Rogue Assassin the seventh Gabby Lane Spy novel

ROGUE ASSASSIN

M.F. KELLEHER

Copyright © M.F. Kelleher 2026

First 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 XXXXXXXXXX

Cover artwork by Claire Meczes

1

Gabby Lane turns her Aston Martin into Emdener Strasse in the north east of Berlin and stops in front of an old battered garage door. She selects one of the switches on the dashboard and the metal starts to grind skyward.

As she waits, she looks in the rear view mirror and the irises of her brown eyes adjust minutely to the shifting light. She runs her fingers through her dark hair then pushes the pedal and her Vanquish drops down the slope into the MI6 underground parking beneath her flat.

She makes breakfast of eggs, bacon and hot coffee before sitting out on the balcony of her apartment to watch this Moabit area of the city come alive.

Today is unusual as she has just completed a mission in Madrid working with Spain’s MI6, the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia. She’s been undercover there for a fortnight. The only thing in her diary today is a meeting at the British Embassy on Wilhelmstrasse right in the centre of the capital to meet the new Ambassador to Germany.

Gabby’s seniority and security clearance means that she is not controlled by Berlin’s MI6 branch who are limited to run spying missions only within Germany. Gabby is controlled by London Centre, the hub of British global espionage operations located in MI6’s HQ called Vauxhall Cross on the River Thames.

She crashes out of the flat and walks to the tram stop then transfers at Berlin Central Station for the five minute underground journey to the Brandenburg Gate.

The British Embassy is a modernist concrete block known by those who work here as the blue cheese sandwich due to its angular design. Gabby pushes the third floor button in the lift and the car rises inside the building until the doors open. She walks to the Sir Christopher Mallaby Conference Room and goes inside. There are half a dozen people already gathered, some of whom she knows as they’re MI6 field agents based in this building.

Gabby looks out across the central light well inside the building to the other offices opposite as more people arrive and the new Ambassador appears and introduces himself as Lawrence Aitkin, then he proceeds to talk about the importance of the work they do.

As Gabby is wondering how long he’ll be talking for, a single sound occurs – the explosive shattering of one of the glass windows on the right hand side of the room that looks out to the light well. Immediately Aitkin stops talking, his eyes still open but now there are red marks on each side of his head.

His body hits the floor before the blood has started to spill out of the bullet holes in this skull.

For one second, the room remains silent then a wave of shouts, swearing and noise rolls up in the air.

As people gather around Aitkin’s now dead body, Gabby rushes to the windows. There’s the tiniest reflection of sunlight from a weapon carried by a fast-moving figure on the roof opposite. She turns and runs to the corridor then along towards the security doors that join the embassy to the upper floor of the Hotel Adlon Kempinski next door.

There’s coded access that Gabby knows and she hammers the numbers into a panel on one side of the bullet proof door before it clicks open and she’s inside the thick-carpeted luxury of this five star hotel.

She turns left to get to the far side of the place and nearer where she saw the glint from the assassin’s rifle. There’s a housekeeper and her trolley up ahead right across the corridor. Gabby runs, grasps the top of the trolley and flicks her legs over to land on the far side and continue her chase.

As she reaches the corner and turns sharp right. For a split second she sees the masked figure from the roof slipping into the stairwell door on the left hand side.

When she reaches the door and hurries out to the steps, she can see her quarry one flight below her. Gabby takes the stairs two at a time then jumps to the next landing down.

She’s gaining, each second she gets nearer.

The assassin takes an exit from the staircase and back into the hotel. This is the first floor and they run towards the main doors on the street called Unter den Linden.

There’s a sweeping flight of stairs to the exit and they’re half way down when Gabby catches up.

She grabs for the attacker and manages to get a handful of clothing. It stops them in their descent. Gabby tries a head hold and gets her arms around their neck but they twist out of it. Gabby punches now, aiming for their face. She hits hard and repeatedly and the impacts take effect but the assassin fights back and has a metal cudgel in their hand. Gabby feels the impact of the metal against her body and can feel the skin break on her temple and blood spurt from a cut.

The attacker hits again, this time on her arms so Gabby focuses on getting the metal weapon out of their hand. She lunges and the centre of gravity of the two of them tips them over and down the staircase. They both roll, together at first then separately as their bodies are pummelled on each step as they bump down.

At the bottom, the assassin is up and running, the sniper rifle lashed across their back. Gabby gives chase.

They crash out onto the pavement and people nearby move out of their way as Gabby again makes contact, this time tripping the attacker who smashes down onto the ground.

She gets a firm grip but the assassin has a combat knife too in their arsenal and pulls it out from a pocket in their jacket. The first swipe is wide but the second touches Gabby’s body and rips through her black jeans, cutting  into Gabby’s flesh. She reaches out and gets fingers onto the bottom of the balaclava and pulls upwards. The mask rides up and Gabby can see the woman’s face.

The attacker scrambles up and runs around the corner.

Gabby stands but her leg is damaged now. When she reaches the corner the assassin is swinging their leg over a black KTM 450 SX-F dirt bike parked near the Akademie der Künste next door.

The bike fires up. Gabby limps out into the road to get in their way and there’s a moment when it looks like it will work as the rider has to swerve violently around her and the bike slips on the road surface. But they manage to correct their steering, the machine skids but then powers away and disappears through the Brandenburg Gate.

Two people come up and help Gabby but she’s dismissive and angry that she lost the attacker. She walks back around to the British Embassy and goes inside.

An hour later, after getting attention from a medic on site, Gabby goes to the secure communications room next to the Ambassador’s suite of offices. Her leg is healing and the administered pain killers at least allow her not to limp now.

She sits down at a long desk with three large screens before her. Gabby logs in to the MI6 operations system called Oberon and clicks through to the facial recognition application.

“Female, early thirties, green eyes, brunette,” says Gabby into the voice interface.

In front of her on the screens, images of women from the MI6 and Interpol databases who match the criteria flash up for half a second each. Gabby keeps her eyes locked on the photographs. The light plays across her face in the room as the software does it work.

“Stop!” she says suddenly. “Go back.” The images click backwards. “Stop there.”

The attacker’s face is on the screen. Gabby clicks on the profile data and reads out what she sees.

“Arabella Cavendish, 33, worked as a sniper for MI6 until three years ago as Agent Marwell.”

The screen shows that a video call is coming in and she answers it.

The MI6 crest dissolves to black then the face of her boss, Sir Bernard Macintosh, Head of MI6 Global Operations, appears before her. He is wearing his ubiquitous dark pin striped three piece suit and his kind blue eyes smile beneath his greying dark hair.

“Aitkin’s dead, Gabrielle,” he says. “A single 8.59mm bullet fired from an L115A3 sniper rifle.”

“The standard British long-range weapon, sir,” she says.

“Used by us and many allies including France and Germany. Did you get an insight into the attacker as you chased them?”

“I saw her face and I’ve just looked her up, she was Arabella Cavendish, Agent Marwell, used to work for us but left three years ago.”

“Are you familiar with Marwell?” he says.

“No, sir.”

“She was a sniper but was relieved of her duties for suspected freelance work outside of the service. She is grand-daughter of the last Duke of Belmont. Her father was in the British army and died in Bosnia. He was an only child and she is an only child too, but the family trust only recognises the first born son as a rightful heir to the estate, so the family line ended with her father’s death. She fought it in the courts when she was twenty-one but lost.”

“I remember reading about it,” says Gabby.

“Arabella went to Gordonstoun,” says Sir Bernard. “Then joined the Army’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment where she was trained as a sniper. She joined us and was one of our best for five years before her removal.”

“Are GCHQ tracing her movements after the attack, sir?” she says.

“They’re trying to but she’s a slippery fish, an expert at covert working and surveillance electronics, so she knows how to stay hidden digitally. We’ve created Operation Hartby to locate Arabella Cavendish and bring her in, and you’re leading it, Gabrielle.”

“I’ll need Agent Coniston, sir, Kate Grosvenor, the sniper,” says Gabby. “She has expert knowledge about the mind of an assassin and she will have worked with Marwell as they would both have been in the C9 Sniper Branch.”

“I’ll make sure she’s allocated,” he says.

“One last thing, sir?” He looks at the camera expectantly. “You said the job is to locate Marwell, if she won’t come willingly, what’s the extent of our options? Dead or alive, sir?”

“A kill order for Arabella Cavendish has been raised to the PM for approval, Gabrielle, in case you need that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The screen goes black.

*

There’s little light at the junction of Rowley Lane and Well End Road near Borehamwood in the British countryside to the north of London's vast metropolis.

The street lights don’t work here for one very good reason and that is they were cut under a secret court order thirty years ago. The judge agreed to the cut because the ordinary looking house half way between the Mop and Brooms pub and a farm down the road is fake.

Any passers-by who look very carefully might notice that the windows are painted over and the lawn is plastic.

Once a month, a security van with no name on the side draws up on Rowley Lane and the high gates that give access to the home are unlocked. The security team drive in, spend less than an hour inside the house, then re-appear, drive out, lock the gates, and drive off towards Borehamwood.

The three men who are waiting in the dark and crouched in the shrubbery at the back of the garden of 43 Rowley Lane knew there’d be no moon tonight because they don't want to be seen.

They don’t speak.

They are in black clothing including black balaclavas, all of which will be burnt after they finish their work here tonight.

One of the men indicates for them all to move and they’re barely visible as they hurry across the plastic lawn.

Another of the men has a crowbar and he pushes it into one side of a window frame, taking care to only open it a few millimetres as there’s an alarm on every window. He feeds long narrow-nosed wire cutters through the tiny gap between window and frame and snips the cables in the sequence he’s memorised from the stolen plans they have.

He pulls the window open and the men jump into the house. They have lights on their jackets and when they switch them on, narrow beams cut across the room in the darkness.

They know what they want and run silently through the lounge with its fake television and furniture and into the hallway. There’s a locked door under the stairs and they know the code to plug into the security panel.

Inside, stairs drop down into a cellar which is empty.

There’s a second door and another code. They know this one too and walk through then down a steel stairway, being careful to shut the door behind them.

Once all three are at the base of the steps, the third man flicks a light switch on the wall and illumination rattles along to reveal where they are. Rows and rows of shelving filled with paper files disappear into the distance. They know that the room is seventy metres long and every metre has racks of paperwork.

Their research guides them to Aisle 26 and they scoot along the sections until they reach 26F. They each have black backpacks on and now they swing them off before the first man starts to flick through the files on the bottom shelf.

He finds what he's looking for and picks out a bundle of manila folders. He opens the front cover of the top folder and moves his light to shine on the papers. Sure enough, this is exactly what they want. He reads the words on the sheet headed Operation Bluefly – British MI5 Infiltration into Corporations and Institutions in the City of London 1992-2002.

The man turns the page and there’s a list of names of individuals, alongside their MI5 code names and the organisations they were covertly placed inside. Each was tasked with delving deep into their host organisation to find any leaked government information that could be damaging to British interests.

He flicks through more pages. This is bigger than he was aware when he agreed to do the robbery. This first file lists a dozen people and details of the crimes that were unearthed as part of Bluefly. He opens another file and further names are listed.

The man grabs fistfuls of folders from the shelves and hands them to his two colleagues. All of them continue to search the documents and weed out the valuable papers.

Slowly, they sort which files they want and start stuffing them into the backpacks.

It takes fifty seven minutes before the men are happy that they’ve got what they came for. They zip the bags and run back to the staircase.

The last man hits the lights and the storage area is plunged into pitch darkness.

They hurry up the stairs to the cellar level then further up into the fake house. They exit the way they came and run out across the plastic grass to the rear boundary then through the shrubbery and across a ploughed field to a section of Rowley Lane fifty yards further along.

Their Range Rover is by the hedgerow where they left it earlier. One man opens the gate to the lane and another drives out to the tarmac then they all scramble in and the driver accelerates away and into the countryside.

After thirty seconds, they can all see a tractor parked across the lane but there’s no one around. As the driver starts a three-point turn to find another route, they see the blue lights of a police car behind them. The driver works more quickly and nearly turns the Range Rover but the police block the road with their BMW then jump out and run to the Range Rover. The officers are armed and shout warnings. The men are panicking as there’s no escape. The two police walk to the side of the Range Rover and indicate for the men to lower the windows.

As the glass descends, the police officers fire only three bullets, one into the head of each man. One policeman pulls the doors open and gets hold of the backpacks and the other drops an incendiary into the Range Rover.

They run back to their police car, turn in the lane and drive away. Behind them, the Range Rover explodes into gold and red in the night and the flames lick up in the darkness near Borehamwood.

2

Gabby pushes the door to the Lounge Bar Le Faubourg in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district. She is shown to a table in a discrete corner and sits in one of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius chairs in the place.

She orders a bottle of Meursault and two glasses.

Within five minutes, she can see her guest arrive and the woman is shown across to her table and they hug.

“Seems like ages, Kate.”

“You’ve been busy, I heard.” Kate’s blonde hair is tied back and her blue eyes flicker with excitement. Kate Grosvenor is Agent Coniston, one of the best snipers in British Intelligence. She works within the elite C9 assassin branch of MI6 and carries out terminations when they are approved by the British Government.

“You’re an heiress now,” says Gabby. “You don’t need to work.”

“I’ll never walk away, Gab. I love it too much.”

A waitress approaches them and they order Gebeizte Meerbarbe and Risotto Milanese.

“You know Arabella Cavendish, Agent Marwell very well, don’t you?”

“Of course. We worked together on numerous outings,” says Kate.

“Tell me about the events that led to her dismissal.”

“She was stopped from working the day after her thirtieth birthday. It took the Crows less than an hour to remove her from the building.” Kate uses the nick-name for the MI6 Internal Investigations Branch.

“What work was she doing outside MI6?”

“Freelance assassination for a gang leader called Noah Fischer. He’s based in Austria. He runs a drugs network in Vienna and Salzburg. He has routes in from the Adriatic and across Croatia and Slovenia but he pays the local judiciary and police so he never gets arrested. They raided his home on the same day that Marwell was removed from MI6 but they couldn’t get any evidence to stick and he walked away a free man.

“How did we find out that she was moonlighting?” Gabby drinks from her glass.

“We had a mole inside the gang, Marwell didn’t know. London were concerned that Fischer was starting to consider gun-running as well as drugs, so they sent an agent in to infiltrate the gang, someone you and I know very well, it was Agent Riverside.”

Their food arrives.

“Knowing how an assassin’s mind works, Kate, how do we find her?”

“She’ll have her safe places. Houses she’s lived in or hotels that she’s used when she was working for us,” says Kate. “I’ve already put a Research Order into London to trawl Marwell’s ops history and identify a list of possible locations.”

“Marwell wouldn’t just kill for the sake of it, would she?” says Gabby.

“Absolutely not,” says Kate. “She’s a professional, Aitkin’s death will have been planned. There are only two reasons why assassins do their work, either they’re being paid or it’s a personal vendetta, but there’s always a good reason to take someone’s life in their mind, if there wasn’t they’d go insane.”

“Do we know if there’s a connection between her and Aitkin?”

“The client option is the most likely,” says Kate. “Being an assassin is a science, Gab, not an art. It’s about process, it’s about exactness, like a watchmaker. You’re taught to be a machine. You’re taught to concentrate on every little step. Assassins think they’re gods, that they’re unstoppable. Her pattern will be sophisticated so she feels intellectual. It will help her ignore the fact that her job is about ending someone’s life.”

“We need to get one step ahead of her.”

“We should get a geo-tag on her,” says Kate.

Gabby pulls out her phone and selects the Alabaster geo-tagging app from the MI6 suite.

“We should be able to attach a tag onto her image from the satellite feed yesterday when I was fighting her in the street.”

Gabby scrolls back to the right time code on the satellite stream and turns the phone for Kate to see. “Here, 13:05, the Hotel Adlon Kempinski. We should see Marwell and me coming out of the doors in a second.”

They watch and can see the women running out of the hotel then scuffling on the pavement before Marwell escapes on the dirt bike.

“If we stop it there,” says Gabby. “I can attach the geo-tag to the bike and it should show the route it took.”

A blue line flows out along the road system until it stops a few seconds later.

“It stopped in Oberschöneweide in Eastern Berlin, down by the river,” she says. “We’ll drive out and have a look, see where Arabella went.”

*

The grey and solid Thames House is only fifteen minutes from Downing Street. This building has been the headquarters of MI5 for thirty years which is five years longer than Connie Barratt has been in the service.

She was recruited to be a field officer whilst still at Oxford and worked on criminal infiltration, then increasingly complex terrorism cases as her twenties progressed.

Connie quickly gained a reputation as having a natural ability for espionage across the three broad spy skill areas of analysis, strategy and field operations. She was rapidly promoted on a fast track scheme until she was appointed to her current job five years ago as the Head of MI5 Operations.

She reads a set of stapled papers marked Top Secret as she sits behind a large oak desk in her office on the fourth floor that has a view of the water. Her green eyes scan the words beneath her brunette hair and she flicks to the next page. There’s a quiet knock on the adjoining door from her assistant’s office and the small and dark Janice walks in.

“The people are here for the twelve thirty, ma’am. I made teas.”

Janice places a tray with a teapot, milk jug, cups and saucers on an oak sideboard along the back wall.

“Are you in the office for lunch, ma’am?” says Janice.

“No, I just had a message from the Cabinet Secretary at No.10 inviting me to a working late lunch. Show my guests in, if you would.”

Connie walks to a chair at one end of a long table that dominates the room but she doesn’t sit down yet. The door opens again and Janice shows in three people.

“Hello again, Rob,” she reaches out her hand to Agent Riverside with his neatly cut fair hair.

“Let me introduce another of our MI6 people that Sir Bernard has seconded over for this operation, ma’am,” says Riverside. He holds his hand out to indicate a woman in her early thirties with light brown hair. She is as tall as he is. “Agent Talgarth, ma’am.”

“I’ve heard of you,” says Connie. “You’re Ivy, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sir Bernard says you worked with Gabby Lane a few months ago and you excelled.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I did my best.”

“And you must be our researcher?” says Connie looking at the third person who came in.

They shake hands. “Gina Campbell, ma’am.”

They pour teas as they stand at the sideboard then walk over and sit around one end of the table. Connie turns to Gina. “Update us all on the events of last night, if you would?”

“Delta One Zero is a Cold War storage facility near Borehamwood,” begins Gina. “It was used from the sixties for documentation that MI5 couldn’t or didn’t want to store in central London.” She looks at the eyes around the table. “It has the usual MI5 storage construction. A false domestic building at ground level then a bomb and fireproof bunker two levels down that contains the storage.”

“You may know that some of these are used for emergency medical facilities in the event of nuclear war or as storage depots for light armaments to be used under emergency powers for civil unrest or attack. But this one, Delta One Zero, only has paperwork in it.”

“The break-in was fast and efficient judging by the lack of damage,” she continues. “They knew the layout and the access codes. Three charred remains were found in the lane outside. We suspect that these men were the burglary team and whoever was paying them to break in subsequently terminated them after the job was done.”

“Any indication who the dead men were?” says Riverside.

“We’ve only checked UK dental records so far and there are no matches but we’re still searching.”

“We know that the thieves were targeting Operation Bluefly documents,” says Connie. “Did we recover any of those at the scene?”

“No, ma’am,” says Gina.

“Let me tell you all about Bluefly,” says Connie. “After the collapse of the USSR in ninety one, there was a feeling inside the British Government that our state secrets were vulnerable to exposure through infiltration by bad actors who were embedded in commercial corporations in the City of London. MI5 was ordered to send in undercover field agents to these organisations to assess and if necessary stop state secrets from leaking.”

She sips her tea then continues. “Those agents uncovered a significant level of corruption being carried out between these corporations and Government. Not the leaking of state secrets however but illicit payments and gifts in kind, raising the spectre of blackmailable material. All of this was recorded and retained on paper files back then, pre-computer records. Bluefly was abandoned after ten years. The agents collected a huge raft of data on the corrupt individuals. Years later, during office moves, everything was sent for archive storage in Delta One Zero.”

“A question, ma’am?” says Riverside.

“Go on.”

“Was anyone prosecuted at the time?”

“Decisions were made not to prosecute for reasons that were important back then.”

“Are any of the people whose names are identified in Bluefly still in positions of responsibility inside Government, ma’am?” says Talgarth, turning her eyes to Connie.

“Before I answer that, I want to confirm something to the three of you. Your personal security clearance has been raised for this operation to Top Secret due to the nature of the sensitivities involved,” says Connie. “I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that Top Secret information cannot be passed on under any circumstances, even if you are talking to a senior figure who may purport to have the same clearance.”

She pauses and they all wait on tenterhooks.

“Is that clear?” she says and looks at each person in turn who confirms their understanding.

Connie continues. “Most of the people named in Bluefly are either no longer significant, have left politics or have died. But there’s one very prominent figure in the current Government who is named in the Bluefly documents and that is David Miller, our current Home Secretary.”

She stops and thinks about the best way to phrase the next words as the silence buffets around the four of them inside Thames House.

“It puts me in a difficult position,” she says. “As MI5 reports to Miller, he is our Minister in Government. That is why you three have been selected for this work. As you all work for MI6, technically you work for the Foreign Secretary, not the Home Secretary, therefore you don’t work for me and therefore not for Miller either. If push comes to shove, we may need to step around David Miller to get things done. But let’s see what happens. Sir Bernard Mackintosh, your Head of Operations, has given me MI6’s unequivocal support if things get hairy. But only he and I, and now you three as well, know of these arrangements. You must not divulge that we have the potential to undermine David Miller. Anything connected to the arrangement will never be formally recorded in any MI5 or MI6 or your personal files. Perhaps, ironically, that’s something we’ve already learned from this Bluefly robbery."

*

Gabby’s Aston Martin is parked in an MI6 garage five minutes from the restaurant. She plugs in the geo-tag location to the car’s navigation system and she and Kate can see a red marker half an hour away. They head south then east on the Bundesautobahn and cut across the river on the Stubenrauch Bridge. Gabby turns off the main road and heads towards the water as they pass old industrial buildings.

“These factories closed after the wall came down,” she says. “They’re mostly abandoned or being turned into event spaces.” She parks on a street that has warehouse walls rolling up to six floors on either side. Gabby transfers the geo-tag to her phone and they follow the tracer until it leads them up an alleyway squeezed between two blocks.

There’s a metal door in the wall of one warehouse that’s locked and the signal is somewhere inside.

“I’ve got some charges in the car,” says Gabby and she returns to the Aston while Kate waits.

Within five minutes she’s back and presses plastic explosive around the door lock then pushes a Bluetooth detonator into the putty. They step back and shield their eyes, Gabby presses the button on her phone screen and there’s a bang from the door where the lock has buckled.

Inside, little light creeps in through the smeary yellow paint across the windows that are regimented along the walls far into the distance. The tracer shows that they need to go to the floors above and they find a metal staircase bolted into the concrete at its base and attached to a mezzanine floor at the top.

They start to climb and the steel creaks and moves beneath their feet. Kate goes first and as Gabby’s trailing foot comes off the top step there’s an aching groan of steelwork. The bolts holding up the structure pull out of a support beam and the staircase crashes to the floor echoing around the abandoned building.

“If she’s still here, she’ll know we’re coming now,” says Kate and they exchange a glance.

“It’s another level up,” says Gabby. They search for more stairs to get them up higher and at the far end of the floor there’s a staircase built into the corner of the building.

They step out onto the second floor.

Gabby holds a finger to her lips and flicks her hand to indicate to Kate that they’ll move forward.

They unholster their handguns and run silently across the grey concrete in the gloom of the warehouse.

Half way down, there’s something lying on the floor.

When they reach it they can see it’s the dirt bike that Marwell had escaped on after the fight, and their geo-tag source.

Beyond the bike is a wooden office with glazed walls for supervisors to see their workforce when this place was in use. The spies split up so they can approach the office from two directions.

Kate goes right and Gabby goes left.

The women make no discernable noise as they move.

Kate reaches the doorway first and can see inside.

“She’s not here,” says Kate.

They both step into the office. There’s a pile of cardboard boxes fashioned into the shape of a bed in one corner and more boxes set out as a table and chair. An old iron stove stands in the centre of the room and Gabby opens the door. “She had a fire in here.”

“It looks like she’s moved on, Gab. There’s nothing here that she would need. I’m trained in the same survival techniques as she is. She was here for a few days, presumably planning the attack on Aitkin.”

“Can you tell from anything here what her next move might be?” says Gabby.

Kate walks around the room in silence, her eyes picking out every detail of the abandoned temporary home for Arabella Cavendish. She stops by the stove. “We need to empty this stove, there may be something in there.”

The two spies create a shovel from one of the boxes and carefully dig out the ash from the stove until there’s a pile of burnt residue spread out on the floor in front of them.

They set up their phone torches to illuminate their work and pick through the remains.

After ten minutes, they’ve found nothing and Kate’s phone hums in her back pocket. She interrogates the message.

“Research Branch have sent the list of locations frequented by Marwell over her MI6 career.”

Kate reads the list. “There’s an apartment in Paris, a house in the mountains in Austria, a family house in Bulgaria and a flat in London that the family owns.”

“Have they done CCTV facial recognition?” says Gabby.

Kate shakes her head.

“Let’s call London.”

They sit on the boxes on the floor and Gabby puts her phone on speaker. Agent Ashwick is on duty.

“Ashwick,” says Gabby. “Can you patch together two things: the European CCTV camera networks that MI6 has access to and the GCHQ facial recognition app? We’re looking for Agent Marwell, whose facial image you can source from her MI6 personnel record on the system.”

In London, Ashwick types and clicks.

Gabby mutes the phone as she turns to Kate. “I hope this bloody works.”

They sit in the warehouse and the smell of the burnt ashes pervades their nostrils as they wait.

“It’s found ten images, ma’am,” says Ashwick from the phone. “I’m sending them to your phone.”

Her phone buzzes and she and Kate lean in to explore the results. “Some of these are old,” says Kate. “That one’s recent, though. Where is it?”

Gabby clicks on the location data.

“She was coming off the E871 road to the south of Sofia in Bulgaria.”

“Matches the location of one of the family houses on the locations list,” says Kate.

“How far is it by road to Sofia from here?”

“A thousand miles, sixteen hours,” says Kate.

“We’ll go now and take turns driving.”

They both stand, run back to the stairs and out of the warehouse to where Gabby parked the car. The V12 roars into life. She steers out of the side street and turns south towards Bulgaria.

3

Arabella Cavendish stands at the enormous sitting room windows of the family house in the Dragalevtsi district of Bulgaria’s capital city and watches the sunset.

She squints her green eyes slightly and tries to make out the places she knows laid out before her in the landscape as the day ends and the sky haemorrhages reds and yellows above her head.

Her dark hair is swept up in a chignon and she wears a midnight blue business suit and a white shirt.

This house is one of the properties she inherited from her father. He’d bought it when she was nine and the long, hot summers they’d spent here are a core part of her childhood memories. She’ll never forget their last family holiday here because she’d slept with a boy for the first time that year, high up in the mountains with a thousand stars above their heads.

Arabella didn’t know she wanted to be an assassin then.

She’s not sure she ever really decided to do the job, it found her. It sought her out. Like death, it arrived without her realising.

The house’s elevation is just high enough in the foothills of the vast Vitosha Mountain to give an elevated view of the city while also being just a short and convenient drive into the heart of Sofia.

She turns to look at the horizon far to the north and can see rain clouds buffeting around the dark brooding Balkans in the distance.

The house has wide open floors with dark wood everywhere to balance the light Italian tiled floors, and outside the mid-century windows the gardens are stuffed with rare flowering but thorny shrubs to provide both beauty and an impenetrable border for anyone wanting to try and see inside.

Along the corridor she can hear the telephone ringing in the study. Arabella turns away from the view and walks at a pace that she decides because she doesn’t rush for anyone.

She picks up the receiver.

“I thought you weren’t going to answer,” says a man’s voice.

“I always answer calls from my special friends.”

“Where have you been? I’ve been calling over the last two days,” he says.

“I’ve been working,” she says.

She holds the receiver under her chin and leans over to a tall round silver pedestal table. She picks up ice cubes with tongs and they drop into a lead crystal glass. When she pours the whisky on them they crack in two and she licks her lips.

“I may have some more work for you,” he says.

“You have to pay for my services, you know?” she says.

“I know.”

“You can’t just bark orders when you want someone killed. You haven’t paid me for last time yet, the agreed fee was a hundred grand.”

“I’ll send you something,” he says.

“Why don’t you fly down to Sofia next time and brief me personally? I have a house in the hills, you’d like it here.”

“I can’t, too much on.”

“Why do you want these people killed?”

“Why do you want to know that? Aren’t you the aloof killer? Knowing why these people have to die would make them more real, would it? It would make it harder to dismiss them as irrelevant work packages inside your head.”

She is surprised at his astuteness.

“All I will say,” he continues. “Is that most of them know too much.”

“Are they friends of yours?”

“Now you’re getting personal,” he says. “That’s not what I look for in a heartless assassin.”

“It’s easier if you just upload the jobs onto my online work portal. Phone calls are traceable and I’m sure you don’t want a record of your interactions with me,” she says. “The work portal is double encrypted, your identity is safe.”

“Alright,” he mumbles. There’s an audible click and the line goes dead.

The silence engulfs her again for nearly a minute until she can hear the soft padding of bare feet on the tiles behind her coming along the corridor.

“I thought I heard you,” says Dominik. “When did you get back?”

“Just now, I hired a car and drove down.”

He puts his arms around her and his blue eyes are close to hers as Arabella brushes his fair hair across his forehead.

“Are you here for a few days?” he says. “I wanted to walk in the hills. I don’t want to stay here on my own. I can go back to my place if you’re busy.”

“I’m here for a day or two.” She kisses him. “Take me to dinner in the city tonight, there’s a new place in Pozitano Square I want to try.”

*

On the third floor of the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross there are four allocatable operations suites named after past Heads of MI6. These rooms allow field agents to work on their missions and collect materials and intelligence together in one place.

Riverside and Talgarth have been allocated the third suite along on the right hand side, recently renamed the Metreweli Suite.

“What’s all that?” says Riverside as he pushes open the door from the corridor with his back and turns into the room with two coffees in disposable cardboard cups.

On one of the clear glass screens dotted around the room, Talgarth has drawn words and boxes. He stands next to her and hands her one of the coffees.

“Forty-one sets of Bluefly papers were removed from Delta One Zero,” she begins, pointing at some of her words on the glass. “Gina in Research is going through them to weed out the key information and ranking them in terms of importance to British interests.”

“OK.” He sips his drink and Talgarth writes more words on the glass with a red marker pen.

“The burglars snipped one set of wires on one window in the correct sequence so as not to trigger the alarm. That means they knew the floor layout, the alarm wiring and the timings of security visits,” she says. “There are no signs of damage to the two coded entrances, so the gang had the numbers to those as well.”

She looks at Riverside, he nods and she ticks one of the bullet points of her words in front of them.

“Inside the storage,” says Talgarth. “There were no disturbed papers thrown on the floor and there were no signs of the gang having searched for ages to find what they wanted. So they knew the indexing numbers, they knew the aisle and the section where Bluefly paperwork was held.”

“Lastly,” she says. “In the shelving, they left some of the material from Bluefly. Gina’s initial analysis of these leftovers has shown that the people named in these abandoned files are deceased. So the gang knew who was alive and who was dead before they broke in.”

Riverside scans the words on the glass. “So there’s been half a dozen leaks of secret information to give the burglars the details they needed to do the job?”

“Exactly.”

“That would have taken weeks if not months to collect together,” he says. “They had to find out what information they needed, who knew it, then steal it or bribe people to get everything they needed. And that’s just to get them to square one.”

“If we need to know everyone who knew each part of information,” says Talgarth. “That could be hundreds of people.”

“Less than that, these things are all classified as Secret, so anyone who looked at the information will be listed on the MI5 Minerva ops system which we’ve been given access to.”

“Let’s test one set of data,” says Talgarth. She sits on a padded tall stool in front of a giant Mac screen. “Let’s pick the wiring diagrams.”

She types and clicks through screens of information until she finds a page then reads out the title. “Access and Alarm Technology. There’s a search box asking for the building name,” she says and types in Delta One Zero. “The wiring diagrams are here inside a secure folder and there’s a list of anyone with access to that folder. We’ve got override so we can see the information but no one else can apart from the people on the list.”

“Good,” he says.

“The screen has two engineers named for Delta One Zero.” She scrolls down the information. “They are someone called Terry Peel and another called Ray Bolton.”

“We can get the police to bring them in for questioning,” says Riverside. “Have you got home addresses for them on there?”

She clicks on one of the men and says. “Terry Peel.” Talgarth reads from the screen. “Deceased.”

“When?”

“Three months ago, a car accident.”

“Try the other bloke,” says Riverside.

“Ray Bolton.” Talgarth selects the man’s record. “Deceased.” She looks at Riverside. “Went missing two months ago, later found in the sea near where he lives.”

“The only two men who knew the wiring both die in unusual circumstances within a few weeks of each other?” he says. “Whoever paid for the burglary is not some small-time amateur. This is a professional criminal network or a high net worth individual.”

“If they bribed everyone,” says Talgarth. “That’s maybe a dozen people, then if they’re having them all killed off too, that’s at least a million in upfront costs, maybe more.”

Riverside stands next to Talgarth and re-reads her notes on the glass screens.

“Here’s what I think, Ivy. There can’t be that many people who could pull off an operation like this. They’d need to be big time, have the cash and the contacts to find state secrets, bribe and kill, as well as pay for a break-in on a top security site. We should be able to identify the small number of possible active individuals who have the money, the connections and the background to do a job like this.”

“Agreed,” says Talgarth. “I want to follow up on David Miller too. We need to know more about him, beyond what it says on the public record. If he’s corrupt then they’ll be evidence somewhere apart from Bluefly. That was thirty years ago. He was in his twenties, a new MP. If he’s been fiddling the books for three decades, he’ll have slipped up. He’s a massive security risk even without this break-in.”

“We can get a tail put on him,” says Riverside.

“I’ll do it,” she says. “I’ll tail Miller myself and find out what makes him tick.”

*

It’s not usual for David Miller to get home late, given that his job is the British Home Secretary.

His Jaguar Sentinel passes the Epson Racecourse and the lights along the roadway flash across his green eyes as he pushes his dark hair back away from his face.

The route to his house drops down into the country lanes of Surrey after that until his driver turns off into the private Nursery Road in the upmarket and exclusive village of Tadworth.

The gravel crunches under the car’s tyres before it comes to a halt and the driver opens Miller’s door for him.

“Can I take your bags in, sir?”

“Thank you, Peter.” He hands the red ministerial case to the driver and the man disappears around to the kitchen entrance.

Miller breaths in and out deeply in the night air. There’s barely any moon but the lights from the house scatter across the perfectly manicured lawn next to him.

He can feel his phone hum in his jacket pocket and guesses it’s his wife calling. He is preparing a funny line in his head when he sees it’s not Lauren calling but an unknown number.

This phone and secure number were given to him on his first day on the job, and the phone itself is a secure device that uses a national security network for calls and not the commercial mobile networks that are used by the public. For those reasons, he answers the call.

“Hi,” he says.

“Mr Miller.” It’s a woman’s voice. “I’m on the road fifty yards from your house. Come and meet me.”

“Who is this?”

“Will you meet me?” she says.

“Not unless you identify yourself. As I’m sure you know, there are security protocols that I must follow. How did you get this number?”

“Then I’ll walk to you,” she says. “Go out to the gate on your road. Tell the plain clothed police in the car outside your house that I can pass.”

“I can’t do that,” he says.

“I have a sample of a document from Operation Bluefly, I’m sure you remember?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Evidence of your corruption, Mr Miller.”

“I don’t know how you got this number,” he says. “But I’ll need to report this call to my security.”

“You were a very junior minister in the Department of Trade and Industry as it was. You took backhanders, didn’t you, Mr Miller? Did you know that you were being watched by MI5 back then? They’ve got evidence, or rather, I’ve got it now.”

He can’t think what else to say and is about to end the call when the woman says. “Walk out to the road, Mr Miller or I will publish it tomorrow.”

She hangs up.

He stands in the moonlight, still holding the phone against his ear.

Miller starts to walk on the gravel. The front gate has shut on the auto-closer after his car came through five minutes ago and he unlatches the pedestrian gate next to it and swings it ajar.

As he steps out onto Nursery Road, one of the two plain clothes officers in their Range Rover steps out.

“I’m meeting someone, it’s fine,” he calls over and the man puts a hand up to acknowledge.

He walks on and can’t see anything at first, then gradually the outline of a young woman dissolves out of the darkness.

She has brunette hair and is wearing a black suit.

When she reaches him she stops. Her eyes are wide and blue, and her hair is in a low ponytail.

“Who are you?” he says.

“Elsa.”

“How did you get my number?”

“We bribed someone,” she says, a smile playing about in her eyes.

“What’s this stuff you were talking about?”

“Bluefly,” says Elsa. “You won’t have heard of the name because you were one of the targets of it. You received payments in 1998 and 1999 that you didn’t declare. The security services were watching you and others at the time and they caught you.”

“Why have I never heard about this before?” His eyebrows pull together.

“They decided not to do anything.”

“You said you had a sample of something?”

She puts her hand into her jacket inside pocket and pulls out a piece of paper folded lengthways. Elsa hands it to him.

Miller opens the paper. It’s a typed report about field activity by an MI5 officer at the time. The words talk about a surveillance operation and that Miller was followed to a meeting with an unidentified man in a Richmond pub. There are references to photographs that show a package being exchanged between Miller and the man. When MI5 broke into Miller’s London flat a week later and cracked the safe, the package was found and discovered to contain a hundred thousand pounds in cash.

When he’s read the words he pauses.

“I can see in your face that it’s true,” she says. “Never take up acting, you'd be dreadful.”

She smiles at her own joke but Miller only stares at her as his mind stutters, failing to give him any clarity about his options to get him out of this.

Elsa is still smiling. “If you pay us, all the material will be destroyed.”

“Who are you?” he says again. “Elsa what?”

“Elsa Roth,” she says.

His face is etched with concern.

“Don’t you want to know how much money you have to pay?” she says.

Miller looks at her with contempt but doesn’t speak.

“One million pounds, isn’t that neat? Do you see what we did? Ten times the amount it took to bribe you in the nineties.”

She pauses, then adds. “There is another option.”

Now his eyes widen very slightly. “What?” He barely says the word.

“You pay me to have the man killed who is paying me to blackmail you. That’s cheaper, it’s only eight hundred thousand.”

She smiles again.

“I’ll leave you to have a think.” Elsa turns on her heel. “You have my number! Let’s do dinner soon!” she calls out.

Then she disappears into the darkness