The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller

to help. She was a graduate of the academy. Tall, blonde and lithe, she wore her hair up in a bun and was the only person in the Directorate who would look him in the eye and disagree, and he loved her for it. His wife had been dead sixteen years now and he had tired of the KGB house girls very quickly. Virtually celibate until he had met Svetlana, he disliked the thought that a girl would go to bed with him simply because he was powerful and could provide influence. She arrived one day from the typing pool downstairs to use the typewriter in his outer office, his own secretary away. He had walked back to his office having forgotten something, dressed to go home, overcoat on over his uniform, and found her there and raised an eyebrow. She had raised one back, then turned away and kept working.

“He’s gone,” she said.

He smiled to himself. “Oh,” he said, looking into the tiny kitchenette alongside her desk. “I hear the old bugger has real French brandy up here.”

She looked up frostily.

“If he has it’s because he’s earned it!”

He liked that. This girl had steel in her bones.

“Oh. Fond of him, are you?”

“Never met him. I’m just using his girl’s typewriter. Now leave me alone to finish this.”

“Dinner?” he asked.

“With you?”

“Yes. With me.”

“I might – but I won’t go to bed with you... and give me more than an hour’s notice when you ask properly, won’t you?” She looked up from the keyboard smiling, but the message there. I’m not some department tart.

Let’s see how much steel you really have, he thought.

“I am not without influence, and bed won’t be too bad now, will it?”

“Go to hell,” she said fiercely.

He threw back his head and laughed, delighted with the find.

He leant across the desk and took the phone, dialling an internal number to the head of Administration.

“Borshin here! There is a girl in my office name of...” He looked at her. She had gone pale and stood straight to attention behind the desk. “Well?” he asked.

“Svetlana Taber, Comrade General. I’m sorry about…”

He waved a hand at her and spoke back into the phone.

“...Taber. Svetlana. I want her transferred to my office first thing tomorrow. No – as my secretary. I know she is only new.” He smiled, then “Get rid of the other one. Move her to a senior position somewhere... No, no, no problem. She just doesn’t have any balls.” He hung up and looked at her across the desk, still standing to attention.  “And you do. I like that.”

He turned and walked out, his greatcoat flapping round his knees.

Now, three years later, they worked together as a closely welded team, her understanding of his style and moods absolute. She was also fiercely loyal – which he appreciated beyond anything else.

She entered the room with another batch of files and placed them at his side.

“You are tired,” she said.

“I’m OK.” He did not look up.

“What are you looking for, Nikolai? Let me help.”

“No.”

“Oh don’t be so bloody pigheaded!” she retorted.

He laughed softly and ran a hand across his eye patch. Twenty years on and sometimes it still hurt. “I need a man. A very experienced man.  Stubborn, good at his job, a loner, because he will be alone most of the time. Smart, canny, a hunter who thinks like his quarry. A man who gets things done without worrying about having his back patted.”

“A man like you,” she said.

He smiled. She understood.

“Yes.”

She pulled up a chair and, sitting opposite, took a batch of files and began to read.

Two days later, she was sifting through department circulars that had arrived on her desk overnight, a collection of requests, memos, notifications and transfer orders for Borshin’s signature. She was authorised to deal with all of it, but she took one item from the stack, read it twice carefully and put it to one side for him to look at. It was a pink disciplinary sheet, stapled to a non-requested transfer order. Later that morning, she requested the man’s file from personnel and took it through to Borshin.

“I have one you may want to look at.”

He looked up from his desk. Its surface was covered in the buff coloured folders. He nodded, leant back and lifted his coffee to his lips.

“He is younger than you had envisaged, but it’s all here. Major Alexi Lenoid Kirov, born 1950. Joined late from the Army. Distinguished at the Academy, languages, English and German. Just scraped out of a committee hearing in ‘81 by his boss... He, ah, told a second assistant attaché what to do.”

Borshin chuckled out loud and she read on, “That was in Budapest, did a tour without problems in Bonn, another in Amsterdam.”

“Who was his boss?”

“A Major Sokolov.”

“Initial?”

“S.K.”

Borshin nodded. He knew him.

“He is on his way back now. There has been an incident in Mexico City.”

Mexico City, once a prime source of intelligence, was now just a backwater. “What’s he doing in that shithole?”

“He doesn’t seem to have many friends in the department.”

“What was the incident?” Borshin asked.

“He assaulted the Head of Rezidentura.”

Borshin stood and walked to his window. Attacking a senior officer was bad, but attacking the senior KGB man in a foreign location was a very serious offence.

“Otherwise?” he asked, still looking out of the window.

“Exemplary. Two commendations for his work, positive acclaim from the people in Bonn.”

“Pull the rest of the file. I want to know what happened in Mexico City. When is he due back here?”

“Monday. This is the file, General. All of it.”

“Nothing further on the Mexico thing?”

“No.”

“Someone is covering something up here.” He didn’t say it but she knew who he was talking about. The old boy network. “Waive normal debrief and relocation as yet. I want to meet this Major Alexi Kirov... Who did he have a go at in Mexico?”

She passed him a slip of paper with a name on it.

Kirov walked through the airport, tired and grainy-eyed. It had been a long flight