Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Dove turned round and saw George pushing aside a wildfaced young woman wrapped in an orange beach-towel while at the same time he appeared to be trying to level his Walther at the Englishman’s chest. Dove stared at the Palestinian, noted the glazed look in his eyes. Then the pistol swung away from him and there was what sounded like a single echoing report. George catapulted back against the wall, clutching his throat. Koller was lying on the bed in much the same position as before with the little Vzor automatic in his right hand. There was a small, blueish hole in the centre of his forehead and he was quite dead. George and Koller had fired simultaneously.

  The woman came over and seized Koller by his bloodied shirt, pulled him upright as if she was trying to shake him back to life. Then she collapsed, her cheek in the gore on his chest, shoulders heaving with great sobs. The Palestinian was slumped against the wall making dreadful choking sounds, legs twitching like a half-crushed insect. Dove, unhurt, stepped over him into the hallway and tried to vomit out the memory of what he had just done and seen.

  The woman followed him out, her cheek smudged with Koller’s blood, absently arranging the top of the orange bathtowel about her breasts. Dove, hardly aware of her presence, was looking down at a small puddle of vomit on the floor, the ringing in his ears from the gunshots beginning to be replaced by a rushing, sea-shell sound. The woman was saying something in her American English, but the sense of the words took a long time to penetrate his understanding. ‘He saved your life,’ she was saying. ‘Hans Koller saved your life.’

  Dove wanted to explain. He opened his mouth to speak, but he found it painful to work his jaw and the reply failed to come. He felt his chest was in a vice, the breath being squeezed out of him in a gigantic bear-hug. He gasped, snatching at the air like a drowning man, conscious that it was spilling past him before he could drink his fill. Everything began to blur as if his eyes were watering. He tried hard to focus, but just then his chest burst out of the bear-hug and he grabbed at the woman’s bath towel too late to stop his forehead cracking the tiled floor.

  Nadia pulled the towel out of Dove’s grasp and then watched the big Englishman shuddering his life away, peering down at him with the detachment of someone attempting to fathom out movement at the foot of a tall cliff. When it was over she allowed the towel to fall about her ankles and stood naked like this for perhaps a minute, thinking about the implications of what had happened. Dove would still be a hero, of course: the manner of his death would serve only to underline his torment, the anguish of a civilized man revenging himself on a barbarian. There would never be any posthumous accolades for Koller; no shrines for a terrorist; he would not even be mourned by the Front.

  She picked up the towel, remembering as she did so the way Dove had lunged for it as he fell, and went into her bedroom, where she dressed carefully in bra and pants, a silk shirt and skirt. She buttoned the shirt carefully, then stood in front of a mirror and ripped it savagely down from the collar so that most of the buttons flew off; she arranged one of the bra cups so that her right breast was totally exposed. When she was satisfied she went back into the hallway and sat down beside Dove. She picked up his head by his hair and, trying not to look into the dead eyes, scratched his face hard several times, making sure she collected plenty of skin under her fingernails. Rigor mortis had not yet set in and there was some blood. She lay down, pulled her skirt up so that it was well over her waist, and rolled her pants down to her hips so that some of her pubic hair was showing.

  ‘Am I in danger?’ Koller had asked.

  ‘Not while I’m with you.’ And she had believed it.

  She swept her hand across the tiles until it came up against the cold metal of Dove’s Walther. She checked to see that the pistol was still in working order, and then held it loosely in her right hand so that her thumb was on the trigger. It might work, she thought. One thing she was certain of: the Front had not intended her to be among the survivors.

  Outside, the band played and the youths continued to let off their fireworks.

  13. A Hero Perishes

  Somewhere over the Mediterranean Fitchett ordered a whisky and decided that he might as well pass the time to Heathrow by starting on his report. He hated paperwork and it was, he thought, doubly unnecessary in this case because the affair had been so thoroughly aired in print.

  The newspapers had badly wanted to make a hero out of Dove and it was not their fault that, in the end, he got a bad press. Policemen and reporters can only work on what they believe to be fact and, in Dove’s case, what they believed to be fact was wrong.

  In the Coroner’s court in Nicosia the circumstances relating to the charnel-house discovered in Nadia’s apartment had been spelt out quite succinctly. There were three male corpses and one female. Two of the men and the woman had died of gunshot wounds. Ballistic evidence provided an accurate reconstruction of who shot who. The Englishman Stephen Dove had died of cardiac arrest in a struggle with the Palestinian woman known as Nadia Mouron. Both their fingerprints had been found on the pistol which killed her and it seemed likely that she had shot herself while fighting for possession of the gun. The state of her clothing strongly suggested that Dove had been trying to sexually assault her when he suffered a massive heart attack, probably almost immediately after the woman had been shot. The pathologist had pointed out that all four of the deceased had died within minutes of each other. It was impossible, he said, to pinpoint the exact time of death to within half an hour. He added that the lividity marks, bruises left by blood gathering at the lowest point in a fresh corpse, indicated that none of the bodies had been moved after death.

  ‘Christ. He iced himself chasing pussy,’ Fitchett had overheard an awed American reporter in court whisper to a colleague. The policeman had to agree that this about summed things up.

  Deprived of an unsullied hero Fleet Street was not slow in assembling the circumstantial evidence. This showed that Dove had been more than a little strange, almost a licensed sex maniac whose revenge seemed to be sadistically aimed at Koller’s women as much as at the terrorist himself. Apart from the Palestinian woman he had tried to rape at gunpoint, presumably near the zenith of some terrible sexual high brought on by the violence, there was the cabinet minister’s daughter who would probably never walk again without the aid of a stick. Then Tina, the whore from Beirut, turned up at the front desk of the most sensational tabloid and for four figures and a. good lunch sold them a story which seemed to prove that the schoolteacher enjoyed beating up ladies of no particular political conviction at all. After that even close friends such as Roger Day, the English teacher, said that grief had obviously driven him more than a little crazy.

  Dove might have emerged with some credit, however mixed his motives, for successfully taking on three dangerous terrorists if the Front’s flimsy explanation that George and Koller accidentally shot each other protecting their female comrade had not been challenged by news stories, quoting ‘Israeli intelligence sources’, giving a truer version of events. The Funny had decided that damaging the Front’s relations with their foreign supporters was much more important than allowing some seedy schoolmaster more dignity than he deserved. So it came out that one of the dead men had been on Dove’s side and they helped him kill their own man.

  The only thing the press got nowhere near to was the Charlemagne Circle. Fitchett might have if he had allowed himself to follow his intuition. For a long time on that flight back to London he studied a photocopy of Koller’s note to his father that the Greek Cypriot police had let him have. It read:

  My Dear Papa,

  ‘After every December there’s always a May.’

  Now for you it will always be December.

  Not even a ‘cut-out’ between us.

  He had written ‘cut-out’ in English.

  Hans

  For some time Fitchett played with a strange idea. He even began to write it. Then he crossed it out. No, it wouldn’t do. Wouldn’t do for the Yard. If he came up with something
like that they’d really think he was a candidate for the funny farm.

  Spies of Jerusalem

  Colin Smith

  Prologue

  Huj, 8 November 1917: about 2.30 p.m.

  There were dead men and dead horses, but at first it was mostly dead horses.

  Meinertzhagen and Ponting arrived with the cleaners, human and otherwise. The birds circled in the low thermals above the ambulances and stretcher parties, especially over the far ridge where the Turkish dead were thickly clustered.

  ‘Buzzards,’ said Meinertzhagen, pushing up the peak of his solar topee and holding a hand over his eyes. ‘Long-legged buzzards and a few Booted Eagles by the look of ‘em.’

  Ponting shuddered. ‘They disgust me.’

  ‘But why? It’s their nature.’

  The officers rode on in silence for a while after that, each apparently lost in his own thoughts. They were freshly horsed on the tough little Australian remounts that were known in that campaign as Walers because they were bred in New South Wales. Now they walked their Walers down the ridge behind which the Warwicks and Worcesters had assembled before making their sudden appearance on the skyline to start their half-mile gallop towards the Austrian seventy-fives.

  The guns were hidden in a hollow in the enemy-held ridge, so that as the English cavalry crossed the flat of the little valley they had ridden into dead ground, where the gunners could no longer fire at them over open sights. Instead, they had relied on air bursts and the covering fire provided by the German machine-gunners and Turkish infantry dug in higher up behind them who could see the Yeomanry coming all the way.

  As they got nearer the Austrian battery Meinertzhagen and Ponting saw bundles of khaki huddled together by the dead horses. Great clouds of flies rose off human and animal cadavers alike, settling down again once they were past.

  They did not go down to the Skoda guns in the hollow right away but rode to the left of them, up to the crest of the ridge where the nationalities were intertwined. Further down the far slope the dead were exclusively Turkish, for it was here that the English had run them through with their long swords as they ran away.

  Close to a Turkish corpse with a gaping back wound was an open, red-covered book, also lying with its spine uppermost. Ponting dismounted and picked it up, half-expecting it to be a Koran, which would have made a nice keepsake. But it turned out to be in English. The Complete Letter-Writer for Ladies and Gentlemen, he read, and he could see by flicking through the chapter headings that it gave advice on how to conduct all kinds of correspondence: business, social, family – even amorous. On the title page was an inscription written in black ink in the large and precise style Ponting always thought of as Working-Class Copperplate: ‘To our dearest son Walter, in the hope that he might learn these lessons well and keep us informed of all his adventures. May God keep you safe and sound until you return to us. Your loving parents, Mr and Mrs Albert Calderwell.’

  Ponting wondered what kind of self-improving Tommy Atkins would take such a volume into battle with him? Written in pencil in the inside front cover of the book was ‘Private W. Calderwell, Warwickshire Yeomanry’. Underneath, inscribed in block capitals in a different, darker pencil lead were the letters ‘B Squadron’. Ponting, who had a deductive mind, decided that Calderwell was probably one of a recent draft of reinforcements who had not known which of his regiment’s squadrons he would be joining until he arrived in Egypt. It didn’t look as if the poor boy had lasted long.

  ‘Interesting?’ asked Meinertzhagen.

  ‘It’s from one of ours,’ said Ponting, slipping the book into a tunic pocket and remounting.

  They turned around and went back to the top of the ridge where, on the English side, the slaughter had only been exceeded by that which had occurred around the Austrian artillery itself. The farriers were busy putting down those horses that could not be persuaded to stand. A single bullet wound, even several, was not always reason enough to kill a horse. Mules were even tougher, but mules didn’t make charges.

  A soldier with hair the colour of corn was crouched with his rifle beside a brown horse lying on its side with its neck outstretched on the ground. Every so often the head and neck would come up, the mane shake enough to dislodge the flies, and then shudder down again. Above the horse stood a farrier corporal holding what Ponting at first mistook for some sort of outsize pistol and then realised was one of those captive bolt devices they had started to use in abattoirs shortly before the start of the war.

  ‘She’ll come round. I know she will,’ the corn-haired boy was saying. Ponting saw that he was one of the very young ones, nineteen at the most.

  ‘C’mon, son, it don’t always work first time with a rifle,’ said the corporal farrier, who had a blacksmith’s forearms.

  ‘Fuck off or I might shoot you,’ the youth said quietly, although not quietly enough for Ponting not to overhear him.

  He thought for a moment that Meinertzhagen would see the youth as another dreadful example of the callowness of these New Army civilian volunteers, and have him awarded field punishment for insolence to a non-commissioned officer.

  But Meinertzhagen did not appear to have heard. He was looking beyond them towards a truck parked on a dirt track about four hundred yards from the Skoda guns. Next to the vehicle, which was of German manufacture, was a horse-drawn British field ambulance. A man was being loaded into the back of the ambulance on a stretcher, watched by a British officer and a woman.

  It was, of course, the woman who had attracted Meinertzhagen’s attention. After the war, when he had polished it to one of those anecdotes that neither bored nor gave away too much, Ponting used to say that he would have been less surprised to see a Clapham omnibus than a female at Huj.

  From that distance she appeared to be European. She was quite tall and was wearing a grubby white dress and a large straw hat. They rode towards her. As they got closer they could see that most of the grubbiness on the dress was blood – and fresh blood at that, because the heat soon dried it brown. Ponting wondered why nobody was assisting her. Then he realised that the blood was probably not her own.

  PART ONE: Even In Our Time

  1

  Caesarea: March 1917

  A prisoner was sobbing softly in one of the deeper cells.

  The Moudir, the head of the Turkish gendarmerie in Caesarea, was on the way out of the building with a little sack of grain in his hands when he heard it. He paused for a moment to listen, but could not make out whether the weeping came from the Christian Syrian boy whom he suspected of being a deserter from one of the regiments on the Gaza front, or the wasted and, to his mind, obviously syphilitic Armenian woman caught picking the pockets of soldiers who had declined her services. He shrugged. It could wait. He had his friends to attend to.

  Years of convict labour had refurbished the dungeons and built the pigeon loft for him amidst the overgrown ruins of King Louis IX’s coastal fortress at Caesarea. It should have been a pleasant enough place, its palms fanned by sea breezes and in summer full of the restful cool that only large stone blocks and marble-tiled floors can bring. Yet, on the whole, men had never been happy there for long.

  Even by Crusader standards it had had an anguished history. Before Louis there had been King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, Gautier of Avense and Jean de Brieme. Sometimes the knights barely held it a year before it was back in Muslim hands. Louis had lasted for fifteen, which was longer than any of them.

  His luck ran out in 1265, when it was successfully stormed by Sultan Baybars. Perhaps Baybars sensed that the fortress was cursed, because he had it pulled asunder in a manner that foreshadowed high explosive and decreed that it should never be inhabited again. For this reason the Moudir avoided spending a night there, though he was dismissive of the tales of wailing djinns and spirits he heard from his Kurdish guards. As a young man he had chased Kurdish bandits and he sometimes suspected that these mountain people clung to beliefs that predated Islam, tales that both scared and comforted t
hem when the snow blocked their high passes and wolf packs roamed the ridge lines.

  He was a fat man, this Moudir, and he moved slowly towards the jetty, the jellabea he always wore for his siesta flapping at his ankles, his podgy feet squeezed into sandals which slapped along the flagged path. The Crusaders had built the jetty too and, though it might have made a handy beachhead for a Frankish sortie from Acre or Cyprus Baybars had not destroyed it. Perhaps he sensed the Christians had had enough.

  The Moudir scattered his grain, as he always did, at the jetty’s seaward end. On the horizon the sun was going down in a blaze of copper-coloured clouds. Before it he could make out the dark silhouette of a steamship sailing north and guessed it was one of the British or French warships that were enforcing the Entente’s blockade of the Levantine coast all the way from Latakia to Khan Yunis. A few gulls cried and wheeled, but there was as yet no sign of his birds.

  This was always an anxious moment. He had never lost his sense of wonder at their navigation. One day, he was convinced, the magic would fail. Something would go wrong with that compass in their heads and the poor little dears would be unable to find their way home to him. The very idea made his throat dry and his eyes warm with tears.

  He looked along the narrow silver highway the setting sun had laid from the jetty to the Mediterranean horizon, shutting his left eye completely and blinkering his other with his right hand. For a guilty moment he wondered whether he should get some of those darkened spectacles the Germans sometimes wore, as if Allah had not given them eyes strong enough to face the day. But then, being infidels, perhaps He had not.

  There was a shadow in the sun, and what was at first barely a smudge, not much harder in outline than the puffs of smoke from the passing ship, slowly became his flapping flock. As usual, they circled high above him, the white ones in the lead, as if they needed to fix various landmarks before committing themselves – in much the same way as the German airmen flew around the country. After a couple of circuits they began to descend in slow spirals which took them out over the sea again until the white-feathered leaders dropped down onto the jetty and began bobbing away at their feed.