Authors: John Sweeney
Grozhov had known there was a leak in the leader’s personal security network, but whoever it was had been subtle and watchful. The odd snippet of intelligence about Zoba had appeared here and there, trivial stuff mostly but nevertheless embarrassing to Russia, to the cause of the great nation. The German intelligence service, the BND, had hoovered up the most. And then the leaking had got far more dangerous.
Grozhov had pulled out all the files and pored over them for two months, sitting on a hard chair, thinking, thinking, thinking. It had come to him at four o’clock in the morning, perhaps the most fruitful time for secret policemen, ancient and modern. The leak was real, but none of the information came from the Kremlin. It was somewhere else: not the seaside villa in Sochi, not the dacha near Moscow, not the other dacha by the lake. No, the leak came from Moonglade.
In their frenzy to hunt down the guilty, his people had made some understandable mistakes. They’d brought in a cleaning woman at Moonglade with a suspicious, Muslim background. One of his people had come up with a clever trick. They’d found out she had a beloved cat, Kiska. They seized it, and to extract a confession out of her they poured acid in one of its eyes, then the other, in front of her. The woman turned out to be innocent, but she made such a row about her Kiska’s torture that she had been turned over to the medical authorities for psychiatric care.
The lack of substantive results continued. And then Grozhov had returned to his analysis and reflected that perhaps the most dangerous leak came from someone who was not permanently based at Moonglade but visited it on official business. No drivers because, obviously, there were no roads. But the helicopter crews? The pilots?
Grozhov had arranged for an agent operating undercover as a BND scout to sound out the prime suspect. The traitor bit the worm and then he was on Grozhov’s hook. He’d been arrested, brought back to the Lubyanka and cracked wide open in the space of a few hours. Gibbering for it to end, he begged, ‘Please kill me, please kill me,’ over and over again. But Grozhov wanted to know everything, so some of the best doctors in the Lubyanka’s pay had kept him alive until the canary was all sung out. The pilot had secretly videoed the packages being flown to Moonglade.
‘Who did you give the film to?’ By this time, the pilot was prickless, eyeless, pretty much fingerless, his body a porridge of blood and broken bone.
‘Who?’ asked Grozhov. ‘Who did you give the film to? I want the full name.’
‘Anatoly Mikhailovich Reikhman.’
The name fell on Grozhov’s ears like a cosh. He had created little Anatoly. He had not been the first but he was the greatest of all of Grozhov’s operatives, and now he had betrayed him. Grozhov had knowledge enough of what the Americans, the British and the Germans knew. Thus far, he knew the film had not yet left Reikhman’s control. The secret remained safe, for the time being. The fool might have been using the footage simply as an insurance policy, as Grozhov had long suspected. For that small mercy, well, thanks. But Grozhov had to get all the film back. No one must ever know about the packages.
He picked up his mobile and called Reikhman. There had been some trouble in London, some neutrals dead, but so far Anatoly had kept ahead of the authorities there.
‘Anatoly?’
‘Grozhov?’
‘Come home, my boy. We need to talk to you. My office has made the arrangements.’
There was a long pause, a crackle on the line. Sometimes that happened, sometimes it didn’t.
‘Anatoly, come home. Uncle still loves you.’
Grozhov killed the call and his internal phone blinked. Someone was calling him from the lower basement.
‘The doctors have brought the pilot round. He’s conscious but we don’t know for how much longer.’
‘Good. I’ll be down in a moment.’
He opened his office drawer, took out his 9mm Tokarev and gently placed a fresh clip into it. Grozhov preferred to take care of the final business personally.
WINDSOR CASTLE
T
he room was no ordinary prison cell. All but circular, seven-eighths of a tower, slit windows overlooked the inner keep of the castle, the walls were decorated with Victorian paintings of men in red uniforms and large moustaches dying in a sporting fashion in various bits of the world. There was a small table, and a low ancient sofa on which Joe and Katya sat. They ignored the small television in the corner, preferring to watch all – well, some – of the Queen’s horses and some of the Queen’s men go by. The sun had got a little stronger, casting a pearly, translucent light on the castle, adding to the illusion that they had somehow been transported in a time machine back a century or two, to an age when horses, not drones, made war.
A polite, diffident knock on the door caused Joe to stand up from the sofa to open it. Lightfoot walked in bearing a silver tray, on it a silver teapot, Royal Doulton cups and saucers and some scones, complete with two pots, one full of cream and one full of strawberry jam. He did so with an air of hating every second of it, to demonstrate that he was not and never would be one of nature’s butlers.
‘Why did you lock the door?’ asked Joe.
Lightfoot ignored him and placed the tray on the table.
‘The door was locked. That makes us prisoners,’ Joe repeated.
‘Ekaterina, could you be mother?’ said Lightfoot and Joe gave up, watching Katya pour the tea first, then the milk, the proper way, and hand out the plates for the scones, cream and jam. Joe shoved a mouthful of scone into his mouth. It was the first proper bit of food he’d had for what felt like days and he was ravenously hungry. Katya delicately dissected her scone into quarters, and had raised one quarter to her mouth and paused to study the appetite of the Irishman as if he were an ape of moderate interest when there was a
tap-tap
on the door.
Lightfoot said, ‘Come in.’
Joe moved to stand up to greet whoever it was, but his big feet got trapped underneath the chintzy table and he was in mid-crouch, his balance awry, when Reilly used the tea service on the table as a launching pad to greet his master, hitting him in the centre of his chest at full power. Man and dog fell like a great spine of timber over the back of the low sofa, Joe’s legs sending the table, teacups, scones, saucers, and pots of cream and jam flying.
‘Reilly. Fool of a dog!’ roared Joe as, tail flicking this way and that madly, Reilly stood triumphantly on his chest, licking his face. ‘Get off me!’
Reilly wasn’t moving.
‘Jesus, Mary. Reilly, you stupid dog, oh, I’m so sorry. Reilly. Reilly. Oh no . . .’
Joe pushed Reilly, still lick-lick-licking his face, aside and said to Lightfoot, ‘I must apologise for my dog.’
Lightfoot was about to say something when his mobile chirruped into life. He took the call, mouthed an apology to Joe and Katya, and walked out of the room. In a few moments they saw him down by the keep at ground level, walking this way and that, his face animated. It was obviously a difficult conversation. Joe stood with his face pressed against the window, intent on every word.
‘What are you doing? You can’t hear him,’ said Katya.
‘I work with difficult young adults. Some of them – some are deaf.’
‘So?’
‘The silly Irishman can lip-read.’
‘What’s he saying?’
‘Shh. Let me concentrate . . .’
Joe stood still, intent on the figure below.
‘It’s hard to work out. He’s saying:
What do you mean it’s out of my level of responsibility? We can’t just hand these people over and wash our hands
. . . something, something . . .
The Americans?
. . .
Who?
. . .
Some Irish grunt and a Russian tart for the whistle-blower in Moscow – Comolli?
. . .
It doesn’t make sense
. . .
The highest bidder?
. . .
We’re not taking part in an auction, are we?
. . .
So we are taking part in an auction?
. . .
OK, so what about the offer of an angle into Picasso?
. . .
Why isn’t that of interest?
. . .
What do you mean the bidding is over?
’
‘An auction?’ asked Katya. ‘What are they selling?’
Lightfoot glanced up, saw Joe watching him closely, and walked away out of the line of sight.
Joe turned away from the window and studied Katya. He barely knew this woman and didn’t trust her. She’d tried to steal Reilly and still hadn’t told him why. But he also knew she was impossibly beautiful and he couldn’t lie to her. They’d been through enough together that he owed her the truth, or at least that small fraction of the truth he understood.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘They seem to be talking about a trade,’ said Joe. ‘I think they’re talking about trading Comolli, the CIA man who ended up in Moscow. The Americans think he’s a traitor and want him back, very much. The Russians have signalled they will trade him, and the British will do what the Americans want.’
‘So the Americans get their traitor,’ said Katya. ‘And the Russians, what do they get?’ The darkness of her eyes didn’t quite shield the fear in them.
‘Us.’
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
I
n pride of place, dead centre at the back of the morgue, hung a picture of Zoba, looking down, with his trademark petulant scowl, on the seventeen young men lying on trolleys, their chests unzipped by a small chainsaw, their ribcages prized open, a flutter of giant pink butterflies. Snow was still falling outside and the morgue was freezing within, but Gennady almost gagged at the honey-sick stink of the dead mixed with a perfumed fixing agent.
Heedless of the blood and stench, the pathologist moved between the bodies, lost in her work. A woman in her fifties, still beautiful, with high cheekbones and something of the aristocracy of the human spirit about her, she seemed utterly at home among the dead. She pierced Gennady with an intense stare and then smiled, mostly to herself. ‘The great thing about my boys is that they don’t answer back.’ Her eyes narrowed yet more. ‘Venny Svaerkova, at your service.’
‘Gennady Semionovich Dozhd, at yours.’ He bowed his head. They could have been in a Chekhov play. ‘What happened?’ asked Gennady, motioning to the pink butterflies.
She handed him a sheet of paper. On it was a list of names, next to them was a box marked ‘Suspected Cause of Death’.
Automobile accident
was written in every box.
‘Officially,’ she said, ‘automobile accident, every one.’
He treated her to a look that suggested he didn’t quite believe her.
‘As it happens, all dead in the same car accident, on the same day.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘That’s a very uncouth expression and not respectful of the dead. I don’t know you from Adam, Mr Dozhd. What is the basis for your extravagant statement?’
‘I am a retired general of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment.’
‘An Afgantsy?’
‘Correct.’
‘So you’ve seen some dead bodies in your time?’
‘Correct.’
‘And why do you think these seventeen men didn’t die in’ – she paused for a second, her voice going a shade softer – ‘the same auto accident?’
He turned to examine the nearest pink butterflies, to the left and right of him. ‘Depends on what kind of car smash. Head on, if they’re not wearing seat belts, you’d expect the head to go through the windscreen. So faces would be heavily lacerated with glass. Side on, the same. Look at this lad here. His face is smooth as a baby.’
A rough white sheet had been thrown over the corpse’s lower torso.
‘May I?’
‘Go ahead.’
He drew back the sheet to see something that even he, seasoned by more death than he cared to think about, recoiled from. Some great scythe had slit the young man’s abdomen open and his guts, coiling this way and that like some ghastly sightless worm, lay in a frozen writhe.
Gennady felt the urge to retch and he fought it, hard, but it was too strong and he raced over to a bin and emptied his breakfast into it. Gennady continued to heave but his stomach was empty. He managed to get the spasms under control, and raised his head and took a glass of water from her. She disappeared with the bin, washed it out somewhere and returned.
‘A general, you say?’
He gave her a look that would have made a more timid creature die of fright. But this place was Venny’s lair and she was in command; she returned his stare with an expression of mild amusement.
‘But a retired one.’
Gennady stood upright, walked back to the corpse and crouched down, examining, as best he could, the back.
‘So?’
‘I’m looking for the entry wound.’
‘You’re looking at it.’ There was a small cut in the lower back by the right kidney, an inch long, if that, in the shape of a scimitar slash.
‘Shrapnel?’
She nodded.
Gennady turned to the corpse on the other side. This one was less gruesome, or Gennady was just getting used to it. Same, same: a small entry wound, this time to the upper leg, and a massive crater of an exit. A third, fourth and fifth all bore the same pattern. A sixth corpse was more charred rubble than human, but the majority of the seventeen dead had been hit by shards of shrapnel slicing through the air. The seventeenth? He had a bullet hole in his forehead and nothing more. Gennady let out a long, low whistle.
‘Conclusions?’ Venny said.
She was treating him like some sperm of a medical student. Still, he was in her mortuary to ask a favour, so he had no choice but to put up with it.
‘This lad? A sniper’s bullet. The rest? They all died from artillery. A couple of the dead were blown to smithereens, but most were killed by bits of shrapnel.’
‘Good, well done,’ she said.
She handed him a small tin tray carrying half a dozen shards of vicious-looking metal fragments wrapped in individual, numbered plastic bags.
‘From your boys?’ he asked.
‘Dead soldiers don’t lie.’
‘My guess, a Grad rocket launcher salvo.’
‘Mine too.’
‘So the official story is a stinking lie.’