He took the suitcase to the hall and then quickly passed through the rooms to make sure that he hadn’t left anything that might later prove to be incriminating. Satisfied, he went back to the suitcase, extended the handle and wheeled it out of the flat’s front door. One of his neighbours was just stepping out of the lift. She was an old woman who spent her days in a pub down by the river. Beck bid her good evening and she did the same, her words a little slurred as usual. Beck put his arm between the doors to stop them from closing and pulled the suitcase into the lift. He hit the button for the ground floor and waited for the doors to close.
He took a moment to compose himself. It had taken him five minutes to clear the flat. That was good. Fast enough. There was no time to spare, and no way of knowing how serious the threat against him was. If anyone had been listening to the call that he had received, they would have concluded that it was from a call centre. It would have sounded authentic, and that was the intention. However, the precise wording had been agreed to in advance and the answer to his question—“ten”—served as the trigger signal. Each number, from one to ten, bore a separate meaning. “Ten” meant that Beck and his agents had been, or were at imminent risk of being, blown.
The lift reached the ground floor and the doors opened. Beck stepped outside. There was a group of young boys smoking weed on the scrubby patch of grass outside the building, but nothing else that made him nervous. Beck was always careful, but tonight required even more caution than usual.
It was nine in the evening when he set off and wheeled his case down to the river, following the route that he took every day. He followed the gentle curve for a mile, maintaining the same leisurely pace as yesterday, the day before that, and all the days before that. Beck was an old man, in his seventies, and, to any normal observer it would look as if he was just off to catch a bus or a train. The main purpose of the walk was to help him to identify surveilling parties and, if necessary, lose them. It was an SDR—a surveillance detection route—and Beck had learned it from a retired KGB colonel who had taught a class at the Dzershinsky Higher School in Michurinsky Prospekt. Beck had been in his twenties when he had attended the KGB school, but the lessons were just as relevant today as they had been then. The fundamental art of espionage was unchanged, despite the advances in technology that had added so many opportunities and perils to the work. In this case, Beck needed to be sure that he was black before he met with his agents. The utmost caution was required.
He usually stayed on this side of the river until he reached the Hurlingham Club, but today he carried his case up the steps from the footpath and crossed the water into Putney. He headed south and then continued along Putney High Street until he reached the overland train station. It was a couple of miles from his apartment, and he used all the tricks designed to flush out surveillance: he paused to tie a lace, crossed over the road to look in the window of the Franco Manca restaurant, turned onto Disraeli Road and then quickly turned back on himself. He waited on the platform for a train, scanning the other men and women to see whether any of them were repeats. He had never spotted anything that made him suspect he was under surveillance, but that did not mean that today might not be different. He looked for clothes that he might have seen before, and, when nothing registered, he checked shoes. Clothes were easy to change, but, in his long experience, Western agents never remembered to change their shoes. It was sloppy tradecraft and an easy giveaway but he saw nothing tonight that gave him cause for concern. There were no signs of pursuit: no suggestion of agents leapfrogging each other, no obvious handovers, no one following him along his erratic route.
The train rolled into the station. He climbed aboard and took a seat at the end of the carriage where he would be able to watch anyone else who got on with him.
Beck was too wily to relax. He had years of experience playing this particular game and had deployed the same tactics in any number of denied areas around the world: he had operated in San Francisco, Madrid, Paris, Berlin—on both sides of the Wall—and Washington. His posting to London had been the longest of his career, and it would be his last. His real name was Vladimir Rabtsevich but he had used this particular legend for so long that now he thought of himself as Beck. He was a retired language teacher at the Znaniye School in Chelsea. He had worked there for ten years to provide the ballast for the legend. A wife had been invented for him; they had used the usual trick, finding a candidate by working their way around Highgate Cemetery until a deceased child of suitable age had been located and then building a persona with the benefit of their birth certificate. Mrs Beck was said to have died, but the fact that she had been British allowed him to stay in the country without a visa. He lived alone with a cat called Lenin, ate microwave meals for one, and occasionally visited the Curzon for the foreign arthouse films that they showed there. He didn’t own a mobile phone because, as he said whenever anyone asked him, he didn’t like their intrusiveness. The real reason, of course, was because he had no wish for the spooks at GCHQ to be able to track him between the phone masts that prickled across London’s streets. He used burner phones and telephone boxes to arrange his business, different ones each time.
Beck got off at Clapham Junction and changed onto the train to Winchester. He looked around at the quiet Sunday night carriage. He was comfortable, still confident that he was black. He looked at his watch. He had an hour until he arrived.
20
“All units, this is Blackjack. PAPERCLIP is on the move. Minimal comms unless operationally necessary. Out.”
The earbud was loose, and Michael Pope pushed it in until it was snug. He was sitting in the back of one of the Group Three backup cars; a surveillance expert occupied the driver’s seat. They were parked on Fulham Palace Road, waiting for PAPERCLIP’s route to be relayed.
PAPERCLIP was the cryptonym of Vincent Beck, an ex-pat Russian who had been living in the United Kingdom for ten years. He was ostensibly a retired teacher of foreign languages, but, as a result of intelligence received from BLUEBIRD, the Secret Intelligence Service had confirmed that he was a senior agent runner working for Directorate S. BLUEBIRD was MI6’s pride and joy, an active source buried within the SVR, and the tip about Beck had been just the latest in a long line of valuable intelligence scoops.
Beck had been subjected to round-the-clock surveillance ever since he had been uncovered. His landline had been tapped, his apartment bugged, and he had been followed every time he stepped out of the front door of his house. So far, though, he had revealed nothing except a predilection for long riverside walks, arthouse cinema and the borscht served at Zima Russian Street Food and Bar on Frith Street in Soho.
“This is Alpha. He’s going down to the river.”
This operation was sensitive and complex enough to warrant the involvement of several of the Groups that comprised the Firm. Group Three was responsible for human surveillance, the teams of agents who coalesced around a target so that it was practically impossible for that person to go anywhere without being observed. In the way that the agents of Group Five—responsible for ensuring the smooth transmission of intelligence among the Groups—were informally referred to as ‘postmen’ and the cryptanalysts of Group Six were ‘hackers,’ the agents of Group Three were dubbed ‘bloodhounds.’ They had earned the sobriquet through the diligence and discretion of their surveillance and tracking and the reputation, hard won, that, once a target was put under their surveillance, it was impossible for them to be shaken off.