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By Root 1059 0

from Helsinki, but customs stopped Tamarov at Heathrow checking on to a late Aeroflot flight with an unidentified woman who would later be released without charge. The translation of his conversation with Duchev came through shortly after midnight, but was lost until morning in the panic and confusion of events. It appeared that the Russians had had no concerns or worries about MI5 surveillance until Taploe had mentioned the land in Andalucia to Duchev in his pitch on Sunday morning. The Latvian had told only one person about his secret plans to retire. That one person just happened to be Mark Keen.

At first they couldn’t find Philippe d’Erlanger. He was not at the restaurant in Covent Garden, nor sleeping at his flat in Tottenham Court Road. The Belgian was eventually discovered back at the lap-dancing club in Finchley, tucked into a darkened corner with Ayesha giggling softly in his ear. Accompanied outside by two officers, he was taken swiftly into custody and visited at dawn by Paul Quinn.

Macklin had flown to New York on Libra business on Sunday, and when Taploe heard that he had received a telephone call from Roth and then fled immediately to Grand Cayman, he thought that at last he had conclusive proof of Roth’s involvement. The call had been logged at 15.47 local time, ten minutes before the shooting in London. How else could Roth have known that Mark was about to be killed? How else could he have been in a position to tip-off Macklin that the game was up?

But this was to prove the final irony of the Kukushkin case, the one random element that neither Taploe nor Quinn could ever have anticipated. It bore the stamp of SIS. It was the revelation of Elizabeth Dulong.

48

She came to Thames House at midday on Tuesday, accompanied by Jock McCreery and an attitude of barely suppressed hostility. Quinn had returned from interviewing d’Erlanger and was drinking tea with Taploe in his office on the third floor. Neither man had slept for thirty hours.

‘Can I help you?’ Taploe said when Dulong entered without knocking. He recognized McCreery instantly as Keen’s friend from SIS.

‘This room’s too small, too public,’ Dulong announced. ‘We have a very serious problem. Can you take us somewhere more private?’

She, too, had been awake all night, coming to terms with the fact that senior employees at the company belonging to one of her most valuable intelligence assets had been under MI5 surveillance for almost a year. There were simple reasons why Taploe had never been able to pin anything on Sebastian Roth, and why Macklin had been given such free rein at Libra. In a windowless conference room in the basement of Thames House, Dulong explained that Roth had been an SIS agent for three years.

If Taploe’s reaction to the revelation was at first one of numb resignation, Quinn almost exploded.

‘Why the fuck weren’t we told?’ he said.

‘Why the fuck didn’t you ask?’ McCreery replied bluntly.

That exchange set the tone of the three-hour meeting, a period characterized by long, embarrassed silences, the unmistakable sound of careers on the skids, of buck-passing and the covering of backs. When Quinn had recovered enough to ask his first question, he directed it at McCreery.

‘How did you find out that we were investigating Libra?’

‘Audio surveillance,’ McCreery told him wearily. ‘A conversation between Benjamin and Alice last night. That was when we put two and two together.’

Quinn, slumped heavily in a chair like a man who had overeaten, looked stunned.

‘Audio surveillance?‘ he said. ‘Why was Elgin Crescent being bugged?’

McCreery coughed nervously and made an unnecessary fuss of straightening a set of papers in front of him. He was seated opposite Quinn at the far end of a long wooden table in the conference room, his walking stick leaning against the wall.

‘The property was under audio surveillance because of a letter Benjamin received from a retired CIA agent who was murdered recently in New Hampshire.’

It took a further forty-five minutes for McCreery to brief Taploe and Quinn about Robert Bone. Tired after working