by R. J. Dillon
Lubov paused, his face very red, his way lost. He stood open mouthed, his eyes fumbling for somewhere to look.
‘No,’ mumbled Lubov.
‘Who else should be here?’
‘Wife and nephew.’
Already Nick knew they were too late.
In a long narrow living room there were twin sofas in a fawn plain fabric, rugs on polished floorboards and charcoal sketches strung in a well proportioned line. Nothing was ostentatious just too neat; flat pack utility creating Lubov’s hard won paradise where someone had fought and lost, decided Nick. He picked out the splashes of blood, smashed porcelain lamps and ripped cushions. Playing loudly a CD worked its way through a Mariah Carey album, and Nick gratefully silenced her mid note. An oversized tropical fish tank filled a wall, its filter humming away; shoals of bright fish large and small darted out of coral and waving plants unaware of the destruction around them.
Taking a room at a time Nick took the lead with Lubov following, muttering curses under his breath. Every room bore hallmarks of a quick ruthless search; in too many places to count, on the fabric, walls and carpet there were ominous dashes of blood. The nephew and Lubov’s wife must have fought a running retreat after putting up resistance with the knife, thought Nick as each room revealed more destruction. The final bedroom door was closed and Nick knew this was where the wife and nephew had finally run out of places to hide.
‘Wait here,’ Nick told Lubov, facing a plain cream door.
‘I am not afraid,’ Lubov said proudly.
Nick tricked the door from its jamb and stepped in. By his foot, blood formed in a thick circle on a Persian rug at the bottom of a bed too big for the room.
Lubov gasped and Nick guessed he hadn’t seen a close relative in such a state. Well this was his lucky day, there were two for him to consider, Lubov’s wife and nephew toppled elegantly forward in a last clinch.
‘Your family?’
Lubov nodded once for each body, and unable to look again, had folded in a heap on a corner of the bed.
They’d tortured them slowly Nick reckoned, one made to watch as someone had gone quite berserk on the other with cigarettes and razors, which one first really didn’t matter. Pieces of cushion were still taped across the wife’s mouth and Nick knew why Mariah Carey’s high notes had been selected to accompany their pain. Nick guessed the wife must have been a lot younger than Lubov, but from what they had done to her body, age difference counted for nothing.
Planting his feet either side of the congealing pool, Nick swallowed his bile and turned the nephew’s plump short body over, a teenager who hadn’t been given a fighting chance.
‘What have we come for?’ Nick asked Lubov.
For a full minute Lubov didn’t move, drained of colour and energy.
‘Have they taken it? Did your wife know what it was? Who knew where it was?’ Nick rattled off the questions aware that time was running out.
‘No one but me, okay,’ admitted Lubov, slowly searching the shattered bedroom with his eyes, but never allowing them to stray too close to the bodies.
‘Then get it, we have to go… now,’ Nick insisted.
And after they’d been tortured for information they couldn’t divulge, Lubov’s nephew and wife were executed. The nephew’s head split by a single shot, his black glasses screwed up in a knot beside him, the wife shot twice, in both eyes. This was getting better by the second thought Nick, right back in messy deaths and secrets never to be told. One for sorrow, two for joy…
‘Anyone else know you might have stashed something here?’ Nick asked, but Lubov had sloped off into the living room, and Nick could hear him quietly weeping.
‘Sure, I tell everyone, the whole damn world,’ shouted Lubov. ‘How should I know?’
‘Is it still here?’ Nick asked when he joined Lubov.
‘Yes,’ said Lubov, going to his fish tank, tears and snot running together on his ashen face. With shaking hands he turned off the power, plunging the tank into stagnant darkness. ‘They…’ but he ran out of breath before completing his pledge and moving pieces of coral, pushing gravel aside, his fingers locked onto a small plastic watertight container that he extracted, his sleeve soaking wet.
Holding out his hand for the container, Nick waited as Lubov clung to his precious cargo, eventually shaking his head in noble defiance. ‘They died for this,’ he announced gravely, nodding towards the bedroom. ‘And I keep it until I’m safe in London.’
‘You’re going nowhere until I take a look at what you’ve got,’ promised Nick, ready to seize the container by force. ‘My rules and that’s my last word.’ He stepped forward and Lubov sensing what was to come, hurriedly uncapped the container slipping out a SIM card.
‘To assist me retrieve my material,’ he said. ‘It is already in London, I took a precaution.’
Fantastic thought Nick, if you’d booked a flight you’d have saved me making the trip of a lifetime. ‘Then we need to take care of it,’ he said, holding out a hand and when Lubov dropped the SIM into his palm he hurried into the kitchen.
‘Sharp knife,’ demanded Nick, unlacing a boot, easing it off. ‘And cling film, you got some of that, know what it is?’ Nick hopped on one foot pulling drawers open. ‘Sharp knife,’ he yelled again.
‘They make big mistake,’ Lubov raged, coming into the kitchen and handing Nick a knife that was anything but sharp, the anger rising through him; a charge too powerful for his demure frame.
Nick heated the knife on a gas ring, a handkerchief wrapped round his fingers. ‘Wrap the SIM in the plastic,’ Nick told Lubov as he opened a slit along the outer edge on the thick rubber sole of his boot. Obediently, Lubov folded the SIM in cling film and passed it across. Easing the card into the slot, Nick heated the knife again and sealed it in. Bending and stretching the sole to check if it held, Nick pulled on his boot and laced it.
‘We’re leaving,’ he said, nudging Lubov towards the door. Lubov needed coaxing and he didn’t have time. ‘Right now, go,’ added Nick.
Outside a police siren tore into the night, an eerie wail moving closer. Glancing out into the corridor Nick pushed Lubov ahead, and closed the apartment door. Out into the snow they faded into the shadows, hugging walls and the freezing air as a second police car sailed towards the block. As they crossed an open square Lubov let out a piercing scream, cursing the GRU, SVR and FSB to hell and back, all siloviki adding the President and Prime Minister for good measure. Nick had heard enough, and clasping Lubov’s arm dragged him at a rapid trot. Weaving into courtyards and alleys he refused to drop the pace or lessen his grip on the little accountant as big wet chips of snow billowed after them, chasing them all the way to a frantic Foula huddled in the car.
The Lada bumped heavily as Nick pitched Lubov in the back. ‘Drive,’ Nick ordered, flopping heavily next to Foula.
‘What’s happened?’
‘There’s been a spot of bloody carnage back there. His wife and nephew are dead. Butchered, tortured, not what I’d call a pretty sight. Happy? All the information you need? Now drive,’ snapped Nick his patience wearing thin, a weariness settling over him.
Two
The Collapse of an Operation
London, October
Nick Torr should never have been paired with Foula argued certain senior dissident voices in the Service, not long after the dust had settled. These wise men and women asserted, quite prosaically after the event of course, that London should have foreseen that the Moscow operation was a tragedy waiting to happen. Any intelligence branch officer worth his or her salt could have seen that Operation Salvage was destined to go off the rails, and therefore, more preparation ought to have been made to recover Viper’s material employing a different method. The defenders of Operation Salvage pointed out with equal fervour that no one was prepared for the speed at which events ran, and actually, if they were being clinical, nothing could have prevented such a spectacular unravelling or saved even one life, not even that of Torr’s wife.
Of course, no one could have foreseen Moscow’s brutal response, the tragedy waiting in the wings, the personal cost to Nicholas Torr.
What both camps did concede however, was that once Nick had committed to recovering Viper, it was inevitable events would run such a bloody course. And neither the detractors nor defenders of Operation Salvage were quite so ready to admit that they had the benefit of replaying events from the security of their desks in the Service’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. Whereas in CO8’s own satellite headquarters, which for obvious reasons was kept at arms length from the Service’s modest, unassuming premises by the Thames, Nick was regarded not as a villain, but a hero.
Nick’s CO8 Directorate was housed in a thin narrow building tucked quite sensibly off Vauxhall Bridge Road. Possessing an air of stoic resilience, the small ragged four-storey place of tired stone had long ago accepted its fate as a government annexe, an Edwardian vision surreptitiously avoiding the developers. Trapped between a fast copy shop and mortgage brokers who could be relied on for Wimbledon tickets, it sat proudly aloof as though better times were ahead. Along both floors the blinds were permanently drawn. Traffic dust covered it like a cracked tarpaulin, while two solid doors that had shed their varnish were electronically barred, deterring casual callers.
A large notice clearly printed and trapped behind cracked perspex, declared it to be the SOUTHBRIGHT RESEARCH INSTITUTE, VISITORS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. And for anyone foolish enough to try the entryphone overlooked by two severe CCTV cameras, they would receive a firm, but none the less specious answer concerning statistical research. If that failed, a frank exchange with two duty door staff usually did the trick; warrant officers from the Royal Military Police not chosen for their conversational technique.
It was known simply to its officers as the Mad House, which some unkind critics claimed symbolised Nick’s temperament. Trained in weapon handling, close-quarter combat and other dubious dark arts by the Special Air Service, CO8’s officers’ exemption to carrying arms under the 1994 Intelligence Act provided the Foreign Secretary with powers to authorise operations that would be illegal in Britain. A good many of which the Service classed as dirty work, which no government saw fit to include in any of its statistics or annual reports since the Directorate’s inception in 1978.
At six-thirty in the evening, Jill Portland settled in for her second night as senior duty officer. Besides a computer, a television on a stand tuned permanently to a news channel, the decoration in the DO’s office ran to political newspaper cartoons haphazardly tacked to the rear wall above fireproof cabinets. She flicked on an Anglepoise and a yellow tongue of light spread out across the grey metal desk. From outside on the street against the background hum of traffic, a motorbike sped along leaving a blur of noise in its wake. Why was it always the sound of motorbikes that stood out at night she wondered, always sounding so sad, so lonely? Maybe it’s only the sad and lonely that pick up every sound, she told herself. Approaching her thirtieth birthday, Portland’s appearance had a no-nonsense practicality about it; her mid-brown hair swept at an angle off her forehead into a ponytail accentuated a slight oval face with deep intense eyes. In her white shirt and dark business suit she could have passed for an IT manager, and often did.
Clearing a portion of the desk she flicked through the latest edicts to come over the river from Vauxhall Cross, laying each page on the sheet of glass covering the desk. All the duty officers used it for storing bits and pieces; slipping timetables and memos under the sheet along with theatre tickets and takeaway menus. The latest addition, a donation slip for a marmoset someone had adopted at London Zoo. A soft distant laugh rippled through the labyrinth of corridors as she ate a salad with no real appetite or conviction. Returning to a wad of operational directives that should have been filed, she looked up with a start as Ramsgill the IT team leader knocked and strode briskly in.
‘We’ve got an emergency in Moscow,’ Ramsgill declared. ‘I think you better come down to the cage.’
The cage was not a cage at all, but a long ugly basement room at the back of the building, its barred windows turned dismally to Chapter Street. Portland threaded her way through individual work bays holding flat screen computers connected to their own large servers, electronic voice transcribers, digital recorders, and CD recorders. All of it staffed by IT specialists who only ever managed formative grunts, none of which Portland acknowledged as she settled in a playback booth, slipping on a pair of headphones as Ramsgill replayed the call Nick had made on his mobile phone.
What she did next, she did very fast. Up in the duty room she opened a safe with a key from the duty officer’s bunch, a small squat robust cream Chubb mottled by many hands. A slim book no larger than a desk diary lay by itself on the second shelf, along with manuals for handling a string of different emergencies of varying magnitude. An emergency contact log, it listed assigned mobile phone numbers to the worknames of specific senior SIS officers. Returning the log she relocked the Chubb, and began to make a number of calls on the encrypted landline. In order of importance five all told, ending with an acrimonious exchange with a Foreign & Commonwealth Office night clerk.
By three that morning her work had begun to bear fruit. Arriving in a foul mood, Paul Rossan, Director of Intelligence Analysis, pitched his duffel coat across a chair. A year shy of turning fifty, Rossan was much given to wearing comfortable clothes, dressing with the expensive élan few people can afford. His face ran to a point pulling shallow cheeks with it, forming a poacher’s face, full of cunning. Pinched from the early morning cold it tracked Portland across the room.
‘So what’s the damage?’
‘The Two Kings failed to make the collection in Moscow and they’re bringing Viper back with them,’ she explained, passing over the decoded printout.
‘Nothing else?’ Rossan demanded, bent over the desk, reading the printout.
Portland shook her head. ‘Nothing, but it means the operation has been compromised, and they were not in immediate danger but…’
‘It’s a probability,’ Rossan said, already ahead of Portland. ‘Who else have you notified?’ he wondered, sitting on the corner of the desk.
‘Director of Operations and Security, Director Corporate Affairs and the Deputy Chief.’
‘Well, I don’t know if Jane’s going to be available, she was attending some damn conference in Germany the last I heard. Roly, who knows, he could be anywhere, and Teddy’s hardly likely to consider a failed collection as an emergency.’ He straightened up rubbing his back, pulling his lank face at the effort. ‘What other action have you taken?’
‘That’s just it, I wasn’t sure who…’ Portland trailed off but Rossan waited, uncommitted, refusing to help her.
‘Then I suppose I’m in the hot seat,’ he snapped, setting off to find an office he could call his own.
• • •
Nick would have willingly exchanged Rossan’s dilemma for his own predicament. But as it was, he was stuck with Foula and the little accountant, doing his damnedest to get them safely out of Moscow. With Foula having selected his emergency escape route completely at random, they lurched down side roads that offered bleary snatches of Moscow as it gradually closed down for the night. A grey sky the colour of fog pressed in low and squalls of snow reduced visibility by half as Foula hit reckless speeds that reinforced Nick’s unspoken sense of urgency. As Foula nursed the Lada towards the M-9, Nick fought the lure and pull of sleep. He shifted in his seat already aware that the little accountant was a liability; a marked man and they’d have only one chance of slipping him over the border.
‘Is this going to work?’ Foula asked petulantly, his Scottish burr becoming more pronounced.
‘Don’t know, haven’t tried it,’ Nick replied, his breath a misty hand climbing the door glass.
‘Yes, well…’ Foula broke off then regrouped for another charge, changed his mind, the veins in his temple standing proud.
Nick tried to remain calm as Foula struggled to k
eep the car on a straight line down the Baltic Highway, running for all they were worth for the border. Squinting through the windscreen Nick could barely make out the road as snow rushed at them distorting distance and proportion, swelling and shrinking the tail lights in front.
In the back, Lubov remained quiet and alert wishing every kilometre to be five, or ten, anything to hasten his departure from a country he had been proud to serve and call home. It took twenty minutes to put Moscow well behind them leaving nothing but a tedious drive to the Latvian border, and each stroke of the wipers beat heavy snow into ice ridges. With the city in their wake Foula fiddled with the radio, his idiosyncratic choice filling the Lada with AvtoRadio, broadcasting a disconcerting mix of Russian classics, Western pop and dreary chat. There were few vehicles around at this hour and Foula hit the accelerator until there were no other lights, just the Lada walled in by the night on an open stretch of road making for home.
How far into the night, how far from Moscow, or how near to Latvia they had travelled, Nick could barely tell on the 610 kilometre highway as it cut its way through a forest. Nick swore that it felt as though they had driven to the border and back at least twice. In actual fact they had barely gone over two hundred kilometres, Foula humming some obscure tune under his breath, the little accountant asleep in a twisted heap. With the wipers struggling against the heavy snow, a skin of ice formed against the screen, the heater offering a frugal portion of warmth. Stubbornly refusing to play anything but a severe crackle as tuneless as Foula’s humming, the radio had gone mute. Ahead of them the highway disappeared into a long curve. Scattered along its rough bare emergency shoulder, a trail of blown out tyre shreds poked through the snow. Then as they rounded the bend, the glow from the backed-up tail lights gave the snow an uncanny red hue.
‘Shit,’ said Nick as Foula slowed to a crawl.