Alex Dryden - Moscow Sting

“Really? How senior?” Logan said. He knew they were approaching their destination, and it tempted him to take a leap.

But just as Logan thought Plismy was about to unburden himself a little more, the taxi drew up at the kerb.

“Oh, yes, France is looking after herself,” Plismy said importantly. And as he opened the taxi door, he veered off the subject completely, possibly recalling an earlier motif. “And the damn Jews in London and New York deserve everything they get,” he said randomly.

Two and a half hours later, after Plismy had been sated by a bottle of 1986 Krug champagne and the “most beautiful eighteen-year-old philosophy student you ever saw,” Logan found himself in another taxi with the Frenchman, on the way to another bar.

“So,” the Frenchman breathed, heavily and too close to Logan’s face. “What have you got for me, Logan? What’s the meaning of our meeting?”

It had taken Plismy nearly five hours to reach this point. He really believed that Logan enjoyed his company, Logan realised. Just like all the others. But Logan saw too that the cunning in Plismy’s eyes, even through the hours of drinking, was still engaged.

“You may need to use some of these KGB defectors you have up your sleeve here, Thomas,” he said.

“Oh, yes? And why is that?”

Logan decided on telling the background from truth, and then adding the big lie under this camouflage to hook in Plismy.

“It’s from our station in Vienna,” he said.

He saw Plismy watching him avidly.

“As you know, the Russians have increased their operations there tenfold,” Logan said. “It’s back to Cold War levels.”

“It’s true, they’re trying to march across Europe again,” Plismy agreed. “Money is no object for them now.”

And now Logan embarked on the embroidered story he had prepared for the Frenchman.

“Last week,” Logan continued, “a man was abducted in Vienna, in the trunk of a car hired by a KGB sleeper who works in an Austrian bank. He was taken to the outskirts of the city, roughed up by a couple of KGB hoods, threatened with worse, and ordered to do a job for the Russians.”

“What job?” Plismy asked.

“To cause a run on one of your biggest banks,” Logan said. “To crash it, effectively.”

“So the man abducted is a banker.”

“Yes. A very influential foreign banker.”

Plismy whistled softly. “They haven’t abducted people like that since before Gorbachev came to power,” he said. “Since the early eighties.”

“Right. They’re turning to the attack.”

The taxi drew up at yet another bar, in the seedy district below the Sacré-Coeur. It was after one o’clock in the morning, and Plismy now needed a little help getting to his feet. Logan led the way into the bar and ordered a coffee to clear his head. Plismy had a cognac. They withdrew to the farthest table, though the bar was almost empty.

Plismy wasn’t going to ask which French bank, or which influential banker had been abducted, Logan noted. Not yet. He would know there was a trade involved.

As the time wore on towards one thirty and Plismy’s roaming conversation was broken up by numerous interruptions, it turned out that the French did have some very senior KGB officers on the run from Putin’s regime. There were two or three, perhaps, Logan guessed, correctly assessing Plismy’s propensity for exaggeration.

Plismy was talking about women in general—a subject he constantly returned to—and then about one woman in particular.

“You should see her!” the Frenchman said, apropos of nothing. “Every inch a Russian princess. They say Gosfilm in Moscow was always trying to get her into the movies. But she was already taken for greater things. KGB father, uncle inside the Kremlin. She trained at Yasenevo for the SVR, right in the heart of the Russian foreign intelligence operations. Department S. She’s a gold mine, believe me.”

“You didn’t get her into bed, did you?” Logan said with a fabricated leer.

“No, no. Not yet, anyway. She’s still grieving the loss of her husband. British. Very peculiar. One of our kind, he was, Logan. SIS. I’m hands-off with her for now. But who knows? One day maybe. One day when she needs a favour, she’ll have to come through me.”

“You mean her Brit husband walked off?” Logan said, feeling a heat rising inside him, an instinctive feeling that he was close to something very important.

“He didn’t walk off!” Plismy scoffed, as if he’d already told Logan all about the woman, a fact that Logan noted. “He was killed. Here in Paris. By the Russians, of course.” He leaned in at the small table by the window. “Nerve agent,” he muttered. “On the steering wheel of his car. All hushed up from the press, of course.”

“No wonder she needs protecting,” Logan said. “They must be after her too. She defected to you, to the French, did she?”

“The Russians are after her, and yes, she should be very grateful to us.”

“Why didn’t she go to the British?” Logan said.

“Because her husband had, let’s say, blotted his copybook with London. Gone out on his own. But we have her safe and sound, tucked up under our wing now. Not far from where I grew up, actually.”

Plismy was from Marseille.

“You won’t hide her from the KGB for long,” Logan said.

“Oh, but we will. It’s a very out-of-the-way spot in the garrigue . In the ‘Midi moins le quart .’ ”

The garrigue , Logan knew, was a local expression for the aromatic scrubland covering the limestone plateau on the far side of the Rhone from Marseille; people there jokingly called the area north of Nîmes and west of Avignon the Midi moins le quart .

“We should pay her a visit, by the sound of it,” Logan said. “She sounds fabulous.”

Plismy took on the look of exaggerated surprise that only a man who’s drunk too much can manage.

“To the village,” Logan prompted. “Where you have her.”

Logan saw Plismy putting up his guard. No matter how much Plismy drank, he had a line over which he never stepped.

It was another half hour before Logan could lead him back to where they’d been. It was a rambling story, with many discursions about the beauty of the Russian colonel. But finally there she was again, as if emerging from a mist; a KGB colonel, a woman. She was a figure “everybody wants,” according to Plismy. “You, the British, and, most of all of course, the Russians,” Plismy stated. The French had given her a new name, a new identity. She was very valuable, very key to something-or-other, which Plismy had been vague about and clearly didn’t know, Logan thought.

Then Plismy had dropped a name—Fougieres—before Logan saw him mentally retrace his steps.

“That’s her cover name,” Plismy said.

“You’ll have to kill me now you’ve told me that,” Logan joked, and Plismy forgot his reticence and laughed until tears poured down his cheeks.

Logan then deftly guided Plismy away from the subject of the Russian colonel, but the talking soon died off. It was the natural end to the evening. Plismy was exhausted from the effort of projecting his own importance and from the drink.

Logan helped him into a taxi and threw his briefcase in after him. He hadn’t even needed to follow up his lie about the French bank. Then he returned to the bar and ordered another coffee.

He sat and thought for a long time before returning to his hotel in the Marais. There he used the hotel’s computer to check for the first flight south to Nîmes in the morning—a Saturday. There was one leaving in just over five hours’ time.

Then he asked the night porter for an atlas of France, and one was finally found with an index of place names at the back. Logan drew his finger down the page until he found it. Fougieres. It was a place name, not a code name. Fougieres was a small village about an hour’s drive north of Nîmes.