This Drakotny
Philip McCutchan
© Philip McCutchan, 1971
Philip McCutchan has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1971 by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
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1
“There’s a girl coming through,” Max said, and then he rolled this film. His words put me in mind of a seance, but of course it was nothing like that; we were sitting, Max and I, just the two of us, in a darkened room in Max’s office suite in Focal House, E.C. 3, and I had the distinct idea there was something big in the air, something too hush for the usual staff of 6D2’s HQ cinema room to be party to. So far Max had been pretty non-committal, so much so in fact that I had another idea, which was that he didn’t know a hell of a lot himself. Anyway, the projector whirred and the image flickered onto the portable screen and I saw what had by now become a fairly normal sight: a gathering of hippies, males and females, hairy and dirty and weirdly dressed. A very big gathering, an enormous one as a matter of fact, with a sight of hills and rocks in the background.
“Colorado, U.S.A.,” Max murmured by my side.
“What are they doing?” I asked, and then I saw only too clearly. It wasn’t a blue film as such, but it might as well have been. I witnessed the sex act, in toto. The nearer hippies in the film were watching it also, but to my mind they scarcely constituted an audience; there was no flicker of interest or of stimulated desire in any of those faces; they could have been cows in a field, morosely chewing the cud and wondering, in an off-hand sort of way, when the bull would get around to them.
Max answered my question. “They’re waiting for the end of the world, Shaw.” He sounded quite casual about it. “Well? Did you see the girl?”
“As much as was exposed,” I said, “but there wasn’t all that much —”
“Not that one,” Max interrupted with a touch of impatience. “The one on the left of the — er — act. There she is still, pushing through the crowd.” The scene, I saw, had shifted; the concealed camera, sated with sex, had moved on behind the girl Max wanted me to study. I studied her rear view. It was good, with plenty of promise for the front. She was a tall girl, and slim, with shapely buttocks that moved in an extraordinarily seductive way, though the clothing was as tatty and sordid as any of the other hippies. She was very young. She had long, dark hair that fell to her shoulders; de-matted and washed, it would look superb. There was real grace in her carriage, a natural, in-bred carry-over from a background very different from the filth into which she had descended. She could be a duke’s daughter; hippiedom, of course, transcended class. Just then the camera cut, and whizzed around to give me a front view. I whistled; it was good, utterly bearing out the promise of the rear. The girl was a dark-eyed beauty — or had been, rather. Now she showed signs of becoming a drug-eyed slut, but it still didn’t kill the bone structure, the high cheek-bones, the hint of imperiousness in the firm mouth, nor the swelling line of the partly-exposed breasts, whose nipples strained sharply against a man’s shirt, filthy and torn.
“Well?” Max demanded again.
My eyes followed the girl while she moved unsuspectingly towards the camera. “A good body,” I said as her image loomed large and then was cut, “but I’d hesitate to express an opinion on the state of mind.”
“Never mind that. D’you think you’d know her again?”
I said, “Yes, I think so. In fact, I’m sure I would.”
“She may have changed. These are the only shots we have of her, and the film was taken a little over four years ago. A crowd of hippies assembled at Boulder, Colorado … a fleet of flower-painted buses dumped them there, under the leadership of a self-styled ‘holy man’ from Miami, who believed that the asteroid Icarus was going to collide with Earth. California was expected to start the ball rolling by sliding into the sea, and after that there would be violent, widespread earthquakes — even the lost city of Atlantis was expected to rise up before the end came. For some reason, the hippies believed the Boulder Dam area was going to be saved —”
“All by itself?” I asked. “Sailing through space, with the atmosphere intact and all — just a detached chunk with all those hippies clinging to it?”
Max laughed, and switched off the projector. He went across and jerked up the blackout covers on the windows. It was quite a relief to get up myself, and look down on workaday London again, and forget about the end of the world. Max said, “That was the theory, I suppose. But since, as we know, it didn’t happen — Icarus whizzed past nearly four million miles away, I think — it isn’t important. The girl is.”
“Who is she?”
Max lifted an eyebrow, and gestured me through the door to his own office. “I’d have thought you’d have guessed. She’s Drakotny’s girl friend. Or I should say — was.”
“Before she went hippie?”
“Correct.” Max lowered himself into his swivel chair, and I dropped into a big leather chair on the other side of the desk. “She was his mistress — it was a very hot affair, apparently. It became a shade too hot — bearing in mind Drakotny’s wife, you see, and the fact he needed to keep his nose clean openly, as all good Communists must. Of course, Drakotny wasn’t in control then, but as Minister of Justice he was in the cabinet and he was quite a big shot in Czechoslovakia — he was a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the party, also a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee. He had to be careful. Moscow would have insisted on that. So —” Max shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I expect you get the drift, Shaw?”
“He had to sacrifice the girl. What’s her name, by the way?”
“Strecka — Nada Strecka. She’s now twenty-four; was seventeen when she became Drakotny’s mistress.”
“And Drakotny?”
“At that time, just forty. There’s an age difference, I know, but it doesn’t signify. Drakotny was Drakotny, after all, and quite apart from his position in the party and the state, which would have flattered a young girl immensely, he was, and is, a man of great personal dynamism and charm — rugged but erudite, physically strong, very determined. Men who know him say he has a magnetic personality and magnetic eyes — very dark, very straight. Which latter is more than one can say for his devious political manoeuvring, of course! Anyhow, the long and short of it is, reports indicate that Nada Strecka genuinely and deeply loved him. Note that I draw a distinction — she was more than ‘in love’. So much so that she apparently accepted his dictum without any overt fuss.”
“You mean his dismissal of her?”
Max nodded. “Well, yes, of course that was what it amounted to, though it seems he didn’t put it quite so bluntly. He decided to make use of her. She already spoke English perfectly, she was a student at Prague University when he first bedded her, and she knew plenty of English people there, defectors, who got her up to near perfection. Drakotny sent her to the Moscow Spy School for six months of hard and concentrated study, which included the final polish to her English, and when she came back to Prague she was allocated to the Intelligence Service and sent into the U.S. via Britain, complete with papers and duly stamped British passport in the name of Rosalie Moore. Her orders were to make contact with the spy ring in the States, and her special mission was to report back to Moscow direct o
n the colour problem — with an assessment of how best the Kremlin could exploit it to the fullest party advantage.”
“Drakotny even then being a Russian stool-pigeon?”
“Yes, indeed. His own country, as such, has always very definitely taken second place in that man’s loyalties. However, let’s keep with the supposed Miss Moore for the time being. It seems she got into the wrong company in Chicago and reports stopped coming through from her. She started on the drugs, by easy stages at first, and finally got hooked on the hard stuff — heroin. Also, before she got to the really hard stuff, she had assimilated the philosophy of the Flower People. Make Love Not War. That scarcely accorded with Moscow’s aims, or Drakotny’s, and the party, of course, didn’t like it. Attempts were made to kidnap her and get her out of the country and back to Prague, and attempts were made to kill her after a while, but she still kept enough grip on herself and her training to stay a couple of jumps ahead all the time. As you know, that takes some doing. She’s a girl of resource and initiative and guts, and the heroin — she hasn’t been long on that, I gather — hasn’t knocked all that out of her yet.” Max drummed his fingers on the desk and gave me a hard stare. I wondered if Drakotny’s eyes were half as direct as his. “Now she’s coming to London,” he said abruptly. “And that’s where you come in.”
I felt a sense of excitement; I didn’t often feel that these days, my skin had grown rather too thick, but that girl had already begun to intrigue me. I asked, “Can you be a little more specific?”
“I can,” Max answered. “Nada Strecka, still under the alias of Rosalie Moore, is due at London Airport on the jumbo jet from Kennedy arriving at 1435 hours tomorrow afternoon. I want you to meet her.”
Sensing that this wasn’t all, I asked, “Just meet her?”
“No. Get your hooks in her before anyone else does. Get her into your car — I’ll have a man report to your flat before you leave, and he’ll keep her quiet while you drive.”
“Where do I drive to? Here?”
“No,” Max said. “Dartmoor. And beyond. I’ve — er — acquired a cottage at the back of beyond … your man will have the key of the property and full directions to guide you there. It’s very, very lonely and remote, no neighbours. When you get there you’ll start work on Miss Strecka. I want to know all she has on Drakotny — the lot. Just let her talk, Shaw. Bring her out all you can, and use a tape. As soon as you’ve got all you think you’re going to get, leave her there with your assistant, and bring the tapes to me yourself. Understood?”
I nodded, somewhat dubiously. “Isn’t her information going to be rather out of date?” I asked.
Max grinned. “Maybe, but maybe not. Certain people are far from being convinced that Miss Strecka entirely ceased being a spy while she was in the States. All we do know is, she stopped feeding information through to Moscow. Follow?”
I pondered that one for a moment. “Maybe I do,” I said after I’d thought. “You mean the drugs-and-hippies thing could have been a bit of an act?”
“It could have been, yes.”
“But in that case … why stop passing the information?”
Max said, “There’s a suspicion she could have been a personal spy for Drakotny. I can’t elaborate on that, Shaw, but I’m asking you to consider it in conjunction with what I told you earlier this morning — that Drakotny’s currently in control in Prague while the Prime Minister, Racilek, is in Moscow. Racilek is a man of liberal ideas, poles apart from Drakotny — poles apart, that is, of course, under the overall umbrella of Communism. They each interpret it differently, shall we say. Also, they loathe each other’s guts. Now Drakotny’s in charge, which he’s been for some while, actually, he has put in hand a crash programme of hardlining, putting the guts back into the party, I suppose you could call it. The Czechs aren’t happy — well, you’ll have read the papers, of course. They don’t like being pushed, especially by Moscow. They don’t like being told, which they are in every newspaper every day, that their workers must show more responsibility, that they must stop loafing on the job, that they must not drink so much, that management must make more efficient use of manpower. They don’t like being made the whipping-boys for Russia’s own falling productivity, its shortfalls in the agricultural programme, the growing economic problems in a set-up that not so long ago was supposed to be about to ‘bury’ the capitalist West. They’re reacting against that in all kinds of ways, chiefly pinpricking ones at the moment — for instance, when the Russians sent teams to the ski championships recently, held at Strbske Pleso in the Tatras, they got booed and jeered and generally made to see they were not wanted. The Russian national anthem itself was booed at the medal-awarding ceremony. Some of the hardy Russian females were so upset they burst into tears. The Kremlin was pretty narked, I can tell you! And of course that sort of thing just doesn’t help — it gives the Russians a nice excuse to clamp down on any freedoms they may have allowed. Now, what Racilek does in Moscow, Shaw, may have some considerable if indirect bearing upon East-West relations and more directly upon Drakotny’s reactions. Racilek could be succeeding in smoothing over some of the effects of the demonstrations and so on. Every little piece of information is going to help us put a picture together. Do you understand?”
I shrugged and said, “I’m getting there — or I think I am. Will you tell me one thing?”
“What is it, Shaw?”
“Is all this for 6D2’s private files … or does someone else come into it?”
Max stared at me harder than ever. After a long pause he said, “I think it’s only fair you should know, but keep the Official Secrets Act well in mind — though I hardly need to say that to you, I know. This is not for our own benefit. The Prime Minister, via the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has asked for the probe on Miss Strecka. They don’t want to be directly involved themselves, for all kinds of fairly obvious reasons, but they feel the Drakotny-Racilek affair holds certain dangers to international stability. And that really is all I’m permitted to say. Frankly,” he added with a disarming grin, “it’s all I bloody well know, Shaw, and I have more than a suspicion Whitehall is just as vague, and will continue to be so until something starts to jell.” He looked at his watch, with an elaborate movement of his arm that exposed four inches of immaculate silk shirt-sleeve; it was Max’s usual dismissive gesture, and I got to my feet. When I reached the door he called me back and said quietly, “I expect this is something else I don’t need to tell you, Shaw, but I want you to be one hundred per cent certain you’re not tailed into the West Country. I leave the means entirely to you.”
“I’ll be doing my best,” I assured him.
*
From the outside Focal House looked just like any other vast, multi-storey block. Shell, ICI, Unilever, right down to the Ministry of Social Security. Even inside, the place looked like a normal big-business set-up — until you started to dig, which you wouldn’t be allowed to do unless you had a 6D2 warrant, and even then, unless you were either an agent, as I was, or one of the really top brass, you would only be accorded the freedom of your own section. 6D2 was a kind of amalgam of Whitehall and New Scotland Yard, Washington’s State Department, the FBI and the CIA, plus the equivalents in Paris and Bonn, Brussels, Rome … everywhere, pretty well, outside the Communist countries. We were a clearing-house for information of all sorts, political, criminal, industrial and commercial, and defencewise too. And the beauty of it all was, we were not civil servants. There was nothing official about us, though we had the confidence of the respective governments in the fullest possible measure. That gave us all the scope we wanted and for my part I much preferred it to my previous work in Defence Intelligence, which had been too straitlaced for too much of the time with far too many yes sirs and no sirs. Focal House was the building that contained 6D2 HQ Britain, and the man we in the upper echelons knew simply as Max was the Executive Head, Britain. I knew he regarded me as his Number One agent, and therefore I knew this job was important and that it c
ould hold much danger as well as holding Nada Strecka alias Rosalie Moore … The excitement was still in my head as I walked along the immense length of the corridor outside Max’s suite, feet silent on the rich thick pile of the carpet, past the doors that held all those secrets. Going down in the lift I thought about the various sections as I sped past the floors: lab section, fingerprints, poison analysis, hush files, defence and political and finance sections, fraud, murder, industrial espionage — or industrial counter-espionage, to be more precise — medical department, training, physical fitness, psychological warfare, and firing range in the basement along with what we called the tough-up room, which wasn’t funny when you were assigned to sample it.
I walked out to the underground car park and took the Jag into Houndsditch and headed for the Prospect of Whitby, all set for a Scotch-on-the-rocks overlooking the river. It was a nice bar and the food was excellent and I’ve always liked the London river in mid-winter, with a red ball of sun behind the mist and the sound of the tugs’ sirens calling out their warnings as they fuss along with their strings of lighters. I thought I had plenty of time, that day, to enjoy it all.
I thought.
2
The fat man propped against the bar was the chatty sort. He was not, in fact, propped there when I went in — he came in just after me, and sat himself on the stool in the corner next to me, and rubbed his pudgy hands together vigorously and blew on them. “Cold day,” he said amiably, looking up at me. He was no more than five foot six, even standing. “Too bloody cold for me. Calls for a large Scotch — eh?”
I grinned back at him. “That’s what I’m having too.”
“So I see. Wise man.” He caught the barman’s eye and asked for his whisky, without ice. He went on talking to me — a lot of guff about British Rail, and the hellish life of the commuter in winter. I didn’t pay him a lot of attention; he was a fairly typical bar bore. That apart, I couldn’t quite place his background, except to the extent that it could be assumed he worked in an office, and I claim no originality for that assessment. Probably all the men in that bar worked in offices of one sort or another. This chap could have been Import, or Export, or something. As well as being fat he was greasy, with an unhealthy, yellowish skin and rather mean eyes. He giggled a lot, in a girlish sort of way, largely at his own attempts at jokes. I felt sorry for his fellow commuters. As soon as I decently could I left the bar itself and made for the adjoining room so that I could sit and have that look at the river that I’d wanted; and the fat man followed me, talking still.
This Drakotny_A Gripping Spy Thriller Page 1