Illegal Action (8 page)

17

S
he had been trained to deal with any crisis, if necessary with violence, just as she’d dealt with that mugger the other month. In her lengthy training, they had made her kill. They took convicts out of the prisons—those who’d been sentenced to death—and put the trainees up against them. At the beginning they’d intervened to make sure the trainees survived. But later in the course, it was a free contest. No one interfered; it was a fight to the death. She had been determined that whoever died, it would not be her. She had surprised herself with the ease with which she killed—stuck the knife in or pulled tight the garrotte—and they had noticed too, the instructors, those hard-eyed, expressionless men whose job it was to turn out graduates of their courses who could survive in the most extreme situations. So she was chosen for assignments where violence was likely, though she had not expected to have to use it so early in this job, and not on the streets of London.

But, as she sat in her latest apartment off Victoria Street, it was not the possibility of violence that was causing her concern. It was something completely unexpected—the intrusion on the scene of British Intelligence. What, she wondered, had brought them buzzing around Brunovsky like flies? There must have been a leak, or why else would they have suddenly turned up? And why had he encouraged them? How much did they know and how best to deal with the situation?

Unzipping the computer bags, she took out the laptop and its small black companion, that would, she hoped, provide her with the answers, and laid them out on the dining table. Half an hour later, she leant back in her chair with a satisfied grunt and, looking out of the window at Westminster Cathedral, glowing pink in the setting sun, she imagined her message bouncing around the world, disguising itself as it moved from server to server, on its way to its eventual destination, a desk in a Moscow office building. A government office building.

18

H
e knew it was crucial to show you were in charge from the start. On the training course they had taught him that if you began with an iron fist you could lighten up later on, but that it never worked the other way around.

Michael Fane ignored the butterflies fluttering in his stomach. This was his chance to show what he could do. He looked out of the thin window at the trees above Berkeley Square. The weather had reverted: after a glorious early morning, a sepia trail of cloud moved in with the easterly wind like ominous writing in the sky.

He sat down but found he couldn’t sit still. The people here at the agency had given him their interviewing room, which was small and square, down the hall from Brigadier Cartwright’s spacious office. When Liz Carlyle announced she’d be away for a week and asked him to do the interview in her place, he was thrilled. You had to belly up to the bar sometime, he told himself, using the cowboy lingo of the westerns he loved. His father had been contemptuous of those movies, implying that he knew about the real thing. He probably did, Michael thought crossly, and doubtless this forthcoming interview would be beneath him. Geoffrey must have recruited countless agents in his time—in much more difficult circumstances. What else could he have been doing all those years abroad? Even the teenage Michael Fane had known enough to understand his father wasn’t really a cultural attaché.

Not that he’d seen much of him. There was the occasional outing—a day at Lord’s, watching the Australians in the Test; lunch at the Traveller’s Club when Michael turned sixteen—as if his father, suddenly remembering he had a son, had dutifully decided to try and “bond.” When his mother at last grew fed up with Geoffrey’s absences, always excused as a matter of work, and her patience had finally snapped, Michael didn’t blame her. Now she lived in Paris, remarried to Arnaud, an international lawyer—the kind of stable
haut bourgeois
she should have married in the first place.

Michael had applied to join MI5 wanting to outplay his father at his own game—but from the safe distance of a rival service. He had had a letter from him, suggesting lunch, just two weeks before he joined. At first Michael had accepted, then, when the day came, he’d left a message that he was ill. There’d been no communication since, which, thought Michael, suited him just fine.

He looked at the dossier Peggy Kinsolving had helped him put together. He’d spent the last hour practising his set recital, checking the pictures for the umpteenth time and arranging the chairs. Instead of the sofa and low table near the door, used for more informal chats, he opted to stay behind the desk at one end of the room. That should give him an air of authority.

He wished he didn’t look so young. Even the photos he’d seen of his father as a young man made Geoffrey Fane seem at twenty confident, commanding. No one had ever called his father lacking in maturity. The phrase used by Michael’s girlfriend Anna to explain why she was breaking up with him. The memory still rankled.

There was a sharp knock and the door opened. The brigadier marched in, looking stern, followed by the tall leggy woman from HR. Behind them, standing in the doorway, stood a man in a blue chauffeur’s suit. Simmons. He looked confused.

“Here he is,” announced the brigadier to Michael. “Shout if you need me.” He and the woman went out, shutting the door firmly behind them.

“Sit down, Mr. Simmons,” Michael said, pointing to the chair he’d placed in front of the desk. “My name is Magnusson,” he added mechanically, as if he’d said this countless times before.

Simmons sat down and hunched forward, his legs apart, arms hanging down between his knees. He clasped his hands loosely together and looked at Michael, his face an open anxious book.

“Can I see your passport please?” Michael asked crisply, holding out his hand.

Simmons hesitated, then slowly passed it across the desk. He had been instructed to bring it with him. “What’s all this about?”

Ignoring the question, Michael leafed through the pages. There weren’t many stamps, but passports were no real guide nowadays—Morocco, and Cyprus twice. Holiday locations. “Have you ever been to Russia?”

“Russia?” Simmons seemed caught off guard. “No. Never. Why?”

Michael shrugged and made a show of examining the passport some more. He flipped it down on to the desktop, where it spun briefly then stopped, well short of Simmons’s reach. “Have you ever known any Russians?”

“Well I don’t know about ‘known,’” said Jerry. “When I worked at the Dorchester loads of foreigners stayed there and some of them were Russians. And I work for a Russian now, you must know that, and he’s got lots of Russian friends. What’s all this about?”

“I work in the Security Service. We’ve had reason to mount a surveillance operation recently, on a member of the Russian Embassy. We followed him to a number of meetings with people, some open and public, some clandestine. One of them was with you.”

“You must be confusing me with someone else,” said Jerry. But there was colour in his cheeks, and he was clasping his hands tightly now.

“Possibly,” Michael said, “though they say the camera never lies.” He opened his dossier, lifted out two of the prints and slid them across the desk.

Jerry made a show of carefully inspecting them. “When were these taken?” he asked, as if they might be snaps from a holiday so long ago he couldn’t remember it.

“Recently,” said Michael.

“I talk to a lot of people,” said Jerry. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Of course there isn’t.” Michael smiled fleetingly, though now there was a cutting edge to his voice. “But what are we supposed to think when we find you meeting a Russian intelligence officer? Old friends talking about old times? I don’t think so.”

“I work for a Russian, for Christ’s sakes. I know a lot of Russians. I told you that.”

“I bet you do, and we’re going to talk about every one of them. But it’s this Russian”—and he stabbed his finger at the photo—“I’m interested in now.”

“Does the brigadier know why you’re talking to me?” Simmons asked. He looked to be flailing, like someone pushed out of a boat, trying to determine how deep the water was and whether there was any chance of swimming to shore.

Michael regarded Simmons knowingly. “What do you think?”

Simmons groaned, then put his head in his hands.

“However,” Michael announced, “he might overlook it. If we asked him.”

There was resignation rather than hope in Simmons’s eyes as he lifted his head. “If?” he said.

“Excuse me?” asked Fane.

“I said
if
. There’s always an ‘if.’ You’ll get Cartwright to keep me on
if
I do what you say.”

“Sure.”

“And when you’re through with me, what happens then? Do I keep my job?”

“That’s between you and the brigadier. Now why don’t you tell me when you first met Rykov?”

“Who’s Rykov?” asked Simmons, and Michael realised his bafflement was genuine. Damn, he thought, annoyed with himself for letting the name slip out. He pointed at the photo.

“Oh, Vladimir,” said Simmons with a dull nod.

“Go on. How did he first contact you?”

And twenty minutes later he had heard all about it: Rykov’s approach, the meetings with his predecessor, Andrei, during Jerry’s days at the Dorchester, what they’d wanted to know, and what Simmons was getting paid. He first denied receiving any money at all, then seemed to realise this made him look even worse.

Throughout, Michael Fane took careful notes. He did not want Jerry to know he was recording everything on a tape deck in the top desk drawer. And in any case he wasn’t sure it would capture Simmons’s low monotone.

Finished at last, Simmons looked tired.

“Good,” Fane said, doling out a titbit of praise. “Was Andrei your only other contact?”

Simmons nodded quickly, but Michael remembered Brian Ackers’ maxim that for spies, truth was an abstract notion better not put into practice. “Have another think,” he ordered. “Who knows what you might remember?”

Simmons stared back at him, but coldly now, the earlier dead look to his eyes replaced by ice. For a second Michael felt uneasy. There was something unnerving about this man, he thought, as if pressure was building inside that quiet shell, just waiting to explode. But Michael knew he mustn’t back off.

“Tell me, why do you think Vladimir is so interested in Brunovsky?” he asked.

“How should I know?” replied Simmons with a shrug.

“Are you the only one watching Brunovsky?”

Simmons’s eyes widened slightly. “What do you mean?”

“Has Vladimir got anyone else keeping tabs on him?”

“Not as far as I know,” said Simmons stiffly.

“All right,” said Michael. “I’ll want you to look at some more pictures next time to see if you can recognise anyone else.”

“Next time?” A fatalistic note had returned to Simmons’s voice.

“We’ll meet in ten days.”

“Where?” he demanded.

“Here.” He hadn’t checked, but he was sure the brigadier would allow it. “If anything else occurs to you in the meantime, you can call me on this number.” He scribbled the number down and passed it over. “I already have yours.”

Simmons pocketed the slip of paper without looking at it. “Is that all?” he said stonily.

“For now,” said Michael Fane.

Simmons stood up abruptly and left without saying a word. As the door closed behind him, Michael felt a mix of relief and elation. In a minute he would go and see the brigadier, but he sat for a bit, savouring his feeling of accomplishment. He could see now why Liz Carlyle and Peggy Kinsolving, and yes, even his father, grew so involved with their work.

He thought again of Simmons. I’ve got him where I want him, thought Michael. He’s not even going to try and lie to me.

As he left the building Jerry Simmons was seething. It was bad enough to have been found out—bloody Vladimir and his insistence on Hampstead Heath, he thought furiously. He might as well have chosen Piccadilly Circus.

Even worse was being played like a fish by this fresh-faced twerp. If his name’s Magnusson, thought Jerry bitterly, mine’s Marco Polo. He’d do what he had to do—“Magnusson” wasn’t exactly leaving him a choice, no more than Rykov had. No, he wasn’t going to tell the kid any lies. Yet as Jerry remembered the gun he’d seen in Brunovsky’s safe, he didn’t see any reason why he should tell the whole truth, either.

19

Y
our turn,” said the old lady, Sonia Warschawsky, encouragingly.

Liz took a step forward and peered at the painting. Once she would have said it was a picture of a horse and left it at that, but she knew better now. “Let’s see. It’s a modern painting but the expert handling of paint gives it a sensuousness that is very old-fashioned. It’s full of references to earlier painters—the chiaroscuro light and shadow of the field is straight out of Vermeer.” She stood back contemplatively. “And the anatomical precision of the horse is pure Stubbs.”

“Excellent,” said Sonia. “Give me another week and I’ll make an art critic of you.” She gave a high clear laugh that belied her years and elegant appearance. Sonia was tall and slim, remarkably upright for a woman in her eighties, with silver hair held back by an ivory cameo slide, startling blue eyes, a nose as sharp as a cutter’s prow and that great asset called “bone structure”—in her case, high cheeks and a small but sturdy chin. She wore a green tweed suit that had certainly been purchased before Liz was born, but, having come originally from a Paris salon, found itself, forty years on, in fashion once more.

Born in the twenties into a wealthy French-Russian family, Sonia Warschawsky had in her young days moved easily through Europe, visiting members of her extended family in great houses and charming holiday villas, meeting artists and musicians, speaking fluent English, French and Russian, a child of aristocratic interwar Europe. She had been staying with her grandmother in the South of France when the Second World War was declared and suddenly privilege ended. In the panic of June 1940, she escaped to England with some of her young relatives on a Dutch merchant ship, probably the last ship to leave France for England. After the war, her formidable intelligence, her cultured background and her family influence had got her to Girton College, Cambridge, and in Cambridge she had remained, eventually becoming a don at Newnham, where even now she occasionally taught, still full of opinions, energetically and often tartly expressed.

“That’s enough for now,” Sonia declared. “Let’s have some tea.”

They left the gallery of the Fitzwilliam and went to the museum’s café in a covered courtyard. This was Liz’s first sortie out with Sonia since she had arrived in Cambridge three days before. She felt like a learner driver on an inaugural run with her instructor.

On the previous Thursday, a courier had rung the bell to her flat in Kentish Town, and while Liz was still blinking the sleep from her eyes he had handed over a large Jiffy bag. Inside she’d found three illustrated histories of art, and she had spent the weekend going slowly through their pages. On Monday, when she’d taken a taxi from the station and dropped her bags off at the Royal Cambridge Hotel, Liz not only knew when Gainsborough had been born, she could name half a dozen subjects of his portraits.

Sonia lived alone, ten minutes’ walk from the city’s central cluster of colleges, in a small Victorian house of yellow brick. It had a large bay window and a white wooden trellis by the front door, on which an iceberg rose was already beginning its springtime climb.

She made it clear from the start that she knew Liz’s line of work, though she accepted at face value that Liz was called Jane Falconer. “The brief I’ve had,” she said on the first morning, as they sat down in her sitting room by the bay window, “is to give you a crash course in art history, with some special tuition on modern Russian painters, especially Pashko. Is that correct, Jane?”

Liz nodded. “Yes.”

“And as I understand it,” Sonia said with a sly smile, “it’s not so much what you know that will be important, but what you
seem
to know.”

Liz smiled. “
A Bluffer’s Guide.
” They both laughed and the ice was broken.

They soon established their working routine. Sonia sat in one corner in a rocking chair, while Liz took over an old Knole sofa, surrounded by her books and notes. On the walls there were dozens of drawings and pictures, most landscapes of English scenes, but with the occasional Russian subject—a small portrait of Tsar Nicholas, an aquatint of the Hermitage. Similarly, the many bibelots that dotted the side tables and mantelpiece were mostly English, but there was a black lacquer box, with a hand-painted scene in gold, which especially attracted Liz, and several miniature icons.

They worked chronologically, trying to cover a century a day. Sonia talked while Liz took voluminous notes. She was a spontaneous, gifted teacher, given to aphorisms that Liz could use:

“The Norwich School is Constable moved to Norfolk, and suffering in the journey” “The thing to remember about Pissarro is that he is simply Cézanne without the genius” “Turner is the first Impressionist. He prefigures Monet in two key respects: light—and more light!”

Every two hours or so, they took a break, retreating to the small kitchen at the back of the house, where Sonia would make tea, and they’d sit for a quarter of an hour at the small pine table and talk about anything but art history.

Sonia spoke freely and fascinatingly about Europe between the wars but about her life after she reached England in 1940 she was more reticent. She said she had spent the war near London, and gave just a hint that there might have been an intelligence connection—she mentioned Bletchley once as if she’d known the place. And that was all. Liz knew Sonia had married—Warschawsky was her married name—but she did not know what had happened to her husband and didn’t want to press, especially as Sonia seemed to sense that Liz herself did not welcome many personal questions.

It was the Easter vacation, so the Fitzwilliam café was crowded with parents and children. Finding a corner table at last, Liz went to get tea and scones. “I’ve been admiring your ring,” she said when she returned with a tray, pointing to the large oval emerald, set in silver on gold, and surrounded by old, dark petal-shaped diamonds.

“When my mother fled Russia in 1921, she left with the clothes on her back and this ring. She was so poor that she was going to have to sell it to pay her rent, but fortunately she met my father first.” She gave a light laugh. “He was French—I spoke Russian and French before I knew English.

“But enough about the past,” she said briskly, putting her cup down. “I was wondering, would you like to have supper at my house tomorrow night? I have some friends coming—they’re Russian. Well, Anglo-Russian. Like me.”

“I’d love to,” said Liz.

Sonia nodded. “Good. Now perhaps we can have a look at the Monets. Don’t look so worried—there are only four of them.”

At her hotel on Trumpington Street, Liz went to reception to ask for her room key. Behind the counter the manager, a diminutive man with a red bow tie, smiled at her. “Did your friend find you?”

“Sorry? What friend?”

“There was a lady asking for you.”

She’d told no one she was in Cambridge—not even her mother, since she could always reach Liz on her mobile. In Thames House, Brian Ackers knew, and Peggy Kinsolving and Michael Fane and possibly also DG. Geoffrey Fane in MI6 knew but that was all. Peggy was the only woman and certainly she would never call at the hotel.

“Hold on a minute,” said the man when he saw the puzzled look on Liz’s face and retreated into the back office. When he returned he was accompanied by a plump girl with hennaed hair and a silver stud adorning one side of her snub nose. She was chewing gum and looked distinctly put out. “Camilla spoke to the lady,” said the manager.

“That’s right,” she said. “About an hour ago. I told her your room number and she went up to see if you were there but you were out.”

“You didn’t give her the key?”

“No. Of course not. We’re not allowed to give keys out to anyone except the registered guest,” said Camilla huffily. The manager nodded in confirmation.

“Did she leave a message?”

Camilla shook her head. “No.” She looked quickly at her boss. “I offered but she said not to bother. She just wanted to know if you were in.”

Liz said sharply, “What did this woman look like?”

Camilla seemed to think this an odd question. “Just normal,” she said.

“Old or young? Tall or short?”

“She looked ordinary. Just, like, middling.”

“Exactly what did she say? Can you remember?”

“She said, ‘I’m looking for Miss Falk.’ That’s all.”

“Falk? My name’s Falconer.”

The girl shook her head. “No. She said Falk. I’m positive.” She added impatiently, “Because of the actor—you know,
Columbo
.”

Liz looked at the man in the bow tie. He shrugged, helpless in the face of the gum-chewing girl’s incoherence. “Is there a Miss Falk staying in the hotel?” she asked him quietly.

He went and consulted the screen on the counter. “No, there isn’t. And you are the only lady on her own.”

“Oh well,” said Liz, since it was clear from the girl’s glum face that she wasn’t going to be of further help. “Doesn’t matter.”

She took her key and went up to her room. There was a thin line between alertness and paranoia, especially in Liz’s line of work, and to stay sane it was important to keep on the right side of it. Gormless Camilla had been categorical that she had not handed out a key but nevertheless Liz opened the door cautiously and stood looking carefully at her room before going in. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed, so shrugging off her uneasiness, she went into the bathroom to get ready for the evening. It wasn’t for a second or two that she noticed that her sponge bag, which she was sure she had left on the dressing table in the bedroom, was now on the bathroom shelf. All its contents had been taken out and arranged beside it in two neat rows. Except for one thing. A bottle of mouthwash had been dropped in the bath. It had formed an unpleasant red stain.