Free Manhunt by James Barrington Page A

penetration operation mounted by either the British or the Americans against the Soviet Union had been successful, and on several
occasions they had even helped the KGB to prevent defections to the West. Possibly the classic example of that had been Constantin Volkhov, and that name was burned permanently into Raya’s
brain.
    Raya studied the listing on the screen and decided to add another filter. Using the listing she’d already generated as a dataset, she eliminated all files that hadn’t been accessed
over the last six months. That more than halved the number originally displayed. Then she decided to approach the problem from the opposite direction, and she specified only those files, classified
Top Secret and above, which had since been accessed by Directorate heads. That reduced the listing to a mere eighteen files, and Raya decided to take a careful look at all of them.
    All the file-directory specifications included the directory’s size, the number of files it contained, the overall classification and the original creation dates. Studying these, Raya
immediately noticed how one of the directories stood out, simply because it was so old.
    Having been created over twenty years earlier, it had been classified Secret almost immediately. The security classification had been increased to Top Secret about six months after the directory
had been created, but this was not unusual; quite often later material obtained by an agent was more sensitive and important than the earlier information, so the file or directory classification
had to be increased accordingly.
    But, apart from its age, there were two other unusual features of the Zagadka – meaning ‘Enigma’ – directory. First, its classification had remained Top Secret;
and normally, as the information contained became older, it became inevitably less critical, so the security level would be downgraded by at least one or two classifications, sometimes even
more.
    The second peculiarity was that, although new files had been added to the directory at frequent intervals during the fifteen years after Zagadka had been created, no new files had been
added for the last five years. This suggested that the source was dead, or had been burned, or for some other reason had ceased acting as an asset for the SVR. But that made a nonsense of the
directory’s access record, for most of the Directorate heads at Yasenevo looked through the directory at least once every month – but why would a busy SVR desk officer waste time
looking at information that must be at least five years out of date?
    But then Raya noticed something else. Although no new files had been added to the Zagadka directory for some years, one file, named ‘Appreciation’, was still being
updated on a regular basis – sometimes as often as once a week. She double-clicked on the file to open it, read through the first page, then closed the file again and sat back in her
seat.
    Suddenly she knew something that she’d previously only suspected. And she also realized in that instant, that she was going to have to be extremely careful, because what was contained in
the ‘Appreciation’ file changed everything.
    Hammersmith, London
    Richter emerged from the building in Hammersmith just after two-thirty, grasping a locked and almost empty briefcase in his left hand and with his stomach rumbling.
Neither Simpson nor anyone else had offered him lunch, or anything else to eat, and the one cup of coffee provided had been so lukewarm and tasteless that he had had no difficulty at all in
refusing a second cup.
    He glanced briefly at his watch and immediately rejected any idea of returning to Whitehall and the Old Admiralty Building where there was in any case nothing waiting for him but an empty
office. He set off in the general direction of central London, until he found a pub offering all-day food, walked in and ordered a plate of chilli. That was now ‘off’, according to the
blonde barmaid,