Tundra (6 page)

Since his arrival, he’d encountered overt hostility from Montrose. The medic, Keys, had displayed a sullen resentfulness which appeared to be directed at everybody, not just Purkiss. Although Efraim Avner came across as genuinely affable, there was a neediness about him, as though he was in search of a friend, or at least someone who would validate him. Patricia Clement seemed out of place, a cool observer more at home in a diverse, urban environment.

They were an odd group, with an eccentricity that might be a reflection either of the academic world they moved in or of the isolated setting in which they’d been thrown together.

Or it might be due to something else.

And there was the matter of Nisselovich and his disappearance. Purkiss hadn’t given it much thought when he’d first read about it in the briefing documents, assuming that the official line was correct and that the scientist had been a straightforward casualty of the terrain and the weather. But Medievsky’s account put a different spin on things. Purkiss found it hard to believe that a man of Nisselovich’s education and presumed intelligence would have ventured out alone in the face of an impending Siberian storm, purely to gather grass samples.

He had the sense that Medievsky found it implausible, too.

L
enilko was speedreading and digesting a memorandum of such utter tedium he wondered if its author was playing a joke, when the door to his office opened almost before he’d registered the knock.

It was Anna. ‘Yarkovsky Station,’ she said as neutrally as she could, though her flushed face betrayed her excitement.

Lenilko stabbed his finger repeatedly at the handset on his desk and Anna disappeared, closing the door behind her. A few seconds later the phone rang. Lenilko drew a long breath and picked it up.

The voice echoed hollowly as though filtered through water.

‘I would have been in contact sooner but I needed time to reflect. The journalist arrived last night. John Farmer.’

Because of the delay on the line, it took Lenilko a few seconds to realise the voice had paused.

‘Yes?’ said Lenilko.

‘I recognise him.’

Lenilko felt a pulse beat in his throat.

He said, ‘Who is he?’

‘British Intelligence, I think. I’ve never met him, but I’ve seen his picture before. He looks vaguely like the Reuters photo. You need to enhance that one and cross-reference it again with your SIS files, see if he comes up.’

‘Can you provide a better photo?’ said Lenilko, trying to keep his voice calm, and managing to do so, he thought.

‘Not yet. He’s about to accompany us on a field expedition. I haven’t had the opportunity to take his picture, and out there the conditions won’t allow it.’

‘What are your impressions of him?’

‘Too early to tell. He’s taking pains to be friendly and not to get in our way. Some of the others are reacting badly to his presence.’

Lenilko paused, trying to think if there was anything more to be asked. There wasn’t, not at this point.

He said, ‘I’ll work on the link with SIS. Get me a quality photograph as soon as you can.’

‘Understood.’

A crackle of static erupted before the connection was cut.

Lenilko folded his hands on the desk to stop them from shaking. He stared, as he always did at moments like this, breakthrough moments, at the framed picture of Natalya and the twins beside his computer.

This is it
, he told them silently.

He reached for the phone, the normal internal one, and hit a single number. His office door was thick enough that he heard Anna’s voice down the line only.

‘Drop what you’re doing and get in here with Konstantin.’

*

S
ix hours later, after a marathon lasting all the way through lunch and beyond, it was Konstantin who found the connection. But Anna had come up with the idea.

The three of them had enhanced the Reuters and passport photos of the journalist to the maximum, using software of every variety they had access to, which was most kinds. This had already been done before, during the initial vetting of Farmer, but it never hurt to repeat the process. Once the images were as clear as they were ever going to be, they was cross-referenced with the FSB’s database of known and suspected members of British Intelligence, both SIS, the foreign service, and the domestic Security Service known as MI5.

Nothing came up.

Lenilko suggested they try known or presumed former members of the services. It was a hoary tactic used by intelligence services all over the world: let it be known that an operative was retiring, but keep him or her on clandestinely.

Again, nothing. No match that was even close. And that was after factoring in possible changes in appearance, up to and including minor plastic surgery.

‘Broaden it,’ said Lenilko. ‘Include known associates of British SIS and MI5 assets, even those not considered to be official employees.

Anna raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘Everyone?’

‘Everyone. Informants, chauffeurs, the guys who they send to collect their dry cleaning for them.’

On the monitors, the images flashed by at the rate of scores every second. Beside them, the enhanced passport and press photographs of Farmer remained static. If there was a match, the flow of images would be arrested. But it continued apace, until the dreaded words appeared across the monitors:
No match found
.

‘Damn it,’ said Lenilko.

Konstantin intoned glumly: ‘Our man must be wrong about the British Intelligence connection.’

‘Our man doesn’t get that kind of thing wrong,’ said Lenilko. He stood up, began to pace his modest office in small circuits. The three of them were alone, Anna and Konstantin having brought their laptops in with them. This was work he’d decided not to share with the rest of the office, because the more people there were involved in it, the greater the risk of leaks.

‘
Think
, guys. What are we missing? What cross-check haven’t we done?’

Anna sat up, stared into the distance. ‘Operations.’

‘What?’

‘Farmer’s given age is thirty-eight, yes? We assume he may have been a British agent since he was eighteen at the very youngest. So we run the files on all the SIS/MI5 operations we know about and have data on, covering the last twenty years. There may be a match there. Someone in a photograph, even an apparent bystander.’

‘Yes.’ Lenilko jabbed a finger at her. ‘Good. Let’s get on it.’

The search was slower this time. Between them, Anna and Konstantin opened each file manually, ran through it for images, immediately rejected those that didn’t include photographs. There were relatively few files dating back to the nineteen nineties. It had been a time when the Russian Federation and Great Britain were notional allies, and while it was perfectly commonplace for even friendly nations to keep tabs on one another, during the Yeltsin era there hadn’t been the intense, painstaking analysis of every move SIS made that was standard nowadays.

All of that changed abruptly in 2000. The new president took a very different view of perfidious Albion, and the numbers of files and case reports exploded. Anna’s and Konstantin’s fingers blurred over their respective keyboards as they screened, sorted and rejected documents.

Lenilko blinked, the prolonged focus on the screens giving him a headache. He stood and stretched and went out into the main office, checked on the progress of a few other projects. Through the high windows, the snow flurries were gathering pace outside. Unusually, The precipitation felt oppressive to Lenilko: an impenetrable stratum between him and the fantastically distant Yarkovsky Station.

He returned to his office twice more before giving up and concentrating on business in the main area. Anna and Konstantin would call him if they found anything of significance. As the morning wore on, Lenilko’s spirits sank. Perhaps his man at Yarkovsky Station had indeed been wrong; perhaps there really was no connection between the journalist Farmer and British Intelligence. Or, more likely, maybe the connection was so carefully concealed that Lenilko and his two underlings were destined never to find it.

No. Damn it.
Lenilko must have clenched his fist with audible force, because one of the operatives looked up from his work station, terror in his eyes. Lenilko shook his head to reassure the young man. He stalked off, heading for the windows, isolating himself as best he could in a room full of people.

We are never doomed to be defeated. We will not be bested.

Lenilko had heard it widely repeated that the Soviet Union had won the espionage battle during the Cold War, but lost the war itself. Even the Brits and, to a lesser extent, the Americans conceded this. The KGB’s recruitment of agents within the Western intelligence services had been astronomically more successful than similar attempts on the other side. The West had never had anyone remotely like a Kim Philby or a George Blake in a position of influence in Moscow or any of the Warsaw Pact countries. The traitors Penkovsky and Popov represented the best the West could do.

The West had won, but the new Russia had regained a deep appreciation of the superiority of its own intelligence and counter-intelligence tradition. Part of Semyon Lenilko’s remit, his
duty
, was to uphold that tradition. More than that, he intended to enhance it, to
raise it to a whole new level
, as the Americans said.

John Farmer
would
be identified. His connection with British Intelligence
would
be exposed. As would his, and therefore Great Britain’s, interest in Yarkovsky Station.

At the periphery of his vision, his office door opened.

Lenilko was a rationalist and an atheist, and no believer in any notion of the supernatural. He included extrasensory perception within that realm. But he was struck by the oddness of the timing.

Anna was in the doorway. Her failed attempt at a nonchalant expression said it all.

Lenilko hustled into the office, flipped the door shut behind him, slamming it, said in almost a snarl, ‘Tell me, tell me.’

At his desk, Konstantin half-turned, his face crepuscular in the light from the monitor.

‘Look.’

The text on the screen was familiar to Lenilko. It gave a detailed account of the events of a Tuesday in October, the year before last.

Tallinn, Estonia. Every FSB employee knew what had happened there, on that date. Every Russian with a sliver of awareness knew.

The Russian president had been attending a summit meeting in the Baltic capital with his Estonian counterpart. A terrorist cell, a group of embittered ethnic Russian Estonians, had attempted to assassinate the President using a long-range missile launched from far out at sea. The assassination had been prevented...
somehow
. It was a source of intense, grating fury to Lenilko, and to many of his colleagues, that the FSB still didn’t know quite what had gone wrong with the terrorists’ plans.

It was also a source of profound, churning shame. Somebody else,
not
the FSB, had prevented the murder of the Russian president.

Somebody else.

These thoughts played through Lenilko’s head as familiar background, but his attention was focused on the picture which Konstantin’s scrolling finger had exposed.

It was a well-known photo, a lucky snap by a junior reporter on a local Tallinn rag, and it had been purchased by the Press Association for a high five-figure sum and syndicated across the world. It showed two men being helped out of a rescue boat onto dry land by emergency services, the sea behind them stretching towards the grey horizon and strewn with burning debris.

One of the men in the photo was unidentifiable, his huddled form obscured behind the second man, his face turned away.

The second man was John Farmer. There was no question about it.

Lenilko gazed at the picture. He didn’t blink. And it was probably that which caused the tears to brim on his lower lids and spill through the mesh of his lashes and down over his cheeks. The eyes had to lubricate themselves against prolonged exposure to the air.

He wrapped one arm around Anna’s neck, swung the other around Konstantin’s. Kissed each of them hard on the cheek in turn. Anna shrieked, Konstantin recoiled, and Lenilko let go. But when they stared round at him, into his beaming grin, he saw that Anna was smiling, and even Konstantin’s eyebrows had risen several millimetres up his long forehead.

‘Geniuses,’ Lenilko said, his voice catching embarrassingly. He lowered it to a near whisper, where he could better trust it. ‘The pair of you are true geniuses. You’ve just identified our journalist at Yarkovsky Station, John Farmer, as one of the men who was fished out of the sea after the attempt on our president’s life sixteen months ago. You’ve linked a man who was at the centre of the most significant political event of the last five years, with a developing situation at one of the most important research stations in the entire Russian Federation.’ He swatted each of them on the shoulder. They both seemed taken aback. Lenilko knew he was well-liked by his staff - it was a response he took pains to cultivate - but he knew also than Anna and Konstantin hadn’t seen such an overt expression of emotion from him before.

He calmed himself, bringing things down a notch. ‘Okay. Let’s find out who he is.’

This time it took only a few minutes. The two men who’d been hauled off the speedboat had disappeared before the FSB had a chance to interview them. An official statement from the Estonian authorities identified one of them, the man who was now John Farmer, as one Martin Hughes, a British photographer who’d rented a speedboat to try and capture pictures of the summit between the two heads of state from out in the bay. His boat had been directly under the Black Hawk helicopter the terrorists had used to launch the missile, and when the Black Hawk had been shot out of the sky the debris had landed on Hughes’s boat.

The second man, the one whose features were indistinct in the photo, was never identified.

The FSB had followed up on Martin Hughes, but had found nothing of interest. A scanned copy of his passport was on their files.