OFFICIAL DENIAL

 

A BLACKHAWK NOVEL

 

 

Copyright ã M.F. Kelleher 2023, 2025

Fifth Edition

 

The right of M.F.Kelleher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or transmitted into any retrieval system, in any form, or by means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any authorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

 

ISBN 9798389840577

Cover artwork by Claire Meczes

 

 

For Etta and Alfie

 

  

CHAPTER ONE

 

The beach at Năvodari is cold this morning. As the dawn fades up far to the east, Gabby shivers and rubs her hands together. In the summer, this part of the Romanian Coast of the Black Sea is packed with holiday-makers, but now only two British spies and a crew of Royal Engineers are on the beach.

“How’s it looking, Hans?” she says. Agent Hans is sitting on a field chair at a makeshift control centre. Four computer screens in front of him show the cameras and status of a maritime drone that sits just offshore.

“Couple of minutes, ma’am.”

“We’ve only got fifteen minutes before our window closes.”

“Aware, ma’am.”

Gabby walks over to the group of men sitting in a landing craft pulled up onto the sand thirty feet away and directs her eyes to the Officer in Charge.

“Major, are your men ready?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “As soon as your boy gets the drone off and pushes the button, we’ll be ready to dismantle his control equipment and load it on board. Then we’ll all be out of here.”

“How long’s the journey back to Bulgaria?”

“Four hours, ma’am.”

Gabby looks at her watch. “An hour until sunrise.”

“We’re exposed after that,” says the Major. “You and your man can be picked up with a patrol boat sooner though. You should be back on land in an hour or two.”

Gabby walks back up the beach to Hans.

“Ready, ma’am,” he says and clicks the mouse. The floating drone immediately roars into life in the open water. Hans turns a steering wheel in front of him on the console and the drone obeys his commands, making a circle in the sea.

“Go ahead, Hans,” she says quietly. He presses the throttle on the console. The boat rises and heads off away from the beach. On the screen, they watch the video streams from the on-board cameras, one showing the beach disappearing into the distant darkness. Hans turns the craft north-east and opens her up to full power.

The time seems to drag for the next ten minutes. Nothing changes on the beach. The soldiers wait for their command, Gabby and Hans watch the drone cameras and a green flashing blip on one of the screens shows where the boat has reached along its journey.

“How long until impact?”

“Three minutes, ma’am.”

The green marker moves up until they can see the shadowy bulk of a long jetty up ahead in the boat’s front camera. The outline gradually gains more detail and shows warehouses crowded around the landing point.

The long stretch of the jetty is outlined on the screen now, pushing out into the cold, dark sea. Gabby moves away from the screens and looks out across the water. It’s peaceful here, the umbrellas and tables where families would have had their holidays in the summer are stacked neatly in rows of yellow and orange at the back of the beach.

“90 seconds to target, ma’am,” says Hans across the distance between them. She walks back to his control point and looks at the central screen. The jetty is clear in the image now. Hans moves the wheel and pushes the buttons on the equipment to reduce the drone’s speed.

“60 seconds.”

One of the main legs of the structure crawls towards the middle of the camera’s picture. Moonlight bounces off the surface of the water which is squally this close to where the legs dive down into the Black Sea.

“30 seconds.”

Gabby doesn’t blink, her pupils are large in the night time. The soldiers on the beach start to stand now, waiting for their part in the next stage of the operation. She raises long-range binoculars to her eyes and focuses on the jetty in the distance.

“Ten metres, ma’am,” says Hans. “Permission to detonate?”

Time stops in her mind, the seconds tick by. She makes a final check.

“Detonate.”

Hans pulls back a flip cover on the desk in front of him to reveal a red button.  His eyes flick up to her for a moment and she barely registers his finger pressing down before the sound and sight of the explosion cuts across the Romanian dawn. She raises her gaze as the white and yellow light explodes on the jetty, but there’s no time to be a spectator.

“Let’s move, major!” She calls out and the soldiers run to the equipment in front of Hans and start to dismantle. Hans stands up and moves out of their way and Gabby indicates to him for them both to get on the assault craft. Within three minutes, the beach is empty again, the hardware stowed back in the boat. The major makes one last check then gives the command and three sappers push the boat off the sand then jump on board. The craft turns east to escape beyond the coastal currents, before turning south and on towards a rendezvous with a British patrol boat to take the spies on board back to dry land.

*

October in London. The water of the River Thames forms a grey sheet beneath Vauxhall Bridge as Sir Bernard Macintosh walks from where his chauffeur dropped him on the north bank. He walks vigorously across to the south bank and on towards 85 Albert Embankment, Headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

As Head of Global Operations, his presence in the reception area causes the security team to stand up a bit straighter and smile at him as he shows his pass card. The barriers glide silently open to let him through. A few minutes later, he emerges from the lift and walks up to one of the few doors on the top floor corridor of the building. A reader scans his iris in less than a second and the door unlocks. For everyone else in the world, they must get to his office via Lawrence, his personal assistant, who has the office next door.

The office is over twenty feet long with three windows spaced equally looking out to the water. The carpet is deep red and the furniture is mahogany. A large desk sits in front of one window, and two sofas lay in the middle of the room. Lawrence has left him a pot of tea and biscuits on a tray in the middle of the sideboard under the central window. Sir Bernard hangs up his coat, leaves his case by the desk and stands looking out at the Thames as he pours a cup of tea.

“Agent Blackhawk is here, sir,” says Lawrence from the inter-connecting door between their offices.

“Thank you, Lawrence, show her in – and bring another cup, would you?”

“Sir Bernard,” says Gabby. She walks in holding an empty tea cup and saucer. “Lawrence gave me this.” She holds up the cup.

“Let me pour,” he says. Then they sit on the sofas with their drinks and he takes a gulp of the liquid before looking directly at her. “Well done on the jetty.”

“Thank you.”

“Any difficulties?”

“No, all went to plan,” she says.

“Royal Engineers good?”

“Very.”

“They know their stuff,” he says. “It was completely destroyed thanks to your efforts. It’s a major piece of infrastructure for Europe’s arms traders.”

There’s a pause while they coincidently both drink.

“I said to you a couple of months ago,” he says. “When we first spoke about the jetty, I was thinking of you for some more work in that region.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sir Bernard opens a manila folder in front of him, picks up a number of photographs and places the pile between them on the table. The top image is of a man taken with a long-range lens, eating in a restaurant. She looks down at the image. “Makari Vorobyov,” she says and looks up. Sir Bernard spreads the other photos across the table.

“These are covert photographs of Vorobyov taken last week in Budapest. He has moved his base to there to be closer to the new flows of demand that have come up with all that is happening in the east.”

“He’s one of the most dangerous arms traders out there,” she says.

Sir Bernard nods. “The intelligence says that he has recently killed the leader of the second biggest arms operation in southern Europe, so that makes him the number one now.”

“OK,” she says.

“We need to stop him,” says Sir Bernard. “That’s your operation.” He watches her eyes.

“An assassination?”

“His death is an option,” he says. “But there’s another aspect to it. We’ve asked the Hungarians if we can mount an operation now that he is in Budapest and they have declined.”

“So, we wait until he travels?”

“He doesn’t,” says Sir Bernard. “He has up to a hundred associates who run his organisation. He is very careful with his own personal security and rarely moves out of his base, wherever that is.”

“But if the Hungarians are saying no?” She looks at her boss seeking answers.

“We’re going to mount an Official Denial operation,” he says flatly.

“MI6 operating in an EU nation without their approval?”

Sir Bernard doesn’t respond but waits for her to think about the risks and consequences.

“Officially the operation won’t exist and there’ll be no permanent record of it,” says Sir Bernard. “The PM will deny that MI6 are there at all if questions are asked.”

“Is this mission being controlled from London?”

“The embassy in Budapest will need to be aware.”

“But I am Officer in Charge, am I sir?” she says emphatically.

“You’ll need to coordinate.”

“Can’t we run it from London?”

“It’s too complicated, Gabrielle. “I know you like working on your own.”

She looks glum. “I’ll need Agents Hans and Laravelle, sir, and access to the sniper, Coniston.”

“I’ll get them allocated,” he says. “You’ll all officially be on an operation in Spain. The records of anything you do won’t be traceable.”

He sips his tea.

“There’s one more thing,” he says. She looks at him. “We’ve lost an asset.”

“Who?”

“Viktor Melnyk, Agent Overbeck.”

“What do you mean by ‘lost’, sir?” she says

“He disappeared three weeks ago.”

“He’s a British spy?”

Sir Bernard nods. “Originally a Russian national, but has been working with us in Ukraine, feeding us whatever intelligence he can get through his network of Russians in the area.”

She stops to think. “And we’ve no idea where he’s gone?”

“He told his handler that he has been diagnosed with cancer,” says Sir Bernard.

“And you think there’s a link between his disappearance and his illness?”

“Possibly,” says Sir Bernard. “I need you to find him.”

“He could have been captured by the Russians,” says Gabby.

“Agreed. We don’t know.”

“How does this fit with the Vorobyov operation?”

“Agent Overbeck was spotted two days ago.” He pauses and smiles. “In Budapest.”

She nods. “I’ll need access to his personal file.”

Sir Bernard picks up a sheaf of papers from the folder. “I thought you’d ask for it.” He holds it up to her and she takes it from him. They both smile.

“Anything else, Blackhawk?”

“No, thank you, sir”

“You’d better get going,” he says. She stands, gives Sir Bernard one last glance, then turns and walks out.

*

After rising in the Lusatian Mountains, the River Spree cuts north-west through Germany before reaching the Spandau district of Berlin. Schiffbauerdammstrasse sits on the north bank of the river, right in the centre of the city. Gabby knows this street very well because the Mett Bar sits at one end. This place has been an MI6 meeting place for decades.

Until the wall went down, it had been on the border between East and West Berlin and used as part of the escape route for those coming into the West. Now, the barman Agent Hans under deep cover. Gordon Rathbone, as he is known to his parents, is one of the few people she trusts in the service.

“Hello,” she says as she sits on a stool at the bar. “How are you?”

“Just thinking about our night-time activities, Gab.”

“Sir Bernard says thank you.”

“I’ll tell my mother.” She smiles and he puts a bottle of beer on the bar in front of her.

“You close at nine, don’t you?” she says.

“Yup, why?”

“We’re having a meeting.”

“Oh yes?” he says. “Who with?”

“Your favourite everyday spy,” she says and opens her eyes wide.

“Laravelle?”

She nods.

“Anyway, she rejected me, you know that. I’ve given up on her now,” he says. “I’m going to follow your approach with relationships and have a bar so high that no one on earth could ever possibly get over it.”

“Glad to hear it. I don’t want you in love when we’re in a war zone.” Hans takes a swig from his beer bottle and his face looks excited. “I’ll tell you later.”

The last of the paying customers push out into the evening rain as nine o’clock approaches. Gabby and Hans take their drinks and sit at a large, round table near the window. The water streaks down the glass outside and they talk about their times together, saving chat about the next mission until their guest arrives.

The bell above the door signals someone entering from the street. The rain has continued to pour down on Berlin. A young woman comes in with a hood pulled up. She pushes it back and smiles at them. She has large eyes and a mop of dark hair. Agent Laravelle sits down and Hans pushes a beer bottle over to her. They exchange glances but say no words.

After five minutes of casual chat, Gabby clears her throat. “Right. As of now, we three are allocated to Operation Millport,” she begins. “If you go and look on the MI6 Oberon database, Operation Millport aims to improve the security for the Spanish Government and we have been asked to help them address a number of weaknesses in the operations in and around Madrid.

The other two look half-bemused and half-disappointed.

“Why do they need us?” says Laravelle. “Aren’t there resources in Spain to do that?”

Gabby puts up her palm. “Millport is not that at all. That’s just what it says on the system. What Millport is going to do will be denied by the British Government.”

“Why?” says Hans.

“Because.” She pauses. “It’s in an EU member state without their knowledge.”

Hans and Laravelle stay silent.

“The main operation is disruption of Europe’s largest arms network. Hans, I’ll need some research on the gang leader.”

“Who is it?” he says.

“Makari Vorobyov.”

“And where are we going?” says Laravelle.

“Hungary.”

“You said the main operation,” says Laravelle. “Is there another one?”

“We also need to do a locate-and-extract on an MI6 asset who has disappeared from their station and surfaced in Budapest.”

“Have you got a plan?” says Hans.

“The disruption should be easy enough once we locate where Vorobyov is staying in Budapest,” she says. “We don’t know enough about the disappearance yet. It’s secondary to the Vorobyov op, we can plan it more when we get there.”

Hans and Laravelle nod.

“There’s an option that Sir Bernard mentioned,” continues Gabby. “If the disruption doesn’t work, he has  got pre-approval for a kill order. But let’s see.”

“Will the spooks in the British Embassy in Budapest be aware of Millport?” says Hans.

“Aware, yes, but involved, no,” says Gabby. “It’s our operation, not theirs.

Hans and Laravelle exchange a wordless glance.

*

A raw wind cuts up from the river to where Marjorie Allardice stands half-in and half-out of the side doorway to St Paul’s Cathedral. From her vantage point she has a clear view down St Peter’s Hill, the road that leads to the Millennium Bridge over the Thames.

Of all the Russian locations in London, St Paul’s is one that Marjorie prefers as she feels safer here than in some of the places where Russian agents meet their handlers. She has had four handlers in her time with the SVR, Russia’s MI6. Three of them had gone back to Moscow and not returned, then within a week, another new face had made themselves known to her and told her that they now were her only communications route in and out of the SVR Headquarters.

Her current handler, Maksim, is the gentlest of all of them. The old attitude left over from the Soviet era and the KGB has gradually changed over the years as Russia has become more outward-looking.

She sees him on the far side of the road and watches him negotiate the traffic and climb the steps to the stone doorway.

“Valentina,” he says using her SVR code name.

“Hello, Maksim.” They speak in English to blend into the background of everyday life. His greying hair is slicked back with hair tonic over a round face and thick nose. His brown eyes are lively behind glasses with thick black frames. 

“You’re looking well, radnaya.” She smiles, a little uncomfortably. “Let’s walk, it’s too cold to be standing still.” They turn north, cross King Edward’s Street and head for the net of narrow roads around St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

After half an hour they buy coffees and sit outside a café on the corner of Smithfield Market. The place is quiet after the dawn-bustle of meat traders who would have been here and gone again before most people had started their day.

“You know that you’re seen as a central part of the fight, don’t you, Valentina?” he says. “There are no more important SVR agents in Britain.”

She smiles at him but waits for more.

“The information that you have provided in the last two years particularly has been very well received.”

“Thank you, Maksim.”

“Now, I have been asked to talk to you about a high priority operation.” He looks deadly serious suddenly.

“There was an unfortunate accident the other day at a port that we have been using to move military equipment.”

“Where was that?” she says.

“On the Black Sea. We believe that MI6 were involved and our friends who own this facility want to know more.”

“If it’s MI6, Maksim, I don’t have full access. I’m MI5 so I can only see the UK operations.”

“I’m sure you can help us, Valentina,” he says.

“I’ll check, but…”

“We can’t go back with nothing,” he interrupts her. There is suddenly more force in his voice and she can see fear behind his watery eyes.

She touches the back of his hand. “Alright, Maksim,” she says. “I’ll find us something.”

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

Gabby drops the clutch and opens up the engine of the Landrover Defender outside her flat in Berlin. Laravelle sits next to her looking at a map of the route they’ll be taking to get to Hungary, and Hans lays across the back seat, asleep.

“Easy enough, ma’am,” says Laravelle. “Down to Dresden and onto Prague. Touch on Slovakia, passed Bratislava, then we’re in Budapest.”

“How long will it take?”

“Nine or ten hours, ma’am.”

“Jenny, you can call me Gabby unless we’re on a live op.”

“Ma’am.” Laravelle looks at her and screws up her nose, and they both laugh.

Gabby turns the SUV out of the street and they head east.

It is dark by the time they turn off the motorway near central Budapest. They navigate through the roads and finally turn into Szondi Street then down the ramp beneath the Radisson Blu Béke Hotel.

After checking in, they agree to meet in the bar of the hotel to plan the next day. Hans is the first to arrive and orders whisky. Laravelle walks up to him within five minutes and orders wine.

“Do you miss being in the army, Gordon?” she says.

“Sometimes.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Didn’t like war,” he says. “I’d only been out of training a couple of years and went into Basra.”

“Were you scared?”

He turns to her. “No, Jenny, I wasn’t. We were trained to defend ourselves.”

Laravelle takes a large swig of wine as Gabby walks up to them. They go to the hotel restaurant and take a table with a view over the gardens outside. After the meal is finished, they have coffee and Gabby turns the conversation to the job in hand.

“Tomorrow,” she begins. “We are going to have a session with a spook from the embassy to give us a briefing on what MI6 operations there are in the country. They’ll come to the hotel.”

“Who is it?” says Laravelle.

“Don’t know yet,” says Gabby. “Hans, has put together a profile of our target.” And from now on we’ll use his code name - Redwick.”

Hans pulls out his phone and finds his notes. “Redwick is ex-Russian military,” he begins. “He was key to the Crimea invasion in 2014. And before that in every key military operation they have had in the last thirty years – Syria, the Chechnyas, Georgia, even Tajikistan back in the 90s. He had a reputation as a hard man and didn’t treat his troops well, but apparently he got respect because of his ability to eventually win in battle. He left the army five years ago and continued with a lot of the black market activity that he was already part of. He grew his operation up from a local one to a regional one, and now, the biggest in Europe.”

Gordon goes through more detail about Redwick, then asks if there are any questions. “Has he got any weaknesses?” says Laravelle. “Routines that he does each day that we can use?”

“He likes his drink, but that’s not unusual as we know from people who have been in the armed services. He’s never been married and has prostitutes shipped in to him, wherever he is. Again, not unusual. There are no other obvious weaknesses.”

“Maybe we can use those somehow,” says Gabby as she drinks the last dregs from her coffee cup.

*

A ray of sunshine glints off the bonnet of the Audi A5 and makes Nadya Koval drop the sun visor to shield her eyes. She turns off Frankel Leó Street on the west bank of the Danube in Budapest and into the underground car park beneath her flat. The lift up from the lower ground floor opens near her front door and she turns the key. Taras isn’t home, so she makes coffee and goes to sit on the balcony overlooking the park in front of their apartment. Nadya pulls her blonde hair out of the tie and lets it fall onto her shoulders. She watches the people on the grass, talking and walking. She has always loved this part of the city since her father brought her here when she was a girl.

Budapest is her city, the place where she was born and has lived most of her life apart from university when her mother and father had insisted on her going to Bonn to study English. Her parents had experienced more of the Soviet way of life in Hungary before perestroika and had wanted her to see more of the West, but she hadn’t been that impressed. She met a boy in her first term at Bonn who was rich and they had driven and flown all over Europe, sometimes on a whim, only deciding at the last minute where they would go.

He had taken her to New York and London and they had stayed in the best hotels. When they had split up in her final year, she missed the glamour that his money had given her. But then she met Taras in a bar back here in Budapest and he had the sort of wealth that could give her the lifestyle she wanted, full of parties and travel. Her parents had complained that Taras was bad for her but she had ignored them.

The sound of the front door opening and then slamming pulls her out of her thoughts. Taras walks out to her on the balcony. He is tall with bright green eyes and beautifully cut dark hair.

“Hello, darling.” He kisses her on the lips.

“I wasn’t expecting you this early,” she says.

“That meeting finished early,” he says. “Got what I wanted, so there was no point staying.”

“There’s coffee made.” He walks back into the flat then reappears five minutes later, changed out of his suit and in jeans.

“What was it about?” she says. “The meeting?”

“You really want to know?”

“Mmm.”

“My contacts have got an introduction to a guy who is handling shipments going out east,” he says. “We’re planning some redistribution.”

She smiles weakly. He never talks about his activities unless she asks. Even though she knows that Taras deals with some violent and corrupt men, he always protects her from the worst of it. She knew from the start that he was involved with criminals. When he had talked about his childhood and how poor he had been, she knew that there had to be an explanation as to why he was rich and only in his thirties.

“When’s that happening?” she says.

“Not sure yet.” He breathes out. “Next week probably. There’s no security to speak of anyway around the warehouses. Once the containers arrive here, no one is tracking them, fortunately.”

“Who do you sell to?”

“Everyone wants military equipment these days,” is all he says.

She has already moved on with her thoughts. “I wanted to eat out tonight. I booked us a table at La Perle Noire,” she says.

*

It is silent in the empty conference room on the third floor of the hotel. Dust in the air catches the pale sunlight that pours in from the day outside. Suddenly the door at the far end bursts open and Major Nicholas Warren walks in. He has dark brown hair cut short and brown eyes that take in his surroundings. He takes off his coat, rolls it up and lays it on one of the side tables then adjusts some of the chairs around the table.

He has his back to the door when it opens behind him. “Are you from the embassy?” says Gabby and he turns.

The two of them say nothing at first but their eyes link.

“Hello, Nick,” she says.

“Gabby, they didn’t tell me it was you.”

“I’m Top Secret.” She widens her eyes.

“You’re leading Millport?”

“Yup,” she says.

“We can make this work, can’t we?”

“Fine by me.” They say nothing more and she moves to look out of the window.

After a minute, Hans and Laravelle arrive and introductions are made. They pour coffees from a jug and sit at the table, but Gabby remains standing.

Nick stands up but Gabby starts to speak before he has a chance to say anything. “Agent Oxwood has come over to brief us.” He looks momentarily frustrated but in less than a second, the look has disappeared.

“I’m going to tell you about our live ops in the region,” he begins. “I’m the MI6 station chief here in Budapest, but I cover Romania too. Cutbacks, you know?”

“Mostly, we are tracking migration and arms movements in the region, as that gives us good intelligence about the illegal activity going on. We had a covert operation in the last couple of weeks which was the destruction of a port used by the black market gangs. I haven’t been fully briefed as it was run from London due to its sensitivity, but we do know it was MI6 resources who carried it out.”

Gabby and Hans exchange emotionless glances.

Oxwood continues to talk about how MI6 are working with the Hungarian intelligence agency, the AH, to support counterintelligence and organised crime.

For an hour, the sun imperceptibly rises in the sky and casts a moving target across the tables in the room.

“Questions?” he says as he finishes his briefing.

“You haven’t mentioned how we’ll work together,” says Hans. “Your team and us.”

“All op decisions must go through my unit.”

“That’s not correct, Nick” says Gabby quickly. “We’re self-determined.”

“But operating in a context,” says Nick.

“We’ll tell you what we’re doing just before we do it,” says Gabby. “You have my guarantee of three hours’ notice. Anything else will undermine the way we work.”

“We can’t have a rogue unit operating in an EU member state.” Nick’s voice rises. “I know you like doing it your way, Gabby. But we’re managing the day-to-day relationship here.”

She stands against the wall, her eyes a thousand degrees. “We need you to give us local intel, Nick, but we will decide what we do. I think you know that Millport is Official Denial status. That way, the PM and Westminster can deny our activities, and you can be honest about how much you knew. We're patently not going to undermine your operations. You just need to keep us across what you’re planning, we’ll do the rest.”

He sighs. “We’ll need to talk more.”

“That is the deal, Nick. Thank you for the briefing. Hans here is your team’s contact point for the intel.”

“I’m going to have to flag this back to London,” he says. Gabby’s mouth says nothing but her eyes speak for her. Nick makes a point of taking a long time to pack up his things.

“Thank you, ladies and gentleman,” he says to the room. He nods to Gabby. “Agent Blackhawk.” Then, he leaves.

After Nick has gone, an awkward silence descends on the conference room. Hans is the first one to brave the cold air.

“Want to tell us something, Gab?” he says.

“I just wanted to make it clear” she says, her voice still giving away her emotion. “They don’t control our work, I am the MI6 Field Officer in charge of this op.”

“You sound spikey,” says Hans. “Has there been some silly bollocks about who calls the shots?”

“Not from my perspective,” she says. Hans and Laravelle exchange glances. “Oxwood is our liaison point, not our control centre. We’ll be a self-contained command and operate team, that’s why we’re on Official Denial status.”

“Are we going to get the intel?” says Hans. “Or will Oxwood be difficult?

“He’ll be OK.”

“You know the guy?” says Laravelle.

Gabby pauses for a second, aware of the eyes watching her. “Yes, I know him.”

“Who is he?”

“We worked together a few years ago,” says Gabby.

“There’s something else,” says Hans. “Behind your eyes. Come on, we’re all trained in interrogation, you can’t hide it from us.”

There’s a pause and the others wait for her. “We had a thing once,” she says.

“This guy is an ex of yours?” says Laravelle, trying not to sound frustrated.

“Long forgotten.”

“Why are you only telling us this now?”

“I only knew it was him a minute before you did.”

“Did you dump him?” says Laravelle.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“I did,” says Gabby. “Now, let’s move on from my personal life to what we’re being paid to do in this country.”

*

It only takes ten minutes from Nadya’s flat to the Híd Bisztró near the western end of the Margit Bridge over the water, where they serve her favourite brunch. Olena is already at the table when she arrives, flicking through her phone. Like Nadya, the woman is tall and groomed. They air kiss, then order eggs Florentine and coffees.

“How’s Taras?”

“Busy. Always doing some new deal, you know?”

“What does he actually do?” says Olena.

The two friends only met three weeks ago but immediately got on. Nadya never tells people that Taras is involved in the black market. In her fictional world, he runs an import export business, bringing in goods from the east and the west and selling them on. This is true in part, and she reassured herself that not all of his cargoes are illegal.

“Runs his own company. Imports stuff, you know,” says Nadya but her friend can sense insecurity in her voice.

“I’d like to meet him, sometime.” Olena’s eyes flash up from her food to look at her breakfast companion. “We should get the boys together, Viktor needs company.”

“How’s his cancer?” says Nadya.

“I don’t know what to say. He lives with it.” Olena looks wistful.

“How did you guys meet?” says Nadya.

“We both worked in Ukraine, for the government,” says Olena. “I was the manager of the admin team, and he worked in some weird backroom analysis job. I never did find out what it was, he was cagey about it, I think he was more important than he says.”

“When did you come to Budapest?”

“Last month. He got a medical payoff. He was desperate to go, and couldn't stand everyone looking at him with the same look in their eyes, you know, a ‘poor guy’ sort of look.”

“And you came too, Olena?”

“I love him, what can I say?” says Olena. “My sort of work is easy to get, I got something within two weeks here.”

“What’s he gonna do?” says Nadya.

“Try and survive,” says Olena. Nadya reaches out to her friend and holds her hand. The woman takes a mouthful of coffee and tries not to look sad but fails.

“We’ll arrange something with us and the boys,” says Nadya. “Taras needs to meet more people, he spends too much time with his business contacts.”

“Can he find a job for Viktor? Something small, something to keep his mind off his treatment.”

“I’ll ask him,” says Nadya. In her mind, however, she can’t help wondering if Olena is a bit too interested in trying to find out about Taras’ business. She needs to be careful what she tells her, and find out more about this woman and her boyfriend, Viktor.

 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

Marjorie walks out of St John’s Wood tube station, crosses the Finchley Road and disappears into the streets to the west of the highway. She turns into a solid, red-brick Victorian mansion block and walks up the stairs to the first floor. She takes a key from her bag and opens one of the doors on the landing and lets herself into number 17A Carlisle Place. Immediately inside, a hallway with a deep red carpet stretches the entire length of the flat from a small arched window that faces the road at the front to a conservatory at the back.

“Marjie?” A voice calls out.

“Mother,” she calls back.

Before going to see her mother, Marjorie goes into her bedroom, takes off her shoes and puts on slippers, then walks down to the conservatory. At the end of the red carpet, the house opens out into a glass-roofed pavilion that had been added in the 1920s. The room is crammed with plants. There is a low table and four wicker chairs scattered around the centre of the space. Lady Fiona Allardice has a tightly-permed helmet of grey hair and wears a trouser suit of dark blue. Her face is perfectly round and her nearly-black eyes crackle with energy behind wire-framed glasses.

“How are you, my dear?”

Marjorie kisses her mother on the cheek. “I’m well. How’s your foot?"

“It’s nothing,” says Lady Allardice. “I was reading about all this threat of war.”

“Oh yes?”

“From my time in the service, I know that most of the so-called news that gets put out is carefully controlled when there’s a war on, but there does seem to be a lot of detail in the reports, more than I would have thought was healthy to release.”

“It’s a different world now, mother. Before social media, you could control the flows, it’s not like that nowadays. The troops on the ground all have camera phones.”

“It can’t do any good,” says the old woman.

“It is how it is.”

Lady Allardice stops her train of thought and looks at her daughter. “A bad day, Marjie?”

“No.” But her nerves are evident to her mother.

“When you were a teenager and I’d seen you smoking at the bottom of the garden of our house in Wimbledon, you’d come back inside and when I asked you if you’d been smoking and you said ‘no’ in exactly the same way as just now. You’ve always been a dreadful liar.”

“I’m OK, just not in a talkative mood. I’ll make dinner.” Marjorie walks out, back up the corridor and disappears into the kitchen. Lady Allardice thinks about her daughter over the years and the half a dozen times that the girl has lied to her.

By ten o’clock they are both sitting in the lounge.

“You’ve been quiet all evening,” says Lady Allardice. “I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be, mum. It’s just work.”

“You seem to worry more these days.”

“I do.” A rare moment of honesty falls lightly into the void between them.

“You’re bored aren’t you?” says the old lady.

Marjorie smiles at the woman. “Well, you know me.”

“You want promotion? What’s the next level up?

“Head of Operations for one sector.”

“You want that?” says her mother.

“I don’t know.”

“Has there been a woman as Head of Ops before?”

“No,” says Marjorie.

“You used to be so ambitious, what happened?”

“Before Dad died, I was.”

“Why did that change anything?”

“I was put out to pasture,” says Marjorie. “They must have thought I had something to do with it.”

“You had nothing to do with your father’s death,” says Lady Allardice.

Marjorie shrugs. “Still happened.”

“You’re not exactly old enough to retire, my girl. And you’re an Ops Controller. People would kill for that job.”

“I don’t know, I’m going to bed.”

She gets up and kisses her mother then disappears up the corridor. Lady Allardice pushes herself up from the armchair and walks over to a bookcase that sits on the back wall. The shelves are loaded with a mass of novels, encyclopaedias, old magazines, and newspapers. She thumbs through the volumes in front of her and finds A Tale of Two Cities. Lady Allardice pulls it out and opens the volume. Inside the hollowed-out book is an old mobile phone. She picks it out, replaces the book and walks to the conservatory, being careful to shut the door to the rest of the house before she does anything else.

She pushes the power button on the device and waits for it to come alive. When the lights come on, she goes to the stored numbers and presses the only number in the device, muttering to herself about the smallness of the buttons as she does so. She puts the phone up to her ear.

“Bernard? Fiona.”

“It’s been a long time, Fi.”

“Our friend is becoming restless, Bernard.”

“You think something has happened?”

“She’s different, there’s something there,” says Lady Alardice. “I don’t know what yet, but I just thought you should be aware. Tell Connie.”

“I will. Thank you, Fi,” he says. “Keep me across how she is. You know the score, I don’t need to tell you what to look for.”

“Shall we have lunch, Bernard? Next week? Location Beta Three?”

“My favourite place for lunch!” he says.

“Wednesday at one.”

“I’ll see you there.”

Across London, in Vauxhall Cross, Sir Bernard replaces the receiver of the telephone on his desk. He pulls open a drawer in one of the side pedestals and brings out a folder. He picks it up and walks to the windows that give him a wide view of the Thames. The ice clinks into a glass and he pours a gin and tonic from his small collection of bottles.

Sir Bernard settles in a high-backed swivel chair near the window and opens the folder resting on his knee to refresh his memory about Marjorie Allardice.

Before she became Operations Controller for MI5, Marjorie Allardice was educated at the top girls’ private school Roedean, then Cambridge University. In her first year at Cambridge, she had slept with her professor but just after the start of Michaelmas Term the following year they had an almighty argument and Marjorie got the woman sacked. Despite all of that, she went on to gain a First in Economics.

Marjorie was officially approached by the British Intelligence Services Recruitment Branch to join MI6 when she was twenty-five. They had spotted her at Cambridge and kept track of her life and career. During several very successful years in MI6, she rose through the organisation at tremendous speed then moved to MI5 after her father tragically died. She needed to cut down on her travel so that she could look after her aging mother. Although, Fiona Allardice hardly needs looking after, he thinks. 

Two years later, the file reveals, Marjorie started talking to some Russian friends of hers and a year after that she was turned by the SVR to be a Russian agent. British Intelligence had tracked her every move and knew that her loyalties had shifted from the outset. Sir Bernard and his parallel in MI5, Connie Barrett, allocated her to be a ‘dum-dum’ route as it is known in the security services. The standard procedure for managing people in British Intelligence who also work for other countries. Dum-dums are given false information that they unwittingly feed directly to foreign powers, whether enemies or allies.

Sir Bernard flicks over the page.

Espionage runs in the Allardice family. Marjorie’s mother, Lady Fiona Allardice was one of the most successful British spies in the 1960s. When Fiona was in her twenties, she had been the honey trap in 1963 that resulted in the exposure of Kim Philby, the most notorious British/Russian double agent of the era.

Sir Bernard takes a sip of gin and starts to think if the time is right to do something about this particular Dum-dum, and he knows that Lady Allardice will be central to whatever plan he decides on.

*

Taras checks his watch, five minutes before the truck is due to arrive. He leans back in the seat of his Mercedes so that his face is away from the arc lamps outside, and in shadow.

Today would have been his mother’s birthday, he thinks. Her face is still crystal clear in the memories of his childhood. When his father had left them, Taras was two and his mother barely mentioned him after that day. Even when Taras was a teenager and went through a phase of asking her every day about his dad, she had remained resolutely silent. When they got the news that he had died, it was the only day he can remember seeing his mother cry.

Their farm in Záhony was right up near where the three borders of Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine meet. He and his sister would walk two miles to the school when they got older. Whenever they arrived home at the end of the day, their mother would be in the fields that surrounded their cottage tending winter wheat or spring barley. It had all seemed so simple, but he knows now that his mother had to fight for everything to keep the three of them alive. By the time he was eighteen, Taras was an angry young man. He was angry about his father and how his mother had suffered. All through his schooling, his friends had split into pro-Russian or pro-Western and would fight on a Saturday night after stealing vodka from old Mr Shevchuk’s shop.

He had fallen in love with Lara Kozlov when they were both fifteen, but her father was Russian and tried to put a stop to their relationship. When Lara was sent to Moscow to study it was the final straw and Taras had kissed his mother goodbye and taken a bus to Budapest. He had no job and no skills, and that’s when he first got involved with crime.

The headlights of the truck track across his eyes and he is snapped out of his memories. Taras grabs the door handle and steps out into the night air. He pulls on a black woollen hat and walks over to the group of men as they emerge from the lorry.

“Did you deal with the security guards on the main road?” he says and the others nod. “Come on, then, we need to move.”

Taras orders them to back the truck up to the loading bay, and one of the men jumps the ignition of a forklift. The others swing open the vast back doors of the trailer and Taras watches them gradually move a stream of wooden crates into the back of the vehicle. He checks that they are pushing each one far forward, so they can fit in as many as possible. After forty minutes, the crates are right up to the back door and Taras calls to the men to close it all up and get back on the road.

“When you get to our warehouse,” he says to the driver. “Volya will be there and tell you where to unload.” The guy nods and the red tail lights of the truck flicker on as he starts the engine. The vehicle rolls out of the yard and Taras watches it disappear around the bend in the access road that leads back to the highway.

He lowers himself into the Mercedes and starts to follow the same route as his men. As he reaches the main road, his headlights illuminate the bodies of the two security guards lying on the far side of the road. His eyes are only on the corpses for a second, but he’s sure he sees one of them move. Taras stops his car but leaves his headlights on and steps out. He walks over to the bodies and dust from the road flicks up onto his Italian leather shoes.

He inspects the men and pushes them with his foot. The corpses rock then fall back to earth. He must have been wrong. He must have been seeing things.

Taras turns back to the car and is halfway across the carriageway when he hears the click of a safety catch coming off. He turns in less than a second, pulling his handgun out from the back of his trousers, but he’s not quick enough to stop the man releasing a shot. Taras returns fire and the man slumps backwards, then a roar of pain explodes in his shin. His leg gives way before he thinks about it and he hits the road heavily. He grabs for his leg, willing the pain to stop. He can see a red pool of blood spreading out across the expensive fabric of his suit and he lets out a cry that sounds like the wolves he heard as a child as he lay in bed in Záhony.

Taras doesn’t know how long he has been lying here in the dirt. He thinks he has remained conscious but can’t be sure. When the pain is bearable, he grabs at the fabric of his trousers and tears a strip off. He struggles but manages eventually to wrap the fabric around his leg and pull it tight, and it reduces the pain from excruciating to agonising.

Inside his head, he battles between the all-enveloping pain and the knowledge that he must move soon or die there in the road. When he eventually lifts his body up, his wound starts to throb but he ignores it and hobbles to the Mercedes. He slumps in the seat, out of breath from the exertion. He turns the ignition and swears as he has to put on his seat belt to stop the alarm going off. He engages drive and pushes with his wrong foot on the accelerator. As the car starts to move, he can feel the blood dripping down his leg and onto the carpet in the foot well.

Taras drives through the empty streets of Budapest, the pain pounding in his leg around the bloody gash. The Mercedes descends into the car park. He stops the engine and slowly leans over until he can reach his phone on the passenger seat. His breathing is coming in short bursts now. He dials the stored number for Nadya, and when she answers all he can say is. “I’m in the car park, I need you.”