Inside Enemy

by Alan Judd

  ‘I have twenty minutes,’ he said, looking unusually pale and serious. In those days he had a moustache. He was often jokey, usually at Charles’s expense, but this time there was no joshing. ‘There is a problem. Not a problem with me. With you. MI6 has a problem.’

  In intelligence officer parlance this meant only one thing. ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s new, the case has just begun. Could he know about me? You must catch him before he finds out.’

  They were standing facing each other. Charles crossed the room and locked the door. Viktor ignored his invitation to sit. Charles sat himself at the desk and tore a sheet from his notebook. The hard surface of the desk would not record the imprint of soft pencil. He pointed at the chair again. ‘Sit down and tell me what you’ve heard.’

  Viktor looked for a moment as if he might walk out. He glanced at his watch, then abruptly sat.

  ‘Tell me,’ repeated Charles.

  Viktor stared at the portrait above the bed of a 1930s or ’40s Sacher, a handsome woman wearing Austrian costume. He addressed her. ‘There was a meeting two days ago in Prague of heads of services for all the Warsaw Pact. Marcus Wolf, the head of East German foreign intelligence, visited us today on the way back. He is an old friend of Guk, our Resident. They served together somewhere. When they were alone he congratulated Guk on the recent success against the British – those were his words. They were speaking in Guk’s office outside the safe speech room. I heard them because I was still inside, collecting papers after our morning briefing, and they didn’t know there was anyone there. It was careless of them. Guk should not have allowed Wolf into the Residency and Wolf should not have spoken like that outside the safe speech room. They were going to lunch with the ambassador and I stayed still till they had gone.’

  ‘No names or dates or indications of where or how? Or what sort of success?’

  ‘Of course, all of that. I was forgetting.’ He waited for Charles to hold up his hands. ‘No, but they continued to talk as they left the room. I didn’t hear everything. I heard Guk ask, “He is definitely MI6?” Wolf said, “Yes, now. We know about him. Everything he’s said checks out. A pity you’ve just been posted here, otherwise you could have become his core officer and got the glory.” Guk asked, “Can he get over here again or are they running him in London?” I didn’t hear Wolf’s reply. He said something but they must have been going through the door then.’

  Charles went back over it twice in the minutes remaining. Later, in the Vienna MI6 station, he sat at the cipher machine himself and sent a DEYOU – decipher yourself – telegram to C/Sovbloc in London, confirming that the main meeting had been successful and adding that there had been another to discuss possible developments. He would brief C/Sovbloc and DCIS – director of counter-intelligence and security – on return, knowing that the mention of DCIS would indicate that there was something serious. He then committed his notes to memory, shredded and incinerated them.

  The investigation ran for months, an invisible stream beneath the thick ice with which Matthew Abrahams, DCIS, covered all his secret work. Charles was occasionally called in to be questioned or to comment, but otherwise never discussed the case with anyone or had any idea how it was progressing until summoned again to Matthew’s spacious corner office in Century House.

  He arrived to find Frank Heathfield also there, a tubby, florid, genial man with sandy hair going white. He had spent most of his career in security posts and now, on the verge of retirement, he was listed as DCIS/res – research. It was a usefully unspecific title.

  Matthew waited for Charles to close the door. ‘We’ve got coffee, knowing your habits.’

  Frank smiled. ‘Sign of a long meeting.’

  Matthew gave a sinuous account of the investigation, illustrating the layered links of each element with movements of his slender hands. He and Charles had worked together more than once and Charles had learned never to expect to know everything that Matthew was involved in. But in this case, it soon became clear, he was being brought into the citadel.

  ‘We started,’ said Matthew, ‘with the assumption that your friend reportedly accurately and that what he heard was true. It told us that someone from the Office has made contact with the Russians, that he – and it is a he – is now based in London, that he passed information that checked out and that all this happened not long before Guk arrived in Vienna. Guk arrived five months ago, so the contact was probably not long before that. We assume – a bit of a jump, this – that something had made the volunteer known to the Russians before he joined the Office. Or, at least, that they knew what he was doing before he joined. That seemed the most likely explanation for Wolf’s saying that he was in MI6 ‘now’. Of course, meanings change in translation so it will be important, next time you meet your friend, to ask him to write it down in Russian. But meanwhile we’ll keep it as a working assumption.’

  The two of them, with no-one else informed apart from the Chief and Sonia, Matthew’s secretary, had trawled through staff records and recent postings home. Personal files were scoured for indications of resentment or disaffection. Using the assumption about ‘now’, they narrowed the search to four men whose previous employment might have brought them to Russian attention. One had transferred from MI5, one from the Army, one from the Foreign Office and one had visited Moscow as an academic.

  ‘We thought they were unlikely to have identified the former MI5 officer because he was not exposed to the Russians,’ said Matthew. ‘Then we had information from the CIA to the effect that one of the subjects discussed at the Warsaw Pact heads of service meeting in Prague was new intelligence – you don’t need to know what – that only a handful of people in this service know about. Of course, rather more than a handful of people in the CIA know about it too but for our purposes we checked all four candidates to see whether any of them were indoctrinated into that particular case. One of them is, the one who had visited Moscow as a student. We’re going to interview him and I’d like you to sit on the panel because you know him quite well. If you feel awkward about it we won’t include you. But if you are there it will make it trickier for him if he’s hiding anything because he’ll be fighting on two fronts, as it were.’

  ‘What about MI5?’ asked Charles. Security investigations were their responsibility, jealously guarded.

  ‘They have been informed that we are examining the possibility of a suspected leak from within SIS. As soon as we are able to confirm that there really has been such a leak, they will be brought in.’ Matthew held up his hand, his smile just detectable. ‘Yes, I know. Don’t say it. We’ve got away with it so far because of their usual reluctance to investigate espionage they haven’t themselves uncovered. Any investigation threatens trouble for them, either because it’s inconclusive and a waste of resources but might still come back to bite them later. Or because a spy is discovered and they get blamed for not having caught him earlier. So they’ve agreed we can continue to examine all four of those we think might be in the frame and let them know our thoughts soon. We are sending them the paperwork today. It’ll be a week at least before they look at it if they work at their usual pace. They don’t know we’re going to interview anyone. And we – I – will be in serious trouble if it doesn’t work.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  When Matthew named Peter Tew, Charles was conscious that they were studying him carefully. He had an immediate image of Peter’s pale, intelligent features, his grey eyes often on the brink of laughter, his quick smile and ready perception. Trying to match the new image of Peter as traitor with the old of Peter as friend was like having a tracing that didn’t fit the map. Yet, somehow, he was not surprised. There was much that was unknown about Peter, an uncharted interior. That was true of many people, of course, but with most there were myriad casual indications that the interior existed, suggesting what kind of country it was. In Peter’s case, he realised as Matthew talked, there were none. The beach was all you saw, sunlit, entertaining, attractive, i
ntended perhaps to forestall curiosity about the interior. Content with the superficiality of daily intercourse, Charles had never sought to explore.

  ‘The interview is arranged. He believes it will be a routine personnel interview to discuss his next posting,’ Matthew was saying. ‘Meanwhile, we have discovered he is homosexual.’

  Quite unexpectedly, that was a tracing that did fit the map. The Office was known for its attractive and talented women and Peter was popular with the girls, charming them, but he had no girlfriends. Unless you counted the one he used to mention – what was her name – Jane? Jenny? – who died of leukaemia. That was a long-standing relationship which had broken his heart, he implied, leaving you to conclude that it was difficult or impossible for him to consider another, yet. But no-one had ever met Jane, or Jenny. No-one had ever seen Peter’s Marylebone flat. Now, as Matthew described how the FBI in New York, where Peter was serving, had come across him visiting clubs in drag and that since his return on leave in the last few days surveillance had seen him picking up young men in a notorious pub in Vauxhall, the tracing drew itself.

  Charles recalled various minor incidents, remarks, tones, inflexions he never realised he had noticed. Peter’s almost maternal solicitude when Charles went down with flu, the follow-up telephone calls, Peter’s silences when people mentioned girls or sex, his abrupt and uncharacteristically brutal condemnation of someone who had been dismissed, allegedly on health grounds, as ‘a flaming poofter’. And that lunch in another Vauxhall pub which they drifted into simply because neither knew it and which turned out to feature a striptease in the bar. A young black girl cavorted to loud music on a raised dais, thrusting herself into the faces of the men nearest her. The performance was more vigorous than seductive and Charles watched, he told himself, more through cultural curiosity than interest, let alone arousal, but Peter was disgusted. He backed away, muttering, ‘Revolting. How can they?’

  Afterwards the girl resumed her white bra and knickers and red shoes and walked amongst the crowd in the bar holding out a man’s tweed cap for contributions. Every man put in something, including Charles, but Peter withdrew as if from contagion.

  As they walked back to the office Charles remarked on the contrast between the girl as symbol and presumed object of desire while on the dais, and the same girl, minutes later and still provocatively clad, walking unmolested amongst the drinkers who threw their change into her cap and treated her with indifference or familial affection.

  Peter wasn’t interested. ‘I can’t – the proximity. It makes me almost physically sick,’ he said, his eyes on the pavement. ‘So vulgar, very vulgar.’ He repeated the phrase softly to himself.

  Like many of his generation, Charles had grown up unaware he knew any homosexuals. He never looked for it in anyone nor had any idea what to look for beyond theatrical camp. A couple of girlfriends had told him about affairs they had had with women but that, though erotically interesting, somehow didn’t seem to count. Until quite late in his career homosexuality had been a bar to joining the Office because it disqualified anyone from being PV’d – positively vetted. The reason given was that it was a criminal offence in many countries and disapproved of in many more, rendering practitioners vulnerable to blackmail. There was also, no doubt, an unexamined assumption that homosexuals led more promiscuous lives and were less trustworthy; Burgess and Blunt cast long shadows. You could be a promiscuous and adulterous heterosexual so long as you didn’t lie about it in vetting interviews and kept clear of women from communist countries; NATO and other Western states were preferred. That was not too difficult – there were after all well over twenty NATO countries – though Charles mildly regretted having never been the target of a KGB honey-trap. He might have enjoyed being the object of seduction, watching the game being played before him.

  ‘It means he lied in his vetting,’ Matthew continued, ‘which means his PV certificate can be withdrawn, possession of which is a condition of working here. So we can dismiss him immediately if we want, whether or not we can prove he is our man. But if he is a spy – and we believe he is – we want him in prison, not free to be debriefed by the Russians whenever they choose.’

  ‘How strong is the evidence?’

  ‘Nothing that would stand up in court. We need a confession.’

  The interview was planned for the following week. It was essential that no-one suspected there was anything unusual going on, so Charles was to continue his current job but spend as much time out of hours as he wanted reading the papers in Matthew’s or Frank Heathfield’s office. It was then that he began to know Peter Tew in a way he never had before.

  6

  Tea with Viktor, without either tea or Viktor, took over three hours. Charles had to wait at the house and tell his story several times.

  He paused now, before doing so again. He had already described his arrival twice, once to the young policeman who was first on the scene, then to the inspector, the woman in plain clothes who was interviewing him now. But that was in the garden where he had waited because it felt inappropriate to wait in the house. A house not his and where Viktor – assuming it was him – lay dead on the polished hall floor with no face and bits of his brain and skull splattered over the first few steps of the stairs. His hair had gone grey, it appeared from some of the larger bits.

  Charles paused because he wanted to get it right, if this was to be a more formal statement. He was trying to be helpful although the inspector’s manner made him feel more like a suspect than the witness who had found the body. The inspector was in her thirties, pale, thin-faced, with a beaky nose and an officious manner. Her short bleached-blonde hair was darkening at the roots. She looked tired. It was hard to feel she had much going for her; perhaps she liked her job, perhaps she was good at it. Her plain-clothes assistant was a younger man with dandruff and a plump pasty face that looked as if it needed washing. Long hours, late nights and shift work did no favours for either, Charles thought.

  They were sitting at Viktor’s dining table with notebooks open and no visible recording equipment.

  ‘So,’ continued the inspector, ‘you say you were calling on Dr Viktor Klein, the owner, who was an old friend of yours but he didn’t know you were coming. When did you last see him?’

  ‘I’m not sure – over ten years ago.’

  ‘Not a close friend, then?’

  ‘Not in recent years.’

  ‘And you say you were calling on him to tell him you are moving into the area?’

  ‘Renting a cottage in Brightling, yes.’

  ‘Can anyone vouch for that?’

  ‘The landlord.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘The MP, Jeremy Wheeler. I’m not sure whether this is part of his constituency but he lives in Battle.’

  They noted that, their expressions giving nothing away. ‘What did Dr Klein do, exactly? He was foreign, wasn’t he?’

  ‘By origin, yes, but he was naturalised British many years ago. He was a scientist, not a medical doctor.’ He knew only the outline of Viktor’s post-defection identity and his new name, Klein. The police would have to be told the full story but it might leak less, or at least more slowly, if it came to them down their own chain of command, from their chief constable.

  ‘Where did he work?’ asked the man.

  ‘I’m not sure he did. I think he was retired.’

  A white van drew up on the pebble drive, joining the police cars. Two men got out and put on white overalls. A uniformed policeman, the alert young one who had been the first to arrive and who had turned pale at what Charles had shown him, walked towards the end of the drive with a reel of white-and-blue tape.

  ‘And you say the door was ajar when you got here?’ continued the woman.

  He was fed up with having what he’d said played back to him as if implying disbelief, but didn’t want to upset them. He wanted them to succeed, more than they could know. ‘Yes, I noticed straight away but I knocked a couple of times first, then I called out.
When there was no answer I pushed the door open. Then I saw the body.’

  ‘But you couldn’t know for certain it was Dr Klein if you hadn’t seen him for over ten years, could you?’ said the younger one.

  ‘I still don’t, without a face to go by. It’s an assumption we’ve all made.’

  There were footsteps and voices in the hall and the sounds of equipment being set up. The mantel clock above the fireplace struck five. Accurate, according to Charles’s watch. Typical of Viktor. It had struck the half-hour while he waited for the police. The longcase clock in the hall had stopped.

  ‘And then you entered the house, you say?’ continued the policeman. ‘Despite the fact that you’d seen there was a body there. Why did you do that?’

  ‘I entered because I’d seen the body, not despite it. Firstly, to see whether there was anything I could do—’

  ‘But then you went all over the house. Why?’

  ‘– and secondly to see if the killer was still here.’

  ‘What would you have done if he had been?’

  ‘Disarmed and arrested him.’

  ‘We’re not being funny, sir,’ said the woman.

  ‘Neither am I.’

  He was but he stared back, as unsmiling as they were. For a moment he had thought it might be suicide. Seeing no weapon, he had tiptoed throughout the house, looking into each room. It was a good house, generous proportions, high ceilings, well but sparingly furnished, a bachelor’s home, solid and comfortable, no frills.

  ‘That was very dangerous,’ said the inspector. ‘You should have waited for us. It’s our job to do that sort of thing.’