Spy Out the Land

by Jeremy Duns

  She nodded slowly, controlling her breathing with an effort. He had offered her no congratulations on her discovery and no apology for having ignored her suspicions nearly six years earlier. She knew that wasn’t his way of doing things, and that her vanity wasn’t the real issue at stake, but she resented it nonetheless. He always managed to avoid giving her any professional credit, perhaps because he felt it would alert others to their relationship or perhaps because he never thought to.

  Still, he was giving her a chance. If she impressed now – and if they managed to bring Dark in – she was sure he’d find a way to promote her that nobody would question. If only she had picked someone else to fall in love with, she thought. But then perhaps that was the whole point: the self-sabotage had itself been part of her attraction to him. In the weeks after she had returned from Kuala Lumpur, a physical tension had built up between them. She had lain awake at night applying obscure cipher pattern theories to his most offhand remarks to try to work out if he felt as she did or if she was simply imagining it. She had finally received her answer in a taxi-cab after a boozy Service dinner at the Garrick, when he’d wordlessly slid his hand across the leather seat and intertwined his fingers with hers. The chaste gesture had been the starting gun for their affair.

  Nearly six years later she was still deeply in love with him, even though she knew it couldn’t end well. She spent her days perpetually on stand-by, waiting for him to whisk her off to his room at his club for a hurried half-hour of sex and whispered promises he wouldn’t keep. She’d drifted – no, she had leaped headlong – into the classic scenario: the affair with the boss who would never leave his wife.

  It was especially unlikely in his case as Celia was fabulously wealthy, having inherited a mining consortium from her first husband, David Meredith, a Service officer who had been killed in a car crash in the late sixties and who had been one of Sandy’s best friends. As well as the very comfortable lifestyle this situation afforded Sandy – and he enjoyed the finer things in life – his position as Chief would be in jeopardy if Celia and he were to divorce, especially if there were any indication of impropriety with a member of the Service. Her career would also be in tatters if the affair ever came out.

  At least, this was the reasoning Sandy used on her, and which she had come to accept. She’d lived with the secret of their affair for so long that it had become cover for her, an instinctive lie she didn’t need to think about any more, like telling people she was an archivist in the Foreign Office – although that one felt increasingly close to the truth. On a weekend visit the previous summer, her mother had found her crying in her bedroom, but hadn’t pressed her for the reasons behind it. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell her. Mum was the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, but the English habit of avoiding all emotional matters had slowly seeped into her until it had settled. The only living soul she had confided in, and even then without mentioning his name, was her brother, Danny. But despite his own chaotic love-life he’d been appalled she was seeing a married man and had pleaded with her to call it off. She now pretended it was over just to avoid hearing his lectures, especially since she had once referred to Sandy in passing in another context and he’d rolled his eyes theatrically: ‘Oh, the old war hero.’ He was nearly twice her age, in fact – and yet still she hung on. Her life was taken up on the surface with work, and beneath it the questionable drama of minuscule oscillations in her relationship with Sandy.

  She closed the folder she had been reading, distracted by his presence next to her.

  ‘Will Bradley be there,’ she asked, ‘and if so do I need to keep anything back?’ Since the war, the head of CIA’s London Station sat in on all Joint Intelligence Committee meetings, and Harry Bradley was the current incumbent.

  ‘Yes, he’ll be there, and he should know everything. In fact, let’s stress that Dark has damaged Washington as much as he has us. We need all hands on deck to catch him, so let’s put the frighteners on.’ He gave a mirthless smile. ‘Shouldn’t be too hard.’

  Chapter 31

  Hope Charamba sat in the passenger seat of the car, her jaw clenched. She was wearing a nun’s wimple and clutching a passport in the name of Sister Emily Sempewa. Next to her, Peter Voers stared at the road ahead as he drove. Hope thought the dog collar in his shirt clashed obscenely with his brutish soldier’s face, but she knew her emotions coloured her view of him – the customs officials would simply see two members of a Jesuit Catholic church in the outskirts of Salisbury.

  Voers looked across at her, and she turned away. She knew he was angry that he had been interrupted by his leader, the one they called Captain, when he had wanted to assault her. Angry and resentful and ashamed – a volatile mixture. But they were under a tight schedule to catch a flight leaving the country, so she felt that she was at least safe from that horror for the time being. Wherever it was they were taking her was a different matter.

  For the hundredth time, she glanced in the rear-view mirror. The blue Vauxhall was still five cars behind them. Ben had become hysterical at being separated from her for the journey, but she had managed to calm him down. There hadn’t been any choice. The Captain had made it plain that if she caused any trouble on the way – attracted the attention of a passer-by, alerted a customs official – the men behind would simply stop following, and Ben would be killed. She had no reason to doubt him.

  They arrived at Arlanda airport, and Voers parked the car in the long-term area. He turned to face her and smiled – oh, how she loathed his smile.

  ‘I wonder what food they’ll serve on the plane,’ he said, stroking his moustache with his forefinger and thumb. ‘I’m famished.’

  Chapter 32

  Saturday, 23 August 1975, Lusaka, Zambia

  It was approaching dawn when the driver of the black Fiat saloon took the turning into the city’s Roma suburb. Matthew Charamba peered through the rear window of the car, searching for any signs of life. This was the first time he had left the house in weeks and his mind was hungry for something to feed on other than the fears that had been occupying it for the last three hours. But all he could make out was a row of greyish houses and dense foliage.

  At the end of the avenue, a large villa was set back from the road with a surrounding fence covered in hessian. This was ‘The Vatican’, the secret headquarters of the Department of National Security and Order – ZAPU’s spy agency. It made for a more discreet location for a rendezvous than Zimbabwe House, ZAPU’s headquarters in the city, which was believed to be under constant surveillance by the Zambian authorities and perhaps others.

  The Vatican was an anonymous-looking four-bedroom villa, but several sentries were positioned just behind the wrought-iron front gates. As the car drew in, one of the guards called through their arrival on a radio set. Once given the all-clear, the men began checking the car for weapons.

  ‘Only you go through,’ the lead sentry said when they were done, pointing at Charamba.

  ‘Impossible,’ said Gibo. ‘He’s not going in there alone.’

  Charamba held up a hand. ‘It’s all right, Phillip.’

  ‘Are you sure about this, sir?’

  Charamba nodded. He hadn’t told Gibo the real reason for his visit here tonight, that Hope and her son had been kidnapped. He had been too frightened to. The man with the metallic voice had been very persuasive on that point. In his last call, he had changed his demands: he now had to confirm by noon the next day that he would be participating in the talks. Charamba had tried to explain that he wouldn’t be able to push Nkomo and the others in such a time frame, and his first call to them hadn’t been promising – Nkomo had claimed they already had enough people for their delegation. But the Rhodesian hadn’t listened. He hadn’t allowed him to speak to Hope or her son, either. What if something had happened to them? The man insisted that if Charamba agreed to their demands they would be released as soon as the talks were over, but how could he trust this would happen? The caller had simply reiterated his d
emand and hung up.

  So here he was, at Nkomo’s door to beg. But if he was going to walk straight into the lions’ den it was vital that he gain the lions’ trust, and he wasn’t going to do that bringing his bodyguards with him. Nkomo and his men could simply kill him, of course – take him somewhere and shoot him as a traitor to the cause – but he didn’t think they would. It would rid them of a potentially dangerous rival, but it would only serve to make him a martyr and was too risky for their own reputations: anyone thought to have been involved in such an act would be cast out forever. Well, so he reasoned. He might have failed to consider all the angles of the current power dynamic, in which case he could be in serious, possibly mortal danger. But bodyguards would send the wrong message, and unarmed they wouldn’t be able to stop anything from happening anyway.

  He climbed out of the car and allowed himself to be escorted through the gates and into the villa. On the ground floor, the living room had been converted into an operations room, and a few serious-looking men were loitering there huddled over telephones. Charamba had a pang as he saw how much better equipped they were than his own group, and that they were still working at this time of night.

  He was led upstairs and ushered into a windowless room. Five men wearing fatigues were waiting for him around a bare conference table. He saw with relief that none of them was armed, either. One of the men stepped forward. It was Nkomo, whom he hadn’t seen since he had left the party just after their release from prison. He looked at ease, and well fed.

  ‘Hello, Matthew.’

  Charamba took his hand. ‘Hello, Joshua.’

  Nkomo gave a wary smile. Charamba shook hands with the others, and they seated themselves around the table. The atmosphere was loaded with unspoken tension for a minute, and then Nkomo asked the question all of them were thinking.

  ‘We were surprised to hear from you. You say you want to join us in these talks. What do you hope to gain?’

  ‘Nothing personally,’ Charamba lied. ‘I think it is a chance for peace, and I want to help influence our country’s future in any way that I can.’

  The men nodded, but looked unconvinced. Charamba tried again.

  ‘I think we can work better together, but also that it is important that we are seen to be working together. A more united African front will be more appreciated in the international press, and it will put more pressure on the whites to listen to us. I am also confident that if we were to reach an agreement with Smith, we would be able to win the vote in the country.’

  He delivered the final point very lightly, as it was a matter of significant resentment with Nkomo and the others that he had become a more popular figure with the public, but he had carefully rehearsed the speech before leaving the house.

  The men asked him some more questions about how he saw his role at the summit, and he answered as best he could. He didn’t reveal the position the metallic Rhodesian voice had ordered he should adopt – that would have to wait for the summit itself, if he ever got that far.

  After fifteen minutes, Nkomo made motions to finish the meeting.

  ‘You have some very interesting ideas, Matthew,’ he said. ‘And you seem sincere. I think some good could come of you partaking, but you must understand there is resistance to your presence. We need to discuss this further among ourselves, but we will contact you to let you know our decision.’

  ‘Soon, please,’ said Charamba, straining to keep the desperation from his voice.

  Nkomo nodded. ‘Of course.’

  Charamba was escorted downstairs again and trudged back to the waiting car. He climbed in reluctantly – all that awaited him at the end of the drive was a sleepless night as he worried about Hope and the grandson he had never met.

  Chapter 33

  Saturday, 23 August 1975, Whitehall, London

  Rachel followed Harmigan down the narrow corridor. One part of her mind was still sifting through the dossiers on Dark, while another part was wondering if she was appropriately dressed. Sandy had told her to keep her outfit ‘sober’, her make-up light and to avoid high heels – he had said the latter because Wilson was short, but she suspected it was also because he wanted to tower over everyone in the meeting, her included. Obedient as ever, she was wearing navy flats and a pale cream blouse, but she was having second thoughts about the skirt, a Prince of Wales check number that probably showed off a little more of her legs than ‘sober’ accommodated.

  But perhaps nobody would notice in the mounting atmosphere of tension, which was now bordering on outright panic. Scarcely half an hour had gone since Sandy had persuaded the prime minister that he needed to be informed of developments. As a result, the meeting had been moved from a boardroom on the fourth floor to the main Cabinet Office Briefing Room, known as COBRA, a small crisis operations centre that had been set up three years earlier amid fears the country’s infrastructure might collapse if there were widespread strikes. It seemed a little like overkill even for Dark coming back to life, but Sandy was fond of grand gestures.

  They came to a staircase and walked down it until they reached a steel blast door guarded by two uniformed guards. One of them took their passes and let them through into a long low-ceilinged room with wood-panelled walls, a large mahogany table that barely fitted into it and dim lighting. She was pleased to note the latter, as now her skirt would be less conspicuous. And the room wasn’t as disturbing as she had expected – talk of it in the office usually brought to mind apocalyptic science-fiction films, but while strikes hadn’t brought the country to a collapse they had led to the three-day week, and having gone through the hunt for paraffin and candles to see her own dinner by, COBRA’s furnishings didn’t seem much bleaker than anywhere else.

  There were a few Dr Strangelove touches nevertheless: part of one wall was taken up with an array of radio and communications equipment, and at the far end of the room there was another blast door. This, she knew, led to the Nuclear Release Room, where the prime minister would use the codes in its safe to give the order for a missile strike if the time ever came.

  Rachel removed the dossiers from her briefcase and placed them around the table, then helped set up the projector screen with a technician from the Cabinet Office while the room filled up. There were five spooks: the heads of Five, DIS, GCHQ and the JIC, and Harry Bradley from CIA. It was, as Sandy had promised, a crowd of abbreviations. Rounding it out were the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, and the foreign secretary, James Callaghan, the latter of whom had apparently been very annoyed to have been called in as he was about to set off on a trout-fishing holiday in Ireland.

  The prime minister was the last to arrive. He was a more formidable figure than Rachel had expected from seeing him on television and from Sandy’s pre-meeting rehearsal, and his every gesture seemed crisp and decisive. He lit a small cigar – his pipe was his trademark, but he smoked cigars in private – and nodded at Harmigan, who quickly got to his feet.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen; Prime Minister. We’re against the clock so I’ll spare the chit-chat. We’re here to discuss this man.’ An image appeared on the wall-screen. ‘I’ll allow my colleague, Rachel Gold, to explain.’

  Rachel scraped back her chair and approached the screen.

  ‘Good morning. This is Erik Johansson. A Swedish citizen, he works for a haulage company in Stockholm. However, he isn’t who he seems.’ She nodded at the technician, and the photograph was replaced with another of Dark, smooth-shaven and several years younger – it was from his 1964 pass-card for Century House, which Rachel had found in Archives. ‘In fact, we’ve ascertained that he is the former British intelligence officer Paul Dark.’

  Jenkins was the first to speak, his mellifluous voice dripping with scepticism.

  ‘And just how have you “ascertained” this?’

  Rachel smiled politely, determined not to be intimidated. ‘The camera never lies, Home Secretary. Interpol sent us a photo and we compared it with all the images we have on file.’ She raised a hand, and with a
loud click the photograph of ‘Johansson’ reappeared, now laid over the photograph of Dark. ‘As you can see here, the position of the eyes, mouth and nose in relation to each other, the eyebrows, eyelids, the angle of the forehead, the size of the jaw – all are identical. His face has become fractionally narrower in the last six years, but it’s definitely him.’

  Jenkins peered at the picture through his thick spectacles. ‘Yes, I’ll grant it looks like him, but how sure are you?’

  ‘I’m afraid the answer is “very”. You can find all the details between pages three and nine of the dossiers. We used a graphics tablet to input the photos into our facial recognition system and our calculations are that the chances of this being anyone other than Paul Dark is around five billion to one – more people than there are on the planet.’

  There was a respectful silence in the room as this sank in. Rachel took a breath and continued.

  ‘Dark turned up on Interpol’s radar a few hours ago, following a violent incident off the coast of Finland. It seems that he’s been living undisturbed in Stockholm, where he has a girlfriend, Claire Nsoka, who holds a Zambian passport but who the authorities in Lusaka have no record of, and that they have a young son. Both Nsoka and the son have apparently been kidnapped – we don’t know who by – and Dark has resurfaced to try to get them back.’

  She looked up at the men facing her. ‘There’s a full account of Dark’s activities in your dossiers, but the thrust is this: six years ago, a KGB officer walked into our Station in Nigeria and claimed to know the identity of a major Soviet double agent working within the Service. Dark, who was head of Soviet Section at the time, realised at once that he was about to be exposed and went on the run. He eventually wound up in Moscow, where it seems the Russians threw him in the Lubyanka, perhaps having decided that even they couldn’t trust him any longer. Dark managed to escape from there, which is some feat, but was killed by Soviet special forces in a remote area between Sweden and Finland in October 1969 – or so we believed until today. Clearly, we were mistaken.’