by Tom West
‘OK, but what do you plan to do with it?’
He drew back and drank some coffee. I watched his Adam’s apple bob. Returning the mug to the table, he tilted his head to one side. ‘I plan to get it to the Americans.’
‘What!’ I rubbed a hand over my mouth and glanced around nervously. Part of me wanted to get up, walk away and never look back, but a more powerful aspect of my mind rooted me to my chair.
Grenyov broke into a smile, the first I had seen from him in four and a half years. ‘Why so shocked, Michael? What would you do?’
‘The Americans, Dimitri?’
‘You and I both know there is a higher calling than serving one’s country. You of all people know this.’
And for a moment, he threw me. What did I feel? I could not refute the man, but I felt a pang. What was it? Guilt? Shame? I can admit it now, it was a little of each. But then my intellect took command pushing away anything sentimental or emotional. There was no room for those things now, not in the world in which I lived.
‘You’re going to give them your secrets?’
‘I plan to take the secrets to them. They will have greater resources than we ever had here, better than the Nazis. There’s even a chance they know enough to decipher the Kessler Document. Einstein knew Kessler, remember. I intend on working closely with Einstein.’
I must have looked horrified because Grenyov paused as he went to speak. He drew in a breath and glanced around the terrace. The other people who had been out there were leaving.
‘How on earth are you going to do that?’ I hissed.
‘That’s where you come in, Michael. I need you to organize it.’
I simply stared at him, lost for words.
‘You are on the inside. You have contacts in Washington. Wouldn’t your people and the Americans grab the chance with both hands? Wouldn’t it impress your superiors?’
‘Well, yes, but . . .’
‘Why any buts, Michael? Is it not obviously a perfect plan? You get me and what I know to America. They obtain a secret lost over sixteen years ago. You receive a pat on the back, perhaps another promotion.’
He had a glint in his eye and his voice was now perfectly calm.
‘But don’t you think it would be a tad difficult?’
Grenyov was shaking his head and smiling. ‘Nothing worth doing is easy, my friend.’
‘Oh please, save the clichés.’ I felt suddenly angry. How dare this man bring me into his crazy plans? Did I deserve this? Wasn’t my life already complicated enough?
Grenyov drew back in his chair and eyed me dispassionately. ‘Perhaps I have misjudged you.’ He started to rise. ‘Forgive me.’
I let him turn and start for the path beside the terrace. Then I got up from the table. By the time I caught up with him my shock had evaporated and I pulled alongside him as he strode quickly towards Red Square. ‘Dimitri, wait,’ I said and tugged on his arm.
He stopped and whirled on me. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ I replied and held his eyes for a second. It started to snow, huge feathery flakes drifting down from the leaden sky.
‘I have tried to think through the alternatives.’ He looked into my eyes and I had the sense that he was already wondering who else he could turn to.
‘Fine, Dimitri,’ I said. ‘You just surprised me back there. I didn’t . . . well, I didn’t expect that. What do you say we walk and you tell me how you think this could work?’
On the plane back to Croydon Airport I came to the conclusion that I would hand over what I had learned to my superiors and that they would assign tasks to the appropriate departments, contact the Yanks, and that would be the last I would hear of it.
I could not have been more wrong. Within forty-eight hours of arriving in London I was flying to Washington for a rigorous debriefing. Forty-eight hours after that I was assigned as chief liaison officer for what was quickly dubbed ‘Operation Retrieval’.
It sounds glamorous, but it really wasn’t. My unenviable task was to plan and implement getting Dimitri Grenyov and his invaluable information out of Russia.
I learned very quickly that for all the surface palliness and talk of ‘cousins across the pond’ there was almost no mutual trust between London and Washington. We, that is, MI6, had not passed on the knowledge of Grenyov’s work out of gentlemanliness; it was simply that the Americans had done a lot of the ground work and that Einstein, the chief architect of applying quantum gravity to creating a force shield, still lived and worked in Princeton. Reports indicated that the great man was not the figure of genius he once was and that many of his colleagues believed he was messing around with flaky notions beyond what might be considered ‘empirical science’. But then other scientists worked on the principle that an ailing and unfocused Einstein was worth a dozen lesser physicists.
The upshot was that we gave the CIA the nod, they got me over to Washington, grilled me . . . politely, and then refused to share anything more they learned about Grenyov and Einstein. The only reason they had me assigned to the operation was that Grenyov knew me and would not have trusted anyone else.
Communication via letter was impossible of course; telegram or telex were out of the question and telephones were assumed to be bugged and unusable. The only thing we could do was to contrive another plausible excuse for me to return to Moscow and then to make personal contact with Grenyov.
It took two months, during which time there was no contact between Dimitri and me. Indeed, I had no idea what progress was being made in getting me to Russia. In the event, I was given just eight hours’ warning that everything had been arranged and I was booked onto a BOAC flight.
It was February 1954. Croydon Airport looked utterly desolate and I felt only anxiety as I boarded the Comet. A mere four weeks had passed since a plane identical to this one had broken up on take-off from Rome Airport. I thought I was used to flying, but I was jumpy the whole way, first to Paris, then Copenhagen and on the final leg to Moscow. It was only later as I dived into the vodka in my hotel room that I realized my nerves were shot, not just through fear of flying, more important was my growing unease with the course my life was taking. I had started out in purity, working for my country. Then I had taken the leap and the money, convincing myself that I was motivated solely by integrity and by political conviction. Now, here I was drawn into a complex intrigue that was way out of my league. I resolved that when this operation was over I would say goodbye to my Russian paymasters and keep my head down.
Based on the concept that the simplest, most basic plans work the best, I just walked from my hotel to the Academy of Sciences. I was in disguise – a dark wig and moustache, a walking stick and appropriate limp. Cleared through the security check at the main entrance using a carefully faked ID, within a few minutes I was at the door to Grenyov’s office.
He reacted with admirable calm, but I got the sense that the man was only just managing to hold together his sanity. He felt bored in his current position, frustrated, angry. When I told him of the plan to get him and his work out and halfway across the world to New Jersey, his eyes came alive as though he had been in a coma for months.
The next morning, Dimitri Grenyov walked out of his office, through the main doors as though en route to a regular monthly meeting at the Institute of Soviet Sciences. Instead of turning right at the junction of Nitali and Stolski Highways he walked quickly to the closest Metro station, travelled three stops, changed lines and slipped down a side street to where a car was waiting for him. This car took the scientist overnight to the border with Finland. Aided by Finnish military personnel, he was smuggled over the border a few miles south of the crossing at Niirala where the forest is dense and only a minute fraction of the natural barrier between the two nations can be manned.
From just inside Finland, Grenyov was taken to a safe house overnight. The next day, he was driven across the country avoiding Helsinki, passing close to Tampere and on to the port of Rauma on the west c
oast. There, a US Navy submarine, USS Phoenix, was waiting.
By the time Grenyov reached neutral territory, I was tying up the loose ends of a contrived meeting that had been my cover in Moscow. Twenty-four hours later, I was on a mid-morning flight to Copenhagen. It was not until I reached London the evening of the following day that I learned the Phoenix had been lost.
There was an immediate communication blackout over the matter, but I could not simply let things go. I was at least partly responsible for Grenyov’s death. Escaping to America had certainly been his idea but I had been instrumental in organizing the route, the method. Now both the Yanks and my own people had shut down. Something about it stank.
It took months of effort and calling in every favour I had from old friends and colleagues but I did eventually unearth the truth . . . the sub had been sunk by the Royal Navy. This alone, I realized, was a fair enough reason for going silent on the operation.
Phoenix had been in the North Sea heading west, very close to the Norwegian coast when it was attacked and sunk by HMS Swordfish. Upon returning to port, the British vessel reported the engagement and logged the precise position as 59° 58’ 03”N 4° 05’ 26”E. The submarine commander, a Captain John Henry, was questioned and gave a perfectly clear account of the circumstances.
According to his report, Phoenix failed three times to identify itself. Captain Henry attempted a direct comms link with the American sub; it was ignored. It was only after the unidentified vessel launched a torpedo that Swordfish engaged, launching a battery of torpedoes that sank Phoenix.
When questioned as to why the Royal Navy vessel was in Norwegian waters in the first place, the commander refused to explain and the matter was swiftly dropped. After some further digging, I learned that the sinking of Phoenix boiled down to a horrible confluence of unrelated actions. The American commander had inadvertently entered a clandestine British experimental site. The Royal Navy was testing a new submarine design. The experimental vessel had suffered catastrophic engine failure, lost its way and drifted into Norwegian waters. HMS Swordfish had been mobilized to rescue it before the Soviets could get wind of the incident. Captain John Henry had his crew on high alert and responded the only way he could when fired upon by a vessel that would not identify itself.
Phoenix was lost in the deepest part of the North Sea, the Norwegian Trench, which can reach depths of over two thousand feet. There was no chance of rescue of course, and all evidence of the incident was lost for ever.
I hate to think of how Grenyov died. I like to think he was killed in the attack by the Royal Navy submarine, caught perhaps in the explosion, or knocked unconscious somehow. But sometimes, in the dead of night, most especially in this godforsaken hellhole in which I will die, I see the poor man’s face contorted with pain as he descends into the abyss.
And so I draw close to the end of my story and the circumstances that led directly to my new identity, prisoner X-R34, and this, the venue for my imminent death, Camp 16, Kemerovo, Siberia.
I still do not know how my secrets were exposed. I can only conclude that I had pushed too hard, dug too deep to find out what had happened to Phoenix and my friend Dimitri Grenyov; but exposed they were.
I was called in to a debriefing to give my side of what the brass were already calling the ‘Grenyov Affair’. I gave a good account of myself and left the meeting feeling positive. After all, I concluded, I was their golden boy, was I not?
I had no idea what was actually going on. The night of my interview with my superiors at MI6 HQ I was visited at home by a man I had never seen before. He turned up on my doorstep at 11 p.m. just as I was preparing for bed and more or less invited himself in. He told me his name was Ernest Wainwright.
Please don’t consider me a fool, Wainwright had sound enough credentials. He was a friend of an acquaintance of mine and claimed to know my sister, who had gone to St Swithun’s in Winchester, the same school as his younger sibling. I offered him a drink and pushed him to get to the reason for his visit – I was tired, you see.
After a bit of prodding, he came to the point. He knew I had been turned and that I was a double agent. He convinced me he was on my side and shared my political views, that he was also a man with unconventional allegiances. He related facts only another such as I could have known and he shared information only someone with the same handler as I could have been privy to. He produced dates, times, places, people. He had photographs of me speaking with KGB operatives, and he could cite which valuable documents I had passed on to the Soviets.
Thanks to Wainwright, I had a few hours of wriggle time and I was able to get out of London just as my erstwhile colleagues and superiors began to close the net.
Having an escape route was all part of the job in my line of work and I had been diligent enough to keep fake passports up to date, carefully hidden cash, a sophisticated miniature radio and scrambler, along with several sets of ID including a driving licence and ration book in the name of Graham Frayne, a lawyer from Manchester.
I shall not bore you with the details of how I slipped out of the country into France. Suffice it to say, in Lyon I made contact with my Soviet boss and explained what had happened. I told him that I had valuable information concerning Grenyov and the experiments he had conducted at Movlovyl. I could tell by the man’s reaction that I had taken him by surprise with my suggestion and I accepted that I would have to wait to hear back from him while he contacted his superiors to see what could be arranged.
I spent a week kicking my heels in Lyon until I was given the green light. Three days later, I was crossing the border into the Soviet Union. That night, I was debriefed again, giving the KGB officers at the meeting everything I knew about Grenyov, the force shield and the fate of Phoenix. In particular, I emphasized that the authorities need no longer worry about the Americans or anyone else having all the pieces of the jigsaw required to build Einstein’s dream. I was expecting this to segue into a formal discussion about what could be offered to me in Russia.
And indeed, that was exactly what did happen, but it did not take anything like the form I expected. I was told that the matter of my future employment and usefulness to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was still under discussion and that a decision would be made very soon. I rose to leave the meeting, walked to the door and felt the barrel of a rifle between my shoulder blades.
So, now we come to the end of this sorry tale. Well, to me it is sorry, perhaps to you it is not. I freely admit my foolishness, what I have called my litany of errors. I would be lying if I said I had no regrets; that given my time again, I would change nothing. Of course I would change things if I could.
I have had plenty of time to think, to ponder my fate, my role, my purpose. I understand that we only have a small degree of control over our lives. We are not truly free, nor are we in any sense able to command the tides of fate.
At least I was involved in something of significance. That is a rare thing, and perhaps you will allow me this boast, for my life has been cut very short by such involvement. In the dark hours before the dawn, I often become morose, but one thought that always helps me overcome the existential shadow is the realization that, yes . . . I will die shamefully young, but perhaps it is better to die in one’s prime having already made a mark upon the world than to wither and wilt and crumble to dust at the end of a long life in which nothing of value is accomplished; a life that is a mere blip in time, a life that changed nothing, neither for the better nor for the worse.
37
‘I’ll need to check this with London,’ Fleming said, closing the file after they had all finished reading Caithness’s account.
‘How’re you going to do that?’ Lou said.
‘I’ll make sure my people dig deep to find out if the facts about Phoenix tally; whether a Michael Caithness ever existed and worked for us at the times he claims he did.’
‘Then what?’ Kate asked.
‘Then, if this is authentic . . .’ He waved the file
in the air between them. ‘I can do business with Sergei.’
They started back towards the huge door. ‘Just out of interest,’ Fleming said. ‘Check your phones again.’
Lou and Kate tapped at the screens.
‘No outside line for phone. Internet’s gone,’ Kate said.
Fleming looked to Lou.
‘Same.’
Fleming was nodding. ‘No flies on Sergei.’
They were close to the doors when a wall-phone started to ring. Fleming picked it up.
‘Yes. Yes, OK. I understand.’ He put the receiver back. ‘The man himself,’ he told Lou and Kate. ‘He must have been watching us in here.’ He glanced up to see if he could find a camera. ‘He said it’s fine for me to talk to London, but he has to be there every moment of the call.’
*
Kate and Lou returned to their room and slept. There was nothing for them to do but hope Fleming’s staff in London were as good as he seemed to think they were. Later, a soldier in fatigues brought them lunch – bread, a selection of cheeses and ham, good strong coffee. Lou was about to watch a Lakers game on ESPN when there was a tap at the door and Adam was there holding the file.
‘Come in,’ Kate said.
‘No, we’ve got work to do.’
‘I take it it’s genuine,’ Lou said, flicking off the TV with a remote and coming over to the door.
‘Looks very much like it.’
*
‘So, you wanted us to know the full story behind the Kessler Document,’ Kate said.
They were sitting in Sergei’s sumptuous quarters. The Russian was seated opposite her, his big arms folded across his chest. To his left Fleming was perched on the edge of a large leather armchair.