Prague: Late May the Same Year, 1967
Pleasingly Warm, with Passing Clouds
The KGB were onto Ben Crosland and he knew it. He’d done the last pickup quite certain he’d been followed from the minute he left the embassy. In fact, the only way he’d got away with it was not to pick up at all. Whatever Tibor K had left for him in the gents’ lavatory at the Café Dodo would stay there until K retrieved it. He turned an assignation into a stroll, walked a circuitous route back to the embassy, during which, in less than two miles, the KGB changed his tail twice. The last bloke was little, plump, pale—a passing resemblance to the Austrian actor Oskar Werner—overdressed for the weather, far too conspicuous in his belted leather jacket and flat cap; the uniform of an apparatchik.
Perhaps it was too risky for the Head of Station (Prague) to be his own courier, but they were understaffed, currently without a Second Secretary, and in Lord Brynmawr had an ambassador who seemed to have no handle on “Intelligence” whatsoever. There was no one he’d willingly trust with the job.
“I’ve been rumbled,” he said to his wife over dinner.
“Then—” She paused. “—Then you have to stop.”
“I can’t. It’s too important. The most I could do would be to pass it down the Service chain.”
“What? You mean one of those arses who play at being your Third Secretary? I wouldn’t trust either of them to go out and buy me a bloody Mars Bar.”
Sarah Crosland despised most of the men Ben had ever worked with, seeing them, perhaps rightly, as public school and Oxbridge dimwits who regarded a diplomatic career as a hereditary right, happily free from the burden of work or thought. Ben was Chelmsford Grammar and Manchester University—facts which concerned him far less than they concerned his wife.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
“What?”
“I’ll do the pickups.”
Where another husband might have replied “Nonsense, darling,” Ben said, “How?”
“Well … first things first … we have to throw them off the scent. You go out as usual for the next run. But we change the venue by whatever means you have of communicating with your man. Go to the Dodo, have a coffee, pretend to check out the gents. Dawdle all the way home. Give them plenty to see. Meanwhile I take Jessica out in her pram and do the pickup at a bench in the Kampa Park—one with a clear view all around so I can see whichever bastard is lurking. If you can give me a thumbnail sketch of the tails you’ve spotted, all the better.”
“There’ve been three so far. As the Czech government gets weaker and more vulnerable to change the Russians may well draft in men. But.”
“But what?”
“Jessica? In her pram? Sarah, she’s five months old. Do you really want to risk—”
“Of course I don’t want to risk anything, but do you honestly think they’ll pounce on a woman with a baby? What kind of people are they?”
He knew very well what kind of people the KGB were, but refrained from saying so. Once she’d got the bit between her teeth, Sarah was all but impossible to dissuade.
It went like clockwork. Late on Wednesday afternoon Ben set off for the Café Dodo, spotted his tail straightaway and noticed no switches.
Ten minutes later Sarah wheeled the pram out of the embassy, attracting the attention of no one except the habitual, and hence ineffectual, StB appartatchik who watched the gate, and blended into the steady stream of pedestrians.
In the Dodo, down by the Legií Bridge, Ben had two coffees—more caffeine than he really needed at that time of day, but he wanted at least two men to use the gents before he went in for the pretence of a pickup. With any luck the Russians would follow one or both of the poor sods who’d pissed out of time and chance and it would be half an hour or more before they learnt the meaning of “red herring.”
A quarter of a mile from the embassy in the Palác Thun, “Oskar Werner” took over and, with a diligence worthy of a British nanny in Kensington Gardens, saw him to the door.
“Went like a dream,” Sarah said as she plonked a Minox film cartridge on his desk. “Your chap left his newspaper on the bench. I read bits of it for about ten minutes. Pocketed the film. Rocked the pram with my free hand, and Jessica slept through it. I saw no one I thought might be a Russian and no one approached me. If they had, I’d have woken the poor darling up and insisted she take the tit there and then. Guaranteed to put any bloke right off.”
And for three weeks it worked flawlessly.
On the sixth dummy run, a familiar face followed Ben to the Dodo. It was almost tempting to wave.
Ben sat at a table in the window, nursing a coffee he would not drink, plagued as he was by insomnia, and waited for an unsuspecting phantom pisser to use the gents. One did. He’d wait for a second. He stared out of the window, the street was busy with people making their way home from work—somewhere on the other side of the passing crowd was the man he’d come to think of as “Belt-Buckle.” The other two were “Oskar” and “Walrus Moustache,” but it was always Belt-Buckle who stood outside the café.
And when the crowd cleared, he had gone.