Manhunt (9 page)

But there was something else. She had been playing a complex game virtually ever since she had arrived at Yasenevo, balancing the demands of her work – which were considerable – with
her own hidden agenda. That had been difficult but soon, perhaps very soon, it was going to pay off, because Raya Kosov, Deputy Data-Processing System Network Manager at Yasenevo, was quite
determined to quit her job, and the SVR, and leave Russia, and she wasn’t looking for any kind of severance package.

Vienna, Austria

The door didn’t open immediately but Richter knew, as soon as he pressed the buzzer, that he was being watched. After a second or two he spotted the lens of a tiny
closed-circuit TV camera, positioned above his head in one corner of the porch. Then a hidden speaker crackled, and a voice asked him something in German.

‘My name is Richter, and I have come to collect a packet,’ he announced, speaking the words slowly and carefully.

There was a short pause, then the sound of a lock being released, and the door swung slowly open. A swarthy, black-haired man stood in the hallway beyond, and beckoned Richter inside. There
didn’t seem to be any alternative, so Richter stepped across the threshold and stood waiting, with his back to the open door. The man stepped around him and pushed the door closed, then moved
back to face him.

‘Your passport, please,’ he asked, his English clear and precise but with a distinct German accent.

Richter handed over his diplomatic passport and, for a few seconds, the man studied the document and Richter alternately. Then he closed the passport and handed it back with a slight tilt of his
head. Richter almost expected him to click his heels together.

‘You’re late,’ the man observed.

‘I know,’ Richter replied, but didn’t elaborate.

The man, who still hadn’t introduced himself, gazed at Richter for a few seconds longer, then shrugged, and headed a few paces further down the hall. Stopping at a low table, he picked up
a parcel wrapped in brown paper, returned and handed it over. Richter opened his briefcase, slid the parcel inside, then closed and locked it. The man stepped past him, opened the street door again
and gestured.

As the door slammed shut behind him, Richter found himself standing on the pavement, briefcase in his left hand, and wondering which way to head next.

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow

Raya Kosov was planning to defect to the West, as she’d intended to since long before joining the SVR. And one of the things that she knew would sway the British
– having no time for the Americans, she hadn’t even considered approaching the CIA – was her dowry, so to speak; the information that she would bring out with her.

At the height of the Cold War, she knew, things had been very different. Any file clerk with a couple of secret files in a carrier bag had been welcomed with open arms, because the West was
desperate for any information that would reveal what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But today, after
glasnost
and the rest, and with Russia seeming to a large extent a
spent force, the Western intelligence services could afford to be more choosy.

These days, if the information wasn’t of a high enough standard, both the British SIS and the American CIA were quite happy to hand a defector back to the Russian authorities. In fact,
what they were ideally looking for wasn’t some highly placed defector who could bring out a bunch of classified data, but a highly placed mole that they could keep in play for as long as they
wanted. For a mole could provide data for years and could also, and just as importantly, be tasked with finding the answer to some specific question.

But the reality was that human moles, living just below the surface of the society they inhabited like their animal counterparts, were loathed by all who knew they were there, and would be
killed by anyone who got the chance. Raya wasn’t going along that route, though. She wasn’t even going to contact the SIS until after she’d got safely out of the Confederation of
Independent States, leaving her boats blazing behind her, just to make certain that the ‘mole’ option would be a non-starter.

The data she could supply, because of her privileged access at Yasenevo, should be enough to ensure her acceptance by the SIS. The rules governing the use of the database at Yasenevo were
broadly similar to those applied to any other databases containing classified information. All users had to be authorized by a superior officer, and were then allowed access to only certain areas
of the database, and to such files as their duties required. Every time they logged on, each user had to enter a username and password, and then the access record attached to each file they
consulted would record their name and rank, the date and time the file was opened and closed, and any additions, amendments or deletions they made to that file. Besides, copying and deletion of any
files classified Secret and above required separate and specific authorization.

What all systems of this type required was a network manager; somebody with overall global authority to carry out what are normally termed housekeeping duties. These included such diverse tasks
as maintaining lists of authorized users, checking users’ passwords to ensure they complied with the system rules, altering the security classification of files, creating directories, moving
files from one directory to another, and archiving files that were no longer considered to be current. But the essential point was that the network manager saw everything, knew everything, and
could do everything. For if he or she didn’t, the system wouldn’t work.

That, in one way, was the strength of the system, but it was also, of course, its weakness. As long as the network manager was competent, motivated, and loyal to the organization, everything
would be fine. But when a network manager was competent but disloyal, the whole system stood in jeopardy. Raya Kosov herself was extremely competent and highly motivated, but also completely and
utterly disloyal.

Most traitors – and Raya Kosov had no illusions about how she would be viewed once her permanent absence was discovered by the SVR – would betray their country for one of three
reasons.

The most dangerous were the ideological traitors. These were people motivated by a belief that the system of government in their own country was immoral, corrupt or otherwise flawed and who,
rather than trying to change the system openly and legally, instead transmitted intelligence data to another nation that they did approve of. The Apostles were, for many, the classic example.

It was one of the ironies of history that most ideological traitors, like The Apostles themselves, had obtained their perception of the idyllic nature of that chosen country by looking at it
through the rose-tinted spectacles of youth. In most cases, they had never even visited the place, to confirm that their perception bore the slightest relation to reality. It was interesting that
when Blake, Philby and others finally escaped to the ‘Workers’ Paradise’, as they saw it, of Russia, all the evidence suggested that they loathed it. Anthony Blunt, of course,
didn’t even have the courage to move to Russia, but remained in the deeply flawed country of his birth which he had tried so hard to destroy, despite the intellectual pain this must have
caused him. Cairncross fled to France.

Such ideological traitors are dangerous mainly because they are so difficult to detect, and conventional counter-espionage techniques are frequently useless against them. There was no point, for
example, in checking an individual’s past history to determine if he has ever been to Russia or any another Communist state, where he could have been tainted or turned, because many such
traitors never experienced any direct contact with the regime they had decided to serve. Recruitment frequently occurred at an early age, usually at university, and the individual might then
refrain from engaging in any treacherous activity for years, doing nothing until well established in government service.

In the second category belong the mercenary traitors, who would sell out their country for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver, although with appropriate allowances for inflation. Aldrich
Ames, who had worked for the CIA and the SVR simultaneously, received almost five million dollars in return for the secrets he betrayed to the Russians. Ames should have been detected long before
he eventually was, because for so many years he and his wife had lived a blatantly opulent lifestyle that his CIA salary was incapable of supporting.

The third category was perhaps the saddest of all: the compromised traitors. These were weak and sad individuals harbouring a secret, very often a secret vice, which they will do anything to
keep secret – including betraying their own country. Before it lost some of its stigma, many of these were homosexuals who had suffered entrapment by KGB ‘quiet ones’ or
‘Ravens’. Just like heterosexual Ravens, these men were highly trained in the art of seduction, and lured their victims into specially prepared bedrooms, where KGB officers wielding
cameras were waiting behind one-way mirrors to record the encounter. Of these targets, perhaps the best-known example was John Vassal, the Admiralty traitor.

But there was a fourth possible motive for a person’s treachery, and it was almost as dangerous as ideology. Raya Kosov was driven by one of the oldest of human emotions, revenge. She had
a score to settle with one particular man, and for her the entire organization known as the SVR provided a convenient tool that she was now preparing to use in exacting her long-delayed
vengeance.

Vienna, Austria

Ninety minutes after picking up the parcel, Richter was sitting behind the wheel of a left-hand-drive Ford Focus with Austrian number plates which he’d hired from an
Avis office, rather than Hertz, in central Vienna. He was currently doing a steady one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour along the A2 autoroute leading south out of the city, and heading in the
general direction of Graz. In the glovebox was an insurance certificate valid for the whole of Europe, and a one-way hire agreement covering a period of two weeks. The car could be left at any
branch of Avis throughout Europe, and in the boot was his overnight bag, which he had driven back to the airport to pick up.

Richter was almost disappointed by the ease with which he had collected the parcel and made his way out of the city. He was still consciously watching his back, but so far had spotted absolutely
nothing untoward, and nobody appeared to be taking the slightest interest in him or what he was doing. That didn’t, he reflected, mean that he was wrong in his wariness. It probably just
meant that he hadn’t yet got far enough along the route specified by Simpson for his activities to become of interest to anyone.

After putting a reasonable distance behind him, he pulled into a service area just north of Wiener Neustadt. There, he found a quiet corner of the car park, slotted the Ford into a vacant space
and switched off the engine. There were two things he wanted to check before driving any further: the first was the route that Simpson had been most insistent he follow, and which Richter was
equally determined to avoid, as far as he possibly could; and the second was the sealed package itself.

He snapped open the briefcase and pulled out the typed briefing sheets which, to his slight surprise, Simpson hadn’t ordered him to memorize and then destroy. In fact they only contained
details of the route and a couple of telephone numbers, so, as far as Richter could see, there was nothing contained in them that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as
classified information.

The route was simple enough. Richter was instructed to follow the A21 autoroute westwards out of Vienna, then to pick up the A1 near Maria Anzbach and stay on that, crossing into Germany beyond
Salzburg. Then he was to proceed via Munich, entering France at Strasbourg, and turn south-west to Lyon and on to Toulouse. But he had followed this route for the shortest distance possible, by
deliberately ignoring the A21 turning and continuing along the A2.

He opened the glovebox and hauled out the route map that Avis had supplied him with, then worked out a new route that would take him down to Toulouse via Italy and Switzerland. Unfortunately,
the only part of Europe to be shown in any detail was Austria, while the remainder of the continent was shown merely as a planning aid. Richter made a mental note to buy himself a detailed
whole-of-Europe route map from the service station before he drove on.

Finally he turned his attention to the sealed package. Totally anonymous, with no markings of any sort and wrapped in thick brown paper, it was reasonably heavy but flexible, like a soft-cover
book about one inch thick. The parcel was sealed with red wax in three places, so as to prevent any casual peeking at the contents, but that wasn’t what Richter had in mind. He hooked his
fingers under the sealed flap at one end, ripped the paper apart, held the package by the other end and shook it briskly, spilling the contents onto the passenger seat beside him.

A wad of paper slid out, secured by two elastic bands fitted criss-cross, which Richter pulled off, before studying the top sheet. It was typewritten in Cyrillic script, which fortunately he
could read; for, like many keen young Royal Navy officers hoping for promotion, Richter had taken a course in Russian while he was serving in the Fleet Air Arm. In his case it hadn’t helped
his career very much, or even at all, but at least he could read the language, and still speak it fairly fluently. His attention was immediately drawn to a single word stamped in red ink at both
the top and bottom of the page –
Sekretno
– ‘Secret’ – and, for a brief few seconds, he wondered if ripping open the package had been a mistake.

Then he looked at the rest of the sheets and relaxed. The first six pages were also typewritten in Cyrillic, and each had the same red
Sekretno
stamps at top and bottom. The text appeared
to be an extract from a Russian nuclear submarine’s sonar manual – an old submarine, Richter noted, recognizing the vessel as a Victor III, with well-known capabilities. Technically,
the Russians might probably still regard details of this boat and its equipment as Secret, but in reality every Western navy now knew just as much about the old Victor as the officers and men who
had originally sailed in her. And, apart from a single smaller envelope, also sealed, the rest of the package consisted entirely of blank sheets of A4 size photocopying paper.