Tundra (16 page)

Wyatt asked, ‘What am I looking for, exactly?’

‘I’ll find out.’

‘Time’s short.’

‘I know,’ said Lenilko.

‘Medievsky’s told me to guard the generators. I’m on my way there after this.’

Lenilko thought about it. ‘He trusts you.’

‘Or he wants me out of the way for a while.’ Wyatt paused. ‘Purkiss may have put him up to it. The two of them have just been talking in private.’

Lenilko closed his eyes.
Yes. Of course it had been Purkiss.

With a sense of stepping off the edge of a precipice, he made his decision.

‘My order to you yesterday. About treating Purkiss as an untouchable.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m revoking it.’

Silence for a few seconds.

Wyatt said: ‘You’ve received new orders?’

‘Whether or not I have is my business. You take your orders from
me
.’

‘Yes. I understand.’

‘Call me three hours from now, if you can,’ said Lenilko. ‘Regardless of whether you’ve learned anything new.’

‘Yes.’

Lenilko put down the handset and turned gently in his office chair, one way and then the other.

The second satellite dish had been his idea, something he didn’t regard as a stroke of genius so much as a prudent precautionary measure. There was always the possibility of the Siberian storms knocking out the main communication system, and that would have cut Wyatt off entirely. Engineers employed directly through Lenilko’s department had installed the dish twenty-five kilometres to the south east of Yarkovsky Station a week before Wyatt’s arrival there.

Wyatt was right. Time was short, and Lenilko didn’t know what Wyatt was looking for. He owed it to his agent, and to himself, to find out.

He picked up the phone, his gut tight.

‘Anna. Get me Director Rokva. Yes, at home.’

He replaced the phone and waited.

*

T
he restaurant was no more than a quarter full, caught as it was between the breakfast and lunch surges. Many of the people at the tables looked as if they’d come in only to escape the cold.

Rokva was there already, alone in a corner booth. He’d ordered tea for them both. There’d be bodyguards nearby, but Lenilko failed to identify them among the clientele of the restaurant.

‘Semyon Vladimirovich,’ said the Director, after Lenilko had sat down. ‘You understand what it means, that I’ve asked you to meet here.’

‘Yes, sir.’ When Rokva had called back, Lenilko had said he needed to talk to him about the Yarkovsky Station project. Rokva interrupted him immediately, telling him to be at the restaurant in twenty minutes. Not his own office in the Lubyanka, not one of the usual dining venues frequented by officers of the FSB, but this middling establishment several blocks from Red Square. It meant that Rokva wanted to minimise the risk of their conversation being overheard. Audio surveillance was less likely here than even in his Lubyanka office.

Rokva poured tea, added lemon to his cup. When he looked up expectantly, Lenilko realised he himself was supposed to start the ball rolling.

‘You no doubt know the essentials of my Yarkovsky Station operation, sir. I have an asset at the station, the Briton, Francis Wyatt. I placed him there in response to chatter on the
Spetssvyaz
channels, in which Yarkovsky Station was starting to come up as a topic too frequently for it to be coincidental.’

Spetssvyaz
, the Special Communications and Information Service, was the Russian Federation’s cryptologic intelligence agency, the service dedicated to among other things the interception and analysis of foreign communications. It was the approximate equivalent of the National Security Agency of the United States. Its relations with the FSB’s various departments were complex, and its willingness to share information varied. The agency would sometimes release raw data to the FSB, leaving it to do the analysis. It was a series of these data dumps which had alerted Lenilko to the mentions of Yarkovsky Station, though the context was too garbled to bear analysis.

‘Wyatt has been in place nine weeks. Thus far, he’s had little to report. But he communicated with me via our clandestine satellite link up just minutes before I called you at home. The main satellite dish has been sabotaged, cutting the station off. And the resident doctor was murdered last night, his death made to look like suicide.’

A tiny crease of interest appeared between Rovka’s brows. He sipped his tea. ‘What do you want to ask me?’

‘Director Rokva, something is happening, or about to happen, at Yarkovsky Station. The break in communications can only be temporary, as help will be triggered automatically after forty eight hours of silence.’ Lenilko chose his words carefully. ‘What is the significance of Yarkovsky Station? I mean, beyond the fact that it’s renowned for its research. What might an enemy be doing there? Be willing to kill for?’

Rokva took so long to reply that Lenilko wondered whether the Director was waiting for more from him. At last the small man said, ‘It’s your project, Semyon. We allow independent work by officers of your seniority precisely because we expect you to show initiative, to come up with answers without handholding on our part. Isn’t it
your
job to find out what is happening at the station?’

In other circumstances Lenilko would have been stung, would have felt rebuked, shamed into silence. But he thought of Wyatt, and of the speed at which events were following one another at the station, and he pressed on, emboldened. ‘With respect, sir, I believe you do know more about Yarkovsky Station and this whole business than you’re letting on. I believe there’s something you want to tell me, but are trying hard not to. You yourself remarked just now on the choice of setting in which you requested this talk of ours to take place. There’s something you need to say.’

Rokva regarded him over the rim of his cup. He finished his tea, replenished his cup from the pot.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yarkosky Station has a significance beyond the scientific research it produces. A significance known to perhaps fifty people. I, and the other directors, am among them. And I believe I’m justified in telling you now, so that you’re included in our number.’

He began.

Lenilko listened. Rokva’s cadences were as lulling as the sea, and as his words took shape, and the full import of what he was saying began to emerge, Lenilko felt himself buoyed as if on the back of some gargantuan, terrible beast rearing from the depths.

When Rokva had finished, Lenilko watched him in silence. He felt stunned. Appalled.
Exhilarated.

‘Perhaps you begin to grasp my dilemma.’ Rokva spooned sugar into his cup. ‘Thirty years ago, twenty five, this would have been a clear-cut matter for us to deal with. A case of espionage, to be met with counterintelligence. Now, it appears to be more the province of Counter-Terrorism. Eshman and his crew.’

Yuri Eshman was the Director of the FSB’s Counter-Terrorism Department. The rivalry between it and Rokva’s and Lenilko’s own Directorate of Special Activities was intense and ongoing. Counter-Terrorism saw the Special Activities people as sad, irrelevant relics, a nostalgia club dedicated to fighting old Cold War battles that were long since over. The Kremlin seemed to agree. Annual funding for Counter-Terrorism had soared in the last decade, in contrast to a steady drop in investment for the Counterintelligence Service as a whole and the Special Activities Directorate in particular.

‘However: I resisted taking the case out of your hands and handing it to Eshman,’ Rokva went on. ‘Until now, it has been perfectly justifiable for our service to conduct a deep-penetration investigation into what is happening at the station. But in light of what I’ve just told you, you must see that it’s looking as though we’ll have to concede this one to Eshman.’

No.
Under the table Lenilko’s fists clenched.

‘I have the agent in place,’ he said, in tones as measured as he could manage. ‘I have exclusive access. I want to hang on to this one, Director Rokva. I want to see it through. Bring it home.’

‘And I can understand that.’ Rokva nibbled at a tiny biscuit which had accompanied the tea. ‘As I say, I have so far resisted what my head has told me, namely that this entire project should be handed over to Counter-Terrorism. I’m old guard, Semyon Vladimirovich. I cut my KGB teeth on the great, stealthy battles between us and the Americans and British. Chasing a rag-tag mob of terrorists and martyrs was not what I signed up for when I joined as a young man.’ He sighed, raised both palms heavenward. ‘But these are different times. The madmen, the bombers, the kidnappers, they have the upper hand. Our old enemies, our old friends, the sane, clever ones, the ones who were so much like us... they aren’t the threat they used to be. And we’ll have to come to terms with that.’

For the first time since he’d sat down, Lenilko applied himself to his own tea. It was bland and cool and insipid.

‘What are my instructions?’ he said, finally.

‘You are to contact Eshman’s office and inform him of the Yarkovsky Station project. You are to include every last detail of what you have learned. You are to tell him that the Directorate of Special Activities recognises this is a case for Counter-Terrorism, and that you will be on hand to provide advice but will otherwise leave CT to handle it from now on.’

Rokva’s tone was matter of fact, but something in his eyes betrayed regret. Bitterness, even.

Lenilko said, ‘This is wrong, sir.’

‘Quite probably, yes. Morally speaking.’

‘I can’t do it.’

‘You have to.’

‘It’s ours.’

‘Not any more.’

‘For God’s sake,
Director.
’

It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to his superior. Lenilko flinched, appalled.

But Rokva didn’t react.

Lenilko held up his hands in apology. ‘That was uncalled for, sir. But...’

He placed his palms neatly on the table, leaned forward.

‘Six hours.’

Rokva raised his eyebrows.

‘Six hours,’ said Lenilko. ‘Give me six hours to prove this is a matter primarily for Special Activities and not for Eshman. If I fail to make my case, I’ll willingly concede defeat. No. I’ll go further. If I’m wrong, I’ll resign.’

Rokva rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’ He placed his hands on the table in a mirroring of Lenilko that was either wholly unconscious or a crude parody. ‘Six hours. No longer. Beyond that, I’ll contact Eshman myself.’

Without warning Rokva rose, signalled somebody behind Lenilko’s shoulder. For an instant Lenilko felt the thrill of primal Russian fear, the abject terror of the hand on the upper arm, the three a.m. knock at the door. But Rokva was probably only giving notice that his car should be brought round.

‘Thank you, Director Rokva,’ Purkiss murmured. ‘Six hours. I won’t let you down.’

E
ither the quality of the transmitter was lower than Purkiss had expected, or he’d positioned it  less than ideally. Because although Wyatt’s voice was unmistakeable, his words were unintelligible.

Purkiss hunched forward over the receiver on the writing table, as if by getting physically closer to it he could somehow boost its power. He pressed the tiny earpiece further into the external auditory canals of both his ears.

Wyatt spoke in a natural baritone, with a slight emphasis on the sibilants, and those two aspects of his speech came across clearly enough. There was even a moment when Purkiss fancied he caught a word –
Purkiss
– but he dismissed it.

Purkiss had gone straight from Medievsky’s office to his room, where he’d locked the door and taken out his briefcase and removed the surveillance kit from the false bottom.

It was a gamble. He’d advised Medievsky to send Wyatt to the generators to stand guard, and it was possible Wyatt would head straight there. But Purkiss knew Wyatt hadn’t been back to his room since the discovery of Keys’s body at seven that morning. Wyatt had been herded into the mess with the rest of them at first, and then had gone straight out with Haglund and Medievsky on the expedition to inspect the satellite dish. On his return, he’d once again gone directly to the mess with his colleagues.

So, if he was communicating with someone on the outside from his sleeping quarters, he’d want to take this opportunity to send a message before he was posted to a potentially protracted stint of guard duty.

It took five minutes, less than Purkiss had expected, and the sudden breaking of a human murmur into the silence startled him.

He listened for three minutes, at most. Then the voice fell silent.

Purkiss continued listening, heard the multitude of random noises produced by somebody moving about a room.

Silence followed. Purkiss knew Wyatt had left his room.

He put the receiver and the ear buds away in the briefcase’s compartment and stowed it in the wardrobe.

He hadn’t heard a word, hadn’t heard even what language Wyatt had been speaking in. But he’d confirmed that Wyatt had a line of communication with the world outside. The rhythm of his speech, the flow and the pauses, had been those of a man talking on a phone, alternately talking and listening.

Purkiss left his room and walked the corridors until he was outside Wyatt’s. He wondered what the man had made of the note he must have found when he’d entered, the one Purkiss had pushed under the door, asking for a meeting to discuss a technical point. Possibly Wyatt would have dismissed it as a lame attempt by Purkiss to lure him into a private conference.

This time Purkiss disregarded the risk of traps. He overcame the lock in under fifteen seconds, pushed the door open.

The room was as generic as Purkiss’s own. He searched it methodically and quickly, all need for stealth long past. It came as no surprise that there was nothing obvious to find, no phone or laptop or tablet computer, no documents, no passport.

He found the satellite phone handset, after seven minutes, in that oldest and most classic of Cold War hiding places: inside a waterproof bag, taped under the lid of the toilet cistern.