Spy People

by Duncan James

  “As you say, you never know. We had better not ignore the coincidence, so perhaps you’d ask David Poulson to check for any connection, would you. It’s about time colleagues in MI5 did something useful; they seem slow at everything.”

  “Something else rings a bell too. Do you ever watch football on TV?”

  “Rarely. Why?”

  “I’m sure there is a football team called Zenit, or something like that. Been in the Euro League or one of those international championships. I’ll check on them. Could be another coincidence, but they could be Russian, too. I’ll look them up on the internet.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Next time I come up, I’ll have coffee, I think,” said Clive, taking his still-full mug.

  “When you’ve told Gladys, ask her to come in will you please,” laughed Peter.

  When she appeared, Gladys said, “I told you about my tea, didn’t I?”

  “Stick at what you do best, Gladys.”

  She grinned.

  “I’m not sure where you’re going to start on this one, but can you find me a top-quality professional genealogist?”

  “A what?”

  “Someone who traces your ancestors. I need to hire one, and quickly.”

  “To see if the Wilkinsons really do come from Yorkshire?” guessed Gladys.

  “Spot on.”

  “I’ll tell you what. There’s a sort of Family History place down the road. A family Record Office, I think they call it, run by the Government. I’ll pay them a visit for a start. I seem to remember that Nick managed to find Donald’s birth certificate there. I’ll ask him, and go there right away. What do you want me to do if I find one?”

  “Hire him. I need him to work full time for as long as it takes.”

  “OK,” said Gladys. “But I’m not sure I’ve got a form for that.”

  “Before you go, could you ask Frank Browne to come up? I need to ask a favour of MI6, and I want him to light a fire under GCHQ. They’re being far too slow for my liking.”

  “Shall I tell him he’s in for a bollocking?”

  “No thanks, Gladys.”

  ***

  Clive Newell rang.

  “I’ve checked on Zenit,” he announced. “They’re a Russian football side, based in St. Petersburg.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Northcot.

  “Probably a coincidence. They are third from the top of their league, by the way.”

  “Tell David Poulson, in case someone in his organisation knows about the property company.”

  “I’ve got the Yard, by the way, to regard the Battersea house as a possible crime scene, and to keep it under guard until we say different. It occurred to me that if the Zenit people hear that their property is unoccupied, they may try to re-possess it and empty it. We wouldn’t want that, would we?”

  “Too bloody right we wouldn’t.”

  ***

  Frank Browne appeared.

  “Come in, and grab a seat,” invited Northcot.

  “Bill told me you’re in charge of finding Barbara and family.”

  “Right; and I need your help. Urgent help, in fact. The longer we are finding them, the more damage they may do if they do turn out to be the informers we are looking for.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “Want a coffee while you’re here?” asked Peter.

  “Rather than tea,” said Frank. “I’m told Gladys isn’t that good at tea.”

  Peter hit the buzzer, and somehow got through to Gladys’s answerphone.

  ‘Barbara has left, I’m in charge, and I’m out. Leave your number.’

  Short and to the point, thought Peter.

  “You’ll have to wait. She’s up the road somewhere looking for a genealogist. The point is, Frank, I need things done quickly as well as thoroughly. With all due respect, your lot at GCHQ, who forgot to monitor the phone in the first place, should by now have done some sort of analysis on the call from Donald. And they should also have managed to come up with something from the two computer hard drives they took away. I need results and I need them soon. Like now, in fact.”

  “I’m surprised myself that they haven’t been back to us yet, to be honest. Leave it with me, and I’ll kick a few arses.”

  “If you’d be so kind, perhaps you could let me know – shall we say, within an hour? – when I might expect to hear something useful. I also want a contact I can talk to at your Moscow station.”

  “I’ll get that for you right away, unless you want me to talk to them?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Browne had got the message by then, and left.

  “Sorry about the coffee,” said Peter, as Frank reached the door, “but we’re in a hurry. This is urgent, tell your people.”

  Peter Northcot sat back to gather his thoughts. Was there anything else he could do to speed things up? He had set everything in motion, so far as he could tell, and apart from talking to Moscow, had asked all the questions he needed to ask.

  He guessed it would be some time before they found the car. It could be anywhere, still in this country – Yorkshire perhaps – or even abroad, if they had taken it somewhere on the ferry. But if it was stuck in a supermarket car park somewhere, it could be weeks before it was found.

  He could think of no shortcuts. If only they had information about the Wilkinsons’ bank or a debit card or something, they could trace their movements by tracking use of that. But they didn’t, so that was that.

  ***

  Clive Newell rang again.

  “I’ve been on to the police looking after the Battersea house, and they say that someone from the agents turned up this morning, demanding access so that they could clear the place and re-let it.”

  “Now that’s very interesting,” said Northcot.

  “That’s what I thought. It means they know the Wilkinsons have left, and that they’re not coming back.”

  “Who the hell would have told them that? Who knows they’re not coming back?”

  “Exactly my thought.”

  “I hope the police on duty didn’t give them access.”

  “No, they didn’t, thank goodness. And now they’ve doubled the police presence until we say they can let the agents in to the place.”

  “Excellent. But I’d give good money to know who told Zenit.”

  “Nobody from here, that’s for sure.”

  “Since they’re based near the Russian Trade Delegation, I’ll get Poulson to see if MI5 have ever heard of them.”

  “They could even ring them up to find out why they never charged any rent.”

  “Let’s not. We may soon find out for ourselves.”

  ***

  When Gladys got back, she went straight in to see Peter Northcot.

  “I’ve found a family history bloke already, and told him to get on with it. He charges £50 an hour, would you believe, but reckons he can do everything from the place down the road, so we won’t have to pay train fares or expenses.”

  “How do you know he’s any good?” asked Peter.

  “The manager chap recommended him to me. Apparently he is well known there, and works for lots of people who think they’re related to Napoleon or the Queen or someone important; that sort of client. I’ve told him we’re different, and it’s a matter of National importance and very urgent. That’s why we’re paying £50 an hour and not £30.”

  “How long will this take?”

  “I told him that if he hadn’t been in touch by close of play today with some really useful information, he could regard himself as having been fired.”

  “Did he mind?”

  “No. Quite confident it won’t take him long.”

  “Good! Tell David Poulson to call off his people, who’ve already taken nearly two days to find nothing. The MI6 guy, Frank Browne is going to give me a contact at their Moscow station. When he does, get hold of them for me, please.”

  “OK. Anything else?”

  “Word has got rou
nd about your tea, by the way. Any coffee on the go?”

  “Comin’ up.”

  ***

  There was a chap at MI5 who Peter thought could be a help, but he didn’t want to go through Poulson. It was a chap he had met during his training, who had quite impressed him. He wasn’t that sure that his new parent organisation had managed to earn all the respect it deserved within Section 11, but he could understand why. They had been a bit slow off the mark in a couple of instances, but then so had SIS.

  He eventually got through to Richard Evans, who remembered him.

  “How you getting on at Section 11?” he asked.

  “I’ve been given a short straw already, and I need your help.”

  “What can I do?”

  “There is a property management company of some sort called ‘Zenit’, based in Highgate not far from the Russian Trade delegation. Know anything about them?”

  “Just a bit. What’s the problem?”

  “Do they ever do any work for the Russians?”

  “Now and then; bound to, as they are so close.”

  “What sort of thing would they do?”

  “Mostly finding flats and so on for delegation staff, and acting as agents for them.”

  “That’s interesting. We’ve come across a place they are managing, in Battersea, which is now empty. The people living there never seem to have paid any rent to anyone, and left in a huge hurry at no notice. Somehow Zenit knew they had gone, and have either assumed or been told that they were not going back, as they turned up to empty the place. How would they know that?”

  “Without a doubt, the people who did a runner were either Russians or working for them. Give me their name and the address you’re talking about, and I’ll do some checking.”

  ***

  Peter Northcot sat back to think what to do next.

  He was now in no doubt that either Barbara Wilkinson or her mother or both were enemy agents. Everything pointed to that fact at the moment. They had access to almost all the information that had been passed to Makienko, but the fact also was that Makienko had not known everything.

  Nobody had actually considered that, so far as he knew. They had been too concerned about who had told him what, but there were gaps in the man’s knowledge. Nobody had told him, or the Russians, that Lloyd was actually Barclay under another name. So far as he could gather, the people in Moscow weren’t at all sure that Barclay was still alive, and even Makienko had only guessed at it.

  So the Wilkinsons hadn’t told him.

  Why?

  Makienko had certainly known that Lloyd was going to Geneva, and followed him on a hunch. But neither he nor anybody else had told Moscow that that’s where he was going. Moscow still hadn’t a clue what had happened to Makienko, or where he had gone when he left London.

  Why?

  Did the Wilkinsons know? If they had known, did they leave before they could get word to Moscow, or simply choose not to tell them?

  The fact was that Barbara Wilkinson was not in her office 24/7. Things happened while she was at home, in the evening or at weekends. Including, perhaps, some of the things she had subsequently learnt about.

  It began to explain why she had cultivated her relationship with poor old Nick, who had inadvertently and in all innocence and good faith, been passing on information to an enemy agent. Pillow talk, they call it. Love is blind.

  Did that explain, perhaps, why the Wilkinsons had left so suddenly? Had Barbara become fond enough of Nick not to want to cause him any harm? Only she could answer that. So where was she?

  His thoughts were interrupted when Stuart Carrington knocked on the door.

  “I’ve heard from GCHQ at last,” he announced.

  “Tell me.”

  “First of all, the phone call from Donald. They reckon it could possibly have been made from an airfield somewhere. Not Heathrow or anywhere like that. Somewhere small.”

  “Why do they think that?”

  “Background noise. Faint, but could just be a small aircraft – piston engine possibly. There are also voices in the background. Again, too faint to interpret, but they think the predominant voices are female. Certainly, it is a woman who grabs the phone from Donald, but they can’t interpret what she says. They think, though, that it could be a foreign language of some sort, or at least a heavy dialect, but more likely foreign than British.”

  “Russian?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Do they have any idea where the call came from?”

  “None at all; not even a general area.”

  “Well, get them to find a Russian speaker and have him listen to it, carefully.”

  “OK. As to the computer discs, though, they’ve found nothing worth mentioning, so they say. Just mush, but no readable information. Anything worth having would have been on the discs, which have gone.”

  “Thanks for that. Let me know about the voices on the phone, one way or the other, and as quickly as possible.”

  He got on the phone to Clive Newell.

  “Tell your guys to forget looking for the Wilkinson’s car at airports or sea ports. Concentrate instead on small airfields only, and especially those accessible from London within a four hour drive.”

  “How do you work out the four hours bit?”

  “It’s about the time between Nick leaving Barbara’s place after being scrambled to go to Switzerland and the phone call from her son.”

  Things were beginning to happen at last. Peter thought he should up-date Bill, and perhaps let Nick know what was going on as well.

  He got Gladys to see if they could both join him. He didn’t want to disappear from his own office and the phone by going down to the Ops Room. To be honest, there wasn’t much point anymore in having a special Ops desk for this. There were only a few pieces of the jigsaw to find and put in place.

  “I’ve just been telling Sir Robin Algar who rang up that not much had happened since we were last in touch,” said Bill when he arrived.

  “You’ll need to ring him back, then, when you hear what I have to say,” said Peter. “Unless you decide not to tell him, that is.”

  “Why should I decide that?” asked Bill.

  “As I understand it, he was responsible for recruiting Barbara Wilkinson in the first place. If she does turn out to be an enemy agent, we may need to look at how she managed, shall we say, to evade the security checks.”

  “You’re not surely suggesting that Robin Algar is working for the Russians are you?” asked an incredulous Clayton.

  “I’m not suggesting anything. But you’ve been handed a rotten job to do by that man, which he should really have given to MI5 to sort out. I just think we need to be sure of our facts before we leap about briefing the Cabinet Secretary again, that’s all.”

  Clayton looked at Northcot quizzically for a moment.

  “What he doesn’t know,” added Peter, “he can’t pass on.”

  “And possibly forewarn others.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Tell me what you’ve found, then,” after a further pause.

  The briefing was short but succinct.

  “How very interesting,” commented ‘S’.

  “We’re still short of a few facts, but I’m sure when we have them that they’ll only confirm our worst fears.”

  Gladys interrupted.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got Moscow station on the red phone for you Peter.”

  “Good. Excuse me a minute,” he said to Bill.

  People in overseas stations knew all about Section 11, as he had done when he was serving in Hong Kong, so Northcot did not need to explain who he was, or plead for co-operation. They would do what he asked. First, he asked them about Makienko.

  “I need to know,” he said, “if you’ve detected any sign of Mrs Makienko doing anything she wouldn’t normally be expected to do.”

  “Since you ask, she has been spotted a couple of times visiting the Lubyanka Building. As you know that�
�s where the FSB has its Headquarters.”

  “Would you think that unusual?”

  “It may not be, considering her husband is missing. She may simply be seeking information about him, to see if they have a clue what’s happened to him.”

  “And do they have?”

  “Frankly, no. They still don’t know where he went after he left London, and haven’t the slightest idea whether he’s dead or alive. I’m told that the current thinking by his Director, Egor Ivanovic, is that he has probably defected, but he’s just guessing and not saying anything publicly.”

  “Don’t let’s tell him then!”

  “Sasha Makienko is said to be furious, and according to reports has had a flaming row with Ivanovic. They were housed in a new flat when they first got kicked out of London, but she’s hardly seen Dmitri since then, so she’s very much on her own.”

  “Keep an eye on her for me if you would, and let me know if you pick up any clue as to what she might think has happened, or what she might plan for the future. It’s just possible that she may decide to finish what her husband started. Meanwhile, we’ve lost a couple of possible agents from here, so the Russians aren’t alone in loosing people.”

  “Who are they?”

  “One Barbara Wilkinson and her Mother, accompanied by a youngster, aged about six, name of Donald. We picked up half a phone call from him, kicking up about being taken away from here. Keep an eye open for them, if you would. The kid could well give their presence away, if he gets too stroppy.”

  “Do you know for sure that they headed our way?”

  “Not a clue where they are at present. Just keep a look out if you would, and I’ll let you know if we pick up any further clues from here.”

  The call ended.

  “That’s a very good piece of thinking, if I may say so,” said Bill. “You should work for MI5!”

  “We’ll know more when we find their car. I would bet it’s on a small airfield somewhere south of London, for a quick hop across the Channel.”

  “Well, keep up the good work, and keep me informed.” Bill made for the door. “By the way, I’ve decided not to call Sir Robin. He can sweat for a bit.”

  “That’s if he really is worried. If he isn’t, he should be.”

  “One other thing. Catherine and I have agreed to look after Donald for a while if he should come back here. I’ve told ‘Uncle’ Nick. And we’ve put off tomorrow’s visit to Dusty for the time being.”

  “It begins to look now as if my own visit will be a purely social one after all. I had thought I would need to pump him for information, but that may not be necessary the way things are turning out. But I would very much like to meet the guy, all the same, when I can be spared.”