‘But, to answer your question, I’m going to send this man down there today — his name’s Paul Richter, by the way — because I want him in place no later than this evening. That will give Gecko two clear days over this weekend to sort him out, and still let him be back in his office on Monday morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and eager to hear the latest news about the Russian cipher clerk.’
‘What’s he like, this Richter?’
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Simpson said. ‘I’ve only met him once. We picked him because he matched all the basic criteria we agreed — no immediate family, unemployed, Russian speaker and with a military background. He actually speaks good Russian, which is a bonus — he took an advanced course while he was in the Navy. The other reason I chose him was because, frankly, we couldn’t find anybody else suitable in the time available. His service record showed him to be somewhat insubordinate, but also stubborn and resourceful, and I thought he would fit the bill. You’ll appreciate that we couldn’t do a full check on him, simply because of the timescale, but I have to confess he’s not the order-following patsy I assumed he would be. In fact, ever since he arrived in Vienna, he’s done very little but disobey almost every instruction we’ve given him.’
‘Deliberately?’
‘Absolutely. He even told me he trusted me about as far as he could spit a rat — which I presume is an expression they use in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. He’s also deeply suspicious about his tasking, and doesn’t believe I’ve told him anything like the truth about why he’s in Europe.’
‘It sounds like he’s got your number, Richard,’ Holbeche chuckled. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’
‘No. It doesn’t matter what he thinks, or even what he does, as long as he eventually goes where I tell him. And once Gecko catches up with him, he’ll either live or he’ll die, and it really doesn’t matter either way. We’ll have got our mole, and Richter will have died in a car crash or a climbing accident, or whatever else we decide to arrange in order to get rid of his body. Or maybe he’ll walk away from this alive. And if he does walk away, I might even offer him a job. I like the way he thinks.’
‘So what do you want from me? To proceed as we agreed?’
‘Yes, though I suggest you do it this morning. That will give Gecko plenty of time to make whatever arrangements he needs for the weekend.’
‘And what about watchers? You still think they’re a waste of time?’
‘Definitely. In fact, it would be worse than that. It would be counter-productive. You can’t watch every officer, and Sod’s Law states that if you do try to put some surveillance in place, either Gecko or somebody else is bound to spot it. Word will get around, and then he’ll guess that this whole thing is just a deception operation, and that will then be that. We’ll be right back at square one with no idea of Gecko’s identity, and no easy way of finding out.’
‘If this was a long-term operation, I’d agree with you. But if you’re expecting Gecko to act this weekend, within the next two days, I don’t see how he could manage to detect any surveillance in such a short time.’
‘Would you really want to take that chance?’ Simpson asked.
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.
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.