Overkill (32 page)

Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye
Headquarters, the ‘Aquarium’, Khodinka Airfield, Moscow

Since the effective end of the Cold War, the number of Russian surveillance satellites which has been launched has dropped considerably, but there are still several
vehicles, all operated by the Directorate of Cosmic Intelligence of the GRU, established in polar orbits which do little but watch the American landmass. Like the early American Big Bird satellites
and the current KH–11 and KH–12 Keyhole vehicles, the Russian platforms are equipped with sophisticated optical devices and an assortment of other detectors working in the nonvisible
electromagnetic spectrum, and are primarily designed to detect any military activity which might be considered a threat to Russia.

The kind of activity which falls into this category includes precisely the actions taken by the American military machine when the DEFCON state is increased, and five hours after America went to
DEFCON FOUR the first satellite pictures arrived at the Aquarium.

Thirty minutes after that, the GRU duty commanding officer was en route to the Kremlin with a sheaf of pictures and a hastily prepared intelligence appraisal.

Stepney, London

Richter left Hammersmith an hour and a quarter later, after the evening meeting, told the duty driver that he was taking the Escort, and drove back to his apartment.
Richter’s London home was in an undistinguished building, lurking in the warren of streets that lay north of Commercial Road, which had originally been a grand town house for some unknown
Victorian merchant. Richter had taken a lease on one of the two top-floor apartments shortly after he had started working for FOE. It was small, anonymous, fairly central, but above all reasonably
cheap, at least by London standards, all of which seemed to Richter to be pretty good reasons for staying there.

In the flat, he pulled off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair, kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the couch. He needed time to think, time to try to tie some of the loose
ends together. Just after eleven thirty the telephone rang and Richter stumbled off the couch and went into the hall to answer it. The FOE duty driver wanted to collect the Escort, unless Richter
still needed it.

‘No,’ Richter said. ‘Help yourself. It’s parked right outside my building.’

As he was on his feet, and getting hungry, Richter walked into the kitchenette, opened the freezer door and surveyed the contents with a marked lack of enthusiasm. He selected a frozen lasagne,
read the instructions, put it in the microwave and returned to the living room.

The ‘ping’ of the microwave timer came several minutes later, and was followed almost immediately by a muffled but loud and echoing thump that Richter couldn’t identify. What
he knew was that the noise hadn’t come from inside the apartment.

He peered out of the windows, but could see nothing unusual, so he walked down the hall to the windows which overlooked the main road. The first thing he saw was two men running across the road,
towards his building, and a few seconds later he heard the distant wail of a siren, getting closer. Then he looked down at the street directly below him. It was only then, when he saw the
blackened, twisted pile of metal that had once been the Motor Pool’s Escort that he knew just how far wrong things had gone.

Saturday
Stepney, London

Richter took another brief glance downwards at the ruins of the car, turned away and walked back into his apartment. He closed and bolted the door on the inside, then
walked through into his bedroom. His face was set and icy calm, and he moved with swift and deliberate purpose.

He peeled off his grey trousers and tossed them on the bed. Then he opened the wardrobe door and pulled out a pair of blue jeans, a black leather motorcycle jacket, a pair of black trainers, a
dark blue polo-neck sweater and a small grey haversack. He put on the jeans, fastening the waist with a broad leather belt, pulled on the sweater and laced up the trainers. Then he reached up to
the top of the wardrobe and pulled down a dark red motorcycle helmet and a pair of leather gloves, which he placed on the bed.

Walking back into the living room, he put his mobile phone in the haversack. Then he walked across to a desk set against the wall opposite the main windows and pulled open a drawer. From it he
took a pair of rubber surgical gloves, a glasscutter, a roll of black adhesive tape, a small flashlight and two spare batteries, and put them all into the haversack.

He pulled the shoulder holster on over the sweater, then checked that the Smith and Wesson was fully loaded and put the pistol into the holster. He put six spare rounds into one of the pockets
of his jeans, and the rest of the bullets into the haversack in their cardboard box.

He ate the cooling lasagne and drank about half of a pint carton of milk. Then he walked back into the bedroom, put on the leather jacket and picked up the helmet and gloves. He shrugged the
haversack on to his back, snapped off all the lights except the low-wattage bulb in his hallway, and walked to the main door of his apartment. For just over a minute he peered through the spyhole
out into the hallway on his floor, then pulled out the Smith and cautiously unbolted and pulled open the apartment door.

Looking down from the head of the stairs, Richter saw and heard nothing. The locks on the building doors were good enough to keep casual thieves out, but he doubted that the people who had wired
the explosive to the Escort’s ignition system came into that category.

Satisfied, he pressed the call button for the lift and waited. When it arrived, he slid inside and pressed the button for the garage floor and watched as the numbers unwound. The garage lights
were activated by motion detectors, and were out when the lift doors slid open and Richter emerged. Nevertheless, he checked carefully around the perimeter before walking across to the far side of
the parking area, where a bulky shape lurked under a green tarpaulin.

When he’d first arrived in London, Richter had come in a car. Within a month he’d realized that four-wheeled vehicles were much less use than he’d anticipated, and he’d
returned to his first love – motorcycles. At the place he still called home – a ramshackle cottage on the east side of the Lizard Peninsular in Cornwall – he kept an immaculate
Vincent Black Shadow and a Velocette Venom Thruxton in a securely locked prefabricated garage.

Wonderful though these bikes were, they were useless in London, being too valuable, too attractive and simply too unreliable to be practical forms of transport. In London, Richter rode Japanese.
Cheap, old, fast Japanese.

He pulled the tarpaulin off the Honda 500–4 and tossed it on to the garage floor, swung his leg over the saddle, stuck the key in the ignition, turned it and pressed the starter button. As
always, the engine burst instantly into life, then settled down to a steady, even tickover. Used to a long series of British-built motorcycles, it had taken Richter a long time to come to terms
with the total reliability that characterized most Oriental machines, but now he just accepted it as normal.

He settled the haversack more comfortably on his back, pulled in the clutch, snicked the gear lever into first and moved quickly away towards the door. Richter stopped by a pillar, reached out a
gloved hand to press a button, waited as the electric motors swung the double doors open, then switched on the Honda’s lights and accelerated up the ramp and away into the silent streets,
heading for Aldgate and London Bridge.

Turabah, Saudi Arabia

The email from Hassan Abbas, which contained the complete transcript of Dmitri Trushenko’s analysis of the implications of the American over-flight of the weapon
test site, plus Abbas’ own comments, pretty much confirmed what Sadoun Khamil had already deduced. As soon as he’d been told about the flight of the spy-plane, Khamil had copied
Abbas’ email, added his own take on the incident, encrypted it and had sent it to his contact with the al-Qaeda leadership, Tariq Rahmani, a dour, secretive man even by Arabic standards, who
remained almost permanently in the background. Although Khamil had explicit instructions to contact only this one man, he had actually met Rahmani only twice in his life.

He knew little about him, not even which country he lived in, as he used a web-based email service and a mobile phone registered in Saudi Arabia. What Khamil did know was that Rahmani was very
close to the top of the al-Qaeda leadership, and that his decisions had the force of law within the organization. And that made Khamil tread very carefully around him.

Now, with Abbas’ very detailed and explanatory email on the screen in front of him, Khamil thought carefully before composing his own message. Like Abbas, he didn’t see what
practical difference the American overflight of Russia made to their own, secret, operation, the part of the plan that al-Qaeda had named
El Sikkiyn
.

Finally, he shrugged. He wouldn’t, he decided, say anything at all. He’d just forward the message from Abbas in its entirety and leave it at that.

Battersea, London

Richter pulled into the kerb in Fenchurch Street and checked carefully that no other vehicles stopped anywhere near him. He’d watched the mirrors of the Honda
constantly since he’d ridden it out of the garage, and had seen no obvious signs of pursuit, possibly because the watchers – and there would definitely have been watchers – would
probably have been looking for a man in a suit, not a black-clad figure on a motorcycle.

Satisfied, Richter pulled out his cell phone and rang the Duty Officer. Using the vague and woolly double-talk necessary when speaking about a highly sensitive matter on an open line, Richter
finally managed to acquaint him with the essential details, and also told him that he would be telling Simpson about it.

‘It is after one o’clock, you know,’ the Duty Officer reminded him.

‘I know.’

‘He won’t like being woken up.’

‘That’s my problem, not yours. Just tell the Pool and you’d better have a chat with the Met as well.’

Simpson, predictably enough, was a bachelor and lived in a service flat in Battersea, and the Duty Officer had been quite right. Richter had tried to call him immediately after he rang off from
Hammersmith, but just got the ansaphone. When he arrived at the building, it took the better part of five minutes to get Simpson to respond to the entry phone before Richter even got into the
building. Simpson’s face, as he edged his apartment door cautiously open, was puffy and full of sleep, and his greeting was notably lacking in warmth. ‘What do you want? Do you know
what time it is? And what the hell are you dressed like that for?’

‘Yes,’ Richter said, ‘I do own a watch. I want to come in. I’m in a hurry, and I’ve got some bad news for you.’

Simpson stared at him suspiciously. ‘What kind of bad news?’

‘The kind I don’t want to talk about out here in the hallway.’ Richter pushed the door open impatiently and walked in.

Simpson slammed it shut behind him. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.

Richter told him the night’s events in clipped tones. Simpson thought for a second and walked over to the telephone. He dialled, switched in the scrambler, held a very brief and subdued
conversation, replaced the receiver and walked back. ‘The driver was Brian Jackson,’ he said. ‘They had to do a run down to Manor Park, and decided to collect the Escort on the
way back. He’d only been married three months.’

Richter nodded. Simpson got up again and walked over to the drinks’ cabinet. He pulled out a bottle of malt whisky and splashed a generous three fingers into a tumbler. He held the bottle
up towards Richter.

‘I know you don’t normally, but—’

‘I don’t ever,’ Richter said. ‘I’ll make myself a coffee.’ The kitchen area was small but well equipped. Richter spooned instant coffee into a mug and
switched on the electric kettle. While he waited for it to boil, he went back into the lounge. Simpson was sitting in his armchair, looking old and tired. He took a long swallow of his Scotch and
looked up.

‘This has got to stop,’ Simpson said. His eyes were like black coals in his pink face. Richter nodded. For the moment they were in complete agreement, but Richter doubted if they
would be when he told him what he was going to do. The kettle emitted a high-pitched scream, and Richter returned to the kitchen and poured water into the mug. He added milk from the fridge and sat
down in a chair.

‘What’s going on?’ Simpson asked, for the second time that night.

‘I think I’ve worked most of it out, now,’ Richter said.

Oval Office, White House,
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

His Excellency Mr Stanislav Nikolai Karasin, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Embassy of the Confederation of Independent States, sat somewhat stiffly
in the leather armchair and looked over at the President of the United States of America.

‘Mr President,’ he began formally, ‘I thank you for agreeing to see me this evening at such short notice, for the matter is grave.’

The grey-haired man opposite him smiled slightly. ‘It is always a pleasure to see you, Mr Ambassador. How can I help?’

The Russian diplomat paused briefly. When he spoke, he sounded almost embarrassed. ‘Mr President, we have, as you know, bilateral agreements which require each of our countries to inform
the other in advance of any planned major military exercises or operations. Despite this, our technical surveillance systems indicate that you have ordered your armed forces to a higher alert state
than normal – what you refer to, I believe, as Defence Condition Four – and there appears to be significant activity at many of your military establishments. Have your staff, perhaps,
forgotten to inform us of some exercise you have planned?’ Karasin stopped and waited.

The President looked at him levelly. ‘We have no exercise planned, Mr Ambassador,’ he replied. ‘It is true that we have moved our forces to a higher alert state, but this is
just a precautionary measure.’