by Eddy Shah
The child's sharp and sudden movement sent Father Christmas sprawling sideways over the edge of the wooden sled.
As his head twisted backwards, the white beard fell to the snow. The boy's mother, realising Santa was dead, screamed.
Before she could grab the boy, the reindeer, frightened by her shrill cry, jerked forward and galloped through the crowd that now surrounded him. Behind him, the child held on, still not knowing what was wrong, still eager to be with Santa Claus.
As the reindeer rushed forward, the mother screamed even louder and longer, panicking the reindeer even further.
No one was hurt by the animal as it pushed through the small group, its swinging antlers well above the height of most of the children.
One of the men rushed behind the sled and took hold of the reins that were sliding through the snow. He pulled the animal to a halt some twenty yards further on. When the Christmas tableau had finally come to rest he turned and lifted the boy out of the sled.
'I saw Santa, I saw Santa,' said the excited boy to his mother. 'He took me for a ride.'
The officials from the Christmas party had now reached the group and were marshaling them, hurrying them back to the restaurant. One of them, an elderly man who was the car park attendant, stood in front of the reindeer and stroked its muzzle to calm it. As he did so, he looked over the animal's head into the sled, at the slumped figure of Father Christmas.
He saw the red coat had fallen open.
He saw the spread of blood.
He turned away, sickened.
When the police came half an hour later there was nothing for them. The deep footsteps that led away from the small wooded patch where the man and his reindeer had first waited had been covered by falling snow.
The only clue was the deep knife wound to the hear that had finally ended Christmas for Father Christmas .
Ch. 2
1.30 a.m.
CIA HQ,
Langley.
Virginia
USA.
The phone that never rang suddenly shrilled across the European communications room.
The clerk on duty, startled by the unfamiliar alarm, leapt back from the computer terminal where he was indexing yesterday's Wall Street prices, and hurried across the big room.
In the far corner sat a myriad of over one hundred telephones that were linked directly to various towns, cities and embassies in Western and Eastern Europe.
They were emergency lines in the old days of the Cold War. Since then, even years before the Cold War had finally thawed and been overtaken by the Gulf Crisis and all the other troubles, communication by phone had been superseded by satellites, micro systems, faxes and more modern systems. But intelligence services were hoarders by instinct. The phones had only remained because the CIA had a jackdaw-like appetite for keeping all lines of communication open.
And when one rang, it meant someone was in trouble.
The clerk, an underpaid computer systems man who spent most of his time researching the secret information that the CIA collected on Wall Street companies so that he could play the markets with the few dollars he managed to save from his salary, searched the phones to see which one was ringing. It took time, over a minute, before he identified the correct one.
'Yes?' he said breathlessly into the receiver. He didn't know what else to say. Answering these phones was not part of his training.
'Washington?' came the hushed reply, a woman's voice, sing-songy and foreign.
'Yes.' He had no idea where the call came from.
'America?'
'Of course...' He tried not to show his irritation. 'Yes.'
'CIA?'
'Yes.' Who the hell was ringing if they didn't know they were connected to Langley? 'Who is this?'
'I was told to ring if anything happened,' the woman said. ‘He gave me an envelope, to open, if anything happened.'
'Where are you ringing from?'
'Riuvamani.'
'Where?'
'From Riuvamani. In the letter, it says if anything happens, I am to ring this telephone number and say 'Reindeer is dead'.'
'Reindeer is dead?'
'Yes. "Reindeer is dead".' That's all she knew, her husband’s life had been his own. She paused before she went on. 'Will I still get the money?'
His instinct was to hang up, but he knew these phones were connected to the past. It was time to pass the buck upstairs.
'Wait,' he said. 'I will get someone more senior to talk to you. Don't hang up. Don't go away.'
He put the receiver down and hurried back to his terminal. He switched the programme out of the Wall Street file before he dialed the senior night officer. There was no way he wanted to be fired from the service for insider dealing. The pay wasn't great, but it was steady.
'Phil Tucker,' came the immediate response from upstairs.
'Phil, it's Greg in the European room. I've got a call on one of those direct lines.'
'What direct lines?'
'The old ones. The ones we keep for back-up.'
There was a pause. 'You're kidding? Who?'
'I don't know. A woman. Foreign.'
'What's she want?'
'Says she's been told to report in.'
'Who by?'
'Don't know. Just says "Reindeer's dead.".
'Reindeer?'
'That's it'
'Is that an open code?'
'Haven't checked the book yet.' He didn't add he didn't know which Cypher manual to check.
'Fuck it, I'm coming down. Who the hell's Reindeer?'
Before the clerk could answer, the phone went dead in his hand. As he waited, he remembered it had been Kuwait's invasion by the Iraqis that had been triggered off by these phones. He hoped this wasn't going to be the start of another such crisis. Only this time it was Europe. It had to be the Russians. 'Damn it,' he thought. 'The Cold War's over.' Then he grinned. Crisis meant falling stocks. He decided to ring his broker first thing in the morning and sell before this leaked out and prices started to tumble.
Across the room, at the other end of the phone that had unexpectedly broken the silence at Langley, Mrs Santa Claus waited patiently to find out if the death of her husband a few hours earlier also meant the death of her housekeeping money.
Times were hard and she hoped those nice Americans would go on sending the dollars that her husband used to pick up in a plain envelope once a month at the local Post Office.
As she waited, she also wondered who Reindeer was.
Ch. 3
The Royal Bistro
Happy Valley
Goose Bay
Labrador
Canada.
Hans Putiloff sipped his decaf and wondered how he was going to get into Room 17 before its occupant, a senior officer in the German Luftwaffe, returned from the Goose air base.
Ever since the Germans had built a new hangar for their NATO exercise aircraft at Goose, the Royal Inn Hotel had become the centre for their off duty pleasures. Visiting aircrews tended to stay there before they were billeted on the base. It was an ideal situation for someone who wanted to pick up loose talk amongst serviceman.
Goose Bay, a small township on the inhospitable east coast of Labrador, is one of the West's most strategic air bases. With two long runways, it is the centre for NATO exercises and houses large British, German and other NATO contingencies in addition to the Royal Canadian Air Force. Under snow for nearly five months of the year, it is also a safe haven and staging post for the many small private aircraft that are ferried across the North Atlantic on their way to and from Europe.
The town's economy is based on the airport and its three hotels are usually fully booked. Two of them, The Labrador Inn and the Royal Inn, are of a wooden structure with blockboard partitions between the rooms. Privacy is not one of the luxuries guests expect in these three star outback hotels.
But, as Hans Putiloff often said, one man's misery was another's reward. Now approaching his sixty ninth birthday, he had, to al
l intents and purposes, come to Canada as an immigrant from East Germany in 1956. Of German origin, he had adopted the identity of a dead Polish sailor called Lalek Widowski, and had thus, with the appropriate forged documents, escaped from East Germany and into Western Europe. In those days, before the Berlin Wall split the continent, it was an easy escape route for those who were prepared to take it. It hadn't taken him long to work his passage across to Canada, where he eventually applied for an immigrant's permit. Five years later he swore allegiance to the Canadian flag and became a citizen. He changed his name to Lou Widders and began work as a refueller for Shell Aviation Services at the civil terminal at Goose Bay Airport. In time, when his foreign accent had been replaced by Canadian clip talk, people forgot about his Polish background and his European ancestry.
To them Lou Widders was a Canadian. Which would have pleased his Russian masters in what had been the GRU and become in more recent years, the KGB. It had been there, in Moscow, at the KGB Headquarters in 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, that the young Hans had been exhaustively trained to prepare for his future role as a Canadian citizen. Hans Putiloff, who became Lalek Widowski, now residing as Lou Widders, was one of the great sea of unknown spies planted across the western world as 'sleepers', those who integrated into local communities and waited to be called one day to exercise their duties by Moscow.
It had been a long wait. And now, in this time of perestroika, it was unlikely that the call would ever be made.
But that didn't worry Lou Widders. He was one of a rare breed, a conscientious, workaholic spy. He did it because he loved it. Even the thought of returning to a unified Germany had not excited him after all these years. But then there was always that other past which had been wiped clean by his Russian masters all those years ago. Dachau. The little town near Munich. A place of death where birds still never sang. It had been Hans Putiloff's playing fields, a playground where he had exercised his pleasure on those unfortunate inmates who were placed under his care. When he saw the war coming to an end, he escaped to the east. His instincts told him the Russians would appreciate his talent for cruelty; what he hadn't expected was to be sent out to Canada and simply cease to exist.
He was over zealous in his duties. Rather than wait for his orders, commands he knew might never be made, he had, over the years set about building up the most comprehensive file on Goose Bay, its airport, visiting aircraft and crews, and improving weapons systems. These files, handwritten for the first thirty years, were now totally inscribed on two 180 megabyte hard discs that were linked to his Apple Mac 11 personal computer. It was a record that his Control in 2 Dzerzhinsky Square would dearly have loved to have, if only they had contacted him.
But the only contact was a member of the Russian diplomatic staff whose annual holiday always coincided with Hans' in Niagara Falls. The meetings were brief, the contact simply checked that Hans was well and out of trouble. The next was scheduled for the following Tuesday.
With this in mind, and eager for more information, Hans waited for the moment when he could go into Room 17 and see if the German officer had left anything that would be a valuable addition to his data base. He smiled as he sipped his decaf. The thin walls at the Royal Inn and the Labrador Inn were to his advantage. He had often slid into an empty room next to someone he was spying on and listened through the blockboard to secret conversations. There had been surprises over the years. The happily married station commander with a penchant for young men, the visiting diplomat who had waited to be beaten in his room by a black French airman, the cypher clerk who dealt in narcotics. These, and many more, were the daily paraphernalia that filled his computer life.
'Everything alright, Lou?' said the plump young girl behind the counter, her bulk shapeless under the large knitted sweater that would have kept two lumberjacks warm on a snow-driven night.
'Fine,' he said, nodding warmly back at her.
'Another coffee?'
'No. Time to go.'
'See ya, Lou.'
'See ya.'
He opened the door and stepped out into the night, the air bitter and cold, a minus 20 degree chill factor.
He looked towards Room 17, motel style with its door opening onto the wooden board-walk. There was no light, nor in Room 16 next to it. When he was satisfied that he wasn't being watched, he drew the master key he had stolen many years earlier and walked towards it.
He reached the door to Room 17 and listened, heard nothing. He knocked softly, waited until he was sure that no-one answered, that he had given ample time for a sleeping man to awaken, then put the master key in the lock and pushed the door open.
He was about to slide into the room when the stranger spoke.
'Excuse me?' said the man's voice.
Hans swung round, was surprised to see the tall man in the overcoat standing next to him, on the step of the now open door of Room 16.
'What d'ya want?' Hans asked, impatient, surprised, yet hushed so as not to attract any passing attention.
The man said nothing, simply held out a rolled up newspaper towards Hans.
'What d'ya want?' repeated Hans, made nervous by the man's surprise action.
'Have you read the news today?' came the muffled reply, East European in its dialect.
'What news?'
'Comrade, you made the news today. Hans Putiloff has passed away.'
Before Hans could react, the stranger pushed the rolled newspaper towards him, to within one foot of his nose, and jerked it sharply. There was a soft pop followed by the sound of tinkling, breaking glass.
Hans Putiloff, the conscientious spy, inhaled the deadly vapour of the Stashinksky gun and fell dead to the snow covered board-walk. Sharp and swift. No time to scream, no blood, no tell-tale mark of death.
His assassin, within a matter of seconds, had picked up his victim's now lifeless body and rolled it into Room 17. He closed the door and went to catch the airport bus at Royal Avenue in time for the Air Nova flight which would return him to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He threw the gun away. Who would concern themselves with a rolled up newspaper and a metal tube seven inches long?
It was just part of the everyday junk that filled the lives of the citizens of Happy Valley, Goose Bay.
Unaware of what had happened, some five thousand miles to the east, in Moscow, the Director of the KGB relaxed in the back of the Zil limousine that took him from his offices in Dzerzhinsky Square to his small home on the outskirts of Moscow.
The days when all top communist officials had country dachas was long gone, now that the Soviet Union was starving and the leadership struggling.
He looked forward to getting home. A few friends, old and trusted comrades, were coming to drink tea and vodka and play a game of vint. They met once a week, had done regularly for the last fifteen years, and it was the highlight of their joint friendship and shared lives.
He watched the slow line of Moscow traffic edge its way out of the city.
'Times are good,' he thought. 'Even if the enemy is now our friend.' He recalled his earlier meeting when he had been summoned to the Central Committee Security Plenary. It was a regular meeting and he was expected to say little, just listen to the committee members rambling on about how Russians must learn to work with the Americans, yet be watchful at all times. His American counterparts were probably having the same meeting.
The business of spying had crossed the borders into diplomacy. It made life difficult. Suddenly there were no obvious enemies, no loyal and trusted friends.
'Ah !' he sighed. 'Such is the way of the modern world.'
Little did he know, as he leant back and closed his eyes for the journey home, that the death of Hans Putiloff, all that distance away, was about to test the new spirit of co-operation between the Soviet Union and America.
Someone was trying to rock the boat, and there was little the KGB would be able to do about it in the coming days.
Ch. 4
London
England.
Adam Nicholson could
n’t give a damn about the CIA or the KGB.
But he did care about the ineptitude of his superiors.
Twenty minutes after his face was splashed across the front page of the London Times, they pulled Adam Nicholson out of Northern Ireland.
The picture wasn't of Adam himself, but of a colleague and his family who had been the unintentional victims of a Belfast bombing. Adam, in military uniform and showing his rank as Captain, was clearly identifiable in the background. Which was just what an undercover member of the SAS 14th Intelligence Unit in Northern Ireland wanted.
After a short de-briefing, he was sent home on four weeks' leave to start immediately.
'We want you to stay out of sight.'
'I thought I was to take some leave.'
'We don't want you recognised. They'll be looking for you. Just because you're in London doesn't mean you're safe.'
'I wasn't intending walking up and down Kilburn High Street.' Kilburn was a haven for IRA members and supporters. 'London's a big place.'
'That's the way it is. Otherwise we'll transfer you to a safe house. I don't think you want that.'
Adam shrugged and got up to leave.
'I haven't finished yet!' barked the de-briefer.
Adam walked to the door before turning round. 'What else did you want to discuss?' he asked insolently.
The officer sighed. 'Understand one thing. Stay out of sight at all times.'
‘You’ve already said that. Do you think I’m deaf? Or just stupid.”
As Adam left the barracks in an armoured personnel carrier, the de-briefing officer heaved a sigh of relief. Even though Adam was one of the best covert operators the Army had, his attitude made him the most hated. The last thing his superiors wanted was that arrogant bastard wandering round the barracks with nothing to do, upsetting his colleagues, disregarding the officers, contemptuous of their tradition and discipline.
Lifted out by army helicopter, a small brown Maxfli sports holdall as his only luggage, Adam was back in his London apartment by three o' clock that same afternoon.