The English Spy Read online

  “Yes, Prime Minister.”

  “Then I’ll tell you the same thing I told her,” Lancaster continued. “I’m not going to change my schedule because of some IRA terrorist.”

  “This has nothing to do with the IRA. It’s strictly business.”

  “All the more reason.” The prime minister rose and escorted Seymour to the door. “One more thing, Graham.”

  “Yes, Prime Minister?”

  “No arrests on this one.”

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “You heard me. No arrests.” He put his hand on Seymour’s shoulder. “You know, Graham, sometimes revenge is good for the soul.”

  “I don’t want revenge, Prime Minister.”

  “Then I suggest you find someone who does and put him very close to Eamon Quinn.”

  “I believe I have just the man. Two men, actually.”

  Seymour’s car was waiting outside Downing Street’s famous black door. It ferried him back to Vauxhall Cross, where he found Gabriel and Keller in the windowless room on the top floor. It looked as though they hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d left.

  “How was he?” asked Gabriel.

  “Resolute to the point of stubbornness.”

  “What time does his motorcade leave Downing Street?”

  “Two forty-five.”

  Gabriel looked at the clock. It was five minutes to two.

  “I know we said two o’clock, Graham, but—”

  “We wait until two.”

  The three men sat motionless and silent while the final five minutes slipped away. At the stroke of two, Seymour rang Amanda Wallace across the river at Thames House and asked about the status of the computer search.

  “They’re close,” said Amanda.

  “How close?”

  “Within the hour.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Call me the minute you have something.”

  Seymour hung up and looked at Gabriel. “It might be better if you weren’t here for this.”

  “It might be,” said Gabriel, “but I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Seymour picked up the phone again and dialed.

  “Arthur,” he said genially. “It’s Graham. So glad I caught you.”

  Seven floors beneath Graham Seymour’s feet, a man in a gray cubicle slowly hung up his phone. Like all the cubicles in Vauxhall Cross, it had no nameplate, only a series of numbers broken by a slash. It was odd that Graham Seymour had spoken his name because most people at Vauxhall Cross referred to him by his job title, which was Personnel. Go and fetch Personnel. Run and hide, here comes Personnel. His name was a slur, an insult. He was loathed and resented. Mostly, he was feared. He was the exposer of other men’s secrets, the chronicler of their shortcomings and lies. He knew about their affairs, their problems with money, their weakness for alcohol. He had the power to ruin careers or, if so inclined, to save them. He was judge, jury, and executioner—a god in a gray box. And yet he, too, had harbored a secret. Somehow, the Russians had found it. They had given him a young girl, a Lolita, and in return they had taken his last shred of dignity.

  It’s Graham. So glad I caught you . . .

  Interesting choice of words, thought Grimes. Perhaps it had been a Freudian slip, but he suspected otherwise. The timing of Seymour’s summons—one day after Grimes had made a wireless dead drop on the Underground—was ominous. It had been a reckless encounter, a crash meeting. And in the process, it seemed he had exposed himself.

  So glad I caught you . . .

  His suit jacket was hanging from a hook in the wall, next to a photo of his family, the last one taken before the divorce. Outside in the corridor, Nick Rowe was flirting with a pretty girl from Registry—Rowe, who had been hovering around Grimes all day. He slipped past the pair without a word and went to the elevators. A car appeared the instant he pressed the call button. Surely, he thought, it was no accident.

  The car rose so smoothly that Grimes had no sense of movement. When the doors hissed open he saw Ed Marlowe, another man from his department, standing in the vestibule. “Arthur!” he called out, as though Grimes were suddenly hard of hearing. “Buy you a drink later? A couple of small matters to discuss.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Marlowe ducked between the closing elevator doors and was gone. Grimes stepped from the vestibule into the dazzling light of the atrium. It was the Valhalla of spydom, the Promised Land. The room where Graham Seymour waited was to the right. To the left was a doorway that led to the terrace. Grimes went to the left and stepped outside. The cold air hit him like a slap. Beneath him flowed the Thames, dark, leaden, and somehow reassuring. Grimes drew a deep breath and calmly collected his thoughts. He had the advantage of knowing their techniques. His cubicle was in order. So was his flat, his bank accounts, his computers, and his phones. They had nothing on him, nothing but a ride on the Tube with Yuri Volkov. He would beat them. He was above reproach, he thought. He was Personnel.

  Just then, he heard a sound at his back, a door opening and closing. He rotated slowly and saw Graham Seymour standing on the terrace. His gray hair was moving in the wind and he was smiling—the same smile, thought Grimes, that had greased his way up the ladder of promotion while better men were left to toil in the boiler rooms of intelligence. Seymour was not alone. Standing behind him was a smaller man with unusually green eyes and temples the color of ash. Grimes recognized him. His bowels turned to water.

  “Arthur,” said Seymour with the same false geniality he had used on the telephone a moment earlier. “What are you doing? We’re all waiting for you inside.”

  “Sorry, Graham. It’s not often I have a reason to come up here.”

  Grimes offered a smile in return, though it was nothing like Seymour’s. Gums and teeth, he thought, and more than a trace of guilt. Turning, he faced the river again, and suddenly he was running. A hand reached for him as he hurled himself over the balustrade, and as he plummeted toward the next terrace he imagined he was flying. Then the ground came rushing up to receive him and he landed with a thud that sounded like splitting fruit.

  It was a fall of several floors, enough to kill a man, but not instantly. For a moment or two he was aware of familiar faces hovering over him. They were faces from files, faces of MI6 officers whose lives he had ransacked at will. And yet even in his suffering, no one referred to him by his given name. Personnel had fallen from the roof terrace, they said. Personnel was dead.

  63

  CORNWALL, ENGLAND

  AT THE MARKS & SPENCER 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.”

  64

  GUY’S HOSPITAL, LONDON

  IN 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.

  65

  GUNWALLOE COVE, CORNWALL

  AT THE INSTANT JONATHAN LANCASTER 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 . . .