Alex Dryden - Moscow Sting

But Adrian was well aware that these new Russians were never going to give Bykov up. Putin’s Russia had made it clear a dozen times in the past eight years that they would flaunt their old-style power and arrogance with complete immunity.

And so, sitting in the car now, he knew this was first base only; a winter evening flight to Helsinki; a meeting with one of Putin’s stooges, followed by the Russians’ inevitable rejection of the prime minister’s ponderous and deliberately indecisive plan.

Make a reasonable request for the hood Grigory Bykov’s extradition? There was nobody reasonable left in power in Russia.

Outside the window of the car, the rain was backing off a little. The day was heading into night without ever having put in a real appearance. The SIS car turned off the main road and ran the few miles to the airport along country lanes clogged with mud and excrement left by a herd of cows being moved to a new field.

High winds battered and shoved the twin-engine converted reconnaissance plane across the North Sea as the temperature outside plummeted. Adrian rubbed his hands, more from nostalgia for the old days than from the cold. It was good to feel he was on a mission, even a mission he had little respect for, rather than sitting behind a desk. As they descended onto Helsinki’s military airfield, the snow was driving down hard, and he spotted the lights of the snowploughs at the end of the runway. An embassy car met him, and he sped away without formalities.

The meeting was to take place in a rooftop conference room at the Heikinen Hotel. The high windows in the long room framed a fine view of Helsinki’s marketplace and the twinkling lights of the waterfront beyond, through the driving snow. Distant sounds of splashing and shouts from a hot tub permeated the otherwise silent venue. A party of loud, naked Finns were disporting themselves, then rolling in the rooftop snow, exiting to a sauna, and finally coming back for more—all lubricated with several bottles of vodka.

The Russian, Sergei Limov, had refused to come to the British embassy, and Adrian had rejected the Russian offer of “hospitality,” for obvious reasons. The Heikinen conference room was hastily swept for bugs by both sides.

Now Adrian sat opposite the huge figure of Sergei Limov. The heavy-lipped, frowning multibillionaire owner of oil transportation and shipping companies was a trusted servant of Vladimir Putin from the old days, and KGB to the core. In the Soviet 1980s, Adrian recalled, Limov had been the chief Soviet trade representative in western Europe. But he had morphed since those days of Russia’s atrophied economic policies to become one of the world’s richest men, due partly to his own cunning, but mainly to his KGB and Mafia sponsors.

There were two bottles of Finnish mineral water and a bottle of Finnish vodka, neither of which they had touched so far, on the table.

Briefly, Adrian presented the case against Bykov and thrust a file of backup documents across the table, which Limov ignored and looked as if he planned to continue ignoring. Now Adrian waited for the ritual slap in the face, but his anger was directed more at Teddy Parkinson than at the Russians. The request itself, his own presence, and the cap-in-hand nature of British policy in general towards the Russians seemed designed to humiliate him.

“What have you got for us in return for Bykov?” Limov said at last, leaning back in the seat that was too small for him, and fiddling with the diamond-encrusted gold Rolex watch on his right wrist as if he had more important things to do. Adrian noted all this with growing fury.

So they wanted a trade. What did Limov—or Putin—want? Adrian wondered. Did they expect the Russian assets of British Petroleum to be handed over to the Kremlin on a plate? The Houses of bloody Parliament, perhaps?

“It’s not a deal, Sergei,” Adrian replied smoothly. “It’s a matter of international law. The one you’re signed up to. A Russian citizen has murdered a British citizen.”

“Ah, justice,” Limov said, as if it were something stuck to the sole of his shoe.

“Call it what you like,” Adrian said generously. “As I say, it’s a matter of international law. Either Russia obeys what it’s signed up for, or it doesn’t.”

He could see Limov blanch at the word obey , just as he’d intended.

Limov leaned across the table and picked up the bottle of vodka and two glasses with one huge hand. He poured Adrian a glass and then one for himself.

But Adrian withdrew a silver flask from the inside pocket of his silk suit and poured himself a nip of Scotch into the silver cup that served as a lid. He raised it towards Limov.

“You can’t be too careful these days,” he said, and drank it.

“What are we drinking to?” Limov said, as Adrian helped himself to another shot.

“Why don’t you choose, Sergei?” he said.

“To justice,” Limov replied, and roared with laughter. He drank the vodka in one gulp, placed the glass on the table as if making a winning chess move, and leaned in.

“What we want is Resnikov,” he said. “That’s the deal.”

So. That was the quid pro quo, Adrian thought. They wanted Finn’s woman, Colonel Anna, their beautiful but vanished KGB defector who had given the Russians, the British, and all the rest of them the slip.

“As far as I know,” Adrian said with icy calmness, “she hasn’t murdered anyone.”

“Worse. A lot worse,” Limov replied.

“So this is a refusal to give us Bykov to face a trial,” Adrian stated, and he realised that this was what he’d hoped for all along. He wanted Bykov dead, on his orders, not in court.

“We want her,” Limov replied simply, without being drawn into Adrian’s refusal scenario. “Then you can have your justice.”

“I’ll convey the Kremlin’s thoughts to London, in that case.”

“When we have the woman, we can give you Bykov,” the Russian said. “With pleasure,” he added.

In the car that drove him through the now softly falling snow back to the embassy where he was staying overnight, Adrian thought of two things. The first was that the Kremlin would happily give up a Hero of Russia in return for what they wanted. Their cynicism was boundless. It outstripped even his own.

But the second, unexpected piece of information was that the Russians didn’t have her. Colonel Anna was still free; she was still out there somewhere, an asset to be won by whoever got there first. And with her would surely come the main prize itself, the source he had been instructed to reinstate: code name Mikhail.

LOGAN HALLORAN IDLED ALONG the narrow pavement in the Marais district of Paris, glancing in the shop windows. Stopping in a shaded doorway, he noticed in the reflection that he had shaved. He didn’t shave regularly. He did nothing, in fact, with regularity. He was, it occurred to him, an “irregular” in every way and had always been, even when he’d had what people called a proper job.

At thirty-six years old, he’d been described as having a face with a “lived-in quality,” a little more than his age justified. But his reflection in the windows ironed out these details, showing an athletic, rangy figure, encased loosely in an old off-white linen suit. The reflection didn’t show his rich tan, or his intense deep blue eyes, or the faded scar on his forehead. Neither did it show his natural expression of amused interest in the world around him.

Logan checked his watch. He was early.

He looked into the shop with a kind of admiration that never decreased, no matter how many times he visited Paris. The French knew about commerce; small, specialised commerce, quality, not quantity. Finely complex chocolate sculptures seduced his eyes through the window of the chocolaterie . As he walked farther along, the rich smell of tobacco filled his nostrils from a tabac next door. There were foxhunting clothes on mannequins in the shop after that; its windows looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned since Louis XVI hunted the fields of Versailles.