‘Quite,’ Holbeche replied. ‘But at least the hare is running.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Simpson agreed, ‘the hare is definitely running.’
Chapter Five
His instructions had been perfectly clear and unambiguous, and the moment he cleared passport control, which was a mere formality thanks to the diplomatic passport he was carrying, Richter began ignoring them.
He had been told to collect a pre-booked hire car from Hertz at the airport, proceed to a street in Vienna, and collect the package from an address there. Instead, Richter checked in his overnight bag at the airport left-luggage section, and walked out of the terminal building carrying just the briefcase. He stood beside the taxi rank for a few minutes, studying a map of Vienna while waiting for the first half dozen cabs to leave, and then took the next available taxi to a location about two streets away from the address he’d been provided with, in the Josefstadt district in west-central Vienna.
Once there, he paid off the driver, made his way on foot to the street where the house was located, and walked a short way along to a cafe. He chose the seat offering the best view of the property, ordered a coffee and a pastry, spread a German-language newspaper out on the table in front of him, then settled down to watch.
Forty-five minutes later, he had learned precisely nothing. Nobody had entered or left the premises, and he’d seen no sign whatsoever of any activity inside. Not for the first time, Richter wondered if he was maybe just being stupid or paranoid, or both. As far as he could see, about all he could do at this stage was exactly what it said in his briefing instructions, which was to walk up to the front door of the house, show his passport, and collect the package.
Richter paid the bill, leaving the newspaper where it was, then stood up and walked away from the cafe. He strode past the house on the opposite side of the road, checking it out as closely as he could without making it too obvious, then crossed the street and headed back towards it. Two minutes later, he was ringing the bell beside the front door.
Raya Kosov stood up, pushing her swivel chair back from the desk, and walked over to the window. The view to the north, over the treetops and towards the centre of Moscow, no longer held her interest the way it once had. Her mind was racing as she thought again about what she’d read on the computer screen, and about the implications of the contents of that single file.
But she was committed now. The measures she’d taken already meant that her future course of action was predetermined. She had no choice in that, no choice at all apart from the actual timing. And really, she acknowledged silently, she had few options in that either. She had always known she would have to be careful, but what she’d seen in the file named ‘Appreciation’ meant she’d now have to take extreme care. And when she moved, she was going to have to move fast.
The other thing Raya realized was that she would have to forget part of her original plan — the bit she had been thinking of as phase two — and work out a completely different approach to that part of the problem. She should have no trouble achieving this, not least because she had the best of all possible motives. For if she failed, she would be killed, and probably killed very slowly and painfully. What she’d read in the Philby file, almost ten years earlier, still haunted her, and ever since then her private, silent mantra had been a simple two-word chant: ‘Remember Volkhov’.
But there was something else. She had been playing a complex game virtually ever since she had arrived at Yasenevo, balancing the demands of her work — which were considerable — with her own hidden agenda. That had been difficult but soon, perhaps very soon, it was going to pay off, because Raya Kosov, Deputy Data-Processing System Network Manager at Yasenevo, was quite determined to quit her job, and the SVR, and leave Russia, and she wasn’t looking for any kind of severance package.
The door didn’t open immediately but Richter knew, as soon as he pressed the buzzer, that he was being watched. After a second or two he spotted the lens of a tiny closed-circuit TV camera, positioned above his head in one corner of the porch. Then a hidden speaker crackled, and a voice asked him something in German.
‘My name is Richter, and I have come to collect a packet,’ he announced, speaking the words slowly and carefully.
There was a short pause, then the sound of a lock being released, and the door swung slowly open. A swarthy, black-haired man stood in the hallway beyond, and beckoned Richter inside. There didn’t seem to be any alternative, so Richter stepped across the threshold and stood waiting, with his back to the open door. The man stepped around him and pushed the door closed, then moved back to face him.
‘Your passport, please,’ he asked, his English clear and precise but with a distinct German accent.
Richter handed over his diplomatic passport and, for a few seconds, the man studied the document and Richter alternately. Then he closed the passport and handed it back with a slight tilt of his head. Richter almost expected him to click his heels together.
‘You’re late,’ the man observed.
‘I know,’ Richter replied, but didn’t elaborate.
The man, who still hadn’t introduced himself, gazed at Richter for a few seconds longer, then shrugged, and headed a few paces further down the hall. Stopping at a low table, he picked up a parcel wrapped in brown paper, returned and handed it over. Richter opened his briefcase, slid the parcel inside, then closed and locked it. The man stepped past him, opened the street door again and gestured.
As the door slammed shut behind him, Richter found himself standing on the pavement, briefcase in his left hand, and wondering which way to head next.
Raya Kosov was planning to defect to the West, as she’d intended to since long before joining the SVR. And one of the things that she knew would sway the British — having no time for the Americans, she hadn’t even considered approaching the CIA — was her dowry, so to speak; the information that she would bring out with her.
At the height of the Cold War, she knew, things had been very different. Any file clerk with a couple of secret files in a carrier bag had been welcomed with open arms, because the West was desperate for any information that would reveal what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But today, after glasnost and the rest, and with Russia seeming to a large extent a spent force, the Western intelligence services could afford to be more choosy.
These days, if the information wasn’t of a high enough standard, both the British SIS and the American CIA were quite happy to hand a defector back to the Russian authorities. In fact, what they were ideally looking for wasn’t some highly placed defector who could bring out a bunch of classified data, but a highly placed mole that they could keep in play for as long as they wanted. For a mole could provide data for years and could also, and just as importantly, be tasked with finding the answer to some specific question.
But the reality was that human moles, living just below the surface of the society they inhabited like their animal counterparts, were loathed by all who knew they were there, and would be killed by anyone who got the chance. Raya wasn’t going along that route, though. She wasn’t even going to contact the SIS until after she’d got safely out of the Confederation of Independent States, leaving her boats blazing behind her, just to make certain that the ‘mole’ option would be a non-starter.