JUDAS 62

Book 2: Box 88

by Charles Cumming

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Spy Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

After a lifetime working with BOX 88, the transatlantic counterintelligence agency so covert that not even the CIA knows of its existence, master spy Lachlan Kite has made plenty of enemies. And now, as the director of the outfit's operations in the UK, one of those past enemies has him in their sights . . .



1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia, a spy in the guise of a language teacher. Embedded in the town of Voronezh, Kite's mission is to extract a chemical weapons scientist before the man's groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands and shuttle him across the border to freedom in Ukraine. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail.



2020: Thirty years after that dangerous mission, Kite discovers that its outcome put his name on the notorious "JUDAS" list—a record of enemies of Russia who have been targeted for assassination. Kite's fight for survival takes him to Dubai, a city crawling with international intelligence officers, where he enters into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the Russian secret state.

Release date: December 6, 2022

Publisher: Mysterious Press

Print pages: 498

Sample

1

‘GONE FISHING!’ said the handwritten note attached to the refrigerator in Saul Kaszeta’s sunlit Connecticut kitchen, sparrows chirping in the trees beyond the conservatory, fresh flowers and a box of chocolates on the kitchen counter. The chocolates were a gift for Kaszeta’s daughter, Tasha, who was driving up from Brooklyn to house-sit for the long weekend. Her father, whom she had seen only once since Christmas because of the lockdown in New York, was heading off to the Adirondacks on his annual fishing trip.

A short, compact widower of seventy-seven, Kaszeta was often seen practising tai-chi in the local park. He was known occasionally to jog on the quiet suburban streets of Darien, sometimes in the company of his friend, Ray, who was at least twenty years his junior, but most often alone. Kaszeta had been a general in the Russian army in the last decade of the Cold War, a fact unknown to all but his closest acquaintances in the United States, none of whom were aware that his real name was Evgeny Palatnik, nor that he had been a source for BOX 88, a top-secret Anglo-American spy agency, for the final nine years of his military career. In Darien it was widely believed that Kaszeta had been a schoolteacher in Rostov-on-Don who had taken advantage of a post-Soviet emigration programme to move to Connecticut. A dignified, charming Russian émigré who had lost his wife to cancer late in 2017, he taught chess to the pupils at the local high school, accepting no payment for his time, sang a stirring baritone in the church choir and was famed for an extraordinarily high tolerance for alcohol.

The journey to the log cabin in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains took approximately four hours in manageable traffic, as much as seven when there was trouble on the roads. Though in robust good health for a man well into his eighth decade, Kaszeta suffered from glaucoma, an eye condition that required the administration of pharmaceutical drops once a day. Driving could sometimes exacerbate the symptoms and Tasha had rung to remind her father not to forget to take his bottle of Xalatan to Lake Placid.

As soon as Kaszeta arrived at the cabin, he carried his overnight bag into the living room, opened the windows, checked that the gas and electricity were working and sat on the porch enjoying the turkey and Swiss cheese sandwich he had bought in town, washing it down with a Heady Topper. The coolness of the beer made him think about his medication, which needed to be kept cold, and he returned to the kitchen to put the Xalatan in the fridge. Having unpacked his clothes, he fetched his equipment from the utility room and called Tasha to let her know that he had arrived safely. She was already at the house in Darien, thanked him for the chocolates and said that she would make a casserole for his return. As a courtesy, Kaszeta then rang his handler at Langley, but the call went straight to voicemail. He sent a text message instead, informing the CIA that he would be staying in Lake Placid for the next four nights.

‘Happy fishing, Saul,’ came the reply. ‘Catch a brook trout, not the virus!’

Kaszeta left the phone charging beside his bed and set out for an afternoon of fishing. In years gone by it had been a matter of pride to the local residents that they did not need to lock their cabins, but times had changed in America. Kaszeta was now careful not only to make sure the windows and doors were secure, but also that the dome lens CCTV camera above the porch was in good working order.

Then he could relax. The lake was the best of his adopted country. In his opinion the calm, sunlit waters and the cry of the loon were as American as apple pie and Nelson Rockefeller. He was never happier than when fishing in summer, breathing the fresh mountain air, listening to the gentle putter of distant motorboats and the delighted laughter of swimmers.

A little more than a mile away, FSB officer Vasily Zatulin, disguised as a US postal worker, approached the front door of Kaszeta’s log cabin.

He picked the simple lock with ease and made his way into the kitchen. Confirming that the label on the bottle of Xalatan exactly matched the details on the duplicate in his hand, Zatulin switched Kaszeta’s glaucoma medication for an A-234 Novichok dissolved in saline, closed the door of the fridge and returned to his vehicle. At the wheel was Virginia Terry, an SVR illegal, resident in Vermont for more than nine years. It was Terry who had run Palatnik to ground, thanks to a detail in the Snowden files and a chance remark by a CIA officer she had befriended in Washington. With the connivance of FSB director Alexander Makarov and his associate, Mikhail Gromik, Terry had obtained Kaszeta’s medical records from a doctor’s surgery in Darien and plotted the assassination.

Several hours passed. Kaszeta returned from the lake having failed to catch a fish, drove into town to buy provisions, then cooked himself scrambled eggs for supper while listening to PBS. Just before nine o’clock he changed into pyjamas and climbed into bed, ready to make a start on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a novel he had always intended to read and had promised himself he would complete by the end of the year.

He had read only two chapters when he felt the telltale dryness in his eyes, always worse in the warm summer months. As usual Kaszeta had forgotten to take his medication. Setting the novel to one side, he made his way to the kitchen, took the bottle of Xalatan from the fridge, shook the contents and unscrewed the cap. At the kitchen table, he tipped his head back and administered one drop to each eye, blinking to ensure that none was wasted.

He could tell something was wrong almost immediately. It was as though a vast shadow had passed over the cabin, dimming the lights in each of the rooms. Kaszeta had the strange, disorienting sensation that he was losing his sight. Confused and growing dizzy, he walked into the bathroom and checked his reflection in the mirror. He switched on the pop light over the basin but it had little effect. The room was now almost completely dark. Stumbling back to the bedroom, his left eye twitching, he reached for his cell phone. He had taken the eye drops a thousand times without difficulty; nothing like this had ever happened before. He tried to find the number for his doctor in Darien, but he could not focus on the screen. His hands were shaking but he managed to make a call, connecting to the last number he had dialled on the phone. It was Jerry, his handler at CIA.

‘Saul? How’s all that seclusion? Good fishing?’

The phone was moving uncontrollably in his hand. Kaszeta found that it was almost impossible to speak.

‘Jerry.’ His voice was very faint. He was trying so hard. It was the feeling of wanting to shout in a dream but being unable to make any sound.

‘Saul? You OK? I can’t hear you.’

‘Help me,’ Kaszeta gasped. ‘Please, Jerry. Something is happening . . .’

2

Lachlan Kite sat on a wooden bench at the edge of Kew Green watching his first cricket match of the long, disrupted summer. He had a mobile phone in one hand, an Americano in the other, sections of The Sunday Times scattered on the seat beside him. It was a blistering July afternoon, the players in caps and crumpled white hats which offered scant protection from the glare of the sun. Kite wished that he was among them, fielding at slip or facing the innocuous medium pace of the opposition bowlers, scoring a quick fifty and taking three wickets after tea. He missed the simple camaraderie of the cricket team: the sense that what was at stake—a frustrating defeat, an honourable draw, a stirring victory—was at once enormously important and yet, in the grand scheme of things, utterly insignificant. Like Kite, the men in the outfield were all in middle age, joking and cajoling one another, clutching sore backs and hobbling on weakened knees. Had he chosen a different path he would have been one of them: a lawyer, a filmmaker, a restauranteur. But BOX 88, even in the quiet summer of 2020, left precious little time for cricket.

Kite was in a contemplative mood. He had come to Kew from the Osbourne & Saxony Care Home in Strawberry Hill, intending to visit the botanical gardens so that he could clear his mind, but instead stopping beside the green to watch the game. His mother, Cheryl, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the beginning of the year, her mental and physical decline described by her doctor as some of the most aggressive he had ever encountered. Due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, Kite had not seen her face to face for over two months. In that time she had suffered a fall and now required a wheelchair to move around. He had waited for his mother in the grounds of the care home on a bench wearing a surgical mask and tight latex gloves, a flimsy plastic apron covering his chest and thighs. In order further to protect her from the possibility of infection, an armchair had been brought out from the main house and placed under a small gazebo two metres from Kite. There was a bottle of hand sanitiser attached to the bench and a sticker showing the correct measurements for social distancing. Some lines of scripture had been carved into the wood, a dedication to a former resident:

‘Their soul shall be as a watered garden; And they shall not suffer anymore.’

It had been a grim hour, punctuated by the occasional cries of patients in distress: an old woman screaming for a nurse; a wheezing man begging for pain relief. His mother had been dressed in a pair of blue linen trousers and a pale pink blouse. Her thinning hair was now completely white; it moved feebly in the warm wind like cobwebs. There were moments during their conversation in which Cheryl had seemed lucid, railing against her captivity, bitterly criticising the nurses who cared for her and lamenting the tedium of her long, unchanging days. Kite was to blame, she said. He had imprisoned her. Kite knew that there was nothing he could say or do to challenge this assertion or even to console her; Cheryl had always possessed an irrational shortness of temper which had been amplified by the wretched disease. They had never been close; indeed, it would be fair to say that Kite had spent most of his life trying to get as far away from his mother as possible. Yet in the sudden twilight of her life he felt a deep responsibility for her well-being. She had raised him as a single mother following his father’s untimely death; Kite was her only child and, with the exception of his estranged wife, Isobel, and baby daughter, Ingrid, her sole living relative.

‘And how is Martha?’ she had asked.

Martha Raine had been Kite’s on-off girlfriend for much of his adult life. She now lived in New York with her husband.

‘I’m not with Martha anymore, Mum,’ he explained. ‘She married somebody else. A long time ago. Remember? They have two children. She lives in America.’

‘I went to America in 1970,’ she replied wistfully. Cheryl had been a model in the sixties, riding on the coattails of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. ‘It was so hot. Hotter than today even.’ Her voice, normally so robust, was faint and indistinct. ‘What about Isobel?’

‘Isobel is in Sweden with her mother,’ Kite replied. ‘She sends her love to you.’

‘Did she have the baby?’

Kite had twice told his mother that Isobel had given birth to a baby girl. He had sent her videos and photographs of the child via WhatsApp. At his request, the home had opened a bottle of Moët & Chandon in celebration of Cheryl becoming a grandmother for the first time. From the Covid-free sanctity of her room they had toasted Ingrid on FaceTime, touching the rim of their champagne glasses against the screens of their phones. This was the new way of family intimacy: distant, pixelated, cold.

‘I told you, Mum,’ he said, trying not to sound impatient. ‘She had a girl. Ingrid. They’re both in Sweden. Do you remember the photographs I sent? They’re on your phone.’

Cheryl’s expression became reproachful.

‘Why aren’t you with her?’ she demanded, the embers of her quick, suspicious temper flaring.

‘I’ve explained that, too,’ he said, resenting his mother’s disease as he resented the fierce heat of the sun in that bland, ordered garden, the sweat on his hands beneath the tight latex gloves. ‘I had to fly back to London for work. Then we were locked down. I haven’t been able to get back to Stockholm to see them.’

It wasn’t the whole truth, or anything close to it. Kite had not spoken to Isobel in over a month. She was refusing to answer his calls, instead writing to say that she was ‘reconsidering her life’ and preferred to keep Ingrid ‘safe in Sweden’. She had always known that Kite worked for British intelligence; what she had not counted on was the threat to her own safety. At the turn of the year she had been kidnapped by members of an Iranian gang who had targeted Kite. Her ordeal might have resulted in the death of their unborn child; did Kite not understand that he must now leave his job in order to guarantee the safety of their family in the years to come? Kite had refused to countenance such a decision, arguing that the kidnapping had been a one-off, a momentary crisis which would never happen again. Yet the demands of secrecy meant that he could not discuss what had happened in any detail, nor why they would not be seeking justice through the courts. To do so would be to risk exposing the existence of BOX 88, the shadow Anglo-American intelligence service to which he had dedicated his working life and about which Isobel knew nothing. With Ingrid barely a few days old, Kite had retreated into obfuscation, telling his wife that he would soon return to London to resume his work for MI6. This simple breach had been enough to tear the fabric of their relationship; the trust they had built up over more than six years had been broken not by something as commonplace as lies or infidelity, but by the demands of the secret world.

A catch was taken on Kew Green, a looping caught-and-bowled bringing an end to an innings of 65 by a short, barrel-chested South African referred to as ‘Savage’ by his teammates. There was a smattering of applause from the wives and girlfriends sitting on rugs at the boundary’s edge. An elderly couple walked in front of Kite’s bench, neither wearing masks, both supported on sticks. In the distance, across the parched outfield, children were throwing a plastic toy for a puppy and delightedly clapping their hands as it jumped and scampered about. A plane roared in descent towards Heathrow. Kite heard the sudden, surprising clack of a seagull and was transported back to his youth, puffins and cormorants wheeling over the beach at Killantringan, the hotel his mother had owned on the west coast of Scotland.

‘Lockie?’

Kite set the coffee down and looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun.

Cara Jannaway was standing in front of him wearing sunglasses, wedge heels and a red summer dress. They had made no arrangement to meet, but Kite was not surprised to see her: the fix on his phone meant that BOX could find him twenty-four hours a day. Her unscheduled appearance meant business. She wouldn’t have disturbed him on a Sunday if it wasn’t important.

‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘Cricket lover?’

‘You must be joking.’ She had a sharp east London accent and a way of treating him almost carelessly that Kite enjoyed. ‘Sporting equivalent of watching paint dry. Makes crown bowls look exciting.’

‘That’s because you don’t understand it,’ he replied, gesturing at Cara to sit beside him. ‘You don’t have to socially distance,’ he added. ‘I’ve already had the plague.’

Cara had joined BOX 88 from MI5 after playing a crucial role in freeing Kite from the same Iranian gang which had held Isobel hostage. She was twenty-seven, imaginative but practical, brave without being reckless. With Kite and several others, she had formed part of a skeleton BOX 88 staff during the global lockdown, living in an apartment near the agency’s temporary headquarters in Chelsea. Kite had grown very fond of her.

‘Funny,’ she said, sweeping dust off the bench and straightening out her dress as she sat down. ‘So what don’t I understand about cricket, Mr Kite? What’s so fascinating about a bunch of men standing in the middle of a field for eight hours throwing a ball at each other?’

He liked it that she hadn’t immediately told him why she was there.

‘Heathen.’ He shook his head with exaggerated dismay and gestured towards the players. ‘Everything you need to know about our business lies before you.’

‘Is that right?’ Cara removed her sunglasses. ‘Go on then, Gandalf. Enlighten me.’

Kite set his empty coffee cup on the bench.

‘You see this man walking to the middle?’ A new batsman had come to the crease, replacing the recently departed ‘Savage’. ‘Chances are the opposition knows nothing about him. He could be their best player, he could be utterly hopeless. It’s a mystery.’

The batsman was at least fifty-five, wearing black running shoes and an ill-fitting helmet. His shirt was out at the front and tucked in at the back. Two of the straps of his batting pads hung loose around his legs.

‘My money’s on hopeless,’ she said.

‘It’s the same for the batsman,’ Kite continued. ‘He’s been watching from fifty metres away, but he doesn’t know much about the bowlers, even less about the pitch. Will it bounce or keep low? Will it spin or move off the wicket? Can the bowler move the ball in the air, or is the weather too hot for a swing?’

‘Is the weather too hot for what now?’ A Labrador had run in front of them, barking delightedly off its lead. ‘I literally haven’t understood a word of what you’ve just said. You might as well be talking to that dog.’

‘It’s a metaphor, Cara. You know what a metaphor is, don’t you? Cricket as a version of life. This man taking guard now.’ Kite was again referring to the new batsman. ‘He has to protect his wicket. He has to score runs for his team. He has to build a partnership with the player at the other end. They have to communicate. They’re going to be calling for runs, rotating the strike. They have to learn to trust one another.’

‘What if he’s out?’ Cara asked.

‘Exactly! It could all be over in the next thirty seconds. He might have driven a hundred miles to be here today, to bat in west London, to make some runs he can go home and feel good about. But he could be out first ball. Then he has the rest of the day to regret the shot he played, to stand in the outfield in thirty-five degrees of sunshine with nothing better to do than think about the long drive home.’

‘I’m still waiting for the metaphor.’

Kite hesitated. He suddenly wanted Cara to take seriously what he was about to tell her.

‘What we do is about making what is unknown known,’ he said, fixing her with a stare which snatched all the playfulness from her eyes. ‘It’s about collective and individual responsibility. It’s about loneliness and leadership. Above all, it’s about trust.’

She nodded quickly. Kite saw that he had struck some sort of nerve and waited for Cara to respond. But then a wicket fell, popping the tension.

‘Oh look, he’s out,’ she said.

Sure enough, the new batsman had been clean bowled second ball, the sound of the quick, gentle clink of broken wickets travelling across the outfield. The fielders roared in celebration and came together to congratulate the bowler, touching elbows ironically in the contemporary style.

‘Not a good shot,’ Kite observed. ‘Played all round it. Speaking of leadership, what are you doing here?’

‘Trouble in America,’ she said. ‘Somebody on JUDAS. Looks like another Skripal, only this time they were more successful.’

Kite felt his chest tighten. JUDAS was a list of Russian intelligence officers, military personnel and scientists living in the West who had been targeted for reprisal assassinations by Moscow. Alexander Litvinenko had been JUDAS 47, Sergei Skripal, the former GRU officer targeted in Salisbury two years earlier, JUDAS 54.

‘Who did they hit?’ he asked.

‘Evgeny Palatnik.’

Kite stared across the green, the name setting off a chain reaction of memories, each one leading inexorably to Martha, to Voronezh and, finally, to Yuri Aranov. He was back in the long, chaotic summer of 1993, a student sent into the heart of post-Soviet Russia by BOX 88 with instructions to bring Aranov out of the country.

‘How did they do it?’ he asked, remembering the dying Litvinenko, the miracle of Skripal’s survival.

‘You don’t want to know.’

3

The first seeds of Kite’s plan to avenge Evgeny Palatnik were sown in these moments. Kite had seen much in his thirty years in the secret world—violence and limitless greed, abhorrent deceptions and treachery—but few things to compare with Cara’s description of what had been done to Palatnik. It was depraved. He was by turns disgusted and roused to furious anger. If the Americans failed to respond to the attack with adequate force—just as successive British governments had done little to deter Moscow from repeated outrages on home soil—then BOX 88 would step into the breach. Kite did not yet know how he would do it, nor what methods he would employ to bring the perpetrators to justice. He knew only that the rule of law would not apply.

They left Kew Green immediately, taking the car which Cara had parked nearby. On the journey to headquarters, Kite explained why Palatnik had been targeted.

‘Evgeny was a colonel in the Red Army and first deputy chief of Biopreparat.’

‘Biopreparat?’

‘The Soviet biological weapons programme. BOX recruited Palatnik in Paris in 1981, codename WALTER. He thought he was working for the CIA. For the next decade he gave us everything he could on Russia’s offensive smallpox and anthrax capabilities. What Gordievsky was to the political picture in Moscow, Palatnik was to the threat from biological weapons. He told us about the anthrax leak at Sverdlovsk; he knew about breakthrough research in myelin toxin, which the Soviets had been able to hide inside a common strain of tuberculosis. When Yeltsin took over, Palatnik called time on his days as an agent. Wanted to get out. The idea was to set him up with a new life in the West.’

‘Wasn’t that straightforward after ’91?’

‘You might have thought so.’ Kite switched off the air conditioning and lowered a window. ‘Ten months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, WALTER was still under round-the-clock KGB surveillance, forbidden to leave the country.’

‘How come?’

‘He was too important. Russia was undergoing a brain drain, scientists leaving left, right and centre. They wouldn’t give him a passport.’

‘And they had no idea he was working for us?’

‘Correct.’

A mother and child stepped onto a zebra crossing on Chiswick High Road. Kite braked, waiting for them to pass.

‘Long story short, one of our officers succeeded in spiriting Palatnik across the border into Belarus.’

‘Spiriting,’ Cara repeated, teasing Kite for being un­necessarily euphemistic. ‘How did he do that, then? Séance? Hot-air balloon?’

‘She,’ Kite replied, not in the mood for joking around. He kept thinking about Palatnik’s last moments, the horror of what had been done to him. ‘The exfil was carried out by a woman.’

‘I stand corrected.’

‘So Mr Palatnik goes to Washington, gets himself a new identity, an American wife, sinecure at the Pentagon, worked there until 2009 before retiring to the suburbs of Connecticut.’

‘How do you remember all this so long afterwards?’ Cara asked.

‘I’ve always been lucky with my memory.’ Kite took his hand off the gearstick and tapped a temple. ‘Stuff goes in, it never comes out.’

‘Memory is a talent,’ she replied. ‘Mine’s not bad. I think you’re either born with it or you’re not. Like being good at chess or playing the piano.’

‘Yes, but annoyingly talent is never enough, is it?’ Kite swerved around a hubcap lying loose in the road. ‘Memory is a muscle. Needs exercise.’

He was playing the boss, trying to teach Cara while at the same time not being entirely truthful with her. Kite remembered so much detail about Palatnik because it was Palatnik who had put BOX on to Yuri Aranov, the brilliant young scientist who had worked on the myelin toxin programme at Biopreparat. Aranov was as much a part of the furniture of his mind as Martha Raine, Cosmo de Paul and his late mentor, Michael Strawson. They had all been principal players in a wretched, chaotic summer twenty-seven years earlier when Kite had been sent to Voronezh to extract Aranov.

‘This was definitely a Russian operation,’ said Cara. It sounded like a statement, not a question. They had reached a second zebra crossing in Hammersmith and were again obliged to wait, this time for a beret-wearing hipster and an old man in a three-piece suit shuffling in opposite directions. ‘I mean who else burns an old man’s eyes out with a Novichok?’

‘Unless somebody wanted to make it look like a Russian operation, for reasons we don’t yet understand,’ Kite replied. ‘But, yes, we can assume the order came from Moscow. Evgeny survived undiscovered for three decades, but they eventu­ally found him. What’s strange is why now? The world is asleep. Why do it when the risk of getting caught is so much greater? Why antagonise the Americans?’

‘Maybe this was their only window of opportunity.’

Kite agreed but did not say so. He was busy wondering how Palatnik had been run to ground. The CIA had been responsible for his welfare. Had they become sloppy or was there a breach at Langley? Perhaps the Russians had simply got lucky.

He put these questions—and others—to Azhar Masood, his second-in-command, as soon as they reached the offices in Chelsea.

‘How did they find out where Evgeny was living?’ Kite asked. ‘Post-Skripal, everyone on JUDAS was supposed to be closely watched.’

Masood—known as ‘Maz’ at The Cathedral—was the tall, good-looking, thirtysomething son of a Pakistani father and Irish Protestant mother who had worked for BOX 88 for more than a decade. Unflappably calm, he expected people to be considerate, principled and kind: when they were not, his natural courtesy became a mask disguising impatience, displeasure and, on rare occasions, ruthlessness. Kite had described him to Cara as the most loyal man he had ever worked with.

‘Unsure at this stage,’ Masood replied. His voice was quick and thorough. ‘Palatnik was well into his seventies. Maybe he got sloppy, started showing off to someone in the Russian community about his mysterious past. Met a woman, wanted to impress her. Who knows?’

Not Evgeny, thought Kite. Palatnik was always methodical, always cautious, dedicated to the memory of his late wife. It was Aranov who had been the reckless womaniser. More likely he was spotted on the street, a face in a crowd on television, and Moscow joined the dots.

‘We don’t have responsibility for most of the agents on JUDAS,’ he explained to Cara. ‘Vauxhall were meant to be babysitting Skripal. With Litvinenko they got careless. Palatnik was CIA. But we still need to check our pucks.’ ‘Pucks’ was BOX slang for former agents living under new identities. ‘Make sure their security protocols are being observed, let them know what’s happened.’

‘Aren’t they going to find out soon enough?’ Cara asked, indicating several television screens bolted to the walls tuned to news channels in six different languages. ‘Only a matter of time before the story breaks. Then the whole world goes mad. As if coronavirus wasn’t bad enough . . .’

‘Didn’t you hear?’ said Masood.

‘Hear what?’

‘Langley has taken care of it. Whoever found him was Agency. Realised what had happened, called it in. The cabin was so isolated only a few locals noticed what was going on. Anybody asked why there were guys in hazmat suits wrapping the scene in polythene, they blamed it on Covid.’

‘You mean nobody knows this has happened?’ Cara asked.

‘Nobody in the UK outside these four walls.’ Masood picked up a paper clip and pulled it apart in his fingers. ‘Better that way. The Cousins knew the White House wouldn’t do anything meaningful. They’d say how disgusted they are, the ambassador might be summoned for a rap on the knuckles, Putin would deny having anything to do with it. Same old story. By the time Bellingcat had put the scoop online, the bad guys would have been back in Moscow for a month polishing their Orders of Lenin.’

Kite walked away from the bank of televisions.

‘Anything from MOCKINGBIRD?’

MOCKINGBIRD was a high-level BOX 88 source inside the FSB, close to Director Makarov, who had lain dormant for much of the previous year.

‘Nothing,’ Masood replied, pouring three plastic cups of water from a cooler in the corner of the near-deserted office and passing them around. ‘Still keeping a low profile. If he knew Palatnik was a target, he certainly didn’t say so.’

Kite absorbed this, wondering why the stream of infor­mation which had flowed from MOCKINGBIRD for so long had suddenly stopped. Perhaps he had concerns about security. Perhaps he was laid low with Covid. More likely it was simply agent burn-out. Sooner or later MOCKINGBIRD, like the rest of them, would want out.

‘What else does Langley have?’ he asked.

‘Considering that it’s been less than thirty-six hours, quite a lot.’ Masood had made a ring of the paper clip, wrapping the wire around his index finger. ‘There was CCTV at the cabin. They got a face. Middle-aged male disguised as a postman who entered the property shortly after Evgeny went fishing, presumably to switch the eye solution. Match for an FSB officer wanted in connection with two other Novichok attacks in Russia. Vasily Zatulin. Langley associates him with an SVR illegal, Virginia Terry, living under native cover; she’s already on an FBI watchlist.’ Masood nodded at Cara, seemed to notice her red dress for the first time. ‘Female. Millennial. Your generation.’

‘So the Yanks let her go home, they’ll keep an eye on her, try to pull down her network?’ It was what Kite would have done in similar circumstances.

‘We must assume so, yes,’ Masood replied. ‘If they’re doing their job properly.’

‘And Zatulin?’

Kite finished his water. He tossed the empty cup into a recycling bucket marked ‘SUPPOSEDLY SAVING THE PLANET’.

‘Already on his way home. Lands in five hours. Langley wasn’t interested in a tail. I’ve got three Falcons picking him up at Sheremetyevo. They’ll house him, see where that leads us.’

‘Good,’ Kite replied. A ‘Falcon’ was BOX 88 slang for a surveillance officer. ‘We need to know who ordered the hit on Palatnik. Was it Kremlin-sanctioned or FSB off-piste? All the agencies have access to JUDAS, they tick the names off whenever they want Vladimir’s attention. Is this the beginning of a new wave of assassinations that’s been thought through at a political level or sheer opportunism?’

‘I’m talking to New York tomorrow, soon as they wake up.’ Masood tugged his earlobe, mentally running through a checklist of all the things he still needed to do. ‘Should know more by then.’

Kite had moved beside a window overlooking a deserted residential street. BOX 88 had moved out of Canary Wharf in the spring as a temporary measure: the office workers who usually provided personnel with sufficient natural cover to come and go as they pleased were no longer around. The Chelsea offices, one of several residential blocks in London controlled by BOX 88, were smaller and more discreet. Under normal circumstances, Palatnik’s assassination would have been analysed by up to thirty Sunday staff, the room buzzing with reports, rumours, strategies. Now it was just three of them in a slow season. Kite doubted that MI6 even knew that Palatnik had been hit. Langley wouldn’t have shared the news with them. Why risk the loss of face?

‘Moscow won’t like it,’ he said, at first to himself, then louder so that Cara and Masood could hear. ‘Their people risked their lives handling the Novichok. The operation was a success, they’ll be expecting a media blitz. Hitting someone in America is a game changer. They wanted to send a message.’

‘And instead they get silence,’ Cara observed. ‘So what does that mean?’

‘It means Moscow will want to know why. They’ll be spooked by the American reaction. They can’t go publicising it without incriminating themselves. Their bots can start some chatter on social media, but the moment has passed. Either they write it off as a missed opportunity or they take a holiday and go again. ...