Spy Out the Land (32 page)

Rachel took this in, absorbing its implications. It made sense. It explained why the papers Kotov had taken from Proshin’s safe and photographed had included documents that had been seen
by Gadlow. The pieces of the puzzle were slowly fitting together, but in a horrifying way. She registered, as if it were happening to someone else, a crawling sensation along her forearms. She
closed her eyes, gathering her thoughts, then opened them again and looked at Proshin.

‘What intelligence did Gadlow provide about this, exactly?’

‘He informed us that he had been recruited into this faction when he worked in the Far East after the war.’

‘In Malaya,’ she said dully, fearing she knew what was coming next.

‘Yes. Gadlow had been in Singapore during the war, with your military intelligence. A “stay-behind” group, as they were known. But the Japanese invaded before they were ready
and he was stranded in the jungle with his cell until 1945, when they were all taken out by submarine. That was when it happened, in the jungle. He was working alongside Malayan Communists against
the Japanese and he became very close to them. By the time the war had come to an end he was a committed Communist, and when he returned to London he approached us, through an attaché at the
embassy. Then in 1948 you will remember that the Malays turned against the British. The same guerrillas Gadlow had trained and befriended in the war had now become the enemy. After your High
Commissioner was assassinated, he and several other British operatives were sent back into the jungle to fight them, now helped by . . . the Senoi Praaq.’

He said the last words as though he were pulling a rabbit from a hat. She looked at him, perplexed.

‘
Safe Conduct
,’ he prompted her with a smile. ‘Harmigan’s memoir. You’ve read it, I presume.’

She felt her neck muscles tensing. ‘Yes, a few years ago. What of it?’

‘Perhaps you remember that the last chapter but one is about his work alongside the Senoi Praaq.’

She looked at him blankly. Proshin straightened his shoulders as he took this in.

‘I see. It was published with a lot of restrictions, of course, but for us it has been an extremely valuable text for many years. The Senoi Praaq were an anti-Communist resistance army
made up of native Malay tribesmen. The British had to remain in camps in the jungle because of their conspicuous appearance, while the Senoi Praaq went into the villages to buy food and supplies
and to gather intelligence.’

Rachel nodded. It rang a vague bell. She felt something give way in her stomach, and a sense of shame and anger at herself for having missed part of the puzzle. Details of Sandy’s secret
life had been hidden in plain sight all this time and she hadn’t even considered it.
It’s hardly a secret . . . It’s been public knowledge since that book was published in
1961.
Of course the Soviets would have pored over every word of his memoir! Had she not looked more closely for fear of what she might find? If only she’d taken the blasted thing when
she’d had the chance, instead of returning it to the bookshelf. She wondered for a moment if there might be a copy somewhere in the safe house, but decided she didn’t have time to
search for it.

She turned back to Proshin. ‘How well do you remember that book?’

He scratched at an eyebrow. ‘Very well, I would say. In our directorate, all new officers are examined on its contents within their first six months, and I often write the questions for
this test. We provide them with a specially prepared Russian version, but I have read it in English several times.’

‘There’s a photograph in it. It shows Harmigan and a couple of other men in some sort of training establishment in Malaya. One man is Gadlow, the other is an Asian, I suppose one of
these Senoi . . .’

‘Praaq.’

‘Yes. Do you know who that man is?’

Proshin shook his head, but Rachel realised the moment the words had left her lips that she had answered her own question.

The waiter.

Of course, the bloody waiter from the party in Kuala Lumpur, walking past her on the grass like butter wouldn’t melt. He was the man in the photograph with Sandy. She thought of the
photograph again, and recalibrated. No, the waiter was too young, but the resemblance was too close. He must be related to the man in the photograph in some way. Had Gadlow recognised him, perhaps,
the man who had come to deliver his death? Or perhaps in the darkness, in a very different environment years later, and in his own desperation to escape, he hadn’t.

‘What do the Senoi Praaq have to do with fascists? What’s the connection?’

‘Not the Senoi Praaq, but the British who trained them. Gadlow was among them, but most were of course extreme anti-Communists. This was a difficult time for him, especially as we lost
contact for several months. But soon he discovered that there was a secret group within the British force. He gradually earned their trust, and they invited him to join. Over the years, the group
expanded and became more influential.’

‘How?’

‘The members assist each other in their careers, like the Freemasons, or Etonians or other groups. This was how Gadlow was appointed Head of Station, for example. But the main purpose is
to protect their own fascistic interests.’

She sighed. ‘And you actually believe this?’

Proshin nodded. ‘Yes, I do. Four agents told us about it, and I have reviewed all the intelligence. First, Philby, who I admit may have been joking, as you suggest. But sometimes the truth
is revealed in jest. Then Gadlow, as I have just explained. Then our agent Pritchard, who managed to infiltrate the group in the early sixties. Then Paul Dark, who found evidence that some of the
most senior members of your service were working in this way, alongside similar groups in other countries. Finally, Gadlow’s own fate sealed it.’

‘
Gadlow’s
fate?’

‘Yes. He felt that his knowledge of this faction would protect him. He called it his insurance policy. “If they ever come for me, Sasha, I have my insurance.” This is what he
used to say to me.’

Rachel looked at him with horror, as the impression of Gadlow, even with the tinge of a Russian accent, was striking. He had to at least have met the man.

‘He often spoke of it,’ Proshin went on. ‘He was convinced that if he were ever exposed as working for us, his information about this group’s members and activities would
be a very strong bargaining tool.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Now Gadlow’s insurance policy has become mine. He never received the opportunity to test it, of course, because someone made
sure that he was killed before he returned to London to tell anyone.’

She stood again, partly so he couldn’t see the expression on her face, and circled around the chair, tempering her breathing as she thought through what he was saying. She turned back to
face him, leaning over the chair.

‘How do you know
I’m
not part of this faction?’

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But I am taking an educated guess.’ He reached into his jacket and she froze for a moment, trying to remember how thoroughly she’d
frisked him and wondering if she could have missed a gun or some other weapon. But instead he brought out what looked to be a cigarette, which he passed to her.

As she took it, she realised it was a piece of paper that had been rolled tightly into a narrow tube and secured with a strip of tape. She tore off the tape and it uncoiled, nearly leaping from
her fingers. It was two pieces of paper, in fact. The first was a copy of a message typed in Russian, the second was in English. She read the latter:

A list of around thirty names followed. Rachel barely took them in, her eyes swimming. She looked up at Proshin.

‘When did Gadlow give you this?’

‘He passed it to his case officer in Bangkok in February 1958, through a dead drop. The original message was of course encrypted using a one-time pad. This is the decrypt and the Russian
translation of it, both copied down by me directly from his file, which I had access to when I was running him from the GRU station in Kuala Lumpur in late 1969.’

‘But you could simply have fabricated this,’ she said. ‘Typed it out at your desk in Moscow.’

Proshin unclasped his hands. ‘That is true, of course. But I have not. Listen to what I have said, read what is written, and judge for yourself. It is genuine.’

She looked down at the note again, taking the names in one by one. In the intervening years, several had become Service old hands, one of them even briefly serving as Chief. He and a couple of
the others were now dead. She recognised one name as that of a journalist at the
Daily Telegraph
, another from
The Times
. Three were backbench Conservative politicians who she
knew held hard-right views. But could Moscow know that, too? Easily enough, surely. And if so, they could use it. The Soviets were avid propagators of precisely this sort of disinformation, and
Proshin could be part of an operation to discredit all these people, either wittingly or unwittingly.

But she didn’t think so, in her bones. Something deep within her told her it was just as he said, and that one night in 1958 Tom Gadlow had written this down and placed it in a dead drop
in Bangkok. It was partly because she knew of previous groups along these lines. In the thirties, there had been The Nordic League and The White Knights of Britain and Mosley’s ‘dining
society’, The January Club. Groups with a similar bent had appeared sporadically since the war, most recently fuelled by fears that the Labour Party was penetrated by Communist agents and
would lead Britain into anarchy. Rachel was only an occasional visitor to the notoriously macho basement bar of Century House, but even so it had been impossible to miss in the last few years that
many of the older officers had very right-wing views, and on several occasions she’d sat through whisky-fumed rants bemoaning the loss of the colonies or advocating the need for a military
reserve in the event of society breaking down.

So the existence of such a group wasn’t implausible. Proshin’s claim that it
controlled
the Service had seemed absurd to her, but even that now didn’t seem as unlikely
as it had done a few minutes earlier. This was because one name on Gadlow’s list appeared to her eyes to be written in bolder ink than the others: Sandy Harmigan. As Chief of the Service he
was an obvious candidate for such a smear, but could he be a fascist? He was right wing, of course, a Conservative through and through, but nothing more sinister than that as far as she knew. And
yet it made sense. Snatches of conversation over the years came back to her, the way he had rolled his eyes at certain remarks, or let others pass . . .

And then there was Celia’s inclusion. David Meredith had been her first husband, and she had inherited his mining fortune after his death in a car crash. Rachel had a sudden vision of
Celia standing at the door of the house in Mayfair, the slash of red at her mouth and the silver necklace flashing around her throat. At the time, the tip of the pendant she had worn had reminded
her of the nib of a pen, but it had been thicker than that. The front section of her scalp tingled as she realised that it much more closely resembled the head of a spear.

It was an Auntie Hannah moment, but she took no pleasure from it. And it immediately raised new questions in her mind. Was the pendant a talisman of some sort, perhaps a private signal used to
identify her to other members of the group? Or a brandishing of status? Perhaps Celia had taken over her husband’s role as leader of the group. If so, that might be why she had been present
at the meeting with Harry Bradley. She hadn’t been acting as Sandy’s aide or errand girl – she ran the whole bloody show. And perhaps her former husband’s financial
interests in Africa still needed protecting.

The thought reminded her of something else in the message and she glanced back up at Proshin. ‘What do they need financing for? What are they spending it on?’

‘Operations. Unofficial ones that serve their political purposes, and which they execute through deniable partners. They have framed us or our allies for several terrorist atrocities in
Western Europe, for example. A few years ago, they tried to make it appear that Paul Dark wanted to kill your prime minister. Perhaps you know of this already.’

She nodded dully. That supposed assassination attempt in Nigeria. She guessed that Sandy had held back the information on that from her for the same reason he had held it from Wilson: any
mention of it in its immediate aftermath would have led to it being thoroughly investigated, with potentially dire consequences for the conspirators. But six years later, it was a fair bet that
while Wilson would be momentarily furious to learn he had been in danger, his anger wouldn’t burn intensely enough to set up an inquiry into such ancient history, especially with the culprit
apparently a traitor on the run. Presumably, the file Sandy had given Wilson to read had been doctored to blame it on Dark.

She closed her eyes, blocking out the room and Proshin and urging herself to think of an alternative explanation. Start again, she thought. Let’s say it’s true, all of it. Does it
hold together? Gadlow joined this group as a Soviet agent, and planned to cash in his ‘insurance policy’ if exposed. That held, she thought. Facing a life sentence for treason, it was
plausible he would have tried to bargain by dropping the bombshell that a far-right faction was working in the upper reaches of the Service, and that Sandy was its leader. But how would Sandy have
reacted? The moment she had shown him the documents proving Gadlow was a Soviet agent, he would have realised the problem. She tried to imagine what his thought processes must have been. First,
horror that his group had been penetrated in this way, which meant that Moscow knew all about it. But that must have paled into insignificance at the thought of what could happen if Gadlow managed
to tell anyone important about it. Anyone not in the group, that was.