Pope took their clothes and stuffed them into the rucksack. He opened the storage locker and left the bag inside.
“Ready?” he asked.
Twelve nodded.
Pope checked his watch: half past eleven. He took a deep breath, slid the bolt back and opened the door. The two women he had seen in the canteen were loitering outside the door to the women’s toilet; Pope nodded as he went by and, before they could speak to him and expose the fact that he spoke no Russian, he was past them and on the staircase that led to the hotel’s public spaces. Twelve followed close behind.
59
There was a service elevator in a separate shaft adjacent to the elevators that the guests used. Pope summoned the car and then he and Twelve stepped inside. The car needed to be authorised before it would move, but all it took was for him to press his keycard against the reader and the buttons for each floor changed from red to green. Pope pressed the button for the tenth floor and stood back to wait for the doors to close. He heard a man’s voice, a shouted request in Russian, and then, even as he willed the doors shut, a hand shot between them and pressed them open again. The man who stepped into the car with Pope was wearing the uniform of hotel security, with faux-military epaulettes and piping along the shoulders of his shirt.
“Zdravstvujtye,” the man said.
Pope had been staring down at his feet; now, though, he glanced up and saw that the guard was looking at him.
“Zdravstvujtye,” Pope said, knowing that his pronunciation was terrible.
Twelve stood there, quietly, and Pope could feel the violence emanating out of him like woozy summer heat.
Pope waited for the man to say something else. He wouldn’t be able to understand him or reply without making it obvious that he did not speak the language – and that, as a staff member in the glitziest hotel in Moscow, would not have been credible. He felt the shape of the gun tucked against his body and knew that there was a good chance that he would have to use it. That would lengthen the odds of successfully completing the operation to such an extent that he would most likely need to abort. And if he did that, if the alarm was sounded, then how would he—
His increasingly gloomy train of thought was interrupted by a chime as the elevator reached the seventh floor.
“Proshchay,” the man said, smiling guilelessly as he stepped through the open doors.
Pope found that he was holding his breath; the doors closed, the lift started to ascend again and Pope exhaled in relief.
“Lucky,” Twelve commented.
Pope knew that he didn’t mean them.
It was a temporary balm. The numbers ticked up through eight and nine and then reached ten. The lift chimed again and the doors parted. Pope and Twelve stepped out. There was a generous lobby, with a lit water feature burbling musically in a sconce, and a corridor stretched away in both directions. The carpet was deep and luxurious, and the door numbers looked to have been inscribed on pieces of polished slate.
Pope followed the signs for room number 1022. His palm itched for the weight of the Sig and he felt the first drops of nervous sweat running down his back. It wasn’t unusual for him to feel anxious at a time like this, and this operation, unlike almost all of the others that he had undertaken since he had joined Group Fifteen, had not received the same degree of planning. Indeed, it was quite the contrary; it seemed as if it had received very limited consideration, and then Twelve had been foisted on him at the last moment and what planning they had done had been disregarded. Intelligence had been received and it needed to be acted upon quickly and decisively; that might have been acceptable if he had been able to take out the targets at arm’s length with explosives or a ranged weapon, but that was not the case. The mandarins wanted to put on a show, to make a point that their counterparts at the Center would not be able to ignore or mistake. It was Pope’s job to make that point, and hang the consequences.
He was nervous.
60
The rendezvous was in Park Presnenskiy, near the children’s playground. It was just before midnight when Primakov arrived, and the only people he saw as he made his way inside were a couple who were evidently the worse off for drink, staggering together arm in arm. He paid them no heed and walked quickly, following the path between a line of oaks to the bench.
PROZHEKTOR was waiting for him.
He sat down.
“My dear Jessie.”
“Hello, General,” she said.
Jessie Ross was fidgeting with her phone, the screen washing blue light up over her face. Primakov had been personally responsible for her recruitment and had kept her file as a project even after his promotion to deputy director. She had been twenty when he had recruited her. They had been fortunate to find her when they did. The recruitment pool for possible Directorate S agents was large: foreign government representatives, businessmen looking to broaden their interests in a country that was encouraging inward investment, scientists, academics, military personnel, and students. It was in this last category that Ross had been found. Her professor had worked for Directorate RT, the KGB’s forerunner to Directorate S, and had continued to work for it after Putin had reincarnated the KGB as the FSB. He had identified her as politically active with socialist leanings and had suggested that she might be ripe for an approach. Directorate S almost always used native Russians; they were more malleable, could be motivated by patriotism and, when things went bad, could be influenced by threats to loved ones who were still at home. One had to be more careful with recruiting foreigners, and the process for bringing Ross aboard had been long and meticulous. The network of agents known as the agentura had become involved in a process of get-acquainted chats. She was studied via agents at the university, by administrative and professorial staff who were friendly to the cause. It was determined that she had the necessary aptitude to facilitate a career in a sensitive area on her return to her country.
Only then had the approach been made. Her professor had been responsible for it and, over the course of a month, he had reeled her in. She had not been won over by politics or ideology; she had shown no interest in either. Rather, she was a product of capitalism in its basest, most brutal sense: she had named her price, and Primakov had decided that they could pay it. The price had gone up over time, but so too had her performance.
She had received additional training that went beyond the curriculum of her course and had been returned to London with the tradecraft necessary to keep her beyond suspicion. Her subsequent application for work at Vauxhall Cross had been accepted and, to Primakov’s delight, he had found himself with a live asset in the heart of the enemy’s intelligence apparatus. She provided regular reports, using an SRAC relay that was buried in Epping Forest. She had developed an interest in mountain biking and would visit the forest under the pretext of indulging it. The trail she followed passed within fifty feet of the relay, allowing her to transfer her reports without incurring even the slightest scintilla of suspicion. Ross had already more than justified the time it had taken and the expense that had been invested in her recruitment.
Primakov had made the educated guess that Anastasiya Romanova would reach out to her father once she had gone into hiding. Ross had already been assigned to the department responsible for babysitting the traitors who had fled to the United Kingdom, and she had been able to pass Aleksandrov’s file to Vincent Beck. She had lobbied to be added to the trip to Moscow—it was an easy yes given the circumstances—and she had alerted Primakov to the two Group Fifteen headhunters who had arrived in the city ahead of her and the plan that had been conceived. She had given him the opportunity to prevent the assassination attempt on Timoshev and Kuznetsov. She had given him the chance to arrest the headhunters and hand a public relations coup to the president.