I woke to see the word ‘BECHEROVKA’ swimming in front of my eyes. My first thought was that I was still at Chief’s house, but then the ringing in my ears and the coating on my teeth brought it all back.
Pritchard had left the club soon after my arrival. He hadn’t mentioned that he had been at Chief’s, though in a way I’d found that more troubling. But strangely enough, despite the fright he’d given me, I had almost been sorry to see him go, as I hadn’t had much to say to Vanessa. I’d hung on at the club with her for another hour, wearing a death’s-head grin and sweating inside my coat as the music spiralled out of control, before finally feigning tiredness and suggesting we leave.
I’d hailed her a cab – the longer I spent with her, the worse it would be. She hadn’t been pleased, of course, but she’d taken it reasonably well and hadn’t asked any questions. I had told her I’d call her in the morning, then I’d hopped in the car and driven back to South Kensington.
After parking near the flat, I had taken the bag from behind the back seat and thrown it into the bins behind an Italian restaurant. On impulse, I’d fished out the bottle of Becherovka and taken it up to the flat with me, hiding it under my jacket so the porter wouldn’t see.
I’d slept very little, spending most of the night going through what had happened and getting to the bottom of the bottle. Now, as the dawn light fell on overturned chairs and shattered glass, I stripped and forced myself to work through the old fitness regimen. By the end of it, I was dripping in sweat and my mind was focused on the morning ahead. I had three objectives. Visit Station 12 and pick up my copy of the Slavin dossier – I didn’t want to have to explain why I hadn’t already received it. See if Chief’s file on Anna was in Registry – as a Head of Section I had full clearance, although one didn’t usually ask to see material related to Chief without a very good reason. I had several. But above all, I had to make sure I was sent out to Nigeria. I had no idea what else Slavin might have up his sleeve, and I needed to hear it before anyone else.
Resolved, I took a bath, shaved and put on a fresh suit. After a scratch breakfast, I packed an old canvas hold-all with a few clothes and took the lift downstairs. I left a message for George to give the car the full treatment, outside and in. Then I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to Lambeth.
*
‘Gentlemen!’ William Osborne’s stentorian tones put a sudden stop to the murmuring around the table. ‘I think it’s time we settled down and got this show on the road, as our American friends like to say.’
He gave a slightly unconvincing chortle, and his waistcoat expanded in the process. Unblessed by the breeding or charm that had smoothed the waters for others, Osborne had clawed his way to becoming Head of Western Hemisphere Section by virtue of his prodigious intellect. A highly capable administrator, he had been widely expected to take over as Deputy Chief last year, but the job had instead gone to John Farraday, a smooth Foreign Office nob with no previous experience of the spy game but a penchant for hosting lavish dinner parties. Osborne had managed to isolate him within weeks, and nobody was in any doubt who really ran things when Chief was away. But he didn’t have the title, yet – and it was by no means a certainty that he’d get it.
This meeting was held every Monday morning at this time, and was known as ‘the Round Table’, although none of us were knights and the table was, in fact, rectangular. Farraday had just arrived and taken his place in his usual corner; he was now busily checking that his cuffs were protruding from his jacket sleeves by half an inch. Seated immediately to his right, and directly facing me, was Pritchard. In a crisp, narrow-cut pinstripe suit and woven silk tie, he didn’t look in the least as though he’d been sipping Riesling in a Soho jazz club less than nine hours ago.
After the war, Pritchard had joined MI5, where he had eventually become Head of E Branch: Colonial Affairs. When it had finally become clear to the Whitehall mandarins that it was suicidal to have intelligence officers posted in former colonies with no official links to the Service, which was responsible for all other overseas territories, E Branch had been taken over, and Pritchard had moved with it. Coming from Five, and being a Scot to boot, had initially made him a deeply suspected outsider, especially as many of the Service’s old guard had been forcibly retired at the same time he joined. However, he was also a decorated war hero, independently wealthy, and staunchly right-wing, and within a few months of his joining the Service he had been taken up as a kind of mascot by its rank and file: their man on the board. While in Five, Pritchard had been converted to the Americans’ idea that British intelligence was still penetrated by the KGB, and he’d devoted a great deal of time and energy to examining old files and case histories in the hope of catching another mole. He’d brought this zeal with him to the Service, and it had made him a lot of high-ranking friends. Chief and Osborne had initially been all in favour of Pritchard’s ‘hunting expeditions’, as his periodic attempts to uproot traitors were known, but now felt that he and his clique were stoking an atmosphere of paranoia and distrust. I tended to agree.
Naturally, I had watched Pritchard’s entry into the Service and subsequent rise in popularity within it with considerable unease – the tall bespectacled ghost I had met in a farmhouse in Germany in 1945 was, for obvious reasons, the last person on earth I wanted to work alongside, especially as he now seemed on a drive to find moles inside the Service. I had been appointed Head of Section at an unusually tender age, partly due to Father’s near-mythical status within the Service and partly due to Chief’s patronage. Now Pritchard had caught up with me, and although Africa was one of the smaller Sections, there was already talk of him in the corridors as a potential Deputy Chief, or even Chief, somewhere down the line.
Also seated around the table were Godsal, who headed up Middle East Section, Quiney, responsible for Western Europe, and Smale, who was standing in for Far East as Innes was on leave. They all looked harmless enough, with their schoolmasters’ faces and woollen suits, but I was under no illusions: they could be lethal. One ill-timed gesture, one misplaced word, and they would pounce. Technically, treason still warranted the death penalty. If I were exposed, I had no doubt they’d apply every technicality in the book. So: tread carefully. I needed things to go my way.
Osborne pushed a garishly cuff-linked sleeve to one side to examine his wristwatch. ‘I was hoping Chief would be able to start us off,’ he said, ‘but he doesn’t seem to have arrived yet.’ His piggy little eyes, buried behind thick black frames, darted downwards, as if he thought Chief might be about to emerge from beneath the table.
‘Strange,’ I murmured under my breath.
‘Did you say something, Paul?’
‘Sorry,’ I said, looking up sheepishly. ‘It’s just that… No. Never mind, carry on.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well… it just struck me that it’s very unlike Chief. He’s usually in well before nine on Mondays, isn’t he?’
Osborne inspected a fingernail, then nibbled at it viciously. ‘Has he called in?’ he asked Smale, who was performing his usual duties as the head of Chief’s secretariat in parallel with his new role. Smale shook his head.
‘Perhaps traffic’s bad,’ I said. ‘God knows this place is hard enough to get to from the centre of town.’
Osborne nodded: the old buildings had been a short walk from his flat.
‘It is a little peculiar,’ said Pritchard suddenly, the traces of his Morningside accent amplified by the room’s acoustics. ‘He called me in to see him last night but wasn’t there by the time I arrived.’
‘Oh?’ said Osborne, turning his head. ‘What did he want to see you about?’
‘The Slavin file – at any rate, his message was attached to that.’
‘What time did you get the message?’ asked Osborne.
‘Around seven. I’d just come back from Enfield and left straight away, but the house was deserted when I arrived.’
‘Perhaps he’d fallen asleep,’ I suggested.
‘I don’t think so. I checked pretty thoroughly.’
Yes, I thought – you did.
‘I was worried something might have happened,’ Pritchard continued, ‘but I couldn’t for the life of me remember the way to Barnes’s cottage and didn’t want to call in a Full Alert without ample reason. I suddenly remembered Chief sometimes spends weekends in London with his daughter, Vanessa. I called her flat, and her roommate – a charming young Australian girl – told me she’d just left for a club in Soho, so I thought I’d drive in to see if Chief was with her – or if she knew where he’d got to.’
‘And did she?’ asked Godsal.
‘No. She also thought he was out at Swanwick and was equally mystified. But I bumped into Paul there.’
The table’s eyes turned to me.
‘Caught red-handed,’ I said, grinning sheepishly. ‘I’ve a soft spot for jazz.’
‘Oh,’ said Pritchard, ‘is that what it was?’ Then, pointedly: ‘She seemed quite taken with you.’
I did my best to blush.
‘Perhaps we should give him a call,’ said Osborne, rescuing me. ‘Perhaps he’s simply slept in.’ He nodded at Smale quickly, before anyone could dwell too much on the unlikely image of Chief failing to set his alarm clock, and Smale walked briskly across the room and picked up a telephone sitting on one of the filing cabinets. As he dialled, I imagined the ring echoing in the empty house. To fill the silence, people conspicuously shuffled pieces of paper, fiddled with pen tops and suddenly realized they had lost their glasses cases, until Smale eventually replaced the receiver and shook his head, and we all went back to staring at him.
‘Call Barnes,’ said Osborne, and waved his hand to indicate he should do it elsewhere.
Smale nodded and slithered out of the door. And that was that: the ball was rolling. Within a couple of hours, a team of specialists would begin prowling through Chief’s living room with dogs and cameras and ink pads. Looking for evidence, looking for blood. I’d carried out last night’s work in a kind of concentrated trance. Now I was gripped by panic as the reality of it came back to me, and a series of possible lapses leapt through my mind. Had I swept every inch of the carpet? Covered the bullet-mark adequately? I had a sudden flash of Chief’s dark, frozen eyes staring up at me from the floor – could I really have removed all trace of that horror?
Osborne clapped his great hands together. ‘I think we should start. I know some of you have to prepare for the Anguilla meeting later. There is only one item on today’s agenda – the Slavin dossier, which I trust you have all now read. All other matters will be covered in our next meeting.’ He turned to Pritchard. ‘Perhaps you could start us off, Henry?’
‘By all means.’ Pritchard walked over to the door and dimmed the lights, then fiddled with the projector in the centre of the table. After some clicks and whirrs, a magnified photograph suddenly appeared on the wall facing us. A man with stooped shoulders and a widow’s peak was bending down to examine a wooden mask at a street market, a quizzical smile on his lips.
‘Meet Colonel Vladimir Mikhailovich Slavin of the KGB,’ said Pritchard. ‘Unmarried. No children. Walked into the High Commission in Lagos on Friday and asked for a British passport in exchange for information about a double agent. In an interview with Geoffrey Manning, the Head of Station, Slavin claimed that Moscow had recruited this agent in Germany in 1945, and that he was given the code-name Radnya.’ He peered at the table over his half-moon spectacles. ‘Needless to say, if true, this would be a monumental disaster. Twenty-four years is a very long time for a double agent to remain undetected, and Christ knows what damage he could have caused.’
With a click, another photograph filled the top half of the wall. This was of a woman, three-quarters in profile, her hair swept back, no make-up. She looked older, of course – but it was her. I focused on her eyes, trying to read anything in them, but she was squinting in the harsh light and it wasn’t possible. An ancient line of poetry I’d last heard recited in a dusty classroom suddenly flashed through my mind, unbidden: With them that walk against me, is my sun…
‘This is the other figure we’re looking at. Irina Grigorieva, a third secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Lagos. According to Slavin, she recruited Radnya after falling in love with him. Cherchez la femme.’ He allowed a brief interval for polite laughter. Once a couple of people had obliged, he continued: ‘Both of these pictures, incidentally, were taken by the Station’s watchers within the last couple of years, so we can take it that this is more or less how they look today.’ He walked back to the door and turned the lights back up.
‘Do we know what their duties involve?’ asked Farraday.
‘I had a look at our records this morning, and we have Slavin down as arriving in Nigeria in ’65, under cover as a political attaché. Before that, he was in similar positions in Kinshasa and Accra, which makes him something of an Africa expert in Russian terms. Our educated guess is that his job is to formulate policy in the region – and, of course, to keep an eye on what everyone else is getting up to.’
‘Everyone else meaning us?’ asked Farraday. He seemed to be following the discussion, for a change.
Pritchard nodded. ‘Among others. I presume everyone here’s au fait with the situation in Nigeria?’ He took some smart buff folders out of his briefcase and handed them round the table – the covers boasted the grand title ‘THE NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR: A SUMMARY AND ASSESSMENT OF THE CONFLICT TO DATE’. ‘This is a draft of a paper we’ll be sending the Cabinet next week,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll find we’ve covered a lot of ground.’ Leafing through it, I could see he wasn’t exaggerating: there was a section on the country’s history, a detailed chronology of all the major events of the war so far, profiles of the leading personalities on both sides… I felt a pang of professional jealousy.
‘I think you all know the basics,’ Pritchard went on airily. ‘But in case you’ve got sick of following it on the news, I’ll quickly summarize the salient facts. Nigeria is our largest former colony. When it gained independence in ’60, it was the great hope of Africa – a shining new democracy of thirty-five million people, with enormous potential both as a trading partner and as a political force for good in the continent. But independence was swiftly followed by chaos and violence. Pogroms against the Ibo tribe in the east eventually led to that region seceding from the rest of the country and renaming itself the Republic of Biafra. That sparked a civil war. So far, so Africa. From our point of view, however, it’s been a complete mess, unfortunately compounded by our government’s handling of the situation. We initially refused to take sides in the war, sitting resolutely on the fence. Then, in August ’67, the Nigerians – “the Federal side” – took delivery of several Czech Delphin L-29 jet-fighters from Moscow. That sent us into a panic: nobody wants the Russians to be in control of one of Africa’s largest nations once the war ends. As a result, we’ve now painted ourselves into a corner, and are effectively competing with Moscow to provide more and more arms to the Nigerians, in the hope of gaining favour with them after the war.’
‘And what does Nigeria have to offer us?’ asked Farraday innocently.
‘Oil,’ I said.
Pritchard flashed me a contemptuous look. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers, Paul.’ It was a nice little dig – I was known for my contacts in Fleet Street. ‘Contrary to public perception, the Biafrans never had all of Nigeria’s oil.’
‘They had rather a lot of it, though. Rather a lot of it that we would prefer remained in our hands. No?’
He leaned forward, glowering across the table. ‘There’s much more at stake here than oil. This is about the four hundred million pounds we’ve invested in the country – and the stability of the whole region. If Nigeria falls to Communism, the rest of the continent could follow.’
‘The “domino” theory? I thought that was a Yank idea.’
He refused to be goaded. ‘Even the Yanks are occasionally right.’
‘And who are they supporting in this thing?’ said Farraday. ‘The Americans, I mean.’
Pritchard turned to him. ‘Well, so far they’ve been officially neutral, but broadly on our side. They’ve left us pretty much alone, though – too busy trying to find ways out of Vietnam and beating the Russians to the moon. That may change now, though, as Nixon made a lot of noise about the Biafrans’ plight during his election campaign. The Prime Minister has made much of the fact that he hasn’t committed British troops in Vietnam, but the Americans aren’t ecstatic about that arrangement and their good will may soon run dry. I don’t think they are going to start supporting the Biafrans – yet. However, there are plenty of other powers already supporting them. France has been supplying them with arms through the Ivory Coast and Gabon in increasingly large quantities in the last few months. De Gaulle would like to protect francophone influence on the continent and sees the plight of “les pauvres biafriens” as a way to win back popularity after the mess of the student riots last year. He also wants access to Biafran oil, of course. Then there’s China, who are apparently lending the rebels their support simply to show up the Soviets as imperialist lapdogs for allying themselves with us and the Americans. It’s hard to gauge what impact these skirmishes they’re having with the Russians along their border might have, but it could mean that they step up their involvement in this conflict as well. Also supporting the Biafrans are the Israelis, who seem to believe that they’re stopping the next Holocaust, and Haiti, who we have reports recognized the rebel regime this weekend – we’re not quite sure what their reasons are. Finally, South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal are all selling the rebels arms simply because they’re happy to help one gang of wogs continue to butcher another.’
The room went quiet while everyone took this in.
‘And the Biafrans, knowing all this, continue to buy arms from these parties?’ Farraday asked.
‘They have little choice.’
‘Poor bastards.’
‘Poor us, rather,’ Pritchard replied. ‘As a result of support from this motley crew, the Biafrans have managed to hang on by the skin of their teeth for nearly two years. We only agreed to supply arms to the Nigerians on the calculation that the whole affair would be over in a couple of weeks. The British public’s disapproval of our involvement is now at an all-time high, partly because of “kwashiorkor”. That’s this disease the children get when they’ve not enough protein. It fills their stomachs with fluid – you’ll have seen the footage, I expect. The Biafrans are now calling it “Harold Wilson Syndrome” and putting that on their death certificates, because they blame him in particular and the British government in general for not allowing enough food and aid through. We also have reports of the PM’s name being used as a swear-word in Biafra.’
‘Well, it’s been that over here for a while!’ said Quiney, eliciting a few quiet chuckles around the table.
Pritchard smiled. ‘Yes, even his own party seems to be turning against him now. That’s largely down to his stance on Biafra, and the pictures that are coming out of it. Liberal do-gooders don’t seem so worried when the starving look like they’re starving, but when they develop pot bellies it shocks them so much they feel compelled to organize jamborees and start marching on Trafalgar Square. Last week, The Times ran a series of articles claiming that the Nigerian pilots are deliberately bombing Biafran civilians. In response to increasing calls for him to resign, the PM announced he will fly out to Lagos this Thursday, supposedly to find out the facts of the war for himself and report back to Parliament.’
Of course. I’d seen it in the papers, but hadn’t realized it was so soon. I asked if there was any ulterior motive to the trip, such as peace negotiations.
‘Partly,’ said Pritchard, ‘although everyone’s started playing that down in the last day or two. There was a similar plan last year for him to go out as a kind of super-mediator, but it was vetoed by the Nigerians, who are very touchy on the issue of outside interference. Ojukwu, the Biafrans’ leader, has made it clear he will only meet Wilson within the borders he currently controls. Agreeing to that would enrage the Nigerians, though, because it would look like we were giving Biafra recognition – that’s how the Biafrans would play it, anyway. Because of the pressure here, the government needs to be seen to be doing something, but our Nigerian sources say there’s little expectation Wilson’s visit will help matters beyond possibly improving the PR situation. But even that might backfire – he was going to go out there with some spades and agricultural tools until someone pointed out it might be reported he was smuggling in arms.’
‘And the Biafrans?’ said Farraday. ‘What do our sources there tell us?’
‘We don’t have any reliable Biafran sources at the moment,’ Pritchard replied, an edge to his voice. ‘I visited Nigeria in December, and Lagos is still a little haphazard.’ The colonial Stations had all been under Pritchard’s control when he had been in Five, but they had been next to useless without the Service’s input. Now they were finally under Service control, but it was clearly taking him longer than he liked to move things on.
‘Are we informing the Prime Minister’s office of the situation?’ asked Godsal.
‘No,’ said Osborne. ‘Nothing is to leave this room. That includes the PM’s office, the FO, the Americans, and even our friends in Five.’ He glanced at Pritchard. ‘Especially our friends in Five. They might conclude that the PM is Radnya.’
Osborne had made a late play for the mantle of head jester. Some of the far right-wing officers in Five – a few of them Pritchard’s cronies – had convinced themselves that Wilson was a Russian agent. I’d even asked Sasha about it. He wasn’t. It was just another whispering campaign against him. The previous spring, there had even been rumours that Cecil King, owner of the Daily Mirror, had been plotting to overthrow the government with the support of Lord Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle. Nothing had come of it, of course.
Osborne waited for the tittering to die down before turning back to Pritchard. ‘Isn’t it a little convenient that a defector has turned up on the eve of this trip?’
‘Slavin may be a plant, you mean?’ Pritchard asked. I had asked Chief the same thing.
Osborne reached for the carafe in the centre of the table. Very deliberately, he poured some water into his glass, his eyes firmly on his task.
‘It would be a pretty little trap,’ he said coolly. ‘Don’t you think? Get us all running around for another traitor.’
Pritchard gave one of his soft smiles. ‘But which is it, William? Either the Russians are so fiendishly clever that they’ve managed to keep one of their agents running in this organization for over twenty years or they’re so fiendishly clever that they’re sending us false defectors to claim that they have.’
Osborne sipped his water.
‘Neither’s an especially appetizing prospect,’ Pritchard went on mercilessly, ‘but considering that we have already discovered – at quite some cost – that we were, in fact, penetrated by the KGB, very successfully, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to investigate the possibility that others remain in our ranks, undetected.’
‘Hear, hear,’ I said.
The two of them looked at me in surprise – my usual line, of course, was that it was divisive and paranoid to search for phantom Philbies among us.
‘Look at the interview,’ I said. ‘If it’s a ploy, it’s not a very clever one. Slavin specifically states that Radnya was a British intelligence officer recruited in Germany at the end of the war. It can’t be too hard to draw up a list of everyone we had involved in secret work in that area at that time. If we gave them all polygraph tests, we’d soon find out if Slavin’s telling the truth.’
There was no response for a few seconds, and I wondered if I’d misjudged it. I got worried when Pritchard cleared his throat, but Osborne beat him to it.
‘I’m not sure we’re quite at the stage of deciding how to go about investigating this, Paul,’ he said, blinking furiously as he pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. He could usually rely on me to head off Pritchard’s demands for more mole-hunts, so it was natural he’d be peeved. ‘At any rate, I think it would, in fact, be rather difficult to draw up a list of everyone we had involved in intelligence in Germany in 1945. There were hundreds of people engaged on that sort of work. We also have no idea where the double is now – if he’s become the Director-General of the BBC or Home Secretary, a request for a polygraph would need a lot of evidence to justify it.’
I nodded, conceding defeat, but he’d made the point I’d been angling for: there were hundreds of possible suspects.
‘Can I just ask a silly question?’ said Farraday, and everyone busied himself trying to look puzzled by such an idea. ‘If this chap’s not a plant and there really is another double, can someone give me a simple explanation as to why? I mean, why they want to betray us. I can’t really understand it – surely they read the news? How can they keep believing they’re on the right side with tanks rolling into Prague and so on? Or did they all fall in love with Russian dolly-birds who turned them onto it?’
‘Not all of them go for dolly-birds,’ put in Pritchard archly. It was like Hancock’s Half Hour.
‘But seriously,’ continued Farraday, turning to me, ‘Paul, has your department done any sort of thinking about this, about what makes these people tick? Perhaps it will help us find this one – we could look at family backgrounds or what-have-you.’
They were looking at me intently so I took it they actually expected an answer. ‘The only certain thing,’ I said, after I had taken out a pack of Players and lit one, ‘is that every double agent is different. The most common reasons for betraying one’s country, as far as we can establish, are ideological conviction, disaffection with authority, pride – they get a perverse kick out of deceiving everyone around them – blackmail, and good old-fashioned pieces of silver.’ I could have added a new one: hopeless credulity.
I took a drag of the cigarette. ‘As to how a person can continue to serve a cause in the face of events that compromise its principles, which would appear to be the case with Philby and his friends, well, nothing’s ever black and white, is it? After all, we all believe we’re on the side of good, despite the fact that Henry has just given us a lot of information about how our government is contributing to the deaths of thousands of innocent people in a war in Africa because we don’t want anyone else to get their hands on the oil there.’ I put up a hand to stop Pritchard from interrupting. ‘I know, it’s not just about oil, and I’m simplifying, but hopefully you can still see my point. If you happen to think we’re doing the wrong thing in Biafra – and most people in the country do – it doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to abandon everything else you believe to be good about the way we do things and start working for the Russians.’
‘But the Russians are supplying arms, too,’ said Farraday, and a couple of others nodded.
‘All right,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Bad example. Suez. Kenya. Aden. Take your pick of situations we’ve made a mess of one way or another in the last couple of decades. How do we continue to do our jobs in the face of this knowledge? We look at the wider picture, of course. I imagine it works much the same for the other side. And from what we know of the KGB’s methods, I doubt it’s all that easy to supply them with secret material for years and then one day announce an attack of conscience and ask if you can swap sides again, without them getting rather peeved, and perhaps sending a man with a silencer after you. The longer in, I suspect, the harder it would be to extricate oneself. And this chap seems to have been in for rather a long time.’
I paused. How could I possibly explain to these people, even in abstract terms, the ups and downs of my journey with Communism, from my tentative steps with Anna to my convert’s zeal after her death – or staged death, as it now appeared – through to agonizing doubts and resulting confrontations with Yuri, and later Sasha, over everything from documents I didn’t want to hand over to, yes, tanks rolling into Prague. I decided I couldn’t, so I concentrated on my cigarette and waited to see if they had any more idiotic questions. But they didn’t – they all seemed to have gone rather quiet.
‘Thank you, Paul,’ said Osborne. ‘Most illuminating, and some food for thought for us all. I’m not sure what it is you think we did wrong in Kenya, exactly, but perhaps that’s for another day.’ He gave a slight nod to Farraday to indicate he was closing the issue. ‘Perhaps you can tell us more about this woman who seems to be involved – Grigorieva? Do you have anything on her?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘there is something.’ I took my briefcase from the floor and placed it on the table. ‘I had a look around Registry this morning and found this in “Germany 1945”. I think it confirms that Slavin is very unlikely to be a plant.’
I’d read all of Father’s files several times – I’d had to, for cover. But Sacrosanct had been off the books, so they hadn’t contained anything about that. I hadn’t known he had asked Chief to take Anna into custody, though, or that Chief had written a report about the incident. Along with his other military records, it had been carried over to his Service file, and once I’d found the relevant bundle it had been easy to locate. I sprang the briefcase open, took out the photostats I’d made and passed them round.
‘As you can see, this is extracted from the monthly reports that Chief wrote in September 1945, when he was head of the British army headquarters in Lübeck in Germany. If you turn to the top of the third page’ – I waited for people to do so – ‘you’ll see the entry headed “Anna Maleva”. Chief – or Brigadier Colin Templeton, as he then was – relates how he had been tipped off by SOE officer Lawrence Dark – my father – that Maleva, a nurse in the Red Cross hospital in Lübeck, was in fact a KGB agent. Chief took a small team to her quarters to detain her on the night of the 28th, but when they arrived she was dead, shot through the chest.’
A police car raced through the street below, its siren blaring, and I let it pass before continuing.
‘Now, if you turn to page four of the dossier, you will find a photograph of Maleva, given to Chief by Major Dark for the purposes of identification. The photostat hasn’t come out too well, so let’s look at the original.’ I walked over to the projector and placed it in the slot. I dimmed the lights, and the picture appeared on the wall.
The photograph had not aged well in the file. The edges were turning brown, and there were black spots across her forehead and her eyes. It had been taken outside the hospital: she was in her uniform, smoking a cigarette. I had naively thought that Father had simply abandoned me, but he had been keeping an eye on the hospital all along.
I pressed the lever to turn back, and the picture of Anna in Lagos filled the wall again. I flicked it forward and back a couple of times and then stopped. ‘As you can see, it would appear that Maleva was not, in fact, killed in 1945, but is currently working in the Soviet Embassy in Lagos under the name Grigorieva.’
There was silence for a few moments. In my peripheral vision, I could see that Pritchard had his head down and was reading the file. I was taking a huge risk bringing this to the table, because I was revealing a direct link between Slavin’s allegations and my father’s work in Germany. As Pritchard knew what that work had been, and that I had been involved in it, he would naturally now suspect me. But there were no records on that operation – he could suspect me all he wanted, but if he couldn’t prove it I didn’t care. And I was fairly confident that he wouldn’t be overly keen to confess to his part in an assassination squad, even after all these years.
‘She was quite a looker, wasn’t she?’ Godsal was saying. ‘The mouth’s a touch thin, but still… she’d probably have got me to sign the Five Year Plan.’ Nobody laughed. Godsal, I should note, has a face like a deranged horse.
‘What would the Russians have had to gain by faking her death?’ asked Farraday.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Chief will be able to tell us more about the situation when he gets here.’
As if on cue, there was a knock on the door. All eyes swivelled as Smale entered.
‘Well?’ said Osborne.
‘No sign of him,’ said Smale: he must have been wondering why everyone in the room was staring at him so intently. Osborne nodded for him to carry on. ‘Barnes went over and called me back. Says he seems to have packed his bags and left in the middle of the night. Didn’t cancel his milk or papers.’
‘Packed his bags?’ asked Pritchard, his voice rising. ‘Are you sure of that?’
‘Well, it looks that way,’ Smale backtracked. ‘He said there appeared to be some clothes missing. Jackets, suits, that sort of—’
‘What about his car?’
‘That’s still there. But the railway station’s a ten-minute walk, with trains to London every hour.’
‘Did Barnes talk to him last night?’ asked Osborne.
‘Yes – he made his final call at half past seven and says Chief answered as usual, with nothing to report. He was just getting ready to go over for his morning pass-by when I rang.’
Osborne harrumphed. ‘Well, if Chief doesn’t see sense now and let the chap have the spare bedroom, I don’t know what we do. This system clearly doesn’t work.’ He turned back to Smale. ‘What about neighbours? Has Barnes had a chance to ask around yet?’
‘Most people are at work. But he said one local claims to have heard a car around nine last night.’
‘What time did you leave, again?’ I asked Pritchard.
‘Around then,’ he said, meeting my gaze. Yes, he suspected me, all right.
Osborne took his glasses off, decided they were dirty, and rubbed them on his tie, smudging them even more. He nodded at Smale, who scurried over to the trolley and put the kettle on.
Farraday was looking at Osborne. ‘Chief received the Slavin dossier as soon as it arrived?’ he asked.
Osborne glanced up, red indents from his frames on either side of his nose. ‘Yes – he was sent it yesterday morning. Why?’
‘Well, because within twenty-four hours of receiving it, he’s disappeared, that’s why!’ said Farraday.
I asked him what he was implying.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Paul,’ he said, turning to me. ‘I know you’re close to the old man. But there is a link with this Grigorieva–Maleva – you’ve just told us so yourself. Mighty suspicious, isn’t it?’
‘I’m sure there’s a simple explanation,’ I said.
But Farraday was on a roll. ‘What could that be, though?’ he pressed. ‘According to this file you’ve dug up, which Chief himself wrote,’ – he stabbed a long finger at the initials at the top of the page – ‘she died in 1945. Either he’s lying or the dame in the photo ain’t her.’ His attempt at hard-boiled American vernacular was painful, and thankfully he dropped it at once. ‘But it does look rather a lot like it is her, doesn’t it?’
The kettle whistled and everyone suddenly busied himself with passing cups and saucers around. Chief’s empty chair suddenly looked very bare.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Godsal. ‘It’s unthinkable! I mean… I mean…’ He searched for a way to get it across. ‘We’re talking about Chief, for God’s sake!’
‘The same Chief,’ said Farraday, ‘who conspicuously failed to catch Philby and fluffed the Cairncross business. And like them and the rest of the rotten bunch, he’s a Cambridge man.’
Pritchard smiled at him generously. ‘So’s half the Service, John.’
‘I’m not,’ said Farraday. ‘I was at Oxford. You were, too, weren’t you, Paul?’ I nodded. ‘And you, William?’
Osborne pushed his glasses onto his nose prissily. ‘Manchester. Look, we don’t know where Chief is at the moment. But I don’t think we can jump to the conclusion that he’s a double agent simply because he’s missed our regular Monday meeting.’
‘I’m not concluding anything,’ said Farraday. ‘But surely we would all agree that no one – not even Chief – can be above suspicion in a case like this. That, after all, is how traitors survive.’
Osborne drummed his fingers against his glass, and we all watched him. ‘With all due respect,’ he said, finally, ‘I’ve known Chief for a great many years and he has never given me a moment to doubt his integrity or patriotism. If the man has been acting, he’s the best bloody double that ever existed.’
He’d meant it to be a throwaway comment, but as the silence stretched out, it took on an unintended resonance, and he began twiddling his thumbs.
‘As I see it,’ said Farraday, splaying his fingers out on the table as though he were about to start playing a piano concerto, ‘there are only two options. Either Slavin’s a KGB plant designed to get us running around for a traitor who doesn’t exist or he’s real and the traitor does exist. Chief has seemingly disappeared, and Paul has found the file on this woman who he says was killed but apparently wasn’t, and whom Slavin just happens to mention as his source for the entire house of cards. Now if—’
‘If I could just stop you there,’ Osborne cut in, and his usual Billy Bunter tone had been replaced by overt aggression. ‘I must insist that we wait for Chief to be present before we start flinging accusations around.’
‘As you wish,’ said Farraday. ‘But this may be the last chance we have for an open discussion on this. Once Chief gets here – presuming he hasn’t done a flit to Moscow – any such talk will be next to impossible on account of his position.’
‘Nobody seems to have taken his position into much consideration,’ said Pritchard. ‘It’s surely far more likely that the Russians or someone else have taken advantage of his abysmal security set-up and snatched him. I would suggest we give Barnes some support to search the area properly, and put out an alert to all ports just in case.’
‘Should we circulate the names of Chief’s known aliases?’ asked Quiney. ‘Or is that too delicate?’
‘Far too delicate,’ said Osborne, before Farraday could open his mouth.
‘Perhaps your Section could look into the Slavin dossier,’ Pritchard said to Quiney. ‘See if your contacts in Germany can get a list of all the patients admitted to this Red Cross hospital in 1945.’ He was talking to Quiney, but he was looking at me.
‘Yes,’ I said, meeting his gaze. ‘Good idea. Perhaps you could also collate all the files of British military operations in the area at the time. I seem to remember there was some sort of a base in Gaggenau.’
Pritchard’s mouth locked tight. I’d put forward a way of implicating him, but it was precisely what the other version of me, the patriotic British agent who had never gone near any Russian nurses, would have done. I’d have suspected Pritchard for the same reason he now suspected me: I knew he had been in the British Zone in ’45.
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Quiney. ‘Though I can’t imagine many of those records have been kept.’ Good old Quiney – you could always rely on him not to do anything in a pinch.
‘I would like to go out to Lagos and interview Slavin,’ I said. ‘It’s been five days since he approached us, so time is of the essence – his colleagues could realize he’s thinking of defecting at any moment and then we’d have lost any chance to find out what’s really going on here. Henry has already as much as admitted that Lagos Station isn’t up to the job, and I have a personal interest in making sure a thorough job is done. This operation of my father’s occurred after he was last seen in London, so it obviously could provide an explanation for whatever happened to him.’ I avoided looking at Pritchard, because he knew I was lying at this point.
‘Perhaps Chief killed him,’ murmured Farraday, at which Osborne’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
‘Killed him?’ he said. ‘Please, John, let’s try to keep the discussion sane. Chief’s hardly a killer.’
‘You have a point,’ Farraday replied, nudging the photostat forward on the table. ‘He last didn’t kill someone twenty-four years ago, to be precise.’
Another silence descended, and people started shifting in their seats. This was a new side to Farraday, and no one knew what might be coming next.
‘Paul has made an interesting proposal,’ said Pritchard, in that fastidious tone of his. ‘But let’s consider it. I agree that Lagos Station isn’t capable of dealing with something of this importance, and that it’s vital someone go out there at once to do so. Because, of course, if the traitor’s not Chief, then the real Radnya may be among us.’ He paused to let that sink in, and then continued. ‘But while I’m sure we all sympathize with your desire to discover the true cause of your father’s disappearance,’ – he looked into my eyes at this point, and I tried not to react – ‘I’m not sure a matter of this magnitude should be influenced by individual officers’ personal concerns – however troubling they may be.’ He dropped a sugar cube into his tea and dipped his spoon in to stir it.
‘Chief’s an old friend of the family,’ I said. ‘If he’s a traitor, or involved in my father’s disappearance, I bloody well want to know.’
‘We all want to know,’ said Pritchard. ‘But have you ever even been to Nigeria? Or Africa at all, for that matter? It’s not quite la dolce vita, you know.’
It was another crack: my last posting had been in Rome. I didn’t rise to it, just asked him if he had any experience of handling Soviet defectors. ‘You don’t even speak Russian,’ I pointed out.
He laughed it off. ‘There are people in Lagos who can translate,’ he said. ‘Someone translated Slavin’s interview, didn’t they?’
Not very well, I wanted to tell him. But I didn’t have the chance to formulate another response, because there was a cough from the head of the table. It was Farraday.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Let us not bicker, please. I have come to my decision.’ Osborne started turning puce and made to interrupt. Farraday shushed him and smiled, pleased that he was exerting control and, finally, rather enjoying this espionage business. ‘Paul,’ he said, ‘you and Chief are very close – not just as colleagues but as friends. So I understand that this is something near to you. Believe me. And I quite see how the matter of your father’s disappearance is something you would want to clear up.’ He leaned back in his chair and spoke to a point on the ceiling, just left of the ventilator shaft. ‘But I agree with Henry: I think it’s probably best if he deals with this one.’
Then his head dropped down again and he smiled innocently at Smale. ‘Any chance of putting some more water on?’
*
My office was cold and cramped. I turned the radiators on full blast and lit a cigarette.
Not good news. Not good news at all. I began pacing the carpeted cell. After several dozen crossings and two Players, I came to a conclusion: I’d have to go it alone – without back-up, without sanction, and probably with Pritchard in the same field.
The first thing to do was to write a note: something for them to get their teeth into, something that would appeal to their Boy’s Own view of the world. When I’d prepared a few suitably indignant lines, I dug out the Service’s Operations Manual from a drawer and looked up which vaccines and certificates were needed for Nigeria. These turned out to be yellow fever and smallpox, so I took out the forms and spent the next ten minutes carefully filling them in, making sure the dates were well within the prescribed time. Nigeria being a former British colony, no visas were needed. Then I placed two calls: one to a travel agent in Holborn, and the second to a number in Fleet Street, where I asked to be put through to someone in the newsroom.
‘Dobson,’ he answered. He sounded tired and a little angry. Not especially propitious.
‘Joe!’ I said, putting all the chumminess I could muster into my voice. ‘It’s Paul. Paul Dark.’
‘Paul, me old china!’ he said, more jovially. He liked to play up the old cockney wag act, even though his father was a barrister in St John’s Wood. ‘Long time, no hear. Got a scoop for me?’
It was a joke, of sorts – I wasn’t a journalist, and he was reminding me of the absurd nature of our relationship – but at the same time he was being serious. He wanted to know if I did, indeed, have a scoop.
‘I can get you one,’ I said, ‘if you return a favour.’
He laughed. ‘You owe me a few, don’t you, mate?’ After a moment or two, he bit: ‘All right. What can you get me, and what’s the favour?’
‘Something big is about to happen in Nigeria,’ I said. ‘I need to be there.’
‘Nigeria? Since when was that your field? You been shifted to the Africa desk and not told me?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ I said. ‘I just need accreditation – that’s all.’
‘Paul, old son, you do know there’s a civil war on there?’ I said I did, and he harrumphed. ‘We’ve got three stringers out there already. I don’t see how I could justify another. It’s not like BOAC will just fly you into the jungle…’
‘I don’t want to fly into the jungle. I want to fly to Lagos.’
I listened to the sound of prolonged wheezing. ‘Nice try, but April Fool’s ain’t ’til next week. There’s bugger all fighting in Lagos – even I know that much.’
‘Yes, but that’s where the story is. Trust me.’
He laughed again. ‘The PM’s visit, you mean? Nobody’s flogging that one. Unless you can give me a clue—’
‘I’ve got everything else,’ I said, trying to keep the desperation from my voice. ‘I just need you to have me listed with the Nigerians that I’m one of yours – in case nobody buys my press pass, you see.’
‘Robert Kane?’
It was the pseudonym we’d used for several stories I had sent his way. I’d had the documents made up months ago, as I did for all my cover names – now I was going to have to bring ‘Kane’ to life.
A sudden noise erupted in the background – the grinding of a machine. ‘Hang on a tick,’ said Dobson. The line went quiet and I chewed my nails. Outside my door, the secretaries chatted about boyfriends and pop stars’ weddings, and further down the corridor Pritchard was in a briefing room, quietly going about making arrangements that might see the end of my days.
‘Sorry about that,’ said Dobson when he came back on the line. ‘Bit of a balls-up on the press.’ He took a deep breath, and I took it with him. ‘All right, mate, I’ll give it a go. For old times, as they say.’ It was good of him – we didn’t have any old times to speak of, unless you counted a few furtive meetings in the back room of the City Golf Club. I wanted to kiss him. ‘All being well, I should be able to have you on the list by the end of the week.’
The kiss could wait.
‘Bloody hell!’ he laughed. ‘Give you lot an inch, you want a flipping hectare. Come on, then – let me have it. When were you planning on getting into Lagos?’
‘Tonight,’ I said.