The Fox

Personally, Yevgeni Krilov had been against the business, but he had been overridden by the Vozhd. It turned out that Krilov had been right. In the aftermath, thirty-six Russian diplomats had been expelled, and the Britishers had chosen well. All thirty-six were embassy-based spies and their departure had savaged Krilov’s network in the UK.

It had all been a disastrous mistake, but he knew it was more than his job was worth to say so again. Now, a fresh catastrophe had occurred in the grounding of the pride of the Northern Fleet and Russian revenge was mandatory. At least he was two-thirds of the way there.

The British had discovered a secret weapon and they were prepared to use it with a ruthlessness he intended to match. It was not a piece of machinery. It was a human brain possessed by an autistic youth that could do the impossible. Like the cyber-scientists of Fort Meade, the Russians at Murmansk had presumed that the complexity of the firewall around the Murmansk database was impenetrable, and they had been proved wrong.

Thanks to an agent in Washington, the youth had acquired a name. Thanks to detective work in Luton, he had located the father of the genius, but he had proved useless. Now a new source had named the target – the place where the British had squirrelled away their secret weapon, out of sight and out of mind. Except he was very much on Krilov’s mind. He now had to accomplish the Vozhd’s third demand. Eliminate him; avenge the insult.

There were five pools of trained killers in Russia on which Krilov could draw. His real quandary was which one to use.

On the government payroll are two. There are the Spetsnaz – Special Forces soldiers to match the British SAS, the SBS and the almost invisible SRR, or the American Green Berets, Delta Force or Navy SEALs. All the soldiers were trained to the ultimate, with slightly varying skill sets, according to their particular talents or areas of expertise.

Inside the Spetsnaz was a secret unit trained to operate abroad. They attended a totally covert school which taught them how to move in civilian clothes unseen through various foreign societies, how to acquire their weapons from secret ‘drops’ where the embassy – importing in the cannot-be-touched diplomatic bag – had left what they needed, then to complete their mission and return to their regular life as invisibly as they had come. They practised foreign languages to high fluency levels and the most studied was the world’s common language, English.

Also in government service and under Krilov’s control was the old Department 13, expanded now and renamed Department V, or Otdel Mokrie Dela, the ‘wet affairs’ unit, a relic of the old KGB that had never been lost when the organization was split up and renamed under Gorbachev.

It had been two operators from Department V, one as team leader and the other to watch his back and drive the rented car, who had visited Salisbury to smear Novichok on the traitor’s door handle. Even the joke Russian ambassador in the UK, Yakovenko, knew nothing about them. That was why he had been able to stand up and tell the British press that the affair had nothing to do with Russia without even going pink.

Outside the SVR, Krilov could call on the organized criminal underworld, the Vory v Zakone. The Vory could always be relied upon to do favours for the government, secure in the knowledge that the favours would be repaid in Russia with contracts and concessions for their pandemic business empire.

Pretty much unknown in the West were the bikers, the Night Wolves, who operated at a level of violence that made California’s Hells Angels look like off-duty curates. Professing a savage patriotism, the Night Wolves specialized in attacking and crippling foreign football fans who travelled in Europe to support their teams. Among them were a sprinkling of ex-Spetsnaz veterans and English-speakers.

Finally, there were two non-Russian groups who could be relied upon to do ‘contract’ work for Moscow, each of whom had networks of criminal gangs notorious for extreme levels of violence – the Chechens and the Albanians.

Non-state contractors would need funding, but this, too, was not a problem. The Kremlin had the closest links with the network of industrial and commercial billionaires who had become unimaginably rich by scalping the assets of their homeland and then moving abroad to live in luxury. Some, the foolish ones, had split with the biggest gangster of them all, and there were vicious vendettas between these and the Kremlin. But they had to live in their foreign estates surrounded by teams of bodyguards, and even that did not always save them. Those who knew what was good for them would always provide the funding.

After two days of cogitation Yevgeni Krilov decided he would use the bikers, an elite team drawn from the Night Wolves, all well travelled and all English-speaking.

There was logic in his choice. The blame for the Skripal affair had landed squarely on Russia and been endorsed by the entire intelligence world because Novichok was very specifically a Russian development. But non-state crime was universal. The bikers could have been hired by anybody. After the death of the computer hacker, the British at official level would know who had sent the assassins but, unlike the Novichok trail, they would never be able to prove it.

Sir Adrian liked to think that he was a pragmatic man, prepared to accept and face reality, however disagreeable it might be. But he also had no contempt for intuition.

Twice in his life he had refused to ignore a gut instinct that things were not right; twice he had scented the odour of danger and removed himself as fast as he could. Once, in the late seventies, the East German Stasi had closed their trap just after he slipped through the border into safety in the West. On the other occasion, in the early 1980s, the KGB raid on the Budapest café where he was due to meet a ‘contact’ had occurred minutes after he slipped away. It later transpired that the contact had already been taken and would die in Siberia.

Years of putting himself in harm’s way for his country had taught Adrian Weston not to mock gut feeling, nor confuse it with the nervousness of a coward, which he was not.

After Budapest, there had been a defection from the ÁVO, and he had interrogated the man in a safe house outside London. By chance, the Magyar had been one of those waiting at the rendezvous for the British spy who never showed up. He was able to confirm that because the arrested traitor was a Russian, a KGB man had attended and his name was Yevgeni Krilov. Subsequently, Weston had not unnaturally followed from afar the steady rise through the ranks of this Krilov and, after his own retirement, had learned of the Russian’s eventual elevation to the chieftaincy at Yasenevo.

As a professional, he knew how the mass expulsions of SVR agents from the London embassy after the Skripal affair must have gutted the man who was once nearly his nemesis. That was why another of his bedside portraits was the face, glean

ed from the archives of all those diplomatic cocktail parties of long ago, of the man who now ran the SVR.

After studying the FBI reports from New York, he caught the same scent again.

Something was not right. Moscow was moving too fast. Sir Adrian knew nothing of a Russian mole inside the Department of Justice in Washington, but somehow Krilov had got that name, and it was the right one. And, according to the Bureau, the men contracted by the SVR had failed in New York only because of a fluke – Harold Jennings’s weak heart.

He became more and more convinced that Krilov would try again. There was an aroma of frenzy about all this. The orders must be coming right from that inner office in the Kremlin, and they would be obeyed. He had poked a bear and the bear was angry. So the old mandarin of Vauxhall Cross asked for another private meeting with his Prime Minister and made his request. When he told her what he suspected and what he wanted, she closed her eyes.

‘You really think it may be necessary?’

‘I pray not, but I would prefer to be safe than sorry, Prime Minister.’

Politicians seldom have to be convinced of the need for caution. There are medal-awarding ceremonies at Buckingham Palace, but they never involve politicians.

‘If you can clear it with the DSF. But I will take his advice if he goes against you,’ she said.

The Director of Special Forces is a senior army officer, usually of Brigadier-General rank, and he has an office off Albany Street, Regent’s Park. He received Sir Adrian that afternoon with no delay at all. The request had come from Downing Street. The DSF looked, thought Sir Adrian, terribly young, but then they all did nowadays. He explained his problem. The brigadier had no trouble understanding it. He had spent years in the Regiment before his promotion.

The Regiment has no trouble with close protection, the technical term for bodyguard work. It has carried out CP missions all over the world, assisting friends of Britain and very often training those heads of state’s own fellow nationals. It is able to charge generous fees to those it enables to raise their CP level and has spent a long time in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Indeed, it may be the only unit in the armed forces that makes a profit for the country.