Assassin (John Stratton) (14 page)

He went to the door as he put on his watch and placed the coins in his pocket. He paused to look back at her, to say goodbye. He decided to say nothing. He walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Thirty-seven minutes after leaving the Chesterfield, Stratton walked along a tunnel and in through the underground entrance to the MI6 headquarters on the River Thames. He was processed through several standard layers of identification recognition and detection systems and made his way up a flight of stairs. At the end of a broad, brightly lit corridor, he arrived at a communal data reception and research room.

He swiped his ID card through the scanner. Two suited men were talking to each other further along the corridor. One of them was tall, balding and athletic. He glanced in Stratton’s direction. The security lock beeped and Stratton pushed his way inside. He was feeling a tinge of paranoia already. Not good. He needed to bring that under control.

The room was filled with all kinds of electronic data-processing systems. There were half a dozen cubicles around the room. Each contained a computer terminal for private use. About half of them were occupied. Stratton walked to one at the back and sat down in front of a monitor. He swiped his ID card.

The machine took a moment to identify him. A log-in
window appeared. He filled in his name and pass-code. An elaborate MI6 homepage appeared seconds later. Stratton stared at the search window, thinking. Keenly aware that he needed to be cautious with his key strokes. He didn’t want to throw up any red flags to the system monitors, which analysed every word typed and every document opened. He needed to be careful of names too. But also key words, phrases and combinations of searches. He needed to disguise any queries. But the system also flagged anomalies like individuals who rarely used it suddenly asking a lot of questions. And Stratton wasn’t a big user.

He typed in
NSA PERSONNEL, SENIOR REPORTING
, <2000. After a few seconds he had a list. Just going back a little over ten years, he had come up with several thousand names. Almost all of them were hyperlinked. He scrolled down the list and quickly saw the name Betregard, in blue underlined. He didn’t pause on the page for long and carried on to the end. He knew he couldn’t simply click on the link. Although dozens of searches were probably made every month on any one of the names, Stratton couldn’t afford to have a single, direct search of Betregard associated with him.

He decided to go down the list of names, checking the link to every one of them. Each opened a pop-up window with an official photograph of the individual, some history and current responsibilities. For more information there were further links.

When he got to Betregard’s name, the picture that appeared looked recent. He took the photograph from his
pocket that Bullfrog had given him and compared it to the one on the screen. It looked very much like the same person.

The information on Betregard was superficial. He had worked for the National Security Agency for thirty years, beginning as an analyst, and he had moved around a lot, but the biography stated that he had retired two years previously. Betregard’s page had no drill-down links. That was it. Stratton closed the window and laboriously went through a dozen more NSA personnel, trying to give the impression of only a general interest in the organisation’s past members.

Then he went back to the search window and typed
KGB PERSONNEL, SENIOR REPORTING
, <1985. He got an even longer list this time, pages and pages. But he couldn’t find Gatovik anywhere. He clicked on a suggested link to the Politburo, narrowing his search to the years either side of the fall of the Berlin wall. A list of two dozen names appeared.
GATOVIK
was about halfway down.

As before, he went through the list in alphabetical order, maintaining a linear search pattern, as though browsing. When he clicked on the link to Gatovik, a picture window came up. There were several images, covering the man’s military career from his mid-twenties to his last official post. There was a reference to Afghanistan. He’d spent five years there as observer for Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, reporting directly to Sergey Akhromeyev, deputy general of the Army. He’d put on weight since then but in all the photos he had a similar hardline expression. The last, most recent photograph matched the one in Stratton’s hand.

Stratton exited the link and, as before, waded through a dozen more names before closing the site. He sat back, unsure exactly what he had been looking for beyond verifying these people were who Bullfrog said they were. It was too dangerous to dig any deeper. He was already playing with fire. But a red flag of his own had flipped up on his way to MI6. Something that had come out of the Bullfrog meeting that hadn’t registered while he was at the hotel. Bullfrog had mentioned an Afghan commander. The one responsible for delivering the arming codes for the nuclear device. Kalil something or other.

Rohami. That was it. He began to type in the name and then suddenly stopped himself. A sense of danger welled in him as he realised what he was about to do. The letters kalil ro were in the search window, the cursor blinking, waiting for him to type in the rest. He back-spaced out of it, leaving the search window blank.

But he couldn’t leave it alone. He had to check. There was something about the name, something about what Bullfrog had said about the codes. A recent operation. He typed in
OPERATION LUSTRE
and the Lustre file presented itself. Stratton paused before opening it. It wouldn’t be considered odd for him to look at the operations file, since he had been one of the team leaders. He clicked on it and scrolled down the file contents. He found an annexe labelled
AFGHAN PERSONNEL DETAINED & KIA
.

He opened it. As expected, there were no names in the detained column. There were several dozen under the
KILLED IN ACTION
column, though. Someone must have compiled the list after the event because no one from the assault party had remained or had enough time to search the dead. He scrolled down the list to
KALIL ROHAMI
. He felt a tinge of excitement on seeing the name. It was a connection Bullfrog didn’t know about. Kalil’s rank was listed as
COMMANDER
. There was no photograph or link to one or any other information on Rohami.

Stratton sat back and let his mind roll through the events at the hamlet. The documents he found. Had the dead man beside them been Rohami? Were the papers the ones Rohami was supposed to deliver to Bagram? To General Mahuba? Were the numbers he saw the arming codes?

Stratton wanted to do a search on Jeff Wheeland to check his links to the NSA. That would go a long way to help corroborate Bullfrog’s version of events – but if it did, the red flags in the system would fly like starlings. He couldn’t take the risk – he’d keep that one to himself, for now. He closed the page. If Betregard had gone for the arming codes, that suggested he wasn’t going to sit back and let Mahuba detonate the device. In fact by capturing the codes, Betregard had prevented Mahuba from detonating it.

But the codes were just paper. They could be reproduced. He had to assume that Mahuba could get a copy. So maybe it was a delaying tactic. Which put Stratton back at the beginning, more or less.

He didn’t want to be in the building any more. It was making him feel uncomfortable. He got to his feet and headed for the door. He stepped into the corridor, glad
that it was empty, and walked to the stairs and down to the exit level. As he reached the exit doors he had a sudden thought and slowed to think things through once more before he entered the tunnel.

He needed better information about Betregard. And whatever the man’s intentions were, someone had to find the bomb before duplicate arming codes could be delivered to Mahuba. He also needed to establish a link between Betregard and Wheeland. He wondered if Betregard knew precisely where the bomb was. If not, he would need to locate it. Finding it would mean one of two distinct kinds of operation: a full-scale search, utilising thousands of soldiers, or a clandestine one by specialist personnel. The former would be more effective. But the sudden numbers of men in the town would alert Mahuba and he might have a counter move. A clandestine search would be slow but its secrecy could be maintained. If Betregard was looking for the bomb, Stratton expected him to use the latter plan.

Stratton just couldn’t come up with a plausible reason why Betregard and Gatovik weren’t coming clean to their own governments about the bomb. Why didn’t they want anyone else involved? What was the reason behind the secrecy? Unless of course Bullfrog was right and they wanted to start World War Three proper. If that was true, then why deny Mahuba the arming codes? An atomic bomb wasn’t exactly subtle. And the reason for the plot would be equally blunt once it was uncovered. He just needed to find the missing clues.

He decided to go to Bagram. There was nothing more
for it. He couldn’t walk away. The journey would give him time to think it all through until he’d exhausted every possibility. He could always change his mind at any time and pull out. At least with the arming codes captured, the chances of the bomb going off when he was there were slim. It wouldn’t be easy to come up with duplicate codes. He felt better about that at least.

But the fact was that as soon as he arrived at the base he’d be in range of a nuclear bomb blast – there was nothing attractive about that at all.

Stratton adjusted the collar of his leather jacket against the wind as he drove his Jeep north along the A11. The headlights illuminated the highway ahead and a dozen or so other vehicles in front of him. At a roundabout at the end of the dual carriageway, he took the exit signposted ‘Mildenhall’, towards the huge American air base.

Purely out of habit, he clocked the headlights of the cars behind as he headed away from the roundabout. One of them took the same turn. Not that there was anything odd about that. It was a popular route. But with a mile to go, the vehicle was still behind him. Stratton didn’t feel anything in it but he increased his speed a little, out of mild curiosity. The car matched his speed. When he slowed down, the car maintained the same distance. That was more than enough to ping his senses.

He took a right down a country lane and the car followed. The narrow lane was otherwise empty. He felt certain it was following him, but there was something odd about it. It was way too obvious. He took another turn. The car followed. He grew irritated. Why were they being so nonchalant about it? He accelerated and the car did the same.

Sod this, he thought, and pulled a handbrake turn, coming to a screeching halt, the Jeep’s headlights blinding the occupants of the car as it stopped abruptly only metres away. Stratton wasn’t armed and quickly climbed out of the Jeep and stepped back and to one side, pretty sure whoever it was wouldn’t be able to see him. The Jeep would be the target and therefore he couldn’t afford to be in it. He waited. If a gun went off, he’d run. No point fighting a one-sided fight.

The car was black and looked new. It was a Lexus sedan. All of its lights went out, except the interior, which came on as the driver’s door opened. A figure began to climb out.

Stratton selected his escape route: to his right, over a fence and into a wood.

The figure stood upright and stepped from behind the open door. It was a woman. She stepped fully into his Jeep’s headlights and he saw that it was Bullfrog. He turned off the engine and killed all the lights, plunging the lane into darkness, except for the glow inside Bullfrog’s Lexus.

‘You followed me from the hotel?’ he asked as he walked over. ‘Why didn’t you just call me?’ He held up his mobile phone.

‘From your apartment and from MI6,’ she said. ‘Don’t feel so bad you didn’t see me before I wanted you to. I’ve been doing it a long time. And I wanted to speak with you in person. Mildenhall makes perfect sense. I take it you have friends in the Navy SEALs.’

‘What makes you think I’m going to Afghanistan?’

‘Berry thought you’d do it,’ she said, ignoring his pathetic attempt to try and get her to doubt it. ‘I needed to know. If you weren’t going to go, I’d have a real problem. I might have to do something desperate.’

‘If you know where I’m going, what are you doing here?’

‘There’s something else you should know. Have you ever heard of an “integer” – as in related to our business?’

‘Integer?’ he repeated, shaking his head.

‘I didn’t think so. They’re known only to those who operate directly behind the mantles of power. Your Prime Minister or the President of the United States may never have heard of them either.’

Stratton had no idea what she was going on about and elected to shut up and wait to hear the point of it.

‘The integers were apparently formed in the 1920s,’ she said. ‘Between the World Wars. They have diplomatic immunity and they are state-sponsored. They originally worked for the UK, Germany and France, and the USA and Russia, as clandestine diplomats. The integer was created to act as an unbiased middleman, their task to assist in the unsavoury chores of high diplomacy. They belong to no single country. No allegiances. They are incorruptible and unbending in their tasks. They are not arbitrators either. They have no voice. And, most importantly, they have no conscience. They do what they are asked without question. If the American President wanted to send a private message to a North Korean general for instance, but didn’t know how to contact him without exposing his own intelligence or spy network, certain
persons in the intelligence services who are able to would summon an integer.

‘I first came across them by accident in Norway a year after the wall came down,’ she said. ‘I escorted a man to a remote Norwegian fjord, where I dropped him off, as ordered. I worked out later by piecing together intelligence reports that he’d gone to meet a Ukrainian-born defector from a Russian submarine somewhere in that fjord. I was on standby to pick him up, but the call never came, so I contacted my handler for the operation and he simply said, “Never question an integer.” It was a slip of the tongue. I never saw the man again after I dropped him off but the defector was turned back. The integer had succeeded.