The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  A woman knocked and came into the room.

  “Morning, Rosalie. Two coffees, please. Both with. And sugar.”

  He would have to break cover, contact Moscow. There was nothing else for it. It was not Marlow now who had to be dispensed with, it was Marcus. And there weren’t many ways to do that, without inviting more suspicion upon himself. It wasn’t going to be easy. Yet in thinking of Marlow he had the clue already, saw a way out.

  Marcus—the lawyer, the interrogator, the counter-intelligence expert; the wily Scotsman who missed nothing, the Russian speaker who’d been the terror of every Soviet trawler skipper in the North Sea when he’d been in the Scottish Office: very well then; he would secure for him a quarry worthy of his talents, somebody possibly even more important than himself: an investigation that would result in his going under for a long time.

  *

  Williams left the office at exactly his usual time that evening. His two meetings earlier with Marlow had passed satisfactorily. The man had voiced a number of perfectly reasonable doubts about the scheme to “look for” Edwards, and he had seemed to think that Edwards was in Cairo already, without actually being told that this was so, but otherwise there had been a few bad moments. Marlow was a loyal fellow. If only it went as sweetly with Marcus, Williams thought.

  He had always walked some distance from the office before catching a bus or tube to the King’s Road—always had a drink at any one of a number of different pubs on the way and gone on to buy an evening paper from an equal variety of news stands. It was a haphazard wandering which he had built into his routine years before—a proviso for just such an occasion as this, when he had to make contact: if he was already under surveillance he would be doing no more than he did every night, going in and out of various pubs, crossing from the saloon to the public. But tonight he would do much more—getting on to the Waterloo tube at the last possible moment, getting off and coming back to where he started, on to the street again, walking, then the same process on the Central line to Oxford Circus, engrossed in his paper, jumping off just as the doors were closing, waiting on the stairway for any footsteps behind him.

  He was tired an hour later, his back against the sweaty phone box in the ticket concourse upstairs, the last of the rush hour crowds swarming past him.

  “Mills here. Who’s speaking?”

  Williams had almost forgotten the Cockney-Jewish Whitechapel Road voice. It wasn’t the sort of mixture one heard often nowadays, with its echoes of a Russian émigré past in the East End, so that the “Mills”, in the way he pronounced his name, became “Meals”—which wasn’t, of course, his name at all.

  Williams gave his code phrase by way of reply and asked for an urgent meeting. They wasted no words on the phone.

  “Come to the office then; the usual routine.”

  *

  Williams had a whisky in the bar on the Grosvenor House Hotel, left a second one unfinished, went to the gents and from there to the penthouse elevators at the rear of the hotel. He turned his back to them, pretending to look for someone, waiting for an empty car. He got off a floor below and walked up.

  Mills opened the door. He was in his sixties and had the rouged and toupéed features of a man who had tried and failed to escape from the mould which nature had cast him in: that of a caricature Jew—a large nose, bulbous and hooked, wide forehead and narrowing chin, hooded eyes close together: a Disraeli from a nineteenth-century cartoon who had done his best to iron out the trademarks of his ancestry. He looked now slightly rubbery and false, like a half finished wax-work or an idea in the make-up department for a horror film. He has survived, Williams thought, because he looks so obviously devious.

  But there was nothing the least shifty in his manner. He had a busy, straightforward, almost overbearing attitude, like a man who had little time to spare and took salad and a glass of milk for his lunch.

  Mills ran a small film company from the office—(“Marlborough Films—a ring of confidence, don’t you think?”)—and there was recommendation from the Cork Film Festival on the wall behind his desk—“Carrot and Donkey” it had been called, a documentary about a red-headed child in Connemara. Williams had seen it once in the King’s Road Odeon. It had been better than the feature.

  They sat together on a sofa under Cocteau’s poster for the Edinburgh Festival.

  “There’s some soda water in the fridge?”

  “Without for me.”

  They drank their whisky in large Waterford glass tumblers (another award from Cork) and Mills listened to Williams’s story of his meeting with Marcus that morning.

  “Well, what do you suggest then?” Mills looked upset, as though he were being put upon unnecessarily. “A fast car going down his street? We can’t risk that sort of ‘incident’—doing in your deputy. It would certainly find its way back to us, and you. And kidnapping, you surely don’t—”

  “No, of course not—”

  “We can’t really do anything to him here without risking more suspicion falling on you. He’ll almost certainly start voicing his theories about you—”

  “That’s the whole point. I want to arrange for someone else altogether to settle him—before he makes his mind up about me. I want you to bait him. Listen: he’s a lawyer, his reputation is as an interrogator; counter-intelligence—that’s his métier in our section: quizzing possible doubles, defectors: ferreting. That’s what he was brought in for. Now I want you to get Moscow to lay on a defector for him—in Cairo. Urgently. And someone important, not some station slogger. Someone he’ll want to go for. Get the man to ask for asylum at the British Consulate in Garden City. They’ll contact the Chief of Service here and he’ll ask for Marcus to go to Cairo to check the man out. That’s his job. Our Mid-East section would have to deal with that sort of thing in any case. I won’t appear to have had anything to do with it.”

  “And how will that silence him?” Mills sniffed and pulled his nose, quickly and vigorously between thumb and forefinger, as though intent on plucking it away from his face without his or anyone else’s noticing.

  “Marcus won’t ever get to the Consulate. He’ll be carrying the goods we’ve arranged for Marlow. We just change the two of them around: the word from Moscow to Egyptian Intelligence will be Marcus, not Marlow. Marcus will be carrying the memorandum instead; I’ll see to that. I expect he’ll get fifteen years for his trouble. Marlow we just leave to look around Cairo for Edwards, as planned; we don’t break him to the Egyptians. As for Edwards, he should have come home by now. Has there been any word?”

  “No. But I wouldn’t have heard yet in any case.”

  “Well, get over to the Embassy straight away. Line up your defector in Cairo, have him approach the Consulate at once, and wait till I call you to say Marcus is on the way. Then bounce him to Egyptian security there. That should be in two—three days at most, if you work fast.”

  Mills was worried. He didn’t like Williams and he cared less for his plan. But there was nothing he could do about it. Williams outranked him; he was the man at the top of the pile in London, the one they could never afford to lose; and certainly he didn’t want to be the man responsible for that: all the others who’d been lost to them over the years had been pawns by comparison to this queen.

  “Right then. I’ve been here too long already.”

  “I’ll have to clear this with the Colonel here. Vorishil—”

  “Clear it with the Politburo—if you think you’ve got that sort of time. But do it; otherwise I’ll have to break—now. Moscow won’t like that. And there’s no reason for it: Marcus suspects at the moment, he may have me under surveillance, that’s all. He’ll be working on it—and me—for the next few days. He’ll want to be sure, absolutely sure, before he comes out and says anything, before there’s any serious investigation. So we have that time, we have forty-eight hours start on him, at least. Make the bait ripe enough—and he’ll go for it. I can guarantee it. Take his mind off me: give him a real peach to get his teeth
into. And by the way, don’t swamp the air waves on the Moscow circuit up at the Embassy—that’s how they first got on to Philby. No arguments, no long correspondence with mother—just one message—help you to make it all the sharper.”

  Williams avoided the lifts, walked down the stairs and back into the gents on the ground floor next to the bar. He tidied himself a little and then returned to finish his whisky. He’d been gone more than five minutes. Too long, but he was sure no one had got near to following him, even if they had already started to tail him. It would have been almost impossible to pick him up in the crowded bar and lobby in any case—if they’d ever got that far: the place was full of stuffed shirts for some ball, in scarlet cummerbunds, lowering quick brandies while their women prepared themselves in the ladies’ cloaks.

  Williams envied their vulgar ease, their next few irresponsible hours, before he decided he might as well match it. He ordered himself a third whisky, an expensive Malt which he took neat. He didn’t want to go back to Flood Street. Not yet. For the moment, like a child playing truant, he felt safety lay in luxury, anonymity, distance—being far from school, leaning over the rim of a Knickerbocker Glory.

  Then he went home, walking briskly across the evening park, glancing at the pickups—an exaggerated blonde on a bench—an exotic flower in the night; the commoner strolling troopers looking for beer money and a bed till reveille—inspected them professionally with perfectly concealed interest Yes, but not now. Not yet.

  He poured a small glass of sherry for his mother. He couldn’t bear the stuff, even the smell of it; yet he’d liked it long ago. Something to do with his father? Another way of getting at him? The locked tantalus in the Thames Valley library; the butler had a second key and they’d taken gulps, at it together; another conspiracy, not long after the Russian doll. Or was it just that, with age, one required the ultimate refinement of the grape: fine, mellowed brandy? Williams amused himself with these sybaritic reflections on long-ago tastes and present passions—fiddling with memory, the panorama of his life, to no purpose—like an idle man on a pinball machine: dabbing in the shallows of thought.

  He’d done his thinking for that day, he decided, come clear of the dangerous passages. Now it was time to merge into the background again. You had to know when to switch off. He’d have a drink round the corner in the Wellington: there was a new Guards battalion in town and rumour of two Swedish frigates on a courtesy visit just berthed below Tower Bridge …

  The great thing to remember, he thought, if they were on to you, was to keep the pattern—exactly; no panic, do the things you’d always done, stick to type. That was what saved you. When the others lost their heads, broke faith and started running for the night ferry—you just carried on as you’d always done, doing the obvious thing. And then, if they were looking for you, they looked right through you. They never saw you at all.

  9

  Colonel Hamdy shook hands with Edwards and then took a seat next to him on one side of the desk. Major Amin, who had first questioned Edwards, joined them.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Edwards. An unfortunate mistake.” The Major spoke in Arabic. Edwards sighed, ruffling back his hair. Fine. He’d have to have the ritual cup of coffee with them and then he’d be on his way.

  “I’d no idea you were with us,” the Major continued, “until Colonel Hamdy told me. I’m with Home Security as you’ve probably realized. We don’t always know what our Foreign section are up to. My apologies.”

  Colonel Hamdy nodded a happy confirmation of this, eased himself in his chair.

  “How are you, Henry? I didn’t expect you back so soon. What have they sent you on?”

  Edwards looked at the other officer.

  “Go ahead. You can speak quite freely.”

  “Well, I don’t know what’s going on with Mohammed Yunis. The thing is that I was sent out to make contact with him. We met on the plane quite by chance …’

  The two men seemed to look at him more closely than they listened, as though his face might give them more of a clue to what had been going on than his words, which already sounded hollow and unconvincing.

  “I was to approach Yunis, sound him out on his real views about the President and the possibility of my section infiltrating his Union—the idea was to form a fifth column around Marxist dissidents in the UAR—”

  “With the idea of overthrowing the President?”

  “Yes. Though of course it hadn’t got beyond the early stages—of finding out what way Yunis might go. That was my job. A wild idea, I thought. But I had to pretend to go along with it. I’d no intention of contacting Yunis. As I said, it was quite by chance. He got on at Munich and took a seat next to me. What have you picked him up for?”

  “He’s been chattering, talking with Moscow, making ‘unauthorized arrangements’.” The Colonel looked at Edwards closely. “After what you’ve said about being told to contact him, you don’t really expect me to believe you met him quite by chance on that plane, do you? The two of you seem to have been involved in exactly the same scheme—an ASU takeover here, a Moscow puppet government.”

  “How could Holborn be involved with Moscow in a plan like that?”

  “Because they see things the same way over this. East and West—they’d both like to see Nasser fall. Their interests are identical there. Another bit of collusion, I’d say. You’d better think up a stronger reason than coincidence, Henry. What were you really doing on that plane with Yunis? Oughtn’t we to talk about it?”

  He glared at Henry, and then at the Major. Getting Edwards away from him was like taking sweets off a child.

  *

  They drove to the new Military Hospital outside Cairo on the Nile road that led to Maadi. Colonel Hamdy sat in front, half turned towards Edwards, his arm stretched behind the driver’s back.

  “Why the hospital, Hamdy? What’s the point? Truth drugs or something? I’ve told you the truth already.”

  The Colonel looked out into the darkness, at the yellow light flickering here and there on the water from small fires built in the sterns of feluccas going southwards, their huge lateen sails just visible against the sky as they moved with infinite slowness upstream.

  “This isn’t a matter for the ordinary police, or Home Security. It’s just between us for the moment.”

  They pulled round to the back of the main hospital building and walked away from it to a group of smaller, half-finished buildings which ran down in two lines to one of the many irrigation canals which drained the area: a flat landscape of berseem fields and market vegetables, as far as Edwards could make out, a mile or two before Maadi, laid out beneath the white pile of the Mokattam Hills just visible with the lights of the Casino high up in the far background. Edwards knew exactly where he was; the canal almost certainly was the one that followed the Bab el LukHelwan railway, which went past the station at Maadi, bordered the playing fields at Albert College and dipped round half a mile to the west of Bridget’s house.

  Edwards and the Colonel went inside one of the new buildings, with light flexes hanging out of the plaster and a smell of limewash everywhere. Two expensively dressed men in the hallway stood up, led them to a room more finished than the others (they’d already managed a photograph of the President on one wall) and coffees were ordered.

  “Well, you’re out of Major Amin’s tender care. Now, tell me, what did Williams send you here for?”

  “To see if Yunis would jump. I’ve told you, for God’s sake. A mad idea. I knew Williams was on to me—”

  “But if he was on to you, he’d hardly have let you go like that, straight back to your friends. Unless he wanted to be rid of you—I mean, dispose of you, kill you—if, as you say, he’d found out you were really working for us. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Perhaps he expected somebody else to get rid of me. The Israelis perhaps. He could have blown me to the Israelis—they have their men in Cairo after all. They’d have willingly done the job for him—if he’d told them I had their n
ames here or something.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “I met Yunis, of course—or rather, he met me, latched on to me as a kind of hostage, arranged to stick with me all the way: on the plane, at the airport, then the bullet-proof car to Heliopolis. They haven’t had a chance to get me yet.”

  The Colonel nodded his head, thinking how exactly that had been the plan. Edwards had been the target all right; the Holborn defector with the names of his circle in Egypt, the tip-off he’d had from Tel Aviv. And he was playing it well now, suggesting the truth in the most off-hand way imaginable so that it would appear entirely unlikely. He still had those names and even if his involvement with Yunis had been pure coincidence, it meant simply that the names were for someone else.

  Perhaps Edwards, staring with such a bewildered look across the table at him now, had his own name, trembling for utterance on his lips. And then again, the Colonel thought, perhaps he’s given Yunis my name already. One should always assume the worst in this business. And the immediate corollary was that he should get clear at all costs, this instant, run for his life out of Egypt.

  And then he knew what had been in the back of his mind all the time, what he hadn’t been facing: he didn’t want to leave Egypt, and the logic of that followed equally quickly: he was a bad double. Tel Aviv wasn’t getting value any more, the goods they’d agreed on years before were shoddy now, not the same quality. He hadn’t changed sides; he hadn’t betrayed Israel, he just wasn’t really interested in it any more and he felt he’d only managed to betray himself with any real skill over the years.