Mikhail played the video a second time. Gabriel focused only on the man’s athletic gait. Mikhail was right, he had seen it before. The man had walked past the front of Gabriel’s car in Geneva, a few minutes after leaving his briefcase behind at Café Remor. Mikhail had been walking a few paces behind him.
“I wish I could take credit for spotting him,” he said, “but it was Sarah.”
“Where was the video taken?”
“The car park at the Holyhead ferry terminal.”
“When?”
“Two nights ago.”
Gabriel frowned. “Two nights?”
“We did the best we could, boss.”
“How did he get to Dublin?”
“On a flight from Budapest.”
“Do we know how the car got there?”
“Dmitri Mentov.”
“The nobody from the consular section of the Russian Embassy?”
“I can show you the video if you like.”
“I’ll use my imagination. Where’s our boy now?”
Mikhail tapped the remote and a new piece of video appeared on the screen. A man climbing out of a Toyota hatchback outside a seaside hotel.
“Where’s Graham?”
“Vauxhall Cross.”
“Doing what?”
“Waiting for you.”
Part Four
Assassination
55
Frinton-on-Sea, Essex
In the late nineteenth century there was nothing but a church, a few farms, and a cluster of cottages. Then a man called Richard Powell Cooper laid out a golf course along the sea, and there arose a resort town with stately homes lining broad avenues and several luxury hotels along the Esplanade. Connaught Avenue, the town’s main thoroughfare, became known as the Bond Street of East Anglia. The Prince of Wales was a frequent visitor, and Winston Churchill once rented a house for the summer. When the Germans dropped their last bomb on Britain in 1944, it landed on Frinton-on-Sea.
Though the town was no longer a fashionable resort, Frintonians had clung, with varying degrees of success, to the genteel ways of the past. Older, wealthier, and deeply conservative, they did not hold with immigrants, the European Union, or the policies of the Labour Party. Much to their dismay, Frinton’s first pub, the Lock & Barrel, had recently opened its doors on Connaught Avenue. It was still a violation of the town’s bylaws, however, to sell ice cream on the beach or to take a picnic lunch on the grassy Greensward atop the cliffs. If one wanted to spread a blanket and eat out of doors, one could drive down the road to neighboring Clacton, a place where few Frintonians ever set foot.
Between the Greensward and the sea was a promenade lined with pastel-colored beach huts. Because it was early April and the afternoon was chill and windblown, Nikolai Azarov had the walkway to himself. He carried a rucksack on his back and wore a pair of Zeiss binoculars around his neck. Had a passerby wished him a pleasant afternoon or asked for directions, he would have assumed that Nikolai was exactly what he appeared to be—a well-educated Englishman of the middle classes, probably from London or one of the Home Counties, almost certainly a graduate of Oxbridge or one of the better redbrick universities. A more discerning eye might have noticed a vaguely Slavic cast to his features. But no one would have assumed he was Russian, or that he was an assassin and special operative employed by Moscow Center.
It was not the career Nikolai had chosen for himself. Indeed, as a young man growing up in post-Soviet Moscow, he had dreamed of working as an actor, preferably in the West. Unfortunately, the prestigious school where he learned to speak his flawless British-accented English was the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages, a favorite hunting ground for the SVR. Upon graduation, Nikolai entered the SVR’s academy, where his instructors determined he had a natural flair for certain darker aspects of the trade, including the construction of explosive devices. At the conclusion of his training, he was assigned to the SVR directorate responsible for “active measures.” They included the assassination of Russian citizens who dared to oppose the Kremlin, or intelligence officers who were spying for Russia’s enemies. Nikolai had personally killed more than a dozen of his countrymen living in the West—with poison, with chemical or radiological weapons, or with a gun or a bomb—all on the direct orders of the Russian president himself.
The next town to the north of Frinton was Walton-on-the-Naze. Nikolai stopped for a coffee at the pier before making his way to the marshlands of the Hamford Water nature reserve. At the tip of the headland, he paused for a moment and, binoculars to his eyes, gazed across the North Sea toward the Netherlands. Then he headed south along the banks of Walton Channel. It led him to the river Twizzle, where he found a marina filled with many fine sailing vessels and motor yachts. Nikolai planned to leave Britain the same way he had entered it, by car ferry. But in his experience, it was always best to have an ace in the hole. Operations did not always go as planned. Like Geneva, he thought suddenly. Or France.
You’re dead! Dead, dead, dead...
