Стелла Римингтон: The Moscow Sleepers

During that time Peggy had developed from a rather shy, scholarly young woman who hid behind her hair and her glasses. She had turned out to have considerable operational skills, particularly in extracting information from unsuspecting people. To Liz’s, and her own, surprise, she had become highly talented at role-playing and had successfully transformed herself into, among other things, a social worker, a census official and a debt collector. Liz felt a little like a proud mother hen as she watched and encouraged her junior’s development.

Recently, Peggy had suffered something of a blow, however, when Tim, her partner of several years and a lecturer in seventeenth-century English Literature, had go himself into trouble – by behaving like the spineless erratic geek Liz had always suspected he was. His behaviour had come as a shock to Peggy, who had seen only the gentle, scholarly side of Tim. The revelation of this other side had upset Peggy greatly and their relationship had broken up.

It was partly to take Peggy’s mind off all this that Liz had asked her to be the main contact point with Miles Brookhaven at the CIA Station in the US Embassy. But there was another reason too. When Miles had been posted to London several years earlier, he had asked Liz out, sent her flowers and behaved like a lovestruck teenager. Though Liz had been amused by Miles, she had found his romantic attentions entirely unwelcome; when she heard that Miles was returning as Head of Station she had tried to avoid a repeat of his failed courtship by appointing Peggy as liaison.

In fact, she needn’t have worried. The Miles who arrived in London this time round was a much more mature character. Liz found they could now meet as friends and colleagues without any embarrassment. Miles was still unmarried, however, and was undoubtedly attractive – something Liz noticed Peggy had recognised as well. Half of Liz hoped that Peggy would get over her breakup with Tim and start a relationship with Miles; the other half worried that an American CIA officer, however Anglophile, might not be the right choice for Peggy.

Liz was mulling over this when Peggy herself appeared in the doorway of her office. Her coat was soaking wet but her face was glowing.

‘Heavens, Peggy, you look chirpy for such a rotten day. How did you get on at Grosvenor?’

‘It was fascinating,’ said Peggy. ‘Do you mind if I just dump my coat for a minute? I need to check my emails, then I’ll come back and tell you.’

In a few minutes she was back. ‘Have a chair,’ said Liz. ‘And fill me in. I hope it’s good news.’

‘Well, I don’t know about good. But it’s certainly interesting.’ She told Liz what Al Costino had reported about the Swedish lecturer in Vermont and his mysterious visitor from Canada.

‘They seem pretty certain that the Petersen man who died was the Illegal that Mischa said was in America. Now the Bureau is pulling out all the stops to find out about his visitor. He called himself Ohlson.’

‘Another Swede.’

‘Yes. He claimed to be a childhood friend of Petersen. Anyway, Al Costino said his HQ in Washington asked if we and Six had any source that could help. Miles and I both thought of Mischa.’

‘Mischa?’ asked Liz thoughtfully. Her mind went back to the church in Tallinn last autumn. Mischa was a Russian army officer, a specialist in sophisticated weaponry who had taken a degree at Birmingham University. He had been in Ukraine with the Russian forces when a Malaysian passenger aircraft had been brought down by a Russian surface-to-air missile. Disgusted by this, and by the denials of any involvement immediately issued by the Kremlin, Mischa had made contact with the CIA’s Kiev Station through an American journalist who had been at the crash site. Mischa had rapidly become a paid source of the Kiev Station, providing information on Russian military activity in Ukraine. Then, out of the blue, he had asked to meet a more senior officer of the CIA, and Miles Brookhaven had gone to Ukraine from London to see him.

It was Mischa who had provided the first information about the Russian Illegals operations in Europe and the US. His source was his brother, a middle-ranking officer in the Russian intelligence service, FSB, who was working on the Illegals programme in Moscow and liked to boast about it when he was drunk. Mischa’s information, though tantalising, had not been sufficiently detailed to act on, and it was not until months later when he had resurfaced in Tallinn, asking to meet a contact from the British Special Services, that Liz had met him. She had gone out to Tallinn under the cover of a recently bereaved schoolteacher who had joined an academic-led tour group.

He’d provided her with enough information for MI5 to locate and the police subsequently to arrest two Russian Illegals working in Britain. After the excitement of the operation to round up the Illegals working in Britain was over, Liz had occasionally wondered whether there had been any repercussions for Mischa or his brother. There must have been an investigation in Moscow to try to find out how the Illegals had been discovered. She was curious whether Mischa’s brother had come under suspicion and if so whether the suspicion had spread to Mischa himself. Nothing further had been heard from Mischa, and no information had come from the MI6 Station in Moscow – not that she had heard anyway – though she knew they had made some effort to find out who Mischa’s brother was, as he sounded like a possible recruit.

‘Do the Americans have a way of contacting Mischa?’ she asked Peggy.

‘Miles is going to find out. He thinks the Kiev Station may have an emergency arrangement.’

‘It’d better be a secure one,’ replied Liz. ‘I would imagine the FSB grew very suspicious once we wrapped up two of their Illegals.’

‘Shall I set up a meeting with Six? They don’t know anything about the American Illegal yet and I said we’d inform them and ask if they have any useful sources.’

‘Yes, do,’ replied Liz. ‘And then we can see what they think about contacting Mischa.’

‘Contact Mischa?’ exclaimed Geoffrey Fane after Peggy had reported on the meeting with Miles and his FBI colleague at the American Embassy. ‘What on earth are the Americans thinking of? There’ll be a full-scale FSB enquiry going on in Moscow as we speak into how we got on to their people here. If the Americans want to land their man in prison, and his brother too, that’s the way to do it.’

They were sitting in Fane’s office on an upper floor of Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s London Headquarters. Liz always enjoyed a visit to Fane’s office, unchanged in all the years she had known him. Through all the structural changes in the Vauxhall Cross building in recent years to accommodate the explosion in manpower, Geoffrey Fane had somehow miraculously managed to hang on to this large room with its tall windows and river view.

He had also managed to acquire a large nineteenth-century wooden desk, a couple of button-back chairs and a leather Chesterfield sofa thrown out from the Foreign Office in some refurbishment programme years before. To these he had added an antique coffee table left to him by his grandmother and the Persian rugs, picked up for a song by clever bargaining, so he claimed, on his various posts in the Middle East. To Liz they epitomised Geoffrey Fane: elegant, discreetly flamboyant and out of date.

‘I think everyone agrees that it’s very risky,’ said Peggy mildly, ‘but it seems they have no other assets in a position to throw light on what’s going on in Vermont. They did want to know if you had any sources who could help.’

Fane looked at the fourth person in the room, his colleague Bruno Mackay, who merely shook his head. The behaviour of the two men struck Liz as distinctly odd. She had known Bruno Mackay for years; when they were both much younger he had been a thorn in her side. She had found him irritatingly self-satisfied, with his Savile Row suits, unruly straw-coloured hair and skin tanned from postings in exotic countries. But age and experience had rubbed the raw edges off both of them. Liz herself had recently suffered a personal tragedy, while it was rumoured that on a recent posting in Libya something very unpleasant had happened to Bruno. Whether it was as a result of their experiences or merely because they had grown older and kinder, both seemed to find it easier now to work together.