Ragnarok 03 - Resonance Read Free

just talking about stopping the Director of Public Prosecution in the first place,’ she said. ‘After the trial, your bloody watchers should have been looking after him. Or are you telling me it was suicide, as the papers say?’
    Perhaps someone here in MI6 had ordered the killing. Cyanide in an apple, so typically Russian, so perfectly characteristic of the KGB’s modus operandi , was precisely the kindof thing some Whitehall mandarin might have indirectly suggested, a hint of: ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’
    She stopped her thoughts and sat down on the visitor’s chair.
    â€˜AMT was in a strained state of mind.’ Rupert tapped the rosewood desktop, noticed a fingerprint, breathed on the mark, and used a monogrammed handkerchief to wipe the surface clean. ‘We did have watchers on him, and they followed him to Blackpool Pier, where he had his fortune told by one Gipsy Rose Lee. When he came out he was white-faced and shaking.’
    This was ridiculous.
    â€˜He wasn’t superstitious.’
    â€˜I’m quoting the report,’ said Rupert. ‘Plus, he had raised the subject of killing himself.’
    â€˜With whom?’ Normally she would have said who with? to annoy him; under stress, she reverted to Teutonic exactness.
    â€˜Someone close to Turing. But the point is, when my officers questioned the fortune-teller, she remembered nothing of him. Nothing at all.’
    Purely in memory, she heard an echo of nine notes: da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da .
    â€˜Tell me there have been no sightings of Dmitri Shtemenko.’
    He was her first suspect, when it came to altering minds.
    Rupert said: ‘Someone who might have been Shtemenko was seen at the Institute of Physics. Looking for a Dr Gavriela Wolf.’
    â€˜No.’
    She was registered as a member of the institute, but as Gabrielle Woods, the name that everyone knew her by: the identity created by Rupert during wartime, with a fully backstopped biography. Only someone who had known her earlier than 1941 would refer to the Wolf identity – someone like Dmitri Shtemenko, who saved her and himself from Nazi thugs, back in 1927 when the world was young.
    â€˜So, Shtemenko... It’s interesting you ask about him, Gavi. Some kind of premonition?’
    â€˜I’m Gabrielle, thanks all the same, and no premonition. Do you have any actual intelligence on the man?’
    Six years ago, during de-Nazification procedures in Berlin, Dmitri had surfaced using the pre-war German cover identity provided by his Bolshevik masters, and he had slipped away from American and British military police who tried to arrest him. At the time, Rupert had concluded that Dmitri Shtemenko slid across to the East via Checkpoint Bravo, presumably reverting to his real name, to be shot in a courtyard or kissed on both cheeks as the GRU’s prodigal son returning. GRU or KGB, they had never determined which.
    â€˜We backtracked,’ said Rupert, ‘to find out he was probably a V man for the last years of the war’ – he meant a Soviet mole inside Wehrmacht intelligence – ‘but what he did before that, no one knows.’
    â€˜There’s no way to justify a manhunt,’ said Gavriela.
    It was the fear that spoke: a creature of the darkness was on her trail, and if anything happened to her, then what about Carl? Twelve years old, a grammar school boy who had excelled in his Eleven Plus, and whose questions about his father received no satisfactory answers.
    â€˜I think there is justification.’ Rupert gave her the chess grandmaster stare. ‘Clearly the real reason has to stay out of the reports – unspoken among friends, as it were – but if our man is back in the field, he’ll be a senior intelligence officer by now.’
    â€˜Therefore a good catch for Five or Special Branch.’
    That was a provocation, because there was no way that Rupert would