The mobile phone rang insistently in John Westwood’s hotel room, his brain first weaving the sound seamlessly into a dream before it finally penetrated his consciousness. Then he grabbed the unit, pressed the green button, and put it to his ear.
‘Westwood,’ he said.
‘This is Richards, sir, and it’s an open line.’
‘Understood. What is it?’
‘We now know how our colleagues from the other side of the street are going to try to find our mutual friend,’ Richards said. ‘And they’re real serious about it.’
Westwood’s brain did an immediate translation. The Russians had obviously come up with some way of tracking down Raya Kosov.
‘How?’ he asked.
‘You’re familiar with the old expression “button man”?’ Richards asked.
‘Yes. I haven’t heard it for a while, but I know what it means.’
In the days of Al Capone, a ‘button man’ was a hit man, or assassin, employed by the Mob.
‘Well, they’re now claiming that our friend is a professional in that field, and that while she was in Moscow she used her talents on a senior official there. They want to talk to her real bad, so they’ve asked the locals to give them a hand. There’ll be pictures of her plastered everywhere, and teams at every airport, ferry terminal and railway station in the whole area, plus search teams covering bus routes and talking to taxi firms. Every registered hotel and rooming house in Italy will be receiving a visit, real soon. Other officers will be stationed at the toll-booths on all the autostradas in the country, and they’ll be watching or even blocking the main roads. The locals have already made this a priority one task, and they’re sewing the place up as tight as a drum. If she’s not out of Italy by now, I don’t think she’s ever going to get out.’
‘Understood,’ Westwood said again. ‘I’ll come in later this morning. Keep your ear to the ground. The first sign of our friend, I want to know about it.’
‘You got it.’
Westwood sat on the edge of the bed for a few moments, considering. Then he switched on his laptop, entered the twelve-digit password that gave him access to his files, and looked up a London phone number. He dialled it and waited a few seconds for it to be answered.
‘This is John Westwood,’ he began. ‘We discussed a certain matter yesterday, if you recall.’
‘And I told you then that we had no idea what you were talking about,’ snapped the man at the other end of the line.
‘I know,’ Westwood’s tone was mild, ‘but now I have some information that may be relevant.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘In case you haven’t already been told, our friends from the north have virtually shut down the country, with the assistance of the local people. They’re watching airports, ferries, buses and taxis, plus checking the hotels and the main roads. You might want to pass that on to somebody.’
‘Thank you. I’ve noted that, and I’ll pass it up the line. Anything else?’
‘No. But if I hear anything more, I’ll let you know.’
Raya woke early, her eyes snapping open as the first rays of the morning sun lanced through a gap in the curtains. For a moment she had no idea where she was — the room was completely unfamiliar to her — till she glanced at the shape that lay beside her, snoring gently, and the memories flooded back.
Raya looked at her watch on the bedside table, then slid out of bed and walked into the bathroom. She emerged a few minutes later, her hair still damp from the shower, and dressed quickly. When she left the room, Mario still lay dead to the world, one arm dangling out of the bed.
Raya smiled at him, remembering the previous night, then walked out of the bedroom. She needed two things: a cup of coffee and then the cyber cafe, in that order.
‘Just tell me again why it has to be me,’ Richter demanded.
He sat facing Simpson at an outdoor cafe near the casino in Ax-les-Thermes, with the remains of a breakfast of coffee and croissants on the table in front of them. Adamson was sitting at a table slightly to one side, taking no part in the conversation but just scanning the surrounding area to ensure that nobody was trying to listen in to what was being said. Hughes and Wallis were sitting in Richter’s hotel room, babysitting a semi-conscious Gerald Stanway, who’d been dosed with drugs to ease the pain and, more importantly, to keep him subdued until a specialist team arrived from London to take him back for interrogation.
‘Didn’t you understand what I told you?’
Richter smiled at him. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘I understand it completely, but I just like hearing you say it.’
Simpson nodded resignedly. ‘Very well, that call last night — or, rather, early this morning — was from the duty officer at SIS headquarters, Vauxhall Cross. They’d received an email yesterday evening from a cyber cafe on the outskirts of Rome, with a rather large attachment. The attachment contained a complete listing of every person employed by SIS, their names and dates of birth, and a short extract detailing the service records and thumbnail photographs of about a dozen of them.’
‘Stanway really screwed you, didn’t he?’ Richter suggested with a grin.
‘This is no laughing matter. I don’t know how long that bastard has been selling our secrets to the Russians, but he’s going to suffer for this. We’ll wring him dry and then I’ll personally ensure he dies as painful a death as we can arrange.’
‘You never explained to me why they contacted you,’ Richter pointed out. ‘I didn’t think your outfit was a part of the Secret Intelligence Service.’
‘It isn’t… that’s the whole point,’ Simpson said. He paused for a few moments, gazing at Richter as if deciding how much to tell him. Then he spoke again. ‘I think I need to explain a few things to you. First, have you ever heard of “The Increment”?’
‘No,’ Richter replied.
‘OK, every now and then, the SIS gets wind of something going on inside Britain that they have particular interest in, but which they can’t investigate directly because they only have a remit to operate outside the UK.’
‘I thought that was what MI5 was supposed to cover?’
‘It is, but the two services don’t have a particularly good working relationship. And often there’s some question about sources or procedures or something and, for whatever reason, SIS don’t want MI5 sticking their oar in. Or maybe the situation is somewhere abroad, but there’s a good chance it’ll all go tits-up at some point, which would embarrass SIS and, by extension, the British government.
‘So, a while ago, some desk officer at Vauxhall Cross came up with the idea of The Increment. For jobs like these, the SIS would recruit ex-military personnel, usually former SAS soldiers because they’re used to thinking on their feet. They’d assemble a team, brief them, and send them off. Then, if the shit hit the fan later, and those guys were caught or killed, SIS could simply deny all knowledge of them, and there’d be no provable link to the men involved. It would be a totally deniable operation.
‘My section is called the Foreign Operations Executive, a nicely meaningless name, and we essentially function in exactly the same way as The Increment. We take care of those jobs that the SIS thinks might turn round and bite them. If you like, FOE is a secret, and unacknowledged, covert section of the SIS — a covert outfit working for another covert outfit — and there are no direct, or at least no provable, links between the two of them. In other words, FOE is a kind of formalized and established version of The Increment.’
‘So that’s why you skulk around in the backstreets of Hammersmith instead of enjoying extensive views along the Thames from that bloody-awful-looking building by Vauxhall Bridge.’