Read The Dark Chronicles Online
Authors: Jeremy Duns
The Dark Chronicles (84 page)
She turned and smiled, and I realized I’d guessed correctly: it was the inaction that was making her antsy, the waiting around. We seated ourselves as comfortably as we could and began reading through the papers. I started by tackling Ivashutin’s strategy document again, reading it through from start to finish. I couldn’t decide if he really believed that the warmongering imperialists could be overcome by the noble Soviets in their overcoats storming through a radioactive Western Europe, or whether the document was empty rhetoric that nobody in the Kremlin took seriously. I hoped for all our sakes that it was the latter.
‘You might be interested in this,’ said Sarah, and I looked up. She pushed across a thick bound dossier and I picked it up. There was a red star in a black circle on the front, and the word ‘НЕЗАВИСИМЫЙ’ in faded type.
‘NEZAVISIMYJ’, meaning ‘independent’ – this was my file. I’d discovered the same dossier in a flat in Rome six months ago, but that version had been a lot thinner. This, then, must be the GRU’s master file, containing all the information they had on me.
I opened it up and was immediately confronted with several strips of film negatives. I held one up to the light and saw it was a photograph of me as a young man in SAS uniform, which must have been taken somewhere in the British Zone. It had been taken from some distance, and I was looking down at the ground, shielding my eyes from the sun with one arm raised. I started running through the rest of the strip. There was one of Anna, casually standing on the
steps of the clinic, smoking a cigarette, and another with me and her in the ward, presumably taken with a camera she had hidden somewhere. There were dozens of the things. Presumably they had sent a few to Sasha in London for safekeeping, because he had shown me some in March to blackmail me into continuing to serve them.
I placed them to one side, exposing a document below. The cover page bore the title ‘
APPENDIX I: RECRUITMENT OF “INDEPENDENT
”’. I turned it over and found a slim pamphlet; the edges of the pages were yellowing and torn, but the type was still legible. It was dated 12 June 1945, and was in the form of a letter from Yuri to Kuznetsov, who had then been the head of the GRU.
I met with agent LOTUS on the 6th to discuss the progress of Operation JUSTICE, the latest report on which I have enclosed with this package (Operational Letter 16/H). At the same meeting, we discussed the matter of LOTUS’s son, whom we have codenamed INDEPENDENT (see Operational Letter 14/H).
I hereby propose that we try to recruit INDEPENDENT. The reason for doing so is simple: in the coming years, he is very likely to rise rapidly through the ranks of British Intelligence. The fact that he is the son of one of our agents gives us the means with which to recruit him, and if we succeed he may prove more valuable than any of the others we have recruited into the British network to date.
I already knew that I was ‘Independent’; it seemed Father’s codename had been ‘Lotus’, and that their operation to find and execute war criminals in the British Zone of Germany had been JUSTICE. There was something disturbing about the phrase ‘the British
network to date’ – how many had been in that, and who were they?
INDEPENDENT is twenty years old and has already served with several British commando units. He is currently attached to the Allied Control Commission in Helsinki, where he is working under cover for the Special Operations Executive. He was placed there through the recommendation of LOTUS, and his performance so far has been exemplary – see my last report. LOTUS is opposed to the idea of recruiting his son, but is still afraid that we may use the compromising material we have regarding himself and BAIT. I feel confident he will be a completely willing participant in the operation.
‘BAIT’? Who the hell was that, and what was the material about them that had compromised Father? My stomach roiled as I realized that my father had never been an ideological traitor, but had been blackmailed into serving the Russians. And that despite Yuri’s claim that he was ‘a completely willing participant’, they had coerced him into trapping me, too.
The relationship between LOTUS and the target offers us a great advantage, but will have to be handled with care. LOTUS’s cover is that of a traditional right-wing member of the British upper classes and this, together with the internment of his wife for German sympathies, has led to a distance between himself and INDEPENDENT, who naturally has no idea of his father’s work for us. LOTUS has agreed that the best course would not be to try to mend
this distance, which would almost certainly prove too difficult, but instead to exploit it.
I propose a variation of the basic honey-trap operation we have used many times previously, including with LOTUS and BAIT, but with a few innovations resulting from the nature of the situation.
I took a breath and tried to clear my head. So Father had been the target of a honey trap – and presumably ‘Bait’ was his lover. And they had played this trick ‘many times’. It looked like their recruitment plans had been a lot more systematic than I or anyone else had ever considered – almost routine.
And Father, behind that cold English mask of his, had apparently known all along that I resented him for his politics and for what he had done to Mother for hers. The stern handshake, the steely glare, the lack of any show of affection – had they all been part of his cover, then? Doubtless they were built in to his upbringing, but I was shocked that he had not only been aware of my feelings towards him but had also known how to exploit them; perhaps parents knew this sort of thing instinctively. But this was nevertheless a very different man to the one I thought I’d known. It showed a level of cynicism that made me resent him anew – but then I remembered the blackmail, and another picture emerged, of a man who was utterly desperate and trapped, and who was pressured into finding a way to recruit his son into the same situation.
I wasn’t sure if I could read on. Did I need to know precisely how they’d gone about recruiting me? I didn’t let myself answer the question: my fingers turned the page anyway.
PHASE ONE.
The operation should take place in the British Zone of Germany over the next six months, and run in conjunction with Operation JUSTICE. Agents
LOTUS and KINDRED already have the list of Ukrainian traitors we suspect of hiding in the British Zone. LOTUS will contact INDEPENDENT and urgently request he come to Germany to support an operation of greatest secrecy. LOTUS has suggested invoking a direct order from Churchill, and I agree.
PHASE TWO.
LOTUS to introduce INDEPENDENT to KINDRED and inform him he is engaged in finding and liquidating war criminals. He will say they are Nazis who have killed British servicemen, rather than the scum who have killed our own agents.
I thought back to that first night in the safe house outside Lübeck, when Father had introduced me to Henry Pritchard and told me about the operation: the tiny sitting room lit by candles, Father talking about his meeting with Churchill, Pritchard standing to attention by the ramshackle wardrobe. Could I, in my wildest imaginings, have guessed that both were working for the Soviets? No, agents ‘Lotus’ and ‘Kindred’ had played their parts well – and I’d been an easy dupe.
The rest of Phase Two had taken place precisely as described: I’d helped Father trace his Nazi war criminals, unaware that they were Ukrainians who had killed Russian agents rather than British ones. And then had come the injury. Father had claimed that our final target was Gustav Meier, an SS officer who had raped and tortured members of the French Resistance, including children. All of this had been backed by forged documents he had briefly waved under my nose. Towards the end of September 1945, Father claimed to have discovered that Meier was working as a gardener near Hamburg, and we’d set off together to capture him. Naturally, it was a set-up. ‘Meier’ –
even the name was included in Yuri’s plan – was in fact a Soviet agent codenamed STILETTO for his expertise with knives, who had been brought in especially and instructed on how to cut me.
The wound we envision would be to one of the kidneys and will be very painful, but shallow and will heal within a relatively short time.
It had been
extremely
painful. Even now, I found it hard to believe it had only been a surface wound, and that I hadn’t received genuine treatment for all those months. And then Phase Three: Father and Pritchard had taken me to the Red Cross hospital just outside Lübeck, where I was soon taken into the care of a nurse codenamed COMFORT – Anna.
You will recall COMFORT from earlier operations. She has now been at this hospital for several months and her professionalism is unparalleled. Once assigned to treating INDEPENDENT, she will befriend and woo him, playing on his youthful desires and ambitions to rebel against his father and the establishment he represents. Incidentally, LOTUS assures us his son is sexually normal and will succumb to her charms. If not, we will replace her with IRINA.
So Anna was a veteran of honey traps – and they even had a back-up model, just in case I didn’t fancy her! Well, Father had been right about my appetites. They’d found a beauty any red-blooded young male would have salivated over, especially if it were her job to make him do so. I wondered who her other victims had been: other Englishmen like myself? How many?
PHASE FOUR.
COMFORT will educate the target about our beliefs and aims, presenting them in a light he is most likely to appreciate. I have already briefed her extensively on how best to do this. If we are lucky, this alone may be enough, and she may be able to recruit him directly. But, judging from previous operations and the unusual biography of INDEPENDENT, it may prove a little more difficult. If that is the case, once she is certain that he has strong feelings for her, COMFORT will reveal to INDEPENDENT that she is one of our agents, under the guise of remorse and affection for him. She will also mention my cover name at the camp, and that I am her handler.
This strategy involves a certain amount of risk, but I am confident of INDEPENDENT’s reaction – namely that he will angrily rebuff her and contact LOTUS to tell him that the British ‘operation’ has been exposed.
PHASE FIVE.
I would request a delivery of the new K4 nerve gas from Department 12 for the next part of the operation. Please send a package with the next courier from our Zone. I will administer the dose to COMFORT to induce catalepsy. Using our usual cosmetics techniques, we will then stage a death scene at the hospital, and ensure that INDEPENDENT sees with his own eyes that she has been ‘killed’.
The next part of the operation involves the death of LOTUS. If all goes to plan, INDEPENDENT
will seek an audience with his father, whom he will suspect is responsible for ordering the murder of COMFORT, due to the fact that he had recently informed him she was a foreign agent.
I have told LOTUS that the plan is for him to strenuously deny involvement to INDEPENDENT, while at the same time emphasizing that COMFORT was an enemy agent. But while I feel that plan would probably be enough to push INDEPENDENT to seek me out and offer to serve us, I do not think it would be psychologically damaging enough to sustain a long-term commitment from him. There is also the matter that LOTUS feels under substantial pressure, and is displaying predictable signs of neurosis as a result. His material has worsened lately, and in years to come he may be overlooked for promotion and have even less access to the sort of material we require.
In short, I think it is clear that INDEPENDENT is the coming man, and so propose we sacrifice LOTUS in order to guarantee his replacement by his son. So, in place of the confrontation I have outlined and rehearsed with LOTUS, I suggest that he is instead liquidated and it be made to look as though he has taken his own life. INDEPENDENT will then, I am certain, believe that his father acted through guilt at having ordered the death of COMFORT. If my calculations are correct – and I would submit that they have not yet been wrong in such matters – INDEPENDENT will then seek me out here and offer his services as our agent, and
the impact of the events surrounding his recruitment will drive him to be loyal to us in perpetuity.
Several more pages followed, but I’d got the picture. I shuffled the papers together and slid the pile back into the attaché case.
I knew a lot of it already, but hadn’t run through all the ramifications. Some of it had been circling around the edges of my consciousness, where I’d let it linger, unwilling to poke the wound. And some of it had never occurred to me at all – the idea that Yuri had killed Father, for example. I had still believed it was suicide. But it was obvious, now that I thought about it: suicide wasn’t really Father’s style. And yes, the operation had been ‘psychologically damaging’, in just the way Yuri had foreseen: I had sought him out and nursed the dual wound of Anna’s death and Father’s ordering of it for years. Not in perpetuity, though. He’d got that bit wrong – not in perpetuity.
‘Jesus!’
I looked up. The muscles in Sarah’s cheek were visible as she clenched her jaw – she was reading Ivashutin’s strategy document. She turned the paper over and stared at me. ‘Isn’t there someone else we can show this to? The Americans, or the French?’
I shook my head. ‘Nobody in the West is going to believe us – we have to make the Russians understand they’ve made a mistake.’
‘And we’re sure they have, I take it? What if there has been a chemical attack on these bases?’
‘It’s possible,’ I conceded. ‘But I think it’s just far too coincidental. There were thirty or more canisters of this precise chemical down there in 1945. If several have escaped to the surface and leaked towards the bases on the currents, I think you’d easily get this effect. Some novice sentry found a lump of the stuff that had washed ashore, picked it up and brought it into the base, after which others have touched it, too.’
‘And the B-52 flights? How do you explain them?’
