‘Which is?’
In answer, Sir Adrian drew a slip of paper from his breast pocket, crossed the carpet between himself and the Resolute desk and placed it in front of the leader of the Western world. Then he resumed his seat. They all watched the blond head lean forward to study the sheet of paper. The POTUS took his time. Then he straightened and stared at the British emissary. He held out the sheet to the Attorney General, who was closest to him. In sequence, all three other men read it.
‘Would it work?’ asked the POTUS.
‘Like so much in life, Mr President, we’ll never know if we don’t try.’
‘You mentioned two purposes to your visit,’ said the Defense Secretary. ‘What was the second?’
‘To try and cut a deal. I think we have all read The Art of the Deal.’
He was referring to the President’s own book about the realities of business. The POTUS beamed. He could not get too much praise for what he regarded as his masterpie
ce.
‘What deal?’ he asked.
‘If we are allowed to go ahead with this’ – Sir Adrian gestured at his sheet of paper – ‘we will put him on the payroll. He signs the Official Secrets Act. We keep him in a sealed environment. Supervise his activities. And if it works, if there is an intel harvest, you share the product. All of it.’
The Secretary of Defense interjected. ‘Mr President, we have not a shred of proof that this could ever work.’
There was a deep silence. Then the big blond head rose and turned to the Attorney General.
‘John, I’m going to go with it. Deep-six the extradition request. Not necessarily for ever. But we’ll give this a try.’
Two hours later Sir Adrian was back at Andrews. The return journey from there was easier, with following westerly winds. His car was waiting at Northolt. He phoned the Prime Minister from the back seat. It was nearly midnight and she was about to turn in, her bedside alarm set for 5 a.m.
But she was sufficiently awake to give him the permissions he needed. And far away, close to Archangel, the sea ice was beginning to splinter.
Chapter Four
IN THE AFTERMATH of that visit to Washington things went well. From the press point of view, the story died because it had never existed, leaving those on the inside to continue repairing the damage at Fort Meade, installing a newer and better defensive system, while consideration in Britain was given to what the future held for the deeply troubled boy now known as the Fox.
In Washington, the US kept her word and the request for extradition was quietly dropped, which made no ripples on the water because it had never been announced. But there was one downside.
Working inside the Justice Department was a Russian agent, a low-level sleeper. It was a woman, one hundred per cent American but prepared to betray her country, like the long-imprisoned Aldrich Ames, for money.
She noted the rescinding of the request to the British government for the extradition of a British youth for data-hacking and wrote a short report for her employers. She gave it no priority, but systems are systems and greed is greed. So she passed it on to her handler inside the Russian embassy, who passed it back to Moscow and thus to the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, the SVR. There it was simply filed.
Sir Adrian had his second conference with Mrs Graham, who was much relieved that there would be no long war in the courts with the USA and agreed with the latter part of his idea. This would involve Sir Adrian moving from Dorset to London at least for the duration. He was allocated a small grace-and-favour flat not far from Admiralty Arch and a workaday saloon car with a driver on twenty-four-hour call.
It had been years since Adrian Weston had lived in London, and he had become accustomed to the peace, the quiet, the solitude of his Dorset country life. It had been a long time since he had run an operation and, back then, it had been against the old USSR and, covering the whole Soviet empire and the Eastern European satellite states, his enemy, the KGB.
Then came Gorbachev and the end of the USSR, but not of the Russian Federation and certainly not of the Kremlin. Until his retirement as Deputy Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, he had continued to keep an eagle eye on the sprawling land east of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.
He knew the KGB had been split up under Gorbachev but did not fool himself it had ceased to exist. The Second Chief Directorate, the internal secret police, had become the FSB, but his career opponent had been the First Chief Directorate, targeted at the West. This had become the SVR, still based at Yasenevo, south-west of Moscow city, and he knew who now ran it.
Even during his decade in the peace of Dorset he had maintained his comprehensive list of contacts throughout the British establishment. After Downing Street he had his driver take him across the West End to the Special Forces Club and from there called a good neighbour who agreed to rent a van with a driver and clear out those items from his cottage that he would need in his government flat behind Admiralty Arch. The lady in Dorset would send two large trunks with enough possessions to turn a functional but heartless apartment into a kind of home and she would look after his dog while he was away.
Above all, he would need his family photographs. He would, as each night before turning into sleep, gaze at the face of his late wife, five years gone to leukaemia, whom he still grieved. Staring at the departed face of that calm, wise woman, he would recall the day she had met a traumatized young Para officer back from Northern Ireland and determined within an hour to marry him and make him whole again. Which she had done.
In a ritual no one else would ever see, he would tell her about his day, as he used to do for forty years, until the cancer took her. Beside her he would put the picture of their son, the only one the God she worshipped had allowed her. He was a naval commander on a cruiser in the Far East. With his treasures around him, Weston could again present the world with the steel-tough spymaster.
His first visit was to Latimer, to see the Jennings family, who chafed in their detention.
Harold and Sue Jennings had done as they had been asked. They had telephoned their friends and colleagues at Luton to explain that their son Luke had been taken unwell and that they had removed the whole family for a spring break at a rented cottage on the coast of faraway Cornwall. After that they took no phone calls, letting each of two or three further enquiries go to voicemail and stay there.
Marcus, the younger boy, had discovered sets of bows and arrows in a storeroom, with a target, and practised archery on the front lawn, tutored by the gardener, who was an adept. Harold read the papers, which were delivered daily, did numerous crosswords and raided the manor’s copious library, puzzled that much of it was in German or Russian, the tastes of Her Majesty’s earlier guests.