Tim Glister - Red Corona

The embassy was a piece of the United States on British soil, so American social mores ruled. In the rest of the city the golden hue of Bennett’s skin and ice blue of her eyes might make her look like a northern European who had spent a long summer in warmer climes. In the embassy, they singled her out as what she really was – someone whose very existence made her fellow countrymen uncomfortable.

Many of the women who worked at the embassy lived together in houses in the area of the city bound to the north by Hyde Park and the south by the Thames. They were attracted by famous names and landmarks like the King’s Road, Harrods, and the Royal Albert Hall. Rooms were often shared, and beds passed on to newcomers as people returned to America or found a Brit to marry and moved out. The embassy encouraged the system as it created a kind of sisterhood and support network that helped its female staff feel safe and settled.

But when Bennett arrived in London, she was told there was nowhere for her in any of the women’s houses. A month later, after she’d found her own room in a boarding house off Gloucester Road, another woman had arrived, a blonde, white woman from New England. The embassy houses practically fought each other for her. There had been plenty of space all along, Bennett just wasn’t wanted.

People did their best to ignore Bennett in Grosvenor Square. Most of the time it irritated her, but today she was more than happy to let it work in her favour, especially in the archive, where the file clerks on duty chose not to see her moving through the aisles of record stacks.

First she went to the set of thick files the CIA held on Bianchi and Moretti. The agency had kept the two Italians under surveillance since they’d arrived in London to see if they posed a threat to local operations or if they were worth recruiting. Bennett wanted to see if anything had been added to their records since they’d been found dead. There was just a note saying MI5 were investigating their suspected murder. The front file had also been tagged with a green strip – code that all records relating to the Bianchi and Moretti should be moved into deep storage during the next reconciliation cycle.

Her superiors may have stopped caring about the Italians, but she was still very interested in them. And so, apparently, was MI5. Bennett didn’t know where Knox had gone after he’d given her the slip in Soho the night before, but she was willing to bet he’d gone to Deptford and Bianchi and Moretti’s flat. Now she wanted to know what connected Kaspar, Horne, and the Italians. Unfortunately, the CIA didn’t have any records on Horne or the Calder Hall Ring, and Bennett had already exhausted the information held on Kaspar in London. She could have put in a request to the central records store in Virginia for whatever they held on him, but that would take too much time and probably earn her a reprimand.

Before she gave up completely on the archive, she stopped by the large pile of new files waiting to be carried off into the stacks and quickly scanned through them. The fourth folder just held a single photo. It was of a woman, her hair caught mid-turn as she walked into a building. The image was slightly blurry, taken with a long lens. The woman’s narrow eyes looked more like sunken slits, and wisps of loose hair hung over her cheeks. But the expression on her face was clear enough. She looked long past the point of exhaustion. But more than that, Bennett thought she looked haunted, like something unspeakably awful had happened to her. She turned the photo over, reading the location and timestamp: Swedish embassy, Helsinki, 16:47, 16 July. Yesterday afternoon. It must have been sent to London almost as soon as it had been taken.

The woman’s name was written underneath in different-coloured ink, added by someone once a source inside the Swedish embassy had confirmed her identity: Irina Valera. Bennett recognised the name, but she had no idea how she’d ended up in Helsinki. She turned the photograph over and looked at it again, trying to work out what had happened to her.

Bennett had a choice: put the photo back in its folder or do something else, something that could end up with her facing much more than a reprimand. She stood still for a moment, deciding if she was ready to cross a very big line. Then she took the photograph to the unattended Xerox machine next to the chief clerk’s desk and made a copy of it before slipping the original back onto the pile of filing.

An hour after the bus left Ilomantsi, it had deposited Valera in the city of Joensuu. Joensuu was the biggest place she had been since she’d left Leningrad, and it was well away from the border with Russia. It felt like a metropolis compared to Povenets B. Well-fed people walked along its streets and riverbanks, cars drove on its roads, and a never-ending stream of boats sailed beneath its bridges.

Valera could have stayed in Joensuu, found somewhere out of the way to rest and build up her strength for a day or two, or stowed away on a ship heading out onto Lake Pyhäselkä and disappeared into the network of waterways that criss-crossed Finland. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment she might be snatched up and taken back to Russia. The ties that bound Finland and its neighbour ran almost as deep as the divisions that separated them. Russia had exerted influence over Finland for centuries, and even after independence and multiple, bloody wars there were still plenty of people whose loyalties lay to the east. For every good Samaritan Valera might encounter, she might also meet someone looking to curry favour with Moscow.

She’d decided that she had to keep moving.

Her ride from Ilomantsi had dropped her off in the middle of Joensuu’s old town and, not wanting to expose herself as an outsider by asking for directions, she had spent almost an hour finding the main city bus station.

She’d tried to buy a ticket to Helsinki, but this time the clerk had refused her rubles. He’d said something to her, but Valera had no idea what. She’d tried, quietly, speaking to him in Swedish and then English, but he didn’t understand either.

Valera had felt the eyes of the queue behind her boring into her back, and then she’d felt a hand gently rest on her shoulder. She’d looked at the fat fingers curling round her clavicle and for one terrifying moment thought they belonged to Zukolev. But they didn’t. They were attached to an old man who had taken pity on her and translated the clerk’s instructions to go get her money changed into Finnish markka two desks down.

After she’d bought her ticket she went to the station’s small cafe, where she ate her first proper meal in days – a thick, meaty stew that she had to coax slowly down her throat. Then, an hour later, she’d got on another bus. Seven hours after that, she’d arrived in Helsinki. And just before five o’clock in the evening she’d walked through the doors of the Swedish embassy on the waterfront of the Finnish capital and requested political asylum.

Valera had no way of knowing that the CIA had a car permanently stationed in the ferry terminal car park across from the embassy and that the young agent sitting behind its steering wheel had taken her photo as she crossed the road and went inside. America had received its fair share of Soviet defectors in its European embassies over the years, and since Rudolf Nureyev, Russia’s greatest ballet star, had requested asylum in Paris a month ago the CIA had been watching at a long list of potential cross-over points all over the continent.

Most of the Swedish embassy’s senior staff had already left for the day when Valera walked in, and had to be urgently called back. All except the ambassador himself who, it was decided, would be better off not knowing about Valera until the Swedish security service, RPS/Säk, had worked out what to do with her.