Spy Out the Land (24 page)

‘I think I know why Dark has gone to Brussels,’ she said.

‘Excellent. What have you found?’

She smiled, despite herself, at the flattery. ‘Well, he’s been there once before, but it was nearly fifteen years ago and it was a very brief diplomatic mission, smoothing relations
with the Sûreté after one of our agents was caught trying to frame a government minister in a honey trap.’

‘I remember that. Johnson, wasn’t he called? Quite a palaver.’

She nodded. ‘We looked at every scrap of paper about it in the files, but it looks like a dead end. So I approached it from another angle, trying to put myself in Dark’s shoes now.
He doesn’t know who’s taken his family, but we know from the Finns that he’s convinced they were African. So if I were him, I’d want to start by finding out more about that.
But he’s at a serious disadvantage. He was always a Soviet expert – he knows bugger all about Africa. In fact, it turns out he has only visited the continent twice: Egypt when he was a
child, and Nigeria in 1969.’

‘The Wilson incident.’

‘Yes. And when he was in Lagos then, the Head of Station was none other than Geoffrey Manning. Who moved to Brussels three years ago.’

Harmigan rolled his eyes at the mention of the name. ‘Christ! That crank. But would Dark know about his new mission in life?’

Rachel took her bag from her shoulder and drew out a single piece of paper. She unfolded it and passed it to Sandy, who eyed it sceptically.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘About halfway down,’ she said, unable to keep the glint of triumph from her eyes. ‘It’s a translation by BBC Monitoring of a documentary about Manning, broadcast by
Swedish radio last year. Conducted in his flat in Brussels.’

Harmigan walked over to the armchair and seated himself in it, crossing his legs, then started reading the paper. Rachel watched nervously.

‘It’s the country’s most listened-to programme—’

Harmigan raised a hand. Thirty seconds passed before he looked up at her. He was smiling.

‘Well done. I knew I could rely on you, my dear. Yes, this is it. He must have heard it and thought “Hello!” And now he’s remembered, and off he’s gone. Very well
spotted. Now let’s think. Actions.’ His eyes travelled around the room as though seeking inspiration from it. ‘We need to send another signal to Brussels right away. Tell Thorpe
to wait for Collins, and as soon as he arrives to drive him straight to Manning’s – is he still at this address?’

Rachel gave a small nod.

‘Good. Tell Thorpe to hold back himself, though. I don’t want the Station directly involved in this.’

She nodded again, but didn’t move or otherwise respond. The moment stretched out between them. Finally, she glanced over at the bookshelf.

‘I had a look at your memoir while I was waiting for you.’

He tilted his head and smiled. ‘Oh? Awful load of crap, I’m afraid. The film was rather better.’

‘There’s a photograph in it of you with Tom Gadlow.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s at a training school in Malaya. You never told me you’d worked with him in the Far East.’

He smiled again, but now more coldly. ‘No. I haven’t told you lots of things about my life, I’m sure. It’s hardly a secret, as you can see. It’s been public
knowledge since that book was published in 1961.’ He tilted his head back and examined her. ‘And I’m not sure I much like your tone, my dear.’

She stared at him, weighing his own tone. He didn’t appear nervous, but then it would take a lot to catch Sandy off guard. He was the definition of unflappable.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But you can see why—’

‘I’ve told you before to resist this temptation of seeing conspiracies behind every corner. There was no reason to tell you this. None. I was briefly in SOE with Philby during the
war, too. And Dark, for that matter. So was half the Service. You can play that sort of connect-the-dots all day long, but the result is you’ll conclude that everyone is some sort of double
agent.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Edmund went barmy pursuing that sort of thinking. I suggest you steer clear unless you want to end up in the sabbatical game, too.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘Getting carried away.’

He gave a curt nod. ‘Accepted. Now can you get back to the office and send that signal to Brussels? We don’t have time to mess around on this. Dark is due to arrive –’ he
checked his watch – ‘within the next forty-five minutes.’

‘I’m on my way,’ she said. ‘But aren’t you putting a lot of faith in this Collins chap? What if Dark gets away from him?’

Harmigan cocked his head and sighed. ‘I imagine I’ll consider involving the Station if it comes to that. But let’s not go through this again, Rachel. I told you why I need you
here—’

‘Think about it, Sandy!’ He flinched, and she realised it had come out more aggressively than she’d meant. She tried again, lowering her voice. ‘Think about it.
Dark’s desperate to find out who took his family. He evidently believes he can get some answers from Manning. He’s a crank, yes, but a well-informed one. Dark will leave Brussels the
moment he has his take from Manning and head for wherever it indicates. So let’s think a step ahead. Say he manages to do that without Collins stopping him. To figure out where he’s
gone and why, we’ll need to find out what it was he got from Manning. Are you sure you can rely on this Collins to do that?’

Harmigan closed his eyes to think. If it had been anyone else making the argument, he’d have agreed at once – she was right. He needed a back-up option: someone who could debrief
Manning if necessary and who had all the background on Dark at their fingertips. She was the best person for the job, but if there were any chance she might run into Dark . . . He realised even as
the thought formed that resisting the idea was futile. This was no time for sentimentality – there were far greater issues at stake. There was an element of risk, yes, but he hadn’t
become Chief without a fair amount of gambling and, besides, she
wanted
to be in the field again. She was practically begging him to give her the chance.

‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Go. Drive to Northolt now and I’ll ring and tell them to get you in the air as soon as you arrive.’ He added, almost as an
afterthought, ‘But please, be bloody careful.’

She adjusted her bag and he escorted her out – the meeting room door was now firmly shut, she noticed – and they said goodbye soberly and without any emotion, as though Celia were
watching them. Perhaps she was, Rachel thought.

She walked across the street and unlocked her car. As she squeezed in behind the wheel a picture emerged in her mind, as though released by her having left the house. It floated in her
consciousness like a three-dimensional tableau: Tom Gadlow’s body splayed out at the bottom of the garden in Kuala Lumpur, his eyes rolled up into his head.

Saturday, 23 August 1975, Moscow

Colonel Sasha Proshin of the GRU’s Second Chief Directorate sat with his hands on his lap, staring at the small tear in the corner of the baize-topped desk. It was
shaped, he thought with sudden clarity, precisely like a miniature sea-horse – he could even make out the serrated shape of a mouth in the far north of the tear before it joined the cloth. He
remembered the real sea-horse he’d found on the beach at Sukhumi that summer with his father when he was – how old? He must have been eleven.

Proshin had never been in this room before, but was unsurprised that it was decorated in the usual over-the-top manner, with a crystal chandelier hanging from the high ceiling, dark red
wallpaper and a massive baize-covered desk in the centre of the room. The chair he was seated in was preposterously ornate, with veneer marquetry spiralling across its back and armrests plated in
red leather and canted with shiny gold tacks. But despite the room’s stagy grandiosity it had very poor ventilation, and his nostrils were filled with the tang of the sweat of the two other
men in the room, unsuccessfully masked by the smell of cologne. The scent seemed rather more delicate than the usual foul stuff one found at GUM, so he guessed someone had been on a trip to the
West and brought back presents as
blat
for the big guns. He wondered who, and where they had been – Paris? How he missed Paris.

Directly opposite him was seated General Ivashutin, the head of the GRU, barrel-chested, staring glassily ahead. To Ivashutin’s left sat Borzunov, head of the agency’s foreign
counter-intelligence directorate, a small-shouldered man with a deceptively gentle demeanour. Although it was being presented as an informal meeting, complete with a large samovar on the table and
painted porcelain cups, Proshin was anxious. Ivashutin and Borzunov’s expressions were inscrutable, but something about the setup reminded him of a tribunal and he knew that at any moment he
might find himself fighting for his career, or his life.

That was, if it hadn’t already been decided. A few years ago he had been severely reprimanded when old Victor Kotov, the security chief of his directorate, had been discovered passing
documents to the British, some of which he confessed to having stolen from the safe in Proshin’s office. Proshin himself had eventually been cleared of any involvement, but it had been a very
unpleasant few months and he knew that the black mark would forever remain on his file. As for being made a general, well, it had been made plain to him that that was out of the question.

He was now, he knew, never more than a step away from being disgraced. He had a surveillance team of three tracking his movements, and a listening post was stationed above his flat. His greatest
fear was of being slipped a dose of the new psychotropic drug that had been developed by the scientific directorate. While it wasn’t quite the ‘truth serum’ beloved of late-night
spy films, it came alarmingly close, transforming you into an eager-to-please blabbermouth within minutes. It had no taste, colour or odour and, terrifyingly, subjects were left with little or even
no recollection of having been under its influence. Proshin had come across it a few months earlier in the case file of a dangle they’d sent to French intelligence who, after a decent
interval, had been ‘kidnapped’ back to Moscow. On arrival at headquarters, the agent had been debriefed about everything he had learned in Paris, then taken to a safe house to be
awarded a medal in secret. After a sombre ceremony, his colleagues had toasted him with a bottle of Kubanskaya. The freshly minted hero had eagerly drunk up, not realising that his glass alone had
been prepared in advance. An hour later he had been sprawled out on one of the armchairs in the living room of the safe house talking about how the French had persuaded him to confess he was a
plant and turned him. He had been executed a few days later.

For Proshin, this incident was more horrifying than all the stories of rats being piped into cells in the Lubyanka. For one, he knew it to be true, having read the transcript of what the agent
had said under the influence of the drug. But it was also the idea of it, the principle. Like all GRU officers, he had become used to living under constant surveillance, watching his every move and
utterance. The sole surviving area of freedom was his mind, and the knowledge that this could also be breached, and without his ever even being aware it had happened until it was too late, chilled
him to his core.

‘Alexander Stepanovich,’ said Borzunov, and Proshin looked up with a guilty start. ‘We’ve asked you here to clear up some discrepancies in the record of one of your
agents.’

He shifted in his seat. ‘I will of course do my utmost to assist in any way, comrades.’

Borzunov nodded, somehow contriving to make even that tiny gesture seem sarcastic. ‘We would like to talk to you about INDEPENDENT. I’ve just been reviewing your handling of his
case, for reasons that will soon become clear.’

Proshin stiffened. So he hadn’t been imagining it – his apprehension was wholly justified. Try as he might, he could think of no good reason why they would summon him to discuss Paul
Dark on a Saturday evening.

The samovar was singing, a long note that to Proshin’s ears sounded like a cry of despair, and Borzunov poured three cups and passed them round. Proshin dutifully took a sip and for a
moment forgot himself in the richness of the flavour, a mix of wood-smoke and pine cones. It was one thing he had never understood in all his years in London – how the English could possibly
think the weak concoction they drank deserved the name of tea.

Borzunov also took a sip, then glanced down at the bulky dossier open in front of him.

‘Between June 1954 and March 1969, you operated as the case officer for this agent. Is that correct?’

‘Yes, comrade.’

‘And how frequently did you meet with him?’

Proshin was sure there was a trap secreted somewhere in the question, but he answered it honestly.

‘Usually once a month, but there were some unscheduled contact breaks.’

Borzunov replaced his cup on the desk. ‘So that would make – allowing for such breaks – well over a hundred and fifty meetings with him. Would you say you grew to know him well
during that time?’

What a question, thought Proshin. Yes, he’d come to know Paul Dark. He had been his confessor, his chess partner, his taskmaster – and, finally, his executioner. But the question
wasn’t a sincere one, and he’d be a fool to treat it as such. He was now certain he was being led into an ambush. If he denied he had known Dark well, he would be admitting he had been
an incompetent case officer who hadn’t managed to get close to his agent despite running him for nearly fifteen years. But if he claimed he had got to know him well, Borzunov might just as
easily accuse him of being incompetent for having failed to foresee Dark’s subsequent actions. He thought for a moment before settling on a line that might sidestep both pitfalls.

‘I think I got to know him as well as one can with such a man.’

Almost as if he were a cuckoo clock stirring into motion at the top of the hour, Ivashutin abruptly cocked his head and leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table. ‘What does that
mean?’ he asked brusquely. The two of them were playing off against each other, Proshin thought – it was straight out of the interrogation manual.