As per orders, they had driven to an empty warehouse in a slum not far from Jamaica Bay, tied the weeping foreigner to some pipes and prepared to complete the assignment. Their orders were very simple. Knock him about a bit and ask him one simple question: where is your son?
Then it had gone wrong. At the second punch from the gang leader, the man had convulsed, his eyes had bulged and he had slumped in the ropes. They thought he had lost consciousness and tried to revive him. But he was dead. Apart from the word ‘please’ over and over, he had said not a word. They had been more worried about the reaction of their boss than about the stiff.
Three of the five went outside to find a place to dump the body. The fourth and Ulyanov stayed to untie the corpse and see if the man had anything worth taking. The other Russian took the signet ring and the billfold; Ulyanov took the watch and stuffed it in his trouser pocket. Later, he put it on his wrist in place of his cheap Timex.
Sitting facing two steely-eyed detectives, the Russian thug realized that if he named his fellow killers he was a dead man. So he was stunned when they offered him a quite different deal. Though, privately, they knew a murder charge would not stand, they told him they were interested in one thing only and that they may be able to drop the charge if they got it. What did the Limey say before he died?
Viktor Ulyanov thought it over. Answering seemed harmless enough. Set against twenty to life?
‘He didn’t say nothing.’
‘Nothing? Nothing at all?’
‘Not a word. Just took the second punch, choked and died.’
The detectives had their answer. They passed it on to the FBI HQ in Washington, which passed it on to London.
For Sir Adrian, the sudden death of Harold Jennings in New York and the assurance from the NYPD that he seemed to have uttered not a word about his son or, more vitally, about his son’s new location, was a partial relief. But only partial.
More to the point was a nagging worry. How had the Russians ever heard the name Jennings or found the right Harold Jennings in a New York apartment 3,500 miles away? Somewhere – he had no idea where – there had been a leak.
It was self-evident that Moscow would not take the global humiliation of her grounded battlecruiser as just a bit of bad luck. Even without traditional Russian paranoia, they would work out that their computers had been penetrated. Back-engineering on board the Nakhimov and in the Murmansk database would have proved there had been a hack, and a very successful one, so clever that it had gone unnoticed until too late. That would entail a massive inquiry. And Sir Adrian had a pretty clear suspicion as to whom it had been entrusted.
That is one of the things about the aces of the intelligence world. Like chess players, they study one another. Outwitting rather than outshooting is the ideal. Shooting is for men in camouflage uniforms. Checkmate is more satisfying. Sir Adrian had worn the camo in the Paras and the dark suit in the Firm.
Though he was more than ten years older than the man at Yasenevo, he had noted the rising star of the SVR when he had been deputy chief of MI6. Yevgeni Krilov had been subtle and tenacious as head of his service’s Western Europe Division back in the day, and he had not disappointed in his subsequent career. He had gone on rising through the ranks to the seventh-floor office.
It is reported that during the desert campaign in North Africa in the Second World War the British general Bernard Montgomery had spent hours in his caravan staring at a picture of his opponent, the German Erwin Rommel. He was trying to work out what his enemy would do next. Sir Adrian had kept a file on Yevgeni Krilov. It too contained a portrait. He went back to his ex-colleagues at Vauxhall Cross and was allowed, for old times’ sake, to sit in a closed room and study the Krilov file.
Krilov had, in the late nineties, spent two years serving under the Rezident, or chief of station, in the SVR unit inside the Russian embassy in London. He was non-declared, meaning he was posing as a harmless junior cultural attaché, but the British knew exactly what he really was.
In that strange danse macabre that is espionage it is common for agents on opposite sides to attend embassy cocktail parties – conversing, beaming, clinking glasses and pretending to be all jolly diplomats together, while behind the mask privately intending to outwit and destroy the opponent. Sir Adrian believed he might have met the (then) junior Russian spy at one such Russian reception.
What he could not know was that there had nearly been another meeting. It would have been in Budapest, on that occasion
when he turned away from a meet with a defector Russian colonel because he sensed it had been ‘blown’. He discovered later he was right. The tortured colonel had given everything away before he was executed. Because the traitor was a Russian, the ÁVO, Hungary’s secret police, had invited a man from the Russian embassy to be present at the capture of the British agent. Budapest was Krilov’s third foreign posting. He had been sitting inside the ÁVO trap, waiting for the British spy who never appeared.
Closing the file and leaving Vauxhall, Sir Adrian’s suspicion grew stronger. Krilov had not climbed from Russian embassy gofer to the seventh floor at Yasenevo for nothing. He must be the man tasked to trace the super-hacker.
Weston also knew that Moscow had learned two names: Jennings and Luton. He did not know how. But it no longer mattered. The Jennings family had disappeared from there, but he had every right to presume that Moscow had never heard the name Chandler’s Court. And yet … and yet. He had that gut feeling again. That was why he wanted a small but expert squad of armed men around the boy. A few soldiers at Chandler’s Court might not be a bad idea.
In a miserable back alley in Brownsville, Krilov’s chosen minions had failed him, but if Moscow had really decided that the heads and hands that had created the humiliation of the Admiral Nakhimov dwelt in that small island off the north-west coast of Europe which the Vozhd loathed so heartily, he would not stop there. He would try again.
Sir Adrian would have been even more disquieted if he could have hovered, spectre-like, in the office of his adversary above the birch forest at Yasenevo.
Spread out across Krilov’s desk was a large print-out of a photograph. The original had been taken by a Russian space satellite rolling unseen over central England, diverted off its original planned course at his request. The machine had followed the coordinates programmed into it from far below. It had taken the picture then resumed its original orbit. The next time it was over Russia it had beamed down the image it had been asked for.
Yevgeni Krilov took a large magnifying glass and studied the image at the centre of the aerial map. It showed a walled, forested estate known as Chandler’s Court.
Chapter Seven
YEVGENI KRILOV DID not work for a squeamish organization. In its time and recently under his direction the SVR had organized repeated foreign assassinations, but Krilov always preferred to use surrogates to accomplish the wet work.
Staring at the print-out of the satellite photo, he realized he had resolved the first two problems set him by the Vozhd. The gut instinct of the President had been right after all. It was the British, not the Americans, who had inflicted this humiliation upon Mother Russia, in revenge for the Skripal affair.
In the early spring of 2018 a Russian living quietly in the British cathedral city of Salisbury was very nearly assassinated by Russian agents. Sergei Skripal had once spied for Britain against Russia. He had been detected, tried, sentenced and imprisoned in Russia. On his release, he had been allowed to emigrate to the UK and settle there.
He was living quietly, indeed invisibly, when a Russian agent had smeared the deadly nerve agent Novichok on his door handle. Both Skripal and his visiting daughter, Yulia, had touched the agent and been almost mortally poisoned. A hitherto unknown British antidote had just saved them both. The credit had gone to Porton Down.