The Protector: A gripping, action-packed spy thriller

by Mike Lunnon-Wood

  “I’m not going back until all this is over.”

  “It is over,” Quayle uttered.

  “Not for me. Not until the files are recovered. Either ours or Morton’s. It’s not over until we find out who’s killing our people. And it’s not over for you either. You wouldn’t walk away from this. It’s them and us, Quayle. MI6 and KGB, if you like.”

  “Six? No thanks, I’m retired.”

  “OK then. You and me.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Even if I go for it, I don’t need you.”

  “You were close to Morton. You knew the way he thought, the way he planned. If anyone can work out where he left his files. It’s you. Now, you may be good. But so am I, and I have the resources of Centre. That’s not a bad package.”

  For a time there was silence in the room.

  “Listen to me,” Kirov snapped. “The people who are after you are not the players any more. That order was rescinded last night. These people took out a safe house in Sussex and they took out an entire office in Moscow. There are about thirty people dead to date. They have resources and they have talent. They are dangerous. They are good. They are after you and the girl. You are the last links with the last hard evidence. Do you think they will stop? Eh? Because you want to be left alone? No,” he smiled warily, “you’re not giving in on this one, you just don’t want me getting in the way. Sorry, Tovarich. I’m on the job. Either with you or not, but I’m there. Now, you can muddy my water, or I can muddy yours. I say we’d be better together.”

  Quayle gave up on the soft retired stance. “You’re sure about that? The metro order has been rescinded?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks for small mercies. The bastards. I’m going to find the files. You just stay out of my way.”

  “And when you get them?”

  “I’ll decide what is to be done with them.”

  “We need access, Quayle. It’s a problem for your government and mine, maybe the Poles, the Americans… Everyone!”

  “I’ll decide,” Quayle repeated.

  “There’s a man in Moscow who knows more than me. If he can convince you, will you co-operate?”

  “Who is it?”

  “My boss. General in charge of the Fourth Directorate.”

  “Bullshit. You’re a major. You report through to a section Colonel”

  “Not any more. Head of Directorate. That’s how important this thing is. I have no controller. I’m free to do what I think best. Quayle, I think you should meet him.”

  “How much does he know?”

  “More than you and me,” he laughed, “but that’s not difficult.”

  Quayle turned to Gabriella. It was time, he decided, to accomplish the very thing he’d first come to Ireland to do. “Tell me about Teddy before he went to Australia. Did you see him at all?”

  “Yes. He came down to my flat twice the month before he left. We sat and talked about old times, but his mind was elsewhere.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We played chess and he lost twice in a row. Unthinkable that he should do that! In all the years we played, I only ever beat him four times – and each victory was rich and well-earned. He was a master, as you know. Well, that night, it felt hollow. Hollow because his mind was on something else and not on the game. I rebuked him. Him the original clear thinker! He was thinking clearly, I know now, but about something else entirely…” She waved her hand theatrically, seeming to enjoy the contribution she was able to make, but then her demeanour changed and a flash of something clouded her eyes. With his long experience of people under pressure, Quayle knew it to be not uncertainty, but fear. “He would tell me little. By then, I was retired and need-to-know is still a good policy. But I could tell that he had found something. Something evil.”

  “Why evil?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why that word?” Quayle asked. Teddy Morton was not a dramatic man. He was a scholar and a pragmatist. If he had used the word himself then it would be significant.

  “It was not a thing one could pin point. But he was uneasy. Normally he found his work for the service a challenge. Stimulating. A battle of wits with worthy opponents.” She smiled at Alexi Kirov. “But not this time. This time, he was disturbed. He was worried to the point where he wasn’t interested in winning a game of chess. That, for Edward Morton, was tantamount to a priest doubting his beliefs.”

  “Did he say anything about it at all?”

  “No, just a reference that may have been the file name.”

  “Which was?”

  “Broken Square.” She paused, taking them both in. “He finished the visit very depressed but trying not to show it, quoting ‘Drake’s Drum’. ‘And drum them up the channel like we drummed them long ago…’“ At last she shrugged. “It’s strange, but I never really did understand his passion for lesser English poets.”

  *

  Cockburn arrived, bleary eyed, at seven the following morning – and was pleasantly surprised to find Chloe there already, her notes piled across the desk and a sheaf of file requests for him to sign. The canteen was yet to open, so he got himself a cup of coffee from a machine on the floor above and sat down at his empty desk, pushing the old telephone off to one side.

  “So where do we start?” Chloe asked.

  Cockburn lit a cigarette and looked at her.

  “This is a no smoking area,” she said, with a raised eyebrow looking at the door.

  “Fuck ‘em,” was his reply. His head ached and he wasn’t feeling well.

  She laughed delightedly. “Big night?” she asked innocently, knowing the answer only too well. She had dragged him round half the trendy wine bars in Soho.

  He shook his head, regretting ever going out with her, and even more trying to keep pace. “Put a big piece of paper on the wall. One of those flip chart things.”

  A couple of minutes later, she was back with a pad and a couple of marker pens.

  “Right, let’s start at the beginning. Our man spends twenty odd good years in the service. Very talented, very handy chap all in all. Learns fast, thinks on his feet. Is forced into retirement on medical grounds. What have we got?”

  She thought for a moment. “Experience, anger, enough knowledge to be a real handful?”

  “Good, write that up. Now, experience… Let’s list the things that he can use that for. Start with the basics. What does an experienced field man have that he can use?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, do you buy your veggies at Sainsbury’s?”

  “Hell no! I have a mate with a...” She paused, as realisation hit her. “Contacts!” she exclaimed.

  “Right! Mark it with a tick. We want all the file references on every job in the last ten years where he reported a local name or a new source...” He paused, and returned to his analogy. “What do you pay your mate with?”

  “Money?”

  “Bank accounts. Every field man worth his salt has about a hundred all over the place. Check on all the personas issued by passports, then match the names against accounts on the continent where there have been withdrawals in excess of ten thousand sterling in cash.”

  “How the hell do I do that?”

  “Interpol. Channel the request through liaison at the Yard. Code it with a Charlie X-Ray. That means it’s a job for Number Ten. You’ll be surprised at the speed of response...”

  “This is fun!” she said, lighting a cigarette herself.

  By 4pm that afternoon, they had filled up nine pages of notes and had seventeen people of various disciplines working to provide information. Even so, Cockburn knew he was only covering ground that others had done before. He wrote out a short message and asked Chloe to walk down to the offices of the Telegraph and the Times and insert it in the personal columns for one week. The message read ‘T. Phone home. All is forgiven. Love Hugh.’

  “It’s worth a go,” he said to a sceptical looking Cloe. “When you’ve done those two, get on the phone, do
La Monde, The Herald Tribune, and one of the big German dailies.”

  “Doesn’t seem very original,” she said.

  “Nothing that’s good ever is. It’s all been done before…” He looked up quickly. “Titus has a lawyer here in this country. Check his file, get the man’s name. See if he’s been in touch or anything. Then get onto the Tate Gallery and Sotheby’s. Find out where someone would dump a collection of religious icons if they needed to…”

  “What?”

  “Titus. He restores icons. His collection was substantial some years ago. He may want to realise some cash.”

  “I thought he was what is termed comfortable?” she asked.

  “Very, but as with most of these family things, it’s largely tied up. He couldn’t access much of it in a hurry. Having said that, talk to the bank. His family have used Coutts for years. If they give you the run around – which is quite likely – talk to the Five counter people. They must have records.” He stood up and took his coat from the steel peg behind the door “Then talk to travel. Get me a ticket to fly to Frankfurt tomorrow.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Adrian Black is coming out of hospital again tonight.”

  “New angle? He’s been interviewed by everyone except News at Ten…”

  “Dunno,” he replied, “but I have a feeling we only have half the story.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The file story on the art dealer in Venice. That was a friends of Ti’s. Well, two bodies turned up a couple of days later.”

  “We knew that,” she said.

  “Well, it turns out they weren’t players, and they weren’t freelancers on the King’s or Kaiser’s shilling either.”

  “Sorry,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “You’ve lost me.”

  “Two heavies have a go at Ti’s friends. They turn up dead in a canal out by the glass factory. But they weren’t ours, and they weren’t put in by the Surete or the other players. These guys were outsiders. So who the hell were they?”

  “Are we sure he did them?” she asked, incredulous. “Seems a bit extreme.”

  “Let me tell you a story. Did you do the martial arts course at Lincoln?”

  “Sort of,” she admitted.

  “Then you know the rituals. The bows, the protocol of the bout?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A few years ago, some idiot administrator at Century was looking at Ti’s records and saw that he hadn’t done a recent competency test on the mat. Believe it or not, he was recalled from Romania to do it. Anyway, he arrived back, pissed off as you can imagine, only to find the instructors endorsed the order. So he goes up to the Oxford place. That’s where the really nasty bits go on. Instead of waiting in the dojo, he walks into the changing room where the instructors are waiting, fully dressed in his street clothes, and beats the three of them then and there. No bow, no protocol, no niceties.” Cockburn shook his head, half appalled, half impressed. “He must be a fourth dan by now. He would have taken out those two in Venice without a murmur after what they did.”

  *

  Quayle placed a message to Kurt Eicheman from Orly airport and, as he stood in the booth waiting for the Bremen housewife on the other end of the line to get a pencil, he watched the arrivals area behind him. He was confident he had shaken Alexi Kirov at Heathrow and was checking more from habit than anything else. Soon, the woman came back on the line, and as he spoke she took it down verbatim. Once Kurt received it he would know where to meet Quayle.

  Putting the phone down, he walked direct from the phones to his departure gate for a flight to Oslo where he would buy a third ticket under a third name and enter Germany from the north. If all went to plan, he would be in Frankfurt that night – and, by then, he hoped that the German BND man had been able to find out something about the Geneva connection.

  By 8pm that evening, he had room in a city centre hotel – and, taking a bag of recent purchases into the bathroom, he went to work. An hour later, his short grey hair was blond and he leant over the dressing table to look into the mirror as he dropped the green contact lenses into his eyes. Satisfied, he pulled on a pair of shoes that he had altered to change his walk and, grabbing an old coat, he walked out into the busy streets.

  The rendezvous was a dingy porn theatre. Twenty minutes before the contact time, he slid his money under the glass window to a bored middle-aged woman and pushed through the grubby double doors. Inside there were seventeen rows of seats and, in the flickering light from the screen, he could see men scattered in the rows. Taking a seat up in the back – from which he could see both the entrance and the exits – he settled back to wait. Up on the screen, in vivid colour, a busty brunette was entertaining two black men. The sound was out of synch with her movements, mouths moving soundlessly, only to be followed a full second later by what the producers had hoped would be a lusty groan. A few rows in front, a transvestite moved seats and sat next to a balding man and they exchanged whispers, the blond wigged head then dropping into the other man’s lap.

  Moments later, the door swung back and a figure entered, sliding into a seat with a coat folded in its lap. Cigarette smoke drifted up from somewhere down front and, to Quayle’s right, a man began fondling his partner, her head thrown back as his hand worked between her thighs.

  Turning her head toward Quayle, she smiled invitingly. On her outstretched hand, he could see the glint of a wedding ring. One large white breast was now out of her blouse and a man in the row in front leant over and began to join in, his erection jutting clear of his trousers.

  Up on the screen, the scene had changed. Now a girl dressed in a school uniform walked down a street and stopped to talk to an old man in a Mercedes.

  The theatre doors eased back again and another figure entered, paused to allow his eyes to adjust to the light, and then moved up toward the back rows. It was the BND man. Quayle lifted his hand in recognition and Kurt dropped into the seat beside him.

  “Nice spot,” he whispered.

  “Thought you’d like it,” Quayle replied. “Anything for me?”

  The woman down the row groaned as someone did something to her that she liked. In the dark the pale shapes of her legs were reaching upwards, toes pointed to the ceiling, as one of the men thrust into her.

  “Ja. Maybe.” He held out a piece of folded paper. “This man is a sometime right wing academic, sometime critic. Nasty little shit, but a good thinker. He was involved in something a few years ago and we got some photos. In one he wore a square ring. I’m told he’s been low key in the last few years – so he may be out of favour and prepared to talk. Who knows?”

  “Thanks Kurt. What about Geneva?”

  “Nothing. This is it. But I’m still being watched. The kill order is off, so by whom eh?”

  “Be careful,” Quayle warned.

  “Always!” he chuckled, the buccaneer still there. “I’m going to pull them in. Get them rousted by the police in the morning. Then we see who gets them out, and maybe get a link that way. Call tomorrow afternoon. Say you’re looking for Annie. If Bremen says ‘lemon’ try the post restante at Fredrichstrasse. There will be a couple of leads for you. What name?”

  “Collins,” Quayle replied. Eicheman nodded and smiled, then stood and moved back down towards the doors.

  Quayle gave him twenty minutes and then left by the fire exit, its old worn crash bar unlocked as he knew it would be. The Federal Government might have put up with filthy porn theatres, but they were very strict on fire precautions.

  On the street he moved carefully for a mile, then took a taxi back to the hotel.

  The man he would need to visit lived in Goch, about an hour’s drive away towards the Dutch border – so, the following morning, he checked out of the hotel, hired a car and took the main autobahn north-west. By 9am, he had reached the village.

  Steiner’s home was a solid old farmhouse outside the village, tucked into a stand of evergreen trees, remnants of the huge forest where Hitler’s SS had
once hidden an entire Panzer division before the push into the lowlands.

  Parts of the Goch area were often off-limits to NATO personnel from nearby RAF Larbruch because of strong ties to the SS that dated back to the war, and some evenings the strains of the Horst Wessel anthem could be heard from the cellar bars as old grey-haired men remembered another time.

  Remaining hidden, Quayle watched for an hour, but the late model Opel remained in the driveway and their were no visitors. A pair of Wellington boots stood by the kitchen door and smoke drifted lazily up from a chimney towards the front of the house.

  Finally, he left the car behind and, having walked the last few yards to the front door, knocked loudly.

  It was opened by a surprised, portly individual of around Quayle’s height.

  “Ja?”

  “Herr Steiner?” Quayle asked, using his northern accent.

  The man paused for a second, as if considering the question.

  “Ja. But who are you?”

  “We have mutual friends. May I come in?”

  The florid-faced man looked at Quayle suspiciously and finally swung the door back to allow him to enter. Inside, the hall was dominated by a large Jacobean dresser and a coat rack festooned in jackets and scarves. Quayle followed the man into a large living room where a fire burned brightly in the hearth, dark smoke pluming up the chimney. A bright rug was spread between two large chairs and, on the floor beneath the dining table, a big antique Qashqai carpet gave the room a warm tone. The table itself was covered in papers, and shelves of books took up one entire wall. A stag in a hunting print gazed balefully down of another.

  “Nice Shiraz Qashqai,” Quayle said, pointing to the big red carpet under the dining table.

  “Yes it is. So what can I do for you?”

  “You can tell me where Herr Steiner is for starters,” Quayle said, smiling nicely.

  “What?” he replied indignantly. “I am Steiner. I own this house!”

  “Bullshit. That carpet is very valuable. It’s a real Qashqai, not a shiraz. No owner, however modest, would let me malign it. You are a big man. The boots and the coats are all small. And the fire burns brightly because you’re burning paper. Paper that isn’t yours…” Quayle swung his arm at the dining table. “You’re not Steiner. So where is he? I won’t ask again – and, if you’re co-operative, you may just walk away from here. Vershtun?”