A Spy's Life

by Henry Porter

  ‘You’re going to write this report?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I need to get it off tomorrow. The sooner they have it, the less exposed we are.’

  ‘You have had no sleep for two days.’

  He looked up. ‘I’ve slept a little, but I work best like this. Besides, I’ve always been able to concentrate in this building.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you. This is the old headquarters of MI6. I worked on the sixth floor in the eighties – not such a good view as from here.’

  She looked perplexed. ‘But why are we here?’

  ‘Because Cuth Avocet also used to work here and he thought it would be amusing to base his business in the building when it was converted. He says it’s the one place nobody would look for us.’

  She was unimpressed. ‘That’s a very British thing to do. Why does everything have to be amusing to you?’

  ‘It doesn’t – it’s just a whim of his. That’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  She seemed unconvinced. She rose to find herself a drink. By the time she’d opened a bottle of red wine and returned to him with a glass, he had started an outline of the report.

  ‘You don’t show anything, do you, Bobby? You’re sealed up like an old building that’s dangerous for people to enter.’

  He didn’t reply but turned from the screen and looked at her.

  ‘You feel things,’ she continued, ‘but you don’t express them. I know you feel badly for Tomas – that’s why you came to find me. But you haven’t said anything about what you feel and you don’t choose to acknowledge what others feel.’

  Of course she was right. Louise had been right too. Harriet was right. Everyone was bloody well right.

  ‘Look, a lot of time is wasted with people’s pity for themselves. By writing this report I can at least affect something. I can begin to settle things with Kochalyin – and it won’t be just for me.’

  ‘Did he do this to you – did he cripple your empathy?’

  ‘You speak as if it was some kind of physical organ,’ he said sharply. ‘If you must know, he didn’t damage my empathy, as you put it.’

  ‘See, look at you pushing me away. You don’t like to talk about these things. Perhaps it’s not your lack of empathy. Perhaps it’s your inability to trust other people.’

  ‘And where did you learn this sensitivity of yours – in bed with a war criminal?’

  She was stung and turned away.

  He softened his tone.

  ‘Look, you’re probably right about my faults – but you’re not telling me anything I haven’t been told before. Just now I need to focus on this. That’s all there is to it.’

  She sat down, stared at the view, then levelled her gaze at him.

  ‘I hope it will be all right if I stay here,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’

  He didn’t hear this. He had already started the first sentence of the report, which reminded Jaidi of the terms of his brief. He was eager to put everything on record because, apart from his letter of authority, no paper had passed between them.

  By 5 a.m. he’d finished a draft. Most of it had come easily but there was a problem with the section concerning the massacre. He needed to be more accurate about the site and explain the origin of the two pictures. He also had to have Tomas’s statement.

  He got up and arranged the blue duffel over Eva’s curled-up form on the sofa. He stood and watched her for a moment, feeling the pity he had failed to express earlier. Then he slumped down on the sofa opposite her.

  Tomas started making his statement at eleven that morning. Harriet was in the room with him. He took a short nap, then continued with Harland by his side until about two in the afternoon. At Eva’s suggestion they had taken turns to be with him because she knew he found it harder to concentrate with them all there. No one looked at what was on the screen until he had finished. Then Harriet printed it out.

  Harland sat down and read the single sheet of paper. In a glance he knew that it was exactly what he needed.

  i am tomas rath – a czech citizen – on 15 7 95 i was in bosnia with oleg kochalyin – aka viktor lipnik – and witnessed a massacre – this was arranged by kochalyin and serb army – we followed four serb trucks into the hills – they contained 70 muslim men and boys – when we arrived we heard first shots – i did not know about this until i saw bodies – the hands of victims were tied behind them – i helped a man who fell from truck – because i did this they kept him to last and i was made to shoot him – i killed this man – they said they would shoot me if i did not kill him – i am guilty of murder – i wish to say sorry for what i did – oleg kochalyin is my step-father – i have given two photos to tribunal – one of him in austria which proves he was not killed – the other photo of massacre was filmed by serb soldier – i took the film later – I testify this is all true – t rath.

  Tomas was exhausted from the effort of writing but he could not sleep. He watched Harland as he read the statement, then his mother and Harriet. He felt an enormous shame. Taking so long over each letter and each word had meant that he’d dwelled on the scene for the best part of four hours. Yet he hadn’t possessed the stamina to hit the thousands of letters it would have taken to express how he’d been trapped into witnessing the massacre.

  Oleg had told him there was some action on the hill. They got into the army vehicle with the smirking Serb soldiers and drove the two kilometres up a narrow, unmade road. It was a long climb. The soldiers passed a bottle of plum brandy around. When they came to a halt, Tomas saw the men in the trucks ahead of them and it had dawned on him what kind of action Oleg had been referring to. The prisoners were terrified. They knew there was no escape because even if they jumped from the trucks and made a run for it, the hill was bare and offered no cover but scrub. The Serbs enjoyed their fear and toyed with a few of the Muslims, pretending to let them go, then shooting them.

  They were taken out in small groups, lined up along a flat wall of rock and shot. Some begged for their lives, but most were so shocked they couldn’t speak and faced their death with a leaden, drained resignation. Literally, their blood ran from their faces and they began to stare, almost as if death had entered them before the bullets. Tomas couldn’t believe what he was seeing, the way the soldiers casually executed them. Oleg helped with a special, silent glee, standing with a younger Serb officer shooting his pistol. Tomas had started to edge away. His arms were free and he could run and he thought Oleg would stop them shooting at him. But as he slid round a truck a middle-aged man was rifle-butted out of the back of it and fell sprawling on to the stones. He was cut on the side of his forehead and instinctively Tomas went to help him, picking him up from the road and examining the wound. The bewilderment in the man’s eyes was something Tomas would never forget. The man couldn’t reconcile this simple act of human concern with what he knew was happening fifty metres away.

  The Serbs saw an opportunity for some fun. They pretended to the man that he had been saved by Tomas, and he was allowed to stand on the other side of the road so that he could be taken back to his village. He stood convulsed by grief as his friends and relations were killed. At the end of the slaughter the Serb officer, a man in his thirties with narrow eyes and a vicious temper, marched over, pulled out a pistol and gave it to Tomas. Then he held his own pistol against Tomas’s temple and ordered him to kill the man. Tomas refused. Oleg came over and barked at him.

  ‘Don’t think I will save you. It is him or you. If you don’t kill him you will both be shot.’

  He laughed as if he had made a joke and Tomas pulled the trigger. There was nothing else for it. A simple calculation – one death against two.

  It was some days before he could think straight again but when he emerged from his shock he decided on two actions: he would eventually admit his own crime to whichever authority would deal with it and he would act as a witness to the massacre and Oleg Kochalyin’s part in it. That was
why he had remained in touch with Oleg after the return from Bosnia and why he went along with the fantasy that Yugoslavia had been little more than a hunting trip – a chance for two men to bond. Kochalyin had tested him, slyly referring to the events to see his reaction. Tomas had smiled knowingly, as if the whole thing had been an escapade. Over the months and years of this revolting pretence he’d got everything he needed. He had the evidence of Oleg’s rapidly expanding operation and the enormous numbers of people who were corrupted by him. He came to understand that the man he had known all his life was not an individual but a force of evil. That was melodramatic, but there was no other way to describe it.

  There was a heavy silence in the room. They had all read the statement. Harland coughed, came over to him, put his hand on the unbandaged part of his shoulder and said, ‘You had no other choice. This is not your crime, it’s his. Any court in the world would agree on that. The main point is that the statement is very helpful and perfectly written – well done.’ He squeezed him gently and smiled.

  His mother and Harriet added their congratulations. He wasn’t fooled; he still knew he was guilty.

  ‘Tomas is on the Internet now,’ said Harriet brightly. ‘The man came to fix it all this morning. He’s got an e-mail address which he can open up by himself.’

  ‘In which case you will need my address,’ said Harland. ‘Shall I put it in your contact list?’

  Tomas blinked.

  While he tapped at the keyboard, he said, ‘I have been writing the report to recommend the opening of the investigation into what happened. I need a location for the massacre. Does Kukuva mean anything to you? It’s a village in the Serb part of Bosnia with a Muslim population.’

  Two blinks.

  ‘It was a long shot anyway. Do you have any clear idea where you were on that day?’

  Two blinks.

  ‘I thought not. Still, we may be able to do it another way. I got some maps this morning from Stanfords and I’ve drawn over them so that we can use them together.’

  He left the computer and rummaged in a plastic bag.

  ‘But first,’ he said, ‘I need to go over the photograph with you. Can you face it?’

  A blink.

  He produced the video still. It was the first time Tomas had seen it for a few months.

  ‘At some stage we will need to include this in your statement and then have both notarised, which means a lawyer comes in here to see you swear that the statement is true and that the photograph was taken at the time of the events you describe.’ He paused, swivelled the computer screen so that it was a couple of feet in front of Tomas’s face and rested the picture against the screen.

  ‘It struck me that there are one or two clues in the photograph that can help us. For instance, we know that the man holding the camera was pointing more or less north because of the time the film was made and the shadows on the ground. That means the massacre took place about forty kilometres south of that mountain range – maybe a little more. I’m not sure. If we can identify these mountains on the map, we can start plotting a corridor in which the site must lie.’ Harland ducked down then bobbed up again. ‘Right, here’s the map I’ve prepared.’ He folded it and propped it against the screen. His mother came round to stand beside Harland. They looked natural together, he thought.

  He saw that Harland had drawn a grid over eastern Bosnia. It extended from the Drina River in the east to Sarajevo in the west, and from Foca in the south to Tuzla in the north. The vertical scale was numbered from one to twenty, while the lateral one was labelled A to O.

  Harland had got a pencil out and was running it up the map, stopping at each line and turning to Tomas for a reaction. This was no good. Harland’s hand was getting in the way and Tomas needed longer to think about where they went. The trouble was that they had dodged hither and thither with the Serb troops.

  ‘He can’t see the map,’ his mother said, with an impatience that he knew well. ‘Why don’t you let him look, then call out the numbers and letters?’

  Harland nodded.

  Tomas was beginning to remember. They’d crossed the Drina River and had gone north to Visegrad, where they camped out the first night. They muddled on in the same direction after that. Then for two days Oleg had gone off and left him with a Serb detachment in a deserted village. He returned on the morning of 15 July. That was the day of the massacre and they had travelled west which would mean they had been somewhere north-west of Visegrad. He found the town on the map and blinked, indicating that he was ready. Harland failed to notice.

  ‘I think he’s ready,’ said Harriet from the other side of the bed.

  Harland began moving the pencil up the map. At each line he turned to look at Tomas’s eyes. Instead of blinking no at each turn, he waited until the pencil reached lines 7, 8 and 9 when he blinked once each time. They repeated the procedure moving west to east. This time Tomas blinked once for the letters H, I, J and K.

  Harland snatched up the map and squinted at the area.

  ‘That means that the mountains in the video film are probably the Javornik group. What’s brilliant is that you’ve picked the area that includes Kukuva.’ He pointed to a speck on the map. ‘I believe that’s where these people came from and that’s important because the authorities will be able to trace their relatives and look for DNA matches. Well done, it’s really good to have pulled that off.’

  Tomas thought it was probably the first time he’d seen Harland smile properly.

  26

  A LETTER TO TOMAS

  The next two days passed with little incident. There was no sign of Vigo, and no hint either that they’d been traced by Kochalyin’s people.

  Harland busied himself with the report, inserting the pictures and captions into the text, together with a map. He pressed Tomas to add a little more to his statement about Kochalyin’s trip to Belgrade and eastern Bosnia and his recollections of the people Kochalyin had dealings with, particularly the infamous Serb general who’d featured in two of Griswald’s witness statements. He also asked Eva to swear an affidavit about her relationship with Kochalyin which she did in front of the solicitor Leo Costigan. The resulting text gave a lot more weight to the section dealing with Kochalyin’s background and his business dealings in Eastern Europe. She outlined his career in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (Foreign Intelligence), his period with the Sixteenth Directorate (Communications, Interception and SIGINT) and his roaming brief in Czechoslovakia and Hungary during the eighties, which fell under the auspices of the First Chief Directorate, Department 11 (Liaison with Socialist countries). She showed how this last shadowy role had developed into a criminal career during the first months of the liberation.

  To Harland’s surprise, her recall was clear and exact, particularly about his business dealings. For instance she knew a lot about the tax fraud involving heating oil and commercial diesel as well as about the shipments made by Corniche-HDS Aviation, Kochalyin’s company in Belgium. After she made her statement she glanced at Harland with an expression of defiant innocence, a look which alerted him to a secret.

  He was anxious to send the report, but felt he needed more on the air crash. As he redrafted this section, he thought it might be worth tracking down Murray Clark in the US. Clark was the proponent of the wake-vortex theory, but he might at least be able to provide some explanation for Ollins’s odd line of questioning. Besides, it seemed unlikely that Vigo had blackened Harland’s name with Clark’s outfit, the NTSB, as he had with the FBI.

  It was also worth bringing Tomas into this. Everyone agreed he was benefiting from involvement. Tomas had applied himself to his own statement and also to Eva’s which he corrected here and there, adding dates. There was another sign of improvement. The nurses said that he was spending a lot of time using the computer, apparently following Internet trails and reading for his own pleasure. No one knew what he was doing because Eva had insisted the computer should be his private domain, unless he specified that messages were t
o be read. That seemed right to Harland.

  One thing had stuck in his mind. Eva had said that Tomas helped Kochalyin on some technical matters during the period after Bosnia. He had asked about this again and she’d looked blank. Rather than trying to explain it to Tomas in person, he decided to send him an e-mail. This would allow him to digest the problem at leisure.

  ‘My dear Tomas,’ he wrote, ‘I may see you before you read this, but I wanted to say now that despite all the terrors and tragedy of the past weeks, nothing in my life has meant quite so much as the discovery that you are my son. Thank you for having the courage to find me. I regret my initial reaction when you did find me and I hope to make it up to you.’ He added a reassurance, again pointing out that Tomas’s guilt about the killing in Bosnia was misplaced.

  He was aware of a certain stiffness in his style, but he went on to ask if Tomas would apply his mind to the air crash. One of the things he understood about his son was that he possessed exceptional reasoning skills as well as being technically adept. Harland described exactly what had happened before and after the crash then went on to describe the mystifying call from Ollins on Christmas Eve. Why was Ollins so interested in the phone and the angle at which Griswald had held the computer in the last moments before the plane dropped from the sky? These two details seemed to concern Ollins more than what might be contained in the phone’s memory and the computer’s hard drive. That was surely significant.

  He re-read the message, feeling that he was maybe asking a little too much of his son, but then sent it anyway. It was important that he say the first part.

  Since he was on-line, he decided to look up the NTSB site to see if anything had been added to Murray Clark’s preliminary finding that the Falcon jet had fallen victim to a powerful wake-vortex. There was nothing more so, before trying to track down Clark, he read through some other incidents involving wake-vortex so that he could talk knowledgeably to Clark. He found an accident synopsis concerning a Cessna Citation jet that had crashed in December 1992 after following a Boeing 757 into Billings Logan International Airport, Montana.