‘How do I know you’re not just saying these things to frighten me?’ And he is frightening me. Mostly because I believe every word he’s spoken.
‘Without me you won’t survive this, Nicole. It’s lucky for you I’m not willing to let Hexter run Joe’s life for him.’
‘Is Joe your son?’
‘He’s certainly the closest I’m ever going to get to one.’
‘How did you know Roger would bring me here?’
‘I found Vogler’s car before they did. I followed when it was moved here. I can still manage to follow people without them knowing they’re being followed. In fact, I think I’m better at it than I used to be. After they left, I waited … to see what would happen next. My name’s on the lease of this cottage. There’ll have been some idea to implicate me in Vogler’s death.’
‘What do you use this place for?’
‘I keep it on for old times’ sake. What age are you? Thirty?’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘Too young, even so, to understand. It’s stupid, really. Human nature.’ He smiles and shakes his head. ‘It can’t be helped. There’s nothing I can do to stop them using the connection against me. What’s vital now is for us to get a long way away from here. Then we can decide what action to take.’
‘Action?’
‘We have two choices. Run and keep on running. Or turn and fight. Like I told you, I’m not prepared to let Hexter take control of Joe’s life. So, for me, it’s turn and fight. What’s it to be for you?’
‘What are you talking about? I’m not running or fighting.’
‘You have to. If not, they will come for you. And I won’t be around to save you next time. The life you led before today?’ He shakes his head. He looks genuinely sorry for me. ‘That’s gone, Nicole. Gone for ever.’
‘That’s ridiculous. It can’t be as bad as you say.’
‘But it is.’
‘Venstrom’s a powerful multinational company. They’ll protect me.’ I don’t believe that even as I say it.
‘No one will protect you. No one can. Not even me.’
‘What are you offering me, then?’
‘Your only chance. If you don’t want to take it, I’ll leave you here and go my own way. Do you want me to do that?’
I can’t seem to frame a reply. I just look at him. And he looks at me.
Then he says, ‘Only I can’t wait for an answer any longer. You have to decide. Now.’
I don’t know what to think. Everything seems to have changed in the blink of an eye. All I know for certain is that I have to make a decision. And it has to be the right one.
When I climb out of the 4WD, Forrester puts his hand under my elbow to steady me, but I tell him I’m fine to walk. It’s strange how fast and how clearly the brain works when it has to. Carl’s dead. Vogler’s dead. And I’d be dead now too, but for Duncan Forrester and whatever secret links him to Roger’s boss. Hexter. Was he the man Roger spoke to in the car park at St Mawes? Was that the moment my death was sanctioned as part of an official cover-up? How calm, how casual it all was. He looked at me. A single glance. Nice-looking young woman, he may have thought. Not long for this world, though.
But here I am. Still in the world. Still alive. For now.
‘I don’t know whether I can do this, Duncan,’ I say, relieved I can be honest with him.
‘Only one way to find out.’
‘I think I have to see the bodies before we go.’
‘You should spare yourself that. It’s not pretty.’
‘That’s why I shouldn’t spare myself. Because I’m guessing life isn’t going to be pretty from here on. And I have to be sure. I have to understand what we’re doing is … real.’
‘It’s real.’
‘Then show me.’
He nods. ‘OK.’
‘And then we go.’
And then we go. Out of one life. Into another.
MIDDLE GAME
I was in Forrester’s world, whether I wanted to be or not. His and Hexter’s. But it was a world I knew nothing about.
Until he told me.
***
There are many milestones in life, Nicole. One of them is the first time someone you trust betrays you.
Hexter went beyond betrayal, though. He tried to kill me. And my reputation. He tried to destroy me.
He almost succeeded. He still might. Now we’re up against one another again. After all these years. After believing it was over.
But this isn’t over. I’m not sure now, looking back, it ever could have been.
You need to understand what happened between us. You need to hear something I’ve never told anyone before.
The truth. About Hexter and me. All of it. The whole damn thing.
Old habits die hard. I’m not going to tell you any more than I have to about my time in the Service. I had an aptitude for the work. It suited my analytical mind and my self-contained nature. I was reliable. I was thorough. I was right for it.
There was no meteoric rise up the hierarchy for me, though. Compared with Clive Hexter, who joined around the same time as me, I was an amateur at playing the preferment game. Hexter had a sort of magical sheen. You never doubted him. He always knew how to get what he wanted. Promotion. Admiration. The best out of any situation. He had the touch.
Women loved him, even though they couldn’t trust him, or maybe because they couldn’t trust him. Actually, though, everyone who met him fell in love with him to some extent. And that’s a great gift to have in the intelligence world.
If there was an exception to the general rule of Hexter worship it was me. I was never convinced he was the genuine article. But he ended up being my departmental boss, so I had no choice about working with him. And ironically we chalked up quite a few operational successes together.
Hexter had an insight into Far East problems thanks to studying Chinese and Japanese at Cambridge, which meant he was in high demand when China started to engage with the wider world. My field was eastern Europe, so we didn’t always work in harness. But in the summer of 1975 we were in Helsinki together, hunting for intelligence crumbs on the fringes of the CSCE negotiations – the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. With the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries all represented, it was a rare opportunity to probe for weaknesses.
In my diplomatic cover role overseeing day-to-day security for the British delegation, I liaised with Tahvo Norrback of the Finnish Foreign Ministry. A good man. We hit it off together. But poor old Tahvo liked his drink and had a tendency to get into trouble when he’d had one too many. He had a file of sensitive documents stolen from him in a bar one night. Luckily, the thief was a local chancer rather than a KGB agent, so he only wanted to be paid to hand them back. But Tahvo couldn’t afford what he was demanding. I put up the cash from departmental contingency funds and we handled the exchange so we got the documents and kept the money. It was a neat night’s work.
When Hexter got to hear about it, he reckoned I should have secured the file and used it to blackmail Norrback for whatever we could get out of him. My argument was that I’d earned Norrback’s undying gratitude by getting him out of a hole and that would give us much more in the long run. Hexter suspected I hadn’t told him what I was planning because I knew he’d have insisted I do it his way. He was right, of course.
But I was right too. Norrback cut down on the booze and got promoted to a senior position in the Finnish Foreign Ministry. Which gave us a valuable contact in the Baltic world when Gorbachev started to loosen things up in the Soviet Union. Hexter never thanked me for that. But C, the boss we all answered to, certainly did.
1989 was the year everything changed. And it was very nearly the year I died. Some in the Service were cock-a-hoop about the difficulties engulfing the Soviet Union and China. The Soviets had pulled out of Afghanistan with their tails between their legs and the Chinese were struggling to cope with student protesters filling Tiananmen Square and demanding liberalization. It wasn’
t anything like as obvious then as it is now how it was all going to turn out.
But Deng Xiaoping was made of sterner stuff than Gorbachev, so maybe we should have known. Overnight on the third and fourth of June, the People’s Liberation Army cleared the square. More than two thousand protesters dead, seven thousand wounded. Just like that. Normal service resumed in the People’s Republic.
Hexter was in Hong Kong when Tiananmen unravelled and I was sent out to help him handle the British side of Operation Yellowbird: a scheme we sponsored to smuggle fugitive dissidents out of China, mostly via Hong Kong. Obviously, we wanted to be the first to question them, though we spent most of our time trying to coordinate the various escape plans. And when we were able to sit down with them, they basically told the same story. They hadn’t seen the crackdown coming. They simply hadn’t understood how ruthless Deng was capable of being.
One episode stands out from those hot summer weeks I spent with Hexter in Hong Kong. There was a dissident called Chen Shufan we were particularly keen to get out. Lots of rumours attached themselves to him. He was a prime mover in the student uprising, but he was also a nephew of Deng’s regular bridge partner. The word was he knew things we needed to know and that we wouldn’t regret helping him, whatever the cost.
And the cost was high. More than fifty thousand dollars in smugglers’ fees. But it was all for nothing. Somehow the PLA patrols got wind of where he was going to be lifted from. Chen Shufan ended up dead in the surf on a Guangdong beach. Someone had talked. After that Hexter reckoned Yellowbird wasn’t worth investing in. He recommended we pull out.
We were waiting for a ruling from London on that point when, instead, we were summoned home for reassignment. It was early September and C had a highly sensitive job for us to which my relationship with Norrback was vital.
The course of the rest of my life was set as we sat round a conference table in Century House on Friday the eighth of September. I had no idea what was being set in train. I hadn’t a clue. Only one man really understood what was likely to transpire. And even he may not have anticipated how far it would reach.
The backdrop to all this was the weakening of the Soviets’ hold on eastern Europe. East Germans had been sneaking out to the west via Hungary for months. Now information had reached us that Hungary’s border with Austria was going to be thrown open completely on the eleventh of September, which was the following Monday. The consensus was that this was the beginning of the end for the Soviet bloc régimes. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t hold their people, then they were finished.
The key was Gorbachev. He’d seen what had happened in Beijing and was appalled by it. He wasn’t going to send the Red Army in to restore order. And that guaranteed disorder.
The long and the short of it was this. The Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen yet. The balance of power in Europe hadn’t yet ceased to be viable. And our political masters weren’t keen on seeing the house of cards come down for fear of the unpredictable consequences. A reunited Germany. A disintegrating eastern bloc. A collapsing USSR. They didn’t like the sound of that. And that made it impossible to ignore an overture that had been received from one Viktor Slavsky, a Politburo member under Brezhnev and Andropov and thought to be a prime mover in opposition to Gorbachev.
Slavsky wanted to talk, in secret, on neutral ground, about how NATO would react in certain circumstances he didn’t care to specify but weren’t hard to guess: Gorbachev’s violent removal from the scene. To my amazement, he was being taken seriously at the highest levels. And the future he might be able to engineer appealed to our risk-averse leaders.
But he required assurances that if there was a new government it would be recognized and treated favourably. The Americans, the British and the French were willing to consider going along with this – unofficially, of course. A retired British politician known and trusted by Slavsky had been settled on as a go-between. It’s best I don’t name him. Let’s call him X. Hexter and I were to accompany him to a meeting with Slavsky where it was hoped an agreement would be arrived at. Along for the ride would be an observer from the CIA and one from the French equivalent, the DGSE. Everything would be deniable and ultra top secret.
A Finnish venue was Slavsky’s idea. He obviously wanted the shortest and least detectable journey possible. That’s where Norrback came in. Could he be persuaded to host such a meeting? Yes was the answer, with clearance from the Finnish government based on scrupulously not knowing the purpose of the gathering.
I didn’t like any of this. We were in the process of winning the Cold War and suddenly we weren’t happy about the unpredictability of what would follow. We were hooked on the stability of the East–West face-off. We didn’t want it to end. Better the devil you know, in the final analysis. That was the attitude, in London, Paris and Washington.
The Austro-Hungarian border opened on cue on the eleventh and thousands flooded across. We all watched the scenes on our televisions in amazement. It was really happening. And Gorbachev didn’t do a thing to stop it.
I had a heart-to-heart with Hexter about what we were planning a few days later. I put it to him that encouraging Slavsky and his fellow conspirators in Moscow would preserve the very system we were supposed to be in business to destroy. We were going against the grain of our own history. And we were betraying all those hopeful liberals in eastern Europe while we were about it.
‘Ours not to reason why, old boy,’ was his initial response. But he was happy to expand on that. The Bush administration wanted to prevent denuclearization in Europe and that meant preventing German reunification. Bush’s priority was preservation of the status quo. As for Thatcher and Mitterrand, they had their personal memories of war to stiffen their opposition to stitching the two Germanies back together.
Remember, this was before the Berlin Wall came down. This was before all the changes that swept through eastern Europe came to be seen as inevitable. If you’re given a choice between stability, even one based on mutually assured destruction, and instability, with nothing certain and very little controllable, what is the truly responsible course of action? Who knows what I’d have decided in their place?
But I wasn’t in their place. I was just a humble facilitator. So, off to Helsinki we went. There was always Hexter’s clinching argument to cling to. If Gorbachev was likely to be toppled, we shouldn’t waste the opportunity to take the measure of those plotting against him.
Norrback had inherited a large house on Kulosaari, an island-suburb of Helsinki, and it was there we went on Friday the twenty-second of September. The British embassy didn’t even know we were in Finland. We were operating on need-to-know. And no one needed to know. We had an interpreter with us, of course, plus X, our retired politician. That was it.
Henri Bourdil from DGSE joined us that evening. Peter Curtis, the CIA’s man, turned up the following morning. They were both fluent in Russian. Slavsky arrived a few hours later, accompanied by an interpreter of his own and an assistant. They were a tense, tight-lipped trio. Slavsky came across as standard issue hard-bitten Communist party man, reared on Stalinist principles, to whom glasnost and perestroika must have been absolute anathema. He was taking a big risk. We all knew that.
How the group had crossed the border without detection from the Soviet side was unclear. They must have had help from someone senior in the Soviet air force. Norrback had cleared the way for their unmarked plane to land at a small airfield west of Helsinki.
Norrback wasn’t going to be party to any of the discussions. In fact, he was planning to be absent most of the time. He’d never been told the exact purpose of the meeting, nor had he asked.
But he’d guessed anyway, as he told me when we were alone together. ‘You want things to stay as they are, don’t you? You want the last forty years to go on for another forty.’
‘It’s not what I want, Tahvo,’ I objected.
‘No. But it’s why you’re here.’
‘I’m just doing my job.’
‘Some j
ob. I get the feeling you’re planning a funeral. But you’re not quite sure who’s being buried.’
I brushed his comment off, but it stayed in my mind the whole time we were there. I don’t think he knew just how right he was. Until later.
The weekend was a round of earnest discussions in the drawing room and breathers in the garden. Slavsky dwelt on nuts and bolts. Could X guarantee tacit support for a replacement regime? How soon after a takeover would the necessary recognitions be forthcoming? What would be tolerated with regard to the treatment of those removed from office? What arrangements could be made for financial assistance in the medium term?
X preferred to deal in generalities and Slavsky had to press him hard for specific commitments. It seemed to Hexter, as we shared a late-night whisky on Saturday, that X hadn’t given as much as Slavsky had hoped for, though whether that would make the difference between going ahead with the coup and not …
‘Second-guessing the Russians is like looking at a fog-bank through binoculars,’ Hexter joked. ‘All you get is a closer view of fog.’
‘Do you think they might actually kill Gorbachev?’ It was a question that had been seriously bothering me.
‘Not if they want swift recognition. No, no. Slavsky and his co-conspirators don’t intend to kill anyone if they can avoid it. Just … crush a few dreams.’
So, that was the business we were in. Crushing dreams.
I didn’t sleep well that night.
Next morning, X sprang a surprise. He’d received a fax, which he’d already delivered to Slavsky. He didn’t say who it was from or what it said. But Slavsky seemed satisfied. Discussion went ahead in a noticeably less tense atmosphere. Less tense on the part of Slavsky and X, that is. Curtis and Bourdil both wanted to know more about the fax. But X wouldn’t tell them.
‘Sub-contracting this operation to you Brits didn’t involve us being cut out of the loop,’ Curtis complained as he, Bourdil, Hexter and I conferred in the garden. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ And Bourdil said much the same, in a French accent.
One False Move Page 14