Manhunt (7 page)

There was a long silence, broken at last by Richard Simpson. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘There might be another way.’

Tuesday

Hammersmith, London

‘Is all that clear?’

‘Yes.’ Richter nodded. ‘What you’ve said is very clear. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense, but it’s very clear.’

The briefing officer – a short and stout man who had been introduced to Richter simply as ‘Gibson’ – coloured slightly and leaned forward on the lectern. ‘What,
exactly, doesn’t make sense?’

‘Almost everything,’ Richter said. ‘You’re basically tasking me with flying to Vienna tomorrow to collect a package and then deliver it here.’ Richter gestured
around the briefing room. ‘I’ll ignore the fact that I don’t actually know anything about the organization you represent, like what it’s called or what it does or why I
should be playing postman for it, but—’

Gibson interrupted. ‘You don’t need to know anything more than I’ve told you,’ he said.

Richter looked up at him. ‘So you keep saying. Pardon me if I disagree with you. I could just about understand it if, having collected this package in Vienna, I simply climbed back onto
the same British Airways aircraft that I arrived on, and then flew back to Heathrow. Why, exactly, can’t I do that? Why do you want me to take a week making my way halfway across Europe by
road to Toulouse, of all places, and then fly back to Britain from there?’

Gibson was silent for a few moments before he replied. ‘That’s the predetermined return route,’ he said finally, though somewhat lamely.

‘Predetermined by who?’ Richter asked. ‘And why?’

‘You don’t need to—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Richter interrupted. ‘No doubt that’s just something else I don’t need to know.’

Gibson studied Richter for a few seconds, then told him to wait, and walked out of the room. Two minutes later he was back, accompanied by a smallish, pinkish man who exuded an unmistakable air
of authority.

‘You’re Richter, right?’ the new arrival asked. Richter nodded, but he remained seated. ‘I’m Simpson, and Gibson tells me you’re unhappy with the return route
we’ve planned for this collection.’

Richter nodded again. ‘That, and just about everything else,’ he said.

‘You served in the Royal Navy, didn’t you?’ Simpson continued. ‘You should be used to taking orders, so why can’t you just do what you’re told?’

‘In the Navy,’ Richter replied, ‘it was different. There I knew who I was working for, and I knew what was going on. Here I don’t, and I’m certainly not going
tramping around Europe, lugging some unidentified parcel, until I find out.’

Simpson and Gibson both looked at him in silence for a moment. ‘Right,’ Simpson said to the other man, ‘I’ll take care of this.’

After Gibson had left the room, Simpson sat down in a chair facing Richter. ‘You’ve signed the Official Secrets Act,’ he stated.

‘Twice, I think,’ Richter agreed.

‘Right. You are to now consider everything I tell you as being covered by that Act, and never repeat it to anyone. This organization is a part – though a very small part – of
the British security establishment.’

‘I guessed that,’ Richter said. ‘It’s presumably why you’re skulking around the backstreets of Hammersmith.’

‘We like to keep a low profile.’ Simpson smiled briefly. ‘Now, this package collection is very important to us, but to be frank the package itself is almost irrelevant. I
can’t give you the background, because it’s classified at a much higher level than you’re cleared to. But this much I can tell you: we need to have someone in place in southern
Europe for the next week or so. And before you ask,’ he went on, ‘for reasons I can’t explain, that person has to be somebody totally unconnected to any part of the security
establishment – an outsider in other words, with no existing MI5 or SIS connections.’

Richter nodded. ‘This is finally beginning to make some kind of sense,’ he said. ‘You’re expecting this person to be contacted, perhaps, by someone who wouldn’t
trust a professional intelligence officer? A defector, maybe? And the slow return journey has been deliberately chosen to allow plenty of time for that contact to be made?’

This time Simpson nodded and smiled too. ‘You may have missed your calling, Richter,’ he said. ‘You seem to pick things up very quickly. You’re quite right.’

‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘accepting all that, why wasn’t Gibson prepared to tell me that, or advise me how to respond if and when I’m contacted by this third
party?’

‘You would have been properly briefed, but at this stage we know almost nothing about this possible contact. That’s why we’ve chosen a slow route back, so that we could get in
touch with you whenever we needed to, and brief you on the fly, as it were.

‘Now,’ Simpson went on, ‘with that cleared up, are you prepared to undertake this collection?’

‘Of course, I am,’ Richter nodded, ‘as long as I know what’s going on.’

Simpson suppressed a smile. What he had just explained was almost true, but the real nature of the contact was likely to be very different from what Richter probably assumed.

‘Right, then,’ Simpson continued. ‘Gibson has already supplied you with briefing sheets, your precise itinerary, an airline ticket and details of the pick-up address in Vienna.
You’ll need some other equipment as well, so we must get that sorted immediately.’

‘Equipment?’ Richter asked. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got exploding briefcases or sub-machine guns hidden inside shoes?’

‘Not exactly,’ Simpson grunted. ‘Our technical resources are somewhat more modest than those supposedly available to James Bond. We’ll be providing you with a diplomatic
passport, which will help with the border crossings and any dealings you might have with the continental plods, and a mobile phone so we can reach you wherever you are. Oh, and a briefcase . . .
but without extras apart from a handcuff to attach it to your wrist.’

Sluzhba Vneshney Razvyedki Rossi Headquarters, Yasenevo, Tëplyystan, Moscow

Raya checked the new directory immediately after arriving in her office, and was amazed at the number of files it already contained. Even allowing for Abramov’s
explanation that some of the material had now been held for assessment at Yasenevo for as long as six months, it was still obvious that the
Zakoulok
database was huge, and that the source
known as
Gospodin
enjoyed excellent access – perhaps even better than some of the American mercenary traitors, such as Aldrich Ames and the Walker family.

Later that morning, Raya made a call to Major Abramov’s office number. She let the phone ring a dozen times before replacing the receiver. She had fully expected him to be out of the
building, but was just running a final check.

She opened her office door briefly, to check that the corridor outside was empty, then locked it and walked swiftly back to her desk. Sitting down at the computer, she opened a file-transfer and
communication program which automatically dialled a telephone number in a fifth-floor office within the Lubyanka. That telephone didn’t actually ring, because a call-diverter, which Raya had
installed during a routine security check nine months earlier, intercepted her call as soon as it recognized the prefix.

The prefix was in fact a signal to the diverter to dial another number elsewhere in Moscow, and the only sign of this happening was the small red light on the telephone that illuminated to show
that the line was in use. This light stayed on for almost fifteen minutes, but the office itself was deserted, as was always the case in mid-morning.

Once the connection was established, the program transmitted copies of the files contained in both of Raya’s hidden directories to the recipient computer. Before the program shut down, it
deleted all the files in the two hidden directories, and finally erased any record of this call from her office to the Lubyanka from the internal-communication record file.

During the afternoon, Raya accessed the internal-communication record file herself. After a careful check of the Senior Officers’ Diary which was held on the computer system, and the
network access log, she inserted nine new and entirely fictitious entries. These showed lengthy calls to a Moscow number made from an office elsewhere in the Yasenevo complex.

Then she opened a directory with a Top-Secret classification, and selected fifteen files dealing with Russian military equipment. She opened each one in turn and added a single extra entry to
each file’s access record.

As she closed the last file, Raya smiled to herself. It was a smile of satisfaction, but her eyes were hard and bright.

Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Headquarters, Vauxhall Cross, London

‘Mr Stanway?’ Mary Bellamy began. A formidable and slightly equine woman, she was personal assistant to ‘C’, namely Sir Malcolm Holbeche, which
entitled her to the official acronym ‘PA-C’. Perhaps predictably, she was known in the spacious corridors of Vauxhall Cross as ‘The Pack Horse’.

‘Yes, Mary?’ Gerald Stanway had recognized her voice immediately.

‘There’s a heads and deputy heads meeting in Conference Room 2 in fifteen minutes.’

Stanway glanced at the wall clock opposite his desk. ‘I’ll be there,’ he replied, then replaced the telephone handset and began clearing his desk. In Vauxhall Cross, the
avant-garde headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service on the south bank of the Thames, all offices operate a ‘clear desks’ policy. This means that no officer ever leaves his room
with papers of any description remaining in view. Everything, including desk diaries, have to be locked away in the officer’s personal safe.

Stanway glanced back at his desk for a final check before spinning the combination lock on the safe door. Then he sat down again, in front of the computer terminal, and systematically closed all
the open programs. When the display prompted for a username and password, he switched off the screen and left his office.

As Stanway walked in, he found Sir Malcolm Holbeche sitting at the head of the long table in the conference room. Two other heads of department followed him and, once all were seated, Holbeche
began.

‘This briefing,’ he stated, ‘is classified Top Secret, and no notes of any sort will be taken. Is that clear?’ The men seated around the table nodded agreement, and
Holbeche continued. ‘This situation is somewhat embarrassing, and has potentially very serious implications for both us and the rest of the security establishment, not to mention our
“special relationship” with the American CIA. As Moore here will now explain.’

Holbeche leaned back in his chair, with a gesture to the man sitting on his right. William Moore opened the file in front of him, and glanced quickly round the table.

‘Three days ago,’ he began, ‘a low-level Russian clerk – but one working at Yasenevo – walked into the British Embassy in Moscow and asked for asylum. There was
some confusion over who should handle this matter, and the Russian began to get visibly perturbed. It’s possible that he was worried that he would be refused asylum, or might even be arrested
and handed over to the Russian authorities. Eventually, after half an hour or so, the clerk ran out of the embassy and vanished into the streets of Moscow.’

Moore looked around, at a collection of puzzled faces. ‘Nothing much to get excited about? You’re quite right. By itself, this episode would be of no real consequence, but what
elevates it from the mundane to the significant is what the clerk left behind him at the embassy.’

‘Which was?’ somebody prompted.

‘A small package of papers,’ Moore said. ‘Most of it apparently was the usual sort of stuff you’d expect a defecting clerk to bring with him, in order to bargain with. We
haven’t seen this material yet, because our people in Moscow are still going through it, but a copy of it has been sent to us, and should arrive here later today. What alarmed our Head of
Station over there involved just one sheet of paper.’

Moore paused significantly. ‘It was simply a list of file names with a number handwritten against each one. Our Head of Station thought he recognized some of the file names, so he
signalled us promptly. He was right to do so, because several of the names listed were those of SIS files. More importantly, all are classified as Secret and above, and most relate in some way to
Russia or the CIS.’

‘And the numbers?’ Holbeche prompted.

‘Oh, yes,’ Moore replied. ‘On initial analysis, we deduced that the numbers weren’t directly relevant to the files – meaning they weren’t, for example, sizes
or creation dates or access history or anything like that. What we think is that they indicate sums of money. The Head of Station’s interpretation of this – and I have to say we concur
– is that this sheet of paper lists files that the SVR has received from somebody within SIS, and what they paid for them.’

‘Or perhaps files that the SVR wants from SIS, and what they’d be prepared to pay for them?’ one of the other men suggested.

‘No.’ Moore shook his head. ‘The Russian clerk said these files had already been obtained.’

There was an appalled silence.

‘You can all appreciate what this means,’ Holbeche declared. ‘Someone with access to SIS files – and that probably means somebody here in this building – has been
selling our secrets to the SVR. What we have to find out urgently is who.’

‘And how do we do that?’ Stanway asked. ‘Call in The Box?’

‘The Box’ and ‘Box 500’ were slang terms for the Security Service, MI5, and were derived from its original postal address of PO Box 500, London.

‘We hope that won’t be necessary.’ Moore shook his head. ‘We’re hoping that the Russian clerk himself might be able to help us out.’

‘How?’

‘Before he ran off into the Moscow afternoon, he’d talked to the SIS duty officer for about ten minutes. The clerk explained to him that he had a number of other papers, similar to
the one bearing the file names, and further information about the individual who had supplied the SVR with those files. Based on what he heard, the duty officer believed the source of the leak
could probably be identified from those papers.’