‘In a manner of speaking.’ Gorelkin considered the matter for a moment. ‘Let me put it this way: Paulton owes me one or two favours. I helped keep him out of jail once he left his position in MI5, and he performed certain. . tasks for me in return. Tasks his former masters would almost certainly not approve of. Paulton knows I like bargains to be kept, and his payment for helping us now is that he gets to live a little longer.’ He glanced at Votrukhin as Paulton walked back into the room, slipping his mobile into his pocket. ‘As to your question about whether we can trust him, not in a million years. He’s a traitor born and bred. You should bear that in mind.’
Paulton sensed, as he returned to the table, that the Russians had been talking about him. It didn’t bother him; he’d have been amazed if they hadn’t. He was, after all, a former enemy, even though he was now helping them out in their dirty hour of need. Suspicions would be natural on both sides. But he was determined that this would be the last time Gorelkin crooked his finger at him like a master summoning a servant. He’d do this one job, but not merely because Gorelkin had demanded it. He had a much broader plan in mind; one which would see him triumph over adversity. He hadn’t yet finalised the full details, but the framework was there.
Then a great many people would find the tables turned.
He’d made a call to his contact in the Met, just as he’d told the Russians. It added slightly to the risk of exposure, but his choices were limited if he wanted to make this visit as productive as possible. What Gorelkin and his goons didn’t know was that he’d made a second call, this to a person high up the food chain, a person with the means and position in the intelligence community to assist his return to the UK — and not under a false flag and a silly beard, either.
That same person had also given him the information he was after: it was indeed former MI6 killer Clare Jardine who had been in King’s College until the other night. Not that he was about to tell the Russians just yet. Better to keep some things back and retain a home advantage. But the information made his next course of action quite simple: find Jardine, turn her over to Gorelkin and his thugs, then set about selling them all as part of his retirement plan to come back home for good.
It made using his contact in the Met Police even more urgent. It might burn the man if anyone caught him with his hands on the CCTV search button, but that was too bad. He’d have to make it worth his while.
He was tired of running. Tired of looking over his shoulder. Tired of wondering if Harry Tate — no, knowing — was out there somewhere, waiting to take him down.
It was time to come in.
All he needed was a bargaining tool that they simply couldn’t turn down.
‘She’s got nowhere to run,’ he announced as he sat down. ‘She’s the product of a care home. She got caught in a gang shooting in Streatham, south London and King’s College was the nearest unit.’
‘But she understood Russian,’ Gorelkin muttered. ‘How is that possible for a girl from a care home?’
Paulton thought quickly. ‘Simple. She was said to be running with a couple of Ukrainians at the time she was shot.’ The lie came easily. It was better than giving them anything they could fasten on and double-check, and was part of the trade-craft he’d learned many years ago: use elements of the truth for real colour, but sprinkled liberally with facts that were difficult or impossible to verify. The delay would give him time to engineer something himself. Part of the bargain for coming in. ‘Even Ukrainians go in for pillow talk, don’t they?’
‘Ukrainians.’ Gorelkin looked disappointed and Paulton knew why. In the Russian’s world, family members offered a bargaining tool; a leverage point. But gang members weren’t family and couldn’t be coerced — even assuming they could be tracked down.
‘Don’t worry,’ Paulton said smoothly, and indicated the two FSB operatives. ‘I have my resources. Your men can start looking and I’ll get things rolling. I should have some answers in a couple of hours. Perhaps I could have a mobile number to contact you?’
Gorelkin flicked a finger at Votrukhin to give Paulton his number. ‘You can talk to him. He will pass messages to me.’
Paulton nodded. Gorelkin was being very careful, using his man as a cut-out. It was standard cell procedure. If anyone locked onto Votrukhin, it would end there.
TWELVE
‘Nothing.’ Rik handed Harry a coffee and nodded at the laptop screen, open on his living room table. The air in the room was stuffy and the machine’s fan cooler was whirring busily, pointing to a long period of constant use. In the street outside, traffic noises signalled life in the Paddington area going on as usual.
‘Nothing at all?’
‘No mention of any prison transfers of females below the age of forty in the last five days. Unless they dropped her into the system without a tag, which I suppose could be possible, she’s not in there. Knowing the way their bureaucratic minds work, they’d have had to provide her with a file, even if they’d given her a cover name. But the bio and physical details would have had to be similar, and I found nothing like a reasonable match.’
Harry agreed. Even given MI6’s possible involvement, the civil service minds would have demanded some appropriate, if false, paperwork for a prisoner transfer, if only for health and safety reasons. And there was only so much fudging of details possible before somebody noticed and shouted out loud.
‘What else?’
‘About Tobinskiy, the usual stuff, mostly going back some years.’ Rik pointed at a small stack of A4 sheets on a sideboard next to an inkjet printer. ‘I printed off what was relevant for you, just in case. Since Litvinenko got iced, Tobinskiy’s been keeping a low profile. He published some bits and pieces supporting calls for an investigation into the murder and Putin himself, but always through third parties. I trawled through photos as well, but they were all old, too. If the FSB taught him one thing, it was how to disappear. Until now, anyway.’
Harry flicked through the papers. Culled from newspapers, Wikipedia and similar sites, most of the material was the usual speculative biographical detail, larded with sinister hints about his former position in the FSB alongside Alexander Litvinenko.
He was surprised at the uncanny likeness between the two men. Perhaps there was some mileage in the suspicion voiced by Ballatyne that the wrong man had died. Not that it mattered now, anyway. Dead was dead.
‘And no mentions of Clare?’
‘Zilch. No photos, no tags on social media, no references anywhere. Unless Jardine was a long-term cover name, she stayed way off the net. It would help if we could check the name through Six. They’d know for sure.’
‘I’m working on that. But don’t hold your breath.’ For some intelligence officers, using a long-term cover name or ‘legend’ instead of their own name, was to avoid the risk of their profession drawing attention to members of their family. Others used legends when working undercover for very long periods, allowing the false identity to take over completely. It was a risky strategy, however, as there was a danger of the line between the two becoming genuinely blurred and the officer losing sight of what was real.
He brought Rik up to date on his chat with Ballatyne. It didn’t take long.
‘The interesting thing is, Ballatyne’s not a happy man,’ he concluded. ‘Something’s going on back at the office and he’s very jumpy.’
‘Bit of internal political back-stabbing going on, probably. Lots of it about. Still, at least we’ve got a job. As long as he pays us, I don’t mind. Where do we start?’
‘We already have. Let’s summarise what we know.’ He sat down. It was their way of forcing clarity on a situation by brainstorming the possibilities. They usually had more to go on when tracing people, such as documents, tickets, background details, friends or work colleagues. But with Clare they had none. And unless Ballatyne came up with a name, even the work angle would be a non-starter.