A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  Jack emerged from a meeting with the mayor of Prague and for a reason known only to himself, wanted a smoke. It was a beautiful spring day, so he shunned the comforts of the embassy car, preferring to stretch his legs. He started his stroll around a pretty city park towards one of the wooden seats in the arched alcoves that lined some of the walls. He hadn't planned to sit there, just walk past, but no matter, that's where history was changed.

  Ambassador Jack saw Jana Kava rise from one of the benches, leaving an open packet of cigarettes with only a few of the contents gone. He did what every gentleman would do. He picked them up and called to her. At the precise moment he waved that packet in the air, something fell from it and unfortunately for Jana, Jack recognised what it was. From that moment on, the intelligence Jana gathered from her position serving Jozef Lenárt and his fellow members of the Communist elite was shared with Jack and his CIA buddies in America, as well as with her London contacts.

  For almost a year, everything was going as well as it could until London heard from Kudashov, telling them of Jana's brother's consorting with representatives from the Solidarity movement and generally making a dangerous nuisance of himself. They wanted to know how Kudashov had permitted such a valuable agent as Jana Kava to be compromised. They asked him to deal with Dalek himself.

  He made as many valid excuses as he could, but London insisted that it was his problem and his to deal with. Eventually, left with no other choice than to agree and risk everything he had worked for, Kudashov told London the truth about the American involvement and how that would make it impossible for him to take care of Dalek.

  * * *

  “I'm sorry for the interruption, Nikita, but once the CIA had their hooks into Jana did they not trawl around and find you in their nets?”

  “No! I was not known to the Americans at that stage and I held out from telling London about Jana being compromised for as long as I could. I could not be completely sure though that the Americans would not tell the Soviet Satellite desk in London. The CIA only heard of me because I couldn't kill Dalek Kava. I told London the full story of Jana's American connection when I told them I couldn't. That's when they told me they were sending you.”

  “Who are 'they' in that context?”

  “The Director General, Francis Grant. I had word passed to me from the British embassy by way of my usual contact. I saw you when you were at the trade conference and once when you were with Dalek in a bar. You two were about to leave when I arrived. The next time I saw you, you were watching Jana and me together at the Palace Zofin on a Saturday night, but I haven't got the date of that meeting handy, Patrick.”

  “Was it Grant who gave Jana Kava the additional code name of Petr Tomsa?”

  “No, not London that time. That name was given her by the CIA. Your next question would be when was that, I presume?”

  I nodded my head in acceptance of his presumption.

  “This I do know as it was on the day my granddaughter was born. My granddaughter was healthy, as was my daughter-in-law, so I was superfluous in my son's house and in everyone's way. I left and was on my way home when I was approached in the street. There were two men, neither of whom did I recognise, nor could I now. The shorter of the two said they knew I was London's man and they told me they had Jana on their books. It was then I heard the name Petr Tomsa. They told me to tell London that name so the wires didn't cross.”

  If I tried to hide the fact that I was confused, it didn't work. “Yes, I'm at a loss to know how they knew about me as well as you,” he stated, but I wasn't convinced.

  “Why did they ask you to tell London the code name and not notify London through accepted passages, I wonder?” Although my question was spoken aloud, I didn't really expect an answer, however Kudashov provided one.

  “They never said, Patrick.”

  I left all the additional questions I had hanging in the cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, allowing Kudashov to continue with his account of what occurred. As he did, more things became clearer. According to him, it didn't take much time for London to discover it was a CIA agent who had introduced Dalek to Solidarity.

  Although the Americans were thin on the ground behind Soviet lines of influence in the eighties, their level of incompetence was astounding. Nobody had bothered to find out all there was to know about Dalek, and they had no idea of the damage his affiliations to that banned movement could cause to Jana's safety. There was absolutely no mileage in Dalek holding a Solidarity member's card. It was fraught with danger. However, with them now included, it was unrealistic for London to handle her alone; hence, the US Air Force lieutenant colonel sitting at the Soviet Satellite desk in Century House. It was American government policy not to get their hands in the grime in Czechoslovakia or anywhere else in Warsaw Pact countries, that's the reason I was sent to Prague with a concealed agenda to the mission.

  Not only was I not told the true reason for being sent, I was given an inept handler on point whilst I was there. Having avidly listened to what Kudashov had to say, I could understand why it was played the way it turned out. My problem with all of it was—why was it necessary to make my instructions so complicated? Why not just send me to kill Dalek Kava?

  I never made Kudashov aware of the full extent of deceit that was the foundation of my briefing before I left for Prague. To be honest, I wasn't sure if I had seen through the slyness of it all, or been informed of the real objective behind sending me, I would have refused and not taken the operation. Equally, I'm not sure I would have acted any differently once I was in Prague. I achieved what was required by a twisting route compared with sending an assassin, it's true, but that was not where Operation Donor ended, nor was it Miles Faversham's end. His end, I suspected, came later from an induced heart attack.

  Hugo Glenister had stood Faversham down, but kept John Scarlett in position. Kudashov knew them all, so I asked him why was that? Receiving no answer, I repeated what Scarlett had said about how he believed Glenister was working from a prewritten script, and would he like to add any comment? Again, nothing was added to the subject. Despite there being a gap to Kudashov's all-round knowledge, there were other matters he had opinions and answers on; particularly the role of the American CIA in it all.

  Poland, with the fuse starting to burn under the Communist government by the Solidarity movement, was President Reagan's target from the offset when Jana Kava was recruited. It was to become a portion of the icing on top of the CIA's cake. They already had a voice inside GCHQ ,whose back could be covered by exposing Geoffrey Prime, and they had a Soviet spy inside their agency. They could and did use the situation in Prague to find the spy they had in their organisation, digging a deeper hole for the one they were using against us in GCHQ to hide themselves in. Prime's exposure was a cheap price to pay.

  The US handler in Prague instructed Jana Kava first to go to Warsaw and then on to Gdańsk and do as much as she could to incite the students to demonstrate in support of Solidarity. Their reasons for that were not sensible and, at their worse, downright idiotic. According to Kudashov, they gave Jana precise instructions where to be in Gdańsk on the first of September '82, making it easy, so he alleged, to murder her and cover their tracks.

  “In my mind, I'm sure the CIA marked you down as the possible fall guy when they became aware of you. No one can be one hundred percent sure how it was to play, but my money is on London insisting it was you who made the pick-up of the radio coding at the main train station in Warsaw. In that way, whoever was in overall control in London, pulled you away from the murderous American hands.”

  * * *

  I had nobody to ask if Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov's theory was correct, but I did know that at the time of the operation I was naive enough to think that only the London desk could know of Warszawa Centralna being the location of the signal coding exchange. At least the answer to why Kudashov had come to me for help in his granddaughter's escape and not the American CIA was getting clearer, but how did he have that inf
ormation, even allowing for the twenty-five years that had passed? For the next citation of events, I wanted to tackle his suspicion of a secret sect within the Rosicrucian fraternity and a dislike of the number three. But before we got to that point, there were other topics on his mind.

  “I would imagine that I'm being kept somewhere below your property in Sussex, The Lodge. A gift from The Home of Cilicia. Do you think that was just an intriguing random choice of words engraved on the box, Patrick?”

  I didn't ask how he knew, but Dickie's words of know everything then nothing comes as a surprise were tailor-made for Kudashov.

  “If I were to tell you where you are, it would make the use of the hood somewhat silly and make me appear a bit of a fool. Yes, the naming of the gift is intriguing, particularly with your surname deriving from the Armenian word for 'home' and your granddaughter's name of Cilicia. Was it your gift to Hannah and me, Nikita?”

  “If only I had that quantity of money, plus that amount of leverage on the Prince of Wales.”

  Had I have been sitting on the edge of my chair, I think that last piece of knowledge might have tipped me out. Could my flippant thought of Dickie's phrase being tailor-made for Kudashov be right? He had more to offer.

  “But perhaps leverage is the wrong word. Please don't offend me and look as though I wouldn't know about the Prince of Wales. I know much more than you might believe.”

  Yes, I thought, you do. Everything does lead to everything if you know what everything is to start off with. As I was thinking about that, his smile creased his eye-line, forehead and seemingly every muscle in his face. He continued speaking before the smile totally disappeared. “Maybe it was the Prince himself who gifted it, Patrick? Have you considered that? Did not the Windsors change their name from the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, when WWI broke out? Have you thought of a family connection along those lines? Perhaps those of the House of Hesse and the Saxe-Coburgs are related by marriage?”

  I had discussed the possibility with Hannah one night not long after our wedding. As I remembered that discussion, I thought of her and I felt cold as I did. I changed the subject from me to him. “You may have a point, but my initial thoughts were on your relationship to him through the Russian tsars. Are you a close friend of the Prince of Wales through your Russian ancestry, Nikita?”

  He sniggered derisively at my question, declining to answer before his rhetoric carried on. “The United States Army Group Europe had its HQ in and around Frankfurt in the region of Hesse in Germany until I think it was 2002, but well before that year came and went, the CIA had established an outpost, close by in Mannheim. Ostensibly, they were there to protect American interests in Germany and her immediate neighbours. The contingent of agents was small for such a huge and complex mission: twelve pairs of boots on the ground and four pairs of dainty shoes. Their mission was accomplished by the cooperation of the National Security Agency and the forty-four operatives they had working their Frosting project from above an innocent garage, where the gainfully employed mechanics below had no idea what was happening above their heads. Some other people never knew either. Only one of America's allies in NATO had a clue what they doing above the garage and that was the West Germans. Not even Britain's GCHQ was allowed to know everything the NSA were up to. But Patrick, the Americans would not have exposed Geoffrey Prime had they not needed to.

  “My granddaughter has a comprehensive list of their present targets, along with every code they used since 1982. Every message they sent and every name and organisation on their list of people of interest. She has copied the complete works they have. In a safe deposit box in the vaults of a place called The Metropolitan Security, in Cheval Place, Knightsbridge, there are two folders of decrypted NSA signal-branded messages to CIA outstations in various parts of Africa and the Far East. Take them and see what your own analysts think of them. If you still want to talk, I will understand how valuable you rate her. As I told you, she has the profile data needed to decrypt their latest information sweep, this Data Mining. I have given you the facts about the eugenic programme and I am willing to trade more on that, but I must press you for a decision about Cilicia, Patrick. She is my main concern.”

  It was a sincere appeal he made and one I took seriously; however, he knew as well as I that these things didn't happen in the time that had just passed. Cheval Place needed a visit.

  “I am in consultation with a colleague about your granddaughter and a feasibility report based on Moscow for the extraction has been compiled. We have worked it up on the assumption that Cilicia is not allowed to travel away from Moscow or anywhere on her own. At first sight, the prospect for success does not look favourable. The advice I'm getting is that central Moscow should be avoided if at all possible. But we're still working with it. What is not feasible for one man can become feasible for another. I can assure you, Nikita, when all the issues in the programme are smoothed away, I'll come back with a proposal, but we are not at that point yet. One outstanding question that requires your deliberation is the answer to who donated The Lodge. I think you know more about the wedding gift of that house in Sussex than you're telling me.”

  The pensive expression he wore gave me cause for hope about the answer I searched for, except that wasn't the reason for his silent thoughts. They dwelt on a previous chapter of life that took another hour to be aired and examined before weariness overtook me and my eyes began to close on his narrative. We parted company a few hours before dawn, he to sleep in one of the 'Fall-Out' bedrooms and I to retire to a single bed in a room on the first floor of the house as far away as possible from the master bedroom Hannah and I had shared. Her haunting cries knew no boundaries such as walls and doors; nonetheless, not even they could not keep me from the sleep I desired but dreaded.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Gdańsk

  Late on Saturday morning I had two telephone calls, one immediately after the other. The first was the more straightforward. It came from the relatively new department at the AIS, Greenwich. The encoded signals contained in the two folders Kudashov had told me of in a safe-deposit box at Cheval Place in Knightsbridge, had been rapidly decoded by their state-of-the-art analytical computers and proven to be every bit as accurate as his granddaughter's decryption. The spatial diagnostic telecommunication readers were the finest anywhere to be found in the western world. Although the intelligence in the signals themselves did not add up to much value for the time we were now in, they would have had a bearing on many matters in the years they applied to. We now had thorough confirmation of Kudashov's assertion about his granddaughter's capability.

  The second call confirmed Kudashov's account of Tereza Místek's training and affiliation to the SOE. This part of our investigation was collaborated by the keeper of the Czechoslovakian Special Operations Executive's records at a place named Morar, a small village on the west coast of Scotland. The custodian of what was left of the history of the organisation was a Scottish lady whose grandfather taught the skills needed with radio equipment, along with how to code and decipher messages to the agents that were parachuted behind enemy lines. It was with a very proud voice she told me over the phone line some of the history of her grandfather's association, including his role in the training of those who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust in Prague.

  Unfortunately, she informed me, most of the files of SOE exploits were destroyed in a fire in 1946 at the place they were kept in Baker Street, London. The remainder were 'weeded through' before either being shredded and burnt, or tucked away out of sight under a one-hundred-year ban on publication. When we finished speaking, I was totally satisfied with Kudashov's explanation. I sent word to the protection team to make him as comfortable as possible, with exercise being restricted to the Fall-Out areas only. I told them to laugh at his jokes and tune in to the Russian news channels if he wanted that, but for now I had no need of his company and, in some ways, his presence reminded me of Hannah.

  A goo
d part of the day was spent on the telephone chatting to the heads of government departments, as well as acquaintances in the UK military, along with the Director of the CIA in London who, using the word loosely, was a friend. I spoke to the Special Branch Commander who was now in charge of the search for my wife's killer. They had no suspects, but they did have one slight lead; a grey van was seen parked on the outer edge of the woods on three occasions prior to the Thursday Hannah was shot. It was parked there the day of her murder.

  A lady who exercised her dog regularly had given the police the first two letters of its registration number. It wasn't much, but at least it was something. I had news of more substance from the Civil Aviation Authorities who returned my call around lunchtime. After contacting their counterparts in Norway, they were able to confirm the wreckage of a Cessna 172 found near a place called Grense Jakobselv, close to the border between Norway and Russia, in January 1997. The flight plan listed two passengers, surname of Kudashov, and a destination of Kramvik north across the Barents Sea. No survivors were found, but there was something else discovered that was of immense interest that I had to put to Kudashov at our next meeting.

  * * *

  The government's secret chemical research facility at Porton Down, Wiltshire, confirmed my fears that the chemicals Kudashov alleged to be in use in laboratory trials were capable of causing severe damage to the human DNA of the host, if subjected to the end product. They could give no formula of effectiveness, nor rate of growth of the parasite, but in simple terms, one was a parasitic cell that would create an infection. One of the chemicals would increase the rapid growth of the infection, causing devastation to the human genome in its wake, and the third, the unicellular Diatoms which, on the surface at least, appeared the most innocuous of them all, would be the element that would hold the manufactured chemical together for the alteration of the DNA to successfully occur. Frightening, as the only possible purpose for the completed synthesis was confirmed by NICE: to be used for the breeding of a human race an elusive few desired.