But if she was going to attempt that route, she had to do it quickly, because the SVR might soon enlist the aid of the Italian police after painting her as a fugitive from justice on some really serious charge, resulting in roadblocks and increased surveillance on all modes of traffic attempting to exit the city.
It all depended, she decided, on what such a strategy would cost her — and not necessarily in purely monetary terms. She glanced over at the two young Italian men and gave them a half-smile. Perhaps, she mused, eyeing them critically, it wouldn’t be too high a price to pay.
A few minutes later, her mind made up, she walked over to stand close to them.
‘Do either of you speak English?’ she asked sweetly, not trusting her rudimentary Italian for this encounter. If neither of them did, there would be other men in other bars and cafes. Somewhere, soon, she would find what she was looking for.
The one standing closest to her nodded. He looked about twenty-five, and the other one slightly younger.
‘Yes, I work as a tour guide,’ he said. ‘My name is Mario Villani and I speak English and French.’ He added, ‘My friend here just speaks Italian.’
Raya smiled at him again. ‘And do you have a car, Mario?’ she asked.
Again the young man nodded.
‘Are you doing anything tonight? I need to get to Civitavecchia as quickly as possible. I can pay you for the petrol or… perhaps we can come to some other arrangement?’
‘What kind of arrangement?’
‘I’ll tell you when we’re in the car,’ Raya said briskly. ‘Let’s go.’
Chapter Fourteen
‘It looks as if the trail’s gone cold,’ George Edwards reported, as he re-entered the room.
Richards and Westwood were still sitting in the Chief of Station’s office, relaxing in easy chairs with a coffee pot and the remains of a plate of sandwiches littering the table in front of them.
‘Our guys are still keeping a close eye on the Russians, but they now seem to have split up their teams. They’ve kept watchers outside some of the larger railway stations, but most of them are just driving around the major streets, concentrating on the bus routes. We reckon they must have lost sight of their target, and now they’re just driving around, hoping to spot her.’
‘So you do think it’s the woman who was being chased near the Stazione Trastevere?’ Richards asked.
‘Yes, we’re now reasonably sure the Russians are looking for a woman. One of our surveillance teams managed to get a couple of good shots of the briefing pages they’re waving about, and the photograph’s definitely of a woman. We’ve tried enhancing the images as much as we can, but we can’t get a picture clear enough to resolve her features. So we still don’t know who she is.’
‘Is there anything else you can do about that?’ Westwood asked. ‘Maybe it’s time we stopped just following the Russians about and started doing something for ourselves. Like getting proactive?’
Richards stared at him. ‘You got a suggestion?’
Westwood nodded. ‘If we are assuming the Russians have a defector on their hands, this woman is presumably hoping to make contact with either us or the Brits. And since, as far as I know, there’s been no approach to us here or back at Langley, that could mean she’s already talking to the British SIS.’
‘And you think we should interfere, sir?’
Westwood grinned at him. ‘Maybe “interfere” is the wrong word. But if we can assist our British friends in handling this defector, it might turn out to our mutual benefit. And, of course, if we managed to find the woman first, and get her safely into the embassy, or on a flight to Washington, then we’d get a chance to talk to her, and maybe make her a better offer.’
‘The Brits wouldn’t like that,’ Richards said, grinning, ‘but it’d be a hell of a coup to pull off. But how could we go about it?’
‘OK,’ Westwood said, all business, ‘the first thing would be to identify the target, and find out who she is. I’m thinking maybe one of our guys runs across one of the Russian watchers, and relieves him of that data sheet with her picture on it. Like a mugging, maybe? Then maybe one of the databases at Langley can help us identify her — and tell us why she’s so important to Moscow.’
‘You still here, George?’ Richards looked up at Edwards. ‘Why don’t you go and organize a mugging?’
‘A pleasure, sir. I know just the man to do it.’
As the door closed behind Edwards, Richards swung round to face Westwood again. ‘You sure this is a good idea, sir?’ he asked.
‘It’s worth looking at,’ Westwood replied. ‘If one of your guys can get us the description sheet the Russians are using, we might know if it’s worth going any further. There’ll just be one Russian wandering about with a sore head, which is the only downside. If the girl’s just some low-level clerk or a runaway we can just walk and forget it. But if she’s important, and the Russians’ reaction so far suggests that she is, then we can get ourselves a bit more involved.’
Raya Kosov leant back in the passenger seat of the Fiat Punto and closed her eyes, the hum of the engine and the sound of the tyres on the tarmac road surface providing a comforting lullaby. She wouldn’t relax properly, though, until she reached somewhere she felt truly safe, which meant out of Italy altogether, and somewhere like France or Germany instead, where she’d have more freedom to manoeuvre. At the very least, she knew she had to get herself further up to the north of Italy, to somewhere like Genoa or at least Livorno. Maybe she could even persuade Mario to take her that far, but anywhere more than about fifty miles from Rome would do, because it would expand their area of search exponentially.
Mario had said goodbye to his friend as they’d left the bar, for Raya was not prepared to make an ‘arrangement’ with both of these men, and then the pair of them had walked a couple of hundred yards to where the young Italian had parked his car.
Mario chatted away as they pulled into the stream of traffic and started heading out of the city, but Raya managed to tune him out as she scanned their surroundings. She checked the crowds of pedestrians, tried to peer into every passing car, scanned the people waiting at bus stops. She saw nothing to arouse her suspicions except for a dark-coloured saloon car, with a couple of shadowy figures inside, parked a short distance from each railway station they passed. Clearly her trail had now gone cold, and the SVR officers had gone back to covering all the most obvious exit routes from the city.
Raya sank a little lower in her seat, though she knew the chances of her being noticed were slim indeed. The Punto was just another car, in an unending succession of them, with two anonymous seated figures inside it.
Mario had glanced at her curiously at this reaction, but hadn’t commented, just continued pointing out various places of interest as they passed them. However interesting they might seem to any one of Rome’s annual influx of hundreds of thousands of tourists, at the moment Raya didn’t care a jot about the Aurelian Walls or the Appian Way or the Coliseum, or anything else. All she was interested in was getting out of this city as quickly as she could. To her the only good news was that there couldn’t be enough Russian Embassy staff to cover all the roads leading out of the city.
But only when the Fiat Punto crossed the Grande Raccordo Anulare, Rome’s ring road, known simply as the GRA, and continued westbound on the Via Aurelia, heading for Civitavecchia, the port of Rome, did she finally begin to feel safe. For a few delicious seconds, she lay back in the seat with her eyes closed.