A Spy's Life

by Henry Porter

  ‘And here?’ asked Harland belligerently. ‘Here in Britain?’

  ‘We’ve had you covered the whole time,’ replied Teckman. ‘The fact that Cuth Avocet put you up in the old building greatly aided us.’

  ‘And the phones? Have you been tapping our calls?’

  ‘No,’ said Teckman. ‘Our chief concern has been to see if Kochalyin would follow you here, in which case we would certainly have had a word with him.’ He gave a bleak, deadly smile. ‘His people are here, but he hasn’t graced us with his presence, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. It’s far too dangerous. The reason you are still alive, I suspect, is because Walter has had you watched since The Bird’s driver picked you up on the Kent coast. As to the phones, no, we haven’t been listening. Besides, with the Harp-Avocet operation in full flow every day it would be difficult to pinpoint the calls.’

  A flat lie, thought Harland. They were bound to have tapped into the phone lines. It explained why they had approached him now. They must have read every word of his report to Jaidi – they’d been forced to make their move and had produced Eva in a desperate attempt to stop him adding anything. He must also assume that they knew about the calls he’d made to Clark, the websites he’d visited while reading up on wake-vortex and the contents of his e-mails to Tomas and to Professor Norman Reeve.

  ‘And The Bird and Macy? Were they in on all this?’

  ‘We informed them this afternoon that you were in danger and that we were shadowing your movements,’ said Vigo. ‘They had suspected something. Their driver spotted a couple of our fellows in the course of the week.’

  Teckman was winding a strand of cotton round a loose button on his jacket. Harland knew the distraction meant the head of SIS was concentrating very hard on his responses.

  He would react accordingly. ‘So it seems you’ve got us pretty much trussed up,’ he said with a hint of resignation in his voice.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that,’ said Teckman amenably. He looked up from the button. ‘We just don’t want any more killings on our patch. We want this business with Kochalyin to take its natural course, and I do promise you that it will take its natural course. That’s why I’ve been anxious to point out that we’re advancing on a unified front.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘You carry on as you have been, while we watch your back for you. I don’t know how long this business will go on, but at some stage we will know when to make alternative arrangements for your safety. It will be clear to Kochalyin that he can no longer rely on Irina. After Tomas was shot he must have known that this would eventually happen, although of course he well appreciated that she didn’t know where Tomas was and moreover she was unlikely to hear of the shooting for some time. So clearly Irina is a priority target for him but he also knows she will be well protected. My guess is that he will make a move later on, once he has settled other accounts. He will seek to eliminate her and possibly her mother. Oh, by the way, Irina, I should mention that we’ve found Hanna the accommodation I was talking about in Switzerland.’

  He paused and placed his hands together on the table.

  ‘So, to conclude, for the moment I think you should remain in Century House, where we can keep a close eye on you. You should continue to visit your son in hospital, where we can also make sure you are undisturbed.’ He looked at Harland. ‘In the meantime, I would very much like your assurance that you will not add to the report. What you have already said on this affair surely discharges your obligations. I don’t want any gestures, Bobby, no desperate resolve. Just keep a low profile. Is that understood?’

  Harland gave a brief nod. There was no mistaking the instruction, and there was little point in letting the Director know that he had no intention of obeying it.

  ‘So I think that wraps up our business,’ said Teckman, clasping his knees and pushing up from the chair. ‘We’ll be in touch. If you need anything, you can phone Walter.’ He moved to the door. ‘I’m glad we’ve had this talk. I can’t tell you how important it is to know we’re working on the same side.’

  Tomas hadn’t seen his mother leave because he was dozing. He had worked steadily for two hours and then fallen asleep while she was with him. When he awoke, he noticed a very sharp pain which sprang from beneath his ribs every five or six breaths. He would have liked to have held his breath to see if the pain still came, but the machine took the option away. It commanded his lungs to inflate at regular intervals. He was forced to breathe – whether he wanted to or not.

  There was another feeling that he hadn’t encountered before, a general enervation which, on thinking about it, he likened to his body being drained of blood. This thought came from his paranoia. He was haunted by the idea that he was being kept alive for medical experimentation, involuntary blood transfusions, even organ donation. How could he tell whether he still had both kidneys? Did they have plans for his eyes – his heart, his liver? And his hands? Would the doctors take his hands from him and sew them on to someone’s arms, fusing the nerves to another man’s impulses? Or why not a woman’s? Flick always said his hands were delicately made. They were sensitive, she said – artistic. She didn’t know they were a killer’s hands.

  Nothing like this had gone through his mind when he was being taken off heroin. The sweats and arthritic fever of cold turkey were a picnic compared to this. Now, once his mind had got hold of a thought it seemed to take pleasure in supplying innumerable permutations of a particular horror. He had become fixated on what he regarded as the certain distribution of his body parts. Perhaps the intended recipients had already been matched with him and were waiting in beds around the hospital, longing for him to die and give them new life.

  He sank a little more into himself. The pain was getting worse. Was this it? Was his heart giving notice of expiration?

  He opened his eyes again and saw that the white ball light was quivering in front of him. The computer was on and the electrodes were still conveying the blistering heat of his panic to the screen, making the light bob like a fishing float. He decided to continue with his work. Practically everything had been completed because his mother had very quickly grasped how to help him. It had given him a thrill working with her and for a few moments that afternoon he had forgotten where he was – and how he was.

  He logged off to still the ball of light and struggled to put some thought to the problem his father had set him in the morning. There wasn’t much to go on – the lights and heating in the plane had failed, then a little time later the plane had crashed. This might indicate a virus at work, but it would be a pretty crude one to knock out the lights needlessly. Maybe he was barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps the lights going out was only relevant in as much as it had forced Griswald to open up his computer and use the glow from the screen to see what he was doing. They had asked about the angle of the computer and where Griswald had held it in relation to the phone in his right-hand pocket. What could be the point of that?

  He let his mind drift, hoping that something would occur to him. Five minutes later a glimmer of a solution came to him, but just at that moment he was racked with a particularly violent pain in his chest. The nurse hadn’t noticed and neither had she bothered to ask how he was. He wished she’d give him something.

  He thought again. That was it! The reason they wanted to know how the laptop had been held was because they believed it had shielded the phone. They wanted to know how it still came to be functioning in Griswald’s pocket after the crash. Shielded from what? Not the impact of the crash, surely? Then he realised what the investigators were being so cautious about. He had heard of such things and, more important, he knew that Kochalyin was familiar with the device.

  As he tried to remember exactly what was involved, the pain returned and filled his chest. He was sure that he was running a fever, his eyes were stinging. There was a clamminess – hot and cold in the same moment. He knew this was the beginning of the end. He’d be going down that stairway and not coming back. />
  But he wasn’t going yet. He still had things to do. He rallied himself. Yes! He remembered. Back in ’97 – or was it ’98? – Oleg had seen a man from a weapons research establishment in the Ukraine. God knows how he knew about the place – probably something to do with his past. The man came to him to explain the technology and, later that week, Oleg had sounded Tomas out about the production of such a device because he knew he was interested in radio frequencies. Tomas had been genuinely intrigued by the simplicity of the device.

  He summoned all his will and laboriously went through the process of an Internet search. He read for over an hour then copied the relevant parts into an e-mail and addressed it to Harland. A second copy he placed on his hard disk for use later. Harland was right, he thought. It had been a logical problem and he was glad he had been able to crack it for him.

  The pain was still with him and the fever was taking hold, but he had to get this one other thing out of the way. He prepared to concentrate for the last time that evening and visited his personal archive – a virtual locker which he had set up after Mortz sent him the package – and began selecting the coded information. Most of it had been used before, but there were one or two items that hadn’t. He placed them in five separate files, attached the virus that his mother and he had worked up over the last couple of days, and began making calls to the numbers his mother had pinned to the laptop for him. Half an hour later everything had been sent.

  But that wasn’t quite the end of his work. He went back to the archive and withdrew everything – coded and uncoded material – and placed it on the old Czech website he had set up five or six years before – www.rt.robota.cz. For good measure he added the material he’d found for Harland.

  29

  DNR

  ‘So that’s all of it?’ he asked. ‘No more surprises?’

  She shook her head, took two rapid puffs from a cigarette and inexpertly tried to stub it out.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘There are no more surprises, Bobby.’

  She was sitting on the sofa with her legs folded under her. Harland had taken himself to the north window and was looking out towards the Houses of Parliament. They’d been through it all: how Vigo made contact with her; how he met her once in Hanover and how she subsequently communicated what she learned of Kochalyin’s affairs through e-mail. It all seemed an extremely unlikely story.

  He left the window and went to the fridge. There were a couple of bottles of white wine in the door. He withdrew the Chablis, pulled the cork and poured two glasses. He raised his glass to The Bird for putting it there and handed her the other glass.

  ‘Vigo put up quite a case for my arrest and prosecution,’ he said conversationally.

  ‘I had nothing to do with that. I knew nothing about them going into the archive in Prague.’

  ‘You know, seeing that picture of us made me feel very old.’

  ‘You haven’t changed much, Bobby. A little heavier and not so much hair. But you’re the same man.’

  ‘I ache all the time,’ he said, smiling. ‘I feel my age and I look it. But you, you’ve kept in terrific shape. It must be the bloody yoga.’

  She returned his smile.

  ‘Did you ever see the picture?’

  ‘No, of course not. You have to believe me. I had nothing to do with that. But I knew that it existed, of course, because Oleg told me about it.’

  ‘I do believe you.’

  ‘Nor the tape recording. I would never have done that to you, Bobby – set you up like that.’

  He looked at her hard. She was very beautiful. He believed her. ‘I know that too. You see, there was never a tape of us talking. Kapek threatened me with it, but that was just bluff – something he pulled out of the hat on the spur of the moment and then boasted about in his report to Kochalyin. Maybe he told him personally. I don’t know.’

  ‘There was no tape recording?’

  ‘No, just the picture of us.’

  ‘I must have misunderstood.’

  ‘Yes, you probably did. But your mentioning the tape is interesting because it indicates that at some stage Vigo and his friends were told there was one.’

  ‘I didn’t tell them.’

  ‘I wonder where they got the idea?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She seemed genuinely perplexed.

  ‘Who told you there was a tape – Kochalyin?’

  ‘I can’t remember – I have believed this for years. Oleg wasn’t concerned with the operation in Rome. But he had access to the information. So maybe it was him. Why are you interested?’

  ‘Because it means one of two things.’ He put his glass down on the table and sat down opposite her. ‘One solution is that they had another source to help compile the dossier about me before Christmas. But who could have helped them in that short time? Not Kochalyin, for obvious reasons. Not Kapek because he knew there was no tape, and anyway no one knows where he is, and not you because Vigo didn’t want to alert you to the fact that he was putting something together on me. Of course, there is another solution. Perhaps they already knew about the supposed tape. Perhaps they already had it on file and dug it out for the interview with me. You see what I’m saying?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ She searched his face.

  ‘Originally I thought it was you. I thought you had worked for Vigo in the eighties.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, Bobby. I wish I had in many ways. It was what my heart wanted. But I couldn’t have risked Tomas and my mother so I stayed loyal.’

  ‘Yes, that was my reasoning. Besides, like every other intelligence organisation, the StB had firewalls between different departments. There was no way a code breaker like you would have had knowledge of how Kapek was handling me. And vice versa of course. Only a few individuals had total access and saw the whole picture. So whoever told them about the tape was either directly responsible for Kapek or was very high up. Kapek was Czech and so one presumes he reported to a senior StB man. Perhaps this individual was SIS’s informant, but my inclination is that it was someone else.’

  ‘But why are you interested in this now? It has nothing to do with the present.’

  ‘But it does. There is one person who had access to everything the StB was doing – Kochalyin. He also told you that there was a tape, repeating Kapek’s little myth. Perhaps he didn’t know that there wasn’t a tape. After all you said he had nothing to do with the operation in Rome. So maybe he just took Kapek’s word for it. The important thing was that this was never committed to Kapek’s file which means that SIS could only have got this information from Kapek or Kochalyin.’

  ‘You’re saying that Oleg was working for SIS? That’s too incredible.’ She paused and groped for another cigarette. ‘Aren’t you placing too much significance on the tape and the fact that it wasn’t mentioned in Kapek’s file?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps,’ he said. ‘But there’s something else. Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about Ana Tollund. She worked in the Secretariat of the Praesidium. She was a quiet little mouse of a person by all accounts, but she fed the West vital intelligence for twenty years after the Prague Spring. She was very good – subtle, courageous and discriminating in what she passed on to her handlers. Then in ’88 she was caught, tried and executed. I heard about her a little time before her arrest, but I knew nothing in detail about the case and I certainly didn’t say anything to Kapek about her. However, when I was questioned before Christmas, they accused me of tipping off the Czechs about Tollund. That was Kapek making it up to boost his own importance after the event. But somehow this was passed back to SIS. It could only have been Kochalyin.’

  ‘Why weren’t you accused then, if she was so important?’

  ‘Because they knew that I had no access to the information about Ana Tollund. They knew I couldn’t know but they kept what Kochalyin had told them on file nevertheless. Everything, you see, is noted down and kept.’

  ‘But you have no evidence that it was Oleg.’

  ‘No, and I n
ever will have. On the other hand, we know that subsequent to the Velvet Revolution Kochalyin had a relationship with SIS. And we know one of his prime motivations is money. Does it not seem likely that he was on the SIS payroll before the revolution? He’d have been an incredibly valuable asset to them and when the collapse of the régime came they would have been very willing to extend the association. More than a few favours went his way, I bet.’

  She drank some wine and absorbed this.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said, ‘that he always had money. Nothing would stop him selling information if he thought he could get away with it. Maybe you’re right, but you will never know. Perhaps you have become a little obsessed with this. Maybe you should stop thinking about the past, Bobby.’

  ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘But it is my past. Ever since I talked to Tomas in New York I realised how damned little I knew about my own life. You said something on the train about a person’s history being hidden from them. I want to know my history.’

  ‘But there’s something more to this for you, isn’t there? You think that Kochalyin learned from your colleagues about your plan to buy the intelligence archives. You’re thinking that they told him you were coming?’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘That’s exactly what I believe. I had a theory about his interception of the coded traffic between here and the embassy, but it seems much more likely that his handlers here sounded him out about the plan. And that was all he needed. He knew exactly where to find me and he could do what he liked without anyone hearing about it in London.’

  ‘Do you think they guessed?’

  ‘That’s an interesting point. I think Vigo had his suspicions. He may even have been responsible for alerting Kochalyin in the first place, but I doubt that he intended what happened.’ He stopped. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though. Kochalyin saved my life.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Oleg Kochalyin saved my life. When the swelling in my groin didn’t go down, the doctors investigated and discovered I had cancer in one testicle. They got it just in time.’