Agent of the State (50 page)

Karl and Olga were climbing into a black cab for a modest hotel in Belsize Park when he caught the warning. Until that moment they had enjoyed a great evening, becoming reconciled over
khachapuri
, beetroot soup, chicken
satsivi
and a bottle of Georgian wine. They had each told only one lie: Olga that she had never had sex with Goschenko, and Karl that he believed her. After Karl had convinced her he would get his job back at the Yard, but not how, they spent the rest of the evening speaking about their future together.

The text was there, buzzing red for danger, ‘Intruder alarm operating’. He had planned to leave his car in the street until the morning, but the message changed everything. He told Olga he had to deal with something urgent and sent her off to the hotel in the taxi, promising to join her later.

Adrenaline flushed his mind clean and sent him roaring through the black, familiar streets to rescue his family, dialling Nancy on the move and accelerating violently when the engaged signal convinced him someone had cut the line.

From the kitchen doorway less than twelve feet away, Kerr watched the intruders defeat the lock and enter the dining room. The men in black moved silently together as a pair, drawing nearer, sending a chill up Kerr’s spine. These were no ordinary intruders. He was in no doubt about the quality of his opponents or the scale of the threat. He was edging back as far as he could into the kitchen, steeling himself for an unequal fight to the death, when the BlackBerry betrayed him. It was on ‘vibrate’ mode, but shattered the stillness of the house like a volcano. He muffled it against his body, but the intruders, already by the kitchen door, were on him in a split second, drawn by the beacon of Bill Ritchie’s caller ID lighting the screen.

With violent death looming over him, Kerr admired their speed and stealth, two executioners working in perfect harmony as the larger of the two men lifted him bodily from the floor while his comrade found the light switch and aimed his gun in a single co-ordinated movement. They acted according to a plan, but Kerr’s reaction was instinctive. Yelling at the top of his voice, he jerked back his head into the mouth of the man who held his arms and heard the cracking of teeth as he kicked out wildly, elongating his body like an enraged child, desperately stretching for any contact to delay his assassination.

His shoe connected with the gun, and he watched it fly from his executioner’s hand in a slow-motion arc, slithering up the hall carpet. As the man flinched in pain behind him, he wrenched himself free. In a co-ordinated movement of his own, he elbowed him in the ribs, then launched himself against the slimmer man facing him, smashing his BlackBerry into the hooded face, the crack of glass telling him he was wearing spectacles. Kerr was shouting at the top of his voice, but both his assailants stayed silent even when he hurt them, confident about the odds in their favour and driven by the sweet experience of killing.

They attacked him again, aiming for his arms and legs and neck as he strove to reach the gun. The three men merged into a rolling bundle of muscle and violence, the black of the assassins slashed by the cream of Kerr’s fresh shirt, bouncing off the walls as he drove them back to the front door.

In their trial of strength the larger man reached the gun first. Senses smothered by the intensity of the struggle and the rush of breath inside the balaclavas, the Turks did not hear the front door opening as they prepared to murder their target at the foot of the stairs.

Karl Sergeyev demonstrated a murderous professionalism that matched their own. When he stealthily entered the house, only Kerr saw him draw the illegally retained Glock 19 from his waistband. And because they had worked together as neatly as the Turks, Kerr was already moving before Karl yelled at the top of his voice.

‘Clear, John!’

As Kerr leapt back and his assassin turned to face the new threat, Karl fired a rapid pair of shots at the Turk’s head. The action braked hard again, giving Kerr a micro-second to admire Karl’s skill in placing one neat hole in the balaclava at the centre of the man’s forehead and another in his throat. Then everything accelerated again as the Turk fell dead to the floor, sending the gun on the move for the second time, and his partner made the fatal mistake of grabbing it. There was another satisfying double pop as Karl executed him, too, although this time Kerr could not tell where the rounds had hit.

Apart from his shouted warning, Karl had been as mute as the assailants. Without a word, he stepped over his first victim to reach the second body with the gun. Closing his hand around the dead man’s to avoid leaving his fingerprints, he carefully took aim and fired a shot at the wall above the front door to demonstrate that their assailant had fired first.

Nancy and the children appeared at the top of the stairs as sirens filled the air, and the street became alive with flashing blue lights and crackling radios. Karl stared silently from Kerr to Nancy and back again as his friend took the Glock from his hand.

‘What the fuck are you still doing with this, Karl?’ demanded Kerr, with a smile, checking the serial number.

Karl stared back at him, then raised his eyes accusingly to Nancy, perched on the top step in her nightdress, shielding his children. ‘What the hell are you doing in my house with him?’

Sixty-one

Friday, 28 September, noon, Paula Weatherall’s office

Weatherall placed Kerr on sick leave by phone as soon as he was discharged from St Thomas’s Accident & Emergency Department. With Langton prowling outside, the doctor examined the bruises on his arms and chest and stitched a cut above his left eye where the larger of the Turks had punched him. At three in the morning the medic sent him home with a stern warning to keep out of fights. Weatherall ordered him to stay there.

In his apartment he checked all the TV networks, which were reporting the miraculous reappearance of Sara Danbury, found wandering in Chiswick, and the fatal shooting of two armed robbers in north London. He woke before eight, showered and returned to the office. Weatherall tried to send him home again, then agreed to meet him with Bill Ritchie at noon.

In the meantime, he rang Justin from the Fishbowl to check his recovery and tell him the fate of the thugs who had probably attacked him, too, during his late-night run.

Justin sounded cheerful. ‘So you’re telling me the streets are safe now, boss?’ he joked. ‘Can I put my trackies on again?’

Kerr was not surprised to find Justin was already back in the Camberwell workshop with another dressing on his head. His youngest expert’s enthusiasm to continue the job, no matter the cost, re-energised him. As he kicked his heels, waiting to see Weatherall and Ritchie, he felt restless. He had unfinished business, and was impatient to see things through to the end. But something else was unsettling Kerr that had nothing to do with his professional life.

The race against time of the previous days, culminating in last night’s violence and fight for survival, had drained his energy, physical and mental. Only now, in the hours of calm before the storm he knew was coming, was there room for a single emotion to bubble to the surface. It made sense of everything else for which he had been fighting so relentlessly: the real victims at the heart of his secret operation were not the blackmailed adults but the abused children. He had found Tania’s killer and rescued Sara; but he guessed there were many more young, defenceless victims he would never be able to identify. Deeply affecting, that single thought sent him hurrying down the spiral staircase to the underground car park.

Ignoring a call from Bill Ritchie, Kerr rang Sara Danbury’s parents, then drove down to see their daughter in the expensive west London clinic where she was to receive specialist medical and psychiatric treatment. He found Sara hunched in a chair beside her bed, pale and traumatised, staring listlessly out of the window.

‘She hasn’t said a word,’ her mother, Selina, told Kerr outside in the corridor. ‘Doesn’t even seem to know I’m here.’

‘How is your husband taking it?’

‘He’s not, Mr Kerr. You rescued her body, but Michael says they still have her mind.’

‘What’s he going to do?’

‘The government’s working out some sort of deal with him.’

Kerr looked at her in astonishment. ‘He’s going to let them buy his silence, you mean? Spin the whole thing around his own daughter?’

‘I know you’re a Special Branch officer, Mr Kerr,’ she said, peering through the glass door at Sara, ‘so don’t feign surprise at the great British hypocrisy. This is the way things have always worked.’ She turned to face Kerr, as if the solution was obvious. ‘Michael wants to be prime minister. Don’t expect him to be any different.’

Kerr had gone to visit Sara Danbury as a father showing compassion, not an intelligence officer harbouring secrets, but the mother’s cynicism doused him in another hot rush of anger. ‘Will you tell Sara that one day?’ he said, as he walked away, his mind made up.

Weatherall and Ritchie were already in conference when Kerr returned with his secure briefcase. In the outer office, Donna insisted on examining his eye. ‘Watch yourself. They’re in a real strop,’ she said, before taking him through.

The aircon was on the blink again, casting a chill to match the mood. He found Weatherall behind her desk, looking as if she had just retreated there, and Ritchie was sitting moodily at the conference table, ready to pounce. They were quiet when he entered, pretending to study their notes, but the body language told him they were taking time out from a bloody row.

Weatherall looked drained as she circled back to the conference table and gestured him to the chair beside Ritchie. ‘You really should be at home, John,’ she said, in a soft tone he had never heard before.

‘And a lot of people should be in jail.’

Kerr listened with mounting incredulity as she gave her account of the morning’s developments, concluding with the schedule of what she called ‘outcomes’. She explained that an official from the Cabinet Office in Whitehall had summoned her to a meeting at seven-thirty that morning. A group of bureaucrats she did not know had already assembled round the horseshoe table in the subterranean Briefing Room B by the time she arrived, and appeared to have a damage-limitation strategy already mapped out. The chairman had informed her they had shrouded the night’s events, including the shootings at Karl’s house, in a Defence Advisory Notice. Specifically it was a DA Five, which covered anything connected to UK security intelligence and special services, and prevented any reporting by the media until approved by the government. It was essential, he had said, straight-faced, to safeguard the public interest.

‘And to protect their own official who was in that house last night. Which means never, a total cover-up,’ was all Kerr could manage when she had finished. ‘So we major on the blackmail.’

‘We’ll see. Now I have to get on, and you should get some rest. You said you have something for us?’ asked Weatherall.

Kerr slid a couple of dossiers across the table, a copy for each. ‘Alan Fargo prepared this overnight. They set out everything we have on these people. If you want the shorthand, it says we can show Claire Grant and Robert Attwell were targeted by a foreign power. And I want you to authorise me to work on the other blackmail victims.’

Ritchie took a printed email from his notebook. ‘Blackmail may be difficult to prove without a lot more international assistance than we’re likely to get,’ he said slowly. Then he made a show of putting on a pair of glasses he hardly ever wore. From experience, Kerr knew this was a delaying tactic, a precursor to unwelcome news. ‘Turkish National Police just got back to 1830 with preliminary findings on your bomber. Abdul Malik was a wealthy businessman based in Istanbul, a crazy, according to them, well known to their Secret Service. Radicalised in London as a student, he turned against the UK and his own country, blah blah. They claim the bombing was timed to inflict political damage on Turkey.’

‘I could have told them that.’

‘Scupper its chances with the EU. Mr Malik believed his government was betraying its Islamist roots, apparently,’ he said, looking at Kerr over his glasses. ‘Oh, and he had a couple of ex-Turkish Secret Service mavericks working for him in London. The people you met up with last night, presumably.’

‘So get them to check out his base. Capture his hard drives.’

‘They already did. The building was a shell. No computers, nothing.’

‘What about the Syrian, Hussain? A known terrorist still using Omar Taleb as his cover name after two decades? Come on, Bill, this has Damascus plastered all over it.’

Weatherall frowned at Ritchie. ‘I thought the Syrians were supposed to be our friends, these days?’

‘We’re only as good as our last compromise,’ said Kerr, before Ritchie could react. ‘If we bottle it today we risk years of Syrian-sponsored subversion alongside terrorism. Don’t you see that? Ahmed Jibril’s still out there somewhere. And Julia Bakkour? Christ, we can show Taleb ordered her to defend Jibril. There’s a clear connection,’ pleaded Kerr, in frustration. ‘For God’s sake, it’s a no-brainer. We should be nicking her right now.’

The aircon coughed into action again, spewing more cold air through the vents and sounding as angry as Kerr. He looked from one boss to the other. ‘Look, this is no time for denial. Theo Canning was a long-term Russian agent and Claire Grant provided visas for terrorists. Those are the facts. I trusted Canning and the truth hurts, but we have to face up to it. They both betrayed our country.’