The Diplomat's Wife

by Ridpath, Michael

  ‘You didn’t tell her?’

  ‘I did tell her.’

  ‘Phil!’

  ‘I told her Lothar was on a Greek island. Skiathos. It was the destination we planned to head for when we were hitching across Europe. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide is very complimentary about it.’

  Emma grinned. ‘Did she believe you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Maybe you’re not such a fool after all.’

  Phil smiled. ‘Maybe I’m not.’

  Emma touched his arm. ‘I’m sorry. I know you liked her. It must be awful to know you were being deceived all along.’

  There was something in her touch, in the tone of her voice, that made Phil realize this sixty-four-year-old woman did understand. And then he realized that at about his age she too had slept with someone who was deceiving her.

  ‘All right,’ said Emma. ‘We need a plan.’

  ‘Don’t we have a plan? We’re driving to Spain.’

  ‘The KGB will be watching us. Following us. They will be expecting us to head towards Greece. Which we will do. Until we lose them.’

  ‘How are we going to do that?’

  ‘I’ll think of something.’ Emma pulled out her road atlas and studied it closely.

  * * *

  They had no problem at the border and stopped for breakfast at a service station on the other side. They sped past Braunschweig, both of them ignoring the signs, and then turned south on an autobahn heading to Munich and Austria, and ultimately Yugoslavia and Greece.

  Half an hour south of Nuremberg, in Bavaria, Emma announced it was time for lunch. They pulled off the autobahn and stopped at a garage with a little shop which sold sandwiches and local maps. They bought both.

  Phil had been looking out for cars following him, but couldn’t spot any. More accurately, there were dozens of cars following them on the long journey, and there was no way of telling if any of them contained KGB agents.

  Much easier on a straight stretch of country road. Which, by examining her newly purchased map closely, Emma found.

  They pulled over on the verge of a straight on a back road a couple of kilometres west of the garage. A blue van, a silver Opel, and a green BMW with a single male driver passed them and disappeared around a corner a kilometre away. They munched their sandwiches, checking each passing vehicle carefully. On one side cows grazed a low hill; on the other, tidy Bavarian farmland stretched into the distance.

  ‘Ready?’ Emma asked, once they had finished their sandwiches.

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Phil drove as fast as he could along the country roads, Emma giving him a bewildering series of directions. He called out the type and colour of any vehicle that appeared in his rear-view mirror; Emma suggested this as an aide to spot a particular car reappearing. None did. They spent a frustrating two minutes trapped behind a slow-moving tractor before Phil accelerated past it on a blind corner. In ten minutes they were back at the entrance to the autobahn, which headed south to Munich.

  ‘That way,’ said Emma, pointing to a sign.

  North.

  Fifty-Five

  Heike and Rozhkov stood beside their BMW on the low hill overlooking the distinctive green British sports car, Rozhkov training his powerful binoculars down on them.

  ‘They know they’re being followed,’ he said in his Slavic-accented German.

  ‘They can’t have spotted us,’ said Heike.

  Rozhkov had planted a radio tracker in the TR6 in the hotel’s garage, and Heike had followed Phil and his grandmother on a heavy portable display plugged into the BMW’s cigarette lighter. Rozhkov had kept at least a couple of kilometres behind the British sports car the whole way. The only time they had got close was when they had driven past the stationary TR6 on the lane down there, and Heike had slipped down low in the passenger seat out of sight.

  ‘It’s all very well stopping for a picnic somewhere,’ Rozhkov said. ‘But they have just pulled over on to a verge. It’s not a natural stopping place. They want to lose us.’

  ‘They are not doing a bad job of it,’ said Heike. ‘But they don’t know we know they are heading to Greece.’

  ‘Phil knows,’ Rozhkov said.

  ‘Phil knows I know,’ Heike said. ‘He doesn’t know you do. He doesn’t suspect me, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Rozhkov said. ‘In which case they will be on the autobahn heading south in half an hour or so.’

  Rozhkov stiffened. ‘They’re off. And they’re not going back the way they came. That means they are trying to lose us.’

  Rozhkov and Heike jumped in the car. Heike put the bulky display on her lap and tried to read it. The display showed bearing and approximate range, which was fine on a straight autobahn, but was very difficult on winding country roads, especially without a detailed map.

  They spent a frustrating fifteen minutes doing their best to keep up, Rozhkov letting his impatience show. Heike had had no training on the system. She suggested that they switch and she drive, but Rozhkov wasn’t having any of that. He was the man, so he had to drive.

  Turned out Rozhkov was just as much a jerk as the hapless Marko, just in his own special way.

  It was with relief that they crested a low hill and saw both the autobahn, and a green sports car moving towards it.

  ‘That’s them!’ Heike said, and put the display to one side.

  A ‘well done’ would have been appreciated.

  Rozhkov drove steadily to the junction and joined the highway heading south.

  ‘OK. How far ahead of us are they? I want to get the separation right.’

  This was easier. Heike checked the display. It didn’t make sense. The dot was at the bottom of the concentric circles.

  ‘Hold on. They’re behind us!’

  ‘They can’t be.’

  ‘Look.’

  Rozhkov leaned over and looked.

  ‘Damn it!’ he said. ‘They’re heading north! We’ll have to double back at the next junction.’

  He glared at Heike and muttered something in Russian.

  Russian was compulsory in East German schools and Heike had been good at it.

  He had just called her a stupid female dog.

  At the next junction, they veered off the autobahn and rejoined it heading north. After a frantic twenty minutes of seriously fast driving, a blip appeared on Heike’s screen, this time where it should be. At the top. Ahead of them.

  They followed it on what was to be a long journey north, and then west, and then south through France.

  To Spain.

  Part Five

  Spain

  Fifty-Six

  July 1979, Jávea, Spain

  * * *

  Lothar’s house stood at the end of a road which wound up a hillside of rock and surprisingly green forest. The blue of the Mediterranean flashed between the trees as they drove.

  Emma studied the local map they had bought in the old coastal town of Jávea, a few kilometres to the north. After their picnic manoeuvre in Bavaria, they had driven for the rest of the day and holed up in a hotel near Lyon in France. The following night, they had stayed in Valencia, so that they could meet Lothar at a reasonable hour in the morning.

  They drove past the villa slowly. It was a single-storey building with a red-tiled roof behind a low white wall rimmed with purple flowers. There was indeed a stone lion grinning at them by the iron gate on the short driveway leading down to a garage.

  ‘Turn around and park a bit further down the hill,’ said Emma. ‘We don’t want to make the same mistake we did in Talloires – leaving the car outside the house.’

  They had passed a few other houses on the road, and a number of building sites. It was a beautiful spot; something the local developers were clearly taking advantage of. Phil turned around at the end of the road, drove down the hill past the villa and parked in a lay-by next to a footpath leading down to the sea.

  They walked back up the
road. It was scarcely ten o’clock but the July sun was already beating down hard from a blue sky. Phil wore shorts and a T-shirt, and the sweat was beginning to form. Emma looked fresh in a yellow sundress and seemed to be taking the climb in her stride, clutching her handbag. The tumour was leaving her alone, at least for now.

  Several hundred feet beneath them, they glimpsed a cove surrounded by lush green vegetation, a rocky headland rearing up on the far side. This was all much greener than the rest of Spain through which they had driven. It wasn’t the sun, sand and beach umbrellas Phil had been expecting; Emma’s road atlas had shown Benidorm not far to the south.

  Phil was wondering how he could persuade Lothar to divulge any clues about who Swann’s mole might be. He had thought of trying to recruit Emma to help him, but that would involve admitting he had been keeping his conversation with Swann from her the whole time. She wouldn’t like that.

  The key thing Swann had wanted to know was where Lothar lived. Phil would at least tell him that, and then MI6 could take it from there.

  They reached the house and opened a small iron gate through which a stone path led down to the front door. With a nervous glance at Phil, Emma pressed the bell.

  They waited a full minute before the door was opened by a tall, stooped man with a stick. He looked at Emma and Phil with intense dark blue eyes over half-rimmed spectacles tied to a cord around his neck. His hair was thick and white, his face strong, but crumbled around the edges by age.

  ‘Lothar,’ Emma said, simply.

  ‘Emma? Emma Meeke?’

  ‘That’s me,’ Emma said in German.

  For a moment a cloud of surprise passed over the old man’s face, followed by a grin. He opened his arms, his stick clasped in his left hand.

  Emma hesitated and then stepped forward. He embraced her with his arms and with his charm, which was almost palpable.

  ‘I should say this was a surprise, but that would be understating it. This is a shock. A good shock. Come in, come in.’

  He led them through to a sitting room, whose windows looked down through trees to the sea and the cove. The walls were covered in brightly painted pictures – modern art from the early part of the century, Phil thought. Some looked like Matisses. Maybe they were Matisses; Phil remembered Kay had said Lothar had become an art dealer.

  Lothar lowered himself into what was clearly his favourite armchair, an ashtray and a novel in Spanish by Gabriel García Márquez on a side table within easy reach.

  Phil perched on a sofa opposite, and Emma on a wing chair.

  ‘You found me. How on earth did you find me? Let me guess. Kay?’

  ‘That’s right. We just saw her in East Berlin. She said she had tracked you down here a few years ago. She also said she hadn’t told her former employers where you are.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear that. I thought I could trust her. I am surprised she told you, but then you and she always had some kind of connection, however unlikely that may seem.’

  ‘You mean Hugh?’ said Emma.

  ‘Hugh. And a belief that the world could be a better place.’

  Phil could see how Emma had trusted this man so completely. Even in his eighties, for that was how old he must be, he oozed reliability and strength. His steady voice, his steady dark blue eyes, his sense of calm purpose.

  ‘This must be your son. He looks a lot like Hugh.’

  ‘Grandson,’ said Emma. ‘And he does, doesn’t he? I brought him with me on a little trip around Europe to revisit old times. He has been most helpful.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Lothar with a smile at Phil. ‘I do hope he’s the only person you brought with you.’

  ‘We weren’t followed, if that’s what you mean. I believe the KGB are interested in our movements, but Philip cleverly led them astray. They think you live in Greece.’

  ‘So they are still looking for me,’ said Lothar, frowning now.

  ‘I believe so,’ said Emma. ‘What have you been up to? I thought you had been shot in Moscow, until I met Kay about fifteen years ago; she said you were still alive. And when we saw her last week, she said you were living here, but she didn’t have a chance to say much more. She was being careful.’

  ‘Good,’ said Lothar. ‘I almost did return to Moscow back in 1938. It was actually Kay who persuaded me not to go, but I didn’t want to endanger her by letting her know I had listened to her. It was safer for her if she believed I had gone.

  ‘I took on a new identity and disappeared to Switzerland, to Zurich. You probably never knew this, but I was for a time a cobbler, a forger of identity documents. I was pretty good at it. There was work in Zurich for people like me during the war. And after the war, I discovered that there was a lot of wayward art floating around Central Europe, prised loose from museums and castles. Some of it was real, some of it was forged, a lot of it had been stolen. It turned out I had the necessary skills to untangle all that, and I set up a business in Geneva dealing in art. Quite a successful business.

  ‘That was where Kay first found me, sometime in the sixties, and I had to retire in a hurry. Franco’s Spain was a good place in those days for people like me to disappear to. Still is, really.’

  He nodded thoughtfully to himself. ‘Then Kay found me a few years ago. I persuaded her to tell her bosses I had left, and she assured me she would. I trusted her.’ He grinned. ‘I found trusting Kay usually worked. I should probably have reinvented myself yet again and disappeared somewhere. But I was too old at that stage. If they find me, they find me. I’m surprised they still care.’

  ‘They must think you still know things,’ said Emma. ‘Things that Russia’s enemies would find useful.’

  Phil’s pulse quickened. Was there a way he could prod the conversation towards moles?

  Somehow, God knows how, Lothar noticed Phil’s interest, even though Phil could have sworn he hadn’t moved.

  His steady blue eyes latched on Phil’s. ‘Was it wise to bring your grandson along with you, Emma? There’s a risk he might hear things that are not good for him.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Emma. ‘A few days ago, I realized that this little trip was significantly more dangerous than I had expected. So I tried to send Philip back to England.’ She glanced at her grandson. ‘I failed. He’s a stubborn boy. Besides, I want him to know what I did. What we did. Before I die.’

  Lothar snorted. ‘But you are still young. What are you, sixty?’

  ‘Sixty-four. I have a brain tumour. I am going to die. Soon.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ The old man meant it; his commiseration seemed genuine and heartfelt, but also, curiously, encouraging.

  He pulled out a packet of cigarettes from the yellow cardigan he was wearing, and after offering them to Phil and Emma, who refused, lit up. Phil noticed that he was indeed missing half of his little finger.

  ‘So that’s why you have come to find me. Because you are dying.’

  Emma nodded. ‘I want to ask you about Hugh.’

  ‘Hugh.’ Lothar sighed. ‘He would have made a wonderful spy. I’m sure he would have got to the top of the diplomatic service. Ambassador to Russia one day. That would have been useful. Or he could have moved across to MI6.’

  ‘It must have been disappointing for you that he changed his mind, then,’ said Emma, calmly.

  Lothar paused. ‘Kay told you that, I suppose.’

  Emma didn’t answer. ‘When he told you he wouldn’t spy for Russia any more, it wasn’t just a lost opportunity, was it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was going to talk to the British secret service.’

  Lothar remained silent. He waited.

  ‘And if he had talked, he would have told them about you. And about the fellow Cambridge students you had recruited.’

  No answer.

  ‘So you had him killed.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  The words hung heavy in the room.

  ‘A few years ago, I would have denied it,
’ said Lothar. ‘But now? We are both old. You have a right to know. For what it’s worth, I am sorry. He was a good man. At the time I believed that helping the cause was everything. Actually, I still do believe that. The Soviets let down the cause of international communism as much as Hugh was planning to.

  ‘I’m sorry, Emma,’ he repeated.

  ‘Who did kill him?’ Emma asked.

  ‘A policeman. One of your bobbies. We had quite a few agents in the Metropolitan Police in those days, did you know that? Recruited them in the nineteen twenties after the police strike. This man used to do the occasional difficult job for me.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Does it matter? He’s long dead.’

  ‘In that case, maybe it doesn’t matter.’

  Emma thought for a moment, and then reached down for the handbag by her feet and placed it on her lap. She opened it.

  And pulled out a gun.

  A gun Phil recognized: the revolver that he thought she had slung into the woods above Lake Annecy.

  She got to her feet, cocking it and pointing it at Lothar.

  ‘What is this?’ said Lothar. ‘Revenge?’

  ‘Justice,’ said Emma. ‘For Hugh. Before I die. I’m sorry you have to see this, Philip.’

  So was Phil. Then it occurred to him that if Lothar died, so would the identity of Swann’s mole.

  ‘Lothar,’ he said.

  Lothar switched his glance to Phil. As did Emma.

  ‘One of the agents you recruited is still working, isn’t he? Deep in the heart of the British secret service. That’s why the Russians are after you. Who is he?’

  ‘Philip!’ Emma was clearly unhappy with Phil’s interruption.

  ‘I won’t tell you anything about anyone I recruited,’ said Lothar.

  ‘Where did you get that idea from, Philip?’ demanded Emma. ‘Who has been talking to you?’