Liz Carlyle - 07 - The Geneva Trap (5 page)

‘Could someone else have told him? Someone you’d confided in?’

‘I didn’t tell anyone else.’

‘Not even family?’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t tell the family, but even if I had, my family have never been in touch with Sorsky or any Russians.’ The truth was that with her father so ill at the time, the last thing she’d wanted to do was to worry him or her mother by telling them that she was applying for a job that they would have considered dangerous.

‘And you never saw Sorsky again?’

‘No, I didn’t. I’ve told you that already. I don’t have any idea why he’s mentioned my name.’

Fane nodded. ‘Well, you’ll find out why soon enough.’

‘What do you mean?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘He asked for you. No one else will do – he said so himself. I can hardly send Bruno Mackay, for example, to fly over and see the man when he’s made it quite clear that he’ll only talk to you.’

Liz knew that he had not picked Bruno Mackay’s name at random. Fane knew very well that she and Bruno were old rivals. They typified the different cultures of the Services they worked in and the different jobs they had to do. Liz was careful, analytical, with a direct, straightforward and very determined style. Bruno was the opposite – his flashy exterior covering a subtle and, in Liz’s view, devious approach; he was no less clever than she but reached his goals in a much more oblique manner. They were like chalk and cheese, and Geoffrey Fane knew that suggesting he might put Bruno in to do a job that Liz was balking at, was bound to wind her up.

‘Are you saying that you want me to go to Geneva and meet Sorsky?’

‘Yes. We can’t afford to ignore his approach and since Sorsky is hardly in a position to come over here to see you, you’ll have to go and see him. Don’t worry. The Geneva Station will look after you. Russell White is very sound.’

Liz nodded slowly. Fane was right of course. If Sorsky had asked specifically for her, it would be stupid to try and fob him off with someone else, at least not until they’d found out what he wanted to say. And Liz had to admit that she was intrigued by his unexpected reappearance in her life.

Fane stood up. ‘Good, that’s settled then. I’m seeing DG now, so I’ll mention it. Then I’ll get Russell White to contact you and fix all the details. Meanwhile,’ he added, ‘I’d give a little thought to how this Sorsky character might know that the girl he met at university is now an MI5 officer. We don’t want any nasty surprises, do we?’

Chapter 8

‘Enjoy your stay in Switzerland, Ms Falconer.’

The immigration officer handed back her passport and Liz walked on, pulling her small overnight bag past the desk, through the baggage hall and the Customs post, emerging into the arrivals hall of Geneva Airport.

She paused for a moment, scanning the sea of waiting faces for anyone who looked as though they might be meeting her. It was 11.30 in the morning; her flight had landed on time. She didn’t know if she was being met; she’d changed her travel plans the previous afternoon, in response to a message from Geoffrey Fane. There had been a second contact with Sorsky and the meeting was arranged for this evening. So here she was, twenty-four hours earlier than she had planned.

She waited a few minutes more, but when no one approached her, she started walking towards the taxi rank. She was just nearing the terminal doors when a man appeared at her side.

‘Ms Falconer?’ he asked, slightly breathlessly.

She nodded and he offered his hand. ‘Russell White from the Embassy. Sorry to cut it so fine – traffic’s unpredictable this time of day.’

He was wearing a smart blue suit and one of the striped ties that Liz knew that Englishmen used as a sort of signal. The corner of a paisley silk handkerchief was poking out neatly from his jacket’s breast pocket. He made friendly small talk as he led her outside to the short-term car park where a small grey Mercedes saloon sat parked near the exit. ‘Hop in,’ he said, unlocking the doors. ‘Shove your bag on the back seat.’

As they drove out of the airport, White said, ‘I’m getting rather fit thanks to you.’ Liz gave him a questioning look and he laughed. ‘I usually play tennis twice a week, but since your friend emerged, I’ve been on the courts every morning. Didn’t want to miss him. And yesterday he showed. We’ve agreed a meet with you at 18.30 in the Old Town. It’ll be twilight but not dark. It depends how long he wants to talk for. I’m glad you could make it at such short notice. Do you know Geneva?’

‘Not really. I’ve been here for a conference, but I came one day and left the next. I didn’t have time to look around much.’

‘Ah, then let me make a few detours. Give you a bit of a feel for the place, and I can show you where your meeting will be. We can talk over all the details back in the office, but I can tell you he’s given us some pretty precise instructions. He’s clearly scared.’

Liz nodded. She was beginning to get that familiar sense of excitement, the tension in her stomach that front-line operational work produced.

They were driving along the lakefront now, passing a mix of modern glass-and-steel towers and grand old-fashioned hotels. Turning away from the lake, White drove down a street of baroque stone-and-brick houses, originally the mansions of the rich but now apparently housing the offices of law firms, accountants, small businesses.

‘Geneva’s a strange city,’ he went on, ‘stuffed with international organisations and banks, of course, but it’s also a big industrial centre: pharmaceuticals as well as hi-tech and IT companies of all kinds. But it’s by no means all modern and soulless. The cultural life here is very strong; you can’t turn a corner without running into a museum or gallery. As you can imagine it’s also a hotbed of intelligence gathering, industrial espionage: political and military, agents of influence – it’s all going on here. A bit like Vienna in the Cold War. The place is heaving with the opposition and our American friends – all trying to get one up on each other. And then there’s the local Security Service, trying to keep the lid on things, never quite sure where to focus their attention.’

They crossed the river, and White parked on the edge of the Old Town. The buildings were smaller, the streets irregular and narrow. ‘We have to go on foot from here. But the meeting point’s not far.’ They walked through an ancient stone arch and on to a cobbled street. To Liz it looked like a Central European version of Stratford-upon-Avon, little houses with bulging white plaster walls and black beams, overhanging the narrow streets.

‘It gets a bit touristy here in the summer,’ White said. ‘People holidaying in the Alps often come down for the day. Now, do you see that park over there?’ He pointed to the west.

‘Just,’ said Liz, catching a glimpse of green beyond a long high stone wall.

‘That’s Parc des Bastions.’

‘Was it once a fort?’

‘Originally, though more recently it was the city’s botanical garden. Now it’s part of the University of Geneva. That’s where chummy wants to meet you this evening. We’ll go over the details when we get back.’

‘Looks awfully exposed.’

‘That’s what we thought. On the other hand, it means he can tell if anyone’s watching him.’

‘Or me,’ said Liz. ‘Speaking of which, I don’t want any surveillance from our side when I meet him.’ She saw White hesitate and said firmly, ‘None at all. I don’t want anything to alarm our man. It’s not as if I’ll be in any danger. If he wanted to murder me, he wouldn’t pick the middle of a park.’

Chapter 9

At six o’clock the café in the small square known as Place du Bourg-de-Four was half-empty. It was too early for dinner, and there were just a few people enjoying an after-work
apéritif
before heading home. Liz sat at a table under the outside awning, with a glass of Campari and soda and a copy of
Paris Match
. She hadn’t touched her drink: she wanted to be completely clear-headed. She had taken a taxi from the Embassy along the shore of Lake Geneva, then walked the half-mile inland, stopping from time to time to look in shops with wide windows which she could use as mirrors to check her back. She went into one or two of these, and at one stage retraced her steps back to a place she had been in before, as if she had left something behind. By the time she’d sat down at this small café, she was pretty sure that she wasn’t being followed.

Unless … there had been a man in a dark winter overcoat and hat who’d been walking ahead of her as she’d turned away from the lake. It wasn’t particularly his clothes that she’d noticed so much as his build – squarely broad-shouldered, almost grotesquely so, as if he had once spent many years as a weightlifter.

She’d spent the afternoon with Russell White at the Embassy, going over every detail of the two contacts with Sorsky: how he’d looked, exactly what he’d said. Liz had looked at the mug shots of the Russian intelligence contingent in Geneva and listened to White’s debating with Terry Castle whether Sorsky was SVR or FSB. ‘The Swiss think he’s part of the Security Department,’ said Terry Castle.

Castle had produced a collection of large-scale maps of the area of Parc des Bastions as well as a laptop computer on which he had brought up Google Street View so Liz could rehearse the route she would take for the meet. At their second contact, Sorsky had given White an envelope which contained detailed instructions as to how to approach the rendezvous. He clearly had some plan of his own for checking that she was not under surveillance.

Over the top of her
Paris Match
, Liz saw a man walking across the square towards the café. He didn’t look in her direction, and he wasn’t wearing an overcoat or a hat. But his build looked familiar – he was broad and square. He stopped at the edge of the pavement and gestured for service. A white-aproned waiter went over to him and the man began speaking – loudly in bad French. It appeared that he wasn’t asking for a table but for directions. The waiter pointed up the street, the man nodded and set off in the direction indicated. Liz noted with relief that he was heading away from the park.

She waited until he had disappeared from sight, then gestured to the waiter for the bill. She paid, stood up and crossed the square.

The route she’d been given took her through a medieval stone arch on to Rue St-Léger, a narrow twisting street with a long stone wall on one side– the ‘Reformation Wall’ she’d learned that afternoon at the Embassy, built to commemorate the city’s die-hard Protestantism. As she neared the park gates, she glanced around and was relieved to see that there was no one else on the little street.

Once inside the park, she strolled along the wide tree-lined avenue which divided the park into two halves. She was carefully controlling her pace now, forcing herself to resist the urge to hurry. Ahead of her on the left was a complex of buildings which she recognised from the maps. They were built in what looked like a light-coloured marble to a classical design. These, according to the maps, had formerly been the headquarters of the botanical society, and now housed the administrative offices of the university.

It took her ten minutes to walk the length of the park. As she neared the wide gates at the far end, facing Place Neuve, she saw an array of life-sized chess pieces. A group of tourists were standing watching as several young people slowly moved the pieces at the direction of two older men – clearly the players. Liz scanned the small crowd gathered around the chess board, looking for anyone whose attention was not focused on the game. Nothing.

Going through the gates, she waited on the edge of Place Neuve. Traffic swirled around the square, horns blaring and brakes squealing; a smaller version of Place de la Concorde in Paris, and equally terrifying. She waited for the nearest lights to turn red, then dashed for the sanctuary of a small island in the middle of the square. Here she paused as if to read the inscription on the immense statue of a local general, but all the while her eyes were looking for signs of surveillance.

A woman emerged from the park. Would she wait to see where Liz was going? No. She walked off and disappeared down a side street. A tall man in a yellow sweater was buying a paper at the kiosk over by the park gates; he looked across in her direction, then quickly looked away again. This made her feel uneasy, but he took his change and walked away from the square.

Following Sorsky’s instructions, Liz took her life in her hands and dashed back across the street to the park gates, drawing only one blast of the horn from an irate driver. She retraced her steps along the avenue, but halfway down she turned right, on to a broad path leading to the university’s marble buildings. After fifty yards she stopped, as instructed, and sat down on a solitary, unoccupied bench under a tall tulip tree.

She sat there for almost ten minutes, pretending to read her
Paris Match
. She was debating how long she should wait when out of the corner of her eye she saw a man come out of the shadow of a copse of trees to one side of her, at one corner of the university buildings. He was walking quickly, looking straight ahead towards her, and as he drew closer, she recognised him. Not from their meetings almost two decades before – he looked quite different, thinner, older, balder – but from the photograph she’d seen in the MI6 Station Mug Book.

His face was expressionless as he came up to the bench and sat down at the far end from Liz, taking a folded newspaper out of his raincoat pocket. She continued to stare at a page of
Paris Match
as he unfolded the paper on his lap and fixed his eyes on the front page. After a moment he said quietly, ‘I am sorry for the complicated instructions but they were necessary. I am confident you were not followed.’