by Jeremy Duns
‘That’s a pretty poor salve for anyone’s conscience,’ I said. ‘Would you say the same to the families of those who are killed? Or is that why you rescued us? A sudden attack of scruples because the virus would mean more deaths than you could justify?’
‘I am sorry to disappoint you once more, but no. We were worried that you would reach London with the documents. That would have been… unfortunate. Osborne and the others will, of course, wonder how much you discovered, and what you will tell us. But once we have returned all the documents to the safe, there will be no reason to suppose that you discovered anything at all, and we are confident that the strategy will continue.’
He was actually boasting about prolonging the operation. It appeared that, from Moscow’s point of view, the more people who were killed and blamed on proxy groups the better – it would be all the more effective when they held their press conference to reveal that NATO had been behind it. Unlike the Berlin Tunnel, this time they didn’t appear keen to call things off and ‘accidentally’ discover the plot when given the chance.
When Barchetti had told me Arte come Terrore knew about the attack in the dome, he had meant the events in London after all – the ‘in’ had simply been a slip of the tongue, or because he hadn’t known precisely what had happened there. What he had discovered, and what he had been desperate to tell Severn, was that the cell knew that they were going to be blamed for that attack. That meant that they knew about Stay Behind – and so did Moscow. So the whole thing was blown, and Barchetti had needed to warn the Service. When I’d turned up instead of Severn and asked if he thought Arte come Terrore were involved in killing Farraday, he had realized I didn’t know about Stay Behind at all, and that something was therefore desperately wrong with my having been sent to meet him. So he’d fled… And that was why Pyotr had ordered me to kill him: Moscow not only didn’t want the Service to know that they were aware of Stay Behind, but were prepared to kill for it.
A strange sensation ran through me. There hadn’t been any attacks planned for Rome or Turin, but there would still be plans for attacks in Italy and elsewhere. And by killing Barchetti before he got his message to the Service, I had allowed the whole bloody thing to continue, just as London, and Moscow, had wanted.
Unless, of course, I could get out of here.
But how? Something told me they wouldn’t take off until Sasha was seated and belted in and had given the go-ahead, so I tried to stall him some more.
‘Why didn’t you answer my call in London?’ I asked.
He smiled tolerantly. ‘Has that been bothering you? Let me put your mind at rest there, then. I had no idea about the attack in St Paul’s, none at all. My radio man simply had a feeling that the safe house was compromised, and he and his team shut down and moved immediately as a precaution. As soon as I felt we were secure again, I sent Grigori to let you know… But you didn’t seem especially open to hearing the message.’
So my paranoia had got the better of me. It hadn’t been the first time they had moved safe houses – it was good practice to do so every once in a while, in fact. As there had been the risk that they would do so at the same time as I needed to contact them urgently, we had arranged that in such events Sasha would send someone to alert me within twelve hours. And he had done so. But he and his team had happened to move just as someone had taken a pot shot at me, and I had forgotten all about that arrangement and jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion. Perhaps if I had stopped for a moment in that call box in Smithfield and considered that, I might have heeded Toadski’s message in Heathrow, and not taken the flight to Rome, and… but that way madness lay. Whatever I had done, that bastard Osborne would have tried to kill me. It was a miracle he hadn’t succeeded – but at what cost?
I couldn’t look Sasha in the face now, but I had one last question to ask him. ‘This new strain…’ I said. ‘Is it more effective than the ones developed by your scientists?’
He nodded. There was a moment of silence, and then he understood what I was really asking. ‘Yes. The doctors isolated it from you a couple of hours ago.’
I leaned forward to try to hit him, but the strap around my chest held me back.
He stood, and smiled down at me. ‘I wish I could make you see how much I admire you, Paul. I’ve always felt you were a man of high ideals – perhaps too high. Sometimes they must be sacrificed for a greater cause.’
I didn’t have any ideals to speak of, but in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king – if he’s not hanged by the mob.
‘What greater cause?’ I asked. ‘Communism – or the Motherland?’
‘Both, of course. The second is meaningless without the first. It is true that in this case the interests of the state have perhaps over-ruled strict ideology, because more important things are at stake. But you surprise me – did you really think you and your girlfriend were going to stop this war alone?’
‘She’s not my—’ I stopped myself. It was futile. There was nothing more important at stake than a perpetual cycle of point-scoring, but he would never be able to understand that.
He gave me a thin smile. ‘I think you should sleep now,’ he said. ‘We’ll be leaving soon.’
*
He had left me here, alone with Sarah. Well, why not? We were strapped to our beds in the hold of a plane, about to take off.
But we hadn’t taken off yet.
I started tearing at the strap, but it was no use: it was fixed tight. Panicking, I began clawing away at it in the hope my nails might break the surface. But I knew that wouldn’t help. My eyes raced around the small space desperately looking for something that might help, and trying not to think of how little time I might have. I had to get moving before…
That was it. Movement. The stretcher was on caster wheels, albeit with brakes on each one. But if I could create enough energy to lift them… At the foot of the bed I could see the glass Sasha had handed me earlier resting on the trolley. But how to move myself towards it?
I placed a hand out of the stretcher and tried to reach down to the floor. I was several inches short. That wouldn’t work. So I strained my chest against the belt again, but this time tried to jerk my entire body upwards as I did so. For a moment, the stretcher leapt a fraction of an inch in the air, and as it did I tried to use the momentum by pushing upwards again, and again, until it bounced. Praying that the noise wouldn’t bring anyone running, I started jerking from side to side as well as upwards, and gradually the stretcher began to turn. It was infuriatingly difficult to control, but after a couple of minutes I had managed to move myself so that I was almost horizontal to the trolley, and less than a yard away.
I didn’t think I was going to manage to get within arm’s reach any time soon, so I reached down and removed the catheter from my wrist. Then I reached for the pole containing the intravenous drip bag and tilted it towards me. I quickly unhooked the bag, and then dipped the pole down and took a swipe at the trolley, missing by several inches.
I made it on the fourth attempt, snagging the pole perfectly around one of the trolley’s legs. I pulled it towards me carefully and reached out for the glass. Shielding my face with my arm, I cracked the glass firmly against the side of the trolley, sending shards scurrying across the floor. But several shards had remained in the trolley. I picked out the largest and sawed away furiously with it at the base of the strap. Finally it started to fray, and then it broke away.
Gulping for air and soaking in sweat, I stumbled over to Sarah’s stretcher and performed the same exercise. She woke while I was freeing her and looked up at me in a daze. I gestured for her to follow me, and she nodded. I knew it could be just moments before they started taxiing across the tarmac, after which we would have no chance. Coming out of the hold I saw that one of the doors was just a few feet away. I ran towards it and pushed the button. It shunted open, and a blast of air entered the plane.
I beckoned Sarah on and she reached the door, and then we started racing down the metal stairs
until we were on the tarmac. Wind whipped across my face, sending a dull ache through my jaw, and the sweat on my back suddenly felt chilled. We must still be in Turin, or nearby. That was good. France and Switzerland were close. I hoped we were nearer Switzerland: we had to get over the border, find a proper doctor…
I ran across the airfield, my chest burning and my head pounding with the desire to reach safety. We reached a fence, and beyond it was a road, a motorway of some sort. I glanced back for a moment: Sarah was a few yards behind me, but the plane was still sitting there in the darkness, and there was nobody coming for us. We had made it. We were going to be all right.
It was when we reached the road that I slowed down for a moment, and I felt a tug at my sleeve. I turned to see Sarah pulling at it.
‘What is it? Are you hurt?’
I followed the direction of her gaze. In the distance was a line of buildings, shrouded in morning mist. But slowly I realized that many of them were domes.
Onion domes.
It hit me like a kick to the stomach and I knelt down on the tarmac and waited until they came to fetch us.
*
We didn’t have to wait long. There were four or five of them: burly men in suits the same shade of grey as the tarmac. Now I saw that a couple of black Chaika limousines were parked on the other side of the plane, and as they walked us towards them I glanced over at Sarah. She gave me a look of sheer panic in return, and I felt numb inside.
Sasha was waiting for us. He stared right through me, then shook hands with the security men and headed into one of the Chaikas. We were led over to the other one, which had a flag pinned to the front grille. The door was opened, and we climbed into the rear. The interior was bright red – Soviet red – with fold-down seats on the side nearest the driver. The leather was cold against the back of my neck. I looked up and saw a man seated opposite us, wearing a uniform: gold glinted on his epaulettes. He was very old, and deeply tanned. He looked alarmingly reptilian, his eyes glinting through a network of wrinkles that spread like tributaries across the landscape of his face, and for a fraction of a moment I had the thought that it was Auden, the great poet revealed as Moscow’s puppetmaster-in-chief, the final Russian doll in the collection. But it wasn’t Auden, of course: the nose was snubbed, and the eyes were tiny sparks in the crumpled papyrus of skin.
‘Hello, Yuri,’ I said.
‘Greetings,’ he said, and smiled to show a collection of nicotine-stained teeth. ‘But perhaps now you can call me Fedor Fedorovich.’ His eyes flicked over Sarah. ‘So this is the woman.’ The tip of his tongue darted from his mouth and licked at his lips. I shivered inwardly as I remembered his ‘daughter’ in Burgdorf.
‘Are you the maniac behind this idea?’ I said. ‘This…’ I struggled to find a word. ‘. . . game?’
He turned his eyes to me, dipping his head in a mocking bow. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I am not the “maniac” behind the strategy, as you put it, although I have had my input. But I am old now – the new guard do not listen to me as much these days.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘I know that our objectives have not always been clear to you. As I am sure you understand, we cannot always provide agents such as yourself with the full picture, so you could not know where our priorities lay in this operation. I nevertheless congratulate you for your efforts to save our Italian comrades from being wrongfully blamed for the deaths of innocent civilians, even if—’
‘I was more interested in the civilians than your comrades.’
He gazed at me for a moment, then turned his head to look out of the window. ‘Take a word of advice from an old man,’ he said quietly, and his voice was a little colder now, a little stiff: ‘When we arrive, adopt the line I have proposed instead. I think it will help you fit in better.’
He suddenly leaned forward, and I flinched. He smiled at my nerves and lifted a bottle of vodka from a compartment in the door, along with three shot glasses. He thrust a glass each into my and Sarah’s hands, then poured out measures for each of us. ‘I give you a toast,’ he said. ‘You must drink it do dna: to the bottom.’ Then he cried out ‘Mir i druzhba!’ – ‘Peace and friendship!’ – raised his glass and downed the contents, eyeing me carefully over the rim as he did.
I turned and stared out of the window, and saw the domes and spires looming out of the mist ahead. We were approaching Moscow: a new world. It was one I had been heading for since I had sought this man out in 1945, but my reprieve had finally come to a close – I had reached the end of the road, as another Russian had told me not long ago.
I forced myself to look across at Sarah. Her face was as cool and beautiful as the moment I had met her in the British embassy in Rome. But her mind, I knew, was flooded with confusion and fear. I had brought her to this point. Another life lay ahead of us now, and we would have to draw on all our reserves to survive it – and I must find a way to protect her. She met my gaze and stretched out her hand. I clasped her soft, ringless fingers in mine, then raised the glass in my other.
‘Mir i druzhba,’ I said, and as the liquid burned the back of my throat, Fedor Fedorovich’s laughter echoed in my ears.
Among wolves, I thought, howl like a wolf…
Author’s Note
This book is a work of fiction, but it is set against a background of real events. In the late 1960s, Britain and Italy both witnessed widespread industrial action, the springing up of terrorist groups, and plots against the governments of the day by senior members of their respective intelligence communities. The First of May group did machine-gun the American embassy in London in 1967, and carried out several other attacks and kidnappings until disbanding in the early 1970s, whereupon their mantle was taken up by the Angry Brigade and others. In Italy, several anarchist and Communist groups carried out attacks on civilians at this time, eventually flowering into the Red Brigades and other groups that terrorized the country for much of the ’70s and ’80s.
As with Free Agent, I was inspired by the investigative journalism of Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, particularly a chapter in their book Smear! Wilson and the Secret State in which they described attempts to organize a coup in the United Kingdom during this period as part of a longer-term ‘strategy of tension’ against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
Arte come Terrore is fictional, inspired by Germano Celant’s essay Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia, published in the journal Flash Art in 1967, in which he wrote of a revolutionary existence that ‘becomes terror’ (‘Un esistere rivoluzionario che si fa Terrore’) – I took his metaphor literally and extended it. However, two explosions did take place in Milan in April 1969, and several anarchists were charged in relation to them. Some now believe that those and several subsequent attacks, such as the bombing in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in December 1969, which killed 16 people and injured 80, and the bombing of Bologna train station in August 1980, which killed 85 people and injured over 200, may not have been carried out by anarchists or left-wing terrorists, as originally thought, but by right-wing groups with connections to Italy’s secret services, NATO, the CIA, MI6 and others.
In 1990, two Italian judges discovered a document written by Italian military intelligence in 1959 that outlined the purpose and structure of a network known as Gladio. In a statement to Italy’s parliament on 24 October 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed that this had been part of a secret NATO operation, known under different names in other countries, which had been set up shortly after the Second World War as a contingency plan in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The plan had involved the creation of ‘stay-behind nets’: forces that could provide effective resistance to the Soviets, and which had access to hidden caches of arms, supplies and technical equipment in many countries.
The existence of British stay-behind networks and their offshoots had been publicized prior to Andreotti’s statement. In 1977, Chapman Pincher wrote in the Daily Express of the existence of the ‘Resistance and Psychological Operations Committee’, w
hich he claimed contained an ‘underground resistance organization which could rapidly be expanded in the event of the Russian occupation of any part of NATO, including Britain’ and which had links to the Ministry of Defence and the SAS. And in 1983, Anthony Verrier stated in a footnote in his book Through The Looking Glass that ‘current NATO planning’ (his emphasis) gave the SAS a similar role to that previously held by SOE regarding stay-behind parties. Since 1990, little else has been revealed of Britain’s post-war networks, although an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London in 1995 noted that junior Royal Marine officers in Austria had been detached from their normal duties in the early ’50s in order to prepare supply caches and coordinate with local agents for stay-behind parties.
The CIA established the Turkish arm of the network in 1952, but I have speculated that the British had already done some work along these lines a year earlier. This is based in part on a paragraph in Kim Philby’s memoirs in which he stated that SIS’s Directorate of War Planning was busy setting up ‘centres of resistance’ and guerrilla bases in Turkey to counter a possible Soviet invasion while he was stationed there in the late ’40s: in other words, a stay-behind network. If Philby were telling the truth, one presumes he informed Moscow at the time, meaning that at least part of the stay-behind operation was compromised from the start. If he was lying, the Soviets nevertheless knew about such plans by 1968, when his memoirs were published.
Following Andreotti’s statement in the Italian parliament, many people questioned whether members of Gladio and the other stay-behind networks had turned from their original mission of protecting Western Europe from Soviet invasion to supporting, planning or executing terrorist attacks on civilians – attacks that were then blamed on Communists and others in order to unite public feeling against the Left and bolster the country’s security structures. Since 1990, a great deal of information has emerged to support this idea, but despite parliamentary inquiries, arrests, trials, acquittals and retrials in Italy, Turkey and elsewhere, it remains unproven. Until NATO declassifies all its files on these networks, the truth may never be known – and perhaps not even then.