At that point, Raya was forced to look away, unable to bear watching the man’s agony any longer. His trousers had already vanished, burnt away to nothing, and the bones of his feet and lower legs glistened in the reddish light from the flames, the flesh on them already consumed. The stretcher was dumped on the floor, where it was left for a few minutes while some rubbish bags were fed next through the furnace door. Meanwhile the camera panned the length of the condemned man’s body, zooming in for several close-ups.
Then the stretcher was hoisted up onto the rails again and slid slowly — terribly, terribly slowly — back into the furnace, the victim screaming in agony throughout. Finally, the top end of the stretcher vanished inside, and the furnace door slammed shut behind it. The image darkened, and after a few seconds a legend appeared somewhat shakily on the screen. It read simply: ‘Death of a traitor’.
So now Raya looked everywhere — and at everyone.
Chapter Eleven
Nobody stopped her. As far as Raya could tell, nobody even looked at her as she fought her way through the crowds and stepped out of the airport building. The sunshine was dazzling, its glare compounded by the reflection from vehicle windows, and the heat hit her like a muggy blanket, the air so heavy and humid that she felt she could almost grab a handful and squeeze the moisture out of it. She slipped on a pair of wraparound sunglasses with a ‘DG’ logo on the frame — a Dolce & Gabbana knock-off she’d picked up for a few roubles from a street market in Moscow a couple of months earlier.
The chaos, she saw at once, extended outside the airport as well, but here a cacophony of car horns now added an even sharper and more discordant note. The Italians, she noticed, didn’t queue for taxis the way people in Russia did, always lining up so obediently. In Rome, it was a no-holds-barred free-for-all, as men and women shouted and elbowed their way forward to get to the vehicles first.
This was such an unusual — such a foreign — sight, that she stood and watched it for a few seconds. But, even as she stood there, staring at the crowds of people milling about her, three black Alfa Romeo saloon cars drove up, their tyres squealing as they stopped just beyond the taxi rank. Six men climbed out, and three of them began walking quickly towards the terminal building, while the remaining trio fanned out, two of them checking groups of people waiting for taxis, the other one heading across to the stops where the hotel buses picked up their passengers.
For a few seconds Raya didn’t move, just remained standing beside a group of Italians who were arguing loudly over something. Just watching the six men, she didn’t need telling who they were.
She was stunned that the hunt for her had started so quickly, having hoped that she would have at least the weekend to put some distance between herself and her pursuers. This meant the Border Guards officer must have raised the alarm at Yasenevo.
At this stage in her escape, Raya didn’t care where she went as long as it was somewhere well away from the airport. She had originally planned to take one of the small buses that ran to various hotels in the centre of Rome, but now immediately ditched that idea. And she’d never even considered taking a taxi, since their drivers sometimes remembered faces, and might even recall exactly where they had taken an individual customer. The only other possible method of transport from Fiumicino was by rail, and the train station was actually inside the terminal building.
Raya silently gave thanks that she’d taken the time to apply her rudimentary but hopefully effective disguise, as she turned round and headed back into the terminal.
Major Abramov sat, with his head in his hands, at the table in a small interview room in the security section of the Yasenevo complex.
As soon as he’d known for certain that Raya Kosov had defected, he’d done what he hoped were all the right things. He’d issued immediate instructions to the SVR duty officer in Rome, once the Sheremetievo Border Guards had definitely confirmed that the city was Raya’s destination, and given orders that she was to be apprehended and held for questioning, pending further instructions.
And only then had he told his direct superior what had happened, telephoning the colonel at his small dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. The officer had listened in silence to Abramov’s halting explanation, then ordered the major to remain at Yasenevo until further notice, while he, in turn, informed the higher echelons of the SVR.
Within two hours of Abramov’s arrival at Yasenevo, a full-scale operation had begun, and almost the first thing the SVR senior officers did was to open a sealed red file classified Sov Sekretno — Top Secret — that possessed a distribution list so restricted that only one of the officers summoned to Yasenevo even knew the document existed. And he only knew about it because he’d been involved in preparing some of the contents.
Specialist officers had immediately been summoned to Yasenevo and briefed, and they were now already either en route to the Moscow airports or actually there, awaiting flights that would take them to France, Austria and Switzerland, with the largest number flying to Italy, for obvious reasons. Photographs of Raya — taken from her personnel file as well as a couple transferred from the security cameras at Sheremetievo — had been sent to the Rome embassy, and also those embassies located in other cities to which the SVR officers were travelling, together with an accurate written description of her.
In parallel with what could be termed this recovery operation, a damage-control analysis had been ordered to assess what she might have taken with her. They weren’t expecting that she walked out of Yasenevo with any classified documents, since the elaborate security protocols in place at the SVR headquarters would have prevented that, but her position as Deputy Computer Network Manager would have obviously given her almost unparalleled access to virtually all of the data held on the Yasenevo computer system. And that was what worried them most.
A search team had already entered her small apartment and removed everything that wasn’t nailed or screwed down, and this haul was now being picked over by a group of specialists at Yasenevo, looking for clues to where she might have gone, or any other evidence of her guilt.
Abramov had already faced one interrogation by a hawk-faced colonel named Yevgeni Zharkov, who had simply introduced himself as a member of the security staff. It was a session that left the major white and shaking, after which he’d been instructed to wait in the interview room.
Abramov looked up, his eyes staring sightlessly at the blank white wall opposite, and muttered the same mantra he’d been repeating for the last hour: ‘Why, Raya, why?’ But, again, no answer was forthcoming.
At that moment, the door swung open and Colonel Zharkov strode in, two SVR guards following him.
Abramov stood up automatically.
‘Hand over your building pass,’ Zharkov snapped, and the major hastened to obey. ‘Now we’ll go to your office.’
‘Why?’ Abramov asked.
‘Because, from this moment onwards, your security clearance is revoked. You will give me all your keys and passwords, and open your safe. You are to hand over every classified document in your charge, and your office will then be sealed until this investigation has been completed.’
‘But I—’
‘But what, Major? Did you expect that you’d be able to continue working here as if nothing had happened, despite the fact that your direct subordinate is now apparently trying to defect to the West?’