Ghosts

The Flight Lieutenant led the Russians to the Kamov. Beatrix stepped down and walked over to him.

“Thanks,” Milton said.

“I thought I was going to be late. The car Mamotchka gave me broke down in the middle of nowhere. I hitched the rest of the way.”

“You hitched?”

“Truck driver took pity on me. Probably thought his luck was in.”

She cocked an eyebrow in amusement. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how quickly he would have been disabused of that idea.

They walked across the airstrip to the Hercules. The ramp was already lowered and they climbed aboard, knocking their boots against the hydraulic struts to clear the compacted snow away.

Milton watched her. “You know Spenser was surrendering, don’t you?”

“I know,” she said.

“I’m not being critical.”

“I wouldn’t care if you were,” she said. “He had it coming to him.”

“You had history?”

“We did.”

“He was one of the ones Control sent after you?”

“He took my daughter,” she said absently. “I’d kill him twice if I could.”

“The score is settled, then.”

“With him, yes. Just five more now.”

Milton looked at her: there was steel in her face and fire in her eyes. He didn’t press.

He finished his cigarette and threw it onto the runway outside. The Russians had Pope on a stretcher and they were bringing him across to them.

He took out the packet. “These taste like shit. You want one?”

“Go on, then.”

He handed one to her and then gave her his lighter. She lit it, holding it between her lips as she took the pistol from its holster, secured the manual safety and then ejected the magazine. The action was completed easily and smoothly, with minimum effort. He knew she would have been able to strip and reassemble the gun when she was blindfolded, too. He was just the same. He remembered what she had been like when she had selected him from the other applicants who had been competing to join the Group: fierce and intimidating, and none of that edge had been dulled in her lost years. Her anger had become a crucible and she had submerged himself in that slow-burning, pitiless flame, until the emotion had been smelted out of her.

Just five more now.

He knew the identity of one of those five.

There was nothing that could have persuaded Milton to swap places with him.

PART SEVEN

LONDON

Chapter Forty-Six

Control sat at the wide table and glared with undisguised disdain at the three men opposite him. It was a senior deposition: the foreign secretary, a particularly oleaginous politician called Jonathan Coad of whom Control had always had a rather bleak opinion, together with the heads of MI5 and MI6. It was midnight and the meeting had been called as a matter of the greatest urgency. The evidence had been delivered earlier that day. It had arrived by email, from an anonymous account that had been accessed at an internet cafe in Hounslow. Agents had been sent to the cafe to question the owner but he could not remember anything of the customer who had booked fifteen minutes at the machine from which the email had been sent. When they checked his security cameras, they found that they had been disabled. Whomever it was who had sent the email, they had an interest in hiding their identity.

Control had not been given advance warning of the subject of the meeting although, after the failure of any of the five agents to respond, it was not difficult to guess. They had taken thirty minutes to run through the extensive evidence with which they had been presented. There were the pictures of Control with Alexandra Kyznetsov and the correspondence and financial details that had been culled from the flash drives. That, in itself, would have been enough to damn him, but they hadn’t stopped there. They had obtained ex camera search orders and collected his bank details for the last ten years. He was not foolish enough to have passed the money he had received from Kyznetsov, or the other people like her who had come afterwards, through accounts that could easily be traced. There were other accounts for that, ones in jurisdictions that did not so easily divulge their secrets, but even with those precautions in place they had put questions to him that he had struggled to answer: how had he found the money to purchase his property outright, for example? He had paid for his Jaguar in cash. Where had that come from? The holidays, the extravagant purchases. They suggested that they exceeded his income. They accused him of living beyond his means. Where was the money coming from? Control knew that they had already reached their conclusion and that anything he said could only incriminate him further, and so he deflected them all with bluster. How did they find the temerity to question a man who had given so much to his country? It didn’t matter. He had already started to plan his next steps. He had already started, in truth, as soon as it became obvious that the mission to Plyos had failed. Forewarned was forearmed and he had always feared that this day would come, no matter how careful he had been. He had steps in place and, knowing that, he was able to brazen it out.

“Do you have anything you want to say?” Coad asked him.

“Just that I find it difficult to understand how you could accuse me of wrongdoing.”

“No-one is accusing you of anything,” he corrected calmly. “We’re simply saying that there are some questions that need to be answered.”

“Semantics,” Control snorted derisively.

Coad held up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “We don’t really have a choice in this, old man. We’re going to have to suspend you until this can be cleared up. Shouldn’t take longer than a month, I should think. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good set of answers that will make this all go away. And, when we have them, you’ll be back in post.”

Control got up. “Is that all?”

“Stay in the country, alright?”

“Anything else?”

“No. That’s all.”

He nodded curtly, collected his overcoat from the stand next to the door and made his way to the street outside.

* * *

He knew he didn’t have long and so he drove straight to Waterloo. There was a large warehouse not far from the station that had been transformed into a secure storage facility, and Control had rented a space there for the past five years. He took a walk-on suitcase from the trunk of the car, showed his driving licence at the desk and went through the doors into the warren of corridors that had been fashioned by hundreds of crates of varying sizes. The one he wanted was of medium size, big enough to stand erect but small enough that he could touch all four walls from the centre. He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and switched on the light. He closed the door behind him. There was just one item inside the room: a hundred litre crate made of opaque plastic. He opened the lid and began to inventory the items inside.

Weapons first. He took out the Heckler & Koch MP7A1 machine pistol wrapped in oilcloth, followed by the sound suppressor. Beneath that were three thirty-round magazines and six boxes of ammunition. There was a FNP-45 .45 calibre double action semi-automatic with one extra magazine.

He put the guns into the suitcase and went back to the crate.

There were six Tesco plastic bags, the heavy duty ones that were supposed to last for life, and, inside, was thirty thousand pounds and ten thousand dollars, all in tens and fifties. A ziplock freezer bag held French and German passports in different names and matching driver’s licenses. There was a wallet with a third driver’s licence, a credit card in the name of Peter McGuigan that would allow him to access the Cayman account with two hundred thousand dollars in it. There was a packet of hair dye, a pair of spectacles with clear frames and a handheld GPS.