“Control’s orders,” Tanner said, his voice crackling through the headphones. “We’re keeping this one in house.”
Milton sat down and buckled himself into the seat. “Where are we going?”
“Winchester.”
“For what?”
“We think we know who did this,” Tanner said. “We know where they live. You’re going to pay them a little visit.”
Raj Shah was in the churchyard, his phone pressed to his ear. Ross strode across the Common toward him; by the time she had opened the gate he had finished his call and was walking across to meet her. The helicopter’s engine whined and the rotors whipped up another fine cloud of dust and debris from the dry ground.
Ross had to shout to make herself heard. “Do you know what that’s all about?”
“Who’s inside?”
“Smith and the other guy… Tanner.”
“Where are they going?”
“Wouldn’t tell me. You don’t know?”
“I have no idea.” Shah was a dreadful liar—it was the reason he had never worked in the field—and Ross had never had any trouble reading him. She was sure of her read now: he was telling the truth. He really did have no idea.
Shah put his hand on her shoulder and guided her toward the church.
“I don’t know how we’re expected to work this case when the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”
“It happens,” Shah said. “I know it’s frustrating. What did you find?”
“Geggel,” she said. “He was here. They got him, too.”
“Feels like we’re stumbling through the dark at the moment, doesn’t it? No idea where we’ve come from or where we need to go.”
She nodded her agreement. “The context’s missing. We’ve got a dead spy, a dead agent runner and no explanation for anything.”
28
“How long until we get there?” Milton said over the clamour of the turbine.
Tanner looked at his watch. “The pilot said forty minutes.”
“Time’s an issue?”
“I don’t know whether we’ve found our killers or not, but, if we have, we’ve got lucky. They should already have been on their way out of the country by now, but if they are still here, we have to assume that they won’t be for long. We think that steps might already have been taken. We’d like to get to them before that can happen.”
“So send in counter-terrorism.”
“It has to be us,” Tanner said. “This comes from the very top. Officially acknowledged governmental departments are not to have anything to do with this. Officially, the PM wants to make sure that we behave in accordance with the rule of law. We take the high road when the Russians go low.”
“Unofficially?”
“He doesn’t want to be hamstrung by protocol or propriety. You have carte blanche on this, Number One. We’d like to bring the bad guys in, but if that’s not possible, you’re cleared to take them out. Them and anyone else you decide might be connected.”
Milton nodded his understanding and hoped his nausea wasn’t obvious.
“I can tell you a little more,” Tanner said. “We think this is Directorate S.”
“Sleepers?”
“It looks that way.”
Milton had to agree. They had never been able to trace the agent for whom Callaghan had left the data stick at the dead drop. Milton had grilled Callaghan, but it was obvious that he knew very little. There was a description, but it had been dismissed as worthless given that Russian agents were well known for their aptitude in disguising themselves when they had to meet sources on a face-to-face basis. He had said it was a man, that his name was Tom, that he spoke in unaccented English, and that he had seduced him at a nightclub in Brighton after Pride last year. But that was it. Nothing more that they could work on.
“One of them was working Callaghan,” Milton said. “You think it could be the same team?”
“I think it’s possible,” Tanner said. “We’re still waiting for the full assessment, but we’ve already got a decent amount to go on. We’ve been following a man who goes by the name of Vincent Beck. He’s retired—used to work as a teacher. He’s been under suspicion for a while; we’ve had full spectrum surveillance on him—a big team, all the talents. He’s always been careful. We haven’t seen anything that made us think that he was involved. Until today, that is. We might have got lucky today.”
The helicopter settled at cruising altitude and the whine of the turbines dipped a little.
“Beck went out tonight and we followed him. He ended up in a house near Winchester. We pulled Land Registry records—the house belongs to Thomas and Amelia Ryan. Here—this is them.”
Tanner took out his phone and showed Milton two photographs. Two pictures were displayed, side by side: they were passport snaps of a man and a woman, both in their late thirties or early forties. Nothing about them stood out on Milton’s first inspection.
“These came from the Border Force,” Tanner said. He reached across and swiped the screen. The pictures were replaced by a second set of two, these looking as if they had been taken at an airport immigration desk. “These were taken at Heathrow last year. The two of them had just come back from Talinn. They made it look like a working holiday to Estonia but we have reason to believe it was cover for a hop across the border to Russia.”
“So they’re SVR?”
“We think they might be,” Tanner said. “Immigration reports that the two of them came to London from Belfast twenty years ago as students and stayed here. We think the woman’s real name is Nataliya Kuznetsov. She was born in Volgograd. Her mother was a party organiser and her father was a senior KGB agent runner based in the Nigerian embassy. She came to London to study at UCL. That’s where she met Thomas—at least that’s the story they’ve sold.”
“And him?”
“Real name Mikhail Timoshev. We don’t know as much about him as we do about his wife. At some point they adopted new legends as the Ryans and set up an online property brokerage. It’s a very good front. Property transactions give the SVR a simple line into them. A Russian oligarch sells his Chelsea townhouse; the Ryans act as go-betweens between him and his buyers; the buyers are given funds in Russia to buy at above market value; the Ryans pocket an inflated commission. Neat and tidy.”
“And Callaghan?”
“He said that his runner was six foot tall and reasonably well built. Timoshev fits that. Everything else is unreliable given that he would’ve been in disguise every time he met him. But how many sleepers could they have? There can’t be that many.”
“You’d hope not,” Milton said.
“Maybe we’ll find out tonight,” Tanner said.
Milton grimaced. “This is all circumstantial. A man we think might be an SVR agent handler goes to a house in Winchester on the same day Aleksandrov is assassinated. We think the couple he’s going to meet are Directorate S sleepers. None of that counts as evidence. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if we had a little more to go on.”
“We do have more,” Tanner said. He swiped on the screen again to bring up another photograph. “This was taken from a camera inside the Barclays on Southwold High Street. Look.”
Milton examined the image. The camera was pointing out of a lobby so that pedestrians passing on the street outside were in view. There was a man in shot. He had a heavy beard and wild, untamed hair. Tanner swiped left and right and then repeated it again, swapping between the still from the CCTV and the images of Mikhail Timoshev from the Border Force.