At the third bench he stopped and put the case down. He looked left and right, but could see no one. Where was his contact? After two minutes, he pulled a pack of Marlboro from his coat, put one in his mouth, and struck a match. The box was damp and the match tore uselessly at the striking paper.
‘A lighter is better than matches, I find.’
Sinitsky looked up to see a man in a raincoat standing before him. His complexion was dark, swarthy. Cheap, flimsy trousers protruded beneath the hem of the coat, making his appearance seem out of step with the bad weather. The Russian looked around him, but could not establish the direction from which the stranger had come.
The man offered him a light. The tip of the cigarette glowed dimly. Sinitsky shielded it from the drizzle.
‘Disposable lighters — cheap, but reliable,’ Sinitsky said. His English, taught well, was strong and fluent.
The other man looked down at the case. ‘The money…’
Sinitsky could smell garlic on the-man’s breath and a spicy odour on his clothes. For a moment memories of the claustrophobic carriage and its plethora of odours returned to him.
Sinitsky shook his head. ‘First, the information.’
The colonel from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command smiled.
‘In the Jebel Al-Baiyada, a mountain range in Southern Lebanon, there is a peak called Ayn An-Nasr, the Eye of the Eagle; in its shadow is the valley where the Sword and his Angels of Judgement have made their camp.’
‘What is the valley called?’
‘It does not have a name.’
‘How will we know it is the right place?’ Sinitsky asked.
‘The camp itself is a deserted khan al-qafila…’ He paused, searching for the English. ‘A caravanserai.’
Sinitsky’s brow furrowed in confusion. ‘Caravanserai?’
The Arab nodded. ‘An ancient building, a resting place.’
‘And the meeting?’ Sinitsky had learned the questions back in Moscow. All he had to do was memorize the answers, as per General Aushev’s instructions.
‘The Shura? It is to take place in two weeks. On the 15th. On that day, the Sword will deliver his message. He will have quite an audience: Al-Haqim of Black June, Abu Ya’aqub of the Palestine Liberation Front, Al-Ghanem of Fatah, those madmen from Hizbollah, and our own dear Jibril.’
The Arab’s face tensed. ‘I need Aushev’s assurance. He must leave no one alive.’
Sinitsky nodded. ‘He gives it.’
The Arab counted the bundled wads quickly. It was all there.
He hawked some phlegm from the back of his throat and spat it at Sinitsky’s feet.
Sinitsky felt the bile rise. He turned on his heels, his mind already dividing the information he had acquired between the essential and the trivial.
Sinitsky walked on past the lido and the restaurant, turning back only once. His contact had disappeared as stealthily as he had arrived. He prepared himself for a circuitous walk back to the embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. The rain was falling more heavily now and he cursed. His cigarette had gone out.
At least he didn’t have to get back on the metro.
The deputy leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, the PFLP-GC, turned north, walking quickly past the bandstand towards the Bayswater Road. He did not have far to go. The safe house in Westbourne Terrace, just around the corner from Paddington Station, suddenly seemed very inviting. His last night in London would pass quickly; there would be much talk with his compatriots, several bottles of araq, a woman, perhaps…
He had much to celebrate.
His ticket, booked under a false name to match the alias carefully prepared for his new Moroccan passport, would be waiting for him. Tomorrow he would stage through Athens on the way to Damascus. He was confident his absence would not have been noticed.
He held the case close by his side. Funds for the cause and the knowledge that in a few weeks he would become the dominant leader in the Holy War against the Israelis had made him a happy man.
The day Ahmed Jibril had shared the information about the Shura had enabled him to hatch his plan. The Soviets were willing accomplices in the achievement of his ambition. General Aushev had long been a man with whom he had been able to do business.
He left the path to take the most direct route across the park towards Albion Gate.
Half-way across the grass, he heard a noise behind him; only slight, but unmistakable. A footstep sinking into the rain-soaked earth. The colonel turned, saw the man twenty yards behind silhouetted against a distant row of street lights. He dropped the case, his hand moving up the lining of his coat, fumbling for the inside pocket where the automatic lay flat against his heart. He saw a light somewhere in the depths of the long, silenced barrel, but his ears never registered the dull sound of the bullet as it left the muzzle, hitting him squarely between the eyes and removing the back of his cranium.
General Viktor Nikitovich Aushev, head of the GRU’s 2nd Chief Directorate, wasn’t given to good moods, but as he slipped his twenty-kopek piece into the change machine in the lobby of the metro station at Ploshchad Sverdlova, he felt a certain excitement. Aushev collected the four five-kopek pieces, tucking three of them into the pocket of his coat. He joined a queue of shuffling Muscovites for the Gorkovsko Zamoskvoretskaya line. After what seemed an eternity, he reached the automatic barrier, pushed the five-kopek piece into the slot and passed through to the head of the escalator. Within minutes he was boarding an underground train that would take him the four stops from the heart of Moscow to Dynamo station.
On that day he had abandoned his Zil for a less ostentatious mode of transport. It was, in fact, the only way of accomplishing his ‘accidental’ meeting with Sinitsky, who had just returned from London.
The rendezvous had gone to plan. Sinitsky and he had met in the north-west entranceway of the old state department store, GUM. They had strolled through the evening air, catching the last rays of light as the sun slid behind the Grand Kremlin Palace, while Sinitsky reeled off the information he had acquired in London.
As the train trundled away from Gorkovskaya station, Aushev reviewed the news. He had all the information he needed; he’d covered his footprints. There was now only the matter of dealing with Sinit-sky before implementing stage two. He was lost still in the details when the carriage doors opened onto the platform at Dynamo.
A minute later and he was on the wide prospekt, dodging the rain-filled potholes as he walked back to the offices of the Directorate. It had been decided some years back to locate the nerve-centre of GRU operational planning in this remote area, because it was deemed the last place the CIA might consider looking.
The care that had gone into that detail now seemed little more than a joke.
When the President signed the Romeo Protocol, he might as well have given the Americans his address and telephone number. It was one more sign of his country’s decline.
Aushev recalled his President’s very words. ‘Viktor Nikitovich, you are to be a point of contact between us and the Americans. Under your guidance and with American help, we will eradicate terrorism from world society. The Romeo Protocol is just the beginning of that vision.’
Aushev hated visionaries.
He cut through the wide squares and alleyways of the Frunze Military Academy. A group of laughing officer cadets almost collided with him as he rounded a corner. The sharpness of their salutes gave him deep satisfaction. Aushev was still lean, with none of the fat on his face that distinguished those of his military contemporaries who had sold their birthright for the Yankee dollar.