Manhunt (19 page)

‘And I presume one of these men will be wired for sound?’ Richter asked.

‘You presume correctly. Now, your name is Anatoli Markov, and you’re a defecting clerk on the run from your masters in the SVR, and currently seeking asylum in the West. Your dowry,
so to speak, is the packet of papers you’re carrying. Keep that with you at all times, but don’t hand it over. The most you can do is show the men the first page, but don’t let
them handle it. Just let them see the
Sekretno
stamps on it, and tell them you’ve got other papers squirrelled away somewhere. Your ace in the hole is that you know the identity of a
traitor somewhere within British intelligence, who’s been copying files from Vauxhall Cross and selling them to the SVR. But, obviously, don’t tell them anything at all about this
business, apart from the fact that you know who the person is.’

Richter snorted. ‘You’ve been reading too much John le Carré, Simpson. That scenario’s a total spy-fiction cliché.’

‘It may be, Richter, but that’s the way we’re playing it. Keep the meeting short – no more than about thirty or forty minutes. Talk only in general terms about where you
work: you’re employed as a clerk at SVR headquarters at Yasenevo, in the south-east area of Moscow, which is why I needed you to be familiar with the contents of that briefing paper. I hope
you’ve read it?’

‘Yes,’ Richter replied. ‘I wouldn’t want to try going on
Mastermind
with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service as my specialist subject, but I think I’ve
retained enough to bluff my way through a conversation.’

‘Good,’ Simpson said. ‘Invent some people you work with there, and a few superior officers. The people you’ll be talking to won’t know any better. You’ve
still got that perforated plastic card, I hope. That’s something we knocked up here in London, but it’s an exact replica of a Yasenevo building pass. About the only way to tell
it’s a fake would be to try to use it to actually get inside SVR headquarters. If you have to, show it to the SIS men, but don’t let them handle it or take it off you. It’s a part
of your dowry, and you have to hang on to it.’

‘When do you want me to do this?’

‘I’ll call you in a few minutes. I just have to brief the SIS guys, so make sure you can get back to your hotel within about fifteen minutes. I’ll tell them to approach you, so
go and sit in the lounge or the bar, somewhere public. When you’ve finished talking to them, arrange to have a second meeting sometime tomorrow, but not later today. As soon as you’ve
finished, call me on this mobile number to let me know how it went, but ensure you’re well away from the hotel, so you can’t be overheard. Take a drive out somewhere, or go down into Ax
proper and have a drink, something like that.’

‘Do I get to ask you any questions?’

‘You can ask, but there’s a limit to what I can tell you.’

‘Where are these two SIS officers from?’

‘Paris station, and they’ve been given the other half of the briefing.’

‘Very convenient for you that I just happened to be in the area with that packet of papers, isn’t it?’

‘Not really, no. It was always possible that the man we were expecting to pitch up in France wouldn’t make it, so your journey was always planned to include an exercise scenario as
well.’

‘And now you don’t think this anonymous man is going to turn up, is that it?’

‘Right now, Richter, we don’t know. All I can tell you is that we’ve passed on your name and location to him, but the last time we heard from him he was still in Vienna. He
could be in Ax right now, or on his way here, or still in Vienna. We just don’t know. We’ve been tracking him using the signal from his mobile phone, but he knows what he’s doing,
and only switches it on whenever he wants to make a call.’

‘And the last time he did that was in Vienna, right?’

‘Exactly,’ Simpson said. ‘About two days ago.’

‘And
if
he turns up, what do I do about it?’

‘We’ve told him that you’re a Russian-speaking British military officer, which is approximately true, and that you’re using the name Anatoli Markov.’

‘Why, though? I mean, why am I pretending to be Russian for this guy? I’d have thought he’d be expecting to meet a Brit.’

‘Local colour, that’s all. He asked that we send out somebody who spoke his own language, and we decided that if you used a Russian name you both could appear more casual at the
meeting itself. Two Russian tourists running into each other away from home, that kind of thing.’

‘Sounds like bullshit to me,’ Richter muttered.

It sounded like bullshit to Simpson, as well, but he didn’t say so.

Saturday

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow

‘What was his name and rank?’ Major Yuri Abramov demanded.

He was wearing civilian clothes, and was far from pleased at being summoned to the duty office at Yasenevo on a Saturday morning, on what he knew was a wild-goose chase.

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘You don’t know very much, do you? Somebody called you to verify the identity of an SVR officer. You have no idea of the man’s name or rank, and you don’t even know for
sure if he
was
calling from Sheremetievo. And you
think
he said my officer was flying to Rome, which is ridiculous. Her travel warrant is for Minsk, and nowhere else.’

But the duty officer stood his ground. ‘No, sir. He definitely said she was flying to Rome. That much I am sure about. And if he
wasn’t
calling from Sheremetievo, how did he
get the number here? It’s unlisted.’

Abramov stared at him for a few seconds.

‘Right, call the Border Guards Directorate at the airport, and we’ll sort this business out once and for all. While you try to track down the man who called you, I’ll collect
the book of travel warrants.’

In the small suite of offices where they worked, Abramov unlocked the door of Raya Kosov’s room, and nodded. Everything was neat and tidy, exactly as it had been on every other occasion
he’d looked in there. In his own office, he quickly unlocked his safe, pulled out the book he needed, locked up carefully, and returned to the duty office.

The duty officer sat at his desk, with the telephone in his hand. ‘Just a moment,’ he spoke into it, as Abramov entered. ‘The Border Guards’ office at Sheremetievo,
sir,’ he informed Abramov, gesturing to the handset.

The senior officer took it and sat down. ‘This is Major Abramov,’ he began. ‘I gather you’ve been enquiring about my colleague Captain Kosov.’ As he spoke, he was
flicking through the pages of the book of travel warrants, searching for the one he’d issued to his subordinate. When he found the counterfoil, he noted the number and the details he’d
written there.

‘She was issued with a warrant to travel to Minsk,’ he began firmly, but then his voice tailed off as he noticed another counterfoil, from which the warrant had been detached. But,
in this case, the counterfoil was blank, and Abramov had always been as meticulous in processing travel warrants as he was with every other accountable item in his charge. He would never have
removed one without completing all the details.

In fact, the counterfoil wasn’t entirely blank. There was something written there, in a hand he was entirely familiar with. It was the single word ‘
’ –
‘sorry’.

Until that moment, he was convinced it had all been a mistake – probably nothing more than something misheard over the telephone. But the missing warrant, and that one word written by
Raya, now suggested a very different possibility.

The Border Guards officer continued saying something, his voice an irritating twitter in Abramov’s ear, but the SVR officer was no longer listening.

‘Wait,’ he interrupted, and turned back to the duty officer. ‘Get onto Minsk,’ he ordered, ‘and tell them to check which hospital Kosov’s mother is in.’
He lifted the telephone to his ear again. ‘Give me the flight details,’ he instructed, and listened for a few moments. ‘Where is the aircraft now? Can you recall it? Right, what
time does it land in Rome?’

Less than ten minutes later, Abramov realized he was standing at the epicentre of a disaster in the making. The travel warrant he’d issued for a flight to Minsk hadn’t been used by
Raya, or anyone else, but the other warrant from his book had been used for a flight to Rome. The Minsk SVR office had made two phone calls and confirmed that Raya Kosov’s mother was already
dead, but what chilled Abramov was that she’d died the very day Raya had told him she was terminally ill, so he now knew, beyond any reasonable doubt, that his subordinate had intended to
defect.

And the flight had already left Russian airspace. In fact, it had crossed the Italian border at about the time he was talking to the Border Guards Directorate officer at Sheremetievo, so there
was now no way of recalling it.

All he’d been able to do was issue the most specific instructions to the SVR office in Rome, backed up by a full description and photograph of Raya Kosov. Abramov just hoped that would
prove enough, because it would take time for their officers in Rome to get themselves out to the airport. And, even then, Raya probably wouldn’t be that easy to spot in the milling crowds of
people there.

Ax-les-Thermes, France

Simpson ended the call and for a couple of minutes sat in thought, running over the sequence of actions in his head, mentally checking to see if there was anything
he’d forgotten.

Then he dialled Adamson’s mobile.

‘It’s Simpson,’ he said. ‘Richter will be appearing at the hotel in about twenty minutes, so get yourselves into position now. Orders as stated, objective
unchanged.’

‘Copied. We’ll be mobile in two, and in position in ten.’

In the Renault Laguna parked beside the road to the north of the town, Adamson started the engine and shot a glance at Dekker.

The two men were dressed very differently, for Adamson looked like a businessman, in an outfit of slacks, shirt and tie, and a lightweight jacket concealing his pistol and shoulder holster,
whereas Dekker wore a pair of thorn-proof olive-green trousers and a camouflage-pattern jacket. Also, in contrast to Adamson’s polished loafers, Dekker’s feet were encased in tough
boots with thick rubber soles.

‘It’s a go?’ he asked.

‘Yup, it’s a go. You got everything?’

Dekker nodded and gestured to the bulky briefcase lying on the back seat. ‘Drop me where we agreed.’

Adamson checked the road in both directions, then pulled the Renault out of the wide lay-by and turned south, back towards Ax-les-Thermes. About three hundred yards short of the Hostellerie de
la Poste, he indicated and pulled the car in to the side of the road.

‘Wait,’ Adamson ordered, checking the road ahead of them, then glancing in his mirrors to see behind them. ‘All clear,’ he said. ‘Go now.’

Dekker slid out of the passenger door, opened the rear door to grab the briefcase, looked both ways and then crossed the road swiftly, to disappear through a scrubby hedge and into the field
beyond.

Adamson checked that Dekker was well out of sight before driving back onto the road. He indicated when he reached a lay-by about seventy yards from the hotel, and pulled the car off the road
again. He lowered the windows, took out his mobile phone and placed it on the dashboard, then picked up a cardboard folder from the back seat and opened it. Inside were printed pages covered in pie
charts and diagrams, together with several sheets of text, all of it in French. It was exactly the kind of stuff a commercial traveller would be expected to carry and, as Adamson spread it out on
the seat beside him, he hoped this would provide him with a plausible reason for sitting there in the car by the roadside for an hour or so, with a mobile phone constantly pressed against his
ear.

The moment he was through the hedge, and out of sight of the road, Dekker crouched low and hurried away up the gentle slope leading towards a small copse of trees some fifty
yards ahead of him. He was shielded from the road behind by the hedge bordering that section of the N20, and from the hotel by another, rather lower, hedge that extended across the southern edge of
the field.

Reaching the trees, he straightened up and eased his way into their sun-dappled gloom. He had already selected this as being the best – and realistically the only – spot from which
he could watch the rear of the hotel from cover. Dekker chose a position on the perimeter of the copse which offered a clear downhill view of the target, and crouched down beside a large shrub with
fleshy green leaves. He clicked open the briefcase, studied the component parts of the sniper rifle lying in their custom-shaped recesses and then, with the ease that only comes with long practice,
began the assembly process.

The weapon was one of the variants of the standard SAS sniper rifle, the British-made Accuracy International PM – Precision Marksman – or L96A1. Designed for covert operations, the
rifle Dekker had chosen was the AWS, or Arctic Warfare Suppressed, model. The name was a hangover from the days when the manufacturer produced a modified version for the Swedish armed forces, a
move which spawned several different models generically known as the AW range. The stainless-steel barrel was fitted with an integrated suppressor which reduced the sound of a shot to about that of
a standard .22 rifle. It was a comparatively short-range weapon, because of the subsonic ammunition, effective only to about three hundred yards in contrast to other versions and calibres of the
rifle, some of which were accurate at up to a mile.