Outbreak, p.17
Outbreak, page 17
‘Do you have a problem with Jewish people?’
‘No. I’m none of these things,’ Luke replied. ‘Come on, Janulis, where are you going with this?’
‘Please, call me Darius. We start to know each other now.’ Janulis was looking intently at him. ‘Because I am not these things either. And as you can see …’ he swept his arm at the room behind him ‘… I have different tastes. But some of the people I know here in Vilnius, they are not very accepting of others, shall we say?’
‘Go on.’
‘Do you mind?’ Janulis reached across Luke’s lap and retrieved a packet of Winston cigarettes and a lighter from beneath a cushion. He lit one, offered it to Luke, who declined, then took a drag, tipping his head back and blowing a plume of smoke up into the room.
‘So, when I joined the company,’ he said at last, ‘that is, Matulis ChemExport, I was “encouraged” – yes, I think that is the word – I was encouraged to join a certain society, a secret group, if you like.’ Janulis looked at his feet, then up abruptly. ‘Do you know about WaffenKrieg90?’ he added, fixing Luke with an intense stare once more.
‘Do I know about WaffenKrieg90?’ Luke repeated, giving himself a moment to think. The name sounded familiar from briefings he’d attended at Vauxhall, but somehow not quite right. ‘You mean Atomwaffen Division,’ he corrected him. ‘That far-right outfit in the southern USA?’
‘No,’ Janulis replied. ‘I do not mean them. I said WaffenKrieg-90.’ Luke had to admire the directness of East Europeans sometimes. They didn’t beat about the bush, they told you exactly what they were thinking. ‘WaffenKrieg90 is an organization here in Europe. It has connections everywhere. Here in Vilnius, in the police, in the government, in America, in England …’
‘In Norway?’
‘Yes! In Norway too.’ Janulis suddenly gripped Luke’s arm, his sweat-shiny face moving close to his. ‘These are bad people, Mr Carlton. They do terrible things. They hate so many people: Jewish, Muslim, African, Arabs, even gay and lesbian. They hate … they hate anyone who is different.’ He looked deflated and his shoulders slumped perceptibly.
‘What d’you mean, “they do terrible things”?’ Luke prompted him. He remembered Jenny saying Janulis had told her the same thing in the Ten Commandments Bar.
‘You want me to go into detail?’ Janulis’s eyes were wide open now, his eyebrows arched. ‘I am talking about sulphuric acid thrown into people’s faces, people burned alive inside their homes, brakes changed on someone’s car so they crash and end up a broken person for the rest of their life.’ He shook his head. ‘Shall I go on?’
Disturbing as this was, it wasn’t getting Luke anywhere. He needed to pin down the link to Svalbard, if there was one. ‘Can you tell me about their international connections?’ he asked.
‘You remember Christchurch?’ Janulis said. ‘The shootings in New Zealand at those mosques in 2019? So, they are saying that it was one of their “brothers” who did it. Yes, that’s what they call them. “Brothers”.’
Luke had reached the conclusion some time ago that Janulis must know that he, Luke, represented something rather more than the OPCW in The Hague. Otherwise he wouldn’t be telling him all this.
‘All right, Janulis, let’s talk money.’ Luke leaned forward and clasped his hands together. ‘What information can you actually give me and how much do you want for it?’
Janulis took a final drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out on the side of the packet. He waved away the smoke, and looked around the room. He spoke in barely more than a whisper. For the first time Luke could see the fear in his eyes.
‘I will tell you this. WaffenKrieg90 are planning something very big,’ he said, ‘and they have help … They have someone on the inside. Someone inside the system – in your country. Someone who works for your intelligence people.’
52
Surrey, England
Saturday, 12 March, 0903hrs GMT
IT WAS A boy who noticed it. First weekend out after his birthday and he could hardly wait to sail his new radio-controlled toy yacht across the lake. And it was everything he had hoped for. Shane Collins was only in year six at school, but when it came to gadgets he left his parents behind. Deftly, he manoeuvred the miniature yacht, Endeavour, so it tacked neatly across the surface of the lake, while his father looked on admiringly. But five minutes in, something caught his attention.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes?’
‘Look over there. What’s that?’ He pointed. His father could see nothing. ‘There!’ He pointed again. ‘It looks like someone’s driven a car into the lake!’
‘Don’t be silly, son. Nobody would do that.’
‘They have! Look! It’s underwater. It’s got its boot sticking up.’
And for a moment his father could see it too. A car, submerged, but only just. Then the wind picked up, ruffling the surface of the lake.
‘D’you think there’s anyone in it?’ asked the boy, excitedly.
‘Now you’re just being daft, Shane. Of course there won’t be anyone in it. They’d have drowned, wouldn’t they? No, it’ll just be someone who wanted to dump their old banger and they must have rolled it down the hill. Honestly, some people. I’ll phone the council on Monday and let them know. Now, come on, show me what you can do with that yacht.’
And for the next thirty minutes Shane Collins raced his toy yacht to and fro across the water, just above the slowly decomposing body of a man riddled with one of the most lethal pathogens ever to threaten the human race.
53
Vilnius, Lithuania
Sunday, 13 March, 0919hrs GMT, 1219hrs local
IT WAS HIS third meeting with his source, Earl Grey, in under forty-eight hours. The man was spilling secrets and the Service was haemorrhaging cash – Luke had twice had to contact London to get pre-authorization for money transfers to Janulis’s nominated bank in Helsinki. But, so far, the feedback from Vauxhall was encouraging. The raw intel, the so-called ‘CX’, that Luke was sending back was getting fast-tracked to the reports officers for cross-checking. They liked what they were reading, Luke was told, but they had one concern. The Service placed a huge amount of trust in its agent runners, but Earl Grey’s greed was just starting to raise suspicions. Could he be embellishing what he was delivering in the hopes of earning more of the filthy lucre?
People defect or become agents, betraying secrets, for any number of reasons. It can be personal: a growing, festering grudge against the state or a colleague. It can be ideological: a sometimes starry-eyed belief that Britain, or wherever, is some kind of utopian paradise compared to the flawed purgatory they are living in. It can be hideous disillusionment: the belated discovery that life in whatever country or organization the agent is in is not what they thought, and they want out. But often, more often than people realize, it comes down to plain old money. And Darius Janulis, ‘legals officer’ at Matulis ChemExport, and designated SIS human informant, wanted lots of it.
They sat on a bench in Bernardine Park, between the banks of the River Vilnia and the ochre walls of Vilnius’s Old Town. It was a spot Luke had chosen where it would be exceptionally hard for anyone to overhear them. Janulis appeared to have overcome his earlier nervousness, perhaps soothed by the thought of all the cash flowing into his numbered account in Finland. In return, Luke was extracting from him every last item of intelligence on WaffenKrieg90, its twisted worldview and, crucially, what his US military counterparts in Afghanistan would have called its TTPs – its tactics, techniques and procedures.
They parted at lunchtime, just as the park was filling with mothers with prams taking advantage of the sudden mild early-spring weather. By agreement, Luke left first, then Janulis ten minutes after that, each departing in a different direction. Luke chose a circuitous route back to the safe house: it was a habit drilled into him by his years of military service that he never returned the same way he’d set out. At the corner of two streets he stopped by a shop window, using its reflection to check behind him that there was no tail. Just standard counter-surveillance. There was no tail. Vilnius’s Old Town was the largest-surviving medieval quarter in Eastern Europe, a quaint step back in time, interspersed with boutiques doing a brisk trade selling amber jewellery and Lithuanian cheese and wine. But these delights were lost on Luke as he started to compose in his head the contact report he would need to send to Vauxhall based on what he had just learned from Earl Grey. Perhaps because he was so focused on this, it didn’t trouble him that when he turned left, down a narrow, cobbled street flanked by low, crumbling, terracotta-coloured walls, he found he was suddenly alone. This street was deserted.
He heard it before he saw it. The deep-throated roar of a car engine being gunned into overdrive. Luke whirled round to see a black Mercedes A-Class, with tinted windows, accelerating down the street in his direction. For a brief, fleeting moment he thought he was being over-cautious. A half-second later the vehicle had mounted the kerb and was on the same pavement he was. Too late, he realized he had entered a street where there was no barrier between road and pavement, nothing to shield him from the oncoming Mercedes that was closing on him with terrifying speed. This was no Sunday-afternoon joyride, this was a targeted hit. On him, Luke Carlton. The Mercedes was being driven so close to the wall next to him its sides were practically scraping against it. There was absolutely nowhere to run to. And not a soul to witness what was about to happen to him.
In desperation, he glanced around for an escape. Anything. An alcove, an open doorway, a flight of steps. Nothing. The sides of this cobbled backstreet offered him no way out, only blank walls and closed doors. Luke braced himself for the seemingly inevitable, bone-splintering impact as 1,500 kilograms of unyielding metal crushed his body against the wall.
And then he spotted it. The thin black iron bar was protruding horizontally from the wall just above and a few metres beyond him. At one time it must have held some sort of a sign. Right now Luke knew it was his only chance of salvation if he could reach it in time. With the deafening roar of the Mercedes-Benz 2-litre engine filling his ears, Luke exploded into action, launching himself into the air, his hands reaching out until they locked around the bar. Oh, God, please let it hold. Using the momentum of his jump, Luke swung his legs up and clear, feeling the rush of the saloon car as it roared past beneath him, missing him by centimetres. There was a hideous scraping noise as the side of the vehicle careered into the wall and, for a moment, the driver nearly lost control. Then the car righted itself and accelerated down the centre of the narrow street and was gone. It was all over in less than five seconds, and Luke cursed himself. He should never have dropped his guard like that, and he had never had a chance to catch sight of the registration number.
Luke let himself fall to the ground, remaining in a crouch for a moment, poised to break into a sprint if the Mercedes returned for a second run at him. Then he doubled back down the street the way he had come, heart still pounding. Things were getting out of control here in Vilnius. Someone was trying to kill him – that much was obvious. Turning left on to a street full of shops, he ducked into a doorway, got out his phone while scanning the road left and right. Accessing the secure line, he typed in a single word: CRUCIBLE. Then he waited.
Seconds later, the reply came back: CHANDOS.
Luke put away the phone. He knew what he had to do now. He had just activated the emergency abort signal and the coded response from Vauxhall Cross had been immediate. It meant: ‘Acknowledged. Abort the mission and get out.’ He moved to the corner of the pavement and ignored the first taxi that passed, and the second, in case they were somehow in on the act – another piece of tradecraft learned in basic training back at the Fort. Then he flagged down the third. ‘Airport,’ he told the driver. ‘And take the highway – no backstreets.’
54
Peredelkino, Moscow Oblast
Sunday, 13 March, 1550hrs GMT, 1850hrs local
COLONEL ARKADY PETROV was at his family dacha just west of Moscow when he took the call. Like so many Muscovites he liked to be out of the capital at weekends, get back to nature in this pretty wooded village where Boris Pasternak was said to have written Dr Zhivago. When Coronavirus had rampaged through Moscow, carrying off so many of his countrymen and -women, this was where he had sat it out with his family, a loaded hunting rifle always at the ready in case any unwanted and infected intruders should venture too close.
Now his phone was ringing in his pocket just as he was turning over the skewers of shashlyk on the patio grill, the scent of aromatic spices coiling up from the kebabs into the chill evening air. Colonel Petrov did not like to be disturbed on a weekend. He gave the skewers a final turn, wiped his hands on his apron and took the call, his brow furrowing in concentration as he listened to the voice of his subordinate at the other end. It was a long call and the news was promising. Their investigations had turned up a suspect, who was in their custody now and was currently having ‘an introductory conversation’ with his interrogators downstairs. Would the colonel like to come and take over the questioning in person? He looked at his watch. The timing was inconvenient, but he knew he must do this. He would have to drive all the way back into Moscow and take charge. Colonel Petrov ended the call, cast a brief, longing look at the half-cooked shashlyki and tipped them into the bin.
Forty-five minutes later he pulled up at the address they had given him. It was in Cheryomushki district, in the south of the city, nowhere near GRU headquarters. His men were not stupid: this whole investigation needed to be off the books and out of sight. Officially it did not even exist. The building looked like any one of a hundred other uniform tenement blocks in this former dormitory of the Soviet Union’s military-scientific community: tall, faceless, somewhat dilapidated. Colonel Petrov stepped over the small mound of wind-blown litter that had piled up beside the concrete entrance awning and nodded to the man on the other side of the glass door: one of his own. The door opened. Petrov stepped inside and followed the man down the steps to the laundry room. A well-built man in jeans, white T-shirt and black anorak stood guard at the top of the stairs, making sure no one followed: another of his own.
To most people it would have been a shocking sight: the half-naked figure tied to the chair, one eye purpled and swollen shut, blood dripping from his battered nose and lips. This was interrogation 1.0: crude, basic, occasionally effective. Colonel Petrov showed no emotion when he walked into the room. He barely glanced at the prisoner before reading through the sheet that was handed to him. There was the man’s name, Konstantin Makarov, originally from the city of Magnitogorsk, his current address, his job specification within the CBRN division: biomedical supply assistant. A junior position, then, but still one with access to controlled materials. So far, the notes said, he had failed to give a satisfactory explanation as to why he had placed calls from inside the GRU building in Moscow to a number on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
‘Research?’ Colonel Petrov addressed him from across the floor of the laundry room. ‘What kind of research needs contact with a NATO country? Who authorized this?’
Silence. The man’s head hung low on his chest. Colonel Petrov walked over and lifted Makarov’s head with his hand. No reaction. Petrov turned to the others in the room and issued a stream of orders.
‘Bring him round. Work on him until you get all the answers. Go to his home, search it from top to bottom. Laptops, phones, USB sticks, everything. Then bring his wife in here and start on her. Keep him conscious for that. When you have all the answers …’ Colonel Petrov walked to the bottom of the flight of stairs that led up to the ground floor and turned back towards his team of investigators ‘… and only then, I want you to call me.’ He gave them a mirthless smile. ‘Keep up the good work.’
55
Battersea, London
Sunday, 13 March, 1955hrs GMT
DODGING DEATH WAS nothing new to Luke. He’d done it for years in uniform and then gone on to have some narrow escapes while on assignment for SIS in Colombia, Armenia and Iran, but what had happened today in that backstreet in Vilnius had left him more shaken than he’d want to admit. Was he getting careless? Forgetting the vital drills that had kept him alive? Or was it that he’d been on his own, operating solo with no recourse to close support on the ground and without the back-up team the Service normally provided? Either way, he had to sharpen up from now on.
Taking no more chances, he had headed straight for Vilnius airport, arriving a full four hours before his flight and having the few personal effects he’d left at the Shakespeare Hotel couriered over to him in the terminal. Its clean, modern interior and smiling Baltic charm had done little to reassure him. Someone in this country had just tried to kill him and he’d thought seriously about getting an earlier connecting flight via Warsaw. Instead, he had found a quiet corner of the departure lounge and held a long, encrypted conversation on the phone to Angela. At this time on a Sunday, despite the fears over the Svalbard outbreak, there were only weekend on-call staff working in Whitehall. But across the river in Vauxhall Cross a lot of staff had been drafted in to work through the weekend on the Moscow angle. Angela was one of them. If anything, she was even more rattled than he was by what had just happened to him. But when he told her what he had gleaned from Earl Grey she had listened intently. Everything he told her would now be relayed immediately to the cross-agency taskforce working around the clock. ‘Stick with the direct flight to London,’ she told him. ‘The Chief will want to be briefed by you in person first thing tomorrow.’
The cab from London City Airport dropped him right outside the block where he and Elise lived. He should have been happy to be home. Yet he found his finger hovering over the door buzzer at street level and something, he wasn’t sure what, was stopping him pressing it. In the almost four days he had been away on the Vilnius mission Luke had received just one curt WhatsApp message from her. Already, these days, he could feel himself growing inexorably more distant from her, as if a rip tide were pulling him away from the shore. He had wanted to ask her how her training was going for the London Marathon, how things were at the art gallery where she worked, whether she was still concerned about her old dad coping in that Buckinghamshire cottage on his own. All the normal, mundane things that had absolutely nothing to do with a lethal, genetically engineered, contagious disease threatening to break out into the general population. And yet he had asked her none of these things. He had simply swung himself into work mode and focused all his energies on the mission. Switching his personal phone back on after the flight from Vilnius, he had thought about sending her a text from the airport to say he was on his way home. But in the end he hadn’t. Luke had never found it easy to express himself in text form, and since joining MI6 what little ability he’d had in that department seemed to have evaporated altogether.
‘No. I’m none of these things,’ Luke replied. ‘Come on, Janulis, where are you going with this?’
‘Please, call me Darius. We start to know each other now.’ Janulis was looking intently at him. ‘Because I am not these things either. And as you can see …’ he swept his arm at the room behind him ‘… I have different tastes. But some of the people I know here in Vilnius, they are not very accepting of others, shall we say?’
‘Go on.’
‘Do you mind?’ Janulis reached across Luke’s lap and retrieved a packet of Winston cigarettes and a lighter from beneath a cushion. He lit one, offered it to Luke, who declined, then took a drag, tipping his head back and blowing a plume of smoke up into the room.
‘So, when I joined the company,’ he said at last, ‘that is, Matulis ChemExport, I was “encouraged” – yes, I think that is the word – I was encouraged to join a certain society, a secret group, if you like.’ Janulis looked at his feet, then up abruptly. ‘Do you know about WaffenKrieg90?’ he added, fixing Luke with an intense stare once more.
‘Do I know about WaffenKrieg90?’ Luke repeated, giving himself a moment to think. The name sounded familiar from briefings he’d attended at Vauxhall, but somehow not quite right. ‘You mean Atomwaffen Division,’ he corrected him. ‘That far-right outfit in the southern USA?’
‘No,’ Janulis replied. ‘I do not mean them. I said WaffenKrieg-90.’ Luke had to admire the directness of East Europeans sometimes. They didn’t beat about the bush, they told you exactly what they were thinking. ‘WaffenKrieg90 is an organization here in Europe. It has connections everywhere. Here in Vilnius, in the police, in the government, in America, in England …’
‘In Norway?’
‘Yes! In Norway too.’ Janulis suddenly gripped Luke’s arm, his sweat-shiny face moving close to his. ‘These are bad people, Mr Carlton. They do terrible things. They hate so many people: Jewish, Muslim, African, Arabs, even gay and lesbian. They hate … they hate anyone who is different.’ He looked deflated and his shoulders slumped perceptibly.
‘What d’you mean, “they do terrible things”?’ Luke prompted him. He remembered Jenny saying Janulis had told her the same thing in the Ten Commandments Bar.
‘You want me to go into detail?’ Janulis’s eyes were wide open now, his eyebrows arched. ‘I am talking about sulphuric acid thrown into people’s faces, people burned alive inside their homes, brakes changed on someone’s car so they crash and end up a broken person for the rest of their life.’ He shook his head. ‘Shall I go on?’
Disturbing as this was, it wasn’t getting Luke anywhere. He needed to pin down the link to Svalbard, if there was one. ‘Can you tell me about their international connections?’ he asked.
‘You remember Christchurch?’ Janulis said. ‘The shootings in New Zealand at those mosques in 2019? So, they are saying that it was one of their “brothers” who did it. Yes, that’s what they call them. “Brothers”.’
Luke had reached the conclusion some time ago that Janulis must know that he, Luke, represented something rather more than the OPCW in The Hague. Otherwise he wouldn’t be telling him all this.
‘All right, Janulis, let’s talk money.’ Luke leaned forward and clasped his hands together. ‘What information can you actually give me and how much do you want for it?’
Janulis took a final drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out on the side of the packet. He waved away the smoke, and looked around the room. He spoke in barely more than a whisper. For the first time Luke could see the fear in his eyes.
‘I will tell you this. WaffenKrieg90 are planning something very big,’ he said, ‘and they have help … They have someone on the inside. Someone inside the system – in your country. Someone who works for your intelligence people.’
52
Surrey, England
Saturday, 12 March, 0903hrs GMT
IT WAS A boy who noticed it. First weekend out after his birthday and he could hardly wait to sail his new radio-controlled toy yacht across the lake. And it was everything he had hoped for. Shane Collins was only in year six at school, but when it came to gadgets he left his parents behind. Deftly, he manoeuvred the miniature yacht, Endeavour, so it tacked neatly across the surface of the lake, while his father looked on admiringly. But five minutes in, something caught his attention.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes?’
‘Look over there. What’s that?’ He pointed. His father could see nothing. ‘There!’ He pointed again. ‘It looks like someone’s driven a car into the lake!’
‘Don’t be silly, son. Nobody would do that.’
‘They have! Look! It’s underwater. It’s got its boot sticking up.’
And for a moment his father could see it too. A car, submerged, but only just. Then the wind picked up, ruffling the surface of the lake.
‘D’you think there’s anyone in it?’ asked the boy, excitedly.
‘Now you’re just being daft, Shane. Of course there won’t be anyone in it. They’d have drowned, wouldn’t they? No, it’ll just be someone who wanted to dump their old banger and they must have rolled it down the hill. Honestly, some people. I’ll phone the council on Monday and let them know. Now, come on, show me what you can do with that yacht.’
And for the next thirty minutes Shane Collins raced his toy yacht to and fro across the water, just above the slowly decomposing body of a man riddled with one of the most lethal pathogens ever to threaten the human race.
53
Vilnius, Lithuania
Sunday, 13 March, 0919hrs GMT, 1219hrs local
IT WAS HIS third meeting with his source, Earl Grey, in under forty-eight hours. The man was spilling secrets and the Service was haemorrhaging cash – Luke had twice had to contact London to get pre-authorization for money transfers to Janulis’s nominated bank in Helsinki. But, so far, the feedback from Vauxhall was encouraging. The raw intel, the so-called ‘CX’, that Luke was sending back was getting fast-tracked to the reports officers for cross-checking. They liked what they were reading, Luke was told, but they had one concern. The Service placed a huge amount of trust in its agent runners, but Earl Grey’s greed was just starting to raise suspicions. Could he be embellishing what he was delivering in the hopes of earning more of the filthy lucre?
People defect or become agents, betraying secrets, for any number of reasons. It can be personal: a growing, festering grudge against the state or a colleague. It can be ideological: a sometimes starry-eyed belief that Britain, or wherever, is some kind of utopian paradise compared to the flawed purgatory they are living in. It can be hideous disillusionment: the belated discovery that life in whatever country or organization the agent is in is not what they thought, and they want out. But often, more often than people realize, it comes down to plain old money. And Darius Janulis, ‘legals officer’ at Matulis ChemExport, and designated SIS human informant, wanted lots of it.
They sat on a bench in Bernardine Park, between the banks of the River Vilnia and the ochre walls of Vilnius’s Old Town. It was a spot Luke had chosen where it would be exceptionally hard for anyone to overhear them. Janulis appeared to have overcome his earlier nervousness, perhaps soothed by the thought of all the cash flowing into his numbered account in Finland. In return, Luke was extracting from him every last item of intelligence on WaffenKrieg90, its twisted worldview and, crucially, what his US military counterparts in Afghanistan would have called its TTPs – its tactics, techniques and procedures.
They parted at lunchtime, just as the park was filling with mothers with prams taking advantage of the sudden mild early-spring weather. By agreement, Luke left first, then Janulis ten minutes after that, each departing in a different direction. Luke chose a circuitous route back to the safe house: it was a habit drilled into him by his years of military service that he never returned the same way he’d set out. At the corner of two streets he stopped by a shop window, using its reflection to check behind him that there was no tail. Just standard counter-surveillance. There was no tail. Vilnius’s Old Town was the largest-surviving medieval quarter in Eastern Europe, a quaint step back in time, interspersed with boutiques doing a brisk trade selling amber jewellery and Lithuanian cheese and wine. But these delights were lost on Luke as he started to compose in his head the contact report he would need to send to Vauxhall based on what he had just learned from Earl Grey. Perhaps because he was so focused on this, it didn’t trouble him that when he turned left, down a narrow, cobbled street flanked by low, crumbling, terracotta-coloured walls, he found he was suddenly alone. This street was deserted.
He heard it before he saw it. The deep-throated roar of a car engine being gunned into overdrive. Luke whirled round to see a black Mercedes A-Class, with tinted windows, accelerating down the street in his direction. For a brief, fleeting moment he thought he was being over-cautious. A half-second later the vehicle had mounted the kerb and was on the same pavement he was. Too late, he realized he had entered a street where there was no barrier between road and pavement, nothing to shield him from the oncoming Mercedes that was closing on him with terrifying speed. This was no Sunday-afternoon joyride, this was a targeted hit. On him, Luke Carlton. The Mercedes was being driven so close to the wall next to him its sides were practically scraping against it. There was absolutely nowhere to run to. And not a soul to witness what was about to happen to him.
In desperation, he glanced around for an escape. Anything. An alcove, an open doorway, a flight of steps. Nothing. The sides of this cobbled backstreet offered him no way out, only blank walls and closed doors. Luke braced himself for the seemingly inevitable, bone-splintering impact as 1,500 kilograms of unyielding metal crushed his body against the wall.
And then he spotted it. The thin black iron bar was protruding horizontally from the wall just above and a few metres beyond him. At one time it must have held some sort of a sign. Right now Luke knew it was his only chance of salvation if he could reach it in time. With the deafening roar of the Mercedes-Benz 2-litre engine filling his ears, Luke exploded into action, launching himself into the air, his hands reaching out until they locked around the bar. Oh, God, please let it hold. Using the momentum of his jump, Luke swung his legs up and clear, feeling the rush of the saloon car as it roared past beneath him, missing him by centimetres. There was a hideous scraping noise as the side of the vehicle careered into the wall and, for a moment, the driver nearly lost control. Then the car righted itself and accelerated down the centre of the narrow street and was gone. It was all over in less than five seconds, and Luke cursed himself. He should never have dropped his guard like that, and he had never had a chance to catch sight of the registration number.
Luke let himself fall to the ground, remaining in a crouch for a moment, poised to break into a sprint if the Mercedes returned for a second run at him. Then he doubled back down the street the way he had come, heart still pounding. Things were getting out of control here in Vilnius. Someone was trying to kill him – that much was obvious. Turning left on to a street full of shops, he ducked into a doorway, got out his phone while scanning the road left and right. Accessing the secure line, he typed in a single word: CRUCIBLE. Then he waited.
Seconds later, the reply came back: CHANDOS.
Luke put away the phone. He knew what he had to do now. He had just activated the emergency abort signal and the coded response from Vauxhall Cross had been immediate. It meant: ‘Acknowledged. Abort the mission and get out.’ He moved to the corner of the pavement and ignored the first taxi that passed, and the second, in case they were somehow in on the act – another piece of tradecraft learned in basic training back at the Fort. Then he flagged down the third. ‘Airport,’ he told the driver. ‘And take the highway – no backstreets.’
54
Peredelkino, Moscow Oblast
Sunday, 13 March, 1550hrs GMT, 1850hrs local
COLONEL ARKADY PETROV was at his family dacha just west of Moscow when he took the call. Like so many Muscovites he liked to be out of the capital at weekends, get back to nature in this pretty wooded village where Boris Pasternak was said to have written Dr Zhivago. When Coronavirus had rampaged through Moscow, carrying off so many of his countrymen and -women, this was where he had sat it out with his family, a loaded hunting rifle always at the ready in case any unwanted and infected intruders should venture too close.
Now his phone was ringing in his pocket just as he was turning over the skewers of shashlyk on the patio grill, the scent of aromatic spices coiling up from the kebabs into the chill evening air. Colonel Petrov did not like to be disturbed on a weekend. He gave the skewers a final turn, wiped his hands on his apron and took the call, his brow furrowing in concentration as he listened to the voice of his subordinate at the other end. It was a long call and the news was promising. Their investigations had turned up a suspect, who was in their custody now and was currently having ‘an introductory conversation’ with his interrogators downstairs. Would the colonel like to come and take over the questioning in person? He looked at his watch. The timing was inconvenient, but he knew he must do this. He would have to drive all the way back into Moscow and take charge. Colonel Petrov ended the call, cast a brief, longing look at the half-cooked shashlyki and tipped them into the bin.
Forty-five minutes later he pulled up at the address they had given him. It was in Cheryomushki district, in the south of the city, nowhere near GRU headquarters. His men were not stupid: this whole investigation needed to be off the books and out of sight. Officially it did not even exist. The building looked like any one of a hundred other uniform tenement blocks in this former dormitory of the Soviet Union’s military-scientific community: tall, faceless, somewhat dilapidated. Colonel Petrov stepped over the small mound of wind-blown litter that had piled up beside the concrete entrance awning and nodded to the man on the other side of the glass door: one of his own. The door opened. Petrov stepped inside and followed the man down the steps to the laundry room. A well-built man in jeans, white T-shirt and black anorak stood guard at the top of the stairs, making sure no one followed: another of his own.
To most people it would have been a shocking sight: the half-naked figure tied to the chair, one eye purpled and swollen shut, blood dripping from his battered nose and lips. This was interrogation 1.0: crude, basic, occasionally effective. Colonel Petrov showed no emotion when he walked into the room. He barely glanced at the prisoner before reading through the sheet that was handed to him. There was the man’s name, Konstantin Makarov, originally from the city of Magnitogorsk, his current address, his job specification within the CBRN division: biomedical supply assistant. A junior position, then, but still one with access to controlled materials. So far, the notes said, he had failed to give a satisfactory explanation as to why he had placed calls from inside the GRU building in Moscow to a number on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
‘Research?’ Colonel Petrov addressed him from across the floor of the laundry room. ‘What kind of research needs contact with a NATO country? Who authorized this?’
Silence. The man’s head hung low on his chest. Colonel Petrov walked over and lifted Makarov’s head with his hand. No reaction. Petrov turned to the others in the room and issued a stream of orders.
‘Bring him round. Work on him until you get all the answers. Go to his home, search it from top to bottom. Laptops, phones, USB sticks, everything. Then bring his wife in here and start on her. Keep him conscious for that. When you have all the answers …’ Colonel Petrov walked to the bottom of the flight of stairs that led up to the ground floor and turned back towards his team of investigators ‘… and only then, I want you to call me.’ He gave them a mirthless smile. ‘Keep up the good work.’
55
Battersea, London
Sunday, 13 March, 1955hrs GMT
DODGING DEATH WAS nothing new to Luke. He’d done it for years in uniform and then gone on to have some narrow escapes while on assignment for SIS in Colombia, Armenia and Iran, but what had happened today in that backstreet in Vilnius had left him more shaken than he’d want to admit. Was he getting careless? Forgetting the vital drills that had kept him alive? Or was it that he’d been on his own, operating solo with no recourse to close support on the ground and without the back-up team the Service normally provided? Either way, he had to sharpen up from now on.
Taking no more chances, he had headed straight for Vilnius airport, arriving a full four hours before his flight and having the few personal effects he’d left at the Shakespeare Hotel couriered over to him in the terminal. Its clean, modern interior and smiling Baltic charm had done little to reassure him. Someone in this country had just tried to kill him and he’d thought seriously about getting an earlier connecting flight via Warsaw. Instead, he had found a quiet corner of the departure lounge and held a long, encrypted conversation on the phone to Angela. At this time on a Sunday, despite the fears over the Svalbard outbreak, there were only weekend on-call staff working in Whitehall. But across the river in Vauxhall Cross a lot of staff had been drafted in to work through the weekend on the Moscow angle. Angela was one of them. If anything, she was even more rattled than he was by what had just happened to him. But when he told her what he had gleaned from Earl Grey she had listened intently. Everything he told her would now be relayed immediately to the cross-agency taskforce working around the clock. ‘Stick with the direct flight to London,’ she told him. ‘The Chief will want to be briefed by you in person first thing tomorrow.’
The cab from London City Airport dropped him right outside the block where he and Elise lived. He should have been happy to be home. Yet he found his finger hovering over the door buzzer at street level and something, he wasn’t sure what, was stopping him pressing it. In the almost four days he had been away on the Vilnius mission Luke had received just one curt WhatsApp message from her. Already, these days, he could feel himself growing inexorably more distant from her, as if a rip tide were pulling him away from the shore. He had wanted to ask her how her training was going for the London Marathon, how things were at the art gallery where she worked, whether she was still concerned about her old dad coping in that Buckinghamshire cottage on his own. All the normal, mundane things that had absolutely nothing to do with a lethal, genetically engineered, contagious disease threatening to break out into the general population. And yet he had asked her none of these things. He had simply swung himself into work mode and focused all his energies on the mission. Switching his personal phone back on after the flight from Vilnius, he had thought about sending her a text from the airport to say he was on his way home. But in the end he hadn’t. Luke had never found it easy to express himself in text form, and since joining MI6 what little ability he’d had in that department seemed to have evaporated altogether.
