All contact with Roadrunner, apart from his visits to the British Embassies in Moscow and Vienna, has been by mobile telephone. He apparently purchased a pre-paid unit in Austria, and technical services — assisted by France Telecom and the French mobile service providers — have identified his exact location each time he turned on this mobile. As well as the Moscow embassy, Roadrunner also made four other calls to numbers in Russia, the recipients unidentified to date but possibly family or friends.
Continuous tracing action was not possible because Roadrunner switched off the mobile after he’d made each call, and apparently removed the battery, so preventing remote activation and tracking of the unit through the Echelon system. But the calls he made have provided a fragmented record of his route from Vienna to France, and his last known location is at the northern end of the town of Ax-les-Thermes, south of Toulouse.
Conclusion
The probability is that he will remain in this location until the requested meeting with SIS officers. This meeting will take place somewhere in Ax-les-Thermes, precise location to be decided later.
‘“Roadrunner”, for God’s sake,’ Stanway muttered to himself. Most code names were stupid, but that was just ridiculous. Perhaps almost appropriate in this case, but still ridiculous.
He glanced at his watch. It was early Friday afternoon and, if the update was accurate, he had until Sunday to recover this situation. He knew he’d have to do something about it himself, because it was clear, from what Lomas had told him, that Moscow either knew nothing about this defecting clerk or, more likely, knew exactly who the man was but wasn’t planning on doing anything about him.
It was, of course, certainly possible that the defecting clerk knew nothing about Stanway, or might not even exist — for it was conceivable that SIS or The Box, having received intelligence suggesting there was a mole somewhere in the security establishment, were using the story of a defecting clerk as an attempt to flush out the traitor. But Stanway wasn’t prepared to take that chance.
He sat silently at his desk for a few moments, working out possible timings and routes. He would have to travel by car, simply because he would definitely need to carry a weapon. Getting a pistol onto an aircraft was possible if you knew what you were doing, especially something like a disassembled Glock because of its mainly non-metallic construction, but it was always dangerous. Driving through one of the channel ports in a car, especially for a traveller leaving the United Kingdom, was as near risk-free as made no difference, the English authorities taking almost no interest and the French less.
Stanway was too cautious to do anything more than read the email. If Holbeche had set some kind of a trap, his keystrokes — and those of every other senior SIS officer — would be scrutinized. If the courier was real, and Stanway’s plans for the weekend came to fruition, the same process would be applied after the event.
But he had a Filofax at the back of which were several maps, none particularly detailed, but the one covering Western Europe was clear enough to show him where Ax-les-Thermes was located, and the size of the symbol suggested it was a fairly small town. Hopefully, finding the clerk wouldn’t be all that difficult: after all, how many renegade Russians could there be hiding out in a small French spa town?
Raya Kosov cleared her desk and checked out of Yasenevo as early as she could, catching the first available coach back to Moscow. She got out at her usual stop, near the Davydkovo station in south-west central Moscow, and headed off towards her small apartment, as usual. But the moment the sound of the coach’s noisy diesel engine had faded, she retraced her steps, crossed the road and descended into the Moscow underground system.
When the train arrived, Raya entered a half-empty carriage. She ignored the empty seats and stood beside the door, because she didn’t have far to go. As the train moved off, accelerating rapidly into the tunnel, she pulled a pair of thin leather gloves from her pocket and slipped them on.
Two stations later she stepped out, climbed back up into the streets of Moscow and walked a few hundred yards down the road to a small apartment building. She glanced around briefly, took out a keyring and unlocked the street door. There was no lift, but the apartment was on the first floor, at the rear, so it was only a single flight of stairs.
Raya unlocked the door and entered. An estate agent would probably have described the flat as furnished, but that was stretching the truth. There were some chairs, a table and a bed, but that was pretty much it. The bed was unmade, and in fact there was no bedding anywhere in the apartment. Or towels, clothes, crockery, or cutlery, for that matter. Absolutely the only thing that suggested occupation was a desktop computer resting on the plain wooden table pushed up against one wall. Incongruously perhaps, bearing in mind the air of desertion in this apartment, the PC was switched on, its system unit humming quietly though the screen was blank. Power cables were connected to a socket on the wall, and a thin cable ran from the modem to an adjacent telephone point.
Raya pulled a chair up to the table, moved the mouse and pressed a button on the front of the screen. She waited until it had flickered into life, navigated to a particular directory and opened it, checked the names of the files listed, and then switched off the monitor.
She opened her briefcase, laid the pencils and ballpoint pen she’d taken from the office at Yasenevo on the desk, and stood up. She glanced carefully around the apartment, checking that she’d not left anything behind, then walked out, locking the door behind her. Less than three minutes had elapsed since she’d first entered the building.
Half an hour later, Raya was sitting in her own apartment, mentally running through her checklist for the very last time. The following morning she’d be leaving Moscow, and she anticipated that, no later than forty-eight hours after that, the dogs would be let loose to find her and haul her back.
The Hostellerie de la Poste stood at the northern end of the town of Ax-les-Thermes — which was actually more like a big village — where the N20 road runs briefly through the countryside before entering the smaller community of Savignac-les-Ormeaux.
Richter arrived there early in the evening and found the establishment without difficulty, mainly because the road ran right beside it. A comfortable-looking stone building, probably about two hundred years old, the hotel was set back a little way from the road, a terrace running along the front and faded shutters adorning the windows above it. Some kind of plant which Richter thought might be wisteria — but his knowledge of botany was virtually nil — was making a determined effort to reach the roof on the right-hand side.
There was a car park at the rear of the building, accessed through a stone archway guarded by tall steel gates. Their paint flaking and metal rusty, they now stood wide open. He swung the Ford through the entrance and parked it in a vacant space immediately behind the hotel itself.
Richter unlocked the boot, pulled out his bag, headed through to reception and checked in. He first tried out his Russian on the proprietor, to no avail, then switched to very basic schoolboy French. The hotel sleeping accommodation was on two levels, and he chose a room at the rear on the first floor and overlooking the car park. There he dropped his bag on the end of the bed and glanced round. The room could only be found in France, for the wallpaper, in a spectacularly garish floral pattern, covered not only all four walls but also the ceiling, and was also virtually a match for the counterpane on the small double bed. But it was clean, at least, and a quick exploration of the bathroom proved that everything worked there and the water was hot.