The John Milton Series Boxset 2 Read online

  “You want to sit?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll stand.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But I’m going to sit. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. Milton leant back against the wall.

  “Who are you?” he said. “Really?”

  “My name is Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko. I work for the SVR.”

  “You’re Russian intelligence.”

  “That’s right, Captain Milton.”

  “Which Directorate?”

  “Is that really important?”

  “It is if you don’t want me to walk out of that door and disappear.”

  “Directorate S.”

  “Operations?”

  “Correct.”

  Milton couldn’t help the smile.

  “What is it?”

  “This is the first time I’ve been busted out of jail by a Russian spook. What are you––undercover?”

  “For the last ten years.”

  “Frances Delaney.”

  She smiled. “That’s me.”

  “But not FBI?”

  “No. That was just a useful story.”

  “Okay, Anna. You better tell me why you risked your cover to get me out of there. You know I’m not going to talk to you.”

  “It would be easier if I showed you,” she said.

  She got up, crossed the room to her suitcase and removed an iPad. She activated it and jabbed her finger against the screen until she had opened the attachment to an email. She handed the tablet to Milton, the screen realigning as he held it up to look at it. It was a photograph of a man. He had short cropped black hair shot through with threads of silver and grey, a slab-like forehead and a nose that had been broken too many times. He had been beaten: his right eye was closed up, a livid purple bruise around the socket. There was a bloody welt on the side of his forehead and abrasions scraped down his left cheek. He was staring into the camera, the defiance on his face belying the punishment that had been meted out to him.

  “Do you know him?” Anna asked.

  Milton gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on the tablet. “Yes,” he said.

  The man in the picture was Captain Michael Pope.

  She watched Milton’s reaction. “We know you and Captain Pope have history. You were in the army at the same time. You are the same age, give or take a year or two, and you were both in Iraq during the first war, although you were in different battalions. Once the war was over, Captain Pope transferred into the First Battalion, B Company. The same Company, the same rifle platoon as you. You served in Northern Ireland together.”

  Milton dropped the tablet back on the bed. “Very good,” he said. “You’ve done your research.”

  “We know that he joined Group Fifteen a little while after you. An excellent reputation, although not in the same league as you, Captain Milton, of course. We believe he replaced you as Number One after you left. Is that correct?”

  “You can’t expect me to comment on that.”

  “No, I suppose not. And nor do I need you to. We know.”

  “So stop wasting my time. Are you going to tell me what happened to him?”

  “Captain Pope was arrested two months ago in Monaco. He entered the country with a false passport. He was apprehended with a Barrett M1 sniper rifle and a hundred rounds of ammunition. The weapon with which you made your name, I understand? The operation in North Korea?”

  “Again…” Milton said, shrugging.

  Anna ignored his reticence. “He was transferred to Moscow. He has been questioned, of course. At great length. He has been as”––she searched for the right word––“stoical as you would expect a man of his training to be, in the circumstances. We believe that his purpose in France was to assassinate my commanding officer. He has a holiday home there. Captain Pope had hired a motorboat. We believe his plan was to take the boat adjacent to his estate and make the shot from there. An audacious attempt, had it been allowed to proceed. Our experts considered it foolish, apart from those familiar with the skill of your country’s cleaners. It would take tremendous skill to snipe a target from a moving boat. You, perhaps, Captain Milton… a shot that you would have taken?”

  Milton said nothing. He looked down at the bed, at the tablet, at Pope’s battered and bloodied face. The last time he had seen him was in Juárez. Pope had orders to bring him back to London, dead or alive. It would have been easier to have shot him––Callan had wanted to––but Pope had forbidden it. There was no question about it: they were on different sides now, but he had saved his life.

  “Where is he?”

  “Captain Pope is in a gulag in Siberia. You will be aware of the quality of life an inmate in a Siberian gulag can expect. If he survives five years, I would be surprised.”

  Milton nodded. He knew he was being baited. “You know so much about us, you must know that we’re not on the best of terms. He still works for the government. I don’t. We have nothing in common.”

  “Please, Captain Milton, I don’t believe that. You have a long shared history. I can’t believe that stands for nothing. And there is an alternative for him. Freedom is not impossible, even for a man for whom there is no question of his guilt.”

  Again, Milton said nothing.

  “Are you not interested?”

  “I don’t like being played, Anna, and you would be wasting your time.”

  “We know what happened between you and Control. We know that you tried to leave the Group and that he wants you dead because of it. All we want is the chance to talk to you. We have some questions which require answers. We would not ask for any operational knowledge and no agent will be put at risk. You might consider yourself to be a consultant. Some of the questions, if you answer them, they will embarrass Control, but mightn’t that be of use to you? We know that his stock is not high with your government at the moment. Your absconding has damaged his reputation. If he was replaced, perhaps the standing order to have you killed would be rescinded, too?”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Nevertheless…”

  “What questions?”

  “That is not for me to say. My superior wants to speak to you. His name is Colonel Shcherbatov. Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “He is in Moscow. It would not be a simple thing for him to come here. Not as simple as it would be for me, in any event.”

  “You want me to go to Moscow?”

  “There is a flight from Houston to New York in the morning. We would take it and then transit to a flight to Moscow. I have a new passport for you. A cover story, should one be needed.”

  “I’m not going to Moscow,” he said. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Think about Captain Pope. Think about what you could do for him. He has a wife, I understand. Two young children. You have it in your power to return their father to them. Sleep on it, Captain Milton. See if you feel the same way in the morning. Perhaps you will have changed your mind.”

  PART THREE

  RUSSIA

  Chapter Twelve

  THE JUMBO circled over Sheremetyevo, slowly negotiating its way down the stack of jetliners, and then the fuselage shook a little as the undercarriage was lowered. Milton stowed his tray table and slid the copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles that he had purchased from the airport book store into his bag. Anna was sitting three rows ahead of him; he could see the top of her head, the crown of red hair easily visible in the dimmed cabin lights. Milton looked out of the window at the huge, sprawling expanse of Moscow. The lights of the city stretched away into the far distance: a seemingly interminable grid of streets, darkened holes marking the public parks, the serpentine slither of the Moskva, white smoke spewing from the smokestacks of the power plant on its bank. The rows of Stalin’s wedding cake skyscrapers were covered over with the snow that was piling down from the thick, angry clouds through which they had just descended. He saw the onion domes of the Kremlin, topped with their luri
d red stars; the basilica of St. Basil’s on Red Square, a child’s toy at this altitude. Everything was mantled in white.

  They landed and proceeded through border control with suspicious ease. They already had their luggage and so Milton followed Anna as she led the way through the glitzy terminal building, replete with Russia’s new wealth, and outside to the taxi rank. The bitter air swept around him again. He had spent a winter in Moscow, five years ago, during an assignment that took four months from preparation to bloody completion, and he knew what a Russian winter meant. He thought of Pope and what Anna had told him; if he really had been stuffed into a Siberian gulag, this weather––which would still be brutal––would be a balmy sojourn in comparison to what he could expect.

  The taxi driver had a tiny five inch television fixed to the dashboard, sucking power from the cigarette lighter. There was a football match taking place––CSKA were playing Munich in the European Cup––and he carried on watching it, occasionally raising his eyes to check the traffic ahead of him. Anna sat next to him, staring out of the window as the streets rolled by them. She had freshened up in the toilet at the airport, applying a fresh coat of lipstick and refreshing her scent. Her right leg was crossed over her left, the expensively shod foot dangled inches from Milton’s calf. The fingers of her left hand, the nails blood red, were spread out on her knee.

  Milton wondered whether she had been instructed to sleep with him.

  The driver turned off Tverskaya Street and pulled up outside the Ritz-Carlton. The pavements had been scrupulously swept clear of the snow that was so thick elsewhere and the uniformed porters hurried to help them as they stepped outside. Milton politely brushed them off as Anna paid the fare.

  “We will stay here tonight,” she said as they followed their luggage inside.

  “When do we see the colonel?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Fine. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “There’s one other thing. We would prefer it if you would stay in the room.”

  “I’m a prisoner?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But…”

  “But we would prefer it if you did not go out tonight but stayed here. The meeting tomorrow is important, for your friend, especially. You should be well rested. Perhaps you could order room service and get an early night?”

  “Yes,” Milton said. “I am tired. Perhaps I will.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  MILTON STOOD, pulled aside the net curtains and stared out into the cold night beyond. His room was on the fifteenth floor but the panorama was constrained by the blizzard of snow flakes that whipped around the building by the harsh wind. The view would open a little as the wind paused: long streets with street lamps casting bowls of golden light against the white; the glowing tail lights of cars and trucks and busses; tall buildings with some windows lit, others switched off by orders of the municipal government in an attempt to avoid the brown-outs that still afflicted the city.

  Milton gazed out over the streets for five minutes, allowing his memory to drift. He was much too young to have been involved in the Cold War but there had been plenty of missions inside the borders of the new Russia and the satellite states that still clung to it like piglets suckling the teats of their mother. He remembered a particular assignment in Moscow a year or two after he had been transferred into the Group. He and Number Four had entered the country under the cover of diplomatic passports and had taken rooms at the Hilton Leningradskaya, not too far from the hotel where he was staying now. An arms fair was taking place, and their target––a dealer who was negotiating the terms of a deal that would secure advanced surface-to-air missiles for the Iraqi regime––was going to be in attendance. Number Four had driven the motorcycle with Milton riding pillion. He had emptied the magazine of his H&K into the dealer’s BMW, killing him but sparing his mistress and his driver. It had been warm then, the end of September and the time of year that the locals called “grandma’s summer;” the last gasp of warmth when peasant women brought in their harvests and now, in the metropolitan version, when eager urbanites gathered at the outdoor cafés and bars for the last chance of an al fresco drink before winter closed its icy fingers around the city for five more long, dark months.

  Milton turned from the window and sat on the edge of the bed. He thought of Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko in the room next to his. What would she be doing? Making her report to her superior officers, informing them that she had successfully delivered him into the country? Her room would be identical to his and he thought of her on the bed, most likely adjacent to his and separated by the wall. Six inches away, perhaps. She was very attractive. He would have been lying to himself if he said that he did not find her beguiling. That, no doubt, was why they sent her. He thought of le Carré’s books or the films about espionage from the sixties and seventies; she was the lissome girl sent to guarantee his attendance, the honeytrap in the Cold War thriller. He wondered what would happen if he stepped into the corridor and knocked on her door. He did not doubt that she would welcome him inside. It was tempting and there would be no harm in it, an interesting diversion to kill the time until tomorrow, but Milton resisted. There were things he had to do. An old friend to meet, and information to gather.

  He dressed in the warm clothes that she had provided, pulled on the Timberland boots and put on his thick overcoat, quietly shut his door and padded softly to the elevator. He took it down to the ground floor and, without pausing, strode across the lobby, down the small flight of stairs, through the revolving door and into the street outside. He had noticed the man sitting in an armchair next to an open fire, a copy of the Herald-Tribune spread out in front of him. He had chosen a spot where he could observe the door and the lobby and Milton pegged him as an agent from the internal security directorate immediately. He didn’t rush through the lobby––he didn’t want them to think he was trying to flee, a reason to call for backup––but neither did he dawdle. As he emerged onto the street outside he made a show of arranging his overcoat, fastening the buttons all the way to the top, and, as he looped his scarf around his neck and tucked it into the front of the coat, he allowed himself a quarter turn back to the interior and saw the man, without his newspaper, coming down the steps.

  The snow was falling thick and heavy, fat flakes that settled on everything, softening edges, turning the parked cars into sculptures with gracefully curved lines. The snow was deep; a trough had been shovelled down the centre of the sidewalks that was wide enough for two people to pass, the walls of snow and ice on either side reaching up to Milton’s knees. He walked at a decent pace, following streets that he remembered from the last time he had been here.

  He stopped at a currency exchange and swapped two of the hundred dollar bills in his pocket for roubles. He turned to the street as the cashier counted out his money and saw the man from the hotel a hundred feet behind him, talking into the open window of a Mercedes SUV that was parked against the bank of snow on the road side edge of the sidewalk. Reinforcements, Milton thought. Fair enough. It didn’t concern him. He took the notes from the cashier, put them into his pocket and set off again for the station at Ploshchad Revolyutsii. He stepped into the relative warmth inside the heavy glass doors and bought a fur trimmed ushanka from the stall-holder who was doing a brisk trade flogging hats, scarves and gloves to credulous tourists. He put the hat in his pocket, bought a day ticket for the trains and made his way to the platform.

  A second tail got ahead of him, probably alerted by a call from the third agent, the one in the car. He was waiting on the platform. Milton recognised him as an intelligence man without very much difficulty. He was standing alone at the end of the platform where the civilian statues were; the athletes, the engineers, the proud revolutionaries with their puffed out chests and bulging biceps. It was the obvious spot for him to wait; he would have a good view of new arrivals. He was glancing at a newspaper that he obviously wasn’t reading, speaking the odd word from the
side of his mouth into a throat mic hidden beneath the scarf around his neck. The Russians used to have plenty of good men. Times had changed; now that the prestige and influence of the security service had been affected by the fall of the Wall, they had plenty of bad ones too, and more of the latter than the former. They were bad ones tonight. Milton thought, a little ruefully, it might have been nice to have been assigned some professionals to keep an eye on him. More of a challenge to lose them and, he admitted to himself, he'd been out of the game for a year. It would have been good for his ego to know that he still demanded their full attention.

  Never mind.

  Milton walked towards the man and looked into his eyes for a moment before he clocked him and turned away. Milton wasn’t concerned that the man knew that his cover had been blown. He wanted him to know. His ego again.

  Milton looked across the tracks to the other platform and waited until the display board advertised a wait of a minute for the eastbound train. He remembered the station well from the times he had been active in Moscow and its geography came back to him without difficulty. He turned on his heel and walked quickly to the stairs that you took to transfer to the green line. He took the steps two at a time, quite sure that he would have sent the man on the platform into a spin and enjoying that knowledge. He turned his head as he reached the middle of the bridge that crossed the tracks: on his left he could see the collection of disc-shaped chandeliers, running away down the platform and, eventually, into the darkened maw of the tunnel from which the trains emerged; on his right was the corresponding walkway that offered a way to cross the line from the other side of the platform. It was close enough for him to see the agent hurrying up the stairs, walking quickly but daring not to run. He was still being careful, even as he was fearful he was going to lose his target. Perhaps he didn’t know that he had been blown; if that was right, that just made him even more pitiable. The train wheezed into the station, the doors sliding open on runners that could have done with a drop of oil, and Milton embarked. It was just two stops to Pushkinskaya. He looked at the etiolated panelling and the strip lighting that flickered and cut out at regular intervals. Eastbound and westbound trains at Pushkinskaya pulled into different sides of the same platform and a second train was drawing to a halt just as the doors of Milton’s train opened. He walked across the platform, quickly obscured by the emerging throng of passengers, bundled up in their thick parkas and muffled hats.