Christopher Reich - Rules of Vengeance

He’d never mentioned the baby, though surely he’d known. Six weeks along was hardly enough for it to show. Maybe he’d been waiting for her to ask. Or maybe he thought Kate didn’t know herself and hoped to save her further anguish. She never knew if it was a boy or a girl.

She touched the scar and felt a jab inside of her, sharp as a spear. Gasping, she caught her eye and stared at the frightened woman bent double in the mirror. Cry , she told the reflection. No one can see you. You’ve been strong. You don’t have to prove how tough you are. It’s time .

The pain went away. Kate stood up straight. Dry-eyed, she turned away from the mirror and wrapped the towel around her.

Someone was knocking at the back door .

Still in her towel, Kate hurried downstairs and ducked a head into the kitchen. She was surprised to find a tall, fair-skinned man in a dark suit standing there with his hands in his pockets, as if he belonged there. “I think your milk’s gone bad,” he said.

“Who the hell are you?”

“ Graves. Five. I apologize for letting myself in. I’d been knocking awhile, and I was afraid that your neighbors were getting curious.”

“Five” for MI5, the country’s national security and counterterrorism apparatus, better known as the Security Service. She should have known it by his posture. He looked as if he had a steel rod in place of a spine.

“What branch?”

“G Branch.” G Branch handled counterterrorism in all countries except Northern Ireland. Kate peered out the front window. The curb in front of her home was empty. “Where’s the blue Rover?” she asked on a hunch, remembering the car that had been parked inside police tape at 1 Park Lane yesterday morning.

“Parked it down the road. Think you might like to get dressed? They’re waiting for us at HQ. Traffic’s a bugger this time of day.”

Kate took a longer look at the man who’d let himself into her home. He was fortyish, tall and spare, with thick blond hair cut more casually than she would have expected. He wore a navy pinstripe, clearly Savile Row, with the requisite inch of cuff showing, and a striped necktie that hinted at service in some elite outfit or another. His black wingtips were of the sleekest order and polished to a paratrooper’s exacting standards. But it was his eyes that captured her attention. They were diamond blue and near holy in their intensity. They were the same eyes she’d seen yesterday evening gazing at her from the offices of Oxford Analytica.

“You have a first name, Mr. Graves?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Colonel.”

MI5 has its headquarters in Thames House , an imposing block-long building situated (as to be expected by the name) on the banks of the River Thames in the Millbank section of London, overlooking Lambeth Bridge. Graves ’s office was on the first floor, down the hall from the director. Kate, the born striver, was suitably impressed. It was a corner office, decorated with fashionable modern furniture. Picture windows offered a stunning view over the south side of the river.

“Sit down,” said Colonel Graves. “You know why you’re here. It’s about Robert Russell. Or, to be more accurate, what he was working on.”

“I was made to understand he didn’t work for the Security Service,” said Kate, taking her place on a low-slung fawn-colored sofa. A chrome-and-glass coffee table faced her. There was an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts alongside copies of various law enforcement journals.

“He didn’t,” replied Graves. “Not knowingly, at least. You spoke with Ian Cairncross. He told you about Russell’s interest in TINs-trusted information networks. You know… experts he’d assembled to gather information about this or that subject. Let’s just say that Lord Russell was a member of my TIN.”

“Looks like he was a member of quite a few.”

Graves nodded. “At the time of his death, Russell had pieced together information indicating that some sort of attack or plot was being planned on London soil. We’re viewing his murder as validation that he was correct. Accordingly, we’ve ramped things up a bit.”

“Why did you wait until now?”

“You mean why didn’t we bring in Russell earlier? It’s a question of resources, DCI Ford. At any time we’re keeping tabs on a few dozen plots in various stages of planning. It’s a matter of separating the chaff from the grain.” Graves reached into his jacket for a packet of Silk Cuts. “Smoke?”

Kate declined.

He lit one and exhaled gratefully. “I’m supposed to say something about the Official Secrets Act now. You know, ask you to swear not to divulge any information you may learn as part of this investigation. Word is that you’re a good egg. We don’t need to have you sign anything, do we?”

“Is this the part where you’re going to admit that Five was maintaining some kind of surveillance on Russell without a warrant?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m a policewoman,” said Kate. “Not a civil libertarian. I’m sure our interests mirror each other.”

“Good.” Graves picked up a remote control from the coffee table and aimed it at a flat monitor on the wall. It was a SMART Board, an interactive high-definition monitor hooked up to the office’s central computer network. The face of the tired, mousy housewife Kate had seen the previous morning in Russell’s flat appeared. All eyes focused on the screen as she spoke to Russell about Mischa, Victoria Bear, and the “hush-hush” meeting set to take place at 11:15 this morning-a little more than an hour from now.

“Know what it means?” asked Kate afterward.

“Not a clue. There are a hundred Mischas in the Russian embassy alone, and that’s not counting the scourge of them that have taken over the West End. A delegation from the Kremlin is visiting, but they’re in Whitehall today, holed up with the Navy. I think they’re safe for the moment.”

“That sounds rather hush-hush, doesn’t it?” asked Kate, quoting from the video message.

“Actually, it’s a matter of public record. No Mischas among them. Just a few Ivans, Vladimirs, and Yuris. Oh, and a Svetlana.”

“And Victoria Bear?”

“We’ve run the name through all our files and drawn a blank. Our boys in decoding are having a go at it as we speak.”

“Have you been able to draw a bead on the woman? Russell’s source? Frankly, I’m worried about her. If Russell was killed for what he knew, why not her?”

“We’re trying to locate her. It’s not so easy. The way our system functions is that we grab everything going into Russell’s in-box, as it were. That doesn’t mean we know where it came from. Tracing it back to its source is trickier. We brought you in to see if you’ve turned up anything in the course of your investigation that might shed some light on this.”

Kate suspected Graves knew more than he was letting on. She’d long heard that Five kept a roster of spies inside the Met. “Robert Russell was killed by a woman who gained entry to his flat from the basement and shimmied up an old laundry chute to a closet in his master bedroom. Once inside, she defeated the alarm system, knocked him unconscious with a bottle of frozen vodka, then threw him over the balcony to make it appear a suicide. It was our good luck that he landed facedown. Otherwise, we’d never have suspected a thing. It goes without saying that the woman is a professional. She knew her way around Russell’s flat, so we can assume she had access to building plans, including his home security system. It’s my guess that she was working as part of a team, and that her partner or partners were keeping tabs on Russell.”

Graves leaned forward, elbow on his knee. “How do you know it was a woman?”