‘I wanted that man to suffer for what he once did to my family, and the weapon I decided to use against him was the SVR itself. Let me explain. In 1989 the KGB burst into our apartment to arrest my father. He wasn’t a criminal, a terrorist or even an anti-Communist. All he had done was to voice mild criticism of a local Party official. Unfortunately, somebody overheard him, and registered an official complaint. They sent six men to make the arrest, in the middle of the night.
‘They broke down the door, pulled my father from his bed, then beat him so severely that he died within hours — apparently even before he reached their headquarters. My mother and I were forced to watch, and I think both of us then realized it would be the last time we would ever see him alive. I was a mere child at the time, but in my memory I can still replay everything that happened that terrible night. My mother remembered the name of the officer in charge, who had directed the beating, and we vowed there and then that someday, somehow, we would make him pay for what he did that night.’
Raya paused and looked at the faces of the four men sitting around the conference table. They stared back at her, none of them making any comment.
‘I deliberately chose to study languages and computer science, because I believed those skills would make me a more attractive prospect for recruitment into the SVR. By the time I’d finished my education, I had already been offered employment by the SVR. I’ve worked at the Lubyanka and Yasenevo ever since.’
‘There are two obvious questions that need asking,’ Masterson began. ‘First, does this man who killed your father still work for the SVR? And, second, how come their entrance security checks didn’t reveal the fact that your father had died as a suspected dissident? If that information had been available, I doubt if the SVR would have taken you on. Tainted blood and all that.’
Raya nodded. ‘Yes, that vicious little Georgian bastard is now a colonel in the SVR. The second question is more complicated to answer. When my father died at the KGB headquarters or in the back of the car on his way there, the squad which had arrested him must have realized they were in trouble. They’d been sent out to bring in a middle-aged man for questioning about a minor offence, and they’d returned with a bloody corpse. I don’t know exactly how that Georgian bastard, then a captain, managed it, but we were told a few days later that my father had died in a traffic accident, and the arrest record simply vanished. And in those days, nobody questioned anything that the KGB told them.’
‘But this captain who’s now a colonel,’ Masterson persisted. ‘Surely he might have recognized your name and checked into your background?’
Raya shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘because as I expect you know Russian names are complicated. Let me explain. The tradition is that a girl’s first name is simply given to her. That’s the easy bit. Her middle name is a feminized version of her father’s first name, and her last name is a feminized version of her father’s last name. My father’s name was Pavel Ostapenko, so my full name as a child was Raya Pavlovna Ostapenka, and my mother’s name was Marisa Hohlova Ostapenka.
‘The year after my father was killed, my mother married a distant cousin. It was a marriage of convenience, purely to allow me to take a different name. The cousin’s name was Alexander Kosov, so my mother became Marisa Hohlova Kosova, and I followed tradition and changed my name to Raya Alexandra, but I preferred “Kosov” as a last name, rather than “Kosova”. Of course, any detailed search would have shown my previous name, but with the arrest warrant missing and my biological father tragically killed in a car crash, there would have been nothing to find. The only person who might have made the connection was the Georgian and, as far as I know, he never looked.’
‘And does he have a name, this Georgian?’ David Walters asked.
‘Yes,’ Raya replied shortly. ‘His name is Yevgeni Zharkov, and by now, with any luck at all, he’ll be sitting in a cell at Yasenevo or the Lubyanka, staring at the wall and wondering just what the hell has happened to his life.’
The SVR search team arrived in one car, and the armed troops in another. The searchers parked some distance down the street and waited for the building to be checked and the apartment secured. A few minutes later, two carloads of Moscow police appeared as well, to help control the scene.
Abramov peered through the car window at a small apartment building, which the Moscow police had identified earlier as the location of the other number he had managed to extract from the data contained on the call diverter. The building itself was undistinguished and anonymous: just another small block of flats in a street that contained little else.
The police officers set up a cordon, diverting all traffic away from the vicinity, then surrounded the building to ensure that nobody could leave it without having their identity confirmed. Then the armed SVR troops advanced towards the street door and took up positions on both sides of it. One officer stepped forward and inserted a key in the lock. Or rather he tried to, but the key wouldn’t fit, so he slipped it back into his pocket and tried a second key. This one slid in smoothly, and moments later the door was open, whereupon the SVR team streamed inside the building and was lost to sight.
Abramov waited patiently in the car, expecting confirmation either that the apartment was empty or that any occupants had been arrested. After three or four minutes, a junior SVR officer emerged from the building, and walked across to the car.
‘The apartment is empty, sir, and it doesn’t look as if it’s been occupied for months. There’s only some very basic furniture inside, but there’s a computer on a table in the main room, and it’s switched on.’
Abramov immediately climbed out of the car. ‘Order your men not to touch that machine,’ he instructed. ‘It might hold vital clues regarding this investigation.’
Moments later, the major was himself standing in the tiny living room of the first-floor apartment, and looking round. As the young officer had explained, on a plain wooden table, which was pushed up against one wall, sat a fairly basic desktop computer. The power light was glowing on the front of the system unit, though the screen itself was blank. Abramov deliberately touched nothing, but he checked the cables and connectors. As expected, the PC was attached to a modem plugged into a telephone point.
He took a handkerchief from his pocket, carefully covered the ends of his fingers to avoid leaving prints, and then powered up the screen. When he saw a standard screensaver running, he touched the space bar on the keyboard to clear it. He was surprised to note that the unit wasn’t password-protected, which would certainly make the job of examining the contents of the hard disk a lot easier.
‘Right, Captain,’ he said, opening up his briefcase which he had placed on the table beside the PC. ‘Witness this, please. I’m about to make a copy of the contents of this computer’s hard disk, then we can shut the machine down and take it back to Yasenevo for full examination.’
Abramov connected a high-capacity external disk drive to one of the USB ports on the front of the system unit, then carefully — still using his handkerchief to prevent leaving prints on the keyboard or mouse — he initiated the copy routine. The dialogue box which now appeared suggested that it would take at least half an hour to completely copy the disk’s contents.
‘Why could you not do that at Yasenevo?’ the captain asked.
‘Because even though the screensaver wasn’t password-protected, it’s possible that the operating system itself might be. The last thing I want to do is shut the machine down and then find it takes us months to bypass the password in order to access the hard drive.’