Manhunt (15 page)

Holbeche paused before replying. ‘No, I suppose not. Very well, then, I’ll arrange for the information to be released this morning.’

‘Another briefing?’

‘No, I think we’ll keep it low-key. I’ll just have it sent round the internal email system, as a routine update. Look, there’s a lot riding on this, Richard, so how sure
are you that it’ll work?’

‘I’m not,’ Simpson confessed, ‘but I still think it offers us our best chance of winkling out this bastard without having Five and Special Branch crawling all over
Vauxhall Cross, and anywhere else he might be employed.’

‘And when will your people be in position?’

‘By this afternoon. They crossed the Channel yesterday – couldn’t fly because they’re carrying weapons – and had reached Cahors by last night. They checked in with
me after they’d found a hotel, and they plan on getting to Ax no later than four this afternoon.’

‘And Richter? What time will
he
arrive?’ Holbeche asked.

In his office in Hammersmith, Simpson glanced at his watch. ‘Early this evening, I should think. I’ll be giving him his instructions in about an hour, and he’s got further to
drive than my other two men. That should be time enough, though. It’ll take Gecko at least five hours from leaving London to get to the location, even if he flies straight to Toulouse, and my
guess is he won’t be flying because he’ll want to take a weapon with him. I think he’ll either drive or go by train, and that means he won’t get there until sometime
tomorrow.’

‘So the timing should work out well,’ Holbeche said. ‘Let’s hope everything else does.’

‘Exactly,’ Simpson replied.

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow

In her fifteenth-floor office, Raya Kosov gazed out of the window towards Moscow for what she guessed would be the last time. She then turned her attention to a
handwritten list – each entry apparently innocuous – lying on the desk in front of her. She was being as methodical in her approach to her defection as in everything else she had ever
done at Yasenevo.

Beside the list sat an official voucher for a return airline ticket to Minsk, made out in her name. Abramov had organized that for her, and her eyes had again welled with tears when he had
handed it to her. Not, in this case, from grief, but simply because she knew exactly how much trouble he was going to be in as soon as her crime was discovered. She just hoped her boss would
survive the subsequent purge.

Also on the desk was her passport, obtained nearly five years earlier for a brief holiday on the Black Sea, and which she’d only ever used on that one occasion, and beside it was her SVR
identity card. She would need the passport to get onto the aircraft, while the identity card should help smooth her path if she met any obstacles. Like the KGB before it, the SVR was regarded with
a mixture of fear and awe by most Russian citizens, and its officers were very rarely impeded.

She had already packed a small case ready for her journey, and that was waiting for her in her tiny Moscow apartment, along with her precious store of euros and American dollars. She’d
accumulated those meagre funds as carefully and inconspicuously as she could, buying the hard currency from a handful of black-market traders in exchange for roubles, and paying – she was
perfectly certain – well over the odds for it.

As well as clothes, her bag also contained a portable CD player. Somewhat similar to a Sony Walkman in appearance, but much more bulky, it had emerged from the production line of a minor Russian
factory about five years earlier, and Raya had immediately seen its potential. She’d bought the unit, which had only worked intermittently from new, and then spent some hours modifying it,
with the result that it no longer worked at all. In fact, the only thing that did operate as the manufacturers had intended were the push buttons, and all they did was illuminate. But it was Raya
Kosov’s prize possession, and would definitely be accompanying her on her final journey out of Russia, together with a few music CDs inside their cases.

Raya looked back at the list and had, she decided, covered almost everything. She’d done a handful of the security checks Abramov had instructed her to perform, and written out a normal
report just as if she’d completed all of them. In fact, the report wasn’t entirely normal. Under the strictly numerical section – the filenames, numbers and directories
she’d checked – she’d added another paragraph headed ‘Possible improper access’, in which she’d listed a number of files that appeared to have been accessed by
somebody here at Yasenevo, identity unknown. She appended a note stating that she was continuing to investigate the matter.

Abramov was out of the office until Monday, and the report, stamped
Sekretno
at the top and bottom of every page, was securely inside his locked safe. He’d given Raya the
combination weeks earlier, which broke SVR rules, but Abramov had decided it was worth taking this risk because he was depending more and more on his subordinate, and was out of the office so
frequently.

When she’d put the report inside Abramov’s safe, Raya had also removed a key. As network manager, the major was required to hold a master key that would open every office door in the
building, even those of the most senior staff officers, just in case some kind of a computer problem required one particular workstation to be switched on – or off – when the occupant
of that office was away from the building.

She’d also taken another voucher for an airline ticket, applied Abramov’s official stamp to it and scrawled a reasonable facsimile of the major’s signature across the bottom.
But the destination she had inserted on this voucher wasn’t Minsk, or indeed anywhere else in the Confederation of Independent States.

Back in her own office, she’d locked the door, opened a small program on her computer – a program she’d written herself – and then used it to dial a Moscow number. The
moment the call connected, her program gave her access to the call diverter she’d been using to transfer files to her own computer, a small but quite powerful laptop tucked away in a corner
of the bedroom in her own apartment. First, she permanently deleted all the call records held in the diverter, then she looked up a number on the Yasenevo database and copied that to the call
diverter. Then she deleted that number as well, but ensured it remained in the diverter’s log, and inserted a different Moscow number. She wouldn’t be calling the device again, and
doubted if anyone else would, but when the call diverter was discovered, as she knew it would be, it wouldn’t take an SVR technician long to identify both the number it was set to dial and
the previous number as well. In fact that was an essential part of her plan.

When she’d originally worked out how she was going to accumulate her ‘dowry’ for the defection, she’d decided to keep things as simple as possible. It seemed to her
almost poetic to be able to use the same hardware mechanism to both copy the files she wanted, and also to fatally implicate her target.

That had been the easy bit. The next thing would be much more difficult, but she knew she had to do it, and as soon as possible, because the clock was already ticking. She first looked at her
watch, then accessed the master workstation record on her computer. That listed the time when every user on the network logged on and off each day. She scrolled through a number of pages, but
paused for a few extra moments on one in particular, just long enough to check a single entry, then she returned to her home page.

Raya stood up and opened the top drawer of an unlocked filing cabinet standing against one wall. From there she took a zipped pouch containing an electronic technician’s toolkit that
included screwdrivers, pliers, chip extractors, earthing wristband, assorted screws and other bits and pieces. She also removed a small cardboard box that held a dozen or so anti-static envelopes
containing RAM chips of various types, since there were several different computer models, with different motherboards and memory slots, attached to the SVR network. She put both into a briefcase
and moved back to her desk.

Raya opened one of the drawers and took out an unopened box of pencils, another of ballpoint pens, a pair of scissors, and a new reel of clear sticky tape, and slid them all into the pockets
inside her briefcase. Then she took out a box of medical plasters, selected two short ones, and stuck one on the end of her right forefinger and the other on her right thumb. The last item she
selected was a small rubber bulb with a fine brush attached: it looked almost as if it could be an item of make-up, but it wasn’t.

Finally, she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out two different Yale-type keys, each wrapped in tissue paper. She had prepared these the previous evening by scrubbing them in a strong
solution of the most powerful cleaning fluid she could find, and then boiling them in a pan on her stove. She’d repeated the process three times and, at the end of it, she was as sure as she
could be that no trace of her fingerprints remained. She checked that the tissue paper still covered them completely, then replaced the keys in her pocket.

She made a final check that she now had everything she needed, opened her office door and stepped out into the corridor, locked the door behind her and strode off, towards the SVR senior
officers’ floor.

Bons-en-Chablais, Savoie, France

The mobile rang just after Richter had ordered a second coffee.

‘Yes?’

‘Right,’ Simpson said, ‘grab a pencil and write this down.’

‘Hang on.’ Richter opened the briefcase and pulled out a notebook and ballpoint pen. ‘OK, fire away.’

‘We need you to get to Ax-les-Thermes as soon as possible, and certainly no later than this afternoon.’

‘And where is this place, exactly? I presume it’s somewhere in France?’

‘It’s about an hour south of Toulouse, on the N20.’

Richter did some swift mental calculations. It would be a six- or seven-hour drive, he guessed, and offered no problem unless he hit unusually heavy traffic or experienced some kind of
mechanical difficulty with the car.

‘And when I get there?’ he asked.

‘The same routine, Richter. Go to the Hostellerie de la Poste and book in there for two nights. This time that is where you’re going to be staying because if this is going to work at
all, I need to know exactly where you are. Use the name Markov for the booking and, if anyone asks, you’re a Russian on holiday in France. So talk to the people at the hotel in schoolboy
French, or in Russian. If you have to speak English, make sure you put on a heavy accent. You really do speak Russian, don’t you?’

‘Yes, and I suppose that’s also why the papers I collected in Vienna have
Sekretno
stamped all over them?’

‘You opened the packet,’ Simpson said flatly.

‘Of course I opened the packet. And if it had been full of drugs, or something I didn’t like the look of, I’d have dumped it in Austria, orders or no orders. I like to know
what I’m carrying, Simpson.’

‘Your reporting officers were right, Richter. You are an insubordinate bastard. But I presume you’ve no scruples about carrying Russian documents classified Secret?’

‘No, because I’ve already read them. Technically, they may be classified at that level, but there’s almost nothing we don’t already know about the Victor III, and
there’s certainly nothing contained there that was news to me. Don’t forget I was an ASW Sea King pilot until I saw the light and switched to Harriers, and in the Navy we were required
to know exactly what the opposition’s capabilities were.’

‘Right,’ Simpson sounded almost resigned, ‘apart from the extract from the Victor manual, there should also have been a smaller envelope in that packet. I presume you opened
that as well?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why am I not surprised? Inside it you should have found a briefing paper about the SVR – which is the Russian foreign intelligence service.’

‘I do know what the initials stand for,’ Richter replied. ‘And there was also a small plastic card with my photograph on it. What’s that for?’

‘You’ll find out later. In the meantime, just check in to that hotel at Ax and wait for instructions. While you’re there, read the briefing paper. I need you to be reasonably
conversant with the structure and functions of the SVR by tomorrow morning, just in case.’

‘Just in case what?’

‘As I said, Richter, you’ll find out later. Somebody might contact you at the hotel tomorrow, or perhaps Sunday. Any other questions?’

Richter had several, but none that couldn’t wait. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You want me to call you when I get there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right. I’d better get moving, then.’

Finishing the call, he took another sip of coffee and opened the briefcase again. He extracted a route-planning map of France and studied it for a few minutes. It looked like an easy drive, most
of it on autoroutes. Richter finished his coffee, picked up the briefcase and walked back into the hotel.

Twenty minutes later, he’d packed his bag, paid the bill and was nosing the Ford out of the hotel car park.

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow

Raya glanced at her watch before knocking on the office door.

She’d been studying the routine followed by this particular colonel for several months, simply by looking carefully at his workstation usage records. Every Friday morning that he was in
the building, he logged off the network at around ten-thirty, and logged on again about an hour later. This, she knew, was because the Head of the Section convened a weekly meeting in his office.
If canteen gossip was to be believed, this meeting first featured briefings from all his subordinates regarding their current projects, followed by the consumption by all concerned of a
considerable amount of alcohol, as a kind of a liquid finale to the rigours of the working week.

It was just before ten-forty. So, unless the colonel’s routine had changed, there should be no reply. A few seconds later she knocked again, with the same lack of response. Raya glanced up
and down the corridor, just in case he was anywhere in sight, perhaps returning to his office to collect something he’d forgotten, but it remained deserted. She took a deep breath, pulled the
pass-key out of her pocket, opened the door and stepped inside.