Kirov looked at him. The man oozed confidence.
“The Nikolai Borshin?” he asked with a raised eyebrow, holding the towel in case it dropped.
“Your boss, if that’s what you mean.”
Kirov gave a sad sort of a smile.
“I knew I was in the shit, but I wasn’t expecting this.”
“You could show more respect, Major Kirov. It might help your case.”
“Comrade General. With respect –” He came to attention; then, feeling slightly foolish in a towel, continued, “– I’m sick of kissing arses. If you want to throw me out then throw me out. I joined up to do a job. I worked hard and I produced results but I have sucked on the crap long enough. I have been returned home in disgrace to appear before a disciplinary hearing for a act that I wilfully committed, and I would commit again. I knocked that bastard’s teeth out – and if anybody here gave a damn about the reasons then I wouldn’t be here. So, with respect Comrade General, I have a right to be pissed off!”
“Why did you do it?”
“Is this my hearing?” Kirov asked. “Because if it is…”
“Answer me!”
“The Head of Rezidentura in Mexico leant on the cleaning women. Jobs are hard to come by. One was a good looker. That was bad enough – but, when I found him forcing himself on her thirteen year old daughter, that was enough. Rape is rape. He laughed and said they couldn’t touch him. But I could. Now he’s talking through a wired jaw. I’m not sorry I did it. I would do it again.”
“Is that the truth?” Borshin asked.
“It is. But since when has that mattered? He is a party member.”
“It matters to me,” Borshin said, his voice soft with menace.
Kirov looked him direct in the eye. “I heard that about you.”
Borshin smiled and, to Kirov’s astonishment, moved across to the picture on the wall, lifting it carefully away exposed a small microphone. He had half expected it, but not that the General commanding the Fourth Directorate should warn him of it.
“Get dressed,” he said, “and come with me.”
Kirov was moved to a brand new apartment just of the Oktober Prospekt. The building was small and its other tenants were very senior public officials, most of whom he was told he would never see. When he climbed into bed that night, he wondered – having come home for a reprimand and now in splendour – just what he was getting into.
Two days later, Nikolai Borshin came by the apartment. He was accompanied by Svetlana who had an armful of files. Kirov was pleased to see him. The waiting had been difficult and the walls of the apartment seemed to be closing in on him.
“Your story checks out. Your... friend has been recalled and has seen his last overseas posting. He will be spend the rest of his career screening visas in some airport.”
Kirov was relieved and it showed in his face as he came to attention. “Good. Thank you, Comrade General. What now? Do I get another posting?”
“That depends,” Borshin replied. The two days had been used in a flurry of vetting, all of Kirov’s known acquaintances and personal history checked and rechecked while they looked for any possible prior association with the task he was to be offered.
“On what, General Borshin?”
“On you. I have a job that needs a man. Reports to me direct. Very little if any Embassy or local network support at first. I requires two things. Loyalty to me and loyalty to the Rodina.”
“If I say no?”
“A posting will be made available from the waiting list.”
Kirov knew he could wait months for a new job abroad, and even then it could be to a hellhole like Guatemala City or Lusaka.
“What’s the job?” he asked with a sigh and Borshin smiled widely.
CHAPTER THREE
Milburn
Henry Arnold had now spent almost three months sniffing for Yuri Simonov’s mole. The job was made doubly difficult because no-one knew what real information had been passed over. The only lead was the cryptic reference to Long Knives, and that had turned up cold. Each time he tried to move his thinking onto a new tangent, his instincts pulled him back to the corrupted data bank – but every request for information from the data processing people simply left him more confused. Finally, one of them admitted that a bug was a bug and, sometimes, one just had to learn from the experience, what with the interface and the access and format omega in this configuration. He had had enough. He raised an eyebrow and left the room, resolved to find someone that could speak English about computers. All his requests for the man who had designed the system were meeting the usual problems. The team involved were now scattered over various defence projects, high priority you understand. Eventually he made the request of Sir Martin Callows himself who hurumphed, barked a laugh and picked up the phone, promising to help.
Arnold returned to his labours in the vast registry at Century and, three days later, a gangly individual in corduroy trousers and a T-shirt arrived at the registry asking for him.
“I’m Jeff,” he said. “You have a hassle with the system?”
Arnold pushed his glasses up his nose. He had seen people like this before. His daughter nearly married one.
“Sort of. You designed it?”
“Yeah. One of a happy bunch. What’s the problem? I’m due back at Holy Loch tonight.”
“You will be going back when we are finished,” Arnold said firmly, “not before.”
“Whoa, relax granddad! For you, the defence of the Realm and the free world can wait.”
Arnold stood. He had had enough of this. “Listen, young man. I was defending the realm before you were born. That is precisely what we are doing here, so curb your tongue! Now then, I have spent months listening to a bunch of computer freaks make excuses for their own incompetence. I have a simple question and I keep getting technical replies that are not answers but gibberish. Listen carefully.”
He outlined the problem clearly and succinctly and, to his credit, the engineer listened silently before saying, “Let’s have a look then,” rather like a doctor.
Three minutes later, he leant back in the chair.
“Are you security” he asked Arnold.
“Yes, in a manner of speaking.”
“Good. Then we don’t have to call them.”
“What are you saying” Arnold asked.
“We have been got at... no doubt about it.”
“I thought you might say that.”
“OK. Let’s get your problem sorted out, then we can look at the system security.”
Arnold was surprised at the casual tone. “I thought these things were supposedly impregnable?”
“Not to a whizz kid. I was at university with a dozen people who could hack into this system in a couple of days, but that isn’t the problem here. Someone has gotten to it all right, but from the inside. Someone who is cleared for entry has purged your file. To do that, they had to present a series of passwords in sequence. It’s not the system at fault so much as the operator. You have a bogey in here somewhere.”
“Can you determine if any other files have been purged in the same manner?”
“No I can’t, but one of the software writers on the team might. We all have our areas of expertise. Let me make a couple of calls and I’ll see who’s available...” He raised a hand. “Don’t tell me! The defence of the realm! You will make them available.”
“Correct,” Arnold replied dryly.
“Right, well, the girl you want is Wendy Khan. She’s down at Cheltenham at the moment. She is only a kid, but the brightest in the business. Don’t shout at her or she’ll go to IBM or someone for a million a year. OK?”
“Give her a call,” Arnold said, “and I will be all sweetness and light.”
She arrived the next evening, an exotic mix of coffee coloured skin, bright blue eyes, sari and a Chester accent.
Arnold took her in one long, admiring glance.
“My mother was Scottish and my father Kashmiri,” she explaine
d with an open smile.
“Ah yes, I see.”
“Jeff said you were a crusty old bugger,” she offered frankly, “and I wasn’t to take any nonsense from you.”
“I see…” he repeated, uncomfortably.
“But I can see you’re really a sweetie. So what’s the problem with the system?”
He began to explain and she listened.
“I think best over a glass of wine. Let me do that and, tomorrow, we shall try and rescue your input…”
It was nearly six and he nodded his agreement. Outside, the evening was damp with drizzle – and, as he walked along towards Euston Station through the sodden bustle of commuters, he tried to place his task in perspective. His son was in advertising and he had watched, fascinated, one night as he had gone through what he had called the proposition. It simply meant writing down exactly what you understood the offer to mean, then removing any nuances that were superfluous to get an exact definition. From there you could shape what you wanted to say, and to whom, without confusing the issue. It seemed a simple enough task, but watching he had learnt a new respect for the discipline. It drew clear thinking out and cast aside anything fuzzy or ill-defined.
He found himself a quiet spot in a pub and sat down to think through his proposition, nursing a small scotch and nibbling at some crisps left by the last people at the table.
We think we have a mole. Why do we think that? We think that because a KGB chappie let it slip. Was he qualified to speak on the issue? After all he was only a low level staffer… Low level yes, but he was a homosexual being rogered by someone who was closer to the action. So far so good. Even considering the post Philby-Blunt paranoia, only mild cause for concern, more a call for verification of the story. But when we start looking something is triggered, something larger, because our chap ends up dead along with four other people. Alarm bells ringing at the station house, bloody big bells because not even the KGB will sanction a kill like that. We don’t kill innocents if we can possibly help it, and we don’t kill operatives unless absolutely necessary, and the Kilos are the same. Yet we have four dead. Then I start to look for the mole, the reason for it all – and I find the computer data tampered with, and the only reference point gone. Synopsis is a low level Kilo blurts something that gets himself and four others chopped. The two are not synonymous.
He sat back and sipped the scotch. He rationed himself these days since his wife was dead. There were two reasons he rationalised. One was he became very maudlin when he was drunk – and the other was that his daughter gave him hell for it. She still lived at home, a solidly competent theatre sister at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, an avid theatregoer and currently seeing a bearded lecturer at the Polytechnic. They would be married soon and he was steeling himself for her departure from the house. He would miss her terribly, that he knew, so in deference to that he never drank more than one scotch, not these days. There had been a time when he could nudge a whole bottle, but he was younger then.
Suddenly he smiled to himself. Synonymous? No wonder they’re not synonymous. He congratulated himself with the last mouthful and still smiling made his way to the station.
He sat and looked at her as she spoke, almost mesmerised by her azure blue eyes.
“This system is capable of much more than the operators ever demand of it. Now then, we can’t re-capture what has been purged, but we can recall some segments that were cross referenced.”
“What will that give us?” Arnold asked.
“Depends on what you’re looking for. Probably some dates, maybe a name or two... But there is one facility we can use. When we designed the software, we had a check package. That was so we could actually follow up early entries and ensure they were loaded and accessible from each of the working programmes.”
He smiled and she stopped.
“What?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking how nice it is to find someone who speaks English about computers.”
Wendy gave him a look. “We aim to please..” Then she went on, “So, using the check package, we can access the operator security programme.”
“Which will what?”
“Well, it will give you the access code of everyone who has been in for any file. In this case, it will tell you who the last persons were into your dumped area.”
“Won’t that have been dumped as well?”
“Absolutely not. I designed this. This was one of the extras I built in, a three stage security package. Every designer does it, little enhancements that you don’t offer to the user because they would just confuse the working issues. Now, with this, the person who got at the file would have known about stages one and two. Stage three was an extra that none of the operators ever knew about. It’s a pig to get at, however. I’ll need about an hour...”
“And you can give me the name of the persons last into that file?”
“Yes…”
His eyes narrowed. The smell of the quarry was closer now.
“Do it,” he said, “I’ll be next door.”
Feeling good, he got up walked purposely though to the main registry, his thoughts of the night before clear in his mind.
Later that afternoon, armed with possible names, Henry Arnold advised John Burmeister that he was ready to involve the Security Service (MI5) Counter Intelligence – and, at 9am the following morning, a team of three MI5 investigators squeezed themselves into Arnold’s cubby-hole office at Milburn. The phone lines ran hot between the services, the Foreign Office and Special Branch – who wanted to add a member to the team to ensure procedures were followed and the evidence for the courts was both conclusive and irrefutable. Technically it was now MI5’s case, but Callows applied pressure to allow Arnold to stay in to the kill, both for the inter-service kudos and to be sure that the job was done properly.
The prime suspect was a thirty-two year old woman who had been employed in Century main registry for six years. Her name was Meredith Jane Mortimer and she was still resident, Special Branch had established, in Datchet near Windsor. Suspect number two was the Head of Registry, but virtually discounted because his access code was used in programme checks. A team of MI5 watchers was put on Meredith Mortimer while Arnold and the investigators went to work to establish a case.
“Look, all I’m saying is this. We should have been in on this from the bloody start.” The speaker was a big florid man, his red nose bulbous and moving imperceptibly as he spoke.
Arnold looked at him like he looked at dog mess on his shoes. “Just count yourself lucky you’re in at all,” he replied, a six man to the end.
“Look, we have systems. We need a case that will stand up in court with some lefty lawyer trying to rip it apart…”
One of the younger five chaps stood up, offering his hands in a conciliatory manner.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, we have a spy to catch. Can I suggest we leave the bickering to our Lords and masters, and get on with the job?”
The watchers numbered thirty-six in total, six teams of six members each. The first team were, or at least appeared to be, a mother with baby, granny doing the shopping, telephone repair man, punk rocker, tow truck driver – and the leader a completely non-descript looking West Indian woman out with her man. They would follow and watch every move made by the suspect until further notice, recording all the details, photographing every meeting and painstakingly identifying every person the suspect met, spoke to or even brushed past. Every waking minute she would be shadowed.
Bit by bit, the routine fell into place. On workday mornings she walked to the Station, usually buying a paper at the tobacconist on the way and catching the 7:52 into Waterloo Station. From there she took the underground and walked the rest of the way to Century House, arriving normally at about 8:50. She lunched in the building in the canteen and headed home, trying for the 18:02 – and, once in Datchet, walked straight home. Her mother usually had dinner on, the watchers being able to identify the food on the plates, and the pair watched televisio
n till about ten.
The fifth evening, the suspect went straight to a play, throwing the watchers into momentary dismay when she by-passed the Station heading for the West End, and an extra team was brought in in case her rendezvous was in the theatre.
Saturday morning was her shopping day, and two of the team followed her around Sainsbury’s, watching her load frozen kippers and tinned new potatoes into her trolley.
It was the second Saturday that she seemed to break her habitual routine. Today she left the house wearing makeup and took a taxi into Windsor. The watchers followed her into a wine bar, where she greeted and sat down with a man.
Out on the street, a woman walking her dog bent her head forward, listening carefully to the fast chat in her secreted ear-piece receiver, crossed to a parked van and quickly climbed into the back. “Camera quick,” she said, passing the small confused dog to the man bent over the radio set.
He scooped up a maroon coloured handbag.
“In the bas. They have fixed it with the lens out of the crack in the end now. Viewfinder’s up and the power winder is a noisy bastard – so be careful.”
“Shit! I thought that was fixed!” she snapped. It had been a long day.
Three minutes later she wandered into the wine bar, placing the bag on the bar under her arm. Waiting for the noise from the kitchen to roll out with the opening of the swing doors, she began photographing the couple at the table. Inside ten minutes she had thirty-six shots exposed, paid for her drink, looked angrily at her watch like a stranded date and stalked out onto the street.
No-one on the team could identify the man she was with, so the film was rushed into MI5’s lab for immediate developing, and a couple of counter intelligence people brought in to study the pictures and try and identify the stranger.
Meanwhile, the watchers stayed on the couple.
“So who the bloody hell is he?” Callows barked.
“Five are running ID checks now, Sir Martin,” Adrian Black answered.
“Bloody Five. They want everything done to death. Run the bugger in to Scotland Yard,” he mumbled angrily.
The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller Page 5