A Spy's Life

by Henry Porter

  Her mouth opened in surprise. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘No doubt about it. I didn’t suspect anything was wrong. If Kochalyin hadn’t done me the favour of whacking me in the balls on the first occasion that we met, I’d probably be dead now.’

  She winced. ‘Are you all right now?’

  ‘Not a sign since. They did a good job. Everything is okay in that department.’

  A silence ensued, both of them lost in their own thoughts. Harland got up and walked to the window again. It was odd that he should end up in Century House with Eva and the ghosts of old suspicions.

  ‘You gave me a look when we were with Teckman and Vigo,’ he said from the window. ‘You were saying something to me. What was that about?’

  She smiled. ‘You’ll see. You have a very clever son, Bobby. He’s like you. He thinks everything through until he finds the solution.’ She looked up at the ceiling then quite suddenly her composure collapsed. Her head sank to her chest and her shoulders convulsed with a sob. She began to run her hands distractedly through her hair as her shoulders continued to heave. ‘I cannot believe what has happened to my beautiful son. It’s my fault.’

  Harland moved to her side, put his hands on her shoulders and held her. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he whispered. ‘You must understand that.’

  She tried to speak but couldn’t get the words out. He drew her to him and stroked her head with his right hand.

  ‘He’s going to die,’ she said. ‘I know he’s going to die. He told me he wanted to die. Bobby, I don’t know how I’ll live without him being alive. It mattered when I didn’t see him for all that time, but at least I knew he was alive.’

  ‘Have you thought that he might have left you because he knew he was going to do something dangerous and he didn’t want to get you involved?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘That’s kind of you. But, no, he left because he couldn’t tolerate me seeing Oleg. If only I’d told him what I was doing.’

  ‘But you have now,’ said Harland, knowing she must have shed the whole story during the long hours by his bed.

  ‘Yes. Oh, Bobby, I can’t bear what has happened to him. I cannot live with the thought of him like that. I know it’s better for him to die, but …’ She sank into herself, falling forward on to her thighs. Harland stroked her back, feeling inadequate to the task of comforting her. The intimacy of shared grief, he now discovered, was as difficult as the intimacy of love. He sat looking ahead at the empty, darkened suite of offices which lay beyond the living quarters, wondering why he’d never recovered that part of himself.

  At length Eva sat up a little and dried her eyes. She had the glazed look of someone whose mind is utterly elsewhere. For a time she looked out of the window, her head nodding gently as her thoughts raced. Then she stretched for the bottle of wine on the other side of the table. Harland leaned forward, retrieved it for her and filled her glass. She thanked him and stretched again, this time going for the packet of cigarettes. As she did so her hair fell from the back of her neck and he caught sight of the oval of dark skin just beneath the hairline, the birthmark he’d kissed a hundred times during the long night in Orvieto. It seemed then to be the essence of her – the mark of her uniqueness. He leaned forward and kissed her neck as she came back to the sitting position. It was an impulse. He didn’t think before doing it and for a fraction of a second afterwards he expected her to whip round in horror. She said something which he didn’t hear and turned to face him, smiling weakly.

  ‘I remember you doing that before.’

  ‘In Orvieto,’ he said.

  ‘Orvieto.’

  He bent down to rest his face at the back of her head and kissed the birthmark many times again. And he murmured the thing that had been formed in complete sentences somewhere in his mind, waited to be voiced for over a quarter of a century.

  ‘I love you, Eva. I’ve always loved you. I never stopped loving. I cannot stop.’

  She turned her face again to him. ‘It’s strange of you to go on calling me Eva. I like it.’

  ‘Eva,’ he insisted. ‘I love you, Eva.’ He was surprised. He wasn’t watching himself. He had dropped his guard.

  She held his face between her fingers as if trying to steady it and looked at him. Her eyes were desperate.

  ‘You have to …’ she stammered. ‘You must …’

  ‘Help you?’ he asked. ‘Of course I’ll help you. You know I will.’

  ‘He’s going to die very soon,’ she said, quietly and matter-of-factly.

  In his former life – five minutes before – Harland would have sought to reassure her by saying that there was a chance that Tomas might recover some of his movement – it was after all a gunshot wound, not a stroke. He would have talked about Tomas building his strength and finding ways of living with his condition. But now Harland had bridged the void that existed between them, or, more accurately, between himself and the rest of humanity, he didn’t say any of this. Instead he said exactly what was in his mind.

  ‘When he dies, I will help you in every way I can. I will never leave you. I am here. Nothing else matters to me.’

  She kissed him, first with gratitude and relief, then with passion. Her hands fell from his cheeks to the base of his neck and she pulled herself to him, lifting her legs to the sofa and moving against him. He held her close, feeling the softness of her breasts against his chest and the firmness of her arms and shoulders in his hands. Her lightness surprised him, as it had done when they were young. He marvelled at her and fell to her neck, then kissed her on her mouth, on her eyes, on her cheeks.

  The scent of her awoke memories in Harland which were not exclusively erotic. He could hear the tolling of the clock tower near the hotel in Orvieto and smell the wood smoke that filled the town on winter evenings. There were inexplicable noises in the hotel. The wooden ceilings shifted and groaned in disapproval. Corridors creaked outside their door and the shutters on the windows juddered in the wind. He remembered her lying on the coarse linen sheets, twisted to an incredible degree at the abdomen so that her legs turned away from him but her torso remained flat on the plane of the bed. He remembered the miraculous curve of her hips – good child-bearing hips, he had said in a silly way, running his hand up the rise of her pelvis and down the slope of her leg and then back again, feeling the resistance of minute hairs on his fingertips.

  At some stage in the long night of their weekend together, he had broken free of her and thrown open the windows and shutters and gazed down on the huge deserted square in front of the cathedral. The sight of this silenced operatic set – the illuminated façade of the mediaeval church, a cat slipping into the shadows at a low furtive run, the eddies of a few leaves in the recesses of the buildings around the square – had stayed with him in a clear, dream-like still, as if this moment had been the only time that he had seen the physical world as it really was. There was a ghostliness in the square and it prompted in him an equal joy and fear that they were the only people left alive in the town.

  He had returned shivering to her warmth and laid his head on her stomach. She turned her legs and pushed herself up from the bed to watch him as his mouth drifted towards the line of her hair and down between her legs where he parted her flesh with his tongue. From the corner of his eye he could see her gazing at him with an intensely serious expression. Her hand suddenly reached down to press his lips closer to her and she came with a shudder, her head falling silently backwards so that he could only see the alabaster shaft of her throat. Quite some time afterwards she produced a gasp and her head dropped forwards on to him and she smothered him in kisses and brushed her hair across his body. In the early stages of their affair, during the collisions in the hotels of Rome, Harland, who was used to the milk-and-water sex of the English, had been taken aback by the ferocity of her attention. Eva gave, but also took with equal passion, and when at last she had exacted what she needed she lay back on the bed with utter lack of modesty. He was amazed at the whiteness of her body
and its strength.

  The sequence in Orvieto – moving from the window to taste her body and watching her strain backwards – he had played over and over in his head, partly because it brought her to life like no other memory, but also because it was the only order of events he could remember from the entire weekend. By that stage they must have told each other everything. He often thought of the taverna where they had sat and she had taken hold of one hand and sternly made him listen. But there was no real order in his mind to the three days because apart from that couple of hours in the restaurant they’d ruthlessly shut out the world and greedily merged into each other.

  Then as now. They stayed in the half-light feeling as young and awed by their delight as they had twenty-eight years before. Their joy was limitless and engrossing. But there were few words between them. He mostly kept his eyes shut to sense her the better, and in the rare moments he opened them he saw hers were closed too.

  Some time in the middle of the night they made their way into her bedroom and sprawled on the bed where he struggled with her remaining clothes. Her head flopped lazily from one side to the other as he removed her bra and drew the white shirt from her arms. He stopped for a moment and absorbed her beauty, feeling less self-conscious than he could ever remember being. She looked drugged with expectation.

  As he kicked off his shoes and removed his own clothes, she began to weave about him, nipping at him with her teeth, clawing him gently, holding him to her to find the tightest fit. She didn’t need to tell him that she loved him or that she had often replayed the way they made love in her mind because everything was as it had been, only more urgent, more serious.

  He watched her moving to a climax, lifting her head from the bed and opening her eyes with a look of surprise.

  About an hour later the phone in the sitting-room began to ring. Harland awoke and wondered furiously what time it was. He groped for his watch but found he’d left it in the other room and decided not to answer. But the phone went on ringing and after a couple of minutes, by which time he was fully awake, he dragged himself out of bed and went to pick it up.

  ‘Mr Harland. This is Professor Reeve. I have the information you wanted.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harland, and cleared his throat.

  ‘Well? Do you want it?’ demanded Reeve. ‘After you sent me the report, I went to considerable trouble to get this information for you.’

  ‘No, no – of course I want it, sir. Let me just get a pen.’ He reached for his coat pocket. ‘Right, I’m with you now.’

  ‘From the information that you gave me,’ said Reeve briskly, ‘my contact was able to identify the likely location of the massacre site. So write this down – the position is forty degrees and two minutes north, nineteen degrees and thirteen minutes east. Computer models of the local topography confirm that the picture you sent me was taken by someone facing the mountains of the Javor and Javornik ranges. The profile of the mountains that you can see is about twenty-five kilometres north-west of the site.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Harland, groping for the maps he had used with Tomas in the hospital. ‘It’ll be useful to be able to pinpoint the place in the report.’ He paused, opened the map and quickly ran his finger to a spot not far from the road that meandered through the mountains.

  ‘Are you there?’ said Reeve, who had been explaining that his contact was a CIA target-spotter who was familiar with the terrain in the Balkans.

  ‘I’m with you,’ he said hastily. ‘I was just glancing at the map and wondering whether it would be possible to learn if the grave was known to the authorities in The Hague.’

  ‘You don’t have to bother,’ snapped Reeve. ‘I’ve already checked on the data base we have. This site is new to us and will be to the people at The Hague. It was what Mr Griswald was undoubtedly working to expose.’

  ‘Well, I’m most grateful to you. My heartfelt thanks, Professor.’

  ‘But I haven’t finished. I rang now because this site has suffered some disturbance in the last twenty-four hours. My contact has been doing some research into this area with the usual resources at his disposal. And he noticed in yesterday’s pictures, which are exceptionally clear, that there was earth-moving equipment in the area. There is a two-hour gap between the first set which shows the equipment moving up a road toward the site and the second set which reveals the vehicles gathered round the site.’

  ‘The evidence is being destroyed,’ said Harland. ‘He’s digging up the bodies.’

  ‘Precisely. With the harsh weather in those mountains at this time of year, it’s unlikely that anyone would countenance carrying out large-scale construction work. The cold wouldn’t allow it. So that is the only conclusion to draw. Someone should get some photographs of what’s happening on the ground. But they’ll need to get there during daylight tomorrow. It won’t take long for those people to dig up and distribute the remains around the hills and then it will be a very difficult task indeed to prove that anything happened at that place.’

  ‘I take your point,’ said Harland

  ‘So, I leave it with you,’ he said. ‘Good hunting, Mr Harland. I’ll send you yesterday’s images. You’ll need them to find the exact spot. Let me know what happens.’ He hung up without saying goodbye.

  Harland thought of going back to bed but then he began to look at the map. He could fly to Sarajevo, hire a car and be there by early afternoon. All he would need to buy was a camera – maybe a video recorder too.

  It was just five o’clock so he made some tea and returned to Eva who was lying on her side, sound asleep. He sipped the tea while his eyes moved over her face.

  Harland’s ears pricked up. Someone was moving on their floor. He put the tea down, crept to the door and peered through. The figure stopped and looked at the open map. As he moved against the glow of London in the window, Harland recognised The Bird’s profile. He called out softly so as not to wake Eva.

  ‘Hello, old chap. Sorry to wake you so early.’

  ‘You didn’t. What’s going on?’

  ‘Only the entire security establishment frothing at the mouth, but don’t let it worry you. I’m sure it’s all in a day’s work for you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Radio stations across Europe are spewing out the code again – just one code this time, and the whole bloody lot is being blasted out at the rate of knots. Vigo is named – so too Brother Morsehead and Friend Lapthorne. Did you know they were tied up with Oleg Kochalyin from way back?’

  Harland nodded. ‘I guessed.’

  ‘But you didn’t know that innocent-looking little fucker Morsehead was on his payroll. Apparently Morsehead used to pay Kochalyin. Come the revolution, Kochalyin paid Morsehead. It’s the end for him and his ambitions.’

  ‘Who’s been translating this stuff for you?’

  ‘The man you met after the races. The first broadcast came on the dot of midnight. Cheltenham went haywire. He was called in to trace it. Bobby, they’re sure it’s coming from London. Though they haven’t got the exact spot yet. I’ve told him to keep me posted.’

  ‘And you came to check it wasn’t us?’

  ‘It did occur to me that you’d rigged up some system here while you were canoodling away with the Bohemian Temptress.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t me.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s asleep. I can wake her if you’re worried.’

  ‘Leave her,’ said The Bird, looking down at the map. ‘What’s this all about?’

  Harland told him about Reeve’s call and his decision to leave for Sarajevo that day.

  ‘So you’re still pursuing this thing?’

  ‘Yes. In all the fuss everyone forgets that there’s a fucking war criminal walking about doing exactly as he pleases.’

  ‘Why don’t you let it drop, Bobby? This man is pure poison. You know that better than anyone. You’ll just get yourself killed if you go.’

  ‘It’s obvious, Cuth. Ole
g Kochalyin has affected every part of my life. I want to see him nailed. I’m going to get pictures of that place if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘It will be,’ said The Bird. He examined Harland again. ‘Are you sure the transmissions aren’t your work, Bobby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then who the hell is responsible?’

  There was a noise in the passage leading from the bedroom. Eva appeared, wrapped in a towel. She looked at them in turn.

  ‘I know what you’re talking about. The answer is Tomas. I gave him help, but he did most of it himself. I told you, Bobby, he’s very clever. It took incredible willpower to do what he has done in the last two days.’

  ‘But how?’ asked Harland. ‘How could he possibly do it from his hospital bed?’

  She sat down on the arm of the sofa. ‘He had stored everything in an electronic archive. The only thing he needed was the virus – but the codes and everything were there, waiting to be used. He learned to use that machine and we worked from there.’ She looked at her watch. ‘There’ll be another one soon. I believe he intends this to be his memorial.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ said The Bird, missing the point. ‘People aren’t going to forget this in a long time. The only mercy is that Fleet Street’s finest can’t read it on the bloody Internet.’

  Eva looked down at the map. ‘Are you going there, Bobby?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’ve just had a call from Washington. The satellite pictures yesterday picked up some activity at the site.’

  She was about to say something when the phone rang. The Bird answered and handed it to Harland. A duty sister from the hospital was on the line. Tomas had contracted a case of double pneumonia and was running a high temperature. She said they should get there as soon as possible.

  The Bird drove them there in fifteen minutes flat and went inside with them because, as he pointed out, the danger from Kochalyin was now very great indeed. In Tomas’s room they were made to wear surgical masks. There were two nurses, each watching different monitors, and a woman doctor standing by his head. As Harland passed the end of the bed he saw the initials ‘DNR’ – Do Not Resuscitate – written along the top of his medical notes.