Overkill (27 page)

It wasn’t until he was outside in the street and walking away from the restaurant that his probing fingers detected the small cylindrical object in his overcoat pocket. Rigby returned
immediately to the restaurant, and looked closely at everyone there, even checking the restroom. As he turned to leave for the second time, he noticed that the bar stool in the far corner was
unoccupied, the newspaper and an empty glass sitting innocently on the bar top.

Kutuzovskij prospekt, Moscow

‘Hullo?’ Genady Arkenko said as he picked up the telephone.

The voice at the other end didn’t bother with introductions, just passed the message. ‘Phase Two has been truncated. Implement Option Two Alpha immediately.’

Genady Arkenko repeated the message and put down the telephone. Then he removed a single page from a large notepad and placed it on a piece of hardboard, which he had already confirmed would not
register the impression of anything written on it, sat down and composed a short message in block capitals. He walked over to the radio, took a one-time pad from a locked drawer, sat down again at
the table and encoded the message.

The radio set Dmitri Trushenko had provided included a squirt or burst transmitter – a device which allowed messages to be compressed to a fraction of their proper length, transmitted, and
then recorded and expanded by the receiving equipment. Arkenko initialized the system, and input the encrypted message into the transmitter’s tape recorder using a Morse key. Then he
re-recorded the message on to the second, high-speed tape deck. When he pressed the transmit key, the red ‘transmit’ light illuminated for less than a quarter of a second, barely time
enough for any detection equipment to register the transmission, and nowhere near long enough for any kind of fix or triangulation to be obtained.

In the corner of the room, tucked behind a bookcase, was a small paper shredder. Arkenko took the page from the one-time pad, and the sheet of notepaper he had used to compose the message, and
fed them both through the machine. Then he opened the shredder’s receptacle, removed the thin strips of paper, took them over to the fireplace and burned them. Finally, he used the master
erase function on both the tape recorders in the radio installation to obliterate the two copies of the message he had sent.

Six minutes after he had received the telephone call, no trace of the message he had relayed could be found anywhere in the room. Genady Arkenko was a very careful man.

Cambridgeshire and London

In the XJ6 on the way back to London, Simpson sat silent most of the time, which Richter ascribed to perhaps one glass of wine too many at lunch – certainly he had
tossed Richter the keys as they had made their way back to the car park. However, as the Jaguar approached the northern suburbs Simpson seemed to rouse himself. ‘Conclusions?’ he
asked.

‘At the moment I haven’t got any,’ Richter replied, ‘but I think I’m beginning to see what’s going on. More importantly, I can understand why my CIA source
was telling me that the problem had two components, and that I was looking at the wrong one.’

‘Go on,’ Simpson nodded.

‘Since we got involved with this, we’ve been looking for things on films. We looked at the hill on the KH–12 films, and at the hole where the hill used to be on the Blackbird
footage. In fact, I think the hill’s irrelevant. What’s important is how the Russians destroyed it – that’s the second component of the problem, and that’s what my
source was trying to tell me.’

Simpson mulled over this for a few minutes. ‘What are your intentions now?’ he asked.

‘Research. Shifting that much earth had to cause a bang, so the first thing I’m going to do is check the seismic records. Then I’m going to have to think about it.’

Simpson nodded. ‘Don’t think for too long. I’m getting a bad feeling about all this, and I think it’s time we started taking some action.’

Anton Kirov

The
Anton Kirov
had made good time. The transit through the Bosphorus had been completed by early afternoon and by 1500 local time the ship was crossing the Marmara
Denizi, the short stretch of water between Istanbul and the Dardanelles. Captain Bondarev was sitting down to a late lunch in his cabin when Zavorin knocked briefly and entered.
‘Valeri,’ he said, ‘there has been a slight change of plan.’

‘Yes?’ Bondarev put down his fork and looked up.

Colonel Zavorin smiled. ‘Nothing too drastic. We have been ordered not to call at Piraeus. Moscow wants us to make best speed across the Aegean and the Mediterranean, and our first port of
call will probably now be Tunis.’

Bondarev grunted. ‘Did our lords and masters say why?’

‘No, but I presume that our arrival time in Gibraltar has been brought forward.’

Bondarev grunted again. He wasn’t fond of Piraeus, but he was finding it increasingly irksome being a ship’s captain who was not allowed to take any decisions. ‘Very
well,’ he said. ‘I will make the signals.’

Le Moulin au Pouchon
, St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

Unusually, there were three emails containing encrypted messages for Hassan Abbas to decode that afternoon. All from a German address, they had actually originated in
Moscow, sent from Dmitri Trushenko’s spacious office at the Ministry. As a minister, Trushenko was entitled to a single unmonitored telephone line with international access. All the other
office lines went through one or more switchboards where, Trushenko was quite certain, either or both the SVR and the GRU – and maybe even the CIA and SIS – had placed taps.

The secure line was checked for bugs daily, and he was certain it was safe. Early in his term at the Ministry, Trushenko had telephoned a trusted colleague and, with his agreement and –
for the safety of both men – with witnesses present at both ends of the line, the two men had engaged in a pre-scripted conversation so blatantly traitorous that no monitoring organization
could have failed to take immediate action. Nothing had happened. Nobody had kicked in his door in the early hours of the morning, or frog-marched him out of the Ministry to the cells at the
Lubyanka. He had repeated the exercise a couple of times a year ever since then, with precisely the same absence of results.

The line was intended to allow ministers to converse frankly with colleagues without fear of being overheard and subsequently forced to listen to taped statements that they should never have
made. Trushenko used the line sparingly for telephone calls, partly because he was supremely conscious of the security implications of the operation in which he was involved, but mainly because he
was essentially a loner and not much given to chatting with colleagues.

However, virtually every day he connected his laptop to the telephone socket next to his desk, because that enabled him to send and receive email messages with as much security as was possible
in Moscow. And with
Podstava
now approaching its final stages, close liaison with the ragheads, as Trushenko dismissively termed them, was essential.

The first two emails Abbas decoded were simple enough. One confirmed that the last device – the London weapon – was as good as finished and would be ready to leave the factory in
Russia the following evening. The second advised him that the route of the small freighter carrying the demonstration device had been changed so that the ship would arrive in Gibraltar earlier than
had originally been planned. Abbas read them, opened a spreadsheet on his computer and input the dates and times. Then he spent some time composing and encrypting an email for Sadoun Khamil which
relayed the same information to him.

It would have been easy enough for Dmitri Trushenko to have sent copies of his emails simultaneously to Khamil, but from the start the leaders of al-Qaeda had insisted that the liaison with the
Russians would be handled solely by Hassan Abbas, to avoid any possibility of compromising any other members of the organization.

The third email was the most interesting, and Abbas read it several times before composing his message to Khamil. Trushenko had couched his information in guarded terms, but his analysis of the
implications of the over-flight by the American spy-plane was thorough. When he’d received the first brief message which simply stated that an over-flight had taken place, it had been
immediately obvious to Abbas, as it had been to Trushenko, that some kind of a leak must have occurred. Trushenko’s considered opinion now was that this leak was an irritant, nothing more,
because the operation was so nearly complete, with only two weapons still left to be positioned, and after some thought Abbas was inclined to agree.

In fact, from the point of view of al-Qaeda, everything they required was already in place, so whether the London weapon was successfully delivered or not made little or no difference to
them.

Hammersmith, London

When Richter got back to the office, he jotted down some dates on a piece of paper. Then he called the Registry and requested the Seismic Activity file and the Moscow
Station activity files.

When they arrived, Richter went back through each for two months, and read all the subsequent reports. Then he checked the dates he had noted against one of the seismic reports, and then he knew
why the Blackbird had flown, and why it had been so important for the Americans to take pictures of a hill that wasn’t there any more. The only things Richter didn’t know were how the
Russians had done it, and what their next move was likely to be. The answer to the first question he might be able to find out by research, but the second Richter could only guess at. And his guess
frightened him.

Richter made a long telephone call to a contact at the Ministry of Defence, then he called Simpson on the direct line and told him he was coming up.

Office of the Director of Operations (Clandestine Services), Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Clifford Masters, Director of the CIA’s Intelligence Division, knocked and walked into the office. ‘We’ve heard from RAVEN again,’ he began without
preamble.

Hicks looked interested. ‘About time. The same transmission method?’

‘Yes,’ Masters replied. ‘And again it wasn’t a film, just a short note in a film canister. It was passed to John Rigby in a Moscow restaurant at lunchtime today, in broad
daylight.’

‘Did he see who delivered it?’ Hicks asked.

‘No,’ Masters shook his head. ‘As usual, Rigby hung up his overcoat when he arrived, and tried to identify anyone who went anywhere near it. He saw no known opposition
personnel in the restaurant, and only left the table to go to the john – he says he was away for less than five minutes – but when he left the restaurant he found the film canister in
his overcoat pocket. He went straight back inside, but saw nobody he recognized.’

‘Well,’ Hicks said. ‘At least we know that RAVEN is still alive and operational, which has to be good news. What was the message?’

Masters opened the file he was carrying and extracted a sheet of paper. ‘We’ve had the Russian translated, and double-checked. Like all of RAVEN’s messages it’s very
brief and cryptic. It contains a single word and two short sentences. The single word is
Pripiska
.’

Hicks looked blank, and Masters nodded. ‘Yes, this puzzled our analysts as well. It’s actually a slang term dating back to the bad old days of the collective farms and Ten-Year
Plans. It means the falsification of records and other documentation to do with agricultural and industrial production. In those days, cooking the books was about the only way the farms and
factories could meet the targets and quotas specified by Moscow.’

‘And the sentences?’

Masters looked at Hicks before replying. ‘They translate as “Last component enters west on 9th. Implementation date 11th.” And that,’ he added, ‘is exactly seven
days away.’

Hammersmith, London

‘I think I’ve worked it out,’ Richter said.

Simpson nodded encouragingly and looked at his watch. ‘Make it snappy. There’s an extraordinary meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee in under an hour, which means I’ve
got to leave here in exactly twenty minutes.’

‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘I’ll give you the short version.’ Simpson motioned him to a seat. Since the beginning of the investigation, their relationship had improved
considerably. Richter still couldn’t say that he actually liked the man because he didn’t, but at least they weren’t sniping at each other quite as much as before.
‘Why,’ Richter asked, as he sat down, ‘is there an extraordinary meeting of the JIC? And why so late in the day?’ Richter had checked his watch, and it was already nearly
five.

‘I don’t know,’ Simpson said, ‘but I’ll let you know if it has any bearing on this.’

‘Thanks. Right, I think I’ve worked out when they moved the hill. The last KH–12 film that JARIC received prior to the Blackbird’s flight was taken a month ago, and they
didn’t receive any further films at all from the KH–12 for eight days, and they’ve still had no further pictures of the area round the hill. I believe that the films shot by the
Keyhole satellite showed something so unusual that the Americans decided a “command failure” was necessary. Again I don’t know, but logic suggests that this was the placement of a
device in or on the hill.’

‘Device?’ said Simpson. ‘You obviously mean some sort of a bomb.’

‘I do mean some sort of a bomb,’ Richter agreed, ‘but I don’t know what sort, except that it’s something totally new. I’ll explain later why it has to be new.
The Blackbird flew last week, so whatever happened out there on the tundra had to have taken place between four weeks ago and last week, and most likely closer to four weeks ago.’

‘Why?’ asked Simpson, then shook his head. ‘I’m not thinking straight,’ he said. ‘It had to be three to four weeks because of the lead-time needed to mount
the Blackbird flight.’

‘Exactly. Just sorting out the logistics of getting a plane out of mothballs at Beale and across the pond probably took at least a week.’ Richter held up the Seismic Activity file.
‘I went back two months in this, just to make sure, but there was nothing significant reported from anywhere in the Eurasian landmass throughout that period, but on the second of last month
there was—’