Manhunt (24 page)

‘Sorry, I meant do you know which division Gecko works for, anything like that? SIS or GCHQ, maybe?’

‘No, not yet. We’ve no idea who he is except that he’s someone highly placed in the security establishment. Now, what you did today was start talking to Richter, the kind of
initial meeting we’d do for real in the case of a defection, and I didn’t brief you about it beforehand because I wanted you to handle it as realistically as possible. And it needed to
be realistic in case anyone was watching you. Was there anyone else in the hotel when you talked to him?’

‘Richter’s good,’ Hughes said grudgingly. ‘I thought he was a plant, but it never occurred to me that he wasn’t Russian. No, there was nobody in the lounge apart
from the barman – and I presume you’d exclude him – and the only other person who turned up was some French guy who walked in and ordered a beer. He was there for about five
minutes.’

‘You’re quite certain he was French?’

‘Yes, he chatted to the barman for a few minutes, about some story in the newspaper. He was a local, I’m sure.’

‘Right,’ Simpson said, nodding, ‘so it looks like Gecko hasn’t shown yet. Richter will be staying at the hotel tonight, and you’ll be seeing him again tomorrow.
Carry on exactly as you’d do if this was for real. I’ll brief him tonight so that he, too, knows what he’s supposed to do.’

‘And then?’

‘And then you pack your bags and head for the hills. If Gecko doesn’t appear here tomorrow either, we’ll know he hasn’t taken the bait. And if he does, I’ve got
people waiting ready to take him down.’

‘Take him down as in kill him?’

‘If it comes to that, yes, but I’d rather keep the bastard alive so we can sweat him for a while. We need to identify his case officer or handler, and he’ll have some other
useful information, no doubt. We’ll kill him only if we’ve got no other options.’

‘And if your decoy, this man Richter, is threatened?’

‘Different rules apply. Richter’s expendable.’

Saturday

Rome, Italy

As she stared through the window of the train, trying to avoid eye contact with the two men she could see searching for her in the crowds, Raya realized that something had
changed.

Another man had approached one of the watchers, and was now speaking to him urgently, grasping a couple of sheets of paper in his hand. Raya possessed no lip-reading skills, but felt sure that
the new arrival uttered the name ‘Kosov’ at least twice. That didn’t bother her so much, as she already knew these men were searching for her, but what was on those sheets of
paper was a matter of increased concern. They had to contain some kind of new information, some extra details they could use to try to track her down.

Then the second man turned round, and Raya caught a brief glimpse of the pages he was holding. Both were clearly photographs, but not merely copies taken from the personnel files at Yasenevo.
One looked more like a surveillance shot of a group of people, and the other showed a dark oblong shape, that was apparently a magnified section of a larger image.

But that didn’t make sense. Why would they need a photograph showing her among other people, instead of just a full-face image that would be much more detailed?

And then it dawned on her. They already had obvious pictures of her, but somebody must have guessed she might attempt to change her appearance after arriving in Rome. She’d attended to her
hair and eyes, and her jacket was now a different colour, but there’d been nothing she could do about her bag. She had thought about ditching it and buying another one on arrival in Italy,
but had decided not to bother. That decision now looked as if it might have been a dangerously false economy.

The images the man held had almost certainly been taken by one of the surveillance cameras back at Sheremetievo. One would show how she was dressed before she boarded the aircraft for Rome, and
the other showed a close-up of the bag she’d then been carrying.

Even as that unpleasant thought surfaced, Raya saw one of the men point at the train she was sitting in, and for the briefest of instants their eyes met. She glanced away immediately, then
quickly she looked back.

But it was too late. Already two of the men were moving, heading swiftly towards the carriage doors.

Raya stood up and grabbed the back of her seat. She knew she’d never be able to tackle the two of them, but she wasn’t going to go down without a fight. And, if she made enough fuss,
perhaps some of the other passengers would come to her aid.

At that moment the train lurched and, a second or two later, it began to move, gathering speed quickly. Her last sight of her pursuers was of the furious expressions on their faces as they ran
along the platform, impotently trying to climb on board.

Raya sat down again quickly and smiled for the first time since she’d left Moscow that morning.

Ax-les-Thermes, France

Thirty minutes after the Peugeot hatchback had driven away from the hotel, and ten minutes after a silver Renault Megane with two men inside it had left the car park and
headed towards the centre of town, Adamson tensed suddenly in his seat. Then he depressed the transmit button on his two-way radio.

‘This is Whisky. Target Richter has just come out of the front door of the hotel. It looks like he intends walking into the town, or maybe he’s just going off to get his hire car.
I’ll follow him. Are you OK there?’

‘Affirmative,’ Dekker replied. ‘I’ll stay here covering the building. Keep in touch.’

‘Roger that.’

Richter crossed the road, climbed into the Ford Focus, did a U-turn and drove north, through the adjacent town of Savignac-les-Ormeaux. He checked his mirror as he cleared the
northern edge of the town, saw only a Renault Laguna following some distance behind him, spotted a piece of waste ground, pulled off the road and parked. He stayed inside the car, fetched the
mobile from his pocket and dialled Simpson’s phone number.

‘It’s Richter. I finished a few minutes ago,’ he said, ‘and that wasn’t the most entertaining afternoon I’ve ever spent. Ninety minutes talking Russian and
thinking up convincing lies to tell the Chuckle Brothers.’

‘Do you think they bought it?’

‘I don’t know. My Russian’s a little rusty, though I don’t know if Hughes noticed it. The biggest problem was remembering what I’d already told them whenever we
went over the same ground again. They were both taking notes, but obviously I couldn’t do the same, so I was relying only on my memory.’

‘OK. Did you arrange a second meeting?’

‘Yes. Tomorrow morning at ten – but, before you dream up some cunning plan for it, I’ve not the slightest intention of being there. Wallis and Hughes are both pretty sharp, and
I can’t keep this up any longer.’

‘No, you
will
be there, but there’s no need to worry. I’ve just briefed the two SIS men that this is just a training exercise. In fact, Hughes did suss you out, but it
wasn’t your Russian that let you down.’

‘What was it?’

‘A combination of things, but mainly the fact that you didn’t look hunted enough. Hughes reckoned you were just too calm and comfortable, so he guessed you were probably a plant sent
over by the SVR.’ Simpson finished, ‘And that’s good.’

‘So now what?’ Richter demanded.

‘Go back to the hotel, have a coffee, take a bath, get drunk, read a book. Do whatever you want, I don’t care. But make sure you stay in the building this evening, and I’ll
call you tomorrow morning.’

‘Right.’ Richter glanced up and down the road. ‘How many people have you got in the surveillance team?’ he asked.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘This guy in the Renault Laguna, on Paris plates, he was parked on the other side of the N20 when I came out of the hotel. Then he followed me up this road, and I’ve just seen him
stop about a hundred yards behind me. If he isn’t one of your men, you’d better tell me right now.’

‘OK, Richter. You’re better at this than I thought you’d be. Yes, he’s one of mine.’

‘What a surprise. And he’s doing what, exactly?’

‘He’s also taking part in the exercise.’

‘And where’s his sidekick? Covering the back of the hotel, I suppose?’

‘How do you know there’s another one?’

‘I don’t know a lot about surveillance, but I do know that you never deploy a single watcher. You’d have had at least two outside the hotel: one in the car in front and the
other somewhere behind it – and on foot, in case I decided to walk instead of drive. And maybe two more in reserve, in a car somewhere nearby.’

‘There are just two of them, Richter,’ Simpson snapped.

‘Right, and your bright idea is that I should go back to the hotel and just wait for something to happen?’

‘Yes, that
is
what I want you to do. And if you don’t, I’ll know.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ Richter said, and ended the call.

Rome, Italy

Raya leant back in her futuristic, padded, blue seat on the Ferrovie Regionali carriage, her mind racing. She was safe for the moment, because neither of her pursuers had
managed to get on board the train before it left Fiumicino Airport. But she also knew she was only safe until it stopped again. And that, according to a station map prominently displayed inside the
carriage, would be soon, at Ponte Galeria.

Before that happened, she knew she had a life-or-death decision to make: whether to get off at that first stop and try to vanish there, or stay on the train until it reached one of the stations
closer to central Rome, where she’d have more choice of finding transport links and, of course, much bigger crowds in which to lose herself.

She scanned the station map, looking for inspiration. She’d obviously never visited Rome before but, as part of her preparations for her escape from Russia, she’d thoroughly
familiarized herself with the layout of the city. But Fiumicino was quite a long way outside central Rome, in fact right down on the coast, and she didn’t know much about the districts the
railway line ran through until it reached the outskirts of the city. All she was certain of was that Ponte Galeria was about halfway between the airport and Rome itself, so she guessed that it,
Muratella, and the other two stops before Trastevere, would be no more than minor stations serving the south-eastern suburbs. She had no idea what alternative transport links might be available if
she got off at one of them.

There was also the time factor. Clearly SVR and other Russian Embassy staff had been scrambled to intercept her, and had been sent out to the airport where her flight from Sheremetievo was due
to land. What she didn’t know was exactly how many people the embassy might have at its disposal, but she was fairly sure that they couldn’t adequately cover every railway station exit
in Rome.

In fact, one reason Raya had chosen Italy was because she knew that the SVR maintained only a relatively small number of operatives in that country. The downside was that Italy was a potential
trap simply because of its elongated shape, and if the SVR didn’t track her down quickly themselves, she feared Moscow would swiftly concoct some story to justify involving the Italian police
and other agencies in the hunt for her. She also knew that Moscow would already have several snatch teams on their way to Italy, to supplement the embassy staff.

While planning her escape, Raya had realized that she had exactly two options, and that only one of them genuinely worked. She could try remaining in the city, going to ground somewhere until
the heat died down. The problem there was that if Moscow did manage to get the Italian police involved she could be found fairly quickly, simply by undertaking routine checks on hotels and boarding
houses. In short, if she tried to hide, she’d inevitably be caught so, however she did it and whatever happened, Raya knew she had to get out of this country as quickly as possible.

Her fastest way of leaving Italy would obviously be by air, but that would leave a paper trail because she’d have to show her passport – and remove her disguise – so that
option had been out of the question from the start. And, of course, SVR surveillance was likely to be far more intense at the airports.

Her original thought had been to buy a Eurail pass, allowing her to travel freely around most of Europe, but checking on the Internet she’d found the cost prohibitive. At the moment she
had only a few hundred euros in cash, and no guarantee of obtaining more.

But whatever route or method of transport she opted for, she had been counting on getting into central Rome immediately she arrived, becoming just one more anonymous face among the tens of
thousands of tourists thronging the city every summer. If she could still achieve that, the SVR’s chances of ever finding her were remarkably slim. But doing so was now her biggest
problem.

Raya studied the station map again, then shook her head. The SVR knew, she was certain, that she’d changed her appearance and what she now looked like: also that she was a passenger on a
train that went all the way to Rome’s main railway station, Termini. But they couldn’t possibly have enough officers to cover every one of the stations between Fiumicino and Termini,
even if they could reach those stations ahead of the train itself, which was unlikely given what she knew about Italian traffic conditions.

She now had to gamble, and take a chance with her life. Staying aboard all the way to Termini wouldn’t be a good idea because, no matter how fast the train, it couldn’t outrun a
phone call, and other SVR officers would already be on their way to Termini to intercept her. She would just have to get off somewhere before.

Decision made, Raya nodded. She’d stay on the train only as far as Trastevere, then get off and take her chances. There were bound to be buses and taxis there – or maybe she could
hop onto the other line that ran through the station, taking the FR3 around to Stazione San Pietro, and then switch to the FR5 route running out towards the north-west, heading for the coastal town
of Ladispoli, or maybe Cerveteri, well outside the city itself. Or just take a coach or bus out of Rome – anywhere away from Rome would do. That might be a better idea, she decided, and it
would certainly be a whole lot cheaper.