Chapters (124)
- Cover
- About the Author
- Acclaim for Frank Gardner’s Luke Carlton thrillers
- Also by Frank Gardner
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
- 68
- 69
- 70
- 71
- 72
- 73
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- 79
- 80
- 81
- 82
- 83
- 84
- 85
- 86
- 87
- 88
- 89
- 90
- 91
- 92
- 93
- 94
- 95
- 96
- 97
- 98
- 99
- 100
- 101
- 102
- 103
- 104
- 105
- 106
- 107
- 108
- 109
- 110
- 111
- 112
- 113
- 114
- 115
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
- THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
She shrugged, said nothing and continued looking outside the window. They were crossing the city’s ring road now and a massive piece of Stalinist wedding-cake architecture was looming up on their right.
‘There’s an underground station below that,’ Luke said, monitoring their route on his phone. ‘It’s called Krasnopresnenskaya according to this.’
‘Da … da …’ the escort in the front was saying, clearly having a conversation with his bosses. He kept turning to check on them, as if Luke and Jenny might suddenly have done a runner at the lights. They were in the western outskirts of Moscow now, travelling at speed down a broad six-lane highway with very little other traffic. Soaring, faceless, pink and white tenement blocks rose up on both sides. There did not seem to be any pedestrians around.
And then, suddenly, they had arrived. ‘We are here,’ announced their escort as they pulled up at the outer wall surrounding the GRU headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street. Luke glanced up at the imposing three-metre-high wall, built, so he’d read, to withstand being rammed by a main battle tank. At the entrance gate, guards checked their ID and briefly inspected their vehicle, then it was through to a forecourt where men, some in military uniform, others in suits, were getting in and out of cars. A shiny round building, around five storeys high, towered above them, like a miniature version of GCHQ’s Doughnut in Cheltenham. Beyond that, Luke could see several taller, white-fronted buildings.
‘Well, this isn’t weird at all,’ he said to Jenny, as they stepped out of the car.
‘You’re telling me,’ she replied. For two serving British intelligence officers to be here, in ‘the belly of the beast’, was an extraordinary moment for both of them. The GRU, Russia’s hugely powerful military intelligence arm, was the bête noire of just about every NATO country’s intelligence service. In recent years its operatives had been very busy on the world stage. The Crimea invasion of 2014, the infiltration of eastern Ukraine by the mysterious ‘little green men’ – the GRU’s Spetznaz special forces dressed unconvincingly in civilian clothing – Moscow’s surprisingly successful deployment into Syria, the Salisbury Novichok poisoning: all these operations would have been planned and executed from right inside this building, Luke was thinking, as he appraised the shiny steel structure above them.
‘Luke Carlton? Jennifer Li?’ Three men were walking up to them, wearing the pale grey double-breasted tunics of GRU officers. Black tie, white shirt, and in the case of the taller of the three, walking in front, gold epaulettes denoting a colonel’s rank. ‘Welcome,’ he said, in a thick accent and without so much as a trace of a smile, ‘to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff.’