“Here in Britain?” Lewis demanded.
“Everywhere,” Adrian said.
“And the repercussions,” Teddy said, “from Moscow—assuming he was still on the inside over there?”
“They’ll be very angry indeed,” Adrian acknowledged. “They’ll look for someone to blame. They’ll reel off a whole lot of guff about ‘lawless Britain.’ The usual hypocritical crap. Who knows, they might even try to blame us.”
“Us?” Lewis repeated.
“The Kremlin will see what damage it can cause, and then try to cause it,” Adrian replied.
“If we assume for a second that it’s not a Kremlin hit, what’s their reaction?” Parkinson said.
“If it’s not a Kremlin hit, I should think it will worry them a great deal,” Adrian said, suddenly thinking about this aspect for the first time. Yes, it was, in its way, a momentous murder. It could have very far-reaching implications. “Anatoly Semyonovich had an extremely complex business empire,” he continued. “It has a real reach. It’s very important to the Kremlin’s foreign economic policy. And the way the Russians do things, Semyonovich would be the only figure who really knew what was going on inside it. It’s not like a Western business model, where the head drops off—in this case Semyonovich’s—and things carry on as before. In the West, there’d be plenty of people, competent boards of directors and so on, who know exactly what the company consists of. If the boss drops off his perch, it all goes on more or less uninterrupted. But that’s not the Russian way. The Russians have an imperial attitude to business, with a single godhead who is all-seeing, all-knowing.”
He looked up at Teddy. “There’ll be chaos, I should think. The stock prices of his companies are going to take a real hit. He, personally, was very much identified with the success or otherwise of his assets. The value of Semyonovich Inc. will plummet when the markets open tomorrow, you’ll see. And that will directly harm the Kremlin.”
Adrian looked around the room, warming now to this theme.
“But that’s just for starters,” he said. “We don’t know exactly what secret partnerships are woven into Semyonovich’s business empire—outside the stuff on his company nameplates, I mean. What else was he doing for his masters in Russia? We think he may have been running arms on the Kremlin’s behalf to Caucasian separatists, for example. Disrupting little pro-West republics like Georgia. Maybe he was funding East European, pro-Kremlin opposition groups? Particularly in Ukraine. That’s a possibility. But we’ll find out, you can be sure of that.”
“There’ll be a lot of collateral damage,” Teddy said.
“That’s about it,” Adrian agreed. “Semyonovich was a key figure for the Kremlin. He was in many ways a bellwether for their commercial expansion in the West. We’ll need to watch the Kremlin’s reaction in the coming weeks, as well as seeing what unravels elsewhere from Semyonovich’s death.”
After the meeting had broken up, Teddy Parkinson unnecessarily repeated his offer to Adrian to come for lunch at his country home in Surrey, as if he’d just thought it up.
Never mind the assassination of Semyonovich, Adrian was caressing the idea of an assassination of his own, and he needed Parkinson’s support. With the Russian refusal to extradite Bykov, there were no other options.
He thought of the note addressed to him and pinned to Finn’s dead body outside the embassy in Berlin two years before.
“Honour him in death,” it had ended. No matter how things had been left with Finn before he met his end, the SIS wasn’t going to let him down after it. Adrian would see that he got his revenge.
Chapter 5
LOGAN WALKED SLOWLY BETWEEN the rows of plastic reclining chairs planted twenty deep along the beach. They were all either occupied or claimed by towels, magazines, half-empty bottles of wine, picnic baskets— all the detritus of the summer tourists.
He’d taken a taxi from the industrial capital Podgorica, after his connection there from Belgrade and Marseille, down along Montenegro’s Adriatic coastline.
Halfway to his destination, he’d paid off the taxi and taken a bus for the remaining twenty-five miles or so. It made slow progress along a winding road that traced the rocky shore broken with bays of fine curved beaches and dotted with islands where yachts were moored—some the second or even third vessel belonging to the Russian industrial barons.
It was ten years since he’d last made this journey. The country was very different now from the time he’d been stationed in the Balkans. Prosperity had arrived in Montenegro, in the form of Russian money. Billions of Russian dollars had first sucked up the local production enterprises of any value to the Kremlin, then turned to tourist development.
While the West was aiding the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, of which the tiny state of Montenegro was part, and notionally shoving it towards democracy, it was Russia that had then stepped in, first with its state- backed industrial giants who’d taken over the profitable parts of Montenegro’s industry, and then with its real estate developers who bought most of the country’s two-hundred-mile coastline.
The Kremlin was advancing into western Europe through the back door of the Balkans, its historic hunger for warm-water ports, backed with its huge new wealth, bringing it closer than it had ever managed under communism. A fledgling new country like Montenegro, barely able to fly, had been swiftly gobbled up by Russian cash.
Logan was looking away from the sea now, up at the cafes along the waterfront. He finally found the one he was looking for. It was called Slovenskja, named for the Slovenians who had made this little medieval Montenegrin town a popular resort in the 1920s.
It was a Sunday, and all the locals had joined the tourists on the beach to create one complex, almost geometric puzzle of oiled, heaving, semi-naked humanity, beneath which “one of the world’s ten most beautiful beaches” was invisible.
That it was a Sunday was of some importance to Logan. The man he was to contact would be stretched for backup. The day after he’d developed the photographs in Marseille, Logan was going to make the third and final delivery of the woman’s picture to the most dangerous and unpredictable of his freelance connections.
Stefan Stavroisky, SVR chief in Montenegro and protege of Putin’s from the days when he was deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, had been stationed in Belgrade during the Serbian war. And that’s where Logan had originally made contact with him. In the thaw between the West and Russia, the KGB and the CIA had fraternised, at least on a personal level. When Boris Yeltsin was Russia’s president, both sides had been keen that the Balkan wars didn’t develop into an American confrontation with Russia.
Logan had known Stavroisky well back then, in the late 1990s. NATO forces were pressurising the Serbs at the end of the war, and Yeltsin’s Russia made protests on the Serbs’ behalf that weren’t backed up by any serious threat of Russian military involvement. But the war had remained a deeply humiliating snub for Russia, and later, under Putin, the resentment it caused had aided Putin’s call to nationalism—the protection of fellow Slavs—when he’d become president in 2000.
Logan and Stavroisky had worked, sometimes together, sometimes in opposition, during those times. There had been some cooperation between the KGB and the CIA, both to limit the damage and to pursue a closer relationship after the war ended. When NATO had accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, Stavroisky was one of those who had silently worked to calm the situation, and the Americans had been grudgingly grateful.
Stavroisky was Logan’s age and had attached himself to Putin’s cause early on in Putin’s rise to power. He’d made the right choice, and had swiftly advanced through the ranks of Russia’s foreign service.
Stavroisky was also meticulous in the cause of his own advancement. Like Putin, he was a fitness fanatic and took care to enjoy the sports Putin enjoyed. He was a keen fisherman and a judo black belt. He had played for the KGB’s volleyball team, Logan remembered.
“What’s the transfer market like?” Logan had joked to him one evening over a drink. But Stavroisky drew the line at jokes about the KGB.
