He swore.
It had to be a second choke-point.
The target had stopped at the top of a steep flight of steps. Adrian had that good peripheral vision, was using it, and didn’t see a way right or left. The steps dropped a level, went down to a little closed-in park. What he saw, what he noticed most, were the fine street-lamps — could have been the Warsaw equivalent of Victoriana, like they had in Holmes films for Baker Street — and they must just have been switched on as the gloom grew. Decision time.
In his lectures to rookies, Adrian liked to speak of the ‘heat stakes’. It was one of his favourite patter lines, and always drew grim smiles from his class. The heat stakes went from one to ten, and ten was when the surveillance officer was busted, like he went to gaol. They were going down the steps, the target guy and November. Put crudely, simply, Adrian and Dennis were expensive pieces of kit. It was not a lightly taken decision to deploy them. They hit the street, as increments of VBX, when matters were serious, and nothing that Adrian had worked on before had seemed more serious than the briefing on a ‘dirty bomb’. He would tell the rookies, the recruits, with an old man’s confidence and experience, ‘If the next stage is to show out, we pull out.’ Easy enough said at a training session. He knew the consequences, potential, of losing his target, and it sort of hammered in his mind like a bad nightmare that he would have to call in on the encrypted net and report. Would have to live with it. He went back to some old basic ones — bent and untied his shoelace, then knotted it again, and they were at the bottom of the steps. He saw them veer left at the bottom, under the furthest light. He turned his back to the steps, lit another cigarette.
‘To D One. I’m sure it’s a choke-point. Don’t feel I can follow. Leg it, pick them up — good luck. That’s two of them, but there’ll be a third. A One, out.’
‘To A One. Getting there. D One, out.’
Then there was the crackle in Adrian’s ear, and silence. He walked back up the alley and looked into the darkened window of a little gallery, old prints in faded frames, counted to fifty and it seemed an age, then drifted back to the head of the steps. He went down slowly. He thought, and it came to him like the blow of a pickaxe handle, that he had never before handled a matter of this importance. Couldn’t remember, not on anything he’d experienced, feeling frightened at the enormity of it.
He let it wait, knew his colleague would be suffering, until he had the eyeball. They came towards him.
It was ‘dry-cleaning’ in reverse. Dennis had done that often enough. Dry-cleaning was when they did choke-points to ascertain whether an agent had a tail. The agent used a prearranged route and specific locations were watched, but the tables had been turned. He hadn’t seen the Russians. Knew them well enough from the last several days, and would have recognized them if they’d been obvious. Because he hadn’t seen them it didn’t mean to Dennis that they didn’t employ choke-points. He was a man with few delusions.
It would have been a delusion to believe that former KGB-trained officers were in any degree inferior to himself in the trade of surveillance. He thought he’d done well to pick them up, Reuven Weissberg and the agent, but he was not a man to let complacency intrude on his concentration. He could sense the strain on the agent, and the stress that had built in him. There was no talk between them. The level-three mafiya man was a half-pace ahead of the agent, November, and seemed to have no conversation, just drifted along the street and didn’t look into the closed shops and restaurant fronts where the last of the day’s customers were drifting away. To safeguard the agent, best thing would have been to back off, but backing off lost the trail and the trail led — Mr Lawson had said — to a dirty bomb. He had the agent’s survival in his hand, could only protect him with professionalism. Bloody hell — and a hell of a number of people’s survival.
He had a handkerchief up to his nose, blew, and spoke. ‘To Control. I need the girl, whatever we’re calling her, sorry and that. I need her. Have to have her. Me and him, it isn’t enough. D One, out.’
In his ear, ‘To D One. Will happen. She is C for Charlie, C One. Where to? Control, out.’
They went past him. He was doing a window bit, using reflections. It was why Dennis — and his colleague, Adrian — liked to work with Lawson, the guv’nor. Old ways used, tried and tested ways. He stayed very still, kept all his muscles tight, locked his gaze on the window. First the mafiya target, then the agent. Would have liked, no messing, to spin, reach out a hand, grip the poor sod’s arm and whisper a sweet-nothing of comfort in his ear … and they were gone. The reflection gave him the route they took at the end of that street. He had his handkerchief up.
‘To Control. Get C One to the old wall, the Barbakan end. It’s where they’re headed. Just hammer at her that it’s about choke-points. D One, out.’
‘To D One. Will do.’ The pause lingered. ‘Up and running, C One is getting there. Control, out.’
He couldn’t say whether that narrow street was the third choke-point, or whether it would be up by the walls and the barbican gate. He glanced, as any visitor would have, at his little street map. Yes, Dennis respected men trained to KGB standards. Had done a trip to Moscow two years before. The rage now was for the use of the electronic dead-letter box, the EDLB in jargon-speak. It was thought of as a star performer. An EDLB was built into a ‘rock’ of shaped reinforced plastic and left in a park, with leaves and earth, even dog turds, to half cover it, and the idea was for the turned guy, the man recruited by VBX, to drive up and park within twenty metres of it, and squirt from his little handheld piece of gear. Maybe he did that every Wednesday. Maybe the embassy man, from VBX, drove by every Friday, and used his laptop, hidden on his knee, to suck in what was transmitted to the ‘rock’.
Dennis had been sent two years back to do the old-fashioned clearance check and give the all-clear that the ‘rock’ wasn’t compromised. It had taken him two weeks to come up with an answer, two weeks of frozen bollocks on a Wednesday and a Friday — and not a decent meal on any evening or wine to wash it down on the expenses VBX would meet — and four random tails on the agent going to work in the ministry and coming away. His answer was clear, given in person to the station chief at the embassy. What had he seen? Three times he had seen a man in a car use the same lighter, one of those metal Zippo jobs, and twice he had seen a woman who was once blonde and the next time a brunette but she’d had on the same damn boots with the little metal buckle for decoration.
He told what he had seen to the station chief, and was listened to, and gave his opinion that the FSB, successor to the KGB, had the bodies identified and the ‘rock’ under surveillance, and he’d known that he was only the bloody messenger who brought unwelcome news: all he could offer, of course, was his opinion, and he’d flown home. About a month later, could have been five weeks, it was in his paper stretched out over the breakfast table. A Russian was in custody, faced a charge of treason, and the station chief’s deputy and one of the staffer kids was identified and accused of espionage while under diplomatic cover. Mr Lawson, the guv’nor, would have believed him.