Moscow Sting
MOSCOW STING
A NOVEL
ALEX DRYDEN
To Ginny
JANUARY 2008
A
DRIAN CAREW GLARED THROUGH
the rain-streaked window of a British intelligence pool Vauxhall Carlton as if the application of his undoubtedly impressive willpower could unsnarl the traffic. Cars were bumper to bumper going west out of London, and the weather was only making things worse.
His driver, Ray, with fifteen years of service and an almost Zen calm by comparison with his boss, half turned towards the rear seat.
“We’ll be through this in a minute or two, sir.” His words barely made their way through the noise of the rain drumming on the roof of the car.
With his usual expression of muscular irritation in place—teeth clamped, jaw muscles twitching—Adrian coldly addressed his reply to the side window.
“Never mind.”
At sixty-three years old, the former SAS hero, military intelligence wizard, and later chief of MI6 Moscow Station, had earlier in the day gleaned from one of his eyes and ears at Joint Intelligence that he had been elevated to the informal short list for the top position at MI6; Spymaster in Chief, the media called it.
He should be out celebrating, he thought, not trotting off abroad like some messenger boy—and to bloody Finland, of all places. But the Russians had insisted that they would see him, and him alone.
Dimly now through the fogged-up window, Adrian eyed the scene and piled on his choleric distaste for the mass of humanity that was getting in his way. As the car headed westwards, he noted the decline of London’s grandeur into ever greater human shabbiness with every mile they left the centre behind them. The city’s clean cut-stone heart at Whitehall degenerated, first to the redbrick postwar semis of Shepherd’s Bush and then on past the shades-of-grey plastic shop fronts at London’s ragged edges, whose bleakness and grime seemed to leach into the countryside.
Adrian came this way at weekends, but only after dark on a Friday night, when he was going down to the country house in Hampshire where his wife, Penny, now spent most of her time. During the week he remained in London, with its gentleman’s clubs for male ritual and his discreet mistress, Hazel from the Far Eastern Desk, for female diversion.
He wiped the window with the back of his hand. The sky was thick with angry black clouds. It would be a bumpy flight, he thought without concern, and a noisy one. The vintage RAF transport plane that had been press-ganged into giving him a last-minute lift on a routine flight to Helsinki was hardly five star.
Adrian listened to the swish of the steady, incessant rain turning to dirty brown spray under the car’s wheels. It was a downpour; the heavens were throwing it at the tarmac so hard the rain was bouncing up again. The wipers cleared gushing waterfalls of rain from the windscreen every few seconds. The violent weather had broken up what was otherwise a typically monotonous January afternoon.
“We’re going to be a few minutes late, I’m afraid, sir,” Ray informed him.
“They’ll wait,” Adrian snapped from the back seat.
The whole affair, this journey to Brize Norton’s military airport included, was suddenly reminding him of the days of the Cold War, and the thought briefly buoyed his spirits.
Short in stature, with a flop of slightly greasy brown hair over his forehead, Adrian possessed a stocky, muscular frame maintained through regular games of squash. His tried and trusted modus operandi, from his days in the jungles of Borneo to the present-day jungles of Whitehall, was to storm through the world sucking the air from everyone in his way. He was the embodiment of preemptive attack, one colleague had observed. Others offered their amateur psychological diagnosis that Adrian behaved as if the planet had done him some grievous disservice.
His physical deportment and mental attitude was one of pugnacious defensiveness. Under the good-life flab that now showed signs of mushrooming around his waist, his wired-up muscles were ready to spring, his fists regularly clenched, and the dark eyes in his livid red face rarely rested.
Adrian was never as meticulous about anything as he was in matters of revenge, and that was the purpose of his trip this evening.
It was revenge against a broken home that had driven him to excel in the military, some said, and revenge against his small stature that drove him to graduate from SAS headquarters at Hereford in the 1960s ahead of all his contemporaries. Others pointed to a sort of muddled revenge against the Establishment while all the time wanting to be deep inside it. This, they said, was what had propelled him upwards in MI6, now almost to the top. But it was a particular revenge that had brought him out of his lair today.
It had taken Adrian fourteen months just to get to this point, but at last here he was, at first base. He was now in possession of an identity; the identity of an assassin, with a name, address, phone number, and probably an inside length measurement, given the heightened efforts of the office researchers on this particular assignment.
For this assassin, a Russian hood by the name of Grigory Bykov, had terminated the life of one of the Secret Intelligence Service’s own officers; and one of a select few Adrian liked to call his “best boys.”
Diligent researchers on the third floor had gladly embraced overtime without pay. Finn had been family, popular too—even loved. Interdepartmental cooperation had been unusually fluid, and the focused urgency of revenge for Finn’s murder had driven everyone on, Adrian included, until the task was done.
Drip-fed leads from sources as diverse as a disaffected KGB officer in Azerbaijan, to the owner of a steam bath and brothel in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, had led conclusively to Grigory Bykov.
Finally the researchers had drawn up Bykov’s biography with meticulous care. In short, Bykov was a petty criminal and south Moscow mafioso, coached to KGB standards and then inducted into the Russian foreign intelligence service east of Moscow, known as the Forest. There they had primed him for this single murder. After all this expert training, Grigory Bykov had finally tracked down Finn in Paris, then killed him with a deadly nerve agent—type unknown—that he’d smeared on the steering wheel of Finn’s rental car.
That was the Russian side of things.
The British side was more complex. Finn had once been one of Adrian’s “best boys”—that was the truth of it. Adrian had recruited Finn personally at Cambridge, back in 1985, back in Gorbachev’s time. And no matter that Finn had turned his back on the Secret Intelligence Service in later years; Finn was still Adrian’s property, in death as well as in life. Nobody—Vladimir Putin included—was going to get away with ordering the death of one of Adrian’s best boys.
In his grey silk suit and expensive Oxford blue cashmere overcoat, both of which were courtesy of Penny’s private fortune rather than his SIS pay, Adrian might look like a toothless catwalk panther, but underneath it all the animal core was still the same one that had driven him through Far Eastern jungles forty years before, where he’d shot or cut the throats of Commie insurgents, and saved the world from Putin’s KGB predecessors.
Adrian began to stoke his own righteous anger now, in preparation for the meeting with Sergei Limov, Putin’s go-between for this evening. More than three days it had taken Finn to die, thanks to Bykov, in the trunk of a car somewhere in Germany, it was said, though Finn’s body had been delivered anonymously to the British embassy in Berlin.
There’d been a note attached to Finn’s body, laid out respectfully on the back seat of a Cherokee Jeep, which was abandoned outside the embassy. The note was addressed to Adrian personally. “You betrayed him in life,” it said. “Honour him in death.”
Who would deliver a body, let alone one as hot as that one? And who was it, with Finn’s corpse on their hands, who dared express such anger—and such accuracy—at the steps of the British embassy? The note pointed him towards two people.
Adrian’s mind turned once again to Finn’s woman, Colonel Anna Resnikov. Was it she, Anna, formerly the youngest female colonel in the KGB, who had first betrayed her country, then run away with Finn and married him? Had she in cold fury delivered the dead body of her lover and, later, her husband? Trained to the highest degree you could reach in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, she was more than capable of it—she possessed all the cunning and subterfuge needed to pull off a feat like that.
Or, more interestingly perhaps, Adrian wondered, was it Mikhail who had slyly delivered Finn’s body?
Over the previous Friday afternoon, before he went down to Penny’s country house for the weekend, for another boring Saturday-night dinner party with her friends, Adrian had read through Mikhail’s file once again, even though he knew it almost by heart.
Code name Mikhail had approached Finn in February 1995 in Moscow, where Finn was using the cover of the British second secretary for trade and investment at the embassy. Right from the start, Mikhail would talk only to Finn. That was the deal. From day one, code name Mikhail was adamant that he would communicate with—and be known to—nobody else, and so Finn’s strategic importance had rocketed.
For the next five years, Mikhail had fed the highest quality intelligence to the British, via Finn. It was so good that it had kept the British right up there, sitting at the high table with the Americans, for a while.
And then, in 2000, Vladimir Putin ascended to power in a well-planned KGB coup. Mikhail was so close to Putin that—as Finn put it—“he practically shits in Putin’s bathroom.” Mikhail was one of the tiny group of so-called Patriots deep within Putin’s innermost circle. The quality, the importance, of his information was greater than ever.
But at that moment, politics back home intervened. The prime minister insisted that Vladimir Putin was a man he could do business with. The American president George W. Bush added the honorarium that he had “looked into Putin’s soul” and liked what he saw.
Suddenly Mikhail’s warnings about Putin’s Russia were off-message. The politicians didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Under orders from Downing Street, the SIS was told that Mikhail must be dropped—exposed as a fraud, was the method the politicians suggested. And so Adrian—promotion and a knighthood at the front of his mind—followed orders. Mikhail was excised.
But Finn hadn’t followed orders. He left the SIS, rather than see his priceless source trashed for reasons of political expediency. And Anna defected from Russia, just for him, not for some cause, and they married. A love story, Adrian supposed, if such a thing existed.
For the next six years, the two of them and a team Finn put together, financed from Russian exiles’ money, independently pursued Mikhail’s leads, which the British refused to touch. And Mikhail’s material was as good as it had ever been. It was so hot, in fact, that Finn had been murdered for it.
The British government’s craving to be on friendly terms with Vladimir Putin had cost Britain and the West five years of high-level intelligence. But it had cost Finn his life.
Now, there was a new twist. The wheel had turned full circle. At the dawn of 2008 politics intervened for a second time, and the attitude to Putin’s regime had gone into reverse. It turned out you couldn’t do business with Putin, after all, and there was apparently nothing very nice to be seen in his soul, if indeed he had one. Orders went out that Mikhail was to be rehabilitated. “Find Mikhail” was the cry.
But with Finn dead, and former colonel Anna Resnikov disappeared, nobody knew how to contact Mikhail.
One of the many reasons for the new policy towards Russia was Finn’s assassination and its aftermath. Grigory Bykov’s reward for the murder of a British intelligence officer was the title of Hero of the Russian Federation—Russia’s highest award—and a seat in Russia’s parliament, the Duma. These days, the Russians made their killers MPs.
Adrian looked at the road ahead and broke away from his thoughts for a moment.
“Foot down, Ray,” he demanded. They were on the motorway, and the traffic had stretched itself apart.
“There’s a weather speed limit, sir,” Ray objected.
“Never mind the bloody speed limit.”
Adrian settled back in his seat. Something else—now it was the damn speed limit—was getting in his way.
Adrian was not planning to be as generous to Grigory Bykov as the Kremlin had been. He hadn’t spent fourteen months finding Bykov, in order to have a British diplomatic rap over the knuckles administered to the Russian ambassador.
At a claret-fuelled encounter with the Perrier-drinking Teddy Parkinson, the Joint Intelligence chief, at the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, Adrian had demanded Bykov’s life. “An eye for an eye . . . just as it should be, always has been, and always shall be, Teddy.”
To return murder for murder was, after all, the standard procedure. An intelligence officer had been the victim, and MI6, Adrian’s Secret Intelligence Service, was not to be viewed as a patsy. That would be tantamount to inviting future acts of murder against SIS officers, not to mention a savage blow to the morale of Finn’s colleagues.
Nevertheless Adrian had known that he would need to lobby Teddy Parkinson hard and cleverly to obtain this natural justice. A British government that could blithely march its armies to slaughter in Iraq—against an abstract enemy and on the basis of false information, to boot—was surprisingly squeamish when it came to dealing death to an actual person; a person with a name and an identity. No matter that the evidence against Bykov was overwhelmingly clear. Without a doubt, the state-sponsored, state-trained, and state-armed Russian hood had murdered Finn, a British intelligence officer.
And so Adrian had entertained Teddy on his own ground at the Special Forces Club, where the beneficial results of force were everywhere in evidence; in the photographs of heroes on its walls, in the letters written in the blood of Gestapo torture victims who had died rather than give up British secrets. The club was a place where bureaucrats like Teddy were viewed with, at best, suspicion.
Adrian, florid of face and with a pugnacious tenacity to match, wanted to show his superior what intelligence work at the sharp end was really about. Unlike himself, Teddy had never been in the armed forces, and dealing with Grigory Bykov was going to be brute work. In his own take-no-prisoners diplomatic style, Adrian had wanted to remind Teddy of both of these facts.