‘What?’
‘The last email Yuri sent to Vauxhall Cross originated in a cyber cafe in a place called Piombino. It’s a small town on the west coast of Italy, almost opposite Elba, so that means Yuri’s already well clear of Rome. And the further out he gets, the thinner the search net will become, obviously.’
‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘I hope you’re right. Now I’d better get going. And Dekker will be following me?’
‘He should be on the road within the next half-hour. We put him on a train up to Toulouse earlier and told him to pick up a hire car there. He’s got your mobile number, and you’ve already got his. Meet him somewhere near Genoa before you rendezvous with Yuri, and then sort out how you’re going to play it.’
Simpson stood up and extended his hand.
Richter stood as well, and shook it. ‘Right, then,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a long way to drive, so I’d better hit the road.’
He strode across to the parking bays fronting the casino, climbed into his hired Ford, backed out and drove away, heading north towards Toulouse.
At almost the same moment Richter was driving north out of Ax-les-Thermes on the N20, Raya Kosov sat in the passenger seat of Mario’s Fiat Punto, waiting for him to follow her out of the hotel, after he had paid the bill for their overnight stay. She knew it was still too soon for the man the British would be sending out to meet her to have arrived in Italy, but she switched on her phone just in case. Almost immediately it emitted the double-tone that indicated receipt of a message.
As she read it, Raya paled. She hadn’t expected that level of surveillance, that quickly. She just thanked her lucky stars that she’d found Mario and managed to get out of Rome the previous night, because if she’d still been there the Russians and the Italian carabinieri would almost certainly have been able to find her. But she’d still have to be very careful, and Mario would now have to stick to the back roads.
She switched off the mobile, reached over, took a slightly dog-eared road atlas from the glovebox and started studying it.
A few moments later, Mario sat down beside her and started the engine. He drove out of the car park, and then threaded his way through the streets of Piombino, heading towards the main road which ran northbound along the west coast of Italy. Livorno, which had been the port for the Renaissance cities of Pisa and Florence, lay about fifty miles ahead of them, and Genoa over a hundred miles beyond that.
‘It’s quite a long way,’ Raya remarked, as she calculated the distances in her head.
‘Yes, but the roads are good,’ Mario replied, ‘so it shouldn’t take us too long to get there. We can take the autostrada.’
‘Actually,’ Raya said, ‘would you mind if we didn’t? This is such a beautiful part of Italy that I’d like to follow the country roads and see a bit more of the countryside.’
‘The autostrada’s much quicker,’ Mario pointed out.
‘I know, Mario, but it’s soulless and boring. Please, let’s take the prettier route.’
‘Whatever you like.’ He grinned at her. ‘But I don’t really know this area, so you’ll have to navigate, OK?’
‘No problem.’
The obvious route up to Livorno was to follow the coast road, so Raya immediately directed Mario onto a spider’s web of country roads that lay between the coast and the autostrada running right past Sienna.
They drove through tiny villages whose picturesque names evoked the spirit of Tuscany, like Frassine, Serrazzano and Fatagliano. Some were little more than hamlets, strung along roads so narrow that in some stretches the only way two vehicles could get by each other was to use special passing places.
It was a slow and sometimes irritating route because of the condition of the roads, but they didn’t see a single police officer or anything else that might give Raya any concern, and that was far more important to her than their speed of progress.
By midday they’d reached a place called Calamecca, near the town of Pistoia and north-west of Florence. There they stopped for a bite of lunch at a small cafe.
‘It’s certainly pretty, going this way,’ Mario admitted, digging his fork into a plate of tagliatelle carbonara, ‘but we could have been in Genoa by now if we’d taken the autostrada.’
Raya nodded. ‘But I’m really enjoying the journey,’ she said, ‘and I’m in no hurry.’
‘And who is he, this man you’re going to meet in Genoa?’ he probed.
‘He’s only a business associate,’ Raya said, which she thought probably sounded rather vague, but nevertheless contained an element of truth.
‘And will you want me to wait for you there, in case he doesn’t show up?’
Raya shook her head. ‘Thank you, Mario, but no. He will definitely be there.’ At least she could be sure about that. Whoever the British had decided to send would certainly turn up at their rendezvous. ‘All I ask is that you get me to Genoa, or at least to somewhere fairly close by. Then I’ll be fine, and thank you again.’
‘I just wish we could have one more night together.’ Mario gave a wistful smile.
‘So am I, and I’m sorry, but I explained all that this morning. We’ve had a great time together, and we’ll part as good friends.’
‘Will you ever come back to Italy?’
‘Maybe,’ Raya said, with a slight smile of her own. ‘Who knows?’
They were back in the car twenty minutes later, Raya planning the next part of their route north.
Major Yuri Abramov leant back in his seat, still staring at the computer screen. What he’d just read — and what Zharkov, still sitting beside him, had read — was simply unbelievable.
He’d guessed that Raya’s message might contain a list of excuses, of reasons, or her personal justification for deciding to betray the SVR’s — and thus his own — trust in her, and to flee to the West. But that wasn’t what he’d read here, for her message claimed that she hadn’t actually defected at all. When Zharkov read that passage he’d snorted in total disbelief. But when he looked at the next section his brows furrowed with concern.
What Raya Kosov was claiming was that she’d fled for her life, not for asylum. She had, she said, detected the presence of a traitor within the SVR data system: somebody in a senior position who was accessing highly classified files and illegally copying them, presumably to sell the contents to Western intelligence agencies. And she believed that this unknown traitor now knew that she’d discovered what he was doing, and had already tried to kill her.
She claimed she’d been crossing the street near her apartment, when a man in a car had quite deliberately tried to run her down. The vehicle had suddenly mounted the pavement and she’d only jumped to safety at the last possible moment. She’d been far too shocked to note its registration number, only that it was a small dark-grey car — a description fitting most of the vehicles in Moscow — with a single occupant.
‘Treacherous bitch,’ Zharkov muttered.
‘You don’t believe her claim?’ Abramov asked.
‘Of course not.’ Zharkov looked at him sharply. ‘She’s just offering a lame excuse for her own defection. You’ll note that nowhere in this message does she ever mention returning to Russia. That bitch knows exactly what she’s guilty of, and she’s just trying to muddy the waters with this ridiculous and spurious claim of hers.’
‘But she’s very specific about what she claims to have found,’ Abramov gestured to the text of the email still on the screen. ‘Surely it wouldn’t hurt to at least investigate what she’s saying?’
The bulk of her message, in fact, was an extract from the security report Raya had been instructed to carry out by Abramov, and which she had placed in his safe before leaving Yasenevo for the last time. The major had instructed her to check a random-selection of a hundred files classified Secret or below, and then to inspect the access records of at least ten per cent of them. That had revealed no anomalies. But she’d also checked the access history, since the last full review, of every file classified Top Secret or above and that had thrown up an oddity which Raya claimed she’d started to investigate.