Red Corona

by Tim Glister

  Knox was now late, but Bennett was less worried about that than she was about her tail following her to their backup meeting point in the Italian water gardens on the other side of the park. For all she knew, Knox was somewhere nearby, had also spotted the man shadowing her, and was purposefully keeping his distance.

  She waited for the next natural shift in the crowd, chose her moment, and fell into step with a group of passing picnickers. Halfway down the eastern edge of the park she peeled off and crossed a wide, open section of ground. There were fewer people here, scattered and gingerly testing the grass to see if it had dried out from last night’s storm. She was exposed, but there was no other way to the Serpentine, the long lake that snaked across the park and led to the water gardens. She moved quickly, but not quickly enough – she hoped – to draw attention. It took her five minutes to reach a tree-lined section of path that gave her a little cover.

  The Serpentine was choked with people. Families swarmed around deckchairs, couples promenaded along the lake edge, and groups of children chased swans. The surface of the lake was scattered with rowing boats.

  Bennett crossed in front of a group of ladies pushing prams, all wearing dark dresses with starched collars. She glanced behind her and saw the man from Speakers’ Corner emerging from the path to the lake. She started to move faster, weaving between more groups of people. She followed the edge of the lake as it curved northwards towards the water gardens, stopping for a moment under the old stone bridge that cut the lake in two.

  She wondered who the man was. Was he KGB, out for retribution for Medev? An MI5 Watcher? Or had her snooping in Grosvenor Square finally caught the attention of someone in the CIA who wanted to know what she was up to?

  When she couldn’t see him on the bend of the path behind her, she decided she must have lost him, and continued along a quieter stretch of path, passing opposite the statue of Peter Pan that had appeared in the park as if by magic one night in 1912. Knox wasn’t waiting for Bennett in the water gardens, but her tail was. He must have guessed where she was headed and cut across the park while she was on the lake path.

  He was no longer playing the part of someone simply out for a stroll. He was standing in the middle of the water gardens, next to its large central fountain and surrounded by its ornamental lakes, scanning the faces of everyone around him.

  When he saw Bennett he started to walk towards her, his eyes fixed on hers, and his hand reaching into his bulging document wallet. Bennett didn’t know what he had hidden in there, but she didn’t want to find out. He hadn’t just been following her, he’d been stalking her – and now he was about to pounce. Bennett knew she wouldn’t be able to outrun him if she tried to make a break for it across the park, and if she turned back the way she’d come she’d just end up confronting him somewhere secluded where she’d be considerably more vulnerable.

  Luckily, she had another option – something he wouldn’t be able to defend against. She walked straight towards him, closing the distance between them. Then, when he was about ten yards away from her, she started to scream.

  ‘Help! Help!’ she shouted. ‘That man is following me!’

  The man froze in place as heads turned first to Bennett and then to him.

  ‘He’s following me!’ she screamed over and over again. Soon everyone in the water gardens was glaring at them.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ an old lady with a scarf over her head and a tiny dog at her feet called out.

  ‘Clear off!’ another added from a bench near the fountain.

  The man realised he’d been outmanoeuvred. He slowly pulled his hand out of the document wallet and shot Bennett one last threatening look. She watched him march back across the gardens and down the far side of the Serpentine.

  Two young men in bright suits who had been strolling through the gardens arm in arm with their short-skirted girlfriends walked over to her.

  ‘You alright, miss?’ one of the young men asked Bennett as the man disappeared in the distance.

  ‘I sure am, mister,’ she replied in her full Midwestern accent. ‘Thank you kindly.’

  Then she gave him a hug and ran away, leaving everyone in the water gardens to wonder if she’d really been in danger or was just some mad American.

  Bennett left the park, crossed over Bayswater Road, and headed into Lancaster Gate tube station. She now assumed Knox had never made it to Speakers’ Corner or the water gardens after all. She didn’t know where he was, and she needed to find him.

  CHAPTER 50

  Bennett took the Central Line from Lancaster Gate to Oxford Circus and, after checking that the man from the park hadn’t followed her or handed her over to another tail, made her way to Kemp House.

  She’d decided that Knox’s flat was a good place to start her search for him. It wasn’t until she reached the top floor of the building that she realised something was wrong. As soon as the lift door opened, the acrid smell of smoke hit her. It reminded her of her childhood and the never-ending task of keeping the kitchen fire burning through winter. The sight of the tarpaulin across the door brought her back to the present. She opened the seam, releasing even more old smoke into the corridor, and shouted Knox’s name as she stepped into the flat and saw the destruction.

  She found Knox strapped to the bed, smeared with dirt and blood. She rushed to his side and checked his breathing. It was shallow, but it was there. She shook his shoulders and shouted his name again, but he didn’t wake up. She ran out into the kitchen, looking for something to cut him free, but only found the two sets of footprints that led into the open-plan area and the single set and long streak that led away from it. The drawers that lined the kitchen counter were all warped shut.

  Bennett tried the bathroom next. Like the bedroom, it had survived mostly intact. She opened the mirrored cupboard that sat on the wall above the sink and found a small pair of scissors. Standing over the bed again, she opened them to make a single blade and slashed at the strips of duct tape holding Knox down. Then she cut the binding around his ankles and wrists. Finally, she ripped the tape off his mouth. She expected the pain of the glue tearing the skin off his lips would bring him round. It didn’t.

  Knox wouldn’t wake up because he didn’t want to. His mind was happy exactly where it was, dreaming that he was back at the Festival of Britain with Jack Williams.

  It was late afternoon, a Friday. The sun was still high, the breeze off the Thames was just right, and Knox was drinking beer with his best friend. Soon they’d make a bet about who was going to buy the next round, Knox would lose, and Williams would make it up to him by taking him for dinner at a new restaurant he wanted to try. Then they’d inevitably end up at Bar Italia before stumbling back to wherever in Soho Knox was living at the time or taking a late train to Hertfordshire to spend the weekend recovering from their excesses. It was a perfect memory, and Knox’s mind had no desire to give it up.

  Unfortunately, Bennett had no idea how content Knox was. She was just scared that he was now stuck in a coma, just like Holland. There was one thing left she could try to wake him up. She slapped him hard across the face. Twice.

  Slowly, and very unwillingly, Knox came to. He was confused to see Bennett in his bedroom staring down at him. Then, as he started to register the pain all over his face and the back of his head, his confusion turned to anger.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. His voice cracked. His throat was dry from inhaling the smoke-heavy air.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Bennett asked.

  ‘I think I upset someone,’ he replied, pulling himself up into a sitting position and delicately leaning his head against the wall.

  ‘That makes two of us.’

  He told her about seeing the aftermath of the fire last night, his visits to White and Sarah Holland, and the attack someone had sprung on him while he was checking the damage to his flat. Then Bennett told him about the man who had come after her in Hyde Park.

  ‘It sounds like they really want us out of the way,’ Kn
ox replied when she was done.

  ‘We might need to add another they to our list,’ Bennett replied.

  She told him about the missing records in the CIA archives, the file she’d found on Medev, and the conversation she’d overheard in the embassy canteen.

  ‘I think it might not just be MI5 that’s been compromised,’ she said. ‘Finney could have been turned too.’

  Knox had spent years searching for signs of Soviet infiltration of British intelligence, and he was convinced he’d found them. But even he struggled to believe that the KGB could have turned the director general of MI5 and the CIA’s chief in London. He thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Why fly someone over from NASA?’

  ‘You said why yourself. To find out what they can from Valera before they hand her back.’

  ‘Maybe.’ A CIA station chief checking out files in the dead of night and the sudden appearance of a NASA scientist in the city were definitely strange, but they weren’t the oddest things to happen over the last week.

  ‘But, if Finney and Manning are both working for the KGB, then why circulate Valera’s photo in the first place?’ Knox asked. ‘Why not bury it as soon as it came in?’

  Bennett had thought about that too while she sat in Hyde Park.

  ‘Anything that’s held back has to be accounted for, eventually. They weren’t expecting anyone to be looking for Valera, or even recognise her. It was low-level intelligence. Better to let it sit in plain sight and then quietly remove it. Then, once Valera’s been put on a plane, or a sub, or buried in a shallow grave somewhere, they can just slip it back into the files.’

  That, unfortunately, sounded entirely plausible to Knox. He felt along the edge of the bruise across his face, and along the line of his brow. He winced when his finger touched the gash and broke the thin scab that had started to form across it.

  He had one last question for Bennett. ‘What about Medev? Why kill a KGB directorate chief if that’s who you’re supposed to be working for?’

  ‘I can’t decide between two answers for that one,’ Bennett replied.

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘First, they didn’t know he was in play.’

  ‘They didn’t know one of the KGB’s highest-ranking officers was involved?’

  ‘I’m serious. How much does MI5 do that MI6 has no idea about? Getting the CIA and the FBI to cooperate on anything takes months of negotiation. The KGB is huge. Maybe there were two operations running at once.’

  ‘And second?’

  ‘He was a target too. Part of an internal KGB power struggle.’

  Somehow Knox liked that idea even less than the notion that both Manning and Finney had been turned.

  He pulled himself up off his bed and walked over to his wardrobe. He opened it, relieved to see both his clothes and the crate from Bianchi and Moretti’s were still inside and in decent condition.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Bennett asked.

  ‘I’m getting changed,’ he replied. ‘And then we’re going to Leconfield House to have it out with Manning once and for all, before he can do any more damage.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Bennett said. ‘But Manning isn’t at Leconfield House.’

  ‘What?’ Knox asked as he gave up trying to remove the duct tape from the front of his shirt and just pulled it over his head. He dropped the ruined shirt on the floor and took a clean one off a hanger.

  ‘He’ll be at the diplomatic reception in Portland Place. Along with Finney.’

  Knox thought about Manning lapping up the attention of the great and powerful in Holland’s place, all the while knowing he was about to preside over an intelligence disaster that Britain might never recover from.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘we’ll just have to crash his party.’

  CHAPTER 51

  The distant blast of a car horn woke Valera. She had no idea where she was, just that she was no longer in the dark room, tied to a chair and surrounded by faceless, shouting figures. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but for the first time in a week she didn’t feel completely exhausted. If it wasn’t for the thick purple bruises on her wrists she might even have thought the dark room had just been a bad dream.

  She was lying on top of a narrow, soft bed. Her clothes were dry and her shoes were still on her feet. She felt clean, really clean. There was no grit under her nails, no foul stench lingering in her hair.

  She swung her legs off the bed – they were heavy, but they moved – and took in her new surroundings. The room was empty apart from the bed. The walls were bare, the floorboards exposed but varnished. There was a large sash window on one side of the room, and a door on the other. Valera slipped off the bed and stepped lightly round the room. She tested the door. It was locked. She peered through the window, looking for something that would reveal where she was, but all she could tell was that she was on the first floor of a house in the middle of a narrow street and, judging from the short shadows she could see on the few cars below her, it was the middle of the day.

  She’d expected someone to come after her, but not the head of the KGB scientific directorate. And she definitely hadn’t expected to watch a bullet pierce his skull and shower her in blood and brains.

  She couldn’t imagine the KGB killing one of their own so openly and brazenly, which meant someone else must now be holding her captive. The Swedes were the only people who knew anything close to the true extent of her breakthrough and what it was worth – not even the GRU or KGB knew how far her work had really progressed – but they already had her. She may not have served up all of her secrets on a plate, but she was cooperating with them.

  She remembered the American woman and British man who, just like Medev, had appeared out of thin air in Skansen. Who were they? And who were they working for? For all she knew, they were another distraction, working with the people who kidnapped her, and right now she might just be enjoying a temporary reprieve before being thrown back into the dark room.

  She tried to untangle the knots in her head. She could still see the broken domes of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood and the grown-up Ledjo reaching out to her when she closed her eyes. And she remembered the voices merging into two, then one, and the feeling of hands untying her and telling her everything was going to be alright. But could she be sure that had really happened?

  Then she realised something more disturbing than everything she’d been through in the dark room. When she tried to picture the boat on the lake in her mind she couldn’t see it. It hadn’t changed, morphed into something new and unfamiliar. It wasn’t buried in the mess of memories and nightmares that had taken over her mind. It was just gone, as if it had been ripped out of her. She was missing something else too. Ledjo’s backpack.

  Valera didn’t know if she was being watched somehow or if her captors were on the other side of the locked door, waiting for her to bang or wail or completely break down. She couldn’t cry even if she wanted to. She was too angry. She stood in the middle of the room, shaking with rage, until she couldn’t hold it in any more and she let out a deep, guttural scream. The door didn’t open. No one came to silence her, or comfort her, or drag her back to the dark room.

  Now sure she was alone, she went back to the door, But instead of twisting the knob again, she kicked it, slamming her heel into it again and again until the panel it was embedded in fractured and the whole mechanism clattered onto the floorboards.

  The door swung open and Valera peered out into the short landing on the other side of it, still half-expecting some unseen guard to jump on her. She ignored the other doors and other rooms on the first floor and ran for the stairs that would lead her down to the ground floor and out onto the street. But they didn’t, because the bottom of the staircase was blocked by a huge slab of metal. It looked like a giant guillotine had sliced through the house, intended solely to block her way.

  There was a door embedded in the thick metal, but no handle for Valera to turn or attack. She still kicked it, purely out of frust
ration, and heard a dull, deep echo on the other side.

  She retreated upstairs. This time she went room to room in search of an escape route. At the back of the house were a small bathroom and kitchen, which, save for a quietly humming fridge, were as bare as the bedroom she’d woken up in. The only other room on the first floor, between the bedroom and bathroom, had been set up as a kind of living room. There were two chairs, a low table, and a large shelf full of well-worn books. They were all in English – the first real clue Valera had found about where she was.

  The living room also had a large sash window. This one looked out onto a narrow, shaded yard. Valera shook the frame, trying to force it open, but it wouldn’t shift. She hit the glass with her fist, but it didn’t shatter. She even picked up one of the chairs and hurled it at the window. It fell onto the floorboards without leaving a scratch. She dragged it into the bedroom and tried to launch it out into the street, only succeeding in breaking one of the legs.

  She was starting to feel claustrophobic, her deep tiredness beginning to creep back. She went back to the kitchen, still hunting for anything that might help her get out of this strange, empty house. She scoured the cupboards, but they were all bare. She tried the tap in the sink. A thin dribble of lukewarm water came out. It felt like she was back in her house in Povenets B.

  She felt a familiar pang in her stomach and opened the fridge. Astonishingly, it wasn’t empty. On the middle shelf was a small plate of sandwiches, half a loaf of bread, and a jar of jam. Valera inspected and then discarded the bread and sandwiches. She didn’t trust them – the bread was too white and neat, the sandwiches filled with some kind of square-cut, processed meat. But she couldn’t resist the jam jar. She picked it up, unscrewed the lid, and inhaled the rich, cloying smell of sugar and berries. Her sense of smell was dulled from the burning embers she’d breathed in as she’d searched the ruins of Ledjo’s school but the pungent aroma was still almost enough to overwhelm her. Then she scooped a handful of the cold, sticky substance into her mouth.