by Bill Granger
Devereaux pressed the pistol muzzle against the hollow of Tartakoff’s cheek until it rested against his teeth, insulated by the Russian’s skin.
“You are a dead man, Russian. How did you get the pistol through Customs? Why did you need it here?”
“I smuggled—”
“You are a liar, Russian. You are a fucking dirty liar.” Each word dropped slowly, like stones in a still pond. “You lied from the first meeting.”
Tartakoff did not speak. His eyes stared wildly at the gray man in front of him.
“It was a trap, Russian.”
“I am a defector. How is this a trap?”
“You were a triple. One of them who would become one of us but still be one of them. A matter of disinformation to begin with; then, later, you would become a mole.”
“This is not true.”
“Russians play a clumsy game because there are always killings,” Devereaux said in the same slow voice. “Everyone who would interfere with me was taken care of. The messenger had to be protected, had to be left alone. Your people killed the prostitute because she had slept with me and with the British agent. You were afraid of her because you could not believe she was only a simple prostitute. But it was all she was. Your people killed the British agent in the sauna. When the cop, Kulak, came to arrest me because of your clumsy killings, he was called off. You people can do that in Finland, can’t you? You killed the priest in Ireland because he knew too much about Tomas Crohan; maybe he would contradict whatever your candidate for Tomas Crohan wants to say. Killing and killing and killing and all of it wrong, all of it clumsy, all of it making no sense. You probably killed the British agent Sparrow because he was the wrong man. Maybe you wanted to kill Ely. Nothing could interfere with me or with the trap or with getting Tomas Crohan out of your country. And now, this morning, a dirty little dago named Antonio was going to kill Rita Macklin in Stockmann’s because you were afraid that she was a spy, not a journalist, and that she would spring the trap the wrong way. You were afraid that we would eliminate Tomas Crohan before he said whatever he was supposed to say. That makes me angry because up to that moment, she was not involved in the game at all. She wasn’t an agent but you made her an agent and now she has to play like we play our games. Do you understand why you’re a dead man, Russian?”
Sweat beaded on Tartakoff’s flushed face. “You cannot kill me. I am still a defector, I have many things I can tell you—”
“Tell me.”
“You promise me sanctuary—”
“Promises are past. Tell me things.”
“Please, the pistol hurts me—”
“Only for a moment, Russian. The bullets contain soft, crossed heads. They will explode on impact and part of them will tear the roof of your mouth away and explode your brain. Others will blow out the back of your neck and your skull. You understand me, Russian; you’ve killed a few people in your time.”
Devereaux’s face had become absolute winter, absolute ice and cold. His eyes were clear arctic fields of ice; his lined face was the terror of a white winter sky.
Ely did not move; no one moved for a moment.
“I was not to defect,” Tartakoff said.
“That’s a lie. You were a triple and you have a fallback if you see the trap won’t work.”
“I know about the old man.”
“Tell me.”
“I cannot tell you. I need an assurance.”
“I can only assure you that you are a dead man, Russian.”
“Tomas Crohan is the man you sent to Austria in the war. An American spy,” said the Russian.
“I know that.”
Tartakoff’s eyes widened. “Then why do you not say this before?”
“I’m tired of you, Russian.”
Devereaux pulled the trigger.
Click.
The Russian shuddered. “One empty chamber. It is a precaution. The next chamber is live. You know it is live.”
“My God, you are going to kill me.”
“You are dead already.”
“What can I tell you?”
“The truth.”
“I—”
“Tell me about the British. Tell me how you manipulated them so well.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“The mole,” Devereaux said softly. Ely’s eyes widened now in fascination. He sat bolt upright on the edge of the chair.
“The mole.”
“Don’t repeat what I said, Russian. Tell me what I don’t know. It is the only part I don’t understand. How did you manipulate the British? How did they keep dogging my steps? Why did this British agent think that Rita Macklin was part of our operation? Why was there a Brit in Helsinki in the first place? I can understand the killings of the British agents if I can believe there is a mole. Somehow, you and Crohan and whatever story you’re putting together is supposed to drive some wedge between us. Mutual mistrust. Your disinformation is supposed to accomplish it.”
“I don’t know of a mole—”
“That is a lie, Russian. There has to be one. None of this could work if someone on the inside in British Intelligence had not set it all in motion. How did the British suddenly, randomly, tap into our message center in Stockholm when I made an inquiry about Crohan? I didn’t know who Crohan was, but you people did. And you made certain the British knew as well. Who is the mole?”
But the Russian did not answer; it was Ely. In a surprised voice, he blurted a name: “George.”
The Russian paled. He shook his head suddenly.
“George,” said Ely again. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
Devereaux stared at Tartakoff. “Speak for the last time in your life.”
“Yes,” Tartakoff said at last. “George.”
Tension exploded out of the room like a burst balloon. Devereaux removed the pistol from Tartakoff’s cheek; it left an impression against the skin, angry and red.
“Who is George really?” Devereaux said, not to the Russian.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Ely said in a wondering tone. “He told me Rita Macklin was the agent who had set up Sparrow. You and her. He used me.”
“He used everyone.”
“But he must have known I would fail.”
Devereaux did not speak.
“Used like that,” Ely said.
“Crohan was the important link then, wasn’t he, Russian?”
The Russian only stared at Devereaux’s gun and did not speak.
“What were you?”
“I was not important,” Tartakoff said.
“Crohan was not the bait for the trap. You were the bait. Crohan was going to make the trap work.”
“Yes.”
“And then you were going to kill him. Or see the job done. So that the story would not be confused in anyone’s mind. Crohan would say whatever he was going to say and then you’d see him dead. Or me. Or Rita. Or all of us. And then you would still have the option to play the defector or return to the Soviet Union.”
The Russian shrugged; something like a smile returned to the arrogant features. The pistol in Devereaux’s hand did not frighten him now.
“Who is George?” Devereaux asked Ely again.
“The man in charge of computer division in Auntie. He is the British commander at Cheltenham.”
“A nice base for traitors,” Devereaux said.
Tartakoff made a sudden move for the pistol. Devereaux waited for it almost as a cat waits for the mouse to dart across the floor. He slapped him lazily with the pistol through a high arc that cracked against his cheek again. Tartakoff slumped back in the chair.
“Be still, Russian,” Devereaux said. “George. Now do you see, Ely?”
“Yes,” Ely replied. “Not all of it, but I see enough.”
“And now we take care of the Russian.”
“What are you going to do?” Tartakoff said.
“Should I send you back to Russia? That wouldn’t be pleasant for you
.”
Tartakoff did not speak. He saw the horror of his choices; there were no choices left to him. The careful trap had been handled clumsily and now it had sprung on him.
“Or you can defect,” said Devereaux.
There was a knock at the door.
Devereaux said “enter” in Swedish.
A short man with a bull neck and black eyes stood in the hall. He came into the room.
“Inspector Kulak,” Devereaux said to the Russian and Ely.
“Well, Mr. Devereaux, are you at last going to tell me what has really happened?”
“Of course,” Devereaux said. “Sit down. It makes a good story. All about spies and killings and mistakes made. You had your murderer today, but this is the man behind the murderer. Sit down. It’s a long story and you might get lost in it, but we have time now to make everything clear.”
30
LONDON
The man who was called George entered the apartment building located three blocks off Trafalgar Square in the noisy, brassy heart of West End. He had followed all the usual precautions, including the routine double-back with two cabs, the aimless Underground trip on the Bakerloo Line and the final walk from the station at Piccadilly Circus down the crowded streets to Trafalgar.
George was a man at home with subterfuge because he had been successful at the game during a sometimes-brilliant twenty-seven-year career with British Intelligence.
Not to mention his fifteen-year career as an “exterior officer” with the rank of colonel in the Soviet Committee for State Security.
The two roles had never seemed at odds to him and he had not been discomforted by them until the new spy scandals of the past two years. The belated discovery of a double agent at Cheltenham—under his nose, as it were—in 1982 had troubled him. Not because he was unaware that the traitor named Prine was also passing secrets to the Soviet Union but because the discovery had focused too much attention on what had always been a secure little fiefdom where he could routinely pass on information to Moscow or tap into the Americans who also utilized the center and still enjoy the comfortable respect of his colleagues without fear that any of them would tumble to his secret. A secret life was best lived openly, George had always felt.
“What is it you finally want from us, George?” he had once been asked by a high-ranking member of the KGB who later became an undersecretary to Andropov.
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
The answer had troubled the Russian; George’s charming vagueness had always troubled them. They felt they had trapped George into working for them fifteen years before but, in fact, it had not been their trap at all. George had gladly become a mole inside Auntie for a simple reason the Russians would not have understood: boredom.
He had been bored all his life.
He had been born to privilege. Privilege had eased his life, though ease had not been comfortable to him. From the nursery with the mothering care of Nanny and the servants through a brilliant and lackadaisical career at Oxford, George had expected doors to be opened to him by faceless people, and it had always been so.
He had never married because sex was a relief from boredom and marriage would have smothered that. He had experimented with homosexuality and found it wanting because it was too respectable to be a homosexual in his class. He had developed several affairs over the years and enjoyed balancing the women in his life against each other, making certain each was contained in a compartment of his own making; he enjoyed the thought that someday he might be caught out by one or another of his mistresses.
He felt contempt for his class, for its indolence and arrogance and leisure; but he had felt the same measure of contempt for the little strivers who by dint of examination and hard work and good luck were his colleagues at Oxford. “Napoleon was right,” he once said on a late evening, drinking brandy and smoking cigars with those school chums he permitted to be intimate with him: “We are a nation of shopkeepers, but the description does not go far enough. The baseness of the middle class has been bred into our class and we now are forced to admire the shopkeeper for his industry and thrift even when we, and the shopkeeper, know both values to be fraudulent. There is nothing left to strive for, but we make a great show of striving; there is no goal worthy of the sacrifice, but we regularly parade our rededication to those goals.”
No. The Russians could not understand him and they were always uncomfortable with him. Though George did not know it, an investigation had been held ten years previously to determine if George were actually a triple agent—one who worked for the British, seemed to work for the Russians as a double, but actually remained on the British payroll. If George had known it, he would have been amused. The game was all that mattered to him, the few moments of terror at the thought of being caught, the sense of thrills.
“Will you come to Moscow at the end of the game?” the Russian had asked.
“No, my God, man, I couldn’t stand it. London is my home and I’m comfortable with it. In five years’ time, I shall retire from Her Majesty’s Service—and I suppose, from your service—and be settled in my ancestral estate near Canterbury. That will be my crisis; to live out the remainder of my days in the perfect peace of absolute boredom.”
“What will you do?”
“I shall probably go out some morning to shoot birds and find it convenient to place the muzzle of the shotgun in my mouth and blow my head off,” George had said pleasantly.
George had somewhat enjoyed the previous forty-eight hours because the game had become very dangerous now, very filled with the terror that energized him. Matters had come unglued and that is why he had been summoned to the house three blocks off Trafalgar Square.
The man who waited for him inside the safe house—for that is what it was—was called Latvia (though that was only a false name) and he had met the man called George twice before—in Nice, during the previous summer, and once in Liverpool, during the hastily called conference when George had been fully briefed on the KGB plan to move Tomas Crohan out of the Soviet Union.
George was the key to the success of the plan and far too intelligent to take part in it without understanding all the elements of the scheme.
But the scheme now had apparently failed. The only option left was to save George at any cost. He was too valuable as a mole.
George knew this; he had not feared the summons.
He was also arrogantly certain he would survive this latest flap.
“Why?” asked the Russian named Latvia as they sat down at a bare table in a bare room over cups of steaming tea. “Why will this not affect you?”
“Affect me?” George raised his eyebrows, his fierce blue eyes glaring triumphantly at the sullen face of the Russian. “Of course it will affect me. But it shall not deter me, and that is all the difference.”
“Tartakoff has defected.”
“I doubt that very much. I believe he was forced to the defection by the American agents at Helsinki, this Macklin woman and November. You people have made too many blunders in this matter. This man, Antonio, for example; wherever did you drag him up?”
“Loyalty and precision are the requisites of a hit man,” the Russian said, slipping into a mix of English and American argot. “One hardly expects a hit man to be normal in all other respects.”
“Yes, but he was dreadful. I suspect that Tartakoff was moved out of Helsinki with special help, probably from that police inspector who became involved in the murders.”
“So we all suspect,” the Russian said. “There is no proof of this. You cannot push the Finns too far.”
“As your people have learned,” George said, smiling, and lighting a Panter Mignon. “But—to cases. What is it you expect to happen?”
“Tartakoff has told them everything.”
“And that includes telling them about me?”
“Yes.”
“That was careless of you, old fellow.” He inhaled the mild cigar and let the smoke filter slowly into the still, damp air
of the room.
“Tartakoff was as essential as you were, George. He was in on the planning from the beginning of the operation.” The Russian frowned and picked up his cup and took a sip of the scalding liquid.
“How can you drink that without milk?”
“I do not like milk,” the Russian said.
“So the problem is: What will we do with George?”
“That is the problem,” the Russian said.
“You will do nothing with me, old fellow, because nothing will happen to me.”
“But the Americans have Tomas Crohan—”
“They shall do nothing,” George said with a smile. “You see, Latvia, none of us understood at first that we were really double-crossing each other. From the beginning, in the war. And I doubt seriously that we need to drag up this matter at this late date.”
“What do you mean?”
“Forty-eight hours have elapsed since Tartakoff was packed off to America. Accompanied, I might add, by our former British agent, Ely. I wonder what they will make of him? The trouble with the Americans is they can clean up the loose ends because they have so damned much money. Ely will doubtless find a new and sensible life as an orange-grower in California or some other equally dreadful place. But Tartakoff. Now he is an important defector, albeit a reluctant one. He alleges that I am a mole and he alleges that I was part of this plan to drive the wedge between ourselves and our American cousins. Particularly at Cheltenham. Very well. What will the Americans do with this information?”
“They have Tomas Crohan.”
“You keep insisting on that and they do not. He has not reappeared since the American woman took him out of Helsinki.”
The Russian seemed puzzled; he stared at his teacup.
George smiled again and waved the cigar in illustration of what he was saying. “We sent in Michael Brent to murder Tomas Crohan in Vienna in 1945. Crohan had been abandoned by the Americans, though God knows he may still have clung to the tired promise that the Americans would give him the Irish government after the war. We could not tolerate Crohan from the standpoint of our own security. So Brent was sent to kill him, which Brent did quite well.”
He paused and puffed the little cigar. “How unfortunate for Brent. He really became quite expendable after that. Not that he wasn’t loyal, but we do not make the same mistakes in hiring our assassins that you do. We sent the Russians a message that Tomas Crohan—who had a new life in the guise of Michael Brent—was an American spy and your admirable army did the rest for us when they entered Austria.”