The John Milton Series Box Set 4 Read online

“It’s a room full of drunks. Discussion can turn to argument before you know it, and arguments can lead to a fight. That’s the last thing you want in the rooms. We want serenity. Peacefulness, like you said. It’s like the best kind of meditation when it’s at its best. You’ve got to come back—the more you come, the better you’ll get at just switching off and absorbing it all.”

  “Are they all like this?”

  Michael shook his head. “They’re all different. The ones around here are like this: most of us are reasonably well off, professionals, decent jobs. But if you go to West Ham or Plaistow you’ll get an”—he paused, searching for the right word—“an earthier crowd. I was at a meeting over there on Friday. The guy who was sharing was straight out of prison for armed robbery. Seriously. The man next to me said he was going inside next week. It varies. You’ve just got to find one that suits you and what you need. Try a few out. You’ll get what you need eventually. One day at a time.”

  The crowd had shuffled out into the lobby. Milton made his way out, too, and Michael followed.

  “We go for coffee now if you fancy it,” Michael said.

  Milton felt his phone buzzing again. He reached into his pocket and took it out. The call was from Global Logistics.

  “There’s a place down the road—”

  “Sorry,” Milton spoke over him, holding the phone up. “I’ve got to take this.”

  Michael held up both hands, smiled, and stepped back. Milton felt awkward and rude, but he didn’t want to go for coffee and this was a good excuse not to. On the other hand, he didn’t want to speak to Control either, but he knew that he couldn’t ignore him forever. He took the call and put the phone to his ear.

  “It’s Tanner.”

  “Hello.”

  “Are you all right? I’ve been trying to get you for twenty minutes.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You need to come in. The old man wants to speak to you.”

  “About?”

  “Just come in, Milton. Soon as you can. He’s not in a good mood.”

  44

  Milton was sent straight up to Control’s office. He remembered the first time that he had been shown up to the room. He had been much younger then, still in the Regiment and itching for a new challenge. He had worn his best suit, the one that he had last worn to the wedding of one of his old SAS muckers, and he had spent half an hour polishing his shoes until he could see his reflection in the caps. He looked down at himself now and could not fail to be disappointed by the comparison. His jeans and shirt had received the most cursory of irons. His boots were scuffed and marked and, as he reached up to rub his temple, his fingers ran through strands of hair that were long overdue a cut. Milton tried to pretend that he had allowed his standards to slip because it was easier to merge into the background when one looked like everyone else, but, although there was truth to that, it was not the reason. The enthusiasm that he had felt back then, and the desire to impress, had all faded away. He was going through the motions now. He had been for a while. He knew that something had to change.

  Milton knocked on the door.

  “Come,” Control called.

  Milton opened the door and stepped into the office. Control was standing behind his desk, facing the window with his arms clasped behind his back.

  “Hello, sir,” Milton said.

  “Sit down, Number One.”

  Milton did. He could see in the reflection that Control had his pipe in his mouth. He took a matchbook from his pocket, broke off a match and lit it. He puffed in and out as he held the match to the bowl; it took thirty seconds to light the pipe, a process that Milton knew Control was prolonging in order to make him feel uncomfortable. It didn’t matter; Milton was wise to all of Control’s foibles. They had worked together for years. He sat quietly with one leg folded over the other and waited until Control was done.

  He inhaled, held the smoke, and then blew it out. He turned to face the room. His expression was grim.

  “What’s going on, Milton?”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Are you well?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’ve been off the reservation all morning. Tanner couldn’t reach you. Is there anything I need to know?”

  “No, sir. I don’t believe so.”

  “Penn said that you looked ill last night.”

  “He did?”

  “When you left the property. He said you looked like you’d been sick.”

  “I had a migraine, sir,” Milton said. “I’ve been suffering from them for the last few weeks.”

  “A migraine?”

  “Yes, sir. They’ve been interrupting my sleep—I haven’t been well rested. I finished up at the Ryans’ house and went home to sleep.”

  “I see,” he said. “And are you better now?”

  There was no compassion in the question; it was as if Control was asking a repairman if a domestic appliance had been fixed.

  “Yes, sir. I am.”

  Control watched him shrewdly. “Nothing on your file about migraines.”

  “They’ve been recent.”

  “Have you spoken to the doctor?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “My preference would be to deal with it myself.”

  Control stared at him for a beat. He was old school; you didn’t let something as mundane as a headache interrupt your work. You’d need to be shot, or stabbed, or break an arm or leg, but even then, it would be a case of getting patched up and throwing yourself back into the fray. A migraine, though? That wouldn’t do.

  “See that you mention it next week,” he said.

  “Next week, sir?”

  “I’ve referred you to Dr Fry. He’ll want to speak to you. Make sure you tell him what he needs to know.”

  This was a black mark against his name; Milton knew it, but he didn’t care. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll do that.”

  Control stood and started to pace the carpet behind his desk. “I need to update you on PAPERCLIP.”

  “Number Five apprehended him.”

  “Yes,” Control said. “He did. But then he killed himself. Cyanide capsule hidden in the stem of his glasses. We lost Kuznetsov and Timoshev, then we lost him. You can understand why I’m unhappy with how the operation was handled. It’s been a bit of a fuck-up, hasn’t it? A comedy of errors—one thing after another. The government is going to want to know what happened and, frankly, I have no idea how I’m going to dress it up.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “You’ll be glad to hear, though, that you have a chance to make amends. You and Five, actually. Come.”

  The door opened and Tanner came inside. “He’s here, sir,” he said.

  “Send him in.”

  Milton turned in his chair as Pope stepped into the office. Tanner said he would bring in some refreshments and hobbled away.

  Control rested the pipe in an ashtray. “Good afternoon, Five.”

  “Sir.”

  Control indicated the chair next to Milton and Pope took it.

  “You two are going to have to cancel any plans you might have been unfortunate enough to have arranged. What happened yesterday obligates a strong response from us. You dropped the ball—the illegals are gone and PAPERCLIP is dead. But we have another source of intelligence and we have another opportunity. I’m going to give you the highlights, and then I’m going to tell you what I want you to do.”

  45

  Control puffed on his pipe. “We have a source of intelligence within the Center: the cryptonym is BLUEBIRD. We were told that Beck was a Directorate S handler, but BLUEBIRD didn’t know about the operation against Aleksandrov until after the fact. We were fortunate that we had Beck under surveillance, and that he led us to Timoshev and Kuznetsov. We’ve confirmed that they murdered Aleksandrov and Geggel yesterday.”

  “Do we know why?” Milton asked.

  “Why they did it?” Control shook his
head. “BLUEBIRD suggests that Aleksandrov was in possession of a list of all the SVR’s agents in Western Europe, and that he wanted to sell it to us. Aleksandrov approached Geggel to act as intermediary.” Control blew smoke. “Geggel’s phone records have been examined—it turns out that Aleksandrov called him last week. We don’t have any record of what was said, but it was important enough for him to drive over from London to see him.”

  “And Geggel didn’t tell anyone? Didn’t call it in?”

  “He did not,” Control said. “And that’s not surprising. I knew him a little. He’d been around. He left SIS under a cloud. Made a mess of one of the files that he was handling—a source in the GRU was burned and it looked like he might have been to blame. He wasn’t ready to retire and they rather pushed him toward the door. If you asked me to guess, I’d say he went to see for himself whether Aleksandrov had anything of interest and, if he decided that he did, he was going to be the one to bring it in.”

  “And we believe the intel?”

  Control shrugged. “Aleksandrov was a nobody. He gave us decent intelligence when he was operational, but that was years ago. Something changed that made him a target. Offering us a list of active agents would be enough to put him in the crosshairs.”

  Control took another match and lit the pipe again.

  “Where are Timoshev and Kuznetsov now?” Pope asked.

  “On their way back to Russia. They were exfiltrated out of a private airfield after you lost them. They had a pilot fly them over the channel to France. ATC confirmed the vector—they took off from Popham and landed at Calais-Dunkerque at just after six. We’ve contacted the DSGE, but the odds of finding them now are slim. They will have picked up new legends as soon as they arrived. If it were me, I’d get them into the Netherlands and fly them out of Schiphol, but it could be anything. They’re gone. We can’t stop them getting home.”

  Pope crossed his legs. “So what do we do now?”

  “We go after them. BLUEBIRD thinks he might be able to help us find them again. The two of you are going to go to Moscow and set up there. As soon as we know where they are, you are going to take them out.” He got up again and walked to the window that overlooked the grey river. “They killed those two men to make a point. The Center is sending a message: they want any other dissident, inside or outside the motherland, to know that the SVR has a long memory and a long arm. And they were making a point to us, too. To the security services. To the country. It was an insult. They don’t care because they don’t see us as a threat. They are thumbing their noses at us, and we cannot allow that to stand. So that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go to Moscow, you’ll find the sleepers, and you’ll kill them both. And then you’ll find whoever it was who ordered the operation and you’ll kill them, too. We’re going to show our Russian friends that there are consequences to their actions. We won’t be anyone’s punchbag.”

  Milton sat quietly. An operation in Moscow would be difficult, to say the least. An operation in Moscow against two high-profile SVR agents would be something else entirely.

  “There’s an Aeroflot flight out of Heathrow at ten forty-five tonight. Pick up your legend from Tanner. You’ll be briefed at Moscow Station at seven tomorrow morning. I want this taken care of as quickly as possible. No mistakes this time. Absolutely no mistakes. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Pope said.

  Control didn’t take his eyes off Milton. “Number One?”

  “Sir?”

  “See that it gets done. Take them both out. Dismissed.”

  Part III

  Moscow

  46

  Aeroflot flight SU 2585 was delayed on its departure from Heathrow, finally taking off at five minutes past midnight. The captain apologised, but said that he was confident that they would be able to make up the lost time en route. It was a standard flight for the carrier. The cabin crew were efficient but not particularly attentive and the late snack that was brought around was cold and unpleasant. Milton passed up the food, asking instead for a vodka and tonic. He drank it as he studied the legend that Tanner had supplied.

  The name was his usual one—John Smith—but this time he was a diplomat in the British Embassy reporting to work in the Economic Section. He had been educated at Colchester Royal Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had obtained a BA and then a PhD. He had joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and was then posted to Bucharest where he had worked as Second Secretary for three years. Following that, he had been transferred to Ankara and then Rome and then, bringing the file up to date, he was moved to Moscow. He was single, had a flat in Highgate, enjoyed cooking and supported Arsenal. He went over the details again, committing it to memory. He had done the same thing many times before, and he knew it would stick.

  Pope was several rows ahead of Milton in the cabin; he could see the back of his head. They would maintain a discreet distance until they met at the embassy for their briefing in the morning. They both knew that there was a good chance that there would be SVR agents on the flight with them, and they did not want to give them any reason to increase the surveillance that they would be subjected to upon landing. Milton didn’t even know Pope’s legend; he might be a diplomat, like him, but he could equally be a trade delegate or a cultural attaché. It made little difference.

  The vodka slid down easily and Milton ordered another. He downed that, too, and then put his chair back as far as it would go, strapped himself in and allowed the drone of the engines to lull him to sleep.

  They landed at Sheremetyevo at four in the morning. The terminal was quiet and they were able to disembark and make their way to immigration quickly. Milton made his way across the lines until he was in the diplomatic channel, and then breezed through the checks and into the arrivals lounge. The embassy had sent a car for him and the driver was waiting, holding a sign with his name on it.

  “Hello,” Milton said.

  “Mr. Smith?” He was English.

  “That’s right.”

  “Come with me, please.”

  The man offered to take Milton’s suitcase, but he shook his head and said that he had it covered. Milton followed the driver through the airport to the parking garage.

  “Pleasant flight, sir?”

  “It was fine.”

  Milton looked around at the other travellers who were making their way to the garage. He saw a few whom he recognised from the aircraft, and others whom he had not seen before. He glanced at the ones following behind them—a young man with tattoos who was carrying a guitar in a case, an elderly couple, a middle-aged woman—and wondered which of them worked for the FSB, the domestic intelligence service. He saw the CCTV cameras positioned overhead. Those feeds would all end up in the Lubyanka and would, he knew, have already been examined by the clerks who were paid to scrutinise new arrivals and cross-check them with known intelligence agents. It was a long time since Milton had been to Russia, and the identities and likenesses of Group Fifteen agents were known to a vanishingly small cohort of senior staff. Milton did not believe that there was a file on him, but he knew not to take anything for granted.

  They reached the garage, took the elevator to the second floor and reached a Mercedes with blacked-out windows. The driver opened the rear door for Milton and slid into the front.

  “We’ve booked you into the Lotte,” the man said as he pulled out.

  It had been raining, with a fine drizzle still hanging in the air. A large municipal building faced them as they drove away, and, with its pink and yellow tiers, it reminded Milton of a Battenberg cake. An illuminated sign on the roof announced MOCKBA, the glow reflecting off rain-slicked asphalt. Milton stared out of the window. It felt real now. He was in Moscow, in enemy territory. He was naked, too, an agent operating without backup. He was always reminded of the espionage films and novels that had enthralled him during his youth, and the malign influence of the all-powerful KGB. That body might have been disbanded, but the change was little more than
window dressing. The FSB was its successor, with a reach and malignancy that was every bit its equal. Milton and Pope were alone against it now, and if they were compromised, there would be little support.

  He leaned back in the seat as they hurried through the quiet streets. He had grabbed an hour of fitful sleep on the flight, but that was all; his only rest since Friday had been his drunken stupor this morning, and he had an early start at the embassy today. It would just have to do.

  The hotel was on Novinskiy Boulevard and was one of the best in Moscow. It was a large building that curved around a bend in the road, the neon sign on the roof burning bright against the slowly lightening sky. The desk was staffed twenty-four hours a day, and, after Milton had checked in, he was escorted to his room by a polite and attentive porter. The woman spoke excellent English, and asked Milton about his trip and what he hoped to do during his visit to the city. Milton suspected that her good nature was not entirely genuine, and that he was being probed for information that might be passed along to the FSB division that specialised in counter-intelligence and the monitoring of foreign visitors.

  “I’m going to be working at the British Embassy,” he said.

  They reached the second floor and the porter indicated that they should turn left to find room 261.

  “We have many diplomats from the embassy,” the woman said.

  Milton knew that, of course; it was the reason the room had been reserved for him here.

  “Is it close?” he asked.

  “You haven’t been before?”

  “First time.”

  “Yes, it is close. You can walk there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Excellent,” Milton said.

  They reached the door. “What will you be doing there, Mr. Smith?” she asked him.

  “Working on a deal to buy more Russian oil and gas. Not particularly interesting, I’m afraid.”