The John Milton Series Box Set 4 Page 5

  He was taking a risk.

  He had just come off a job. Control had assigned a file to him: an MI6 analyst called Callaghan had been found poking through files that had no connection to his work. He had accessed the SIS network from his home computer and had been traced by his IP address. He had been put under surveillance and had been followed to Brick Lane in East London where he had been observed removing a small object from a cleft in the wall of an alleyway behind an Indian restaurant. It was a dead drop, and when agents investigated it they discovered that he had left behind a USB drive that, upon analysis, was found to contain intelligence on an active SIS operation in Eastern Europe. The follow-up investigation attributed more than two dozen disappearances of local sources to Callaghan’s perfidy.

  The traitor’s flat was searched and the details of a hidden bank account containing fifty thousand pounds were recovered. The dead drop was put under surveillance but no one ever returned to it. The SVR agent, thought to be a Directorate S agent, either had a preternatural sense for self-preservation or he or she had been tipped off. The decision was made that they would not arrest Callaghan for fear of what might come out during a trial; instead, Milton was given the green light to interrogate him and then make him vanish.

  The memories rushed over him and, even though he closed his eyes, he couldn’t stop them. He had broken into the man’s flat and waited for him to return from work. He had found a bottle of gin in a kitchen cupboard and had had his first drink then, two fingers to silence the spectres in his head, the wails and shrieks of the phantoms who were hungry for another to join their number. Callaghan had arrived. Milton had hidden behind the door and met him with his Sig pressed to the back of his head. Callaghan had confessed to everything, had answered Milton’s questions and then gone beyond them. He had volunteered information on his recruitment, on the intelligence that he had supplied, on the intelligence the SVR had requested of him. There was no need for what the CIA euphemistically described as ‘enhanced’ techniques; Callaghan had spilled his guts as soon as Milton had sat him down and told him how it was going to play out. Milton had recorded his mea culpa on a digital recorder and then, with the wailing pounding in his head, he had pressed the suppressor against the back of Callaghan’s crown and put a 9mm round into his brain. He had called it in, requested clean-up, and left.

  After that? He could remember fragments, and then nothing: he had taken a taxi to Chelsea and had started drinking properly. He remembered The Crown, The Pig’s Ear and Riley’s. He remembered the dream, vivid and real: Callaghan visiting him while he was on his hands and knees in a filthy toilet cubicle. Milton saw the hole in his head and the blood still dripping down onto his face. After that, though, there was nothing. Milton had woken up with a black eye, a vicious bruise all the way down his ribcage, scraped and bruised knuckles and someone else’s blood on his shirt. He couldn’t remember how it had got there.

  “Hello?”

  Milton looked up. It was one of the men who had been smoking outside the building. The man was in his forties, dressed in clothes that suggested a reasonable income and a care for his appearance, with skin that bore all the hallmarks of a fake tan.

  “Hello,” Milton said.

  “Are you here for the meeting?” The man’s teeth were a little jagged, and Milton could smell stale smoke on his breath when he spoke.

  “I’m fine,” Milton said, suddenly wanting to be left alone again.

  “Is it your first?” The man had an effeminate quality. He didn’t wait for Milton to answer his question and, instead, he sat down next to him on the bench. “I remember my first, too. Nervous as hell. My throat was so dry I could barely speak. I still get nervous now, so I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and volunteered to be secretary here. My name’s Michael.”

  He put out his hand for Milton to shake, but, instead of taking it, Milton stood up. “I’m just enjoying the sunshine,” he said. “I’m not here for a meeting.”

  “Of course,” the man said gently. “But if you were, and if you changed your mind, you could just come and sit at the back and listen. You might find that’s what you need.”

  Milton found himself conflicted: his head was shouting that he should walk away and never come back, while his heart told him that Michael was right, that this was what he needed, that he had come here for a reason, that he could take a seat at the back of the room and just soak it all in, get a feel for the meeting so that he could decide whether it was for him. He was caught there, pinned by wariness and indecision, but, just as Michael was about to speak again, Milton’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

  He turned away from the bench, took out the phone and looked down at the screen. The caller was Global Logistics.

  Milton tapped to accept the call and put the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Smith?” The caller was using Milton’s usual legend for when he was in the United Kingdom: John Smith, a sales rep for the company.

  “Yes,” he said. “Tanner?”

  Tanner was Control’s private secretary: ex-army, infantry, like Control and all of the other operatives in the Group. He sounded nonplussed and a little annoyed.

  “Where are you?” Tanner asked.

  “In the city,” Milton said.

  “Something’s happened. We need you.”

  Milton gritted his teeth.

  “I’m sending a car to pick you up now. Where are you?”

  Milton reached a brick wall and sat down on it. “Mile End.”

  “What are you doing in Mile End?”

  Milton had no interest in answering that. “I can be at the Tube station in fifteen minutes.”

  “Very good. The car is on its way.”

  There was no point in arguing. Milton looked back at the building. Michael was just going inside, with the other two smokers following him. A wedge was removed from underneath the door and it swung closed.

  “And Smith?” Tanner was still on the line.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to need to be sharp. We have a situation. You’ll be briefed en route.”

  13

  Jessie Ross woke up to the sound of her phone buzzing in her handbag.

  She had been out in Camden last night. It had been a typical Saturday: they had started in the Good Mixer, staggered up Parkway to the Dublin Castle, watched a terrible band and then danced to the same music they always danced to until the late lock-in finally came to an end at three. She had told herself that she wouldn’t stay out all night but, already half cut, her resistance had been pathetic. They had picked up a greasy kebab from Woody’s Grill and taken it back to Fuzz’s house to eat it.

  The phone.

  She sat up and found that she wasn’t alone in bed. She remembered. There was a man next to her. He was lying on his front, his head angled away so that she couldn’t see his face. The sheets had been dragged all the way down to his knees and she could see that he was naked. She knew who he was: his name was Peter and he was one of Izzy’s friends from Fort Monckton, the facility that served as the SIS field operations training centre.

  She got out of bed, took her dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door and put it on. She found her handbag beneath the piled clothes on the floor and took out her phone. She looked at the display and saw that the call was from Raj Shah and that, much worse, she had already missed four calls from him. She groaned. He was calling on a Sunday? It must be serious.

  She took the call and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?” she said quietly as she stepped out of the bedroom and into the kitchen diner of her flat.

  “I’ve been calling you for the last thirty minutes,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “The phone was on silent.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At home. What’s happening?”

  “I need you to get to Southwold as quickly as you can.”

  “Southwold?” She wrinkled her brow as she tried to remember where that was. “Norfolk?”


  “Suffolk. I’m sending a car to pick you up. There’ll be a briefing in the back—you need to be up to speed by the time you get there.”

  She looked down at the dirty dressing gown and then at her reflection in the window. Her hair was a disaster and she was still wearing last night’s make-up. She was a mess. “Give me half an hour,” she said.

  “Can’t do that. The car will be with you in five minutes. Don’t fuck about, Jessie. This has the potential to be very serious.”

  Jessie thought about her son; Lucas was with her parents, and she was supposed to be going over to pick him up later. She was going to have to call them to see if they could keep him for a little longer. She went back into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe, hoping against hope that she had something suitable to wear.

  “Jessie?” Shah said curtly.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, taking down a skirt that would just about do the trick. “It’s fine. Can you give me an idea what this is about?”

  “Pyotr Aleksandrov is dead. He’s been shot. I don’t need to tell you what that means.”

  “Hey,” said the man on the bed.

  “Shot?” Jessie hissed. “By who?”

  “Get in the car. I’ll see you there.”

  Shah ended the call.

  “Hey,” the man on the bed repeated.

  Jessie turned around. She could see his face now. He was blandly handsome, in the sort of emaciated indie musician fashion that she found annoyingly attractive. Last night was the first time that they had met; Izzy had set it up as a blind date and Jessie had decided that he was someone it might be useful to know.

  “Hey,” he said for the third time. “Come back to bed.”

  “You have to go,” she said, taking off the dressing gown and pulling on the only clean underwear that she could find.

  “Don’t be mean,” he said.

  She found his jeans and t-shirt on the floor and tossed them at him. “I’m serious. Get dressed. I have to go to work.”

  He must have heard the determination in her voice and, grunting, he sat up and started to work his legs into his trousers. Jessie picked up her blouse, saw it was dirty, found a clean white shirt and teamed it with the skirt.

  “I had fun,” the man said.

  “Great,” she said, going through into the bathroom and quickly sorting out her hair and make-up.

  “So can I see you again?”

  She wanted to say no, but she was ambitious and you never could tell how people might prove to be helpful down the road. No point in burning bridges when they didn’t need to be burned.

  “I’ll call you,” she said. She reapplied her make-up, then took a bottle of aspirin out of the cabinet and swallowed down two tablets with a double-handful of water.

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  Jesus. Why were men all so insecure these days?

  “Maybe we can get lunch next week. When are you in the River House again?”

  “Thursday.”

  “So give me a call.”

  She was just checking herself in the mirror—better, not great, just about presentable—when she heard two short blasts of a car horn from outside. She couldn’t wait around any longer.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Let yourself out.”

  She grabbed her jacket, keys and phone and left the flat.

  A black BMW was idling at the side of the road. She hurried over to it, opened the back door, and slid inside. There was a man sitting there already. He looked to be of average height—five eleven or six foot—and looked as if he might be muscular without it being obvious. His eyes were on the grey side of blue, his mouth had a cruel kink to it and, as he turned to look at her, she saw that he had a faint scar that ran from his cheek to the start of his nose. His hair was long and unkempt, with an unruly frond that curled across his forehead like a comma.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Jessie replied. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

  The man put out his hand. “John Smith,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  14

  They raced south under blue lights, the Sunday evening traffic parting before them. Smith was wearing a pair of jeans, a black polo-neck shirt and a scuffed leather jacket. Jessie looked down at her own clothes—the skirt was creased and she spotted, to her horror, a small red wine stain on her shirt—and felt a fresh surge of irritation.

  She took out her phone and typed a quick message to her mother, telling her that she had been called away on urgent business and asking whether she would be able to look after Lucas for another couple of days. Her parents lived in Southampton, and ever since Lucas’ father had betrayed her, they had taken her son on alternate weekends so that he could maintain something of a life. They were besotted with the boy, as Lucas was with them, and the arrangement had proven to be invaluable. Jessie argued with her parents often, usually prompted by their unsubtle suggestions that she had been single for too long and shouldn’t a young and attractive woman like her have found someone suitable to settle down with rather than going out with her friends… but, despite their disagreements, Jessie knew that they worried about her for all the right reasons and that, without them, her life would be so much more difficult.

  She fidgeted, unable to settle. She looked over at Smith: he was skimming through a sheaf of papers and, perhaps aware that she was looking at him, gestured to the seat back in front of her.

  “One for you, too,” he said, pointing to a bundle of papers in the seat back pocket.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Smith looked back down at his papers.

  “How long will it take to drive there?” Jessie asked.

  Smith looked up again and smiled at her with forced patience. “Where?”

  “Southwold.”

  “Who told you we were driving?”

  “We’re not?”

  “The plan changed.”

  Jessie looked out of the window and noticed, for the first time, that they were heading south.

  “Southwold’s east.”

  “It is,” Smith said as the driver carved through a gap on the Old Street roundabout.

  “But—”

  “We’re flying there. Helicopter.”

  “Oh.”

  “You flown before?”

  “Not in a helicopter.”

  “We’ll be there in forty minutes. It’ll take two hours if we drive. Apparently, this”—he tapped a finger on the dossier—“is fast moving and they need everyone there yesterday.”

  He looked down at the papers again.

  “I’m sorry,” Jessie said. “I don’t think you told me what you have to do with this.”

  “I didn’t,” Smith said. And then, when he realised that she was still staring at him, he added, “I’m your military liaison.”

  “Why on earth do I need that?”

  “You might not,” he said. “But it’s better to have something and find you don’t need it, than not have something and find that you do. Read the briefing.”

  Smith looked back down at his own briefing document. She had exhausted his patience; it was clear that he had no wish to continue the conversation. She looked at him a little more carefully. He looked a little rough around the edges: his face was stubbled with five o’clock shadow and there were dark pouches beneath his eyes. He looked like she felt.

  Jessie fished her briefing pack out of the seat back and started to leaf through it. It began with an MI6 summary of CHERRY’s case file. It had been signed off by ‘LG’; Jessie knew that was Leonard Geggel, her predecessor. CHERRY had a reputation for surliness, and, as she flicked through the reports that had been filed by Geggel—a man famed within the River House for a similar level of crabbiness—she saw repeated references to how unhappy the retired spy was.

  CHERRY’s given name was Pyotr Ilyich Aleksandrov, although they had resettled him as Vladimir Kovalev. He was born in St. Petersburg in 1950, had served in the Soviet Airborne Troops and had
then been co-opted into military intelligence. An impressive career had followed, and he had been a prize catch when he had been turned by Geggel while he was operating out of Athens Station. Aleksandrov had allowed them to mine a rich and valuable seam of information; he had reached the rank of colonel in the GRU and provided MI6 with lists of active Russian operatives and other organisational information. He was venal, as was often the case, and jealous of the perceived lifestyles of his counterparts in London and Langley. More than that, though, was a feeling of underappreciation that had quite clearly been with him all his life, a feeling that had not been assuaged since his defection.

  Aleksandrov had had a good run. He had lasted nine years before he was blown and would have lasted longer if it were not for the unwise extravagance of spending some of the £100,000 a year he earned from MI6 on a brand-new BMW. The FSB had investigated him, then arrested him, and after a two-week spell in the bleak dungeons of the Lubyanka, they had broken him and extracted a confession. He was convicted under Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code for high treason in the form of espionage and sentenced to thirteen years in a high-security detention facility, whilst also being stripped of his military rank and decorations.

  His liberation had come with the capture of a cadre of Russian spies in New York. An offer had been made to exchange the Russians for five double agents who had been working for MI6 and the CIA. The offer had been accepted and, on a snowy bridge in Prague in a scene reminiscent of exchanges in the depths of the Cold War, the swap was made. Aleksandrov had asked for asylum in the United Kingdom and MI6 had acceded to his request.

  But his useful years were long past. Aleksandrov had been out of the game for years and hadn’t been able to offer them anything useful since he had been exchanged. He was old and washed up, homesick and embittered by every slight and grievance that demonstrated, he argued, that MI6 was ungrateful and had forgotten the service that he had provided.