Fit For Purpose by Julian Parrott (novels for students .TXT) 📕

of London. He liked the city, he liked the people, he liked the food and drink and he would be sorry to leave. Sorry, also, to leave the role in the hands of upstart imperious arseholes like Kamenev.

Chapter Fifteen

London, Nia’s house, January 10th

Nia woke to her alarm. As always, her house was cold. She lay in bed enjoying its warmth but missing Tom. It was a feeling that she knew would only deepen through the two weeks she’d be away on a closed TV shoot. She had been offered a role in a BBC drama to be filmed in Wales. Partly, Jane told her, on the strength of her appearance at the BFI event. She was a last-minute replacement for an actor whose Welsh accent had failed muster. Nia was also attracted to the part in the 1920s costume drama about the closed mindset in the Welsh village and its gradual opening in the shape of a dynamic teacher all the way from England. The charismatic teacher, still recovering from the horrors of the first world war, was the lead character. Nia would play the wife of the village’s cruel and reactionary Baptist preacher. The preacher’s wife would become a quiet ally to the teacher and his modernised curriculum but not the object of his affection. That role went, of course, to a much younger actress. Nia, in this case, didn’t mind the obvious ageism at work. The script was good, her role meaty, and she knew the director was a good one. Nia had been alarmed that the lead role had gone to Goldenboy, but as there would be no on-screen romance with Goldenboy and, after chatting with Tom, she had accepted the role. She had spent a busy week alone learning her lines.

Nia had temporarily put aside the script for a guest starring role on a weekly detective drama playing a doting single mother whose only child goes missing. She would have several good scenes with the show’s star who played a damaged but brilliant detective. Nia would be required to go through lots of emotions. There would be shouting, crying, desperation, and gut-wrenching tragedy. Her concerns that the script would stir up her own feelings of maternal loss were not shared with anyone. Tom didn’t know of the pain and guilt she still carried. Rachel’s advice to Nia to talk to Tom about the loss still resonated with Nia. She lay there, fuck, Tom should know, she thought.

She got out of bed with an audible shiver and put her heavy dressing gown on. Partly to jump-start another stream of thought she moved across the bedroom to open the curtain. As she did, she noticed someone move quickly into the square’s small park across the street below her window. Nia could still see the damp footprints the person had left behind.

“Fucking paparazzo,” she said out loud. “I do one public event and the bastards are back.”

        In the square’s small park opposite Nia’s house, the

cold and tired SVR watcher whispered into his hidden microphone and reported a confirmed sighting of the actress.

***

 

Heathrow

Gagnon was ‘made’ as soon as he made it through passport control. Being six feet five, rail thin, with a long red beard, and cue ball bald, and Canadian, he was always strikingly noticeable. Somewhere in the depths of a Border Force database, Gagnon’s passport was flagged as belonging to a member of the intelligence community and passport control automatically notified MI5. The database system noted that Gagnon’s visit was not official and, that the Canadian, against intelligence service standard procedure, had not informed any of the UK’s security services. MI5 would need to call him in for a little sit-down chat. More troubling for Gagnon, was that he was also made by the SVR. The SVR look-out, who possessed a preternatural ability to remember faces, called the sighting into the Rezident’s office at the Russian Embassy, SVR’s London central. There, it didn’t take the intake analyst long to confirm that Dr Jacques Gagnon, now of Canadian Military Intelligence, was in London. Kamenev would discover Gagnon’s arrival when he went through the SVR’s sights and sounds activity logs the very next morning.

It was clear to the SVR tail that the tall Canadian wasn’t a trained or experienced field agent as he shadowed him across the concourse, through a large revolving exit door, and to the taxi rank. The Russian noted to himself that Gagnon had no field craft, that he must be some sort of analyst. The watcher called the embassy and they directed him to note the taxi’s licence plate but to return to his general surveillance duties. SVR control knew that, if needed, the licence plate would give them the taxi company, the driver and, for either a few pounds or through some medium level skill hacking, they’d discover where Gagnon was dropped off.

Gagnon took a taxi directly from the terminal to his hotel. He paid for the taxi and got out onto the pavement, picked up his bag and turned to walk into his hotel. He remembered some field craft training and scanned the small lobby and didn’t see any potential surveillance. He checked in and made his way up to his room. There he unpacked his bag, showered and changed clothes. He left his room and found the stairs and proceeded to go down to the lower level and through a labyrinth of corridors to an exit that opened on to a small service alley behind the hotel. He stood in the alley by a small skip taking in the surroundings and checking for a tail. He smiled to himself. He made his way down the alley and out onto the street.

Gagnon made his way through London’s busy streets. He found a small supermarket where he purchased a burner mobile, a small paring knife, a bag of chocolate bars, and a half bottle of bourbon. He found