Gordon Stevens - Moscow USA

So what’s tonight all about, Jack old friend? What game are you playing and why?

Not Jack – he corrected himself. Jack Mikhailovich Kincaid, because in Russian everyone used the first name of their father as their own middle name.

Okay, Jack Mikhailovich, so what’s running?

He stepped on to the escalator, the descent reminding him of the metro stations at Dupont Circle or Bethesda, except in Washington the walls and ceilings were grey and concrete. He came to the bottom and stepped into a different world. Walked through the hallway connecting the various platforms and could have been walking through the Louvre or the Smithsonian or the Hermitage. The floor and walls and ceilings were marbled, marbled busts on plinths and marbled garlands in alcoves.

At the end of the platform a digital clock indicated how long ago the previous train had left and therefore, by deduction, how long the next would be. Even in mid-evening the platform was crowded. The train pulled in and the doors opened. Those waiting on the platform stood to each side, and those arriving poured off. The moment the last left the train those waiting streamed on. He found a seat and looked up and down the carriage at his fellow travellers.

So what’s this about, Jack Mikhailovich? Why take a cab, then the metro, and end up less than a thousand metres from where you started?

His observations over the next hour were footnotes to what had gone before. When he returned to the flat shortly before eleven the message from Riley was on a notepad.

Nik will pick you up at six. Session at range for six-thirty. You’re on the nine o’clock flight to London .

Gerasimov’s driver collected Jameson from his hotel at eight. Gerasimov was in the rear seat. He wore a dark blue suit and matching tie. In his left lapel he wore an Alpha pin. The driver cut across the inner ring road, skirted Red Square, and eased down the narrow tree-lined street three hundred yards from the Kremlin.

‘Brief me on who’ll be there tonight,’ Jameson requested.

Gerasimov briefed him.

‘Who’s important?’ Jameson asked.

‘They’re all important, but the man for the future is Malenkov. He was First Chief Directorate, now he’s a major-general in the SVR.’

The Omega driver eased to a halt on the right side of the street. They left the car and crossed to the building on the left. The house was three-storey, grey and anonymous, black door and no obvious security. As Gerasimov and Jameson crossed the road another car pulled in behind theirs.

The doorbell was on the left; before they had pressed it the black door opened and they stepped inside. The reception area was marbled, marbled stairs on the right leading to the floors above and a desk on the left, the monitors of the security cameras above it, one man at the console and another standing. They were escorted up the stairs, past the next floor, to the next. The double doors were wood and highly varnished, another set of stairs leading to the floor above. They went through the doors and into the flat.

The hallway was long, the walls a pleasant pastel, and the lounge was on the left. It was large, windows on to the street, and the furniture and decoration were art nouveau. The library was through a door in the far corner, the dining-room was on the other side of the hall – exquisite oval table, finest tableware, elegant chandelier above it and priceless Lalique glassware behind it. The first bedroom – as Jameson would be shown later – was on the same side as the dining-room: again art nouveau and twin beds. The bathroom, large and luxurious, was next to it, and the double bedroom – king-size art nouveau bed – was opposite the bathroom, on the same side as the lounge.

Half a dozen men were already in the room. Most were in their forties or early fifties, though two were older, all were wearing suits, and all were former or present generals in the KGB or its successors, the FSB, the internal security service, and the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service.

Jameson looked around. ‘Nice place.’

‘Marcus Wolfe used to use it when he was in town,’ Gerasimov told him.

Marcus Wolfe was the legendary East German spymaster.

‘What I would have given to have been here ten years ago,’ Jameson joked.

‘What we would have given to have had you here,’ Gerasimov joked back.

They accepted a Lagavulin and caviar and Gerasimov began the introductions, the conversations switching easily between English and Russian, and the handshakes and welcomes as if Jameson was a new friend rather than an old enemy.

There was a movement at the door from the corridor and Malenkov came in. He was six feet tall, late forties and slim; hair beginning to turn silver and hand-cut suit that made him look like a high-flyer in an American or European bank or blue-chip investment house. His eyes were sharp and blue, the antithesis of the West’s image of a KGB general.

‘General Sergei Malenkov, Grere Jameson …’ Gerasimov did the introductions.

‘Recognize you from your file,’ Jameson joked in perfect Russian.

‘And I recognize you from yours.’ Malenkov’s face was locked in a smile and his reply was in flawless English.

Sherenko rose at six.

The apartment was almost too big for him now. It had been small when Natasha and the girls had been there; the girls had had the bedroom, and he and his wife (when he was at home) a pull-down in the sitting-room. Their photos were still on the sideboard and the documents which chronicled their lives together lay in a folder in a drawer.

He made coffee, ate a small breakfast, then cleared the table, washed up, slipped on the shoulder holster and Sig Sauer, locked the flat and collected the BMW, checking underneath it before he opened it. Fifteen minutes later he turned into the street where the company apartment was situated. The street was almost empty: half a dozen slightly battered cars were parked along the sides, the pavements were dusty, and a dog was relieving itself against a tree. The only man in the street, leaning with his back against the wall as if he was waiting for a tram or trolleybus, was as grey and inconspicuous as the street itself. Sherenko stopped and Kincaid got in.

‘ Nu, chto vchera delal ?’ So what did you do last night?

‘ Nichevo osolennovo .’ Nothing in particular.

The building, when they reached it, was faded red brick and looked like a factory. Sherenko turned through an unlit archway, showed an ID at the security barrier, then drove into the courtyard beyond. Despite the hour there were other cars already there, plus two transits. The morning was quiet, as if the walls around them deadened any noise. Sherenko locked the BMW and led Kincaid through a door in the wall opposite the archway, then down a set of stone stairs to the range.