The Fox

  Yevgeni Krilov was with him within an hour. The Vozhd thrust the two reports at him and, while Krilov read, he stared out over the Alexandrovsky Garden at the roofs of western Moscow.

  ‘You failed,’ he said. ‘Your Night Wolves failed in England, and the Pasdaran failed at Eilat.’

  Krilov sat in silence and reflected that this was not all that had gone wrong. He had not revealed that his rival had not fallen for his plan to incriminate the Assistant Cabinet Secretary as his informant in London – and he still did not know why – and that his real ‘mole’, in the form of the junior civil servant Robert Thompson, must be presumed not to have died in a car crash but had quite simply disappeared, along with the daughter whose kidnapping had purchased his treachery. He did not know the details, but he had long ago been forced to assume that the four Albanian gangsters charged with that operation would not be seeing Tirana again.

  None of this he had shared with his boss in the Kremlin. Years spent climbing the career ladder had taught him that superiors like only good news, and that these instances of good news, unless repeated, are soon forgotten. Failures, on the other hand, are etched into the record.

  After the news the chief of the SVR had just learned, there could be absolutely no doubt: Weston was the man he was up against. It was he who was foiling his every attempt to locate and eliminate the teenage hacker.

  All spy agencies have their legends. Sometimes these legends are their heroes, perhaps long gone, but sometimes they are their opponents, often also departed. The British remember Kim Philby, the Americans Aldrich Ames. The Russians still snarl at the recall of Oleg Penkovsky and Oleg Gordievsky. These were the great spies, of their own side the traitors. But, across the divide, those who recruited and ‘ran’ them were the heroes.

  When he was a rising star in the old KGB, Yevgeni Krilov had heard of a British spy who had flitted into and out of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, who had recruited and run a cipher clerk in the Foreign Ministry and a Russian missile colonel in Hungary.

  Krilov also knew, though he could never prove it, that he had also been present at the ÁVO trap in Budapest set in order to capture this spy. After that the man had been withdrawn from active operations to a desk job in London and risen to Number Two in MI6. Then he had retired. Or so it had been thought.

  Yes, there was the teenage super-hacker, but Weston was running him, selecting the damage, slamming in body blow after body blow at Russia.

  His master was obsessed by the code-cracking youth. But the thwarting of Krilov’s Liechtenstein deception, the unveiling of Robert Thompson and the deliberate selection of ruinous targets – that was down to another mind, and every bell in his brain rang out the name Adrian Weston.

  The Vozhd was still glaring out at the clouds now drenching Moscow.

  ‘What do you want?’ Krilov asked of the figure at the window.

  The Vozhd turned, strode across the room and placed his hands on the shoulders of the seated Krilov. The spy chief looked up into two ice-cold, angry eyes.

  ‘I want it over, Yevgeni Sergeivich, I want it over. I don’t care how you do it, who you use. Find this boy and terminate him. One last chance, Yevgeni. One last chance.’

  Krilov had his orders. He also had his ultimatum.

  In the spy world, they all know each other. Or at least they know of each other. Across the great divide, they study one another as chess masters pore over the tactics and the character of the players they are going to battle at some future table where the weapons are queens and pawns.

  Allies meet and dine, confer, consult and sometimes share. At diplomatic receptions, under the protection of the Vienna Accords and their diplomatic immunity, opponents smile and clink glasses, each knowing who the other is, what they really do and that, if possible, the one will wreck the other’s career. Sometimes they even collaborate – but only when the politicians, in their stupidity, are going too far. In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, they collaborated.

  That awful October, as Kennedy ordered the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and Khrushchev refused, it had been the KGB chief for the whole American East Coast who sought out a CIA contact. The Russian proposed to the American that if the USA would give up her Turkish missile base at İncirlik, which threatened Russia, Khrushchev could save enough face in front of his own Politburo to abandon Cuba. A swap, not a humiliation. It worked. Had it not, someone was going to launch a nuclear missile.

  Yevgeni Krilov, in the back seat of the limousine returning to Yasenevo, had not been born at the time, but he had researched the incident thoroughly. Later, racing up the promotion ladder in the KGB, he had studied the faces of the British, American and French department chiefs who opposed him across the chasm of the Cold War. And Weston had been among them.

  Then came Gorbachev, the dissolution of the USSR, the abandonment of Communism, the end of the Cold War. Then years of humiliation for Russia, much of it self-inflicted, which was even now being avenged. And by the time that was over, the man he was thinking of had retired. Five years later, at fifty, Krilov had been promoted to the chieftaincy of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. He had thought there could no longer be a clashing of swords. But Weston had come back and, since he had, things had never gone so wrong.

  Far to the west, the man he was thinking of, more than ten years his senior, was having a drink with friends at the bar of the Special Forces Club. The bar was noisy, convivial with shared jokes and old memories. Sir Adrian sat in his corner chair nursing his glass of claret, nodding and smiling when addressed but otherwise lost in thought. He was thinking of a Russian far away whom he had never met but whom he had first clashed with, and defeated, over twenty-five years before. Thanks to the witless Vernon Trubshaw.

  It was at the end of the Cold War, but no one knew that. Back then, when so much of the land behind the Iron Curtain was hard to get at, let alone operate within, it was common practice to ask innocent businessmen with a legitimate reason for going there to keep their eyes and ears open for any snippet that might interest officialdom, meaning the spook world. On return, there would be a friendly lunch and a gentle debriefing. Usually, these were sterile, but one never knew.

  Vernon Trubshaw was the sales director of some company that was attending a trade fair in Sofia, capital of the iron-hard Bulgaria. He was asked for a BOLO, and Adrian Weston was tasked to debrief him. And Trubshaw, throwing back the government-paid-for wine, had an anecdote, probably valueless.

  He had been included in an invitation to a reception at the Russian embassy and during it he went to the basement lavatory. On emerging, he found four men in the corridor. One of them, clearly the senior man, was tearing an almighty strip off a younger and very junior one. All in Russian, of which Trubshaw spoke not a word.

  The younger man was nearly in tears of humiliation as the older man treated him like dirt. A week later, the thirsty Mr Trubshaw was asked to a second lunch. More government wine … and some photos. Adrian Weston had asked the British SIS team in Sofia for a small gallery of faces from the Russian embassy there. Trubshaw did not hesitate. His nicotine-yellow forefinger tapped two faces.

  ‘He was the one doing the screaming, and that was the one being roasted alive,’ he said. Another week later, under diplomatic cover, Adrian Weston was in Sofia. The local British intel team helped him with identifications. The humiliated Russian was Ilya Lyubimov, a junior gofer at their embassy. The next day, Weston knocked at the door of the young Russian’s apartment.

  He knew it was a long shot and probably doomed to failure. But he had not the time to stalk the Russian, to catch him alone outside the embassy, then court him over several weeks until a friendship bloomed. Fortunately, he at least spoke fluent and rapid Russian.

  The crash-bang approach to a recruitment rarely works but, once again, one never knew. Weston inveigled himself into Lyubimov’s flat and made his pitch. And it worked. The humiliation the young Russian had been subjected to in front of two collea
gues outside the lavatory doors had rankled deeply and still did. This was one profoundly dejected and disillusioned young man. And he was angry, very angry. An hour later, he agreed to ‘turn’ and spy for the West.

  He was no real use, of course, but six months later he was returned to Moscow, still in the Foreign Ministry. Two years later, patience had its reward. Someone in Ciphers had a heart murmur and was invalided out. Lyubimov replaced him. The mother lode. All the ciphers of all the diplomatic cables, worldwide – London got them all and shared them with the USA. It lasted until Lyubimov, eight years later, on a visit to his widowed mother in St Petersburg, was knocked down and killed by a drunk driver on Nevsky Prospekt. The diplomat screaming abuse in the Russian embassy in Sofia ten years earlier had been Yevgeni Krilov.

  In London, the knighted veteran Sir Adrian signalled for a refill. In Yasenevo, Krilov decided how he would fulfil his commission from the Vozhd. It was that or the end of him.

  There was a man. He had heard of him and his reputation but had never met him. A man of the shadows, of the Spetsnaz. Even among these he was something of a secret, and he preferred it that way. He was known only as Misha, and he was the best sniper they had ever had.

  There was talk that, in Syria, he had nailed over fifty terrorists of the al-Qaeda or ISIS persuasion and another hundred Ukrainian fighters in east Ukraine after the Russian invasion posing as an uprising. He was being compared to the legendary Zaitsev of Stalingrad.

  A sniper is different. In combat men kill men, in the air, at sea or by shell, grenade and mortar on the ground. But they hardly ever see them as other human beings. When they use a rifle, the enemy is still just a form, a shape that slumps to the ground when dead. The sniper studies every tiny detail of the victim, before squeezing the trigger and ending the life.

  It is not enough simply to be a marksman. Such an ace, horizontal and squinting through a scope-sight at a target on a range, can win an Olympic gold, but that piece of cardboard is presented to him, clipped motionless in place, unprotected. The combat sniper is a true manhunter.

  Both have the capacity for total concentration, but the sniper must add to that the ability to remain utterly motionless, if need be for hours. The competition marksman does not need to hide himself; the sniper must remain invisible. He must suppress the urge to ease aching muscles, twitch, scratch or relieve his bladder, unless inside his clothing.

  Camouflage is his salvation, his lifeline, and it will vary. In a city, it will be brickwork, stone, timber doors, windows, shattered glass, rubble. In the country, his background will be trees, bushes, grass, foliage or fallen timber. Into this, adorned with leaves and tufts, he must disappear like a creature of the wild. And then wait, hour after hour, until the target appears from his foxhole or crawls into vision.

  All that waiting, all that thinking. It makes for a very private man, rarely a conversationalist even off-duty. Zaitsev had been the son of a hunter from Siberia, crawling through the wreckage of Stalingrad, taking down German after German. Misha was similar. He came from the Kamchatka, a land of snow and trees, but he could disappear into the broken brickwork of Aleppo or the scrubland of Luhansk and Donetsk, across the Ukrainian border.

  Yevgeni Krilov lifted the receiver of his office phone. He needed to make a secondment from the Spetsnaz to his own SVR.

  There is surely no such thing as a sixth sense, and yet there must be. Adrian Weston was alive because of it, and he knew others like him. Such were the merry drinkers at the club bar. There is a moment to stay put and a moment to move. Pick the right one and you will see old age.

  He recalled the time in Budapest, back in the Cold War, when he was heading for a meet with an asset in a riverside café by the Danube. He was ‘on the black’, no diplomatic immunity, his asset a Russian colonel who had lost faith in Communism and turned coat. As he came closer, the sweat had started to trickle.

  There was always a moment of trepidation, perfectly normal, to be suppressed, but this was different. Something was wrong: it was too quiet for a busy street, the pedestrians too carefully studying the sky. He turned down another alley, emerged in another street, blended with the crowd, slipped away. An abort, perhaps for no reason. Later, he had learned that the general was taken, interrogated with extreme duress, and that the dreaded ÁVO had been waiting for him in strength. That was why the passers-by had been staring at the sky. They had seen the silent trench coats hovering.

  Now he was feeling the same about Chandler’s Court. Its location and its house-guests were known in Moscow. There had already been one attack. Captain Williams and his men had done what had to be done. Krilov would have known weeks ago that his team were never coming home. But Krilov’s boss in the Kremlin had torn up the rule book long since.

  News of the disaster of Paektu mountain and from Krasnodar must have reached the Kremlin and the correct deductions made.

  Sir Adrian knew he had no proof, but he suspected the news from Korea and Krasnodar would have led the man in the Kremlin to deduce that Luke was still alive, and thus another attempt on his life was more than conceivable. It might be entrusted to Yevgeni Krilov, but Weston knew the man at the top would be the giver of the order. In a long life of many hazards he had trusted his gut instinct and, so far, it had not let him down.

  Disruptive to Luke Jennings it might be, but it could not be helped. Better to be disrupted than dead. It was time to move the computer hub to a new and safer place. He sought and got another talk with the Prime Minister.

  ‘Are you sure, Adrian?’

  ‘As sure as one can ever be in an uncertain world. I now believe he will be much safer far away.’

  ‘Very well. Permission granted. Anything you need?’

  ‘I think I still need close protection from the Regiment. I can sort that out directly through the brigadier and the CO at Hereford. But I will need a budget, Prime Minister.’

  ‘Well, this office has access to a reserve fund with no questions asked. You can have what you need. Have you any new targets in mind?’

  ‘Just the one. But it’s back to North Korea again. Unfinished business. But I’ll be very careful, Prime Minister.’

  With clearance from the PM, Sir Adrian returned to this new quandary: where to go?

  He hunted high and low, then recalled a Scottish officer who had served with him in the Paras long ago. He had been The Honourable something back then. His father had died and he had become Earl of Craigleven. The family seat of Craigleven was a huge estate in Inverness, in the Highlands of Scotland with, at its centre, Castle Craigleven.

  He recalled a brief visit there when they were both young men. Castle Craigleven stood proud and stark, medieval granite with sweeping lawns, on a promontory amid thousands of acres of forest and sheep pasture, offering deer-stalking and pheasant shoots west of Inverness.

  Back in 1745 when Charles Edward Stuart, Bonny Prince Charlie, had led the uprising against King George II, most of the clan chiefs had sided with the Stuarts. The cannier Craigleven of the time had stayed with the King. After the destruction of the Highland army at Culloden, many of the chiefs had lost their lands and their titles. Craigleven was rewarded with elevation to earldom and even more estates.

  Sir Adrian traced his old comrade-in-arms and they lunched in St James’s. Yes, the elderly peer spent most of the year at his London house and the south wing of Castle Craigleven stood empty, available for a modest rent. The wing alone had twenty-two rooms, plus kitchens and stores. There was a live-in staff who would have something to do with out-of-season guests.

  ‘The place might need a bit of attention,’ said the laird. ‘It’s been empty for several years, since Millie and I moved down here. But if you can give it a lick of paint, it’s all yours.’

  A reputable firm of interior decorators from Inverness moved in the next day. What was needed was a bit more than a lick of paint, but Sir Adrian and Dr Hendricks flew north to supervise and instruct. The computer scientist would recreate the cyber-centre so tha
t the operations room at Chandler’s Court could be transferred with as little disruption and upset to Luke as possible.

  Both men knew there was another chore, and that it had to be done right. This was to create an exact replica of the living quarters of the vulnerable Luke Jennings, who would notice the tiniest variation in his surroundings and be unable to concentrate.

  The entire transfer was going to take a week. In the interim, Sir Adrian asked Luke to devote his attentions to a new task. It concerned an ultra-secret and fearsomely guarded controlling database situated deep underground in North Korea.

  In Russia, other preparations were in hand. A man called Misha was transferred from the Spetsnaz to the service of the SVR and given a copious briefing on what would be his third foreign assignment.

  He had fragmentary English, acquired from a compulsory language-skills programme included in the training of Special Forces soldiers. He was shown an array of photos of a manor house buried deep in the countryside in a place called Warwickshire in the heart of England. He was shown windows at one of which it was likely that a face would sooner or later appear, and he was shown the face, transmitted from Tehran. It was not the actual face, of course, but it was similar.

  In London, the SVR Rezident Stepan Kukushkin was fully briefed on the forthcoming mission and alerted that two of his sleeper agents living as British among the British would be needed to chaperone Misha into and out of the country, to and from his target area. This would involve transportation between various airports and a temporary safe house where he could live unseen until he could be introduced into the Chandler’s Court estate.

  Sniping is a speciality of the Russian armed forces and the traditional weapons have long been the Dragunov or the Nagant sniper rifles. But Misha had chosen the more modern and much superior Orsis T-5000 with its DH5-20x56 scope-sight.

  Every sniper in Russia is steeped in the history of the great aces over the years and most especially that of Vassili Zaitsev. He had been trained from childhood by his father to bring down marauding wolves and became skilled in hiding in snowdrifts. In snow-blanketed Stalingrad through the winter of 1942 he slotted over 300 German soldiers, notably the German ace Major Erwin König.