by Brian Martin
So I held to what was conjectured in Tallinn. I made no mention of Myrex. What really happened out there in Paldiski did not feature. I wrote no revelatory exposure of crime and corruption in the business community. Such an article would have made my name in other circumstances. The Sunday Times would have given me a contract. I would have commanded an astonishing salary as a television journalist. It was impossible: I could not write against Myrex. I had seen one friend killed in front of me. I could not witness Mo’s murder because of my actions. Her life was in my hands. My moral dilemma was dire, but my decision had been taken. My regret that I did not save Mark’s life was profound. I could not have any more lives on my conscience. My principles were nothing.
My article was number-three story on page one. It was preceded by an account and commentary of an Israeli occupation of a West Bank town, and a report on the implications of the Monetary Policy Committee’s decision to lower the Bank of England’s interest rate by a quarter of one per cent. My article ran over on to page two for half a column.
Other papers followed suit. Their stories were much the same. I reflected bitterly that Myrex would have no complaints about the coverage. There was no mention of Myrex: no implication. Only the Financial Times referred to the firm and that was in a subsidiary report on companies that were pioneering for British and European interests in the Baltic. The public impression, therefore, was that Mark’s death was an unfortunate result of the criminal conflict in Estonia.
My task for the editor done, I registered to myself that I ought to visit Willy at the St James’s house. Although Willy had told me that there was always a duty officer present on a Sunday who would know how to get hold of him, I decided to wait until Monday before doing that. I wanted him and the director to read the newspapers so that I could put them right about Mark’s murder when I spoke to them.
Sunday was a terrible day for me. I was deeply depressed. The popular view is of hard-bitten investigative journalists who do not suffer from ordinary ailments and complaints. Naturally that is not so. I was subject to awful depression. My mood was sombre. When I looked ahead, the prospects were starkly bleak. I was completely immobilised. Around lunchtime, my editor rang to say he liked my article but wondered why there was not more known of possible culprits. I had difficulty explaining and said that I was so fed up, shocked and depressed by Mark’s death that I could hardly write the article let alone discuss it any more. He understood and, both kindly and sensibly, suggested that I rang a friend of his who helped run the mental health trauma unit at the Tavistock Clinic. I thanked him and said that if I did not feel better in an hour or two, I would give his friend a ring. He said he would warn her that I might phone, and gave me her number.
Later, I reckoned there would be no harm in talking to someone about my loss of Mark. A Tavistock therapist might be a good thing, although I should have to be careful in what I said.
During the afternoon, I thought about Raoul’s next choice of victim, Mo. Why had he not chosen Uri. Perhaps it was because she was a woman. On the other hand it occurred to me that Raoul and his Myrex people did not take Uri seriously. It was just possible that they did not know who he was and what he was really doing in Estonia. It began to dawn on me that they simply thought him a buffoon, a sad American, bumbling through a life exiled from his home territory. It struck me that almost certainly they did not realise the threat he was to them. By the end of the day I resolved to talk with Rovde on the level with nothing held back.
In a way I was pre-empted. On Monday morning when I had finally arrived at the Journal’s offices, reports were coming in of a crisis in the Myrex Corporation in Estonia. Its chief man in Tallinn had been gunned down in an Italian-owned hotel in the centre of the old city. The man’s full name had been given; Kalja Arne Halvedi, had been shot by a lone gunman as he had left the hotel after meeting a Russian businessman. He had collapsed on the steps and died before he reached hospital. Speculation was that the growing Russian mafia had carried out the assassination. There was no doubt in my mind that Arne was the victim. The coincidence of names was too great for it to have been someone else.
My editor gave me whatever resources I needed to follow up on the story. Immediately I phoned Uri. He did not reply on his landline. I rang his mobile. ‘Rovde here.’
‘Uri. It’s Pelham. What’s happening? Is it Arne who’s been shot? I assume it is.’
‘Too right, old buddy. He’s out of the way. He was a danger to too many people. Anyway he was a latter-day Nazi.’
Uri spoke as if he or his colleagues had at last made a decision that Arne had to be removed from the Myrex scene.
‘Did the Russians get rid of him?’
‘I wouldn’t say that. Let’s just say that he was making lots of people unhappy, including us.’
I interpreted that as a covert admission that the Agency was involved in the removal of Arne. Uri cut the conversation short.
‘Look, I’m flying into London this afternoon. I have to be at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Let’s meet late evening. How about it?’
Quickly, I thought to myself that now was the time to confess to Uri what had happened to Mark; it was time I told Willy and time I told the Yanks. Something had to be done about Myrex.
‘Gladly. There’s a restaurant at the top of Selfridge’s. Let’s meet there – around 7.30?’
‘If you don’t mind, by then I’d rather just walk. I’ll have been more or less sitting and eating all day. Could we stroll in Hyde Park?’
‘Of course. I’ll meet you at the Queen Mother’s Gates, the entrance into the park at Hyde Park Corner.’
‘See you there, buddy,’ and with that Uri rang off.
28
Uri turned up on time. He rolled along rather like an old sea salt still accustoming himself to dry land or more exactly like a patient cattle drover. He lent his bulk slightly backwards and swayed from side to side with his arms out at an angle as if at any moment he would shoo some straying cow back into the herd. We walked towards the Serpentine and the late sun disappeared to the west and left us in twilight.
I lost no time. I had already told Willy what had happened to Mark in that sinister warehouse in Paldiski. Now it was Uri’s turn to listen. He showed no surprise but was appalled by the fact that I had been subjected to that inhuman pressure. He gave me the impression without admitting any truth that the Agency had decided some weeks back to eliminate Arne. He was key to Myrex’s operation in Estonia and therefore in Russia. The chief cog in the machine had to be broken. He did not overtly admit that his organisation had carried out the shooting but he left me to infer that. He reminded me that the agency was aware of Myrex’s Paldiski development and kept watch on it. The Agency was not naïve or innocent of the knowledge. Where, I thought, had the Americans been on the afternoon Mark had died? Uri’s main conclusion was as we walked slowly back towards Apsley House that my journalistic investigations would in the future be extremely useful. I was to keep him informed and he would feed me what he could in the way of useful leads.
By the time I arrived back at my house, I felt I had been engaged by both MI6 and by the CIA. What worried me most seriously was that Uri had hinted to me that Raoul’s days were numbered. It was only that he had been inaccessible in Tallinn that Raoul had escaped a similar fate to Arne’s; but I had the impression that he was being tracked. That was what he implied without actually saying. I wondered how Raoul’s demise might affect my relationship with Roxanne.
In the late afternoon I telephoned the therapist my editor had recommended. Dr Linda Evans had followed a successful career in Oxford, Philadelphia and London. When I met her the following day, I eventually recognised her. She had appeared on Newsnight and late-night chat shows when her expert witness, or opinion, was quite often sought. From the first I thought she looked familiar: perhaps I had met her in London at some meeting or other, or in some restaurant with friends. Then I placed her. It was from the television screen that I knew her. She w
as in her early forties, good figure and features, her dark brunette hair obviously styled, cut severely at an angle from the back of her head to her chin. She was good-looking rather than beautiful; but there was a sensuousness about her lips and eyes. On the phone, she was understanding, and kindly said that in view of the editor’s request, she would fit me in the following morning if I turned up early at the Tavistock before her regular appointments started. Early for her transpired to be 9.30. I managed that, although once or twice I had second thoughts.
At first, even though I had slept badly, I did not feel inclined to get up. Yet I was able to be objective enough to see that it was a symptom of depression. I overcame it and went to the clinic. Linda Evans explained to me that her profession ensured our session had the secrecy and confidentiality of a priestly confessional. She made me describe carefully the cause of the trauma. I had no difficulty with that: I remembered all the details of the execution. From the moment of entry into that ghastly room in Paldiski, the sequence of events reeled across my mind. I could not erase the tape; and it kept rewinding and then playing again. She learned very quickly what I had witnessed and realised what I felt. I described the relationship between Mark and myself. She listened and occasionally prompted me. She made few comments and gave no advice. She told me she was treating the cause of the trauma. If I wanted treating, she could arrange for me to have a course of psychotherapy. Why not, I thought. I was in such a bad way.
She did say before I left that I should not be afraid to relive the terrible experience in my mind. Every time I ran through it, it was another catharsis. The moral dilemma I had been faced with would take a long time to fade. There had never been any possible chance that I could have avoided it. I had to reconcile myself to that. I would never know what would have happened if I had agreed with Myrex’s proposal before Mark’s death. Of course, I could not tell her why Myrex wanted my cooperation. The reason had to be couched in general terms of them wanting something I knew and their wishing to keep hold of me in the future. Any connection to Willy or even to Rovde I could divulge to no one. There my revelation ended. I needed her counsel. My depression and frustration, I felt, would otherwise destroy me. The psychotherapist sounded a good idea. At the time of leaving the Tavistock, I intended to proceed with the course.
I spent the rest of the morning at the Journal. In the afternoon, I had a meeting with Willy in St James’s; and that was the beginning of the situation I find myself in now.
29
I was not in a good state of mind when I arrived at St James’s. I knew I was going to have to talk about Mark. That was not an attractive prospect. In spite of what Linda Evans said, I had been trying to block the images of his very last moments from my memory. I was going to have to relive them. I went up the few steps between the iron railings reluctantly. A new secretary, a fashionably dressed young woman in her mid-twenties, with fair shoulder-length hair, carefully made up, giving off a perfume I did not recognise, smiled at me and ushered me into one of the first-floor debriefing rooms. Its tall windows looked down on to the square. I imagined it as being originally an elegant drawing room that might have hosted tea parties and pre-dinner drinks. Its role had seriously altered. I was there for the most part to explain what had happened in Tallinn, an alien city miles away to the north. It was strange to be there in those secure and civilised surroundings and to have to describe the details of what had happened in that run-down outbuilding in Paldiski.
Willy greeted me almost immediately. The director came in a few minutes later. I had always thought him perfect for the job. He looked like a bank clerk, meek, subservient, bespectacled, the top and back of his head bald: you would not notice him in a city crowd. Yet his looks belied his ability. His intellect was acutely sharp. No detail escaped him, and he combined a photographic memory with interpretative judgement and shrewdness. I had often said to Willy that he was destined to be the next head of the whole establishment. At once the director said how sorry he was about Mark. The three of us sat in high-backed chairs around the highly polished dining table: we might have been meeting for a private lunch.
The director asked me to describe what happened from the time that Lars delivered us in the Mercedes to Paldiski: I was to lead him through the events right up to the time I was taken back to Tallinn. Every so often he would interject questions, ask me for some clarification, make me define my reactions more precisely. I found it a great strain.
‘When Mark was first brought in,’ the director asked, ‘what do you think was going through his mind? Do you think he realised he was in extremis, with his executioners? What was his mental state?’
I did not know what to say. That line of questioning was intensely disturbing for me. I had no idea what had been going on in Mark’s mind. It had been impossible to tell. The situation had been starkly awful. Anyway, what difference did it make to the director to know? How did it help him or any of the rest of us? Much of the director’s line of questioning made no sense to me. I kept calm, but with difficulty.
Eventually, it came to a point when Willy broke in and suggested that it might be a time in our discussion when I would like to say something unprompted. Was there anything that I saw as important that was occupying my mind?
‘There is one matter above all others that concerns me,’ I responded. ‘The director wanted very much to find out how far Myrex was prepared to go in making sure that they secured my services. Well, we now know. I was put in an agonisingly awful position, morally, spiritually, and I think I may have made terrible, wrong, decisions. There is no consolation for me. Mark is dead. What about the Service? Has it succeeded? Myrex is prepared to murder to get its way. What happens now? Did I do what was right?’
The moment I asked the last question I reflected how absurd it was. I was not speaking to my father confessor. I was talking to two professional spies at what amounted to a debriefing session. I could expect no spiritual salve from either of them. The Service had learned what it wanted to know. I was beginning to understand from my experience that I was now under judgement. Had both my efficacy and efficiency been eroded by the way I had behaved? If so, then I was of no use in the future. The director had to judge whether I stayed in place and worked both for the Journal and Myrex, known to both sides as a double agent. Or, should I now be side-lined, marginalised, and left impotent, merely patronised by Myrex. I knew my future was in the balance and it was dangerous for me either way. If ever I were considered a real danger to the Service, I would be eliminated. If Myrex tired of me, they would have no compunction in ridding themselves of my tiresome presence. Supposing Raoul were to die as Uri seemed to intend, or even that Raoul and Roxanne were to split, then no doubt I would end up in a road accident or as a floating corpse in the River Thames. Such thoughts did nothing for my sanity.
The director replied to my questions. He assured me that I could have acted in no other way than that in which I did. He understood the huge emotional upheaval I suffered because Mark, my closest friend, had been so cruelly butchered in front of me. He stressed that the moral responsibility was not mine: it was the Service’s. I should reconcile myself to Mark’s sacrifice. I should stand back and be objective. In the circumstances, I thought what he said was laughable, except that it was impossible for me to laugh. I felt like weeping, as I so often had done in private over the past days.
Towards half past three, our meeting came to an end. The director stood up first, Willy and I followed suit. He shook my hand and patted my shoulder. The gesture had the feeling of a farewell. I did not like it. He left.
I said to Willy, ‘I didn’t like that. It had an air of finality. What’s in his mind?’
‘Look, stop worrying. You’re unsettled. Take things calmly for a week or two. We won’t want anything of you for a bit. Get some rest and enjoy what Myrex gives you.’
I did not like what he said either.
As we went towards the door, he said, ‘Do you think you need some help? I mean counselling. Have
you thought about that? Do you think it’d be any good?’
‘I’ve thought of that,’ I said. ‘I’m on to it. I’m seeing someone at the Tavistock. It probably helps. I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ll go on with it. I’ll give it a try, or, “that way madness lies”,’ I added jokingly.
It was an awkward moment. I knew I should not have attempted a joke. A first rule in that sort of situation is not to joke. Nothing at the St James’s house reassured me. I felt extremely vulnerable as I went out into the square.
And that was the last time I saw the interior of the St James’s house for a long time. I was cut adrift. I went on writing for the Journal. A fortnight later I rang the St James’s house and asked for Willy but was told that he was out of his office. A message would be left for him and he would be in touch with me. The director had instructed that I was not to telephone directly until further notice. I heard nothing from them. So, another two weeks later I called at the house. I rang the bell and spoke through the intercom.