He had seen the little roe deer. She had been ten feet away when she spotted him. Now there was a squirrel, scampering towards his netting. He had no idea another pair of eyes fifty yards along the slope was looking for him, no inkling another motionless figure as skilled as he was in the forest.
Stuart Mackie tried to see what the deer had been pointing at. Further down the scree, a jumble of fallen trunks. Nothing moved … until the squirrel. It was hopping over the pile of logs and fallen branches. Then it too stopped and stared. It too ran to save itself, emitting a chatter of alarm calls. At two-feet range, it had seen a human eyeball. Mackie stared. The logs were still and silent.
Oh, he was good. But he was there. Slowly, a shape amid the foliage. Pine and broadleaf twigs drawn through loops on the camo jacket. Beneath them, an outline, shoulders, arms, a hooded head. Crouched behind a tree trunk, hessian sackcloth over dull metal, nothing to gleam in the morning light.
Mackie slipped silently away, memorizing the spot. Behind a stout oak he pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and tapped in the memorized code. Across the valley in the castle, a connect, a whisper.
‘Stuart?’
‘I have him,’ the ghillie murmured back.
‘Where?’
Harry Williams was in a top-floor room on the south face. The windows were open but he was back in the recess of the room, invisible from outside in the daylight. He had his Zeiss field glasses to his eyes, his phone to his ear.
‘See the white rock?’ asked the voice down the line.
He scanned the mountain face across the glen. One white rock, just the one.
‘Got it,’ said Captain Wil
liams.
‘Ten feet above it. Track fifty feet to your left. A jumble of fallen tree trunks. Hessian sacking, extra foliage.’
‘Got it,’ Williams repeated.
He disconnected and laid down the binoculars. He shuffled on his knees to the upended armchair and the rifle laid across it, took the stock into his shoulder and squinted down the Schmidt and Bender scope-sight. The cluster of fallen trunks was as clear as through the Zeiss. A tiny adjustment. Clearer still. Could have been ten yards away.
Hessian sacking – no place in a forest – and deep in the sacking a hint of glass. Another scope-sight, staring at him. Somewhere, an inch above the glass, invisible under the hood, would be the squinting face of the marksman.
Down below he heard voices. The computer technicians, picture windows being opened. He had warned them to stay away from the lawns and keep the curtains closed, but someone was coming out for a breath of air. It might be Luke. No time for mercy. The trigger of the AX50 was under his forefinger. A gentle pressure. A slight thump in the shoulder.
The .50 cal. round crossed the valley in three seconds. The Russian saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. The incoming slug flicked off the upper surface of his own scope-sight and went into his brain. Misha died.
Inside the castle, Luke Jennings was not moving towards the lawns. He was in the computer centre, staring at his screen. Dr Hendricks crouched beside him. They had been up all night. For the Fox there was no night or day, just the flickering ciphers on his screen and the keys under his fingertips.
Nine time zones to the east, in a cavern beneath a mountain far north of Pyongyang, the technicians guarding the secret of Kim Jong-un’s missile programme suspected nothing. They did not realize their firewalls had been penetrated, their access codes conceded, their control yielded to the high-functioning brain of a blond English boy far away.
In another semi-dark cavern in a Scottish castle, at Luke’s side, Dr Hendricks, watching the cyber-doors open in front of him, merely whispered, ‘Bloody hell.’
An hour after the shooting at Craigleven Sir Adrian had received a full report from Captain Williams, and it posed a quandary. What the Russians had done was a naked act of aggression and, if the media ever got a sniff of it, there was no way a massive scandal could be averted.
Moscow would deny all knowledge, of course. In the case of the Skripals, father and daughter, there had been two barely alive Russian asylum-seekers and the very Russian nerve agent Novichok had been found smeared on their door handle. Against a tower of evidence, Russia had still denied all knowledge and the scandal had raged for months.
Now there was a very dead body with certainly Russian-identifiable dentistry. But that too could be denied. There was an equally Russian Orsis T-5000 sniper rifle – but the UK would be accused of acquiring that from specialist sources outside Russia. Additionally, Sir Adrian had been specifically ordered by Marjory Graham not to start a war.
And, finally, the entire affair might lead to the exposure of the fragile youth lodged in Castle Craigleven, and that was something he wished to avoid at all costs.
He knew perfectly well who had ordered the sniper attack in the Highlands. But for the intervention of a very astute Scottish ghillie, the shooter might well have succeeded. Over a solo lunch at the club he hit upon an idea that might resolve all problems and inflict long-due retribution upon Yevgeni Krilov. On a safe line he called Captain Williams and issued his instructions.
As for Krilov, sitting in Yasenevo waiting for news, let him stew … for a while.
A week later, the British Foreign Secretary confronted the Russian ambassador, who had been summoned to King Charles Street. The minister remained standing to indicate he had no time for jollity. This was a formal rebuke.
‘It is my forlorn duty,’ he told the diplomat, ‘to inform you that British security forces have captured a member of the Russian Special Forces, the Spetsnaz, on a mission of aggression in our country. Her Majesty’s government takes the dimmest possible view of this outrage.
‘The man in question was in possession of a sniper’s rifle which he had every intention to use to commit murder.’