Moscow Sting (6 page)
“Honour him in death,” it had ended. No matter how things had been left with Finn before he met his end, the SIS wasn’t going to let him down after it. Adrian would see that he got his revenge.
L
OGAN WALKED SLOWLY BETWEEN
the rows of plastic reclining chairs planted twenty deep along the beach. They were all either occupied or claimed by towels, magazines, half-empty bottles of wine, picnic baskets—all the detritus of the summer tourists.
He’d taken a taxi from the industrial capital Podgorica, after his connection there from Belgrade and Marseille, down along Montenegro’s Adriatic coastline.
Halfway to his destination, he’d paid off the taxi and taken a bus for the remaining twenty-five miles or so. It made slow progress along a winding road that traced the rocky shore broken with bays of fine curved beaches and dotted with islands where yachts were moored—some the second or even third vessel belonging to the Russian industrial barons.
It was ten years since he’d last made this journey. The country was very different now from the time he’d been stationed in the Balkans. Prosperity had arrived in Montenegro, in the form of Russian money. Billions of Russian dollars had first sucked up the local production enterprises of any value to the Kremlin, then turned to tourist development.
While the West was aiding the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, of which the tiny state of Montenegro was part, and notionally shoving it towards democracy, it was Russia that had then stepped in, first with its state-backed industrial giants who’d taken over the profitable parts of Montenegro’s industry, and then with its real estate developers who bought most of the country’s two-hundred-mile coastline.
The Kremlin was advancing into western Europe through the back door of the Balkans, its historic hunger for warm-water ports, backed with its huge new wealth, bringing it closer than it had ever managed under communism. A fledgling new country like Montenegro, barely able to fly, had been swiftly gobbled up by Russian cash.
Logan was looking away from the sea now, up at the cafés along the waterfront. He finally found the one he was looking for. It was called Slovenskja, named for the Slovenians who had made this little medieval Montenegrin town a popular resort in the 1920s.
It was a Sunday, and all the locals had joined the tourists on the beach to create one complex, almost geometric puzzle of oiled, heaving, semi-naked humanity, beneath which “one of the world’s ten most beautiful beaches” was invisible.
That it was a Sunday was of some importance to Logan. The man he was to contact would be stretched for backup. The day after he’d developed the photographs in Marseille, Logan was going to make the third and final delivery of the woman’s picture to the most dangerous and unpredictable of his freelance connections.
Stefan Stavroisky, SVR chief in Montenegro and protégé of Putin’s from the days when he was deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, had been stationed in Belgrade during the Serbian war. And that’s where Logan had originally made contact with him. In the thaw between the West and Russia, the KGB and the CIA had fraternised, at least on a personal level. When Boris Yeltsin was Russia’s president, both sides had been keen that the Balkan wars didn’t develop into an American confrontation with Russia.
Logan had known Stavroisky well back then, in the late 1990s. NATO forces were pressurising the Serbs at the end of the war, and Yeltsin’s Russia made protests on the Serbs’ behalf that weren’t backed up by any serious threat of Russian military involvement. But the war had remained a deeply humiliating snub for Russia, and later, under Putin, the resentment it caused had aided Putin’s call to nationalism—the protection of fellow Slavs—when he’d become president in 2000.
Logan and Stavroisky had worked, sometimes together, sometimes in opposition, during those times. There had been some cooperation between the KGB and the CIA, both to limit the damage and to pursue a closer relationship after the war ended. When NATO had accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, Stavroisky was one of those who had silently worked to calm the situation, and the Americans had been grudgingly grateful.
Stavroisky was Logan’s age and had attached himself to Putin’s cause early on in Putin’s rise to power. He’d made the right choice, and had swiftly advanced through the ranks of Russia’s foreign service.
Stavroisky was also meticulous in the cause of his own advancement. Like Putin, he was a fitness fanatic and took care to enjoy the sports Putin enjoyed. He was a keen fisherman and a judo black belt. He had played for the KGB’s volleyball team, Logan remembered.
“What’s the transfer market like?” Logan had joked to him one evening over a drink. But Stavroisky drew the line at jokes about the KGB.
Logan and Stavroisky had struck up a form of friendship, had met on maybe a dozen occasions, drunk together, whored together, and until Logan’s recall and dismissal, it might have seemed they were even working together during those times.
Now, Logan heard, there was no fraternisation between the CIA and the KGB anywhere, let alone here. The Balkans were a new frontline of sorts. It had all reverted to the status quo ante 1989.
It being a Sunday, Logan figured that Stavroisky would have fewer resources to call on; August weekends would draw out significant numbers of his operatives to the beach, to yachts, to bars and restaurants, their mobile phones out of range or quietly switched off to evade his summons.
And he had given Stavroisky just an hour and a half’s warning to be at the café, against the Russian’s protests that it wasn’t possible to get there in time.
“I have something with me that will make your masters very happy,” Logan had told him. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Stefan,” he’d said. “Promotion for you, maybe one of your Russian awards, certainly money,” he’d said. “Certainly, lots and lots of money for you.”
“Tell me on the phone,” Stavroisky had told him. “I’m busy.”
“It’s a photograph,” Logan had said. “Somebody your side wants very badly. I’ll need payment within twenty-four hours. Be there by four, at the café Slovenskja, or I’ll take it elsewhere.”
The Russian would know that by “elsewhere” he meant the Americans, or maybe a European intelligence service, and maybe guess that Logan would do that anyway. Speed was essential.
“I can’t make it in that time,” Stavroisky protested. “I’m over sixty miles away.”
“You’re the head of the SVR in Montenegro, Stefan,” Logan replied. “If anyone can make it, you can.”
Logan decided he’d give Stavroisky until four thirty anyway.
“And make sure you’re alone, Stefan,” he’d added. “I’ll be watching. Any sign of company, you can forget it.”
Now, Logan looked away from the café and out to sea. Even with depleted Sunday resources, he knew that Stavroisky would not come alone if he could avoid it. He knew, fairly certainly anyway, that the SVR chief’s backup would come from the sea, where it was less easy to detect a presence. There were dozens of small boats coming in and out, to and from the beach. Anyone in them could be at the café in a few minutes, if Stavroisky gave the signal.
Logan took out the photograph, wrapped up in its waterproof plastic cover, from inside his jacket and rolled it into a tube, tying it finally with a rubber band. Then he found a wastebin, behind a toilet cubicle and out of sight. It was thirty or forty yards from the Slovenskja. He thrust the rolled package deep inside the bin until he felt the bottom underneath the cans and paper cups that were overflowing from its upper edges.
Satisfied it was safely concealed, he walked up the beach towards the town. Just behind the beach, he turned away from the town and climbed past the medieval houses up towards a cliff, where there was another café, with a telescope for tourists.
But rather than the ancient monastery on the island in the bay, or simply out over the placid turquoise sea, the telescope also offered him a fine view of the Slovenskja café and the surrounding area. He settled in for the wait.
At 4:48, he saw Stavroisky approach the café in too much of a hurry for an experienced operative.
Stefan Stavroisky was a tall, fit man with thick black hair cut short. He had the manicured look and the consciously honed figure of a vain man suddenly aware that his age was beginning to tell. Logan watched him closely. The Russian was wearing a grey suit, the jacket slung over his shoulder, and black leather shoes. He looked incongruous—and very visible—next to the semi-naked bodies on the beach.
Through the magnification of the telescope, Logan saw that the Russian was in an agitated state. Swivelling the telescope, he studied the bay. There were too many boats to be certain, but he detected three or four that seemed to be approaching in time with Stavroisky. It could be any one of them—or none at all.
But the SVR chief had at least arrived at the café alone. Logan had watched him from the moment his BMW drew up by the café, and he’d parked in a handicapped space. No other cars seemed to be trailing him. If Stavroisky had only just managed to get here himself, then there was a good chance he would have no backup—at least for a while.
Logan dialled the number and watched Stavroisky open his hand and flick open the cell phone clenched inside it. “Where the hell are you, Logan?” the Russian demanded.
“Leave the café. Walk right, out of the entrance on the sea side, along the beach for around thirty-five yards. There’s a blue-and-yellow sun awning. Behind that there’s a toilet. And behind that there’s a wastebin. At the bottom of the bin you’ll find a black plastic waterproof package. You’ll need to dig a bit. It’s dirty work, Stefan.”
“Where are you?” But the line had gone dead.
Logan watched Stavroisky looking around the beach, then up into the town and finally out to the water and the sea. He looked angry. But then he stepped out and began to walk in the direction Logan had indicated, an irritable figure whose office attire drew one or two catcalls from the sun worshippers.
Logan saw him stop at the blue-and-yellow awning and then go to the right, as if to the cubicle, but he disappeared behind it at the last minute. He was out of a sight for a minute or so, but reemerged holding the plastic package. He didn’t look up, and Logan took that as a sign that he wasn’t making contact with anybody.
Then, from the corner of his vision, Logan saw a black van moving slowly along the beachfront. It looked too commercial to have any business in the town on a Sunday, and it was moving too slowly for his liking.
He observed it for a whole minute. It was not stopping, either outside the Slovenskja or anywhere else, just trawling along as if watching or waiting for an instruction or—more likely—trying to pinpoint his cell phone transmission.
At that moment, his phone rang and he swivelled the telescope back to the café. There was Stavroisky, apparently calling for a drink and with his phone to his ear. He carried the package carelessly in his hand, unopened.
“The photograph is of a woman,” Logan said. “A KGB colonel. If you want to know where she is, I’ll need the money deposited before Tuesday morning.”
Then Logan switched off the phone, watching the screen die. Then he tossed it in the palm of his hand a couple of times and finally lobbed it over the cliff and watched it fall onto the rocks below.
He returned to the telescope. He’d given Stavroisky instructions for payment, inside the packet with the photograph. But the photograph was useless without the location. There was no room for discussion. Either Stavroisky paid within forty-eight hours, and received the location of the woman, or he didn’t.
Logan walked swiftly down the steep path from the promontory and looked back down at the black van a quarter of a mile away. It had stopped now at the edge of the road, roughly in the middle of the beach. There was an antenna rising from the centre of the van now—vainly trying, he assumed, to pick up his signal. But the van had arrived too late.
He took a taxi from the centre of the town to Bar, farther down the coast, and caught the night ferry to the Italian port of Bari.
T
EDDY PARKINSON’S “COUNTRY HOME”
was, in Adrian’s eyes at least, a modest, modern three-bedroom brick house on the high street of an undistinguished Surrey village. Adrian considered that it cried “modesty” to an unnecessarily excessive degree.
But Parkinson had always been known for his low-profile tastes, and he hadn’t, as Adrian had, married into money.
Teddy Parkinson was a safe pair of hands, which was why he’d been given the politically adroit position of head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was a man with reasonable horizons, who deferred to authority and had always kept his political masters’ self-confidence buoyant.
He holidayed once a year in England—another example, in Adrian’s opinion, of an almost sackcloth approach to personal enjoyment.
Adrian considered him a perfectly behaved, grammar-school-educated civil servant who knew his place, and whose main fault was in not aspiring to be more than that. But for precisely this reason, Adrian often needed him. Teddy’s support was valuable in anything that might be considered by Downing Street to be too risqué.
Adrian, by contrast, had from the start brought a flamboyance to MI6, which had almost cost him the top job. It was only his own political adroitness, and this solely in the field of internal politics, that had beaten two other, more Parkinson-like candidates out of the running.
To some at the Service, this new style at the top was welcome. To others—in particular those whose feet Adrian had trampled over to reach the top—he was unsuitable, even dangerous. Teddy was a useful, a necessary ally for Adrian, therefore, when he needed something that required the imprimatur of a man with a reputation for safety first.
After lunch cooked by Teddy’s wife, Elizabeth, a self-described “English rose,” the two men decided to walk across the fields at the rear of the house and up to a small hill that looked towards the South Downs.
But Teddy knew that Adrian hadn’t come for the lunch. Despite Adrian’s scornful, snobbish opinion of him, he was well aware of Adrian’s need—and Adrian’s own faults that propelled that need. The two were not friends, and Teddy wasn’t fooled by any pretence that they were. They’d never socialised together outside work.
He assumed it was further information about Semyonovich Adrian wished to impart, in private, but in this at least he was to be surprised. The matter Adrian wished to discuss was nothing to do with the murdered Russian.
“The Semyonovich business has overshadowed another development over the weekend, Teddy,” Adrian began as they left the cultivated field at the rear of Parkinson’s house and walked uphill across a rough, sun-scorched meadow. “Grigory Bykov. Remember him? The Russians have finally declared that they won’t extradite him. It’s taken them six months from my meeting in Helsinki. This is a matter that concerns us much more than the assassination of Semyonovich. It’s one of my boys that got killed, our boys.”
“Oh, yes?” Teddy replied.
“Yes. You remember Finn?”
Parkinson let the name hang in the still afternoon air and continued to tramp up the field.
“He’d left the Secret Intelligence Service, hadn’t he, Adrian?” he said finally. “By the time he was killed, he hadn’t been with us for . . . how long? Five, six years? Still on first-name terms with someone who deserted the SIS?”
“He’s dead now, Teddy. And as you know, Finn was always my boy. When he was onside, he was one of the best officers I ever had.”
This was a new argument of Teddy’s, he saw, different from the one he’d used back in January. Parkinson was now distancing Finn from the protection of the SIS. The politicians were moving the target as usual. It was an argument Parkinson certainly hadn’t used over their lunch at the Special Forces Club. Then, it was all about making an effort at quiet extradition first. Adrian gritted his teeth.
“But he’d given the SIS the push,” Parkinson said. “Or we gave him the push. Both, perhaps. Either way, what do we owe him? Isn’t that the question?”
“He turned his back on us, yes. In a way,” Adrian agreed. “He became a liability, and we had to lose him. That was back in 2000. But . . .” He paused, for a rare moment uncertain how to continue.
They’d reached the top of the meadow, where a small copse was maintained for pheasant shooting in the winter. Wire netting and metal bird feeders were ready for the new young chicks to be reared. It was a beautifully clear day, and the view began to unfold as they breasted the hill.
Adrian didn’t like to say what he was going to say. He rarely, if ever, admitted he was culpable. However, in this case . . .
“It’s true, Teddy. Finn did leave us, in the sense that he rejected government policy back then. He suddenly got all hot about what was right and wrong, and so on. It became impossible for him to work any longer in the role he’d performed so brilliantly for many years in Moscow. But he left us for a reason, and that reason has come home to roost. The reason he left was that HM government was cosying up, as he saw it, to Vladimir Putin. He believed it was against the UK’s national interest. Finn’s view was out of whack back then, but now it’s become government policy. Now Putin is out in the cold with our government, as Finn always said he should be.”
“Policies change, Adrian. It’s not our job, let alone the job of our officers, to interpret political necessities.”
“Okay. Agreed. It wasn’t right for Finn to take matters into his own hands. The awkward fact, however, is that he was right.”
“So?”
“Finn was murdered by a KGB assassin for following up lines of enquiry we’d told him to drop. To drop for political reasons. Now, today, these are exactly the lines of enquiry we are pursuing. Again, for changing political reasons. He got murdered for it. And we were wrong,” he added, including Parkinson in the assessment. “In January you told me to meet with the Russians. Give them an opportunity to hand Bykov over without losing face. That’s all happened. I met Sergei Limov, as you know, seven months ago now. This weekend we learn the Russians aren’t going to hand Bykov over. That leaves us with only one option, according to SIS procedure. We take out anyone who assassinates one of ours.”
“One of ours, yes,” Parkinson said, with heavy emphasis on “ours.”
“To the Russians he always was one of ours. They never knew he’d left MI6. They murdered someone they believed to be a fully paid-up member of SIS. We can’t allow that.”
“Intelligence officers aren’t paid to have political opinions,” Teddy Parkinson said, returning to his earlier theme. He sounded hard-edged now, and ignored what Adrian perceived to have been his winning throw. He was better at dealing with Adrian than Adrian knew. “They’re paid to put into play whatever they’re told by HMG and by us.”
“Finn was disobedient. I agree with you entirely, Teddy. But although he was no longer officially on our books, he was one of us. And the Russians thought so, that’s the real point,” Adrian repeated.
He was uncomfortably conscious that he was being far more supportive of Finn now than he’d been in the last years of Finn’s life.
Honour him in death
.
“We don’t allow people to kill our officers and get away with it,” Adrian said. “It’s part of the highest ethics of the SIS.”
“So. You want to take action.”
“Now that the Russians have refused extradition, yes. That was your condition, Teddy, not mine. We’ve done everything the prime minister asked us to do. Foreign agents don’t murder our people with impunity. If we don’t make the point, they’ll just be encouraged, maybe to do a similar hit on another, acting SIS officer in the future.”
Parkinson looked across the rolling hills that stretched into the haze of distance. He’d picked up a stick, Adrian noticed, and was flicking it in the air, like a headmaster wielding a cane.
“I share your concern,” he said, without looking at Adrian.
“Thank you, Teddy. So I have your support?”
“So far as it goes,” Parkinson said.
Parkinson observed Adrian standing impatiently on the hill beside him. Carew looked very out of place in this ordinary, unkempt, though to him spectacular countryside, he thought. He imagined that Adrian’s country estate in Hampshire, with its tailored buildings and lawns, would accommodate Adrian rather better. The man’s face had a city pallor, which accentuated the red parts of his face, but it wasn’t the ruddiness of the open air. Maybe the pallor was also the smoking, Parkinson thought.
He noted Adrian’s blue suit and black shoes—Parkinson had changed into his gardening clothes as soon as they’d arrived. Adrian’s very stance as he stood on the top of the hill suggested to him someone deeply uncomfortable with the relentless ordinariness of nature. He was someone who needed action, for which the city was an illusory substitute, in his opinion.
Adrian now leaned down and picked up a smooth stone from the grass, though not from any admiration for the fossil that Parkinson saw in it. It was a tool, something to play with, an accessory to Adrian’s central purpose. Adrian handled its smoothness, turning it in his palm.
“There is an additional factor,” Adrian said suddenly.
“Let’s walk down here and come back through the village,” Parkinson said, ignoring the remark. “There’s a very ancient Saxon monument I’d like to show you.”
He could see the impatience flash across Adrian’s eyes as the other man said brusquely, “As you know, Teddy, Bykov has actually been rewarded for killing our officer. With a seat in Russia’s parliament. They’re laughing in our face.”
“Well, I know, I know,” Parkinson said. “But killing MPs isn’t exactly our beat, Adrian.”
“They don’t play by the rules, why should we?”
“What if they retaliate?” Parkinson said. “Suppose they suddenly decide it’s open season on our MPs for instance? I say this just for the sake of argument, you understand.”
“I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing, would it?” Adrian replied.
“Adrian, Adrian . . .”
Adrian smiled without apology.
“The point I’m making is that if the Kremlin can come here and murder our people, they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it just because they turn their killers into MPs.”
“All right, I take the point. You made the same one in January, I remember.”
They’d reached the bottom of the hill, on the other side from where they’d walked up.
A man and a woman were walking a pair of identical dogs. Parkinson hailed them. It was his way of saying to Adrian that they were back in the real world, a world where spies being murdered wasn’t really of much relevance to anyone.
“We’ll have to see how this might play with the PM,” he said, when the couple had passed. They stood in front of a stile, the crossing of which, Adrian knew, signalled the end of the conversation. “Politicians, Adrian, don’t like other politicians getting murdered, even their direst enemies. And certainly not on their orders. It sets a precedent. Leaves them feeling exposed.” He tapped his stick on the stile. “And they don’t like other politicians getting murdered even if they’re fake politicians,” he added.
“They’re all bloody fake,” Adrian said.
Parkinson chose to ignore another of Adrian’s explosive verbal devices—EVDs, as they were known at SIS headquarters.
“Do we have to include them in the decision, then?” Adrian persisted. “The politicians? Shouldn’t it just be an SIS matter?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to have a think about that.”
Parkinson looked down the lane and pointed. “See that stone there? Saxon monument with a Celtic cross on it. See it? Very strange,” he said.
“I’d appreciate it very much, Teddy,” Adrian said, ignoring the monument, “if you could back me on this.”
Parkinson showed no sign yet of stepping over the stile.
“Any contact with Finn’s old source in Moscow?” he suddenly said instead, looking almost in the opposite direction to Adrian, back up the hill. “High-placed, inside Putin’s coterie, wasn’t he. Someone we could do with now, I’d have thought. Mikhail, wasn’t that it?”
It was a question Adrian would have preferred not to be asked, and Parkinson’s archly vague memory of the most important source Britain had had in living memory irritated him still further.
“Not since Finn was murdered,” he replied. “As you know, Source Mikhail only ever communicated through Finn. That was why Finn was murdered.”
“Pity we didn’t get through to him before Finn’s death,” Parkinson demurred.
Adrian detected the criticism, as he was intended to, he realised.
“That wasn’t our brief, Teddy,” he countered. “In fact, the opposite was the case. Back then we were told that Mikhail was discredited. Told by the politicians, if you remember.”
“But he isn’t discredited now,” Parkinson said.
“We know that, yes. Now. Come on, Teddy, you were there back then. You know we were told to lay off the information from Finn’s source as it was deemed anti-Putin. That’s why Finn left the SIS, walked out on us. He was disgusted. And he was right.”
“You didn’t defend Finn then, I seem to remember.”
“Nobody did. But I am now.”
For a moment, Adrian uncomfortably recalled his last conversation with Finn, under a tree in St. James’ Park in an autumn downpour. It had been a cold, wet October day. Back then, almost three years ago now, he’d practically told Finn he was dead meat, not for leaving the SIS, but for carrying on his investigations solo. And, worse than that, he’d threatened Finn’s woman, the KGB colonel.
As if picking up his thoughts, Parkinson said, “And the woman—his wife, wasn’t she?”
“They married, yes,” Adrian said patiently. “After she defected from Russia.”
“Well?”
“Not a word, not even a whisper. She’s disappeared.”
“Any ideas?”
“We think the French have her.”
“And they’re not talking.”
“No.”
Teddy Parkinson let the silence grow. Eventually he said, “With Finn dead, she’s the last possible hope we have of ever reviving Mikhail.” He looked steadily at Adrian. “We need that source now. Mikhail, Adrian. We really do need him now.”
“I know that, Teddy.”
Parkinson put his hand on Adrian’s shoulder, but it was not a gesture of friendship.