The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller

by Mike Lunnon-Wood

  THE PROTECTOR

  Mike Lunnon-Wood

  Silvertail Books ♦ London

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  PROLOGUE

  1984

  The charred remains of the house’s wooden frame stood, stark and smoking, as the young fireman played his hose back and forth in the first rays of the morning. In the dawn shadows, a gaggle of boys in dressing gowns watched quietly, and beyond them the group of teachers and staff who had come running when the watchman raised the alarm.

  The ambulance had already been gone for more than an hour, but the shocked silence hung in the early light. For most of the watchers it had been their first view of death: the pathetic charred bundle that was eased with gloved hands into the green zip-up bag. The watchman had seen the fire from the other end of the school – the flames licking out from the spare room’s window and catching the lower branches of the fir tree that had stood and shaded the house for forty years. From there, the fire had raced up through the branches, crackling and roaring. Those staff and prefects not keeping the boys in their dormitories, away from the danger, ran to help, but were forced to stand impotently back by the heat and smoke.

  Later that morning, as the boys walked towards the dining hall for breakfast, they could see the grey police car still down at Mr Morton’s house, and for those who had been huddled at their dormitory windows, the topic was rich and exciting. One boy suggested that they would have to identify the body by dental records. Another guffawed at his friend’s stupidity, saying that they already knew who it was: Mr Morton. the Languages Master from the senior school. They walked quietly for a moment, each remembering the shambling old man, seemingly as old as the hills, who walked the cloistered main quadrangle in an old tweed jacket, discussing history with his twelfth year students. For those seniors he had taught there were no jokes or macabre speculative statements. They had recognised something rare in the man and, for most of them, his classes were an intellectual journey.

  He had arrived in the area the previous year and agreed, after some consideration, to take the senior German students as a replacement for the sick department head. He had then begun teaching a pilot course in Russian and finally stood in teaching his first love, history. For the those lucky enough to sit before him, he managed to give the normally dry topic a fresh modern perspective. Sometimes, as a direct answer to a question, he would talk briefly of his years at Corpus Christi Cambridge. For him, the schoolboys were a refreshing change of pace, eminently suitable for a retired academic. They had none of the idle, slightly indolent ease of the Cambridge students and absorbed knowledge like computers with a discipline that delighted him. They called him Teddy, a name they thought original – but, in fact, he had been called that in 1943 when he had first gone up as a very junior Don.

  What the students, staff and the policeman at the grey car didn’t know was that, in 1944, he was also called that by three men who were ostensibly employed by the Army, but seemed to spend a lot of time in Whitehall sorting out the bickering between two divisions of Military Intelligence. Teddy Morton had an eye for bright young people and, over the next thirty years, recruited many for MI6. In time, he was added to the full payroll and used when events demanded a fresh mind on an old problem, a mind unsullied by politics, departmental strife or personal vested interests.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In spite of the new wallpaper and pictures, the room still had a neglected air, its high ceiling showing the damp, and the threadbare carpet, the paths of feet long ago. The original furniture had been replaced by modern Swedish pine that someone had put together from a kit – as alien in the old house as the man who sat in one of the chairs. A nail protruded from a spot where a stag’s head once hung and there were stories about the young men who would throw their hats from the hall as they slid down the wide oak banisters, trying to land their hats between the antlers squarely atop the deer’s head. That was long ago. Nowadays, the huge old house just had two full time occupants, both staff. The official comings and goings were rarer now and the stand-up gas heater, with its orange and red plastic coal, sitting sadly in the hearth symbolised the economies of the times.

  Yuri Simonov calmly puffed on his cigarette and occasionally fingered the razor nick on his chin with studied indifference. He liked the English cigarettes supplied to him and, as he smoked, he watched as Mrs Hogan changed the tapes on the recorder. He was a medium grade defector who had been in the United Kingdom for seven weeks now, all of it except the first two days here at the house in Sussex. All KGB were given the medium grade and, when an individual crossed over, they were debriefed where possible by the same team of people. Mary Hogan was a doctor who routinely worked for MI6 but sometimes found her skills hired out to Special Branch and MI5. Yuri Simonov was, however, a 6 catch – and, with the computer that selected code names currently on confectionery, he had been labelled “FRUIT GUM” and driven down to the wringer in Midhurst.

  The house was a two-storey Georgian Mansion set discreetly off the road. In its time, it had seen many people with thick European accents repeat their stories over and over to endlessly patient listeners.

  Simonov scratched at the nick again, his lank grey hair resting on the worn collar of his shirt. His watery brown eyes peered from a roundish florid face. He was, Mrs Hogan thought, two stone overweight.

  “When can I go shopping?” he asked abruptly. “I want to go to Spencers and Marks.”

  “Other way round, Yuri,” Mrs Hogan replied patiently.

  “What?

  “Other way round,” she repeated, still facing the tape machine. “It’s Marks and Spencer, and you can’t go there until we’re finished and Mr Bellamy says you can.”

  David Bellamy was in charge of the de-brief team and, at that moment, was in the town shopping to alleviate the monotony of the diet. The cook had spent twenty years cooking in a boarding school and Bellamy said everything tasted steamed.

  “He doesn’t like me,” Simonov muttered.

  “Of course he likes you,” she said placatingly, then turned back to the table. “Now then, where were we, mmm?”

  She knew very well where they were but adopted the almost maternal manner because that seemed to work the best with this particular individual.

  “Ah yes, we were going over the early 80s again…”

  “We have gone over this all before!” he exclaimed, waving the cigarette theatrically.

  “Let’s do it again, shall we? Just make sure we haven’t forgotten anything?” She paused and smiled at him before continuing, “1982 Yuri, February. You moved across to the Fourth Directorate for six weeks...”

  And so, Yuri Simonov began to talk.

  Occasionally, Mrs Hogan interrupted him with open questions, leading him astray with red herrings to see if he would return to track again, constantly checking his story. Her tactics moved with the mood – sometimes cajoling, other times sympathetic, sometimes bullying and, at other moments, playing on the vanity that most defectors displayed. They had been aware for some time that a structural change within the KGB had begun moving specialists between directorates. Yuri Simonov was an analyst, a political scientist who specialised in extremism and terrorist groups. As such, he had nothing that MI6 wanted, but he had moved about the separate directorates enough that he could fill many holes in the files. He could put names to pictures, cover policy issues and possibly even isolate the latest concerns of the Komitet Gestabetvich Bedresknay.

  So far, the seven weeks of his interrogation had been a waste of time.
He had offered nothing substantial – barely, Bellamy considered, covering his room and board.

  It was after lunch that day, pate and cheeses and a strictly rationed can of John Smiths Yorkshire Bitter, that things began to change.

  “Then I moved back to First at the Sverdlov office.” He belched softly, smiling with embarrassment. “Back on routine material. PLO, Hezbollah. They never let me develop anything fully – always change to this, change to that, Mujahedin one week, Serbs the next, never anything interesting like the Knives group. One of your people was on that in ‘82 as well. Mismanaged, I was. Totally mismanaged!”

  He seemed to be enjoying the word.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Mrs Hogan said, leaning forward imperceptibly in her seat. “What was that about one of our people? Knives, was it?”

  “Yes, interesting group! Long Knives.”

  “Long Knives… as in Reichstag?”

  “Yes,” he said quickly.

  “What about them?” she replied, goading him. “It’s ancient history.”

  “History repeats itself,” he replied smugly, reaching for the cigarettes. “Your Churchill said that.”

  “What about them then? Who are they and what are they?”

  “Ask your man who was on it,” he replied.

  Gotcha-you-little-shit, she thought, trying not to seem too interested.

  “Who was that?” she asked in the same tone of voice, praying that the tape machine was working properly.

  “Don’t you know?” he snapped back. He was suddenly fidgeting now, in obvious discomfort.

  “No and neither do you,” she fired back.

  “Yes I do!”

  “How could you know that?”

  “I do!”

  “BULLSHIT!” she snarled. “How would you know? What are you? The big shot spy master?”

  He leant forward angrily, the challenge thrown down. “I do… I do, I do!” Childishly now. “There’s someone in your...” He stopped suddenly, sitting back and going visibly pale before her eyes. “My God they will kill us. I am a dead man.”

  Oh goody, she thought, the gossip has gone down and dirty. This is what I’m paid for, this is what I’m good at.

  She pressed the button on the chair leg beside her left knee. Seven weeks.

  “Yuri, who told you we had someone on this Reichstag group?”

  “Not Reichstag,” he replied almost automatically. “Long Knives.”

  “Who told you? Come on Yuri, we can go shopping later if you like…”

  Next door, David Bellamy leapt for the spare headphones, his eyes glancing at the secondary logging recorder as its spools turned slowly, recording the conversation next door.

  That evening, as Yuri sat morosely sipping his second can of John Smiths, his evening meal uneaten on the table, a courier drove the day’s tapes up to London where David Bellamy – in his capacity as head of the wringer team – had telephoned the Milburn office of no less a personage than the Deputy Director General of MI6, Sir Martin Callows.

  Callows was not only DDG. He was the last in a long string of knee jerk reactions that began in Downing Street and, steam-rollering over the Minister, ended up at the feet of the Director General of the service Sir Gordon Tansey-Williams. Milburn – or more correctly, Department E – had long been a thorn in the side of Whitehall.

  Moved into a building of that name in the late’60s, the move was that of a street fighter slipping a white glove over the fist that wore the brass knuckles hoping the latest bruised victim would forget it was there. Theirs was the nasty end of the business, to be kept firmly away from the Embassy parties and military attachés, away from the legitimate Foreign Office types.

  They handled the dirty work, the jobs no-one else would do, either because they were inherently dangerous, or likely to fail, or both. They provided couriers and bag-men, protection for their parent MI6 people, resourceful people to fulfil tasks given up as lost – and, when things got really bad, they provided what was called the ‘forward pack’, a team that consisted of a controller, an operator – and a group of the little-known ‘Acton Fairies’.

  They had none of the prolonged satisfaction of the Department D people who ran their networks of agents, or ‘friends’. They just came in when the wheels had come off an operation and someone was in real trouble, or when Whitehall wanted people on who, they could turn their.

  The Acton Fairies were the striking arm of the service. When MI6 began recruiting operatives in earnest in 1939 they gave the training of unarmed combat, marksmanship and the black arts in general to the most feared man the Royal Marines had ever produced. Sergeant Norman Tidwell was famous for his slanderous accusations of the sexual preferences of his pupils and in time, rightly or wrongly, the name became part of the service law. The Acton Fairies were still trained in Acton but, since then, the black arts had become blacker, the exponents less careful about covering their tracks – and, in 1981, three of them had badly botched the kidnapping of an Argentinean within yards of Gatwick Airport. Two bystanders had died and, because both were third world immigrants only minutes into the land of milk and honey. the Left’s reaction was swift and virulent.

  It was this indiscretion that had directly led to Callows’ appointment Sir Martin’s job was to control Milburn. Those that knew about these things didn’t argue that the department had its place in the scheme of things but a low profile was of the utmost importance, or those who didn’t know would be demanding its demise.

  Milburn was run by career Six men who were seconded to the department for anything up to three years. There was one man who had been there five and it was generally acknowledged that he wouldn’t be going back into the MI6 mainstream. He had made a mistake – and mistakes, where lives were concerned, are not forgotten. It was he who took the tapes and transcripts from the driver of the battered Citroen and carried them up the steep dark stairs past the silent ex-Fairy porters to Sir Martin’s office.

  Sir Martin himself was a large crag-faced man with a thick mane of grey hair, hooded eyes and a voice like gravel. He had rarely raised it, speaking only in moderate tones punctuated by harsh barks of dry laughter. He was tipped to be the next Director General and was, everyone agreed, a real bastard. Since his arrival at Milburn he had taken the department in his huge fist and shaken it until it began making the right kinds of noises.

  There would be no more bungled jobs and embarrassed Governments.

  Callow took the large brown envelope from the man and, without raising his head, said, “Get Burmeister up here,” into his intercom.

  Finally, he pulled the papers clear and began reading, his leonine eyes creasing as they scanned the transcript.

  Thirty seconds later, John Burmeister knocked and entered through a second door. He was one of the career men on attachment from D, the intelligence gathering section, and looked the part in a Saville Row suit of dark blue wool. He was wearing a Royal Artillery tie he wasn’t entitled to, but he was one of those men who didn’t give a damn. Dropping into one of the easy chairs that Sir Martin was indicating, he crossed one leg over the other, looking like a city banker with his iron grey hair and his air of confident wealth.

  Sir Martin gave a porcine grunt and thrust the transcript across.

  “Read this. Yuri Simonov’s temper tantrum is laced with something that smells.”

  Burmeister took the typed pages and began to slowly read, knowing better than to hurry and miss anything.

  Fifteen minutes later, he spoke.

  “My God, she’s saying…”

  “She’s telling us we have a mole,” Sir Martin finished.

  “Christ, where are we looking?”

  “In Six certainly,” Sir Martin replied. “Here at Milburn possibly. Who knows.” Then he leaned inward and uttered two words with unutterable force. “Find him!”

  “Sir Martin,” Burmeister appealed, “I’m not George Smiley...”

  “By the time this is over, you will wish you were. Get on with it. I will
get you a sniffer dog across from C, but I’m not having Five or Special Branch nosing round my bailiwick. Not yet… I don’t want him flushed until we’re ready. Understood?”

  “Yes, Sir Martin.” Burmeister stood. “I’ll want to go down and talk to Simonov myself, of course.”

  “No, leave it to the shrink. That woman has found his key. She’s bloody good, John. She judges at Crufts, you know. Dogs and defectors! Ha!” He barked his laugh and then his eyelids dropped menacingly. “Find him for me, John. Use the sniffer, give him access to everything, create a reason for it that will cover his work, and give him whatever support he needs. I will hang this bastard at the gallows!”

  Burmeister knew he would do just that.

  Forty minutes later, Sir Martin joined Sir Gordon Tansey-Williams at his club, the latter already clutching his habitual drink, a fiery Cape Brandy, in his fist.

  “Thought I would find you here,” Callows began.

  “Well Martin, what have your yobbos been up to?” Tansey-Williams replied jovially. He had had a good day.

  “I wish it were that simple,” Callows muttered, beckoning a waiter. “Let’s take a walk.” He nodded towards the billiard room, usually deserted at this time of the day, and together they headed in that direction. “We have a little problem…”

  “What sort of problem?”

  “Moscow Centre. They have someone inside Six.”

  That was all it took. Thirty seconds later – Callows’ drink untouched – they were on their way back to Tansey-Williams’ offices, the Director General’s day now ruined, and within twenty minutes they were back within Century House, the electronically swept sterile environment of the Secret Intelligence Service

  Soon, Callows’ brief was over and Tansey-Williams leant back in his leather chair.

  “Firstly, how much credence do you place on this Simonov?”

  “I am inclined to believe it. It slipped out. It wasn’t meant to.”