XI

I came back to consciousness slowly and realized I was lying on the floor. After a few seconds, I remembered what had happened.

I did a quick inventory of my status. I was still in my suit, but my belt, shoes and socks had been taken, and my pockets emptied. Physically I seemed to be fine, apart from a small mark on my thigh from the hypodermic and some pain at the base of my neck and along my spine, no doubt due to having slept on the floor. I was drowsy, but not overly so: probably just a simple sedative, then. Mentally, nothing was damaged – yet.

The room was bare: nothing in it at all, not even a bed or a bucket. It was about fifteen feet across and ten wide. The floor and walls were white and appeared to be made from some sort of plastic material, smooth to the touch. A sliver of light crept in through a tiny window high in the ceiling. Was it dusk or dawn? My last meal had been the sandwich and juice in the bar in Trastevere, which suggested it was at least the next day, as my stomach was beginning to gnaw at me and my throat was very dry. What the hell was going on? And where the hell had they brought me?

I didn’t have to wait long for answers. Within a few minutes, fluorescent panels in the ceiling flickered on and began to brighten, until it became almost painful to the eyes. A door opened in one of the walls and through it walked Zimotti . . . and Severn. Both of them were wearing dark glasses with mirrored lenses, and Zimotti was now in a tailored midnight-blue uniform and cap. He was head of military intelligence, I remembered. They must have brought me to a base or barracks.

A deeply tanned man with a sharp nose followed – I recognized him as one of Zimotti’s men from the flat. He was also wearing dark glasses, and camouflage fatigues instead of the jacket and jeans he’d been in earlier. He carried a couple of rather tatty-looking wooden chairs into the centre of the room, planted them down, then swivelled and marched to one of the walls, where he took up station.

Zimotti and Severn seated themselves and looked down at me. Their entrance so soon after I had woken seemed unlikely to be coincidence, but how were they watching me? The room was as smooth and featureless as it was possible to be – I couldn’t even make out the edges of the door they had come through – but presumably there were film cameras somewhere, monitoring every movement I made.

I looked up, and was shocked to see a frightened, cowering animal reflected in the lenses of their glasses. I struggled to my feet and started shouting at them, telling them they’d made a dreadful mistake, that I was going to have Severn dismissed, that if they wanted to believe a Soviet agent over the Deputy Chief of the Service they were out of their minds, and so on.

‘Save it for someone else,’ Severn said once I’d done. ‘We know you’re a double.’

It wasn’t so much the words that scared me as the way in which they’d been said. The tone was of calm contempt, and there hadn’t been a fraction of hesitation: he was dead certain. Think. The glance between him and Zimotti when I’d shown them the typewritten note in the bar . . . It hadn’t been acknowledgement that Pyotr was guilty, but confirmation of my guilt. But how could they be so sure about it? It must have been something I’d done, because if the Service had known I was a double before now they wouldn’t have let me get on a plane – they would have interrogated me back in London. So somehow I had just told them I was a double – but how? Simply because I had tried to frame Pyotr for Farraday’s death? Yes, that must be it. They knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he hadn’t been responsible for it because . . .

Christ.

Of course.

‘You killed Farraday,’ I said to Severn.

His eyes didn’t flicker.

‘Not deliberately,’ he said. ‘You were our target.’

I shivered. If they had suspected me of being a double, they hadn’t waited for confirmation of it – they had simply arranged my assassination anyway. But why would they . . .?

Leave it for the moment. Now you need to fight back, before it’s too late.

‘I planted the evidence on the Russian,’ I said. ‘I admit that much. But that doesn’t make me a double.’

‘Why do it, then?’

‘Because I wanted the glory, of course. Christ, you should see how they’re acting back in London. Haggard sent me out here to sort everything out. I couldn’t very well go back and tell him that not only had I failed to make proper contact with Barchetti but that he’d been killed. I saw this chap hanging around the gallery and he got careless, so I followed him. And I thought, well . . . it would be a good opportunity. I know how that must sound, but—’

‘Pathetic is how it sounds,’ said Severn, and my hopes lifted. Precisely what I’d hoped he would think of me. ‘So, the great Paul Dark is just a little fraud. Tell me, what other triumphs of yours have you created this way? How about that business in Nigeria – was all that bravado and planted evidence, too?’

‘I saved the Prime Minister, for God’s sake – there were witnesses to it!’

‘I don’t believe him,’ said Zimotti, and my hopes sank again. ‘It was too calculated, too fast. He knew this Soviet, and I think the man was his controller.’

Evenly matched. Could I convince one of them to go the other way? Zimotti looked firm, but perhaps I could play Severn off against him?

‘Let’s find out,’ said Severn, and then uttered three words that I knew meant I would never be able to change anyone’s mind again. ‘Let’s break him.’

*

They left, taking the chairs with them. The chairs had been brought in from the garden, I thought, remembering Toadski’s warning in Heathrow to keep a low profile. Well, I hadn’t listened, and here I was.

The lights began to flicker, then dim, before extinguishing completely. There was a thin buzzing sound above me as a panel moved across and covered the tiny window. I was in complete darkness. I stepped forward until I reached the wall opposite – the door had to be somewhere here. I felt along the surface, but couldn’t find it. It was completely flush. I made my way around the room, frantically running my hands across every inch of the walls I could reach. Finally, I came across the thinnest of seams – was this where they had come through? It must be. But there was nothing else there: no hinge, no handle, just the shallowest of grooves. I tried to dig into it with my hands, but I couldn’t even get my nails in.

After several minutes searching the rest of the cell in vain for anything to get a handle on, I fell back onto the floor, exhausted from the effort. As I did, the lights flickered back on again. Had it just been a power cut? They kept flickering, and I realized that it was deliberate. The cell itself was an instrument of torture, a state-of-the-art environment that could be used to manipulate the occupant: me. I moved to one of the corners and seated myself as comfortably as I could, waiting for whatever they would throw at me next.

It came about ten minutes later. A blast of music suddenly erupted from hidden speakers in the ceiling. The song was vaguely familiar, the singer wailing about the world being on the eve of destruction – a little joke on Severn’s part? The song became louder as it went on, until eventually I had to place my hands over my ears to try to muffle it. Then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, it was cut off. I realized I was breathing hard, and my heart rate had shot up.

Over the next few hours they continued with this game, suddenly introducing the song – always the same song – at a very loud volume, only to cut it off again abruptly. Sometimes the song lasted several minutes, sometimes just a few seconds. The result was that the music became indistinguishable noise to me, and I began to fear its return.

I knew they were trying to soften me up and that if I succumbed now I would never be able to get back, so I put all my effort into resisting, keeping my mind busy. I certainly had a lot to think about. The one question nagging at me above all was: why? Why had they tried to kill me? I’d cleared myself of being a traitor, and Osborne had even approved my promotion . . . But no, that must all have been for show, I realized, a front they had put on to lull me into complacency while they made arrangements for a sniper to take me out. They had evidently decided at some point that, traitor or not, they didn’t want to take their chances with me. I could still expose the plot they’d cooked up in Nigeria, and that alone was reason enough to have me swept out of sight.

They must have planned some of it while I’d still been in isolation at the hospital recovering from the fever. Where would they have met, I wondered. The conference room on the third floor? The basement bar? No, both were too conspicuous. Not everyone could have been in on such a plot, and they’d have wanted to keep any meetings not just discreet, but completely off the radar. So they’d probably met at one of their homes after work – perhaps even Farraday’s. That would have been ironic. But no, Farraday couldn’t have been part of it, I realized, or he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to stand in front of me in St Paul’s. Then again, he hadn’t been the brightest of men. But no, I reckoned Osborne was the brains behind it, in which case his house in Eaton Square would have been their base. I could just picture the scene: Osborne, Innes, Dawes, perhaps Smale . . . the whole clutch of them drinking Scotch and smoking cigars and plotting into the night. The old guard, the robber barons, protecting the Service. I had never entered that little world, had deliberately stayed apart from it. That had been my undoing, I saw now.

At some point in the fug and the smoke, as they had debated what to do about the fact that Wilson was still alive despite their best efforts, the conversation would have swung round to me. ‘What the hell are we going to do about Paul?’ Well, it wouldn’t have taken them long to come to their decision – I was best out of the way. They could have just given me a swift injection, of course, and nobody would have been any the wiser. ‘Yes, the fever took him. Dreadful affair. He caught it out in Nigeria.’ But someone had been more imaginative than that, had seen a way to get more mileage from me, even in death. By doing the deed in St Paul’s, in full view of two Cabinet ministers and half the Service, they would have killed two birds with one conspicuously Soviet-manufactured cartridge. I would have died a hero, a convenient martyr in the Service’s struggle against anarchists and Communists, and the ministers, spooked at seemingly having come so close to being killed themselves, would jump to treble the Service’s budget to deal with the menace. A nice fringe benefit. The Service would never come under suspicion, of course, and neither would Five. They were the investigators, so they could make certain the evidence showed just what they wished it to. And who would suspect them of plotting to kill one of their most senior officers? I hadn’t.

They’d had to improvise, certainly, putting it all together in so short a time. Presumably the sniper had been one of Zimotti’s men, completely unconnected with Arte come Terrore. Did Arte come Terrore even exist? Yes, I reasoned. Barchetti had clearly infiltrated them, and even with their elaborate plot to kill me I doubted they had the imagination to create something quite so outlandish out of whole cloth. They had simply used Arte come Terrore as a decoy, a convenient Moscow-backed group to pin the blame on. No doubt Five had been in on it, too: that was how the sniper had been able to ‘smuggle’ his rifle into the cathedral so easily. I added Giles Fearing into the scene at Osborne’s house, his jowls wobbling with mirth as each of them had put successive ideas into the pot, stirring it until it came to a boil. I could just imagine how they had rubbed their hands with glee and patted themselves on the back when they’d come up with the thing. A bold and fitting move to counter the Nigerian disaster. Checkmate in one.

But it wouldn’t have been easy. They’d had to find a sniper, train him, rehearse his getaway route in case something went wrong. Show him the tunnel leading to Smithfield, perhaps. And, luckily for me, something had gone wrong: Farraday had moved his head at just the wrong moment.

Worse, from the point of view of the conspirators, was that I had taken the initiative. I’d chased the sniper down, and he’d said something in Italian. They’d had to improvise anew then – Osborne biting his nails in the Rover – and they had decided to reveal their great foresight in predicting that this was the first of a wave of attacks across Europe, stemming out of a group in Italy. I thought back to the meeting in Whitehall, playing it again in my mind. Christ, Osborne had even had me call Innes to prepare their story!

I discounted Haggard as being part of the plot – there was no feigning that depth of outrage, and his suggestion that I go to Italy to hunt down and kill those responsible for Farraday’s murder wasn’t a script they would have wanted to play: it might have made me think a little more carefully about who had tried to kill me. I cursed myself that it hadn’t; the thing had been staring me in the face. But I’d been sure that I was finally in the clear. The idea that they would try to assassinate me simply hadn’t crossed my mind.

And, despite killing the wrong man, they’d got away with it: I hadn’t suspected their involvement for a moment, and I doubted Haggard had, either. They hadn’t intended for me to visit Rome, of course, but when Haggard had given them little choice in the matter they’d been happy enough to send me on a wild-goose chase – with Barnes watching over me to make sure I didn’t stray too far. Barchetti must have wanted to meet about something else entirely. If I hadn’t insisted on going in Severn’s place, no doubt he would have returned from the museum and fed me a suitable story that would have led me somewhere else.

My thoughts turned to the here and now. Where had they brought me? I presumed from Zimotti’s presence that we were still in Rome, or somewhere in Italy, at any rate. But why had they not already flown me back to London to face Osborne et al? Zimotti might want a piece of me, if the hatred of Communists I’d glimpsed at dinner were any indication – but that couldn’t be the answer. There must be some other reason. It was also odd that they had waited for me to interview Pyotr first and then brought me in, instead of simply carting me off the moment I’d shown them the note. Perhaps they had wanted to see how far I’d take it. No, of course: they must have realized Pyotr was a Soviet agent, too – my handler, Zimotti had surmised. They had let me run ahead and lead them to him. Two for the price of one . . .

The music suddenly shut down, bringing me back to earth. There was a noise coming from somewhere outside the cell. It was dulled by distance and the walls, but there was no mistaking it: screaming. So they had brought Pyotr here, too, and were torturing him. How long before it would be my turn? I shivered, and my stomach clutched anew.

The record started up again, at ear-splitting volume, but after a few seconds it began repeating the same fragment over and over: ‘Destruction . . . destruction . . . destruction . . .’ Either the record had become stuck and there was nobody manning the machine playing it, or they had put it on a loop deliberately to drive me mad. Probably the latter. How long were they planning to keep me here? There was no bucket, no slops . . .

Wake up, Paul. They’re not planning to keep you here at all. They’re going to kill you. They had tried in St Paul’s and narrowly missed. Yes, but they hadn’t been certain I was a traitor then. It made little difference. They would squeeze everything they could out of me, then finish me off with a bullet through my skull. Severn would report back to London that the deed had been done, and Osborne would no doubt furnish a plausible story for Haggard. On reflection, perhaps I hadn’t been so lucky that Farraday had moved his head.

The music stopped again, just as abruptly as the other times. This time, though, it didn’t start up again. It was what I had been craving, but as the hours passed the silence became worse than the noise it had replaced: the room was suddenly twice as cold and lonely. I was desperately tired, and knew I needed to sleep if I had any chance at all of surviving. But the fear of being woken at any moment had blocked my brain, and all I could see around me was death, and death at my own hands: Colin Templeton’s face as he handed me the drink, sometimes interspersed with the sniper closing his eyes on the floor of the market, or with Barchetti, choking. The images played in my mind on an eternal loop, and I tunnelled ever deeper into them.

 

XII

I jerked awake, my ears ringing. As the echo faded, I realized it had been a shot.

Had they just killed Pyotr?

I kept listening, but there was nothing else for several minutes. And then I heard the clacking of shoes. The door opened. I struggled to catch a glimpse of how the mechanism worked, but they had turned the lights up again and it was impossible to make out.

My eyes smarting, I squinted as Severn stepped into the cell. He was still wearing the mirrored glasses, and he had someone with him. Not Zimotti this time, but Barnes.

I’d forgotten about Barnes.

Severn took a pack of cigarettes from a pocket, shook one into his fingers and lit it, then slowly blew the smoke into my face. ‘How are you doing?’ he said. ‘Ready to confess yet?’

‘It’ll take a bit more than a few flashing lights and some pop music,’ I said. ‘Try harder.’ It was a stupid thing to say, and I don’t know why I’d reacted that way. The cigarette, perhaps.

He smiled, almost jovially. ‘Oh, we will. We will. You’re forgetting that Reginald here worked in the camps in Kenya. He knows how to get information from a suspect, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Barnes quietly. His jaw was locked tight, and his pale blue eyes drilled into me. No sunglasses for Barnes: he wanted to look at me unvarnished. ‘We used to use a bucket, sir. Put it over their heads, then hit it with a club for a few hours. That was one trick we used to use, sir, with some of the harder-core elements.’

They’d told him, of course – that I’d killed Templeton.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I confess. I’m a double.’

It was a relief to say it after all these years, simply to say the words aloud. But it evidently wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Barnes suddenly lunged forward and began pummelling at me, his fists crashing into my stomach and a deep animal roar bursting from him. As I tried to shield my head and body from the blows, I caught a glimpse of his face, his mouth in a rictus, the veins at his temples throbbing, and I just held my hands up meekly and waited for it to end. Fighting back now would only make it worse. Let him tire. Let him tire.

He didn’t tire easily.

When it was finally over, my face felt like it had been inflated like a balloon. Through barely open eyes I saw him salute Severn and march out of the room. I prayed he wasn’t going to fetch a bucket.

‘Poor Dark,’ said Severn, and laughed at the weak pun on my name. ‘Got yourself into something bigger than you understood this time, didn’t you?’

I looked up. Two versions of him floated in front of me. Part of my brain registered that this might mean a damaged retina, but the rest of it was busy trying to bring the two of them closer together, and failing.

I let my head hang down and wondered whether I could muster the strength to hit him, possibly even to kill him. It might be worth it, just for the cigarettes. I smiled at myself. I knew I didn’t have it in me to pull it off, and what good would enraging him do? It would get it over with, perhaps. Make him kill me quicker. No. Hold out. What have they done? Music, lights, a beating up. You can handle that. Hold out. You might yet survive this, you might yet . . .

Severn threw his cigarette to the floor and crushed it with the heel of his shoe. Then he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me up until I was standing. It was his turn to have some fun now. He removed his glasses and I stared into his eyes. They were cold, dead: the gunmetal had turned to stone. I could smell his cologne – Floris? – but it was covered with the sharp tang of sweat. Anger – or excitement?

‘I hate scum like you,’ he sneered. ‘I don’t know how you can live with yourself, lying to your colleagues and friends day after day, for years. How do you do that, Dark, tell me?’

It was best not to answer that kind of question. And yes, true, I was scum. But there are grades of scum, and I was beginning to feel that he might be at least on the same grade as me.

‘Betrayal, deceit . . . What a life. You Judas.’ He spat out the word. The veins in his forehead were standing out, his throat muscles constricted. His body had released adrenalin into his system and he was beginning to experience tunnel vision, seeing red. He was seeing a Red, in fact: me. He seemed to have derived a vicarious thrill from watching Barnes beat me up, but he was no weakling himself.

‘Tell me about school,’ he whispered under his breath.

I stared at him, not understanding. School?

‘You know about it,’ I said slowly. ‘You were there, too, remember?’

‘Tell me about it anyway.’

It was then that I noticed his hand. Why hadn’t I seen it before? It was gripping something I recognized, but had never expected to see again. A cat-o’-nine tails. He lifted it and I caught a closer look: it had a thin black leather grip, opening into the plaited thongs.

‘Did you enjoy it?’ he said, seeing that I had begun to understand where we were heading. ‘Did you take pleasure from seeing me suffer?’ His voice rose and he loomed over me, the cat waving in his hand. ‘Oh, I know you didn’t take part in the fun yourself, but you stood by and watched readily enough, didn’t you? You didn’t do anything to stop it!’ The intensity of his rage seemed to be growing by the second. I had to calm him down before he completely lost control and killed me.

The cat’s tails came down, and as the agony shot through me I finally understood what was happening inside the mind of Charles Severn.

In 1942, shortly before I left to join the army, I had been made a praefect at Winchester. One of my first duties had been to sit in on the ‘Notions Examina’, the school’s initiation ceremony for new boys. Like most such ceremonies, it involved an element of humiliation: stupid games, coarse questions, name-calling. I’d experienced it myself, but had forgotten until this moment that Severn’s test had gone horribly wrong: a few of the praefects had whipped him with a cat and somehow bones had ended up broken.

He had spent a few days in the San, but as far as I knew had suffered no lasting damage. Three months after sitting in on his Notions test I had gone to Oxford, before being sent to train with SOE. Just over a year later, I had seen men mown down by machine-gun fire in a village in Normandy. Severn’s ordeal was small beer compared to what the rest of the world had gone through – though not, of course, to him. He had been recruited into the Service after the war, but would still have seen his share of men injured and killed over the years. But this had been his injury, and it had been deeper than anyone could have guessed.

I hadn’t been one of the boys who had hurt him, but it didn’t look like that was going to mean much now. And he had a point. He had been whipped brutally, and I hadn’t lifted a finger to stop it. He had been thirteen then, and I had been seventeen: old enough to act. I hadn’t realized how badly it had been going – none of us had – and I certainly hadn’t enjoyed it. But it hadn’t occurred to me to try to stop them. Severn had been having a worse time than most, certainly, but that was just hard luck. Someone had to. I hadn’t felt ashamed of my inaction then, or in the intervening decades. I did now, although I suspected that if I had tried to stop them, they would have simply laughed, and quite probably turned on me.

But that was easy to say now, and not much of an excuse when it came down to it. That way led to mob rule, to Eichmann and his ‘following orders’. I had stood by and let it happen. Yes. I was just as guilty as the others had been.

I became dimly aware of the sound of singing. It was Severn.

Domum, domum, dulce domum
Domum, domum, dulce domum
Dulce, dulce dulce domum!
Dulce domum resonemus . . .

It had always struck me as a strange kind of school song, one that remembered and glorified home. He was singing it very loudly, and flat. His face was scarlet and the tendons on his neck were bulging like tree-trunks. He had clearly gone quite mad, and the reason I was here and not in London was because he wanted to exact his revenge on me, in private. There weren’t going to be any letters to The Trusty Servant about this particular reunion.

‘What do you want to know?’ I managed to gasp out.

He spat in my face and then leaned forward and kicked me in the stomach, winding me. I crashed to the floor.

He raised the cat again.

‘What did she tell you?’ he hissed.

I looked up at him, lost.

‘Who? About what?’

‘What did she tell you?’

His eyes stared out from his head as he screamed at me, and then he lifted the cat higher, above his shoulder. ‘I’m going to destroy you, Dark,’ he said. ‘First I’m going to break you into little pieces, and then I am going to destroy you. Nobody . . .’ he whispered, spittle foaming at the edge of his lip.

‘. . . touches . . .’

His hand twitched.

‘. . . my wife!’

He brought it down, and I let out a long scream. He kept going, bringing the thing up and then down, I don’t know for how long, and then I started falling back into the abyss again, and my mind clouded over.

*

Something was terribly wrong.

That was my first thought as I came back to consciousness. The whole of my back throbbed with pain and, as I opened my eyes, my vision was still blurred. But I was alert. That should have been good news, but I knew it wasn’t. Presumably they had drugged me again, but this time with some sort of stimulant.

I was strapped to a table. My arms and legs were in iron cuffs, making it impossible for me to move them. I couldn’t lift my neck more than half an inch, but I could make out that we were in some sort of an operating theatre. Someone was hovering near the table, but all I could see was a slash of white sleeve.

I had spent twenty-four years in almost constant fear of being exposed, but I had never envisaged it ending like this. Interrogation, prison, perhaps even the chair, yes. Prolonged and sadistic torture, no. But it seemed fairly clear that that was their plan. Well, I didn’t have anything to complain about – I had betrayed them. I’d had it coming to me.

I looked up. Neon lights lit a frame of steel instruments that was suspended from the ceiling, waiting to perform whatever form of punishment Severn and his friends had thought up for me. I tried not to think about water, food or cigarettes.

‘He’s come to,’ said a voice I didn’t recognize.

There was a delay of a few seconds, and then Severn’s face loomed in front of me, his eyes expressing mild concern. They turned to stone again as soon as he saw I was conscious.

‘Be brave, Paul,’ he said with a grim smile. ‘This will hurt you more than it will me.’

He patted me on the wrist, and I clenched it out of instinct, even though I couldn’t move it away. Sweat ran down my forehead as I watched a hydraulic arm descend from the ceiling: it was clutching a needle, and I had a good idea that it would contain more than a sedative this time. Here came the squeeze of the syringe. Here came the part where I spilled out every secret I had ever betrayed. And after that they would shoot me, as they had Pyotr . . .

I looked up at the ceiling and then away, clamping my jaw as the needle plunged in, desperately searching for something in the room that would take my mind away from what was happening and give it something new to focus on as the drug pulsed through me.

Yes. There it was.

The room itself. The whole thing. Like the cell they’d kept me in earlier, it was immaculate, state-of-the-art. Glistening machines hummed, and the walls were made of the same strange plastic material. The thought leapt into my mind that it must have cost a fortune. Followed by ‘Yes – but whose?’ The Italians surely couldn’t afford such a facility alone. Had the Service helped fund it? A stretch, I’d have thought: mechanical syringes and doors that disappeared into walls. The Americans, then? All three? I had been a Head of Section for four years but had never even heard mention of such a place. But to keep something like this so secret, it had to be operating at the very highest level. What was it Severn had said earlier? Something about me getting myself into something bigger than I understood.

And what had all that been about Sarah and me? He seemed enraged by jealousy, apparently for no other reason than he’d seen her touch my arm. But he also thought she might have told me something, which was interesting because it meant she had something to tell, and that he suspected her loyalty. I thought back to the Thursday evening, on the balcony. ‘Perhaps the bullet hit the wrong man.’ Had she been trying to tell me something then? No, surely she had just been angered by my over-reaction to her trying to help me. Help me, yes – she had wanted me to talk to Zimotti . . . But that didn’t get me anywhere either, because Zimotti was in on the game. But she had said something else, in the corridor. That I had managed to find out something, or I wouldn’t have been in Rome. Perhaps she’d been trying to warn me. Perhaps she had wanted to show me something in the Station. But what? Evidence of the plan to kill me?

‘What is your name?’ It was Zimotti’s voice.

‘My name? You know my—’

A shard of agony pierced my chest, and I realized they had wired me up to some sort of electric shock machine. In my peripheral vision, I glimpsed pieces of coil dangling from the table.

‘That was just a warm-up,’ said Severn, as though we were playing tennis and he’d aced me on the first serve. ‘I will now increase the voltage. Please answer the question.’

I hesitated for a moment and another jolt shot through me, a sheer blast of pain that made my bones shudder and my heart palpitate madly.

‘Paul Dark,’ I said, gasping.

‘Age?’

‘Forty-four.’

‘Where were you born?’

‘London . . .’

They were softening me up, getting me to talk about innocuous subjects so my mind would offer less resistance. They wouldn’t be innocuous for long. It was the standard technique. They would have asked me all these questions before they had injected me, but I’d forgotten what answers I’d given them. The drug was already starting to take hold and I could feel my thoughts drifting away from me like pieces of an ice floe. I had at most a couple of minutes before they disintegrated completely and I lost control of my own mind, after which I wouldn’t be able to stop them probing it for every last secret they wanted. But there was something wrong, and I had to find out what it was. I had to interrogate them.

‘Bill Merriweather told me about this,’ I said. ‘There are several phases to it, aren’t there? The first—’

‘Who’s Bill Merriweather?’ asked Severn.

‘Porton Down,’ I said. ‘Don’t you know him? Our chap there. Flaky skin, plays golf with Chief, used to anyway.’ Steer clear of Templeton – you’ll be confessing to murder next. ‘Met him a few times, first in ’65 after I’d been made Head of Section, and I went down to see him, took Vanessa’s car, not that we were involved then’ – steer clear – ‘but I suppose it was the beginning of something because I took her car, and I visited Bill in his office and he told me all about how it works.’

Porton Down was the Ministry of Defence’s chemical laboratory, and Merriweather was the Service’s chief scientist on the staff. He had told me in gruesome detail about how the North Koreans had managed to brainwash American POWs. According to Merriweather, the Americans wanted to beat the Koreans at their own game, and had a project dealing with barbiturates that could break down the mind and render any subject helpless in the arms of his captors. Merriweather wanted a larger research budget, but admitted that there were ethical concerns.

Someone had obviously overruled them.

There was also Blake, of course, whose files I’d studied. One theory was that he had become a double after the North Koreans had captured him, and in the rounds of vetting that had followed his confession there had been a lot of discussion in the office about the plausibility of brainwashing, or ‘conversion’, as it was known. Could it really be the case, some had wondered. Wasn’t all this conversion stuff simply fantasy? Let’s not beat about the bush here, chaps, Blake was just a bloody Dutch Jew traitor. I had asked Merriweather about Blake, and he had explained in chilling detail how they might have done it, enumerating each phase, or ‘plane’, in the process. The first plane was to break down the mind so you got at everything there was in it, and that, I was sure, was what they were going to try with me now. I tried desperately to remember the other planes, because Merriweather had also said that no drug was perfect. The drugs simply ‘opened up’ the mind, enough to let the interrogator pry into it. But if you were prepared for it to happen, or knew about it, you could counter it. So I tried to counter it now by thinking about the very process I was going through, and blocking out the part of my mind that wanted to cooperate.

‘What have you used?’ I said. ‘Amytal?’

Severn looked at Zimotti anxiously. He didn’t know Merriweather, but he knew that a subject who was aware of mind control techniques was going to be a lot harder to crack.

‘You met Barchetti,’ he rapped out. ‘Do you remember?’

‘Yes,’ I said. Volunteer nothing. It’s his interrogation.

‘What did he tell you?’

‘He was scared,’ I said, unable to help myself. ‘He ran away from me. I followed—’

‘What did he say to you?’

The voice was firmer, urgent, and it rang alarm bells. Why did they want to know this? Instinct warned me not to tell them.

‘He didn’t say anything. He didn’t get the chance.’

There was silence, and then I thought I heard a fluttering sound far off in the distance: a helicopter in flight? There was suddenly fierce whispering between Severn and Zimotti. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I knew what was wrong now. They were going about this all the wrong way. They were asking the wrong questions. I had been a double agent for over twenty years, but they hadn’t shown the faintest interest in any of the secrets I’d revealed in that time. They didn’t want a confession. Instead they were asking me about Barchetti, and what he had told me. That suggested that something was still running, that they were in the midst of some kind of operation. So the sniper in St Paul’s was not the whole picture, just part of it – part of something wider. The wave of attacks Innes had mentioned back in London? Only Arte come Terrore hadn’t been responsible for Farraday’s death in the first place, they had, so why would—

Christ.

The bombs in Milan: the Fiat stand and the other one. They hadn’t been Arte come Terrore either, of course. Zimotti’s lot had been responsible, and they had framed Arte come Terrore and others for it, just as the Service had done with Farraday’s death. It was part and parcel of the same thing, a continuation of the shenanigans Osborne had been up to in Nigeria. Italy had the largest Communist party in Western Europe: what better way to keep them out of power here than by carrying out attacks on civilians and blaming them on Red groups? The Communists’ support at the ballot box would plummet, and any security measures Zimotti and his cadre wanted to introduce to counter the threat would be welcomed with open arms.

So there was a plan for a campaign of attacks: a campaign to be committed by Italian military intelligence. And the Service was providing the support – with American help, perhaps? As Deputy Chief, presumably they would have considered indoctrinating me into the operation, to stop me asking too many awkward questions if I came across material that didn’t make sense. But in the end they had decided they couldn’t trust me at all, and that I was better off dead. Better off, in fact, as another rung in the plan. Kill me and blame it on the Communists – perfect. Only they had missed.

And now? Now they wanted to know whether Barchetti had told me about any of this – but why were they so desperate? There could only be one reason, I realized: another attack was imminent.

I turned my focus back to Severn and Zimotti. I guessed they had tried to find out from Pyotr if he knew anything about the plan. Perhaps they hadn’t been successful, but they had shot him just in case. Now all they wanted from me – apart from the personal satisfaction of tearing me limb from limb – was to discover whether Barchetti had unwittingly revealed the conspiracy to me, and whether or not I had told anyone else about it. Well, perhaps I should just tell them he had. What difference did it make either way? I couldn’t stop whatever it was they were planning, for the simple reason that I didn’t know what it was. But no – if I revealed I knew about the plan, they would kill me. The other night in the embassy Sarah had told me I was brave, that not many people would have risked their own skins chasing down a sniper. But, of course, the only reason I had chased him was to save my own skin. All I cared about was saving my own skin.

There was a noise and I looked up at Severn. I suddenly noticed another figure standing behind him. He was wearing flannel trousers and a dickie bow, and he looked very angry.

‘Hello, Paul,’ he said. ‘Thought you could kill me, did you?’

It was Colin Templeton.

Ignore. It was a hallucination caused by the drugs, that was all: mental pictures fished from the parieto-occipital region of the brain, my visual mechanisms out of control, creating scenes that the subconscious had been avoiding, that the core of my psyche was terrified of confronting. Pink elephants occurring to a man terrified of elephants, a man in the pink . . .

I was entering Plane Three now – thoughts disrupted, difficulty in forming new thoughts. This was their access area, their point of penetration. But Plane Three only lasts a few minutes. It can be prolonged with further injections – how many had they given me, I wondered – but not for very long. I had to get through the next few minutes without giving away that I was on to them. I had to pretend to be . . . what? Well, they knew I was a double. Tell them about that, then. Bore them with it.

‘I was recruited in 1945,’ I announced. ‘By a woman called Anna Maleva. She was a nurse at the Red Cross hospital in—’

‘We know about all that,’ snapped Severn. ‘We want to know about more recent events. Why did you meet with this man Valougny?’

‘That was his idea,’ I said, unable to stop myself from blurting it out. ‘He met me.’ Change the subject. You’re a double agent. Bore them. ‘He’s the local control, you see. Sasha couldn’t make it in London. He didn’t answer the call, nobody answered the—’

‘What did Valougny want from you?’

‘He wanted me to kill Barchetti.’

‘Why?’

They didn’t even care. Didn’t care that I’d killed one of their own.

‘Because . . .’

‘Yes?’

Think.

‘Because Barchetti knew about him.’

‘What do you mean? That he had blown his cover?’

‘Yes. Exactly. Pyotr – that’s his name, or the name he gave me anyway – was worried, because Barchetti had discovered his identity and he was sure he was compromised, so he needed him killed. I told him you were due to meet him and he ordered me to go instead, said it was the perfect opportunity.’

Silence again. Then more whispering. The prick of a needle. And darkness.

*

I came back to consciousness to discover I was being dragged by my feet. I lifted my head as much as I could, as my back scraped against the floor. The man carrying me was panting and grunting, and I could hear shouting in guttural Italian. Above me swung a never-ending stream of lights, and I realized I was being dragged down a long corridor. Finally there was the jangling of keys, the clicking of a lock, and I was plunged into darkness again.

‘Bene,’ I heard a voice say. ‘Leave him there.’

My body fell, bones crunching as my spine hit the floor.

I opened my eyes. My vision was still somewhat blurry, but I could see a fierce-looking brown face with a beak for a nose and bloodshot eyes. He was deeply tanned all over, like polished mahogany, and his eyes were sharp little pellets in his skull. Zimotti’s chief enforcer and chair-carrier. Behind him was Barnes, gripping a brutish-looking sub-machine gun. They talked between themselves for a few moments, but too low for me to hear, and then they went out, leaving me in my private world of pain.

I managed to sit up, and touched the back of my head: it was sticky with blood. I was dizzy from hunger and thirst, although it was still the craving for tobacco that hovered utmost in my mind. I knew if I even thought about any of that I would go mad, so I rocked back and forth on my haunches, whimpering lines from a hymn I’d sung at Templeton’s service:

O still, small voice of calm.
O still, small voice of calm . . .

My vision gradually began to clear, and I looked around. It looked very similar to the first cell, only the dimensions seemed slightly different: a little squarer. There was a pile of grey matter in one corner of the room, and I crawled towards it frantically, hoping it might be food or drink. But as I got closer, I saw with horror that it was a body, laid out like a corpse. At first I thought it might be Pyotr, but then I saw a curl of blonde hair, and realized it was her.

 

XIII

‘Sarah,’ I whispered.

No response.

I lifted myself onto my elbows and slowly crawled nearer, willing the pain in my neck and spine away. Her nostrils flared as the breath came in and out: she was alive, but either in a deep sleep or unconscious. She was wearing the same clothes I’d last seen her in, back at Pyotr’s flat, only they were now torn and spotted with blood. Her skin was yellowish, and mottled and dark under her eyes. Finally, I saw the deep welts that criss-crossed her shoulders and neck. He had used the cat on her, too. A wave of revulsion swept over me, which swiftly turned to a cold rage. He had tortured his own wife.

I retreated slowly to the nearest corner to gather my thoughts. I wondered how many Severn and Zimotti would kill to get their way. Hundreds? Thousands? The goal would be a dictatorship, with Zimotti either the head of it or part of the leadership. It would be a coup, effectively, albeit a gradual and undeclared one. Italy had seen coups before, of course, but nothing like this. After a few large-scale attacks and swift arrests, Zimotti and his men would be able to introduce whatever measures they felt necessary, while a pliant and terrified public would greet them with open arms. And the British were apparently lending a hand, through their man in Rome. It seemed extraordinary, but I realized that I hadn’t been paying close enough attention. There was a very powerful right-wing faction operating within the Service. Perhaps more of a movement than a faction. They had tried to take control of the government but failed – because of me. Perhaps they were planning a similar series of attacks in England, blaming everything on the First of May or similar groups. Perhaps Italy was just the beginning . . .

Something in me turned. This wasn’t where my life should end. I hadn’t helped. I had spent it trying to divine the difference between causes, but I hadn’t seen the forest for the trees. East and West, I now knew, were just two frightened children spurring each other on to greater and greater acts of excess. But I was no better, standing on the edge of the field pointing out their mistakes. I had to get onto the pitch, into the game. I had to put aside all my cynicism and stupid bloody English pride and admit that there were choices here, and that I could make a difference to the situation. Where was the shame in that? Why was I so afraid of it? Here was the opportunity: a chance to save others, and atone for all the men I’d betrayed.

No. That was still selfish thinking. I glanced across at Sarah, her chest rising and falling. I wondered what she would think were she to know who I really was. Utter contempt, I was sure. Nothing could wash the blood from my hands or atone for those I had betrayed – for Colin Templeton, or Vanessa, or Isabelle. But I could save others from their fate, and stop a gang of power-hungry men taking this country over, simply because it was the right thing to do.

Moscow hadn’t tried to kill me, after all – but they would now. I had deliberately exposed one of their men and got him tortured and, it appeared, killed as a result. Even if they were prepared to let that go and still wanted to use me, I didn’t want them any more, and they no longer had anything to blackmail me with: the Service knew who I was now. I realized that I had become unmoored from both sides and no longer had anyone to blame for my actions but myself – that I was, finally, living up to my codename: independent, a free agent. But what to do with that new-found freedom? Run to ground? Or fight back – and create my own side? I had to, or I was lost forever.

I shook my head suddenly: the only thing that was unmoored was my mind. I wasn’t free at all, and had no way of creating any side. I was not only imprisoned, but hours or perhaps minutes from death. The guards would return soon, and for the last time.

I looked across at Sarah again, and wondered why had they put me in here with her. On the face of it, it was a weak move, as we could conspire together, perhaps even help each other escape. On the face of it. In reality, of course, we were in a secured cell inside a military base that was doubtlessly manned by hundreds of soldiers; she was unconscious; and I was nearing the point of physical and mental collapse. There was no bucket or bed or food or anything else in this room, so it looked like they were only planning to hold us here for a short while before killing us. Severn had thrown me in here with her because it no longer mattered to him if she knew of his plans, or that she might tell me them. He had discarded us both.

So how would they end it, then? A bullet to the head, like Pyotr? That might well be the plan. But where had Severn and Zimotti disappeared to in the meantime? Perhaps they had left to oversee the next stage in their grand scheme, the next attack. Or perhaps it was now the middle of the night, and they were simply catching up on their sleep before returning for some more games in the morning. Yes, a bullet to the head would be too easy. They would have a slow and painful death in mind for me . . .

Perhaps it was the awareness that I hadn’t long to live, or perhaps my nascent conscience, but my mind latched on to the idea that they had disappeared to execute the next attack, and refused to let it go. Hypothetically speaking, it asked, if you were somehow able to escape, how could you help, how could you stop them? What would the man you might have been do? What would the man Colin Templeton had believed you were do? Well, perhaps he’d try to get in touch with London, reach Haggard and tell him what was happening. No, I realized at once, that would be pointless. I was an exposed double agent. Haggard would never believe me. Yes, but exposed in what way? The only proof they had of my treachery depended on their admitting that they had murdered Farraday. A chink of understanding opened in my mind. Was that why they needed a confession from me – to block any remaining chance I could expose them? Was that why I was here, and not in London? They could extract a confession, then see that I didn’t live much beyond it. And sort out the paperwork later.

Perhaps. But my confession hadn’t seemed paramount. Regardless, I didn’t trust taking this to Haggard, or anyone else. I would have to find out what they were planning and address it myself.

I stopped, and glanced at Sarah once again. I thought of her walking down the corridor, her hips swinging in front of me, asking if I wanted to see the Station. She must have wanted to take me there for a reason. Could it be that she knew what they were planning?

I crawled over to her and stared at her face, pale and gaunt from the stress and fear. I felt her pulse. She was sleeping, not unconscious. She needed her rest. I shouldn’t wake her.

But somewhere outside these walls, a bomb might be ticking down.

I shook her shoulder gently, and her eyes opened. The moment she saw me she started sobbing.

*

It took some time for her to stop, but when she did it was almost frightening how calm she was, as if utterly detached from the world. I left her alone, fearing the worst, but eventually she called out to me. ‘I think we need to talk,’ she said, and I couldn’t help smiling at the matter-of-factness of it.

At first I insisted we only communicate in whispers. I was afraid that the whole thing might be some sort of a set-up so Severn could learn what it was she knew – the place was almost certainly bugged. But it soon became clear she had told him everything already. She didn’t say what he had done to extract the information, and I didn’t ask, but we both knew we had been left here to die, and therefore had nothing to lose from telling each other all we knew. Her voice was hoarse, as was mine, and we spoke quickly and frantically, uncertain how long we had before Barnes and his friend returned.

It transpired that Severn had used her as a courier, giving her packages to deliver to dead drops around Rome. She told me how she had gone about the job quite happily, not thinking too much about what it might mean – until the bombs had started going off.

‘In Milan?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, ‘this was earlier than that. They were smaller scale. Charles had been frantic and nervous enough already, but now he was at fever pitch. I noticed one morning that he was reading the newspaper very intently over breakfast, and then rushed off to use the telephone. I looked at the page he’d been reading: it was about a bomb somewhere in the north of the country. A few people had been killed, and the thing had been blamed on some Marxist group. Bits and pieces of conversations I’d overheard suddenly seemed to make sense. The next time he asked me to do one of his late-night deliveries, to a churchyard in the south of the city, I opened the package.’

‘What made you do that?’

‘Well, he’d insisted so much that I never open any of them, and I was worried that they might have something to do with these bombs going off. I thought he might be involved in something . . . outside the remit of the embassy.’

‘Working for someone else, you mean?’

She held my gaze for a moment. ‘Yes.’

I considered this. ‘All right, so you opened the package. What was in it?’

‘Codes,’ she said. ‘Lots of documents in code: one-time pad stuff. I panicked because I couldn’t find a way to reseal it so it didn’t look like it had been opened. But eventually I did, and I thought the chap who picked up the message wouldn’t notice. But he did, and he told Charles about it, and Charles went completely mad. He screamed at me, asking me dozens and dozens of questions until I just broke down and told him I’d been curious but hadn’t understood any of it. That seemed to calm him down a bit. He made me promise never to mention any of it to anyone else or he’d . . .’ She grimaced. ‘ . . . or he’d kill me.’

I tried not to think about what sort of marriage they had had, and what had happened to her in this cell. I asked her to carry on.

‘Well, he never mentioned the packages again after that, and I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. But then the message came through that you were being sent over from London, and Charles seemed to panic a little. Towards the end of Thursday afternoon I found myself alone in the Station: Cornell-Smith and Miller had gone home to get ready for dinner in the embassy, and Charles had left to collect you from the airport. Last year, he gave me the combination to his safe as a contingency – if anything ever happens to him, I’m to take everything out and burn it. So I went into his office and opened it. I just had to know what was going on. After looking through several dossiers, I found some one-time pads and documents that contained photographs of some of the drops I’d been sent to. And there were numbers – lots of them. Dates. I recognized them.’

‘The dates when the bombs had exploded?’

‘Yes. But the thing that really scared me was that some of the documents I saw had been stamped with Service seals. Charles isn’t working for anyone else: it’s an officially sanctioned operation, codenamed “Stay Behind”.’

I stared at her, and let the silence envelop me for a moment. A chill crept through my bones.

Stay Behind. Was it possible?

Yes, I thought. Of course it was . . .

 

XIV

Saturday, 16 June 1951, Istanbul, Turkey

‘Breakfast in Europe and lunch in Asia!’ cried the ambassador’s wife as the motorboat drew up to the landing-stage. ‘I shall never get used to the decadence.’

‘We do our best,’ smiled Joan Templeton, stretching out an arm to help her ashore. She alighted with an unladylike squeal, but swiftly recovered and handed small bouquets of wild flowers to Joan and her daughter, Vanessa. The ambassador made the leap unaided, then turned back and muttered instructions to the crew, half a dozen young men in starched white shirts and matching pantaloons. They swiftly removed the Union Jack from its position by the wheel, folded it away, and seated themselves cross-legged on the cushions on deck – I guessed they would wait here until required for the return journey.

On land, everyone greeted one another with polite pecks on the cheek, and the ambassador asked Vanessa how she was enjoying her final year at Badminton. His wife, meanwhile, had caught sight of me standing to the side and immediately leapt over.

‘I was so sorry to hear about your mother,’ she said, taking my hands in hers and clutching them urgently.

‘It was perhaps for the best,’ I told her. ‘She had suffered long enough.’

She tilted her head and gazed at me for a long moment, her eyes large and liquid with sympathy. I gave a tight smile in return: I knew this was one of many such exchanges I could expect to face in coming weeks. While we spooks were housed in the city’s Consulate-General – the old embassy, a magnificent nineteenth-century palazzo – the regular diplomatic corps were based out in Ankara, an arrangement that suited us rather well. But in summer they descended on Istanbul, their arrival presaged by a flurry of thick crested invitation cards embossed with gold type. My usual existence, in which I saw less than a dozen colleagues regularly, was about to be overturned with two months of cocktail parties and picnics.

Today was the opening of the season, the Templetons’ annual lunch party, which one had to take a ferry to reach as they lived in Beylerbeyi, a pleasant suburb on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus. Like many others out here, the ambassador and his wife had known my parents in Cairo. I had spent much of the previous summer, my first in the city, fielding anxious enquiries over Father’s disappearance at the end of the war and my mother’s continuing ill health. But with Mother’s death a couple of months earlier I had become an orphan, so I was braced for an even higher pitch of concern.

Had she known the truth about my parents, the ambassador’s wife would probably have recoiled in horror. My mother had hailed from an old Swedish family that had settled in Finland in the nineteenth century. Father had been introduced to her at a ball in Helsinki in 1923 when she was just nineteen, and they had married soon after and moved to Egypt, where Father had been Head of Station. I had been born in London a couple of years later – I was to be their only child.

Shortly after my birth, it had become clear that beneath Mother’s poised exterior lurked serious problems. She suffered from continual headaches, and became increasingly demanding, rude and, eventually, hysterical. Her father had been killed in the civil war by the Red Guards, and as a result she harboured a deep hatred of the Soviet Union. She was also virulently anti-Semitic, and would often refer to Jews in public as ‘vermin’.

All this proved to be highly embarrassing for Father, whose career in the Service was flourishing. In 1936, he was posted back to head office in London. As the Nazis in Germany became more powerful, he had advocated closer ties with them, becoming one of the leading lights of the Anglo-German Fellowship. He was also an admirer of fascism – he was briefly Treasurer of the Nordic League – and argued strongly in favour of appeasement. However, he had swiftly abandoned this line once it had become clear that war was inevitable, and following the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact he had publicly cut all ties with fascist groups and become staunchly anti-Nazi as well as anti-Communist. But Mother’s ‘condition’, as everyone had started to call it, was much harder to disguise.

Things had come to a head in early September 1939, when she had announced at a party in Belgravia attended by several government ministers that Hitler was the strongest leader Europe had seen in generations and that he was fully justified in his persecution of the Jews, who, she had added for good measure, were also natural enemies of England. Father had been advised by friends in the War Office that she was a liability, and that if nothing were done the three of us could be interned. As a result, he had had her shipped off to Finland, where she was cared for by private doctors at a remote estate. I came home from school to be told that Mother was ill, and that it might be some time before I saw her again. In the event, it wouldn’t be for another five years.

In late 1941 Britain had declared war on Finland, and Father had had her shifted again, this time to a clinic in Stockholm. I had visited her there briefly early in 1945, but she hadn’t even recognized me: either madness or medication had frozen her mind. She had remained in the clinic after the war, and had finally passed away after a series of strokes in April. Her funeral had been a quiet affair near her family’s home in Helsinki. I had attended and spent a few days there, and then flown straight back to Istanbul.

The ambassador’s wife let go of my hand, and Joan Templeton led us beneath some parasol pines and into the house. We walked through the cool shade of the living room and out to the sunlit garden, where several cane chairs were arranged beside a table laden with salads, cold cuts and a large dish of pigeon with rice.

‘Colin’s just upstairs with some guests,’ Joan said. ‘Colleagues from London. He’ll be down shortly, I’m sure. Can I get you both a drink? Colin made some of his punch.’

‘That sounds just the ticket,’ said the ambassador, and his wife nodded her approval from beneath the brim of her hat. Joan headed towards the table to fix the drinks and everyone seated themselves. Vanessa settled into the chair next to mine and gave me a mischievous grin. She was seventeen now, and had blossomed into a classic English rose. She was lively company, but my thoughts were still entirely consumed by another woman: Anna, the nurse who had treated me in Germany six years earlier, whom I had loved and had planned to marry – and whom my own father had murdered before turning the gun on himself.

Anna had been a Russian, and over the course of our love affair had tried to convert me to Communism. She had come within a hair’s breadth of doing so, but her revelation that she was an NKVD agent and allegation that Father was using me to execute Soviets rather than Nazi war criminals had been more than I could accept. I had coldly rejected her, and immediately delivered a message to Father denouncing her as a spy. Her subsequent death at his hands had overturned my mind: as well as the devastation of the loss, it had seemed to confirm everything she had claimed, and I had been plunged into shock, grief and rage. The rage had soon won out, however, and it had been directed not just at Father, but at all he represented. The thought of Anna’s body laid out on the stretcher in the hospital, her skin already turning grey, tormented me. And so, as I had buried Father in the garden of the farmhouse in Lübeck, I had vowed to take my vengeance, by adopting Anna’s cause as my own.

She had told me that her handler was based in the Displaced Persons’ camp at Burgdorf, so I had taken Father’s jeep and driven there. It had started snowing, huge flakes of the stuff, and by the time I arrived at the camp there was a blanket of it across the landscape. I presented the papers identifying myself as a member of an SAS War Crimes Investigations Unit and said I wished to interview residents of the camp as part of my team’s enquiries. My uniform was a mess, but I had placed Father’s leather jerkin over it, and after I had filled in a couple of forms, they had let me through with the advice to tread very carefully: several former SS officers had recently been discovered in the camp and nerves were particularly taut as a result.

I had walked around the main area for several hours showing the one photograph I had of Anna. Most people had clammed up as soon as I approached, but eventually someone recognized her and told me she had been an occasional visitor of Yuri, a Ukrainian doctor whose room was on the second floor of the old barracks. I made my way there and knocked on the door. After a few seconds, it was opened by a thin man wearing a greatcoat over a pair of pyjamas.

‘Yes?’ he said, peering at me. His face was cracked and leathery, as though he had spent most of his life outdoors, and he had tiny eyes, like sparks in a furnace. A snubbed nose gave him a faintly childlike appearance, but his hair was greying at the temples and I put him in his mid to late forties.

‘I believe we have a mutual acquaintance,’ I said.

He looked me over uncertainly, but then something registered in the eyes and I guessed he had recognized me from my file. He turned to speak to someone in the room, and a few seconds later a small figure scurried past me: a girl, fourteen or fifteen years old, wearing a thin nightgown. She looked up at me for a moment with startled eyes, then wrapped the gown tightly around her waist and disappeared into the corridor.

‘My daughter,’ said Yuri, his voice raspy. ‘I do not like to discuss my work in front of her.’

He opened the door wider and I stepped inside. The room was sparsely furnished: an iron bedstead with a dirty mattress, a couple of wooden chairs, and clothes and books laid out on the floor. But he and his daughter had a room to themselves, which meant he was a very powerful person in the camp. I had seen rooms elsewhere that had been home to two and even three families. Presumably he was using his medical skills to gain favours and influence – and to seek out potential agents.

‘Anna should not have told you about me,’ he said, locking the door. ‘Why have you come here?’

‘Anna is dead.’ At first I wasn’t sure if he had heard me, but then he visibly crumpled, his body hunching over and his breathing coming in gasps. I made to approach him, but he held a hand up until he had recovered. When he looked up at me again, his eyes were wet with tears.

‘It cannot be,’ he whispered. ‘Not my Anna.’

‘Was she also your daughter?’ I asked, suddenly shocked at the thought.

He shook his head slowly. ‘But she could have been.’

He asked me what had happened and I told him, leaving nothing out. He listened very carefully, occasionally interjecting with questions to clarify a detail. When I had finished, he walked over to one of the chairs and perched himself on it.

‘Thank you for telling me this,’ he said. ‘Anna was one of my finest agents, but she is not the first to have been murdered by the British.’ He looked up at me sharply. ‘Can you believe that earlier this year your country and mine were allies? Now one would almost think we are at war.’

‘I know. There were even rumours after the ceasefire that we would join forces with the Germans and take up arms against you.’

His eyes widened a fraction.

‘Why have you come here?’ he said.

I had rehearsed a speech in the jeep, but suddenly I wasn’t so certain of my convictions. I shut my eyes. The image of Anna in the stretcher swam back into my mind, and I forced myself to imagine Father squeezing the trigger, the bullet entering her . . .

‘I want to work for you,’ I said.

He stood up. ‘And yet you did not when Anna was alive?’ he said, a touch of anger in his voice. Perhaps realizing this, he stepped forward and placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘I am sorry, but revenge is not a good motivation. It burns out too quickly. It does not persist. And I need people with persistence. With ideals.’

‘I have ideals,’ I said. ‘You’re right, I didn’t want to do it when Anna was alive. But I didn’t understand the situation, not fully. I . . . I’m afraid I didn’t believe what she told me.’ I stared into his face, at the curious snubbed nose and the glinting eyes.

‘But you do now?’

I nodded, willing myself not to cry in front of him. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Have some faith in me. I am ready to serve . . .’ But even then, even in that moment, I had been about to say ‘Anna’, not ‘Communism’ or ‘the Soviet Union’.

Yuri paced around the room for a few minutes, his hands steepled together at his lips as he considered my proposal.

‘I want to make sure we are very clear about this before we proceed any further,’ he said, after a while. ‘I need to be certain that you understand the consequences of what you are suggesting. There is no return from this point. Once you have committed to us, we will become your home. Your family.’

I thought of the family I had been born into: Father a murderer, Mother on the brink of insanity. And I thought of Anna, and the family we might have had together had she lived.

‘I am committed,’ I said.

Yuri looked at me for a long while. I held his gaze. ‘You must go to London at once,’ he said finally, and his voice had taken on a quiet hardness. ‘Nobody must ever know you have been in Germany. You will be contacted shortly.’

I was filled with conflicting emotions: elation that he had agreed to take me on, disappointment and puzzlement that it wasn’t to be at once. ‘How will you know where to find me?’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We will.’ He walked over to the bed and picked a book from a pile leaning against it. I was surprised to see that it was a selection of poems by W. H. Auden. He opened it and read out one of the lines, then looked across at me. ‘That will be your signal.’

It didn’t seem as if there were anything else to say, so I had shaken his hand and left him. My frustration at his request for me to wait was tempered by the knowledge that I had now set out on the path Anna had wanted for me. I returned to London as instructed, and told everyone I had been visiting my mother in Sweden. A few people asked about Father, and I replied that I hadn’t seen him in over a year. The story soon went around that he had disappeared just after the ceasefire – nobody knew where, or what had happened to him, but as time went by most presumed he had been killed. Eventually, I cleared out his things in Chelsea Cloisters and moved in there myself.

I had expected to find another job fairly easily, but it proved harder than I’d anticipated. This was perhaps partly because I felt very uncomfortable being back in England. After three years in foreign fields, the entire country now seemed to me an ugly braggart: delighted with itself for winning the war, but ignorant of the fact that without the Soviets and the Americans it would never have happened. I hated the glorying in victory, especially as I had seen the terrible state Germany had been left in.

I was a fish out of water in other ways, too. After joining the war late because of my age I had, almost as though making up for lost time, taken part in operations under the auspices of several organizations: the SAS, SOE and a few other irregular units. But all of them had either been disbanded or were about to be, and I wasn’t sure I was cut out for the Service: I was a field agent, and most of the Service chaps I knew were desk men.

I nevertheless applied for a job in the Soviet Section, which was expanding almost by the day. Unbeknownst to me, it was headed up by one of Father’s oldest friends, Colin Templeton. I was given the position, and started work at Broadway Buildings in early February, 1946.

The Section’s entire focus was on obtaining up-to-date information about the Soviet Union: its scientific expertise, intelligence structures and, of course, military plans. Many were convinced that Stalin intended to invade Western Europe. As reliable information was extremely scant, real war crimes investigators in Germany, Austria and elsewhere were being thwarted: many of the senior Nazis they apprehended were swiftly judged by London to be crucial counter-espionage assets, and were exfiltrated, given new names, and pumped for everything they had. But the more I heard about the supposed Soviet threat, the more determined I became to counter it from within – and the more anxious I became about the fact that I had not yet been contacted.

Just as I was starting to wonder if Yuri had simply given me the brush-off, it happened. I was walking down Thurloe Street when I felt something graze my shoulder. Whirling around, I caught sight of a slim man in a grey herringbone coat heading in the opposite direction. As he walked away I felt my pockets, but to my surprise found that something had been added to them rather than subtracted. It was a small visiting card for a café a few streets away. And on the back of it, someone had written in pencil: ‘It is later than you think. Saturday. 11.00.’

The line of poetry seemed more ominous now than when Yuri had recited it to me a couple of months earlier. Perhaps as a result, I left the flat at eight o’clock that Saturday morning. The café was within walking distance, but instead I took a succession of buses all over town, repeatedly checking my watch. I had arrived, flustered but certain I had not been tailed, just before eleven, and waited for my contact to arrive. When he did, I realized it was the man in the herringbone coat. He shook me by the hand as though he had known me for a very long time, removed his coat, and ordered a pot of tea.

This was Georgi. He was in his mid-thirties, intelligent, cultured and charming. He had worked in France and Belgium, where he had been responsible for rooting out information about the Nazis’ troop movements. We got on immediately, and over the next few months met regularly in locations around South Kensington. I once asked him if it wasn’t unwise to meet so close to where I lived, and he had told me that it was by far the safest option: it would be easier to explain my presence if I happened to meet anyone, and the police were less vigilant because it was a genteel neighbourhood with few immigrants. As an additional precaution, we opened every meeting by establishing the cover story for it in the event of any interruption: most of the time he was a Finnish aristocrat who had known my mother in Helsinki. But we never had to use any of the cover stories we prepared: nobody paid us the least attention. We would sit in a corner and play chess or backgammon – he was rather good at both – and he would quietly question me about my work at the office. At that stage there was very little to report, and I had the feeling he already knew everything I told him anyway and was simply testing how much I would reveal to him, and how clearly I could relay information.

At our fourth meeting, Georgi announced that he would cut contact with me for six months, barring emergencies, in which case I was to leave him a message at a dead drop in a cemetery in Southgate. I had immediately feared that I had done something wrong, but he assured me that this was a positive sign, and that it meant that Moscow now trusted me enough to leave me to advance my career without having to watch over my every step.

‘Bide your time,’ he said. ‘Go about your work efficiently, and when we meet again you will have more to tell me.’ As I had watched the back of his coat disappear through the door of the café, I had felt strangely abandoned.

But I had followed his instructions. I had continued with my work in Soviet Section, and slowly but surely was given more responsibilities. Colin Templeton now often invited me to his home, where I met his family. The six months crept by, and then it was time to meet with Georgi once more. He asked about my work, and seemed pleased with my answers. Once again, I didn’t feel I was telling him anything he did not know, but was happy I was finally of some use.

My meetings with Georgi continued in this way until late 1949, when Colin Templeton called me into his office and told me he was being posted to Istanbul as Head of Station, and that he would like me to come along as part of his team. I accepted at once, and left a message for Georgi in the cemetery in Southgate telling him the news. There had been no time for another meeting, as I was due to head out to Turkey immediately.

After nearly four years behind a desk in London I had been looking forward to heading into the field again, and Istanbul didn’t disappoint. The city had been crawling with spies during the war, and it seemed little had changed since. The main concern was the Soviets, with the growing American influence a close second. Turkey had been neutral in the war, by and large, and was now cleverly playing the former combatants off against one another. Despite the plans for democratic elections, the possibility that they might turn to the Soviet Union had everyone worried, and strenuous efforts were being made to convince them to come into the new NATO structure. Britain’s position was that this should happen in conjunction with it joining a separate Middle Eastern security alliance, but the Americans had other ideas. Despite Britain’s efforts to persuade them otherwise, the Turks were coming to the realization that the balance of power was shifting in the world, and that the United States might be better able to provide them with long-term support.

I quickly settled into my position in the Station. I loved being away from London, with its pea-soupers and boiled beef, and immediately immersed myself in the hubbub and intrigue of the city’s back alleys. After a year had passed without any contact from the Soviets, I began to panic. Perhaps Georgi had not picked up my message in Southgate, and they were unaware I had moved to Turkey? But surely he would have checked the drop.

My fears had finally been put to rest just three weeks earlier. I had been wandering around the Grand Bazaar when a small boy had placed a piece of paper in my jacket pocket and run away giggling. I had followed the address to a shop that sold antique silverware, where I had discreetly been led through to a back room. To my surprise, I found Yuri seated on a pile of silk cushions. He looked much the same as he had in Burgdorf, only his hair was a little greyer and the greatcoat and pyjamas had been replaced with a smart lounge suit.

He had wasted no time in getting to the point. There had been some commotion in Moscow: several agents in the field had been recalled to headquarters for further training. As a result, all the information I had given to date had been reviewed – and been found wanting.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, reeling. ‘Georgi was very pleased—’

‘He was mistaken. Moscow feels you have not yet handed us anything significant.’

‘But I haven’t had anything significant to provide!’ I said. ‘Georgi told me to bide my time until I was more established.’

Yuri gave a thin smile. ‘Moscow is concerned about the time and resources that have been spent on you for such little reward. Unless you can provide a higher grade of material, it is perhaps best that we discontinue our arrangement.’ And with that he announced the time and location of the next meet, then stood, parted the curtains, and disappeared through them.

That next meet was now less than a week away, and I still had nothing of note to report. The simple truth was that, at twenty-six years old and with just five years in the job, I was still far too junior to be given access to any great secrets – and I couldn’t see that situation changing any time soon.

I took a sip of punch and looked up at the villa, wondering again what it was that Templeton might be discussing with the ‘colleagues from London’. They had arrived a couple of hours earlier, not by motorboat like the other guests, but in a scratched-up jeep they had parked in the driveway at the foot of the garden, on the Asian side. Templeton had immediately escorted them inside the house and up to his office, and they hadn’t been seen since.

There had been three of them. William Osborne was one of the Service’s rising stars: having spent much of the war working in the Middle East, he was now establishing a reputation as an expert in deception operations. Charles Severn, the driver of the jeep, was a new recruit to the Service whom I had known at school, and not much liked. The final member of the party had not been from London at all: the head of Turkish military intelligence, a dapper man with a marvellous moustache who, for reasons I had been unable to unearth, we called ‘Cousin Freddie’. He sometimes came by the office to meet Templeton – but what was so important that he had come to his house?

‘Hello, Dark.’

I looked up to see a young man stretching out his hand. He was dressed in a dazzlingly white short-sleeved shirt and navy-blue Daks, and his fair hair was brushed back with pomade. Despite the addition of several inches in height and a short clipped moustache, he was instantly recognizable as the boy I had last seen nine years earlier.

‘Severn,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Do you know everyone?’

Severn made his way around introducing himself, and Vanessa blushed as he kissed her hand.

‘Is this your first visit to Istanbul?’ she asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said, settling into a chair.

‘How are you enjoying it?’

He wrinkled his nose. ‘Not much. Rather a scruffy-looking place. I was expecting more, somehow.’

There was an awkward silence, and I wondered whether Templeton had sent him out of the meeting early because he was too junior to hear the rest, or because he hadn’t been able to stand the sound of his voice any longer. Perhaps he was nervous. I asked him if he wanted a drink, and he looked up at me with gratitude. Yes, I decided, it must be nerves. Probably his first mission in the field – I remembered how I had felt on mine.

More guests arrived, most of them diplomats. Drink was consumed, and food eaten. Conversation turned to Korea, and the King’s health, and which mosques were worth visiting. Severn told me a series of anecdotes about old boys I had no recollection of, and I did my best to feign interest. But there was still no sign of Templeton, Osborne or Cousin Freddie. They’d now been closeted away for over two hours. What on earth could they be discussing?

‘Pretty girl,’ said Severn. ‘Is she yours?’ I turned to him, and he nodded at Vanessa, who was talking to a first secretary.

‘No,’ I said coldly. ‘She is not.’

‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to offend.’

I decided to change the subject. ‘How’s London these days – do I take it you’re working for Osborne?’

Severn laughed bitterly. ‘That’s one word for it. The man’s a positive slave-driver, and I’m the one being driven. Or rather, it’s the other way round – would you believe he’s dragged me halfway across the world to be his chauffeur? Wish he’d got some local sod to drive him around the desert instead.’

I suppressed a smile. ‘Why didn’t he?’

He placed a finger to his lips. ‘Hush-hush stuff. Although no doubt Templeton’s given you some of the background?’

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize. Templeton doesn’t tell me that sort of—’

‘Don’t pull that with me. You should have heard him in there – he couldn’t stop talking about you. You’re his boy. Stay close to him, I would. Only reason I’m chumming up to Osborne is because I reckon he might go to the top. And his politics are sound. He says what he means, anyway.’

I made some assenting noises and went to help myself to more punch. I couldn’t work it out: was something significant going on here, or was it just the pressure from Moscow that was making me believe there might be? I found Severn’s attitude mildly surprising. His family were one of the richest in England, and I had presumed the Service was simply a hobby for him. But it appeared that he was, in fact, rather ambitious, and sharp enough at least to try to judge which way the wind was blowing.

I made a note to myself to keep an eye on him, and turned to see Templeton, magisterial in a straw hat, cream linen suit and a pair of battered leather sandals, marching out of the house. Osborne and Cousin Freddie followed directly behind him. The meeting finally appeared to be over.

‘Hello, everyone!’ Templeton said as he approached the gathering. ‘Sorry to be the absent host. Is there any punch left?’

Everyone laughed, and he kissed his wife and daughter. More introductions were made; glasses clinked; the sun beat down. A hookah appeared from somewhere and Templeton offered it to Cousin Freddie, who nodded in appreciation at being given his own amber mouthpiece to use. Some felt that Templeton had gone native, but I suspected that this sort of thing was simply solid tradecraft, an extension of the idea that a good agent always listens twice as much as he speaks. Cousin Freddie certainly seemed to become more talkative as he inhaled from the water-pipe, and Templeton sat cross-legged opposite him, nodding his head every once in a while.

The shape of the party shifted, with separate circles forming. Osborne ambled over to speak to Severn, who noticeably stiffened as he approached. Osborne gave me a nod – we had met briefly during the war. He had put on a lot of weight since then, and the heat seemed to be getting to him: his hair was plastered to his forehead and his cheeks were flushed. I couldn’t see his eyes, as they were hidden behind small dark glasses with gold rims.

‘What’s the story with the missing diplomats?’ Vanessa asked him. ‘Is it true they were spying for the Russians?’

I glanced across at Templeton to see whether he had heard, but he was still deeply engrossed in conversation with Cousin Freddie. Templeton tried to shield his daughter from any discussion of his work, but it had had the opposite effect: Vanessa was fascinated by the espionage world, particularly its more sensationalist aspects. She had been talking incessantly about the diplomats since they had vanished from their jobs at the Foreign Office a few weeks earlier.

She wasn’t the only one. I had never met either man, but both were well known to the community here. Donald Maclean, the son of a Liberal MP, had been head of Chancery in Cairo, while everyone seemed to have a story to tell about Guy Burgess. He had been in the Service before the war, worked for the BBC during it, and afterwards had joined the Foreign Office, eventually being posted to Washington as a second secretary. The rumour was that he and Maclean were Soviet agents who had been on the brink of being exposed by Five. Their disappearance was the talk of the town, and as a result, several diplomats within earshot turned to see how Osborne would reply to Vanessa’s question. Such subjects were not generally broached in public, but if ever you were going to pick up a titbit it would be at the Templetons’ party.

‘It doesn’t look good,’ Osborne admitted sotto voce. ‘The bad news is that Five now want to interrogate Philby about the whole affair.’

‘Really?’ said Vanessa, placing her hand over her mouth. There was an almost audible intake of breath from people seated nearby. Kim Philby had been Head of Station here before Templeton, leaving for Washington in ’49. We were sitting less than a mile from his old house: he had been the first from the office to live out in this neighbourhood, and several others had followed suit, the Templetons included. I knew Philby and Burgess had been friends: the regulars at the Moda Yacht Club still hadn’t forgiven either man for the time they had become royally drunk in the bar on one of Burgess’ visits out here. But that hardly seemed enough to hang him for.

‘They don’t seriously suspect him?’ I asked.

Osborne removed a handkerchief from his jacket and wiped the back of his neck with it. ‘Apparently, yes. They claim he’s the only person who was in contact with Burgess and also knew Maclean was under suspicion. But the whole thing’s absurd. Everyone’s blaming everyone else, and it looks like Five want to blame us.’

‘I heard they were queer,’ said Severn, who was now on his fifth glass of punch by my count. ‘Part of the Homintern.’ He gave a braying laugh, and Osborne glared at him. ‘Well,’ Severn trailed off, ‘they’re snakes in the grass anyway.’

‘We once had a snake in our garden in Cairo,’ said Joan Templeton brightly, and polite titters rippled around the chairs. ‘No, really, we did! What was it, Vanessa – a cobra?’

‘No, Mummy, it was an adder! And the snake-charmer brought it there especially, remember?’

The conversation moved on. People began reminiscing about the embassy ball in’47, when the Fleet had visited, while Severn continued to knock back the punch and Osborne turned more and more scarlet. The heat was starting to get to me, too, and I excused myself to stretch my legs.

I wandered through the house and back to the landing-stage. The boat crew were busy chatting to one another, and looked up at me with surprise.

‘Does anyone have a cigarette?’ I asked, placing my fingers to my lips.

One of them smiled and produced a packet. Although disappointed I couldn’t get hold of Players in the city, I had gradually become accustomed to the taste of Turkish tobacco. As I gratefully accepted the cigarette, I pondered the conversation about Maclean and Burgess. By the sound of it, they were indeed doubles. I had occasionally wondered whether there might be others, but had been grateful I didn’t know who they were any more than I imagined they knew of me, working on the well-established principle that the fewer people who were in on a secret the more likely it was to be kept. But it seemed the two men had planned their flight together, so perhaps they had been aware of each other’s secret beforehand – and then there was the extraordinary possibility they might have been aided by Philby. I had nobody to confide in but Yuri, or whomever else Moscow sent to run me. Once away from a meet, I was on my own.

I chatted to the boat crew for a while, then wandered back into the house. Joan had decorated it with her customary good taste: elegant silk screens, mementoes from the family’s time in Egypt and a few artfully placed carpets. I smoked my cigarette and eyed the staircase that led up to Templeton’s study. I knew from the office that he often left the last thing he had been working with on his desk. Perhaps he had done the same now. Everyone was sitting outside, enjoying the party – would anyone be likely to notice if I were away for a few more minutes? I thought not. I headed towards the staircase and started walking up it.

As I reached the top, I heard raised voices – they were coming from Templeton’s study. I pushed open the door and saw Templeton towering over Severn, his eyes bulging out of his head and his face flushed. He looked like he was about to hit him. He spun round on his heels at the sound of my entering, and I immediately hid my cigarette behind my back – he disapproved of smoking.

‘Paul,’ Templeton said, his jaw clamped together in quiet fury, ‘I wonder if you would be good enough to put Charles up this evening? I fear we’re a little short of room here.’

‘Of . . . of course, sir,’ I said, and Templeton bowed his head at me and stalked out of the room.

I stepped forward and helped Severn up – he had slipped to the floor.

‘What the hell did you do?’ I asked in wonder. I’d never seen Templeton lose his temper in this way.

Severn looked up at me with clouded eyes. ‘Search me,’ he said, slurring the words. ‘I only placed my hand on her leg, I swear.’

After a decent interval, I took him by the arm and led him downstairs.

*

By the time we reached my flat in Pera, Severn’s head was lolling against the side of the jeep. As I had helped him downstairs, Templeton had discreetly taken me to one side and given me the keys to the vehicle, telling me to return it to the Consulate-General transport park as soon as I was able. Then he had placed a hand on my shoulder, thanked me, and trudged back to the party. I didn’t get the chance to see Vanessa before leaving to check if she was all right.

I managed to drag Severn up the stairs and hoisted him onto the couch in my tiny living room. I took his shoes off and went back down to the jeep to lock up. As I did, my eye fell on a flap of yellow material peeking out of the underside of the driver’s seat. I jimmied the seat up, slid it out, and squinted at it in the glare of the afternoon sun. What on earth . . .?

It was a large-scale fold-out map of Turkey, and someone had drawn small black circles at several points on it: I counted thirty of them.

I quickly considered my options, and came to the conclusion there were two: I could either make a copy of the map and give it to Yuri at our next meeting, or I could replace it under the seat and forget I had ever seen it.

My first instinct was to copy it, of course. Here, finally, was something substantial to give Moscow. But was it, and if so just how substantial? I had no way of knowing. It was a strange sort of morality, perhaps, but it was mine: I was uncomfortable with the idea of handing over a secret I didn’t even know myself. And there would be nothing lost if I replaced it. After all, it was only thanks to Severn getting blotto that I had seen it at all. I might just as easily not have done – and it might not be important at all.

No, it had to be important. Osborne had come out here because of this, and Severn had obviously driven him, Templeton and Cousin Freddie to some or all of the marked locations.

Perhaps, it occurred to me, there was a third option. I could find out what the map meant myself, and then decide whether it was something I felt I could pass to Yuri. I glanced down at it again. The nearest circle was positioned just outside Izmit, a town about sixty miles away – if I took the jeep, I could be there and back in a couple of hours. Severn was passed out, and everyone else was still at the party in Beylerbeyi. I had a jeep at my disposal . . .

I walked back up to the flat and into the living room. Severn was snoring now, his head tilted back. I went over to the dresser and wrote a quick note explaining that I was returning the jeep and would be back shortly. I placed it by his head, then went into the bedroom and removed a metal case from beneath a floorboard. I took out Father’s Luger, which I had taken from his body in Germany six years earlier, and held it in my hand. It was heavy and cold. I placed it in my waistband, then turned off the lights, locked up the flat and returned to the jeep.

*

Once I had crossed back over the Galata bridge, I took the road out of town, heading through a landscape of grey mosques and olive groves until I was driving along the coast, the wind blowing dust into my hair. The circle on the map was a few miles short of Izmit, and as I reached the spot I saw a wide earth track heading off the road and decided that it must be the location. I slowed to a snail’s pace, checking for signs that the site might be occupied or under surveillance. There didn’t seem to be any, so I slowly drove down the track, eventually coming to a dead-end at the crest of a hillock. I parked the jeep and got out to have a look.

It was late afternoon now, but the sun was still a glaring hole in the sky, and it beat down on my neck as I walked around trying to see what it was that Severn and the others had driven out here to see. I decided I had turned off too early, as there was nothing but scrub and a few beech trees. After several minutes of fruitless searching, I headed back to the jeep and started reversing back down the track to rejoin the road. It was probably just as well, I thought . . . But as I tried to angle one of the wheels, I saw something that made me hit the brakes: a tree stump.

If I hadn’t been here with the map, it would never have given me pause for thought. But it was the only stump around, and it was setting off alarms in my head. I braked again and went to the back of the jeep, where there was a small bag of equipment: driving gloves, binoculars and a torch. I took the torch and walked up to the stump. Kneeling down, I placed my hands against the side of it, and pushed.

The stump lifted: it was on a hinge. I brushed away soil and leaves to reveal netting. Pulling that away, a dark hole about the width of a man appeared, and I saw a narrow wooden ladder leading down. I took a breath. There was still a chance to turn back, pretend I’d never seen the map, pretend none of it had happened. But Yuri’s words came back to me: ‘Unless you can provide a higher grade of material, it is perhaps best that we discontinue our arrangement.’ I reached out for the top rung of the ladder.

A few seconds later I landed in darkness. I grabbed the Luger from my waistband and turned on the torch. I was in a low tunnel. There was an opening to my left, and I crouched down and crawled through it.

The space was bigger than my bedroom in Pera. Most of it was taken up with wooden crates. I pushed aside a layer of plastic sheeting in one and shone my torch down on it: cold metal glinted up at me, and I caught a whiff of cosmoline.

I spent several minutes poking around the boxes, prying with my fingers and the torch. I found rifles, pistols, binoculars, a radio set and even commando daggers. The latter confirmed all my suspicions: this was a stay-behind base.

Early in the last war, several groups in England had been secretly trained and provided with underground arms caches such as this, the idea being that if the Germans invaded a resistance force would already be in place ready to counter them. The concept of the Auxiliary Units, as they had been called, had expanded as the war had progressed. Instead of waiting until a country fell to the Axis powers and then dropping supplies to hastily assembled partisan groups, as had happened in France, men in several countries were discreetly approached and asked to commit to staying on as part of resistance forces in the event of invasion. In Singapore, these groups had initially been called ‘left-behind parties’ until someone had realized that it might not be the best name to inspire volunteers, and changed it to the rather more inspiring ‘stay-behind parties’.

But why would the Service need stay-behind parties in Turkey? The answer was obvious: the threat of Soviet invasion. If there were to be another war, as many were predicting, Turkey was an obvious flashpoint – the Russians could slip over the mountains along the long border and the army wouldn’t know what had hit it. Britain didn’t fancy that idea, so had set up these bases as a precautionary measure. That meant that there must also be men who knew where the bases were and had been trained in guerrilla warfare – that, presumably, was where Cousin Freddie came in.

I made sure there was no sign that I had been in the cave, then clambered back up the ladder and hoisted myself out of the hole. I carefully replaced the netting, the foliage over it and the stump, then headed back to the jeep and drove off, my heart thumping in my chest.

I arrived back at the flat around dusk. I replaced the map under the driver’s seat and entered the flat. Severn hadn’t moved from where I had left him, and his snores had only increased in volume.

I tore up the note I’d left him, and headed for the comfort of my bed.

 

XV

A lot had happened since that summer eighteen years ago. Turkey had joined NATO, and the Americans had soon taken charge of the place. All three of the Templetons were dead: Joan from cancer a couple of years ago, Colin more recently by my own hand. And Vanessa, whose love I had ignored for so many years, then tried but failed to return . . . she, too, was gone.

My dreaded meet with Yuri had been a wash-out: I had waited in the chill morning mist outside the warren of the Grand Bazaar for half an hour, but he had never turned up. I had tried again the following day, then three days after that and so on according to the schedule, but he had never shown his face again. Part of me had been relieved, as the prospect of blowing the stay-behind bases had made me very uneasy: if the Soviet Union did invade, the entire security of Turkey might depend on them, and that was a measure of influence I wasn’t sure I wanted to have. But Yuri’s vanishing act had also seemed rather final: it seemed Moscow had carried out its threat, and discarded me.

I had been posted back to London in September, where I was given a hefty promotion within Soviet Section. I had occasionally checked the old dead drops, but to no avail. Finally, one freezing December evening someone brushed past me as I left a cinema, and my double life resumed once again.

My new contact, Sasha, was in his early forties, with a neat beard and a penchant for tweed suits and bow ties. He claimed not to know why Yuri had failed to show in Istanbul, but assured me that Moscow’s previous concerns about me were ancient history. He pumped me with questions about my work in Soviet Section, and I answered them as fully as I could. He never asked me about Turkey, and I decided not to mention the map or the arms cache.

Our meetings continued over the next few years, although after a while they became much more infrequent for security reasons. The Templetons’ garden party had given me my first indication that I might not be the only double, and that had been confirmed in ’56, when Burgess and Maclean appeared at a press conference in Moscow. A string of exposures had followed: Blake in ’61, Vassall in ’62, and then Philby’s defection in ’63, which had, in turn, led to the unmasking of Blunt and Cairncross. The newspapers were filled with talk of spy rings and third and fourth men. I was as agog as anyone at the extent of Soviet penetration.

I forced my mind back into the here and now: a prison cell, presumably somewhere in Italy. Now, finally, I too had been exposed, but I had to figure out what the hell was going on and get out of here and stop it. When I had been appointed Head of Soviet Section in ’65, I had been given access to a lot more files, but I had seen nothing about a stay-behind operation in Turkey, and I’d presumed that it had been wound down: the threat of Soviet invasion no longer seemed realistic. The idea that Severn and Zimotti’s plans were part of the same operation suggested a much larger scale than I had feared. There had been thirty arms caches hidden across Turkey in ’51. How many would there be in Italy now and, more importantly, how many men had been trained to use them? If my suspicions were right, this wasn’t just a few spooks idly plotting, placing a bomb here or there: they had a highly trained army prepared to do their dirty work.

I turned to Sarah sitting next to me in the gloom of the cell, and let my mind absorb the significance of it for a moment.

‘So this is what you wanted to tell me at the embassy?’ I said. ‘Your suspicions about Charles, the documents you found in his safe . . .’ She nodded. ‘But why? How could you be sure I wasn’t a part of the plot?’

She took a deep breath and smiled faintly.

‘Charles had already told me about what happened in St Paul’s: that you had chased down the sniper, discovered that he was an Italian, and were coming out to investigate. He seemed very jumpy about you, so I asked him about your history. He told me you’d been at school together, and also about what had happened in Nigeria, and after – that you had briefly been suspected of being a double. We still had files in the office from your time here, so I read up on you – your missing father and your wonderful career and so on – and suddenly it just came to me, I suppose.’

‘What did?’ I asked. But I knew what she was going to say.

‘Well, that you were a double. That you had gone out to Nigeria to stop that defector exposing you, and chased the sniper halfway across London because you had been the target, not John Farraday. As I read the files, it seemed that everyone around you ended up dead, but there you were still standing at the end of it all, and . . .’ She looked into my eyes. ‘I was right, wasn’t I?’

I stared back at her. It was ironic, of course: I had fooled Templeton and Osborne and everyone else for all these years, and finally with barely a glance at my file a cipher clerk in Rome had guessed at the truth.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You were right. But if you were so sure I was a double, why did you decide to confide in me?’

She raised a smile. ‘It was a risk – but I reckoned a Soviet agent probably wouldn’t be involved in a conspiracy to smear Communists. I thought you might have already guessed at what they were up to, in fact, and that that was why you had come out here, or that you were at least somewhere on the road to finding out. So I thought I could be . . .’ She looked for the right word. ‘Indiscreet. Not tell you, exactly, but just give you a nudge in the right direction. If you realized what was going on, you’d tell Moscow, and then they’d have to stop it.’ She shrugged her shoulders simply. ‘I’m not a Communist or anything.’

‘Neither am I. I was, once, but that was a long time ago, and I was . . .’ What – young? Trapped? It was time to put my excuses away. ‘And I was wrong about it,’ I said.

We sat in silence for a while then. I wanted very much to tell her that everything would be better – to make it better for her, somehow. But there was nothing that could be done. For anything to move forward, we had to get those documents. Without them, this was all smoke and mirrors: nobody would ever believe it. Even with them it might be smoke and mirrors, because several governments would be very quick to discredit them as fakes, and it might be hard to prove otherwise. But the operational details would be in there, and if Sarah were telling the truth we were faced with the slaughter of hundreds, possibly even thousands, of innocent people.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, the seed of an idea was forming: Haggard. In Italy, the operation was designed to discredit the Communists and keep them from coming to power. But in Britain, the target seemed to be the Labour government. That meant Haggard couldn’t be part of the conspiracy: he was one of its main targets. And as Home Secretary, he could act. Unmask the conspiracy to him and I had a sliver of a chance of not just stopping whatever bloodbath was being planned, but redeeming myself. My life as a double agent was over, but perhaps, if I could take on this lot and win, I could start afresh, in a new Service purged of the conspirators. A new life, a new page . . .

Well, it was a nice thought, but I couldn’t unmask anyone without proof. And that was tightly locked up in Severn’s safe in Rome. I squeezed Sarah’s hand gently, and as I did I felt a hardness in her fingers. Her wedding band, no doubt. Only it was sharp. I glanced down. Her other jewellery had gone, but her engagement ring, dirty and bloodied, shone dully.

That meant two things. First, Severn had not discarded her entirely. My watch and everything in my pockets had been taken from me, so it must have been a deliberate decision to leave this on her. Despite imprisoning and torturing her, it seemed he hadn’t wanted to remove this symbol of love from her body. I remembered his screams as he had brought the whip down on me: ‘Nobody touches my wife.’ Secondly, it was a weapon. Not an ideal weapon, by any means, but then prisoners with no other hope of escape can’t be choosers.

‘I have an idea,’ I said. ‘Can you run?’

She nodded slowly. ‘I can try.’

‘What would happen if . . .?’ I stopped myself. It wasn’t the most gallant request I’d ever made. I tried to keep my voice even. ‘What would happen if I kissed you?’

I thought for a moment she was going to slap me, but then she saw me nodding at the walls and felt me squeeze her ring finger, and understanding dawned on her.

‘Charles . . . Yes, I see. But he might bring others with him.’

I held her gaze. ‘What do we have to lose? They’ll be here sooner or later anyway. Isn’t it better if it’s sooner?’

She didn’t answer for a few moments, and then I thought I saw the trace of a smile cross her pale lips.

‘“Was ever woman in this humour wooed?”’

My spirits lifted faintly: if she still had the wherewithal to make literary references, we might just have a chance. I took a deep breath, and she nodded. This was, I thought, quite likely suicide.

We stood and I moved closer to her, whispering in her ear to pass me the ring. She wriggled it off and I squeezed it onto my little finger. I made sure that the stone was facing outward: a very small, very expensive knuckle-duster.

We were inches away from each other now. I tried to keep my mind focused on the task ahead, and brushed a wisp of hair away from her face with my fingers. My stomach began to contract as the adrenalin began pumping through me. I leaned down and touched my lips gently against her collarbone.

‘Does that hurt?’ I whispered.

She shook her head. She was breathing rapidly now, whether in earnest or acting for the cameras I wasn’t sure, and I brought my face up and gently pressed my mouth against hers. She didn’t react at first, but then her lips parted slightly, and I felt the warm moistness of her tongue . . .

The door of the cell slammed open, and Severn rushed in, his face dark with rage and a low roar in his throat. I lunged at him, thrashing the ring against his face with every ounce of strength I had in me. Somehow I hit home, because he cried out and reeled backwards, stumbling into the wall and falling to the ground with a thick thudding noise. I stepped forward to finish the job, but he was already out for the count: his cheek was torn open and blood was gushing down it, but his mouth was lax and his head was resting on his shoulder.

I breathed out. It had worked. Against all the odds, it had worked.

But now we had to get out of here.

I quickly searched him: he was unarmed, but I grabbed the keys from his belt. Sarah picked the ring from the floor and threw it at him fiercely, then made to kick him. I pulled her away – we didn’t have time. I opened the door and we came out into a long corridor, at the far end of which was a staircase.

We started running towards it.