Read The Dark Chronicles Online
Authors: Jeremy Duns
The Dark Chronicles (85 page)
I couldn’t. Although I’d told both Brezhnev and Maclean that I was certain the Americans weren’t planning a strike, I was far from sure of that. I was hoping they were up to something else because I thought the mustard gas must have leaked from the U-boat. But I didn’t
know
it.
And there was one other thing bothering me. When I’d come out of hospital in April, in the fortnight before Templeton’s funeral, there had been a brief moment of panic when the North Koreans had shot down one of the Americans’ reconnaissance planes over the Sea of Japan. For a few hours, the signals had been frantic, and Nixon had placed nuclear-armed fighters in South Korea on a fifteen-minute alert to attack the North. In the end he had changed his mind, and simply resumed the reconnaissance flights instead to signal that he wasn’t going to back down. But he had nevertheless considered a nuclear strike. Could it be for some reason I didn’t know of that he was considering it again, only this time against the Soviet Union?
‘If the Americans are planning a strike, we can’t stop them,’ I said to Sarah. ‘But if they aren’t, we might be able to stop the Russians from reacting. So we have to act on the basis that they aren’t. Does that make sense?’
She smiled, and placed her hand across the table. I took it in mine, savouring the warmth of her touch. I looked into her eyes, and remembered for a moment the sweat on her skin in the boat in Sardinia. We were a long way from there now.
There was the faint sound of typing coming from the other room.
‘Let’s hope he’s ready soon,’ I said. ‘Did you find anything of interest in the papers so far?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think there was anything we didn’t already know. How about you? Was that your file?’
‘Yes.’ There was little more to say about it, or little I wanted to, anyway.
‘And what about the rest of it?’ she said, pointing to some papers poking out under the dossier I had just read. ‘Anything there?’
My stomach tightened and I pushed the other dossier aside. The document beneath was simply titled ‘Report on INDEPENDENT’. I picked it up. It was dated 20 October 1969 – just a week ago.
‘Are there any cigarettes left?’ I said to Sarah, and she found the packet and lit one for me.
I stared down at the document, and breathed in the tar that might help me get through it. It looked to have been written by Sasha, and was addressed to Yuri.
*
Esteemed Comrade,
You asked me to give my reasons in writing for bringing INDEPENDENT to Moscow. It is my view, having been his handler for nearly twenty years, that when he was recruited in 1945, INDEPENDENT strongly believed himself to be setting out on a moral crusade. As we had hoped, he applied his adolescent sense of idealism to our cause, associating his service to us with vengeance for COMFORT’s death at the hands (as he believed) of his father.
But although INDEPENDENT was able to convince himself that he was a Communist for the first few years of his work, this soon faded. He disagreed with our actions in Hungary in 1956, for instance, and on other occasions when I discussed such issues with him it was clear that he had become a believer only in the vaguest sense of the word, in a manner similar to many of our sympathizers in the West.
Due to his position and relationship with us, INDEPENDENT has long felt that he has a central role to play in the direction of political forces in the world. For him to be of
use to us, it was necessary that we sustained his belief in this delusion. However, when he was threatened with exposure in March he discovered some limited information about the nature of his recruitment, namely that COMFORT was a honey trap.
As a result, he turned against both the British and us. This entire episode has been a disaster for us and for the KGB, who I hope I am not remiss in saying acted with great malice towards us in this affair, and at great cost to the Motherland. The results of this were discussed in my previous reports.
Following the fiasco in Nigeria, which resulted in the deaths of two of our agents by INDEPENDENT’s hand, he was then targeted by a faction of neo-fascist hawks within British intelligence, whose links to covert groups in other NATO countries we have monitored for some time. Unfortunately, INDEPENDENT was not aware of our attitude towards these groups and their plans. This resulted in him nearly wrecking the hawks’ actions in Italy, which would in turn have destroyed our own long-term strategy regarding this NATO action.
As these events took place at great speed across several countries, there was no possibility for me to communicate with Centre about every development, and I was forced to make several decisions without going through the usual channels or face the possibility of more disaster. I decided that it was in the best interest of the Motherland that INDEPENDENT not make public the NATO hawks’ actions before we
had deemed it politically expedient, and so I extracted him from Italy. As he was with another British agent, SARAH SEVERN, the wife of a hawk (now deceased), I decided she too must be extracted, or we would wake up to find the incidents in question across the front pages of newspapers across the world.
But I did not make this decision solely for wider strategic reasons. Since March, INDEPENDENT has effectively run amok, and I felt we needed to capture him before he could do yet more damage. A primary consideration was that he has been serving us for over two decades, and was at this time the deputy head of the British Service. In normal circumstances, this would have been a great victory for us. However, it had already become clear that INDEPENDENT had not just stopped serving us, but was working against us. By bringing him back to Centre, I felt we would be in a position to present his service to us without his interference, when and how we judged would cause the most propaganda damage to the West.
I confess that it has not worked out as easily as I had imagined. The British have so far managed to conceal the fact that he was one of our agents, reporting in the press simply that he died on assignment in Italy in May. My initial proposal was that we simply counter this with a press conference at which INDEPENDENT would appear and read a statement revealing that he has served us since 1945. I now feel that this would be unwise, mainly because INDEPENDENT is uncontrollable. Even with
sedatives and the threat of the torture of SARAH SEVERN, for whom it is clear he has a sentimental attachment, I am not confident we would be able to control what he might say.
And there remains a wider problem: if we present his service to us to the international community, the propaganda benefit of revealing that such a senior figure in Western intelligence was an agent would be considerable in the short term, but in the longer term may cause us more damage than good. With previous British agents, the public revelation that they have served us has resulted in a pleasing level of anger from the Americans, and the British have yet to fully regain their trust as a result. In addition, the British cannot even trust themselves, and have spent much of their energy in recent years looking for more of our agents within their structures, to pleasingly unsuccessful effect.
In the case of INDEPENDENT, however, I feel that public exposure of such a senior figure in the Western intelligence structure would attract not only the attention of those within his own agency who have so far been concerned with trying to find members of our British network, but also others in Western intelligence. Some would no doubt conclude that INDEPENDENT must be one of several agents we have planted in their countries, and would investigate much more thoroughly than they have done to date. This would endanger many of our agents who are active or sleeping in the West.
As INDEPENDENT is no longer of use as an
agent, and is rather a danger to us and a drain on resources, I suggest the time has come to liquidate him. It is probably advisable to liquidate the girl, too.
I dropped the stub of the cigarette into my glass, and placed the document to one side. So they had wanted me dead, and Sarah, too. The report had been written only a week ago, so either Yuri had disagreed with Sasha’s assessment or, more likely, he hadn’t yet decided what to do about it and the current crisis had intervened.
Sasha had been right about one thing, though: I was uncontrollable. I wanted to break his fucking neck.
‘Not good, then?’ said Sarah.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not good.’
I walked to the doors leading to the balcony again. It had begun to hail, tiny hard pellets. My world and Sarah’s had been reduced to this small flat, in its way no less a prison than the one from which we’d escaped. The cramped walls and ceiling made me want to run into the streets with her. But while the air would be crisp, the sky would be grey and men with steel-toed boots and loaded rifles were looking for us both with the intent to kill. And somewhere deep underground, surrounded by marble pillars and oil paintings, the walls were closing in on Brezhnev and the Supreme Command.
Soon, with any luck, we were going to try to cross a border. Which one, though? The maritime frontier was very tightly monitored by the Navy, with patrol craft along the whole stretch. They would also have stepped up their numbers and been given instructions to watch for us. But it is never possible to check all outgoing boats from a shoreline, however heavily you patrol it. Perhaps we could find a fisherman with an outboard motor willing to take us across the water. Perhaps.
We also had to decide where along the frontier to try to cross.
The ‘attacks’ were in a part of the country that was closed off to anyone without a special pass, and would now be under complete lockdown, with hundreds, if not thousands, of military personnel there. So we would have to give that whole area a wide berth. Our best bet might be to try to reach the U-boat from the other direction – from Åland. It was a longer way around, but it had some advantages. Yuri and his colleagues might soon realize we were planning to head for the U-boat, but probably wouldn’t guess we would take such an indirect route. They would also be unable to coordinate the hunt for us, because if we managed to get into Finland they wouldn’t easily be able to control their men there, or the Finns for that matter.
It was a very big if, though. There were twelve miles of protection either side of that frontier – the
pogranichnaya polosa
, or border strip – including sentries with dogs. And even if we found a way to get past the Soviet patrols in the area, we would still have the Finns to contend with on the other side, where it was almost as heavily guarded. Despite the difficult history between the two countries, the Finns regularly handed back anyone they caught coming over the border.
Another thought that had slowly been taking shape in my mind was the question of equipment. I needed to get back down into the U-boat to find the canisters, but to do that I would have to find a way to get hold of diving gear. I knew from the war that the Germans had made sure all their U-boats had self-contained diving suits on board, complete with oxygen flasks and air purifiers, but I had to get down there in the first place. Could I break into one of the Soviets’ naval stations and steal one? It seemed a stretch. There was a naval base at Kronstadt, but that was fortified on its own island and I didn’t fancy my chances there. Perhaps I could find equipment on Åland itself? I wondered what had happened in the intervening years to Kjell Lundström, the police constable from Degerby who had helped me in 1945 – perhaps he could help me again.
And then there was the problem of what to do if I did get down
there. I was hoping it would be obvious that the canisters had leaked, and that I would be able to point this out to the Russians at their consulate in Mariehamn. But I had no idea if the Soviets still had a consulate on the archipelago – perhaps they had abandoned it in the intervening years. If so, I might have to try to reach Helsinki or Stockholm. But first I would have to find the canisters, and they might well have come loose from the U-boat and be many miles from it. I would either have to find them myself or bring the Russians close enough to them that I could take someone down there with me and force them to see the evidence for themselves…
The door to the bedroom opened and Anton emerged, his hair sticking out at even zanier angles than previously, his hands clutching a sheaf of booklets triumphantly. He was done. He spread them out on the table for our inspection – I had no way of telling, of course, but they certainly looked the part. He went through them carefully with me, explaining the purpose of each document and why I might be asked to show it, and after we had gone through it all once more I leaned over and gave him a bear hug.
‘We may never be able to repay you, but thank you.’
There was an awkward silence as he shuffled his feet. Then there was a sound at the door: three muffled knocks. We stood still and waited. A couple of seconds passed and two more raps came. Sarah walked towards the door.
‘Wait!’ I said, but she had already opened it.
Maclean was standing in the doorway, a sombre expression on his face. It took me a moment to understand why. Directly behind him stood two men: one was Smale, and the other was William Osborne.
‘Move,’ said Osborne, and Maclean jerked forward and staggered into the room, his eyes entreating me for forgiveness. The damn fool couldn’t even check for tails properly.
Osborne stepped smartly into the room. He was clutching a Browning in one chubby little paw. With the other, he motioned for Smale to shut and lock the door, which he swiftly did. I saw that Smale wasn’t empty-handed either, but instead of a gun he was carrying what looked like a black doctor’s bag.
‘Well, well,’ said Osborne. ‘Birds of a feather stick together. Sit down, all of you. Over there. Hands on your heads.’ He gestured at the space by the wall where the bed had been, beside a tottering pile of books. Maclean, Anton, Sarah and I looked at each other, then did as he’d ordered. The flat, now occupied by six people, suddenly seemed very small indeed.
Osborne walked over and looked down at us with a sneer. There was something wrong with seeing him holding a silencer: he had always been the puppet-master, not the man who got his hands dirty. He looked much fatter than I remembered, almost grotesquely so, but perhaps that was because I’d spent six months in prison while he’d been eating jam buns. He was wearing thick tortoiseshell spectacles, a pinstripe suit and even had a handkerchief in his jacket pocket. Brandishing the gun, he looked like a Punch cartoon: the banker who had decided to rob the safe.
