The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller

by Mike Lunnon-Wood

  Across the old chipped table, Meredith sat in a tearful silence, broken only by the odd pathetic sob or sniff.

  “Was he paying you? Was it for money? Thirty pieces of silver perhaps? Or do we have a dyed in the wool communist here?”

  Meredith looked up hurt. “No,” she said righteously.

  “Or perhaps you just believe in freedom of access then?” she asked sarcastically.

  “No! Why are you being so awful?”

  “Because you betrayed your country! My country! You handed over classified information to an agent of a foreign power, to the bloody USSR! What did you bloody expect, you fool?”

  Meredith began crying again.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, stop crying! Why? Why did you do it? What on earth possessed you? You aren’t a communist. You say he didn’t pay you.”

  “You don’t understand. I knew you wouldn’t. None of you would. I love him. That’s why! I love him, and you have sent him away, so damn the lot of you...”

  “You have done that quite well already without us. Come on, Meredith. You’re no fool. You must have suspected something when you met him.” Mrs Hogan’s tone had become almost big sisterly. “Men that handsome don’t chase girls like you and I. A sexy foreign accent like that? You’ve done the security courses. It must have been like a flashing light...”

  The fight was gone now and she replied almost mechanically. “I meant to tell Mr Black. That’s SOP, but I thought I would just wait and see what happened, then we started... you know. I’d never done it before. He was the first, and then I just knew I couldn’t not see him again. It was only every six weeks or so.”

  “A fling is one thing. Treason is another,” Mrs Hogan said dryly.

  Meredith looked up with an expression that said ‘were you born yesterday?’

  “Without one there would not be the other,” she replied in a voice that was laced with bitterness.

  “When did you start seeing him?”

  “March 16th. It was a Sunday. I was in the park at Great Windsor. He asked me for directions.” She smiled wistfully and blew her nose.

  “What year?”

  “Two years ago. 1987.”

  Three days later, Henry Arnold received a call from the Special Branch officer at Aldershot with Mrs Hogan. The Chief Inspector had agreed that he could have half an hour that evening. After that, the plaintiff would be transferred to a woman’s remand prison and be unavailable until her trial.

  “That’s me away then,” he said cheerfully to Callows’ secretary. They had developed a cheerful banter in the office with Arnold’s comings and goings.

  “Where? Home to the moggy and the paper?”

  “Aldershot Redcaps.” He winked at her. “To have a chat with Mata Hari Mortimer. All in life is never what it seems.”

  An hour and a half later, he showed his pass to the gate guards, entered the establishment and was shown into the high security remand area.

  The woman’s lawyer was present, sitting self-importantly at a table in the interview room, Mortimer in a shapeless pink cardigan beside him.

  “I have only agreed to this because I have been assured it will bear well on my client’s case,” he said in a strained Birmingham accent.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Arnold replied pleasantly, “but I don’t need long. “

  “You may commence your half hour now,” he replied, tight lipped.

  Arnold, his patience pushed, answered abruptly, “Don’t push it sonny. She is up for high treason, not some traffic offence. I am the man who caught her and I will take all the time I like! Now, why don’t you take a walk? You can listen on the intercom next door.”

  “Rest assured, I will,” he said, standing.

  After he had left, Arnold shook his head in wonder looking at Meredith Mortimer. “There are better lawyers than that around, you know.”

  “He’s from legal aid,” she answered. “Anyway, he’s been very nice to me.”

  He shrugged and sat down, his coat over his lap, and crossed one long bony leg over the other. “I just have the one question, Miss Mortimer.”

  She nodded at him to continue.

  “Why did you purge things from the system?”

  “Purge?” she asked

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t,” she said flatly.

  “You sure?” Arnold pursued.

  “Yes,” she replied, “I’m not that stupid.”

  “You didn’t purge the Long Knives file from the system?”

  “No!”

  “You didn’t. You are sure of that?”

  “I made a few mistakes – but, as I said, I didn’t purge anything…”

  Arnold’s eyelids lowered and he gave a tight lipped smile, as if it were exactly the answer he was expecting. They talked for a few minutes about the file and then Arnold left.

  The following evening, as he walked the last few yards down Blackheath Road toward his home, a light blue Cortina with two men inside climbed the pavement at speed and knocked him down. It then shrieked to a halt and, wheels smoking, reversed back over his broken body. Three witnesses saw the incident, one walking his dog, another a woman from her front room window. The third was the same man who had been sitting on the riverbank when Arnold and the Special Branch officers had arrested Meredith Mortimer. He remained in the shadows up the street, not talking to the police and careful not to be seen. Twenty minutes later, blue police lights illuminated the area as officers put up bright yellow tapes and a mobile incident control room arrived. Someone had already found his wallet, and inside the M.o.D. pass with its characteristic but tiny red dot in the upper left corner, which identified him as someone cleared for high security. As a result of this, Special Branch were informed. Half an hour later, Sir Martin Callows was phoned at home to be told of Henry Arnold’s murder.

  At precisely that moment, Meredith Mortimer was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant inside the remand centre. The accuracy of the angle of entry led a Scotland Yard pathologist, called from his dinner table for the post mortem, to remark that it was either a very lucky assailant or an expert. The blows had both penetrated the heart and death had been virtually instantaneous.

  Callows said nothing, listening with intent to the debrief from Adrian Black. It was midnight and John Burmeister, as usual immaculately turned out, sat in the second chair at Callows’ desk. They were awaiting the arrival of the Director General.

  Black finished reading from his notebook and closed it with a final tired flick of his wrist.

  “What the hell is going on?” Callows thought aloud. “First Simonov and the people in the house, then Arnold – and, at the same moment, the Mortimer woman…”

  “The Soviets,” Burmeister offered, “cleaning up the loose ends perhaps.”

  “Only in a paperback,” Black said, “but they are related. Simonov gave us the clue. Our sniffer and his target got killed because they were becoming dangerous. It’s not the Soviets. They were working on the same thing. That’s what Simonov said…”

  He paused to let it sink in while he thought about his next step. “So the next question is, what happened yesterday that meant Henry Arnold had to go, and go quickly? Once again no time for anything subtle. This was almost a warning killing. Noisy. Dramatic...”

  Callows caught his drift immediately. “You’re saying that Arnold’s investigation turned up something yesterday, and who ever killed him knew it.”

  “Yes,” Black said, “something like that.”

  “My God. That means they are all over us!”

  Callows leant forward and spoke into the intercom. His ever present secretary had arrived back in the office along with Black and he called her in.

  “Henry Arnold. Did he stop in to see me or anyone last night?” he asked as she entered his office, notebook and pencil in hand.

  “He tried, Sir Martin, but you had gone. So had Mr Burmeister and Mr Black.”

  “Dammit!” he muttered.

  “He tried me today
as well,” Black said, “but I was over at Century or something…”

  Callows looked back at his secretary. “How did he seem to you, worried, anxious?”

  “Definitely not. Almost pleased with himself. May I speak?” she asked respectfully.

  “Certainly!”

  “Well, I have been thinking. I saw him last night before he went down to Aldershot. He said something like ‘all is never what it seems’ with reference to Miss Mortimer. It seemed he had found something he wanted to pursue.”

  “He had said as much to me some weeks ago,” Callows said. “Said he wanted to stay on it.” He looked at Black. “Get onto the duty officer. I want his files. Everything, the FRUITGUM tapes, Arnold’s work and the interview notes from Aldershot. All these killings over some honey trap files girl? Doesn’t make sense!”

  The following morning, as Sir Martin stepped into his office, there to greet him was Adrian Black, for once the usual smile missing.

  “Well?” Callows asked.

  “We seem to have misplaced Arnold’s stuff,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Arnold’s notes and the FRUITGUM material. No longer in the files. The lot. Gone.” He paused while Callows dropped his case on his desk, his mind racing at what the statement meant.” I’ve been up all night on it. Arnold’s comment to your secretary: ‘all is not what it seems…’ Mortimer was just a bonus. There’s something else afoot here. Milburn security has been breached. Someone in this building, someone with access all down the line, has walked off with all Arnold’s work.”

  “Who else has been advised of this?” Callows asked.

  “No-one, Sir,” Black answered, “but I’ve called in two others. One was Mrs Hogan, and the other is Mortimer’s lawyer. He was in the next room when Arnold spoke to her. He remembers the question Arnold put. One question only. He asked her why she dumped the Long Knives File. She answered that she didn’t. She was emphatic about it. Mrs Hogan confirms the name as the same that triggered the initial search.”

  “So we’ve been so paranoid about a mole we missed the real issue,” Callows said.

  “That’s the way I read it, Sir.”

  “Right. Get Burmeister in and let’s see where we go from here.”

  It was in the next day’s interviews, when Adrian Black was talking to the Assistant Head of Registry, that the break came.

  Mrs Holloway was a career Six administrator who had been working in Main Registry at Century House for seventeen years and her lead came almost as an aside.

  “Of course, Henry was all through the old files by that time. He had two girls pulling hard copies for him.”

  “Did he find what he was looking for?” Black asked.

  “No, not directly. The file he was after was on the computer system, but we came across a reference. It’s almost impossible to completely erase the existence of material when you have multiple cross referencing taking place.”

  “Sorry. Explain?”

  “When a long search is on, and material is slowly coming together, we store it in hard copy form. Only once sections are complete do we load it onto the system and dump the hard copies. All those entries are entered and referenced.”

  “And he found something?”

  “No, I did – although at the time I wasn’t sure what it was. I told him some days later that I recognised the signature of the depositor. The individual compiling the file.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Teddy Morton.” She paused and smiled at the memory. “You won’t remember him. You were still with Five when he retired. He’s dead now I believe.”

  “Did the name mean anything to Henry Arnold?”

  “Oh yes. The pair were thick as thieves over the years. Teddy was about ten years older than Henry, an academic part-timer who came on the full time payroll in the mid-Sixties, while still retaining his chair at Cambridge. Henry was chuffed with the discovery. If Teddy Morton had been the man pulling the Long Knives thread then that was significant.”

  “In what way?” Black asked.

  “Teddy Morton was brilliant. In his day, he was the clearest thinker in this murky little pond of ours. If he had been on Long Knives for any time at all then there was skullduggery in the plot. He never wasted his time. Yes, Henry Arnold and Teddy were well respected. The other in that trio during the cold war years, was of course, Gabriella Kreski. “

  “Now that name rings a bell…”

  “Should do. She must be in her eighties now. She ran the Gdansk net. You’ll have covered her work at Lincoln when you trained. She was WILLOW.”

  Black nodded as he remembered the case studies. She had lectured once, a softly spoken woman with grey hair – and that had been fifteen years ago.

  “But Long Knives is long after she retired, surely?”

  “Yes, but she knew Teddy Morton better than anyone. He was her protégé after she came in. She channelled his thinking. Taught him to think like a spy. Him a Cambridge man, it should have come naturally.” That was a direct dig at his MI5 background and the Burgess Philby Maclean group of five, all recruited from Cambridge. He smiled and thanked her and, the next day, he drove down to Brighton to pay Gabriella Kreski a visit.

  “Put Mahler on, if you will,” she asked, settling slowly into a lumpy looking armchair with a sigh.

  He did so, carefully handling the old recording and watching Gabriella Kreski in the mirror as the old stiff arm jerked across the turntable and lower itself onto the record.

  Her face was deeply lined, pale and dry, but her brown eyes were bright and alert beneath a tight cap of almost white hair. According to records she was now eighty nine years old, but beneath the frail exterior she was as tough as old leather.

  “So you want to know about Teddy, yes?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I need to know how he was, how he thought…”

  “That’s no answer,” she said crisply.

  “You are still covered by the official secrets act?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Edward Morton was working on a file before he retired to Australia. That file has since been removed. Apparently, every trace if its existence has gone. I need to know what it was, what it involved. Then maybe I can determine why it has been removed and who did it.”

  “You are Counter Intelligence?” she asked.

  “Yes, and I need help now. Mrs Holloway in Registry said that you and Teddy and Henry Arnold were a formidable team in the’60s.”

  “Ah yes. That old busybody!” she exclaimed, remembering. “And Henry. What an old woman he is! How is he?”

  “He’s dead, Miss Kreski,” Black answered. “There are others dead too. That’s why I’m here.”

  She took it all in in a second, her expression never changing.

  “That is reason enough. Put the kettle on, young man, and I shall tell you the tale of my Teddy, my clever Teddy Morton.”

  She spoke for two hours, much of it history and much of it shambling anecdotes, but all of it building a picture for Black.

  “So you rated him well?”

  “Better!” she said sternly. “He was formidable!”

  “And the file? Where do I go from here?”

  “Now, you may be lucky and you may see the master’s work yet. He never did anything important without backups. My first lesson to him and one he never forgot. This file was never closed by the sound of it, so somewhere he would have a copy, somewhere he could get at it when he felt the urge to think. You know, he never lost a game of chess. Never one. I used to sit with him and we would play. He did crosswords incessantly. I never saw him admit defeat ever. No. If this file was open, then he hadn’t finished with it.”

  “But he was retired…”

  “Teddy? No! Just having a break. He could no more walk away from a thing like this than walk away from a chess game or a damaged icon. He painted like he thought, like he played chess. With clarity and precision and a perseverance that w
as frightening.”

  It was now dark outside and, looking around, he asked if there was anything he could do for her before he left.

  “There is one thing.”

  “Name it.”

  “I have a rather vulgar but very English passion that is hard for me – well, with my arthritis and the fish and chip shop all down those long stairs…”

  He smiled and, twenty minutes later, he was unwrapping her dinner over the sink.

  It was when he handed her the plate and the tomato sauce bottle that she looked up at him.

  “Is this the Square file you are concerned about?”

  “The what?” he asked quickly

  “Something Square?” She waved a fork, cursing her memory lapse.

  “No,” he answered disappointedly. “Long Knives.”

  “Probably the same thing,” she said with a flick of her ancient wrist.

  “You know of it?”

  She studied him for a moment, her fork poised over a piece of fish. “He was here before he went to Australia. We played chess. We talked. He thought he had the pieces of something. Something big. In America. In West Germany. And maybe, he thought, even here. It might be he was right. But it was all very vague.” She shrugged as best she could with old tired shoulders. “Be careful, young man. I am old it doesn’t matter for me anymore. But you be careful. This Square, if this is your Long Knives… be careful.”

  When he had gone, she sat and thought about it and wondered if she had helped or confused him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  With Gabriella Kreski’s warning fresh in his mind – and the deaths of seven people a horrific reality – Adrian Black decided to ignore normal investigation recording procedures and clamp the lid down tight. He would run a file, but he would hold it. There would be access for no other. He would report confidentially to Sir Martin Callows, and ask the D D-G to limit involvement to essential staff only. With luck, that would be John Burmeister, William Warren, the head of ‘A’, the Soviet desk at Century House and possibly the Director General.