Wormwood (Group Fifteen Files) Read online

  Wormwood

  A Group Fifteen Thriller

  Mark Dawson

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part II

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part III

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part IV

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part V

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part VI

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Part VII

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Part VIII

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Part IX

  Chapter 92

  Epilogue

  Also By Mark Dawson

  In the John Milton Series

  In the Beatrix Rose Series

  In the Isabella Rose Series

  In the Atticus Priest Series

  About Mark Dawson

  Part One

  Nineteen Years Earlier

  Chapter One

  The speakers scratched and popped as the operator lowered the needle of a record player to vinyl. The static continued for a moment before the string section of the Moscow Philharmonic swelled and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 2 began to play. The buzz of the spectators was dulled as they waited for the performance to begin. They stared down at the centre of the rink as a girl in a blue satin dress drew a deep breath. She looked down, as if in a moment of deep self-reflection, before pushing hard off her skate blade, her arms swaying rhythmically as each fresh stride propelled her across the ice. She gave a hard kick and was airborne, pulling up her knee as she completed two full spins before landing perfectly on her left skate, her arms outstretched, the crowd rewarding her with a ripple of applause.

  Eloise Shepherd had a cheap seat at the back of the gallery, up high. It was a good spot to watch the young man on the upper concourse.

  Stanislav Petrovich Kalashnik leaned against the top rail with both forearms, a cigarette in one hand as he gazed down at the skater. The girl swooped around the outside of the rink, leaping up again in a full turn before landing neatly and speeding away once more. The place was half-empty, and the upper concourse was quiet. Kalashnik had broad shoulders and a short, neatly trimmed brown beard. He was young and prodigiously intelligent and harboured doubts about how his talent was being used in Laboratory 23 of the Lenin Komsomol shipyard. Those doubts were why Eloise was in Komsomolsk-on-Amur; they were why she was preparing to take the step that would establish her reputation as one of the Secret Intelligence Service’s brightest rising stars.

  Kalashnik had one hand jammed into the side pocket of his woollen greatcoat, while the other flicked ash from his cigarette. He checked his watch. Eloise winced. He was nervous, and any observer with even a little awareness would see it. She had left a chalk mark on the concrete post outside his apartment block to indicate that she had left a message at their dead drop, a matchbox hidden behind a radiator in the hallway of an apartment building on Pushkinskaya Street. The message said that they needed to meet. Eloise had a number of possible venues for a rendezvous and had suggested this one on the basis that it was the closest to Kalashnik’s apartment.

  Eloise had been working on the Kalashnik file for two years. Her supervisor, Norman Fielding, had passed her a report from a Catholic priest in the Soviet Far East, suggesting that Kalashnik was a member of his congregation. Religion was discouraged in the Soviet Union, but, despite the official Party line, there were still many who worshipped, albeit furtively. The report stated that Kalashnik had confessed that he was unhappy. He felt that the leaders of both East and West had set their countries on a path that would lead to nuclear confrontation and the millions of deaths that would follow. He said that he was being forced to work on weapons systems that would bring that confrontation closer, and had asked the priest to pray for him.

  Fielding had told Eloise that they had researched Kalashnik and had concluded that it might be possible to persuade him to defect. It was certainly worth the attempt. He had excellent working knowledge of the VM reactor cores that powered the Soviet Yankee- and Victor-class submarines. It was rare to be presented with an opportunity to acquire intelligence of that kind of strategic value. Eloise had been given the assignment and had been in Komsomolsk for the last three months. It had proven to be challenging, but Eloise was beautiful and smart and had made good progress. At twenty-three, she was the youngest active SIS field operative, and spoke Russian, Polish and Ukrainian fluently. She had followed Kalashnik for a week and, once she had an idea of his character and habits, had introduced herself at the bar he visited near to his apartment. They had drained a half-litre bottle of Kubanskaya and, both a little drunk, had gone back to his apartment. He had tried to sleep with her, but, feigning coyness, she had said that she would rather wait.

  She had let him stew for a week and then returned to the bar. There had followed a series of dates: an exhibition at the Artists’ Union Exhibition Hall, a walk in Sudostroitel Park, a day at the zoo. She spent their early meetings assessing his character. He had few friends and unvarnished social skills, yet he had proven to be charming company. He was an acerbic and funny conversationalist, thoughtful and kind and fascinated by almost any topic. He told her that he was a pacifist and, eventually, that he did not approve of the focus of his work. He knew that it was forbidden to talk about what he did at the shipyard, but he had grown to trust her, and she could see that he wanted to unburden himself. He said that he hated the military purpose of his work, and that he was more interested in finding a job that would
allow him to work on civilian applications of nuclear technology. He quoted the slogan of the Ministry of Energy and Electrification: Hai bude atom robitnikom, a ne soldatom!

  “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier!”

  She had made her play as they went for a walk along the banks of the Amur, stopping to watch as one of the submarines that he worked on slid through the gentle waves in the centre of the channel. She told him that she knew he was unhappy with his life and, if he was interested, she might be able to help him make things better. She knew that he had fallen for her, and that fact—added to his disenchantment with the work he was being asked to do—gave her the confidence to take a risk and identify herself as a British agent.

  His first reaction had been horror and then anger. He contended that she did not love him as she had said, that she was sleeping with him in order to win his defection. She told him that she had been told to make an approach, but that, over the course of their time together, she had developed feelings for him. She explained that she was taking a serious risk and that she had been persuaded to do so by the prospect of the more open and honest relationship that they would be able to have in London. Unmoved, he had stormed off, furious, but, after a week in which she did not hear from him, he had appeared at the door to her apartment one night to confess that he loved her, that he missed her, and that he wanted to be with her.

  Now all that was needed was to seal the deal.

  Eloise had always been careful about being with Kalashnik in public. There was nothing to suggest that the KGB were aware of her, but he was engaged in sensitive projects, and it would not have been unusual for him to be assigned a watcher every now and again. She had chosen this rendezvous carefully, knowing that if she arrived before he did, she would be able to look for the tell-tale signs of surveillance. The Soviet Far East was not an attractive posting, and that meant that the KGB agents working here were usually less able than those sent to larger cities. She stood and, checking for anything that might suggest that she was being watched, made her way down to where Kalashnik was standing.

  “Kotyonok,” he said, using the term of endearment—‘kitten’—that he reserved for her.

  “Meelyi,” she said, using the word for ‘darling.’ “I needed to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s been a development. I need to talk to you about it.”

  “Here?”

  “I was hoping I could come to your apartment.”

  He looked at her, conflicted: the prospect of time alone with her was one she knew he found hard to resist, but he had told her that he was concerned about what would happen to him if they were discovered.

  “There’s no one here,” she pressed. “You know I’m careful, and I watched when you arrived. You don’t need to worry.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You have immunity. You know what’ll happen to me if they find out we’ve been seeing one another? I’ll be sent to the gulag.”

  She laid her hand atop his wrist and squeezed. “You won’t, Stanislav. Don’t you want to see me?”

  He looked pale, but, bolstered by her touch, he nodded. “More than anything. But please—be careful.”

  “I will.”

  Kalashnik had suggested on more than one occasion that—in time—he wanted to defect, but Eloise had kept to herself quite how advanced the preparations were. Fielding had arranged for a message to be left at the dead drop he used for their communications a week earlier, suggesting that the exfiltration take place the following morning. He had advised against Kalashnik having any notice; Eloise knew that cold feet could be an issue when it came to momentous decisions like this, and she knew that Kalashnik was a cautious man. Better to present it as a fait accompli and deal with his reservations when it was too late to go back.

  The exfiltration plan was standard. They would leave from his apartment in the morning and drive south, all the way to Nakhodka, a small town to the east of Vladivostok. From there, they would be taken out to sea aboard a trawler, and then there would be a ship-to-ship transfer onto HMS Phoebe, the Royal Navy destroyer that was currently berthed at Sapporo in Japan.

  All Eloise had to do was win Kalashnik around to the idea.

  She descended the steps to the lower level and walked to the exit. She knew he was watching her. It was going to be a late night and a long day, and she had preparations to make.

  Chapter Two

  It was just before eleven, and the streets of Komsomolsk were quiet and frigid. It had begun to snow, flakes drifting down through the sodium-yellow light of the streetlamps, gusting flurries that settled on the cars that were parked up against the kerb. Workers on the late shift were the only other pedestrians, watched over by the occasional policemen walking their beats. Eloise had walked for an hour after leaving the rink until she had confirmed—again—that she was not being followed.

  She had entered the country under the pretext of working as a translator in the embassy and had waited a week before being taken out of the building in the back of a Volga and dropped off in the suburbs, where she had conducted a ten-hour surveillance run until her feet had been rubbed raw and she was confident she was clear. Her papers identified her as Magdalina Novikova, a clerk who worked in the administration block of the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Production Association. Her story, when she was asked, was that she had been visiting relatives in Moscow and was now returning east to her job. She took the train to Komsomolsk, a trip of over five thousand miles that had taken nearly seven days.

  MI6 had spent a year getting her ready for the task. The field tradecraft course was detailed and comprehensive. She had been taught about dead drops and bumps, brush passes and dry cleaning. She had practised in London, marking signal sites with chalk and wads of chewing gum and losing the surveillance teams that waited outside the doors with hours-long excursions across the Underground and on buses until she was sure she was black. She had worked on her memory until she was able to memorise the number plates of a dozen cars at once so that she could spot repeats, and had learned to notice the things—shoes, jewellery—that a tailing surveillant rarely changed. She had learned how to make cold approaches to possible assets, how to engineer the ‘bump’ that would encourage them to talk. Hard-nosed retired case officers played the parts of potential defectors and intelligence assets, with some of them looking to work her as double agents; it was her task to separate one from the other, those who would be valuable from those who would burn her. There had been other classes, too, where Eloise had been shown how to use her looks to bend a man to her purpose, and how to seduce him so that he would do what she wanted without thinking twice about the risk. Those classes had been helpful here; Kalashnik had been no match for her.

  Eloise was confident that her skills were good enough to keep her secure, although that confidence did not ameliorate the constant anxiety that had accompanied her ever since her entry into the country. The Soviet Union was a vast police state, its citizens watched by hundreds of thousands of agents who were alert for any sign of Western interference. Stealing someone familiar with their nuclear submarines would be a difficult coup to pull off, and the consequences of failure would be cataclysmic.

  Eloise walked to the end of the alley and checked both ways. She stepped out onto the road beyond as a car rounded the corner: a police Zhiguli. She froze, then, catching herself, set off along the path. The car approached. She kept her eyes forward as it crawled by, trying not to stare as it passed. She knew that there would be awkward questions to answer if she was stopped, and it would also put an end to any prospect of exfiltrating Kalashnik tomorrow; she needed to be completely sure that she was black before going to his apartment, and she wouldn’t have time to do that if she were picked up again now. She glimpsed a pale face looking out at her before the car picked up speed and moved away. She exhaled, not realising that she been holding her breath, and carried on.

  She crossed the street, the snow squeaking beneath her boots, her breath steaming
in the cold air. She walked for another minute until the apartment building—the Brezhnevki—was directly across from her: a grey rectangular block of brutalist concrete, without balconies or adornments. She crossed over to the opposite pavement and tried the front door; it was unlocked. There was a panel of small metal mailboxes set into the wall immediately to her right, followed by a long corridor to the ground-floor apartments. A set of concrete stairs led up to the other floors.