Shidak yawned exaggeratedly.
‘I thought leaving that match folder with MI-5’s address was clumsy but I suppose you’d have got away with it, if everything else had worked. How’s this sound? Famous Russian dissident settles in England where he’s used, briefly, as a consultant by British secret services. Self-proclaimed enemy of Alexei Palov, a Soviet old-timer who’s now a disposable sacrifice in the eyes of the KGB. Palov comes to London where he’s assassinated by the Soviet dissident with known connections with British intelligence. Huge scandal, maybe even the breaking off of diplomatic relations. But what’s this! Valentin Shidak isn’t yet a British citizen! He still holds a Soviet passport! He’s a Russian. So the application is made for your extradition, to face Russian justice for murdering your countryman. And home you go, not actually to face Russian justice at all but to the congratulations of the KGB and promotion through their ranks. Because that’s what you are, isn’t it, Valentin Shidak? You’re not a dissident at all. You’re a KGB sleeper who came to this country five years ago with the perfect cover story for acceptance in the West. And here you had to stay, until you were activated. That’s it, Valentin, isn’t it? That’s all the pieces neatly slotted into place?’
‘Mad,’ said Shidak. ‘You’re quite mad.’
‘You got the M-16 and the Colt from the Russian embassy here, didn’t you? Both American weapons. A little addition to the propaganda.’
‘Isn’t there an English law restricting the length of time you can hold an innocent man in custody?’ asked Shidak, bored.
‘Yes,’ agreed Fowler. ‘But there’s another one covering people suspected of terrorism and you easily qualify for that, so we’ve got lots of time if we choose to hold you.’ He allowed one of his broad smiles. ‘But actually we don’t choose to hold you. We don’t even choose to prosecute for possession of those weapons. Waste of public time and money. We’re just going to send you home.’
‘What!’ For the first time Shidak’s complacency slipped and he looked worried.
‘Send you home,’ announced Fowler. ‘We can withdraw your residency permit any time we like. Which we have, in fact. We don’t want people here walking about with illegal guns. So we’re shipping you back to the Soviet Union. All very quietly, of course. Well, not with any public knowledge, that is. We’ll let your embassy know why. Tell them what a bloody awful assassin you are, like I said when I arrested you. Don’t suppose they’ll be very happy about that, will they? Certainly the KGB won’t. It’ll cause a hell of an internal row in Moscow, I wouldn’t be surprised. The country’s intelligence service plotting to kill one of its own ministers! That’s going to leave a bad taste in a lot of mouths. Probably yours most of all.’
‘No, wait!’ said Shidak desperately. ‘I want to talk, discuss things.’
‘Nothing to discuss,’ said Fowler, rising. ‘You’re going home a failure, Valentin. And we’re going to make sure that everyone knows it. You know something? I’d hate to be in your place. I’d really hate it.’
‘So he’s definitely gone?’ said Alice Irving. She wasn’t crying, but it was close.
‘I think so,’ said Fowler. ‘We can’t find him anywhere. He’s closed down his bank account and it seems he got his citizenship without telling you and an English passport with it, so the Russian passport isn’t important any more. He just walked away and left you.’
‘I had a letter from the bank about the account,’ said the girl. ‘I was curious about the passport, until you explained. I suppose he’ll be all right?’
‘I’m sure he will,’ lied Fowler.
‘I really loved him,’ said Alice. ‘I never imagined he would leave me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Fowler. He’d have to leave her soon: he had a boy scouts meeting that night. ‘Relationships end like this sometimes. People just walking away.’
‘It was good of you to take the trouble to come and tell me.’
‘I knew you’d like to know.’
‘Just as long as he’s all right.’
‘We’ll never know, will we?’ said Fowler. ‘All we can do is hope.’
5
The Mole
Committed, thought William Davies. No turning back now. There hadn’t been, he supposed, for several months. But until this precise moment there’d always been the opportunity to change his mind and not actually cross to the Soviet Union. Not any longer. That morning he’d written the farewell message and walked out of the British embassy on the banks of the Moscow river to…? To what? He didn’t know, Davies acknowledged. Despite all the planning and all the preparation, he didn’t really know what sort of new life he was entering: didn’t know if he could do it.
‘You haven’t any doubt?’ pressed Vladimir Baykov. The man had been his KGB control from the outset of Davies working for Soviet intelligence, more than a year before. The Russian was a dour, unsmiling man who always smelled of cigarettes: he had a rasping, ugly cough.
‘None at all,’ insisted Davies. ‘I always set small traps in my room, so I would know if it had been searched: books in certain positions, drawers partially closed, things like that. They’ve all been disturbed over the last two or three days. Yesterday I was interviewed for two hours by the head of internal security at the embassy: two of the things he kept on about were pieces of information I’ve passed on to you.’
Baykov nodded, lighting one of those Russian cigarettes with a long cardboard tube at one end, so that only half is really filled with tobacco. The two men were in a workmen’s café on Krasnaya Street, one of their regular meeting spots. Baykov said: ‘I agree. They were on to you. It was inevitable, in the end: I just wish it had taken longer. It’s not often we have a spy like you.’
‘You always said you’d help me, if it happened,’ reminded Davies, a plea in his voice. He was a tall man, always conscious of his appearance. He’d had to leave behind all his clothes and personal belongings, running as he had: he’d been careful to wear his Oxford University tie.
‘We’ll look after you,’ assured Baykov. He smiled with attempted encouragement. ‘Welcome to the Soviet Union,’ he said. At the end he started to cough, spoiling it.
‘I thought everything that could go wrong had gone wrong,’ said Jeremy Thurlow. ‘But I couldn’t conceive this: it’s a disaster. An absolute and unmitigated disaster.’
Deputy Director General Thurlow had been more critical than anyone of what had been happening in the department over the past few months, although he hadn’t actually suggested there was a Soviet informer here, embedded in London headquarters.
The Director General was convinced there was a traitor. ‘The Prime Minister is demanding a personal explanation. I’m due there this afternoon.’
‘Davies has been head of our Moscow intelligence station for two years!’ reminded Thurlow unnecessarily. ‘It’s impossible to calculate the damage he’s done.’
‘We’ve got to try,’ said Bell. ‘I want a full analysis of everything the man has been involved in.’
‘Over what period?’ demanded Thurlow. ‘While he’s been in Moscow? Or before, while he was here?’
Bell appeared to think for a moment. Then he said: ‘Let’s go right back to the beginning, from the moment he joined.’
Thurlow sighed despairingly. ‘Like I said, an unmitigated disaster.’
After the man left his office the Director General rose and gazed through the window at the east London street. He couldn’t tell Thurlow that William Davies wasn’t a defector but a very brave man. Until he found out who the traitor was here, at the Factory, Bell knew he couldn’t trust anyone, not even his deputy.
Davies’ debriefing was conducted outside Moscow, up in the Lenin Hills in a dacha which also became his temporary home. His interrogator was a surprisingly young man, younger than Davies, who did not identify himself beyond a first name, Oleg. He was fair-haired and wore rimless glasses and had the expert questioner’s way of not immediately speaking when Davies finished answering a question,
tempting the man to fill the silence by talking further.
‘All the information you gave us when you were at the embassy proved to be a hundred per cent accurate,’ said Oleg.
‘Of course it was,’ said Davies. ‘How could it be otherwise?’
‘We’ve had situations in the past, with other people, when it hasn’t been.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Davies, who did. Ensuring that everything he’d leaked was completely true had been an essential to build up his absolute credibility.
‘To mislead us. Send us off in the wrong direction on an inquiry,’ said the Russian.
‘I didn’t seek to mislead you,’ said Davies.
‘Why?’ demanded Oleg. ‘You’re the son of a very wealthy family. You occupied a senior position in British intelligence and would have gone higher, maybe even eventually become Director General. Why did you start spying for us?’
The question for which he had rehearsed most of all, thought Davies. He said: ‘There is a new regime in the Soviet Union. New freedoms: openness, after being closed for so long. Russia is offering friendship to the West. Friendship and trust. We should be offering friendship and trust back. But we’re not. Britain and America are building up their spying apparatus all the time, putting satellites in space, going ahead with Star Wars development. I was sickened by it: still am sickened by it.’
The silence from the other man was longer this time: Davies wasn’t sure he had sounded as convincing as he’d wanted. Eventually Oleg said: ‘Almost ideology, in fact?’
‘No,’ said Davies at once. ‘Contempt, for the way my country and other countries are responding to the Soviet Union.’
‘A personal crusade?’ said Oleg. It only just stopped short of a sneer.
‘Everything I provided was accurate,’ reminded Davies. ‘Wasn’t it valuable?’
‘Highly so,’ agreed the Russian.
‘Because I occupied the position I did. So what I did … what I have done … wasn’t a ridiculous one-man crusade. It hurt. Badly.’
‘I wasn’t trying to sound dismissive,’ said Oleg.
That was exactly what the Russian had tried to be, Davies knew: sneeringly dismissive so that he would lose his temper and give an unconsidered reply. He said: ‘I regret that I had to stop when I did.’
‘Are you happy, to be in the Soviet Union?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ answered Davies easily. ‘I’m hardly in the Soviet Union yet, am I? The inside of this dacha is all I’ve really seen.’
Oleg smiled. ‘What do you imagine you are going to do?’
‘I haven’t really had time fully to consider that,’ said Davies cautiously. ‘The investigation … my having to run … were all too sudden. Obviously I want to work.’
‘In intelligence?’
Davies appeared to think upon the question. Then he said: ‘I imagine I would have considerable experience to offer. I occupied a senior position in the British espionage service, as you’ve already acknowledged. I know a great deal about the workings and methods of intelligence.’
Oleg nodded. ‘Which you are prepared to disclose?’
‘What sort of question is that!’ demanded Davies, loud-voiced. ‘How can you doubt me! Haven’t I shown for months precisely what I am prepared to offer, in everything?’
Oleg appeared unmoved by the outburst. ‘What would happen if we refused you asylum? If you had to return to Britain?’
Davies swallowed, visibly worried. ‘I would think that was obvious,’ he said. ‘I’d be put on trial. Be jailed, for a long time.’
‘Didn’t that occur to you, when you began spying for us?’
‘Baykov, through whom I worked, always promised me that if I were suspected you would protect me.’
‘Would it frighten you, to go to jail?’
‘Of course it would frighten me!’ said Davies, voice loud again. ‘What would upset me more would be the rejection by the Soviet Union, whom I’ve tried to help!’
‘I haven’t said we’re rejecting you,’ pointed out Oleg.
‘You haven’t said you’re accepting me, either!’
‘No I haven’t, have I?’ said the Russian quietly.
‘Well?’ demanded Viktor Lezin. The man was an assistant controller in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, responsible for foreign intelligence. It was through Lezin that all the information leaked by Davies had been channelled in the past.
‘I don’t know yet,’ replied Oleg. ‘His attitude is about what I’d expect from someone who’s been forced to defect.’
‘Did you talk about what sort of work he could do for us here?’ They were meeting in Lezin’s office in Dzerzhinsky Square, the headquarters of the KGB.
‘Not in detail,’ said Oleg. ‘He says he’s prepared to.’
‘Does he expect to?’
‘He claims not to have thought sufficiently about it.’
‘You sound doubtful about him?’
‘I’m not making up my mind, one way or another, not yet.’
‘He’d be invaluable here, with the experience he has, as an analyst of what comes in from the West.’
‘You sound anxious to use him?’
‘I am. But not recklessly so.’
‘I will be as fast as I can.’
Up in the Lenin Hills William Davies gazed down from a window of the dacha at the Russian capital far below, a spilled jewel case of lights. He wasn’t sure he was convincing Oleg. Would they imprison him if they decided he was an imposter: kill him even?
‘I thought we might go away somewhere for a few days: abroad even,’ suggested Bell. They hadn’t done that before and he supposed it marked a deepening of the affair he was having with his personal assistant.
Ann Perkins looked curiously across the office. ‘That would be wonderful,’ she said. ‘What about your wife?’
‘She’ll hardly be aware of my being away.’
‘Why stay together at all?’ asked the girl directly.
‘I’ve suggested we have a holiday together, not an in-depth discussion about our future.’
‘Do we have a future?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Sure it’s wise for you to be away at a time like this, so soon after the Davies defection?’ asked Ann worriedly. ‘It’s come too close on top of everything else.’
The Director General didn’t reply immediately, studying the girl intently. He’d decided to trust no one in his hunt for the mole within his organization and had set tests and traps for some officers, to gauge their loyalty. But he hadn’t devised a test for Ann, because it had never occurred to him to doubt her. But shouldn’t he? She was in as good a position as anyone – better in some cases because she knew almost all of what went on at the Factory – to be the traitor. He said: ‘It’ll only be for a few days. I thought Paris.’
‘I’d like that very much,’ said Ann.
Oleg lengthened their daily meetings and included the weekends as well. Davies was curious at the increased concentration but held back from asking the reason because it might have made him seem more nervous than he already was. The Russian kept to the same pattern of debriefing, with long pauses after Davies’ replies. By the end of the first week Davies realized Oleg was phrasing in a different way questions he’d already asked, and decided the Russian was checking his answers the second time around for disparities with earlier replies. They went again over his family history and his schooling and of his recruitment into intelligence from university. The most detailed questioning was about his early career in the department, with a particular emphasis upon names and management structure at the Factory, and here Davies remained extremely careful. The demands had been obvious to anticipate and Davies had rehearsed how much to disclose, just one or two names beyond those whom he guessed the Russians already knew. He was particularly anxious not to reveal any more names than he had to, nor to forget any he’d already listed.
‘We announced your defection, two days ago. Identified you as a senior Br
itish intelligence agent,’ announced Oleg at the beginning of one session.
‘What was the reaction?’
‘London confirmed your defection, although not the intelligence position,’ said the Russian. ‘There’s been uproar in the media. Questions asked in Parliament.’
It was something else Davies had anticipated and particularly regretted, very deeply. His family would be hounded by newspapers: his father, who had risen to the rank of High Commissioner in Hong Kong, would rightly, on the evidence that would be published, regard it as a huge disgrace to the family name. Davies wondered if he would ever be able fully to explain. He said: ‘It was inevitable there’d be an outcry.’
‘How would you feel about appearing before a press conference here in Moscow?’
Another experiment to test his genuine commitment, Davies recognized at once. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll do whatever you consider necessary.’ It would be televised, he guessed. It would be agony for his parents to sit in England and watch and listen to him admitting to being a spying traitor upon his own country.
‘No definite decision has been made,’ said Oleg. ‘I just wanted to see if it would cause you a problem.’
‘Why should it?’ demanded Davies.
‘Some defectors don’t like appearing in public: being identified.’
‘I don’t consider I have anything to be ashamed of.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ said Oleg.
Glad enough to accept the defection as genuine, wondered Davies: the debriefing seemed to be going on interminably.
That weekend Oleg produced unlabelled photographs for him to identify and Davies was staggered by the apparent depth of the Soviet knowledge of the British intelligence establishment. There were prints of Samuel Bell and Jeremy Thurlow and five more people in the Factory, as well as pictures of every person attached to the intelligence section of the British embassy in Moscow. There were also about twenty photographs he didn’t recognize at all.
The Factory Page 7