The Fox

  ‘Yes, sad, really. His marriage broke up. Mind you, I wouldn’t have minded taking that wife off him. What a cracker.’

  ‘Sue, wasn’t she?’

  ‘That’s right. Gorgeous girl. Anyway, they’ve parted, and he’s gone off to New York. Good job, nice flat, new life, last I heard.’

  ‘He’s been in touch, then?’

  ‘Gave me a call the other day.’

  An hour later Agent C helped Toby to his car and, in the process, a mobile phone found itself transferred from Wilson’s pocket to that of the agent.

  When Agent C reported to Dmitri Volkov, he was able to be very helpful. If the hacker was the boy, he and his mother had definitely disappeared from Luton. But if anyone would know where they were, it would be the father. He was in New York, but the agent now had his mobile-phone number.

  The SVR has another chain of agents in New York City and, with modern tracing technology, a mobile-phone number is as good as an address. The colony of Russian gangsters in New York was duly contacted.

  Chapter Six

  THERE WAS NOTHING unusual about the garbage dumpster on the dingy New York street that morning in mid-May, except for the human leg dangling out of it.

  If the skip had been empty, the body would have been at the bottom of it and out of sight, for days or even weeks. It wasn’t. Had an apartment owner high above looked down, that person might have seen the limb of the cadaver hanging out of the dumpster, but there were no such apartments.

  The skip was on a patch of waste ground off a dingy alley in Brownsville, not far from Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn. Flanking the alley were old and empty warehouses; the whole area was an industrial slum. The only reason the police patrolman had seen the leg was because he had entered the waste ground to relieve himself.

  He zipped up and called his partner. The two young men stared at the limb then peered into the interior. The remainder of the corpse lay on its back: a middle-aged white man, eyes open, staring sightlessly upwards in death. The partner called it in to their local precinct station. After that, the usual machine went into operation.

  After ascertaining that life was extinct the street cops left the body alone. It was a matter for the detective branch and the medical examiner. Awaiting their arrival, the patrolmen scouted the immediate area and, in a nearby warehouse, rank and empty apart from scattered trash, one found ropes tied to some heating pipes. It looked as if – and the ME would confirm this from rope burns on the wrists – the victim had been tied to the pipes, apparently to take a beating.

  An unmarked sedan arrived, carefully picking its way down an alley strewn with debris. Two detectives got out to join the uniforms and have a look at the body. A crime team came to fence off the dumpster and the surrounding area with tape. Passers-by would be forbidden from entering, but there were none. The thugs who had done this had chosen well.

  Next came the ME himself. He took very little time to pronounce death, presumably murder, and permit the removal of the body. His team hauled it out of the dumpster and on to a stretcher, then to their van, and thence to the morgue. By this point the ME had been able to establish only that the body was fully clothed but had been stripped of valuables. There were pinch marks either side of the nose, but no eyeglasses. These were later found near the ropes in the warehouse. So, also, was a discarded handkerchief.

  There was the mark of a signet ring on one finger, but no ring. All pockets were empty. No billfold and no identification. A more thorough examination would have to be done at the morgue.

  It was there that the examiner, during the removal of the cadaver’s clothes, noticed two more oddities. There was a ring around the left wrist where a watch would have been, but no watch. Even stranger, the maker’s tags on the clothing indicated that none of it was American. The clothes looked to be British. The ME’s heart sank. A dead tourist, snatched and murdered in a slum, was bad news. He called down a senior detective.

  For the rest, he could establish cause of death. It was heart failure. The victim had been punched hard in the face. The blow had broken his nose and there was congealed blood in the nostrils and around the mouth. He had also been punched in the solar plexus. It was clear, with the chest cavity open, that the victim had had a weak heart, although he might not have been aware of this, and the trauma to which he had been subjected – the terror, the pain, the beating – had provoked cardiac arrest. The detective from upstairs joined him.

  He too examined the clothing labels. Jermyn Street. Was that not in London? The victim was middle-aged. A tad overweight, but not obese. Soft hands. He ordered the face to be cleaned up and photographed. And fingerprints taken, of course, plus a DNA sample. If he was a Britisher and a recent arrival, he must have come through immigration control, probably at Kennedy Airport.

  What Detective Sean Devlin wanted was a name. Did the dead man have a residence in the city? Was he staying at an uptown hotel? With friends? In addition to the British clothes, there were other oddities. This had not been a street mugging gone wrong. Muggers pounced, struck, incapacitated, robbed and ran. This man must have been snatched from miles away, brought to this slum, tied to metal pipes and beaten. Why? Punishment? Information?

  When he had the pictures Detective Devlin ran them to three state agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known simply as ICE; the omnipresent Department of Homeland Security; and, of course, the Bureau, the FBI. It took a day, and it was facial-recognition technology that clinched it. In the Brownsville precinct house to which Detective Devlin was attached, it suddenly rained FBI. The dead man was a new arrival as a resident and was under the protection of the Bureau. This was going to be embarrassing. But not for Detective Devlin. It went way upstairs to the FBI offices in New York.

  Their records showed that Mr Harold Jennings had been granted permission to move to and settle in New York City and that the necessary and copious paperwork had been fast-tracked by the Bureau as a favour to the British Prime Minister, via Scotland Yard. The Yard had to be informed, with apologies.

  Over in London, a man called Sir Adrian Weston was also informed. He motored out to Chandler’s Court and sadly relayed the information to Mrs Sue Jennings and her two sons. The younger one, Marcus, shed tears; the older one noted the death of his father as a fact, along with many others that he stored.

  Sue Jennings asked if the body of her husband could be repatriated for burial in England. This was promised. The British consulate in New York was charged to liaise with the FBI so that this would happen as soon as the cadaver could be released. She mentioned a watch that she would like returned. It had sentimental value.

  She explained it was a Rolex Oyster in gold. She had presented it to her husband on their tenth wedding anniversary and it was inscribed. On the reverse were the words ‘To Harold, with love from Sue, on our tenth anniversary’.

  New York replied that there was no watch but the hunt for the killers was ongoing and the New York Police Department would put out a BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) for a gold Rolex inscribed in that manner. There was a list that went regularly to pawnbrokers and jewellery shops, and the BOLO went on it but yielded nothing.

  Sir Adrian was troubled by the New York incident. It was too coincidental. If Moscow had made a connection between the disaster of the Admiral Nakhimov and the United Kingdom, they had done so incredibly fast – that was worrying. He called the FBI in New York and asked to speak with the detective who had been assigned to the case.

  With the Bureau’s help, he had a long talk with Detective Devlin in Brooklyn, who was as helpful as he could be, which was not much. And there, for a week, the trail died.

  On the day that the body found in the New York dumpster was identified as Harold Jennings, eight of the most powerful oceangoing tugs in the West assembled in the Strait of Dover and were hooked up to the stranded battlecruiser. Steel cables the thickness of a man’s waist snaked from their sterns to the immobile leviathan. At the height of the spring tide they hauled together. The two massive pr
opellers of the Nakhimov churned up tons of fine sand beneath her stern. Inch by inch, then foot by foot, then yard by yard, she slipped backwards off the Goodwins into deep water.

  For ten days, the Admiral Nakhimov had been a tourist attraction. Enterprising owners of launches up and down the Kent coast had run trips out into that patch of safe water between the Goodwins and the shore known as the Downs. Visitors took millions of photos, usually of themselves standing, beaming, with the battlecruiser in the background.

  Once she was free, the eight tugs unhitched and scattered to their bases; the Russians set off for the Baltic and the Dutch and French who had been summoned to help to their respective ports. The Nakhimov, however, did not get far in her journey to the Russian Far East. She needed a hull examination. Once under way again, she turned north, back towards Sevmash, in perfect working order. For the Kent locals, the spectacle was over. That was not the view of the Kremlin.

  As so often with police inquiries, the break, when it came, was a fluke. A mugger was arrested and he was wearing an inscribed gold Rolex watch. And he was Russian.

  There are 600,000 Russians in New York City, and half of them live and work in the zone known as Brighton Beach. This is a community in the southern section of the borough of Brooklyn, running along the shore of the Coney Island peninsula. It contains a vigorous and violent crime world made up of several known gangs. The NYPD has a large team of Russian-speaking officers for whom Brighton Beach and its gangs are the sole concern.

  The arrested man was called Viktor Ulyanov, and he was making it plain he intended to say nothing. He was clearly a gang-fringe lowlife and extremely stupid.

  He had tried a solo mugging in leafy Queens, miles from home, selecting a respectable-looking executive type walking down the street where he lived. But it had not been Viktor’s day. The middle-aged businessman had boxed at light-heavyweight for the USA in the Atlanta Olympics and his right fist was still an impressive assemblage of muscle and bone.

  Before Ulyanov could use his knife his target’s fist had made acquaintance with his jaw and he had woken up on the sidewalk to find several blue-clad legs around him. Down at the station house he was an object of mockery and lapsed into sullen misery. And all his possessions were confiscated before he went into his cell.

  On an upper level a bright young recruit looked at the watch and recalled a BOLO that had gone out a week earlier that mentioned an inscribed gold watch belonging to a dead Brit. He raised the matter with his sergeant and was duly praised for his sharp wits. Then the detectives took over and alerted the FBI.

  Mrs Sue Jennings was shown a picture of the watch as she returned to Chandler’s Court from her late husband’s funeral at a nearby church and confirmed it had been his. Over in New York, Ulyanov was informed that the charge against him was being raised from street assault to murder in the first.

  He recalled perfectly clearly what had happened. He had been recruited into the gang assigned to undertake the snatch of the British accountant only at the last minute because a smarter gang member had fallen out. There had been five of them, and it was a contract job. They had had no idea they had been contracted by a Russian agent working for the SVR in Moscow.

  The job was to go to an apartment in Queens, ring the bell and, when it was answered by the sole tenant of the flat, march him at gunpoint out to the sidewalk and into their van. This duly happened, with the terrified prisoner doing exactly what he was told. It had been dark, close to midnight, and no one had noticed a thing.

  As per orders, they had driven to an empty warehouse in a slum not far from Jamaica Bay, tied the weeping foreigner to some pipes and prepared to complete the assignment. Their orders were very simple. Knock him about a bit and ask him one simple question: where is your son?

  Then it had gone wrong. At the second punch from the gang leader, the man had convulsed, his eyes had bulged and he had slumped in the ropes. They thought he had lost consciousness and tried to revive him. But he was dead. Apart from the word ‘please’ over and over, he had said not a word. They had been more worried about the reaction of their boss than about the stiff.

  Three of the five went outside to find a place to dump the body. The fourth and Ulyanov stayed to untie the corpse and see if the man had anything worth taking. The other Russian took the signet ring and the billfold; Ulyanov took the watch and stuffed it in his trouser pocket. Later, he put it on his wrist in place of his cheap Timex.

  Sitting facing two steely-eyed detectives, the Russian thug realized that if he named his fellow killers he was a dead man. So he was stunned when they offered him a quite different deal. Though, privately, they knew a murder charge would not stand, they told him they were interested in one thing only and that they may be able to drop the charge if they got it. What did the Limey say before he died?

  Viktor Ulyanov thought it over. Answering seemed harmless enough. Set against twenty to life?

  ‘He didn’t say nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? Nothing at all?’

  ‘Not a word. Just took the second punch, choked and died.’

  The detectives had their answer. They passed it on to the FBI HQ in Washington, which passed it on to London.

  For Sir Adrian, the sudden death of Harold Jennings in New York and the assurance from the NYPD that he seemed to have uttered not a word about his son or, more vitally, about his son’s new location, was a partial relief. But only partial.

  More to the point was a nagging worry. How had the Russians ever heard the name Jennings or found the right Harold Jennings in a New York apartment 3,500 miles away? Somewhere – he had no idea where – there had been a leak.

  It was self-evident that Moscow would not take the global humiliation of her grounded battlecruiser as just a bit of bad luck. Even without traditional Russian paranoia, they would work out that their computers had been penetrated. Back-engineering on board the Nakhimov and in the Murmansk database would have proved there had been a hack, and a very successful one, so clever that it had gone unnoticed until too late. That would entail a massive inquiry. And Sir Adrian had a pretty clear suspicion as to whom it had been entrusted.

  That is one of the things about the aces of the intelligence world. Like chess players, they study one another. Outwitting rather than outshooting is the ideal. Shooting is for men in camouflage uniforms. Checkmate is more satisfying. Sir Adrian had worn the camo in the Paras and the dark suit in the Firm.

  Though he was more than ten years older than the man at Yasenevo, he had noted the rising star of the SVR when he had been deputy chief of MI6. Yevgeni Krilov had been subtle and tenacious as head of his service’s Western Europe Division back in the day, and he had not disappointed in his subsequent career. He had gone on rising through the ranks to the seventh-floor office.

  It is reported that during the desert campaign in North Africa in the Second World War the British general Bernard Montgomery had spent hours in his caravan staring at a picture of his opponent, the German Erwin Rommel. He was trying to work out what his enemy would do next. Sir Adrian had kept a file on Yevgeni Krilov. It too contained a portrait. He went back to his ex-colleagues at Vauxhall Cross and was allowed, for old times’ sake, to sit in a closed room and study the Krilov file.

  Krilov had, in the late nineties, spent two years serving under the Rezident, or chief of station, in the SVR unit inside the Russian embassy in London. He was non-declared, meaning he was posing as a harmless junior cultural attaché, but the British knew exactly what he really was.

  In that strange danse macabre that is espionage it is common for agents on opposite sides to attend embassy cocktail parties – conversing, beaming, clinking glasses and pretending to be all jolly diplomats together, while behind the mask privately intending to outwit and destroy the opponent. Sir Adrian believed he might have met the (then) junior Russian spy at one such Russian reception.

  What he could not know was that there had nearly been another meeting. It would have been in Budapest, on that occasion
when he turned away from a meet with a defector Russian colonel because he sensed it had been ‘blown’. He discovered later he was right. The tortured colonel had given everything away before he was executed. Because the traitor was a Russian, the ÁVO, Hungary’s secret police, had invited a man from the Russian embassy to be present at the capture of the British agent. Budapest was Krilov’s third foreign posting. He had been sitting inside the ÁVO trap, waiting for the British spy who never appeared.

  Closing the file and leaving Vauxhall, Sir Adrian’s suspicion grew stronger. Krilov had not climbed from Russian embassy gofer to the seventh floor at Yasenevo for nothing. He must be the man tasked to trace the super-hacker.

  Weston also knew that Moscow had learned two names: Jennings and Luton. He did not know how. But it no longer mattered. The Jennings family had disappeared from there, but he had every right to presume that Moscow had never heard the name Chandler’s Court. And yet … and yet. He had that gut feeling again. That was why he wanted a small but expert squad of armed men around the boy. A few soldiers at Chandler’s Court might not be a bad idea.

  In a miserable back alley in Brownsville, Krilov’s chosen minions had failed him, but if Moscow had really decided that the heads and hands that had created the humiliation of the Admiral Nakhimov dwelt in that small island off the north-west coast of Europe which the Vozhd loathed so heartily, he would not stop there. He would try again.

  Sir Adrian would have been even more disquieted if he could have hovered, spectre-like, in the office of his adversary above the birch forest at Yasenevo.

  Spread out across Krilov’s desk was a large print-out of a photograph. The original had been taken by a Russian space satellite rolling unseen over central England, diverted off its original planned course at his request. The machine had followed the coordinates programmed into it from far below. It had taken the picture then resumed its original orbit. The next time it was over Russia it had beamed down the image it had been asked for.