The Fox

Yevgeni Krilov lifted the receiver of his office phone. He needed to make a secondment from the Spetsnaz to his own SVR.

There is surely no such thing as a sixth sense, and yet there must be. Adrian Weston was alive because of it, and he knew others like him. Such were the merry drinkers at the club bar. There is a moment to stay put and a moment to move. Pick the right one and you will see old age.

He recalled the time in Budapest, back in the Cold War, when he was heading for a meet with an asset in a riverside café by the Danube. He was ‘on the black’, no diplomatic immunity, his asset a Russian colonel who had lost faith in Communism and turned coat. As he came closer, the sweat had started to trickle.

There was always a moment of trepidation, perfectly normal, to be suppressed, but this was different. Something was wrong: it was too quiet for a busy street, the pedestrians too carefully studying the sky. He turned down another alley, emerged in another street, blended with the crowd, slipped away. An abort, perhaps for no reason. Later, he had learned that the general was taken, interrogated with extreme duress, and that the dreaded ÁVO had been waiting for him in strength. That was why the passers-by had been staring at the sky. They had seen the silent trench coats hovering.

Now he was feeling the same about Chandler’s Court. Its location and its house-guests were known in Moscow. There had already been one attack. Captain Williams and his men had done what had to be done. Krilov would have known weeks ago that his team were never coming home. But Krilov’s boss in the Kremlin had torn up the rule book long since.

News of the disaster of Paektu mountain and from Krasnodar must have reached the Kremlin and the correct deductions made.

Sir Adrian knew he had no proof, but he suspected the news from Korea and Krasnodar would have led the man in the Kremlin to deduce that Luke was still alive, and thus another attempt on his life was more than conceivable. It might be entrusted to Yevgeni Krilov, but Weston knew the man at the top would be the giver of the order. In a long life of many hazards he had trusted his gut instinct and, so far, it had not let him down.

Disruptive to Luke Jennings it might be, but it could not be helped. Better to be disrupted than dead. It was time to move the computer hub to a new and safer place. He sought and got another talk with the Prime Minister.

‘Are you sure, Adrian?’

‘As sure as one can ever be in an uncertain world. I now believe he will be much safer far away.’

‘Very well. Permission granted. Anything you need?’

‘I think I still need close protection from the Regiment. I can sort that out directly through the brigadier and the CO at Hereford. But I will need a budget, Prime Minister.’

‘Well, this office has access to a reserve fund with no questions asked. You can have what you need. Have you any new targets in mind?’

‘Just the one. But it’s back to North Korea again. Unfinished business. But I’ll be very careful, Prime Minister.’

With clearance from the PM, Sir Adrian returned to this new quandary: where to go?

He hunted high and low, then recalled a Scottish officer who had served with him in the Paras long ago. He had been The Honourable something back then. His father had died and he had become Earl of Craigleven. The family seat of Craigleven was a huge estate in Inverness, in the Highlands of Scotland with, at its centre, Castle Craigleven.

He recalled a brief visit there when they were both young men. Castle Craigleven stood proud and stark, medieval granite with sweeping lawns, on a promontory amid thousands of acres of forest and sheep pasture, offering deer-stalking and pheasant shoots west of Inverness.

Back in 1745 when Charles Edward Stuart, Bonny Prince Charlie, had led the uprising against King George II, most of the clan chiefs had sided with the Stuarts. The cannier Craigleven of the time had stayed with the King. After the destruction of the Highland army at Culloden, many of the chiefs had lost their lands and their titles. Craigleven was rewarded with elevation to earldom and even more estates.

Sir Adrian traced his old comrade-in-arms and they lunched in St James’s. Yes, the elderly peer spent most of the year at his London house and the south wing of Castle Craigleven stood empty, available for a modest rent. The wing alone had twenty-two rooms, plus kitchens and stores. There was a live-in staff who would have something to do with out-of-season guests.

‘The place might need a bit of attention,’ said the laird. ‘It’s been empty for several years, since Millie and I moved down here. But if you can give it a lick of paint, it’s all yours.’

A reputable firm of interior decorators from Inverness moved in the next day. What was needed was a bit more than a lick of paint, but Sir Adrian and Dr Hendricks flew north to supervise and instruct. The computer scientist would recreate the cyber-centre so tha

t the operations room at Chandler’s Court could be transferred with as little disruption and upset to Luke as possible.

Both men knew there was another chore, and that it had to be done right. This was to create an exact replica of the living quarters of the vulnerable Luke Jennings, who would notice the tiniest variation in his surroundings and be unable to concentrate.

The entire transfer was going to take a week. In the interim, Sir Adrian asked Luke to devote his attentions to a new task. It concerned an ultra-secret and fearsomely guarded controlling database situated deep underground in North Korea.

In Russia, other preparations were in hand. A man called Misha was transferred from the Spetsnaz to the service of the SVR and given a copious briefing on what would be his third foreign assignment.

He had fragmentary English, acquired from a compulsory language-skills programme included in the training of Special Forces soldiers. He was shown an array of photos of a manor house buried deep in the countryside in a place called Warwickshire in the heart of England. He was shown windows at one of which it was likely that a face would sooner or later appear, and he was shown the face, transmitted from Tehran. It was not the actual face, of course, but it was similar.

In London, the SVR Rezident Stepan Kukushkin was fully briefed on the forthcoming mission and alerted that two of his sleeper agents living as British among the British would be needed to chaperone Misha into and out of the country, to and from his target area. This would involve transportation between various airports and a temporary safe house where he could live unseen until he could be introduced into the Chandler’s Court estate.

Sniping is a speciality of the Russian armed forces and the traditional weapons have long been the Dragunov or the Nagant sniper rifles. But Misha had chosen the more modern and much superior Orsis T-5000 with its DH5-20x56 scope-sight.

Every sniper in Russia is steeped in the history of the great aces over the years and most especially that of Vassili Zaitsev. He had been trained from childhood by his father to bring down marauding wolves and became skilled in hiding in snowdrifts. In snow-blanketed Stalingrad through the winter of 1942 he slotted over 300 German soldiers, notably the German ace Major Erwin König.

But he had used a standard Soviet infantry rifle. Since then, impressive advances have been made in sniper rifles and the latest, the Orsis T-5000, can bring down a target which to the naked eye is out of sight. The one Misha chose was carefully packed under his personal supervision, with scope-sight and ammunition, ready to be transmitted by diplomatic bag, unexaminable by British customs and lead-lined in case of X-ray cameras used by Britain’s MI5, to the Russian embassy in London.