by James Quinn
Chapter Six
LONDON – FEBRUARY 1968
A week later the man known as the Salamander sat staring out at the River Thames, waiting for his contact to make the approach. He'd never met this man, Trench, but he knew everything about him; had in fact, co-ordinated his successful recruitment as a freelance killer into the Raven clan's organisation. He knew the man's face, his quirks, his tastes and his weaknesses. Especially his weaknesses…
Salamander was seated on a cast iron bench, a little way out from Westminster, near Blackfriars Bridge. He glanced lazily at that day's edition of The Times. Hidden inside the pages of the newspaper and held in place by a small strip of Sellotape, was the envelope containing the information Trench had requested. It had taken Salamander's 'people' – trusted sources all of them – several days of digging to find what he wanted. It was a risk, but a worthwhile one, especially if it plugged the leak and kept him protected. The Salamander had it all; influence, wealth and respect – and all supported by his wife of good breeding and his extensive array of mistresses. His facade was that of a man who yearned for nothing more than to be respectable and a servant, albeit a secret one, of the country he claimed to love.
But Salamander was that rarest of political animals, in that he was completely honest – to himself, if not to the rest of the intelligence community and Whitehall – about the fact that he craved nothing but power. He'd manoeuvred himself up through the ranks of the post-war intelligence machine, circumventing rivals, removing fools who were out of their depth and attaching himself to noted power players of influence whom he could use and later discard. He'd risen and risen fast and had in fact, come a long way from his humble beginnings as a foot soldier of the intelligence war, to become one of the most influential executives in the secret espionage world. Not that he'd yet achieved the zenith in his ambitions; there was still some distance to go. But he was at least secreted high up; not at the top, but an inch or two behind the man with the power. Salamander was a king maker and judged it the safest place to be, to feed his ambitions and remain hidden.
His relationship with the Raven was a symbiotic one. They'd helped and protected each other over many decades. What had started out as a classic agent/case officer agreement had quickly developed into the Salamander becoming a willing accomplice and partner in the Raven clan's operations. Salamander provided information which would help the clan carry out an operation – move a shipment of arms, or conduct a terrorist attack – and in return, the Raven would give his source a share of the profits and dispose of any of Salamander's political rivals. Many an old agent, government appointee or even on one occasion, a love rival, had been 'hit' by the Raven's assassins. This was something the Raven encouraged because he knew it would benefit the survival of the clan for years to come. The Raven would do anything to keep the Salamander protected and safe.
The last person to challenge the dual power of the Raven and the Salamander had been the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Richard Crosby. C, with his usual cunning, had started to have his suspicions about who was behind the Kyonshi operation and who the masterminds and architects were. The old spy was just too damned clever for his own good and he had gotten far too close for comfort. It would only have taken one more leak or slip up, and the whole house of cards would fall. So he had to be silenced. Partly to plug the leak, but also to send a message to others who might want to challenge both the Raven and his partner, the Salamander. The message was simple; 'face us and face death'.
Salamander glanced at his watch, it was eleven-thirty in the morning. The hustle and bustle of the busy London rush hour had receded several hours earlier and now, there was a serene calm. He folded the newspaper and placed it carefully on the seat next to him. Then he stretched out his long legs and waited. Only a few more moments before the brush past was due to take place. Then, to the moment exactly, there was the contact. The man looked like any other businessman in London on a working day. A smart suit, hair perhaps a little too long for the Salamander's liking, and a briefcase. He sat down, ignoring his fellow bench dweller and watched the small boats moving stoically along the river for a few moments.
“The paper?” asked Trench, muttering out of the side of his mouth and staring straight ahead.
Salamander nodded. “Yes, the paper.”
Trench coughed, picked up his briefcase and his newly acquired copy of The Times and set off on his way, walking briskly against the chill in the air.
Nicely done, thought Salamander as he watched his contact walk away. Natural and no one had noticed anything. Why would they? To the rest of the world, they were just two businessmen taking a breath of fresh air before returning to offices and meetings and the day-to-day grind of official life. When instead, what they really were, was a traitor and a killer working in tandem.
* * *
An hour later, Trench was sitting in his small hotel room, flicking through the information provided in Salamander's letter.
Trench had caught a brief glimpse of the man's features. He'd been tall, well-groomed – quite unremarkable, really. He could have been any one of a hundred Whitehall mandarins. Trench was none the wiser as to who he actually was, even now. But whoever Salamander was, he must have had excellent sources. The information could only have originated from one location – inside the Secret Intelligence Service.
The files gave all the details they had on his dead contractors and what SIS and the Security Service knew about them. They'd been flagged as having recently been requested from the Registry; nothing recent for some of them, but several had the same access code of 'RSI', which Trench knew stood for 'Research/Secret Intelligence' and could only have come from the Archives Section in Century House, SIS's headquarters.
So someone in Archives?
The second sheet of paper gave a listing of several possible Personnel in the RSI Section. Two had their names highlighted. One man and one woman. Good – that narrowed down the possibilities.
Trench flicked down to the conclusion which had been typed, he assumed, by Salamander himself. The man was a possible, certainly had the access and opportunity on the days when the files had been removed from the Archives. But it was the woman who interested Salamander. He'd checked her background and her tours of duty stretching back over many, many years.
Palestine, injured in the King David Hotel bombing in 1946. Her fiancé had been killed during the initial explosion. After that, she had several overseas tours at various stations, always in the backroom, administration or research, before being given a promotion and becoming part of the Registry Team at Broadway, before SIS had moved to its current location of Century House. But then, several years ago, she'd been part of a team attached to the now-defunct Redaction Unit, under the control of Stephen Masterman. The operational commander had been one Jack 'Gorilla' Grant. By all accounts, the investigation team had been first rate and discovered some exceptional intelligence that had helped the Redaction team to bring down the enemy they were hunting. Yes, remembered Trench. Like that little shoot-out we had in that whorehouse in Marseilles. But more telling was that in the intervening years, Masterman had personally requested this particular Archivist from RSI to be attached to Redaction for several other operations he was conducting.
It wasn't concrete and he knew it wouldn't stand up in a court of law, good intelligence never does, but at least he had a possible link from his dead contractors, to Grant, to Masterman, to this Archivist possibly acting as a source of information inside SIS. Someone was feeding a hit-team intelligence to take out his men and this was the best lead he had at the moment.
Trench closed the folder and sat in the darkness for a few more moments, thinking. Next he would have to talk to this Archivist and ask her some hard questions. And Frank Trench was good at asking unwilling people hard questions, very good indeed.
Chapter Seven
Nora Birch hurried, pushing her head down against the driving rain, clutching the net shopping bag closer to her
body in case the contents – her tea of sausages and eggs for this evening – should spill out onto the cold and wet street. The streets were poorly lit in this part of the city and she increased her pace, keen to be home safely. She'd already missed the bus to her lonely flat in Ealing, and decided to walk to the next bus stop along. Better that than standing in the freezing cold of a dark night; at least by moving, she was keeping warm and getting nearer to home.
Every day she got up and went to the new office block that was the Secret Intelligence Service's headquarters. She would lock herself away with her equally bland colleagues in the Research/Secret Intelligence Section. The section was lost in the maze-like corridors of Century House. It had no windows and the doors were deadlocked and bolted from the inside. Access was granted by means of a buzzer. It had been many years since she'd been a part of any operations of value for SIS. That was when her talents as a researcher and a finder of vague clues had been her forte. She had helped, in those heady days, to catch spies, hunt down terrorists and avert assassination. She'd been valued and respected. In the old days… before the murder of C and the decimation of the operational arms of the Service by the politicians and back-room deal makers.
These days, she was just another file clerk and paper pusher. There to dot the 'I's' and cross the 'T's'. In the space of a few short years' things had changed at SIS. It had once been a place of beauty and hope for her. Now, it was like living inside the rotting remains of a long dead corpse. Her life had become a routine of boredom and drudgery, each day as bland as the next.
So her recruitment by Colonel Masterman for a private operation had been an easy one. The Colonel was such a charmer when he wanted to be. He knew the right buttons to press to keep people loyal to him. She would be fed names, dates, places and for the Colonel, she would ferret about deep into the darkest secrets of SIS and their liaison departments within a host of friendly intelligence services worldwide. So far, she guessed she'd been foot perfect, no Special Branch officers had been beating her door down, dragging her off to be charged with leaking top secret information, and as far as she was aware, she wasn't under hostile surveillance from either SIS's Hawkeye teams or the Security Service's spy catchers. She was Nora Birch, the Dormouse, and Sentinel's spy inside SIS, the woman who no one looked at twice, who the male officers pitied because of her scarred face. A nobody, a nothing. A perfect spy.
But that had only been part of her mission. The other part, far more valuable and dangerous, was to seek out leads about the ultimate devil, the traitor, the Raven's man inside the Whitehall intelligence machine who had long been suspected but never found. It had been a long road, littered with many false starts and blind alleys. She'd had doubts about her role, effectively being an informant for someone now classed as outside the Service, but her moral fortitude had kept her committed. They all owed that to the memory of their murdered Chief. Once the information gained from Gorilla Grant had come through, about the real identity of the Raven, the rest had been easy. Tracking files, old field reports, case notes until she had whittled it down to five possible officers, then three… then another discounted… until finally, there had been only one man left… the Raven's spy. And his identity was located, in written code for Sentinel's Eyes Only, inside the small cigarette carton she had in her coat pocket.
She'd barely made it through the door of her basement flat when the leather-gloved punch hit her directly on the jaw. The force sent her falling into the darkness of the room, dizzy and uncoordinated; she landed on her side and immediately experienced another sharp pain as a heavy shoe was kicked, with force, into her side.
“Get up, you little bitch, get up,” said the voice in the most calm and reflective way. It was as if in her dizzy state, the voice, its gentle manner and the violence, were coming from two separate people. But Nora was canny enough to know that they weren't. Then the man grabbed her by her hair and lifted her up and she felt the scream rising from deep in her throat…
* * *
Frank Trench had everything he wanted. The woman had folded easily. Of course she had, she wasn't a field agent or particularly tough. She was just a sad, middle-aged spinster, scarred and deformed and lonely. It hadn't taken much to break her.
He'd started with the rough stuff, beatings and kickings. Then he'd calmed her down and talked to her. She'd been good, held out for a little while until he'd grown tired of her stalling. Then he'd produced the knife, a long, thin filleting knife he'd purchased from a department store. He'd threatened to chop off her fingers – she'd screamed – and it was only when he took her thumbs by crunching down through the bone with the blade, that she told him, through tears, the whole story. He'd held her hand in the sink of her small and neat bathroom and cut away at her. She'd fought at first but then submitted. Through sobs of shame and pain, he'd barked questions at her and occasionally smacked her face when she didn't answer fast enough.
She spilled her guts fast. Masterman recruiting her… working inside SIS as their informant… a private operation to get close to the Raven organisation… Redact the top man, the Raven…
“But who?” he'd cooed gently in her ear moments after torturing her with the knife. “Who is going to get close to us?”
“O-o-ne of M-m-masterman's men… retired, on the outside,” she stammered, her left eye almost closed over from the punches she'd suffered.
“Does he have a name?”
“O-o-only a… c-codename… Gorilla! His name was Gorilla…”
Trench believed her. “And then what? What happens after this man, Gorilla, gets inside?”
“I… I…think the plan was to destroy the organisation… they had some kind of terror weapon… some kind of hold over the government… they had to be Redacted… all of them… killed.”
“But not by SIS?”
She shook her head and the sweat from her face and in her hair flicked out across the bathroom. Trench thought that he could have fried an egg on her skin at that moment, such was the level of fear in her. “Redaction was dismantled. Masterman had taken it upon himself to fight back for C. The mainstream didn't want to know, made a half-hearted attempt to start some kind of… investigation… but it faltered and died.” The last part had seen her wincing as blood poured from her wounds.
“So how do you know Masterman?” asked Trench.
“We worked together, years back, an operation in Europe. I was part of the intelligence team. The Colonel had remembered me, he said, said I was good at tracking down leads… said he needed my help… that it was important.”
Trench laughed. “Ha! And that didn't bother you, selling out your employers on a bit of a private mission?”
She glared at him, the fire returning to her eyes. “Never seemed to bother you, Trench… I know who you are and what you did. You were on the rogue agents list I helped to compile.”
That snippet had earned her another lost finger and she'd passed out after that. Trench had gone to the kitchen to find a saucepan and then filled it to the brim with cold water. So, it was a private operation organised by that cripple, Masterman. No wonder Salamander hadn't been alerted to it – it had fallen through the cracks in the British intelligence community. The clever bastard. And of course, who else would Masterman pick but that little killer who had watched his back for years and done his Redacting for him – Gorilla Grant. He returned to the bathroom to find her slumped on the tile floor, blood everywhere. Disgusted, he pitched the cold water into her face to bring her round again.
“So this Gorilla chap gets inside, then what. Then what!” he barked.
“A t-team… an unofficial team… storm their way in and kill the top men,” she spluttered
“Who are they?”
“I don't—”
“Who are they!”
“I don't bloody know!”
Trench believed her. Operational security would dictate that the spy on the inside would be on the wrong end of the flow of information and anything she did know would only be on the
periphery of the operation. He stared down at her; Christ, she was feeble and pathetic. His hand tightened around the handle of the knife, he felt it twist in his grip. He grabbed her head, forced it back onto the floor and moved the knife blade closer to his target.
She knew what was coming, had seen and felt the knife. More importantly, she'd seen Trench's face and she knew the way it worked. She'd seen him, knew he was alive and consequently, she would have to die. So when Trench grabbed her head and forced it sideways against the cold floor, she knew it was happening now. There would be no hero storming in to rescue Nora Birch. No fanfare, no medal, she would die a cruel and lonely death… and yet she still smiled. She smiled, because she knew that even though her end would be brutal and painful, she had still won. Oh, maybe not the battle between Trench and herself, but certainly the war. She'd given him the slimmest of details, nothing really, regarding what she knew of Masterman's operation. Really, she couldn't handle the torture and the violence against her… would do anything to make him stop… and she'd known that not talking was never going to be an option. Everyone talks.
But the little dormouse, the spy, kept the most precious thing hidden inside and deep away from sight… not the name of the agents on the ground, not the plan of attack, not the fact that Masterman was on a private operation. No, she kept hidden deep in her heart the information she'd left at the dead letter box at the bus shelter, for Jordie Penn, her case officer. The information in the little packet of cigarettes, left between two bricks in a crumbling wall next to the bus shelter, had been found earlier that day in some obscure SIS Registry file she'd unearthed, holding the details of the only man in the British Intelligence community to have intimate knowledge of Yoshida Nakata, the Raven. This man had been the Raven's wartime SIS case officer, who had eventually been rescued by the Raven from a Japanese interrogation camp in Singapore… but of course, Trench would never know that now because he'd taken the bait and thought he had the gold seam, when all he really had were a few titbits'. Checkmate, Mr. Trench, she thought. I've outplayed you and your murderous mob.