The reality was that, despite its somewhat vague and deliberately ill-defined operating brief, the principal job of Zaslon operatives was, ever since the unit’s inception, to act as a highly professional assassination squad.
‘Was that it, then? We should spend our time finding out why she chose to run to Italy?’
Abramov shook his head. ‘No, not just that — and, in any case, I might be wrong about it. Maybe she just stuck a pin in a map, though I doubt it. No, there are two things that I think you need to bear in mind during your search for her.’
The major leant forward then, and spoke earnestly to the Zaslon colonel for a couple of minutes, before he sat back in his seat.
Zharkov nodded. ‘I confess I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said. ‘Good, Major. You might have just bought your life with that. As long as we do find Kosov, of course.’
On the terrace of the Auberge du Lac, Gerald Stanway gazed up the road towards the Hostellerie de la Poste, and wondered if he’d missed anything.
He’d watched a tall blond man, who’d been sitting at the far end of the terrace, receive a phone call on his mobile and leave the hotel. But there was nothing unusual about that, of course. What was odd was that the same man had then walked down the road, crossed to the other hotel and gone inside.
Then there was the Renault Laguna. The vehicle had pulled up in a lay-by a short distance down the road, and it had been standing there ever since, nearly half an hour. It could, of course, just be that the driver was making a long phone call, or was completely lost and trying to find out where he was on a map. But the simpler explanation, Stanway guessed, was that the man in the Renault was watching the Hostellerie de la Poste.
Putting these two things together, it seemed to him most likely that the blond man was the Russian cipher clerk he’d come to find, and that the man in the car was covering the hotel to ensure that the clerk’s initial debriefing wasn’t interrupted. And that, in turn, meant that there was at least one or possibly two SIS officers inside the building as well.
Stanway wasn’t concerned that the Russian would betray him at this stage in the questioning. The man would obviously realize that the identity of a traitor within the British establishment must be the crown jewel in his dowry, and he wouldn’t release that piece of information until he was safely tucked away in a safe house somewhere in the Home Counties, in possession of a new identity, a British passport and a decent bank balance.
No, Stanway had read enough reports regarding the debriefing of various defectors to have no worries on that score. In this first — he assumed it was the first — meeting, all the interrogators would be doing was establishing the man’s identity and asking him a lot of background questions. They’d be trying to find out where he’d been employed at Yasenevo, what his job description was, what grade and classification of files he had been allowed to work on. All of these were questions intended to confirm that he was who he claimed to be, and that he might have access to the kind of information he was supposedly peddling.
So far, Stanway reckoned, he’d done quite a good day’s work. He’d possibly identified the renegade Russian as well as the vehicle being used by one of the surveillance officers. All he needed to do now was confirm his suspicions, and he thought he’d worked out an easy, if slightly risky, way to do so.
He stood up, put enough money on the table to cover the cost of his drinks, and picked up the copy of Le Monde that he’d bought in the centre of Ax. He walked out to the car park, climbed into his Peugeot, and started the engine to let the air-conditioning cool the interior. He pulled out his Browning, extracted the magazine and checked that it was loaded, then replaced it in the butt of the pistol. He racked back the slide to cock the weapon, then set the safety catch and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers, resting in the small of his back, and out of sight.
The one thing he hadn’t been able to establish, from his vantage point on the hotel terrace, was whether or not the watcher in the Renault was using binoculars. That meant he had to be careful, so it would all be a matter of timing.
Stanway drove the Peugeot over the uneven ground to the entrance of the car park, which lay on the south side of the hotel and was at least one hundred yards from where the Laguna was parked. If the watcher had binoculars, the Peugeot’s number plate would be readable at that distance, but not with the naked eye. So what he had to do was make sure that, when he made the turn onto the main road, he was effectively invisible. He didn’t want the man in the Laguna to realize that the car had also been at the Auberge du Lac, because that would immediately raise a flag.
He stopped the car at the side of the road and checked the oncoming traffic heading south towards the centre of Ax-les-Thermes, picking his moment. An elderly Citroën van, painted brown, perhaps to hide the rust, was just coming around the bend towards him. Stanway waited until the van was directly between him and the Renault, then pulled out, accelerating hard and turning right. Behind him, the van driver noisily expressed his displeasure at this manoeuvre with a blast from his horn, but Stanway ignored him. He would have preferred to have driven away from the hotel in a less obtrusive manner, but he was certain that all the watcher in the Renault would know about him now was the make, model and colour of the car, and Peugeots were common enough for that not to be a problem. His registration plate would have been completely invisible, and that was all that mattered.
Stanway drove on through the town until he reached the small roundabout just outside the casino, where the main road forked. Then he swung the Peugeot left, right around the roundabout, to head back the way he’d come. There were several parking spaces in front of the casino itself, and he pulled into one of them and waited for a few minutes. After about fifty cars had driven past him, heading north, he waited for a convenient gap in the traffic, then backed out and joined the northbound flow himself.
He drove steadily back through the town and as he reached the Hostellerie de la Poste he pulled off the road and stopped the vehicle in one of the handful of vacant parking spaces directly in front of the hotel.
Stanway turned off the Peugeot’s engine and unbuckled his seat belt, but his eyes never left the interior mirror, in which the parked Renault Laguna and its driver were clearly visible — the man’s face staring directly towards the hotel. As Stanway watched, he saw the seated figure briefly move his lips, apparently just uttering a sentence or two. The man could easily have been mouthing the words to a song playing on the radio, or talking into a hands-free mobile phone, but Stanway frankly doubted either explanation. His guess was that he was using a short-range, two-way radio to tell one of the men inside the hotel that a car had just drawn up outside. Well, in that case, he’d soon find out.
This was, Stanway knew, probably the most risky part of the entire operation, the time when he would literally have to show himself to the enemy, but he couldn’t think of any other way of confirming his suspicions about that tall blond man. He picked up his copy of Le Monde, checked that his Browning was securely in place but still invisible, opened the car door and walked into the hotel.
‘Sierra, this is Whisky. That Peugeot outside is on French plates, registered in this département, and it has a single male occupant. I’ve noted the number. Stand by.’