The John Milton Series Box Set 4 Read online

  Milton stepped closer and looked into the cabin. The torch burned bright, picking out the trash on the floor, the scuff marks that had been left on the carpet by muddy shoes, a can of Diet Coke that had been pushed into the cupholder in the central console. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat. He was old—Milton guessed that he must have been in his mid-sixties—and wearing a suit that looked shiny and cheap in the unforgiving glare from the Maglite. He was leaning forward, his head resting on the wheel and a deflated airbag. Milton tracked the beam up to his face and saw that his eyes were permanently open, glassy and unresponsive, and that a gunshot had mangled his head.

  “Shit,” Ross muttered.

  “Is that him?” Milton asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s Geggel.”

  Winchester

  26

  There had been no time to get a team to Winchester in time to pick up Beck as he left the station, and so Pope was left with no choice but to risk a single-handed tail. He hoped that Beck’s suspicions would have been allayed by the time that he had been travelling without—Pope had to assume—having seen anything that might have given him cause for concern.

  Beck had stepped into a taxi and Pope had taken the next in line, telling the driver to follow after thirty seconds had passed.

  The village of Kings Worthy was two miles northeast of the city. Beck’s taxi stopped and the cabin light came on; Pope saw Beck and the driver settling up. He told his driver to continue on until they were around the corner from the house that Beck had stopped outside. He handed over a twenty and then walked back again.

  Church Lane was opposite St Mary’s Church and was full of expensive-looking properties. Beck’s taxi was pulling away as Pope turned the corner. The old man was wheeling his suitcase along a drive, the wheels crunching against the gravel. The house was accessed by way of a set of white wrought-iron gates that were, in turn, reached by the drive. The perimeter of the property was enclosed by a stone wall with a wooden fence atop it. Pope walked by the closed gates and glanced quickly down the drive to the house, taking in as much detail as he could. The building was constructed of whitened brick elevations with shuttered windows visible on two sides. It had a tiled roof with a single-storey slate-roofed extension to the side. Nothing unusual. A normal property, similar to the others around it. There was a plant pot sitting next to the gate pillar; there was nothing incongruous about it, but it was the kind of item that could be moved to signal danger.

  Pope couldn’t see the door, but, as he paused by the gate, he heard it open and close. He had no way of knowing how many other people were inside the house with Beck. He would have liked the luxury of more time to assess the property, but his orders were clear. He had to move quickly.

  He took out his phone and called the Group. He was connected to the night desk and then patched through to Tanner. He reported the situation, that PAPERCLIP was inside the property and that it would be impossible to continue the surveillance were the target to move on. Pope asked for his orders. He was told to hold his position. Backup was on the way.

  Southwold

  27

  Milton and Ross made their way back to the road. Ross took out her phone and reported the news of the discovery. The story had just taken an unexpected turn, and, even as she spoke to Shah, Milton knew that they were nowhere near the boundaries of how far it would expand and what it would eventually encompass. That an ex-spy had been murdered had already alerted the police, the intelligence community, and various Firm agencies including Group Fifteen. The fact that the spy’s former handler had also been shot to death, just a short drive from the town in which the spy had been killed, meant that they were dealing with something much more serious. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. Aleksandrov and Geggel had met in Southwold and, soon afterwards, both men had been killed. A double murder was certain; the hunt would now focus on finding the perpetrator—or perpetrators—and discovering their motive.

  They clambered up the loose bank and returned to the lay-by. The officer who had driven them was waiting for them.

  “Find anything?”

  “He’s down there,” Milton said. “Down in the marsh.”

  Ross finished her call and slipped the phone into her pocket.

  “What’s happening?” Milton asked her.

  “They’re sending a team here now.” She nodded to the officer. “Close the road. Both directions.”

  The man went to the boot of the car and took out warning signs and flashing beacons. He set off back down the road and started to arrange them.

  Ross breathed out. “This is a fucking mess,” she muttered.

  Milton gestured back down to the marsh. “How well did you know Geggel?”

  “Hardly at all. He was an old-timer. Retired a year ago. I was given some of the agents off his book.”

  “Including Aleksandrov?”

  She nodded. “Including him.”

  “So why did Aleksandrov reach out to Geggel and not you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said tersely. Milton regretted the question; he wasn’t surprised that she was so agitated. Why would one of the agents that she was running ignore her and contact her predecessor? It was far from a ringing endorsement.

  “I met him a few times,” she said after a pause. “We didn’t get on. He was old fashioned. I think he thought I was too young. And possibly too female.”

  Milton’s phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and saw that it was from Global Logistics. He turned away from Ross, took the call and put the phone to his ear. “Yes?” he said.

  “This is Tanner.”

  “Hello, Tanner.”

  “Report, please.”

  “We’ve found the handler.”

  “Leave it to the police and get back here. We’re flying out.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll brief you when we’re in the air. The helicopter is waiting. Same place.”

  He put the phone away and turned back. Ross was waiting for him.

  “You okay?” she asked him.

  “I need to get back to the town.”

  Local officers relieved Milton and Ross from their makeshift cordon to establish something more enforceable, and the two of them were driven back into town.

  Milton leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Could you take me to the Common?”

  “Yes, sir,” the driver said.

  “Where are you going?” Ross asked.

  “That call,” Milton said. “I have to leave.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Smith?”

  The driver brought the car to a stop and Milton stepped out. Ross opened her door and got out, too. There was blood in her cheeks and her eyes flashed angrily.

  “Come on, Smith,” she complained. “What’s going on?”

  Tanner was standing by the helicopter. He saw Milton and gave him a nod of acknowledgement. Tanner twirled his finger in the air, the signal that the pilot could start the engine. He stepped over the raised sill of the chopper’s door so that he could get inside.

  Ross grabbed Milton’s arm. He let her, stopped, and turned back. The pilot of the helicopter chose that moment to start the engine and the rotors slowly began to spin.

  “Don’t ignore me,” she yelled over the growing roar of the turbines. “We’re on the same side. What the fuck is going on?”

  “I’m sorry, Jessie. It’s classified.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Milton put out his hand. “I really can’t say. But it was nice to meet you.”

  She left him hanging. “Fuck you, then.” She spun on her heel and started to walk toward the church.

  Milton turned away from her and ducked his head as he passed through the backwash. He clambered aboard and pulled the door shut behind him.

  Tanner was strapping himself into one of the seats. “Everything okay?” he called out.

  “Fine,�
� Milton said. He pulled on the headphones and arranged the microphone so that it was over his throat. “I don’t think MI6 likes being kept in the dark.”

  “Control’s orders,” Tanner said, his voice crackling through the headphones. “We’re keeping this one in house.”

  Milton sat down and buckled himself into the seat. “Where are we going?”

  “Winchester.”

  “For what?”

  “We think we know who did this,” Tanner said. “We know where they live. You’re going to pay them a little visit.”

  Raj Shah was in the churchyard, his phone pressed to his ear. Ross strode across the Common toward him; by the time she had opened the gate he had finished his call and was walking across to meet her. The helicopter’s engine whined and the rotors whipped up another fine cloud of dust and debris from the dry ground.

  Ross had to shout to make herself heard. “Do you know what that’s all about?”

  “Who’s inside?”

  “Smith and the other guy… Tanner.”

  “Where are they going?”

  “Wouldn’t tell me. You don’t know?”

  “I have no idea.” Shah was a dreadful liar—it was the reason he had never worked in the field—and Ross had never had any trouble reading him. She was sure of her read now: he was telling the truth. He really did have no idea.

  Shah put his hand on her shoulder and guided her toward the church.

  “I don’t know how we’re expected to work this case when the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”

  “It happens,” Shah said. “I know it’s frustrating. What did you find?”

  “Geggel,” she said. “He was here. They got him, too.”

  “Feels like we’re stumbling through the dark at the moment, doesn’t it? No idea where we’ve come from or where we need to go.”

  She nodded her agreement. “The context’s missing. We’ve got a dead spy, a dead agent runner and no explanation for anything.”

  28

  “How long until we get there?” Milton said over the clamour of the turbine.

  Tanner looked at his watch. “The pilot said forty minutes.”

  “Time’s an issue?”

  “I don’t know whether we’ve found our killers or not, but, if we have, we’ve got lucky. They should already have been on their way out of the country by now, but if they are still here, we have to assume that they won’t be for long. We think that steps might already have been taken. We’d like to get to them before that can happen.”

  “So send in counter-terrorism.”

  “It has to be us,” Tanner said. “This comes from the very top. Officially acknowledged governmental departments are not to have anything to do with this. Officially, the PM wants to make sure that we behave in accordance with the rule of law. We take the high road when the Russians go low.”

  “Unofficially?”

  “He doesn’t want to be hamstrung by protocol or propriety. You have carte blanche on this, Number One. We’d like to bring the bad guys in, but if that’s not possible, you’re cleared to take them out. Them and anyone else you decide might be connected.”

  Milton nodded his understanding and hoped his nausea wasn’t obvious.

  “I can tell you a little more,” Tanner said. “We think this is Directorate S.”

  “Sleepers?”

  “It looks that way.”

  Milton had to agree. They had never been able to trace the agent for whom Callaghan had left the data stick at the dead drop. Milton had grilled Callaghan, but it was obvious that he knew very little. There was a description, but it had been dismissed as worthless given that Russian agents were well known for their aptitude in disguising themselves when they had to meet sources on a face-to-face basis. He had said it was a man, that his name was Tom, that he spoke in unaccented English, and that he had seduced him at a nightclub in Brighton after Pride last year. But that was it. Nothing more that they could work on.

  “One of them was working Callaghan,” Milton said. “You think it could be the same team?”

  “I think it’s possible,” Tanner said. “We’re still waiting for the full assessment, but we’ve already got a decent amount to go on. We’ve been following a man who goes by the name of Vincent Beck. He’s retired—used to work as a teacher. He’s been under suspicion for a while; we’ve had full spectrum surveillance on him—a big team, all the talents. He’s always been careful. We haven’t seen anything that made us think that he was involved. Until today, that is. We might have got lucky today.”

  The helicopter settled at cruising altitude and the whine of the turbines dipped a little.

  “Beck went out tonight and we followed him. He ended up in a house near Winchester. We pulled Land Registry records—the house belongs to Thomas and Amelia Ryan. Here—this is them.”

  Tanner took out his phone and showed Milton two photographs. Two pictures were displayed, side by side: they were passport snaps of a man and a woman, both in their late thirties or early forties. Nothing about them stood out on Milton’s first inspection.

  “These came from the Border Force,” Tanner said. He reached across and swiped the screen. The pictures were replaced by a second set of two, these looking as if they had been taken at an airport immigration desk. “These were taken at Heathrow last year. The two of them had just come back from Talinn. They made it look like a working holiday to Estonia but we have reason to believe it was cover for a hop across the border to Russia.”

  “So they’re SVR?”

  “We think they might be,” Tanner said. “Immigration reports that the two of them came to London from Belfast twenty years ago as students and stayed here. We think the woman’s real name is Nataliya Kuznetsov. She was born in Volgograd. Her mother was a party organiser and her father was a senior KGB agent runner based in the Nigerian embassy. She came to London to study at UCL. That’s where she met Thomas—at least that’s the story they’ve sold.”

  “And him?”

  “Real name Mikhail Timoshev. We don’t know as much about him as we do about his wife. At some point they adopted new legends as the Ryans and set up an online property brokerage. It’s a very good front. Property transactions give the SVR a simple line into them. A Russian oligarch sells his Chelsea townhouse; the Ryans act as go-betweens between him and his buyers; the buyers are given funds in Russia to buy at above market value; the Ryans pocket an inflated commission. Neat and tidy.”

  “And Callaghan?”

  “He said that his runner was six foot tall and reasonably well built. Timoshev fits that. Everything else is unreliable given that he would’ve been in disguise every time he met him. But how many sleepers could they have? There can’t be that many.”

  “You’d hope not,” Milton said.

  “Maybe we’ll find out tonight,” Tanner said.

  Milton grimaced. “This is all circumstantial. A man we think might be an SVR agent handler goes to a house in Winchester on the same day Aleksandrov is assassinated. We think the couple he’s going to meet are Directorate S sleepers. None of that counts as evidence. I’d feel a lot more comfortable if we had a little more to go on.”

  “We do have more,” Tanner said. He swiped on the screen again to bring up another photograph. “This was taken from a camera inside the Barclays on Southwold High Street. Look.”

  Milton examined the image. The camera was pointing out of a lobby so that pedestrians passing on the street outside were in view. There was a man in shot. He had a heavy beard and wild, untamed hair. Tanner swiped left and right and then repeated it again, swapping between the still from the CCTV and the images of Mikhail Timoshev from the Border Force.

  Milton squinted. “You saying that’s the same man?”

  “Heavily disguised, of course. The hair, the beard, the glasses. We’ve run the biometrics. The techs are confident.”

  “How confident?”

  “Confident.”

  “I only ask because sending me in
to their home might mean that they die tonight. I’d like a little more than ‘confident’ before I do that, Tanner.”

  “This is the best we can do. MI6 has a source in the Center. He’s been asked to confirm that Kuznetsov and Timoshev are the Ryans, but that’s not going to happen tonight and we don’t have time to wait. They’ll be gone and it’ll be too late.”

  “Jesus,” Milton swore.

  “It’s as good as we’re going to be able to do,” Tanner offered with a shrug. “If that’s not good enough, you’ll have to take it up with Control.”

  Milton stared at the screen and the image of a bearded man walking by the camera. He felt a clamminess, sweat beading on his brow, and turned away to look out of the window.

  He saw Callaghan’s reflection in the glass, mocking him.

  He turned back. “What does Control want me to do?”

  “Bring them in. Find out why the SVR would take such a big risk to assassinate an old spy who hasn’t been operational for over a decade.”

  “And if I can’t bring them in?”

  Tanner drew his finger across his throat. “You know.”

  Milton felt the nascent throb of a headache. “Who else?”

  “Five’s on the surveillance. He’s there now.”

  Milton was pleased with that, at least. Number Five was Michael Pope, and he was the nearest that Milton had to a friend in the Group. They had known each other for twenty years, ever since they were in the Royal Green Jackets. They had been in the Gulf together, although in different battalions, but, upon returning to the United Kingdom, Pope had transferred into the same battalion and had then been assigned to B Company, the same as Milton. They had been sent to South Armagh and Crossmaglen, bandit country that was very much in the pocket of the Provos. They had both joined the SAS and then Pope had followed Milton as he was selected for the Group.

  “Anyone else?”