by A P Bateman
***
Caroline Darby rode with the sergeant from Special Branch. She kept her window rolled down, avoiding the smoke from another of his cigarettes. She didn’t complain. She would always be the outsider; she didn’t want to create more problems. Special Branch and the Security Service had to work together daily.
The man was forty-five, balding and had gained a beer gut since she had last seen him. She did not know him well, but he had been on arrests similar to this in the past. He was a good officer, but aging fast. She knew he drank a lot after each shift, and he was smoking incessantly. He was old school too and she had seen him punch first and ask questions later. She doubted he would make retirement age smoothly.
“Your watchers are facing us in a Vauxhall, ours are in a van and we have eyes on across the street in an empty house.”
“Fast work,” Caroline said.
“It’s up for lease, we established it’s empty and borrowed it for the day,” the officer said. He was Welsh, heavily accented. He smiled at her and flicked his cigarette butt out of the window. “Skeleton key entry, nobody will ever know.”
“Nice.”
“So how are we playing it?”
Caroline had been ordered to take the lead. The target was an MI5 employee and she was there to keep control of the situation. If the target protested about an internal interview, then Special Branch would make the arrest. Personally she hoped it could stay informal. She could bring him back to headquarters without him lawyering up. Forester had mused that this would be the preferred option. “Stay back, we’ll keep surveillance in place. See how it pans out, I’ll call you over if I decide to make the arrest. Then I’ll need you to transport both of us to the yard.” New Scotland Yard Anti-Terrorist Department was where these sort of arrests were processed and the suspects held.
“Righty-ho,” he said. He brought the car into a double space near the Special Branch van.
Caroline noted he left plenty of space in front of the car and turned the wheels outwards, almost at full lock. It shaved seconds off a fast getaway. The man looked like he was going to seed, but he was still sharp enough.
***
The dark-skinned woman had taken refuge in a coffee shop on Beak Street. She had ordered a vanilla Espresso. She sipped the strong caffeine hit and took out her smartphone. She dialled the number from memory. Her phone held no numbers in its phonebook. She deleted all texts and call history after each call. Like she had been taught.
“Yes.”
“General, it’s Alesha.”
“Yes.”
“I went to meet him. There is a problem,” she hesitated. “He is under surveillance.”
“Whose?”
“His own, I think.”
“Good. We are done with him.”
“What shall I do?”
“Where are you?”
“Coffee Grinds, a Starbucks style place on Beak Street.”
“All right. I am sending you someone. Eliminate him.”
“But… he is under surveillance.”
“It is time to step things up. Eliminate them also. We will send them a message.”
Alesha felt the blood run to her loins. She crossed her legs - excitement, anticipation threatening to overwhelm her. She glanced at the barista behind the counter but he was working on an order. She leaned forwards. “How do you want it done?” she whispered, trembling with excitement, urging him to go into detail.
“Brutally…” The line went dead.
Alesha pressed the call end icon and tossed the phone into her open handbag. She cursed loudly. He knew what it did to her, knew how she enjoyed the thought of it. It was purely sexual, a desire. She loved to kill, loved the sensation of all-empowering domination. To kill someone begging for their life was her ultimate fantasy. She could orgasm to the thought of it, the discussion of it. She had fulfilled this fantasy. The night she had killed the man who had turned her into a drug addict and sex slave on the Black Sea coast. Ridden him to climax and plunged a knife deep into his neck, watching him choke and drown in his own blood as she had writhed and shuddered in dizzying heights of pleasure.
***
Jeremy Hoist was forty and single. He was pale and out of shape. He had a shock of ginger hair which could not be styled and was now starting to recede. His teeth were crooked and his chin was weak. He once tried to grow a goatee to hide the weak chin, but this had grown through pinkish and wispy. He had shaved it off, creating office banter and more ridicule. Needless to say, Hoist was not a player in the dating game. He had never had a girlfriend. Not a proper one at least. He was often in the friend zone, a shoulder to cry on and occasionally, usually after lots of alcohol, he had managed a one-night stand. These dalliances always ended in disaster, with the friend zone closed also. His circle of friends had diminished, many getting married or into serious relationships and by his mid-thirties most of the people he knew had children and had entered into different circles of friendship. He was now finding himself on the fringes of everyone else’s lives. Invites to gatherings dwindled, then halted altogether. He tried internet dating, speed dating, lonely hearts, but he was a realist. He was exceptionally ugly and if he was honest, he hadn’t cultivated a personality to compensate.
But Veruschka had changed everything. She was stunning. How could she be attracted to him? It didn’t make sense. But of course, it did. He had known early on. What he lacked in looks and personality he made up for in intelligence. He had been recruited in university. His IQ was exceptional and British intelligence wanted people like him to keep the seats behind the desks warm and analyse and interpret the data.
He knew, or rather he suspected he was being manipulated from the very beginning, but he was also with the most beautiful, the most sensual woman he could ever imagine. A man with no friends, no life outside of work, a man forced to buy sex once a month after payday from a brothel near his home. At first he used snippets of information and his work at MI5 as a hook for Veruschka. He wanted to be important and admired. He thought he could control it, manipulate the data, but he was weak and the people were clever. Not IQ clever, just deviously smart. Before long Hoist had been introduced to Veruschka’s uncle. Hoist knew that the man wasn’t her uncle. He knew that they were more intimate than that. It enraged him at first, sickened him, but he moved past it quickly. As long as he could be intimate with her, he could forgive, forget or at least be oblivious to it. She must have genuinely liked him – she was so convincingly passionate.
Her uncle went by the name of Vladimir. Hoist did not know if that was his real name or not. He suspected so. He was an old man, but fit and smart and Hoist suspected he was ex-military. Vladimir was quite specific in his demands and expectations. He wanted certain information and he was clear what would happen if he did not receive it. He had many of the couple’s assignations recorded on both film and audio. When played back, perhaps edited to a degree, the evidence was damning. Hoist was a traitor. Plain and simple. He was also a poor lover on film, a fact that he rather curiously was less keen on being made public than his treachery towards the Security Service and his country.
Hoist sat in his bath robe. He had showered. Veruschka always insisted upon it. He had used aftershave and deodorant also. He hated this part. He knew what he was doing was wrong. But it was like a drug. He could not resist her. He looked at his watch. She was late. Unusually late. He had given them the ultimate information. Had he been discarded?
The doorbell rang and he flinched. He got up and walked excitedly downstairs to the door. The flat was a maisonette. He kept his bicycle next to the door and there was a cloakroom adjacent to the stairs. He opened the door and recoiled as it was pushed inwards. The woman stood there, most of her body in the doorway.
“Caroline Darby,” she said. “General Intelligence Group. You know why I’m here.”
“Oh shit…”
“Exactly right,” she said. “Are you going to talk to me, or do I get my Special Branch pal here to take you do
wn to the yard?”
Hoist looked broken. He swayed, his bath robe opening in the breeze through the open door. “I… I…”
“Cover yourself up. Christ, it must be cold. Get back upstairs,” she said, turning to the Special Branch officer she nodded. “Come on in. Get a brew going while he gets himself dressed.”
Caroline climbed the stairs behind Hoist. When she reached the top Hoist was standing meekly by his open bedroom door. She pushed past him, looked around the room, checked the wardrobe. “Anybody else in here with you?” she asked, walking back onto the landing. “Anything here I should know about?”
“No,” he replied docilely. “I’m alone.”
“Get dressed. Don’t be alarmed, I’m going to watch,” she said. “So make it bloody quick.”
***
Alesha looked at the man beside her. He was thin, hard-looking and dark. She did not know much about him except that his name was Betesh, he was a Yemeni by birth but grew up in Birmingham and he had been fighting for ISIS in Syria. He never looked her in the eye and she was sure that he hated her. She recognised that he had a problem with women in authority and she relished the chance to demean him.
“I want you to go in first,” she said. “Don’t kill him. Just subdue him.”
“What will you be doing while I do this?”
“I will be sending a message to British intelligence.”
“How?”
“You’ll know when you hear it,” she said. She checked over the Scorpion machine pistol. It looked like a child’s toy bought from a beach shop next to the buckets and spades. It was tiny, chambered the 7.65mm pistol cartridge and held twenty rounds in its magazine.
“The General said that the British pig should die,” Betesh said. “He was to be of further use to us, but now that they are on to him he wants him silenced. Why do you just want me to subdue him?”
Alesha smiled. “I have had to sleep with that pig, as you put it,” she grimaced. “I want to cut off his balls before I kill him.”
Betesh shrugged. Nothing could shock him, he had butchered children in Syria. He checked his Makarov 9mm pistol and tucked it into his jacket pocket. It was a compact weapon, an old Soviet copy of the Walther PP.
Alesha felt a wave of elation flood over her. She crossed her legs and took a steadying breath. She had wanted this for a long time. It would be brutal.
8
Kazan, Russia
The room was dark. A single lightbulb hung from a ceiling rose high above the man’s head. He was seated on a wooden chair. His ankles were taped to the chair legs; his hands were bound with the same tape behind his back. Urine, blood and faeces pooled on the floor. Under the chair a grate would take it to the open drain after the room had been sluiced.
The man had been beaten and systematically tortured for sixteen hours. There was a skill to extracting information and that skill had been practised and learned over years. It wasn’t the infliction of pain that was difficult, it was reading the signs, extracting the information in the right order and piecing it together. Naturally the prisoner would lie. And those lies could be broken down and replaced by the truth, but only after the correct amount of persuasion had been applied. There was a point that the lies would contradict. All the interrogations would be recorded and the answers cross-referenced. Sleep deprivation was key to this and combined with hunger, thirst and pain – as well as the fear of more pain to come – as long as they were delivered in the correct order, the formula of interrogation, the truth would out. It did not matter how strong, tough or experienced a prisoner was, the formula would always work. The only variable factor was time.
Unfortunately for the interrogator there was a set precedence with the prisoner that he had not expected. The prisoner in question was an eighty-year old man. He was former KGB and he had written the book on interrogation. He knew the tricks and he knew that the interrogator knew this too. He had almost reached the end of his life, and he was in very real danger of dying in this very room. His heart was weak. Yevgeny Antakov was near the end and the interrogator knew it.
The interrogator was a GRU major in his late thirties. He was tall and thin and his dark hair was cropped close to hide the fact that he was balding. He was a member of the Special Operations and Security Group. A secretive wing of army intelligence with a remit that ended at the president’s office. The group did not recognise borders. It operated in the shadows and respected no law which stood in the way of its operations.
“Yevgeny?” The man nudged the prisoner’s shoulder. He looked at the file as the prisoner tensed. “So tell me about the warhead again.”
“I told you…” he was cut off as the man slapped him across the face. “All right! The warhead was sold to a syndicate of the St. Petersburg mafia. The Bratva Brotherhood.”
“And who sold it?”
“Colonel Afansy. The 343rd Armoured Brigade in Odessa. He was dealt with. Permanently.”
“By whom?”
“I told you…” Again he stopped as the man slapped his face. He reeled backwards. “Stop it! I am co-operating!”
The interrogator slapped him again. “You will show respect and you will answer my questions,” he said calmly. “Understand?”
Yevgeny Antakov shook his head and smiled. “You do not know what I have done for Mother Russia. For the Union when we were once a great nation.” He swayed a little as he said this, his eyes blurring.
The major held his head firmly and pulled up the prisoner’s eyelid. He looked at the eye. He knew the life was leaving this old man. He needed him to hang on a little while longer. He bent down and picked up a bottle of water. “You want this?” He opened it and poured a little onto the man’s forehead. “You want a drink?” Yevgeny nodded and the major poured some over his mouth. The man lapped at it, like a dog under a garden tap. “That’s good, yes?” He took the bottle away and opened the file. He took out a picture of a young woman of about nineteen. He placed the photograph on the prisoner’s lap and watched his face. He saw the flicker in the man’s eyes, noted his breathing. There had been a sharper intake of breath for sure. “Your granddaughter has recently moved to America. A place at Yale university. I am sure you are proud, no?”
Yevgeny looked up at him. He knew where the talk was going, he had taken people down the same road many times. “Please…”
“I know a man in Boston. He could be with your granddaughter within two hours,” the major said. “It’s a small world, you know? Did you hear there are lots of rapes and murders in Massachusetts?”
For the first time since he had been taken, perhaps the first time ever, Yevgeny Antakov looked defeated. He knew he would never be free again, knew he may well be shot later this very night – his body crudely disposed of under the very forest floor he had filled during his time with the KGB. But he also knew if he could satisfy this man before him, he would save his granddaughter, his beautiful Anya. A tear trickled down his cheek as he thought of her. How he had bounced her on his knee as a baby, repeatedly thrown her high in the air as a toddler, watched her walk excitedly towards him for the first time, taught her to ride a bicycle, bought her a pony for her eighth birthday. If he gave everything he knew, convincingly, she would be safe. They would not harm her if they had what they wanted. There was no point in risking a vendetta he would not be alive to see or know about.
“Okay,” he said. “I will tell you everything. But I would like a drink and something to eat first. I need my medication also… If you want me alive long enough, you will get these things for me.”
“Very well,” the major said and nodded towards the two-way reinforced mirror on the wall. A subordinate would see to this. He looked back at the prisoner. “You said that the warhead was from an SS-27 Topol M. This is good, this tallies with what was missing in the manifest. It is a mobile launcher. It fits in with Colonel Afansy and his service with the 343rd Armoured Brigade. I am pleased with your answer, Yevgeny. Now, tell me about former General Vladimir Zukovsky. Di
d you know he was a Chechen Muslim?”
“I did not.”
“The man served the Soviet Union for over twenty-five years. Ten of those years were spent fighting Mujahedeen in Afghanistan,” he paused. “Fellow Muslims.”
“Nobody could have known.”
“His troops suffered many defeats in Afghanistan. Maybe these were not clear cut battles. I imagine that he instigated these defeats. A sympathiser of the enemy, a traitor within our own camp.”
Yevgeny shrugged. “I did not know. It would make sense, now that you have told me.”
“And you did not suspect that the warhead you hatched a plan to detonate in the Ukraine would instead be targeted against the west?”
“Absolutely not!”
“You were friends with Zukovsky. He was at your wedding!” The major looked up as a corporal entered carrying a tray. There was bottled water and bread and cured meat on a plate. He waved the man in and motioned for him to put the tray down on the floor. It rested near the blood and faeces and urine. “So you planned to detonate this device in Ukraine? For what ends?”
“To show that if we cannot take back Ukraine then we will leave them with nothing.” Yevgeny Antakov scowled. “We are weak. Our young all want to be popstars or reality whores. The rich buy up London and own soccer clubs. They bask on billion dollar yachts in the south of France or Monaco. They take their money out of Russia and spend it all over the world. We have lost what we stood for. Vladimir Zukovsky was supposed to send a message to the world. Russia will not be toyed with. If we were not going to fight hard to get back the Ukraine, then those ungrateful dogs could melt and die there. Like Chernobyl in the north, the Ukraine would be rendered useless.”
The major looked at the old man in front of him. “So Vladimir has the warhead from the SS-27 Topol M, financial independence from funds you gave him – Russian funds from old KGB accounts - and a new target. And you don’t know what this target is. But you know who he was working with, don’t you?”