Sir Adrian recalled years ago standing on the banks of the Thames at Henley, weekending with an MI6 colleague who had a Thames-side cottage, watching Eton win the Princess Elizabeth Cup. Rowing at stroke in the Eton Eight was a very young Julian Marshall.
Before reaching Zurich airport, he realized he had been looking in the wrong place. He had presumed that a senior mandarin was the Judas. That was what Krilov had wished him to think and why they had gone to all that trouble to bribe Herr Fritsch to put out word of a fictional bank account and a fictional visit by a genuine British civil servant. He had been almost out-calculated. What he had forgotten is that there is another category of person who sits at the heart of the British establishment – the invisible underling.
As one of life’s compulsive observers, he had noted that those styled as the great and the good often overlooked the army of good and loyal men and women who really made the machine of commerce, the professions and of government work: the drivers, the secretaries, the note-takers, the file copiers, the archive-keepers, the interpreters, even the white-jacketed coffee-servers.
They came, they went, they stood and served, and they were generally ignored. But they were not wooden statues. They had eyes and ears, brains to remember, deduce, and certainly a capacity to feel affronted, ignored, belittled by the snobbish and arrogant.
That the name Chandler’s Court had been passed to the Russians there was no doubt. But which underling had broken ranks? As to the ‘why?’, he still clung to bribery, and nothing like $5 million’s worth. But where in the haystack of Whitehall was this invisible needle to be traced? He recalled from his days at MI6 the exposure of a leak and the ruse he had employed to bring the mover in darkness to the light. He would have to use it again.
On the flight back to Heathrow his mind returned to the single conference when the name Chandler’s Court had been fleetingly mentioned. Someone present had heard that, possibly noted the words, the name of the place where the youth nicknamed the Fox had been lodged for his safety.
Who had been present? Well, the heads of four Intelligence services: MI6, MI5, GCHQ and Joint Intel. All security-cleared to the eyeballs. But who had sat behind them, quietly note-taking?
And there were two Cabinet ministers, the Secretaries from the Home Office and Foreign Office, each with a small team of subordinates.
Four days had passed since the Russians’ raid on Chandler’s Court. Sir Adrian was certain that Krilov had by now concluded that the armed attack had been a total disaster. There at least it was they who had underestimated him. Perhaps they could be tricked into doing it again. It would be logical for him to move his hacking phenomenon somewhere else. So he would do the opposite.
He had in any case conferred with Dr Hendricks on this after the shoot-out. The computer wizard from Cheltenham had begged him not to relocate the family, if it was at all feasible. The academic had over a few weeks become like a surrogate father to the youth. Every time Luke Jennings was moved or his world disrupted, he descended into a mental crisis. And he had just been tasked with his second database-hacking exploration and was working on it.
Sir Adrian, on one of his visits, had noted with approval the developing relationship. After a lifetime in computers Dr Hendricks was, in technical terms, far ahead of the teenage boy. But neither he nor anyone else from GCHQ could match the seeming sixth sense of the youth when it came to penetrating the blinding complexity of the firewalls that the major powers used to protect their innermost secrets. Dr Hendricks might have resented this. Others probably would. But Jeremy Hendricks had a generosity of spirit that endowed him with a protective paternalism towards the young genius in his charge. Luke Jennings seemed to respond to this. He was receiving daily encouragement, something he had never had from his late father. Rejected, he had lived in his own private world. His mother could protect, shield his fragility as a mother hen with her chick, but she could not encourage, because his world was utterly incomprehensible to her, as it was to Sir Adrian and would have been to all Luke’s former schoolteachers. Only with Dr Hendricks did he at last have a common language. So, for Sir Adrian, Hendricks’s advice was important. If moving the entire hub from Chandler’s Court somewhere else would send the boy into a frantic depression, it would be resisted. Luke Jennings would have to stay where he was.
So, with Hendricks’s advice in mind, Sir Adrian began to work on his attempt to wrongfoot Krilov. He would pretend to move the lad and let it be known that he had. He would choose four targets. But first there was some research to do. He began with his copious contact list. Four country houses, all set in their own grounds.
In the days when he kept a pair of shotguns and accepted invitations to spend a day shooting pheasant and partridge he had made acquaintance with over a dozen of these home-owners. He rang four of them and asked for the favour he wished. All agreed. One even suggested ‘it might be fun’, which was certainly one way of putting it. He doubted the Night Wolves on their slabs in Herefordshire would agree.
His second concern was to revisit the Director of the Special Forces.
The brigadier was courteous but reproving.
‘The CO of the Regiment is not best pleased,’ he remarked. ‘He thought his men were on a training mission close-protecting a family of three and three boffins. They end up in a re-enactment of Stalingrad.’
‘That was evenly balanced,’ replied Sir Adrian. ‘What happened at Chandler’s Court was very one-sided. But please convey my apologies to the Regiment. I had no idea the killers had located the target. Had I known, the target would not even have been there. The house would have been empty. What is likely to follow will be wholly different.’
He explained his proposition. The DSF thought it over.
‘I recommend the SRR. They’re based in Herefordshire too. At Credenhill. I would suggest two men per house. Then they could spell each other.’
The Special Reconnaissance Regiment is, with the SAS and the Special Boat Service, one of Britain’s three SF fighting units. High among its skill sets are covert entry and invisibility. Add to that close observation (unseen). Its members will usually seek to avoid close encounters but can be just as lethal as members of the other two units if needs demand.
There was another encrypted conversation between the commanding officer of SRR at his Credenhill base and the DSF. Once again the evocation of the wishes of the Prime Minister in assisting her security adviser clinched the matter.
The four pairs of unexpected house guests arrived at the residences of their hosts within twenty-four hours and were made welcome. The four residences were a manor, a grange and two farms.
All the houses were large and sprawling, set deep in the countryside, where a wandering stranger, let alone a foreigner on a scouting mission, would be noticeable. The soldiers installed themselves in their quarters, patrolled the surrounding territory and selected their watching points. In each case they chose an elevated eyrie to give a good overview of the grounds of the residence. Then, turn and turnabout, they mounted guard.
Sir Adrian had picked four of those who had attended the crucial National Security Council meeting. These were the quite innocent Julian Marshall, the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He knew them all, though the two politicians less well.
He wrote to each a very personal private letter with the envelope so marked that it would not be opened except by the hands of the man named on the front. After perusal it would be seen by not more than one other, a confidential private or filing secretary trusted with classified correspondence.
He explained that there had been an incident at Chandler’s Court and he felt it wise to move the young cyber-hacker at the heart of Operation Troy to a new location. He then revealed the new location, but each one was different. For clarity, Weston identified them to himself as A, B, C and D.
He knew about waiting. Much of espionage involves waiting, and he had spent his life in it. An angler knows the feel
ing: the hours trying not to nod off into a doze, to keep eyes on the floater, an ear cocked for the tinkle of the little bell at the rod-tip. When a trap has been laid it is similar, except that there are constant false alarms. Each call has to be attended to, but it is not the one the setter of the trap is really waiting for.
He did not have to wait long. The call came, as agreed, from the CO of the Regiment at Credenhill.
‘My lads tell me they are under observation. Someone patrolling the woods, field glasses, staring at the house. My men have, of course, not been seen. Do you want the intruder taken? Just say the word.’
‘Thank you, Colonel. I have what I need. I think you will find he will soon be gone.’
The colonel had named Residence C. That was Persimmon Grange, in Wiltshire. Years ago on a one-day shoot Sir Adrian had knocked down fifty pheasant as one of eight guns. A former ambassador from an embassy behind the Iron Curtain had retired there with his arthritic wife and plain daughter.
Persimmon Grange was the location mentioned in the letter to the Home Secretary. Weston needed to talk to him.
He got his chat after the minister finished a private lunch at Brooks’s. They repaired to the library, where the portraits of the Dilettantes stared down at them.
‘I really do need to know, Home Secretary, who would have seen that letter after you read it.’
The man was twenty years his junior, one of the up-and-coming thrusters, one of those to whom the Prime Minister had given high office and who was proving worthy of it, despite his youth.
It was not a long conversation. There was no need to waste time.
‘After I read it,’ said the Home Secretary, ‘it would have been filed. One copy only, the one you sent, no duplicates, filed under lock and key. By my personal private secretary, Robert Thompson.’
Unless something had gone badly wrong, Sir Adrian had his betrayer.
Robert Thompson was a civil servant on a civil servant’s salary. He did not live in Chelsea, Knightsbridge or Belgravia but south of the river in Battersea. Records showed he was a widower with a daughter aged ten who lived with him. Sir Adrian knocked at the door of the flat just after 8 p.m. It was answered by the man whose file he had been studying.
Thompson was about forty, and he looked tired and strained. There was no sign of any daughter. Jessica might be on a sleepover with a schoolfriend. When Thompson saw Sir Adrian on the doorstep, something flickered in his eyes. Not surprise, not guilt, but resignation. Whatever he had been doing, it was over and he knew it.
The civilities were observed. Thompson invited Adrian Weston into his sitting room. Both remained standing. No need, again, to waste time.
‘Why did you do it? Didn’t we pay you enough?’
In reply Thompson slumped into an armchair and put his face in his hands.
‘Jessica,’ he said.
Ah, the daughter. A better school, perhaps. More exotic holidays. The tropics. Keeping up with better-off friends. He noticed a framed photo on a side table. A young girl: freckles, pigtails, a trusting smile. Daddy’s little girl.
Then the younger man’s shoulders began to shake. Sir Adrian turned away. The man was weeping like a child and Sir Adrian had a problem with crying men. He came from a generation and a military tradition that taught other things.
In triumph, modesty. In pain, stoicism. In defeat, grace under fire. But very rarely tears. Winston Churchill had been prone to tears, but he had been different in many ways.
He recalled two times when he had seen grown men break down. There was the agent in East Germany who had made it through Checkpoint Charlie into the West and safety and who had collapsed in sheer relief at being alive and free at last. And his own son, in the maternity ward, looking down at the wrinkled, outraged face of his first-born son, Sir Adrian’s only grandchild, now at Cambridge. But a traitor caught red-handed? Let him weep. But then, everything changed.
‘They have her,’ sobbed the man in the chair. ‘Snatched her on her way home from school. A voice on the phone. Threatening they would gang-rape her, strangle her … unless.’
An hour later Sir Adrian had the details. The child walking home alone after choir practice. A car at the kerb. A friend watching from fifty yards away the only witness. Jessica had got into the car – half pulled, half pushed by the man on the pavement. It drove off.
Then the phone call. So they knew his mobile number, but she would have given them that. There was a special nickname she used for her dad. The speaker knew that too.
The voice? Fluent English but accented. Russian? Possibly. There was a number retained by Thompson’s phone, but it would be a buy-and-throw, a ‘burner’, long gone into the Thames.
Sir Adrian left the broken man with one last instruction. To tell his contact at the next call that there had been another letter. Weston had changed his mind. The youth would be moved, but to an army camp, not a private house.
He left the house in Battersea and walked home, back across the Thames to Whitehall and Admiralty Arch. He had spent a lifetime trying to avoid anger. It clouded judgement, defeated logic, obscured clarity. When things went wrong an intelligent man needed all three. But he was angry now.
He had lost agents and grieved comrades who would never come home. He had been in hard, merciless places, but there were still rules. Children were out of bounds. Now Moscow had again decided to abandon all rules, as with the attack on long-retired Colonel Skripal.
Adrian Weston had few illusions about the profession of espionage to which he had devoted most of his life. He knew it had its darker side. He had repeatedly put his freedom and his life on the line because experience in ‘the job’ had convinced him that in a thoroughly imperfect world it was necessary if the safe and free were to remain safe and free. He believed in his own country and in its tested standards. He believed that these were basically decent, but he also knew that on modern planet Earth decency was something to which only a small minority still held.
For years his main enemy had been the KGB and, since the fall of Soviet Communism, its successors. He knew that, across the divide, murder, torture and cruelty had been the norm. He had fiercely resisted the temptation to go down that route to cut corners, achieve results. He knew with regret that some allies had not resisted.
His own choice had always been to deceive the enemy, to outwit, to out-manoeuvre. And yes, there were dirty tricks, but how dirty? Servants of the global enemy had been suborned, persuaded to betray their country and spy for the West. And yes, by blackmail, if need be. Blackmail of thieves, of adulterers, of perverts in high office. It was repugnant but sometimes necessary, because the enemy from Stalin through to ISIS was far crueller and must not triumph. He knew that the man at Yasenevo now charged by the master of the Kremlin to avenge the Nakhimov humiliation, must, in his spectacular rise through the ranks, have endorsed or set into motion practices which Adrian Weston would not touch with a bargepole.
But this was different. A child had been snatched, possibly threatened with gang-rape, to blackmail a civil servant into committing treason. Krilov was using contracted killers, little more than animals. There would be retribution. There would be blood. He intended to ensure it.
Chapter Ten
THE COURTING COUPLE in the lay-by in the middle of the night were locked in each other’s arms and took no notice when the saloon car shot by them, going well over the speed limit.
But they sprang apart with cries of alarm when, a hundred yards up the road, it came off the tarmac and slammed into a tree. They watched through the windscreen as the first flickering flames began to lick at the wreck at the foot of the trunk.
As the light level given off by the flames increased they could see the outline of a single figure silhouetted against the fire. Then the blaze took over as the petrol tank caught alight and the car exploded. The young man was on his mobile phone, dialling 999.
In due course there was an ambulance and two fire engines. The latter hosed the wreckage with white foam u
ntil the flames were gone, but there was nothing the paramedics could do for the slumped and fire-consumed figure in the front seat. What was left of him was removed and taken away to become yet another accident in a country-road statistic.
The mortuary team accomplished the distasteful job of identification. The rear trouser pockets of the victim had survived the worst of the blaze. There were credit cards, more or less undamaged. And a driving licence. The unfortunate who had been driving far too fast was identified as Robert Thompson, a civil servant resident in London, where he also worked.
Without the quiet influence that was brought to bear, the incident might not have hit the media, but it made the papers the following evening and the day after that. In fact it achieved more coverage on radio, TV and the papers than it might normally have merited. Such quiet influence is an aspect of British official life of which, like the iceberg, very little is ever observed.
The phone call followed the appearance of the morning papers. Sir Adrian had secured the fullest cooperation of both MI5 and GCHQ at Cheltenham. The first provided the telephone numbers, which would have proved a considerable surprise to those who actually owned those numbers and thought they were secure.
Thames House, home of the Security Service, is only a few hundred yards down the river from the mother of parliaments, but democracy invisibly ends on the doorstep. The mass expulsion of Russian spies posing as diplomats after the flagrant use of the Novichok nerve agent on the streets of Salisbury had caused chaos in the hitherto active espionage machine that Moscow operated in London.
Linkages were broken, ongoing operations stultified, relationships discontinued. The newcomer, Stepan Kukushkin, had lately become the Rezident inside the Russian embassy and he needed more time to work his way in. The same applied to his new deputy, Oleg Politovski, who had been a lowly press officer. Both men thought their private mobile phones were secure. They were not; they were tapped.
Outside the embassy were the on-contract servants of Krilov, among them Vladimir Vinogradov, a gang boss and professional criminal, and an oligarch and billionaire who had moved into London, bought a football club and lived in a £10 million apartment in Belgravia. He was the one who made the call. It was tapped. GCHQ had seen to that. Sir Adrian was not surprised. He knew that, behind his façade of football-match-attending bonhomie, Vinogradov was a thoroughly nasty piece of work.