by Jeremy Duns
‘What else did London say?’ I asked Manning.
‘Not much,’ he replied, somewhat blithely. ‘That Chief’s gone missing. Reading between the lines, there’s a flap on that he may have something to do with the double agent this Russian johnnie has told us about, and you’ve flown the nest to prove them wrong. Am I right?’
‘Close enough,’ I said. ‘Did London mention when Pritchard would be arriving?’
‘No, just to expect him soon. Good chap, Henry. Came out here a few months ago. Thrashed me at golf. Beautiful swing.’
‘What were your instructions?’
‘What? Oh. To pick you up at the airport, then provide you with any assistance you required.’
‘I need to arrange accommodation,’ I said. If they were going to assign me a nanny, I might as well make use of him.
‘Of course. I’d have done it already, only nobody was sure what cover you’d be using.’
‘Robert Kane. Times hack covering the Wilson visit.’
‘Yes – so I gathered from Bernard. Well, we can check you in somewhere now if you’d like. Any preferences?’
‘What’s the best-known hotel?’ I asked, and Manning glanced over at me. Most agents would have wanted somewhere discreet, but I wanted to make my presence felt in the city, fast.
‘The Victoria Palace,’ he said. ‘It’s the closest Lagos gets to the Ritz. Not that it’s particularly close…’
I knew the name. Pritchard’s dossier had mentioned it a couple of times, notably because an Ibo had tried to blow it up in advance of a peace conference a few years earlier. That it was enough of a landmark to be a target meant it was precisely the kind of place I was looking for.
‘I’ll drop you there,’ said Manning. ‘If this traffic ever gets going, that is. Oh, and before I forget…’ He plunged a hand inside the pocket of his pyjama jacket and fished out a small package, which he passed over to me. ‘You’ll also need these.’
I opened the box and took out a dozen white tablets sandwiched between some cellophane.
‘Paludrine. Anti-malaria. Take them once a day. It’s all there in the instructions: “Best absorbed with evening G and T”.’ He had another chuckle, and I began to wonder if he might simply be drunk. He caught my look. ‘Sorry. But see it from my view, if you can.’ He gestured at the Lagos night. ‘Stuck out here in the sticks miles from the bloody war and suddenly people start flying in looking for Chief – this is the most excitement we’ve had in yonks.’
I nodded, and packed the medicine in my hold-all.
‘Seems we’re in luck,’ said Manning, pointing ahead. The cars were starting to move.
*
The hotel was a horrendous white modernist building that looked like a collection of giant window-boxes, but the car park was stuffed with diplomatic plates and flagpoles jutted importantly from the entrance marquee, so it was clearly the right spot. I told Manning to wait for me and walked through to the reception, where a sullen-looking young woman behind a marble counter sold me an air-conditioned double room for a hundred and eighty Nigerian shillings a night – the single rooms were all gone, she claimed. After filling in the registry and handing over my passport, I took the stairs to my room on the third floor.
It didn’t quite live up to the picture I’d been given in reception, but it looked like it had the basics: the air conditioning worked, and there was a telephone and a radio. Was it secure, though? I threw my bag and jacket onto the mattress and checked the strength of the door from the outside. After a few minutes, I was satisfied that anyone wanting to break it down would have to make a hell of a noise to do so. The windows also shut firmly, and I rigged an elastic band across the two handles to make sure. They led out onto a fire escape, which would come in handy if anyone tried anything. I was directly above the swimming pool. Despite the lateness of the hour, there were still a few people lounging on deckchairs sipping from long-stemmed glasses: diplomats, or aid workers. Nice life. Not mine.
There was a tiny en suite bathroom with a sink that trickled lukewarm water, and a cracked mirror above it. After splashing my face and drying it on my shirt – towels didn’t appear to be part of the service – I called reception and asked them to put me through to the Soviet Embassy. Amazingly, this took only a couple of minutes.
‘Da?’ The voice was cold. Night shift.
‘Hello,’ I said in Russian, but playing up my English accent. ‘Could you put me through to Third Secretary Irina Grigorieva, please?’
‘Everyone’s gone home,’ she said. ‘Do you want to leave a message?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tell her it’s an old friend calling: name of Paul Dark. I’m at the Palace Hotel on Victoria Island, room 376. Did you get all that?’
She said she had, and I replaced the receiver. Slavin was my first priority, because he was planning to defect and might have more information that could point to me. But Anna could also expose me – she wasn’t volunteering to do so, but she could – so I had to get hold of her, too. She would be unlikely to return to the embassy until the morning, and they wouldn’t have given me her address, so I’d taken the next best option, which was to leave a message to try to bring her to me.
I locked up, and headed downstairs.
*
‘Everything okay?’ asked Manning.
‘First class,’ I said, fastening my seat-belt.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Tell me what you know about Slavin,’ I said.
‘Slavin?’
‘Yes. Russian johnnie. Was there anything you didn’t mention in the dossier you sent?’
He looked at me blankly. ‘Like what?’
‘How about the woman he mentioned – Irina Grigorieva? What’s their relationship?’
‘I have no idea,’ he replied, irritated. ‘I sent all the information we have.’
I smiled. ‘Just double-checking. I’d like to talk to Slavin – see if I can make him open up some more.’
‘You can do that tomorrow morning. He’s due at the High Commission at nine…’
‘I’d like to talk to him tonight.’
He tensed up. ‘Sorry, old chap, I don’t follow.’
‘Tomorrow may be too late,’ I said. ‘Did he have any surveillance on him when he arrived at the High Commission?’ He stiffened, but gave no reply. ‘And when he left?’ No reply. ‘So you see, we have no idea how secure his position is, let alone how he’s handling the pressure of being about to defect. He could already be under suspicion, or he could be getting horribly drunk and about to spill everything to one of his colleagues while we sit here discussing it. Have you put his home under surveillance?’
He shook his head defensively. ‘Too risky. He was quite clear we should make no further contact until tomorrow.’
‘But you know where his house is?’ A nod. ‘Well?’
‘It’s in Ikoyi, near the Russian Embassy.’
‘Near, but not in?’
‘That’s right. Most of the Russians have their own villas, same as us. But I don’t—’
‘Right, then. We’ll go and knock on his door, see if he’s still alive, alive-oh, and then you can head off to your party and I back to my little rat-hole.’
He frowned. ‘If he’s under surveillance, we could blow him.’
‘If he’s under surveillance,’ I said, ‘he’s probably already been blown. London told you to hold my hand, and that’s precisely what you’re going to do.’
After a while, he shook his head and let out a deep sigh. ‘You’ll have to think of something to tell Marjorie,’ he said. ‘She’ll be livid.’
*
Like many others in the neighbourhood, the villa sat behind an imposing set of iron gates. ‘Villa’ was Manning’s word, and was perhaps a little generous. It was a large but plain-looking bungalow, with mosquito nets on the windows and a jacaranda tree in the drive helping to mask the peeling paint.
Slavin’s house.
We were at the easternmost edge of the
city: Ikoyi was the last island. On the way over, Manning had told me that many of the city’s expatriates, himself included, lived here. I could see why. Its houses, even the run-down ones, were spacious, its gardens neatly trimmed and, in comparison to the cacophony of traffic elsewhere in the city, it was eerily quiet: the only sounds I could hear were the mosquitoes buzzing around my ears, the ticking of my watch and the creaking of leather as Manning shifted his bum in his seat.
A Peugeot 404 was parked in the drive, so it looked as if Slavin was in. However, I had no way of knowing whether he was in there alone. I’d made Manning drive around the neighbouring streets to check for surveillance. I hadn’t found any, but that wasn’t conclusive: they could be watching us from inside the house itself. And so could Slavin. I’d told Manning that surveillance would mean he was already blown, but that wasn’t strictly true. This man was a KGB officer and, if his work was important enough, he could be guarded around the clock as a matter of course.
Manning was also right to worry that this kind of approach might tip off Slavin’s colleagues that he was intending to defect. If they were to get the slightest sniff of that, he would immediately be deported, and probably shot on arrival in the motherland. But that wasn’t my plan: for the time being anyway, I wanted Comrade Slavin to stay alive. I had to find out what he knew, and how he’d discovered it. He had claimed that Anna had loved me, but had she been the source for that, or someone else? I had to get to him, but I had to find a way to do it without the Russians being alerted.
It wasn’t looking promising. We’d been here for twenty minutes and there hadn’t been a flicker of activity from inside the house.
‘It is the cocktail hour,’ Manning said, finally.
I looked at him. ‘You think Slavin might also have a pyjama party on tonight?’
He shrugged. ‘He might even be at the same one.’
‘You socialize with the Russians?’
‘Sometimes. Plenty of diplomats, from all over, are members of the Yacht Club. The Russian ambassador joined last year – chap called Romanov. Charming fellow, actually, and quite a good sailor –’
‘Is Slavin a member?’
‘Not that I know of. But anyone who is could sign him in. And it’s quite a big bash tonight, so perhaps he’d want to go.’
I found it hard to believe Moscow would allow anyone important out on the cocktail circuit: it was almost an invitation to defect. Still, Slavin was planning to defect, so perhaps they had as tight a rein out here as the Service appeared to, employing buffoons like Manning. Perhaps Lagos was just one big pyjama party.
Or perhaps I was just tired. Manning was worried about the rocket he was going to get from his wife and was probably using the slightest possibility that Slavin would be at the same party as a pretext to stop my goose chase around Lagos. But it was a possibility, however slight, and now he’d put the thought in my head it was hard to dismiss. It would be too painful to bear if we were staking out his house while he was lording it up over the road in his nightgown and slippers.
‘How far away is this party of yours?’
Manning jollied up. ‘A fifteen-minute drive – less at this time of night. It’s over on Lagos Island.’ He pointed in the direction we’d come. As he did, I noticed the field lying in darkness by the side of the road.
‘What’s that? A golf course?’
‘Yes. Part of the Ikoyi Club. I’m a member there, too. Not a bad little course, as it happens. Henry—’
I didn’t want to hear about Pritchard’s birdie on the ninth, so I opened the door and climbed out.
‘Wait here,’ I said.
*
As I approached the gate, I saw that behind it and to the right, partly shielded by bushes, was a small hut, wooden and painted blue. I pressed a buzzer, and after a few seconds a bulb went on and a man emerged from it. He was wearing grey flannel trousers and a sweater with epaulettes.
‘Who goes there?’ he called. His handsome face was half-lit by the bulb, highlighting deep symmetrical scars down his cheeks. I could see the silhouette of his rifle: from the way he gripped it, he looked to be an amateur. Surely a KGB colonel would have more protection than this?
‘Who goes there?’
‘Is Mister Slavin in?’ I asked.
He peered out at me. ‘He expecting you, sir?’
That was good. ‘Sir’ was good.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m here for the party.’
He didn’t register either way, but he raised his rifle a little. I’d guessed wrongly: there might still be people in there, but he wasn’t convinced it classed as a party.
‘Listen,’ I said quickly. ‘What’s your name?’ I needed to change direction.
‘Isaac,’ he said warily.
‘Isaac, could you do me a favour?’ I patted my pockets absent-mindedly. ‘Do you have a piece of paper I can write on?’
He went into his hut and came back a few seconds later with a newspaper. It was the Daily Times, Alebayo’s read of choice. As he approached the gate, I saw that his rifle was now pointing towards the ground. His neck shone under the corona of the lamp. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to overpower him at that moment. But what then? What if I broke in and Slavin had company? At best, he’d be blown. At worst, I’d be dead.
Fifteen minutes, Manning had said. I looked at my watch: it was already half ten. I handed Isaac the note. ‘Please give Mister Slavin this, and let him know I visited.’
*
‘Any luck?’ Manning asked, back in the car.
‘Not much.’
‘So what now?’
What now, indeed? It was getting on, and I was no further ahead. Come tomorrow morning, I was going to be in trouble. Even more trouble than I was already in. But I couldn’t see a way past it – the odds were too high.
Manning was looking at me expectantly.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Just for half an hour.’
He turned the key in the ignition.
*
‘The bar only opened last year, you know,’ said Manning as he handed me my drink. ‘Very controversial – the debate raged for years. A lot of us were worried the place would fill up with non-sailing types. There was even one chap – German, wasn’t he, Sandy?’
‘Dutch, I think,’ said Sandy, who was a small elegant man in a long white nightshirt.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Manning, popping a peanut into his mouth. ‘That’s right. Dutch. Well, he came along one week and asked if he could join just to socialize. Brazenly admitted he had no intention of sailing at all! Put him right, didn’t we?’ He snorted, and Sandy nodded his head sagely.
‘Oh, Geoffrey! I’m sure Robert isn’t interested in the intricate workings of the Yacht Club.’
Marjorie Manning had been flirting with me outrageously since we’d arrived. She might have been a beauty twenty-odd years ago, but too much drink, sun, and Geoffrey had shaken most of it from her.
‘What would you rather discuss, dear?’ Manning asked her sweetly. ‘The shops in London?’
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘What’s in fashion this season, Robert? Tell us, please. We have to rely on the local supermarkets to provide us with our clothes, and it’s hardly Yves Saint Laurent.’
‘I don’t think fashion’s quite Robert’s patch,’ said Manning, winking at me.
I’d been a bloody fool to listen to him, of course: there was no sign of any Russians, let alone Slavin. The party reminded me of dozens I’d been to in Istanbul and elsewhere: several dozen expats, mostly Brits, getting sloshed on brandy and sodas and munching stale crisps. We were seated at a table outside, making the most of the faint breeze coming in off the water. Stewards in white uniforms and guests in nightclothes milled about the lawn, giving the place a somewhat ghostly air. A group of men directly behind me discussed the merits of fibreglass hulls and wondered how long it would be until the rainy season. The consensus seemed to be that it would arrive any day now.
I glanced at my
watch: twenty-five past eleven. My note had asked Slavin to meet me at midnight. Despite the needless detour, this was still marginally preferable to sitting in the car with Manning for half an hour, which was what I would have been doing otherwise: and staying on for that length of time might have been unwise if there had been any sort of surveillance of the street from inside Slavin’s villa. I took a sip from my drink and wondered again if he was being guarded. Perhaps he was being questioned about my note right now: perhaps I’d blown his defection. And that would be disastrous, because I couldn’t afford for him to be carted away before Pritchard arrived. But I was being too pessimistic, surely. The most obvious explanation was the most likely: he hadn’t been at home. Perhaps he was working late at the embassy. Men about to defect often become conspicuously loyal to those they are about to betray. If he was at the embassy, it was stalemate – I couldn’t get near him there.
‘Mister Kane?’
I looked up. The man called Sandy was speaking to me. ‘Sorry?’
‘I said, “What is your patch, exactly?” I can’t remember seeing your byline in The Times.’
I’d been wondering when he would pounce. Manning had introduced him as a property developer, but I recognized his name – he’d been a BBC correspondent in the war, and was now connected behind the scenes. Still did some work for The Mirror, I seemed to remember.
I mentioned a few of the stories that had appeared in The Times credited to Robert Kane in the past couple of years. Each had been written for short-term operational reasons, using the name as a convenient blanket – they hadn’t been intended to build cover in the field. If Farraday hadn’t suddenly fancied having a go playing at spies, Manning could simply have introduced me under my own name as a second secretary at the embassy. Instead, I was going to have to be on my back foot defending a half-formed legend.
‘Out here for the PM’s visit, I suppose?’
I nodded. ‘My editor wants something about the feel of the place, how the Brits see the war, that kind of thing. Perhaps I can interview you at some point?’