Normally, only a senior officer could reply to that. But Captain Williams had been briefed that he should follow instructions from the voice on that number.
‘Do you remember Loughgall?’
It is a small village in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. On 8 May 1987 a task force of eight of the IRA’s top killers attacked the small barracks of the Royal Ulster Constabulary there. They arrived in darkness with a mechanical digger containing a bomb in its bucket. The bomb destroyed the main gate and the driver jumped down to join the other seven. All eight invaded the base. Their orders were to wipe out the entire garrison of RUC men. But there had been a leak. Some informer high in the ranks had made a call. Twenty-four SAS men were waiting, inside the barracks and in the surrounding woodland. They emerged and opened fire. All eight IRA men died. Since then the word ‘Loughgall’ has meant what Lawrence shouted to his men on the road to Damascus: no prisoners.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then, Captain, you have your orders.’
He disconnected and the sommelier refreshed his glass of claret.
To the wine waiter, the composure of his client did not flicker. Internally, Sir Adrian was seething. The fact that his enemy, Krilov, knew about Chandler’s Court could mean only one thing – there had to be a second mole.
Chapter Eight
THEY RETURNED; THE Night Wolves came back the following night, and they were armed to the teeth. They thought they were taking on an undefended target. Their mission was to invade an old if sprawling house and eliminate a sleeping teenager in one of the bedrooms. Anyone else on that floor would also have to be taken down.
They wore black coveralls and black ski-masks. They parked along a deserted stretch of the boundary wall and, using the roof of their vehicle as a departure point, leapt down into the forest. In single file they padded through the wood until they saw in the moonlight the manor of Chandler’s Court before them. They did not know that inside the manor red lights were flashing angrily on a console. And they did not know that thirteen sets of night-vision goggles were staring at them. And most of all, they did not know about the night-vision rifle sights. Worse, they had never heard of Loughgall.
The Special Air Service Regiment enjoys a privilege (among others) shared only by the other two SF regiments. They are allowed to choose their weaponry from a worldwide menu rather than accept what is allotted to them by the Ministry of Defence.
For a combat rifle they prefer the C8 carbine by Diemaco, now made by Colt Canada. Its barrel is only 15.7 inches long but the gun is cold-hammer forged and very accurate. For a sniper rifle they choose the Accuracy International AX50 with a Schmidt and Bender scope-sight. There were six of each concealed behind the curtains of Chandler’s Court. The moon had not emerged, but it did not matter. The night-vision sights illuminated the intruders in a liquid-green luminescence. And the weapons pointed at them were silenced.
Anton led his comrades as they emerged from the trees on to the grassland. He was no stranger to violence, having put three England football fans on the streets of Marseille into wheelchairs. But he was still surprised when the hollow-point slug hit him in the chest. Half a second later he ceased to be surprised because he was dead.
Seeing him go down, his companions brought their assault carbines to the fire position, but too late. Hollow-point ordnance does not permit debate or post-trauma surgery. Two of the six, realizing they were in a killing ground, turned and tried to make the cover of the trees. They went face down and stayed there.
Within five minutes the six cadavers had been dragged into an outhouse belonging to the manor. They would be removed in a windowless van to the mortuary at Stirling Lines, until a decision could be made. Mother Nature and a long hose-watering would cope with the red splashes on the greensward.
In daylight the parked van outside the wall was traced, hot-wired, driven a hundred miles and torched. The local police in that county traced it to a second-hand-car dealer in London from whom it had been bought for cash by a man who did not exist. The burnt-out carcass went to a car crusher. The slaughter at Chandler’s Court simply never happened.
At Yasenevo, Yevgeni Krilov waited in vain for news. In two days he would realize that his killers were not coming home. But he still had his ace. He would try again. He had to. The Vozhd would insist.
In London, Sir Adrian was woken by another pre-dawn phone call and given an elliptical report that would have meant nothing to any eavesdropper. Something about the weeds having been successfully cleared from the garden.
He sat in his flat as the rising June sun tipped the spire of Big Ben over the Palace of Westminster down the street called Whitehall and stared at the face in the frame. The eyes above the Slavic cheekbones, last seen at a meaningless cocktail party twenty years ago, stared back. The British spymaster seldom swore, but he swore now. With venom. His worst fears had come true.
The name Chandler’s Court had never crossed the Atlantic. He would scan the records, uncover every occasion it had ever been used, where and by whom. Who had heard it? How had Yevgeni Krilov ever learned it?
This second mole, this hidden informant, must be in London, close at hand in the heart of the establishment. Moscow simply knew too much. The FBI had been adamant: the late Harold Jennings, father of the autistic genius, had had no chance to give up the name Chandler’s Court. But they knew. There had to be a traitor. The hunter gene in Adrian Weston came back on-stream.
Back in the Cold War, even after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the brutal suppression of the Czechs in 1968, when so many Western Communists, disgusted by the ruthlessness of Moscow, had abandoned their deranged faith, there were still diehards who clung to Karl Marx’s dream right to the end.
But that end was well past. Even Moscow and the man who now controlled Russia had abandoned Communism for rabid nationalism. Even the most deluded intellectual – and Sir Adrian had never fooled himself that even a lauded intellectual could not also be as thick as a plank – would no longer spy for Communism. The traitor had to have a motive, and a powerful one. What could it be?
Wounded pride, resentment at ego-affronting treatment, self-importance? As a spotter and recruiter in the Cold War, Sir Adrian had exploited them all.
A life of freedom in the West worked as a motive for prisoners of the Communist world, but something else was behind this leak. Where and in what documents had the name Chandler’s Court been mentioned? Only among a very select few, which would mean that the leak must have come from someone already high up in the British system, someone well paid, privileged, cosseted. He settled on two motives. Blackmail, perhaps to cover up career-destroying private behaviour? That could still work. Or old-fashioned money-greed. Bribery as old as humanity. Then he began to hunt for the leak. He used his influence to call for the transcripts; all the meetings concerning the relocation of the Jenningses had been recorded.
There was COBRA, the Cabinet Office Briefing Room. The ‘A’ might stand for ‘Annexe’ but probably does not. It was simply added to make a word beloved of the media. He remembered one meeting at the long oval table with squared-off ends in that silent room in the basement of the Cabinet Office. Being underground, you could not hear the rumble of traffic on Whitehall, as you could on the ground floor. The attendance list was clear: only five, and from the very top drawer. The transcript made no mention of Chandler’s Court. He would have been the only one to know that he had made the choice of the manor house as the new home of the ultra-secret cyber-unit. And he had not mentioned the name.
There had been a restricted Cabinet meeting inside Number Ten, Downing Street, in the same room where he and the Prime Minister had confronted the US ambassador. Those present were Mrs Marjory Graham, the Home, Foreign and Defence secretaries, the Cabinet Secretary – the highest civil servant in the land – and two note-takers. Again, Chandler’s Court had not been mentioned.
That left only one meeting: of the National Security Council, which he had attended as a guest. And yes, Chandler’s Court had been mentioned once. Those attending were the Home and Foreign secretaries, the heads of GCHQ, MI6, MI5 and the Joint Intelligence Committee. And the Assistant Cabinet Secretary, whose superior was abroad with the Prime Minister on that day.
He decided to concentrate on that meeting. Everyone at it had security clearance to the highest level. But so did Kim Philby. There never was a human machine in history that could not make a mistake. In the Firm they had a saying: if you want to keep something secret and three men know, shoot two of them. He thought about the two possible motives.
Blackmail? He stared at seven faces. Could one be a victim of blackmail? A secret orgiast? A paedophile? An embezzler in an earlier career? All were possible.