‘I really do need to know, Home Secretary, who would have seen that letter after you read it.’
The man was twenty years his junior, one of the up-and-coming thrusters, one of those to whom the Prime Minister had given high office and who was proving worthy of it, despite his youth.
It was not a long conversation. There was no need to waste time.
‘After I read it,’ said the Home Secretary, ‘it would have been filed. One copy only, the one you sent, no duplicates, filed under lock and key. By my personal private secretary, Robert Thompson.’
Unless something had gone badly wrong, Sir Adrian had his betrayer.
Robert Thompson was a civil servant on a civil servant’s salary. He did not live in Chelsea, Knightsbridge or Belgravia but south of the river in Battersea. Records showed he was a widower with a daughter aged ten who lived with him. Sir Adrian knocked at the door of the flat just after 8 p.m. It was answered by the man whose file he had been studying.
Thompson was about forty, and he looked tired and strained. There was no sign of any daughter. Jessica might be on a sleepover with a schoolfriend. When Thompson saw Sir Adrian on the doorstep, something flickered in his eyes. Not surprise, not guilt, but resignation. Whatever he had been doing, it was over and he knew it.
The civilities were observed. Thompson invited Adrian Weston into his sitting room. Both remained standing. No need, again, to waste time.
‘Why did you do it? Didn’t we pay you enough?’
In reply Thompson slumped into an armchair and put his face in his hands.
‘Jessica,’ he said.
Ah, the daughter. A better school, perhaps. More exotic holidays. The tropics. Keeping up with better-off friends. He noticed a framed photo on a side table. A young girl: freckles, pigtails, a trusting smile. Daddy’s little girl.
Then the younger man’s shoulders began to shake. Sir Adrian turned away. The man was weeping like a child and Sir Adrian had a problem with crying men. He came from a generation and a military tradition that taught other things.
In triumph, modesty. In pain, stoicism. In defeat, grace under fire. But very rarely tears. Winston Churchill had been prone to tears, but he had been different in many ways.
He recalled two times when he had seen grown men break down. There was the agent in East Germany who had made it through Checkpoint Charlie into the West and safety and who had collapsed in sheer relief at being alive and free at last. And his own son, in the maternity ward, looking down at the wrinkled, outraged face of his first-born son, Sir Adrian’s only grandchild, now at Cambridge. But a traitor caught red-handed? Let him weep. But then, everything changed.
‘They have her,’ sobbed the man in the chair. ‘Snatched her on her way home from school. A voice on the phone. Threatening they would gang-rape her, strangle her … unless.’
An hour later Sir Adrian had the details. The child walking home alone after choir practice. A car at the kerb. A friend watching from fifty yards away the only witness. Jessica had got into the car – half pulled, half pushed by the man on the pavement. It drove off.
Then the phone call. So they knew his mobile number, but she would have given them that. There was a special nickname she used for her dad. The speaker knew that too.
The voice? Fluent English but accented. Russian? Possibly. There was a number retained by Thompson’s phone, but it would be a buy-and-throw, a ‘burner’, long gone into the Thames.
Sir Adrian left the broken man with one last instruction. To tell his contact at the next call that there had been another letter. Weston had changed his mind. The youth would be moved, but to an army camp, not a private house.
He left the house in Battersea and walked home, back across the Thames to Whitehall and Admiralty Arch. He had spent a lifetime trying to avoid anger. It clouded judgement, defeated logic, obscured clarity. When things went wrong an intelligent man needed all three. But he was angry now.
He had lost agents and grieved comrades who would never come home. He had been in hard, merciless places, but there were still rules. Children were out of bounds. Now Moscow had again decided to abandon all rules, as with the attack on long-retired Colonel Skripal.
Adrian Weston had few illusions about the profession of espionage to which he had devoted most of his life. He knew it had its darker side. He had repeatedly put his freedom and his life on the line because experience in ‘the job’ had convinced him that in a thoroughly imperfect world it was necessary if the safe and free were to remain safe and free. He believed in his own country and in its tested standards. He believed that these were basically decent, but he also knew that on modern planet Earth decency was something to which only a small minority still held.
For years his main enemy had been the KGB and, since the fall of Soviet Communism, its successors. He knew that, across the divide, murder, torture and cruelty had been the norm. He had fiercely resisted the temptation to go down that route to cut corners, achieve results. He knew with regret that some allies had not resisted.
His own choice had always been to deceive the enemy, to outwit, to out-manoeuvre. And yes, there were dirty tricks, but how dirty? Servants of the global enemy had been suborned, persuaded to betray their country and spy for the West. And yes, by blackmail, if need be. Blackmail of thieves, of adulterers, of perverts in high office. It was repugnant but sometimes necessary, because the enemy from Stalin through to ISIS was far crueller and must not triumph. He knew that the man at Yasenevo now charged by the master of the Kremlin to avenge the Nakhimov humiliation, must, in his spectacular rise through the ranks, have endorsed or set into motion practices which Adrian Weston would not touch with a bargepole.
But this was different. A child had been snatched, possibly threatened with gang-rape, to blackmail a civil servant into committing treason. Krilov was using contracted killers, little more than animals. There would be retribution. There would be blood. He intended to ensure it.
Chapter Ten
THE COURTING COUPLE in the lay-by in the middle of the night were locked in each other’s arms and took no notice when the saloon car shot by them, going well over the speed limit.
But they sprang apart with cries of alarm when, a hundred yards up the road, it came off the tarmac and slammed into a tree. They watched through the windscreen as the first flickering flames began to lick at the wreck at the foot of the trunk.
As the light level given off by the flames increased they could see the outline of a single figure silhouetted against the fire. Then the blaze took over as the petrol tank caught alight and the car exploded. The young man was on his mobile phone, dialling 999.