9 – Naivety
Lyudmila got the file from the safe. She was in charge of admin, records included, down in the rezidentura, and retrieved what Katerina asked for from the room which was one big safe itself. Katerina wasn’t allowed inside there: just Lyudmila and Ilya could go inside.
The file concerned the Heathrow Incident.
It had happened at the beginning of the year at Britain’s biggest airport. Katerina had been briefed on what had happened by the British and given a short summary by Ilya when she had asked to see the file. She could also recall hearing about it when in Canada. However, none of that was as thorough as the file itself.
Colonel Domenico Vittore was at the centre of it all.
He was an Italian military officer who’d been on assignment to a NATO command facility here in the UK. The GRU had their hooks into him with Russia’s military intelligence service, the SVR’s rivals, having been using Vittore for several years to gain information for them all while paying him handsomely. The relationship between spy and handlers had soured though. Vittore had turned on the GRU and had began to feed them lies. According to the file, this wasn’t done with the knowledge of the Italian AISE (their foreign intelligence agency) nor any other Western organisation either. The deception was uncovered at the GRU took the ‘nuclear option’ where they decided to kill Vittore: forcing him back under control or exposing him hadn’t been done even when such a course of action might have been favourable. That decision was made in Moscow by a general who’d recently been disappeared… he was now pushing up daises. Outside his temporary residence in North London, the Italian military officer was exposed to the VM nerve agent. It was used in a binary fashion with the attack on him made when two elements were mixed together on his face by assailants clad in masks and fast to escape.
Vittore went straight to the airport. How much he knew about what had happened to him was unknown yet that was his immediate response. He took the Tube, going via the Piccadilly Line to the Terminal 4 station. Straight up into the airport above he went, heading for the ITA check-in desk. He didn’t make it that far and collapsed in the middle of the terminal while undergoing seizures which would subsequently kill him.
How Vittore had died, who had caused it and why it was done wasn’t something that had at once been known. The truth had slowly come out though, much of that being put into the public arena. Already having done something similar beforehand, and much worse too on UK soil, Russia was – quite rightly – blamed for the assassination. Denials came from the Rodina, counter-accusations too. VM wasn’t Novichok and so didn’t immediately scream ‘Russia’ as that later weapon would. It was a chemical agent that many outer countries could produce and maybe use. However, what purpose would North Korea or maybe Iran have for using doing such a thing against an Italian NATO officer in Britain?
Working with the Italians, as well as the Americans, the British uncovered the treason undertaken by Vittore and the lies he had been telling. That had been aided by a Russian traitor. There was nothing in the file to directly say that, yet it might as well have been written in the file. The jumps that Russia’s enemies had made to put things together hadn’t just been through hard work, maybe the odd bit of luck with a communications intercept. Someone had confirmed that Russia was responsible: SPEARMINT.
It was one of the GRU officers assigned to the UK under diplomatic cover whom the British had gone after. Major Igor Sverchkov had been the point man who had directed the attack undertaken by a pair of Latvian nationals in Britain too as Illegals. They’d only had the faintest clue as to what they were doing but Sverchkov had known everything. He’d been nearby when the attack had been made then followed Vittore almost all the way to Heathrow. Katerina could only assume that he had been horrified that the Italian had managed to get as far as he did, all while having been exposed to a nerve agent in the manner which the attack upon him had come. The British had deported Sverchkov, unable to arrest him as they surely would have liked to due to his diplomatic status when assigned to the Defence Attaché's Office up in Highgate.
Not only had Russia been identified as the guilty party, Katerina could see, but the MI-5 agent here inside the rezidentura had put them onto Sverchkov too. The GRU had launched an investigation and there Mikhail here had as well with him (correctly) convinced that there was a traitor.
As to him, she asked Lyudmila for another file concerning him.
Katerina observed the one concerning the Heathrow Incident be safety put away before the older woman brought her what else she had asked for. Lyudmila was efficient and businesslike. She was married to the embassy’s third secretary, a busy diplomat, and long a SVR officer independent of her husband. Previous encounters with her by Katerina had been cordial though not very friendly. She was suspicious, untrusting in fact.
If only she knew…
The second file concerned the daily activities log during February. Everyone working here in the rezidentura, Katerina included, had to complete a record of where they had been, what they had done and whom they had talked to. This didn’t just include espionage duties but everything else. The SVR was nothing but paranoid about its own people. Most of what would be in there would be entirely true, almost all of it boring including Tube trips to work, where lunch was eaten with whom and such like. There would be lies big and small though. Momentarily, Katerina recalled falsifying her own activities log when up in Edinburgh over where she had once spent the night. It was a memory which brought her a brief smile, one she looked up to see if Lyudmila had caught.
No, the woman was busy with her own work.
As to Mikhail’s activities, she studied the February days. There was a lot of comings and goings by him considering his official duties with facilities management that took up most of his working hours. Yet, she saw a few opportunities for the continuation of the zapachkat against Mikhail. She could tie him to the identification of Sverchkov.
Another smile.
*
“Katya, come to lunch with me.”
Ilya was standing before her desk. Katerina looked up at him and nodded.
“If we’re going somewhere expensive again, you’re paying. I cannot afford to go Dutch with you again.”
Ilya pulled a face of mock hurt. “I’m a gentleman and I offered to pay.” He put a hand atop of one of hers. “This time, I insist on paying as where we are going will be nice… and I have a generous expense account, don’t I?”
They left the rezidentura and then went out onto Bayswater Road via the Chancery. Ilya hailed a taxi and directed the driver to a Kurdish restaurant over near Holland Park.
The rezident would never ‘talk shop’ outside of the rezidentura. Katerina understood that. Despite the fact that he’d never been here before and gave no warning of his arrival, Ilya expected that the British, maybe the Americans too, would have surveillance on him. All sorts of devices, from the technical to the basic, could be used to try and overhear what was said.
This was social too, not business.
Ilya spoke to her about her legitimate diplomatic activities and how she was getting on in London while they waited for their food. He asked about her flat too and whether things had improved with her flatmate. In return, Katerina inquired about where he lived. He and the wife – Katerina had met Irina before, had she not? – had recently moved into a new place in Kentish Town. When Katerina asked him about that neighbourhood, speculating out loud as to whether it was upmarket enough for him, because he always cane across to her as a snob, he howled with laughter at her remark. Other diners took note of the disturbance but he didn’t look as if he cared. He was near to the Gospel Oak Station, he informed her, which was a nicer bit of Kentish Town.
Next, Ilya moved to a subject that Katerina feared he might bring up.
Her father.
“We’re were working in Istanbul, at the Consulate there. This was back before you were born, before I’d met my Irina, though your parents were engaged to be married by then.
Vanya took me out for dinner and I was more than surprised at the quality of the food. There were Kurds in Istanbul then though not as many as there are now. I’d never tried the food but afterwards, I knew I’d have more.
Ah, the good old days with Vanya: the best of my friends.”
As Ilya reminisced, Katerina felt that familiar, painful tightening in her belly. The pain came when anyone, her mother even, mentioned her father.
It was grief.
It was hurt.
It was anger.
Using all the strength that she had, she kept up the appearance of listening to Ilya was an understanding smile. Katerina gave nothing away. She refused to yield to him any inkling of what she was feeling inside as he, one of the people responsible for her father’s death, him and all of those other chekists & siloviks, sat across from her trying to share a moment with her.
“To good times gone but not forgotten.”
She raised a glass and toasted the memory which Ilya had shared with her.
All while the anger continued to boil within her. That was what she had turned the pain into, that was why she was doing what she was doing.
They would pay for killing her father.
As they continued to lunch, Katerina paid attention to the other people in the restaurant. One couple gain her notice. They’d come in about fifteen minutes after she and Ilya had. British spooks she pegged them as, either following Ilya or her.
With regards to everyone else, staff included, Katerina reckoned that many might thing that she and the rezident were an item. They sat close to each other, talking quietly and only paying the other attention, with the usual touchy-feely Ilya on show. Of course, that was far from the case. Despite what he had done, not done to be perfectly honest, Ilya still had an affinity for her father, even with the man in his grave. He wouldn’t dare instigate anything with her. Katerina knew him well. He looked on her like a daughter that he’d never had.
He’d pay for such naivety in the end.
“…and so Irina said that that we must go. I had no choice. She makes the rules on these things and I obey. But, Katya, you know how these things go. Sometimes I must…”
Ilya was blabbering on about his wife. Katerina was smiling and nodding and giving one-word answers as she spoke.
Her mind was still on that couple at the table nearby. They’d know that she and Ilya weren’t an item but did they know about who Ilya was seeing? The gossip around the embassy – not down in the rezidentura though – was that he was involved with Ksenia. Katerina could see the attraction. She wouldn’t mind a liaison with the other woman herself!
Poor Ilya, being played for the fool. She’d feel sorry for him but the fate of his friend Vanya, her father, was on him. Thinking upon his commence coming kept her smiling, it kept her sane.
They made a return to the embassy for the afternoon and after work, Katerina took her now usual route home. The commute was still long and it was always busy yet it gave her opportunities.
One of those was to collect a message from an electronic dead-drop.
Once off the Jubilee Line at Canning Town, Katerina headed for the twenty-four hour mini-market. The convenience store was a usual stop for her, somewhere that anyone watching her would have taken note of her going to before. What no one would have been able to determine was where he eyes went though. She was looking for identifying marks that the dead drop ahead had content in it.
There was a mark on the black traffic light pole at the pelican crossing. Using a day-glow pen, someone had made an X. She saw that one and the second cross too on the other side of the road. To the bin outside the shop she went next, with her phone out of her bag.
They’d given her a pen last week. It had all been very retro, very old-fashioned with a tiny slip of paper inside. Katerina was a modern girl and had made sure that there was to be none of that again. The British had fears over electronic surveillance but this system was considered by her to be fool-proof. The rubbish bin was near the store entrance and she stood before it while looking at her phone using the weather app.
A written message flashed up, something being transmitted to her briefly before it erased itself and the app received an update.
Continue the frame of Mikhail Mazyrin. Tie him to Heathrow. We’ll work the outside. Confirm progress next Friday at Drop Two.
Katerina smiled as the message vanished. Her phone went back into her bag and she entered the store to buy a few essentials.
Everything that the British wanted her to do, she was already doing. Out ahead of them she was, already doing what they thought they were so clever to be figuring out. It was part of a pattern. They couldn’t see her motivations, they couldn’t see what drove her. Those MI-5 people also couldn’t keep up with how this was also moving along at her direction towards her goal.
That being revenge for her father.
The Rezidentura
Re: The Rezidentura
What i wanted to do with Katerina was have her different from depictions of others in books/films. They are usually working for the 'good guys' against their fellow native 'bad guys' due to a higher moral belief etc.
She's different. She just wants revenge for personal reasons.
Re: The Rezidentura
10 – Scrap
Daniel sent Nathan a text message from an unknown number. It told him that he’d be picked up in ten minutes from outside his flat and that he was to bring nothing with him. Arriving a couple of minutes late, Daniel wouldn’t let him in the car, one which Nathan hadn’t seen beforehand, until he’d turned out his pockets.
“You can’t bring them.” He was talking about the keys in Nathan’s hand. “You couldn’t have left them in the flat with your phone and wallet?”
Nathan stared at him with an exasperated look: “How am I going to get back in later?”
“Stick them in those bushes over there: somewhere that you can find them later.”
“What if someone breaks in?”
He shook his head. “Don’t be daft!” His look was of that was rather unlikely. “C’mon, we haven’t got all day!”
Not happy at all to be doing what he was, but going along with Daniel’s instructions, Nathan hid his flat keys. He went back over to the car and climbed in the passenger seat.
“Bear in mind that if the worse happens, those clothes your wearing, the new white trainers too, might have to get dumped as well.”
“You’ll telling me,” Nathan asked with horror, “that not only might I have to be rolling around in that bush for my flat keys but I might be doing it starkers too?”
Daniel gave no reply as they drove off.
“Where are we going?”
They were a couple of miles away from Nathan’s and Daniel had said nothing since starting out.
“Bermondsey.”
“To see Roid?”
“To see his father.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got a lot of questions this morning, Nath.” Nathan could agree with that. He thought he was entitled to them though. “Why did you say ‘Roid’ when I mentioned Bermondsey?”
“That’s where he’s from, isn’t it?”
“Did he tell you that?”
“He did.” Nathan could clearly recall Robinson doing just that. “We were talking football and Millwall is his local team. You told me to pal up with him and that I did.”
Daniel drove on a bit more without saying anything. He got chatty when they were stopped in traffic though.
“Steven has gone missing. I’ve already been to see his girl and she knows nothing. His dad, now that’s a different story. If there’s something to know, he’ll know it.”
“Missing?”
“Missing is what he is and I’m more than a little concerned.” A firm, worried nod came with that. “And we’re going to find him. Open that glovebox.”
Nathan did as instructed. There was a gun inside, a shiny automatic handgun sitting there atop some car paperwork.
“Is that to help us find him?”
“The gun is for me, for if the situation requires it. Which I hope it won’t but I’m bringing it. I want you for your fists so don’t you worry about the gun. Just don’t freak out if I have to use it.
Roid’s father and me have history. He’s a tough guy and I am not in his best books. When we come asking about Steven, he’s going to cause a problem… just because he can. He’s got a scrap metal yard near The Blue and he won’t be there alone.
Nath, the clue is in the name: there’s likely to be a scrap there, okay?”
It happened fast, the scrap that was.
Daniel and Roid’s father, John Robinson, were having a heated conversation and then a punch was thrown. Down to the ground in the middle of the workshop went Daniel. Nathan was quick to react, keyed up waiting for this as he’d been told to be.
There were two other guys, young gym freaks. They came in from the left and the right towards him. Nathan hit the bigger one on the chin as he stepped aside from the smaller, stockier one who took a swing at him. They were a tough pair but none of them had ever fought a prison fight. Nathan had, many in fact. He’d learnt a lot in those. Being the strongest and meanest was all well and good but more than that, being quick was best. That was how you won those and how you made sure you were never a victim.
He took down the second attacker, smashing his elbow into the guy’s chest.
Towards Daniel and John he turned next, discovering as he did so that his boss had that situation in hand.
“You ain’t going to shoot me, Dan.” John was standing over Daniel.
Daniel had his pistol pointed up at him.
“I will if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
A barrage of filthy obscenities about Daniel’s mother are directed towards him in reply.
Nathan watched as Daniel stood up. He was bleeding from the mouth and his trouser leg was torn from where he had fallen. The gun in his hand remained pointed at John. Would he shoot him? Nathan reckoned he just might too, especially after what was just said.
He himself recalled what had been said by Hannah when the lady from MI-5 had forced him into doing what he was. Forget what you’ve seen in any television show or film, especially the American ones, such had been her comments. You’re an informer for us, not the police. If you have to get involved with something bad then do it for the sake of the mission. You, Nathan, aren’t going to get in trouble for something you don’t stop someone doing or have to do yourself.
The thing was that she hadn’t been clear. Tricky with words Hannah was. Nathan had wanted to ask back then what should he do if he was forced to take part in someone dying. Surely he’d get in trouble for that even if she was with MI-5. But, she refused to allow him to direct those questions at her.
Boy, she’d played things smart!
If Daniel shot John, Nathan told himself now that he wouldn’t, couldn’t do anything about it. He’d expect to get in trouble for it though, Hannah or no Hannah. He was just unlucky like that.
He damn well hoped that Daniel wouldn’t fire that gun.
“Down!” Daniel had the barrel of the gun at John’s forehead and kicked a knee. John knelt down. Nathan kept his eyes on the two he’d knocked to the floor himself, two men who had open, vengeful eyes but could see Daniel’s gun.
“You ain’t going to shoot me. You don’t have it in you.”
There was supreme confidence there for John.
“Nath, pull down his jogging bottoms. I’m going to shoot him behind his left knee. Then his right one too if he still won’t talk.”
Nathan winced at the idea of talking down another’s man’s trousers. Still, he moved to do it.
Daniel’s words had been for John though. Nathan realised that as he moved.
“C’mon, c’mon. There’s no need for this.” As he said that, John moved away from Nathan.
“Talk, or you’re going to either walk with a limp from now on or bleed out, John.”
John started talking, finally.
“Okay. Damn you, Daniel: damn you.
Steven had a side-deal with one of those the Russians you had him in with. There was money in it, money he wouldn’t let me have a taste of too. Something has gone wrong there. Steven has always been greedy since he was a toddler.
They’re out for him and he’s done a runner.”
Nathan believed Roid’s father. He didn’t know what Daniel was thinking at the moment, but this man appeared to him to be telling the truth.
He considered what that meant.
Roid was doing something behind Daniel’s back with the Russian spooks. He’d stolen from them too and was now on the run. All of that was a problem for Daniel.
“What was he doing with them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hold his leg, Nath, the left one. Our friend John here is about to be in a whole world of pain.”
There was a scream of fright this time. The big tough guy image from John was no more.
“No, Daniel: no!” He pleaded. “Don’t do it. I don’t know anything more than that. I tried to get him to tell me and he wouldn’t.”
A question in reply:” Did you punch him in the mouth when you asked?
“I never hit my boy, ever, even when he deserved it.”
“So it’s just me that you’re willing to whack, is it? John, I’m going to shoot you. Nath, hold him.”
Nathan did as instructed. He really didn’t want Daniel to shoot Roid’s father, probably even more than the would-be victim didn’t want that.
The gun barrel was behind John’s knee once the trouser leg was rolled up.
“Tell me where he went.”
“I don’t know.”
“Liar.”
The gun fired.
Nathan flinched, stepping back too.
John screamed.
And screamed again.
“The other knee is next.”
“I don’t know anything else!” He said that through more howls of pain. “I’d bloody well tell you if I did. I would, Daniel: I really would.”
Still Daniel didn’t believe him. “You do. I’m going to shoot you again, John.”
“Okay, okay.” And he gave up some more. “There was a girl, one of those Russians. She had a stupid name, beginning with a ‘D’.”
“What was it? Tell me before my pal here helps me shoot you in the other knee.”
His face strained in thought before a name came: “Dasha.”
John didn’t get shot a second time. He started crying as they walked away.
Daniel said that he believed Roid’s father had said all that he knew, which wasn’t much. He gave instructions for Nathan to follow him and they left the scrap metal yard. Nathan kept his eyes on the two guys he’d fought as they left though both of them were too cowed to do anything but rush towards their shot boss.
They got back in the car, leaving Bermondsey in a hurry. Nathan had blood on his clothes, on his trainers too!
“You look as white as a ghost, Nathan. Not used to that much blood, eh? It’s just the shock, it’ll pass.”
“Right…”
He had nothing more to say. If he was in shock as Daniel said, then so he was.
“He didn’t think I’d shoot him. I wouldn’t have if he’d just told me what I wanted to know straight away. Him and me aren’t strangers and he should have known better.
There’s a bag of clothes in the boot. One of the tee-shirts is white, Nath, so you’ll be happy. We’ll find somewhere, get changed, burn our clothes and then his car soon enough too. John is going to live yet if I’m wrong, and he doesn’t, then there will be no physical evidence tying us to it.”
“Apart from those two other guys.”
Daniel let out a chuckle before replying to that. “Do you want to go back there and shoot them before they can tell the police anything?
The one you hit first is Peter Adams. The other one if Freddie Makeman. I know who they are, they know I know their names. Believe me, they aren’t the talking-to-the-police-kind. Don’t worry about them, don’t worry about John either. There’s no cameras anywhere near the place either: John wouldn’t want any footage falling into the hands of the police.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t. Nathan tried his best to sound confident when he wasn’t.
“The problem at the minute,” Daniel told him, “isn’t any of those three back there who we just had a scrap with.
It’s Steven, it’s what he’s been doing. We need to find out that and where he is too. Oh, and who is this Dasha?”
They drove on with Nathan thinking about how soon he was going to have to tell all this to that pretty new girl Hannah had assigned to him as a handler…
…and the loss of his new trainers too when Daniel burnt them.
Daniel sent Nathan a text message from an unknown number. It told him that he’d be picked up in ten minutes from outside his flat and that he was to bring nothing with him. Arriving a couple of minutes late, Daniel wouldn’t let him in the car, one which Nathan hadn’t seen beforehand, until he’d turned out his pockets.
“You can’t bring them.” He was talking about the keys in Nathan’s hand. “You couldn’t have left them in the flat with your phone and wallet?”
Nathan stared at him with an exasperated look: “How am I going to get back in later?”
“Stick them in those bushes over there: somewhere that you can find them later.”
“What if someone breaks in?”
He shook his head. “Don’t be daft!” His look was of that was rather unlikely. “C’mon, we haven’t got all day!”
Not happy at all to be doing what he was, but going along with Daniel’s instructions, Nathan hid his flat keys. He went back over to the car and climbed in the passenger seat.
“Bear in mind that if the worse happens, those clothes your wearing, the new white trainers too, might have to get dumped as well.”
“You’ll telling me,” Nathan asked with horror, “that not only might I have to be rolling around in that bush for my flat keys but I might be doing it starkers too?”
Daniel gave no reply as they drove off.
“Where are we going?”
They were a couple of miles away from Nathan’s and Daniel had said nothing since starting out.
“Bermondsey.”
“To see Roid?”
“To see his father.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got a lot of questions this morning, Nath.” Nathan could agree with that. He thought he was entitled to them though. “Why did you say ‘Roid’ when I mentioned Bermondsey?”
“That’s where he’s from, isn’t it?”
“Did he tell you that?”
“He did.” Nathan could clearly recall Robinson doing just that. “We were talking football and Millwall is his local team. You told me to pal up with him and that I did.”
Daniel drove on a bit more without saying anything. He got chatty when they were stopped in traffic though.
“Steven has gone missing. I’ve already been to see his girl and she knows nothing. His dad, now that’s a different story. If there’s something to know, he’ll know it.”
“Missing?”
“Missing is what he is and I’m more than a little concerned.” A firm, worried nod came with that. “And we’re going to find him. Open that glovebox.”
Nathan did as instructed. There was a gun inside, a shiny automatic handgun sitting there atop some car paperwork.
“Is that to help us find him?”
“The gun is for me, for if the situation requires it. Which I hope it won’t but I’m bringing it. I want you for your fists so don’t you worry about the gun. Just don’t freak out if I have to use it.
Roid’s father and me have history. He’s a tough guy and I am not in his best books. When we come asking about Steven, he’s going to cause a problem… just because he can. He’s got a scrap metal yard near The Blue and he won’t be there alone.
Nath, the clue is in the name: there’s likely to be a scrap there, okay?”
It happened fast, the scrap that was.
Daniel and Roid’s father, John Robinson, were having a heated conversation and then a punch was thrown. Down to the ground in the middle of the workshop went Daniel. Nathan was quick to react, keyed up waiting for this as he’d been told to be.
There were two other guys, young gym freaks. They came in from the left and the right towards him. Nathan hit the bigger one on the chin as he stepped aside from the smaller, stockier one who took a swing at him. They were a tough pair but none of them had ever fought a prison fight. Nathan had, many in fact. He’d learnt a lot in those. Being the strongest and meanest was all well and good but more than that, being quick was best. That was how you won those and how you made sure you were never a victim.
He took down the second attacker, smashing his elbow into the guy’s chest.
Towards Daniel and John he turned next, discovering as he did so that his boss had that situation in hand.
“You ain’t going to shoot me, Dan.” John was standing over Daniel.
Daniel had his pistol pointed up at him.
“I will if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
A barrage of filthy obscenities about Daniel’s mother are directed towards him in reply.
Nathan watched as Daniel stood up. He was bleeding from the mouth and his trouser leg was torn from where he had fallen. The gun in his hand remained pointed at John. Would he shoot him? Nathan reckoned he just might too, especially after what was just said.
He himself recalled what had been said by Hannah when the lady from MI-5 had forced him into doing what he was. Forget what you’ve seen in any television show or film, especially the American ones, such had been her comments. You’re an informer for us, not the police. If you have to get involved with something bad then do it for the sake of the mission. You, Nathan, aren’t going to get in trouble for something you don’t stop someone doing or have to do yourself.
The thing was that she hadn’t been clear. Tricky with words Hannah was. Nathan had wanted to ask back then what should he do if he was forced to take part in someone dying. Surely he’d get in trouble for that even if she was with MI-5. But, she refused to allow him to direct those questions at her.
Boy, she’d played things smart!
If Daniel shot John, Nathan told himself now that he wouldn’t, couldn’t do anything about it. He’d expect to get in trouble for it though, Hannah or no Hannah. He was just unlucky like that.
He damn well hoped that Daniel wouldn’t fire that gun.
“Down!” Daniel had the barrel of the gun at John’s forehead and kicked a knee. John knelt down. Nathan kept his eyes on the two he’d knocked to the floor himself, two men who had open, vengeful eyes but could see Daniel’s gun.
“You ain’t going to shoot me. You don’t have it in you.”
There was supreme confidence there for John.
“Nath, pull down his jogging bottoms. I’m going to shoot him behind his left knee. Then his right one too if he still won’t talk.”
Nathan winced at the idea of talking down another’s man’s trousers. Still, he moved to do it.
Daniel’s words had been for John though. Nathan realised that as he moved.
“C’mon, c’mon. There’s no need for this.” As he said that, John moved away from Nathan.
“Talk, or you’re going to either walk with a limp from now on or bleed out, John.”
John started talking, finally.
“Okay. Damn you, Daniel: damn you.
Steven had a side-deal with one of those the Russians you had him in with. There was money in it, money he wouldn’t let me have a taste of too. Something has gone wrong there. Steven has always been greedy since he was a toddler.
They’re out for him and he’s done a runner.”
Nathan believed Roid’s father. He didn’t know what Daniel was thinking at the moment, but this man appeared to him to be telling the truth.
He considered what that meant.
Roid was doing something behind Daniel’s back with the Russian spooks. He’d stolen from them too and was now on the run. All of that was a problem for Daniel.
“What was he doing with them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hold his leg, Nath, the left one. Our friend John here is about to be in a whole world of pain.”
There was a scream of fright this time. The big tough guy image from John was no more.
“No, Daniel: no!” He pleaded. “Don’t do it. I don’t know anything more than that. I tried to get him to tell me and he wouldn’t.”
A question in reply:” Did you punch him in the mouth when you asked?
“I never hit my boy, ever, even when he deserved it.”
“So it’s just me that you’re willing to whack, is it? John, I’m going to shoot you. Nath, hold him.”
Nathan did as instructed. He really didn’t want Daniel to shoot Roid’s father, probably even more than the would-be victim didn’t want that.
The gun barrel was behind John’s knee once the trouser leg was rolled up.
“Tell me where he went.”
“I don’t know.”
“Liar.”
The gun fired.
Nathan flinched, stepping back too.
John screamed.
And screamed again.
“The other knee is next.”
“I don’t know anything else!” He said that through more howls of pain. “I’d bloody well tell you if I did. I would, Daniel: I really would.”
Still Daniel didn’t believe him. “You do. I’m going to shoot you again, John.”
“Okay, okay.” And he gave up some more. “There was a girl, one of those Russians. She had a stupid name, beginning with a ‘D’.”
“What was it? Tell me before my pal here helps me shoot you in the other knee.”
His face strained in thought before a name came: “Dasha.”
John didn’t get shot a second time. He started crying as they walked away.
Daniel said that he believed Roid’s father had said all that he knew, which wasn’t much. He gave instructions for Nathan to follow him and they left the scrap metal yard. Nathan kept his eyes on the two guys he’d fought as they left though both of them were too cowed to do anything but rush towards their shot boss.
They got back in the car, leaving Bermondsey in a hurry. Nathan had blood on his clothes, on his trainers too!
“You look as white as a ghost, Nathan. Not used to that much blood, eh? It’s just the shock, it’ll pass.”
“Right…”
He had nothing more to say. If he was in shock as Daniel said, then so he was.
“He didn’t think I’d shoot him. I wouldn’t have if he’d just told me what I wanted to know straight away. Him and me aren’t strangers and he should have known better.
There’s a bag of clothes in the boot. One of the tee-shirts is white, Nath, so you’ll be happy. We’ll find somewhere, get changed, burn our clothes and then his car soon enough too. John is going to live yet if I’m wrong, and he doesn’t, then there will be no physical evidence tying us to it.”
“Apart from those two other guys.”
Daniel let out a chuckle before replying to that. “Do you want to go back there and shoot them before they can tell the police anything?
The one you hit first is Peter Adams. The other one if Freddie Makeman. I know who they are, they know I know their names. Believe me, they aren’t the talking-to-the-police-kind. Don’t worry about them, don’t worry about John either. There’s no cameras anywhere near the place either: John wouldn’t want any footage falling into the hands of the police.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t. Nathan tried his best to sound confident when he wasn’t.
“The problem at the minute,” Daniel told him, “isn’t any of those three back there who we just had a scrap with.
It’s Steven, it’s what he’s been doing. We need to find out that and where he is too. Oh, and who is this Dasha?”
They drove on with Nathan thinking about how soon he was going to have to tell all this to that pretty new girl Hannah had assigned to him as a handler…
…and the loss of his new trainers too when Daniel burnt them.
Re: The Rezidentura
11 – Hurricane Yelena
Colonel Komova clandestinely slipped into the London rezidentura. For Katerina, the arrival of the Second Deputy head of counterintelligence at the SVR meant serious trouble. Hurricane Yelena was here and it wasn’t an enjoyable experience at all.
From Moscow she had come, to stand before Katerina and Ilya today in the foulest of tempers.
“This is all absolutely absurd. What has been going on here is to end at once. General Olyunin has taken ill and has been relived of his duties until he is fit enough to resume them.
Surely he cannot have known just what a mess of things the two of you have been making of the tasks which he assigned you?
To identify a traitor was the task given. And who is it that you have decided is that spy here? Captain Mazyrin? That is ridiculous. He has been framed by the British and the two of you have gone along with that.
No more.
You, Lieutenant Dubova,” the visitor who’d come down into the rezidentura through the ambassador’s residence, after getting into the country undetected by the British authorities too so Katerina had been informed, pointed a hostile finger at her, “have the trust of the general but, I tell you now, you do not have mine. You have failed miserably in your task.
And you, Major Zelepukin,” another accusational finger, this one aimed at Ilya, “are insubordinate. You are running your own investigation when you received, and acknowledged, clear instructions from Moscow Centre to stand back for the investigator which General Olyunin appointed to do their task.
Orders are to be followed, not ignored.
The pair of you are a disgrace.”
Following Ilya’s lead, Katerina stood silent and still. Yelena continued to glower at them both but had nothing more to say at the moment. The fury that the colonel had worked herself up into and blown itself out. Still, the hurricane surely wasn’t over with just yet.
While waiting for more of it to be unleashed, Katerina thought for a moment about that revelation concerning General Olyunin.
The old man Dmitri was her patron. Without him, her deceased father’s past service notwithstanding, she was nothing in the SVR. She had duped him, played him for a fool. The British had helped but it was mostly her work. Dmitri had put all of his faith in her, wholly unaware of what she was going to do to him and all of those like him. He was the First Deputy but now he was ill. Katerina was well aware of Yelena and what that woman was all about. Dmitri’s apparent illness sounded untrue.
The idea struck her, one which wouldn’t go away, that he was either ill because Yelena had made him or he had been shoved aside due to other internal factors at home.
While he thoughts were elsewhere, Ilya stuck up for her: “Colonel, Katya has linked Mazyrin to the Heathrow Incident. I doubted her when she first came to me with her suspicions of Mikhail Nikolayevich but the evidence is mounting up.”
The brave fool did his best.
Which wasn’t good enough.
“Idiot.” As she called him that, Yelena stared Ilya down. She wanted a reply, a reaction yet none came so she continued onwards. “If it was up to me, you would be out of here, Major. I’d have you sent to Tanzania or… maybe Paraguay.
And, you, Lieutenant, you are on notice of my official disapproval of your findings. Captain Mazyrin is one of my people. Do you understand what I mean by that?”
Katerina nodded in reply. She wasn’t exactly sure of what ‘one of my people’ exactly entailed, but thought it best to go along with what Yelena was saying.
The irony of all of this wasn’t something that passed her by in regards to how everything that Yelena was saying was correct. Mazyrin was innocent. Ilya, to be perfectly honest, was an idiot. She – Katerina – had failed to identity the traitor she had been sent to smoke out: SPEARMINT was still active, still reporting to the British.
Of all the people she could have picked too…
Who could have known that Mikhail Mazyrin was ‘one’ of Yelena’s?
“Major, I want to talk to you about these British smugglers that you have working for you and what has gone wrong there too. That means you are dismissed, Lieutenant.
Go.”
Katerina left Ilya’s office. There was no sorrow in her for his situation. Perhaps there should have been but her inner anger, that which allowed her to continue to seek the justice that she sought, wouldn’t let her. She’d really wanted to stay too, to hear that next conversation. An urgent message this morning had given her warning of what the British knew about that but she needed more.
She’d have to pick Ilya’s brain later on that issue… and just what was going on with her flatmate Dasha tied up in it as well.
There was shouting come from within Ilya’s inner office. It wasn’t the rezident whom Katerina and others in the rezidentura heard though. He would have been speaking quietly, during the pauses in the loud outbursts coming from Yelena.
Ksenia, Oleg and Polina were each in the outer office area, set below ground where the hurricane that had come from Moscow Centre continued to rage. Noting how all of them were looking at either their computers or paperwork on their desks, Katerina realised that her internal cover here within the rezidentura was now blown. Yelena had done that. No longer could she pretend to be just a new addition to the intelligence team here.
These three, then everyone else soon enough, would know that she was counter-intelligence here to find a traitor. Interrogations rather than being crafty were going to have to be overt with everyone aware of who she really was. That wasn’t her favoured method of working at all.
Yelena wouldn’t have blown her cover by accident. It would have to have been something decided among the top ranks as acceptable before the fact. Katerina knew little of how things really worked back at Moscow Centre. The SVR was an organisation run on factions, on secret agendas. She was one of the little people, the worker ants far from home. Back there though, it might as well have been a whole different planet. What little she did know was Yelena was now in a position of influence over whom had been there before.
General Olyunin had faith in her, of that she was certain. His replacement was of another faction though, one which now must be in the ascendancy if her patron was out of the picture, even temporarily. How she had manipulated him, how he had trusted her so she could work for the British against him!
She still had her orders: find the traitor here.
Katerina wasn’t going to give them SPEARMINT. Her framing of Mazyrin had failed so it would be someone else then.
As she pondered over who the next person she would do a zapachkat too, Katerina listened to Yelena continuing to berate Ilya.
*
Katerina went out for lunch, not going very far and alone too. Her mind was fully occupied and she was engrossed in plotting and scheming. Dasha occupied her thinking. While still hating her personally, Katerina had to admire the other woman regardless. She’d had Katerina fooled. Being SVR too, though never stepping foot in the rezidentura, Dasha had been working with those smugglers. Katerina was aware of the links with them though had thought it was only Mazyrin involved in using British operatives for deniability purposes.
No: it was Dasha too.
She wondered over whether it was possible to replace Mazyrin as the victim of the frame up with Dasha instead…
Walking along Queensway, away from Bayswater Road, Katerina headed for another mini-supermarket: just like the one near her flat. There were no innocuous markings to indicate that the dead drop up head had waiting messages yet Katerina set out to send rather than receive.
She stopped in front of the bin, opening the weather app on her phone. Quickly she typed.
Mazyrin plan has failed.
Komova is in London, surprise visit. Possible Dutch passport use.
Aiming to transfer suspicion to Daria Fukrova if I can.
Will update in 24hrs.
The message was received and with the acknowledgement, the app closed itself. Katerina put her phone back in her Lord of the Rings tote bag as she walked away from that bin and the electronic dead drop that it was. She went into the shop, brought something to snack upon and ambled back out on her way to make a return to the rezidentura.
Dasha: poor Dasha.
Hurricane Yelena wanted a traitor and Katerina would give her one.
“A question: why weren’t there any girl Hobbits?”
Irrelevant Yevgeny greeted her with such a remark when she returned. He had failed to warm on her.
“Has our visitor gone?” Katerina opted not to answer his question and instead had something relevant to say.
He nodded: “She’s no longer down there.”
Past the gate guardian to the rezidentura Katerina went and to see Ilya. He was drinking in his office, looking downcast. His eyes barely met hers when he spoke.
“What a day!”
“What’s the capital of Paraguay?” Her question was an attempt at humour but he only shrugged. “You should learn that if she is going to send you there.”
“I guess I should.”
Her joke had in no way improved the rezident’s despondency.
“Tell me about these smugglers and who you have got working for them.”
So began Katerina’s second frame attempt.
Colonel Komova clandestinely slipped into the London rezidentura. For Katerina, the arrival of the Second Deputy head of counterintelligence at the SVR meant serious trouble. Hurricane Yelena was here and it wasn’t an enjoyable experience at all.
From Moscow she had come, to stand before Katerina and Ilya today in the foulest of tempers.
“This is all absolutely absurd. What has been going on here is to end at once. General Olyunin has taken ill and has been relived of his duties until he is fit enough to resume them.
Surely he cannot have known just what a mess of things the two of you have been making of the tasks which he assigned you?
To identify a traitor was the task given. And who is it that you have decided is that spy here? Captain Mazyrin? That is ridiculous. He has been framed by the British and the two of you have gone along with that.
No more.
You, Lieutenant Dubova,” the visitor who’d come down into the rezidentura through the ambassador’s residence, after getting into the country undetected by the British authorities too so Katerina had been informed, pointed a hostile finger at her, “have the trust of the general but, I tell you now, you do not have mine. You have failed miserably in your task.
And you, Major Zelepukin,” another accusational finger, this one aimed at Ilya, “are insubordinate. You are running your own investigation when you received, and acknowledged, clear instructions from Moscow Centre to stand back for the investigator which General Olyunin appointed to do their task.
Orders are to be followed, not ignored.
The pair of you are a disgrace.”
Following Ilya’s lead, Katerina stood silent and still. Yelena continued to glower at them both but had nothing more to say at the moment. The fury that the colonel had worked herself up into and blown itself out. Still, the hurricane surely wasn’t over with just yet.
While waiting for more of it to be unleashed, Katerina thought for a moment about that revelation concerning General Olyunin.
The old man Dmitri was her patron. Without him, her deceased father’s past service notwithstanding, she was nothing in the SVR. She had duped him, played him for a fool. The British had helped but it was mostly her work. Dmitri had put all of his faith in her, wholly unaware of what she was going to do to him and all of those like him. He was the First Deputy but now he was ill. Katerina was well aware of Yelena and what that woman was all about. Dmitri’s apparent illness sounded untrue.
The idea struck her, one which wouldn’t go away, that he was either ill because Yelena had made him or he had been shoved aside due to other internal factors at home.
While he thoughts were elsewhere, Ilya stuck up for her: “Colonel, Katya has linked Mazyrin to the Heathrow Incident. I doubted her when she first came to me with her suspicions of Mikhail Nikolayevich but the evidence is mounting up.”
The brave fool did his best.
Which wasn’t good enough.
“Idiot.” As she called him that, Yelena stared Ilya down. She wanted a reply, a reaction yet none came so she continued onwards. “If it was up to me, you would be out of here, Major. I’d have you sent to Tanzania or… maybe Paraguay.
And, you, Lieutenant, you are on notice of my official disapproval of your findings. Captain Mazyrin is one of my people. Do you understand what I mean by that?”
Katerina nodded in reply. She wasn’t exactly sure of what ‘one of my people’ exactly entailed, but thought it best to go along with what Yelena was saying.
The irony of all of this wasn’t something that passed her by in regards to how everything that Yelena was saying was correct. Mazyrin was innocent. Ilya, to be perfectly honest, was an idiot. She – Katerina – had failed to identity the traitor she had been sent to smoke out: SPEARMINT was still active, still reporting to the British.
Of all the people she could have picked too…
Who could have known that Mikhail Mazyrin was ‘one’ of Yelena’s?
“Major, I want to talk to you about these British smugglers that you have working for you and what has gone wrong there too. That means you are dismissed, Lieutenant.
Go.”
Katerina left Ilya’s office. There was no sorrow in her for his situation. Perhaps there should have been but her inner anger, that which allowed her to continue to seek the justice that she sought, wouldn’t let her. She’d really wanted to stay too, to hear that next conversation. An urgent message this morning had given her warning of what the British knew about that but she needed more.
She’d have to pick Ilya’s brain later on that issue… and just what was going on with her flatmate Dasha tied up in it as well.
There was shouting come from within Ilya’s inner office. It wasn’t the rezident whom Katerina and others in the rezidentura heard though. He would have been speaking quietly, during the pauses in the loud outbursts coming from Yelena.
Ksenia, Oleg and Polina were each in the outer office area, set below ground where the hurricane that had come from Moscow Centre continued to rage. Noting how all of them were looking at either their computers or paperwork on their desks, Katerina realised that her internal cover here within the rezidentura was now blown. Yelena had done that. No longer could she pretend to be just a new addition to the intelligence team here.
These three, then everyone else soon enough, would know that she was counter-intelligence here to find a traitor. Interrogations rather than being crafty were going to have to be overt with everyone aware of who she really was. That wasn’t her favoured method of working at all.
Yelena wouldn’t have blown her cover by accident. It would have to have been something decided among the top ranks as acceptable before the fact. Katerina knew little of how things really worked back at Moscow Centre. The SVR was an organisation run on factions, on secret agendas. She was one of the little people, the worker ants far from home. Back there though, it might as well have been a whole different planet. What little she did know was Yelena was now in a position of influence over whom had been there before.
General Olyunin had faith in her, of that she was certain. His replacement was of another faction though, one which now must be in the ascendancy if her patron was out of the picture, even temporarily. How she had manipulated him, how he had trusted her so she could work for the British against him!
She still had her orders: find the traitor here.
Katerina wasn’t going to give them SPEARMINT. Her framing of Mazyrin had failed so it would be someone else then.
As she pondered over who the next person she would do a zapachkat too, Katerina listened to Yelena continuing to berate Ilya.
*
Katerina went out for lunch, not going very far and alone too. Her mind was fully occupied and she was engrossed in plotting and scheming. Dasha occupied her thinking. While still hating her personally, Katerina had to admire the other woman regardless. She’d had Katerina fooled. Being SVR too, though never stepping foot in the rezidentura, Dasha had been working with those smugglers. Katerina was aware of the links with them though had thought it was only Mazyrin involved in using British operatives for deniability purposes.
No: it was Dasha too.
She wondered over whether it was possible to replace Mazyrin as the victim of the frame up with Dasha instead…
Walking along Queensway, away from Bayswater Road, Katerina headed for another mini-supermarket: just like the one near her flat. There were no innocuous markings to indicate that the dead drop up head had waiting messages yet Katerina set out to send rather than receive.
She stopped in front of the bin, opening the weather app on her phone. Quickly she typed.
Mazyrin plan has failed.
Komova is in London, surprise visit. Possible Dutch passport use.
Aiming to transfer suspicion to Daria Fukrova if I can.
Will update in 24hrs.
The message was received and with the acknowledgement, the app closed itself. Katerina put her phone back in her Lord of the Rings tote bag as she walked away from that bin and the electronic dead drop that it was. She went into the shop, brought something to snack upon and ambled back out on her way to make a return to the rezidentura.
Dasha: poor Dasha.
Hurricane Yelena wanted a traitor and Katerina would give her one.
“A question: why weren’t there any girl Hobbits?”
Irrelevant Yevgeny greeted her with such a remark when she returned. He had failed to warm on her.
“Has our visitor gone?” Katerina opted not to answer his question and instead had something relevant to say.
He nodded: “She’s no longer down there.”
Past the gate guardian to the rezidentura Katerina went and to see Ilya. He was drinking in his office, looking downcast. His eyes barely met hers when he spoke.
“What a day!”
“What’s the capital of Paraguay?” Her question was an attempt at humour but he only shrugged. “You should learn that if she is going to send you there.”
“I guess I should.”
Her joke had in no way improved the rezident’s despondency.
“Tell me about these smugglers and who you have got working for them.”
So began Katerina’s second frame attempt.
-
jemhouston
- Posts: 4791
- Joined: Fri Nov 18, 2022 12:38 am
Re: The Rezidentura
I can't wonder if the visit was meant to panic the spy into doing something stupid. Even if they ran to the SIS, they'd be out of the embassy.
Re: The Rezidentura
Alas, that wasn't what it was. 'Changes' in Moscow and the dispatch to London to sort them the f*** out.jemhouston wrote: ↑Sun Jan 19, 2025 10:03 pm I can't wonder if the visit was meant to panic the spy into doing something stupid. Even if they ran to the SIS, they'd be out of the embassy.
Re: The Rezidentura
12 – TANGERINE
Richard had asked for a full report.
Hannah gave it as instructed.
“Officers with the Met. found the body of Steven Robinson last night. There is a patch of waste ground on the edge of Watford and he was inside the boot of it when it was set alight: it does appear that he was dead when the fire was started, according to the initial report from the Home Office coroner.
It was a petrol-driven fire and the car – reported stolen by a homeowner down in Bermondsey – must have gone up quick. The police report says that a, and I quote here, a couple getting cosy in some bushes saw the fire ignite and at once called the fire brigade. They didn’t see anyone but were fast to make a call: there was a fire engine returning from a call a couple of streets away and so they got there quick. That might mean that there is some evidence to collect, possibly anyway.
Two bullet holes in him. One in the chest, one in the forehead. Double tap is what they call that.
Robinson hadn’t been dead long either though a time of death still needs to be properly determined with a follow-up examination.
Just shy of four and a half hours before that fire was reported, the Watchers assigned to Daria Fukrova lost her. They were tricked when it appears that the Opposition used a double at Euston Station in the middle of rush hour. Watchers were following Fukrova – Dasha as she’s known – though keeping it loose because she was acting as if she was alert for counter-surveillance. There was another woman, dressed the same, looking very similar to her. They seemed to have crossed paths and the Watchers stayed with the double while Dasha, after the quickest of disguises being donned, slipped away.
It’s perfectly possible that Dasha was up in Watford and if not directly responsible for killing Robinson, then was present when it occurred. She was late home to her flat and has gone to work this morning, Watchers in tow and, so I’m told, with the team size doubled and on guard for another effort to throw them off their game.
A report from our operative embedded within the Organised Crime Group which Robinson’s friend Daniel McSherry heads up was made this morning. There doesn’t appear to be any indication that Robinson’s death is known about. They’ve gone looking for him again this morning, still seeking to discover who Dasha is: all they have is a first name and a nationality. Our operative has been told little, so he cannot give anything away, and has reported back what he has been told in return, which again isn’t much.
The smuggling operations on behalf of the Russians, which we were still trying to get a handle on what the Opposition was having brought in, have come to an end. McSherry is still moving other contraband but nothing with national security implications.
All of this brings up some interesting matters. Going forward, Richard, my plan is to…”
“Let me cut you off there, Hannah.” He was on the opposite side of his desk with Hannah seated in front of him, Leighanne beside her. “I have decided that Leighanne will be taking charge from now on with regards to Katerina, SPEARMINT, Dasha and these rotten little smugglers as well.
She’s going to be making the decisions, planning operations too. You’ll report to her and her to me. I think that this is the best approach to take in light of all that has happened recently. Matters have gone awry under your leadership, and Leighanne is best placed to assume command and correct the unfortunate recent turn of events.
I trust that you are comfortable with my instructions, Hannah?”
Her mouth might have fell open a bit.
Hannah took the deepest of breaths, holding in the rage that suddenly rose in her like a rocket less it explode all over Richard’s office.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught glimpse of the smug, self-satisfied smile that Leighanne wore. She’d gotten what she wanted, all at Hannah’s expense. How pleasant would it be to wipe that look of Leighanne’s face!
“If that is what you want, Richard, then…” she paused to choose her words carefully, still controlling the urge to start screaming & shouting, “then that is how it is going to have to be, I guess.”
Hannah thought she sounded stupid. But she was talking calmly rather than exploding.
Looking direct at Richard, refusing to take a glance over to Leighanne, Hannah watched him drink some of his tea. His eyes were on her, measuring her reaction.
He can see I’m furious.
Hannah felt justified in that. He was saying that she had failed, that she hadn’t done the job given to her to properly. That infuriated her.
She also felt sadness: he was taking Katerina away from her.
“I think that we are going to work well together, Hannah.” Leighanne broke the silence. “You were about to say something before Richard brought you up to speed on the latest change of direction that we have had with operational control, weren’t you? I’m sure you said ‘interesting matters’ had been raised by what has gone on, yes?”
Hannah took another deep breath, turned to her new boss and replied: “I was, indeed.
Katerina mentioned that Yelena Komova might possibly have arrived here on a Dutch passport. As you know, we have had issues before with the Russians using legitimate travel documents issued in the Netherlands by someone that they have working there, someone as yet unidentified. That doesn’t seem to be the case though. Coming from Moscow, she’s arrived by other means and not gone through any passport control: cameras have been examined overnight at all ports-of-entry.
So we need to find out how that entry was made.
What’s going on back in Moscow is another matter: General Olyunin anyone? Why has Komova been sent? What necessitated the visit in person? What more has she been up to apart from turning up at the rezidentura?
Then there is Dasha Fukrova.
Katerina was of the firm belief beforehand that Dasha was nothing but a pain in her rear end. I took the decision to investigate her further but came up empty. All of a sudden we find that she was involved with the smuggling operation that the rezident had a personal hand in and then we find out that she’s killed someone part of that.
Dasha is likewise a big deal.”
“She committed that murder rather well… getting away from our people, I mean.”
“The silent assassin.” Leighanne added to Richard’s remark there. “But, of course, doing it the way that they did, showing their hand in such a manner by going to all of that trouble to throw off our surveillance, has tipped their hand.
Perhaps she’s done this before: killing people that is. I’d like to know why SPEARMINT hasn’t highlighted Fukrova to us either.
We know now what Fukrova is. And they know that we know too. Which means that we are going to have to act. She cannot become the latest frame for what Katerina is here to do. I cannot see Katerina’s idea to make her a dupe for who SPEARMINT is working out.
Can you, Hannah?”
“No, of course not.” Hannah pushed down her rage and remained all business. “I didn’t like the idea the moment that I got Katerina’s message. There has to be someone else she can make use of.”
Leighanne had turned to face her, moving her chair while doing so. That previous smug grin was gone and she had her friendly face on: Hannah wasn’t deceived. What came next confirmed her distaste in the other woman, one she had held right before this meeting.
“You and Katerina go all the way back, don’t you? You recruited her and worked her up in Edinburgh. From the reports that I’ve read, and from what Richard has told me too, the pair of you have always got on well together, have you not?
Would you say that you are rather close to her?”
Back came the rage. And the self control to push it down too, to not let it come out here.
Hannah knew exactly what Leighanne was getting at. She was suggesting that there was something of a personal nature – to put it mildly – between her and Katerina.
In her MI-5 file was Hannah’s sexual orientation. Back in the ‘good old days’, Hannah would never have been allowed to do the job that she was doing based on that. She would have had to hide it and always been worried about exposure. Homosexuality, even between women, wasn’t just a cause for lack of employment or termination upon discovery while in government organisations such as this one (any one in fact), but a major security risk.
She could have been blackmailed to the detriment of herself and her country.
This was the Twenty-First Century though with all of its inclusion. Hannah being gay was seen as an asset. It could be put to use in field work. More than that, a theoretical briefing given by the service head to MPs would include a percentage of staff with such an orientation all to satisfy quotas while making everyone feel warm & fuzzy…
…and sent their imaginations running wild too.
Without coming out and directly saying it, Leighanne was asking whether there had been anything between Hannah and Katerina.
Only two people knew what had happened that one night up in Scotland all those years ago with neither of them telling: Hannah was certain that Katerina wouldn’t have opened her mouth. So it was just a suspicion. Had someone been gossiping with speculation? Probably. Someone on her team? Maybe.
Once again, Hannah had to swallow it.
Perhaps there was a time to explode, to make something out of all of this with regards to possible discrimination: legal action or such like. But that wasn’t Hannah. It would also mean the end of her career. She didn’t want to give Leighanne the satisfaction of making a scene, or, better than that, smacking her in her face.
“Our relationship is professional and always has been. She’s an asset that I recruited and have run. There is no more to add.”
A lie, but a necessary one.
“Moving on,” Richard did just that, looking uncomfortable at what had just been asked, “Leighanne is going to be bringing into the ongoing operation an outside operative.
Hannah, have you met Amanda O’Reilly beforehand?”
Yes, she had.
Across Thames House, Amanda had the sobriquet ‘Pipsqueak’. It wasn’t a name of affection. Short and annoying, no one liked her. Apart from the bosses though. They liked Pipsqueak because she got results. Hannah wasn’t clued in on exactly what those were, due to the natural need for compartmentalization, but she was aware that Pipsqueak was one of the very best field officers when it came to running the TANGERINE methods against the opposition.
What was TANGERINE?
It was the random codename for an outline of a series of protocols and actions to take place during intelligence gathering operations against the Russians. For many years, MI-5 had been rather passive. They’d allowed the SVR and the GRU to act in the UK against British interests with minimal blowback, including such outrageous instances as the Heathrow Incident. Their operations were curtailed and exploited if they could be worked back against them, that was true, but MI-5 was always on the defensive.
That wasn’t the case with TANGERINE. Instead, an offensive was launched. Their people were targeted with hostile operations. Assignment to Britain for Russian spooks was no longer the easy life. They were under attack themselves. At the heart of that was targeting them for hostile coercion into turning those spooks against their country whether they liked it or not. Britain only did what Russia was doing, such was the justification. The government was behind that, so too career climbers like Richard who revelled in it all.
SPEARMINT, the spy inside the London rezidentura, was a good example of that. MI-5 had forced that spook into working for them using blackmail and extensive pressure was applied to get them to deliver the goods. There was no waiting around for that spook to see the light, to discover within themselves their morality & their conscience where working for Britain was the right thing to do.
It was all about forcing MI-5’s will upon them.
Pipsqueak, so Hannah had heard on the grapevine, had left a trail of devastation in her wake among the opposition by going after them as hard as she had.
“What do the Americans call it?” Leighanne asked rhetorically. “Oh, yes: putting them ‘in harness’.
Katerina has for too long done her own thing. I know Richard has discussed with you before how unfathomable he finds it for Katerina to have her own unknown motivations, for her to be acting so independently when our aim is for her to protect SPEARMINT at all costs.”
Richard added his input here: “Amanda will change that, Hannah.”
“I see…”
“I’m glad you do, Hannah, I am.” There was victory written all over Leighanne’s face again. “At the first opportunity, Amanda will meet with your long-acquainted Russian recruit and make sure that she is doing what we want from her.
Naturally, you’ll set that up and make sure it all goes okay considering your good professional relationship with Katerina.”
Hannah had to take all of this.
She could do nothing but accept not just the humiliation of having Leighanne brought in above her, but the insinuations about her and Katerina too.
Richard and Leighanne were going to make her do what they wanted, putting her in harness too as TANGERINE was applied quite liberally, even among their own.
The fury was contained because there was nothing else she could do unless she no longer wanted to be working here… and no longer seeing Katerina again either, which led Hannah to start worrying about her future as well.
Richard had asked for a full report.
Hannah gave it as instructed.
“Officers with the Met. found the body of Steven Robinson last night. There is a patch of waste ground on the edge of Watford and he was inside the boot of it when it was set alight: it does appear that he was dead when the fire was started, according to the initial report from the Home Office coroner.
It was a petrol-driven fire and the car – reported stolen by a homeowner down in Bermondsey – must have gone up quick. The police report says that a, and I quote here, a couple getting cosy in some bushes saw the fire ignite and at once called the fire brigade. They didn’t see anyone but were fast to make a call: there was a fire engine returning from a call a couple of streets away and so they got there quick. That might mean that there is some evidence to collect, possibly anyway.
Two bullet holes in him. One in the chest, one in the forehead. Double tap is what they call that.
Robinson hadn’t been dead long either though a time of death still needs to be properly determined with a follow-up examination.
Just shy of four and a half hours before that fire was reported, the Watchers assigned to Daria Fukrova lost her. They were tricked when it appears that the Opposition used a double at Euston Station in the middle of rush hour. Watchers were following Fukrova – Dasha as she’s known – though keeping it loose because she was acting as if she was alert for counter-surveillance. There was another woman, dressed the same, looking very similar to her. They seemed to have crossed paths and the Watchers stayed with the double while Dasha, after the quickest of disguises being donned, slipped away.
It’s perfectly possible that Dasha was up in Watford and if not directly responsible for killing Robinson, then was present when it occurred. She was late home to her flat and has gone to work this morning, Watchers in tow and, so I’m told, with the team size doubled and on guard for another effort to throw them off their game.
A report from our operative embedded within the Organised Crime Group which Robinson’s friend Daniel McSherry heads up was made this morning. There doesn’t appear to be any indication that Robinson’s death is known about. They’ve gone looking for him again this morning, still seeking to discover who Dasha is: all they have is a first name and a nationality. Our operative has been told little, so he cannot give anything away, and has reported back what he has been told in return, which again isn’t much.
The smuggling operations on behalf of the Russians, which we were still trying to get a handle on what the Opposition was having brought in, have come to an end. McSherry is still moving other contraband but nothing with national security implications.
All of this brings up some interesting matters. Going forward, Richard, my plan is to…”
“Let me cut you off there, Hannah.” He was on the opposite side of his desk with Hannah seated in front of him, Leighanne beside her. “I have decided that Leighanne will be taking charge from now on with regards to Katerina, SPEARMINT, Dasha and these rotten little smugglers as well.
She’s going to be making the decisions, planning operations too. You’ll report to her and her to me. I think that this is the best approach to take in light of all that has happened recently. Matters have gone awry under your leadership, and Leighanne is best placed to assume command and correct the unfortunate recent turn of events.
I trust that you are comfortable with my instructions, Hannah?”
Her mouth might have fell open a bit.
Hannah took the deepest of breaths, holding in the rage that suddenly rose in her like a rocket less it explode all over Richard’s office.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught glimpse of the smug, self-satisfied smile that Leighanne wore. She’d gotten what she wanted, all at Hannah’s expense. How pleasant would it be to wipe that look of Leighanne’s face!
“If that is what you want, Richard, then…” she paused to choose her words carefully, still controlling the urge to start screaming & shouting, “then that is how it is going to have to be, I guess.”
Hannah thought she sounded stupid. But she was talking calmly rather than exploding.
Looking direct at Richard, refusing to take a glance over to Leighanne, Hannah watched him drink some of his tea. His eyes were on her, measuring her reaction.
He can see I’m furious.
Hannah felt justified in that. He was saying that she had failed, that she hadn’t done the job given to her to properly. That infuriated her.
She also felt sadness: he was taking Katerina away from her.
“I think that we are going to work well together, Hannah.” Leighanne broke the silence. “You were about to say something before Richard brought you up to speed on the latest change of direction that we have had with operational control, weren’t you? I’m sure you said ‘interesting matters’ had been raised by what has gone on, yes?”
Hannah took another deep breath, turned to her new boss and replied: “I was, indeed.
Katerina mentioned that Yelena Komova might possibly have arrived here on a Dutch passport. As you know, we have had issues before with the Russians using legitimate travel documents issued in the Netherlands by someone that they have working there, someone as yet unidentified. That doesn’t seem to be the case though. Coming from Moscow, she’s arrived by other means and not gone through any passport control: cameras have been examined overnight at all ports-of-entry.
So we need to find out how that entry was made.
What’s going on back in Moscow is another matter: General Olyunin anyone? Why has Komova been sent? What necessitated the visit in person? What more has she been up to apart from turning up at the rezidentura?
Then there is Dasha Fukrova.
Katerina was of the firm belief beforehand that Dasha was nothing but a pain in her rear end. I took the decision to investigate her further but came up empty. All of a sudden we find that she was involved with the smuggling operation that the rezident had a personal hand in and then we find out that she’s killed someone part of that.
Dasha is likewise a big deal.”
“She committed that murder rather well… getting away from our people, I mean.”
“The silent assassin.” Leighanne added to Richard’s remark there. “But, of course, doing it the way that they did, showing their hand in such a manner by going to all of that trouble to throw off our surveillance, has tipped their hand.
Perhaps she’s done this before: killing people that is. I’d like to know why SPEARMINT hasn’t highlighted Fukrova to us either.
We know now what Fukrova is. And they know that we know too. Which means that we are going to have to act. She cannot become the latest frame for what Katerina is here to do. I cannot see Katerina’s idea to make her a dupe for who SPEARMINT is working out.
Can you, Hannah?”
“No, of course not.” Hannah pushed down her rage and remained all business. “I didn’t like the idea the moment that I got Katerina’s message. There has to be someone else she can make use of.”
Leighanne had turned to face her, moving her chair while doing so. That previous smug grin was gone and she had her friendly face on: Hannah wasn’t deceived. What came next confirmed her distaste in the other woman, one she had held right before this meeting.
“You and Katerina go all the way back, don’t you? You recruited her and worked her up in Edinburgh. From the reports that I’ve read, and from what Richard has told me too, the pair of you have always got on well together, have you not?
Would you say that you are rather close to her?”
Back came the rage. And the self control to push it down too, to not let it come out here.
Hannah knew exactly what Leighanne was getting at. She was suggesting that there was something of a personal nature – to put it mildly – between her and Katerina.
In her MI-5 file was Hannah’s sexual orientation. Back in the ‘good old days’, Hannah would never have been allowed to do the job that she was doing based on that. She would have had to hide it and always been worried about exposure. Homosexuality, even between women, wasn’t just a cause for lack of employment or termination upon discovery while in government organisations such as this one (any one in fact), but a major security risk.
She could have been blackmailed to the detriment of herself and her country.
This was the Twenty-First Century though with all of its inclusion. Hannah being gay was seen as an asset. It could be put to use in field work. More than that, a theoretical briefing given by the service head to MPs would include a percentage of staff with such an orientation all to satisfy quotas while making everyone feel warm & fuzzy…
…and sent their imaginations running wild too.
Without coming out and directly saying it, Leighanne was asking whether there had been anything between Hannah and Katerina.
Only two people knew what had happened that one night up in Scotland all those years ago with neither of them telling: Hannah was certain that Katerina wouldn’t have opened her mouth. So it was just a suspicion. Had someone been gossiping with speculation? Probably. Someone on her team? Maybe.
Once again, Hannah had to swallow it.
Perhaps there was a time to explode, to make something out of all of this with regards to possible discrimination: legal action or such like. But that wasn’t Hannah. It would also mean the end of her career. She didn’t want to give Leighanne the satisfaction of making a scene, or, better than that, smacking her in her face.
“Our relationship is professional and always has been. She’s an asset that I recruited and have run. There is no more to add.”
A lie, but a necessary one.
“Moving on,” Richard did just that, looking uncomfortable at what had just been asked, “Leighanne is going to be bringing into the ongoing operation an outside operative.
Hannah, have you met Amanda O’Reilly beforehand?”
Yes, she had.
Across Thames House, Amanda had the sobriquet ‘Pipsqueak’. It wasn’t a name of affection. Short and annoying, no one liked her. Apart from the bosses though. They liked Pipsqueak because she got results. Hannah wasn’t clued in on exactly what those were, due to the natural need for compartmentalization, but she was aware that Pipsqueak was one of the very best field officers when it came to running the TANGERINE methods against the opposition.
What was TANGERINE?
It was the random codename for an outline of a series of protocols and actions to take place during intelligence gathering operations against the Russians. For many years, MI-5 had been rather passive. They’d allowed the SVR and the GRU to act in the UK against British interests with minimal blowback, including such outrageous instances as the Heathrow Incident. Their operations were curtailed and exploited if they could be worked back against them, that was true, but MI-5 was always on the defensive.
That wasn’t the case with TANGERINE. Instead, an offensive was launched. Their people were targeted with hostile operations. Assignment to Britain for Russian spooks was no longer the easy life. They were under attack themselves. At the heart of that was targeting them for hostile coercion into turning those spooks against their country whether they liked it or not. Britain only did what Russia was doing, such was the justification. The government was behind that, so too career climbers like Richard who revelled in it all.
SPEARMINT, the spy inside the London rezidentura, was a good example of that. MI-5 had forced that spook into working for them using blackmail and extensive pressure was applied to get them to deliver the goods. There was no waiting around for that spook to see the light, to discover within themselves their morality & their conscience where working for Britain was the right thing to do.
It was all about forcing MI-5’s will upon them.
Pipsqueak, so Hannah had heard on the grapevine, had left a trail of devastation in her wake among the opposition by going after them as hard as she had.
“What do the Americans call it?” Leighanne asked rhetorically. “Oh, yes: putting them ‘in harness’.
Katerina has for too long done her own thing. I know Richard has discussed with you before how unfathomable he finds it for Katerina to have her own unknown motivations, for her to be acting so independently when our aim is for her to protect SPEARMINT at all costs.”
Richard added his input here: “Amanda will change that, Hannah.”
“I see…”
“I’m glad you do, Hannah, I am.” There was victory written all over Leighanne’s face again. “At the first opportunity, Amanda will meet with your long-acquainted Russian recruit and make sure that she is doing what we want from her.
Naturally, you’ll set that up and make sure it all goes okay considering your good professional relationship with Katerina.”
Hannah had to take all of this.
She could do nothing but accept not just the humiliation of having Leighanne brought in above her, but the insinuations about her and Katerina too.
Richard and Leighanne were going to make her do what they wanted, putting her in harness too as TANGERINE was applied quite liberally, even among their own.
The fury was contained because there was nothing else she could do unless she no longer wanted to be working here… and no longer seeing Katerina again either, which led Hannah to start worrying about her future as well.
Re: The Rezidentura
13 – Ambush
Coffee was what Hannah wanted. Now.
She went to her favourite place, in Hammersmith and not far at all from her flat. There were Saturday afternoon shoppers to avoid and a bloody long queue of people inside. Everyone in front of her was, without fail, taking their time with things. Breathing, Hannah stayed calm. She tried not to listen to nor watch the idiocy from those in front who were making things complicated.
Finally, she got to the counter. The barista recognised her and was making her drink just the way she liked it before Hannah even had to ask. She was just getting her phone out of her bag, ready to pay for the coffee with her banking app, when there was a tap on her shoulder.
Gentle, but more than enough to get her attention.
“Excuse me,” someone was speaking to her, “you’re Tamara, aren’t you?”
Hannah had turned to the side to find a man standing in front of her.
Early forties. Cheap glasses, seriously balding head, hoop earring with a hanging crucifix. Bad teeth and needing a shave. Dressed like he was half his age with sportswear that was all about the labels rather than the quality. He looked clever, yet without much of an engaging personality: it was the way that he spoke that clued her in to that.
Instantly, she was reminded of her first – and only – boyfriend. He’d been a super-cool seventeen year-old when she was fourteen. She hadn’t realised until sometime later that he was a loser. This was just about how Hannah was sure he’d turned out.
As to the name he called her, her natural instinct was to say ‘no, sorry, but you’ve got the wrong person’… or maybe something less polite even.
But that name was one which she had used once before. Several years past. When she was in Edinburgh. What she first met Katerina.
It couldn’t, wouldn’t be a coincidence that such a name was being said now.
As cagey as possible, Hannah had a reply: “Maybe.” she stared right at him, forcing his gaze down. “What’s it to you?”
“Your coffee?” She caught side of the barista out of the corner of her eye but ignored her momentarily.
“You wanted something?” Hannah remained giving the man her full attention.
He looked up at her: “Erm… your friend Kat, well she gave me this to… erm… give it to you.”
This was a man who had no idea how to hold a conversation.
He had a folded up piece of paper in his hand. Hannah took that, turned to get her coffee, nodding thanks at the barista, and walked away from the counter. She could sense the man standing behind her for a moment, perhaps wanting to say something else, but then he walked away. He gave her the creeps and she was glad he was gone while hoping that he never came back here again or she’d have to go somewhere else.
She had some of her coffee.
And held onto a note that Katerina had had someone innocuous slip to her.
Hannah thought about walking out of here. She find somewhere else to read what Katerina had had delivered to her, somewhere that no one else was. It was busy in here with people all around her. She almost did so though stopped herself from doing that.
It would be important.
Surely.
Carefully, she placed it inside her open handbag and opened it there, acting as causal as possible and trying to look as if she was doing anything but that.
Katerina kept the clandestine communication short.
MEET ME NOW.
THERE IS A DOOR TO THE LEFT OF WHERE THE TOILETS ARE.
I’M ON THE OTHER SIDE.
KATYUSHA.
Questions aplenty popped into Hannah’s mind.
What was Katerina doing here? How did she know that Hannah would be here, now? Had someone followed Katerina? Was someone following herself? What did Katerina want?
Folding the note back up, Hannah turned around. She swung her gaze over to the rear of the coffee shop. She knew where the toilets were located though hadn’t seen another door by them before. Slowly, she stepped left, going around a young mother with two ill-behaved children, so she could get a better look.
There was the door.
Katerina was apparently behind that.
Hannah had some more of her coffee, to calm herself down and help wake herself up after pulling an all night shift before she’d gotten such little sleep, and ambled over that way.
“Surprise!” Katerina whispered that welcome and then stepped into Hannah’s personal space. There were hands then a tongue-in-the-mouth kiss.
Hannah backed away after a moment. “Whoa. Slow your horses.”
“I’ve seen that show!” Katerina stepped forward again, up against Hannah was was against the door that she had closed behind her after coming into this passageway that she had no idea was here.
There were stairs going up behind Katerina.
“What’s here? Where do those stairs go?”
“Storage. There’s no one up there. No one’s coming in here but you.” There was complete confidence in what she said about the privacy of this little space. “I’ve missed you Hannah. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you, and I’m not counting yesterday in that either.” She really looked like she meant that too.
Yesterday: when Amanda had dragged Hannah along to confront Katerina elsewhere in quite the uncomfortable experience for two of the three of them.
“What was with the guy? You cannot know that no one else will come in here.” Hannah’s reply was rushed. This was all entirely crazy.
Katerina took a hand of Hannah’s hip – the other stayed where it was, elsewhere – and locked the door with a key that was already in it.
“No one is coming in. It’s just us.” She grinned at her, moving up against Hannah again. “He was just a random idiot and so perfect for what I needed. I told him to find a flame-haired Scottish lass – oh, am I saying that right? – and described you. Then, I had to give him some money or he wouldn’t do it.”
“Money?”
“Yes. Fifty pounds: he wouldn’t take the twenty that I first offered him. Don’t worry, I won’t make you run that through your expenses and have questions asked. Look,” she showed Hannah a roll of cash, “I’ve got plenty. I swiped Yevgeny’s wallet. What does he need all of this money for?”
Hannah opened her mouth to say something in reply to that. It was all too much though so nothing came out. Stealing the wallet of one of the rezident’s most-trusted people, following Hannah here, bringing into her exceptionally dangerous unauthorised meeting with someone else’s assistance in making it happen…
…this was all what Amanda was talking about yesterday, what she’d been telling Katerina off for. The independence and the risk-taking foolishness was going to get her busted by her own people.
Katerina had been told all of that and this was her response!
“Her name isn’t Suzannah. I could tell that was a lie, just like you were never Tamara. Although, I do like the name Tamara. I think that it actually suits you.” Katerina was talking fast, talking crazy. She stepped back again though had Hannah’s hands secure inside each of hers now. “I do not like her. Did I say that already?
I didn’t like meeting her yesterday and I don’t want to see here again. Are you in trouble at work, Hannah? That not-Suzannah looked like she was there to supervise you. I didn’t tell her where to stick her orders because I didn’t want to get you in trouble. Otherwise I would have, because I didn’t like her at all.”
There was so much that Katerina had to say for herself. Hannah shoved all of that aside though for it wasn’t important.
What was was what was going on here and now, that was what was important.
“How on Earth are you here, Katerina? What are you doing following me and making this ambush? The risks are…”
“Acceptable risks,” Katerina cut her off, “ones calculated to minimise exposure. Take my word for it. Are you glad to see me? Did you not like my surprise visit?”
Without waiting for an answer, Katerina came forward again with her tongue and wandering hands.
Hannah didn’t push her away. She should have yet did not.
Soon enough, Katerina was back with the lot that she had to say.
“Yesterday, I don’t think you were hearing me: that horrible woman was – and she chose to ignore it – but you weren’t. I’ll tell you again.
I did as you people wanted. I found someone to frame as a spy to protect your real spy. I did a good job of it too, almost had the rezident convinced, though I’ll admit it: sometimes Ilya can be quite the fool. The zapachkat goes awry. Not my fault, not yours either. These things happen.
I pick someone else. I was getting started on that good too before, all of a sudden, it is a no-go on Dasha. And you don’t tell me why. Now, it is don’t frame someone, but still protect your spy.
You know this is difficult to do, right? That’s what I do best.
Why not Dasha? What was wrong with her as the frame-up? In fact, where is Dasha?
Don’t tell me you don’t know that Hannah, because I can see that you know.”
Hannah couldn’t tell Katerina what she wanted to hear.
She had instructions from Amanda and Leighanne both to do no such thing. More than that, it would break protocol, be unprofessional too. Now, being in this tight space with her agent was the height of unprofessionalism but that was a different matter. Regardless of her doing what she shouldn’t on that issue, Hannah wasn’t about to blab about what had gone on with Daria Fukrova.
“I cannot say.”
Katerina screwed up her face and took another step back, going up on the first stair in fact so she was above Hannah.
“Oh, no, you haven’t, have you?” She didn’t wait for an answer to that. “What did she do? It’s got to be about them smugglers. So… that means that there is more to it than I thought.
Has she been arrested? She doesn’t have diplomatic immunity like me, so you cannot P.N.G. her, but have you had her detained?
Hannah, if you people have done that, once Moscow Centre finds out, they’ll respond: not proportionately either. They’ll find a tourist, probably two, in different cities, and have them arrested on trumped-up, no, false charges of something awful. You know this is how the chekists behave, I know that is what they do.
That woman you were with yesterday must know too. Tell me that I am mistaken?”
Hannah repeated what she had said beforehand: “I cannot say.”
What she didn’t say was that everything Katerina was saying was correct though while being wrong.
Dasha had been detained late yesterday. On her way home from working at the visa centre in Clerkenwell, while walking down to get the nearby Tube, she’d been approached by half a dozen police officers. They’d led her into a vehicle, all while she said nothing. To Heathrow Airport Dasha had then been taken to be held there before she could be put on a flight back to Moscow. There was no dealing with her embassy done, just demands made from MI-5 officers at the airport – Hannah among them – that Aeroflot take her, someone who hadn’t uttered a single complaint despite being thrown out of the country in the manner that she was.
Downing Street had signed-off on that action, so Hannah had been told.
They were willing to deal with the consequences. Dasha had murdered a British citizen, at the clear behest of the SVR, and while there was some willingness to see her arrested, charged in open court & brought to justice, an outcome like what Katerina was suggesting was feared. Yes, something would happen in reply over in Russia, but the belief was that it would be similar, not over-the-top.
Such was the fervent hope.
“I’ll find out. Monday morning when I’m back in the rezidentura, Ilya will tell me.” She looked entirely confident that he would too.
“How is the rezident?”
“He’s happy. He’s still jumping into bed with Ksenia every chance that the two of them can get. You know, I’m surprised that you and your people don’t want more details on that. Perhaps to make a movie or something… or have you already?”
“I cannot…”
“…say.” Katerina finished what Hannah was saying there for her, all while wearing a big grin.
“This cannot happen again, Katya. We cannot meet like this. You need to tell me how you tracked me down, who else helped you too. I want you to make me a promise that you won’t do anything as reckless as this again.”
“I was correct. You didn’t like the surprise at all.” There was a look of true disappointment in Katerina as she moved to unlock the door behind Hannah.
“I’m serious. This behaviour isn’t on.”
“I’m leaving.” Such was Katerina’s reply. “I do what I want, Hannah. You people can give orders but it’s up to me if I want to follow them or not.”
The door opened. The hustle and bustle of the coffee shop was what Hannah could now hear. Katerina was beside her, this time no wandering hands.
“Will you have to tell that Suzannah about today?”
She didn’t wait for a reply. Gone she was, quick as a flash. Hannah spun around, stepped outside, but couldn’t see her.
As to the disappeared Katerina’s question, she didn’t know what she was going to do.
Coffee was what Hannah wanted. Now.
She went to her favourite place, in Hammersmith and not far at all from her flat. There were Saturday afternoon shoppers to avoid and a bloody long queue of people inside. Everyone in front of her was, without fail, taking their time with things. Breathing, Hannah stayed calm. She tried not to listen to nor watch the idiocy from those in front who were making things complicated.
Finally, she got to the counter. The barista recognised her and was making her drink just the way she liked it before Hannah even had to ask. She was just getting her phone out of her bag, ready to pay for the coffee with her banking app, when there was a tap on her shoulder.
Gentle, but more than enough to get her attention.
“Excuse me,” someone was speaking to her, “you’re Tamara, aren’t you?”
Hannah had turned to the side to find a man standing in front of her.
Early forties. Cheap glasses, seriously balding head, hoop earring with a hanging crucifix. Bad teeth and needing a shave. Dressed like he was half his age with sportswear that was all about the labels rather than the quality. He looked clever, yet without much of an engaging personality: it was the way that he spoke that clued her in to that.
Instantly, she was reminded of her first – and only – boyfriend. He’d been a super-cool seventeen year-old when she was fourteen. She hadn’t realised until sometime later that he was a loser. This was just about how Hannah was sure he’d turned out.
As to the name he called her, her natural instinct was to say ‘no, sorry, but you’ve got the wrong person’… or maybe something less polite even.
But that name was one which she had used once before. Several years past. When she was in Edinburgh. What she first met Katerina.
It couldn’t, wouldn’t be a coincidence that such a name was being said now.
As cagey as possible, Hannah had a reply: “Maybe.” she stared right at him, forcing his gaze down. “What’s it to you?”
“Your coffee?” She caught side of the barista out of the corner of her eye but ignored her momentarily.
“You wanted something?” Hannah remained giving the man her full attention.
He looked up at her: “Erm… your friend Kat, well she gave me this to… erm… give it to you.”
This was a man who had no idea how to hold a conversation.
He had a folded up piece of paper in his hand. Hannah took that, turned to get her coffee, nodding thanks at the barista, and walked away from the counter. She could sense the man standing behind her for a moment, perhaps wanting to say something else, but then he walked away. He gave her the creeps and she was glad he was gone while hoping that he never came back here again or she’d have to go somewhere else.
She had some of her coffee.
And held onto a note that Katerina had had someone innocuous slip to her.
Hannah thought about walking out of here. She find somewhere else to read what Katerina had had delivered to her, somewhere that no one else was. It was busy in here with people all around her. She almost did so though stopped herself from doing that.
It would be important.
Surely.
Carefully, she placed it inside her open handbag and opened it there, acting as causal as possible and trying to look as if she was doing anything but that.
Katerina kept the clandestine communication short.
MEET ME NOW.
THERE IS A DOOR TO THE LEFT OF WHERE THE TOILETS ARE.
I’M ON THE OTHER SIDE.
KATYUSHA.
Questions aplenty popped into Hannah’s mind.
What was Katerina doing here? How did she know that Hannah would be here, now? Had someone followed Katerina? Was someone following herself? What did Katerina want?
Folding the note back up, Hannah turned around. She swung her gaze over to the rear of the coffee shop. She knew where the toilets were located though hadn’t seen another door by them before. Slowly, she stepped left, going around a young mother with two ill-behaved children, so she could get a better look.
There was the door.
Katerina was apparently behind that.
Hannah had some more of her coffee, to calm herself down and help wake herself up after pulling an all night shift before she’d gotten such little sleep, and ambled over that way.
“Surprise!” Katerina whispered that welcome and then stepped into Hannah’s personal space. There were hands then a tongue-in-the-mouth kiss.
Hannah backed away after a moment. “Whoa. Slow your horses.”
“I’ve seen that show!” Katerina stepped forward again, up against Hannah was was against the door that she had closed behind her after coming into this passageway that she had no idea was here.
There were stairs going up behind Katerina.
“What’s here? Where do those stairs go?”
“Storage. There’s no one up there. No one’s coming in here but you.” There was complete confidence in what she said about the privacy of this little space. “I’ve missed you Hannah. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you, and I’m not counting yesterday in that either.” She really looked like she meant that too.
Yesterday: when Amanda had dragged Hannah along to confront Katerina elsewhere in quite the uncomfortable experience for two of the three of them.
“What was with the guy? You cannot know that no one else will come in here.” Hannah’s reply was rushed. This was all entirely crazy.
Katerina took a hand of Hannah’s hip – the other stayed where it was, elsewhere – and locked the door with a key that was already in it.
“No one is coming in. It’s just us.” She grinned at her, moving up against Hannah again. “He was just a random idiot and so perfect for what I needed. I told him to find a flame-haired Scottish lass – oh, am I saying that right? – and described you. Then, I had to give him some money or he wouldn’t do it.”
“Money?”
“Yes. Fifty pounds: he wouldn’t take the twenty that I first offered him. Don’t worry, I won’t make you run that through your expenses and have questions asked. Look,” she showed Hannah a roll of cash, “I’ve got plenty. I swiped Yevgeny’s wallet. What does he need all of this money for?”
Hannah opened her mouth to say something in reply to that. It was all too much though so nothing came out. Stealing the wallet of one of the rezident’s most-trusted people, following Hannah here, bringing into her exceptionally dangerous unauthorised meeting with someone else’s assistance in making it happen…
…this was all what Amanda was talking about yesterday, what she’d been telling Katerina off for. The independence and the risk-taking foolishness was going to get her busted by her own people.
Katerina had been told all of that and this was her response!
“Her name isn’t Suzannah. I could tell that was a lie, just like you were never Tamara. Although, I do like the name Tamara. I think that it actually suits you.” Katerina was talking fast, talking crazy. She stepped back again though had Hannah’s hands secure inside each of hers now. “I do not like her. Did I say that already?
I didn’t like meeting her yesterday and I don’t want to see here again. Are you in trouble at work, Hannah? That not-Suzannah looked like she was there to supervise you. I didn’t tell her where to stick her orders because I didn’t want to get you in trouble. Otherwise I would have, because I didn’t like her at all.”
There was so much that Katerina had to say for herself. Hannah shoved all of that aside though for it wasn’t important.
What was was what was going on here and now, that was what was important.
“How on Earth are you here, Katerina? What are you doing following me and making this ambush? The risks are…”
“Acceptable risks,” Katerina cut her off, “ones calculated to minimise exposure. Take my word for it. Are you glad to see me? Did you not like my surprise visit?”
Without waiting for an answer, Katerina came forward again with her tongue and wandering hands.
Hannah didn’t push her away. She should have yet did not.
Soon enough, Katerina was back with the lot that she had to say.
“Yesterday, I don’t think you were hearing me: that horrible woman was – and she chose to ignore it – but you weren’t. I’ll tell you again.
I did as you people wanted. I found someone to frame as a spy to protect your real spy. I did a good job of it too, almost had the rezident convinced, though I’ll admit it: sometimes Ilya can be quite the fool. The zapachkat goes awry. Not my fault, not yours either. These things happen.
I pick someone else. I was getting started on that good too before, all of a sudden, it is a no-go on Dasha. And you don’t tell me why. Now, it is don’t frame someone, but still protect your spy.
You know this is difficult to do, right? That’s what I do best.
Why not Dasha? What was wrong with her as the frame-up? In fact, where is Dasha?
Don’t tell me you don’t know that Hannah, because I can see that you know.”
Hannah couldn’t tell Katerina what she wanted to hear.
She had instructions from Amanda and Leighanne both to do no such thing. More than that, it would break protocol, be unprofessional too. Now, being in this tight space with her agent was the height of unprofessionalism but that was a different matter. Regardless of her doing what she shouldn’t on that issue, Hannah wasn’t about to blab about what had gone on with Daria Fukrova.
“I cannot say.”
Katerina screwed up her face and took another step back, going up on the first stair in fact so she was above Hannah.
“Oh, no, you haven’t, have you?” She didn’t wait for an answer to that. “What did she do? It’s got to be about them smugglers. So… that means that there is more to it than I thought.
Has she been arrested? She doesn’t have diplomatic immunity like me, so you cannot P.N.G. her, but have you had her detained?
Hannah, if you people have done that, once Moscow Centre finds out, they’ll respond: not proportionately either. They’ll find a tourist, probably two, in different cities, and have them arrested on trumped-up, no, false charges of something awful. You know this is how the chekists behave, I know that is what they do.
That woman you were with yesterday must know too. Tell me that I am mistaken?”
Hannah repeated what she had said beforehand: “I cannot say.”
What she didn’t say was that everything Katerina was saying was correct though while being wrong.
Dasha had been detained late yesterday. On her way home from working at the visa centre in Clerkenwell, while walking down to get the nearby Tube, she’d been approached by half a dozen police officers. They’d led her into a vehicle, all while she said nothing. To Heathrow Airport Dasha had then been taken to be held there before she could be put on a flight back to Moscow. There was no dealing with her embassy done, just demands made from MI-5 officers at the airport – Hannah among them – that Aeroflot take her, someone who hadn’t uttered a single complaint despite being thrown out of the country in the manner that she was.
Downing Street had signed-off on that action, so Hannah had been told.
They were willing to deal with the consequences. Dasha had murdered a British citizen, at the clear behest of the SVR, and while there was some willingness to see her arrested, charged in open court & brought to justice, an outcome like what Katerina was suggesting was feared. Yes, something would happen in reply over in Russia, but the belief was that it would be similar, not over-the-top.
Such was the fervent hope.
“I’ll find out. Monday morning when I’m back in the rezidentura, Ilya will tell me.” She looked entirely confident that he would too.
“How is the rezident?”
“He’s happy. He’s still jumping into bed with Ksenia every chance that the two of them can get. You know, I’m surprised that you and your people don’t want more details on that. Perhaps to make a movie or something… or have you already?”
“I cannot…”
“…say.” Katerina finished what Hannah was saying there for her, all while wearing a big grin.
“This cannot happen again, Katya. We cannot meet like this. You need to tell me how you tracked me down, who else helped you too. I want you to make me a promise that you won’t do anything as reckless as this again.”
“I was correct. You didn’t like the surprise at all.” There was a look of true disappointment in Katerina as she moved to unlock the door behind Hannah.
“I’m serious. This behaviour isn’t on.”
“I’m leaving.” Such was Katerina’s reply. “I do what I want, Hannah. You people can give orders but it’s up to me if I want to follow them or not.”
The door opened. The hustle and bustle of the coffee shop was what Hannah could now hear. Katerina was beside her, this time no wandering hands.
“Will you have to tell that Suzannah about today?”
She didn’t wait for a reply. Gone she was, quick as a flash. Hannah spun around, stepped outside, but couldn’t see her.
As to the disappeared Katerina’s question, she didn’t know what she was going to do.
Re: The Rezidentura
14 – Flight Fund
Katerina came out of the coffee shop and stood in the closed doorway for a moment. She reached up to her left ear and tapped the lobe with a finger, twice in quick succession. It wasn’t the most dramatic of movements but not so subtle either.
Confident that Josephine would have seen it, understanding the meaning for what it was too, Katerina then turned and took a brisk walk back to the Tube station.
Though she had met Josephine in Canada, the girl – she was only twenty – was British. A successful serial fraudster even when so young, Katerina had helped her out when Josephine had gotten into trouble with her boyfriend: she made bad romantic choices... which had ended up with the chap floating in the Ottawa River. Katerina had gone out of her way to aid Josephine, all to put her in her debt.
Now the two of them were back in England, Katerina had her debtor helping her out here. No one knew about the girl. Katerina hadn’t told her own SVR people, nor let onto the British either. There’d been intelligence activities that Josephine had been trained by Katerina in while they were on the other side of the Atlantic. The girl was a gifted amateur though. She had the ability to make herself anonymous and unremarked upon, useful skills for when Katerina had tasked her to follow Hannah.
With the signal delivered to her, Josephine would now cease that until instructed to take up the task again. Katerina didn’t look for her, she let the girl vanish as she was able to do, all without Hannah knowing who was on her.
While walking, Katerina took a glance upwards and saw the dark clouds. It was going to rain, soon. She increased her pace, seeking the sure fire shelter of the Underground Station not far off. Josephine was pushed out of her mind, Hannah too. Instead, Katerina thought of Dasha.
The suka was gone!
The flat that they had been forced to share was now all hers.
That was the good news. The only good news on that note. The rest was rather troubling. Dasha was an assassin! Yet, Katerina took the win for the time being. Dasha out of her life was a reason to smile.
There were tourists and shoppers but Katerina moved through the crowds and got on a train soon enough. She even managed to snag a seat, slipping into a gap between two large people each spilling out of their own ones. But there was enough room for her.
Now Dasha was out of her mind as well.
Katerina was thinking of her flight fund: something to help towards being one of the reasons (the other for the fun of it) that she had swiped Yevgeny’s wallet.
SVR employees on foreign deployments were required to have escape routes prepared in case the very worst happened and they needed to disappear less the host country’s intelligence services come after them for detention and interrogation. An illegal operation might be exposed or even a war might unexpectedly break out in the most extreme circumstances. Two separate routings were required of each officer so as to give a strong chance of successful evasion.
Katerina had worked with Yevgeny – him and his stupid comments – to set up hers soon after arriving for her duties at the rezidentura. He didn’t know the finer details but had a general idea about them. In the safe with only Ilya and Lyudmila had access to, one complete with quite the effective self-destruct system, the exact pathways were laid out: there could be a need for assistance to be given to Katerina in certain unforeseen circumstances.
The British had laid on a pair of their own escape routes for Katerina should she get in trouble with her own people. They were very similar in scope to what the rezidentura had arranged, though designed to keep her away from her fellow Russians if they were chasing her should she be exposed working for her country’s enemies. The precise information on those would surely be held in safety within MI-5 headquarters.
If Katerina had to run, she wouldn’t use any of the four.
There would be no taxi rides taken to bus stations before cutting across waste ground where there were no CCTV cameras to reach an abandoned bed-&-breakfast, nor taking a train out into the countryside to pick up a tent in a locked shed and camp out on the edge of a forest. People knowing about those escape routes were her primary concern…
…squatting in a field to relieve herself because she had no access to indoor toilets was another important factor in her thinking.
If everything went wrong, if her own people were on to her, or the British turned on her, Katerina would flee on her own terms using her own means through a routing she had chosen. She’d been working on three of them as well, considering it best to have a wide range of options. If danger came, danger she couldn’t talk her way out of, then she’d do a runner.
These things took time to set up and they cost money too.
Josephine could have helped. The girl was a genius when it came to crafting fake identities. Things could have gone a lot smoother if Katerina had enlisted her assistance in that. However, no matter how much she liked Josephine and how indebted the girl was to her, Katerina wouldn’t, couldn’t use her in such a task. She just won’t take the risk that if the day came when she needed to run, Josephine wasn’t against her either by design or an accident.
Katerina had had to arrange for her own false identification.
Then there was the money issue. She’d never taken money from the British. They’d tried to get her to, even spoke of a bank account in Switzerland where there was money for her due to apparent ‘expenses’ she could have occurred in assisting them. Katerina knew what that was about. They were trying to apply pressure there with the unspoken threat of imagine if your own people found out you’d been taking money from us.
The SVR did the same to foreigners it had their hooks into. She wasn’t offended. In fact, she would have been mighty miffed if the British hadn’t done such a thing because that would mean they were incompetent. Nonetheless, Katerina would never go near that bank account. She had no expenses working for them and did what she did not for personal need nor any greed.
But, she still needed money. A flight fund it was called in the intelligence business. Costs for her escape routes had already been spent but to keep running & to stay hidden, now that would require money.
And Katerina needed more money than could ever be found in Yevgeny's wallet.
Maybe ten minutes later, an idea struck her.
Dasha rudely pushed herself back into Katerina’s mind when she saw a woman get on the Tube who was wearing a coat remarkably much like one that that awful person usually wore. Long and green, baggy around the hips: damn ugly.
The smugglers with who Dasha had been working would have plenty of ill-gotten gains to hand.
There was money there for the taking, if Katerina could figure out how.
Katerina crossed London. The rain caught up with her when she reached Peckham and went up to Burgess Park, an urban green area where she’d been beforehand to scout as a meeting location. On the Old Kent Road, Katerina went quickly into a shop and brought a throw-away umbrella. Blue in colour, it was big, curving down on all sides too in a bell-like shape.
Perfect.
SPEARMINT met her where at the correct location in the park on time: at the northern side of the pond exactly at ten past four, just when it was getting dark.
“The umbrella suits you, Katya.”
“I was going to leave it on the Tube after I’m done with it today, for someone else to use, but it’s grown on me.”
“Anyone,” Katerina’s walking companion took a wide look around, “watching you on camera will be frustrated by it.”
“There aren’t many cameras here, and I’m staying away from there. Still, you’re correct.”
“I’ll get myself one too.” SPEARMINT sounded like she meant that.
“You called the meeting,” Katerina reminded her fellow spy for the British, “so, tell me what is important enough to meet.”
SPEARMINT practically growled: “Suzannah.”
Katerina listened as a litany of complaints were made about the new MI-5 woman who’d been put in above Hannah. She didn’t like that new woman, but SPEARMINT positively hated her. Saying very little herself, Katerina listened to what SPEARMINT had been told to do.
None of it sounded good for the long-term survival of her fellow SVR officer if they both were to remain undetected. That came alongside what Katerina had herself been instructed to do in ceasing to try and find someone to frame as the guilty party.
SPEARMINT had a lot to say as they kept on walking. They came off the path at Katerina’s direction, to avoid a camera mounted up high, wandering past some horrible teenagers who were out in the rain in shorts and t-shirts while wolf-whistling at the two Russian woman who went past them. Katerina couldn’t get away from them fast enough while SPEARMINT had a nasty, racist phrase to use to describe them.
When SPEARMINT was finished, Katerina said all the necessary things though doubted that she sounded as sincere as she needed to. Her fellow Russian was on edge, really worried about how all of this was going to end.
“I’ll run if I have to, Katya. I have my flight fund and a way out. I don’t know where I’ll go, but wherever I do, it will be far.”
Katerina said nothing of her own near-identical thoughts.
“What they – the British – want is to continue to have access to the rezidentura. They don’t want to shut things down nor have me run a wrecking ball though it. I understand that desire,” SPEARMINT didn’t appear sincere in that comment, “but it puts me in grave danger. Us in fact.” Now, she sounded honest.
“Yes.” Katerina’s reply was only to keep the conversation going.
“They have me as theirs, they blackmailed me into doing what they wanted. They’ve used me and threatened me and put me in this position where, without warning, I’ll be bundled off back to Moscow by our side before being tortured for everything I know and the taken to a forest and shot in the back of the head to be pushed into a shallow grave.
I think about that all the time. It scares the hell out of me, Katya, ending up like that.
I will run rather than face that, even if it means that my family suffer in my place.”
Katerina had winced when SPEARMINT spoke of her feared fate.
Those words cut deep because it reminded her of what she knew of what had become of her father, the man whose revenge she was getting by doing what she did.
Syrian rebels had killed him, shooting him in the back of the head while he was bound & blindfolded, before pushing him into a ditch with others. His own side – the SVR – had got payback for the death of an active case officer when slaughtering those rebels’ leaders but, and she wasn’t supposed to know this, it had been their mistakes in the first place that had put him in that position.
That was why she was against her own people. They’d indirectly killed her father because they had messed up. They’d pay for that.
SPEARMINT’s situation was different though.
As to her fellow Russian spook, Katerina had a question for her.
Perhaps it could be said to be irrelevant, but it was something she also wanted to know. In addition, Katerina wanted to fully understand SPEARMINT better because keeping her where she was, at the rezidentura and doing damage there, helped her with her own revenge against those who were ultimately responsible for the loss she had suffered.
The question: “Ksenia,” that was whom SPEARMINT was, “just why are you sleeping with the rezident?”
“Ilya and I are in love.”
Due to such an answer as that, the terrors in the mind of Ksenia / SPEARMINT could continue for as long as it suited Katerina. If they came true, so be it. Her fellow spy working too for the British was tying herself to Ilya, one of those who’d made that mistake back in Syria during that country’s civil war, something which left Katerina without her father, and so she would suffer with him.
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
Katerina walked away, her mind – as usual – turning over plots and plans against those who had not just wronged her but stood in her way too.
Katerina came out of the coffee shop and stood in the closed doorway for a moment. She reached up to her left ear and tapped the lobe with a finger, twice in quick succession. It wasn’t the most dramatic of movements but not so subtle either.
Confident that Josephine would have seen it, understanding the meaning for what it was too, Katerina then turned and took a brisk walk back to the Tube station.
Though she had met Josephine in Canada, the girl – she was only twenty – was British. A successful serial fraudster even when so young, Katerina had helped her out when Josephine had gotten into trouble with her boyfriend: she made bad romantic choices... which had ended up with the chap floating in the Ottawa River. Katerina had gone out of her way to aid Josephine, all to put her in her debt.
Now the two of them were back in England, Katerina had her debtor helping her out here. No one knew about the girl. Katerina hadn’t told her own SVR people, nor let onto the British either. There’d been intelligence activities that Josephine had been trained by Katerina in while they were on the other side of the Atlantic. The girl was a gifted amateur though. She had the ability to make herself anonymous and unremarked upon, useful skills for when Katerina had tasked her to follow Hannah.
With the signal delivered to her, Josephine would now cease that until instructed to take up the task again. Katerina didn’t look for her, she let the girl vanish as she was able to do, all without Hannah knowing who was on her.
While walking, Katerina took a glance upwards and saw the dark clouds. It was going to rain, soon. She increased her pace, seeking the sure fire shelter of the Underground Station not far off. Josephine was pushed out of her mind, Hannah too. Instead, Katerina thought of Dasha.
The suka was gone!
The flat that they had been forced to share was now all hers.
That was the good news. The only good news on that note. The rest was rather troubling. Dasha was an assassin! Yet, Katerina took the win for the time being. Dasha out of her life was a reason to smile.
There were tourists and shoppers but Katerina moved through the crowds and got on a train soon enough. She even managed to snag a seat, slipping into a gap between two large people each spilling out of their own ones. But there was enough room for her.
Now Dasha was out of her mind as well.
Katerina was thinking of her flight fund: something to help towards being one of the reasons (the other for the fun of it) that she had swiped Yevgeny’s wallet.
SVR employees on foreign deployments were required to have escape routes prepared in case the very worst happened and they needed to disappear less the host country’s intelligence services come after them for detention and interrogation. An illegal operation might be exposed or even a war might unexpectedly break out in the most extreme circumstances. Two separate routings were required of each officer so as to give a strong chance of successful evasion.
Katerina had worked with Yevgeny – him and his stupid comments – to set up hers soon after arriving for her duties at the rezidentura. He didn’t know the finer details but had a general idea about them. In the safe with only Ilya and Lyudmila had access to, one complete with quite the effective self-destruct system, the exact pathways were laid out: there could be a need for assistance to be given to Katerina in certain unforeseen circumstances.
The British had laid on a pair of their own escape routes for Katerina should she get in trouble with her own people. They were very similar in scope to what the rezidentura had arranged, though designed to keep her away from her fellow Russians if they were chasing her should she be exposed working for her country’s enemies. The precise information on those would surely be held in safety within MI-5 headquarters.
If Katerina had to run, she wouldn’t use any of the four.
There would be no taxi rides taken to bus stations before cutting across waste ground where there were no CCTV cameras to reach an abandoned bed-&-breakfast, nor taking a train out into the countryside to pick up a tent in a locked shed and camp out on the edge of a forest. People knowing about those escape routes were her primary concern…
…squatting in a field to relieve herself because she had no access to indoor toilets was another important factor in her thinking.
If everything went wrong, if her own people were on to her, or the British turned on her, Katerina would flee on her own terms using her own means through a routing she had chosen. She’d been working on three of them as well, considering it best to have a wide range of options. If danger came, danger she couldn’t talk her way out of, then she’d do a runner.
These things took time to set up and they cost money too.
Josephine could have helped. The girl was a genius when it came to crafting fake identities. Things could have gone a lot smoother if Katerina had enlisted her assistance in that. However, no matter how much she liked Josephine and how indebted the girl was to her, Katerina wouldn’t, couldn’t use her in such a task. She just won’t take the risk that if the day came when she needed to run, Josephine wasn’t against her either by design or an accident.
Katerina had had to arrange for her own false identification.
Then there was the money issue. She’d never taken money from the British. They’d tried to get her to, even spoke of a bank account in Switzerland where there was money for her due to apparent ‘expenses’ she could have occurred in assisting them. Katerina knew what that was about. They were trying to apply pressure there with the unspoken threat of imagine if your own people found out you’d been taking money from us.
The SVR did the same to foreigners it had their hooks into. She wasn’t offended. In fact, she would have been mighty miffed if the British hadn’t done such a thing because that would mean they were incompetent. Nonetheless, Katerina would never go near that bank account. She had no expenses working for them and did what she did not for personal need nor any greed.
But, she still needed money. A flight fund it was called in the intelligence business. Costs for her escape routes had already been spent but to keep running & to stay hidden, now that would require money.
And Katerina needed more money than could ever be found in Yevgeny's wallet.
Maybe ten minutes later, an idea struck her.
Dasha rudely pushed herself back into Katerina’s mind when she saw a woman get on the Tube who was wearing a coat remarkably much like one that that awful person usually wore. Long and green, baggy around the hips: damn ugly.
The smugglers with who Dasha had been working would have plenty of ill-gotten gains to hand.
There was money there for the taking, if Katerina could figure out how.
Katerina crossed London. The rain caught up with her when she reached Peckham and went up to Burgess Park, an urban green area where she’d been beforehand to scout as a meeting location. On the Old Kent Road, Katerina went quickly into a shop and brought a throw-away umbrella. Blue in colour, it was big, curving down on all sides too in a bell-like shape.
Perfect.
SPEARMINT met her where at the correct location in the park on time: at the northern side of the pond exactly at ten past four, just when it was getting dark.
“The umbrella suits you, Katya.”
“I was going to leave it on the Tube after I’m done with it today, for someone else to use, but it’s grown on me.”
“Anyone,” Katerina’s walking companion took a wide look around, “watching you on camera will be frustrated by it.”
“There aren’t many cameras here, and I’m staying away from there. Still, you’re correct.”
“I’ll get myself one too.” SPEARMINT sounded like she meant that.
“You called the meeting,” Katerina reminded her fellow spy for the British, “so, tell me what is important enough to meet.”
SPEARMINT practically growled: “Suzannah.”
Katerina listened as a litany of complaints were made about the new MI-5 woman who’d been put in above Hannah. She didn’t like that new woman, but SPEARMINT positively hated her. Saying very little herself, Katerina listened to what SPEARMINT had been told to do.
None of it sounded good for the long-term survival of her fellow SVR officer if they both were to remain undetected. That came alongside what Katerina had herself been instructed to do in ceasing to try and find someone to frame as the guilty party.
SPEARMINT had a lot to say as they kept on walking. They came off the path at Katerina’s direction, to avoid a camera mounted up high, wandering past some horrible teenagers who were out in the rain in shorts and t-shirts while wolf-whistling at the two Russian woman who went past them. Katerina couldn’t get away from them fast enough while SPEARMINT had a nasty, racist phrase to use to describe them.
When SPEARMINT was finished, Katerina said all the necessary things though doubted that she sounded as sincere as she needed to. Her fellow Russian was on edge, really worried about how all of this was going to end.
“I’ll run if I have to, Katya. I have my flight fund and a way out. I don’t know where I’ll go, but wherever I do, it will be far.”
Katerina said nothing of her own near-identical thoughts.
“What they – the British – want is to continue to have access to the rezidentura. They don’t want to shut things down nor have me run a wrecking ball though it. I understand that desire,” SPEARMINT didn’t appear sincere in that comment, “but it puts me in grave danger. Us in fact.” Now, she sounded honest.
“Yes.” Katerina’s reply was only to keep the conversation going.
“They have me as theirs, they blackmailed me into doing what they wanted. They’ve used me and threatened me and put me in this position where, without warning, I’ll be bundled off back to Moscow by our side before being tortured for everything I know and the taken to a forest and shot in the back of the head to be pushed into a shallow grave.
I think about that all the time. It scares the hell out of me, Katya, ending up like that.
I will run rather than face that, even if it means that my family suffer in my place.”
Katerina had winced when SPEARMINT spoke of her feared fate.
Those words cut deep because it reminded her of what she knew of what had become of her father, the man whose revenge she was getting by doing what she did.
Syrian rebels had killed him, shooting him in the back of the head while he was bound & blindfolded, before pushing him into a ditch with others. His own side – the SVR – had got payback for the death of an active case officer when slaughtering those rebels’ leaders but, and she wasn’t supposed to know this, it had been their mistakes in the first place that had put him in that position.
That was why she was against her own people. They’d indirectly killed her father because they had messed up. They’d pay for that.
SPEARMINT’s situation was different though.
As to her fellow Russian spook, Katerina had a question for her.
Perhaps it could be said to be irrelevant, but it was something she also wanted to know. In addition, Katerina wanted to fully understand SPEARMINT better because keeping her where she was, at the rezidentura and doing damage there, helped her with her own revenge against those who were ultimately responsible for the loss she had suffered.
The question: “Ksenia,” that was whom SPEARMINT was, “just why are you sleeping with the rezident?”
“Ilya and I are in love.”
Due to such an answer as that, the terrors in the mind of Ksenia / SPEARMINT could continue for as long as it suited Katerina. If they came true, so be it. Her fellow spy working too for the British was tying herself to Ilya, one of those who’d made that mistake back in Syria during that country’s civil war, something which left Katerina without her father, and so she would suffer with him.
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
Katerina walked away, her mind – as usual – turning over plots and plans against those who had not just wronged her but stood in her way too.
-
jemhouston
- Posts: 4791
- Joined: Fri Nov 18, 2022 12:38 am
Re: The Rezidentura
She needs to get out sooner, not later.
Re: The Rezidentura
They both need to TBF.
Re: The Rezidentura
15 – With pity
Nathan was sitting in a car with Daniel, one parked in Shoreditch over in East London. They were waiting for someone. A woman was coming, such was all that Daniel would reveal, to tell him something and when she did, Nathan wouldn’t be here to listen.
Instead, his job was to watch his boss’ back.
In the meantime, Daniel was telling him a story about the older man’s youngest nephew: a not very successful criminal mastermind.
“As I said, Ricky the Abominable is a dope. He’s my little sister’s kid so there’s affection there but… damn, why does he have to be so stupid?”
“What’s he done this time?” Nathan recalled hearing about this Ricky character before yet he couldn’t remember what the moniker was all about.
The Abominable Snowman?
“He wanted to make some money and, because he’s a thieving little cretin, he came up with a plan. Ricky apparently smartened himself up a bit – proper clothes and finally had a shave – and went into the town centre. He swiped a pocket-full of films before taking them to a trade-in shop to get cash for them. The kid looked up the prices first and got almost half their face value.
But then he got himself caught on the second go-round, one he did the same day, all while carrying the receipt for the first sale too. They’ve looked in his phone and the police now have his search history. In his bag, he has the ripped-off wrappers with the prices & barcodes as well.
This is first-rate theft, pre-planned they’re saying. He didn’t go to another shop, he didn’t change his clothes, Nath, and he kept that evidence to be used against him.
Idiot.”
“So, hang on, what’d he steal?” Nathan didn’t wait for an answer there. “D.V.Ds? Do people still buy them, not just stream what they want to watch?”
“It was Blu-ray discs actually: they cost more and he was going to get more trade-in cash as opposed to the older D.V.Ds. Yes, Nath, people still buy them… and my nephew goes stealing them to sell at another shop down the road too.”
Nathan checked something: “Of course he knows nothing about any of this?” He held his hands out open, aiming to signify the business they were both in.
“Of course not!” Daniel gave a brief chuckle at that. “The kid is stupid, as I said. His idea of crime isn’t my idea. There is nothing that can back on me, nor you either, through what he was stupidly doing.
Anyway,” this time a deep breath, “here comes that lady: Arwen.
Get out, wait over the road and keep me in sight. Don’t keep staring over though: I don’t reckon she’s the type to like that.”
“Okay.” Nathan did as he was told, walking away without looking at the woman heading for Daniel’s car.
He waited.
Nathan stood in the rain with his hood up. He saw that the woman had a fancy umbrella with her and was jealous. He wanted one too, even that one. She folded it as she climbed into the car across the road where Nathan was, all while he stood in the wet.
He was cold as well: winter was coming on fast.
Leaning back against the wall, Nathan tried to be all casual. He wasn’t convinced that he was pulling that off. He was out of place here. Shoreditch wasn’t somewhere he knew well at all. There were people about. Most of them ignored him yet he saw two teenage lads giving him the eye.
He didn’t assume that they wanted to be friends.
This would be their turf, where they dealt whatever they were selling this evening. He’d been taken note of as possibly someone out to rob them, if not now then at some point soon. Nathan didn’t believe that they thought him with the police either.
He made sure that he didn’t stare back at them.
He didn’t stare at the parked car either.
Nathan just looked downwards at the pavement, aiming to look as if he wasn’t here to do anything. It felt like a thousand pairs of eyes were on him though.
His mind went to the woman who was now with Daniel. What kind of name was Arwen? He’d heard that before and tried to recall where. Wasn’t it from a film? Nathan wanted to take out his phone and look it up. That he wouldn’t do though, not now. He was supposed to be paying attention – without looking like he was – and wouldn’t be able to do both.
Arwen.
So... a fake name.
Who was she really? Daniel hadn’t said. Nathan would have liked to have known, so too would his handler, Phoebe.
Having been handed off to her, Nathan had missed Hannah at first. The second MI-5 lady he was working with was a whole different character. But she’d grown on him fast, probably because she was pretty he had to admit. He liked her due to how she looked, how she talked to him too.
Nathan had got a message to Phoebe less than an hour ago. It had been brief and had come with an ever shorter reply. He was to find out everything he could about who Daniel was meeting and what was said. Phoebe had wanted him present in fact – that had been impossible to pull off – and to even sneak a picture of her with his phone.
He remembered that second bit just now: damn, what an idiot I am?
Casually, oh-so causally, Nathan took out his phone. He turned to the side, opening his jacket to keep the rain off his screen. At first, he searched for ‘Arwen’. There were two reasons for that. One: to satisfy his curiosity. Two: if Daniel demanded to look at his phone, that would be shown.
Arwen was from The Lord of the Rings.
Then he took a couple of pictures of the car. He’d angled his phone as best as he could, doing what he could to get a picture of who was in there with Daniel but being unable to check if the angle was right. Quickly, Nathan attached the trio of images to a text message and sent them to the number Phoebe had given him with the task of memorising it, not saving it in his phone.
Delete, delete, delete, delete.
The three pictures and the message were all wiped from his phone with no chance – he’d been assured of this – of any retrieval.
Looking back up, he saw the teenagers. They’d moved spots, closer to him. Nathan didn’t want to have to fight them but he would if he had to. If there was trouble, he was ready for it.
His attention moved to the car though.
The woman got out, her back to him, and popped open her umbrella. She walked quickly away with Nathan noting her white trainers getting splashed by dirty rainwater. Past the teenagers she went without giving them a second glance. After waiting until she was surely gone, he went back over to the car himself.
“I looked it up. Arwen is from…” Nathan started speaking as soon as he got into the car, telling Daniel the ‘reason’ why he had been on his phone.
He was interrupted though: “Yeah, it’s a silly made-up name. Don’t worry about it. You see them kids over there, Nath?”
“You should run them down!”
Nathan was only half joking.
“I should.”
Daniel sounded like he actually wanted to.
He started the car and drove them away, not doing that though.
“What,” Nathan asked, unsure if he’d get an answer, “did the lady with the umbrella have to say then?”
*
“Haemorrhoid – Steven Robinson that is – well… he’s dead. The woman Dasha, who we’ve been looking for, killed him and she’s apparently left the country so there is no getting to her now.”
“This is all that she told McSherry?”
“It’s all that he told me that she told him, yes.”
An unimpressed reply came: “Erm… I see.”
Nathan was back South of the River, comfortable to be away from where he’d been earlier in the day. He was in a pub now, sitting in a corner booth with a woman opposite him.
Phoebe.
The green-eyed lady from MI-5.
“The pictures,” Phoebe said, “gave us nothing. There really isn’t anything to see there. If you hadn’t have said it was a woman in the car with him, I wouldn’t have been able to tell.”
“I tried my best.” Nathan had.
“What you should have done is to have left your phone in the car with the voice recorder running. That would have been better.”
“I’m never going to make a good spy.” He gave her a self-deprecating grin.
There was utmost seriousness in her reply: “No, you’re not.”
If it was possible for a man to be deflated instantaneously by a remark, Nathan would be that unlucky fellow.
The cold, matter-of-fact manner in which Phoebe spoke about his failings stung him. All he wanted to do was impress her, to get her to like him as he liked her. But she was having none of it.
The woman with the green eyes, the ginger hair that she had dyed dark brown and the hint of freckles on her face hidden by make up was in no way responding to his best efforts. Part of him knew that there couldn’t, wouldn’t be anything between them with her a professional intelligence officer and he an ex-convict turned informer.
Still… a man could dream…
Phoebe was so unlike Hannah. The latter, that happy-go-lucky Scot had never brought forth such feelings in Nathan as the former had done. The two women were so different. Not just in looks but in personality too. Hannah was easier to get on with. Phoebe was so demanding of him, always criticising.
He did understand that it was due to that harshness that he liked her. Nathan wasn’t a dummy. He was sort-of in love though, with a woman who he was unable to please.
Sitting across in a pub from her made him happy though. He assumed that anyone noticing them would think that they would be a couple. That idea made him happy. If Nathan couldn’t have her, having people thinking that he did was an admittedly distant second best. It was still better than nothing. The pub meeting was her idea too.
So maybe, against all of the odds, he had an inkling of a chance… maybe.
“You didn’t speak to this woman, you didn’t look her direct in the face,” Phoebe did that thing as she spoke that she’d done before where she waved her hand away sharply as she ticked off things, “and all she gave McSherry was a silly false name. Am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“If you were to be shown some pictures, ones of Russian spooks, do you think that maybe you could pick her out?”
He gave her an exasperated look: “Phoebe, I didn’t get even a glimpse of her. All I saw was an umbrella and her figure walking away.”
Phoebe shook her head while twisting her hands when they were locked together.
There was frustration there, something that Nathan would have loved to have eased. His mind filled with images of how to do that.
“And there is nothing else that McSherry told you? How hard did you push him?”
“Hard.”
He had too, risking a lot by asking the questions that he had.
“I’m going to have to talk to my boss because this is likely to be important but I don’t know what it all means.”
“Hannah?”
“No, not Hannah: Amanda.”
“Who is that?” Nathan was under the impression that Hannah was solely in charge.
“Don’t worry yourself about it.” Another dismissive hand wave directed at him.
She started to stand up. “Hang on a second,” he said, “I wanted to ask you something else.”
Phoebe sat back down: “Yes? Make it quick though.”
“What happened to Haemorrhoid and this Dasha woman doing a disappearing act, none of it seems to have surprised you.
Did you, and Hannah, and whomever this Amanda person is, know all of that beforehand? It would have been nice if you have let me know. Daniel has had me doing all sorts to find Robinson and I could have skipped plenty of that if I’d known the truth.”
With pity she looked at him before her reply: “Nathan, I mean this as nice as possible.
As you said, you’d never make a good spy.”
And with that, Phoebe was up and gone. Quick, without looking back too.
Nathan remained sitting where he was feeling, as he always did after talking to women, like a complete moron.
Nathan was sitting in a car with Daniel, one parked in Shoreditch over in East London. They were waiting for someone. A woman was coming, such was all that Daniel would reveal, to tell him something and when she did, Nathan wouldn’t be here to listen.
Instead, his job was to watch his boss’ back.
In the meantime, Daniel was telling him a story about the older man’s youngest nephew: a not very successful criminal mastermind.
“As I said, Ricky the Abominable is a dope. He’s my little sister’s kid so there’s affection there but… damn, why does he have to be so stupid?”
“What’s he done this time?” Nathan recalled hearing about this Ricky character before yet he couldn’t remember what the moniker was all about.
The Abominable Snowman?
“He wanted to make some money and, because he’s a thieving little cretin, he came up with a plan. Ricky apparently smartened himself up a bit – proper clothes and finally had a shave – and went into the town centre. He swiped a pocket-full of films before taking them to a trade-in shop to get cash for them. The kid looked up the prices first and got almost half their face value.
But then he got himself caught on the second go-round, one he did the same day, all while carrying the receipt for the first sale too. They’ve looked in his phone and the police now have his search history. In his bag, he has the ripped-off wrappers with the prices & barcodes as well.
This is first-rate theft, pre-planned they’re saying. He didn’t go to another shop, he didn’t change his clothes, Nath, and he kept that evidence to be used against him.
Idiot.”
“So, hang on, what’d he steal?” Nathan didn’t wait for an answer there. “D.V.Ds? Do people still buy them, not just stream what they want to watch?”
“It was Blu-ray discs actually: they cost more and he was going to get more trade-in cash as opposed to the older D.V.Ds. Yes, Nath, people still buy them… and my nephew goes stealing them to sell at another shop down the road too.”
Nathan checked something: “Of course he knows nothing about any of this?” He held his hands out open, aiming to signify the business they were both in.
“Of course not!” Daniel gave a brief chuckle at that. “The kid is stupid, as I said. His idea of crime isn’t my idea. There is nothing that can back on me, nor you either, through what he was stupidly doing.
Anyway,” this time a deep breath, “here comes that lady: Arwen.
Get out, wait over the road and keep me in sight. Don’t keep staring over though: I don’t reckon she’s the type to like that.”
“Okay.” Nathan did as he was told, walking away without looking at the woman heading for Daniel’s car.
He waited.
Nathan stood in the rain with his hood up. He saw that the woman had a fancy umbrella with her and was jealous. He wanted one too, even that one. She folded it as she climbed into the car across the road where Nathan was, all while he stood in the wet.
He was cold as well: winter was coming on fast.
Leaning back against the wall, Nathan tried to be all casual. He wasn’t convinced that he was pulling that off. He was out of place here. Shoreditch wasn’t somewhere he knew well at all. There were people about. Most of them ignored him yet he saw two teenage lads giving him the eye.
He didn’t assume that they wanted to be friends.
This would be their turf, where they dealt whatever they were selling this evening. He’d been taken note of as possibly someone out to rob them, if not now then at some point soon. Nathan didn’t believe that they thought him with the police either.
He made sure that he didn’t stare back at them.
He didn’t stare at the parked car either.
Nathan just looked downwards at the pavement, aiming to look as if he wasn’t here to do anything. It felt like a thousand pairs of eyes were on him though.
His mind went to the woman who was now with Daniel. What kind of name was Arwen? He’d heard that before and tried to recall where. Wasn’t it from a film? Nathan wanted to take out his phone and look it up. That he wouldn’t do though, not now. He was supposed to be paying attention – without looking like he was – and wouldn’t be able to do both.
Arwen.
So... a fake name.
Who was she really? Daniel hadn’t said. Nathan would have liked to have known, so too would his handler, Phoebe.
Having been handed off to her, Nathan had missed Hannah at first. The second MI-5 lady he was working with was a whole different character. But she’d grown on him fast, probably because she was pretty he had to admit. He liked her due to how she looked, how she talked to him too.
Nathan had got a message to Phoebe less than an hour ago. It had been brief and had come with an ever shorter reply. He was to find out everything he could about who Daniel was meeting and what was said. Phoebe had wanted him present in fact – that had been impossible to pull off – and to even sneak a picture of her with his phone.
He remembered that second bit just now: damn, what an idiot I am?
Casually, oh-so causally, Nathan took out his phone. He turned to the side, opening his jacket to keep the rain off his screen. At first, he searched for ‘Arwen’. There were two reasons for that. One: to satisfy his curiosity. Two: if Daniel demanded to look at his phone, that would be shown.
Arwen was from The Lord of the Rings.
Then he took a couple of pictures of the car. He’d angled his phone as best as he could, doing what he could to get a picture of who was in there with Daniel but being unable to check if the angle was right. Quickly, Nathan attached the trio of images to a text message and sent them to the number Phoebe had given him with the task of memorising it, not saving it in his phone.
Delete, delete, delete, delete.
The three pictures and the message were all wiped from his phone with no chance – he’d been assured of this – of any retrieval.
Looking back up, he saw the teenagers. They’d moved spots, closer to him. Nathan didn’t want to have to fight them but he would if he had to. If there was trouble, he was ready for it.
His attention moved to the car though.
The woman got out, her back to him, and popped open her umbrella. She walked quickly away with Nathan noting her white trainers getting splashed by dirty rainwater. Past the teenagers she went without giving them a second glance. After waiting until she was surely gone, he went back over to the car himself.
“I looked it up. Arwen is from…” Nathan started speaking as soon as he got into the car, telling Daniel the ‘reason’ why he had been on his phone.
He was interrupted though: “Yeah, it’s a silly made-up name. Don’t worry about it. You see them kids over there, Nath?”
“You should run them down!”
Nathan was only half joking.
“I should.”
Daniel sounded like he actually wanted to.
He started the car and drove them away, not doing that though.
“What,” Nathan asked, unsure if he’d get an answer, “did the lady with the umbrella have to say then?”
*
“Haemorrhoid – Steven Robinson that is – well… he’s dead. The woman Dasha, who we’ve been looking for, killed him and she’s apparently left the country so there is no getting to her now.”
“This is all that she told McSherry?”
“It’s all that he told me that she told him, yes.”
An unimpressed reply came: “Erm… I see.”
Nathan was back South of the River, comfortable to be away from where he’d been earlier in the day. He was in a pub now, sitting in a corner booth with a woman opposite him.
Phoebe.
The green-eyed lady from MI-5.
“The pictures,” Phoebe said, “gave us nothing. There really isn’t anything to see there. If you hadn’t have said it was a woman in the car with him, I wouldn’t have been able to tell.”
“I tried my best.” Nathan had.
“What you should have done is to have left your phone in the car with the voice recorder running. That would have been better.”
“I’m never going to make a good spy.” He gave her a self-deprecating grin.
There was utmost seriousness in her reply: “No, you’re not.”
If it was possible for a man to be deflated instantaneously by a remark, Nathan would be that unlucky fellow.
The cold, matter-of-fact manner in which Phoebe spoke about his failings stung him. All he wanted to do was impress her, to get her to like him as he liked her. But she was having none of it.
The woman with the green eyes, the ginger hair that she had dyed dark brown and the hint of freckles on her face hidden by make up was in no way responding to his best efforts. Part of him knew that there couldn’t, wouldn’t be anything between them with her a professional intelligence officer and he an ex-convict turned informer.
Still… a man could dream…
Phoebe was so unlike Hannah. The latter, that happy-go-lucky Scot had never brought forth such feelings in Nathan as the former had done. The two women were so different. Not just in looks but in personality too. Hannah was easier to get on with. Phoebe was so demanding of him, always criticising.
He did understand that it was due to that harshness that he liked her. Nathan wasn’t a dummy. He was sort-of in love though, with a woman who he was unable to please.
Sitting across in a pub from her made him happy though. He assumed that anyone noticing them would think that they would be a couple. That idea made him happy. If Nathan couldn’t have her, having people thinking that he did was an admittedly distant second best. It was still better than nothing. The pub meeting was her idea too.
So maybe, against all of the odds, he had an inkling of a chance… maybe.
“You didn’t speak to this woman, you didn’t look her direct in the face,” Phoebe did that thing as she spoke that she’d done before where she waved her hand away sharply as she ticked off things, “and all she gave McSherry was a silly false name. Am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“If you were to be shown some pictures, ones of Russian spooks, do you think that maybe you could pick her out?”
He gave her an exasperated look: “Phoebe, I didn’t get even a glimpse of her. All I saw was an umbrella and her figure walking away.”
Phoebe shook her head while twisting her hands when they were locked together.
There was frustration there, something that Nathan would have loved to have eased. His mind filled with images of how to do that.
“And there is nothing else that McSherry told you? How hard did you push him?”
“Hard.”
He had too, risking a lot by asking the questions that he had.
“I’m going to have to talk to my boss because this is likely to be important but I don’t know what it all means.”
“Hannah?”
“No, not Hannah: Amanda.”
“Who is that?” Nathan was under the impression that Hannah was solely in charge.
“Don’t worry yourself about it.” Another dismissive hand wave directed at him.
She started to stand up. “Hang on a second,” he said, “I wanted to ask you something else.”
Phoebe sat back down: “Yes? Make it quick though.”
“What happened to Haemorrhoid and this Dasha woman doing a disappearing act, none of it seems to have surprised you.
Did you, and Hannah, and whomever this Amanda person is, know all of that beforehand? It would have been nice if you have let me know. Daniel has had me doing all sorts to find Robinson and I could have skipped plenty of that if I’d known the truth.”
With pity she looked at him before her reply: “Nathan, I mean this as nice as possible.
As you said, you’d never make a good spy.”
And with that, Phoebe was up and gone. Quick, without looking back too.
Nathan remained sitting where he was feeling, as he always did after talking to women, like a complete moron.
-
jemhouston
- Posts: 4791
- Joined: Fri Nov 18, 2022 12:38 am
Re: The Rezidentura
That's called a clue, heed it.
Re: The Rezidentura
Oh, Phoebe got the clue indeed. But her actions won't be as they should rightly be!
Re: The Rezidentura
16 – Thames House
“Fi-Fi, come sign this card for Abigail, will you?”
Phoebe stood up from her desk and went over towards where Hannah was standing with the rest of her team, minus Abigail of course. As she crossed the section of the fourth floor within Thames House, the home to MI-5 which sat beside the river and where she was currently assigned, Phoebe made sure that none of her anger was shown across her face. The look had been practised in the mirror. The face she wore was one when she had to deal with Hannah…
…whom Phoebe loathed.
How did she get ‘Fi-Fi’ from Phoebe?
What made her think that Phoebe would ever want to be her friend?
Why couldn’t she just go and jump in the Thames at high tide?
None of those silent internal questions escaped from Phoebe. Hannah nor anyone else should have the slightest indication of how she felt. Emotionless she could imagine that Hannah and the others might think of her due to how she behaved around them. They’d be wrong in that but, more importantly, Phoebe didn’t care about what Hannah and the others thought.
She told herself that now as she often did.
She just didn’t care. No, really, she didn’t care about their existence.
It was a birthday card for Abigail. Hannah was someone who did cards. And cake. And touchy-feely, I’m-your-friend stuff too. The thought struck Phoebe that Hannah would know when her birthday was coming up. In two weeks time, Phoebe would be getting a card at the office, probably cake too. She failed to stop herself from imagining Hannah giving her a hug!
Kill.
Me.
Now.
For the past six years, Phoebe Carmichael had worked counter-intelligence within MI-5. Hunting for spies within the organisation was her primary brief though there were other security-related tasks as well when she had been in that job.
She’d never caught a foreign spy.
There hadn’t been one positively identified as active against MI-5 from the inside in decades. That didn’t mean that such people didn’t exist though. Such a ‘truth’ had been drummed into Phoebe from the start of her career. Russia and other countries, even friendly ones, worked to infiltrate Britain’s domestic intelligence service. Away from those opponents, there were Britons who set out themselves to betray their country and give away the secrets of MI-5 to a foreign power. The latter were the ones which caught. Phoebe had been intimated involved in nabbing a trio of them over the years. Those were fellow employees who’d been seeking to make money, get a personal revenge or did what they did for another reason.
All of them had been caught because they had made mistakes. Phoebe had educated herself on such errors made by those traitors and ones whose activities went back to the very beginning of MI-5.
She had done so to make sure that she herself was never caught.
There had been feelers put out to the Russians beforehand. Phoebe had made contact with the SVR here in London where she had sent them some information and promised to be in touch again in the future. What she had given them hadn’t been anything dramatic, nothing that they shouldn’t have been able to get themselves with a bit of hard work. It was an opening gift. That was how she saw it. They paid nothing for it but the next go around, there would be a fee for what she would hand over. The Russians were given it without knowing who she was. Phoebe’s intentions were to keep it that way when it came down to her selling them more information in the future.
Her belief wasn’t that she wouldn’t be caught by anyone else here in Thames House if her identity was unknown to everyone.
Money was what Phoebe wanted. Not much, just cash to help her ‘retire’ early from a working life. There were secrets that she could get her hands on that the Russians would pay for. The decision to do what she intended to do had been made some time ago, long before she was transferred from where she was happy in Counter-Intelligence to working for Hannah in her Special Surveillance detachment. It wasn’t about Hannah.
It was about Phoebe getting rich.
However, working where she was now had given Phoebe some first-rate intelligence to sell to the Russians. How they would pay to know not just about Ksenia (aka SPEARMINT) but Katerina too! Phoebe was sitting on a goldmine by being one of the very few people who knew about each of them. Cash, plenty of cash, would come to her as long as she could figure out a way to let the SVR know what she did, all without revealing herself to them too less there be another Ksenia or Katerina on their end whom she didn’t know about.
To do all of this, to get rich, was something that there was a ticking clock on now though.
After signing the card for Abigail, Phoebe went with Hannah to the latter’s work area. Hannah didn’t have an office per se but her desk was in a quiet corner and thus out of the way.
“So you got nothing from Nathan Clay?” Hannah looked rather disappointed.
“No, I didn’t.” Phoebe tried to ape that. “As I put in the email, there was nothing at all.” The lie had rolled easily off her tongue. “It’s a shame, because at one point there was a lot of potential there, but that is all done with now.”
“Damn. You tried your best though, Fi-Fi, and did some good work there. I’ll make sure that I highlight that for Amanda and up to Richard as well.”
Phoebe was certain that Hannah would do as she said she would too: that was her all over.
“Are we going to shutter the whole operation with those smugglers then?”
Hannah nodded: “Amanda already wants to do such a thing and with this news that there remains zero contact between McSherry’s people and any of the Russians, there is no need to keep the surveillance going any longer. It’s costly and the resources are needed elsewhere.
So, yes: it’s all over with. We’re going to have to pass a file to the National Crime Agency, and I want you to focus on that, but it’ll be thin. We can’t give them much and, conversely, they won’t want much too less it come back to bite them when they – eventually – take McSherry to court. Clay is who we give them: an informant who knows what to do to make a case for them.”
“Nathan gives me the creeps, Hannah. You should see the way he looks at me. They way he undresses me with his eyes. The… I don’t know what else to call it but the ‘longing’ for me.”
“I’m sorry that you have had to deal with a situation that makes you uncomfortable.” There was genuine concern in Hannah’s voice there. “Such things are difficult when contacts, agents and informants alike seek to create an attachment, where they make their desires for romantic or sexual connections overtly known even without words.
You know that there are people here that I can have you talk with if you need further….”
“Oh, no, it’s okay.” Phoebe cut her off. “It’s fine: it really is.”
And it was.
She had dealt with Nathan’s attention with ease and wasn’t affected by them. What Phoebe noted at this moment and, once again made the effort to keep her face neutral, was how Hannah spoke of agents getting ‘attached’.
Hers – Katerina – had once been rather attached to Hannah… horizontally from what Phoebe could gather. Hannah though that no one knew about that yet she was remarkably incorrect in such a belief. Phoebe knew and Phoebe had told both Amanda & Richard of it all as well.
“Okay, as long as you’re sure, Fi-Fi.”
For just a moment, in an act which sickened Phoebe, Hannah touched her arm. It was always that way with Hannah. She was a personal space invader of the first order.
“I am.” She turned away and fled, stopping herself from asking if there was someone she could talk to about when your superiors give you the creeps.
When she went back to her desk, Phoebe replayed the whole conversation in her mind. She recalled exactly what she had said, what Hannah had said too. There could be no misunderstanding. Phoebe had lied to her, telling Hannah something about an operation that was entirely false.
Though Nathan hadn’t known it, it had been Katerina Dubova in that car with his boss McSherry. Whatever the conversation had been about – Phoebe once more silently chastised herself for not having Nathan record the meeting – the overarching theme of it would have been Katerina going to McSherry to somehow get hold of what Phoebe herself was after.
Money.
Katerina’s recent behaviour, from what Phoebe knew of it and how she interpreted that, was that she was soon for the jump. She was going to do a runner. When she did, the value that her name as a traitor had to the SVR from someone – Phoebe – giving them that would be next to nothing. Katerina running might even allow them to identify Ksenia as SPEARMINT too. Again, without Phoebe’s paid input for that.
Phoebe had to act as soon as possible or there would be no early retirement for her.
She had to get in contact with someone at the rezidentura, a place where so many eyes were upon it at the minute, and give them information while it was still valuable. Her actions had to remain undetected by her own people in MI-5 and not give away her identity to the Russians either. She had to get paid too, not get cheated out of giving away what she knew for nothing.
It was going to be tricky and it had to be done with haste too.
“Fi-Fi, come sign this card for Abigail, will you?”
Phoebe stood up from her desk and went over towards where Hannah was standing with the rest of her team, minus Abigail of course. As she crossed the section of the fourth floor within Thames House, the home to MI-5 which sat beside the river and where she was currently assigned, Phoebe made sure that none of her anger was shown across her face. The look had been practised in the mirror. The face she wore was one when she had to deal with Hannah…
…whom Phoebe loathed.
How did she get ‘Fi-Fi’ from Phoebe?
What made her think that Phoebe would ever want to be her friend?
Why couldn’t she just go and jump in the Thames at high tide?
None of those silent internal questions escaped from Phoebe. Hannah nor anyone else should have the slightest indication of how she felt. Emotionless she could imagine that Hannah and the others might think of her due to how she behaved around them. They’d be wrong in that but, more importantly, Phoebe didn’t care about what Hannah and the others thought.
She told herself that now as she often did.
She just didn’t care. No, really, she didn’t care about their existence.
It was a birthday card for Abigail. Hannah was someone who did cards. And cake. And touchy-feely, I’m-your-friend stuff too. The thought struck Phoebe that Hannah would know when her birthday was coming up. In two weeks time, Phoebe would be getting a card at the office, probably cake too. She failed to stop herself from imagining Hannah giving her a hug!
Kill.
Me.
Now.
For the past six years, Phoebe Carmichael had worked counter-intelligence within MI-5. Hunting for spies within the organisation was her primary brief though there were other security-related tasks as well when she had been in that job.
She’d never caught a foreign spy.
There hadn’t been one positively identified as active against MI-5 from the inside in decades. That didn’t mean that such people didn’t exist though. Such a ‘truth’ had been drummed into Phoebe from the start of her career. Russia and other countries, even friendly ones, worked to infiltrate Britain’s domestic intelligence service. Away from those opponents, there were Britons who set out themselves to betray their country and give away the secrets of MI-5 to a foreign power. The latter were the ones which caught. Phoebe had been intimated involved in nabbing a trio of them over the years. Those were fellow employees who’d been seeking to make money, get a personal revenge or did what they did for another reason.
All of them had been caught because they had made mistakes. Phoebe had educated herself on such errors made by those traitors and ones whose activities went back to the very beginning of MI-5.
She had done so to make sure that she herself was never caught.
There had been feelers put out to the Russians beforehand. Phoebe had made contact with the SVR here in London where she had sent them some information and promised to be in touch again in the future. What she had given them hadn’t been anything dramatic, nothing that they shouldn’t have been able to get themselves with a bit of hard work. It was an opening gift. That was how she saw it. They paid nothing for it but the next go around, there would be a fee for what she would hand over. The Russians were given it without knowing who she was. Phoebe’s intentions were to keep it that way when it came down to her selling them more information in the future.
Her belief wasn’t that she wouldn’t be caught by anyone else here in Thames House if her identity was unknown to everyone.
Money was what Phoebe wanted. Not much, just cash to help her ‘retire’ early from a working life. There were secrets that she could get her hands on that the Russians would pay for. The decision to do what she intended to do had been made some time ago, long before she was transferred from where she was happy in Counter-Intelligence to working for Hannah in her Special Surveillance detachment. It wasn’t about Hannah.
It was about Phoebe getting rich.
However, working where she was now had given Phoebe some first-rate intelligence to sell to the Russians. How they would pay to know not just about Ksenia (aka SPEARMINT) but Katerina too! Phoebe was sitting on a goldmine by being one of the very few people who knew about each of them. Cash, plenty of cash, would come to her as long as she could figure out a way to let the SVR know what she did, all without revealing herself to them too less there be another Ksenia or Katerina on their end whom she didn’t know about.
To do all of this, to get rich, was something that there was a ticking clock on now though.
After signing the card for Abigail, Phoebe went with Hannah to the latter’s work area. Hannah didn’t have an office per se but her desk was in a quiet corner and thus out of the way.
“So you got nothing from Nathan Clay?” Hannah looked rather disappointed.
“No, I didn’t.” Phoebe tried to ape that. “As I put in the email, there was nothing at all.” The lie had rolled easily off her tongue. “It’s a shame, because at one point there was a lot of potential there, but that is all done with now.”
“Damn. You tried your best though, Fi-Fi, and did some good work there. I’ll make sure that I highlight that for Amanda and up to Richard as well.”
Phoebe was certain that Hannah would do as she said she would too: that was her all over.
“Are we going to shutter the whole operation with those smugglers then?”
Hannah nodded: “Amanda already wants to do such a thing and with this news that there remains zero contact between McSherry’s people and any of the Russians, there is no need to keep the surveillance going any longer. It’s costly and the resources are needed elsewhere.
So, yes: it’s all over with. We’re going to have to pass a file to the National Crime Agency, and I want you to focus on that, but it’ll be thin. We can’t give them much and, conversely, they won’t want much too less it come back to bite them when they – eventually – take McSherry to court. Clay is who we give them: an informant who knows what to do to make a case for them.”
“Nathan gives me the creeps, Hannah. You should see the way he looks at me. They way he undresses me with his eyes. The… I don’t know what else to call it but the ‘longing’ for me.”
“I’m sorry that you have had to deal with a situation that makes you uncomfortable.” There was genuine concern in Hannah’s voice there. “Such things are difficult when contacts, agents and informants alike seek to create an attachment, where they make their desires for romantic or sexual connections overtly known even without words.
You know that there are people here that I can have you talk with if you need further….”
“Oh, no, it’s okay.” Phoebe cut her off. “It’s fine: it really is.”
And it was.
She had dealt with Nathan’s attention with ease and wasn’t affected by them. What Phoebe noted at this moment and, once again made the effort to keep her face neutral, was how Hannah spoke of agents getting ‘attached’.
Hers – Katerina – had once been rather attached to Hannah… horizontally from what Phoebe could gather. Hannah though that no one knew about that yet she was remarkably incorrect in such a belief. Phoebe knew and Phoebe had told both Amanda & Richard of it all as well.
“Okay, as long as you’re sure, Fi-Fi.”
For just a moment, in an act which sickened Phoebe, Hannah touched her arm. It was always that way with Hannah. She was a personal space invader of the first order.
“I am.” She turned away and fled, stopping herself from asking if there was someone she could talk to about when your superiors give you the creeps.
When she went back to her desk, Phoebe replayed the whole conversation in her mind. She recalled exactly what she had said, what Hannah had said too. There could be no misunderstanding. Phoebe had lied to her, telling Hannah something about an operation that was entirely false.
Though Nathan hadn’t known it, it had been Katerina Dubova in that car with his boss McSherry. Whatever the conversation had been about – Phoebe once more silently chastised herself for not having Nathan record the meeting – the overarching theme of it would have been Katerina going to McSherry to somehow get hold of what Phoebe herself was after.
Money.
Katerina’s recent behaviour, from what Phoebe knew of it and how she interpreted that, was that she was soon for the jump. She was going to do a runner. When she did, the value that her name as a traitor had to the SVR from someone – Phoebe – giving them that would be next to nothing. Katerina running might even allow them to identify Ksenia as SPEARMINT too. Again, without Phoebe’s paid input for that.
Phoebe had to act as soon as possible or there would be no early retirement for her.
She had to get in contact with someone at the rezidentura, a place where so many eyes were upon it at the minute, and give them information while it was still valuable. Her actions had to remain undetected by her own people in MI-5 and not give away her identity to the Russians either. She had to get paid too, not get cheated out of giving away what she knew for nothing.
It was going to be tricky and it had to be done with haste too.