The Oktober Projekt (24 page)

Nick crossed the road still unsure of what he would find,
wondering how Rossan had arranged his clearance. From around the corner an old
Ford truck weighed down by scrap clung lopsided to the bend; a mongrel dog
barking and snapping at its back wheels as the mud flaps dug into the road.
Pushing along the path, Nick counted five cameras tracking his arrival under a
neat sign instructing visitors that this was the base of a registered charity
for African orphans. On the steel door a rebellious hand proposed that charity
should begin at home, along with the usual graffiti in many styles declaiming less
serious hates, and at the centre of it all, a rusty shadow where a heavy
padlock and chain had hung. There was a bell too, with years of Ministry of
Works paint covering the original brass that Nick did not ring; instead he
provided his details into an intercom, watched over by a stern camera lens.

As a strong set of locks clicked open Nick went straight into a
musty porch where a pair of Ministry of Defence police officers, both carrying
Heckler & Koch’s MP5A3s waited to receive him.

‘You know the procedure, sir,’ the senior of the two called
Berry announced, escorting Nick through into the hall.

In a practised routine, almost a ceremony, Berry walked Nick in
silence through a beamed hall stacked with artefacts from a different more
recent unfought war. Respirators, body bags and boxes of tags lying alongside
mobile cleansing stations, stored now Nick supposed, for the next great threat,
another colder war perhaps? At a door marked WARDEN Berry applied his keys to
the three locks, waving Nick in. Going down a wide set of concrete steps Nick
paused at the bottom, again supplying his name and authorisation at a modern
bunker door. Stepping through the hatchway, Nick was met by another two
Ministry of Defence police officers with their Sig Sauer P230s neatly holstered
and not a smile between them.
 

‘Your archive officer will be along shortly, sir,’ one of them
informed Nick, as a vault sized door swung closed.

Nick’s guide to Service history was a sturdy woman named
Sabden. In her late forties, she had the archivist’s wary acceptance of
outsiders; her thick permed hair speckled grey, her serious reading glasses on
a cord around her neck discouraged frivolous enquiries. She wore a thick green
hand knitted cardigan over a ruffled blouse, black trousers and wore
no-nonsense flat shoes that accentuated her aura of having devoted herself to
inflicting order on the chaos of the past.

‘Files?’ she barked, setting off down a corridor with buzzing
light tubes matched by the hum of the air-conditioning.

‘Latvian operations between 1970 and 1990,’ Nick said, hurrying
on behind, offering a wide chronological span to disguise his main purpose.

At measured intervals branch corridors fed off into different
levels and sectors designated alphanumerically, though in places Nick could
still make out designations of Second World War provenance.

‘This
is
available on
Chronos,’ she pointed out, turning down another corridor, B12-C4, above a
stencilled arrow providing direction to WAR PLANNING.

‘I know,’ said Nick and left it at that. Not wanting to explain
that if he searched the electronic database, senior officers would be able to
run a check on who had been logged onto the system and what had been accessed.
And that thought Nick, posed too much of a risk considering Aubrey-Spencer’s
conviction that Moscow had been given open access to the Service’s systems.

Pulling up abruptly at a door marked COMMAND OFFICE, she
instructed Nick to wait inside while she went to collect his material. There’d
been no attempt to cater for the modern reader; for the large room smelling
slightly dank, still contained its Second World War paraphernalia, a telephone
exchange down one wall with a teleprinter stationed at the far end. Rows of
tables held school chairs with canvas backs and seats; above each table, a
green metal shade housing a single bulb, and suspended by chain, a small
blackboard detailing each table’s wartime responsibility carefully written in
chalk capitals. Nick picking a table at random, and quite unaware of any irony,
sat under a blackboard specifying CO-ORDINATED RESPONSE.

In twenty minutes Sabden was back, pushing a trolley stacked
with files.

‘Do not detach any sheets, do not lean on the pages and crease
them,’ she said irritably. ‘If you require further assistance, I shall be sat
over there,’ she added, indicating with a very straight finger, a wooden desk
already stocked high with files.

So off Nick went, turning page after page of Latvian operations
that somehow had been compromised, curtailed or cut-off before they’d even got going,
trawling them all for a reference to the Oktober Projekt. Names of officers
some dead, some retired, flooded off the pages. How long he sat there he
couldn’t tell, so thoroughly absorbed had he become. And it was at this
particular instance, Nick realised, in the solitude of this Second World War
bunker as he unwound and recovered the thread of each and every trail, that the
Latvian operations underwent a subtle change. Nothing so distinct to put his
finger on, no discernible name leaping out at him, a definite direction or
single clear fact that screamed ‘fixed’; yet a change nonetheless in how the
operations had been handled came through with the sole purpose of burying
Operation Windfall.
 

At that moment he’d a clear impression that he had broken a
hidden code, a dissenter who has somehow questioned absolute trust. But while
he was amongst these ghosts of previous operations, any feeling of victory, of
having an end in sight did not trouble Nick. Only once more did Nick require
Sabden’s help; meekly requesting if she could bring him a CO8 file on Juris
Valgos, which he knew, as he waited for it to arrive, that it would be very
thin as he had compiled it himself. What Nick didn’t expect to find was the
number of retrievals its jacket recorded, six in the past month.
 

‘Visitors from the eighth floor,’ Sabden told him, not even
raising her head.

Back at his table Nick unwound the treasury tag on the file
belonging to ‘Ivars Skriveski’, the Lat he was supposed to have murdered; real
name Juris Valgos, codename THORN, logged and recorded by Nick’s own very hand
as a potential talent spotter. Slowly Nick went through each of the contact
records, personal details and glanced briefly at his own signature at the
bottom of each sheet. A paper clip held a number of grainy black and white
surveillance photographs together. On each image, taken as standard procedure
when a Service agent is resettled, Nick spent the same amount of time. Studying
them intently, going over the features of a Latvian who Gav had employed years
ago in Riga; Juris Valgos stared blankly back at him, the same look, the same
angry eyes he knew from numerous meetings in dingy London bars. There was a
second section on friends and relatives and here Nick found the details on
Ingrid. Ingrid, how could Nick have forgotten her? Not Russian or Latvian, but
a rough and ready escort that he’d only seen from afar during routine
surveillance.

In the same way that any historian embarks on a journey into
the past, Nick realised that he was not alone; a dialogue between past and
present had already been set in motion. All he had to do was listen.

• • •

No one could ignore Andrejs Valgos.
Standing behind a row of cellar railings with an assortment of plastic cups and
an odd beer can marked extra strength punched through the rusty points, a faded
sign was more or less hanging over his head; TWILLER FOR QUALITY MEAT. The ‘F’
and ‘M’ had slipped down, but Valgos didn’t seem bothered by the rearranged
message. He had blood on his hands and smears of it on his white butcher’s
coat. Pushing solemnly at pieces of discarded market litter with his feet, he
struck his final wholesale deal of the afternoon, his bloated face a patchwork
of colour and glimpses of past emotions and Nick held back until Valgos’
customer moved off.

‘I want to talk to you about Juris,’ Nick said, watching
Valgos’ face rise and stiffen, the muscles in each cheek brace. Valgos stopped
writing in a notebook, his reddened hands locked into each other for
protection. Stepping forward his weight on his left foot, Andrejs hit Nick with
a fierce right hook splitting his lip, spilling Nick to the ground.

That’s okay, Nick thought, wiping the blood away with the back
of his hand getting to his feet, I can understand he’s angry, he thinks I’ve
murdered his brother.

‘Whatever they told you, I didn’t do it,’ said Nick.

‘I don’t do no more talk. You want talk, you go find my sister
she talk about Juris all day. I got business to run, got that.’

‘Juris was murdered on Moscow’s orders,’ said Nick bluntly, not
prepared to move, letting the information sink in.

‘Who say?’

‘I do.’

‘Me, I don’t have no involvement with Russians, got that,’ he
cried, as if he needed to start by refuting allegations.

‘That’s fine.’

‘If you sure, come into office and we talk.’ Valgos tossed back
his dark head and walked off, a plodding shuffle in both feet.

The office was a cabin nailed up out of plywood sheets,
proclaiming Twiller & Sons painted unevenly above a door neither of Valgos’
sons would ever walk through. After Nick followed him inside, Valgos hammered a
rubber wedge under the door with the heel of a boot. He dropped his notebook
and pencil into separate coat pockets clotted a deeper brown. When he frowned,
folds of skin deepened around his nose and to the side of his mouth.

‘Did Juris mention anything about being contacted recently by
any of our people, or anyone from overseas?’ Nick asked, propped against a
tatty trucker’s map of major trunk routes, his lip throbbing as it swelled.
There were no windows and the other walls were crowded with invoices and bills
stamped ‘Final Demand’.
             

Taken off guard Valgos shook his head, everyday he prepared
himself for another crushing blow despite Irka, his second wife, going to
church each morning to pray nothing more would happen. With Andrejs first wife
losing two sons, Irka herself never able to become a mother, she saw everything
as a punishment for an unknown family sin and at any moment, God would send
another disaster. Valgos accepted her pious reliance on fate, making enough space
for religion to take over. What did he mind? Running like a dog in the night,
changing addresses, moving to a different country, he lived with the reality in
order to accept this world’s candid price as opposed to the mystical promises
of the next.

‘Juris never been same since his friends betrayed and
murdered,’ said Valgos, reclaiming his composure. ‘I tell you people, the
family not interested no more in spying for English.’ He whipped a wad of
invoices from a hook and his movement shook the cabin’s wall.

‘Maybe Juris had something to prove, make something right from
the past.’

Flinging the sheaf of papers Valgos went for Nick. His chapped
hands reaching only as high as Nick’s chest were spread wide pushing at Nick,
but couldn’t manage to move him a fraction towards the door.

‘Get out,’ he raged, his hands at his sides. This tough spy
could go rot in hell before he would strike him again, stain his pride once
more. ‘My family fought the Russians in Latvia, we made sacrifices. You hear
that?’ he said bitterly, in a trance. ‘Juris no get involved with them.’

From the file Nick had compiled on Juris he remembered the
Valgos family history. One uncle executed by the Russians in 1953, his body put
on public display in the marketplace, another uncle had undertaken courier work
for the Service, and Andrejs’ first wife was a Service agent, four months
pregnant with twin boys when the network was blown and she was tortured and
shot in the prison where they’d held Gav Rafford. Andrejs and Juris abandoned
everything they possessed, escaping to Britain as émigrés in 1989.

‘Someone must have contacted him,’ suggested Nick. ‘You talked
to him everyday, he must have said something,’ said Nick, his hand outstretched
in an appeal.

‘Go, get out,’ said Valgos, knocking Nick’s hand sideways.

‘Juris made an easy target and you want to ignore it, pretend
it didn’t happen?’

He saw the mention of fidelity sting Valgos who looked blankly
for somewhere to sit; a stool or chair, both were outside the arc of his hands.
His knees gave and his body sagged. Sinking his elbows onto the lid of a
freezer cabinet, he sent a stack of telephone directories skidding onto the bed
of a set of scales. Irka you should pray more he thought, your prayers are not
getting through. He’d ask her to pick a different saint. Their life destroyed
and wasted for no gains.

‘Help me Andrejs, make them hurt for a change, make them know
what it is to feel fear.’

‘A chance to make good old wounds? That’s what you think I
should do? Against shadows, against people who have no names? You understand
nothing, nothing of them and their methods.’ The words came without any
control, his face flushed.

‘A chance to prove your brother didn’t die for nothing.’

‘No one wants to listen.’

‘Who contacted him, Andrejs, who contacted Juris?’

‘Since he had big win on lotto two year ago he forgot who he
was, where he come from,’ answered Valgos, an empty chaff of a man blown dry by
the winds of battles he never stayed to fight. ‘He start believing he is some
rich spy like in damn film.’

‘Who was it Andrejs?’

Shaking his head, swallowing hard, Valgos recounted the event
for Nick. ‘At our sister’s birthday, a family meal, Juris gets a call on his
cell phone, goes outside. When he returns he is white, whiter than a damn
ghost. It was Georgs, Juris says. Georgs Lauvas is in London, a representative
for a Swiss company, and he has an investment opportunity. I don’t know all
details, he were not specific. Georgs Lauvas is traitor, my sister and I tell
Juris, you don’t even take a damn toffee off him, nothing. We all said we were
pretty damn sure he worked for Russians in Latvia, betrayed people for money.
Betrayed members of our family, maybe even my wife. This is Moscow all over
again playing their dirty tricks, but Juris won’t listen, gets big ideas, loses
his way, thinks he can fool them.’