Anna clasped her face in her hands, her sob all but stifled, and Lenilko thought he’d gone too far. He hated this, the hard-hearted manipulative bullshit that was so engrained in the FSB’s way of doing things that his trainers had presented it in their seminars in an almost bored manner.
Lenilko drank water. He glanced at the clock. Nine minutes had passed since he’d terminated the call with Purkiss. The British agent’s voice had disappeared suddenly, or rather receded. From the clamour in the distance, Lenilko assumed the phone had been laid down somewhere. He’d killed the call himself.
‘Anna,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a complete shit. I’ve upset you, with my florid analogies, and I didn’t mean to do that. I never wanted to be that kind of bullying, arsehole of a boss. I apologise. But the situation we’re in is this. Yarkovsky Station is in meltdown. Our asset — his name is Wyatt — has been murdered. Shot dead. Our communications are gone. A terrorist cell has infiltrated the station and is about to gain possession of six missiles armed with nuclear warheads which lie in the wreckage of a plane nearby.’
She lowered her hand so that eyes were visible above her fingers.
‘Yes,’ Lenilko said gently. ‘Those are the stakes. If we don’t act, decisively, an extra-national terrorist group will have its hands on six thermonuclear weapons. We don’t know who these people are, or what their level of technological sophistication is. But in one week, in one month, in a year, six of the world’s cities may be obliterated, charred beyond recognition under a twisting radioactive cloud. It may be New York, or London. It may be Moscow itself. If we don’t act, Anna, and within the next hour… this carnage will happen.’
She lifted her hands away entirely, flattened them on the desk. It was a mannerism of his, he knew.
Lenilko pressed on. ‘You will be approached by Counter-Terrorism. By the Director himself. They will argue that this is a matter entirely inappropriate for us in Special Activities. They will say they are best equipped to deal with a threat of this nature. But do you know what they will then do, Anna? They’ll spend precious minutes reviewing the evidence, poring over transcripts, conducting crisis meetings… wasting time, while the opposition seizes the warheads and spirits them away and ensures they are lost forever. Until they are used. Used to destroy our cities, and our way of life.’
He saw something in her face, and thought he had her, but kept up the momentum to make sure. ‘Will you be that NKVD officer, Anna? Shooting a peasant boy in the back because it’s deemed the right thing for a servant of the State to do? Or will you help me stop what’s about to happen at Yarkovsky Station, even if it means disobeying orders, even if it requires you to deceive Director Rokva and Director Eshman and everybody else in this building?’
Her gaze was level, and her answer was in her eyes.
Lenilko gave the briefest of smiles.
‘Thank you, Anna. Now let’s roll our sleeves up.’
Lenilko had two telephone calls to make. Sharing them with Anna would save time.
When he gave her the number he wanted her to call, she blinked. That was all. At any other time, she would have hesitated, perhaps even in her mild way queried his order. Now, her commitment seemed absolute. She used the landline phone on his desk, while Lenilko paced the carpet, his cell phone held to his ear.
The PA who answered was brusque. When he gave his name and title, her voice faltered.
‘I’ll have to check, sir.’
She came back on the line in under twenty seconds. This time she sounded genuinely fearful. ‘Putting you through, sir.’
A moment later a male voice, rasping and low, said, ‘Semyon Vladimirovich. What a pleasant surprise on a Sunday morning.’
‘My apologies, General. I need your help. Urgently.’
He spoke quickly, tersely, the voice on the end of the line silent. When he had finished, the other man said: ‘You understand the implications of what you’re asking.’
General Mikhail Tsarev’s ragged voice was the result of a bullet he’d taken in the throat as a colonel leading a Special Forces — Spetsnaz — brigade against a group of Chechen militants in the North Caucasus thirteen years earlier. In early 2009, Lenilko had done him a favour. Tasked with vetting the General’s son who was considering a career with the FSB, Lenilko had discovered the young man had once been arrested as a student for demonstrating against the Chechen Wars and specifically Russia’s artillery bombardment of the capital Grozny. The blot on his record was relatively minor, as youthful indiscretions went, but its nature was enough to disqualify him automatically from consideration for an FSB post. Except that Lenilko had made the evidence disappear, judging the man to be of decent character and potentially an asset to the organisation. Somehow General Tsarev had found out what Lenilko had done. He’d requested a personal audience with Lenilko. During that meeting, he’d clasped Lenilko’s hand, and had sworn to repay him in any way he could.
Lenilko had never called on the General for assistance before now.
‘Yes, General. I understand fully what I’m asking.’
‘An operation like this, without the sanction of the Director of your own department, let alone the chief of the entire FSB…’
‘Yes.’
‘It would require the approval of the President himself.’
‘Understood.’ Lenilko glanced at Anna, seated at his desk. She was murmuring into the phone, her tone patient but authoritative. ‘I expect to obtain the necessary approval shortly.’
‘You’re using the Blue Line?’
‘That’s right.’
There was silence at the other end.
Every senior officer in the FSB, in each department, had access to the so-called Blue Line. It was a telephone number which would activate a process resulting in the Russian President being located wherever in the world he was at that moment. The President would call back, in person. It was designed as a means whereby a particular senior officer might bypass the usual chain of command if he or she believed security had been compromised. Lenilko didn’t know if it had ever been used before, by anybody. The understanding was that it was a kind of nuclear option, to be activated only in situations where the security of the State was under immediate and catastrophic threat.
It was further understood that misuse of the Blue Line would be career suicide.
General Tsarev said, ‘I’ll set things in motion, to save time. But understand that I won’t give the final order until I’ve been told to do so by the President personally.’
‘Of course. Thank you, General.’
‘Semyon Vladimirovich?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I hope to God you’ve got the balls for this.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The line went dead.
Seventeen minutes later, Lenilko’s cell phone rang.
The conversation he’d had with General Tsarev had been followed, eight minutes later, by one Lenilko had never in his life expected to hold. He was aware of Anna’s eyes on him and fought his fear into submission, determined not to let her see the slightest trace of it, while at the same time struggling to keep a quaver out of his voice.
He took a little under two minutes to explain the situation.
The President’s reply took five seconds.
Lenilko handed the receiver back to Anna, allowing the tension to dissipate in a long exhalation through his nose. He glanced at her, nodded.
The triumph in her face reflected, he supposed, his own.