The Crossing

by Ted Allbeury

  The interrogators gradually realised why Moscow had recalled him. Apart from keeping the appointments with his controller, Hayhanen had been totally indifferent to his mission. Using the money he was paid for his own purposes, unscrupulous in his demands for more funds and, as far as they could tell, never carrying out even the minor tasks that he had been ordered to undertake. But what they got from him that really mattered was the description of Mark, the places where they met and the various addresses in New York where he lived or appeared to live. As often happened when a man really hates another, Hayhanen could describe Mark in great detail.

  It was the studio in the Ovington Building that they were able to identify most accurately despite the vague, rambling description, and a twenty-four-hour surveillance of the building was mounted by the FBI even before the interrogation of Hayhanen was completed. The interrogation team were going back into his recruitment and training in the Soviet Union but Hayhanen was slowly disintegrating, becoming fearful of KGB retribution for what he had done. Nervous and excitable, he refused to sign statements and insisted that even if they were able to trace the man named Mark, he would not appear personally in court as a witness to Mark’s activities.

  His description of Mark had portrayed an elderly man, bald with a fringe of grey hair, a narrow face with a prominent nose and a receding chin; he thought that maybe Mark was Jewish. And always the dark straw hat with the broad white band around it.

  14

  Bert Harris stirred his coffee slowly as he watched the two men at the table near the service counter. One of the men was Grigor Grushko and he had no idea who the other man was. It was the second time they had met in the last two weeks. The first time they had met at a pub, the Bricklayer’s Arms near Victoria Station, and this time they were in the cafeteria on the main concourse at Euston Station.

  They were talking earnestly, with Grushko tapping his finger on the table as if to emphasise some point. They weren’t quarrelling but it looked as if they were disagreeing about something. Ten minutes later Grushko stood up, standing for a moment, still speaking as if he was trying to convince the other man of something.

  Harris looked at his watch. It was four-thirty and he decided, for no particular reason, to stay with the second man. But he watched as Grushko walked across the concourse and down the steps to the underground taxi rank.

  Ten minutes later the second man looked around the cafeteria slowly, and Harris was sure then that the man had had anti-surveillance training. It had been done too methodically, despite the casualness. The man stood up, patted his jacket pockets as if to check that something was there, and then he walked across to the bookstall and bought a copy of the Evening Standard. He turned it sideways to look at the stop-press column on the back page, folded it slowly and strolled across to the exit to Euston Road. He stood outside looking at the passing traffic. Harris watched him from just inside the station.

  When the man walked to the line of taxis Harris was close behind him. After the man closed the door of the taxi Harris let one taxi go and took the second. He flashed his ID card at the driver and pointed to the taxi he wanted followed.

  They were held up by the lights in Regent Street but the target taxi had turned into Beak Street and was heading for Golden Square where it stopped by the Dormeuil building and the man got out. Harris waited in the taxi for a few moments watching the man walk across the gardens towards Berwick Street. Then he paid off the cabbie and followed the man into Brewer Street. In Old Compton Street the man turned into an open doorway leading to a flight of stairs. A handwritten postcard tacked to the door merely said, “Sunshine Escort Agency.”

  Harris crossed the street and looked up at the dusty windows of the agency above the newspaper shop and couldn’t for the moment think of anything positive he could do. So he waited. Fifteen minutes later the man came out with a young girl. He guessed she was about eighteen. She was very pretty. He followed them both to Cambridge Circus where the man waved down a taxi. It had circled the roundabout before there was another empty taxi and he’d told the driver to go down Charing Cross Road and they caught up with the other taxi as it turned into Charing Cross Station.

  He heard the man ask for two tickets to Folkestone and the clerk said that a train was due to leave in twelve minutes which had given Harris time to buy a ticket and phone through to Shapiro for some assistance. No assistance was available.

  Just over an hour later the man and the girl got off the train at Ashford in Kent. Harris walked ahead of them and took the first taxi, telling the driver to wait. It was nearly five minutes later when the man and the girl came out of the station and Harris breathed a sigh of relief as they got into a taxi themselves. He had to use his ID card again but the driver cooperated well. Harris asked him to check with the taxi company’s despatcher where the white Granada was going. The reply was that it was going to Stone-cum-Ebony to Cooper’s Farm. The driver said he’d been there himself a month before, with a fellow and a girl. It was old man Hipcress’s farm. When Harris asked him to describe the male passenger he knew that it was the same man. The driver also volunteered that when he had done the trip he’d been told to pick them both up at the farm the following morning in time to catch the 9.15 from Ashford to London.

  The white Granada was already heading back for Ashford as they turned into the lane that led past the farm. The driver slowed and stopped, winding down his window to talk to his colleague. He was going straight home. He’d got to pick up his fare at 8.15 the next morning. Harris paid off his driver a hundred yards past the farmhouse and asked him where was the nearest public telephone box. It was half a mile away at the bend in the lane, where it joined the main road to Rye.

  The farmhouse was reached by a gravel drive, there was one light downstairs and one light upstairs in the gable end and Harris stood in the darkness, listening and watching. Apart from the distant bleating of sheep and the sound of water running in the ditches everywhere was silent. When his eyes were accustomed to the darkness he made his way cautiously up the drive.

  When he was about twenty yards from the farmhouse he saw that the gravel drive gave way to a cinder track rutted from farm vehicles. As his eyes followed the ruts he saw the lights in the “looker’s” cottage by the trees. There were two cars parked by the cottage. A Mini and a Rover 90.

  Harris waited for ten minutes before he approached the farmhouse. As he edged his way along the wall towards the lighted window he could see that the curtains were open and when he looked inside he saw that there was nobody in the room. It was a farmhouse kitchen. Quarry-tiled floor, a solid fuel cooker, big oak table and old-fashioned chairs. The sink and cupboards were modern and cheap. From the overhead beams the old hooks for carcasses still hung down. On one of them was an oil-lamp, its glass shade cracked and dusty.

  The “looker’s” cottage was not so easy. There were lights on all over but the curtains had been drawn. There was a small gap in the curtains at one end of the downstairs window but the view of the inside of the room was blocked by a man standing with his back to the window. He could hear voices but not the words. He had a feeling that they were talking in a foreign language. The rhythms were not English.

  Then the man moved away and he saw that it was the man he had been following. He was offering sandwiches to a white-haired man, a man in his fifties, and a woman who was a little younger. They were talking animatedly, shrugging and shaking their heads. Then they laughed at something the man had said.

  Harris made his way cautiously back to the lane. He had no idea where it led but he followed it to the telephone kiosk and phoned the duty officer. Fifteen minutes later a police car picked him up and drove him back to Ashford Station.

  The Vice Squad from West End Central applied some discreet pressure to the agency’s proprietor. The girl’s name was Judy Manners, she was twenty-two and she had a room in Islington. The client was a Mr. Gordon. He always paid cash and they had no address for him. He paid £80 and the girl got half.

/>   A plain-clothes policewoman from the Vice Squad picked up the girl and brought her in to West End Central for Harris to interview. The three of them sat around the table in the stark interview room. The girl defiant but obviously scared.

  “What are you charging me with?”

  “Nobody’s charging you with anything—yet,” the policewoman said.

  “So why am I here?”

  “The gentleman wants to talk to you.”

  The girl glanced at Harris. “Go on then—talk.”

  “You went with a man a few days ago to a farmhouse in Kent. Yes?”

  “So what?”

  “What was the name of the man who took you there?”

  “You’d better ask the agency, mate.”

  “They said his name was Mr. Gordon. Is that correct as far as you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many times have you been to the farm with him?”

  “Three times—maybe four—I don’t remember.”

  “Always with Mr. Gordon?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happens at the farm?”

  “You know bloody well what happens.”

  “I want you to tell me.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “I can make it my business if you’d like it that way.” The girl turned to look at the policewoman.

  “You can’t touch me. Everything I do is legal.”

  “So tell the gentleman what you do.”

  The girl turned her head to look at Harris. She shrugged. “OK. He screws me.”

  “Who? Mr. Gordon?”

  “No. For Christ’s sake. The old man, Hipcress or whatever his name is.”

  “What about Mr. Gordon? What does he do?”

  “God knows. He goes off to the cottage. He meets his friends—I go over there in the morning and Mr. Gordon takes me back to London.”

  “Is it straight sex with the old man?”

  “More or less. He plays around for a bit but there’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Have you ever had sex with Mr. Gordon?”

  “No.”

  “Does Mr. Gordon talk about himself at all?”

  “He chats. He obviously fancies himself with girls but he never makes a pass.”

  “What does he chat about?”

  “Nothing special. Football sometimes—I think he said that he’s a Portsmouth supporter. I think his friends come from Portsmouth or it could be Plymouth. I don’t remember which. He’s obviously got plenty of money.”

  “What does he do?”

  She laughed. “At first he used to give me this spiel about being in entertainment. He sounded off like he was running the Palladium or at least a club.” She laughed again. “It turns out that he flogs one-armed bandits.” She shrugged. “He obviously makes a lot of dough but it sure ain’t showbusiness.”

  “Have you got any idea where he lives?”

  “No.” She hesitated. “It’s near Regent’s Park I know that—and it’s posh. He showed me a photo of his main room. Some sort of party for his friends.”

  “Is he English?”

  “No—he’s Canadian.”

  “Did he seem to be on good terms with the farmer?”

  She shrugged. “He thinks he is. But the old man told me on the quiet that he didn’t really like him. Thought he was too full of his own importance.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “I never made me mind up about him. He wasn’t mean or anything like that. But there was something odd about him. I don’t know what it was. A bit scary.”

  “What did you think about the farmer?”

  She laughed. “He’s all right—just a dirty old man.”

  Harris stood up. “You’ve been very helpful, Miss Manners. We much appreciate it. I’d like you not to talk about our conversation with anybody. Especially Mr. Gordon. Is that understood?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Is that all?”

  “Yes. Can we give you a lift somewhere?”

  “You’re not doing the agency for anything?”

  Harris smiled. “Of course not. Not so long as you don’t talk with anybody about being here today. I’m sure the agency is a very well-run business concern.”

  “Well,” she said, “you know where to come if you want me.”

  A routine check on the two cars at the cottage had been inconclusive. The Mini belonged to a middle-aged spinster in Weymouth and the Rover 90 was registered in the name of Peter John Kroger at an address in one of the outer London suburbs. A check with the local police showed that Peter Kroger was a dealer in antiquarian books. Married, the couple lived a quiet middle-class life and were regarded well by their neighbours. A check on the bookshop indicated that the man was considered an expert in his field by other booksellers and the business was modestly successful. A contrived inspection of the house by Chapman posing as a Ratings Assessment Officer from the local council proved negative. It was a typical suburban house and there were no signs of anything suspicious.

  Harris applied for a specialist search team to check the cottage at the farm but it took two weeks before it was available and a pattern of the farmer’s daily movements had been established. The only opportunity seemed to be his regular visit to Ashford Market on Wednesdays, and the search team were assembled and briefed the evening before. They estimated that they would need three hours for a Class A search but would only need half an hour for a routine check. Harris decided on a Class A and the team moved in when the radio link confirmed that the farmer’s Landrover had gone through Appledore village.

  A Class A search was based on the assumption that the target site was operated by a trained agent and where security precautions might have been taken either to prevent search or merely to reveal that a search had taken place. The team made their entry from an upstairs window and neither the front nor rear door of the cottage were opened. They were the most likely places for check-traps to have been laid.

  Before the search team started, the photographer, with a Polaroid camera, photographed every wall and feature of every room. And as the search started he recorded the layout of every drawer as it was opened, and nothing on any surface was moved until its position had been recorded.

  The technicians applied stethoscopes and thermocouples to the walls and floors of every room to check for cavities, and a two-man team checked all the inside and outside dimensions of the whole building room by room. There were two bedrooms upstairs, one living room below, a good-sized kitchen and what had once been a pantry. As soon as they saw the two elaborate locks on the pantry door they guessed that the search was going to be worthwhile.

  Everything was neatly laid out. A small pile of one-time pads, a Minox camera, a photocopying stand, a standard KGB micro-dot reader, photographic paper and chemicals, plastic trays, a Durst enlarger, and an almost new ICOM transceiver, and a label with transmission and reception times and frequencies pasted on its case. It was the first of the missing jig-saw pieces, and there was only one snag. There wasn’t a single clue as to who Mr. Gordon was. But they were justified now in extending the surveillance on the cottage as well as on Mr. Gordon and Grushko.

  15

  The FBI’s surveillance team’s first sighting of Mark was on May 23. He paid a brief visit to the studio late in the evening and with the aid of a radio-link a team of two agents followed him when he left. Along Fulton Street to Clinton through to Montague and down to the Borough Hall subway station. He was followed to the City Hall stop where he got off, walking north on Broadway to the corner of Chambers Street, where he took a bus and got off at 27th Street. Up Fifth Avenue the FBI man followed as his quarry walked the block to 28th Street and turned the corner. But when Special Agent McDonald reached the corner of 28th Street and Fifth Avenue there was no sign of his man.

  It was three weeks before they saw him again, and once more it was late at night when the lights went on in Studio 505 in the Ovington Building. It was ten minutes before midnigh
t when he left and although the route was different this time the journey still ended at 28th Street, and this time they watched him enter the Hotel Latham. It was just past midnight on June 13 and the report of the sighting went back to FBI headquarters. The hotel register showed that the man Hayhanen called Mark had booked in under the name of Emil Goldfus. The FBI notified the New York director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and from there a report on Hayhanen and the surveillance operation was passed to the Internal Security Division of the US Attorney’s office.

  What could seem to outsiders as an exercise in passing the buck was, in fact, the reverse. When espionage is involved and the suspect is not a citizen, either born or naturalised, Federal Law requires the legal procedures to be followed meticulously. If the accused comes to trial on charges of espionage the evidence has to be concrete and conclusive or any experienced defence lawyer can reduce the prosecution case to one where nothing more than deportation can be the outcome. When prosecuting foreigners or illegal immigrants every step of the legal process has to be observed. If, as now seemed possible, Goldfus was an illegal immigrant, he would have to be brought to justice by the INS, but that would not give powers to the FBI or the CIA to use the arrest to obtain evidence of espionage.

  The head of the Internal Security Services decided that without Hayhanen giving evidence in public, in court, they had too little evidence to bring a charge of espionage. He sent two of his attorneys to talk to the only witness—Hayhanen.

  For two days and nights they talked, argued, pressured and persuaded but Hayhanen adamantly and angrily refused to go beyond just talking. He said he was afraid of reprisals by the KGB against his family in the Soviet Union. They also realised that he was genuinely afraid that the long arm of the KGB could reach out for him, even in the United States. He would go on answering their questions but he would never testify in court.