Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
NEW YORK
Three teams would do it. One in the fast, smart SUV. A second with motorbikes by Gramercy Park. The third on the corner of East 20th Street and Irving Place as backup.
And then there's what you can't see.
Two ways to get out. The short route via the Lincoln Tunnel and the New Jersey Turnpike – the longer one, twenty-six miles, but fast and straight along FDR drive and out over the Willis Avenue Bridge.
Two separate arcs north of Gramercy Park, heading for Teterboro airport across the New Jersey line; the Embraer Legacy 600, fuelled and cleared for imminent take-off; customs and immigration, in the way of such matters, bought and paid for in advance.
They had rehearsed most of it in other countries – but never as a team. In the hills above Beirut, near the village of Baa'bda. On a baking, dirt track outside the Uzbek city of Andijan, where government forces had shot down unarmed demonstrators in the main square and then meticulously put a bullet in the head of anyone still breathing. And then, for real, in piercing daylight, with crowds of passers-by screaming their heads off in the Petrozavodskaya suburb of Moscow.
They liked an audience.
In their head, all the training was reduced to a single mantra. Surprise equals shock equals power. You hit hard and loud and nobody moves. A thousand people can watch, but nobody sees you. They're mesmerized by the streaking image, the racket of engines like chainsaws, blaring horns, figures in bright colours.
To them you're simply invisible. Because you're slow, methodical, head down, hiding in the middle of the chaos, doing the business.
Twenty minutes on standby and then real life stumbles into the picture.
The police are towing a truck along East 21st Street. A van decides to unload. There's a crowd of nuns from God knows where doing God knows what.
But you've only got a single shot, so you do it anyway.
The bikes go first, white and yellow, buzzing like giant hornets, rearing up on one wheel, screeching around the square on the sidewalks, dodging passers-by, pushchairs and dogs. They are theatre.
As they ramp up the noise, the SUV pulls slowly out onto E.20th. It's black with blackened windows, shiny and immaculate.
You can't be that bad if you've got a clean car.
And the couple leaning against the railings of the park, turn almost lazily to watch, still smiling, still chatting, showing no sign of alarm.
The bike riders are glorious acrobats, the crowd in awe. No one can take their eyes off them.
They don't see that the SUV has moved around the square, right behind the couple. And the two of them don't see it either.
They're both young. Exploring, chatting. Early days because the shyness is still there. Hands touching from time to time, not holding.
They could have had a chance at something. It looked that way.
From the back of the SUV comes an effortless performance from a balding man in chinos and trainers. A janitor, a plumber perhaps. Baseball cap with illegible logo, epaulettes on a blue shirt. You see a million of them every day and you won't recognize a single one.
The crowd missed the cosh in his hand as he brought it down hard on the back of the woman's head. They missed her fall, missed her companion, mouth open, walking straight into a hypodermic needle. As he loses his footing, there's another blue shirt to catch him and between them, they carry him, as if it's the most normal thing in the world, to the back of the SUV and lay him gently on the floor.
No rush, just the practised, unhurried movements of the two professionals. Seen but not seen, easing the SUV slowly, so very slowly into the afternoon traffic.
It was the smell that hit her first. The disinfectant. Sharp and invasive. Then the rattle of distant trolleys, whispered voices. She opened her eyes, taking in the white hospital gown, white bed, white walls. A room for all purposes. Recovery one day – if your luck held; departure the next – if it didn't.
Clawing at the bedside phone, she dialled her emergency number.
'It's Mar ...'
She stopped mid-croak and tried to swallow.
'I'm Margo Lane.'
'Yes, I know. You should stay where you are until the morning.'
'And you are who?'
'Duty assistant. We'll be in touch.'
'Is that so? How did I get —'
But the man had hung up.
The Service, she recalled, had a habit of hiring charmless graduates, devoid of social graces. Like machines they were programmed to use the minimum number of words and ensure they were meaningless to anyone who might overhear them.
And frequently to everyone else as well.
Margo found a button beside the bed and called the nurse.
'What time was I admitted?' she asked her.
'About four hours ago ... you were really out of it.' She stood at the end of the bed and pointed to Margo's head. 'Does it hurt?'
'Now you mention it. How did I get here?'
'Ambulance. I don't deal with that part.'
'Who's paying for this?'
The nurse rearranged her pillows. 'You had some visitors not long after they brought you in. Nice couple. Said they were colleagues. Wouldn't leave their names though ...'
'Did they say if they were coming back?'
The nurse shook her head. 'They didn't really say much of anything.'
She fell in and out of sleep.
She remembered bursts of sunshine through the trees in Gramercy Park, the two of them thinking aloud with long, silent intervals; the nuns on the other side of the square, offering by their presence an unspoken and utterly false assurance that everything would be fine.
After all the training you still see what you want to see – still arrange the dots in the wrong order, open the wrong doors.
It would fall into place – some kind of place – but not a happy one.
Two visitors had come to see her while she lay unconscious. They hadn't waited, hadn't identified themselves. Left nothing behind. She had been observed and discarded.
Which meant that it was over.
For everyone, except her.
CHAPTER 2
LONDON
You move on, Margo told herself. Course you do. The Service had designed a whole range of rituals and cliches to get you through those occupational inconveniences. Like abduction. Or killing.
And if you needed it, there was an anonymous outhouse of men and women, who smiled just a little too frequently, spoke in very low voices and wondered, in between long silences, whether she was coping and how things were going at home.
On her return to London Margo had spent a day with them, enough to avoid the label 'uncooperative'; she had drunk their milky tea and told them with all the conviction she could muster that 'it was just one of those things'.
Grimaces all round. Nodding heads. Murmurs of regret.
There had been one final debrief. Gentle. Far too gentle, she thought. One of the Service's so called 'elder statesmen', way into his sixties, had been sitting at the wooden tea table beside the apple tree in the garden. He had risen stiffly to greet her. Not there to interrogate. But in a kindly, almost disinterested way, to enquire how she had processed the events in Gramercy Park and what she would do next.
Processed?
Did she have any idea why her contact had been abducted in broad daylight in central New York? Had he been careless? Said too much? Or did the leak come from somewhere else?
Replaying the conversation, she had no doubt what they were doing. The questions were superficial, almost academic. A far cry from the forensic inquisitions she had attended when other operations had failed and the Service had dug savagely into its own gut, determined to gouge out the truth, wherever it lay.
This time the Service wasn't digging for the truth or anything else.
The file was being closed.
Much later, when they acquired the CCTV from the New York police, it seemed that the two men in blue shirts had been complacent, almost lazy.
The whole thing too pat, too slick.
The police too slow.
The airport too easy.
As if everyone had let it happen.
But no one said it.
My friend.
She could see him on that spring day they had met in Manhattan – both at breakfast in the Astro Café on Sixth Avenue, both laughing at the rudeness of the waiters and the size of the omelettes.
They were crammed together at the bar and somehow they had tried to scramble out at the same time and fallen against each other, and laughed some more. She from embarrassment – and he? Well, he had planned it that way. Of course he had. That had been London's view. Almost certainly a trap.
And yet he had never stopped surprising her. A week later he told her that he worked for Moscow, that his cover was part of a trade delegation, that he was a specialist in artificial intelligence.
Ten days after that he'd given her a name and address that produced near-catatonic excitement in London.
By mid-June, three months to the day since their first meeting, he had been seized as he stood next to her amid the trees and sandwich eaters and the wide-eyed, ever-smiling nuns in Gramercy Park. No contact was ever made with him again.
Mikhail.
At least give him his name.
'Why are you doing this for us?' she had asked him. 'Taking such risks ...'
An afternoon without end in Central Park.
'Feels right,' he said and his smile broadened suddenly as if he just wanted to play. 'Who knows, maybe I'm doing it for you.'
And in that moment she had wanted to break every rule in the book and tell him: Don't say that. You can't do this for me. Do it for all those cringing abstracts like 'freedom' and 'world peace' that only Americans can say with a straight face. Do it because you hate your boss, or you didn't get promotion or you're greedy and want the cash.
And if you can't think of anything else, do it because you want to live one day in a place where the rain is soft and the winters are mild and the skies are cast in a dozen colours, all at the same time.
Just don't do it for me.
He had smiled again as if he had read her thoughts.
'You think too much,' he said.
It had taken months to find out what happened. Manson, long labelled the Service's 'shit in residence', had gone over to Washington to get a briefing. But they didn't tell him anything.
So he had trawled the European services for almost a year, begging bowl outstretched, until a new Russian defector who had fallen in love with Rome and short skirts – one in particular – came over to London to recount what he had seen and heard.
Turned out that an American agent had been arrested in Moscow and to get him back, the CIA had thrown Mikhail to the Russians. If they could extract their man from Moscow, the KGB would be allowed to lift theirs from New York.
A deal that apparently suited everyone – 'except Mikhail and of course us'. Manson leaned back in his chair. Even though it was early morning, his suit was creased as if he'd slept in it.
As he talked, he leafed through a light-blue file. Inside it she could see a cascade of handwritten notes, marked and annotated in several colours – the patchwork story of a man traded and sold for slaughter.
Mikhail had been executed in Moscow's Lefortovo prison a month after his arrest, but not before they had extracted everything they wanted. Contacts, methodology, motive. The usual list.
There had been no trial. No family visits. No last requests. He had been quite alone.
'Fuck the Americans,' Manson had said with characteristic economy.
Margo remembered him looking at her quizzically across his desk. 'You're very silent about all this.'
'Perhaps I think too much,' she told him.
CHAPTER 3
MOSCOW
It's only when you see the very old weeping, she thought, that you confront true despair.
The kind that had sat inside them for decades, spawned by unimaginable evil.
Wherever she looked there were fresh tears on wrinkled, mottled skin; old eyes, struggling to focus in the harsh daylight, hands clasping scuffed and faded photographs.
They didn't cry for nothing, such people. Not here.
Margo had broken orders to make the trip; Manson's warning flung at her back as she had marched out of his office; made her own arrangements, dismissed the risks.
Saunders from the Moscow Embassy had met her at the airport, tweed jacket and a bad temper to signify that his weekend had been interrupted and he'd had to give up a lunch party at the dacha.
'I'm Margo Lane,' she told him.
'I know who you are,' he replied. 'They told me you're only here for a few hours. Wasn't necessary, you know.'
She was going to answer him, but thought better of it. The little creep didn't know, couldn't know why it meant something to her, why she'd fly, at some appreciable risk, all the way to Moscow to visit a cemetery, when you couldn't even be sure who was in it.
'Wait in the car,' she told him, when they arrived. 'I won't be long.'
Past the gates of the Donskoy Cemetery and they were huddling in small groups. Some, she felt sure, had been coming every weekend for most of their life, drawn by the separate and collective tragedies that had touched them all.
No lost or faded memories in this place. No sleeping, gentle souls at rest under the fir trees. Everything raw and bitter, just as it had been.
In its heyday, during Stalin's purges of the 30s, the crematorium had despatched some 500 souls a night – a charnel house, way out beyond the reaches of the civilized world.
Margo could feel the anger that lay just below the surface. The same anger that had brought her from London.
Move to the left of the main door, they had said. A hundred metres down the main path between the endless gravestones. Left at the dark grey monument and then you will see it.
It's probably the place where his remains have been left. Probably.
Only then did she let herself think of him.
She stood in front of the central plaque. Mass grave number three. Ahead of her the statue of a woman, half-kneeling, arms across her chest, head bowed forever, frozen in stone.
Close by, a single urn in memory of the lost, the unknown, perhaps even the unloved.
'Nevostrebovanniye prakhi'. Unclaimed ashes.
They would have brought him here in darkness, she thought, when the cemetery was closed. Nameless, state functionaries, sweating and swearing. And in the long grass behind the gravestones, they would have dug a small hole, shoved the container with his ashes inside and covered it over. Amazing, that they had bothered at all.
And yet they would have seen it – and enjoyed it – as ritual humiliation. A shabby final act, without prayer or mention, as if Mikhail had never existed.
Two days after returning from Moscow she had gone to see Manson. Even on a bright day his presence had made the room seem dark and unhappy.
'You shouldn't have gone to Russia.' He didn't look up from his papers. 'You disobeyed a direct order.'
'I had my reasons.'
'Which were ...?'
'What do you think? He was my agent.' She sat down uninvited. 'I want to re-open his file.'
Manson stopped writing and slowly lifted his head. 'I'm happy to have a conversation with you, Lane – but not that conversation. OK?'
'No it's not. He was betrayed and you did nothing about it. The file was opened and closed on the same day. I know what a real investigation looks like – and this was a sham.'
Manson raised a single eyebrow. 'There's no point going down this road because there's nothing at the end of it. No compensation. No revenge. No resurrection. Just a fucked-up relationship with an awkward, angry ally who we need, more than he needs us.'
'Thank you for making the situation so clear.'
'You can take that tone if you want to, but it doesn't change anything. Leave the Americans alone. Understood? Move on, Lane. You lost a man who could have been saved. Should have been saved. But it's over.'
She made for the door but Manson called out after her. 'He didn't belong to you. You know that, don't you? Agents don't belong to anyone. They drift in and out ...'
'That's bullshit. Try some other cliches.' She was angry, didn't mind if he saw it. 'They're human beings. Mikhail was a human being. Remember what they look like?'
He got up and stood by the desk, suddenly tired, ill at ease. She could see his eyes fighting to stay open.
'What happened to you?' She shook her head. 'All these years here. All those grand ideals? Or did you just decide it was easier to lie in your basket and piss where they told you to?'
He looked down at the floor. 'Forget it, Lane. I wish there was another way, but there isn't. For all our sakes, forget it.'
She had crossed Vauxhall Bridge, turned right along the Embankment and as the city left work and fumbled its way home, she found herself on a bench in St James's Park.
It was autumn and a gale blew sudden gusts of leaves across the damp grass.
A few people glanced at her – caught the strong jaw, the short blonde hair, a little spiky on top where the wind had played with it.
Her coat hid a slim figure – one size too slim, according to the common view. Ever since she could remember, there had been someone in her life, wanting to feed her more.
Had the passers-by been closer, they might have seen the slow movement of her eyes, absorbing, recording, not rushing pointlessly from object to object, but calm and grounded, just as they had been on the day she was born.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Fatal Ally"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Tim Sebastian.
Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
