Milton thought back to the brief airport rendezvous with BLUEBIRD. No one at VX had ever seen the agent before and Milton had been surprised by his appearance; he was much younger than he would have expected for someone with the access to both the FSB and the SVR that, Milton understood, BLUEBIRD had demonstrated during the years that he had worked as a British asset. There had been no time for a conversation, and Milton would not have asked in any event, but he wondered whether it was BLUEBIRD that he had met or an emissary. His suspicion complicated matters—he would report it in due course—but, for now, there was nothing for it other than to continue as planned.
He looked back to Ross. Her hands were in her lap, her right hand massaging the joints of her left. It was difficult not to be impressed by her assiduousness. She had been working them all along. There had not been enough time at the airport for him to have been fully briefed, but Milton could read between the lines: he could see how Ross had put her head down and built up her career, how she had ensured that she was in position to take over the running of the dissidents and defectors once Leonard Geggel had retired. He knew that Geggel had been put out to pasture thanks to errors in his handling of an agent; Milton wondered whether Ross had been responsible for that, opening up a vacancy that she had been able to fill. It would all come out eventually.
Milton read the newspapers and knew about the deaths of Russian dissidents in recent years. The diplomat who had died before meeting prosecutors to discuss Russian activities in Italy; the oil tycoon and friend to a jailed dissident who had died of a suspected embolism; the oligarch who was found hanging from a cupboard rail in his Berkshire mansion; the ex-spy who had died beneath the wheels of a Tube train. Those deaths now looked much less like the unfortunate accidents that the police had categorised them as being and more like the assassinations that SIS had always suspected. Some of those men, and others who had died in similar circumstances, had been hidden from the SVR with fresh identities, supposedly put out of reach. Just like Pyotr Aleksandrov had been put out of reach. Ross had killed Aleksandrov, just as surely as if she had put a gun to his head herself. She had marked him for death, and perhaps she had marked the others, too. She had found herself in a compromised position, but she was evidently smart and ruthless. He wondered, again, whether there was another card that she still had to play.
70
They rolled into the parking lot outside the railway station. It was empty, and Smith drove across it so that he could park nearer to the buildings. Ross ran her palm over the hip pocket of her trousers. She had taken the lipstick that Stepanov had given her and dropped it inside; she could feel the hard metal tube against her leg. Using it was an option. Stepanov had said that it would be effective up to two metres. She just had to point it and twist the end and the single round would fire. Smith had no reason to suspect it; she could shoot him in the back and run. But what then? What of her son? She would never see him again. She couldn’t do it.
“Come on,” Smith said. “Let’s go.”
Ross opened the door of the car and stepped outside. Smith did the same, then reached down and collected the newspaper that had been delivered to the room with his gun. Ross looked at him and gritted her teeth at how comprehensively they had outmanoeuvred her. She had had no idea that they knew about her. She wondered how long he had hidden the knowledge. When had he been told about her? And by whom? It must have been BLUEBIRD. She knew that it was an academic question, at least for the moment. They had her on a hook now, ready to dangle her in front of Primakov and Stepanov and the rest of Directorate S, the bait to lure them into a trap that would unravel the work that she had done for them for so long.
It wasn’t that Ross’s beliefs were offended by what had been forced upon her that morning. She had no political leanings in either direction. The professor who had recruited her into the SVR had known her well enough not to try and persuade her with philosophical or ethical arguments, had not tried to sell her on the evils of the west, the purity of Russia or the benefit to the world of levelling the geopolitical playing field. No, Ross had been persuaded to work for the SVR because of a more practical motivation: money. They had offered to pay her handsomely and, as she delivered more and more valuable intelligence, they had reacted with correspondingly larger amounts. She knew that she was one of their most valuable assets, buried deep within SIS and marked for a significant career there, and, true to their word, they paid accordingly. Her Swiss account contained nearly a million pounds, and the flow of money had included the largest payment yet after she had located Pyotr Aleksandrov for them.
So, no, it wasn’t her beliefs that had been offended. It was her pride. She was upset because she had been duped. The stuffed shirts at VX had made her look like a fool, and it was that that she found so hard to swallow.
Smith left the keys in the ignition.
“Ready?” he said.
“This isn’t going to work,” she muttered.
“You’d better hope it does.”
“Or what? My life is over whichever way this goes.”
He stared at her; his eyes were the coldest, most piercing blue. “It doesn’t have to be. Make up for what you’ve done and things can be as they were.”
“Really?” she said. “You’ll excuse me if I’m not overcome with enthusiasm.”
“I don’t really care. You brought this on yourself. You’ve been given a chance to fix it.”
“Or I could give the signal and have you arrested.”
“You could. But you know what that would mean for your family. I don’t think you’ll do that.”
She shivered in his stare, but ignored him. Perhaps she could make him a little apprehensive. She had almost no influence now; she held onto the small amount that she had left.
Smith led the way across the parking lot toward the station building. Ross looked around. It was a wide space, and it was almost completely empty. There were five cars and a dirty white van parked near to the building, but that was all. There were a few men and women outside the station: a man on a bench, a couple talking animatedly to one another. She didn’t recognise any of them, although she knew that she wouldn’t. They would be FSB or SVR, trained in surveillance, practiced at hiding in plain sight, giving nothing away.
Smith walked on, and Ross turned to glance into the cabin of a car that had been parked twenty feet away from them. Stepanov was inside. He looked at her, and, for a moment, their eyes locked. She knew that all she would need to do was touch her ear and he would bring his agents out into the open, weapons drawn. Smith would be arrested but she would be blown; her usefulness to the Center would be at an end and her family would suffer. She would have her money, enough so that she would never again have to work, but she would have no life. Her usefulness to Deputy Director Primakov would be at an end. And she would be stuck in Moscow forever, a prisoner in a gilded cage.
She didn’t know whether she would be able to do it.
71
Milton held the newspaper in his hand and led the way across the parking lot. Ross followed alongside him.