Dinner was already being served so, without unpacking his bag, he washed his face and hands, and went downstairs to the dining room. He chose the menu touristique, because it offered a cassoulet as one of the main courses, ordered a bottle of still water, and settled back to enjoy it.
After he’d finished eating, he picked up his coffee and found a seat on the terrace outside. After checking that nobody could hear him, he pulled the mobile phone from his pocket and dialled the number Simpson had given him earlier.
‘You’re in Ax?’
‘Yes. What do you want me to do now?’
‘Nothing else today, and it’s still not clear exactly what’s going on. There’s been no further contact with the man we were expecting you to meet, so, while we’re waiting, we’ve decided you can assist us in a training exercise. Tomorrow you’ll be contacted by two officers from our Paris embassy. I’ll call you again in the morning and give you a verbal briefing.’
‘A training exercise? I could have flown down here if that’s all that’s going to be happening. And what about afterwards? Do you still want me to carry on driving round Europe like some hopeless tourist?’
‘Just do what I tell you, Richter,’ Simpson snapped. ‘You’re not exactly flavour of the month right now, based on your performance to date. Don’t do anything else to piss me off.’
Chapter Nine
A little after one in the morning, in French time, Gerald Stanway drove his hired Ford Mondeo off the Eurotunnel train at the terminal just outside Calais. Within a few minutes he was heading for Paris on the A26 autoroute, driving at a few kilometres per hour above the legal speed limit.
In the boot of the car was a small suitcase containing enough clothes for the weekend, his washing kit and a couple of books. Nobody on either side of the Channel had bothered looking inside the case, or even in the boot. But it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, for Stanway’s Browning Hi-Power 9-millimetre semi-automatic pistol — which Lomas provided almost five years ago, only after repeated requests — wasn’t in the suitcase. Instead, it was wrapped in an old towel, together with two spare and fully loaded magazines, and hidden under the rear-seat squab.
Stanway knew all about documentation and the kinds of tracing action that the British intelligence establishment could and would employ, and had decided that the simplest option was just to be as open as possible about what he was doing, and where he was going.
So when he got home the previous evening, he’d used his landline phone to call the closest branch of Hertz, quoted his Gold membership number, and told the booking clerk exactly what he wanted. Ninety minutes later, the Mondeo had been delivered to his home address with a full tank of fuel, and valid Green Card insurance cover for continental travel. Stanway had chosen the unlimited mileage option, explaining that he was going off to enjoy a weekend in France, visiting some of the Loire chateaux and also stocking up on wine.
And to substantiate his cover story he would stop somewhere near the Loire later that morning, and use his credit card to buy a dozen or so cases. Once he was actually on the continent, he would simply drop off the British radar screen, because France operated barely a fraction of the surveillance cameras that infest the British Isles, and those they do possess are mainly found on the autoroutes or in major cities. Once he was near Orléans, he’d leave the autoroute and stay off it for the rest of his journey. Then, unless he was unlucky or unobservant enough to be caught speeding, his masters at Vauxhall Cross wouldn’t have the slightest idea where he had actually been.
There was virtually no traffic on the autoroute, and probably wouldn’t be, at least until he got closer to Paris. Stanway had estimated that he should reach Toulouse after about ten to twelve hours’ driving — say about fourteen hours maximum including stops — which would see him in the vicinity of Toulouse by mid afternoon, even after stopping to buy the wine. Then, of course, he had something else to do before he could continue south to Ax-les-Thermes, but he hoped that wouldn’t take too long.
He didn’t know when the two SIS officers were scheduled to interview the Russian clerk, but they would have to be briefed in Paris before leaving for Toulouse, and so he guessed they wouldn’t reach Ax-les-Thermes until Saturday afternoon, at the earliest, which should give him at least an hour or so to find where the clerk was staying. But even if he didn’t manage it in that time, Stanway wasn’t overly concerned. In fact, it was quite possible that the quickest way to find the Russian was to wait for the two Six officers to pitch up, since they might well be easier to identify, and then follow them. The only downside to that option was that if the clerk handed over the incriminating documents to the SIS men, he might have to take them out as well.
But Stanway wasn’t too bothered by the possibility of collateral damage. He was determined not to leave France until he’d resolved the situation, to his personal satisfaction, and if that meant killing three men rather than one, well, so be it.
Raya Kosov woke early — in fact, she’d barely slept, or that’s what it felt like — and walked out of her tiny flat well before eight, clutching a bulky, black, leather-look overnight case and her handbag. She’d packed the case the previous evening, selecting a few of her favourite clothes as well as the usual toiletries and underwear, and including her precious CD player and a few music discs. She’d debated about taking her laptop computer, but had decided it simply wasn’t worth the risk. The customs or police or perhaps even FSB officers at the airport would be certain to want to inspect it, and not even her SVR credentials would be enough to deter them. And, anyway, she didn’t need it, because she already had another storage medium containing everything she wanted to take with her.
So, with regret, she’d left the laptop behind in her flat, after first carefully wiping the contents of one particular directory on the hard drive. She couldn’t rely on a simple deletion, though, and used a commercial utility program to perform multiple overwrites of the data, using random characters to ensure that nothing could ever be recovered, even by using a low-level disk sector editor. Then she’d finally switched off the computer and closed the lid, leaving it on the tiny desk in one corner of her living room.
The first part of her long journey that day was also the shortest. Raya simply walked out of the front door of her building and headed towards a bus stop, just as she did every day of her working week. The only difference was that this time she crossed the street to the stop on the other side of the road. For today, her destination lay to the north, at Sheremetievo Airport, rather than southeast of Moscow, at Yasenevo.
Richter had spent a somewhat disturbed night, despite being tired after his journey. His fundamental problem was not knowing what the hell was going on, and he was acutely conscious that, for the first time since he’d stepped off the aircraft in Vienna, his location was fixed, and therefore known to Simpson and to anyone else he chose to tell. Before he climbed into bed, he’d jammed the back of a chair under the door handle, wondering if he was just being ridiculously paranoid.
The hotel had creaked and groaned as its timbers settled in the cool of the night, with sounds like the occasional pistol shot echoing around the old building. Richter seemed to have woken up almost every time it happened, his eyes wide open and staring into the darkness.