Contents
THE KOMPROMAT KILL
About the Author
KOMPROMAT
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
THE KOMPROMAT KILL
MICHAEL JENKINS
Failsafe Thrillers
About the Author
Michael Jenkins MBE served for twenty-eight years in the British Army, rising through the ranks to complete his service as a major. He served across the globe on numerous military operations as an intelligence officer within Defence Intelligence, and as an explosive-ordnance disposal officer and military surveyor in the Corps of Royal Engineers.
His experiences in the services involved extensive travel and adventure whilst on operations, and also on many major mountaineering and exploration expeditions that he either led or was involved in. He was awarded the Geographic Medal by the Royal Geographical Society for mountain exploration and served on the screening committee of the Mount Everest Foundation charity. He was awarded the MBE on leaving the armed forces in 2007 for his services to counterterrorism.
The Kompromat Kill is Michael’s second novel, his debut novel, The Failsafe Query, having been published in July 2018. He has started work on his third spy thriller and hopes to publish it in mid-2020.
This edition first published in 2019
All rights reserved
© Michael Jenkins, 2019
The right of Michael Jenkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ASIN (eBook): B07QFSF44F
ISBN (Paperback): 9781090614193
Cover Design by Mecob
Cover images:
© iStockphoto.com © Shutterstock.com
To my late father, whose creative Welsh genius inspired me.
And in dedication to the close family of British and American bomb-disposal teams and high-risk searchers.
“To touch something that was meant to cause death and destruction and overcome it, to deny it, is the most amazing feeling.”
Anonymous bomb-disposal officer, 2006
KOMPROMAT
Compromising information collected for use in blackmailing, discrediting or manipulating someone, typically for political purposes.
Origin: Russian, short for komprometirujuščij (‘compromising material’)
Prologue
East Berlin
1986
Marcella placed a hand inside her dark grey coat and touched the pistol. She reached further inside, just far enough to feel the full comfort of the Heckler & Koch P7 sitting taut and primed within the pocket she had meticulously made for its carriage. With a round chambered, it gave her the assurance she needed to continue with this disturbing mission. Just.
Feeling anxious, she glanced across the dimly lit road, watching the late-night comings and goings of East Berlin’s Auberge bar situated right in the heart of Friedrichshain. The bristle of a chilly wind caught her hair and the collar of her coat flapped.
Marcella didn’t like the gritty bars here and the depressing facades reminded her that these were the surly masks behind which tyrannical Stasi informers were ready to act. She knew she had to be careful on this desperately cold night. Much more careful than on her previous mission for she knew she had enemies who had been ruffled in recent days.
The street lights flickered as she watched a tiny rodent scurry along the gutter before dashing into a pavement crevice, squeezing its body into the void like a chipmunk into its burrow. She curled her toes, feeling the chill creep into the arches of her feet and wishing now she’d worn warmer boots. She lit a cigarette. Waiting. Remembering. Recalling her actions from three months ago on the inner German border, deep inside a coniferous forest, where she had dug up her communications equipment ready to facilitate the escape of a high-grade defector into the hands of her MI6 colleagues who were hiding on the far side of the heavily defended border.
The man she was helping to defect was a German with the codename BRUMBY. She remembered the lengthy make-up session with an MI6 colleague, who had created the perfect disguise of a lady in her mid-seventies, rather than the forty-one years she was. The immaculate disguises, backed up by forged exit visas, had allowed them to take advantage of the pensioner scheme, which allowed the elderly to cross into West Germany for up to four weeks a year. As they were retired, they were seen by the East German government as economically unimportant and of no great loss if they defected.
She smiled as she remembered how the Americans trusted the Brits to create these genius escape routes, including a tunnel in East Berlin that Marcella occasionally used when security was ultra-high. Marcella smiled again, knowing that tonight she would use a route by road, disguised as a pensioner, to surreptitiously help an East German Stasi officer defect to the West.
Marcella had one primary role in the cold war as a covert member of the British Embassy BRIXMIS team: planning escape routes and helping defectors cross the border. She was secretly embedded in the British Military Commanders Mission in East Germany, living her life travelling between its mission house in East Berlin and the Olympic stadium in West Berlin. The other eighty-odd soldiers and officers of BRIXMIS knew nothing of her missions into the depths of East Germany for clandestine defection operations, nor did they know about her mysterious Czech-born consigliere that she regularly met in East Berlin. The BRIXMIS staff, who knew her fondly as Marcie, were legitimate British military staff operating from their mission house in Potsdam, where they mounted overt patrols to collect intelligence on the Warsaw Pact forces stationed across East Germany.
Back in the street, the psychedelic bar lights cast a series of curious shadows across the road. Marcella moved slowly to the doorway of a cake shop, bidi
ng her time. The mist was super fine, small beads of water drifting gently in front of her face, enough to make her strain her eyes as she watched the American officer cross the street and walk into the bar. She touched her pistol once more, felt her mouth go dry, a signature of her stress levels at this stage of a covert operation, and looked at her watch again. A watch that was counting down the last few hours of her life.
Marcella looked over her shoulder, as if to check that her consigliere was watching over her, guiding her. He wasn’t. And she knew that. But it was a ritual that kept the fear at bay, allowing her to get on with the job in hand. Mindfully presuming that she was safe, she began the long walk to the bar and the start of another mission with her CIA contact.
As she opened the door to the bar she felt a chilled breeze quell the lingering smell of alcohol. She looked at the clocks behind the bar – one showed the time in London, another that in Berlin and the last that in Moscow. For a moment it seemed as if she was in a cold-war vacuum as she felt the barman’s eyes pierce her torso, before she made her way to the window seat where the American was sat with two glasses of dark Alt beer. Medium height, nothing distinctive, a man who blended in well with the nightlife of Friedrichshain, but he did have one distinguishable characteristic when he spoke. A lisp. A lisp so faint it was almost indiscernible, but Marcella noticed it was always more pronounced when he was drinking.
It wasn’t a long conversation and the German they spoke was pitch-perfect to anyone listening in that night to what was an intriguing exchange between the pair. Their cover stories had been immaculately crafted by their respective organisations, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Secret Intelligence Service, and each of them was the best of the best of the intelligence officers operating behind the Iron Curtain. Marcella listened carefully as the CIA man explained how they would help a Stasi colonel, a newly recruited agent, escape East Berlin and that it was now up to her how she got him across the border and into West Germany. The CIA would be waiting for her in Helmstedt in the West.
Marcella left the bar first and made for the narrow rear exit before walking down five small concrete steps leading to a makeshift veranda. She walked confidently into the shadows, crossing a small pebbled yard to a pond which was collecting water from a tall aquatic feature gently trickling over green moss. The sound of running water gave her a feeling of serenity. She sauntered behind the tall water feature and underneath an ornate arbour bristling with ivy that ensured she was hidden from any peering eyes in the bar. She looked at her manicured fingers. No paint. Just trimmed short. She pinched a small brick with her index finger and thumb to carefully release it from the back of the water feature, placed the antique snuffbox inside the void and replaced the brick to complete the dead-letter drop. Inside the snuffbox was a tiny piece of paper that had been carefully inserted under the powder and into a void in the base of the box. It contained an encrypted message. A message for her consigliere, her handler if the operation went awry that night. She had carefully crafted the message in the toilet of the bar following her discreet conversation with the American. The writing was miniscule but precise, the result of years of training to get lots of information onto a single tiny piece of paper.
Marcella shrugged her shoulders and sighed before walking the short distance under the floral archway to the garden gate and then into the darkness of the street. The sharp wind streaming off the river cut through her hair and she pulled her collar up, tightened her scarf and squinted hard to adjust her eyes to the darkness, feeling her eyes water.
She rounded the corner and strode purposefully along the street, looking for a Wartburg 311 with a crack in the top right-hand corner of the windscreen. Within two minutes she was bending down and peering into the car to check that the driver was who she expected it to be: a middle-aged woman with a floral scarf over her head who was now beckoning her to get in. Only a brief nod and smile were exchanged between the two females before they drove off with the defector neatly hidden in the specially adapted boot, which contained a hidden void, breathing tubes and a manual clicker to operate if he was in any trouble.
Two hours later, after an uneventful journey across the East German countryside, they arrived at a small farmstead at the canopied rendezvous point deep in the Bartenslebener Forest. The woman in the headscarf drove over a cattle grid, causing Marcella to accidentally bite her tongue before the car was forced with high revs through deep mud and shale until skidding to a halt outside a small wooden chalet.
Inside the warming chalet, Marcella scrunched up her face, allowing the scarf woman to accentuate her natural wrinkles with make-up. An expensive ultra-light wig was fixed over her naturally short hair, dark brown eyeshadow applied around her nose to age her sharp features and stage paint applied to make her eyes look harsh and sunken. It took twice as long to create a workable mask for the Colonel before he too had the appearance of a seventy-five-year-old. Within a few hours Herr and Frau Schroeder were good to pass muster. Marcella bade farewell to her MI6 colleague and began the process of making sure the exit visas and photographs matched their new pensioner identities. They would cross the border at precisely 8am in their two-stroke Trabant 601 estate car, which was laden with a Zimmer frame and enough clothes for four days to visit a dying sister in Hamburg. Over the last year, Marcella had made good use of the pensioner traffic across the inner German border, which had increased over the years to nearly three million in 1986. She felt confident of another successful defection, but something gnawed away at her from the last words of the CIA officer. Cryptic words from an ambiguous mind.
Marcella peeled off the vinyl gloves to angle a spotlight onto her visa handiwork before glancing across to the Colonel, checking that everything would be OK. Everything would be fine she told herself, despite her mind stoking the fear and her senses dreaming the unknown. Marcella knew she was approaching the most dangerous part of the mission and she took heart that, if she did not return, then one day someone could decipher her message, which would cause bedlam in the intelligence services. She had risked her life to investigate several cases related to East Berlin spy rings and her legacy now lay in that antique snuffbox, a present from her closest confidant.
Marcella walked outside to retrace the route to a buried cache she had taken on arrival that night, confident with her surroundings, pleased with her forgeries. A final radio call to her master would signal that the operation was good to go. She had walked the route a dozen or so times previously, using prominent markers to navigate her way to her secret location in the woods.
A distant owl hooting and the leaves flickering in the breeze were the only sounds she heard amongst the thicket of trees, though she found her mind juggling with the racket of confusing voices in her head. Did her CIA contact know? How might he know? Don’t be so silly, you’re being paranoid. She touched her pistol one more time before looking to the ground where her stash lay. Below her feet and next to a small tree stump lay a buried cache, the contents of which included an HF radio, two Beretta pistols, a variety of passports, exit visa documentation and a thousand Deutschmarks. Marcella reached under the stump of a tree to pull out a small trowel to break the turf. She began to lift the lid of the metal container to replace the items she had used for the forgeries and to make that final call. She glanced over her shoulder one more time.
Just as she peered inside with a pen torch in her mouth, a tall man stepped out from the shadow of the trees. He approached her from behind, drew his Makarov pistol fitted with a silencer, grabbed Marcella’s forehead from the rear and pumped two shots into her head.
Chapter 1
London
July 2019
Fletcher Barrington was an American spy who carried troubling secrets and wore a cleverly developed mask to hide them. Now in his late sixties, he took pride that most secrets in his life remained unknown to others, not even his closest Washington colleagues. Only a handful of people in his esteemed career truly knew the man behind the aging face who now wal
ked with a slight limp. Those who knew Fletcher Barrington described him as charming and domineering, but they knew little of the real man who was walking past the Ritz hotel on his way to a rendezvous at one of London’s iconic venues with one such person who knew him better than any.
Two immaculately dressed doormen graced the entrance to Quaglino’s in the affluent St James’s area of London. A timeless cocktail bar. A jazz club with a buzzing atmosphere. A magnificent venue for the discerning, elite and wealthy of Mayfair. Barrington handed his coat to a pretty Polish woman as the maître d’ appeared though a gap in the neatly hung curtains that concealed the entrance to the huge amphitheatre below. A tall woman, she was immaculately dressed in a black cocktail dress with matching high heels and her hair was in a tight bob. She spoke with a distinguished Home Counties accent and held a smile that drew Barrington’s gaze for too long. She exchanged courteous pleasantries and led the way to his regular table just below the showcase stairway. The house was full. There was a vibrant mood as the eight-piece jazz band readied itself for the first of its two sessions on a low stage at the far end of the gargantuan hall that preened itself in a colourful opulence that represented 1930s London.
Barrington enjoyed his forays to this special place, lavishly refurbished to recreate its style of yesteryear, and a place of respite from his slavish political routine as an American official visiting London. Fletcher Barrington was a former CIA grandee – a knotty, gregarious figure with a stare as cold as the wars he had fought in.
Barrington stood to welcome his guest. ‘Nice of you to come along, Edmund,’ he said jovially, gripping his friend’s hand before giving him a hug. ‘It’s been too long my friend.’
‘A long time indeed,’ his friend replied, bowing slightly. ‘We will make up for it tonight. What a splendid location.’
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