Tundra Read online

  Lenilko paused, trying to think if there was anything more to be asked. There wasn’t, not at this point.

  He said, ‘I’ll work on the link with SIS. Get me a quality photograph as soon as you can.’

  ‘Understood.’

  A crackle of static erupted before the connection was cut.

  Lenilko folded his hands on the desk to stop them from shaking. He stared, as he always did at moments like this, breakthrough moments, at the framed picture of Natalya and the twins beside his computer.

  This is it, he told them silently.

  He reached for the phone, the normal internal one, and hit a single number. His office door was thick enough that he heard Anna’s voice down the line only.

  ‘Drop what you’re doing and get in here with Konstantin.’

  *

  Six hours later, after a marathon lasting all the way through lunch and beyond, it was Konstantin who found the connection. But Anna had come up with the idea.

  The three of them had enhanced the Reuters and passport photos of the journalist to the maximum, using software of every variety they had access to, which was most kinds. This had already been done before, during the initial vetting of Farmer, but it never hurt to repeat the process. Once the images were as clear as they were ever going to be, they was cross-referenced with the FSB’s database of known and suspected members of British Intelligence, both SIS, the foreign service, and the domestic Security Service known as MI5.

  Nothing came up.

  Lenilko suggested they try known or presumed former members of the services. It was a hoary tactic used by intelligence services all over the world: let it be known that an operative was retiring, but keep him or her on clandestinely.

  Again, nothing. No match that was even close. And that was after factoring in possible changes in appearance, up to and including minor plastic surgery.

  ‘Broaden it,’ said Lenilko. ‘Include known associates of British SIS and MI5 assets, even those not considered to be official employees.

  Anna raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘Everyone?’

  ‘Everyone. Informants, chauffeurs, the guys who they send to collect their dry cleaning for them.’

  On the monitors, the images flashed by at the rate of scores every second. Beside them, the enhanced passport and press photographs of Farmer remained static. If there was a match, the flow of images would be arrested. But it continued apace, until the dreaded words appeared across the monitors: No match found.

  ‘Damn it,’ said Lenilko.

  Konstantin intoned glumly: ‘Our man must be wrong about the British Intelligence connection.’

  ‘Our man doesn’t get that kind of thing wrong,’ said Lenilko. He stood up, began to pace his modest office in small circuits. The three of them were alone, Anna and Konstantin having brought their laptops in with them. This was work he’d decided not to share with the rest of the office, because the more people there were involved in it, the greater the risk of leaks.

  ‘Think, guys. What are we missing? What cross-check haven’t we done?’

  Anna sat up, stared into the distance. ‘Operations.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Farmer’s given age is thirty-eight, yes? We assume he may have been a British agent since he was eighteen at the very youngest. So we run the files on all the SIS/MI5 operations we know about and have data on, covering the last twenty years. There may be a match there. Someone in a photograph, even an apparent bystander.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lenilko jabbed a finger at her. ‘Good. Let’s get on it.’

  The search was slower this time. Between them, Anna and Konstantin opened each file manually, ran through it for images, immediately rejected those that didn’t include photographs. There were relatively few files dating back to the nineteen nineties. It had been a time when the Russian Federation and Great Britain were notional allies, and while it was perfectly commonplace for even friendly nations to keep tabs on one another, during the Yeltsin era there hadn’t been the intense, painstaking analysis of every move SIS made that was standard nowadays.

  All of that changed abruptly in 2000. The new president took a very different view of perfidious Albion, and the numbers of files and case reports exploded. Anna’s and Konstantin’s fingers blurred over their respective keyboards as they screened, sorted and rejected documents.

  Lenilko blinked, the prolonged focus on the screens giving him a headache. He stood and stretched and went out into the main office, checked on the progress of a few other projects. Through the high windows, the snow flurries were gathering pace outside. Unusually, The precipitation felt oppressive to Lenilko: an impenetrable stratum between him and the fantastically distant Yarkovsky Station.

  He returned to his office twice more before giving up and concentrating on business in the main area. Anna and Konstantin would call him if they found anything of significance. As the morning wore on, Lenilko’s spirits sank. Perhaps his man at Yarkovsky Station had indeed been wrong; perhaps there really was no connection between the journalist Farmer and British Intelligence. Or, more likely, maybe the connection was so carefully concealed that Lenilko and his two underlings were destined never to find it.

  No. Damn it. Lenilko must have clenched his fist with audible force, because one of the operatives looked up from his work station, terror in his eyes. Lenilko shook his head to reassure the young man. He stalked off, heading for the windows, isolating himself as best he could in a room full of people.

  We are never doomed to be defeated. We will not be bested.

  Lenilko had heard it widely repeated that the Soviet Union had won the espionage battle during the Cold War, but lost the war itself. Even the Brits and, to a lesser extent, the Americans conceded this. The KGB’s recruitment of agents within the Western intelligence services had been astronomically more successful than similar attempts on the other side. The West had never had anyone remotely like a Kim Philby or a George Blake in a position of influence in Moscow or any of the Warsaw Pact countries. The traitors Penkovsky and Popov represented the best the West could do.

  The West had won, but the new Russia had regained a deep appreciation of the superiority of its own intelligence and counter-intelligence tradition. Part of Semyon Lenilko’s remit, his duty, was to uphold that tradition. More than that, he intended to enhance it, to raise it to a whole new level, as the Americans said.

  John Farmer would be identified. His connection with British Intelligence would be exposed. As would his, and therefore Great Britain’s, interest in Yarkovsky Station.

  At the periphery of his vision, his office door opened.

  Lenilko was a rationalist and an atheist, and no believer in any notion of the supernatural. He included extrasensory perception within that realm. But he was struck by the oddness of the timing.

  Anna was in the doorway. Her failed attempt at a nonchalant expression said it all.

  Lenilko hustled into the office, flipped the door shut behind him, slamming it, said in almost a snarl, ‘Tell me, tell me.’

  At his desk, Konstantin half-turned, his face crepuscular in the light from the monitor.

  ‘Look.’

  The text on the screen was familiar to Lenilko. It gave a detailed account of the events of a Tuesday in October, the year before last.

  Tallinn, Estonia. Every FSB employee knew what had happened there, on that date. Every Russian with a sliver of awareness knew.

  The Russian president had been attending a summit meeting in the Baltic capital with his Estonian counterpart. A terrorist cell, a group of embittered ethnic Russian Estonians, had attempted to assassinate the President using a long-range missile launched from far out at sea. The assassination had been prevented... somehow. It was a source of intense, grating fury to Lenilko, and to many of his colleagues, that the FSB still didn’t know quite what had gone wrong with the terrorists’ plans.

  It was also a source of profound, churning shame. Somebody else, not the FSB, had prevented the murder of the Russian
president.

  Somebody else.

  These thoughts played through Lenilko’s head as familiar background, but his attention was focused on the picture which Konstantin’s scrolling finger had exposed.

  It was a well-known photo, a lucky snap by a junior reporter on a local Tallinn rag, and it had been purchased by the Press Association for a high five-figure sum and syndicated across the world. It showed two men being helped out of a rescue boat onto dry land by emergency services, the sea behind them stretching towards the grey horizon and strewn with burning debris.

  One of the men in the photo was unidentifiable, his huddled form obscured behind the second man, his face turned away.

  The second man was John Farmer. There was no question about it.

  Lenilko gazed at the picture. He didn’t blink. And it was probably that which caused the tears to brim on his lower lids and spill through the mesh of his lashes and down over his cheeks. The eyes had to lubricate themselves against prolonged exposure to the air.

  He wrapped one arm around Anna’s neck, swung the other around Konstantin’s. Kissed each of them hard on the cheek in turn. Anna shrieked, Konstantin recoiled, and Lenilko let go. But when they stared round at him, into his beaming grin, he saw that Anna was smiling, and even Konstantin’s eyebrows had risen several millimetres up his long forehead.

  ‘Geniuses,’ Lenilko said, his voice catching embarrassingly. He lowered it to a near whisper, where he could better trust it. ‘The pair of you are true geniuses. You’ve just identified our journalist at Yarkovsky Station, John Farmer, as one of the men who was fished out of the sea after the attempt on our president’s life sixteen months ago. You’ve linked a man who was at the centre of the most significant political event of the last five years, with a developing situation at one of the most important research stations in the entire Russian Federation.’ He swatted each of them on the shoulder. They both seemed taken aback. Lenilko knew he was well-liked by his staff - it was a response he took pains to cultivate - but he knew also than Anna and Konstantin hadn’t seen such an overt expression of emotion from him before.

  He calmed himself, bringing things down a notch. ‘Okay. Let’s find out who he is.’

  This time it took only a few minutes. The two men who’d been hauled off the speedboat had disappeared before the FSB had a chance to interview them. An official statement from the Estonian authorities identified one of them, the man who was now John Farmer, as one Martin Hughes, a British photographer who’d rented a speedboat to try and capture pictures of the summit between the two heads of state from out in the bay. His boat had been directly under the Black Hawk helicopter the terrorists had used to launch the missile, and when the Black Hawk had been shot out of the sky the debris had landed on Hughes’s boat.

  The second man, the one whose features were indistinct in the photo, was never identified.

  The FSB had followed up on Martin Hughes, but had found nothing of interest. A scanned copy of his passport was on their files.

  Lenilko looked at the passport photo. Yes, there was no doubt. It matched the one in John Farmer’s passport.

  ‘Get on the Hughes information, find out how extensively he was followed up, and what was missed,’ said Lenilko, his voice more businesslike now, but still tinged with good humour.

  He rose, strode to the window once more, gazed out at the white sky, rapt, feeling as light and unburdened as the flakes of swirling snow.

  Seven

  Years earlier, Purkiss had met a man who had a phobia for cold temperatures. Not just an excessive dislike of them, but a full-blown clinical syndrome which resulted in severe panic attacks whenever he found himself caught outdoors with the weather turning bad, or even when a shower head in an unfamiliar bathroom failed to deliver within a few seconds water that was at least warm. The man had developed the phobia when, working on an oil rig in Alaska, he’d fallen into the sea after a partial collapse of the superstructure. He had been rescued half-drowned and with severe hypothermia, but his physical injuries had healed fully.

  For the first time Purkiss understood fully how such an intense, overwhelming terror of the cold might develop.

  He ducked his head down as low as he dared while still allowing himself to peer through the snowmobile’s windscreen at the ground ahead. The machine handled beautifully, gliding across the snow surface as gracefully as an Olympic iceskater. There was a danger in that. The passage across the tundra was so smooth that it was easy to lose awareness of just how fast you were moving. Purkiss’s speedometer showed ninety-five kilometres per hour. He slowed a fraction.

  Ahead of him, across the yards of undulating whiteness, he could make out Wyatt’s own machine. The man handled it confidently, almost arrogantly, with the occasional flourish such as a tilt towards one side or the other before a correction back to the middle.

  Behind Purkiss was the third snowmobile, carrying Montrose and Dr Clement.

  Back at the hangar, a minor argument had broken out. The engineer, the big and taciturn Swede, Haglund, had insisted Purkiss ride with Wyatt. Purkiss had other ideas.

  ‘I want to get to grips with one of these. Get a feel for what all of you experience when you go out in the field.’

  Haglund said: ‘They are not toys.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, and I promise you I won’t do anything reckless. Nor would I suggest I ride one on my own if I wasn’t confident I could handle it.’

  Purkiss had used a more basic type of Arctic Cat in rural Wisconsin one winter. That was several years ago, when he was still working for SIS and had been on a trip to try and persuade a retired agent to return to Britain and to intelligence work. The visit had been brief, and a failure. But Purkiss was of the opinion that no experience was wasted experience, and now it appeared his introduction to the snowmobile would come in useful.

  Haglund didn’t look happy. But Wyatt spoke up: ‘Go on, Gunnar, let him. We’ll keep an eye on him.’ He glanced at Purkiss, his expression light but neutral.

  Purkiss hadn’t encountered Wyatt all morning, had met him again just a few minutes earlier when Purkiss had gone to the hangar with Montrose and Clement. Wyatt was with Haglund, loading kit on to the snowmobiles. He nodded at Purkiss.

  ‘Good morning?’

  ‘Informative.’

  And that was the full extent of their interaction.

  Haglund sighed heavily. ‘Okay. You ride alone. But you damage my machine, you pay for it. Understood?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Purkiss.

  Haglund showed him the Cat, a small, single-person model. Purkiss got in, familiarised himself with the controls.

  ‘Aren’t you bringing anything with you?’ said Montrose. ‘Equipment or something?’

  ‘I have my camera.’ Purkiss lifted his shoulder bag. ‘But I’m here more about the story than anything else.’

  Outside, it was as though the cold had been milling about, waiting for victims, and descended upon them ravenously as soon as they emerged. Purkiss cringed within his layers of clothing, pulled the goggles he’d been provided with down over his eyes, feeling as if their very sclerae would freeze into brittle shells within seconds. He looked at the others. They seemed unfazed. Even Patricia Clement moved naturally, without huddling, as she climbed on to the rear of the snowmobile into which Montrose had already settled himself.

  Now, the vehicles sped across the tundra, the bleak landscape less threatening than the very cold itself.

  Montrose had briefed Purkiss succinctly and unenthusiastically on the way to the hangar. ‘The site’s Outpost 56-J, not that the name’s important. It’s seventeen kilometres due east of here, so it’ll take us twenty minutes, unless we encounter any freak weather. Which Wyatt says isn’t likely, and he’s the expert.’

  ‘What sort of site is it?’ Purkiss asked.

  ‘It’s useful to most of us in our different fields, because of its nature,’ Montrose said, his tone thawing a little. ‘It’s on the southern side of a ridge, which
protects it to some extent against the winds from the north. The soil’s unusually fertile there, which means good sampling for Medievsky and Budian, and for me. The protection from the wind allows Wyatt to set up his equipment without too much difficulty.’

  Purkiss glanced at Clement, who was walking alongside Montrose on the other side. ‘And you’re interested in every site, because you get to study the people.’

  Clement smiled. They were in the entrance corridor, heading for the front door, and in the fluorescent light from overhead the psychologist’s skin looked more transparent than ever. ‘Yes, Mr Farmer,’ she said. ‘But I also get to familiarise myself first-hand with some of the work my colleagues are doing. It’s essential to understand the work in order to understand why they engage in it.’

  To Purkiss the scenery looked frighteningly uniform, and when he checked the dashboard clock and saw they’d been riding for a full twenty-five minutes, unease clawed at his throat. Had they overshot? Were they lost in the vastness of Siberia, thirteen million square kilometres of some of the harshest terrain on the planet?

  He watched Wyatt veer rightwards ahead, and slow, and in the distance through the hazy gloom an elongated bulky shape loomed. As they drew nearer, Purkiss saw it was a ridge of rock, its height difficult to be sure of as the upper regions merged into the darkening sky.

  Purkiss pulled the Arctic Cat in next to Wyatt’s. A rudimentary prefab structure had been set up against the base of the ridge, its door half-obscured by a bank of snow. Wyatt climbed off the snowmobile and lifted two cases of equipment from the back. He unclipped a shovel from the side of the vehicle and nodded to Purkiss.

  ‘There’s one on yours, too. Give me a hand clearing the entrance, will you?’

  They set to work digging away the snow as Montrose and Clement brought further cases from their own vehicle. Inside the prefab hut Montrose lit a paraffin heater. Purkiss felt himself drawn to it with a selfish greed he imagined starving men experienced at the sight of a limited food supply. It was all he could do not to shove the others aside and hunch himself over the sudden warmth.