Execution ht-5 Read online

  Execution

  ( Harry Tate - 5 )

  Adrian Magson

  Adrian Magson

  Execution

  ONE

  She awoke to the scuff of leather shoes in the corridor. Eyes dragged open, gummy with sleep, then closed again, a reflex action. Easy does it. Relax. You’re safe.

  She froze as a random thought wormed slowly through her befuddled mind. The nurses don’t wear leather shoes. She was familiar enough with the hurried tread of the consultants, or the heavier, measured stroll of the security guards. So who?

  Outsiders. Not good.

  She willed her breathing to remain steady. Not easy with a hole in her side. She focussed instead on the air around her, going over the small details to get her brain working. She’d been shot. She was in a hospital. King’s College, south London — the Major Trauma Centre, they had told her. She kept forgetting that bit. Stuff seemed to leak out of her head all the time like water from a holed bucket.

  She concentrated. It was night, she was certain; at a guess, two a.m. There wasn’t the hum of daytime activity, the rush of feet, the voices; nor the beep of electronics signifying seconds to someone’s total blackness and a bed left empty. Wakefulness brought a throb in her temples and a woozy feeling from the drugs, and the stickiness between her shoulder blades from lying in the overheated, cloying atmosphere for too long. There was a tightness across her middle and the tug of plaster against skin, still tender and sore.

  So who was out there? And why now?

  The door to her room whispered open. Soft footsteps approached the bed, accompanied by a man’s nasal breathing. Her body shrieked with a sense of vulnerability but she remained still. It wasn’t hard — she’d had a lot of practice in this place; using it to distance herself as much from the probing of questions as of fingers, of their barely restrained curiosity about what had brought a civilian woman here with a gunshot wound.

  A ghost of warm peppermint fanned her cheek. Along with it came the tangy smell of damp clothing. It made a change from the sickly aroma of anaesthetics and cleaning fluids. Must be raining outside. God, what she wouldn’t give for a walk in the rain and a lungful of fresh air. And a Starbucks to go. With a double shot.

  Some hope.

  She tensed as the man leaned further over her. She didn’t need to open her eyes to see him. Normal times, she’d have reacted by kicking back the covers and planting her foot in his face for invading her space. Watched him fall and lie still, before stepping over him and kicking him in the balls for good measure.

  But these weren’t normal times.

  ‘She awake?’ A whisper from over by the door. A second man, the accent rough.

  The peppermint smell receded. ‘I don’t think so.’ The air around her shifted and she sensed the man move to the foot of the bed, heard the clank of the clipboard being lifted.

  ‘What’s her problem?’

  ‘She has a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Not pleasant.’ This man sounded more educated.

  ‘So she’s army.’

  The clank of the clipboard being replaced. ‘It doesn’t say. Most of them are, here. Who cares? She’s out of it, so not our problem.’

  Footsteps moving away. The door closed and she once more felt the emptiness of space. They had gone.

  She continued to remain still, fighting against the temptation to open her eyes. A minute ticked by in silence. Two. Three. Then the door huffed, as she knew it would.

  Heavy breathing. They were back.

  ‘Well?’ The one with the rough accent.

  A long pause, then: ‘She hasn’t moved. Come on, let’s get this done.’

  ‘What if she hears us?’

  ‘Then we’ll have to finish what the bullet started, won’t we?’

  ‘We could save the bother — do it now.’

  ‘No. There’s no time. The guard might come back.’ A pause, then a whisper, very close: ‘You’re lucky, Miss Jardine, whoever you are.’

  The soft tread of footsteps moving away.

  Lucky? Why am I lucky? Where the hell are the security guard and nurses?

  She followed the men’s progress, visualising a mental picture although she’d never seen anything of the corridor outside. You don’t, when you’ve been gut-shot, see much of anything beyond the chaotic inner world that is the shock and pain and confusion of memories, some imagined, some real. All the rest is a blur of vague faces and ceiling lights.

  The men didn’t go far. Next door or across the way, she couldn’t be certain. The corridor ended there. Two other rooms, two other patients. No, wait. Next door had gone not long after dark. Rushed to theatre in a controlled scramble of feet and wheels and clanking equipment.

  They hadn’t come back.

  If it was across the way, she knew who they were going to see.

  Knew what they were going to do.

  Because like the patient in that room, who had gabbled on almost non-stop since his arrival two days ago, including shouting his name several times, the two men had been speaking Russian. And suddenly the mush of details sloshing around in her brain was starting to make sense.

  She understood Russian. And from what the man across the way had been saying over and over again, between bouts of silence, there was only one reason for these two men to be right here, right now, in the middle of the night, when the security guard was away, probably on a fag break.

  They were going to kill him.

  And if they found out who she was — and what she had once been — she would be next.

  So much for being lucky.

  TWO

  In a luxury Mayfair office rented by a holding company registered in the Cayman Islands, three men watched as a female technician swept the room they were in with an electronic countermeasures device. The building was checked regularly, but today was deemed especially important in view of the matter under discussion. The fact that this office was held under a blanket of cover names, and that there were no regular staff, led to a clear understanding by all who stepped foot in the building that what was discussed here stayed in the minds of those present and was never confirmed on paper or digitally recorded.

  It was especially important to the three men now here, as none had been recorded entering the UK under their real names, and they would have no contact with their official embassy.

  The technician finished and packed away her probe and monitor and pronounced the room clean. When she had gone, the three men sat down at a central table and opened small bottles of apple juice.

  ‘Report,’ said one of them, glancing impatiently at his watch. His thoughts were clear: it was not yet eight in the morning and his day was going to be busy.

  In his sixties, he wore a grey suit and crisp white shirt, the image of a successful businessman. However, he was anything but. His name was Sergei Gorelkin. Once a senior officer in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), successors to the old and much feared KGB, he still held the rank of colonel, although his position of Honorary Deputy in the Division for the Defence of the Constitution carried far more weight than that of any military officer.

  ‘The assignment was completed without a hitch.’ It was about as much report as Gorelkin would require, and the speaker, Fyodor Votrukhin, who held the rank of lieutenant, crunched on an Extra Strong Mint and waited for the signal to continue. A long-time member of the elite Special Purpose Centre of the FSB, Votrukhin was tall and lean, with the dark looks of a Georgian. He seemed at ease in the plush surroundings of the leased office, but after their journey here from Moscow and their activities of a few hours ago, he was looking tired.

  Gorelkin nodded and sipped his apple juice, rolling it around his mouth before swallowing. ‘Good. Glad to hear it, lieutenant.’ He eyed the third
man, who so far had said nothing. ‘Is that your summary also, sergeant?’

  Sergeant Leonid Serkhov blinked in surprise. It wasn’t often that he was called on to speak, although every member of the Special Purpose Centre was aware that he or she was expected to have an opinion if asked. But this was unusual. For a start, it was Colonel Gorelkin doing the asking; and he hadn’t got them here just to congratulate them on a job well done. There had to be another reason.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he replied, flicking a nervous glance at Votrukhin. Stocky and heavy across the shoulders, with receding hair and high cheekbones, Serkhov looked as if he might be in danger of breaking something if he moved too quickly, and kept stretching his chin to ease the stiff collar of his shirt.

  ‘Interesting. So neither of you had any concerns about the woman?’

  ‘Woman?’ Lieutenant Votrukhin lifted an eyebrow, and looked suddenly rather uneasy.

  ‘Yes. There was a woman patient in the room next to the subject.’ He waited a few heartbeats before adding, ‘Or have I been misinformed?’

  ‘No. No, that’s correct.’ Votrukhin cleared his throat and threw a warning glance at Serkhov. But the sergeant was staring resolutely straight ahead, the message patently clear: you’re on your own with this one.

  ‘She was unconscious or in heavy sleep,’ the lieutenant continued. He didn’t bother wondering how Gorelkin knew about the woman. The colonel was former old-style KGB, and those people had eyes everywhere and double-checked everything and everyone. He probably checked up on his own wife if he had one. ‘We didn’t think she presented a threat, so we left her alone. In any case, we had little time to do anything other than what we were there for. The security guard was incompetent, but he stayed on the move.’ He rolled a fragment of mint across his mouth but didn’t bite into it.

  ‘You took a close look at her, of course?’ Gorelkin studied the juice bottle as he spoke. It was a trick he’d perfected over the years, feigning an interest in some inanimate object while asking questions, to make others think he was merely going through the motions. It was rarely the case.

  ‘Yes. She was out of it. She’d been gut-shot, according to her notes. I checked the face. There wasn’t a flicker, so we got on with the job.’

  ‘Serkhov?’

  The sergeant shrugged, and instantly wished he hadn’t. Shrugs in the SPC were not well received. It was seen as demonstrating a lack of commitment. He said quickly, ‘I, uh, was by the door, watching the corridor. But from where I was, she didn’t move a muscle. Like the lieutenant says, she was out of it.’

  The bottle went down on the polished table with a firm tap, and Gorelkin looked at them each in turn. ‘If she was out of it, gentlemen,’ he said softly, ‘perhaps you could explain why, just five minutes after you exited the target building, a woman was seen walking down the stairs from that floor and leaving the building through a rear door used only by staff? Why, the following morning, the room where you had seen the supposedly unconscious or sleeping woman, was empty, and her clothes gone?’

  Neither man spoke. They had messed up. Gorelkin wouldn’t have been this specific if he didn’t have the facts. And now they had to wait to hear what he was going to say. From long experience with others who’d failed in the centre, they knew it wouldn’t be pleasant. Gorelkin was every bit the old-style apparatchik, but in modern clothing. Scratch the surface of his kind, and there was cold, hard steel underneath. If the current administration ever turned itself back beneath the true cloak of communism, as many wanted, Gorelkin would roll with it as easily as changing his underwear, and emerge victorious.

  But the expected firestorm didn’t come.

  ‘You can count yourselves lucky,’ the colonel muttered coldly, ‘that right now I don’t have the luxury of replacing you and sending you back to whatever shit-hole regiments you came from. If I did, you’d be on the next plane out!’ He emphasised the final word by slapping a hand down on the table top. The bottle jumped, then toppled and rolled towards the edge.

  Votrukhin reached out instinctively and grabbed it. Placed it carefully back where it had come from.

  ‘What should we do?’ he asked. As the senior man, it was down to him to take the lead. Even if it meant sticking his neck out for Gorelkin to take off his head.

  ‘What do you think you’ll do — you find her!’ Gorelkin snapped. ‘She’s a threat we can’t ignore. She can’t have vanished completely.’

  ‘She was probably just military,’ Serkhov put in with unusual bravado. ‘A female grunt wounded in Afghanistan like the others in that unit. Why would she be a threat?’

  ‘Think about it, Serkhov.’ Gorelkin’s voice could have sliced marble. ‘A woman recovering from being shot in the stomach. That’s a nasty wound for anyone. But in the middle of the night, the same night you two turn up, she gets up from her bed and walks out of the hospital, taking whatever clothes she had with her. Now that’s not normal “grunt” behaviour. Something scared her enough to get out of there — and she had the balls and toughness to get up and walk. What do you think made her do that, huh?’

  ‘She heard us,’ Serkhov replied, his tone subdued. He threw an accusing look at Lieutenant Votrukhin, a reminder that he’d urged the lieutenant that she should be taken care of, and he’d been ignored.

  ‘Of course she heard you. I presume you spoke in Russian?’

  Their silence confirmed it. He nodded. ‘As I thought. Which means she probably understood every word you said. And if this wounded trooper understood you, what does that lead you to conclude?’

  ‘She would have heard and understood what the target said, too,’ said Votrukhin softly. Both men had received a thorough briefing on arriving in the UK. It had begun with details of the target’s shooting by another member of the centre flown over to deal with Tobinskiy in the coastal town of Brighton in southern England. That operative had since left the country. The decision, they had been informed, had been made at the highest level to activate a second team to finish the job, and Votrukhin and Serkhov had been assigned that task. The reason given for the urgency was that the target had been transferred to a specialist hospital in London, and had been heard raving aloud under the regime of drugs he was under. The conclusion was that the risk of anybody working on the unit comprehending what he was saying was moderate to high.

  And clearly somebody had.

  ‘It’s a big city,’ Serkhov put in. ‘It would help if we knew something about her. . where she comes from, that kind of stuff. I didn’t even see what she looked like.’

  ‘I’m dealing with that. You’ll have the information as soon as I can get it.’

  ‘From the embassy?’

  ‘No. Not from the embassy.’ Gorelkin paused, then said, ‘This mission is running under chyornyiy rules; you know what that means, but I’ll repeat them in case you’ve forgotten. You are to have no contact with the embassy or any of our residents or other assets. You understand?’ Both men nodded. ‘You pass all requests and operational decisions through me. You need something, I will get it for you, including information, money, papers or equipment. You get caught and we do not know you. I will make all efforts to extricate you, but you know that might not be possible for some time. Understood?’

  The two men exchanged a brief look, then nodded. They had heard of chyornyiy or black rules operations before, but had never worked under them.

  ‘Don’t they have next-of-kin details on the hospital database?’ asked Votrukhin. He wanted to get this business over and done with.

  ‘No. That unit lists patients’ names only. The British Ministry of Defence placed an embargo on any personal information of wounded military personnel being available in case of targeting by the press or extremists. This woman was listed simply as Clare Jardine. I’ll run it through our database but I don’t expect it to turn up much. I’ll have to get it another way.’

  ‘How?’ Serkhov queried.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Gorelkin admitted, his anger subsiding quickly as he
considered the action to be taken. He reached in his pocket and took out a Blackberry. ‘But I think I know of a man who can help us.’

  THREE

  In a stripped-out three-storey building off Belgrave Road in Pimlico, Clare Jardine came awake in a rush, reaching for the elbow crutch. She bit back on a yelp as her stomach muscles protested. Too quick, instincts overcoming caution. She waited for the pain to recede while assessing what had woken her in the first place, mentally gathering herself for flight.

  The noise came again: it was the clatter of a rubbish skip out in the street, followed by a man swearing. She lay back. Normal everyday sounds. No threat. Not yet, anyway.

  Above her head the high ceiling showed yellowed mouldings and a tracer work of fine cracks spread throughout the plaster. Bare wiring hung down from the central fitting, plaited and sheathed in fabric instead of the modern plastic coating. She shivered at the chill in the atmosphere. Like the rest of the building, the room was bare, ready for gutting and renovation. Only the two thin mattresses on the bare floorboards showed that anyone was using it, a low-quality squat in a high-society street.

  But for now it was salvation. Of a sort.

  She allowed the events of the night before to reel through her mind. After dressing hastily in her laundered clothes, and a T-shirt to replace the blouse ruined by the shooting, she had left the trauma centre and lost herself in the darkened streets of Camberwell. She’d headed north on Denmark Hill towards Newington and Southwark. It was an area one of her MI6 instructors had referred to only half-jokingly as bandit country, but going round it would have taken too long. Going south or east was too open; west or north-west would take her too close to Vauxhall Cross and the network of cameras around the building she had once called work: the headquarters of SIS — the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6.

  Progress had been slow, keeping one eye open for cameras, the other for obstacles at ground level. Instinct had made her scoop up the discarded aluminium crutch in the stairwell of the hospital, which had helped. Aware that the two men who had entered her room might return and come after her, she’d forced herself to put as much distance between them as possible. But she was still weak after her enforced inactivity, especially in the legs, and bouts of dizziness made the street lights swim in front of her eyes, forcing her to rest up when it got too bad.