The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  Collard had nothing on Quinn, except what Sheehan had told him. But he had the addresses copied from the hotel register before leaving Wales.

  Hoover’s was in West Berlin. No Hoover was listed there in the international directory.

  Scobie’s was care of the Travellers’ Club, which Collard called and was told it had no Scobie among its members.

  Furse was equally unrevealing: none in Crowborough; even had the number been ex-directory the operator would have said.

  At least Beech’s number was listed under the same Bury St Edmunds address. When Collard rang he was told the line was disconnected. Another dead end.

  There were a lot of Barrys in the Maryland phone book, a couple of Charleses, none matching the address Collard had. He supposed some might be relatives but the task of phoning round seemed a pointless long shot at this stage.

  He made progress at last, with a phone listing for Angleton, under the Arlington address, which Collard considered extraordinary; spies in the phone book! The thought of being able to telephone Angleton direct seemed like being able to call another planet.

  Clumsy fingers twice caused him to redial as he wondered how to introduce himself. His anxiety was groundless. No one answered.

  He was about to give up for the day then remembered the telephone company had a directory unavailable to the public that listed numbers by address. He knew Joost Tranter had good connections in telecommunications and picked up the phone and spoke to him, making a point of sounding casual. Tranter showed no curiosity. Less than two minutes later Collard had the Crowborough number.

  ‘There you go, sport,’ Tranter said.

  A woman answered and Collard asked if anyone called Furse lived there.

  ‘Are you selling something?’ she asked, suspicious.

  Collard wondered why the English always sounded affronted if they thought you were trying to sell them something.

  The call was unproductive. The woman had lived there for the last ten years and before that her mother since the late 1950s. He could hear Radio Four in the background and what sounded like The Archers. It was past seven o’clock already. He hadn’t realized the time and was surprised Joost Tranter was working so late.

  Collard gave it one last go and asked if he had the right address. The woman reluctantly confirmed it was. He said he had been given exactly that one for someone called Donald Furse.

  ‘Never heard of him. Is this one of those calls about Kim Philby?’ she asked sharply.

  Thrown by the mention of Philby, Collard lamely repeated that he only wanted to speak to Furse.

  ‘I told you I have never heard of him. Aileen Philby, however, was a Furse.’

  ‘Aileen Philby?’

  ‘Yes. She was Philby’s wife until she died.’

  Collard was more bewildered. He was aware of the woman’s impatience.

  ‘Do your research next time. My mother bought this house off her mother after Aileen died. Philby née Furse. Never heard of Donald, so stop wasting my time.’

  She hung up, sounding pleased by her outburst. Collard supposed Furse could have been Aileen Philby’s brother. He tried Angleton again, without success.

  He had no inclination to go home. His nearest lead was Beech, disconnected but still little more than an hour’s drive away, up the motorway and across country.

  The Chinaman

  Greene told Angleton he liked sniffing cunt on his fingers and always fucked women until they were dry. Angleton sensed that Greene’s insistence on the forensic quality to his sexual questing was his way of saying he considered Angleton a novice. A wife was hidden away in the country, along with a couple of children; there was a mistress in a London mews and frequent visits to Piccadilly tarts. Greene was alert to the distinctions of paid and unpaid sex, what he called the duty-free advantages of the financial transaction. Angleton was jealous of the grubby ease with which Greene and Philby inserted their way into women’s lives. At the end of one drunken evening a woman had asked with amused exasperation, ‘Well, do you want to or don’t you?’ To which he had thought: If it were that simple.

  Philby, Angleton and Greene were in the Red Lion as usual to talk about Angleton’s imminent posting to Rome. Rome was a ‘sellers’ market’, according to Philby. Since the Germans had pulled out the city had become an intelligence bazaar and Scattolini a main provider.

  ‘Information commands incredibly high prices and in the excitement sources often remained unchecked.’

  An unchecked source was a dangerous source and American intelligence was lazy and susceptible. Part of Angleton’s Rome brief would be to check internal security.

  Angleton had lost count of how much they had drunk – God alone knew how many pints of watery English ale and at least five Scotches. Philby and Greene showed no signs of flagging.

  Greene said to Philby, ‘I think you should make Jim a present of Scattolini when he takes over the X-2 desk.’

  ‘What a good idea,’ Philby replied, managing a good impression of a man hearing an idea for the first time. Angleton never really saw what was coming.

  Philby ordered another round. His excitement showed in the enthusiasm he displayed firing up his pipe.

  Scattolini would approach American intelligence offering the exclusive sale of secret documents – in reality false but convincing material purporting to come from the heart of the Vatican.

  ‘What a cherry that would be,’ Greene said. ‘Vatican security is traditionally as tight as a virgin’s crack.’

  Scattolini would make his approach to the Americans before Angleton’s arrival in Rome, giving the deception time to bed in. The whole thing would be as fictional as Garbo’s intelligence to the Germans.

  A hopelessly pretty Wren, known in the office as ‘the piece of furniture’, showed off her exquisite profile to double advantage in the join of two wall mirrors while men played court.

  ‘Pay attention, Angleton,’ said Philby and they laughed. ‘Seriously now, we’re going to bowl the OSS a Chinaman.’ He looked at Angleton. ‘Do you know what a Chinaman is?’

  ‘It’s a left-handed googly.’

  Greene looked irritated. ‘I thought Yanks weren’t supposed to know about cricket.’

  Philby asked, ‘All right, Mr Know-It-All. What’s a googly?’

  Angleton had to shout to be heard above the noise of the bar. A googly was an off-break delivery, he said, disguised by sleight of hand to resemble a leg-break action, thereby deceiving the batsman as to which way the ball would turn.

  Greene was disgruntled by such showing off. Philby, keen cricket fan, used the sporting example to illustrate the business of espionage.

  ‘You offer the other fellow three deliveries. He gets one chance to read the googly, one to play it and the third you give him a real leg-break, which he misreads for a googly, and he doesn’t know where he is, if you get my drift.’

  Scattolini’s approach would test the thoroughness of American in-house investigative and security measures. In that respect it was a legitimate deception.

  Philby said, ‘They’re meant to run any espionage contact past our respective departments for checking, but they won’t because they’ll be jealous of guarding what they believe is an exclusive top-level source.’

  ‘I bet you anything you like they won’t spot it,’ said Greene. ‘That’s how hopeless they are.’

  ‘Are you all right with this, Jim?’ asked Philby, drawing contentedly on his pipe. ‘It’s going to be your show.’

  Said the spider to the fly, thought Angleton, knowing he would need all the help he could get, however loaded. The X-2 department he was going to head was small and unproven and deemed unimportant by fellow American intelligence officers, who were nevertheless jealous of its high-level access to British intelligence.

  Greene, doing a good job of pretending they were chums, said, ‘And Jim at some point will “expose” Signor Scattolini for a fake and reveal the dire state of OSS security.’

  Greene gave him
an oblique look that Angleton took to mean that he should be grateful for what he was being handed on a plate. Angleton made his gratitude plain – ‘This calls for another drink!’ – and kept his own counsel. Philby and Greene disliked and mistrusted the Americans and, for all his Anglo ways, Angleton was one. In the practised hands of Philby and Greene it was quite likely he was being set up as part of a larger deception and, unless he was very careful, would be enticed by them into spying on his fellow-countrymen.

  At the same time, the set-up was irresistible: knowing everything by running the agent his rivals in US intelligence believed was their man.

  Playing God.

  In the Angle

  Collard left the A1 at the Royston turning and took the A505. The country flattened as he moved into East Anglia.

  On the outskirts of Bury he bought a local map at a late-night garage. He located Beech’s place in a cul-de-sac on a new executive estate, beyond the old barracks. Collard drove through the estate. The houses, of traditional appearance, typified the lack of imagination that had gone into the recent building boom. Cars were parked inside their attached double garages or on the cobbled aprons outside, giving the place an American air.

  As there were no cars standing in the street Collard thought it prudent to park outside the estate. He walked back through the deserted enclave. Most houses had lights on. Televisions flickered behind drawn curtains. Beech’s by contrast was dark and looked unoccupied.

  The door at the side of the garage was open and led to the garden, which gave on to woods. He tried the back door. It was locked. He checked for burglar alarms. There weren’t any, not even dummy ones. It would be a safe, secure area where people didn’t necessarily lock up.

  The back-door key was in the second place he looked, under a milk-bottle holder.

  He didn’t know what he was doing going in other than risking arrest and scaring himself by prowling around in the dark. But he wanted to breathe the same atmosphere as Beech. And something more. Finding Nick meant stepping across a personal threshold. Beech’s abandoned house represented that. Collard was not one of life’s risk-takers; at the same time only his risk would retrieve Nick. It was a test of nerve for the meeting with Nazir: he pictured a dusty road and bumpy ride to a remote desert destination and escorts of masked, armed men with their safety catches off, and the distinct possibility of not being alive for the return journey.

  Collard stepped into the dark house.

  Downstairs the furniture had gone, apart from a large television on a broken stand. The glow from the street lamps outside showed the marks in the carpet where the furniture had been.

  Upstairs the main bedroom with shower en suite was empty. In the second bedroom, a bunk bed had been left, with kids’ posters on the walls and the ceiling decorated to look like the night sky. The bathroom linen basket hadn’t been emptied nor had the medicine cabinet. Someone travelled. There were malaria pills.

  The third bedroom was used as an office, again with signs of hasty departure. Most of a filing cabinet had been cleared out, apart from old domestic bills. The desk drawer contained stationery. A single sheet of paper lay dropped under the desk.

  Collard took it over to the window where he made out a pro-forma invoice to Beech from an Austrian firm, dated March 1984: 140,000 rounds of howitzer ammunition M107, filled with TNT, complete with fuze PDM557, percussion primer M82 and charge MMA2 @ $285 per shell.

  The amounts seemed sinister and meaningless. The whole order was for cannon shells. Collard was staggered by the size of it: forty million dollars.

  The lights of an approaching car made him pull back and wait for it to pass. Instead of carrying along the crescent a black Range Rover turned into the cul-de-sac and pulled up outside Beech’s garage. Four men got out, dressed in the same dark clothing worn by the men who had roughed him up in Scotland before throwing him into the helicopter.

  The men said little as they moved about the house. They kept lights off. Collard heard nothing apart from the occasional movement.

  It was too dark to see in the loft. There had been no time to retrieve the ladder or close the hatch, which was an open invitation. Balanced precariously on all fours, the beams cutting hard into his knees, he swiped blindly with his hand, feeling for something to hide behind. The loft appeared to be empty. He crawled across the beams, testing each one to make sure it didn’t creak, trying to put distance between himself and the hatch. He located the water tank and groped his way behind it and was caught poised between two beams when a man started to climb the loft ladder. Torchlight splashed over the roof above him.

  Collard froze. The water tank gurgled.

  Someone laughed downstairs. Grumbling voices, wanting to leave, complained of wasting time. The man on the ladder said the loft was empty. One of the men on the landing farted, long and loud, followed by stifled laughter and swearing.

  Collard waited until he was sure they were gone. When he finally dared to move he brushed against what felt like a small empty shoebox. He took it with him and felt his way back to the hatch.

  Before leaving he checked the front of the house from upstairs. The Range Rover was still parked on the apron with the men inside. He could see two of them talking and smoking. His heart still thumping, he let himself out of the kitchen and left by the garden, shinning over the fence. A footpath fifty yards into the woods brought him out near his car.

  He drove back through the estate. The Range Rover was gone but he came up behind as it waited to turn on to the main road.

  The road was busy at first. Traffic dwindled as they moved into unlit countryside and soon there was nothing between the two vehicles. Collard dropped back, keeping his distance. Following was easy on the straight open road. He wasn’t sure what he was doing but he felt safe enough in the protection of his car.

  The Range Rover turned off without signalling. Collard let it go. He pulled up in a lay-by.

  The shoebox he had taken from Beech’s loft contained a dozen snapshots of unpopulated foreign views, azure skies, blue seas, desert landscapes, remote bars. Not holiday photographs, Collard thought; assignments. Only one picture showed anyone: two men in sweat-stained desert fatigues, arms loosely around each other, sub-machine-guns casually toted, as they did thumbs-up for the camera and grinned like monkeys.

  The print was small, the colour faded. The stiffness of the paper and its curly border suggested a certain age. One of the men was Beech. Collard didn’t know the other.

  He took out the other photograph from his wallet of Angleton and his mysterious friends on the bank of the Usk. He looked at Furse with his unlikely beard. Furse stammered, he remembered, and Beech had trouble with his rs.

  Collard placed the two photographs back in his wallet. He suspected the second was as germane to his investigation as the first: the old spy in mufti and the souvenir of battle. Beech and his companion were bleached from overexposure, making the background hard to read, but, unless he was mistaken, there were bodies at the foot of a wall, looking like they had just been lined up and shot.

  Telephone Line

  Collard didn’t know why he didn’t go home, instead of taking the single-track road the Range Rover had gone down, or why he kept thinking of Furse. Furse had reminded Valerie Traherne of someone who had spent years away in the colonies. Furse had given a fictitious address previously belonging to Philby’s wife.

  Valerie Traherne believed Angleton, Scobie and Furse had known each other a long time. If Angleton had checked into her hotel under a false name then Furse might have too.

  Thinking it through, Collard was tempted to draw an impossible conclusion, a historical bombshell that made nonsense of everything before.

  He drove on, dazed by the enormity of his hypothesis. Could he have stumbled across some bizarre secret endgame to the Cold War? Had it been one of the first signs of the big change now apparent everywhere in East Europe? The Soviet front had thawed to such an extent that Oliver Round was extending business feelers into M
oscow. Collard wondered if he wasn’t becoming one of those crackpot theorists who read everything as conspiracy.

  The bright moon led him on. He couldn’t remember when he had last seen a house. He wanted to go back but found nowhere to turn.

  Philby stammered. Evelyn’s book said he did. Collard was still surprised that Evelyn had written the Philby book; he wondered if the old reporter had any inkling of events in Wales.

  He drove on until the road divided and he took the fork that he hoped would take him back to the main road. Instead he ended up in a darkened farmyard where the parked Range Rover stood. Collard switched off his lights, turned and drove carefully away.

  He left by moonlight. The network of lanes was more complicated than he remembered and when he turned on his lights again he wasn’t sure where he was. He came to a divide in the road he didn’t recognize and ended up on a dirt track in a landscape of marsh and reed, which, instead of leading back to the road, took him into an open arena surrounded by a chain-link fence. Collard stopped the car and wound down his window. The stench of rotting garbage carried on the breeze. His headlights lit up a telephone box, solitary and incongruous. He got out. To his surprise, the phone worked; too remote for vandals. He used his card. Valerie Traherne answered straight away. She sounded very cool.

  ‘Do you know how late it is?’

  ‘I know. What I’m going to say makes no sense but tell me what you think.’

  She gave a cautious laugh that had nothing to do with amusement.

  ‘Is it remotely possible Donald Furse was Kim Philby?’

  She laughed again, incredulously. ‘The man was the biggest traitor to his country. Why should he come back or why should the British or Russians let him?’

  ‘Yes, you’re quite right, but what if, somehow, it was him?’

  Spies were always up to the most extraordinary business. He had enough sense of that from Churton wanting to set up an unofficial meeting with Nazir, a terrorist who for some reason had a line to the British government.