by Matthew Dunn
He knew that the CIA officers were telling him the truth when they said that he’d become the Agency’s top Israeli agent. And he was sure that his work for the officers had done wonders for their careers. It came as no surprise to them when he said that Mossad was likely to post him back to Israel unless he could convince his masters that he’d recruited a U.S. spy. They said they’d play the role of that spy and would give him U.S. secrets that should placate his employer. Everything they gave him was low-level crap that Mossad already knew. He played along with that for a while but one day said that he needed much more or Mossad was going to order him to find a better spy. He told them that he needed the identity of a Russian SVR officer who was on the Agency’s books. This clearly unsettled them, but a day later they met and supplied him with the name of Lenka Yevtushenko. They said they’d set up an introduction to the Russian and that in return he’d better give them a whole lot more names and details of Israeli operations on American soil.
He was sure that the four CIA officers had given him the name of the SVR officer without authorization to do so.
He gave Yevtushenko’s details to Mr. Schreiber, who approached the Russian and said that he had to steal the code or else Mr. Schreiber would tell the SVR that he was a CIA spy. Yevtushenko was petrified and said that his ability to travel was tightly restricted but that he would do the theft if Mr. Schreiber could help him get out of Russia. Mr. Schreiber agreed and told him that he was to use a highly effective Polish exfiltration route, but under no circumstances was he to go anywhere near the Polish embassy in Moscow as it would be under surveillance. He gave him precise instructions. Yevtushenko walked into the small Polish consulate in Saint Petersburg, said that he needed to speak in strict confidence to someone in the consulate who was familiar with intelligence matters, and was told that there was no one like that there but that he should liaise with their embassy in Moscow where there were professionals who could help him. He said he had to escape to Poland with a secret, that he couldn’t go anywhere near the Moscow embassy, that time was running out. Some urgent calls were made to the embassy; everything was arranged for him. That afternoon, he stole half of the military grid reference from the SVR vaults and used the Polish exfiltration route to enter Gdansk.
At the same time, Simon and his family flew to Europe, having no further use for the CIA.
Mr. Schreiber had anticipated the possibility that Yevtushenko would be pursued by the SVR and had asked Simon to arrange for a deniable team of private contractors to confront not only the Polish ABW and AW officers who’d be waiting for the SVR defector in Gdansk, but also any Russians. Mr. Schreiber also put in place a team of his own men to take possession of Yevtushenko and the code.
Simon lifted the dead-letter box out of the soil, held it in front of him, smiled, and muttered, “All that effort to find you.”
He opened the box, placed a folded piece of paper inside it, sealed the container, and returned it to the hole. After covering it with soil, he stood and looked at the Black Forest’s magnificent vista. Tomorrow, Kronos would be standing on this spot.
Later that day, Kronos would meet Mr. Schreiber, who would give him the instruction to kill the treacherous bastard who was due to testify under oath in two weeks’ time.
Men had ordered Mr. Schreiber to stop that from happening.
Because nobody could ever learn the secret behind Slingshot.
Twenty-Six
Betty Mayne sat at the kitchen table, watching Sarah attempt to peel and slice two cloves of garlic. It had taken Alfie two days to succeed in getting Sarah to accompany him to the nearest town to buy groceries. Today she’d reluctantly agreed, largely because her husband James had jokingly told her that if she didn’t go he could finally tell all their friends that he’d become the dominant partner in their relationship. It was now evening, the blue sky darkening into dusk, and Alfie was making his usual rounds of the hunting lodge’s grounds, setting his traps, watching and listening, having a smoke in the icy, fresh Highlands air, checking for anything that looked unusual, always keeping one hand close to his pistol.
Betty was wearing a thick tweed jacket, skirt, and hiking boots—clothes she’d worn to take James on a hike around the mountainous estate earlier in the day. James had cursed and wheezed and grumbled for most of the walk, but as they’d strolled alongside the loch toward the lodge one hour ago he told Betty that he’d had the best day he could remember, had decided that London life was no longer for him, recited the fauna and flora they’d seen on their route, and said that he was very worried about his wife.
He was now preparing a fire, and probably pouring himself a slug of single malt.
“Would you like me to help you, my dear?” Betty watched Sarah reach for shallots.
“You could get me a glass of wine.” Sarah’s hand shook as she held the knife. “Join me in one?”
“Not when I’m working.” Betty stood, poured a glass of Shiraz, and handed Sarah the glass. “What are you cooking?”
“I don’t know . . . yet.”
“Keep it simple.”
“Simple isn’t good enough. I’m being judged by the men.”
“Actually, you’re being judged by me. The men will eat anything. They just want to see you moving.”
Sarah held the knife still. “I know.”
“What else do you know?”
“More than you!”
“I’m sure you do, my dear.” Betty moved alongside her. “Maybe just put the chicken on top of what you’ve already chopped. Onions, garlic, celery, herbs. Bit of wine. Keep it simple. Blimey, Alfie will think he’s in heaven.”
“You’re patronizing me.”
“I’m talking to you.” Betty put her hand on top of Sarah’s knife-holding hand. “Shall we slice some potatoes, sauté them first, then add them to the mix?”
Sarah said between gritted teeth, “I don’t normally play the domestic housewife.”
Betty patted her hand. “Then what do you do?”
“I arbitrate corporate litigation. You wouldn’t understand.”
Betty nodded. “I wouldn’t.”
“Playing dumb?” Sarah grabbed the chicken and put it on top of the vegetables.
“Just being myself, my dear.” Betty looked at Sarah, saw that her ordinarily beautiful face was greasy and swollen, full of anxiety, tortured. She picked up Sarah’s glass of wine, took a sip, smiled, and placed the glass next to Sarah’s fingers. “Rules are much more fun when they’re broken.”
“You’re not breaking any rules. You know exactly what you’re doing.”
“Perhaps, but you wouldn’t understand that, my dear.”
“I . . .”
“I, what?”
Sarah said nothing.
Betty grabbed six potatoes, took the knife from Sarah, and sliced the potatoes into quarters. “When he came back from the Legion, he would barely speak at first. Four of us looked after him, the same four who helped you leave your home. We washed his clothes, ironed them, fed him, and made him attend the lectures for his degree at Cambridge. It was hard. He’d become someone he didn’t like.”
“Will?”
Betty placed the potato wedges into a pan and began frying them on the stovetop. “We were ordered to do it. The logistical help we gave him wasn’t really necessary; I’d never met anyone so self-sufficient. What was necessary was that he needed to be integrated into society.”
“Ordered by whom?”
“Will thought we were friends of your father before he was killed. We let him believe that. The truth was different.”
Patrick and Alistair had been the ones who’d instructed the team.
“Why are you telling me this?” Tears ran down Sarah’s face as she put the chicken in the oven.
“Because you need to realize how selfish you are.” Betty tossed the potatoes in oil.
; The comment shocked Sarah. “I’m not selfish. I just don’t know what he does!”
Betty continued cooking. “When he wasn’t studying, we’d spend time with him doing things. The four of us had a rule that none of us would talk about our prior military service, that it was essential we talk about normal life. We told him how to open a bank account, how to join the local library, how to eat in a restaurant.” She drained the oil from the potatoes. “And how to cook. In the evenings, we’d play board games with him. He became rather good at Monopoly”—she smiled—“though he did try to cheat sometimes by stealing Monopoly money and hiding it under his side of the board.”
Sarah wiped tears away and took a sip of wine. “He was like that when we were kids. Took me years to realize that he’d marked the cards we were playing with.”
Betty chuckled. “Seems he hasn’t changed.” Opening the oven door, she sprinkled the potato wedges around the chicken. “After two weeks, I told him that we were leaving. He didn’t want us to go, said that he liked us being around. I replied that he needed to start socializing with other students. So we left.” Betty leaned against the work surface, staring at nothing. “Since then, I’ve often wondered if we should have stayed a bit longer.”
“Maybe you should have done!” Sarah put her wine down. “Perhaps it would have stopped him getting involved in stuff that”—she swept an arm through the air—“screws up other people’s lives.”
Betty frowned and turned toward Sarah. “What do you think he does for a living?”
“I don’t know. But I suspect that whatever it is, it’s illegal.”
“You think he’s a criminal?”
Sarah nodded.
Betty considered this. “I suppose he is.”
Sarah muttered, “I thought so!”
Betty knew that Will would be furious with her for what she was about to say. “After all, spying is a crime in most countries.”
Sarah looked incredulous. “He’s a spy? For whom?”
“For us, silly. Britain.” Already, she regretted saying anything, though part of her knew it was the right thing to do. “He’s an MI6 officer, has been since he graduated from university.”
“Why . . . why didn’t he tell me?”
“Because he’s not allowed to. The Service uses him on very specific projects. There are only a few people in MI6 who know he’s an officer.” She wondered if she should stop talking. “They singled him out and put him on a very tough training course. Only him. Despite the odds against it, he passed, and for the last eight years he’s been deployed almost continuously.” She hesitated. “The other reason I suspect he didn’t tell you is because you wouldn’t let him do so.”
The hostility was back in Sarah’s face. “No. All the good you did for him after he left the Legion was undone. They made him become the person he didn’t want to be. Probably much worse.”
Betty said more to herself, “I don’t think so.” She frowned. “No . . . I don’t think so, at all.” She looked at Sarah. “There’s no doubt he’s exceptionally good at what he does. He’s driven by guilt that he couldn’t save your mother, and has been trying to make up for that by putting himself at great risk to protect others. But he knows there’s another world out there. During the two weeks we spent with him, we gave him the tools to live within that world.”
“Maybe, but he still chooses to do what he does.”
Betty nodded. “He won’t quit while there’s a job to be done. But he’s working hard to have a different side to his life. You can’t see that because you’ve made no effort to get to know him during the last few years.”
“Of course not! He’s a dangerous man.”
“Not to you. You’re the only family he has left.”
“I saw what he’s capable of.”
Betty was silent.
Fresh tears ran down Sarah’s face. “The gang of criminals came in; they bound my mother with tape, some of it over her mouth; one of them threw me to the floor and put a boot on my head; then Will came in the room. He was . . . was only a boy.”
“He was seventeen.”
Sarah shook her head. “Only a boy, to me. They sent him out of the room to fetch cash. My mother died. He came back in holding a knife. I looked at him, he looked at me. The boy was gone. And he killed them.”
“How do you think that made him feel?”
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen such explosive violence come from someone. Probably it made him realize how good he was at it.”
“That’s not what I meant. How do you think it made him feel, seeing you look at him with an expression that suggested you no longer knew him?”
Sarah didn’t respond.
“He’s been living with that ever since.” Betty sighed. “And he’s been trying to get you to understand that the boy you once knew is still inside him.” Her tone became stern. “But you made a judgment about him, wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t reply to his letters, wouldn’t do anything that could unbalance your perfect self-centered world. And as a result, he’s felt totally disconnected from people around him because he’s believed that if you can’t see the good in him, then others must feel the same.”
“He brings danger into people’s lives!”
“No, he doesn’t!”
A split second after Betty had uttered the words, a high-velocity round smashed through a window and struck the wall inches from Sarah’s head.
Sarah screamed.
Betty shouted, “Get down!”
Alfie burst into the room, his handgun held high. “Direction of shot?”
Betty crouched by the kitchen table. “West, from one of the mountains.”
Alfie moved to Sarah, put a hand on the back of her head, and pushed her roughly to the ground. “Stay down.”
James called out in a terrified voice, “What’s happening?”
“Get behind cover and stay there until I tell you to move!” Alfie stared at the broken window, waiting.
Nothing happened.
They stayed like this for twenty minutes, Sarah sobbing, Betty and Alfie motionless as they gripped their guns.
Alfie narrowed his eyes. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”
The sniper got onto one knee on the mountainside and started stripping down his weapon. The man next to him continued staring through his binoculars toward the house. A third man was on his cell phone confirming to Kurt Schreiber that they had sufficiently unsettled the property’s occupants to get them to move locations.
Just as Mr. Schreiber had wanted.
Because he couldn’t allow Sarah’s guardians to become too familiar with their surroundings and therefore further refine their security protocols.
They watched Alfie sprint to the car, start the engine, and stand next to the vehicle while training his handgun toward the darkness ahead. Betty rushed toward the vehicle, gripping Sarah and James. Five seconds later the car was speeding off down the track.
That didn’t matter.
The rest of the surveillance team were all waiting in vehicles, ready to tail them to their next location.
And Mr. Schreiber had promised his men that if he gave the order to kill their target, it would happen there.
Twenty-Seven
Kurt Schreiber glanced at Simon Rübner. “You’ve performed impeccably. After tonight, take a couple of weeks off.”
“What about your other projects?”
“They’re all in hand.”
Rübner sighed. “I’m not going to say no. I could do with a rest.”
“You’re not going to say anything, and you’ll do what you’re told.” Schreiber checked his watch. “Report back to me in fourteen days. I’ll put you in charge of the Budapest initiative. It’s time the prime minister knew who he was dealing with, and I want you to personally hand him the photographs while giving him a s
trongly worded verbal message.”
“Certainly, Mr. Schreiber.” He smiled, though he felt uneasy. “Good luck . . . tonight.”
“Luck?” Schreiber laughed.
The old man opened the car door and stepped onto a cobbled street in the Bavarian capital of Munich. It was late evening, and a fine drizzle was descending over the dimly lit old town. Wearing a thick overcoat, suit, dark felt fedora hat, and rimless glasses, and carrying a stick to aide his journey, he walked into the Karlsplatz—a large square next to the Karlstor, which between the fourteenth century and 1791 was one of the main gates in the city wall. Now, its fountain had been transformed into a beautifully illuminated ice skating rink; adults and children were laughing and calling out to each other as they glided over it. Leaving the square, he walked alongside various streets, some that had remained unchanged since well before Adolf Hitler’s creation of the Nazi Party in the city and others that had been rebuilt after the allies crippled Munich with bombs. When Schreiber was in the Stasi, the city had been part of West Germany—enemy territory. But he’d spent more time in places like this than he had in East Berlin, and knew every inch of the city.
He stopped opposite Michaelskirche, the sixteenth-century Jesuit church that was the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps. It was shut for the night. Over its closed doors was a gleaming bronze sculpture of Archangel Michael fighting a demon in human form.
His heart beat fast as he approached the entrance.
The plaza around him was deserted of people.
This was the moment.
He stood within twelve feet of the magnificent church’s entrance and looked at the shadows within it. “Schreiber, looking for Kronos.”
In the doorway, he saw a man’s large boots.
“Colonel Schreiber. I arranged this meeting.”
The man said nothing.
“You got my message. I’m here, as arranged.”
Silence.
“Speak! I have little time.”
Kronos stepped forward.
The church’s lights shone down over his face. “I could have killed you ten times since exiting the Israeli’s car and coming here. I’ll speak when I wish to and your time is of no relevance to me. Where are the others?”