Overkill (10 page)

Trushenko unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt and extracted a slim steel key on a chain that he invariably wore around his neck. He inserted the key in the lock and turned it twice, then
grasped the recessed handle on the safe door and opened it. Inside were a dozen or so video tapes plus three bulky files. Trushenko removed the top file and took it back to his chair. The name on
the file cover was ‘
Podstava
’, and Trushenko already knew the contents almost by heart.

Hammersmith, London

It was eight forty when Richter got out of the lift on the seventh floor, knocked on the dark green door with the word ‘Director’ inscribed in faded gold leaf,
and walked in. Richard Simpson – the Foreign Operations Director – was waiting for him, looking pointedly at his watch. ‘You’re late,’ he said, somewhat sourly.

‘I know,’ Richter replied. ‘Traffic,’ he added. He put his briefcase on the floor and sat down in the armchair in front of the desk.

‘I didn’t say you could sit,’ Simpson snapped.

‘That’s true.’

So far, the interview was going more or less as usual. Simpson was small, about five eight, with a pink and freshly scrubbed look about him. He’d headed the Foreign Operations Executive
for six years, which was four years longer than Richter had been employed there, and throughout that period he’d almost never been known to praise anyone or anything.

Richter still simmered slightly whenever he met Richard Simpson. Two years earlier Richter had been an out-of-work ex-Royal Navy Sea Harrier pilot with a minimal pension and a gratuity that was
leaching out of his bank account at an astonishing rate. He’d spent three irritating months scratching about, trying and failing to find any kind of employment that would pay his mortgage
without boring him to death. Then he’d attended an interview in London for a courier job that was so intriguing that Richter had just had to take it. It had sounded too good to be true, and
it had been.

Sent into France on a courier assignment that nobody, and certainly not Richter, believed made any sense, he had been set up by Simpson as an unwitting target to trap a high-level traitor in the
Secret Intelli-gence Service. Richter had been considered expendable, with no family to make a fuss if he didn’t return. Against all the odds, Richter had survived the encounter, which the
SIS officer hadn’t, and his performance had convinced Simpson that he was too useful to lose. The death of the SIS officer was marked ‘unsolved’ by the Metro-politan Police and
the French authorities, but the file was still open, and Simpson had made it clear that if Richter ever stepped out of line, he would be only too happy to assist the police with their enquiries
into the matter.

Simpson stared at Richter from the opposite side of the desk, and Richter stared straight back at him. Behind the row of cacti on his desk – the cacti were about the only things Simpson
seemed to have any affection for, and there were more of them in serried ranks on all three window-sills – his face was all Richter could see, his dark, almost black, eyes unwinking.
‘Come on, then. I haven’t got all day.’

Richter opened the briefcase, took out the notebook he had been using in Moscow and put it on the desk in front of him. The other items could wait until later. ‘Right,’ he said.
‘We got the signal about Newman on Tuesday evening. I flew into Moscow – economy class as usual – on Wednesday morning and checked into the Budapesht Hotel under cover name
Willis. I rang the Embassy that afternoon and got an appointment for the following morning with the First Secretary, a man called Horne, William Horne.

‘As agreed with Tactics and Equipment, I presented him with the insurance company letter and accreditation, and after a bit of grumbling he passed me on to the Fourth Under-Secretary,
Simon Erroll. I inspected the car and the body that morning – the corpse was in the basement fridge – and the office and apartment that afternoon. Then I flew back to Heathrow.

‘I took an abstract from Newman’s file before I left,’ Richter continued. ‘He was five feet eleven, weighed about twelve and a half stone, had fair hair and a fair
complexion. There is no mention of any distinguishing marks. The body in Moscow was about the correct height and weight, though obviously it was impossible to measure or weigh the cadaver without
Erroll smelling a rat. The hair and skin colour looked correct, but the face was completely unrecognizable, and the burning of the hands had destroyed the fingerprints.’

Simpson opened the personnel file in front of him and looked up expectantly. ‘So how do you know it wasn’t Newman?’

‘I’m coming to that. When people talk about distinguishing marks, they think about scars or birthmarks. Newman had no obvious scars or marks, so they probably didn’t realize.
He had had an in-growing toenail on his right foot removed about ten years ago. The body in the basement mortuary in Moscow had all ten toe-nails.’

Simpson studied the file for a few moments in silence. ‘There’s no mention here of a toenail removal.’

‘Yes there is,’ Richter said, ‘in the “Summary of Hospital Treatment”. Newman had only had three operations – removal of tonsils and draining of sinuses when
he was a kid, and the toenail job. The effect on the toe is quite unmistakable. The nail never grows normally again, because the nail bed is excised, wholly or partially.’

Simpson finally closed the file with a snap. ‘Two questions. If the body wasn’t Newman, who was it? And where’s Newman?’

‘Two answers,’ replied Richter. ‘I don’t know – at least, I know what he was, but not who he was – and Newman’s dead.’

Le Moulin au Pouchon,
St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

The four men had rented the small three-bedroomed house about a mile outside the village some four months earlier, and they had all lived in the property ever since. The
reason for this uninterrupted occupation was simple security – although the level of crime in rural France was commendably low, an unoccupied property was still a target and the one thing
they couldn’t risk was some French low-life breaking in and stealing any of the equipment or, worse, talking about what he had seen inside.

Actually, there wasn’t very much to attract a thief to the house. No readily saleable items like TV sets or hi-fi equipment. There was a TV set, but it was at least ten years old, big and
bulky, and of little or no value. Hassan Abbas had bought it second-hand from an electrical shop in Aire-sur-l’Adour, the local town where they did most of their shopping. There wasn’t
even much in the way of furniture. Four single beds, two in each of the largest bedrooms, a table and four chairs in the kitchen. In the living room, two elderly sofas were pushed against opposite
walls and on one wall there was a single incongruity – a clear mark showing the direction of Mecca so that prayers could be said correctly. Below the mark there were four highly decorated
prayer mats.

There were no curtains at the windows, because the faded wooden shutters were always kept closed, and no signs of anything that might be described as the comforts of home. In fact, the only
items of real value lay behind the door of the third and smallest bedroom, at the back of the house. The door to this room was the only one with a lock – a five-lever exterior quality Chubb
which had been fitted within a week of the signing of the tenancy agreement at the agency in Aire-sur-l’Adour – and it was always kept locked unless the equipment in the room was
actually being used. The room’s single exterior window was, like all the other windows, kept firmly closed, as were the external shutters. What was not visible from the outside was the steel
grille bolted to the wall inside the room and which completely covered the window opening – another unofficial addition to the property which Abbas had organized.

The other invisible deterrents to a thief were the Glock 17 semi-automatic pistols always carried by each of the four men, and the two AK47 Kalashnikov assault rifles, magazines fully charged,
which were kept propped up behind each of the two outside doors. They had also spent some time carefully positioning plastic explosive charges on the inside of the ground-floor doors and windows,
to be actuated by trip-wires, and installing a number of high-wattage floodlights under the eaves, powerful enough to illuminate the entire grounds.

There were two reasons why the old mill had been chosen, rather than either of the two other houses that had been on the short list. The first was a unique architectural feature of the property
that Abbas had stumbled on almost by accident, and which he devoutly hoped he would never have to use. Just over two miles from the house was the second reason; a small nondescript grey concrete
building, it was the automated telephone exchange which served the properties in the shallow valley which opened up to the south of St Médard.

When Abdullah Mahmoud – the name in the genuine Moroccan passport carried by Hassan Abbas when he had stepped off the ferry from Tangier at Algeciras – had decided on the location of
the property they needed, he had planned to have an ADSL line installed. An Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line would have provided a permanent Internet connection, but technical requirements
meant that the user had to live within about four miles of the local exchange. The other two houses he had been considering were each over ten miles from their respective exchanges, hence the
choice of the St Médard property.

In the event, Sadoun Khamil, who had first supported Abbas’ decision, had later vetoed the idea of ADSL, simply because it would have been an unusual request in that area and might have
attracted attention. So instead Abbas had signed up for Internet access with Wanadoo, one of the French service providers, and relied on a dial-up connection through the V92 internal modem in the
2GHz IBM desktop computer that sat on a rough square table against the wall in the locked rear bedroom of the house.

The PC had been supplied with Microsoft Windows XP, but Abbas had stripped that off because of the potential ‘spyware’ implications of the Product Activation routine, and had
installed Windows ME and Office 2000 instead. The machine had come with Outlook Express and Internet Explorer, which worked well enough despite various security loopholes and which Abbas had left
alone, but he had added an anti-virus suite and a firewall for safety. He’d also installed a copy of the PGP – Pretty Good Privacy – file encryption program.

Next to the computer was a small-footprint Hewlett-Packard laser printer, which was used only to print the very rare email messages intended for the group, rather than just Abbas, to see. On the
floor next to the table was a large uninterruptible power supply – a UPS – which would provide back-up power to the computer for about half an hour in the event of a mains power
failure. Beside the UPS was a black leather Samsonite case containing a powerful laptop computer to be used as a back-up to the IBM machine in case of some kind of major software or hardware crash,
and a mobile telephone in case the landline ever failed. And apart from two upright chairs, the room contained nothing else.

Every afternoon Abbas unlocked the door of the back bedroom, switched on the computer, opened Internet Explorer and surfed the Internet for a couple of hours, concentrating on pornographic
sites. This he had done ever since they had taken the house, establishing a routine that served to cloak his real activity on the web. He had no interest whatsoever in the lurid images that flashed
across the screen, and barely even glanced at them. All he was interested in was one site that he himself had created and that was hosted on a low-cost server in Arizona. He had done nothing to
promote the site, so very few people knew it existed, and fewer still bothered to visit it because it was, even by the low standards normally applied to sex sites, remarkably badly constructed and,
frankly, boring.

One link on the site generated a 404 error – page not found – but pressing the ‘Refresh’ button three times within two seconds ran a small piece of code Abbas had
embedded in the site. This action didn’t produce a new page but simply dialled the classified number of a distant mainframe computer, which Abbas logged on to at least once every week.

As well as surfing the net, Abbas had established himself on several email mailing lists, and every day had to wade through some fifty advertising messages. The majority of these he deleted
immediately, but he always read the messages from one advertiser in Germany completely. Some of these messages he deleted after reading, but some he didn’t. Although the originating address
was German, these emails had actually been sent from a different country, using a series of redirection sites to conceal their true origin.

That morning, Abbas downloaded the overnight messages and found only one from the German email address. He scanned through it carefully, then grunted with satisfaction. About halfway down the
page were a few lines of what appeared to be corrupted text. Abbas highlighted the text and copied it into the word processor, then closed his Internet connection and shut down Outlook Express.
Then he ran the decryption routine in the 128-bit PGP encryption program on the copied text, using his private key, and read the message twice. Its contents disturbed him, and he knew Khamil had to
be told at once.

Abbas spent forty minutes working at the computer, composing and encoding a message for Sadoun Khamil’s eyes only, which he embedded in another advertising email, this one with a Spanish
originating address. As with the incoming message, Abbas arranged for it to be bounced from server to server before finally being delivered to Saudi Arabia.

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi
Headquarters, Yazenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow

It was, Sokolov thought, as he surveyed the pile of folders and files on the desk in front of him, an almost impossible task. He was not even sure that Nicolai Modin was
right, that one of the records he was studying was that of a traitor. It was surely possible that the Americans had flown their spy-plane just because they wanted to photograph the weapon test
site.