The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  Marcus nodded, privately unconvinced, and walked across to the window which looked over the car park at the back of the building. Cars were popping in through the control gate, one after the other, stopping and starting at the barrier with hideous regularity, as though automated and not driven. On-the-dot, conscientious people in little Heralds and Minis, twenty-nine miles an hour all the way in from Croydon and Barnet with their mild tweed jackets and a copy of last week’s Sunday Express in the rear window. Yet in half an hour they would be sorting cables in the cypher room, decoding reports from the field, culling through the Beirut and Cairo pouches, handling people’s lives—and Marcus’s reputation.

  They looked so very safe and dedicated and English, Marcus thought. And stupid. But one such person had been Philby, a second Blake, another Edwards. And perhaps Marlow? Williams was too beguiled by him, too soft. Marlow was so ordinary it worried Marcus. And it crossed his mind if, in these stringent days, a certain degree of flamboyance in a spy might not be a better guarantee of security and trust—rather than the anonymous characteristics of these people who locked their cars in a top security area and streamed in through the back of the building with such an air of probity and dedication. You couldn’t tell a thing from their faces. It made Marcus uneasy.

  Still, with Edwards, there would be an object lesson for them all at last. He would never again have to doubt those inscrutable morning faces. Edwards’s total demise would put an end to it all, make up for it all: there would be no dacha in Moscow or forty-two years in the Scrubs for him; the deceits and betrayals of the past, the good men in so many sectors who had simply disappeared and the rest who were nursing ruined careers on cut pensions in small houses in Sussex.

  Marcus thought about their various fates with an overwhelming righteousness, as though in multiplying the pity he brought to bear on their individual misfortunes he could justify his own insensate vehemence in the matter of defectors and double agents.

  He knew Williams didn’t share his vindictiveness, indeed that he was far more concerned with his own rider to the plan of disposing of Edwards. He wanted to use Edwards before he “disappeared” whereas Marcus just wanted to see him dead—something which he could no longer arrange for him through any British court. And he saw just a chance that in being tied in with Williams’s scheme Edwards might get away. That was the flaw in the plan—simply that there were two plans. Edwards was being given an alternative, albeit an impossibly dangerous one, which Marcus would never have allowed him: a narrow exit which, if he were foolish enough to take it, could get him clear of them.

  Marcus’s plan for him had been straightforward enough: Edwards had gone to Cairo and his own department had already blown him to Israeli Intelligence in Tel Aviv as the Russian agent he was. They had said he was on his way there with the names of a group of Israeli Intelligence men stationed in Egypt—names that he had picked up in the course of his work for Holborn—and that he was about to pass this information on to Egyptian Security before beating it back to Moscow. On this impeccable advice Tel Aviv’s men in Cairo would pick Edwards up at the airport—or the moment he got to his hotel—and kill him. The Israelis were tough about that sort of thing. Necessarily tough. Unlike Williams.

  The operation had every chance of success—until Williams had imposed what seemed to Marcus a quite unnecessary handicap to the scheme: the ostensible purpose which Edwards had been given for going to Egypt was to contact Mohammed Yunis and stir revolution within the Arab Socialist Union. Williams had justified this as a “necessary reason” for sending him to Cairo, without which he would immediately suspect something. Marcus, on the other hand, had argued that Edwards went to Cairo every few months in any case, as a matter of routine—and wasn’t that sufficient reason in this case? But he had been unable to dissuade Williams.

  Why had Williams wanted to jeopardise the plan? For that’s what it amounted to, Marcus decided. Was he getting too old for the job, too cautious, past making an unequivocal decision, intent always on creating innumerable “standbys” and “provisos”? Was that it? And if not was it possible that somehow, for some reason, Williams wanted Edwards to have a get out, wanted to warn him that the whole affair was a trap by offering him the clearly impractical idea of subverting Yunis? And who would want to let Edwards off the hook? Unless, like Edwards, he worked for Moscow?

  It was a quarter past nine. Someone opened the door in the next room and the two men looked up, almost apprehensively, and then continued talking, but in lower, more careful tones, like conspirators. But were they both involved in the same conspiracy? Marcus wondered.

  “Edwards may break,” Marcus said. “I mean not after the Israelis get him—but before. I can’t believe that anyone with his experience of the area would fall for that plan about contacting Yunis. And if Edwards has any suspicions don’t you think he’ll run the moment he hits Cairo? Or before—on the way. He’ll know we’ve cooked something up for him. A trap.”

  Williams knew that this was perfectly true, just as he’d known long before anyone else that Edwards was a double, working with Moscow. He’d realized it finally when, out of the forty or so British agents in the Middle East whom Blake had shopped, only Edwards and half a dozen other minor figures had remained with their cover intact.

  All had been well until Marcus had been moved from the Scottish Office and appointed as an internal watchdog by the new Minister to look into the whole question of security in the Middle East section—from then on the sands had begun to shift awkwardly.

  Marcus had got to the point about Edwards with uncomfortable rapidity. He’d hit on the fact that Edwards’s cover had been left intact after Blake had shopped everyone else, he’d combed his files, turned his life inside out, grilled Crowther in retirement He just couldn’t accept that Blake could have overlooked one of their key men in the Middle East section—and he’d been right.

  Petnicki, the defector the Americans had got hold of a month before, had confirmed it all. And Williams had been unable to do anything about it—except ensure that Marcus’s investigations didn’t percolate up to him, and try to get Edwards out of the way, which he couldn’t do directly, or through Moscow, since he’d cut every contact with them once Marcus had begun his ferreting. As far as Moscow was concerned Williams was “buried” for the time being, which meant he didn’t exist for them, was not to aproach them in any way, warn them, or tell them anything. That was the arrangement. It was his only chance of keeping his cover intact. After Philby and his two friends, whom he’d recruited in the early ’thirties—and then Blake and now Edwards—he was the last, the most important man left in the Citadel. It wasn’t a question now of being caught without a chair when the music stopped; he couldn’t afford to play the game any more at all. It was a matter of sitting tight and never taking one’s eyes off the orchestra.

  He looked at Marcus firmly. “Edwards may run. But if he does they’ll be with him. The Israelis were going to have a man at the airport.”

  “But the whole idea of his contacting Yunis—it seems to me an excellent way of warning him—no? If he has any sense, and he has, he won’t go near Yunis and hell know something’s up. We should have had him in the Scrubs by now, with another forty-two years, and not given him the chance, however slight, of getting back to Moscow.”

  Williams smiled slightly and created a sigh. “Forty-two years doesn’t seem to do much good. They don’t seem to last the pace these days. And the hanging judges have all gone. This is the way to do it. Edwards won’t be many days on the Nile—and he’ll never see Moscow. The Yunis alternative is perfectly sound—perfectly in order.”

  Williams lied comfortably, a slow pensive authority in his voice—the voice and the authority born of many years dealing with over-conscientious, pushy subordinates—underlining his real knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs which he knew Marcus, for all his other skills, didn’t possess. He’d been involved with the Scottish Office for too long and in negotiating that devious terrain he had
found little time for any wider geography.

  “We’ve gone over it all. Goodness me. And Edwards is already there. We’ve talked it out together, you should have voiced your doubts at the time.”

  “I suppose so. I wasn’t so familiar with UAR affairs then. But it’s clear enough now to me. We’re warning Edwards …”

  Marcus looked directly at Williams for the first time that morning: a sad look, the small blue eyes admitting failure for a moment, Williams thought. Or were they questioning him, connecting him directly with this idea that Edwards had been warned?

  For that had been exactly his intention—to alert Edwards. He hoped what he’d done would be sufficient, that Edwards would get himself safely to Moscow. He would leave the Cairo flight somewhere along the line, at Rome, or more likely at Munich where he could slip into Berlin, contact the Resident there, cross over into the East city and on to Moscow. And that would be the end of it all; Edwards would go home; he would never get near the Israelis at Cairo Airport, let alone Mohammed Yunis. Without any direct contact, Williams would get him out of the way under Marcus’s nose. The message and the warning would be implicit in his directions to contact Yunis and infiltrate his Union—for nothing could be more obviously suicidal: he was waving red flags all down the line at Edwards. He couldn’t fail to notice them.

  After all, thought Williams, if he put himself in Edwards’s position, as he’d often done recently … it was surprisingly easy, professionally they were the same sort of men. And Williams reminded himself once again of how many professional characteristics they must share: the development to a fine pitch of all those senses beyond the fifth—those which created confidence and attracted luck in the worst corners, the others which warned or encouraged, pushed or stalled one, at just the right moment, so that even in the most hazy circumstances where logic was useless, one felt impelled towards the right decision. Thus equipped it was possible to survive indefinitely in two worlds, for these added dimensions of the deeply committed liar, like any gift of genius, had the effect of creating a patina of trust around one which the merely honest rarely possessed.

  In these circumstances one paid court to the dissembler and mistrusted steady virtue. A licence for deceit was like cut garlic in one’s pocket: one stank of belief.

  And Edwards must still have all these gifts, Williams thought. He would not have lost them—the confidence and the skills and the early warning systems born of a lifetime’s necessary disloyalty would now be more acute than ever: Edwards would run for his life. There was little to worry about there.

  But there was Marlow to think about; the other half of the plan called MOUSE: the official Holborn plan which would now have to be put into operation when they met Marlow that afternoon. He was an important lever in the machine: if Israeli Intelligence in Cairo, once they got hold of Edwards, were to believe that he was a genuine Soviet defector and not just a plant, London would have to appear much more concerned at his loss; someone from the Holborn section would have to be sent chasing him, to try and stop him before he got over to the other side: a bona fide spy-catcher, a warranty of the goods being supplied; Marlow was to be that man.

  Of course, it would never come to that, Williams realized; since Edwards would surely never get to Cairo Marlow would never be needed to guarantee him in this way as a defector: certainly not; Marlow’s visit to Cairo would be for another purpose altogether, something which Williams had planned and arranged long before with Moscow.

  Suez had given him the idea; Eden’s muddled ‘collusion’—they would do it properly this time: a scheme for Moscow which would once and for all bring about a complete Soviet grip on the Middle East: the subversion of the Nasser regime by creating a war for them against Israel, which they would necessarily lose and which would subsequently allow for a massive Soviet military and political build-up in Egypt, which in turn would lead to their virtual control of the country and the other Arab satellites—a position Moscow would never achieve as long as Nasser remained in power.

  The steady, honest, loyal Marlow was to be the man who took the fall here, the ‘plant’ who carried the virus, the British agent dealing with Israel, to be unmasked by Egyptian security in Cairo with a secret memorandum, a forged copy of an Israeli Ministry of Defence document from the Chief of Staff General Rabin to General Elazar, Commander Northern Front, outlining details for an advance on the Syrian border—troop dispositions, attack schedules, primary targets—orders, in fact, for an Israeli preemptive strike against Syria.

  With a message of this sort, found on a genuine British agent, Nasser would have his MiG’s and Sochi bombers over Tel Aviv within forty-eight hours, and Israel would have shot them out of the sky and been on the canal by the end of the week.

  The Moscow Resident’s department in London had had Marlow under surveillance for some time and as soon as he packed his bags for Cairo their plan with him would come into operation: the hidden document which Egyptian Security would “find”—on a tip-off from Moscow.

  Williams had chosen Marlow as the carrier of this virus because he had initially agreed to his recruitment into the service, years before, for just such an eventuality as this. Every Intelligence Department needed people like Marlow on hand—men in whom nothing had been invested and whose account could only show a profit when it was closed. And that, after all, was the proper use—the only positive justification—for an intelligence service, Williams thought: to make war for a country that didn’t want one, and couldn’t win it, in order to bring on better times …

  *

  Marcus turned away from the window, sat down and stretched himself amiably, easing his muscles, tilting his head back, in a happy cruciform.

  “You’re right. There’s no real warning for Edwards in the Yunis plan. It’s reasonable—or as reasonable as some of the other schemes I’ve come across in the files here. It takes time to accustom oneself, that’s all—from the Highland Development Authority to Cairo back alleys—it’s a different sort of intrigue. It was just a thought about Yunis.”

  Williams suspected the intrigue was probably identical.

  “We’ve all had too many second thoughts. The ones we started with are all right. You can depend on it. Let’s get some coffee. The trolley must be about by now.”

  Williams got up, looked into the still empty room next door, and went now to the window, pulling the last bit of curtain back firmly to the edge of the casement. The secretaries were flocking in through the back entrance—Navy Recruitment used the front one—and he looked at the bobbing scarves and heard the click-clack of small feet beating on the concrete like a football rattle and found that he could no longer interpret what his senses told him about the view in any meaningful way. Abruptly, there was no name which he could give to what he saw; the idea that the “things” crossing the car park could be described as “women” or “secretaries” or by any other word was ludicrous. It was like looking at a fork for so long that it lost its identity, its forkiness. It sometimes happened to him, this: it was a rapid sensation, hardly more than seconds, like brief concussion, during which everything lay suspended.

  But as soon as he managed to put words back to his vision—“those are the secretaries in scarves and stilettoes arriving for work”—he knew that Marcus was lying. That querulous Scottish logic of his that had eased up so many stones in his department, smashing the insects, had now suddenly disappeared. He had not climbed down in the face of Williams’s explanations about Yunis, he had argued all the way and had then suddenly fallen headlong backwards. He had accepted everything, given up the questions.

  “Of course there’s no warning implicit in Edwards’s directions to contact Yunis. Of course not. It was sound thinking, so that he won’t suspect his trip has any other motive …” Marcus might as well have said the words there and then, Williams thought, sitting back, arms triangled behind his head, like someone who has at last seen the light in an argument and taken pleasure in the admission. Williams had been prepared to argu
e the case for subverting Yunis—as he had done, convincingly, in the face of persistent arguments against the plan for Marcus. He was not now prepared to accept the man’s capitulation. There was something completely out of character in it.

  And that was what disturbed Williams: the break in the logic, in the slow precise meanderings which had always before got Marcus out of the maze and into the truth; Marcus had broken off too soon. Now there was a real threat to his own long sense of security in his cover in Holborn; he could feel it, like a proffered knife. He had come to depend so much for his safety on intuition, on the sense which he had developed which monitored every detail of his work and office routine: the low-grade memos and files he was passed and the others he received on a strictly limited circulation: a new secretary in the next office but one, a different messenger in the corridor, a click at the wrong time on an outside call: he had come to assess all the minute paraphernalia of his work as a single picture, which he glanced at every hour of the day, and which, if it changed even in the smallest detail, like a degree on a barometer, alerted him like a gun blast. He had been safe for so long; the picture had remained exactly the same for thirty-five years. And now Marcus had turned it upside down, in seconds, while his back was turned.

  He knew now that Marcus had finally agreed with him because in some way he had seen the light; he had seen exactly what was going to happen: Edwards was going to give them the slip. He would never get near Cairo—or make contact with Mohammed Yunis; that ridiculous rider to the plan would warn him and he’d run for Moscow long beforehand: Marcus had seen all that. And the next thing Marcus would see, or confirm—how long had he?—days or hours?—was that the man who had carefully rigged this red light for Edwards was himself.

  Williams looked out at the last of the girls, a few tall stragglers in silk scarves and twin sets, crossing the rear car park; the “better class” of girl who still lived with Mummy and Daddy in Tunbridge Wells and never made it on time. Marcus was on to him—or dead set in the right direction for him at least; there was no doubt about that. His ordinary senses had failed a minute before, like that passage of time on a train ferry when the carriages pass from one guage to another, but he had come now into full possession of those other senses, every one beyond the fifth—the ones which warned one, at just the right moment, so that even in the most hazy circumstances where logic was useless, one felt impelled towards the right decision …