The two SIS officers signified their agreement, and Richter slowly slid the first page of the Victor manual out of the envelope, and held it up.
‘This is secret information,’ Richter continued, ‘about one of our submarines.’ He pointed to the Sekretno stamps, at the top and bottom of the page, then quickly replaced the sheet in the envelope.
‘We’re not very interested in submarines these days, Anatoli. What else have you got for us?’
Richter smiled. ‘I have a lot of good hard data, including the name of the man who sent us copies of some files from your Vauxhall Cross.’
Both Wallis and Hughes leant forward. ‘That’s more like it, Anatoli,’ Hughes said eagerly. ‘Tell us about that.’
Raya Kosov cleared passport control without any problems and headed into the baggage-reclaim hall at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. She stood for a moment and watched the couple of hundred people surrounding two of the luggage carousels, which had just started moving, and above which the incoming flight numbers were displayed. Beyond this mass of jostling humanity, three other carousels were also rotating, each carrying a few pieces of orphaned luggage on endless and pointless journeys into and then out of the terminal building.
If the SVR had sent anyone to intercept her, she was reasonably certain they wouldn’t have involved any of the Italian agencies, at least not at this stage. That was partly because it would be embarrassing to admit one of their own officers had flown the coop, but mainly because, if she was picked up by the Italian police or customs officers, she could try to claim political asylum, and the resulting media storm would do nothing to help Russia’s new international image as an emerging democracy.
But Raya had no intention of being caught, and she’d already planned to do something about it. Her two most distinctive features were probably her short blonde hair — she’d had it cut in this new style the previous week — and her light blue eyes. That gave her an almost Nordic appearance, and she hoped this was what any watchers now positioned on the other side of the customs’ channels or outside the airport building would be looking for.
Raya looked around, till she spotted a ladies’ lavatory, and walked quickly across to it. She had to wait a couple of minutes for a vacant cubicle, the airport being very busy, then she stepped inside and locked the door. She took off her jacket and blouse, hung them on the hook behind the door, then sat on the toilet bowl and opened her carry-on bag, taking out a small folding compact, a make-up kit, and a tiny plastic case. Resting the bag on her knees, she opened the compact and positioned the mirror so she could see her face, before she snapped open the case and took out a coloured contact lens. Swiftly, she slipped the lens into her left eye, and repeated the process with her right eye. She then smiled at the result: her blue eyes had vanished behind the dark-brown plastic lenses.
They were completely at odds with her very fair skin, however, so she set about doing something about that as well. From her make-up case she took a tube of instant tan, squeezed some into her palm and began massaging it into the skin of her face and neck. Within a few minutes, she’d achieved an even colour, making sure she’d covered her hands and wrists, and the back of her neck, as well. She wasn’t so worried about her legs, as she’d deliberately chosen dark-coloured tights. Now, when she put her blouse back on, she was satisfied that her appearance would seem Mediterranean.
Next, Raya opened a plastic bag and took out a long, dark wig. She tucked her own newly cropped hair neatly under it and settled the wig on her head, making sure that not a single blonde strand was visible underneath.
Finally, she took out a bright-red lipstick, much brighter than she normally wore, and applied it carefully.
Raya put her blouse back on, held the compact at arm’s length, and looked critically at her image in the small round mirror. She almost didn’t recognize herself, so she hoped there was little chance any of the Rome SVR officers would either.
The very last thing she did was pull the jacket inside-out. She’d spent a long time searching for exactly the right garment to wear on this journey, and had finally chosen a lightweight reversible jacket, one side a dark blue, the other a creamy off-white. When she’d arrived at Rome, she’d been a blue-eyed blonde wearing a dark jacket. Now, leaving the Ladies, she’d be a brown-eyed brunette in a light-coloured one. A complete transformation, she hoped.
After a few more minutes in the cubicle, checking her appearance, she pulled her coat back on, opened the door and stepped out. She crossed to the washbasins and stared at her reflection for a few moments longer, then left the Ladies.
Raya had no luggage to collect, since everything she now possessed in the world was crammed into the black carry-on bag in her left hand, but she didn’t want to leave the baggage reclaim hall walking by herself. So she waited until thirty or forty new arrivals had fought their way through the scrum to the carousel and retrieved their cases, before she began making her way towards the exit.
Like almost everyone in front of her, she headed for the green channel, nothing to declare, and strode purposefully through it, at the tail-end of what seemed to be a large Italian family group. A handful of Italian customs officers in dark-coloured uniforms watched the departing passengers, their eyes flicking over each in turn with a relative lack of interest. None attempted to stop her, or even speak to her, but she could almost feel them watching her as she walked past.
Outside, the arrivals hall was an apparent chaos of crowds milling about, and with loud and, to her, incomprehensibly garbled announcements echoing from loudspeakers in rapid-fire Italian. Everyone appeared to be talking at the same time, while those unencumbered with bags were making their points in the way only Italians can, through wide and expansive gestures that had passers-by ducking and dodging to avoid their swinging arms.
And Raya walked silently through it all, her eyes darting in all directions as she constantly looked out for danger. She hoped she was home free, but if that officious little shit of a Border Guards officer had decided to run a check on her at Yasenevo, she knew that there could already be a snatch squad waiting, somewhere at Fiumicino, with orders to grab her. And if that happened, she knew she’d be on the next available flight back to Moscow, probably heavily sedated, and that she would then spend the last few days, or weeks, of her short life screaming her lungs out as she waited for death in the torture chambers under the Lubyanka.
The Russian intelligence organs implement a simple policy with regard to any employees who betray the motherland. They are almost never tried for their crimes, but simply disappear. Shortly after joining the SVR, Raya had been shown a graphic example of the way such ‘disappearances’ happened.
It was an old and scratchy film, shot possibly with an 8-millimetre hand-held camera, and it had been taken in the basement of the ‘Aquarium’ — the headquarters building of the GRU, Russian Military Intelligence, at Khodinka Airfield in Moscow.
The film showed a man wired, rather than strapped, to a metal stretcher. Within seconds of the film starting, the reason for the steel wire became obvious. For the man was being fed feet-first into a working incinerator, in which straps of any usual kind would have disintegrated quickly in the intense heat. The victim was struggling violently, his screams the more disturbing to her because of the absolute silence of the film. The two men lifting the stretcher onto the rails that led into the furnace wore body protectors, heavy gloves and heat-resistant face shields. And they appeared to be following specific orders, for the lower half of the stretcher was fed into the furnace first and then, after half a minute, deliberately pulled out again.