The Secret Families

by John Gardner

  ‘She seems to be playing it straight,’ Fincher said. ‘The kids’re going to the Manor tomorrow. It’s bloody cold out tonight, shall I call off the house surveillance?’

  Maitland-Wood looked at the transcript of the conversation. ‘You run a check on this Pegler fellow?’

  ‘Car-hire firm. Up-market. Mayfair. Straight.’

  ‘Get the dogs out of the cold, then. I’m off to have a chat with this bloody Beckeleg boatman.’

  So it was that the two novices who had been detailed to watch the back and front of Naldo’s house were withdrawn some fifteen minutes before the black Rover pulled up. The driver, in uniform, got out and was starting towards the door when Arthur and Emma came out, shepherded by Barbara. There were three suitcases, two of them carried by Arthur. Barbara did not wear a coat. She supervised as the luggage was stowed away and the young people settled into the back of the car. To anyone interested, it was as though Barbara was seeing her family off on a holiday. Only at the last minute did she seem to remember something, returning to the house, hands hugging her shoulders in the chill of the night.

  Inside the house, she activated the alarms, grabbed a small parcel already prepared and lying on the table in the hall, switched off the lights and seemed to allow the door to close by accident. She opened the car’s front passenger door and appeared to be having a short conversation as the driver switched on the ignition. Only at the last moment did Barbara slide into the passenger seat. The door had hardly closed before the Rover was off, picking up speed.

  But there was nobody from the shop to see. Nobody to report back to the firm. Maitland-Wood had dropped his guard, and in those crucial minutes, Naldo’s family had been whisked away. The error was not discovered until the morning, and by then they were already installed in a small family hotel in the quiet village of Axbridge, close to Cheddar, in the West Country, lying below the folds of the Mendip Hills.

  The only people to note the exit of Naldo Railton’s family from their Kensington home were a young couple indulging in some heavy sexual groping in a Mini some fifty yards away. They were due to be relieved by a small van which was to park below them, at one in the morning. The driver of the van would lock his vehicle and go away. The two-man team would stay in the back, observing the house through two-way mirrors disguised as glass panels.

  As it was, the moment Barbara leaped into the Rover, the young woman slapped the driver’s face inside the Mini and got out, quickly walking back up Exhibition Road. The Mini’s engine started and it drew away, some three cars’ distance behind the Rover.

  Tim, the driver, did not spot any surveillance on him during the drive to the West Country, but the Mini’s driver was a cautious, intuitive man, who knew the roads of England almost as well as he knew the fastest route from the Patrice Lumumba University to Turgen Square, a spit and a stride from Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow. His skin was black and, at one time, he had hoped to become a doctor. To that end he had gone, with many other so-called Third World students, to Moscow with the promise that he would study medicine. Instead he had been one of the first graduates of the Lumumba University where he learned, not medicine, but the science of guerilla warfare, the making of bombs, the arts of terrorism and the way to strike at the heart of the capitalist powers.

  The driver had been such a promising student that they had kept him on in Moscow and taught him other skills. On that night he was also helped by two other cars.

  The girl who had been with him in the Mini walked quickly into Kensington Gore and crossed the road. She passed the luxurious façade of the Royal Garden Hotel and turned right again, through the police-guarded gates leading to Kensington Gardens. Within five minutes, Ludmilla Kirsanov, was making her report to the Second Secretary (Trade) in a sterile room in the Russian Embassy basement.

  ‘They have all gone.’ She spoke in Russian. ‘But Sammi is behind them. It would be best, Comrade Secretary, to have others of our people out.’

  The Second Secretary nodded and smiled, ‘They are already out. Sammi is using his radio. He makes an excellent Jamaican freelance taxi driver on the air. We have them well covered.’

  ‘May I go, then, yes, Comrade Secretary?’

  ‘You have done well, Kirsanov. Very well. Sleep now.’

  2

  At almost the same moment as Naldo’s family was being spirited out of London, Carole Coles was making her observations regarding Caspar’s discovered diary to her lover, Gus Keene, in bed at the Regent Palace Hotel.

  Earlier, she had stopped for a drink with their other partner, Martin Brook. He was also at a loss concerning the late Sir Caspar’s revelations. ‘The man was a past master of deception.’ Brook gazed into his beer. ‘You’ve only got to glance at the restricted file to see how he operated through the years. Damn it, he left the service because he considered we were neglecting the Russian target, and, after the war, he broke that unwilling defector Rogov.’

  Gennadi Aleksandrovich Rogov was an NKVD (precursor of the KGB) officer who had been lured into the West shortly after the end of the war. Caspar had been mainly responsible for the interrogation of the man, whom he had finally broken. Out of the entire business Caspar Railton had written a handbook on KGB tradecraft that was still standard and required reading on the induction course at Warminster.

  Brook wore a puzzled look. ‘There’s something not quite right about the whole thing. Certainly the diaries appear to show great familiarity with the Sovs, their operational methods, cryptos, drops, the works. But why would someone like Sir Caspar, who was so careful in his own work, be so slovenly in covering his tracks?’

  Carole agreed. ‘The father confessor will have to go through this with his tweezers. If I didn’t know that BMW and his crew, including C, were taking the matter so seriously, I’d say it was a hoax.’

  And, as all these things were happening, so Naldo Railton, nervous to hear that Barbara was safe, carefully examined the documents in his possession at the Grand Hotel Victoria-Jungfrau, Interlaken.

  The Hypermarket material was straightforward. Just as Oleg Penkovsky had slandered the Railton name, by directly suggesting that his cover was blown by an agent of influence working under the cryptonym Dionysus, so Blunt had, in a couple of sentences during one of the recent interrogation sessions, provided back-up mentions. Like Penkovsky a few years before, he had directly implicated the Railtons and Farthings.

  Naldo read the transcript. The dialogue was like two men chatting, exchanging gossip, in a club. The interrogator was relentless, but pleasant. ‘Anthony,’ he began the relevant passage, ‘we have a very strong lead on possible people still working for the Soviet Union within the service. That is, within both services, Five and SIS.’

  ‘Really?’ Blunt sounded bored and languid.

  ‘Yes, really, Anthony. And by what you’ve already told us, I want to run a few cryptos through your mind. Think of it as a game. Put the right name to the right crypto.’

  ‘Peter, I’ve told you a hundred times, I’ve been out too long. The Russian service had no more use for me. I agree, there are indications that they had someone, probably much better placed than I. I was low grade. You must know that.’

  ‘Yes, we know it, but we don’t completely buy it, my dear fellow. We’re pretty certain that you did know one or two people who were active. Let me give you one pair of cryptos. Dionysus and Croesus. Heard those before?’

  When he read the words in the transcript, Naldo’s stomach turned over. Dionysus and Croesus, the names used by Oleg Penkovsky in that last, seemingly frantic, message to London saying he thought he was blown.

  He remembered Arnold Farthing, quoting verbatim from the decrypted signal, in the Berlin safe house, as the snow fell outside.

  ‘… Since the late 1930s there has been an agent of influence within the secret department,’ Arnold had quoted. By the secret department, the Russians meant the Secret Intelligence Service. ‘This man is now retired, but I believe I have met him. I do not know his real
name, but he belongs to an aristocratic family which has links with the world of secrets going back for centuries. The man’s cryptonym is Dionysus. His dossier was Sovbloc Red …’ That all figured. The family with links going back for centuries, and the dossier marked Sovbloc Red. The Sovbloc Red stamp appeared on SIS officers’ dossiers if they were known to the Soviet intelligence services and those of their satellites. Caspar’s certainly carried Sovbloc Red.

  ‘… And the dossier suggests that he still provides high octane material via a relative who is known as Croesus. This man might be a son. Further details are that Dionysus was seriously wounded in the First Great War. Croesus is a Sovbloc Green. Also a member of the same family is what we call a shifr odtel.’ That fixed it. Caspar had been branded by the words. Inevitably, Caspar was Dionysus. Who, then, was Croesus if he had a Sovbloc Green, signifying he could be used on covert assignments? Himself? Yes, though he had worked very close to the Russians, Naldo had not yet lost his Sovbloc Green stamp. And a member of the same family was a shifr odtel — a code-breaker, a cryptanalyst. The loathsome runt, Alexander, Caspar’s younger son.

  Naldo recalled that the signal had gone on to implicate an American family who could only be the Farthings. His mind filled with fury as Blunt stalled, recovered and stalled again. He was, Naldo thought, a consummate artist in what the Russians called dezinformatsia: just as Oleg Penkovsky had been. Now Blunt put the boot in.

  ‘Yes.’ There was a note that Blunt had sounded vague. As though he was searching back through dozens of names, hundreds of acquaintances, the note said. Then Blunt spoke again —

  ‘Yes, those were active cryptos. Identification’s difficult, I’m trying to recall who brought them up. The Russian service was very careful about interconsciousness.’

  ‘Your last case officer, perhaps?’

  ‘Perhaps. It isn’t easy, you know. I recall Dionysus being mentioned, and Croesus come to that. Croesus was definitely a penetration. There was talk of them being related. Father? Son? Nephew? I really can’t remember it. Oh do let me rest from all this.’

  ‘A little more, Anthony. Just a little more. Think about Dionysus again. Was he long-term?’

  ‘Very.’ No hesitation, the note said ‘Oh, very long-term. As long as Kim or the others, I felt.’

  ‘Interconscious with Kim and Guy Burgess.’

  ‘No.’ Again very firm. ‘No, but senior. Very senior indeed. I cannot recall Kim, or Guy, ever mentioning a crypto like Dionysus, or even Croesus. It came from a quite different source.’ The transcript marked a long pause, as though Blunt’s expression was altering. Then, ‘Dionysus’s situation in the service went back to the ’14—’18 war, I know that. I mean his history in the SIS, or Five, whichever. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Five. One remark I do recall. My control said something about “that one-armed and one-legged Dionysus”. But he also talked about someone who had been recruited in Shanghai, but that was Five. Could even have been Roger Hollis himself. But I’m almost certain the cripple was SIS. No, positive, and Croesus was certainly a relative.’

  That did it very nicely, Naldo thought. All the back-up anyone needed. Right from the fucking art expert’s mouth. Blunt was leading them all along false trails, lighting long fuses to distant witch-hunts.

  He was already well into Caspar’s diaries when Herbie called back to say Barbara and the children were out of London and on the way. They would be in the Axbridge hotel within the hour. Herbie recited the false names under which they had booked in, and the telephone number. All this information, together with a little flash identity material, credit cards, a few letters and the like, had been handed over by Tim Matyear.

  With great relief, Naldo went back to the diaries.

  3

  Caspar had been careful to use two different methods so that the diaries could be distinguished one from the other. First, the transcript from Diary One, the concocted work originally in cipher, had been typed on a modern electric machine. Probably, Naldo judged, an IBM golf ball. Diary Two, the real and unciphered work had been done on a much older manual machine. In the package of notes called Bogeyman, Naldo discovered the two affidavits giving legal proof. Witnesses, dates, times and indisputable evidence that the two works were genuine. One true, the other, in cipher, false and put together in order to mislead someone senior in the SIS, and so prepare what Caspar referred to as a ‘tiger trap. A pit with sharpened stakes, covered with fronds and bracken, into which the unwary would fall, no matter who it might be’.

  The rest of the night was spent tracing those three years of Sir Caspar’s double lives. By six o’clock in the morning, Naldo had placed extracts from each of the diaries side by side, marking and interleaving them.

  The diary that Caspar had seeded, to be found if necessary, appeared to provide conclusive proof that he had already been recruited by the Soviet service before his resignation, while the other, real, diary told a different story. The tone was set in the first two extracts from each.

  The entries for 5 and 6 August 1935 read as follows.

  Diary One, for the consumption of those for whom the trap had been set, said:

  Tuesday 5 August 1935.

  Today I left for good. Consummatum est. For several weeks now, since the long talk I had with the man who calls himself Redruth, I have been going out of my way to be difficult, picking small quarrels with senior officers and, twice, with C himself. Today, things came to a head at the morning briefing. I blew up after remarks concerning the Nazi target, particularly a stupid query from a young officer just posted to Prague who had complained that his senior in passport and visa control had not been able to give him any advice on how to proceed with his real work. There was a similar one last week from our new nominee in Berlin.

  In front of everyone C said that I was taking it all too seriously and that these things happened. I remarked that we should be acting professionally and we might as well all ally ourselves to Stalin, in Soviet Russia, who appears to be doing a good job in removing the dead wood. My implication was that we had a great deal of dead wood.

  C asked me to withdraw the remark. I refused and resigned on the spot, leaving without saying goodbye to anyone. I simply cleared my desk and went home, taking with me some extracts from our ‘most secret’ notes on the conduct of officers working in overseas embassies.

  Tonight, C had the gall to send a young junior, a pompous little ass called Maitland-Wood, to ask if I would reconsider. My answer was ‘Certainly not.’ Good. Finis. Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness. But another greatness calls. Tomorrow I meet Redruth in Paris and it will now start in earnest. I wonder what Pa would have thought?

  Wednesday 6 August 1935.

  The hell is not being able to confide in anyone. After a lifetime of knowing and debriefing field agents, I realize the dangers and terrible loneliness I now face. Last night I spoke at length to Phoebe about being disillusioned with the service, but was careful not to show absolute disloyalty. Nobody must suspect, and the danger lies within the family, as it has always done. I said to Phoebe that, before we try to start a life of retirement, I would need a short rest. I fear that I shall need these ‘short rests’ quite frequently now that I am to serve a new master.

  This morning I flew to Paris, and booked into an unlikely hotel near the Place de l’Opéra. The Hôtel des Deux Mondes, which, I suspect, is a whores’ paradise, for they appear to have some rooms which are leased by the hour. At four minutes past seven this evening I made contact with Redruth in the Café Balzac. He hardly spoke, so we observed the local ground rules. He left a copy of Paris Soir on the table which I picked up to read when he had gone. Inside was a slip of paper giving me the address of one of their safe houses in Paris.

  At the safe house, which lies off the Avenue Kleber, on the top storey of an apartment block, I met Redruth as arranged. He had another man with him who said I was to call him Dubois. I think he is a French national, but he speaks perfect Russian.

  We stayed until d
awn, and it turned out to be a long debriefing session. I gave them the names of all our overseas agents in the embassies, and also the identities of the local agents. At least those I knew about. They were more specific in their demands. They need from me a complete list of both the Five and SIS order of battle, which I take to mean the organization, with names of all who run departments. This, as I told them, would take a little time. I would have to sit down and write out the entire thing from memory. I also pointed out that I was not completely au fait with Five’s operational organization.

  Their questioning was very thorough, and I am in no doubt they are testing me, quite rightly, to make certain I am no double. Both of the men spoke of Stalin in the most glowing terms. Redruth said that he really is weeding out the poison ivy within the system. I cannot but have a high regard for all this. Lenin maintained that early Communism had no chance of working without the co-operation of the West: free trade and the like. Stalin maintains that, to work, Communism must have a leader, someone firm at the helm. He is undoubtedly the man.

  I performed their tasks, and wrote a detailed list of the way in which the SIS is organized. Also what I knew of Five’s set-up. Both are friendly and well disposed to me. They say someone will be in touch in a matter of three or four days. This is impressive, for it means they will have been able to check what I have told them in a very short time. I shall wait impatiently.

  The true diary, typed on an old manual, probably the ancient Royal Naldo had seen many times in the hide, told a very different story.

  Tuesday 5 August 1935.

  Well, I’ve done it now. Lord forgive me, I can only hope I get away with it. For several weeks I have engineered rows, been cantankerous and a generally difficult person to deal with. It appears that we are shifting our sights. More and more I see meagre cash, and even more badly trained officers, going into the field. All the time the accent is on infiltrating the Nazi Party.