‘Normally, he’s the model of diplomacy, never a word out of place. I’ve never seen him like this before. If I didn’t know better,’ he finished, the words coming slowly, ‘I’d say he doesn’t know anything about it.’
Vladimir Illych Orlov was the possessor of a diplomatic passport and was officially Third Secretary at the London Embassy of the Confederation of Independent States, with special responsibilities for Cultural Exchange and Industrial Development. Third Secretaries, generally, are pretty low on the pecking order at most embassies, but Orlov lived in a large house with a bodyguard and chauffeur, and was regularly to be seen at important Embassy functions, where he was treated with marked deference by everyone from the Ambassador downwards. The reason was simple enough – Orlov was a full colonel in the SVR, and was head of the large staff of SVR officers employed in the Embassy. He also ran at least three separate and distinct spy rings – mostly comprising low-grade sources in industry and the fringes of the military – that SIS knew about, and probably others as well.
He was quite literally the most powerful Russian in Britain, and FOE had a dossier an inch and a half thick on him at Hammersmith. Richter knew that talking with him wasn’t going to be easy. There was a clip of photographs of the house in the file. It was detached, surrounded by thick hedges and a brick wall on the side of the property adjoining the road, with double gates, electrically operated with remote control switching both from Orlov’s official car and from the house itself. All the downstairs windows were barred, and the doors front and rear were lined with steel. It was not, Richter knew, a tempting place to crack.
He pulled the Honda into the side of the road a hundred yards or so from the house and switched off the engine. He pulled the bike on to its stand, removed the ignition key, secured his helmet to the lock below the seat, switched off his mobile phone and started walking. It was a fairly bright night, the moon only occasionally vanishing behind clouds, which was more or less what he wanted. Richter didn’t anticipate that anyone in the house would be awake, and the moonlight would certainly help him avoid falling into any ditches or other obstacles Orlov might have strategically or accidentally positioned in the grounds.
He felt the brickwork on the top of the wall, but could find no trace of glass, barbed wire or, more importantly, any indication of an alarm system. He checked the road carefully in both directions, then pulled himself up and dropped down on to the lawn on the other side. He removed the haversack, opened it and transferred the glasscutter, torch and adhesive tape to pockets on his leather jacket. Then he pulled down the jacket’s zip so that he could reach the Smith and Wesson easily, pulled on the rubber gloves and moved off.
Richter kept to the edge, near the hedge, all the way, keeping his eyes on the house and looking and listening for any sound of movement. There was a light burning downstairs in the hall, which he could see through the narrow vertical windows either side of the front door, and another upstairs, but no lights were visible in any of the bedrooms. Richter made three complete circuits of the house before he was satisfied.
It was a substantial red-brick property, as an estate agent would have described it, and the bars on the ground-floor windows would certainly have given Richter peace of mind if he’d been thinking of buying it. With his present intentions in mind they were, at best, a nuisance. The first floor looked a good deal more promising, with no bars as far as he could see, and a balcony area at the rear of the house, above a bay window.
Richter thought briefly about the best entry point, and decided that the balcony was it, as long as he could get up on to the top of the bay. There were no convenient creepers or ivy – Richter would have been surprised if there had been – so he looked around behind the garage and the shed at the rear of the house for a ladder or anything similar. He didn’t find a ladder, but he did find a warped twelve-foot scaffold plank, presumably discarded after some work on the property. Richter examined it carefully, but apart from the twist in it there were no other obvious signs of weakness, so he carried it out from behind the garage to the house. He rested one end on the top of the bay and jammed the other into the soil of a flowerbed adjacent to the wall.
Then he started his ascent. The plank had looked steady enough when he had put it in place, but with Richter’s weight on it, it wobbled enough for him to be very glad of the wall on his left-hand side. He hoped he would be able to leave by the front door.
On top of the bay, he looked cautiously through the window with the aid of the torch. There was a large double bed against one wall with blankets neatly folded at one end. Richter could see a wardrobe, three chairs and a dressing table, but nothing that suggested that the room was anything other than what it seemed – an unoccupied spare bedroom. The window was double-glazed and the catches closed, but that was what he had expected.
Richter took the roll of sticky tape and pulled a length of about a foot off it. This he stuck on to the window pane next to the catch, after doubling the centre four inches of the tape, so that he ended up with eight inches of tape stuck to the glass with a ‘handle’ about two inches long in the centre of it. Then he took the glass-cutter and described a circle around the tape, big enough to get his hand and arm through. He ran the cutter round twice in the groove, then replaced it in his pocket. Holding the tape firmly in his left hand, Richter gave the glass a sharp rap with his right fist. There was a splintering sound, and the circle slid inwards. Carefully he brought the circle of glass outside, and placed it flat on the top of the bay.
Richter repeated the operation on the inner pane and placed the second circle of glass on top of the first. Then he slid his right arm inside, and felt all the way round the opening section. If there were any wires, he didn’t feel them, so he slowly released the catch and gently pulled the window open.
No alarm bells rang or lights flashed. Richter climbed through the window and into the room. He pulled the window closed behind him and secured the catch – the last thing he wanted was for it to bang shut in a gust of wind and scatter glass all over the floor. Richter worked his way carefully round the room, and found absolutely nothing of interest.
He walked to the door and listened for a minute or so. The house was silent. Richter turned the handle and pulled the door towards him. He peered through the widening crack out onto the landing area. All was silent. Just the light burning and closed doors.
Richter knew that Orlov had a staff of only three – his chauffeur and bodyguard, who accompanied him almost everywhere, and a cook/housekeeper who lived out and was helped in the running of the house by two daily women who handled the cleaning and so forth. He knew that because one of the dailies was on the SIS payroll. Richter didn’t anticipate any trouble from the cook, who should be at her home and in bed, but the two heavies might prove more difficult. His intention was simply to snatch Orlov, and with him under his gun, convince the other two men to surrender their weapons. If they didn’t, Richter believed that the Smith could persuade them in a permanent fashion.
He guessed that Orlov would sleep in the large bedroom at the front of the house – FOE and SIS held detailed plans of all the properties leased by Russian citizens – so Richter walked along the landing corridor until he came to the door. He took the Smith out of the shoulder holster and turned the door handle slowly. As the door opened, he could see no light in the room, but he could hear the sound of gentle snoring. Even if it wasn’t Orlov, it would do no harm to incapacitate the occupant. Richter eased the door shut behind him and started walking across the floor towards the sound on the other side of the room.
He was about halfway there when the main lights came on and something hard prodded him in the back. A voice from behind Richter spoke softly. ‘Good evening, Mr Willis. We’ve been expecting you.’
Chapter Fourteen
Saturday
The basic training given to men who become members of elite combat forces, like the Royal Marine Commandos and Special Air Service, lays a very considerable stress on proficiency in a hand to hand combat situation, because taking someone out with the use of a knife, fists or feet is, generally speaking, silent and anonymous. Every bullet fired from a gun identifies the gun, but the best a forensic scientist can do with a stab wound is to say that the knife had, say, a single-edged blade at least four inches long, which covers a positive multitude of weapons. As well as being taught to attack and kill in silence, such men are also taught to counterattack in the same sort of situation.
