by Jeremy Duns
‘Can’t say I know of anyone by that name, sir,’ said the Redcap, and put his pad away. ‘I’m afraid I cannot allow you to come through here—’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, stop mucking me around!’ I said. ‘It’s vitally important I get through before the PM arrives. Find Henry Pritchard and tell him…’
I trailed off. A man with a jovial red face and a Saint George bow tie had made his way through the checkpoint and was striding towards us.
*
‘Gosh – you have been in the wars, haven’t you? So to speak.’ He chuckled into his chins.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve caught some rare new disease, apparently.’
His eyes widened. ‘Contagious?’
‘Could be.’
He wiped his brow with a dirty-looking handkerchief. ‘Best keep out of your way, then!’ He squinted into the sun, which was almost directly above us. ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen, eh?’
David had gone off with the Redcap to park the Land Rover, and Manning was leading me through the compound’s main courtyard. All the usual pageantry and pomp of a state visit had been rolled out: Union Jacks hung from every available flagpole and a banner welcomed the British prime minister in foot-high letters above the main gate. Shirtsleeved photographers circled one another trying to find innovative angles to shoot it, while doctors in spotless white coats muttered abstractedly to journalists as they glanced anxiously at the wards that wrapped around the place like a quad.
It was easy to take the scene for granted, but I knew it could all change in an instant. I mentally replaced the Union Jacks with Hammer and Sickles and the black Rovers with ZiLs: one squeeze of a trigger and that could be the next state visit this place saw. So where could she be? The wards were very low-ceilinged, but there were three floors, so it wasn’t possible to see into them all. Especially the corners… Manning was babbling something next to me, and I interrupted to ask him if he had heard from Pritchard yet.
‘Yes, he arrived with Smale a few hours ago.’
‘Smale? What’s that little prick doing here?’
Manning looked offended. ‘I thought he was rather a nice chap, actually. He’s over there.’ He pointed to a group of whey-faced men in suits standing by an armoured car at the other end of the courtyard. One of them seemed vaguely familiar, and I asked Manning who he was.
‘Sandy Montcrieff,’ he said. ‘You met him at the Yacht Club, remember?’
I remembered: the ghostly figure in the nightshirt. Ex-BBC Mirror man.
‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked. ‘And Smale?’
‘They’re both with the PM’s advance party. Making sure of security with Henry.’
‘And where’s he?’
‘Oh, Christ knows. Last time I saw him he was about to head off to check the wards. Lord knows why he’s so anxious: I’d have thought he’d have been used to this sort of thing, what with his connections.’
I stopped walking. ‘What connections?’ It sounded odd coming from Geoffrey: he was also a spook.
Manning turned to me, his piggy little eyes looking a little forlorn. ‘Well, you know…’
‘No, I don’t know. Tell me: it could be important.’
‘Ah,’ said Manning. ‘Did I not mention that Henry is Marjorie’s brother?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You didn’t.’ It explained how the old fool was still working, though. ‘So Henry is an aristocrat, is that it?’
‘Well, yes – but not just any old Scottish aristocracy, old boy! They’re second cousins to the Queen. I just thought with the number of state functions Henry’s been to, he must be used to—’
I didn’t hear the rest. I had already started running in the direction of the wards.
XXIII
‘Hello, Henry,’ I said. The sweat was pouring off my right hand, the one clutching the pistol.
Pritchard turned and smiled at me. Actually smiled.
‘Paul,’ he said. ‘I wondered when you might turn up.’ He looked back at the window. As I had suspected, it was one of the corner rooms. ‘Game’s up, is it?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘“No sudden movements?”’
‘That’s the drill.’
It was dark in here: it seemed to be some sort of office-cum-storeroom, with filing cabinets and shelves of medical supplies. I mustered all the concentration I could to follow his arm as he dropped to his knees and placed the rifle on the floor.
‘When did you find out?’ said Pritchard, standing again, still affecting the absurdly casual tone, as though I’d walked in on him searching my drawers or reading my diary rather than preparing to shoot the prime minister.
‘Just now,’ I replied. ‘Manning mentioned you were related to the Queen, and I wondered why I’d never heard that before. Where’s Anna?’
Pritchard looked at me for a moment, then tipped his head back and gave a slightly deranged laugh. ‘Oh, Paul!’ he said when he’d managed to pull himself together. ‘I thought you’d got a little further than that.’ He adjusted his spectacles primly. ‘Anna’s dead.’
Something broke inside me. I don’t know why, as it was what I had believed for nearly twenty-five years. But I had wanted to see her, just one more time. To hear her voice, just one more time.
‘The photograph,’ I said with the part of my brain that wanted all the details accounted for. ‘In the marketplace…’
‘Faked,’ said Pritchard. ‘Rather a good job, considering the time we had to put it together.’
‘So Geoffrey is working for you?’
‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘He’s not aware of the full ramifications, one might say.’
‘Did you kill her?’
He dipped his head. ‘In ’45? No, that was also faked. Sorry, old boy. Anna changed her name and moved to Tunisia, where she died in ’57. Lung cancer. Those unfiltered cigarettes she liked, do you remember?’
I remembered. ‘So you and she… ?’
He nodded. ‘Always. Yes, I was her one true love.’ He saw the look on my face. ‘You’re lost, I know. I have a lot I need to tell you.’
I leaned against the wall. ‘You can start with this’ – I gestured at the rifle. ‘Why kill Wilson? And why send a plant to London?’
He shook his head. ‘I didn’t send Slavin. Do you think I’d have given him my code-name?’
‘What then?’
‘Think, Paul. I’m no sniper – the chap you strangled on the golf course was meant to do the job. So why did I fly out here?’
‘To protect yourself,’ I guessed. ‘To make sure Slavin didn’t have anything else that could point to you being Radnya.’ But even as I said it I knew I was wrong.
‘To protect us,’ he said.
So he knew about me. All right. Let that sink in for a moment.
‘Slavin didn’t know the double’s name,’ I said. ‘So that meant either one of us could be blown.’
The corners of his mouth twitched. ‘Well, you certainly seemed worried about the possibility. I must say I wasn’t expecting you to kill poor old Chief. That’s made life rather tricky for us, I think.’
‘I had to,’ I said, then stopped. I wasn’t going to justify myself to Pritchard. ‘So… Slavin was a genuine defector.’
Pritchard shook his head slowly from side to side.
‘But why would Moscow want to expose a long-running double agent?’ I asked. ‘Possibly even two.’
‘Moscow’s a large city,’ he said. My skin was prickling, but I didn’t yet know why. ‘Whom do we work for?’ said Pritchard, and his pale blue eyes searched my face for a reaction. I realized that although he knew it was the end of the road, he was enjoying revealing the plot to me, like a conjuror finally able to show his audience how clever he had been. ‘It’s a simple enough question,’ he said. ‘Whom do we work for?’
‘The KGB,’ I replied, and winced; it sounded so childish suddenly, so cops and robbers.
‘No, Paul,’ said Pritchard. ‘We don’t. When Anna recruited me,
it was into Glavnoe Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie: military intelligence. She had been persuaded of my good intentions by another of her agents – your father.’
He was lying. He had to be lying.
I knew he wasn’t lying.
A dozen images flew through my head, but above them all I could see my father’s body sprawled across the bed at the farmhouse, one half of his head a ruin.
‘Did you…’ My mouth was sewn up. ‘Did you kill him?’
‘But it was I who persuaded Anna to recruit you,’ Pritchard went on, as though I hadn’t spoken. ‘Larry hated the idea – he felt you were too young. He always said that successful recruitment depended on the subject having a firm ideology. I thought you were at precisely the right age to foster that. I proposed we give you the ideology – through Anna.’
It was like listening to some macabre joke. The man whose views he was blithely referring to was unrecognizable to me – and yet, recognizable, too.
‘Larry still wasn’t satisfied,’ said Pritchard. ‘He desperately didn’t want you spoiled by betrayal, as he felt he had been. He didn’t want that life for you. In the end, he had no choice, though: Moscow demanded it. And Larry always obeyed Moscow. I never left for Gaggenau, of course – I was with Anna then. We knew it was only a matter of time before you were injured in one way or other. That cut you got wasn’t much more than a scratch, really. Anna made certain you were isolated, and took care of your treatment. And you walked right into it, of course. Who wouldn’t? She was young, beautiful, good in bed…’
I ran towards him then and hit him, smashing my fist into his mouth. He barely even flinched, just dipped his head a little, and I slouched to my knees, my hands falling uselessly into my stomach, where I clutched myself as though I were the one who had been hit.
I tried to stand up, failed, tried again. ‘Finish the story,’ I said, steadying myself by leaning against the wall.
Pritchard wiped the blood from his lip and smiled at me mock-affectionately. ‘You always were too emotional,’ he said. ‘But the problem was you were stubborn, too – you refused to be swayed. You had your precious principles. So we came up with the idea of Anna’s death, and that did the trick, finally, didn’t it? You ran into our arms. Anna was taken out of the country. Larry… well, Larry didn’t take it well. He could never really handle the hard decisions. He was weak.’
So well-spoken, this Scottish aristocrat. It was hard to believe that monsters dwelt inside him.
‘So you killed him.’
He looked genuinely surprised. ‘No, no. When he received your note about Anna, he immediately ran to his old friend Colin Templeton in Lübeck and asked him to take her away from the scene. But Chief and his men were too slow. When the soldiers brought Anna back to the safe house in her comatose state, Larry saw that he had failed and went, quite literally, mad. Said he couldn’t live with the choice between betraying you or Moscow, so he was going to take the only way out he knew. He already had the gun – there was nothing I could do.’
He could have been lying – I was pointing a gun at him, after all, and confessing to killing Father might make me pull the trigger more readily. But somehow I knew he was telling the truth.
‘And Churchill authorizing the mission personally – all a complete hoax.’ I laughed at my own naivety.
‘Yes – we were working to Beria’s orders, in fact. All those men were traitors to the Soviet Union.’
‘It’s 1969,’ I said. ‘Tell me you don’t still believe in all this.’
‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘I’ve always been a believer, ever since I read Marx at school. I’m still a believer, even with all this.’
‘All what?’
‘After the war, the foreign intelligence arms of the GRU and the Ministry for State Security merged. The new organization was called Komitet Informatsii – the Committee of Information.’
I nodded dumbly. KI. I knew it from a hundred dossiers: Molotov had been appointed chairman. ‘It didn’t last long,’ I said.
‘Indeed not. A couple of years later it was wound up and the GRU was once again an independent intelligence agency. So, what can we deduce?’
‘That while the two organizations were merged, someone found out about you.’
‘Bravo, that man! Yes, someone discovered that the GRU had recruited a British agent in Germany at the end of the war and given him the code-name Radnya. They didn’t have my real name, but it was enough. They stored away this information – perhaps they had an inkling that the KI wouldn’t last long. Then, a couple of decades later, as this same fellow sat at the head of some nasty little division of the KGB, he decided that Radnya would make the perfect ingredient for a grand plot against his counterparts in London.’
So I had been right about Slavin being a plant – albeit a very unusual one. Plants had to have a few secrets to hand over or nobody would believe they were genuine defectors. But that information couldn’t be too valuable, or it would defeat the purpose. So you gave them lots of pieces of genuine but not very important information that you knew or suspected the other side already had. Barium, we called it: chicken-feed. But it had got trickier. With the paranoia over plants, all would-be defectors had come under pressure to produce much more than barium. The KGB officer handling Slavin had calculated that the details about a double being recruited in the British Zone in 1945 would be enough for the Service to unmask Radnya’s identity on their own steam, thereby cementing Slavin’s credentials and simultaneously sinking the British into a morass of recriminations over yet another traitor in their ranks. Slavin would then have been able to concoct the most outrageous untruths and have everyone hanging on his every word. At the same time, a body blow would have been dealt to the KGB’s old rivals, the GRU, who wouldn’t have known what had hit them.
It was a brilliant ploy. The only problem with it had been… me. The KGB hadn’t known that the GRU had, in fact, recruited two British double agents in the same part of Germany at the end of the war, and that both of them – the Russian practice being not to tell agents their own code-names – would presume they were under threat of imminent exposure.
‘Where does the PM come into this?’ I asked.
‘Ah, that,’ said Pritchard, making it sound like a trifling affair. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘We have time,’ I said.
He smiled. I didn’t like the smile, and it set alarm bells off in my head.
‘Anna’s here, isn’t she?’
‘No, Paul. Please let go of that idea. I told you: Anna died a long time ago.’
I could sense a false note somewhere. The eyes. His eyes didn’t move – they were fixed on me. Because he was fighting the urge to look elsewhere. The window? Was it my imagination or was there some noise coming from that direction? What was it – cheering?
I glanced down at my watch. I managed to register that it was twenty-five past before I picked up the movement in my peripheral vision and looked back up to see Pritchard leaping towards me, his hands outstretched like claws. I pulled the trigger without even willing it to happen, and watched as the bullet ripped through his jacket and forced him back onto the floor.
‘Where is she?’ I screamed. ‘Which corner?’
He whispered a word, and then was silent. His voice had been hoarse, and the word hadn’t come out clearly, but I knew what it was instantly: ‘Pockets,’ he had said.
I searched them, and then headed downstairs and into the courtyard. A long black car was slowly approaching the gates, and somewhere above me was Anna with one eye glued to her sniper sight, waiting for it.
XXIV
The courtyard was packed and noisy, with the crowd jostling against the ropes to catch a glimpse of the car that was now edging through the gates one yard at a time, presumably so the PM could wave at everyone. One of the Redcaps saw me and started racing over, so I dropped back to a brisk walk and made as though I were calling out to someone on the other side of the ropes. Manning had also spotted me and was
heading in my direction, but I was just a few yards away from the next corner, and yes, there was the staircase. I took the steps three at a time, my ears hot and pulsing and my chest constricting. Then I was on the landing.
I took out the Tokarev and uncocked the safety. As there had been with the other staircases, two large open wards faced each other. All the patients who could move had thronged into the one facing the courtyard and were gathered around the windows peering down. All but one, a young boy with an artificial leg, who was leaning against the wall, watching me with large eyes. I had a sudden memory of a German boy of about the same age who had once looked at me like that, a lifetime ago.
At the far end of the landing was a door. If this staircase followed the pattern of the others, which it seemed to, it should lead me to a storage-room-cum-office. This was the door I’d travelled thousands of miles to open: behind it, almost certainly, lay the answers I was looking for. I grabbed the handle.
Locked.
I smashed my foot into the lower half of the door. A couple of splinters flew up, and after a couple more kicks the whole thing fell in.
The gun was the first thing I saw, a dark snake pointing out at me, the barrel gleaming. Then the figure in white behind it.
‘Drop your weapon!’ she hissed, and there was such danger in her voice that I immediately leaned down and placed my pistol on the floor, then kicked it towards her.
She picked it up and pocketed it, then backed away from me to the window. Thin bars of sunlight glowed through the shutters but much of the room was in darkness and it took my eyes a moment to decipher some of the objects. A mop and bucket leaned against one corner, a duffel bag on the floor nearby. On the windowsill, a tripod had been mounted. It wasn’t until she started placing the rifle onto this that I got a good look at her.