Manhunt (21 page)

Next, Raya opened a plastic bag and took out a long, dark wig. She tucked her own newly cropped hair neatly under it and settled the wig on her head, making sure that not a single blonde strand
was visible underneath.

Finally, she took out a bright-red lipstick, much brighter than she normally wore, and applied it carefully.

Raya put her blouse back on, held the compact at arm’s length, and looked critically at her image in the small round mirror. She almost didn’t recognize herself, so she hoped there
was little chance any of the Rome SVR officers would either.

The very last thing she did was pull the jacket inside-out. She’d spent a long time searching for exactly the right garment to wear on this journey, and had finally chosen a lightweight
reversible jacket, one side a dark blue, the other a creamy off-white. When she’d arrived at Rome, she’d been a blue-eyed blonde wearing a dark jacket. Now, leaving the Ladies,
she’d be a brown-eyed brunette in a light-coloured one. A complete transformation, she hoped.

After a few more minutes in the cubicle, checking her appearance, she pulled her coat back on, opened the door and stepped out. She crossed to the washbasins and stared at her reflection for a
few moments longer, then left the Ladies.

Raya had no luggage to collect, since everything she now possessed in the world was crammed into the black carry-on bag in her left hand, but she didn’t want to leave the baggage reclaim
hall walking by herself. So she waited until thirty or forty new arrivals had fought their way through the scrum to the carousel and retrieved their cases, before she began making her way towards
the exit.

Like almost everyone in front of her, she headed for the green channel,
nothing to declare
, and strode purposefully through it, at the tail-end of what seemed to be a large Italian family
group. A handful of Italian customs officers in dark-coloured uniforms watched the departing passengers, their eyes flicking over each in turn with a relative lack of interest. None attempted to
stop her, or even speak to her, but she could almost
feel
them watching her as she walked past.

Outside, the arrivals hall was an apparent chaos of crowds milling about, and with loud and, to her, incomprehensibly garbled announcements echoing from loudspeakers in rapid-fire Italian.
Everyone appeared to be talking at the same time, while those unencumbered with bags were making their points in the way only Italians can, through wide and expansive gestures that had passers-by
ducking and dodging to avoid their swinging arms.

And Raya walked silently through it all, her eyes darting in all directions as she constantly looked out for danger. She hoped she was home free, but if that officious little shit of a Border
Guards officer had decided to run a check on her at Yasenevo, she knew that there could already be a snatch squad waiting, somewhere at Fiumicino, with orders to grab her. And if that happened, she
knew she’d be on the next available flight back to Moscow, probably heavily sedated, and that she would then spend the last few days, or weeks, of her short life screaming her lungs out as
she waited for death in the torture chambers under the Lubyanka.

The Russian intelligence organs implement a simple policy with regard to any employees who betray the motherland. They are almost never tried for their crimes, but simply disappear. Shortly
after joining the SVR, Raya had been shown a graphic example of the way such ‘disappearances’ happened.

It was an old and scratchy film, shot possibly with an 8-millimetre hand-held camera, and it had been taken in the basement of the ‘Aquarium’ – the headquarters building of the
GRU, Russian Military Intelligence, at Khodinka Airfield in Moscow.

The film showed a man wired, rather than strapped, to a metal stretcher. Within seconds of the film starting, the reason for the steel wire became obvious. For the man was being fed feet-first
into a working incinerator, in which straps of any usual kind would have disintegrated quickly in the intense heat. The victim was struggling violently, his screams the more disturbing to her
because of the absolute silence of the film. The two men lifting the stretcher onto the rails that led into the furnace wore body protectors, heavy gloves and heat-resistant face shields. And they
appeared to be following specific orders, for the lower half of the stretcher was fed into the furnace first and then, after half a minute, deliberately pulled out again.

At that point, Raya was forced to look away, unable to bear watching the man’s agony any longer. His trousers had already vanished, burnt away to nothing, and the bones of his feet and
lower legs glistened in the reddish light from the flames, the flesh on them already consumed. The stretcher was dumped on the floor, where it was left for a few minutes while some rubbish bags
were fed next through the furnace door. Meanwhile the camera panned the length of the condemned man’s body, zooming in for several close-ups.

Then the stretcher was hoisted up onto the rails again and slid slowly – terribly, terribly slowly – back into the furnace, the victim screaming in agony throughout. Finally, the top
end of the stretcher vanished inside, and the furnace door slammed shut behind it. The image darkened, and after a few seconds a legend appeared somewhat shakily on the screen. It read simply:
‘Death of a traitor’.

So now Raya looked everywhere – and at everyone.

Saturday

Rome, Italy

Nobody stopped her. As far as Raya could tell, nobody even looked at her as she fought her way through the crowds and stepped out of the airport building. The sunshine was
dazzling, its glare compounded by the reflection from vehicle windows, and the heat hit her like a muggy blanket, the air so heavy and humid that she felt she could almost grab a handful and
squeeze the moisture out of it. She slipped on a pair of wraparound sunglasses with a ‘DG’ logo on the frame – a Dolce & Gabbana knock-off she’d picked up for a few
roubles from a street market in Moscow a couple of months earlier.

The chaos, she saw at once, extended outside the airport as well, but here a cacophony of car horns now added an even sharper and more discordant note. The Italians, she noticed, didn’t
queue for taxis the way people in Russia did, always lining up so obediently. In Rome, it was a no-holds-barred free-for-all, as men and women shouted and elbowed their way forward to get to the
vehicles first.

This was such an unusual – such a
foreign
– sight, that she stood and watched it for a few seconds. But, even as she stood there, staring at the crowds of people milling about
her, three black Alfa Romeo saloon cars drove up, their tyres squealing as they stopped just beyond the taxi rank. Six men climbed out, and three of them began walking quickly towards the terminal
building, while the remaining trio fanned out, two of them checking groups of people waiting for taxis, the other one heading across to the stops where the hotel buses picked up their
passengers.

For a few seconds Raya didn’t move, just remained standing beside a group of Italians who were arguing loudly over something. Just watching the six men, she didn’t need telling who
they were.

She was stunned that the hunt for her had started so quickly, having hoped that she would have at least the weekend to put some distance between herself and her pursuers. This meant the Border
Guards officer must have raised the alarm at Yasenevo.

At this stage in her escape, Raya didn’t care where she went as long as it was somewhere well away from the airport. She had originally planned to take one of the small buses that ran to
various hotels in the centre of Rome, but now immediately ditched that idea. And she’d never even considered taking a taxi, since their drivers sometimes remembered faces, and might even
recall exactly where they had taken an individual customer. The only other possible method of transport from Fiumicino was by rail, and the train station was actually inside the terminal
building.

Raya silently gave thanks that she’d taken the time to apply her rudimentary but hopefully effective disguise, as she turned round and headed back into the terminal.

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow

Major Abramov sat, with his head in his hands, at the table in a small interview room in the security section of the Yasenevo complex.

As soon as he’d known for certain that Raya Kosov had defected, he’d done what he hoped were all the right things. He’d issued immediate instructions to the SVR duty officer in
Rome, once the Sheremetievo Border Guards had definitely confirmed that the city was Raya’s destination, and given orders that she was to be apprehended and held for questioning, pending
further instructions.

And only then had he told his direct superior what had happened, telephoning the colonel at his small dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. The officer had listened in silence to Abramov’s
halting explanation, then ordered the major to remain at Yasenevo until further notice, while he, in turn, informed the higher echelons of the SVR.

Within two hours of Abramov’s arrival at Yasenevo, a full-scale operation had begun, and almost the first thing the SVR senior officers did was to open a sealed red file classified
Sov
Sekretno
– Top Secret – that possessed a distribution list so restricted that only one of the officers summoned to Yasenevo even knew the document existed. And he only knew about it
because he’d been involved in preparing some of the contents.

Specialist officers had immediately been summoned to Yasenevo and briefed, and they were now already either en route to the Moscow airports or actually there, awaiting flights that would take
them to France, Austria and Switzerland, with the largest number flying to Italy, for obvious reasons. Photographs of Raya – taken from her personnel file as well as a couple transferred from
the security cameras at Sheremetievo – had been sent to the Rome embassy, and also those embassies located in other cities to which the SVR officers were travelling, together with an accurate
written description of her.

In parallel with what could be termed this recovery operation, a damage-control analysis had been ordered to assess what she might have taken with her. They weren’t expecting that she
walked out of Yasenevo with any classified documents, since the elaborate security protocols in place at the SVR headquarters would have prevented that, but her position as Deputy Computer Network
Manager would have obviously given her almost unparalleled access to virtually all of the data held on the Yasenevo computer system. And that was what worried them most.

A search team had already entered her small apartment and removed everything that wasn’t nailed or screwed down, and this haul was now being picked over by a group of specialists at
Yasenevo, looking for clues to where she might have gone, or any other evidence of her guilt.

Abramov had already faced one interrogation by a hawk-faced colonel named Yevgeni Zharkov, who had simply introduced himself as a member of the security staff. It was a session that left the
major white and shaking, after which he’d been instructed to wait in the interview room.

Abramov looked up, his eyes staring sightlessly at the blank white wall opposite, and muttered the same mantra he’d been repeating for the last hour: ‘Why, Raya, why?’ But,
again, no answer was forthcoming.

At that moment, the door swung open and Colonel Zharkov strode in, two SVR guards following him.

Abramov stood up automatically.

‘Hand over your building pass,’ Zharkov snapped, and the major hastened to obey. ‘Now we’ll go to your office.’

‘Why?’ Abramov asked.

‘Because, from this moment onwards, your security clearance is revoked. You will give me all your keys and passwords, and open your safe. You are to hand over every classified document in
your charge, and your office will then be sealed until this investigation has been completed.’

‘But I—’

‘But what, Major? Did you expect that you’d be able to continue working here as if nothing had happened, despite the fact that your direct subordinate is now apparently trying to
defect to the West?’

Twenty minutes later, Abramov was escorted back to the interview room by the two guards, pushed inside and the door locked. Zharkov hadn’t accompanied him back, but had remained in the
network manager’s office suite, inspecting the rooms occupied by Abramov and Raya Kosov.

This time the major had a longer wait. Nearly an hour passed before Zharkov returned, clutching a bulky file in his hand. He slammed it down on the table, pulled out a chair and sat down
opposite Abramov.

For several seconds he just stared at the major, his mouth compressed into a straight, hard line and his expression unblinkingly hostile.

Abramov dropped his own gaze, unable to face such blatant aggression. He looked down at the folder and recognized it immediately as a personnel file. The name printed on its front cover was
‘Kosov, Raya’.

‘Was it your plan?’ Zharkov began.

‘What?’

‘Was it your plan – or was it all Kosov’s idea?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

Zharkov lifted the cover of the file and pulled out a slim red folder. He opened it and glanced at the first page, taking his time. Finally, he looked up again.

‘Then let me explain it to you. Kosov used a travel warrant taken from your safe to escape from Russia. She cannot possibly have known the combination of your safe, because that would be
in direct contravention of Yasenevo standing orders. So obviously you yourself must have supplied her with the warrant, and therefore you must have known that she intended to defect. Or am I wrong,
Major?’

Abramov held the colonel’s gaze for less than a second this time, then dropped his eyes. He had already guessed the direction Zharkov’s questioning was likely to take, and he knew
that the only possible chance he had of getting out of this mess was to make a clean breast of everything, while trying as far as possible to exonerate himself. If he attempted to obstruct the
investigation, or conceal anything, he knew he could face the same fate that was being planned for Raya.