Free Moscow Sting by Alex Dryden Page B

backup—at least for a while.
    Logan dialled the number and watched Stavroisky open his hand and flick open the cell phone clenched inside it. “Where the hell are you, Logan?” the Russian demanded.
    “Leave the café. Walk right, out of the entrance on the sea side, along the beach for around thirty-five yards. There’s a blue-and-yellow sun awning. Behind that there’s a toilet. And behind that there’s a wastebin. At the bottom of the bin you’ll find a black plastic waterproof package. You’ll need to dig a bit. It’s dirty work, Stefan.”
    “Where are you?” But the line had gone dead.
    Logan watched Stavroisky looking around the beach, then up into the town and finally out to the water and the sea. He looked angry. But then he stepped out and began to walk in the direction Logan had indicated, an irritable figure whose office attire drew one or two catcalls from the sun worshippers.
    Logan saw him stop at the blue-and-yellow awning and then go to the right, as if to the cubicle, but he disappeared behind it at the last minute. He was out of a sight for a minute or so, but reemerged holding the plastic package. He didn’t look up, and Logan took that as a sign that he wasn’t making contact with anybody.
    Then, from the corner of his vision, Logan saw a black van moving slowly along the beachfront. It looked too commercial to have any business in the town on a Sunday, and it was moving too slowly for his liking.
    He observed it for a whole minute. It was not stopping, either outside the Slovenskja or anywhere else, just trawling along as if watching or waiting for an instruction or—more likely—trying to pinpoint his cell phone transmission.
    At that moment, his phone rang and he swivelled the telescope back to the café. There was Stavroisky, apparently calling for a drink and with his phone to his ear. He carried the package carelessly in his hand, unopened.
    “The photograph is of a woman,” Logan said. “A KGB colonel. If you want to know where she is, I’ll need the money deposited before Tuesday morning.”
    Then Logan switched off the phone, watching the screen die. Then he tossed it in the palm of his hand a couple of times and finally lobbed it over the cliff and watched it fall onto the rocks below.
    He returned to the telescope. He’d given Stavroisky instructions for payment, inside the packet with the photograph. But the photograph was useless without the location. There was no room for discussion. Either Stavroisky paid within forty-eight hours, and received the location of the woman, or he didn’t.
    Logan walked swiftly down the steep path from the promontory and looked back down at the black van a quarter of a mile away. It had stopped now at the edge of the road, roughly in the middle of the beach. There was an antenna rising from the centre of the van now—vainly trying, he assumed, to pick up his signal. But the van had arrived too late.
    He took a taxi from the centre of the town to Bar, farther down the coast, and caught the night ferry to the Italian port of Bari.

Chapter 6
    T EDDY PARKINSON’S “COUNTRY HOME” was, in Adrian’s eyes at least, a modest, modern three-bedroom brick house on the high street of an undistinguished Surrey village. Adrian considered that it cried “modesty” to an unnecessarily excessive degree.
    But Parkinson had always been known for his low-profile tastes, and he hadn’t, as Adrian had, married into money.
    Teddy Parkinson was a safe pair of hands, which was why he’d been given the politically adroit position of head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was a man with reasonable horizons, who deferred to authority and had always kept his political masters’ self-confidence buoyant.
    He holidayed once a year in England—another example, in Adrian’s opinion, of an almost sackcloth approach to personal enjoyment.
    Adrian considered him a perfectly behaved, grammar-school-educated civil servant who knew his place, and whose main