Manhunt (45 page)

The Lear turned sharply to the north, and its engine noise rose to a crescendo as the aircraft began its takeoff run.

Richter looked again through the window. The two engines were heading for the mid-point of the runway, the intentions of the crews obvious. It was all a matter of speed and acceleration and
physics. The two vehicles were probably travelling at twenty miles an hour, and gaining speed slowly. He guessed that the Lear was already doing nearly a hundred knots, and getting near V1. And
there was also the human factor. He doubted if the crash crews would actually want to drive directly in front of a jet aircraft travelling at well over one hundred miles an hour, because that way
they would effectively be committing suicide.

And as he watched, the two fire engines slowed right down, and then came to a stop just off the edge of the runway. The aircraft roared past them, and Richter gave an ironic wave as they went
by.

The Lear lifted smoothly off the runway and started to climb swiftly over the long, narrow lake lying immediately north of Chambéry airfield.

As they passed through about five thousand feet, Westwood picked up a phone.

‘Frank,’ he said, ‘it’s possible our guests here might have offended the French, so make a call to see if our friends can join us.’

‘Friends?’ Richter asked.

Westwood nodded. ‘I’ve had a couple of F-16s from the 31st Fighter Wing at Aviano on standby, just in case we needed an escort out of here. They got airborne about twenty minutes
ago. As far as the Italians are concerned, they’re being sent over to Mildenhall on a liaison visit, so they’re fitted with drop tanks to give them range. They’re also carrying
what I believe the pilots refer to as a “full rack”.’

Dekker turned enquiringly to Richter.

‘That means they’re fully armed,’ he said, ‘just in case the Frogs decide their best interests might be served by having a couple of Mirages pop up beside us, to try to
make us land at some French military airfield.’ Richter glanced at Westwood. ‘A U2, this Lear, and now a couple of F-16s? This has not been a cheap exercise for you. Why are you so
interested in Raya here?’

Westwood shrugged. ‘Mainly, I suppose, we got interested because the Russians were so keen to get you back, Ms Kosov. You simply had to be important because of the size of the operation
they’ve mounted to find you. And I’m very glad they didn’t succeed. The British, of course, denied all knowledge of your existence, and that was why I knew they were deeply
involved.’

‘So what’s in it for you?’ Richter asked.

‘I work for the CIA, as I’m sure you know. Ideally, we’d like to debrief Raya ourselves, back at Langley, but now we know that’s not going to happen. So our next best
option seemed to be to help you get her out of the clutches of the thugs that Moscow sent after her, and then ask politely if we can share her material.’

Westwood turned to Raya. ‘So who are you, exactly?’ he asked. ‘Our Moscow people first identified you a long time ago, but you haven’t popped up on our radar for quite a
few years. We guessed you’d been recruited by one of the organs, like the SVR, and that’s why you seemed to vanish.’

‘She’s just a clerk,’ Dekker said, holstering his pistol and peering out of the window at the fast-receding ground. The Lear was climbing rapidly. ‘Goes up bloody fast,
doesn’t it?’ he added.

‘Like a fart in a bath,’ Richter remarked. ‘Like Colin said, Raya’s a clerk.’

‘No, she isn’t,’ Westwood said firmly. ‘And Colin here is who, exactly?’

‘Our guardian angel. He’s the man with the long rifle to make sure the bad guys keep their distance.’

‘Sounds reasonable,’ Westwood said. ‘And what about you? I presume you’re the guy who was flying that little puddle-jumper you stole in Italy?’

Richter nodded and introduced himself. ‘I’m ex-military,’ he finished, ‘and I kind of got suckered into this by taking a job that looked too good to be true. Which it
was, of course.’

‘So you’re not SIS at all?’

‘No, Mr Westwood,’ Raya chipped in, ‘because that was one of the conditions I insisted on. There are at least two SIS officers on our Moscow payroll, and the one thing I
wasn’t prepared to risk was one of them being sent to meet me. That would be a sure and certain way of ending up back in Moscow. So I wanted London to send out somebody completely unconnected
with SIS and I ended up with this character, who’s so far proved quite good at keeping me alive.’

‘OK.’ Westwood nodded. ‘Now we know who we all are, but no way is Ms Kosov just a clerk. Almost the entire Russian Embassy staff were out on the streets of Rome looking for
her, plus a minimum of fifty experts flown in specially from Moscow to help. They wouldn’t do all that for a defecting clerk, so just who the hell are you, lady?’

Raya glanced at Richter, then nodded. ‘You may have just saved all our lives,’ she said, ‘so I think you at least deserve to know this. I was the Deputy Computer Network
Manager at Yasenevo.’

‘Holy shit,’ Westwood muttered. ‘Or maybe I should say the holy grail.’ He glanced from Raya to Richter, and back again. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t
take this the wrong way, but I owe it to my bosses to at least make you an offer, just in case you might be interested. Whatever the British have agreed to pay you we’d double it at a
minimum. You can have a new identity in the States, as part of the Witness Protection Program, and live wherever you want. This aircraft could take you to Virginia right now.’

Raya gazed at him for a long moment, then shook her head. ‘There’s more than one motive for betraying your country, Mr Westwood. Money doesn’t interest me. I have a very
different reason for being here.’

‘And that is?’ Richter asked.

Raya smiled at him. ‘All in good time, Paul. Let’s get somewhere safe – somewhere
really
safe, I mean – and then I’ll answer all of your
questions.’

‘Our playmates have just arrived,’ the captain announced over the cabin broadcast system.

As he made the announcement, there was a sudden roar audible even over the noise of the Lear’s engines. Richter changed seats and peered through the window. One of the F-16s was just
passing down the starboard side of the Lear, at the same level and maybe eighty metres away. Clearly visible on the rudder were the ‘AV’ letters that identified it as being based at
Aviano.

‘Now,’ Richter said, leaning back in his seat, ‘when I see a Fighting Falcon out there instead of an Aermacchi, I actually do feel safe. Just you make sure the jet jockeys
driving this thing know we’re heading for London, not Langley, Mr Westwood. Because, you’re right, it
was
me flying that Piper Arrow over the Alps, and I’m perfectly
capable of driving this executive knocking shop as well.’

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow

Yuri Abramov stood at the rear of Colonel Yevgeni Zharkov’s spacious office and stared around.

Members of the search team the general had sent in were busily opening doors and drawers, looking for anything that might be construed as incriminating. As Abramov watched, one of the men pulled
a drawer completely out of the desk, the more easily to inspect its contents. As he lifted it up, another investigator spotted a metallic glint from the drawer’s underside, and muttered an
instruction.

Working together, the two men swiftly removed the contents of the drawer and stacked them on the desk. Then they turned it over to inspect the base. Immediately, Abramov saw precisely what had
attracted their attention. Secured to the underside of the drawer, with clear tape, were two flat keys. This find alone was enough to convince the searchers that they were onto something. If these
keys were innocent – if they merely fitted a lock in the colonel’s apartment or something in his office – then why were they hidden?

They studied the keys closely, then one of the men made a call. A few minutes later General Morozov himself appeared.

‘Leave them where they are,’ he instructed. ‘I will invite Colonel Zharkov to explain what they are used for, and why he felt it necessary to conceal them.’

Then he turned to face Yuri Abramov. ‘I hate to admit it,’ the old man said, ‘but it looks as if you were right and Zharkov is playing some kind of a dirty game.’

‘Have you questioned him, sir?’ Abramov asked.

Morozov nodded. ‘Yes, but he merely claims somebody is trying to set him up. And there is one thing he’s saying that makes sense. You found his apartment number on the call diverter
recovered from that office in the Lubyanka. Zharkov’s point is that the only reason for setting up such a diversion would be to link a computer terminal, here at Yasenevo, with another
computer inside his apartment, so as to enable files and data to be sent out of this building. And because the call would apparently terminate in the Lubyanka itself, no suspicion would be aroused
that anything was wrong.’

‘That was exactly what I thought, sir,’ Abramov agreed.

‘But Zharkov doesn’t own a personal computer, and claims he has never had such a machine in his apartment. Of course, it’s possible that he may have secreted it somewhere else,
if he became concerned that questions might be asked of him. What I would like you to do, Major, is examine that call diverter and see if there are any other numbers on it that you might be able to
recover. Can you do that?’

‘It depends on the way the diverter functions, but I will do my best.’

‘And do it right now,’ Morozov instructed, ‘before I ask Zharkov to explain what we’ve just found here.’

One of the search team escorted Abramov back to his office, and stood watching while the major tried to analyse the diverter’s history. It was quickly clear to Abramov that somebody had
wiped any earlier numbers from the device, and apart from the telephone number that he now knew belonged to Colonel Zharkov’s apartment, there was only one other recorded. He wrote it down on
a piece of paper, then ran a check on the directory system. But that produced no information and, wherever that particular number terminated, it was not a location known to the SVR.

Back in the colonel’s office, Abramov explained what he’d found.

‘Leave it with me now,’ Morozov instructed. ‘I’ll organize a back-trace of that number.’

London

The next message Andrew Lomas received from Moscow through the Australian website was completely unexpected, bearing in mind the earlier communications.

He had genuinely expected simply to receive confirmation that Raya Kosov had been captured somewhere in northern Italy, and then handed over to the Russian authorities. Instead, he was told
that, against all odds, she had somehow managed to escape into France, and had then climbed into a North American registered executive jet, which had flown north. Moscow’s assessment of the
situation was that the aircraft was making for London, so it was now up to Lomas to ensure that Kosov was unable to pass on any classified information to the British. And, more importantly, he must
make certain she wouldn’t be able to betray the identity of the jewel in Moscow’s crown – the high-level SIS officer who had been working for the Russians for over twenty
years.

Lomas closed the Internet connection and sat back in his chair to consider his next move. The first thing to do was obvious: identify the destination of the aircraft in which Kosov was
travelling. That was probably the easy bit because, if it was heading for London, it wouldn’t land at any of the three major civilian airports, Heathrow, Gatwick or Stansted, for a variety of
reasons. That left only one choice, RAF Northolt, a military airfield conveniently located just north of Heathrow, with easy access to London and also the benefit of being closed to the public. It
seemed to him the only possible destination.

He knew he would never be able to gain access to the airfield, but that didn’t present an insurmountable problem. He didn’t need to actually enter RAF Northolt, only find out where
Raya Kosov was taken when she left the airfield. Once he knew that, he could decide exactly how to carry out the orders he’d received from Moscow Centre.

Lomas considered his next move carefully. It would mean breaking cover but, in the circumstances, he felt he had no option. There was no way that he could complete his assignment without help
– and expert help at that.

Twenty minutes later he left his apartment and walked for about a quarter of a mile through the rain-soaked streets of West London. He picked a public phone box at random and made a call to a
man he’d never met but whose name he knew very well. Although Lomas was using a public phone, he still had to be very careful in what he said and how he said it, because the man at the other
end of the line was sitting in Harrington House at 13 Kensington Palace Gardens. It was home to the Russian Embassy in London, and all lines going into the building would almost certainly be
monitored by British intelligence.

He used a series of code words couched in seemingly innocent and innocuous sentences to establish his bona fides, and finished by requesting a callback. He gave the Russian a telephone number
which didn’t exist, but which he knew was held in a highly classified file inside the embassy, together with the real number to which the callback should be directed. That was a pay-as-you-go
mobile phone which Lomas used just often enough to keep it active, but which he never used for any kind of sensitive conversation.

Less than a quarter of an hour later, during which time the Russian SVR officer had to leave the embassy and find a phone box, Lomas’s mobile rang. He answered it and then issued a series
of urgent orders in Russian.

When he’d finished, Lomas used the public phone to make another very brief call. The man who answered sounded irritated, which was unsurprising. Most busy men would react that way if a
car-insurance salesman called their personal mobile phone with details of some fatuous special offer during the working day. But, when Lomas ended the call, he felt certain that the other man had
completely understood his message.

RAF Northolt, West London

The Lear 60 landed smoothly a little under ninety minutes later. The pilot had filed an in-flight flight plan while the aircraft was somewhere over central France. There
had been no delays, caused by air traffic or otherwise, in their approach and final landing. Their escort duty over, the pair of F-16s had peeled off as the Lear crossed the coast of southern
England, and then headed north for their own landing at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk.