Spy People

by Duncan James

  Amidst all the confusion, there was only one fact. Fellow FSB agent Dmitry Makienko was missing. He should have been there – NOW – standing before his Director, as he had done only recently. But he was not there. Secretly, Comrade Director Egor Ivanovic was not altogether surprised, he had to confess. Their last “meeting” had been less than comfortable for Makienko, who, it seemed at the time, had made a colossal error and caused considerable embarrassment to the Russian Federation on a diplomatic level, and to him, Director Ivanovic, on a professional level.

  But that had been some weeks ago. Makienko had been given another chance. Indeed he should have been eternally thankful that he had not been thrown into the infamous Lubyanka prison, deep below the FSB offices and the old KGB museum. Instead, he had been sent on a humiliating few weeks’ of intensive refresher retraining, which he did not need. But it was better than incarceration, and, in the Director’s view, just punishment for what appeared to be a thoroughly botched piece of work. Makienko had claimed that Barclay had been assassinated, but there was no proof; not even so much as an obituary in the British press.

  So, in a way, Ivanovic was not altogether surprised.

  On the other hand, he was very surprised. Makienko was a true professional, had served his country well, and knew better than to be absent. He had some explaining to do, that was certain, but nothing to fear. Makienko must know that. Whatever had happened in the past few months, whatever mistakes he might have made, whether or not his last mission had been a success or a failure, Makienko knew that he was secure. Ivanovic would see to that. Whatever others might suggest about Dmitri Makienko, he, Egor Ivanovic, would defend the reputation of his old friend and pupil in the face of any allegations that might be made.

  It was true, of course, that Dmitri had become something of a loose cannon recently, no doubt buoyed by his earlier successes and his senior position within the FSB. If anything, he had become overly self-confident.

  He had, after all, returned to London, after his ‘refresher training’, without proper authority. At his request, he had been granted leave of absence while awaiting a fresh assignment. He had mentioned in passing to a colleague that he planned to return to London to collect a few personal items which he and his wife had left behind at the time of their first rather ‘hurried’ departure – “on the next plane or else”, more or less summed it up. Nobody had thought anything of it at the time. But he had returned discretely it was true, almost secretly in fact, using his own passport and travelling as a tourist, probably to avoid any further embarrassment to the Ambassador or to his country. He had, so it was said, chosen to stay with colleagues at the Trade Mission, rather than travel on his diplomatic passport and return to the Embassy.

  But the British Foreign Office had quickly discovered that he was back in London, and once again, just as quickly, demanded that he should leave the country on the next available flight. Once again, not a formal expulsion, with all the diplomatic ramifications that went with it, but the message was clear enough. The UK wanted Makienko out, and wanted him to stay out. According to London Ambassador Yuri Nevski, he had departed for Moscow immediately, in order to avoid further diplomatic embarrassment between the two countries.

  But Makienko was not there, in his Director’s office, as he should have been. Furthermore, it seemed he was not even in the building, or, it transpired later, possibly not even in the country. The idiots at the London embassy had only followed him as far as the Heathrow airport terminal. They had not watched him pass through the check-in desks or passport control, so had only assumed that he had caught the flight to Moscow. But there was no record of him arriving at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, or for that matter, at any of the others which served the City.

  They were the facts. Makienko could be anywhere. Still in London perhaps, or anywhere else. The only certainty was that he was not in Moscow. At least, he had not been seen arriving, or been checked in at passport control. So where could he be? And why had he chosen not to return to Moscow and to his wife and friends?

  It would have been little comfort to Ivanovic to know that the authorities in London had also failed to check Makienko’s progress through Heathrow. They, too, had assumed that he had returned to Moscow. They quickly discovered that he had not, however, and almost as quickly discovered where he was. The UK Border Agency people at Terminal 5 had a record of him leaving for Zurich.

  London thought they knew why, as well.

  Ivanovic was ignorant of all this.

  As news got out of Makienko’s disappearance, there was an inevitable fuss. Missing spies were always bad news, although, given his previous record, it was impossible to imagine that Dmitri Makienko could have defected. But you never knew. There were already fears that another of their agents in London had been turned, although there was no direct evidence to support the suspicion. Eventually, the Foreign Ministry demanded a full but secret inquiry. Makienko must be traced. Every record at every airport and sea port and border crossing was to be checked and checked again. While that was going on, the agents based in London and elsewhere in the UK were told to do everything possible to prove as best they could that he was not still there, and to show to everyone’s satisfaction that he had indeed left that country.

  One obvious starting point for their enquiries in Moscow was to question Makienko’s wife, but before they could speak to her, she got in touch with them. Even as they were trying to ring her, and while others were visiting the new Makienko apartment they had been given when they were first expelled from London, she arrived in a great state of agitation at the Lubyanka Building.

  She stood at the reception desk, insisting on seeing Director Ivanovic himself, and demanding to know where her husband was.

  Egor Ivanovic knew Sasha Makienko quite well. He had always regarded himself as a friend of her husband as well as his superior. He immediately ordered the staff at the reception desk to escort her to his office.

  “My dear Sasha,” he said, extending his hand, which was ignored, “we have been trying to contact you.”

  “To tell me what you have done to my husband, I hope. Where is he?” she demanded to know.

  “I was rather hoping you might tell us,” he replied. “That is why we have been trying to get in touch with you so urgently, in case he had been in contact with you by some means.”

  “Do you mean to tell me you have no idea where he is?”

  “At the moment, we do not know, that is true,” Egor admitted.

  “What kind of organisation do you run here when you can lose one of your top men?” She was becoming hysterical. “You must know where he is, and I demand that you tell me.”

  “Do sit down and try to keep calm,” pleaded Ivanovic. “Let me get you something to calm your nerves. A coffee or even something a little stronger perhaps.”

  “All I want from you is my husband,” came the angry response.

  “And all I want is to be able to return him to you,” responded the Director. “I take it that you have not heard from him, any more than we have?”

  “The last thing he told me was that you had treated him like a traitor, sent him on some useless training course, and given him indefinite leave.”

  “Which he seems to have chosen to take in London, from which you had both only recently been expelled,” countered Ivanovic, crossly. “Hardly sensible, in my view.”

  “He returned to collect some personal items which we were unable to bring with us, such was the rush to leave.” She sipped the strong black coffee which had been brought.

  “When did you last hear from him?”

  “After he arrived in London, he rang me.”

  “It will not surprise you to know that we have a recording of that telephone call,” responded Ivanovic. “But since then, nothing? No word at all?”

  “You tell me. You are the one spying on us for some reason.”

  “He has not contacted us at all since he left, on an unauthorised visit to London, so it ha
ppens.”

  “Never mind whether he signed your wretched piece of paper, or whether or not you gave him permission to visit London. We both know that’s what he did, and why he went. I want to know where he is now.”

  “And I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. He could be anywhere, which is why we were anxious to speak to you as part of our extensive search for him.”

  “Do you know he is not still in London?”

  “I don’t know where he is. I have said that. We know the British discovered that he had returned there, and once again demanded his immediate departure. We know he went to Heathrow airport in London, and we had assumed that he had caught the flight to Domodedovo, but he never arrived.”

  “So where did he go?”

  “I keep telling you, ‘I don’t know’. He could still be in London; he could be anywhere, including in this country. We are checking all the borders, and our people in London are doing their best to establish whether he did in fact leave.”

  “But they should already know,” she almost shouted. “Surely they watched him on to the aircraft, through the airport controls?”

  “I’m afraid not. A major oversight, which will be the subject of disciplinary action, of course.”

  “Never mind the idiots in London, I want my husband back. I want to know where he is!”

  “You will know as soon as I do,” he promised. “And I insist that you tell me the moment he contacts you again, as I am sure he will, soon.”

  “Since you are obviously listening in on my phone calls, you will know as soon as he rings me, if he does.”

  There was a slight pause.

  “I suspect,” she said, looking at Ivanovic through narrowed eyes, “I suspect that you have sent him on some secret and dangerous mission which you are trying to hide from me.”

  “I can assure you, on my word, Sasha, that I have not done so. We are as mystified and baffled as you are, and share your urgent need to find Dmitri.”

  She shook her head, in tears now.

  “Tell me,” asked Ivanovic, “has he ever said anything to you about wanting to visit some other place, perhaps to live or for a holiday?”

  “Never,” she replied after a moment’s thought. “He was always happy here, and we always spent our holidays in this country except when we were serving abroad. He had no wish to go anywhere else, for any reason.”

  The Director shook his head. “Such a puzzle,” he said.

  He crossed to his low bookcase, and poured two small glasses of Vodka from the decanter.

  “You look as if you need something stronger than that coffee,” he said, proffering a glass.

  She looked at the man standing above her.

  “From all that you have said,” she almost whispered, “I conclude that you believe Dmitri could just as likely be dead, rather than simply missing.”

  He shook his head. “We know nothing for certain yet. However, I am sure in myself that he is still alive. Somewhere.”

  But he wasn’t.

  ***

  Professor Jack Barclay was definitely still alive, though, but only just.

  Now known as Dr. Roger Lloyd, he had just escaped death for the second time in recent weeks, this time skiing in Switzerland. Thinking about it, he had not had a very good year.

  ***

  2 - COMMANDER NICK MARSDEN – GONE SKIING

  “The Russians will need to be sure Barclay is still alive before they risk doing anything,” retired Air Commodore ‘Doc’ Perkins had said. Within Section 11, he had taken the lead in transforming Barclay’s appearance. “Lloyd is not at all like Barclay now, and in any case we don’t think Makienko ever met the Professor anyway. He will have photos of Barclay of course, but they won’t be enough. So he will have to rely on inside information.”

  “If you mean someone telling him, that will mean we have an informer in our camp,” said Clayton, who was chairing the meeting. “And Jarvis is dead, so it can’t be him.”

  “Someone told them Barclay was going to California, otherwise there would not have been KGB men at the reception in the university,” Marsden reminded him.

  “I must say, I had always assumed an American source for that, and we’ve been careful to make sure they all believe Barclay has been killed,” said Clayton.

  “Sounds like a mole to me,” said Dusty Miller. “Someone on the inside, who knows the score and what’s really going on.”

  “If the Russians can turn Jarvis, they can turn anyone, even if Jarvis was being blackmailed.” said Marsden. “I think we need to get MI5 to mount a ‘mole’ hunt, and pretty quickly. Meanwhile, we have to assume that the Russians know the facts, and that they know Lloyd is Barclay under another name. For us to do otherwise would be plain stupid.”

  “I agree,” Clayton nodded. “The possibility of an informer in our midst has worried me for some time, I must be honest.”

  “As a matter of interest,” asked Miller, “what’s Lloyd going to do for a living when the dust settles?”

  “He’s said he wants a change, and has asked to join the UK team at the CERN project in Switzerland. He knows of a couple of people there - fellow particle physicists - and Sir Robin Algar has arranged for him to go out there immediately after the cremation, which in turn will be immediately after the inquest. He obviously can’t go back to his old job in the nuclear fusion research field at Culham, although he can continue to help as a consultant while he’s abroad. A few people on his old project will know of his new ‘alias’, and know too that they can call on him from time to time if they must. Once the heat is off, there is no reason why Lloyd shouldn’t even visit Harwell now and then, if he needs to.”

  “I’ll go with him to Switzerland,” said Miller, without being asked. “I shall also need to be in the coroner’s court and at the cremation, since I know what Dmitry Makienko looks like, and everyone else has only seen the photos I took of him. I’ll bet he turns up at one or the other.”

  ***

  It had been a busy few weeks for quite a lot of people in high places. Providing a prominent scientist with a new identity is no easy matter. His disappearance had to be arranged for a start. A nervous breakdown due to overwork was the preferred option, and should be enough until the body of his twin brother was found, then everyone would know that the professor had been murdered. Until then, the breakdown would explain his absence from the laboratory where he worked. Only the Director in charge would know the truth.

  A new identity was not just a question of changing the man’s appearance, although that was difficult enough. His whole background had to be changed, documented and then committed to memory by Barclay, who had already decided to change his name and title to Dr. Roger Lloyd. Lloyd needed to remember such details as how many ‘O’ level exams he had passed and when, and at what school. He needed to be added to the school’s historic records, and his exam results registered and documented. Similarly, at University. He needed a new birth certificate, and new medical records had to be prepared, so who was his GP? Where did he start work, and what did he do? Where did he live? Where did he go on holiday? For those involved, it was a familiar, if difficult, process, but for Lloyd it was a nightmare. Disappearing from the face of the earth is no easy business, he discovered, but it was worth the effort to avoid being assassinated by the Russians.

  Creating Lloyd’s background was not the end of it. Once his past had been established, his present and his future had to be planned, perhaps in even more detail.

  As he was fluent in French, Lloyd had decided to live and work in Switzerland, at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva. He had visited the place many times before, and aspects of the work there were not dissimilar to the work he had recently been doing. Indeed, it would be possible for him to continue his pioneering work into nuclear fusion, if only in an advisory capacity. But the fact that people there knew him, as Professor Barclay, itself presented a nightmare for the man. One wrong word and his cover would be blown
. One small slip-up with his new identity, and he would be recognised for who he really was. There were a couple of senior scientists there who had to know, of course, but they were only the most trustworthy, with the highest possible security clearance.

  But he couldn’t simply move into Switzerland, just like that. For a start, the country was not a member of the EU, and therefore not a signatory to the treaty which allowed free movement of labour. So there followed a great deal of diplomatic activity, to provide Lloyd with dual nationality and a Swiss Passport, to establish him as a taxpayer, and to take care of all the other aspects of a bureaucracy which were necessary to confirm Lloyd as a Swiss citizen. The administration at CERN had found him a nearby apartment, into which he could move, but he needed such things as a bank account and credit cards, a driving licence, a doctor – the list was endless. And the longer the list, the greater the risk that some of it would leak out to the Russians, to confirm their suspicions that their target was still alive. The need to eliminate the suspected informer in Whitehall had become an even more urgent priority.

  ***

  Eventually everything was in place, and Lloyd flew to Geneva to start his new life immediately after the cremation, which had been arranged to take place immediately after the inquest. As a precaution, his ‘minder’ Dusty Miller went with him, since he was the only member of Section 11 who knew what Makienko looked like, and would therefore be able to recognise him in the unlikely event that he should turn up. Miller and Lloyd had become good friends in recent weeks, and they had agreed that they would go skiing in the mountains above Montreux on their first weekend in Switzerland for a well-earned break.

  Miller was taking care to keep in touch with the Ops. Room in Clerkenwell, so that they knew what was happening and what his plans were in relation to Lloyd. There had been no further news about Makienko or his whereabouts, although MI5 thought they had identified the ‘mole’. A junior clerical assistant in the Cabinet Office had been trying to make a few extra bob selling low-level information. The problem was that he didn’t know what was ‘low-level’ and what wasn’t. The other problem was that the man was still there. They didn’t have enough direct evidence yet to arrest him or sack him, or even suspend him. They were working on it.