James Barrington - Overkill

Le Moulin au Pouchon , St Médard, near Manciet, Midi-Pyrénées, France

Unusually, there were three emails containing encrypted messages for Hassan Abbas to decode that afternoon. All from a German address, they had actually originated in Moscow, sent from Dmitri Trushenko’s spacious office at the Ministry. As a minister, Trushenko was entitled to a single unmonitored telephone line with international access. All the other office lines went through one or more switchboards where, Trushenko was quite certain, either or both the SVR and the GRU – and maybe even the CIA and SIS – had placed taps.

The secure line was checked for bugs daily, and he was certain it was safe. Early in his term at the Ministry, Trushenko had telephoned a trusted colleague and, with his agreement and – for the safety of both men – with witnesses present at both ends of the line, the two men had engaged in a pre-scripted conversation so blatantly traitorous that no monitoring organization could have failed to take immediate action. Nothing had happened. Nobody had kicked in his door in the early hours of the morning, or frog-marched him out of the Ministry to the cells at the Lubyanka. He had repeated the exercise a couple of times a year ever since then, with precisely the same absence of results.

The line was intended to allow ministers to converse frankly with colleagues without fear of being overheard and subsequently forced to listen to taped statements that they should never have made. Trushenko used the line sparingly for telephone calls, partly because he was supremely conscious of the security implications of the operation in which he was involved, but mainly because he was essentially a loner and not much given to chatting with colleagues.

However, virtually every day he connected his laptop to the telephone socket next to his desk, because that enabled him to send and receive email messages with as much security as was possible in Moscow. And with Podstava now approaching its final stages, close liaison with the ragheads, as Trushenko dismissively termed them, was essential.

The first two emails Abbas decoded were simple enough. One confirmed that the last device – the London weapon – was as good as finished and would be ready to leave the factory in Russia the following evening. The second advised him that the route of the small freighter carrying the demonstration device had been changed so that the ship would arrive in Gibraltar earlier than had originally been planned. Abbas read them, opened a spreadsheet on his computer and input the dates and times. Then he spent some time composing and encrypting an email for Sadoun Khamil which relayed the same information to him.

It would have been easy enough for Dmitri Trushenko to have sent copies of his emails simultaneously to Khamil, but from the start the leaders of al-Qaeda had insisted that the liaison with the Russians would be handled solely by Hassan Abbas, to avoid any possibility of compromising any other members of the organization.

The third email was the most interesting, and Abbas read it several times before composing his message to Khamil. Trushenko had couched his information in guarded terms, but his analysis of the implications of the over-flight by the American spy-plane was thorough. When he’d received the first brief message which simply stated that an over-flight had taken place, it had been immediately obvious to Abbas, as it had been to Trushenko, that some kind of a leak must have occurred. Trushenko’s considered opinion now was that this leak was an irritant, nothing more, because the operation was so nearly complete, with only two weapons still left to be positioned, and after some thought Abbas was inclined to agree.

In fact, from the point of view of al-Qaeda, everything they required was already in place, so whether the London weapon was successfully delivered or not made little or no difference to them.

Hammersmith, London

When Richter got back to the office, he jotted down some dates on a piece of paper. Then he called the Registry and requested the Seismic Activity file and the Moscow Station activity files.

When they arrived, Richter went back through each for two months, and read all the subsequent reports. Then he checked the dates he had noted against one of the seismic reports, and then he knew why the Blackbird had flown, and why it had been so important for the Americans to take pictures of a hill that wasn’t there any more. The only things Richter didn’t know were how the Russians had done it, and what their next move was likely to be. The answer to the first question he might be able to find out by research, but the second Richter could only guess at. And his guess frightened him.

Richter made a long telephone call to a contact at the Ministry of Defence, then he called Simpson on the direct line and told him he was coming up.

Office of the Director of Operations (Clandestine Services), Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Clifford Masters, Director of the CIA’s Intelligence Division, knocked and walked into the office. ‘We’ve heard from RAVEN again,’ he began without preamble.

Hicks looked interested. ‘About time. The same transmission method?’

‘Yes,’ Masters replied. ‘And again it wasn’t a film, just a short note in a film canister. It was passed to John Rigby in a Moscow restaurant at lunchtime today, in broad daylight.’

‘Did he see who delivered it?’ Hicks asked.

‘No,’ Masters shook his head. ‘As usual, Rigby hung up his overcoat when he arrived, and tried to identify anyone who went anywhere near it. He saw no known opposition personnel in the restaurant, and only left the table to go to the john – he says he was away for less than five minutes – but when he left the restaurant he found the film canister in his overcoat pocket. He went straight back inside, but saw nobody he recognized.’

‘Well,’ Hicks said. ‘At least we know that RAVEN is still alive and operational, which has to be good news. What was the message?’

Masters opened the file he was carrying and extracted a sheet of paper. ‘We’ve had the Russian translated, and double-checked. Like all of RAVEN’s messages it’s very brief and cryptic. It contains a single word and two short sentences. The single word is Pripiska .’

Hicks looked blank, and Masters nodded. ‘Yes, this puzzled our analysts as well. It’s actually a slang term dating back to the bad old days of the collective farms and Ten-Year Plans. It means the falsification of records and other documentation to do with agricultural and industrial production. In those days, cooking the books was about the only way the farms and factories could meet the targets and quotas specified by Moscow.’

‘And the sentences?’

Masters looked at Hicks before replying. ‘They translate as “Last component enters west on 9th. Implementation date 11th.” And that,’ he added, ‘is exactly seven days away.’

Hammersmith, London

‘I think I’ve worked it out,’ Richter said.

Simpson nodded encouragingly and looked at his watch. ‘Make it snappy. There’s an extraordinary meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee in under an hour, which means I’ve got to leave here in exactly twenty minutes.’

‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘I’ll give you the short version.’ Simpson motioned him to a seat. Since the beginning of the investigation, their relationship had improved considerably. Richter still couldn’t say that he actually liked the man because he didn’t, but at least they weren’t sniping at each other quite as much as before. ‘Why,’ Richter asked, as he sat down, ‘is there an extraordinary meeting of the JIC? And why so late in the day?’ Richter had checked his watch, and it was already nearly five.