Execution (A Harry Tate Thriller) (2 page)

‘The assignment was completed without a hitch.’ It was about as much report as Gorelkin would require, and the speaker, Fyodor Votrukhin, who held the rank of lieutenant, crunched on an Extra Strong Mint and waited for the signal to continue. A long-time member of the elite Special Purpose Centre of the FSB, Votrukhin was tall and lean, with the dark looks of a Georgian. He seemed at ease in the plush surroundings of the leased office, but after their journey here from Moscow and their activities of a few hours ago, he was looking tired.

Gorelkin nodded and sipped his apple juice, rolling it around his mouth before swallowing. ‘Good. Glad to hear it, lieutenant.’ He eyed the third man, who so far had said nothing. ‘Is that your summary also, sergeant?’

Sergeant Leonid Serkhov blinked in surprise. It wasn’t often that he was called on to speak, although every member of the Special Purpose Centre was aware that he or she was expected to have an opinion if asked. But this was unusual. For a start, it was Colonel Gorelkin doing the asking; and he hadn’t got them here just to congratulate them on a job well done. There had to be another reason.

‘Yes, sir,’ he replied, flicking a nervous glance at Votrukhin. Stocky and heavy across the shoulders, with receding hair and high cheekbones, Serkhov looked as if he might be in danger of breaking something if he moved too quickly, and kept stretching his chin to ease the stiff collar of his shirt.

‘Interesting. So neither of you had any concerns about the woman?’

‘Woman?’ Lieutenant Votrukhin lifted an eyebrow, and looked suddenly rather uneasy.

‘Yes. There was a woman patient in the room next to the subject.’ He waited a few heartbeats before adding, ‘Or have I been misinformed?’

‘No. No, that’s correct.’ Votrukhin cleared his throat and threw a warning glance at Serkhov. But the sergeant was staring resolutely straight ahead, the message patently clear: you’re on your own with this one
.

‘She was unconscious or in heavy sleep,’ the lieutenant continued. He didn’t bother wondering how Gorelkin knew about the woman. The colonel was former old-style KGB, and those people had eyes everywhere and double-checked everything and everyone. He probably checked up on his own wife if he had one. ‘We didn’t think she presented a threat, so we left her alone. In any case, we had little time to do anything other than what we were there for. The security guard was incompetent, but he stayed on the move.’ He rolled a fragment of mint across his mouth but didn’t bite into it.

‘You took a close look at her, of course?’ Gorelkin studied the juice bottle as he spoke. It was a trick he’d perfected over the years, feigning an interest in some inanimate object while asking questions, to make others think he was merely going through the motions. It was rarely the case.

‘Yes. She was out of it. She’d been gut-shot, according to her notes. I checked the face. There wasn’t a flicker, so we got on with the job.’

‘Serkhov?’

The sergeant shrugged, and instantly wished he hadn’t. Shrugs in the SPC were not well received. It was seen as demonstrating a lack of commitment. He said quickly, ‘I, uh, was by the door, watching the corridor. But from where I was, she didn’t move a muscle. Like the lieutenant says, she was out of it.’

The bottle went down on the polished table with a firm tap, and Gorelkin looked at them each in turn. ‘If she was out of it, gentlemen,’ he said softly, ‘perhaps you could explain why, just five minutes after you exited the target building, a woman was seen walking down the stairs from that floor and leaving the building through a rear door used only by staff? Why, the following morning, the room where you had seen the supposedly unconscious or sleeping woman, was empty, and her clothes gone?’

Neither man spoke. They had messed up. Gorelkin wouldn’t have been this specific if he didn’t have the facts. And now they had to wait to hear what he was going to say. From long experience with others who’d failed in the centre, they knew it wouldn’t be pleasant. Gorelkin was every bit the old-style
apparatchik
, but in modern clothing. Scratch the surface of his kind, and there was cold, hard steel underneath. If the current administration ever turned itself back beneath the true cloak of communism, as many wanted, Gorelkin would roll with it as easily as changing his underwear, and emerge victorious.

But the expected firestorm didn’t come.

‘You can count yourselves lucky,’ the colonel muttered coldly, ‘that right now I don’t have the luxury of replacing you and sending you back to whatever shit-hole regiments you came from. If I did, you’d be on the next plane out!’ He emphasised the final word by slapping a hand down on the table top. The bottle jumped, then toppled and rolled towards the edge.

Votrukhin reached out instinctively and grabbed it. Placed it carefully back where it had come from.

‘What should we do?’ he asked. As the senior man, it was down to him to take the lead. Even if it meant sticking his neck out for Gorelkin to take off his head.

‘What do you think you’ll do – you find her!’ Gorelkin snapped. ‘She’s a threat we can’t ignore. She can’t have vanished completely.’

‘She was probably just military,’ Serkhov put in with unusual bravado. ‘A female grunt wounded in Afghanistan like the others in that unit. Why would she be a threat?’

‘Think about it, Serkhov.’ Gorelkin’s voice could have sliced marble. ‘A woman recovering from being shot in the stomach. That’s a nasty wound for anyone. But in the middle of the night, the same night you two turn up, she gets up from her bed and walks out of the hospital, taking whatever clothes she had with her. Now that’s not normal “grunt” behaviour. Something scared her enough to get out of there – and she had the balls and toughness to get up and walk. What do you think made her do that, huh?’

‘She heard us,’ Serkhov replied, his tone subdued. He threw an accusing look at Lieutenant Votrukhin, a reminder that he’d urged the lieutenant that she should be taken care of, and he’d been ignored.

‘Of course she heard you. I presume you spoke in Russian?’

Their silence confirmed it. He nodded. ‘As I thought. Which means she probably understood every word you said. And if this wounded trooper understood
you
, what does that lead you to conclude?’

‘She would have heard and understood what the target said, too,’ said Votrukhin softly. Both men had received a thorough briefing on arriving in the UK. It had begun with details of the target’s shooting by another member of the centre flown over to deal with Tobinskiy in the coastal town of Brighton in southern England. That operative had since left the country. The decision, they had been informed, had been made at the highest level to activate a second team to finish the job, and Votrukhin and Serkhov had been assigned that task. The reason given for the urgency was that the target had been transferred to a specialist hospital in London, and had been heard raving aloud under the regime of drugs he was under. The conclusion was that the risk of anybody working on the unit comprehending what he was saying was moderate to high.

And clearly somebody had.

‘It’s a big city,’ Serkhov put in. ‘It would help if we knew something about her . . . where she comes from, that kind of stuff. I didn’t even see what she looked like.’

‘I’m dealing with that. You’ll have the information as soon as I can get it.’

‘From the embassy?’

‘No. Not from the embassy.’ Gorelkin paused, then said, ‘This mission is running under
chyornyiy
rules; you know what that means, but I’ll repeat them in case you’ve forgotten. You are to have no contact with the embassy or any of our residents or other assets. You understand?’ Both men nodded. ‘You pass all requests and operational decisions through me. You need something, I will get it for you, including information, money, papers or equipment. You get caught and we do not know you. I will make all efforts to extricate you, but you know that might not be possible for some time. Understood?’

The two men exchanged a brief look, then nodded. They had heard of
chyornyiy
or black rules operations before, but had never worked under them.

‘Don’t they have next-of-kin details on the hospital database?’ asked Votrukhin. He wanted to get this business over and done with.

‘No. That unit lists patients’ names only. The British Ministry of Defence placed an embargo on any personal information of wounded military personnel being available in case of targeting by the press or extremists. This woman was listed simply as Clare Jardine. I’ll run it through our database but I don’t expect it to turn up much. I’ll have to get it another way.’

‘How?’ Serkhov queried.

‘I’m not sure,’ Gorelkin admitted, his anger subsiding quickly as he considered the action to be taken. He reached in his pocket and took out a Blackberry. ‘But I think I know of a man who can help us.’

I
n a stripped-out three-storey building off Belgrave Road in Pimlico, Clare Jardine came awake in a rush, reaching for the elbow crutch. She bit back on a yelp as her stomach muscles protested. Too quick, instincts overcoming caution. She waited for the pain to recede while assessing what had woken her in the first place, mentally gathering herself for flight.

The noise came again: it was the clatter of a rubbish skip out in the street, followed by a man swearing. She lay back. Normal everyday sounds. No threat. Not yet, anyway.

Above her head the high ceiling showed yellowed mouldings and a tracer work of fine cracks spread throughout the plaster. Bare wiring hung down from the central fitting, plaited and sheathed in fabric instead of the modern plastic coating. She shivered at the chill in the atmosphere. Like the rest of the building, the room was bare, ready for gutting and renovation. Only the two thin mattresses on the bare floorboards showed that anyone was using it, a low-quality squat in a high-society street.

But for now it was salvation. Of a sort.

She allowed the events of the night before to reel through her mind. After dressing hastily in her laundered clothes, and a T-shirt to replace the blouse ruined by the shooting, she had left the trauma centre and lost herself in the darkened streets of Camberwell. She’d headed north on Denmark Hill towards Newington and Southwark. It was an area one of her MI6 instructors had referred to only half-jokingly as bandit country, but going round it would have taken too long. Going south or east was too open; west or north-west would take her too close to Vauxhall Cross and the network of cameras around the building she had once called work: the headquarters of SIS – the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6.

Progress had been slow, keeping one eye open for cameras, the other for obstacles at ground level. Instinct had made her scoop up the discarded aluminium crutch in the stairwell of the hospital, which had helped. Aware that the two men who had entered her room might return and come after her, she’d forced herself to put as much distance between them as possible. But she was still weak after her enforced inactivity, especially in the legs, and bouts of dizziness made the street lights swim in front of her eyes, forcing her to rest up when it got too bad.

Twice she’d spotted the approach of police patrol cars and scurried out of sight just in time, losing herself in the shadows. They looked like standard night-time patrols, but a lone woman might be enough to attract a bored policeman’s curiosity. She had been trained to lie for England, but had no rational explanation for being out by herself, or why she was walking in obvious pain. And with her wallet holding cash, ID and credit cards all locked up in the hospital for safe-keeping, not being able to prove who she was would be a step too far.

A couple of drunks had appeared out of an alleyway near the Elephant and Castle station, buttoning their flies. They had eyed her with eager, if unsteady interest, and she’d hurried on, leaving them behind. But at the next convenient doorway she’d studied the crutch. It was lightweight, made of aluminium, with a plastic grip and a cuff for the arm and a rubber ferrule on the end. She’d ripped off the ferrule and stamped hard on the aluminium tip, squashing it into a sharp edge.

Now it was a weapon. She wouldn’t last long swinging it, but a look at the tip might put off all but the most determined of attackers. The rubber ferrule was no longer a perfect fit, but it would do. An SIS instruction drilled into the class had been a simple one: having a weapon didn’t mean you had to use it. But the value of the increased confidence for a field operative, especially in hostile territory, was immense.

Although she had no easy access to a phone, she had racked her brains for someone to contact. But whatever the gunshot had done to her stomach had also blitzed her memory bank; she couldn’t recall a single name or number of anybody she knew. At first she had panicked, staring out at the street in dread. What if she never regained her memory? How would she survive?

But she had forced herself to calm down and think logically. It was what she’d been trained to do in moments of high stress. Things weren’t so bad, because she wasn’t totally blank. She’d instinctively remembered the location of the SIS building, and the direction to take for Southwark; and she’d recognised the fact that the two mystery visitors to the unit had been speaking Russian . . . and that one of them had wanted to deal with her, the words uttered with all the emotion of ordering a takeaway.

‘We could save the bother – do it now.’

She shivered at the memory, hating knowing how vulnerable she’d felt right then; acknowledging that there wasn’t a thing she could have done to stop them.

The rest of the journey to the river had been a blank, constantly dodging the most obvious street cameras, other pedestrians, cars and well-lit areas. But she had made it.

And now she was here.

She flinched as the door to her temporary refuge inched open, and lifted the crutch in readiness. A girl’s head popped into view. Orange hair with yellow streaks, face piercings and black lipstick. The body followed, tall and lean. Torn denims and Doc Martens. Her name was . . . Maisy? Mitzi? She couldn’t remember. Only that she had met her near Charing Cross after crossing the river, sipping soup from a paper cup. She had blagged a cup for herself, then a room here for the night.