The Fox

He had no doubt the overburdened British taxpayer should not be saddled with yet another contribution to a foreign cause, but he was not lying when he said he could think of a possible donor.

No one will ever know what really went wrong in the heart of the holy mountain of Paektu that day in September.

The Hwasong-20 missile towered up from the

base of its silo far below. It was truly enormous. With extreme care, component by component, the new RD250 power unit from Russia had been installed. With even greater care, the highly unstable propellant, the hypergolic liquid that would launch it halfway across the planet, had been inserted. There was no thermonuclear warhead yet and the high-tensile steel doors to the sky were still in place.

But all complex systems have to be tested. It was during the testing that something went awry. In theory, there was nothing that could go wrong. Switching circuits on and off, ensuring that connections will not fail at the moment of need – these should not be hazardous.

The blast tore the holy mountain apart. It made the deliberate explosions at Punggye-ri, so eagerly watched by the media and American observers, look like celebratory fireworks.

There were no foreigners at Paektu. But the North Korean generals were there, crouching in their bunkers. They had come to observe a triumph. They stumbled back to their limousines, brushing the rubble dust off their uniforms.

Far away, in several directions, seismic detectors noted a tremor somewhere in the north of Korea. It was identified as being from the only volcano in that part of the world. They concluded it must be Mount Paektu rumbling. But surely it was dormant?

The outside world, the watchers of seismic recording screens, could only speculate as to why a seemingly dormant volcanic mountain had suddenly rumbled. In the palace of The Marshal in Pyongyang, there was no enigma, just delay.

The generals who had been present at the disaster of Paektu returned to the capital in their limousines, sweeping through villages of rake-thin, under-nourished peasants who cheered them because they dared do nothing else. Once arrived, they dared not be the first to break the news. Only after repeated enquiry by the plump dictator did one of them admit there had been ‘a problem’. When the full details emerged the hapless messenger lost his job and his freedom. He was sent to a labour camp.

In that culture, to scream with rage is to lose face, yet scream was what The Marshal did. For an hour. The courtiers fled in terror. When calm returned he demanded every tiny detail and finally ordered a root-and-branch inquiry into what had gone wrong. Later analyses of the wreckage would ascertain that the flaw must have been inside the RD250 engine that had arrived from Russia, some manufacturing error that caused a tiny spark. Whatever it was, the propellant fuel had ignited. But that was several weeks away.

In the immediate aftermath, The Marshal knew only that his gamble had failed. The Hwasong-20 had been the missile that, tipped with the most lethal thermonuclear warhead he possessed, should have made him a true nuclear power, invited to sit at the highest of high tables. His scientists now told him it would take years, and astronomical sums of money, to recreate the missile and another silo in another mountain. That was when he summoned the Russian ambassador, who left ashen-faced.

Chapter Nineteen

IT TOOK SIR Adrian three days to find his donor for the Korean resistance movement, the No Chain volunteers working under Mr Song. He began with quiet talks with two old contacts inside the National Crime Agency. This used to be the Serious Organized Crime Agency and, although not part of the capital’s Metropolitan Police, it works closely with the Met but has a nationwide jurisdiction.

It also has divisions that concentrate on narcotics and the known Russian underworld. He spoke with the heads of both those divisions before settling on Mr Ilya Stepanovich. He was a former high-ranker in the Russian underworld who, like the now-departed Vladimir Vinogradov, during the economic collapse of Russia years earlier, had used money, bribery and violence to acquire a controlling interest in an industry. This was his country’s platinum business. Out of this he had become a billionnaire.

This enrichment enabled him to become a supporter in funds and influence of the Vozhd when he was rising through his first premiership; after he had snatched it in ‘arranged’ elections, his presidency had now become permanent. The linkage had never been broken. Stepanovich’s tentacles still reached into both the Kremlin and the underworld. His criminal record had been erased and he had moved to London to live the life of the Russian mega-rich who had been permitted to settle as ‘non-domiciled’.

He lived in a £20 million mansion in the city’s wealthiest enclave, Belgravia, kept his executive jet at Northolt, and his social entrée, instead of a football team, was his string of racehorses trained at Newmarket. He had several non-secret phone numbers for friends and contacts, and another that was very secret indeed and protected by firewalls installed by some of the best cyber-geeks on the market. He presumed it was untappable. Luke Jennings had cracked the access codes in days. Dr Hendricks, once more without a clue as to how Luke had done it, set up an untraceable listening watch which eventually logged a call to a number in Panama City. This was identified as a bank.

The mentor at Chandler’s Court put the young genius back to work. Another few days saw the in-house database and its covert records of overseas-account holders penetrated. The database enquired of the caller, who was clearly identified as Mr Stepanovich himself, because the ID codes were all perfect, how much he wished to have transferred and to which account with which bank.

There was no actual telephone involved. This was computer talking to computer. Sir Adrian allocated the role of ‘caller’ to himself, sitting in the computer hub at Chandler’s Court with Dr Hendricks at the computer console asking for instructions. Sir Adrian glanced at a sheet of paper in his hand.

It bore the e-details of a new account in a reputable merchant bank situated in the British Channel Islands. Letter by letter and figure by figure, Sir Adrian read out the account details. Dr Hendricks tapped them into the keypad and the instructions went in a nanosecond to Panama. Then he looked up.

‘Panama is asking how much of the contents of this account you wish transferred.’

Sir Adrian had not thought of that. He shrugged.

‘All of it,’ he said. In another second the transfer was made.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Hendricks, staring at his screen. ‘It’s 300 million quid.’

The phoney Mr Stepanovich terminated the connection. He had already ensured that reverse-engineered enquiries would never lead back to Chandler’s Cross. Then Dr Hendricks started to giggle. Across the room on a chair, Luke Jennings smiled. He had done something that had pleased his friend, so he was happy. Sir Adrian drove back to London.

Of course, this was far too much for the needs of Mr Song in Seoul. Sir Adrian cabled him a handsome operating fund to drench North Korea in subversive propaganda and permitted himself to offer some large anonymous donations to charities involving abused or hungry children worldwide, and damaged or crippled soldiers.

Domestic staff at the Belgravia mansion, chatting to one another over off-duty beers at the Crown and Anchor around the corner, mentioned hearing a sound like that of a wounded animal coming from their employer’s sitting room after dinner earlier that evening.

What they did not divulge, because they did not know it, was that the departed fortune did not belong to Mr Stepanovich. He had been sheltering it for the Vory v Zakone. It was the Russian underworld’s cocaine money, and they have a reputation for being very sceptical of excuses when their wealth goes missing. Mr Stepanovich saved his life by repaying them, but the racehorses had to go.

The day after the cheerful beers beneath the rafters of the Belgravia pub there was a very closed meeting at Chequers. Among the politicians was the Prime Minister, who was in the chair but said little, preferring as ever to listen to the real experts: the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary and junior ministers from three other ministries. But they were there to listen to some very senior civil servants.

These included the Chief of the Defence Staff, the Chief of the SIS, the Director of the National Cyber Security Centre and his colleague from GCHQ, and one representative each from the SIS and the Foreign Office who spent their careers studying Eastern Europe and Russia. News had come in from various sources, and no