by Tim Glister
Now she heard more footsteps approaching the bedroom. She stood up. She wanted to face whoever had come to visit her on her feet. The steps stopped briefly outside the door, then with a gentle nudge it swung open to reveal a man in a grey suit carrying a tray with a teapot and two teacups.
‘Ah, Miss Valera, you’re awake,’ Peterson said, a broad smile across his face. ‘Wonderful.’
‘Who are you?’ she demanded. Her voice cracked as she spoke, and she realised she hadn’t drunk anything since she’d devoured the pot of jam she’d found in the fridge as fast as if it had been ice-cold water, fresh from a mountain stream.
‘I’m Devereux,’ Peterson replied. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. How are you feeling?’
‘Where am I?’
‘You’re safe. Don’t worry, you’re not back in Russia. You’re in London.’ Peterson gave the broken chair on the floor a brief, quizzical look, then put the tray down on the end of the bed. As he got closer to Valera, she instinctively backed away from him, ending up on the other side of the chair, pressed against the impenetrable window.
‘Would you like some tea?’ he asked.
Valera’s mouth felt even drier at the mention of tea, but she stayed where she was.
‘Who do you work for?’ she asked.
‘British intelligence,’ Peterson replied, as he poured a cup of the hot, fragrant liquid. ‘We like to keep tabs on everyone who makes it through the Curtain. We had a feeling the KGB might make a play for you in Stockholm, and when they did we thought it best to step in.’ He poured a second cup. ‘We weren’t fast enough to stop them, but we followed the extraction team that kidnapped you to a warehouse on the outskirts of the city and made our move there. I’m sorry we couldn’t get to you sooner, I know how brutal KGB interrogations can be.’
Valera thought back to Skansen. Her memory was still a little hazy and distorted, but she remembered Medev trying to persuade her to go back to Russia.
‘The man who was killed. He said he was a KGB general.’
‘KGB maybe, but not a general. He was a ploy to soften you up.’
‘But they shot him in the head.’
‘A mistake. Though you never know, the KGB isn’t particularly concerned about collateral damage.’
‘What about the others? The man and the woman.’
‘You don’t need to worry about them either.’
Peterson offered her a cup of tea. She reached out and took it from him, but she didn’t drink it.
‘I hope you like Earl Grey,’ he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
He picked up his own cup and took a large gulp. Valera watched him swallow, then, reassured that she wasn’t about to be poisoned, tried hers. She winced as the tea hit her tongue. It was hot and bitter, and tasted like it had been stewed for far too long.
Peterson smiled. ‘I like it rather strong, I’m afraid. I could get you some sugar, or honey?’
‘No,’ Valera replied. ‘This will be fine, thank you.’
She took another couple of sips, beginning to enjoy the feeling of the liquid soothing her dry throat. Her body relaxed, leaning against the window rather than pressing against it. ‘So, Mr Devereux, what do you want from me?’
Peterson smiled again, and put his cup back on the tray. ‘The British government wants you to be safe,’ he said. ‘And we are in a position to help make sure that’s exactly what you are.’
‘That is very generous of you.’
‘Well, it’s not an entirely altruistic act. We, of course, expect a quid pro quo.’
‘Of course,’ Valera replied.
‘To be rather blunt, we need to know why the KGB was so eager to get you back. And, I’m afraid we need to know quickly.’
‘So you can decide if I’m worth protecting?’
‘To be even more blunt, yes.’
‘And if I told you I don’t know why they were after me? That I’m just a lowly comrade desperate to build a new life in the West?’
‘Then I’d ask you not to waste my time.’
Valera took another sip of her tea. ‘Am I free to leave here if I want?’
‘Of course. You’re not a prisoner.’
‘Then why was the door locked?’
‘For your protection.’ Peterson topped up his cup. He raised the pot to Valera, but she shook her head. ‘You had an awful lot of drugs pumping through your system. You needed time for them to wear off somewhere you couldn’t hurt yourself. Now you’re feeling better, you can do whatever you like.’ He took a sip of tea. ‘But the vultures are circling. It won’t take the Russians long to work out where you’ve ended up. You can take your chances with them, or you can give me the information I need to convince the powers that be that we ought to keep them at bay.’
It was the same negotiation Valera had gone through over and over – her knowledge in exchange for her safety, and the implication that her life would be forfeit if she didn’t cooperate. It might be more polite now, coming from a smiling man serving her tea rather than Zukolev looming over her or masked figures in a dark room, but it was still the age-old threat.
Her best, and only, option was to stall. ‘I need time to think,’ she said.
‘Unfortunately neither of us has that luxury,’ Peterson replied.
‘Then take me to meet your scientists. I will talk to them about my work.’
It was another delaying tactic, but it was also a perfectly reasonable request. The Swedish security service had checked out her academic credentials before they even put her on a plane to Stockholm. She couldn’t imagine a member of British intelligence not wanting to do the same thing.
The edge of Peterson’s smile started to drop. ‘There’ll be time for all that, but right now I need to give my superiors something that demonstrates your willingness to work with us.’
Valera stood her ground. ‘Tell your superiors I’ll work with you once you guarantee my safety.’
Peterson’s mouth twisted into a tight grimace. ‘You’re in no position to dictate terms here.’
‘I am free to do what I want,’ she said. ‘Unless you were lying.’
Peterson slammed his cup back down onto the tray and shot off the bed. His body language changed as he stood upright. A deep line appeared across his forehead, his grimace turned into a scowl, and his shoulders became high and tight.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ he said, glaring at Valera. His voice sounded like it had dropped an entire octave. ‘Tell me what I need to know. Now.’
Strangely, his transformation didn’t scare Valera. It calmed her. Now that Peterson had given up on his charade, she knew what kind of man she was dealing with – a man exactly like Zukolev.
‘Why should I?’ she asked.
‘Because I’ve made several promises I need to see through. And if you can’t help me then I have no reason to keep you alive.’
‘What is it you’ve decided I know?’
‘Don’t play stupid with me. I know you’re working on ways to control radio signals. That’s what the KGB wants, and it’s what everyone else in the world wants too. I could force you to give me your research, but I’m on a tight schedule. So you can either give it to me now, or you can die.’
Valera was now sure who her enemy was, that everything this man had said about her rescue from the dark room was a lie, and that he was almost certainly the one who had put her there, yet she suddenly found her appetite for revenge fading. She might just have the strength left in her to hurt the man who called himself Devereux, but it wouldn’t change everything the world had done to her. It had taken her parents and stolen her son. There was no way the scales could be balanced, so what was the point in trying? She could devote all her energy, waste her whole life, and only gain a fraction of the vengeance she deserved.
So, instead of fighting this man, she decided she would use him, give him just enough so she could get what she wanted.
‘I am not going to give away my secrets,’ she said, ‘and
you are not going to kill me.’
‘I’m not?’
‘We are going to work together.’
Peterson looked, and sounded, surprised by this sudden attempt to shift the power dynamic between them. ‘We are?’
‘Yes. We are going to be partners.’
Peterson let out a short laugh. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because I have something more valuable to sell than just a way to manipulate radio signals. You want to give people a way to eavesdrop on each other. I can give them something bigger. Something much bigger.’
‘Why should I trust you?’ he asked.
Valera walked over to the bed, put her cup down on the tray, then casually sat on the edge of the bed, exactly where Peterson had perched a few minutes earlier.
‘You don’t have to trust me,’ she replied. ‘I don’t trust you. You just have to see what we both stand to gain. I have the product, you have the buyers. It makes sense for us to help each other get what we want.’
It took Peterson a moment to process the new possibilities Valera was presenting. He’d discovered too late that the research Bianchi and Moretti had given him was fake. He’d always planned to have them killed rather than let them walk away and sell their imitation Pipistrelle technology themselves. He’d never suspected that they’d double-cross him as well and leave him with a set of useless, meaningless equations. But he was, above everything else, a pragmatist, so he’d still been prepared to sell their bogus work to as many interested parties as possible, then disappear without a trace and with a very healthy balance in his bank account.
But he’d rather not have to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. So when Knox told him he’d discovered the Italians’ secret research he’d sent a couple of men after him for it. Unfortunately, they’d failed rather pathetically and he’d found himself back where Bianchi and Moretti had left him. Then Irina Valera had appeared, dropped into his lap like a deus ex machina, and now she might be giving him the chance to achieve something beyond even his wildest ambitions.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘Freedom,’ she replied. ‘Enough money to go wherever I want and be left alone.’
Peterson smiled, at her and to himself. He was happy to give her both, or at least the promise of them.
‘I think I can help you with that.’
‘Good,’ Valera said, getting up from the bed. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Well then,’ Peterson said, picking up the tray and standing next to the open, broken door like a dutiful butler. ‘After you.’
CHAPTER 55
No heads had turned in the ballroom as Knox was escorted down the grand staircase and out through the RIBA building’s front doors to a waiting car that Manning had somehow summoned along with the Watchers.
He was driven straight to Leconfield House and taken directly from the subterranean car park to an interrogation cell on the third floor. Knox didn’t know if it was intentional or just a coincidence that he was put in the same room that Sandra Horne had occupied while she’d been held at MI5 headquarters after the Calder Hall Ring was blown.
The cell also reminded Knox of the room in Holloway he’d visited Horne in. The walls were bare, a table and chairs sat in the middle, and a narrow shelf with a thin mattress on it ran the length of the back wall.
The guards left Knox with a large jug of water and a single glass. They didn’t take his jacket, belt, or shoelaces. They either thought there was no risk of him killing himself or they didn’t care if he did.
For the first hour of his incarceration Knox indulged in the fantasy that the Watchers who had witnessed his tirade against Manning were repeating his accusations through the corridors of Leconfield House and were going to come and ask him to lead a rebellion against the director general at any moment. For the second hour he alternated between sitting at the table and pacing around the room, thinking about what White might have done with Bianchi and Moretti’s passports and research. For the third hour he wondered if he’d been forgotten. Manning hadn’t appeared to gloat, or sent Peterson to do it for him. No one had come to break him out, but no one had come to rough him up either.
At about nine thirty he finally lay down on the mattress. He felt dizzy for a moment and realised he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten anything. He got up, poured himself a large glass of water, swallowed it in a single gulp, and returned to his bed.
He decided that whatever Manning had planned for him would wait until the morning, or maybe even after the conference was finished, and he’d dealt with Valera and whatever else he had planned over the next two days.
However, the longer Knox stared at the ceiling, the less he was able to shake a feeling that had been quietly taking root in his gut since Portland Place. Manning hadn’t broken character the entire time Knox had been attacking him. His temper barely flared even when Knox accused him of being a traitor and personally responsible for multiple deaths.
As Knox relived the confrontation over and over in his mind, Manning only ever looked disappointed and hurt, like a gentleman whose honour was being unfairly smeared. Even when Knox was being marched off there was no little sneer or wink telling him he was right but had still lost.
It raised a worrying question. Did Manning’s mask not slip because he was the greatest double agent in the history of espionage, or because there was no mask to begin with? Knox realised that he hadn’t just thought Manning was the mole, he’d wanted him to be it. He’d wanted to tie all the loose threads of the man’s career into a rope he could hang him from. But would anyone else do the same in Knox’s place? Manning himself had said Knox had a personal interest in bringing him down. Maybe it was too personal.
Perhaps this was all just the final act in Manning’s long rise to power, and Knox was simply a bit player, done with after strutting and fretting his hour on the stage. It was a sobering thought. But Knox wasn’t ready to completely write himself out of the narrative just yet. He was still the hero of his own story, and if Manning wasn’t his nemesis then someone else had to be.
CHAPTER 56
At the same time Knox was lying on his back in Leconfield House trying to weave a new thread that would connect all the events of the last week and lead him to the person behind it all, Bennett was sitting in the front seat of a car that wasn’t hers desperately trying to stay awake.
After Knox had left 66 Portland Place flanked by Watchers, Manning and Finney had returned to the reception, leaving Bennett alone in the exhibition gallery.
She spent five minutes processing the magnitude of what had just happened, and just how badly wrong things had gone. She decided there was no point returning to Grosvenor Square. In fact, she figured that chances were her security clearance had already been revoked. Instead, she left the RIBA building and walked up Portland Place to Regent’s Park tube station. She briefly thought about returning to Brompton Cemetery, to pay one final visit to Pankhurst’s grave, but decided against it. She’d come to London to prove she was just as smart and capable as any man in the CIA. Now she would be leaving in disgrace, written off as rash, emotional, a liability – a prime example of why women shouldn’t have ideas above their station. She wasn’t sure Pankhurst’s ghost would forgive her.
The boarding house Bennett called home was on Neville Street, ten minutes’ walk from South Kensington tube station. The house, number nine, was three storeys tall, the first covered in white stucco and the second two exposed brick. Unlike the other houses in the street, which were in immaculate condition, the stucco and bricks of number nine were both crumbling. The black and white mosaic steps that led up to the front door were cracked, and the door itself hadn’t been painted in a long time. The owner, Bennett learned shortly after moving in, had bought the house a long time ago, lived somewhere in the country, and rarely came into the city.
Bennett’s room was on the first floor, facing onto the street, and it was cavernous. Once upon a time it had been a grand reception ro
om. Bennett’s single bed, wardrobe, and small table and chairs looked out of place pushed up next to its enormous, ornate fireplace. The room was draughty, but she didn’t care. It was bigger than anywhere else she’d ever lived, and it was all hers. She’d found it, she paid for it, and she didn’t have to share it.
Bennett’s journey back to Neville Street had been full of self-pity. She hated the idea of giving up her life in London and going back to America. She didn’t want to face her mother’s attempts to hide her disappointment or her useless brothers’ inevitable jokes, and she didn’t want to end up working some meaningless secretarial job in New York or Chicago if she was lucky, or Garden City if she wasn’t.
But when she reached her room, the home she’d made for herself, her pity transformed into anger. And fear. Seeing Medev killed and Valera kidnapped had shocked Bennett, but she’d told herself that she hadn’t been a target – she’d just got caught up in the attack along with Knox. Now that Finney had effectively taken her out of the game her mind was starting to catch up with everything that had happened in such quick succession since Stockholm. The man in Hyde Park had been there purely because of her. He’d wanted to hurt her, maybe even kill her. She realised she’d been so consumed with proving herself that she’d put herself in real, mortal danger. But as much as that scared her it also persuaded her even more that she was right – something very wrong was happening in MI5, and Finney was up to something too.
There was no one waiting for her but an envelope bearing the seal of the American embassy had been slipped under her door. It contained a letter informing her that her cover position had been terminated with immediate effect. She carefully slid the letter back into the envelope, then tore both of them in half.
She didn’t know where her future was, but she now knew it wouldn’t be in Neville Street. The embassy knew she lived there, which meant so did the CIA and so would anyone Finney might tell. She didn’t want to be sent back to America, but she also didn’t want to be kidnapped or killed and left to rot in her room. It was time to go. She started to pack.