Ryan, Chris - Zero 22

‘We don’t need to worry about getting her out of the country, of course,’ Sturrock said. His self-satisfied smile had returned.

‘What’s the timescale?’ Danny said.

‘O’Brien is already in Amman,’ said the CO. ‘The drop happens tonight.’

‘Where’s Bethany now?’

‘On her way to Brize Norton,’ said Sturrock. ‘By all accounts, she’s making rather a nuisance of herself.’

‘No shit,’ Danny muttered.

‘A van’s waiting for you,’ the CO said. ‘Check out anything you need from the armoury.’ He pushed a folder of documents across the table. ‘That’s your target pack. It has your movement orders, details of the location of the hotel in Amman where the General’s staying, everything you need to know. The rest is up to you.’

Danny nodded, stood and left the room.

The door clicked shut. Sturrock, Attwood and Williamson remained silent for a full minute.

‘Can he be trusted?’ Sturrock said finally.

‘You asked us that once before,’ Attwood said. ‘I think it’s safe to say that Danny Black has proved himself.’

‘Frankly, Sturrock, I’m surprised he sat in the same room as you for so long,’ said the CO. Another long pause. ‘We should have told him that Bethany White’s little boy is dead.’

Both Attwood and Sturrock shook their heads. A rare moment of solidarity between them. ‘The boy’s the only leverage we have over White,’ said Sturrock. ‘If she finds out he’s dead, we have nothing over her.’ He coughed. ‘It’s all very tragic, of course,’ he added.

‘He’s right, Mike,’ said Attwood. ‘We can’t risk Black letting it slip.’

‘Danny Black’s a professional,’ said the CO.

‘Agreed,’ said Attwood. ‘But he’s also a decent guy beneath it all. Not always an advantage, in situations like this.’

Nobody had anything to say to that. The three men collected their papers and left the room.

FOUR

London, 10.00 hrs, GMT

Alice Goodenough was married to her job. All her friends said so. But they didn’t know what her job was.

They thought they did. Something boring and desk-bound in the civil service that kept her in the office way past six o’clock. It was a big joke that she was always too late to get a round in. As long as she smiled and joined in on the joke, nobody asked what had kept her.

Alice was twenty-nine. They’d recruited her at a university careers fair. She thought her degree in Russian Language and Literature might lead her into the Foreign Office, so had chatted with a bookish civil servant. No, he had assured her. Being a woman of colour would not impede her application in any way. He encouraged her to put her name and email address down on a clipboard list. She received an invitation to come in for an ‘informal chat’ the next day. It took place in a bland office near Victoria Station. One chat led to another, and another. Gradually it became clear to Alice that she was being recruited into something more interesting than the civil service.

Alice accepted the need for secrecy. In the seven years she had worked at the MI6 building in Vauxhall, she never told her friends or even her widowed mother, who lived in a council flat in Peckham, what she really did for a living. She sometimes wondered what would happen if she found herself in a serious relationship. Would she be able to keep the secret then? That was academic anyway. Yes, Alice Goodenough was truly married to her job.

And she was good at it. Very good. She had an enquiring mind and an eye for detail. It could make her unpopular. Hers was not a workplace where young black women from poor backgrounds were expected, or even intended, to thrive. She endured all the usual slurs, racist and sexist. The pale, male and stale contingent – the PMS, as she liked to think of them – routinely raised their eyebrows at her south London accent. As for the coloured strands in her braided hair, her elaborately painted nails and the tiny stud in her nose: Alice stood out in the offices of MI6. People stared and talked behind her back. She ignored all this as best she could, and concentrated on her work.

Right now, her work involved research into an FSB agent called Dmitri Poliakov.

The assignment came from the top. Alice could practically hear the muttering from the PMS contingent when she was summoned to the fifth floor to see the head of the Russian desk, Maxwell Stark. Stark was a powerful guy, second only to the Chief, the odious Sturrock. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at him. He was a tubby old-timer in his late sixties with eyebrows so bushy Alice wanted to reach for the tweezers every time she saw him. He wore thick-rimmed spectacles that often looked as though they needed a good clean. And he had a helpless addiction to extra strong mints. The tang of peppermint accompanied him at all times, and his teeth were shocking. Stark was a mild-mannered old boy, though. He wielded his authority lightly and treated Alice with respect. He clearly saw something in her. He asked her opinion on important matters when he didn’t need to and listened carefully to her replies. If he was male and pale, perhaps he wasn’t quite so stale as some of the others.

The brief was concise. ‘We’ll be needing every last bit of intel you can find on an FSB agent called Dmitri Poliakov, especially in respect to any contact he may have had with the American General Frank O’Brien. We think O’Brien’s dirty. Would you be okay with that, Alice? That’s very good of you. Needless to say, we can’t allow this to go any further.’

Alice fully understood. A five-star general on the Russian books? In her world, that was as big as it could be. The need for secrecy was obvious. Equally obvious was that putting Alice on the job was a vote of confidence in her abilities. If she worked this case well, there might be a promotion. That, she thought, would silence the PMS contingent for good.

Stark briefed her more fully about the reasons for this research. She learned about a disastrous SAS mission in north-eastern Syria. Thirteen men dead at the hands of a Russian paramilitary force. He showed her the transcript of a recording made by the CIA in Crete between O’Brien and Poliakov that incriminated the American general. And she knew not to ask too many questions when Stark said, ‘The O’Brien situation is being dealt with.’ His statement had an air of impropriety about it, and Alice was smart enough not to probe further. Her job was to do some digging on Poliakov. Nothing more.

Alice had a small office – more of a cupboard, really – on the fourth floor overlooking the train line into Waterloo. River views were not for people like her. It was neat and adequate for her needs. She sat at her desk. To one side was a laptop displaying a screensaver image of a Caribbean beach. She had a file open in front of her, fresh from the records office in the basement. Her index finger guided her eyes down the page as she read. She felt she had a good idea of who Poliakov was already.

Born 3 September 1970. Father: an intelligence analyst for the KGB. Mother: no job listed. Married to Alexa, a florist in Moscow, with two children, one boy, one girl, Ivan and Sophia. Poliakov had been a known field operative for at least fifteen years and likely been working for Russian Intelligence for much longer than that. He’d been active, so far as MI6 knew, in Georgia, Ukraine and South America. Alice studied a picture of him meeting with a contact in a Bogota cafe in 1998. He was a handsome man, or at least he had been then. Short black hair, an aquiline nose, a mole on his left cheek, heavy stubble and – according to this photo at least – a charming smile. Charm was the most important attribute in an intelligence officer working in the field. You couldn’t learn it. Charm was either there or it wasn’t. Alice continued to look through the file. Here was Poliakov in Rio de Janeiro. Here he was in Tbilisi. Here he was with his wife and kids waving at the camera under the Eiffel Tower.