I was asleep when they came for me. I was running through a field, palm trees in the distance, when I woke to find a man shaking my shoulders and yelling my name.
I sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, sweat pouring off me. The man was wearing a cap, and looked to be barely out of his teens. Part of my mind was still caught up in the dream: I was sure I’d been in the field before, but couldn’t think when or where. But I didn’t get the chance to consider it further because I was being hauled from the mattress by my arms. Now I could see that there were two men, both in the same uniform but one without a cap. Neither was part of my usual guard detail.
‘Get up, scum!’ shouted the one in the cap, leaning in so close that he was just a couple of inches from me. His face was squared off, with a wide jawline and a pug nose, and he was wearing some foul eau de cologne that seemed to have been impregnated with the scent of fir trees rolled in diesel. He shoved a pile of clothes into my arms.
‘Put these on, old man,’ he sneered. ‘And make it fast.’
I looked at the bundle. There was a dark suit, crumpled and baggy, a white shirt with sweat stains around the armpits, and a pair of slip-on shoes. No belt or tie.
I started to dress, my eyes still half gummed with sleep. What the hell was going on? I’d been wearing the same grey tunic and trousers since my arrival here, so why the sudden change of clothes? Perhaps they were transferring me to another prison, or to a courtroom – Sasha had often mentioned the possibility of a trial. Or perhaps they were simply dressing me up to take me out to the woods to finish me off. I had a sudden memory of a summer’s day in 1945 in the British Zone in Germany, the jeep riding through the burnt-out roads with Shashkevich manacled in the back, until we came to the clearing; the Luger heavy in my hand as I placed it against his neck; his sweating, shaking; and my finger squeezing down on the trigger…
I shivered at the thought, but found to my surprise that I wasn’t afraid. There were worse ways to go. I wouldn’t feel it, at least. I’d been here six months but it seemed much longer, and the future held nothing for me but the gradual disintegration of my body. I was forty-four, but already felt twice that. Rather a bullet through the head than the prolonged suffering and indignity of old age and disease.
‘Faster!’ shouted the man in the cap. He must be the senior of the two. I finished buttoning the shirt and, as I leaned down to pick up the trousers, realized that both men were armed with pistols at the hip. Judging by the size of the holsters, they were Makarovs. Despite their resemblance to the Walther PP, their combat effectiveness was comparatively poor, and I began gauging the distance between the men, the angles of their bodies and their respective weights to see if there might be any possibility of catching them by surprise, taking one of their pistols and turning it on the other. But it was just a habit, a tired old spook’s reflex. I had no real intention of attempting to escape. There was nowhere to go. Even if I were able to overpower these two, there would be dozens, if not hundreds, more of them.
I adjusted the lapel of the jacket and stood to attention, ready. The suit was a couple of sizes too large for me and stank of stale urine, but it felt almost civilized to be wearing one again. The guards led me through the door of the cell and marched me down a series of corridors, until we reached a large steel door I hadn’t seen before. Once it had been unlocked, we walked through it and, for the first time in nearly six months, I found myself outside.
*
We appeared to be on an enormous airfield. I took a deep breath, then exhaled. My breath misted: it was at least a couple of degrees below freezing.
The sky was the colour of slate, and the barbed wire and bare-branched trees formed a strange tracery against it. To my left, I could make out several large buildings. I recognized their outlines from dossiers I had read and memorized in London years before and knew, finally, where I had been held all this time. The building we had just left was nicknamed Steklyashka – ‘the sheet of glass’ – by its inhabitants, because two of its wings were encased in glass. A former army hospital, it now served as the headquarters of the GRU – Soviet military intelligence. It had been my first guess, but it came as a shock nevertheless. I suppose I’d made the place another world in my mind, away from the reach of dossiers.
My escorts gripped me by the arms again and we headed across the tarmac, buffeted by the wind. We passed several helicopters and armoured tanks, and I remembered that it was, by my calculations, the last week of October, and guessed they were destined for the annual parade in Red Square.
A car was waiting for us near the perimeter, its engine running. It was a polished black ZiL limousine with red flags attached to the mudguards. That was interesting: they were usually reserved for the very top brass. I recalled reading a report that there were only a couple of dozen in the whole country. The man with the cap opened the rear door and his bare-headed comrade pushed me onto a cold vinyl seat. He climbed in beside me, while his colleague walked around to the other side. Up front, a driver was seated with his hands on the wheel, and sitting next to him was Sasha. There was also someone sitting in the back seat next to me, and as I turned I saw that it was Sarah.
*
Sasha snapped at the driver to head off, and we passed through a barricade and turned onto a broad avenue. I caught the word ‘Vladimir’, and my heart sank: that was the prison east of Moscow where they had held both Greville Wynne and Gary Powers. But then he said it again and I realized that it was the name of the man with the cap and that he was asking why they had taken so long to fetch me. Vladimir replied that I’d been difficult, and Sasha grunted disapprovingly. They were in an almighty hurry, clearly, but there was something else to it – an edge of panic? I decided not to think about what it might mean: I’d find out soon enough.
I looked at Sarah. She sensed my gaze and turned to me. As our eyes met, a thousand thoughts went unspoken. She was wearing a shapeless grey dress. Although she seemed thinner and her blonde hair was cut brutally short, she looked much the same as when I’d last seen her, in the back seat of a limousine like this one about six months ago. I felt a hollowness in my stomach as I remembered it: we had come to a stop on a barricaded street, and I’d watched helplessly as she’d been swiftly bundled into another car and driven away. I’d vowed to myself that I would protect her come what may, but when the moment had arrived I’d offered no protest. But she had survived. I had long given up hope of that. I’d felt that they wouldn’t risk giving her any freedom for fear she might reach the British embassy and tell them everything we had learned in Italy. As a junior member of the Service, she had very little information to give them. Once they had extracted it from her, I’d reasoned, they would have seen little point in keeping her alive.
But they had. I tried not to think about what they had put her through instead, but an image of the girl Yuri had kept in his rooms in the camp in Germany, and of the way he had flicked his tongue over his lips at his first sight of Sarah, flashed into my mind nevertheless. Repulsion and rage coursed through me.
It had soon become clear to me that Yuri, or Colonel Fedor Fedorovich Proshin as I now knew his real name to be, had been the mastermind behind my career as a Soviet agent, from my recruitment at the age of twenty onwards. He had greeted me in Moscow, but it was no hero’s welcome. I was one of several British double agents who had ended up here: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and George Blake. But, unlike them, I was no longer a Communist, and had been brought here against my will, whereas they had all defected by choice.
After I’d been put through a comprehensive – and extremely unpleasant – medical examination, Yuri had proceeded to interrogate me about every aspect of the twenty-four years since I had sought him out in a displaced persons camp in the British Zone of Germany. He hadn’t presented it as an interrogation at first, even installing me in fairly comfortable quarters, but the armed guards had never left me with any doubt about the truth of the situation.
He had started every morning the same way: once I was seated, he would open up my dossier and read directly from the reports my handlers had sent to Moscow at whichever point in my career we had reached. After that, the questions would begin.
‘Why did you cut off all contact for eighteen months after this meeting?’
‘Why did you not mention that Burgess and Maclean had come under suspicion?’
‘Why didn’t you tell us about Penkovsky?’
And so on, ad infinitum. Part of me had been expecting it – the documents I’d discovered in Rome had revealed that for several years they had suspected me of being a plant by the Service, feeding them carefully selected secrets along with a healthy dose of disinformation: in effect, a triple agent.
That theory had eventually been discredited in ’51 and I’d been cleared as ‘highly valuable’, but now Yuri revived it. The material I had taken so many risks to give them meant nothing to him. It was only the information I had neglected to hand over that he found telling. But while it was true that the higher I’d risen in the Service the greater my access to classified material had been, my seniority had often made it harder for me to hand material over, because so few others had such access. If it had ever come to light that the Soviets had this kind of information, I would have immediately come under suspicion.
Yuri had dismissed this argument with a wave of his hand. While my actions would have had me strung up in England, from his perspective I was now an erratic agent with perplexing gaps in his story, who for good measure had betrayed several Soviet agents and even killed two of them. It didn’t help that I made no attempt to conceal that I was disgusted with myself for falling into their arms, and with him for the way in which he had recruited me.
He had finally lost patience with me in June, and it was then that I had been moved into Steklyashka, where one day I had been marched into a briefing room and been confronted by Sasha, whom I hadn’t seen since we’d arrived in Moscow. He had been my handler since the early Fifties, but any hope that he might prove to be any more understanding as a result was rapidly dispelled. He had barely acknowledged our past relationship, and was even more hostile than Yuri had been. I’d always known that his friendliness towards me was contrived, of course, as real as the intimacy a prostitute shows a wealthy and potentially long-term client, but it had still come as a shock when it was switched off so swiftly, and so absolutely. The familiar ‘My dear Paul’ had no longer issued from his lips, and his benign condescension had been replaced by a cold and sometimes frightening implacability.
At first I’d thought his behaviour was a pose, a way to get me to talk more by making me want to recapture the old bonhomie, but I’d soon realized that there was nothing forced about it, and that this was in fact his real self – or, at least, his Soviet self.
I looked at him now, partly obscured by the back of his seat, staring at the road ahead of us. He was wearing a uniform and ushanka, neither of which I’d ever seen him wear before, and he didn’t look right somehow. I knew every inch of his face, from the lines around the eyes to the bristles of his pointed beard, but I found it increasingly hard to associate him with the cheery fellow in the tweed coat and polka-dot tie I had met in an assortment of pubs, cinemas and dives in London, a collector’s book of postage stamps under his arm. English Sasha had always seemed podgy and harmless, but Soviet Sasha was a burly bear of a man with an air of barely repressed violence emanating from him. Over the years he’d often told me that he loved London, and I wondered if that had simply been a lie to get me on his side, or if his recall to Moscow had hardened him, and he’d forgotten his appreciation of the good life he’d once led in the West.
Perhaps he was simply scared. My failures as an agent reflected badly on him, and possibly even placed him under suspicion of disloyalty. After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had been, relatively speaking, benign, but Brezhnev had started pushing things back in the other direction: arresting dissidents and sending them to labour camps or into ‘internal exile’. Perhaps that was where we were all going now: to some gulag in Siberia where we would freeze our arses off until we died.
Whatever the reason, when Sasha had taken over my case any remaining pretence that I was simply an agent undergoing a debriefing had vanished. I was unequivocally a prisoner, placed in a small concrete cell and entitled to one bowl of thin soup and three cigarettes a day. Every morning and afternoon I had been made to write an account of my career, operation by operation, month by month. After that, I would be summoned into a small office, where he would question me at length on everything I’d written. We had reached June 1961.
The car took a sudden turn, throwing my shoulder against the door. The windows were covered by grey curtains, but there was a small gap near the edge and I peered through it at the streets speeding by. Giant portraits of Lenin lined the roads, but I saw very few other cars. It must still be quite early in the morning. Domes shone faintly in the distance, and there was a glint of copper in the sky, a refraction, I imagined, from the giant stars of the Kremlin. But then we took a turn – we didn’t seem to be heading that way.
The car slowed to a halt in front of a nondescript building painted a faded orange, and I was dragged out by one of the men. The other stayed in the car with Sarah, and I wondered fleetingly if it would be the last time I saw her.
It had started to snow now and the wind was sharper, biting into my cheeks and stinging my eyelids. Sasha led the way to a sentry box manned by two lieutenants in light blue greatcoats, both armed with finely polished semiautomatic rifles. A pigeon pecking at the ground nearby suddenly came to a standstill and turned in the same direction, its chest puffed out, and for a moment it looked like it was imitating the sentries. All it needed was a few brass buttons and a miniature ushanka to complete the picture, but a moment later it returned to its pecking, and the illusion was broken.
Sasha handed some papers to one of the men, who looked through them, then turned and spoke into a small grate in the wall. There was a loud hissing noise, and I saw that the whole section of wall was, in fact, an air-locked door. With some effort, the sentry pulled it open and stepped inside. After a moment’s hesitation, Sasha motioned to me, and we followed him in.
We were in a dimly lit space, smaller than the size of my cell. I could see the sentry just ahead, wrestling with the lock of another, much larger, door. Once he had opened it, we walked into a room with concrete walls and a large blanket of green netting in the middle. The sentry knelt down and pulled this to one side, revealing a small wire cage recessed several feet into the floor. He climbed down into it and Sasha and I followed. The sentry pulled a lever in a box on the side of the cage, and we started to descend with a loud cranking noise.
It was then that I recognized the mood I hadn’t been able to identify in the car. It wasn’t panic. It was fear. They were all terrified out of their wits, and I couldn’t blame them. Those had been bomb-blast doors we had just come through.
We were entering a nuclear bunker.