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1
Vardas dead. Leman in jail. Carswell talking of traitors. The Sovs laughing out of their backsides. What a bloody mess.
He stared out of the open window. A helicopter hovered over the city, a silver pendant suspended motionless in an arching blue sky, its rotors beating angrily in defiance of the pull of gravity, the sun exploding on the glass of its canopy. The ever-watchful eye of the enemy.
Vardas gone. It was impossible to believe. The man was brave, he did what he believed in and did it brilliantly, refused any reward. (‘How can you pay for the chance to strike a blow against those who deny you your freedom?’) How different from so many of the recruits they’d found in the transit camps of displaced persons after the war, who had quickly learned that loyalty was a negotiable currency. His loss was incalculable. He was the model agent, his best Boris, and now he was dead meat in a refrigerator, silenced for ever.
If that wasn’t bad enough, what was happening now was even worse. As he learned of the arrival in Budapest of a Russian general whose presence meant the Soviets were getting ready to suppress any insurrection, London saw fit to take his eye off the ball by letting ghosts from the past accuse him of treachery.
He burned with anger. Out there on the streets the bullets were real, and when people were shot they fell bleeding, or when the pain of their torture was too great their hearts gave out. You only had to look at the bruised bodies in the morgue, if you could get anywhere near them, to know that. Bullet wounds. Cigarette burns. Fingers without nails. Broken limbs, beaten feet. What the hell did London know about the risks his Borises took, the pain and anguish of torture or the terrifying isolation of violent death in a prison cell? How could they imagine for one second that he could betray brave men and women who risked their lives to give him the truth? Why on earth did Carswell have to arrive now? What the hell was going on?
‘What is this?’ Martineau asked. ‘An interrogation?’
‘A few questions, Bobby. You know the form.’
‘Are we on the record?’
Carswell shook his head. ‘I’m here unofficially. It’s not in my gift to say there won’t be a formal enquiry. I’ll be producing a report for the Director-General on my return. Where we go from there is up to him.’
Not an ounce of the rebel in good old Nigel. The man had a deep and unshakeable belief in the rightness of what he was doing, to which his years of impeccable loyalty to the Service bore eloquent witness. How he envied Carswell’s immunity to doubt. Faith in the Service had never come blindly to him, and his inability to conceal his lack of it had shown through in his bumpy career.
‘Did the old man send you?’
‘I volunteered. Told him you and I go back a long way. I thought you’d rather talk to an old friend.’
Confession is easier to the priest, you know, that was the thinking behind the Director-General’s decision, because in their business, without a confession you seldom got a conviction.
‘What we’re good at in our line of country is concealing evidence,’ Carswell had said to him years before. ‘That’s why the only way you’ll convict a double agent is to get him to own up to his crime. Without a confession, you’ll never have enough evidence to support a case in court.’
That’s what the Director-General was after, why Carswell was in Budapest now. How much greater the likelihood of the unguarded moment when your interrogator is your friend, especially one as painstaking and deliberate as Nigel. If there were secrets to dig out, Carswell was the man with the spade, none better; a skilled and professional interrogator who left nothing to chance. He was an odds-on favourite to get a confession if there was one to be had.
‘How come I’m back in the frame?’ Martineau was using his bitterness as a defence while he took control of his anger. Letting rip at Carswell would get you nowhere. Keep cool, and you may be able to work something out. ‘You told me I’d be invisible in Budapest.’
‘Budapest is incidental,’ Carswell said. ‘The problem’s in London, Bobby.’
‘I paid my dues on Peter years ago. We’ve moved on since then, haven’t we?’
Hadn’t Carswell and the others buried Peter? That’s what they’d promised when they’d packed him off to Rio. No comebacks, they’d said. What’s dead is dead, never to return. Drop out of sight for a time. Let tempers cool, memories fade. A year or two away from the limelight and everything will be forgotten, sure as eggs. Time the great healer and other rubbish. He hadn’t believed them but they’d given him no choice, and he’d gone with as good a grace as he could muster. He’d done his stint in that South American cesspit, a real prison sentence, every loathsome minute of it, and no remission for good behaviour either, the bastards. By the time he returned. (‘We’ll slip you back in quietly, no one will be any the wiser’), Merton House was a different place, just as Carswell had predicted. New faces, new cultures, new concerns, not necessarily for the better, he thought, though he kept that opinion to himself. Did prudence come with age? Or had he lost his appetite for the fight? Whatever the reason, the old days and many of the old players had been well and truly kicked into touch. Peter was embalmed in Service history and a sanitized version was taught as part of the New Entry course at the Vicarage. Martineau’s role in the affair had been marginalized as a footnote. He wasn’t too sure how he felt about that, but on the whole he was glad he wasn’t mentioned by name.
‘A number of the old Peter brigade have got together to allege the existence of what they call the Soviet faction within Merton House, a small group of officers who used the clean-up after Peter as an opportunity to get rid of certain loyal members of the Service on trumped-up charges so they could install their own people, all of whom are on Moscow’s payroll, into positions of power and thereby neutralize the impact of our intelligence operation. It’s all nonsense, of course, but the Government has taken it seriously and there’s a secret enquiry going on.’
Years after he’s been dead and buried, someone violates his grave and Peter springs back to life. It was either a cock-up or Carswell and the others had deceived him when they’d sent him into exile in Rio. Peter hadn’t been buried, as they’d promised, only silenced. In his experience, where the Service was concerned, the cock-up theory was always the odds-on favourite but that didn’t make him feel any happier.
‘A few promising careers ran on to the rocks when we tidied up the mess all those years ago,’ Carswell was saying. ‘Well, it seems that some of those who swam to safety have long memories.’
Martineau was back on the icy streets of Moscow, ten years younger, his breath congealing in the cold early morning air (how perilously close to the surface these memories of painful moments live), the madness of those anxious days controlling him, his heart racing, his knees turning to water, in his pocket the undeniable evidence that he alone knew would reduce the Peter intelligence to ashes. He remembered how terrified he was that at any moment a figure would emerge from the shadows and put a bullet through his heart, so the devastating revelation that Peter had been turned might die with him and the poison the Soviets were leaking into London might continue to do its deadly work. But no one came out of the shadows that night, or any other night. He got away with it as he had done so often before. But he’d known as he coded up the cable for London that this was the beginning of another kind of ending for him, and at least he’d been right about that.
‘If the Peter brigade didn’t like you then, Bobby, time has done little to soften their hostility.’
Blowing the whistle on Peter had hurt because Peter was his discovery, his triumph, the break he needed to unlock a high-flying career. But before he had manoeuvred into a position to do himself some good, the Soviets had slammed the door brutally shut in his face and his chance had gone. He knew then, as he came out of the frozen streets of Moscow into the warmth of the embassy and prepared to send his warning to London, that he was was blowing his own chances. He had no option, he knew that. The irony was that, by doi
ng his duty, he was condemning himself never to rise high in the ranks.
Horseferry Road had turned on him for the bad news he gave them and for a time they fought hard to deny the truth. Nobody wanted to know that the train had hit the rails, the good times consigned to a past that, as each day went by, grew into a mythic golden era.
‘The Peter days. What times those were. We were so close to the Kremlin we could hear Stalin fart.’
The trouble was, Carswell explained when Martineau finally returned from Moscow, they now knew that he had stumbled across the truth months after the Soviets had nobbled Peter, and by then the poison they’d been feeding into our system was well and truly lodged. That made the cleansing process more difficult. They’d had to cut deeper into the infected area than they’d intended, Carswell had said cryptically. ‘Much deeper.’
The Director-General asked for a clean-up after the Peter business, and that’s what Carswell and others had given him. The internal investigation was loud with the snap of recriminations, the crack of reputations breaking and the hollow thud of careers collapsing. Perhaps Carswell was right and the cleansing had gone too deep, too much blood was spilled, too many heads had rolled. It wouldn’t be the first time good intentions had been transformed into a self-inflicted wound and the Service had come close to tearing itself apart. The Sovs laughing out of their arses again.
‘I’ve never denied I should have spotted much earlier what the Soviets had done,’ Martineau said, going on the defensive. ‘But it wasn’t an easy time after the war. We had to take the few chances that came our way. Peter was one of them. For a good eighteen months, we were a heartbeat away from the centre of Soviet power. If I was to bring all that to an end I had to be certain I was right, and that took time.’
‘Nobody’s blaming you for what happened, Bobby. That’s all water under the bridge now.’
Then who the hell had resurrected the Peter business, and why in God’s name had London gone along with the idea that he might be a traitor? There had to be more to it than the Peter lot wanting revenge for events that had happened years before. If the source pointing the finger hadn’t got something convincing on him, Carswell wouldn’t be here now. He felt baffled, uneasy. He’d been stuffed, he was sure of that, but by whom and why he had no idea.
‘What are they saying about me?’
‘That at the time you were blackmailed by the Soviets into supplying information you knew to be false many months before Peter came to an end. Now, because of this woman you’re supposed to be seeing, you’re at it again.’
‘I’m not giving anything to the Sovs, Nigel.’ Leave nothing to chance. Carswell could report back that he’d denied the charge vigorously. ‘Never have done. Never could. It’s all nonsense. You know that, don’t you? I hate the bastards too much.’
What damage they were doing to their own side, accusing a tried and tested operative of treachery. Pulling a man like Carswell off the essential task of watching the enemy to chase phantoms, the paranoid creations of a few disaffected men whose days were well and truly over. Perhaps the Soviets really did have someone at Merton House, and they were all dancing to the enemy’s tune. It was the only rational explanation, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to believe it.
‘I’d never betray my Borises, Nigel. I don’t have to tell you that, do I?’
Carswell would understand that, even if London didn’t.
‘In all the years we’ve known each other, Bobby, I’ve seen you crass, impetuous, misguided, plain bloody-minded, but you’ve never given me the least cause to imagine for one single moment that you were working for the other side. Nor have you ever shown anything but the greatest loyalty to the agents you’ve been responsible for.’
He took his pipe out of his mouth, looked at the bowl unhappily and poked around in the ash.
‘I may accept that, but it’s not what they believe in London.’
A thousand questions crowded his mind. What were they saying? What evidence had they for saying it? Or was it just malicious gossip put around by those who’d like to get rid of him?
‘One minute I’m doing my job, the next I’m accused of being a traitor. It’s like a nightmare.’
‘If it’s not true, then someone has it in for you, Bobby. They’ve done a skilful job in planting the notion and it’s proving to be a difficult one to shift. I’m here to establish the truth. Set the record straight so we can get back to the real business of beating the Soviets. I want you to help me do that.’
Was that true? Or was it the comforting disguise of the practised interrogator? He looked at the familiar figure sitting opposite him. Until Carswell was certain that Martineau was off the hook, he’d cannily reserve his position, the old bastard. Better tread warily. No equivocation now. Cards on the table. This was life or death time. He took a deep breath.
‘All right then, let’s clear the air. Where do we start?’
‘Eva Balassi. Shall we talk about her?’
How the hell did he know about Eva?
*
The doors are closed, the windows open. The helicopter is flying silently into the sun. The only sound is the whirring of a small fan. The room is stifling. They sit on opposite sides of the table, jackets off, ties loosened, sleeves rolled up. No papers. No recording machinery. Two men, face to face, friends and colleagues for years in the service of their country. Between them lies the poison of an accusation of treachery.
‘Are you having an affair with the Balassi woman?’
The interrogation begins.
‘Yes.’
He sees it clearly now. Merton House thinks Eva is another Marie-France Pelissier. It wasn’t true (it couldn’t have been less true), but denials aren’t going to sound convincing, he knows that.
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘A few weeks.’
‘How often do you see her?’
‘As often as I can.’
‘Once a week? Twice?’
‘Twice. Three times if I’m lucky.’
‘Do you stay all night?’
What difference does it make? ‘I don’t fuck her and fuck off, Nigel. That’s not my style.’
‘You are aware that Eva Balassi is a member of the Communist Party?’
‘Everyone’s a communist here. How else do you think they
survive?’
Somebody has it in for you, Bobby.
*
The room is in darkness. He picks up his watch and turns its face towards the window to catch what little light comes up from the street below. Ten to two. He puts the watch back on the bedside table and turns over. Even with a single sheet, he is hot and restless. The temperature seems to have diminished hardly at all since the afternoon. The bedroom is like an inferno.
‘What is it?’ Eva asks.
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Nor can I. It’s too hot.’
She pulls back the sheet and fans them both briefly, their naked bodies cooling momentarily with the rush of air. The truth is, he hasn’t slept at all. Too many questions. His mind is racing out of control again tonight.
*
‘She has a daughter, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Dora.’
‘That’s right, Dora. Mother and daughter live together.’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you organize yourself around that?’
Why the hell do you want to know all this?
*
She telephones in the afternoon with the coded message they have agreed on. ‘The papers are ready for collection.’ If Hart takes the call, Eva is to say that Martineau has asked for a transcript of a recent speech given by an economics deputy and she has translated it for him. Not much of a deception but better than an embarrassed silence. Decrypted, it means that Dora is staying at her friend’s house, and Eva is inviting Martineau to spend the night with her.
He arrives at her flat soon after half past
six, carrying his linen jacket, his shirt sticking to his back, his face dripping. He does not want to kiss her when she opens the door (‘I need a bath, make myself presentable’), but she kisses him anyway and runs a cold bath while he undresses. She is wearing a loose white dress gathered at the waist that makes her hair and skin seem even darker, through which he can clearly see the contours of her body.
She talks to him as he washes, their conversation self-consciously avoiding anything other than the trivia of their lives. They have shared their passion for each other, they have recklessly spent as much time together as they can, but, for reasons neither will admit to, they have never once talked about themselves – what they do, what they believe in, who they are. Their knowledge of each other hardly extends beyond their bodies. No trespassing on the dangerous ground of their identities. Not yet, anyway. An unspoken rule of engagement.
Martineau is sitting on the side of the bath drying himself when Eva takes off her dress and, naked, climbs on to him. Her arms are tightly around his neck, her feet in the bath. She kisses him so fiercely he can hardly breathe. His hands, still wet, force their way through her thick hair and down her back. Eventually he breaks from her grasp, drawing her to her feet, kissing her and then gathering her in his arms. He carries her, face buried against his chest, into the bedroom, lays her down on the cover and explores her body as never before, speaking to her gently in whispers. She says nothing, her eyes closed, her mouth half open, only her breathing quickening until her body arches under him and a cry bursts from deep within her, all the mysterious longings of her life gathered in a single piercing sigh.
Much later, they are lying side by side but not touching except for their hands, which are tightly laced together, as the daylight gives way to dusk and then to night. Later still Eva gets up and finds them both something cold to eat while Martineau dips his body into the cool water of the bath. They eat in bed, propped up against the pillows, Eva cross-legged before him, drinking wine with ice in it.
*
Secret Kingdom Page 21