Chapter 73: Colonial Collection

I got back to the UK to find complete chaos at Heathrow Airport. The place was stuffed full of armed police. They even had armoured troop carriers lurking around the airport roads. Nobody was saying anything about what was going on. A security alert was the best I could get anyone to admit to. The main focus seemed to be on international departures and I didn't have any trouble getting out of the airport once we'd been able to find a gate for our aircraft — with no international flights leaving, the place was filling up.

It was the following morning when I heard what had been going on. Allegedly British intelligence had received a tip off from "a credible source" that Chechen terrorists intended to attack an aircraft leaving the UK for Russia.

Wherever that tip off came from, it sounded like they hadn't found anything or that nothing had been really intended or whoever was planning the attack had been scared off. It was only later that evening that I learned that one very large piece of excrement had come into contact with rotating blades.

"Kremlin Deny Naked Girl Kidnap" the headline on billboards outside the underground station said when I emerged from the office. I picked up a copy of the London Evening News. According to the article the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, successors to the KGB, had denied any involvement in a plot to transport a drugged and naked woman out of the UK in an airline cargo container. The woman had allegedly been discovered during the anti-terrorist alert following a baggage and cargo search of an aircraft flying to St Petersburg. The British Government had refused to comment on security issues, seemingly bouncing the press between the security services, the police, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, the Department of Transport and the CAA without anyone giving them enough to confirm their suspicions.

My first reaction was, "bollocks." It was obviously Tricia. She'd been due for shipping while I was in the Caribbean.

I had a message from Freddie, which seemed to confirm my thoughts. "Don't bother about the current excitement," it said. "I'm calling in a few favours."

By the next day even the Government had given up, trying to avoid commenting. The Daily Mirror had found that a girl had been admitted to hospital near Stansted airport. According to The Mirror, Stansted was handling a lot of cargo traffic to Russia; ATRAN Cargo Airlines, a spin off from Aeroflot, was running transports out of there. Interviews with doctors suggested that the girl was in a seriously confused state, apparently mentally disturbed, and with no memory of her identity. The paper had even managed a shot of the cargo container — or at least a cargo container — it was taken from so far away that in reality it could have been any of a hundred containers lying around at the airport. The questioning caption, "Was This Russian Girl's Flying Prison?" probably deserved the answer, "Maybe", "No," or at best "Who can tell?" but that wasn't the point.

I tried to reach Freddie and then Elly but I couldn't get through to either of them. When I found out where they were, I guess I wasn't surprised to learn that they had flown out for a meeting with Anatoly.

I didn't think there was much I could do about it, anyway. If there was anything about Tricia's trip to point to us, then I didn't think our first problem was going to be "what is the right PR spin to put on this?"

I spoke to Rick, He didn't think we had too much to worry about. "First," he said, "she has zero awareness of what's happened to her. Freddie had been really keen to get a deep burn on anything that might relate to her life with us, especially after he found to that she'd had a briefing from my lot that should have told her the target was a problem. He got quite cross when he found out she'd had the set of email intercepts from the Kustenky email as well as the Oblumov one. Tricia had somehow buried them at the bottom of her files. After that Freddie was pretty insistent that she got the works. We were really worried about whether she'd actually be able to function when she got to the other end."

"And second?"

"Second; it's not one of our containers."

How come?" I asked.

"Anatoly wanted to use one of his own. Said it would make it easier getting clearance at the other end. Plus Freddie had agreed with Anatoly that she should be shipped FOB anyway. His team picked her up from the Prep Centre, we just handed her over naked and clean."

"Is that going to cause difficulty for him?"

"His boys over here are hopping mad but after that business with Litvinenko they reckon that MI5 and the SVR are going to be tripping over each other enough to keep Anatoly out of the picture."

"So what's the word on the Chechens? Was this genuine? Where did the tip off come from?"

"Nobody on Anatoly's team is saying, even if they've got any idea. My take is that its one of four possibilities. Either it was a genuine security alert and we were just unlucky. Or someone here didn't want to see Tricia go. Or someone's trying to trip Anatoly up. Or someone's trying to make us look dumb."

"I don't buy the second," I said. "Nobody seemed that bothered and there would be too big a risk that it would come whistling back into our organisation. Any of the others could be right."

"And I can think of at least one person that might be interested in making us look dumb."

"Who?" I said.

"Constanza," Rick said. "Got to cherchez the old femme, that's my thought. She'll be wanting to cream off as much as she can from the Russian Toy contracts and she'll still be pissed about Lady Marchmont."

It sounded plausible to me but I didn't have any more evidence than the Daily Mirror did. Still, that wouldn't stop rumours spreading around the organisation any more than it stopped newspapers writing good stories.

I disentangled my self from Rick and went to talk to Harry about the pick up of the girls for Basher. He didn't see any reason to put a hold on it so everything was going ahead as planned.

I'm not sure who had come up with the idea. Maybe it just sprang out of the stuff we'd been doing with video generally and the sting behind the All Spice pick up all those months ago. Anyway we'd worked out a plan for the Colonial Collection as it was becoming known.

I needed to brief Clegg about my trip but I guessed that he would have plenty on his plates for a while so I sat in on Colonial Collection to kill some time until he got back.

Harry ran the briefing session personally. It was a resource-intensive project but then we were planning to lift twelve girls in one go and that wasn't something even Harry's team did that often. We'd got the house set up and we'd sent out the invitations. We just had to wait for the girls to turn up.

Harry ran through the photos we had of each of the targets. The research team had chosen them using the basic database that we had already built up plus some custom work at Heathrow and Gatwick airports. We'd been able to tap into the CCTV coverage of international arrivals and some judicious monitoring around the time of landings from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and so on, we had been able to identify a number of possibles. That had been followed up by our conventional surveillance and target screening before any of the girls was approached.

We'd kept Basher updated through the web site; he'd been involving himself enthusiastically all the way along. Sebastian showed me the log of his emails. "Like the look of that one." "She'll do." "Try to find one with longer legs." "Mylene — ha, with tits like that they should call her Melons J " "Like the idea of Miss Monique Devent : General Wolf had the right idea about French Canadians!!!"