Eve takes off her reading glasses and rubs her eyes. Wise eyes, her husband Niko calls them, although she’s only twenty-nine, and he’s almost ten years older. She and Simon have been working together for a little over two months. Their department, known as P3, is a subsection of the Joint Services Analysis Group, and its function is to assess the threat to “high-risk” individuals visiting the UK, and if necessary to liaise with the Metropolitan Police with a view to providing specialist protection.
It’s in many ways a thankless task, as the Met’s resources are not infinite, and specialist protection is expensive. But the consequences of a poor judgement call are catastrophic. As her former head of section Bill Tregaron once said to her, before his career went into freefall: “If you think a live extremist preacher’s a headache, wait until you have to deal with a dead one.”
“Tell me,” Eve says to Simon.
“The Pakistani writer, Nasreen Jilani. She’s speaking at the Oxford Union on Thursday week. She’s had death threats.”
“Plausible?”
“Plausible enough. SO1 have agreed to put a team on her.”
“Go on.”
“Reza Mokri, the Iranian nuclear physicist. Again, full protection.”
“Agreed.”
“Then there’s the Russian, Kedrin. I’m not so sure about him.”
“What aren’t you sure about?”
“How seriously we should take him. I mean, we can’t ask the Met to babysit every crackpot political theorist who shows up at Heathrow.”
Eve nods. With her make-up-free complexion and nondescript brown hair gathered in a scrappy up-do, she looks like someone for whom there are more important things than being thought pretty. She might be an academic, or an assistant in the better sort of bookshop. But there’s something about her—a stillness, a fixity of gaze—that tells another story. Her colleagues know Eve Polastri as a hunter, a woman who will not readily let go.
“So who requested protection for Kedrin?” she asks.
“Eurasia UK, the group which organised his visit. I’ve run checks, and they’re—”
“I know who they are.”
“Then you’ll know what I mean. They look more cranky than dangerous. All this stuff about the mystical bonds between Europe and Russia, and how they should unite against the corrupt, expansionist USA.”
“I know. It’s pretty wild. But they’ve got no shortage of supporters. Including in the Kremlin.”
“And Viktor Kedrin’s their poster boy.”
“He’s the ideologist. The face of the movement. Charismatic figure, apparently.”
“But not at immediate risk in London, surely?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“I mean, who would he be at risk from? The Americans aren’t crazy about him, obviously, but they’re not going to call in a drone strike on High Holborn.”
“Is that where he’s going to be staying?”
“Yes, at somewhere called The Vernon.”
Eve nods. “I suppose you’re right. We don’t need to trouble Protection Command with Mr. Kedrin. But I think I might go to his talk—I assume he’s addressing the Eurasia UK faithful at some point?”
“The Conway Hall. Friday week.”
“Good. Keep me posted.”
Simon inclines his head in assent. Although only in his twenties, he has the arch solemnity of a metropolitan vicar.
Keying in her identification code, Eve calls up the HST, or High Security Threat list. Circulating among friendly intelligence services, including on–off allies like the Russian FSB and the Pakistani CID, this is a database of known international contract killers. Not local enforcers or fly-in-fly-out shooters, but top-echelon assassins with political clients and price tags affordable only by the seriously wealthy. Some of the entries are lengthy and detailed, others are no more than a code name harvested in the course of surveillance or interrogation.
For over two years now Eve has been building up her own file of unattributed killings of prominent figures. A case she constantly returns to is that of Dragan Horvat, a Balkan politician. Horvat was an exceptionally nasty piece of work, implicated in human trafficking and much else besides, but that didn’t save Bill Tregaron when Horvat was murdered in Central London on his watch. Relieved of his post, Bill was seconded to GCHQ, the government listening centre at Cheltenham, and Eve, previously his deputy, became head of section at P3.
Horvat was killed on a trip to London with his girlfriend, a seventeen-year-old heroin addict from Tblisi named Irema Beridze. Officially, he was in London as a member of a high-ranking trade delegation; in truth, he and Irema spent most of their time shopping. They had just left a Japanese restaurant in a poorly lit side street in Bayswater when a hurrying figure bumped hard into Horvat, almost knocking him down.
In a cheerful mood, well lubricated by sake, Horvat was initially unaware that he had been stabbed. Indeed, he apologised to the disappearing figure before becoming aware of the warm blood pumping from his groin. Open-mouthed with shock, he sunk to the pavement, one hand clamped uselessly to his severed femoral artery. It took him less than two minutes to die.
Irema was still standing there, shivering and uncomprehending, when a party of Japanese businessmen left the restaurant a quarter of an hour later. Their English was imperfect, hers non-existent, and it was a further ten minutes before anyone called the emergency services. Irema was profoundly traumatised, and initially insisted that she could remember nothing about the attack. But patient questioning by an officer from the Metropolitan Police’s SO15 Branch, assisted by a Georgian interpreter, eventually elicited a single key fact. Dragan Horvat’s killer was a woman.
Professional female assassins are very rare indeed, and since joining the Service Eve has been aware of just two. For some years, according to the HST file, the FSB used a woman named Maria Golovkina to execute overseas hits. A member of Russia’s small-bore pistol squad at the Athens Olympics, Golovkina is thought to have been trained in covert assassination at the Spetsnaz base in Krasnodar. There’s also an entry in the file for a Serbian hitwoman, attached to the notorious Zemun clan, named Jelena Markovic.
Neither could have killed Horvat, for the simple reason that by the time the politician met
