Spy Out the Land (30 page)

The line suddenly went silent, and she took the opportunity to switch hands – the one holding the receiver was slick with sweat. She looked out at the car and Thorpe raised his hand to
her. She raised hers back to indicate that all was well, but her throat was dry and her stomach had coiled in tight. She couldn’t see Proshin’s expression in the rear of the car, but
she felt he had played some bizarre version of the old ‘pick a card, any card’ magic trick on her, and she imagined he was smiling smugly at having pulled it off.

It may be that your superiors try to persuade you it is better if I am not interviewed at all.

Four long minutes passed before Sandy came on the line again, his tone now brisk and businesslike. ‘Right, I’ve just spoken to Harry and he’s willing to play ball.
There’s an airfield at the NATO base in Chièvres, about an hour and half from the Château. Be there at seven o’clock sharp. That’s in just over four hours, which
gives you ample time to get to the Château, make sure Proshin’s tucked up safely with Thorpe and then to head back again. You can sleep on the flight.’

‘Why don’t I just bring Proshin with me? It’s not ideal, but I can at least conduct a preliminary interview with him on the plane—’

‘Rachel, just do as I fucking say for once!’

She drew the receiver from her ear for a moment to gather herself, the blood pulsing at her temples. When she replaced it he was speaking in a more conciliatory tone.

‘I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough of the second-guessing my decisions now. This entire operation has been jeopardised.’

The phrase ‘because of you’ hung in the air.

‘But you still love me, don’t you?’ She had meant it to sound like a flirtatious joke, but her voice caught on the sentiment and it came out as more of a whimper.

‘For Christ’s sake, pull yourself together,’ he hissed. ‘Not now. We have to behave like professionals and sort this out. So don’t interview Proshin, make it clear
to Thorpe he’s not to, either – and then get on that plane at seven. Understood?’

Not now?
Yes, now!
she wanted to scream down the line at him.
Especially now.
But instead she simply said, ‘Understood,’ replaced the receiver, and walked back to
the car.

Rachel sat in the tiny observation room and stared through the one-way window at Alexander Proshin. He was seated in an armchair in the living room, looking down at his hands
clasped together in front of him. Where was the anxiety he had shown in Manning’s flat, she wondered. Had it all been an act? But then she noticed that his feet were twitching, a couple of
tremors every second. So he was still nervous, but just trying to keep it under control.

The Château was a flat overlooking the beach in Ostend. The nickname was ironic, as when the Service had bought it just after the war it had been the height of luxury, but it was now
rather grim, with flyblown lampshades, a low ceiling and stains on the carpets. It was looked after by two officers who posed as a married couple, and the husband of the team, Sawkins, a
six-foot-five officer who had trained with the SAS, was now standing outside the door of the living room with a machine-pistol by his side. His ‘wife’ was in the kitchen, washing up the
remains of coffee and an omelette Rachel had devoured on arrival. In one of the bedrooms, Manning was already asleep.

The flat was nothing to look at, but it had been given a very careful makeover by the boffins. Dozens of miniature microphones had been placed in the walls and beneath items of furniture, giving
a crisp sound to recordings. At the moment there were eight microphones within a five-foot radius of Proshin.

Rachel glanced at her watch. It was coming up to four, the fag-end of the morning. If she wanted to make the flight from Chièvres at seven, she should leave within the next hour.

But still she stood fixed to the spot. Something was very wrong, and no matter how she approached it, everything circled back to Sandy. He had repeatedly deflected her requests to go out in the
field to find Dark. Admittedly, quite a lot had gone wrong since she had, but now that the shock of it had worn off she didn’t feel it could justifiably be laid at her door. Now Dark’s
handler wanted to defect – a chance to salvage at least a small victory from the jaws of defeat – and yet Sandy had ordered her to fly back to London, not even bringing the man with
her.

It was mystifying. Troublingly so. Leaving an asset of the magnitude of Proshin behind simply to have her analytical skills on tap didn’t make sense to her. Dark was heading for Africa
now, and she didn’t see how she could help with that.

Might it be that he was simply being protective of her? Perhaps, she thought – he had warned her Dark might kill anyone who got in his way, and he had done just that, drowning Collins in a
pool of dirty water barely an inch deep.

But this didn’t feel like protectiveness. It felt more like Sandy simply didn’t want her to interview Proshin. She remembered the instructions he had given her to pass on to Thorpe
and corrected the thought: it looked like he didn’t want
anyone
to interview Proshin.

She was also perturbed by his reaction when she’d told him about the Selous Scouts, and how they looked to have been behind the kidnapping of Dark’s family. Her pet theory,
he’d sneered. She thought back to the conversation they’d had in her office, when he’d asked about her false-flag remark only to dismiss it in similarly snide terms. What was it
he’d said? ‘If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and carries Soviet weapons, it’s probably a Soviet-sponsored duck.’ She’d found it a little peculiar at the
time, but now the entire exchange rang alarm bells. It
hadn’t
been her pet theory, merely a possibility that had occurred to her, and a standard consideration in such circumstances.
His dismissal of it stank of protesting too much, and the duck joke felt forced. It looked like he had wanted to drive her away from the idea. Why? Had he known right from the start that the
kidnappers were Rhodesian? If so, how – and why hadn’t he told her? And later, when he’d found out Dark was heading for Brussels, he hadn’t wanted the Belgians to intervene,
claiming he had things ‘under control’ – what had that meant?

Most troubling of all was the prediction Proshin had made. He’d warned her that her superiors might try to dissuade her from interviewing him in Brussels, and Sandy had then done precisely
that. She could think of no good reason not to interview such a potentially valuable defector straightaway – and she could think of one very bad one. It was an absurd idea: monstrous,
unthinkable. He was Chief of the Service. But the idea had invaded her thoughts and now she found she couldn’t dislodge it and it played over and over in her head like the tattoo of a
drum.

What if Edmund Innes had been right? What if Sandy was a Soviet agent?

It would explain why he was so determined Proshin shouldn’t be interviewed. She knew from the files that Dark had done something similar, delaying the interviewing of a KGB defector who
knew about him until he could arrange for counter-measures to be put in place.

Well, there was only one way to find out, and if she was going to do it she had to do it now. She checked that the recorders were turning and left the observation room. She walked down a small
corridor and came to the door leading to the living room. She told Sawkins that he and his ‘wife’ could now clock off for the night.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She watched him walk towards the kitchen, then turned and faced the door. This was the point of no return. If she were wrong, she could kiss any idea of promotion goodbye. Indeed, whatever
happened on the other side of the door, she was almost certainly kissing goodbye to her job, and to Sandy, too. But quiet desperation wasn’t going to cut it any more – she had to
act.

She took a deep breath and opened the door. Proshin looked up in surprise as she entered and gave a laugh of seemingly genuine pleasure.

‘I am very relieved,’ he said. ‘I was starting to worry you might not keep your promise.’

She walked across the threadbare carpet to the corner of the room, where she took a folding wooden chair from beneath its dust covers. She carried it over to where Proshin was seated, unfolded
it, and seated herself opposite him. She peered into his face, thinking of the hours she had spent studying him in London, the cigarettes she had smoked down to the butts while trying to piece
together the information they’d gathered on him. The grand spymaster, Paul Dark’s handler . . .

But now she was finally face to face with him, she was disappointed. He looked like any other middle-aged Russian official. Hair cropped very close at the back and sides, stocky and squat,
wearing a poorly tailored blue serge suit. Five-o’clock shadow complemented his already greyish pallor. His eyes were perhaps the most interesting thing about him, she thought: they gave an
impression of cool intelligence, but there was something perturbing flickering in them. He reminded her of a toad seated on a lily pad, and she tried to compose her face so as not to give away her
visceral dislike. She had to find out why the hell Sandy had been so determined to stop anyone talking to this man.

‘Are we alone?’ Proshin said, breaking into her thoughts.

‘Yes. I’ve dismissed the housekeepers.’

‘What about your colleague?’ He tilted his head towards the large mirror on the wall, behind which the office was hidden.

‘There’s nobody in there.’

He stared at her intently and then leaned forward, his knees almost touching hers.

‘Can I trust you?’

His breath smelled strongly of garlic, and she leaned back in her chair fractionally. ‘I think the question here is more whether I can trust
you
,’ she said. ‘You
called the embassy to announce that you wish to defect to us having just killed one of your colleagues in the home of a British citizen. So right from the start you’ve forced us to cover up a
murder you’ve committed. Why shouldn’t we simply turn you over to the Belgian authorities? Or to the Soviet embassy?’

He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he smiled again. ‘I’m so glad Sandy Harmigan sent you here. I’m sure Mr Thorpe is perfectly competent, but I don’t think he
would have been as appreciative of what I have to tell you.’

She bristled instinctively at both names being said aloud in a Russian accent, but of course he would know about them. She knew the names of senior intelligence officers in other agencies, and
it was natural that someone of Proshin’s seniority in the GRU would know the name of their Chief and the Head of Station in a European capital. But it was disconcerting nevertheless. Coupled
with his earlier warning, it felt eerily like he had been listening to her private conversations.

‘I apologise for the inconvenience,’ he went on, sounding less like a man who had left a corpse bleeding over a parquet floor and more like a British Rail driver announcing a delay.
Perhaps that was where he’d picked up the expression, she thought. ‘It wasn’t my intention to cause trouble for you. Shall we start again?’ He extended a paw of a hand for
her to shake. ‘Alexander Proshin. But you can call me Sasha.’

‘Sarah Severn.’

She wasn’t sure what reaction the name would elicit, but nothing immediately registered on his face. He simply replaced his hand on his lap. She decided to press.

‘I’ve read the memorandum you wrote about Miss Severn in 1969. I presume you were referring to her, anyway, and that she really is dead?’

Proshin shifted in his chair. ‘Yes,’ he said finally, his voice barely above a whisper. ‘But this was my father’s doing, not mine. A very regrettable matter, I am sorry
to say. When she became involved with Paul Dark, her fate was effectively sealed.’

‘But in the report you said you had killed her. Did you lie then or are you lying now?’

He clasped his hands together. ‘I was lying in the report. This was to protect my father’s good name.’

‘By taking the blame for it yourself?’ Proshin didn’t respond. ‘You also claimed that you killed Dark. Again, why did you lie?’

He sighed, thinking of the cross-examination he’d gone through in Moscow the day before. ‘At the time I was convinced that I
had
killed him. My radio operator, Cherneyev,
felt his pulse and assured me Dark was dead. He was wrong. Cherneyev is the man I shot tonight. What have you done with his body?’

‘How nice of you to take an interest. Cremation. Let me see if I follow what you are telling me. This Cherneyev knew you lied about Dark being dead six years ago, so you killed
him?’

Proshin flinched. ‘No. That is not it at all. But there are more important subjects for us to discuss. I must—’

‘Mr Proshin, I’m afraid I do need an explanation for why you murdered this man.’

He sighed again, then nodded and held up the palms of his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Yes, I will answer. The fact are like this: I recently came under suspicion in Moscow. I
realised I had only one choice: to defect at once. I had a chance to do this because I was sent here to find and kill Dark, accompanied by Cherneyev. This was the only way I could escape him to
reach you.’

‘By killing him? There were easier ways, surely? You could have lost him somewhere or simply made an excuse, then jumped in a taxi to our embassy.’

Proshin shook his head. ‘Cherneyev was
spetsnaz
– special forces – and he was under orders not to let me out of his sight. I had no choice.’

‘What were you under suspicion of in Moscow?’

‘I have been under surveillance for some months, I do not know why. But yesterday Ivashutin’s chief investigator accused me to my face of being a British agent. Once such an idea is
uttered, it is impossible to escape, believe me. It follows you wherever you go, it crawls its way into everything.’

Rachel wrinkled her nose, unimpressed. ‘And yet they let you travel to the West.’

‘Yes, but this was my chance to prove my loyalty, by finding Paul Dark. They evidently felt that Cherneyev’s watch on me would be sufficient. In most circumstances, it would have
been, but I had no other options. I had to choose, as you say, between the devil and the deep blue sea. It will now take some time for Moscow to realise he is dead and send some other dogs to hunt
me down. But by then I very much hope they will be too late and that you will have taken me from here and secured me a new life under a new name in England.’