by Daniel Kemp
I shredded the note of names my secretary had left, not returning the calls from Hannah's sister, her aunt and the three Rothschild godparents who had either contacted the Home Office to find a phone number or had my private mobile as a contact. If I wanted to be with Hannah, then it was to Sussex and The Lodge I should go.
* * *
Ever since Thursday's horrendous incident, the risk factor I presented had notched up a degree or two on whatever it was that Special Branch used to measure how my safety was represented to them. In response, I was assigned two extra cars, four police motorcyclists, and five extra protection officers to look after me. By the time I had reached a decision to travel to Sussex, both Jimmy and Frank had been stood down for the weekend, which disappointed me greatly as they knew my temperament and how best to deal with me.
I needed friends but had none other than Fraser. There were of course colleagues in the same job as Fraser and me, but I didn't count on them as I did on him. It was a conscious choice I'd made not to make friends with any person from the day my last friend, Job, passed on. I felt close to him and to Jack Price, who died before Job. Both those deaths had an effect on me that neither the death of my father nor my mother ever had. I never needed to ask the service psychologist, who anyone involved in a shooting incident had to see, why it was that killing someone had no effect on me, but the loss of a friend did. The death of a close friend hurts, that's why. Having no friends saves on the Kleenex.
I believe to know oneself is the most difficult aspect of life. One can learn most things from others and, if one is clever, one can learn how and where to discover that which cannot be taught. A single person can create unique works of art of many descriptions, but if the individual elements are combined it may tempt the critical part of the person to alter over time. The trick is to know what made up the original, and to be able to do that one must be absolutely certain of the instinctive characteristics. I had known every tiny detail that constituted my complexity, until the slight alteration I mentioned chipped away at it each time I had thought I was in love. On more than one occasion, the object of my affections had died in similar ways to Hannah.
The beautiful Kerry, whom I'd found in Ireland, had trespassed into my heart before being taken from me in excruciating pain, inflicted in the name of freedom by people Hannah's brother had no knowledge of how vile humanity could be, as he hurled insults in the wrong direction. Fianna, another from that beautiful enigma of an island called Ireland. Sitting beside me with her head blown off, slowly sliding down the front car seat towards me as Job dragged me from the car. I was lucky that love only touched me three times. The other voices came from loves of a different sense. Desire, yes, intimacy, yes, fondness, yes, but devotion and adoration, then no. But honesty could not always satisfy a protesting voice.
Friends are a nuisance. They are a weakness in my trade and love is a traitorous emotion that I should have fought harder to resist. I had heard love described by many people caught up in many differing circumstances.
Once, on an assignment into Southern Ireland, the officer I was assisting wanted to tell me his life story the night before we went 'live' on an execution of an IRA brigade commander. He and his wife had a newborn baby, three weeks old and, to make matters worse, he was given the chance to sit this operation out because of that. But he was good at his job and he thought it his duty to say yes, sir, please, bring it on, sir.
The hit was easy, they said. Every Wednesday morning, the brigade commander went to the first Mass at his local Catholic church. That's where it was to happen. On the dot of 6:15 our man's car pulls to a halt outside the church. His minder and driver have a quick look around and then he steps out of the car and onto the pavement. We had done everything by the plan, by the book; nevertheless, someone had blown us.
My fellow officer, the father of the three-week-old son, crossed the road from behind the van I'd parked thirty yards north of the kill zone. I was to cross from the front. My door was open and my gun was in my right hand as my colleague raised his gun to fire. Without warning, three men appeared from inside the church. I got one in the chest as they, and the two with our target, fired. I saw my colleague hit several times before the gunfire was concentrated at me. I got away two more shots, hitting the target on his shoulder and his driver in the head. Those still standing retreated to the church doorway. I reloaded and kept laying down a covering fire as I dragged my man into the van from the passenger side, ducking under the wide incoming fire, and drove away from the scene unscathed. He was dead when I got to safety.
That experience taught me the lesson that I never forgot; the one where being in love was for others, not me. He had shown himself too quickly at the scene. Had he waited a split second longer, when I was fully out in a position to fire a kill shot at our target, then I believe we both could have escaped, but I think he had his mind on things other than the plan. The grief that man's wife must have suffered when she was told of her husband's death must have been the same as I now felt but, strangely enough, whatever sympathy I might have had for her then now vanished, as though it was never there. The choice of abandoning commitment had a lonely consequence that now drove away any equanimity I could find for myself. There was no help to expect from Hannah's Landgft family, but there might be clues to who presented the keys of The Home of Cilicia in her private possessions that were now at The Lodge. I decided to look and disregard sentiment.
The first possession I looked for was her computer, which she was constantly using in her research into the ownership of the house. I found the file and opened it … opening yet another surprise.
* * *
Oswald Raynor, the last owner of The Lodge, had not died intestate with the property being dealt with as bona vacantia. Raynor had gifted the property directly to the Prince of Wales. That came as a shock. I imagined there would be very few on the Prince of Wales' staff who were empowered with the authority to transfer property from his estate. At some time, I must find whoever had signed the transfer papers.
I looked again at those numbers of 3/9/1989, remembering the date of 'Petr Tomsa's' nonappearance at the baseball Battery or Non-Strike terminology points: 1/9/1982 both divisible by the Freemasonry number three, and was surprised at how I'd missed the dovetailing of the Tomsa date into the conspiracy. As I stared more intently at Hannah's findings, I wondered if Fraser had missed that as well. There were too many numbers that had connections to Mayler's branch of Freemasonry to be just a coincidence, but how could it not be so?
I started to recall my adventure with Jack Price and his continued reference to The Firm, the name he used for the Royal Family, and how tightly meshed and secretive they were, but he had penetrated that secrecy, turning what was a weakness into a strength that I managed to make use of at my meeting in the Travellers Club with Dickie Blythe-Smith.
My first meeting with Dickie was in a hotel room in New York, with Jack, Job, and Fraser all rushing to collect luggage to make the flight from America back to London. He was inquiring after my welfare, worried that my busted cheekbone and broken eye socket, along with the missing toes, would curtail my ability to fly. Jack Price passed me two syringes filled with morphine, his last two. Neither Dickie nor Fraser were aware of Jack's incurable illness. When he told them of his impending death, Dickie Blythe-Smith made a comment to me that I failed to see the point of then, but now I do—know everything then nothing comes as a surprise. However, that had a sting to it that Dickie hadn't seen coming; the secret I kept in my back pocket that only Jack Price and I knew of.
* * *
I was jolted back to reality by Fraser's phone call. He wanted to know how I was doing. “I'm doing just fine,” I said as the extent of our shared incomprehension of the surprises kept hitting me, making me want to scream. The recurring number three had been a surprise. Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov's knowledge of Henry Mayler had been another surprise. Hannah's death had been the biggest surprise of them all.
“I'm doing just
fine,” I repeated the reply as Hannah's brother's accusations were overcome by my flippancy. I had used her for my own convenience, that of shutting myself away in the arms of love until an all-knowing Russian arrived in London with tales of Cilicia, and perhaps an assassin following his every footstep. My muddled memory of repeats, clues, and unanswered questions was in danger of being drowned by partially controlled tears.
* * *
Those confused thoughts had been with me when I arrived at The Lodge. Approximately thirty minutes later another car arrived and a hooded passenger, wearing handcuffs, was escorted into the nearest outbuilding to the main house, down several flights of winding stairs, then along a brightly lit corridor and finally into a room where the hood and handcuffs were removed. The first person he saw was me.
His dark brown eyes blinked rapidly and, when fully adjusted to the light in the room, he scanned his modest surroundings of what the inventory of the house stated was the Safe Room, a misnomer as there was more than one room, as the doors that led off attested to. There was sufficient space to comfortably accommodate up to eight people and sufficient provisions to sustain them for two years. It was the 'fall-out' facility, excavated in the grounds of the estate to withstand a nuclear attack on London and the South East. Although, as I say, the furnishings were functional rather than sumptuous, they were perfectly suitable for the purpose.
My visitor was not to be subjected to any physical attack, but he seemed to suspect as much as he repeatedly claimed to have a delicate heart condition that could lead to his premature death if abused.
“Your file says nothing of a heart complaint. Something new, is it?”
I asked as I occupied one of the soft upholstered chairs opposite Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov, and together we began trying to unravel a twenty-five-year-old mystery.
“My humble apologies, Mr West. That was my cowardly defence mechanism kicking in when put in the back of the car and hooded. I am not a man equipped for torturous pain, but I don't think you're that kind of man. A strange way to do it, but you have presented me with a chance to extend my condolences for the tragic loss of your wife. However, I doubt you have brought me here to listen to my compassion in your time of loss. But perhaps you've brought here because you believe I killed her?”
“I have no reason to believe that at the moment, but who knows how my mind might work as we conduct our discussion. Let us start with a lie and see where we go. Why did you lie when you said you didn't know who Petr Tomsa was, Nikita?”
“It was important that you found it out for yourself. If I had told you who Petr was when you first asked, then I believe you would have closed your mind to everything else. Now, hopefully, you can begin afresh with a clean mind.”
“And would you have a preferred point where you would like to start with it all, or maybe you would like to start with what you're not telling me? Because I think there's a helluva lot you're not saying.”
Chapter Sixteen: Microfilm
“I was London's operative way before anything started involving you and the Kavas. It was I who was the author of both the reports that appeared in the classified files you read on Jana Kava and her brother Dalek for the operation London coded as Operation Donor. Although this operation commenced in May 1982, its real beginning can be traced back to 1944 and to a small town in Scotland, where a British army colonel named Maurice Buckmaster trained a Czechoslovakian woman, who was to become Jana and Dalek's mother.
“It was from that Special Operations Executive camp that she said her goodbyes to Buckmaster and, under the name of Tereza Místek, took to the skies to be parachuted into Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Tereza was twenty-four years old when she arrived in Prague in her SOE role as a courier between the Czech and Slovak resistance and their soon-to-be liberators, the 9th Soviet Army Group, commanded by General Anotoly Vladislav Kava, who was to become her liaison officer. It gets interesting, doesn't it, Patrick?
“Tereza's cover from the Scottish school was excellent and it did not take her long to exceed all Buckmaster's expectations, as he originally marked her as Not Ready, before being persuaded to the contrary by Vera Atkins, his counterpart in charge of the female section. They were all part of Winston Churchill's 'Secret Army' ready to set Europe ablaze as he told his Minister for War. I shall not bore you with any details of the exploits she endured during the final months of WWII, but it led to Tereza marrying General Kava a year after the war ended. Not even he knew that she was London's long-term plant inside what was to become the Czechoslovakian corner of the Soviet Bloc. She wasn't executed for distributing subversive material as I wrote it up in the Kava's file. She was executed for telling the truth.
“One night during one of her husband's increasingly violent alcoholic periods of abuse, she went searching for a way of striking back at her husband. She hadn't the strength to fight him off, nor gun or knife to finish a once love-filled marriage now turned into a bitter violent one, where she and the two children suffered at his hands as his depression-induced attacks got worse and worse.
“In a loud, rasping voice she told him of her spying activities in his domain of Czechoslovakia and how those activities of hers had helped to fight against the Communist dominance of Europe. Yes, she cried out, I told London everything thing, no matter what.
“There was nothing more damaging or hurtful she could have thrown at him. His blows of temper that hit her were less painful now she knew how much she had repaid his brutality. It was his turn to be hurt, but that pain turned to retribution. He gagged and tied her hands, pinned the Solidarity leaflets he'd found all over her clothing, then marched her to his army barracks and there, after forcing her to kneel on the parade ground, shot her in the back of her head. All that is true, Patrick West, because he would not have killed his wife for having leaflets. Who would do that? But he would kill her and gag her if she had confessed to having been a spy.
“I saw her shot, and the abhorrence I felt towards Stalin and the system he believed in was reinforced a thousand times. I was disgusted by how mankind could act in defence of a murderer and tyrant. It was I who loosened the bolts of the inspection ladder where Khrushchev slipped and then voraciously abused Kava for his incompetence, so much so that it almost came to blows before two of Khrushchev's bodyguards dragged the general away and shot him. He deserved that and more for what he done to Tereza, a kind woman who I never heard speak ill of anyone. I didn't watch Kava die that day in the factory, but there was no need to follow the First Secretary's hoods to know what was about to happen. Hearing the argument was enough for me. But had I needed proof, it lay on the mortuary slab an hour after his body was found, where I was summoned to appear in order to increase my police education.”
Kudashov was genuinely sad as he leant forward with elbows on his knees and head in his hands. At this point of time, coffee and sandwiches were brought in and placed on the dining table pushed against one of the wallpapered walls. As the tray-bearing officer left the room, Kudashov rose and examined the small array of books on display on the shelves along the adjoining wall. He poured himself a mug of coffee and returned to his seat.
“It's possible for me to tell you stories of Tereza Místek as Tereza Kava that would take hours of your time to hear a fraction of her accomplishments during and after WWII, but that's not the period of European history that interests you in this matter regarding my granddaughter, Mr West, is it? Incidentally, is it permissible for me to be informal in the way I address you? Or should I forget Tuesday's meeting now I'm your prisoner?”
“Prisoner? No, you're my guest, Nikita. Forget Tuesday, no, not at all,” I replied. “We need to broaden our outlook, that's all. Be as informal as you like and please do carry on, but before we go deeper into this, tell me how Jana Kava came to be known at the Soviet Satellite desk by two code names? The one on the file you claim to be all your work—FlyHi One, and Petr Tomsa, the name London gave me as your coded name?”
“Puzzle, isn't it? But London also ga
ve you my name as Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov, did they not?”
“They did, yes.”
“Then, do you think you had a dummy working that desk, Patrick, or did he tell you something you shouldn't have known? Was your handler that clever, do you think? If he was not that clever, was there someone else who was?”
I was imagining Fraser sitting where Kudashov sat, as it seemed to be the same sanctimonious smile on his face when he asked that all-important question. Yet another I had no answer to. An expression conveying knowledge beyond my limitations was a trademark of Fraser Ughert's that he often used, but if the boot were on the other foot and I knew more than he, his defence was to deflect the question by either asking one of his own or simply ignoring it. I chose the second option, adding a bottle of whisky and two glasses alongside the food, and offering cigarettes as I advised him to continue in unveiling the intrigue that lay ahead.
* * *
Although Kudashov condensed the parts of the story that had no direct impact on the present day; it still took hours to tell and even more for me to fully comprehend its importance. He started it somewhere in the middle with Jana Kava, who had been a member of the StB as I'd suspected. The association proved to be a strength to her in respect of credibility for her intelligence gatherings, but it also led to a meeting that was not planned. It was during a drop-off intended for Kudashov that she met her nemesis, an American. Officially, the CIA was never in Czechoslovakia, but there was an American embassy with diplomatic staff and an ambassador who had an eye for the women and the scent of promotion. Kudashov told me the ambassador's name, but it's not his name that was important. What was important is what he did. I shall call him Jack.