A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  * * *

  The thought that Hannah's assassination was a mistake and the assassin intended to kill me had been considered by Special Branch, and in their opinion rejected, however it did leave me feeling that I should want to be dead in her place. But I didn't. I was alive and I was happy to be so. Being alive was not my fault. Or was it? If I'd dreamt at all since Hannah's death, the dreams were harmless and forgotten as soon as I woke. Nevertheless, my guilty apprehension was not completely obliterated by smothering myself in work. With a terrorist threat that linked the assassination of my wife to the writing inside the Bagdad launderette, I convinced myself that I needed to do more.

  * * *

  The signals from Thames House all referred to the problematic situation at Victoria Station and now, more than ever, the thought of why the assassin had not tried to kill again was pounding at my brain. Perhaps this was his way of pulling me into the open? Victoria Station remained closed and taped off to the public whilst the bomb disposal teams went about their painstaking and dangerous job looking for evidence of the bomb the message to The Sun newspaper from the previously unheard of Defenders of the Levant stated was concealed there.

  I wanted to see if I could be of use in drawing him out into the open. I called Sir Elliot Zerby and told him of my idea. He wasn't in favour, but after some haranguing, he agreed to speak to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner who could move some police marksmen from the rear to the front of the station. He would also authorise additional bums to the seats of the surveillance monitors. I called Frank, expecting to hear his displeasure with my plan but I heard the opposite. He was up for it. Oh yes, guv, Jimmy and I will fancy that!

  * * *

  I wanted my arrival to be as conspicuous as possible. A cavalcade of five was arranged, blue light flashing, sirens blasting vehicles, with armed police outriders escorting me on the short drive from the Foreign and Commonwealth building, making as much noise as possible. When we arrived, our escorts peeled away as only our vehicle was waved onto the station forecourt. With screeching brakes and an expertly executed handbrake turn, Jimmy parked our vehicle slap-bang in the middle, allowing me to get out on the side overlooked by the adjacent and cleared London Transport buildings, with Frank alighting on the station forecourt side. The plan was to draw a sniper's bullet, but not for one to hit me. Although I was wearing a vest and protective helmet, the calibre of bullet used to kill Hannah would penetrate anything we had available.

  There were seven police marksmen plus Frank scanning the overlooking buildings for movement, along with several others on static positions around the station. The whole area was swamped by cameras. As I neared the end of our car, I caught sight of a uniformed police officer walking towards me from the shadows of the overhanging station façade into the sunlight. He walked into a line screened from my direct view by Frank and an armed police marksmen. Instinctively, I knew something was wrong. In reality, everything was happening at a walking pace, but reaction time was flying past as it had happened the last time I was in a kill-zone. Despite my history, no longer could I be included on any list as proficient. Where before, in my active service life there was never a doubt, now the doubts were drowning me. I tried to shield my eyes from the sun, but they were watering at the intensity of it. My legs started to feel as though they were made of jelly as I tried to move towards what I knew to be the oncoming assassin, keeping the car between him and me.

  In a steady, unhurried pace he broke cover from behind Frank, starting to raise his machine pistol as he did. From somewhere a deeply installed inherent sense compelled me to shout: Down! Gun!

  Years of pain-filled training, supervised by seemingly spite-ridden physical training officers, saved my life. I drew my own weapon, then threw myself to the tarmac forecourt. I heard the closeness of zip-zip-zip as the first three rounds of volley fire he got away passing close to where I lay behind the rear wing of the car. The dislodged stones lashed at the underside of the petrol tank. I had no target as I couldn't see anything, but I heard the deafening sound of a pistol fired tight to my left ear, then I felt a great weight on top, propelling me further to the ground.

  * * *

  I was shot in the left leg, inches above my ankle, and luckily the bullet passed straight through the flesh without hitting bone, leaving just a hole of a wound that needed little treatment at St Thomas' Hospital other than some stitches, painkillers and antibiotics. The only one else who had been hit by gunshot fire was the murder-intent gunman, whom Jimmy had killed with a single shot to the head. It was that shot that had deafened me just as he had fallen on top to act as a shield against any more gunfire.

  The gunman's name was not Solidus, it was Aybak Khoury. He was born in a small Israeli town named Shalom, near the border with Lebanon, in September 1978. There was a record of him being detained by the invading American military near Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2001, but nothing of him being involved in anything of a similar nature anywhere. Mossad had him on file under what they called a 'yellow' flag, which I was told amounted to no more than being a person of interest. Special Branch was aiding Scotland Yard in tracing how he came by the uniform and security passes found on his body. I was told the serial numbers on the gun had been removed, but there were car keys and a hotel pass in a pocket of his. Photographs were being shared with other agencies, along with Interpol, and the usual graphics were underway. There was no 'hard evidence' linking him to my wife's assassination; however, his affiliation to the Defenders of the Levant was, although technically circumstantial, deemed sufficient to wind down the investigation.

  * * *

  I was pleasantly surprised by the first call of congratulations I received while I was still at the scene. It was from the Prime Minister. I was being treated in one of the ambulances that were there on standby when he called. Although my ears were still blocked and I couldn't understand all of what he said, I'm sure I sensed an unusual amount of relief in his tone of voice as he praised my initiative and what he called my bravery. He briefly mentioned the Middle East in its widest terms, but nothing about the forthcoming party conference or its agenda.

  Sir Elliot Zerby was the next to call. After I refused his invitation for lunch at Shepherd's, a popular restaurant nearby, he offered the dining rooms at Thames House for an informal meal, as he put it. I refused that offer too. Had the Queen rang, which was not likely, I would have turned her down as well. My three missing toes to my right foot were now joined by a hole in my left leg, which did not make me the most cordial person to be found in Victoria Station that day.

  I'm embarrassed to admit only mawkish thoughts were filling my mind as I watched Jimmy from the back of the ambulance as a pretty young paramedic was applying a pressure bandage to the wound in my leg. He was with Frank, making written statements in the Incident Command Centre beside the station where inside the bomb disposal team had located and defused a Semtex bomb of significant size. Despite it being someone close to me who had saved my life, I didn't know what to say and how to thank him. Furthermore, he was the last person I wanted to see. My animosity was childish I knew, but I didn't want to speak to him.

  The paramedic nurse was speaking to me, but I could not properly hear what she was saying through the blockage in my ears, which kept coming and going. She smiled and pulled the rear doors closed, shouting good to go, to the driver then the siren wailed and we were off. I was fully conscious with the morphine taking away what pain there was, but be that as it may, the movement of the ambulance seemed to be pushing death to a pinnacle beyond my reach.

  I was heavy-hearted and miserable, beyond any commiseration I might hear. The orderliness that had constituted my life since marriage was destroyed last Thursday, leaving only the state of death to hold me together: Hannah's death and now Aybak Khoury's. Looking back on the events of that morning, I realise my resentment towards Jimmy was because I was so close to the person who had murdered my wife without it being me who took his life away. I was too slow. But it was my heart t
hat was the grateful recipient of Khoury's death.

  The rest of the day flashed by as if it was a mere second of normal time. Constant phone calls were either made or answered with Fraser being the main caller, patiently holding while other calls were taken, then discarded. My honest answers to his questions of how I felt was that I didn't know. Responsibility was something never far away from me since leaving university and losing both parents, but the responsibility for losing Hannah was a heavy load to carry without being able to adequately express the utter confusion going on inside my mind. With the death of the assassin achieved, perhaps now I could find a way forward into solitude. Early that afternoon my hearing had fully returned to normal and I finally made it into the main apartment without the constant feeling of guilt. After I made my inner peace with Hannah, it was to Fraser I turned to chase down the closure of what surrounded Kudashov.

  * * *

  General Ivan Aleksandrovich Solidus, from whom Fraser had taken his soubriquet for the killer, and Jana Kava's father were, according to my confidant, great friends and colleagues during Stalin's reign of power in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for Solidus, he lost his position after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fearing for his life during another of Khrushchev's temperamental purges, Solidus allegedly buried some compromising documents that conclusively named Victor Rothschild as an agent of the KGB. Future blackmail was his reason, in case he needed Rothschild's financial help in escaping from Russia and setting up somewhere warm and inviting. However, Solidus figured there could be a far greater advantageous use if ever he needed to embarrass Khrushchev.

  It was Fraser's contention that in early 1961, General Ivan Aleksandrovich Solidus told Khrushchev that his KGB had incontrovertible information directly from Rothschild that the American government intended to station a squadron of Pershing nuclear-tipped, medium-range ballistic missiles at İzmir in Turkey. Just a little over two-thousand kilometres from Moscow, roughly half the distance Cuba is from Washington DC.

  Khrushchev did not believe the new president of America, John F. Kennedy, would position nuclear weapons in Turkey and thereby threaten not only Warsaw Pact countries, but Russia too. He was wrong and the opportunity to bargain away the threat passed when the missiles were installed at the Turkish military base. Cuba, Ivan Aleksandrovich Solidus, told Khrushchev, was a lost cause before the ships carrying the Soviet nuclear missiles left harbour. 'Comrade First Secretary, the Americans have their weapons pointed at us already. They can fire at any moment if they are pushed too far. We, on the other hand, must sail across the Atlantic, unload and position our missiles. It is a bluff we cannot win. Their weapons could annihilate all the silo stations throughout the Soviet Bloc.'

  Fraser was using facts to substantiate his argument about Cuba and Turkey, but using guesswork when it came to the conversation Khrushchev had with his head of the KGB. None of his hypothesis was unreasonable, provided his General Solidus had the information Fraser claimed he had from Rothschild. His assumptions did not stop there. He quoted dates and venues where General Ivan Aleksandrovich Solidus and General Kava had been together during and after World War II. I replied that it was not unusual for generals to meet. He had me beat on that.

  Fraser tied that knot of the alleged friendship with an intercepted message dated the 29th March 1963. It was a happy birthday wish sent by General Solidus, who was commanding an Army group in the Ukraine, to General Kava who was in Czechoslovakia. It was signed: From your dearest friend. Perhaps an innocent address, but in the spying game it's the minutest of gestures that count. Fraser surmised what Solidus would tell his 'dearest friend' about his survival ticket. Depending on where the conversation took place, Solidus could even have shared the unabridged version of how the Americans were allowed to station their Pershings while First Secretary Khrushchev's reactions were inferior to those of the American President.

  I had heard and read chronicles of Dickie Blythe-Smith's prowess in the game played by spies. Once I was the beneficiary of his organisational skills, but if half of what Fraser and Kudashov wanted me to believe was true, then this matter involving the Kavas was one of the biggest sagas of smoking mirrors ever played by anyone anywhere. The trouble was I couldn't work out why Dickie wanted to play it.

  * * *

  A message pinged red on my computer at 3.10 in the morning, waking me instantly. A red ping sounds similar to a fire alarm signal, which during the day is more bearable than the same alarm sounding in the quietest hours of the morning. It was from Special Branch headquarters, containing an itemised list of all that was found in the hotel room the dead terrorist had rented near Victoria Station. There was no evidence of the assassination of Hannah in the room. No residue of a firearm being discharged on any clothing other than what he wore at the Station, and the gun he carried in the attack on me was not the weapon he used to assassinate Hannah. That gun was not found. Special Branch listed the property discovered in the van his keys fitted. It was a grey van, matching the description of that seen near The Lodge, and two letters of its registration matched the same two the police had already.

  Chapter Twenty: The Game

  Whoever thought that nothing ever happened on a Monday had never earned a wage working in the intelligence industry. My 'bravery' of the morning had lost its noteworthiness by the afternoon. The telephone conversation I was having with Fraser was cut short by my senior secretary's unannounced entrance to my office.

  “I'm sorry to interrupt, sir, but the PM needs you now. He was most insistent and sounded distinctly angry. He said to tell you to come immediately.”

  Haste was not a motion I applied to any given task or pleasure I indulged in; in fact, on more than one occasion life had shown how foolhardy haste could be. There are plenty of jokes, alongside moral stories on the subject of how being slow and careful is far better than being fast and reckless. I will add one story to those detailing the actions of a person we have already met in this tale of mine: Spencer—ahem—Morrell.

  It happened in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, known to the security branches as simply Derry. I had been Officer Commanding in Ireland for a few months, going about the business of tracking terrorists without too much interference. I was to introduce Spencer to my lead ground officer responsible for watching three separate cells of Provisional IRA. The CIA were instructed to exchange information concerning the people of America who bankrolled the violence and death the IRA inflicted on the legal and moral inhabitants of Northern Ireland and to the government in Westminster. But the CIA were also on the ground in the Emerald Isle to put names to the faces of the terrorists in case, one day, they sailed across the Atlantic.

  Spencer was the personification of the easy-going. On the day of the meet, he had strolled to the Erin Arms, the place we were due to get together, taking twenty minutes longer than if he had taken one of his station cars. The bomb that killed five and maimed the same number spared me, but not completely; it took away a kidney. By luck, it spared my leading ground officer. Had Spencer arrived five minutes earlier and used the door from the tarmac road instead of the rear door from the alleyway where he'd walked, then he would have caught the full blast of the nail bomb.

  It was with my normal steady speed that I journeyed along the interconnecting tunnel that many of my predecessors, along with Foreign Office Ministers and others, had travelled. With each echoing step that sounded heavy on the bricked passageway, I imagined Fraser's eyes staring at his ceiling while listening to the tapes I'd had couriered to him of my conversation with Kudashov.

  * * *

  “Our family name is not Kudashov at all. It is Mecklenburg from the German aristocratic line of heraldry. My family abandoned Russia in 1905 following the Bloody Sunday massacre of that year. Although my memory of my grandfather is shrouded by time, I remember my mother telling me that he was a wise man with great vision. He told everyone that Russia would never be the same again after that sad event and we should go. Of course he was right and by the time his prop
hecy had come true, the Mecklenburgs were scattered to the four corners of the world.

  “I was told that the reason why we settled in Czechoslovakia was that we had influential relatives in Prague. Our relatives had retained the Mecklenburg name and were, so I was enlightened, the virtual masters of that country, along with the country of Austria. Notwithstanding that fact, Grandfather judged it best to keep our name, but distance ourselves from them. I was never told why and still don't know the answer to that riddle.

  “Over the years that followed, money bought us the positions my elders required. I was born the day before Germany invaded what was still then the unified Czechoslovakia. The most inopportune time for so many, but for us it was different. It was not so much our heraldic line that made a difference, although that did not interfere, but it was our wealth and the influence it buys that kept us from the inequities of what occurred for the next six years. My eldest brother, Philip, had gone to England before hostilities broke out and it was he who sent word to me, during the height of the Cold War, to spy for your country. We were nothing if not pragmatists, and it wasn't hard to see that as Nazism had failed, so too would Communism,” he smiled, and I bought it.

  “No, I joke, Mr West. We were Royalists at heart and besides, Philip went to England in 1937 to marry a cousin of your Prince Albert. We Mecklenburgs swayed with the times and adjusted to them. Hence the change of name from Mecklenburg to Kudashov conveniently done before the Red Army took over the whole of the Czechoslovakian countryside.”