Sea of Spies

by Alex Gerlis

  ‘Come with me!’ It didn’t sound as if he was about to find that company for him. Two more men had appeared behind Vasil, one of them pushing the Bulgarian out of the way to be closer to Prince. If anything they were taller than Ulrich.

  The Kayseri fell silent.

  Prince shifted in his seat, wondering how on earth he was going to get out of this. Then his companion stood up; he was a large man, tall and well-built with a swarthy complexion and two or three days’ growth of beard. He brushed back his thick hair and addressed – more like snarled– at Ulrich in less than fluent German.

  ‘This is my friend and he’s coming with me.’ He gestured to Prince to get up and follow him as he got up to leave the banquette. To Prince’s amazement, Ulrich and the two men who’d appeared behind him moved back a step or two.

  ‘You’re making a mistake – I just want to talk to your friend.’ Ulrich no longer sounded so threatening.

  ‘You know full well I can have this place closed down tomorrow. Now, move!’

  He shepherded Prince out of the bar, through the courtyard, and snapped at the doorman who quickly opened the wrought-iron gate. In the street he turned left and hurried Prince along. For such a large man he moved surprisingly fast. At the end of the block they turned into the dead end where the taxi had dropped Prince barely an hour earlier. The large man whistled and waved an arm above his head. Ahead of them a car engine started and its headlights came on as it eased down the small street towards them. It was only when they were in the back of the Mercedes that the man spoke to him.

  ‘English?’

  ‘Well, Irish actually.’

  ‘Really?’ The man raised his eyebrows in apparent disbelief. He gave instructions to the driver in what sounded like Spanish.

  ‘And where are you staying?’ His English was not quite as bad as his German.

  ‘The Hotel Bristol.’

  His companion turned round, looking out of the rear window.

  ‘They’re not following us but they’ll find you eventually, assuming you don’t want to be found. Do you want to be found?’

  Prince replied that he’d rather not. He had no idea who this man was and was beginning to fear it was a trap.

  ‘Did you give them your name?’

  ‘No, I’m sure I didn’t.’

  ‘That’s something, I suppose. You should be all right for a day or two. I’ll have a word with Ismet.’ He leaned back against the door, lit a cigarette and handed one to Prince. He sighed and spoke with the driver again, seemingly instructing him on what route to take. ‘Perhaps we ought to go somewhere first where we can have a chat, eh?’

  This, Prince decided, was a trap. He couldn’t believe he’d revealed where he was staying. He was making so many basic errors. In the unlikely event this wasn’t a trap he’d leave Istanbul in the morning. He wasn’t even sure he’d bother to tell London before he arrived in Baghdad. He checked the door wasn’t locked and resolved to jump out when the car next stopped at a junction. He could see one looming ahead.

  The other man placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘You look worried. I can assure you I’m your friend – in fact, I’m the best friend you could have in this city, and if Ulrich is your enemy then you’re certainly my friend. My name is Alvertos, by the way.’

  Chapter 16

  London

  September 1943

  Sir Roland Pearson shared his aversion to hot places with a similar dislike of the cold and Tom Gilbey was finding the heat in Pearson’s office in Downing Street bordering on the intolerable. Despite it being a typical late September day – neither too hot nor too cold – the radiator was on full and the windows firmly closed. The small office with its improbably thick carpets and heavy drape curtains felt like a sealed cabin.

  Notwithstanding the heat in the room, the prime minister’s intelligence adviser looked considerably paler than he had when Tom Gilbey had entered some twenty minutes earlier. His visitor had not been the bearer of good news. He’d said nothing while Tom Gilbey had been speaking and had barely reacted other than with a frequent raising of his eyebrows, an occasional nod of his head and quite a lot of shaking of it. He waited for a while after his former schoolmate had finished, staring in the direction of the window covered by a dirty net curtain and with a deep courtyard beyond that.

  ‘I thought you said he was one of your best agents, Gilbey?’ It was delivered more in the tone of an admonishment than a question.

  ‘In the same way, Roly, as you said your man Cooke was. You described him as a rising star before you organised your own mission for him, didn’t you? So you should appreciate then how no one can predict what will happen when an agent is in another country. It’s the nature of the beast. At least my man isn’t feeding the fish at the bottom of the Bosphorus.’

  Another pause. Pearson shifted his gaze from the window to the blotting pad on his desk, shooting a disapproving look at Gilbey in between.

  ‘I don’t know, I have no idea why I allowed myself to get drawn into this Turkey business. I do believe the sun may have had a detrimental effect on me when I was in Cairo – ought to have worn a hat. I should have passed it on to you chaps straight away. It’s been a bloody nightmare from the off, eh? I tell you what, when I die, which I imagine will be sooner rather than later thanks to all this nonsense, the word Turkey will be an epitaph on my grave. Not that there’ll be many people at the funeral – an avaricious cousin or two, my housekeeper I daresay, a token person from this place and one or two enemies checking I’m six foot under. I hope the obituary in The Times is decent.’

  ‘I fear you’re being unduly pessimistic, Roly. My chap is first class, maybe he’s on to something after all.’

  ‘But you’ve just been telling me how he’s gone missing, Gilbey! I expect you to sort this out.’

  ‘That is precisely what I’m planning to do.’

  * * *

  The following day – the last one of September – they gathered in Tom Gilbey’s office in St James’s. It was just the three of them: Gilbey, along with Christine Wright and Martin Mason. The latter had recently been through a further vetting, one considerably more rigorous than before, and had come out of it with an enhanced level of security.

  ‘Remind me when he arrived in Istanbul, if you will?’

  ‘It was 29th August, sir – a Sunday.’

  Gilbey glanced up at a calendar on the wall next to the table the three of them were sitting at. ‘And it’s what – the 30th today, 30th September. So he’s been there for a month, a whole month. Frankly, I’d have expected him to be on his way back by now. Instead he’s disappeared. Martin, perhaps it would help if we reviewed his messages?’

  Martin Mason had various pieces of paper splayed out in front of him. He carefully put on a pair of reading glasses. ‘As you say, sir, Michael Doyle arrived in Istanbul on 29th August. The following day – the Monday – he sent the pre-written article from the Grand Post Office. He used the correct code to indicate everything was fine. He sent his second article on… where are we, ah – here… the Friday, 3rd September. This message embedded in this article reads: no problem so far found good contact on track of chromium ends. The article itself was rather well written, I have to say – a nice colour piece and the idea of building it around a famous coffee shop was a clever one.

  ‘We sent a telegram from Zurich confirming we’d received the article. He filed his next article – this one, here – on the following Thursday, the 9th. It was an article about walking on the banks of the Bosphorus. Rather overwritten in my opinion, not as clever as the first one. The message within that article was somewhat encouraging: promising progress chromium hunt evidence to follow soon ends.

  ‘Then we heard nothing for a while, until Tuesday, 21st September in fact—’

  ‘…this was the Greece article?’

  ‘Yes, sir, well in fact an article – rather shorter than one would have wanted, but never mind that – about the Bosphorus linking the Mediterranean and the Bla
ck Sea and the different countries ships come from and go to and—’

  ‘…a subject he should have steered well clear of. He was told to stick to matters that would not arouse suspicion, minarets and the like…’ Christine Wright was shaking her head, a disappointed look on her face.

  ‘Remind me of the message, please, Martin – I know I have it somewhere here.’

  ‘…new lead close chromium need visit Greece first stop…’

  ‘Which of course is quite contrary to his instructions, which were to stay in Istanbul. On receipt of that article we sent a telegram poste restante including the code word Ankara, which he would have known was a very clear instruction to abort the mission and return home, immediately. But since then – nine days ago – not a word.’

  ‘And of course, prior to that, we had the report from Bryant and Stone—’

  ‘…who knew nothing of his presence in Istanbul?’

  ‘Correct, sir. However, they did report two bits of intelligence regarding him. The first was a meeting with the Irish Directorate of Intelligence’s resident in Istanbul, Joseph O’Brien. He’s rather highly thought of, I’m told, and not especially anti-British. He’d been asked by an officer of the Turkish secret police about a journalist called Michael Eugene Doyle who was staying at the Hotel Bristol and using an Irish passport. As far as we can gather, Prince hadn’t done anything in particular to arouse suspicions, but the secret police nonetheless wanted to check him out. O’Brien was concerned he may be an agent of ours and was angry he was using an Irish passport. They assured him he wasn’t.

  ‘However, soon after that – on 8th September to be precise – Doyle turned up in the bar at the Park Hotel, where the Holy Trinity of diplomats, spies and journalists gather. He joined a group of four journalists and was rather generous with drinks. Apparently he steered the conversation onto to Turkish trade and specifically about coal and chromium exports to Germany – wanted to know if any of them had any idea where they may be being shipped from.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake…’

  ‘One of the group was Buchan from The Times and he’s on Bryant and Stone’s books, in the you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours sense of the word. He also said Doyle’s accent was not totally convincing.’

  ‘A blessing in disguise, possibly?’

  ‘In what sense, sir?’

  ‘In the sense that it gave us an excuse to instruct Bryant and Stone to investigate Doyle, without us having to let on to them he’s one of ours. I think you may be unaware of what transpired, Mason, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘As we understand it, by the time we received the report from Bryant and Stone and then responded to them, telling them to see what they could find out about Doyle it was… what, the following Thursday, the 16th. They visited the Hotel Bristol and were told Doyle had checked out the previous Friday, the 10th – the day after he’d filed the article about walking the banks of the Bosphorus and—’

  ‘…and what, eleven days before he filed the message about going to Greece?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And just to be clear – that message, about Greece – it was filed from the Grand Post Office, the same place as the others?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So since Friday 10th, no one has seen him – but he must have been in Istanbul because he filed from there eleven days later. Do we know if Greece has any connection with the chromium trade – do they even mine it there?’

  ‘Very small amounts, as I understand it, sir.’ Martin Mason was consulting one of his sheets of paper, his reading glasses now perched on the end of his nose.

  ‘So we have no idea where Michael Doyle is, sir,’ said Christine Wright. ‘He could still be in Istanbul, he could be in Greece… he could be anywhere.’

  ‘He could be dead.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mason, he could well be.’

  ‘There is something else that only came in this morning from Istanbul, sir.’

  ‘Go on, Christine.’

  ‘Bryant and Stone have an informer – a plumber who occasionally works at the German consulate. Bryant and Stone’s contact with him is somewhat intermittent – when he has some information and can be bothered he contacts them. Apparently his access within the consulate is quite limited, so the information he has is rather low level, but useful nonetheless. They caught up with him yesterday. He’d managed to pick up an internal telephone directory at the consulate and wanted some reward for it. Then he happened to mention how he was last there a couple of Fridays ago – which they established was the 10th – and he said there was a real flap on, people rushing in and out, lots of shouting and the like. He doesn’t speak German but he did overhear two of the consulate’s Turkish drivers talking and they said something about searching for an English agent who’d gone missing the night before.’

  ‘And he didn’t think to mention this sooner?’

  ‘Apparently not, sir. Evidently he thought the information would be less rewarding than an internal telephone directory.’

  ‘I’m beginning to appreciate why Sir Roland thinks Turkey will be the death of him. Maybe it will be on my gravestone too.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘So what do we do now, sir?’

  Gilbey shook his head; he’d rather been hoping Christine Wright would have a recommendation of her own. ‘I suggest we tell Bryant and Stone that we have an interest in tracking down this Michael Doyle – don’t be specific as to why – and that they should keep looking for him. Other than that we’ll just have to wait for Prince to pop up – he has a habit of doing that, you know. He went missing for a good three months in the heart of Nazi Germany earlier this year and sorted himself out in the end. He’s quite the most resilient of agents. We need to have faith in him.’

  ‘We don’t have much alternative, do we, sir?’

  Christine Wright spoke as the three of them stood up. She waited until Martin Mason had left the room before following Tom Gilbey towards his desk.

  ‘I appreciate this may be none of my business, sir, but I was wondering if there was any news on Prince’s son?’

  Tom Gilbey frowned and shook his head. He gave the impression this was a subject he hoped he wouldn’t have to address.

  ‘Chief Superintendent Newton has my direct number here and calls me as a matter of course every Monday and Thursday. I insist on that. He can’t be faulted for perseverance and he’s methodically working his way through every Brown in the country. But so far, nothing… heaven knows what I’m going to say to poor Prince when he comes back and we still haven’t found his son. The thought keeps me awake at nights, I can tell you.’

  Chapter 17

  Istanbul

  September 1943

  ‘I’m the best friend you could have in this city.’

  The man who’d introduced himself as Alvertos hadn’t said much more than that as the Mercedes sped through a strangely quiet Istanbul. The moon was quite full and improbably low, casting a blue-grey light over the city, catching the minarets in particular in an unusual glint. Alvertos had spent much of the journey twisted backwards in his seat next to Prince so he could keep looking out of the rear window. When he did speak it was to the driver, in what sounded like Spanish.

  As far as Prince could tell they’d headed south from Unkapani and were driving around the peninsula between the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn, sticking to smaller roads and alleyways. Every few minutes the driver would respond to an apparent instruction from Alvertos and pull into a lane coming off an alleyway and park the car in the shadows. They’d wait for a while, the only sounds being the three of them breathing and the inevitable dog or two annoyed at an unwelcome presence in their street.

  After maybe five minutes Alvertos would leave the car, keeping his passenger door ajar. As he did so he’d remove something from inside his jacket and hold it against his side as he walked down the lane and into the alley, disappea
ring. On one occasion when he returned to the Mercedes Prince spotted it was a gun and he held it front of him as he sat down, taking time to admire it. He held it up for his passenger to have a proper look.

  ‘Beretta.’

  Prince nodded approvingly. Before his first mission he’d had a couple of sessions on handguns. They’d felt it was important he was familiar with them, important to know who carried what. ‘Sometimes the handgun will be the best clue you get as to who’s carrying it.’ He reckoned this was one of the newer semi-automatic pistols with its distinctive short barrel and chunky grip. It was standard Italian army issue and his instructor had told him it was one of the best pistols around, before remarking about it being wasted on the Italians as they had no idea how to use it. Satisfied his passenger appreciated the quality of his weapon, Alvertos bounced it in his hand before replacing it in his shoulder holster.

  Two or three times Prince tried to start a conversation but each time Alvertos hushed him: ‘…later.’

  Despite the events in the Kayseri, the drama of their escape from it and the fact he was now sitting next to a man with a gun, Prince felt less nervous than he might have done. There was something about Alvertos – his best friend in the city apparently – which made him trust him. Even the display of the pistol was unthreatening: it seemed to be intended to impress and reassure him.

  Soon he became aware of the Sea of Marmara on their right before they entered Sultanahmet, with the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia both splendidly lit – a sight which still took Prince by surprise. He was used to dark European nights, where any breach of the blackout invited air raids.

  They stuck to the main road running by the Bosphorus, the driver accelerating hard past the Topkapi Palace. As they approached Sirkeci railway station the car turned off the main road and continued its journey through smaller streets away from the Golden Horn. Sirkeci was the main station for trains into Europe and he’d had in mind to write an article based on it. He imagined even Martin Mason would be satisfied with the amount of colour he was bound to find at the station – the travellers to and from Nazi Europe, maybe even a refugee or two, the terminal building with its unusual mix of European and Oriental styles of architecture. He was now beginning to wonder if he’d ever get round to writing it.