Manhunt (22 page)

‘Please believe me, Colonel,’ he replied. ‘I had no knowledge, no knowledge at all, of what Kosov planned to do. I didn’t know she had the combination of my safe, nor did
I ever tell her what it was. I can only assume that she must have watched me open the door and noted the numbers I was using.’

That was the first lie Abramov had told, and he mentally crossed his fingers as he spoke the words. Zharkov’s next words chilled him.

‘Perhaps,’ the colonel said, his eyes never leaving Abramov’s face. ‘Or perhaps not. When we get her strapped down on a table in the cellars at the Lubyanka, we’ll
find out the truth. And,’ he added, leaning forward for emphasis, ‘if I even begin to suspect that you’re not cooperating fully with this investigation, that’s where
we’ll continue your questioning, too.’ Zharkov sat back. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘why did she run?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Abramov replied truthfully. ‘I thought she was happy here and enjoyed her work. Her mother—’

‘Her mother,’ Zharkov interrupted, ‘was dead even before Kosov requested compassionate leave, you fucking idiot.’

‘I know,’ Abramov said miserably. ‘I know that now,’ he amended.

‘Precisely. Didn’t it ever occur to you – didn’t you even think – to check on what she was telling you? One telephone call, that’s all it would have taken.
One call to Minsk and we wouldn’t be sitting here now, having to mount a recovery operation that’s going to cost us millions of roubles.’

‘I trusted her,’ Abramov muttered. ‘I know I—’

‘Trust is for idiots. I trust no one, and nothing I can’t prove. So you’ve no idea why she ran?’

Abramov shook his head, but didn’t reply.

‘I haven’t had time to read her personnel file. Did she have any relatives outside Russia – outside the Federation?’

‘None that I knew of.’

‘So why did she choose to go to Italy?’

Again, Abramov shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘We’re just lucky that a border guard at Sheremetievo wasn’t satisfied with her explanation, and decided to check her story. Otherwise we might not have even known she’d
run until Monday, and by then she could have got to almost anywhere in Europe. It’s just a shame he didn’t call us
before
she got on that flight.’

‘But you
will
find her?’

Zharkov smiled unpleasantly. ‘Don’t worry, Major, we’ll track her down. And I’ll make sure we get all the answers from her, before I order someone to put a bullet in the
back of her head.’

For a few seconds Abramov just stared down at the surface of the table in front of him, weighing up his options, few though they now were. He knew he’d be lucky to survive the purge that
would inevitably follow Raya Kosov’s defection, but maybe, just maybe, if he could show that he was fully committed to helping find her, he might at least escape with his life. He murmured a
silent apology to his subordinate, then looked up at Zharkov.

‘There is something,’ he began.

The colonel looked interested. ‘Yes, Major?’

‘Well, two things, actually,’ Abramov said. ‘I know Kosov, and you don’t, and I don’t think she’ll be easy to find. She’s obviously been planning this
for a long time, and I know the way her mind works. She must have had some good reason for choosing to fly to Rome.’

‘To defect. We already know that,’ Zharkov snapped.

‘No, that’s not what I meant. Why did she pick Rome? Why not Paris or London or Madrid? What was her reason for choosing Italy?’

‘That’s a good point.’ Zharkov nodded slowly. ‘So why did she select
that
city?’

‘I don’t know, but it might be worth somebody going through her personnel record to see if she’s ever had any connection with anyone in Italy. I’m not aware of any
relevant association, but I’ve never fully checked.’

‘Perhaps you should have done, Major.’

‘Perhaps,’ Abramov snapped, ‘but I was under the impression that investigating the background of Yasenevo staff was the responsibility of the SVR security staff, not its line
officers. The responsibility of your department, in fact, Colonel.’

Zharkov’s cold eyes bored into him, though Abramov met his stare levelly. ‘I’m not responsible for internal security, Abramov,’ he snapped back. ‘I just have to
solve the problem once it’s arisen. I’m the senior colonel in the Zontik Directorate. Perhaps you know what that means?’

Abramov nodded and dropped his gaze. He knew exactly what Zharkov was talking about.

In 1988, a specialist and ultra-secret unit had been created within the SVR itself. The Spetsgruppa Zaslon – special operations or
spetsnaz
team ‘Barrier’ or
‘Shield’ – was formed ostensibly to provide armed backup for SVR operations. But in fact its remit was more wide-ranging, and it was given a virtually unlimited budget. It was
also known as the
Zontik
or ‘Umbrella’ Directorate, or sometimes just as the ‘Z Directorate’, by those few people within the corridors of Yasenevo who even knew about
it.

Spetsgruppa Zaslon had been involved in a variety of different types of operations since its first creation. These included a clandestine mission deep into Iraq, at the time Saddam Hussein still
held the reins of power, when the operatives successfully located and removed a large quantity of highly sensitive and secret documents from the dictator’s palaces. Those were documents that
would have severely embarrassed Moscow, had they been found by the invading American forces.

Some three hundred very experienced officers were selected for Spetsgruppa Zaslon, all characterized by two criteria: all had extensive experience in special operations and also in working
outside the borders of the Russian Federation. Many of the officers selected had a further qualification that wouldn’t normally be on their CVs. For, during some of their special operations,
they’d been involved in what the old KGB used to refer to euphemistically as
mokrie dela
, ‘wet affairs’, meaning that blood had been spilt.

The reality was that, despite its somewhat vague and deliberately ill-defined operating brief, the principal job of Zaslon operatives was, ever since the unit’s inception, to act as a
highly professional assassination squad.

‘Was that it, then? We should spend our time finding out why she chose to run to Italy?’

Abramov shook his head. ‘No, not just that – and, in any case, I might be wrong about it. Maybe she just stuck a pin in a map, though I doubt it. No, there are two things that I
think you need to bear in mind during your search for her.’

The major leant forward then, and spoke earnestly to the Zaslon colonel for a couple of minutes, before he sat back in his seat.

Zharkov nodded. ‘I confess I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said. ‘Good, Major. You might have just bought your life with that. As long as we
do
find Kosov, of
course.’

Ax-les-Thermes, France

On the terrace of the Auberge du Lac, Gerald Stanway gazed up the road towards the Hostellerie de la Poste, and wondered if he’d missed anything.

He’d watched a tall blond man, who’d been sitting at the far end of the terrace, receive a phone call on his mobile and leave the hotel. But there was nothing unusual about that, of
course. What
was
odd was that the same man had then walked down the road, crossed to the other hotel and gone inside.

Then there was the Renault Laguna. The vehicle had pulled up in a lay-by a short distance down the road, and it had been standing there ever since, nearly half an hour. It could, of course, just
be that the driver was making a long phone call, or was completely lost and trying to find out where he was on a map. But the simpler explanation, Stanway guessed, was that the man in the Renault
was watching the Hostellerie de la Poste.

Putting these two things together, it seemed to him most likely that the blond man was the Russian cipher clerk he’d come to find, and that the man in the car was covering the hotel to
ensure that the clerk’s initial debriefing wasn’t interrupted. And that, in turn, meant that there was at least one or possibly two SIS officers inside the building as well.

Stanway wasn’t concerned that the Russian would betray him at this stage in the questioning. The man would obviously realize that the identity of a traitor within the British establishment
must be the crown jewel in his dowry, and he wouldn’t release that piece of information until he was safely tucked away in a safe house somewhere in the Home Counties, in possession of a new
identity, a British passport and a decent bank balance.

No, Stanway had read enough reports regarding the debriefing of various defectors to have no worries on that score. In this first – he assumed it was the first – meeting, all the
interrogators would be doing was establishing the man’s identity and asking him a lot of background questions. They’d be trying to find out where he’d been employed at Yasenevo,
what his job description was, what grade and classification of files he had been allowed to work on. All of these were questions intended to confirm that he was who he claimed to be, and that he
might have access to the kind of information he was supposedly peddling.

So far, Stanway reckoned, he’d done quite a good day’s work. He’d possibly identified the renegade Russian as well as the vehicle being used by one of the surveillance
officers. All he needed to do now was confirm his suspicions, and he thought he’d worked out an easy, if slightly risky, way to do so.

He stood up, put enough money on the table to cover the cost of his drinks, and picked up the copy of
Le Monde
that he’d bought in the centre of Ax. He walked out to the car park,
climbed into his Peugeot, and started the engine to let the air-conditioning cool the interior. He pulled out his Browning, extracted the magazine and checked that it was loaded, then replaced it
in the butt of the pistol. He racked back the slide to cock the weapon, then set the safety catch and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers, resting in the small of his back, and out of
sight.

The one thing he hadn’t been able to establish, from his vantage point on the hotel terrace, was whether or not the watcher in the Renault was using binoculars. That meant he had to be
careful, so it would all be a matter of timing.

Stanway drove the Peugeot over the uneven ground to the entrance of the car park, which lay on the south side of the hotel and was at least one hundred yards from where the Laguna was parked. If
the watcher had binoculars, the Peugeot’s number plate would be readable at that distance, but not with the naked eye. So what he had to do was make sure that, when he made the turn onto the
main road, he was effectively invisible. He didn’t want the man in the Laguna to realize that the car had also been at the Auberge du Lac, because that would immediately raise a flag.

He stopped the car at the side of the road and checked the oncoming traffic heading south towards the centre of Ax-les-Thermes, picking his moment. An elderly Citroën van, painted brown,
perhaps to hide the rust, was just coming around the bend towards him. Stanway waited until the van was directly between him and the Renault, then pulled out, accelerating hard and turning right.
Behind him, the van driver noisily expressed his displeasure at this manoeuvre with a blast from his horn, but Stanway ignored him. He would have preferred to have driven away from the hotel in a
less obtrusive manner, but he was certain that all the watcher in the Renault would know about him now was the make, model and colour of the car, and Peugeots were common enough for that not to be
a problem. His registration plate would have been completely invisible, and that was all that mattered.

Stanway drove on through the town until he reached the small roundabout just outside the casino, where the main road forked. Then he swung the Peugeot left, right around the roundabout, to head
back the way he’d come. There were several parking spaces in front of the casino itself, and he pulled into one of them and waited for a few minutes. After about fifty cars had driven past
him, heading north, he waited for a convenient gap in the traffic, then backed out and joined the northbound flow himself.

He drove steadily back through the town and as he reached the Hostellerie de la Poste he pulled off the road and stopped the vehicle in one of the handful of vacant parking spaces directly in
front of the hotel.

Stanway turned off the Peugeot’s engine and unbuckled his seat belt, but his eyes never left the interior mirror, in which the parked Renault Laguna and its driver were clearly visible
– the man’s face staring directly towards the hotel. As Stanway watched, he saw the seated figure briefly move his lips, apparently just uttering a sentence or two. The man could easily
have been mouthing the words to a song playing on the radio, or talking into a hands-free mobile phone, but Stanway frankly doubted either explanation. His guess was that he was using a
short-range, two-way radio to tell one of the men inside the hotel that a car had just drawn up outside. Well, in that case, he’d soon find out.

This was, Stanway knew, probably the most risky part of the entire operation, the time when he would literally have to show himself to the enemy, but he couldn’t think of any other way of
confirming his suspicions about that tall blond man. He picked up his copy of
Le Monde
, checked that his Browning was securely in place but still invisible, opened the car door and walked
into the hotel.

‘Sierra, this is Whisky. That Peugeot outside is on French plates, registered in this
département
, and it has a single male occupant. I’ve noted the
number. Stand by.’

Adamson didn’t take his eyes off the car newly parked outside the hotel, till the door opened and the driver climbed out.

‘Confirmed. Single male carrying a newspaper. He’s heading for the front entrance.’

‘Copied,’ Dekker radioed. ‘Nothing seen to the rear of the building.’

Stanway stood for a couple of seconds in the small lobby of the Hostellerie de la Poste and looked around. There was a small reception desk, currently unmanned, directly in
front of him, and to the right of that a wide curving staircase leading up to the first-floor bedrooms. To his left was the dining room, where he could see several tables already laid with plates,
napkins and cutlery, but what he was primarily interested in was the bar and lounge over to his right-hand side.