James Barrington - Overkill

The Babushka Restaurant just off Nikitskaja ulitsa was small and intimate, and a popular lunchtime venue for foreign diplomats and newsmen. Rigby was a regular there, and nodded to several acquaintances as he hung his overcoat on the end peg just inside the restaurant doorway. Rather than join any of the people he knew, Rigby selected a small table for two in the far corner. He sat with his back to the wall, facing the restaurant entrance, ordered his meal and then buried himself in a two-day-old copy of the Wall Street Journal .

Despite his apparent absorption in his paper, Rigby was paying close attention to the comings and goings at the restaurant, and particularly to the area near the coat rack. Ever since the last message from RAVEN he had been making himself even more visible than before, eating three meals a day in various Moscow restaurants, taking walks in Gorky Park, shopping in GUM or just wandering the Moscow streets. His duodenal ulcer had been complaining ever since this routine had started, and he was beginning to lose sleep as well.

As he ate the rather plain meal and drank the glass of milk that was all he could tolerate without reaching for his bottle of pills, Rigby wondered if Langley was right. Initially he had been instructed to make absolutely no attempt to identify RAVEN, for fear of alarming him, but since finding the message in his car, Langley had been frantic to get any indication of the identity of the disaffected Russian. Rigby had spent hours memorizing the faces of the most senior officers in the GRU and the SVR plus, where photographs existed, those of their principal assistants, friends and associates. That hadn’t helped identify RAVEN, although Rigby had detected certain liaisons of which CIA Moscow had not previously been aware.

At every meal, and every time he went out anywhere, Rigby had tried, as surreptitiously as possible, to be aware of anyone who approached him, his overcoat – which he invariably took off in every bar and restaurant he visited – or his car. To date, his vigilance had yielded absolutely nothing, because RAVEN had simply failed to make contact.

Rigby drank the last of his milk, and then went into the toilet at the back of the restaurant. When he returned to his table, he called for the bill, paid it, and collected his coat. He glanced carefully around the restaurant before he left, but paid no particular attention to the grey-haired man sitting alone at the far corner of the bar, head buried in his newspaper, which was perhaps unfortunate. The man’s face would have been almost as familiar to Rigby as his own, and if he had identified him, the CIA’s search for source RAVEN would have been over.

It wasn’t until he was outside in the street and walking away from the restaurant that his probing fingers detected the small cylindrical object in his overcoat pocket. Rigby returned immediately to the restaurant, and looked closely at everyone there, even checking the restroom. As he turned to leave for the second time, he noticed that the bar stool in the far corner was unoccupied, the newspaper and an empty glass sitting innocently on the bar top.

Kutuzovskij prospekt, Moscow

‘Hullo?’ Genady Arkenko said as he picked up the telephone.

The voice at the other end didn’t bother with introductions, just passed the message. ‘Phase Two has been truncated. Implement Option Two Alpha immediately.’

Genady Arkenko repeated the message and put down the telephone. Then he removed a single page from a large notepad and placed it on a piece of hardboard, which he had already confirmed would not register the impression of anything written on it, sat down and composed a short message in block capitals. He walked over to the radio, took a one-time pad from a locked drawer, sat down again at the table and encoded the message.

The radio set Dmitri Trushenko had provided included a squirt or burst transmitter – a device which allowed messages to be compressed to a fraction of their proper length, transmitted, and then recorded and expanded by the receiving equipment. Arkenko initialized the system, and input the encrypted message into the transmitter’s tape recorder using a Morse key. Then he re-recorded the message on to the second, high-speed tape deck. When he pressed the transmit key, the red ‘transmit’ light illuminated for less than a quarter of a second, barely time enough for any detection equipment to register the transmission, and nowhere near long enough for any kind of fix or triangulation to be obtained.

In the corner of the room, tucked behind a bookcase, was a small paper shredder. Arkenko took the page from the one-time pad, and the sheet of notepaper he had used to compose the message, and fed them both through the machine. Then he opened the shredder’s receptacle, removed the thin strips of paper, took them over to the fireplace and burned them. Finally, he used the master erase function on both the tape recorders in the radio installation to obliterate the two copies of the message he had sent.

Six minutes after he had received the telephone call, no trace of the message he had relayed could be found anywhere in the room. Genady Arkenko was a very careful man.

Cambridgeshire and London

In the XJ6 on the way back to London, Simpson sat silent most of the time, which Richter ascribed to perhaps one glass of wine too many at lunch – certainly he had tossed Richter the keys as they had made their way back to the car park. However, as the Jaguar approached the northern suburbs Simpson seemed to rouse himself. ‘Conclusions?’ he asked.

‘At the moment I haven’t got any,’ Richter replied, ‘but I think I’m beginning to see what’s going on. More importantly, I can understand why my CIA source was telling me that the problem had two components, and that I was looking at the wrong one.’

‘Go on,’ Simpson nodded.

‘Since we got involved with this, we’ve been looking for things on films. We looked at the hill on the KH–12 films, and at the hole where the hill used to be on the Blackbird footage. In fact, I think the hill’s irrelevant. What’s important is how the Russians destroyed it – that’s the second component of the problem, and that’s what my source was trying to tell me.’

Simpson mulled over this for a few minutes. ‘What are your intentions now?’ he asked.

‘Research. Shifting that much earth had to cause a bang, so the first thing I’m going to do is check the seismic records. Then I’m going to have to think about it.’

Simpson nodded. ‘Don’t think for too long. I’m getting a bad feeling about all this, and I think it’s time we started taking some action.’

Anton Kirov

The Anton Kirov had made good time. The transit through the Bosphorus had been completed by early afternoon and by 1500 local time the ship was crossing the Marmara Denizi, the short stretch of water between Istanbul and the Dardanelles. Captain Bondarev was sitting down to a late lunch in his cabin when Zavorin knocked briefly and entered. ‘Valeri,’ he said, ‘there has been a slight change of plan.’

‘Yes?’ Bondarev put down his fork and looked up.

Colonel Zavorin smiled. ‘Nothing too drastic. We have been ordered not to call at Piraeus. Moscow wants us to make best speed across the Aegean and the Mediterranean, and our first port of call will probably now be Tunis.’

Bondarev grunted. ‘Did our lords and masters say why?’

‘No, but I presume that our arrival time in Gibraltar has been brought forward.’

Bondarev grunted again. He wasn’t fond of Piraeus, but he was finding it increasingly irksome being a ship’s captain who was not allowed to take any decisions. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will make the signals.’