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.