Yes, there was the teenage super-hacker, but Weston was running him, selecting the damage, slamming in body blow after body blow at Russia.
His master was obsessed by the code-cracking youth. But the thwarting of Krilov’s Liechtenstein deception, the unveiling of Robert Thompson and the deliberate selection of ruinous targets – that was down to another mind, and every bell in his brain rang out the name Adrian Weston.
The Vozhd was still glaring out at the clouds now drenching Moscow.
‘What do you want?’ Krilov asked of the figure at the window.
The Vozhd turned, strode across the room and placed his hands on the shoulders of the seated Krilov. The spy chief looked up into two ice-cold, angry eyes.
‘I want it over, Yevgeni Sergeivich, I want it over. I don’t care how you do it, who you use. Find this boy and terminate him. One last chance, Yevgeni. One last chance.’
Krilov had his orders. He also had his ultimatum.
In the spy world, they all know each other. Or at least they know of each other. Across the great divide, they study one another as chess masters pore over the tactics and the character of the players they are going to battle at some future table where the weapons are queens and pawns.
Allies meet and dine, confer, consult and sometimes share. At diplomatic receptions, under the protection of the Vienna Accords and their diplomatic immunity, opponents smile and clink glasses, each knowing who the other is, what they really do and that, if possible, the one will wreck the other’s career. Sometimes they even collaborate – but only when the politicians, in their stupidity, are going too far. In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, they collaborated.
That awful October, as Kennedy ordered the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and Khrushchev refused, it had been the KGB chief for the whole American East Coast who sought out a CIA contact. The Russian proposed to the American that if the USA would give up her Turkish missile base at Incirlik, which threatened Russia, Khrushchev could save enough face in front of his own Politburo to abandon Cuba. A swap, not a humiliation. It worked. Had it not, someone was going to launch a nuclear missile.
Yevgeni Krilov, in the back seat of the limousine returning to Yasenevo, had not been born at the time, but he had researched the incident thoroughly. Later, racing up the promotion ladder in the KGB, he had studied the faces of the British, American and French department chiefs who opposed him across the chasm of the Cold War. And Weston had been among them.
Then came Gorbachev, the dissolution of the USSR, the abandonment of Communism, the end of the Cold War. Then years of humiliation for Russia, much of it self-inflicted, which was even now being avenged. And by the time that was over, the man he was thinking of had retired. Five years later, at fifty, Krilov had been promoted to the chieftaincy of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. He had thought there could no longer be a clashing of swords. But Weston had come back and, since he had, things had never gone so wrong.
Far to the west, the man he was thinking of, more than ten years his senior, was having a drink with friends at the bar of the Special Forces Club. The bar was noisy, convivial with shared jokes and old memories. Sir Adrian sat in his corner chair nursing his glass of claret, nodding and smiling when addressed but otherwise lost in thought. He was thinking of a Russian far away whom he had never met but whom he had first clashed with, and defeated, over twenty-five years before. Thanks to the witless Vernon Trubshaw.
It was at the end of the Cold War, but no one knew that. Back then, when so much of the land behind the Iron Curtain was hard to get at, let alone operate within, it was common practice to ask innocent businessmen with a legitimate reason for going there to keep their eyes and ears open for any snippet that might interest officialdom, meaning the spook world. On return, there would be a friendly lunch and a gentle debriefing. Usually, these were sterile, but one never knew.
Vernon Trubshaw was the sales director of some company that was attending a trade fair in Sofia, capital of the iron-hard Bulgaria. He was asked for a BOLO, and Adrian Weston was tasked to debrief him. And Trubshaw, throwing back the government-paid-for wine, had an anecdote, probably valueless.
He had been included in an invitation to a reception at the Russian embassy and during it he went to the basement lavatory. On emerging, he found four men in the corridor. One of them, clearly the senior man, was tearing an almighty strip off a younger and very junior one. All in Russian, of which Trubshaw spoke not a word.
The younger man was nearly in tears of humiliation as the older man treated him like dirt. A week later, the thirsty Mr Trubshaw was asked to a second lunch. More government wine … and some photos. Adrian Weston had asked the British SIS team in Sofia for a small gallery of faces from the Russian embassy there. Trubshaw did not hesitate. His nicotine-yellow forefinger tapped two faces.
‘He was the one doing the screaming, and that was the one being roasted alive,’ he said. Another week later, under diplomatic cover, Adrian Weston was in Sofia. The local British intel team helped him with identifications. The humiliated Russian was Ilya Lyubimov, a junior gofer at their embassy. The next day, Weston knocked at the door of the young Russian’s apartment.
He knew it was a long shot and probably doomed to failure. But he had not the time to stalk the Russian, to catch him alone outside the embassy, then court him over several weeks until a friendship bloomed. Fortunately, he at least spoke fluent and rapid Russian.
The crash-bang approach to a recruitment rarely works but, once again, one never knew. Weston inveigled himself into Lyubimov’s flat and made his pitch. And it worked. The humiliation the young Russian had been subjected to in front of two collea
gues outside the lavatory doors had rankled deeply and still did. This was one profoundly dejected and disillusioned young man. And he was angry, very angry. An hour later, he agreed to ‘turn’ and spy for the West.
He was no real use, of course, but six months later he was returned to Moscow, still in the Foreign Ministry. Two years later, patience had its reward. Someone in Ciphers had a heart murmur and was invalided out. Lyubimov replaced him. The mother lode. All the ciphers of all the diplomatic cables, worldwide – London got them all and shared them with the USA. It lasted until Lyubimov, eight years later, on a visit to his widowed mother in St Petersburg, was knocked down and killed by a drunk driver on Nevsky Prospekt. The diplomat screaming abuse in the Russian embassy in Sofia ten years earlier had been Yevgeni Krilov.
In London, the knighted veteran Sir Adrian signalled for a refill. In Yasenevo, Krilov decided how he would fulfil his commission from the Vozhd. It was that or the end of him.
There was a man. He had heard of him and his reputation but had never met him. A man of the shadows, of the Spetsnaz. Even among these he was something of a secret, and he preferred it that way. He was known only as Misha, and he was the best sniper they had ever had.
There was talk that, in Syria, he had nailed over fifty terrorists of the al-Qaeda or ISIS persuasion and another hundred Ukrainian fighters in east Ukraine after the Russian invasion posing as an uprising. He was being compared to the legendary Zaitsev of Stalingrad.
A sniper is different. In combat men kill men, in the air, at sea or by shell, grenade and mortar on the ground. But they hardly ever see them as other human beings. When they use a rifle, the enemy is still just a form, a shape that slumps to the ground when dead. The sniper studies every tiny detail of the victim, before squeezing the trigger and ending the life.
It is not enough simply to be a marksman. Such an ace, horizontal and squinting through a scope-sight at a target on a range, can win an Olympic gold, but that piece of cardboard is presented to him, clipped motionless in place, unprotected. The combat sniper is a true manhunter.
Both have the capacity for total concentration, but the sniper must add to that the ability to remain utterly motionless, if need be for hours. The competition marksman does not need to hide himself; the sniper must remain invisible. He must suppress the urge to ease aching muscles, twitch, scratch or relieve his bladder, unless inside his clothing.
Camouflage is his salvation, his lifeline, and it will vary. In a city, it will be brickwork, stone, timber doors, windows, shattered glass, rubble. In the country, his background will be trees, bushes, grass, foliage or fallen timber. Into this, adorned with leaves and tufts, he must disappear like a creature of the wild. And then wait, hour after hour, until the target appears from his foxhole or crawls into vision.
All that waiting, all that thinking. It makes for a very private man, rarely a conversationalist even off-duty. Zaitsev had been the son of a hunter from Siberia, crawling through the wreckage of Stalingrad, taking down German after German. Misha was similar. He came from the Kamchatka, a land of snow and trees, but he could disappear into the broken brickwork of Aleppo or the scrubland of Luhansk and Donetsk, across the Ukrainian border.