Execution (A Harry Tate Thriller) (26 page)

He scrolled down the list of sightings and reports, most of it undecipherable to an outsider, but offering a ready picture to a man with his experience. She was being watched along with several other persons of interest, her progress tracked with surprising ease by the watchers employed by Five. But then, she wasn’t using covert means and was operating quite openly in an otherwise mundane job, escorting a variety of government appointees on their daily business and being a good girl until she could be rehabilitated back to her former position.

Vienna. The latest surveillance log entries had her entering Austria with three financial bureaucrats attending a conference in the city. Three charges with Balenkova and one other to keep them out of trouble. Good luck with that, he thought. Once free of the watchful eye of Moscow, three bureaucrats could kick up a ton of grief for a security team trying to keep them under control.

He glossed over the rest. It didn’t tell him much other than where she was right now. It certainly didn’t explain to him what her frame of mind was, which would have been a lot more interesting. Just beneath the final words of this entry was a blue hypertext link. He frowned. What had Maine been playing at – copying anything that came to hand? He clicked on it.

The screen flickered and opened up a cross-connection of KAs – Known Associates. It was a standard format on files for persons of interest; you might know their names and addresses, but more often than not, their associates gave you a far greater grounding in what their specific interests were. The greater the KA file list, the clearer was the subject’s probable intentions.

He chuckled knowingly. Clare Jardine was at the top of a very short list. She was a KA, all right; about as KA as you could get without being married. But so what?

Then his heart skipped a beat.

An entry had been made further down showing a further link, this time to a file being run by a Richard Ballatyne of MI6, requesting an all-eyes lookout for Clare Jardine, a former officer currently on the loose in central London with two former members of Five. Their names were Tate and Ferris. The look-out was tagged LAR – Locate and Report. In other words, no direct action until otherwise ordered.

Beneath that, like the good little bureaucrat that he was, Maine had cut and pasted a reference code from a travel docket raised by Ballatyne.

Three return tickets to Vienna. Tate. Ferris. Jardine.

Bingo. Or game set and match of his own.

He reached for his mobile and dialled a number. Rule 1 of intelligence gathering: check and double-check the source of your information. Rule 2: never trust a source completely, even then.

The phone was answered immediately. He identified himself and said, ‘Now why would Tate, Ferris and Jardine possibly go to Vienna, do you think? For coffee and cake? A bit of Strauss?’ The sarcasm was deliberately heavy, because he sensed he was being ignored.

‘I don’t know. I only just heard myself.’ Candida Deane sounded testy. There was a long pause, then she said, ‘How come you know?’

‘I have my means. I’m intrigued by any departure from the norm. What on earth would attract them to Vienna – have you thought about that? Tate and Ferris are hardly the cultural type, and Jardine’s a nasty little killer.’

‘Maybe it’s as good a place as any to hide, knowing who’s after them.’

Paulton considered that seriously only for a moment. Vienna as a hiding place was ridiculous. Too full of government officials of every kind, therefore security people as well, it was too conservative a city for fugitives to stay for any length of time without standing out. Even experienced people like Tate and Jardine would be pushing it to go there with the intention of finding a secure hole longer than a couple of days.

‘No. That doesn’t fit,’ he said. ‘Vienna is a specific destination; they would have gone there for a reason.’

‘And you think I would know?’

‘Well, not you perhaps, Candida, dear.’ His voice was purring with a vicious undercurrent he was finding hard to retrain. ‘But somebody in that nest of vipers you call a workplace does. Try finding out who.’

‘You know something.’ The accusation was immediate.

‘Suspicions, actually. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Much better if you do, don’t you think? Gain some more kudos.’

‘Why the hell should I? I don’t need this.’ The south London tones came thick and harsh on the edge of anger. ‘This is getting pointless, George. I’m thinking I should cut you adrift and let you fend for yourself.’

‘I wouldn’t do that. You’ll regret it, I promise.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Hardly. But then I don’t have to. If Tate and Ferris get Jardine clear, the FSB team will pack up and go home because there’s no point in them staying. If they do that, you’ll have nothing to take to your bosses: no Jardine, no hit team – and if you cut me loose, there’s no way I’ll ever tell you who the inside man is.’

He heard her gasp at the promise he was offering. At the same time, he knew she wouldn’t let him go that easily. She needed whatever he could offer and, most of all, she needed him. He had no illusions about her real plans; she wanted him wrapped, parcelled and stamped for the senior men and women in MI5 to call their own. He was, after all, a rogue intelligence officer. And rogues had to be brought down.

He decided to let Deane stew in her own juice for a while. She might be getting difficult, but he knew she would have already begun a search among the files to see what he knew.

He cut the connection and dialled another number. Time to switch the game a little. Perhaps this was something Gorelkin would have to handle. Tough luck on Deane, losing one of her hoped-for trophies, but that was the way the game played out. And he knew just what to say to make the man from Moscow take immediate action: an MI6 officer and two former MI5 officers, known subcontractors for the government, were on their way to Vienna to make contact with an officer of the Federal Protective Service. That should certainly light a
Katyusha
rocket under his arse. And with a bit of luck it would bring down the ceiling on Katya Balenkova’s career for good. He didn’t know the woman, didn’t care if she lived or died. But anything she suffered would put a serious kink in Jardine’s life, and that alone would be well worth celebrating.

Gorelkin’s familiar, gravelly voice answered.

‘Sergei, my friend,’ Paulton said smoothly. ‘How would you like to bag Jardine, two British intelligence offices and one of your own turned double-agent into the bargain?’

H
arry had just dropped his bag in his room when his mobile rang. He expected it to be Rik telling him that Balenkova and her charges were on the move. It was Ballatyne, sounding energised.

‘Right, we’ve discovered the rat in the woodpile. His name’s Keith Maine. He’s not inside Six; he’s a senior intelligence analyst with Five. He used a loophole in a joint server to gain access to Jardine’s file in Six. We think it’s the same person who tried a while back, on a fishing trip.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to find someone inside the building to do that? Why go through Five?’

‘Actually, it wasn’t so shabby. Maine used to be with GCHQ in Cheltenham, working closely with Five. When Thames House began recruiting their own analysts with specialist experience, he requested a transfer. Said he wanted more of a hands-on challenge. They grabbed him with both hands. As for finding someone in the building, believe it or not you can’t just trawl through the faces and pick someone at random, you know. Staff get a bit suspicious at that kind of carry on.’ He sounded almost jaunty, Harry decided, at finding that the rat was at Thames House, not Vauxhall Cross.

‘What’s his history?’ Harry instinctive thought was whether the transfer had been instigated by an outside influence, to get a man inside MI5. It had been tried before more than once.

‘On the outside, he’s clean. Single – pretty much a carer for his mother until she died last year – no overt political leanings, belongs to two books groups, a small collector of first editions and other rare books. Colleagues think he’s a good guy, but boring. Good at his job, but coming up for retirement.’

Harry nearly laughed. That profile alone would fit nearly any person discovered to have dipped their fingers in the secrets drawer over the past fifty years. But it also fitted a vast number of totally innocent and hard-working members of the intelligence community.

‘The original grey man.’

‘Not to somebody, he wasn’t,’ Ballatyne murmured. ‘I doubt he was doing this out of conviction. I think he was got at.’

Harry knew what that meant. Money or a weak point, not political gain. ‘What’s happening now?’

‘The internal security heavy mob is running his entire history through the meat grinder as we speak. They’re going to town on his background, friends, where he’s been, the bookshops he visited – everything and anything. You know how it works.’

Harry knew very well. The effect of that kind of close security vetting on everybody around Maine wouldn’t be pleasant. The net result would be that he would shortly discover just how many loyal friends he had left in the world. The likelihood was, very few.

‘If he had the nous to use a back door into Six, how did he get found out?’

‘The usual thing: he got careless. He dropped a receipt from a bookshop near another officer’s terminal – an officer who’s been in Afghanistan for three weeks. Thames House knew what we were doing, so they did a deep system sweep which led to Maine’s desk. They found a twelve-digit code on the underneath of a notepad. It matched entry codes to personnel records in Six. They’ve got him lined up for a heavy chat.’

Harry frowned. There was something in Ballatyne’s voice that wasn’t right. ‘You mean they haven’t done it already?’

‘They can’t find him. He didn’t report in after lunch today and his mobile’s switched off. He logged out of Thames House for lunch, and was seen walking south across Lambeth Bridge. Last thing anyone saw of him.’

They were too late. ‘Is that normal?’

‘No. His colleagues say he keeps regular patterns, rarely if ever varying. He’s a creature of habits. Heading south across the river wasn’t one of them. That’s where the internal hunters are focussing their search.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But that’s not all.’

‘Go on.’

‘He delved into an open access surveillance log on Katya Balenkova. All agencies can check it, given the correct codes. Maine had been doing some analysis on surveillance report patterns, so he had authority to go in there.’

Harry didn’t want to ask, but had to. ‘Why is that a problem?’

‘Well, very few people knew of the link between Clare Jardine and Katya Balenkova. The techs can’t tell me how much he read yet, but whoever was running him had clearly made the connection between the two women, and knew just where to point him for maximum effect.’

‘I thought that file would be closed.’

‘It is – or was. But I think I have the answer to that. When they did an initial audit of Maine’s activities, they pulled up traces of another search he’d made. This one was closer to home, in Thames House. It was a read-only file, but it looks like that’s all he needed. He was reading up on an old friend of yours. I think Maine was looking for a smoking gun to protect himself.’

Harry knew instinctively what Ballatyne was going to say. There was one other person he could think of who knew all about Clare Jardine and Katya Balenkova

George Paulton.

In an annexe to the Russian Embassy on Reisnerstrasse, a single phone call was all it took to have a team of specialists ready and briefed to go out on the streets in force, armed with photographs of Clare Jardine and Katya Balenkova. They knew who and what Balenkova was, but none had ever met her. The tone of the phone call from a source in London left no doubts about how important this was.

‘Trace and report,’ Captain Yuri Symenko, the resident commanding officer of the FSB security detachment told his men, after handing out the photos and briefing notes. ‘Do not apprehend either of these women until I give the order. There are British spies involved and I want to scoop up all of them, you hear?’ He smiled in spite of the gravity of the situation. He had been here almost two years now, and had never witnessed anything this exciting before. British spies, for heaven’s sake! He’d never even seen one, let alone arrested one. If all went well, this could lead to a posting to somewhere far more interesting, like Paris or even New York.

‘But Balenkova’s FSO,’ whispered one of his deputies, staring at the briefing notes as if they carried the seal of the Kremlin. ‘Are you sure about this information, sir?’

‘The instructions come from an impeccable source, lieutenant,’ Symenko said loftily, waving away the officer’s concerns. Even so, he experienced a tiny moment of doubt. Arresting a member of the Federal Protective Service was unheard of, and would be like charging a member of the inner cabinet in Moscow with treason, such was their reputation. They were above reproach, vetted and trained to the highest level, especially Balenkova, of whom he’d heard. Yet he had also heard of Colonel Gorelkin and knew enough of his background to realise that arguing with him would be to bring his own career to an abrupt and painful end. It was sufficient to reinforce his decision. ‘When I give the order, separate Balenkova from her FSO colleague, Bronyev. Neutralise him if necessary but don’t harm him. He is not part of this. But above all, do it quietly. We do not want an international incident on our hands.’

T
he area known as Riesenradplatz, with the giant wheel at its centrepiece, and the amusement arcades and rides that had attached themselves to it like noisy, brash pilot fish, was bright with colour and movement as the afternoon slipped into evening. Tourists anxious to get an exclusive photograph of the wheel made famous in the film
The Third Man
were shuffling around the site like paparazzi, looking for a memorable viewpoint against the fading light without including the gaudy neon of a MacDonald’s franchise or a haunted castle.