly in his hand, unopened.

  “The photograph is of a woman,” Logan said. “A KGB colonel. If you want to know where she is, I’ll need the money deposited before Tuesday morning.”

  Then Logan switched off the phone, watching the screen die. Then he tossed it in the palm of his hand a couple of times and finally lobbed it over the cliff and watched it fall onto the rocks below.

  He returned to the telescope. He’d given Stavroisky instructions for payment, inside the packet with the photograph. But the photograph was useless without the location. There was no room for discussion. Either Stavroisky paid within forty-eight hours, and received the location of the woman, or he didn’t.

  Logan walked swiftly down the steep path from the promontory and looked back down at the black van a quarter of a mile away. It had stopped now at the edge of the road, roughly in the middle of the beach. There was an antenna rising from the centre of the van now—vainly trying, he assumed, to pick up his signal. But the van had arrived too late.