Alex Dryden - Moscow Sting

ADRIAN CAREW GLARED THROUGH the rain-streaked window of a British intelligence pool Vauxhall Carlton as if the application of his undoubtedly impressive willpower could unsnarl the traffic. Cars were bumper to bumper going west out of London, and the weather was only making things worse.

His driver, Ray, with fifteen years of service and an almost Zen calm by comparison with his boss, half turned towards the rear seat.

“We’ll be through this in a minute or two, sir.” His words barely made their way through the noise of the rain drumming on the roof of the car.

With his usual expression of muscular irritation in place—teeth clamped, jaw muscles twitching—Adrian coldly addressed his reply to the side window.

“Never mind.”

At sixty-three years old, the former SAS hero, military intelligence wizard, and later chief of MI6 Moscow Station, had earlier in the day gleaned from one of his eyes and ears at Joint Intelligence that he had been elevated to the informal short list for the top position at MI6; Spymaster in Chief, the media called it.

He should be out celebrating, he thought, not trotting off abroad like some messenger boy—and to bloody Finland, of all places. But the Russians had insisted that they would see him, and him alone.

Dimly now through the fogged-up window, Adrian eyed the scene and piled on his choleric distaste for the mass of humanity that was getting in his way. As the car headed westwards, he noted the decline of London’s grandeur into ever greater human shabbiness with every mile they left the centre behind them. The city’s clean cut-stone heart at Whitehall degenerated, first to the redbrick postwar semis of Shepherd’s Bush and then on past the shades-of-grey plastic shop fronts at London’s ragged edges, whose bleakness and grime seemed to leach into the countryside.

Adrian came this way at weekends, but only after dark on a Friday night, when he was going down to the country house in Hampshire where his wife, Penny, now spent most of her time. During the week he remained in London, with its gentleman’s clubs for male ritual and his discreet mistress, Hazel from the Far Eastern Desk, for female diversion.

He wiped the window with the back of his hand. The sky was thick with angry black clouds. It would be a bumpy flight, he thought without concern, and a noisy one. The vintage RAF transport plane that had been press-ganged into giving him a last-minute lift on a routine flight to Helsinki was hardly five star.

Adrian listened to the swish of the steady, incessant rain turning to dirty brown spray under the car’s wheels. It was a downpour; the heavens were throwing it at the tarmac so hard the rain was bouncing up again. The wipers cleared gushing waterfalls of rain from the windscreen every few seconds. The violent weather had broken up what was otherwise a typically monotonous January afternoon.

“We’re going to be a few minutes late, I’m afraid, sir,” Ray informed him.

“They’ll wait,” Adrian snapped from the back seat.

The whole affair, this journey to Brize Norton’s military airport included, was suddenly reminding him of the days of the Cold War, and the thought briefly buoyed his spirits.

Short in stature, with a flop of slightly greasy brown hair over his forehead, Adrian possessed a stocky, muscular frame maintained through regular games of squash. His tried and trusted modus operandi, from his days in the jungles of Borneo to the present-day jungles of Whitehall, was to storm through the world sucking the air from everyone in his way. He was the embodiment of preemptive attack, one colleague had observed. Others offered their amateur psychological diagnosis that Adrian behaved as if the planet had done him some grievous disservice.

His physical deportment and mental attitude was one of pugnacious defensiveness. Under the good-life flab that now showed signs of mushrooming around his waist, his wired-up muscles were ready to spring, his fists regularly clenched, and the dark eyes in his livid red face rarely rested.

Adrian was never as meticulous about anything as he was in matters of revenge, and that was the purpose of his trip this evening.

It was revenge against a broken home that had driven him to excel in the military, some said, and revenge against his small stature that drove him to graduate from SAS headquarters at Hereford in the 1960s ahead of all his contemporaries. Others pointed to a sort of muddled revenge against the Establishment while all the time wanting to be deep inside it. This, they said, was what had propelled him upwards in MI6, now almost to the top. But it was a particular revenge that had brought him out of his lair today.

It had taken Adrian fourteen months just to get to this point, but at last here he was, at first base. He was now in possession of an identity; the identity of an assassin, with a name, address, phone number, and probably an inside length measurement, given the heightened efforts of the office researchers on this particular assignment.

For this assassin, a Russian hood by the name of Grigory Bykov, had terminated the life of one of the Secret Intelligence Service’s own officers; and one of a select few Adrian liked to call his “best boys.”

Diligent researchers on the third floor had gladly embraced overtime without pay. Finn had been family, popular too—even loved. Interdepartmental cooperation had been unusually fluid, and the focused urgency of revenge for Finn’s murder had driven everyone on, Adrian included, until the task was done.

Drip-fed leads from sources as diverse as a disaffected KGB officer in Azerbaijan, to the owner of a steam bath and brothel in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, had led conclusively to Grigory Bykov.

Finally the researchers had drawn up Bykov’s biography with meticulous care. In short, Bykov was a petty criminal and south Moscow mafioso, coached to KGB standards and then inducted into the Russian foreign intelligence service east of Moscow, known as the Forest. There they had primed him for this single murder. After all this expert training, Grigory Bykov had finally tracked down Finn in Paris, then killed him with a deadly nerve agent—type unknown—that he’d smeared on the steering wheel of Finn’s rental car.

That was the Russian side of things.

The British side was more complex. Finn had once been one of Adrian’s “best boys”—that was the truth of it. Adrian had recruited Finn personally at Cambridge, back in 1985, back in Gorbachev’s time. And no matter that Finn had turned his back on the Secret Intelligence Service in later years; Finn was still Adrian’s property, in death as well as in life. Nobody—Vladimir Putin included—was going to get away with ordering the death of one of Adrian’s best boys.

In his grey silk suit and expensive Oxford blue cashmere overcoat, both of which were courtesy of Penny’s private fortune rather than his SIS pay, Adrian might look like a toothless catwalk panther, but underneath it all the animal core was still the same one that had driven him through Far Eastern jungles forty years before, where he’d shot or cut the throats of Commie insurgents, and saved the world from Putin’s KGB predecessors.

Adrian began to stoke his own righteous anger now, in preparation for the meeting with Sergei Limov, Putin’s go-between for this evening. More than three days it had taken Finn to die, thanks to Bykov, in the trunk of a car somewhere in Germany, it was said, though Finn’s body had been delivered anonymously to the British embassy in Berlin.

There’d been a note attached to Finn’s body, laid out respectfully on the back seat of a Cherokee Jeep, which was abandoned outside the embassy. The note was addressed to Adrian personally. “You betrayed him in life,” it said. “Honour him in death.”