Carole-Anne Jackson — officially an American expatriate employed at the embassy as a typist, but in fact a CIA officer on exchange — nodded.
Evans made a drinking gesture, but she shook her head.
‘No, not tonight, Bill. Prior engagement and all that.’ Evans’s face darkened in mock anger. ‘Who with?’ he demanded.
‘You find out,’ Carole-Anne replied, her smile turning into an impish grin. ‘After all,’ she added, ‘you are supposed to be a spy, aren’t you?’
Dawson stopped the truck on the dockside just after five. The transit documents supplied by Borisov had been scrutinized at the gate, and no eyebrows had been raised. The cargo-carrying motorized barge they’d booked space on was already waiting alongside the dock. It was scheduled to sail at six-fifteen, so their timing was just about perfect.
Wilson walked up the gangway and onto the barge, while Dawson opened the rear doors of the lorry. A waiting forklift truck lifted out the crate and deposited it next to a crane, and minutes later it was swung into the cargo hold and the barge’s hatches then closed.
Wilson came back down the gangway, having concluded his arrangements with the barge master. The crate was an unscheduled addition to the vessel’s cargo that the Americans had booked only two days earlier, so payment in cash had been agreed, half in advance and the rest on delivery to Volgograd. The barge master wasn’t interested in paperwork, only in the money, and the operating company would know nothing about the unscheduled load, which suited everyone just fine.
The vessel would take about four days to cover the two hundred and fifty miles down the river. While the barge was heading south, Dawson and Wilson would ditch the truck. They’d already located a commercial vehicle park on the outskirts of Atkarsk that would do nicely. It would be bad luck if anybody took any notice of one extra truck, but even if it did get spotted and questions were asked, the pursuit would at least be stalled for some time in the town. From Atkarsk, the two Americans would take a train back to Saratov, and from there on to Volgograd.
‘OK,’ Wilson said, hauling himself up into the passenger seat, ‘let’s get out of here.’
Dawson fired up the diesel, engaged first gear and drove back towards the dockyard entrance. Unless they met any unforeseen problems, they calculated that they should be in Volgograd by mid-evening.
Evans strode out of the embassy and paused for a moment, looking round. He spotted Mazen’s dusty Mercedes parked about seventy yards away, but gave no sign of recognition. He turned in the opposite direction and began walking slowly along the pavement. Two minutes later Mazen pulled up beside him. Evans quickly opened the door and climbed in.
‘Tariq,’ Evans acknowledged. ‘I gather you’ve got something for me?’
Evans spoke fluent Arabic — a requirement in his posting — but he knew Mazen was proud of his linguistic abilities and preferred to conduct their meetings in English.
‘It’s just a story, Bill,’ Mazen said, accelerating gently down the road, ‘and it may all prove to be a false alarm, but I believe it’s worth looking into.’
Forty minutes later, having discussed everything from the strength of the Bahraini dinar to the latest problems in Israel, Mazen finally broached the actual subject of their meeting with a somewhat dramatic announcement.
‘We could, my friend,’ he said, ‘be sitting about two kilometres away from where Osama bin Laden is lying helpless in a hospital bed, plugged into a kidney-dialysis machine.’
The sports centre lay at the end of Gibbins Road. It wasn’t an ideal location, because Tango One was a full half mile away, but it had a car park where the unmarked white Transit vans — the ‘horses’ Jessup had referred to — and the ARVs could park without attracting undue attention.
There were also two saloon cars there, in one of which Richter had hitched a ride from New Scotland Yard, sharing the back seat with a slim young man with reddish hair and an embryo moustache that didn’t look as if it was going anywhere. The other passenger had ignored him for the entire journey, and Richter guessed he was probably one of the ‘pimply-faced geeks’ from the Security Service that Jessup had complained about earlier.
There are few activities more tedious than waiting for something to happen, especially when creature comforts are somewhat limited. There was nowhere to sit except inside the cars, and nowhere to go apart from a handful of cafés in the nearby streets.
They’d already been waiting for over four hours before the first message arrived:
‘Standby all units. Players Five and Six returning direction Tango One.’
The mood changed now that it looked as if the endgame was near. There were few cars and fewer pedestrians around as the armed officers — which was most of them — checked their weapons.
Richter pulled out the Glock, extracted the magazine and inspected it carefully. Then he reloaded the pistol and pulled back the slide to chamber a round.
Fifteen minutes later, GT sent a further message:
‘Players Five and Six now inside Tango One. All units move to FUP and report readiness.’
Immediately the car park was filled with the sound of engines starting, and within seconds all six vehicles were mobile. Minutes later, they pulled to a halt in Bridge Road, their designated forming-up point.
Now speed was important. Vehicle doors opened and officers piled out, donning Kevlar quick-release vests and equipment belts. As they checked their weapons again, a group of teenage boys standing on a nearby street corner stared at them wide-eyed, then retreated a cautious fifty yards, several of them pulling out mobile phones and taking pictures. Shoppers and pedestrians paused to look at the increasingly familiar sight of armed police on the streets of London, then philosophically continued about their business.
Once all the final inspections were complete, the group leaders used their standard-issue 75 radios to check in with the baseman at GT. Then it was just a matter of waiting.
‘All units stand by Go signal. Estimate minutes zero four.’
And three minutes later they were mobile. No sirens, screeching tyres or flashing lights, just a gentle and steady drive for the two hundred yards that still separated them from their destination.
The target flat — Tango One — was situated on the third floor. Four CO19 officers took the lift, the rest climbed the stairs. Three armed police stayed in the lobby to cover the building’s main entrance. On the landing, one burly officer produced an enforcer — the steel battering ram that has become a trademark of CO19 operations — and waited beside the apartment door. The rest made a final check of their weapons, because professionals check everything repeatedly, and waited.
Up to that point, they’d tried to keep as quiet as possible, but when the enforcer smashed into the apartment door, just above the lock, everything changed. The door crashed open, and suddenly the building resounded with bellowed shouts of ‘Armed police, armed police!’ as the CO19 officers surged inside the apartment.
Richter was right behind the first group, making him the sixth man to enter. The hallway was long and narrow, three bedrooms and a bathroom opening off it, with a combined lounge and dining room at the far end, next to a tiny kitchen.
Two men were in one of the bedrooms — they’d apparently been using a laptop computer that sat on a wooden desk against one wall — and they stared in shocked bewilderment as a couple of officers raced into the room, weapons aimed straight at them. A third was taking a shower, the bathroom door closed but not locked, his terrified face peering at the arresting officer from behind the shower curtain.