by Jeremy Duns
‘The Americans are out,’ I said. ‘They’d simply call the Service and ask for their take on it. The same goes for all the other Western embassies.’
‘So it’s this or bust? What about one of the Eastern embassies – China, for instance?’
‘No, I think that’s more likely to exacerbate the situation, don’t you? The only thing I can think of is that we could try to get to the U-boat ourselves. If we could prove that the injuries at these bases are the result of a leak rather than an attack, it might be enough for them to draw back. If we got hold of the leaking canisters, we could get the Soviet embassy on the islands to signal Moscow that the mustard gas in them is of the same type that was found in the “attacks” on their bases fifty miles away.’
She looked unconvinced, as well she might. It wasn’t just a matter of getting out of the country: we probably wouldn’t even be able to get out of the city. We were being hunted by an army of dedicated professionals: I knew from reviewing the Penkovsky operation that Moscow was home to around 20,000 KGB agents.
‘How would we reach the canisters? And what about the B-52s?’
‘Not sure. But I think if we can show that at least one part of this is an accident, it will make them reconsider. I think it’s the combination of the events in Estonia and the B-52 flights that has persuaded them they’re about to be attacked. Take away the attacks on the bases and the B-52s aren’t enough to wage a nuclear war over. The Americans may be playing silly buggers or trying to scare them, but by themselves the B-52s aren’t conclusive.’
‘That’s not a contingency plan,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s a prayer.’
I didn’t reply. Behind the counter, one of the waitresses swore at a battered coffee-maker. My eyes flicked back and forth between the occupants of the room and the door, a dilapidated affair with paint sticking to the frame and a small bell that tinkled whenever anyone passed through it. It rang again now, and a girl emerged through the smoke and the steam. She was young, pretty and very Russian-looking, but that didn’t mean much: you could find Russian-looking girls in England, and if you did you might decide to recruit one of them and post her here. But the girl immediately greeted the older woman behind the counter with a cheery wave and removed her quilted jacket, beneath which was a waitress’s uniform.
It must now be at least twenty minutes since I’d made the call to the embassy. Twenty minutes more of Brezhnev and the others discussing warhead positions…
‘Paul.’
I looked up at Sarah, and realized my knees were jerking under the table. I willed them to stop.
‘Sorry.’
One of the waitresses, an older woman in a stained red smock with a kerchief wrapped around her head, waddled out from the kitchen with a tray of pastries and placed it in front of the chess-players, who set aside their game to tuck in. After months of eating nothing but thin soup and seeing nobody but my guards, there was something so normal about the scene that I suddenly wondered if I hadn’t imagined the whole thing: the bunker, Brezhnev and all the rest. The normality was also depressing. This was daily life in Moscow, and it looked to be roughly akin to Britain during the Blitz. How could I have ever believed this was a society that could bring equality to all, to the extent that I’d chosen to betray my own country? Freedom, justice, peace for mankind… Why had I fallen for such a ludicrous fairy tale?
Anna, of course. She’d fed me with the romantic dash of Lermontov and Tolstoy and the rest of them – all perfect fodder for a twenty year old – before filling my head with Marx, presenting his nonsense in the same beguiling manner. I had a sudden memory of her leaning over my hospital bed, administering a poultice to the wound around my left kidney. I had winced as she’d pressed it, and she’d smiled down at me with those beautiful flashing eyes of hers.
‘My poor boy,’ she had said, her lips forming a pout of mocking, flirtatious concern.
I replayed the memory in my mind, as I had done many times before, narrowing it down to that one despicable gesture. Because my wound had been a real one, and it had been deliberately administered in order to have me hospitalized so that she could nurse me back to health and, while doing so, seduce me, after which she had been prepared to feign her own death – all of it part of Yuri’s elaborate honey-trap operation to recruit me. And that moment, that gesture, showed a level of calculation and, I thought, pleasure in deceiving me that turned my insides out.
‘My poor boy.’ What a sick, twisted little bitch she had been. But what a sad, pathetic waste my life had been as a result of falling for her…
The bell above the door tinkled again, and I looked up to see a man in a long grey coat walk in, struggling with a large umbrella. I turned away, for one horrid moment thinking it might be Smale from London, but then my skin started prickling and I glanced back and the horror returned because, of course, it was him.
*
Christ, that was all we needed. I forced myself to keep my gaze on him. He’d managed to collapse the umbrella and was shaking excess rain from his coat as though trying to rid himself of fleas. He hadn’t changed an iota since I’d last seen him, filling in forms for me to travel to Rome in that cramped corner office of his on the third floor of Century House.
He began making his way past tables towards the counter, and I almost expected someone to stop him, he looked so out of place. It was around freezing outside, but I knew from the amount of times the milk had curdled in my cell that it had been an Indian summer and nobody else in here was really dressed for winter – a few wore coats, but most were in jumpers and jackets. Smale, on the other hand, was wearing a fur-collared overcoat, scarf, gloves and an astrakhan ushanka, looking like an extra from Doctor Zhivago. Except that everything else about him said England: the bony little nose, the fish eyes, the pursed lips – even the way he was walking, his back a little hunched. He belonged in that building in London and nowhere else, and I was having trouble absorbing the information.
They had made Smale Head of Moscow Station.
He was now hovering near the counter like a constipated pheasant – he had seen us but was pretending he hadn’t, and seemed to be deciding what to do next. After a few moments, he joined the queue and I ground my teeth as I watched him progress with it, his podgy pink face almost painfully conspicuous among the sallow complexions of the other customers. He reached the front of the line and ordered, and I held my breath, watching for a flicker of suspicion on the face of the waitress, but she didn’t flinch, turning to the samovar without hesitating. She poured tea into a glass, and he took it, paid and then shuffled into the centre of the room with his tray, ostensibly looking for somewhere to sit. With studied carelessness, he stumbled into the back of the chair opposite mine, and asked loudly if it was free. His Russian was good: perhaps he’d gone for a top-up with Craddock.
I nodded. He thanked me and placed the tray on the table, then removed his coat and draped it over the back of the chair. I clenched my jaw at the sight of his beautifully starched white shirt, which looked like Jermyn Street, and which he had paired with a dark-green woollen tie. I suppose I should have been grateful it wasn’t an Old Harrovian one and that he hadn’t brought a bowler hat with him for good measure. He seated himself, crossing his legs. He had surprisingly small feet, which were squeezed into a pair of Lobb brogues. Most of the shoes worn by those around us didn’t even have complete soles. I resolved to ignore all this, and just hope to God that anyone whose eyes rested on him would presume he was a Party official or one of the nachalstvo slumming it for breakfast. He’d managed to get past the waitress, at least. Oblivious to my concerns, he lifted the glass of tea by one of its filigreed handles and took a dainty sip of the hot liquid, staring sightlessly ahead.
He’d come and, it seemed, he’d come alone. It was possible he had people stationed outside, but nobody else had entered the place after him and I didn’t think anyone who had come in earlier was a likely candidate. So I should have been pleased. But Smale presented greater problems t
han I’d anticipated, and it wasn’t just his damn-fool getup. He’d always disliked me, even when I’d been the Service’s boy wonder. Now he would hate me, and with good reason. It wasn’t just that I was a traitor to my country: it was personal.
They had sent him out here under diplomatic cover even though I was in Moscow and knew he was with the Service. It wasn’t overly dangerous, as the Russians were perfectly capable of working out for themselves who the spooks were in the embassies, just as the Service knew who the Soviets had under diplomatic cover in London. But, if asked, I would nevertheless have been able to run my finger down the list of embassy staff and pick him out as a Service officer. That was why London had sent Fletcher-Peck out earlier: he’d not been around in Blake or Philby’s time. He had also been bloody useless, which was perhaps why they had decided not to use that tactic again. This time Smale had drawn the short straw, and if I knew Smale that was going to rankle, because quite apart from the unpleasant sensation of knowing his cover could be blown at any moment by a double agent, it meant he was never going to be Chief: he had already been marked down as disposable, and therefore a second-tier officer at best.
In short, he was probably one of the last people in the world who would be prepared to give me a fair hearing. But I had to get him to listen to me, and act on what I had to say, and I had to do it very fast.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I said. ‘I know it can’t have been an easy—’
‘Was he worth it, then?’ he broke in. He was talking to Sarah. ‘Quite a price to pay for a quick roll in the hay, isn’t it? Or were you betraying us earlier, as well?’
Christ. It was worse than I’d feared. He clearly had no idea what had happened.
‘I’ve never betrayed anyone,’ Sarah said quietly, but Smale wasn’t listening, having turned back to me.
‘And it’s a bit early for vodka, isn’t it?’ He waved at the glass on the table and wrinkled his nose. ‘You all seem to drink yourselves to death. Pity you can’t take the honourable way out and just use a gun.’
‘That’s not my—’ I stopped myself. There was no time to get into arguments. I had to placate him. His opening comments indicated a level of contempt that I recognized as not just personal but institutional. It looked like the initial shock had worn off and I had become a totemic name in the Service, along with Philby and the rest.
‘Did you come alone?’ I asked him, and he looked at me as though I had accused him of stealing the bishop’s silverware.
‘Of course. That was your stipulation.’ He wanted to nail down that he was the honourable professional and I the dirty Commie traitor. If it made him feel better, fine. Anything was fine, as long as I could get him to listen.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I appreciate it. I would like your help, Hugh. I really need you to get a message to London.’
Smale leaned forward, his lips parting to show a row of yellowing fangs.
‘So you’re the new hotline,’ he hissed, ‘is that it?’ He sat back again, pinching his nose. ‘I must say, it’s very poor form bandying emergency phrases around – even for you. Did you really expect us to take that at face value? In case you’ve forgotten, you no longer work for us – in fact, never did. And now we’ll have to alter all our security procedures. Perhaps that was the idea. Very tedious. We’ve only just changed all the dead drops as a result of your coming over. The boys weren’t too pleased with me for ordering it, as it wasn’t so long ago they had to do the same on account of Blake.’
He was talking at rather than to me. His eyes were locked in a supercilious gaze, and I suddenly realized what was happening. He thought this was a showdown. I’d seen something similar in the aftermath of Philby’s defection in ’63: almost everyone in the Service who had crossed paths with him had developed the notion that they had played a crucial role in the saga. Sometimes this took the form that they had ‘just known something wasn’t right about him all along’; but a few had been deluded enough to think that they’d presented some sort of threat to Philby.
Smale had either forgotten or was ignorant of the fact that I had simply asked to meet the Head of Station here, and that until he’d walked through the door I hadn’t known that was him. He had persuaded himself I’d asked him here because of our scant history together in the same office. And so he was listening to me with one ear, trying to figure out what angle I was playing, while in his mind’s eye he was already drafting the chapter of his memoirs in which he related the curious incident in which he met the notorious double agent Paul Dark and his accomplice Sarah Severn in a seedy Moscow café.
I had to try another tack quickly. I had to find a way to make him see he wasn’t going to live to write My Life in Shadows: Three Decades as an Arse-Licking Creep in British Intelligence if he didn’t respond to what I was telling him.
‘Please listen,’ I said, as quietly and gently as I could – manners maketh man. ‘This is a genuine emergency, and it’s not about me. Yes, I made the dreadful mistake of working for the Soviets, and I wish I could turn back time and put it right. But, unfortunately, I can’t. I’m very sorry for it, but I know that no apology or confession I make can change anything. Some mistakes can’t be undone. But Sarah has never worked for the Russians, and I no longer am – in fact, they’re chasing both our hides right now.’ I saw the open disbelief on his face, and pressed on. ‘But none of that matters. I’m talking about the possibility of very imminent nuclear war, so please can you try to set aside your understandable animosity towards me for a couple of minutes and hear me out?’
His face was very still apart from his eyes, which flickered all over me. Contemplating, weighing. The hubbub around us seemed to be in another room as I focused on him, and he on me. Finally, he cocked his head a little to one side.
‘It’s unfortunate for rather a lot of people that you can’t turn back the clock,’ he said, and gave his tea a ceremonial stir. ‘Because quite a few of them are dead. But I’m listening.’
I leaned down and picked up the attaché case. ‘The documents in here will provide all the evidence you need,’ I said. I briefly explained about the mustard gas in the U-boat, the ‘attacks’ on the bases, the B-52 flights, the Soviets’ interpretation of these events and Brezhnev’s order to prime the missiles. Then I took out Yuri’s threat assessment and placed it on the table.
He read it in silence, then pushed it back towards me and took another sip of tea.
‘Very interesting,’ he said grandly. ‘Thank you for showing it to me. But you must understand, old chap, that I can’t simply take all of this on trust. This document could be forged. We will have to analyse it, verify it against other sources and so on.’
‘There’s no time for any of that,’ I said. ‘And there’s no earthly reason for me to be forging Soviet military documents. You need to get a message to London now so we can stop this going any further. Is Osborne still in charge?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Whoever is Chief needs to get the PM to call Brezhnev and tell him there’s been a serious misunderstanding and there’s no attack being planned. And the PM also needs to get hold of Nixon, sharpish, and get those B-52s back on the ground.’
He pinched at the knee of one of his trouser legs, realigning the crease so it was perfectly vertical, then looked up, his face expressionless. ‘But you do see that I can’t just take your word for all this, even if you have brought along a briefcase filled with official-looking documents. I couldn’t take anyone’s word for it, but especially not yours. You must see that?’
‘This is no time for—’
‘Paul.’
‘What?’
Sarah nodded towards the window. A car had pulled up outside the café: a yellow Volga with a blue stripe along the side and a siren on its roof. Militsiya. A man in a blue coat and a peaked cap was at the wheel, and another was in the passenger seat.
Had someone in the café reported our presence? The waitress? The old man by the door? They couldn’t have followed
either of us here – too much time had elapsed since Detsky Mir and my phone call if that had been the case. But had enough time elapsed for Yuri to have issued an alert to all available patrols with Sarah’s and my descriptions? Despite its name the militsiya were simply the civilian police, subordinate to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Could the wheels of Soviet bureaucracy be so well oiled that the GRU had reached every patrol car in the city since I’d killed Vladimir?
There was no way of knowing. I glanced at Smale.
‘Did you keep radio silence about this meeting?’
‘Of course,’ he said sniffily. ‘What do you take me for?’
It was my turn not to answer.
The car had parked, and the man on the passenger side had got out and begun walking towards the door of the café. Were they after us, or simply stopping for a bite to eat on their patrol?
I made a decision. I replaced Yuri’s document in the case and closed it, then picked a fork off the table and held it stiff behind my back.
I handed the case to Sarah. ‘Take this and follow me,’ I said. I pushed my chair back, then lowered my head and walked smartly towards the counter, because that was the opposite of what he would expect and then I could get a blow in, surprise him, and double-back. The man pushed his way through the doors and strode confidently in to the café. As he approached the counter, our eyes met for a moment. My fingers tightened around the shaft of the fork as I prepared for the flicker of interest that would mean I would strike, but he ignored me and strode past, his eyes on the menu pinned up on a board behind the counter.
He wasn’t here for us. I looked back at Smale, who was leaning forward but hadn’t moved from the table. He didn’t believe me about the threat, that much was clear, and I didn’t know what it would take to budge him, if anything. It might take hours, but another militsiya man could walk in here in five minutes, and the next one might be looking for us, or be armed with our descriptions. And even if Smale did listen, there was no way to be certain he would get the message to the Americans fast enough to avert disaster.