The English Spy (32 page)

A
T THE
M
ARKS
& S
PENCER
in Bristol, Quinn and Katerina purchased two pairs of hiking boots, two rucksacks, binoculars, walking sticks, and a guidebook for Devon and Cornwall. They loaded the bags into the back of the Renault and drove westward to the Cornish town of Helston. Its neighbor was the Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose, Europe’s largest helicopter base. Quinn felt his chest tighten as he drove along the station’s tall chain-link fence topped with swirls of concertina wire. Then a Sea King floated over the road and he was suddenly back in the Bandit Country of South Armagh. His war was over, he told himself. Today his war was here.

Three miles south of the airfield lay the village of Mullion. Quinn followed the signs to the Old Inn and found a car park directly across the lane, next to the Atlantic Forge beach shop. They pulled on the
hiking boots and the oilskin coats; then Quinn stuffed the map, guidebook, and binoculars into the canvas rucksack. He left the bag of weapons in the car and carried only the Makarov. Katerina was unarmed.

“What’s our cover story?” she asked as she finished dressing.

“Holidaymakers.”

“In winter?”

“I’ve always been fond of sea resorts in winter.”

“Where are we staying?”

“Your choice.”

“How about the Godolphin Arms in Marazion?”

Quinn smiled. “You’re very good, you know.”

“Better than you.”

“Can you pull off a British accent?”

She hesitated, then said, “Yes, I think I can.”

“You’re a banker from London. And I’m your Panamanian boyfriend.”

“Lucky me.”

They set out from the village along the Poldhu Road, Quinn at the edge of the asphalt, Katerina safely in the verge. After a half mile, a break appeared in the hedgerow and a small sign pointed them toward a public pathway. They negotiated a cattle grid and crossed a farmer’s field to the South West Coast Path. They followed it north along the cliff tops to Poldhu Beach, then along the edge of Mullion Golf Club to the ancient church of St. Winwaloe. After paying a brief visit to the church for the sake of their cover, they continued north to Gunwalloe Cove. The cottage stood alone atop the cliffs at the southern end, nestled in a natural garden of thrift and fescue. Two cars were parked in the drive.

“That’s it,” said Quinn.

He dropped the rucksack, removed the binoculars, and swept the
cliff tops, as though admiring the view. Then he took direct aim at the cottage. One of the cars was unoccupied, but in the other sat two men. Quinn scanned the windows of the cottage. The shades were tightly drawn.

“We have company,” said Katerina.

“I see him,” said Quinn, lowering the binoculars.

“What do we do?”

“We walk.”

Quinn returned the binoculars to the rucksack and the rucksack to his shoulder. Then he and Katerina set off again in the same direction. A hundred yards ahead, a man was walking toward them along the cliff tops. He was no ordinary hiker, thought Quinn. Disciplined movements, light on his feet, a gun beneath his dark blue windcheater. He was ex-military, perhaps even ex-SAS. Quinn felt the Makarov pistol pressing against the base of his spine. He wished it were more readily available, but it was too late to make a change now.

“Start talking,” murmured Quinn.

“About what?”

“About how much fun you had with Bill and Mary last weekend and how you wish you could afford a place in the countryside. Maybe a little cottage in the Cotswolds.”

“I hate the Cotswolds.”

Nevertheless, Katerina spoke with passionate enthusiasm about Bill and Mary and their farm near Chipping Campden. And how Bill became flirty when he drank and how Mary was secretly besotted with Thomas, a good-looking colleague from the office whom Katerina always thought was gay. It was then that the ex-soldier came upon them. Quinn fell in behind Katerina to give the man room to pass. She slowed long enough to wish him a pleasant morning, but Quinn kept his eyes on the ground and said nothing.

“Did you see the way he was looking at us?” asked Katerina when they were alone again.

“Keep walking,” said Quinn. “And whatever you do, don’t look over your shoulder.”

The cottage was now directly ahead of them. The coastal path ran behind it, along the edge of a green field. A slight differential in elevation allowed Quinn to peer innocently over a protective hedge and glimpse the faces of the two men sitting in the parked car. Katerina was speaking rather judgmentally about Mary, and Quinn was nodding slowly, as though he found her remarks unusually perceptive. Then, approximately fifty yards past the cottage, he stopped at the cliff’s edge and gazed down into the cove. A man was casting a line into the heavy surf. Behind him a woman walked along a stretch of golden sand, trailed by another man whose windcheater was the same color as the one worn by the ex-soldier on the cliffs. The woman was walking away from them, slowly, aimlessly, like a prisoner taking her allotted exercise in the yard. Quinn waited until she turned before lifting the binoculars to his eyes. Then he offered them to Katerina.

“I don’t need them,” she said.

“Is that her?”

Katerina stared at the woman walking toward her along the water’s edge.

“Yes,” she answered finally. “It’s her.”

I
N THE MINUTES FOLLOWING
the suicide of Arthur Grimes, Graham Seymour once again appealed to Jonathan Lancaster to cancel his visit to Guy’s Hospital. The prime minister held firm, though he did agree to add two men to his security detail. Two men who shared his opinion that revenge could be good for the soul. Two men who wanted Eamon Quinn dead. The head of SO1, the division of the Metropolitan Police that protects the prime minister and his family, was predictably appalled by the notion of adding two outsiders to his detail, one an officer of a foreign intelligence service, the other a man of violence with a dubious past. Nevertheless, he gave them radios and credentials that would open any door at the hospital. He also gave each a Glock 17 9mm pistol. It was a breach of every known protection protocol, but one that had been ordered by the prime minister himself.

There wasn’t time for Gabriel and Keller to go to Downing Street, so a Metropolitan Police BMW scooped them up outside Vauxhall Cross and shot them up Kennington Lane toward Southwark. The historic Guy’s Hospital, one of London’s tallest structures, rose above a tangle of streets near the Thames, not far from London Bridge. The MPS unit dropped them off outside the futuristic skyscraper known as the Shard. Parking was forbidden on the street under normal circumstances and now, with the prime minister’s arrival imminent, it was empty of traffic. There were several vehicles parked on Weston Street, though, including a white commercial van that was sitting low on its axles. On Gabriel’s order, the Metropolitan Police tracked down the owner. He was a contractor, a veteran of the Royal Navy, who was doing renovation work in a nearby building. The van was loaded with limestone flooring tiles.

The last street adjoining the complex was Snowfields, a narrow urban gully with no parking, and on that day no cars other than police units. Gabriel and Keller followed it to Gate 3, the hospital’s primary entrance, and passed through a cordon of security. The secretary of state for health waited outside in the forecourt, along with a team from the National Health Service and a large delegation from the hospital staff, many in white coats and scrubs. Gabriel moved silently among them, searching for the face he had sketched at the cottage in County Galway, searching for the woman he had seen for the first time in a quiet street in Lisbon. Then he rang Graham Seymour in the operations room at Vauxhall Cross.

“How far out is the prime minister?”

“Two minutes.”

“Any news on the Fleetwood computer?”

“They’re close.”

“That’s what they said an hour ago.”

“I’ll call you the minute they have something.”

The connection went dead. Gabriel dropped the phone into his pocket and stared at Gate 3. A moment later two motorcycle outriders appeared, followed by a customized Jaguar limousine. Jonathan Lancaster bounded from the backseat and began shaking hands.

“Does he really have to do that?” asked Keller.

“I’m afraid it’s congenital.”

“Let’s hope Quinn isn’t in the neighborhood. Otherwise, it might be fatal.”

The prime minister shook the last proffered hand. Then he looked toward Gabriel and Keller, nodded once, and went inside. It was three o’clock on the dot.

A
T THE INSTANT
J
ONATHAN
L
ANCASTER
disappeared through the doors of Guy’s Hospital, rain began to fall on central London, but in the deepest reaches of West Cornwall, a low sun shone through a slit in the stratified layers of cloud. The clear weather was an operational asset, for it lent credence to Katerina’s presence on the beach at Gunwalloe Cove. She had arrived there at 2:50 p.m., five minutes after dropping Quinn near the ancient church. The Renault was in the car park above the cove, and in the rucksack at her side was a Samsung disposable phone and a Skorpion submachine gun with an ACC Evolution–9 sound suppressor screwed into the barrel.

You always liked the Skorpion, didn’t you, Katerina?

During the drive from the church to the cove, she had briefly considered fleeing England and leaving Quinn to his fate. Instead, she
had chosen to stay and see her mission to its end. She was all but certain Alexei was now dead. Even so, she knew it would be unwise to return to Russia having failed to carry out her assignment. It was the tsar who had sent her back to England, not Alexei. And like all Russians, Katerina knew better than to disappoint the tsar.

She checked the time. It was five minutes past three. Quinn would be nearing the cottage. Perhaps one of the security guards would approach him, the way the ex-soldier had done that morning. If that happened, Quinn would kill him, and then there would only be three men protecting the target—the two outside the cottage and the one now fishing in the cove. Katerina was certain of his identity. She could see the outline of a weapon beneath his jacket, and the miniature radio he had used to alert his colleagues to the presence of a visitor in the cove. In short order, the guard’s radio would undoubtedly crackle with some sort of emergency signal. Or perhaps there wouldn’t be time for a radio alert. Either way, the guard’s destiny was the same. He was viewing his last sunset.

He hauled a fish from the sea, placed it in a yellow bucket at the tide line, and baited his hook. Then, after acknowledging Katerina with a nod, he waded into the breakers again and cast his line. Smiling, Katerina lifted the flap of the rucksack, exposing the stock of the Skorpion. It was set to full automatic mode, which meant it would be capable of firing twenty rounds in less than a second with minimal muzzle climb. Quinn was identically armed.

Just then, the Samsung mobile vibrated and a text message appeared on the screen:
THE BRICKS ARE IN THE WALL
. . . He had to do it, she thought. He had to let the British know it was him. She dropped the mobile phone into the rucksack, wrapped her hand around the grip of the Skorpion, and stared at the man in the breakers. Suddenly, his head snapped sharply upward and to the left, toward the cliff tops. Too late, he turned, only to find Katerina
advancing toward him across the sand, the Skorpion in her outstretched hands.

Twenty rounds in less than a second, minimal muzzle climb . . .

The next waves that broke across the sand were red with the blood of the dead MI6 security man. Katerina calmly reloaded the Skorpion and climbed the steep path to the car park. It was deserted except for the Renault. She slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and headed down the drive toward the cottage.

N
OTHING IN THE LANGUAGE OF
the exchange was outwardly suspicious, but to the experienced eye of the MI5 tech it stank of inauthenticity. So did the addresses of the two participants. He showed the printout to his superior, and the superior in turn brought it to the attention of Miles Kent. Kent was most intrigued by a street address that appeared in the final e-mail. The address seemed familiar, so he quickly ran it through an MI5 database and there discovered an alarming match. His next stop was the operations room where Amanda Wallace was monitoring the prime minister’s visit to Guy’s Hospital. He placed the printout in front of her. Amanda read it and frowned.

“What does it mean?”

“Look at the address carefully.”

Amanda did. “Isn’t that the cottage where Allon used to live?”

Kent nodded.

“Who lives there now?”

“You should probably ask Graham Seymour.”

Amanda reached for the phone.

Five seconds later, on the opposite bank of the Thames, in yet another operations room, Graham Seymour picked up the call.

“What do you have?”

“A problem.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Is anyone staying at Allon’s cottage in West Cornwall?”

Seymour hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry, Amanda, but it’s not something I can talk about.”

“My God,” she whispered gravely. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

The cottage was officially designated an MI6 safe facility, so it contained no active telephone line. Nor had its current occupant been entrusted with a mobile, lest she say something in an unguarded moment to divulge her whereabouts to her enemies. All attempts to contact her guardians proved unsuccessful. Their phones rang unanswered. Their radios crackled with no response.

One call, however, was answered without delay. It was the call that Graham Seymour placed to Gabriel’s mobile at 3:17 p.m. Gabriel was in the auditorium at Guy’s Hospital, where the prime minister was about to offer a remedy to the ills facing Britain’s sacred government-run health care system. Seymour was watching a live
feed of the event on the video screens in the operations room. He spoke with more calm than he would have thought possible, given the circumstances.

“I’m afraid the prime minister wasn’t the target. There’s a helicopter waiting for you and Keller on the pad in Battersea. The Metropolitan Police will give you a ride over.”

The call went dead. Seymour replaced the receiver and stared at the screen as two men rushed from the auditorium.