A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  “Did you know about Kudashov being related to the Mecklenburg of Yugoslavia, Fraser?”

  “Not until we had this conversation, but if your next question is going to be will it make a difference to how I react when I see him next, then no. My professional approach will not change; however, psychologically, I cannot help but think of the past, but we are both different from his relative and my father. Time has moved on, as they say, laddie.”

  The pride the young Fraser must have felt on seeing his father's name being honoured in a foreign land had overshadowed the despondency he'd shown when listening to Trubnikov's account of how and why he was so highly thought of in war-torn Yugoslavia. On lighting another pipe and pouring another glass of our whisky, his smile had returned. I had no wish to see it disappear; nevertheless, the issue over the visit of an aide to the Court of St James's at his and Molly's home in the rural splendour of Chearsley, and the delivered court dictum read to me in India, was hanging over both our heads and had to be addressed. It wasn't I who opened the discussion. Nor was it approached in the delicate way I thought was warranted. Fraser dived in with all guns firing in all directions.

  “I'm not sure that the load of rubbish I got was the same as the load you did, but does anyone really expect us to believe that about Kudashov and Dickie, because I don't and I never will. How on earth did the Palace get involved?” he asked and I wished he hadn't.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: 1987

  When George Stoneman saw the microfilm fall from Jana Kava's cigarette packet as he strolled into the Letna Park in Prague that sunny spring lunchtime, a catalogue of events were put in motion, leading me to where I was in the understanding of the importance Dickie Blythe-Smith placed on Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov. It was Kudashov as Klaus Mecklenburg who invited Stoneman to join the Rosicrucian fraternity and enjoy the benefits that association would bring. Enjoying himself making money was what George did best. He needed no second invitation.

  George was fifty-two years of age when he and Jana met on that day. He was flattered by her attention and, in return, she was more than gratified by his. His marriage was not an insurmountable problem for his wandering eye and use of casual acquaintances to satiate the increasing sexual appetite he enjoyed into his later stage of life, but for the obvious StB reasons, their meetings were sensibly conducted with appropriate guile so as not to bring attention to themselves. Although Jana could not be described as ugly, she could not be described as beautiful either. Her greying hair and chubby face were not unattractive; indeed, she had an air of breeding about her that turned many a male head in her direction. However, as many as there were that looked, there were more who did not.

  The file that Kudashov had crafted for MI6 summed her up entirely accurately: comely. Jana was someone's mother and aunt in the waiting. She was not a long-term American ambassador's mistress, but she was a spy. George quickly parted from Jana, leaving her troubled by the withdrawal of his affections, but never attributing that to anything other than the sexual impulses men suffer from. After all, she told herself, she had the bed of an ex-Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia to keep warm when he could escape from his evil wife. No consequences from the normal separation of paths that happen with men and women contributed to Jana's death. Even so, there was a separation—one made permanent by Anna Kudashov's murder.

  * * *

  The attributes George offered the Rosicrucians were of a material kind and far more than they actually required. He moved inside the circles of power that controlled a military machine that one half of the civilised world worshipped as the possible saviour and the other half despised, as one would despise the school bully in the playground. Nikita, as Klaus Mecklenburg, offered George an alternate playground to the Rosicrucians which, although they would be beneficial, were not really offering the things at the top of George's list. Klaus Mecklenburg offered the patronage of a group of eight families who moved in a constructed circle for the elite only. One where the Stonemans could be rewarded with privileged positions that would be advantageous to those who made up the core of the Circle.

  Before George Stoneman left Czechoslovakia for America in March 1983, Klaus Mecklenburg introduced him to Bohdan Dimitriyevich Valescov, a native Russian of immense wealth and influence. Bohdan had plans way beyond those of the old men on the Politburo of the Soviet Union. He wanted to rule the whole world without blowing it up to achieve that objective. He had made friends with a young man full of visionary ideas of being able to dominate the world without fracturing the infrastructure, a young Vladimir Putin. Bohdan was the Russian government minister for oil and gas production, who had already become a dollar millionaire without anyone noticing. He needed somewhere safe to relocate his growing pile of money from the seven Russian banks he presently used.

  George Stoneman was Bohdan's answer. George had been called home to take up a position inside the US Treasury as advisor on investment inside the Eastern Bloc countries. He was specifically tasked with formatting a committee to undergo a thorough analysis of the future when the lantern of Communism would be extinguished and the pragmatism of democracy would be adopted. Domination of the world would be a harder proposition than dominating a committee, but George was soon able to open the accounts in the Panama banks into which not only a special Russian's money was funnelled, but also legitimate American funds—a large part of the trillions of dollars from the US defence budget that went missing.

  The Stonemans were diverse in their business portfolio. Compared to many American families they were wealthy, but in comparison to the Mecklenburgs they were as poor as a slave on a cotton farm when slavery was accepted as the norm. George Stoneman was a greedy human being, not one to settle for the wealth he had. He sniffed the Mecklenburg opulence and was resentful through jealousy. He heard the tales of corrupt opportunities that Bohdan waved under his nose and he signed on the dotted line. Tucker Stoneman, the eldest of his three sons, was earmarked for the top job available on the world stage, from the chair of which the world could be driven in the direction the invisible government wanted to go. Stoneman's eldest would be the crucial element to supremacy sought by the inner sanctum of eight.

  George pinned his colours to the imperious military leaders disillusioned with the appeasement they saw in their country's foreign policy that armed the future enemies of America, forcing them to order troops to die as American ordnance rained down on them. They wanted to control where the weaponry went and who lived and who died, not the ever changing politicians on Capitol Hill. It was not long after Marcus Stoneman, George's second son, joined the Central Intelligence Agency that he found like-minded agents with high-ranking military relatives who had constructed a tentative blueprint based upon an existing confidential NATO file that they said needed polishing with clean dollar bills before it could deliver the strategy that all true isolationists needed to rule.

  Spencer Stoneman, George's youngest son, left Harvard University, making a name for himself in corporate law before being headhunted for a branch of the United States legislative where, for a time, he served on Tucker's presidential campaign. The Stonemans were well placed to have the singular edge one needs to succeed.

  * * *

  As a family, the Mecklenburgs looked at Gladio B and saw some advantages to do with future trade, but not much else. They had affiliations to most powerful institutions owing to their established Rosicrucian association within the larger Freemasonry fraternity. They were content with the ever expanding markets the Rosicrucian fellowship presented, which were far less confrontational to conquer. There was one other member of the Circle who was satisfied with the fraternity they belonged to, without having the need for the desolate aims advanced by the escalated Gladio B file.

  But sadly, the two member families were outnumbered and the balance became even more uneven when the formidable remaining six persuaded Klaus and the other Mecklenburgs that Gladio B was the only way forward. That left one family unwilling to concede to the aspirations of the ba
stardised NATO file. Despite the separation of ideals, the exiting family were unable to completely sever links to the Circle, owing to past arrangements in areas of combined interest.

  The family of Bohdan Dimitriyevich Valescov looked, and the five other families who were bored looking inside their bank vaults looked, and with one accord they all agreed on the future formula—divide the world's populace into those they could continually squeeze more from and those they could only bleed dry once. The ultimate formula was based around the concept of breeding more of those that would become of use and obliterate the strain of human genome of those that would become a drain. With the two objectives achieved, all else would fall into place. When ready to proceed, they would start with Iraq, move on to Iran, then when in control of the oil from both, they would weaken the Saudi grip on the Western world. The life of the planet would be extended they argued by the population management as decreed by the Circle, who would conserve the world's energy by managing the numbers of those who used it.

  However, with Tucker's demise, the families that made up Fraser's Circle were forced to reassess their position. The seven who were left participating within it concluded their business in 2003 by agreeing their time to control the foreign policies of America would come again when a suitable candidate, acting as their puppet, could be identified. Meanwhile, Bohdan Dimitriyevich Valescov was to be left alone to effect what ambitions he could, using the chemicals he had developed. It was all Bohdan's money that had financed the Zaragoza complex with the knowledge of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. When the plant was at full operation, the Circle could preside over a reviewed Food for Oil programme—this time for the displaced Kurdish population of the corridor from southern Turkey across northern Syria, Iraq and Iran, contaminating the supplied food with the eugenic mutilating drugs devised at Zaragoza.

  Tucker had been stopped by British intelligence intervening prior to the Iraqi invasion. The photograph of Klaus Mecklenburg was one thing to handle, but the tracking down of Nikita Kudashov was an entirely different proposition, which by August 2007, George was incapable of pursuing as it was on the sixteenth of that month he met his end, quietly as he slept. The job of tracing Kudashov's whereabouts was left to his two sons, with Marcus in the vanguard through his CIA connections.

  * * *

  I now knew part of the meaning to Dickie's final message that I found in the Foreign and Commonwealth vaults. The date was insignificant as he filed it a long time before George Thomas Stoneman's death. But although the capitalised letter 's' to Stone obviously stood for Stoneman, at this stage I did not know about the Panama banks, nor did I know what the word Finnish signified; some of that knowledge was shortly to come.

  * * *

  Time had moved more quickly than I hoped, being much later than I'd planned for; nevertheless, there was a heavy Monday to navigate without any failure or complications occurring in Moscow to deal with. Then there was the meeting of the Defence Chiefs alongside their boss, the Minister for Defence. Military men are trained to fight battles in wars, not to sit in an air-conditioned room discussing areas of conflict they cannot have an impact upon. Yes, they needed my intelligence reports, but none of those in the room on Monday wanted to hear me telling them of a botched extraction from Moscow or, come to that, the UK's involvement in the successful destruction of Russian property on Russian soil. Notwithstanding any of that, my main meeting with Kudashov could not wait until tomorrow when his granddaughter's life was at stake.

  My plans were to tell him of the operation being set for 6 o'clock in the morning Russian time and report on progress from my office in Whitehall via a video link that was being set up in his rooms at Beaulieu, which was one of the reasons for moving him. The other reason I moved him was for his safety. I could only be happy to a certain extent that nobody outside of my extraction team knew of what we planned to do. Unfortunately, I could not be one hundred percent certain as I could only take the words of others regarding the security of the Moscow family helping on this operation. Kudashov had no knowledge of them when I'd asked, but that meant nothing overall. I had to accept Liam Catlin's approval of their use, and that made me feel a little nervous. Nervousness was not an emotion I could show in front of Nikita Kudashov and, partially because of that, I invited Fraser along with me for the ride and the company. I gave my word to Molly I'd look after him overnight and send him back to her safe and sound by Monday lunchtime.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Beaulieu

  Kudashov could not have known I'd been to India to meet Trubnikov, but from the moment we arrived at Beaulieu he was unusually defensive. He had eaten by the time of our arrival, which was fortunate as dinner would have delayed our deliberations. I thought he would be perturbed now there was less time than he'd said he would need to prepare before his granddaughter was rescued, but any disappointment he had was quickly tempered by the pleasure the video link installed in his sitting room gave him, accepting that as the reason for the temporary change of accommodation. It was one of them of course, but the other was more important.

  I'd planned to leave a mobile phone with him when we left, which he would suspect I'd bugged in some way. If he was half the man I imagined him to be, he would strip the phone down to see if there was a device fitted inside. There was none. However, the whole residential area including the grounds of this part of the Beaulieu estate was tuned to this phone. There was nowhere he could use it without my people able to monitor the call. I hoped he would be open about why he needed prior knowledge without making that call, but I couldn't risk not knowing who he would contact. For now, I started at why Dickie had altered the files about the death of his wife. When I had first asked, Kudashov had described it as protection. I asked him: from whom?

  “I had enemies who would have loved to know all the details of my life, Mr West. It was merely a ruse we thought up that might confuse some of the less vigorous followers,” he replied in a more heavy and introspective voice than I could remember of him.

  “I will have to disagree with you. I think it was to do with one of the three reasons why Jana Kava had to die. One of which was because she knew you'd murdered your wife in Prague, Nikita. Is that right? And was that behind Dickie's reasoning?”

  Fraser tried to look nonchalant and aware of my accusation, but it did not fool me or Kudashov. “I would assume that we will be here forever if that's the substance of your accusations this evening, Mr West. Either forever or until one of us dies of surprise.”

  He was looking directly at Fraser when he said that. Fraser smiled, which made every grainy tissue of skin on his face demand attention, as it was he who put the next question. “No, we have good reasons behind that assumption. We would simply like to know why it was Mr Blythe-Smith who would want to protect you from anyone or anything?”

  “Now, here we have what you English use a strange word to describe a puzzle, a conundrum, and I hope I have pronounced that word right?” He quickly looked at our two faces to check what already he knew was correct before continuing. “Dickie spoke highly of you, Mr Ughert, but he kept things away from you as he regarded you as what we say in Russian as—vysypaniye, and you mean—rash. In Russia, rash people are regarded as seditious. Not people to rely on. In actual fact, I was closer to him during his passage through the British secret intelligence services than you were. I was a valuable asset working in hostile areas of the world. I would not expect my name to have been voiced much as if it had been, it would threaten my cover, but my contributions were of immense value. There you have the basic reasons for him wanting me protected. I was important.”

  Fraser's smile degenerated into a grin he held firm throughout Kudashov's explanation. When Kudashov finished speaking, Fraser filled his pipe and prepared to light it. I kept an eye on him, as I believed the ritual he'd adopted was one filled with nervous energy, not knowing where to explode if the pipe was no longer an available choice. His and my drinking habits I attributed purely to being sociable. I lit a cigarett
e more from frustration than desire, as I had cut down on smoking for the time away in India and the absence of nicotine was harder to accept now home.

  “It doesn't seem to me that Dickie had your importance in mind when he notified the CIA of you showing your face at the NSA establishment in Mannheim, Germany, and then sent a copy of the photograph they took of you off to your old friend George Stoneman in Delaware USA. What do you think of that?”

  Fraser had found the whisky and an ashtray, and I'd found the chink in Kudashov.

  “Not sure I know a George Stoneman, Patrick, but if Dickie did do such a thing I'm sure it would have been for a valid reason.”

  “There's no point in playing game, Klaus,” I let that name sink in for a second before continuing. “All that will do is delay the end slightly. I know most of the story and I know for certain that it was Dickie who sent the photograph, as he was the only one who knew you both. One of George's sons has found you and that's why you're scared stiff for Cilicia, isn't it?”

  He looked at the wall clock before he spoke, but I got in before him. “I don't anticipate being here for long. Tomorrow is a worrying day for you and me, and sleep would be very welcome tonight. I will leave you a phone when we leave. It's not bugged, but I don't expect you to believe that without checking. You'll have at least six hours to arrange whatever it was you needed to do. I went to India over the weekend to meet another friend of Dickie's. One I don't believe you've met, but you will have heard of his name if for no other reason than it was he who appointed Cilicia to her position, a Vyacheslav Trubnikov.

  “At one time I could have been persuaded about the importance you represented to the British intelligence community, but that was shattered when I learned Dickie gave away your most classified secret to Trubnikov. That was the one you only told Blythe-Smith about, when he threatened to expose you to the Polish StB after your refusal to kill Dalek Kava. That's why there was a necessity for Operation Donor and for my involvement.