A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  I interrupted, knowing precisely what was to come if my safety was paramount, but Faversham, or more likely the person I could vaguely hear in the background who was directing the conversation, would hear nothing of my claims of proficiency when it came to disposing of dead bodies in rivers.

  “We hope you're right, but we're not taking any chances on it floating up and being found. There's a United Nations flight leaving Prague for Hamburg later this evening. The duty officer at your end will see to the ticket and the necessary papers; all you have to do is turn up at the airport and get on the plane. You will be met at the other end and shipped home, literally aboard a freighter leaving early Sunday for Harwich.

  “I'll get a communiqué to the ambassador in Prague in an open transmit telling of a sudden death of a close relative of yours in Germany that requires your urgent attention. As it's Saturday today, there's no necessity to advise anyone outside of the Embassy of your departure until Monday. That delay will also help with Dalek's no show at work. Puts you out of the picture by the time he's missed. Now, as for Jana. This department has all its noses to the grindstone as we speak. We have a local man who we will install as her handler and control. Unusual I grant you, but we feel it's necessary.”

  “Who's we?” I shouted down the phone line, seething with indignation and anger.

  “I'm here on the ground and it's me who cleared her brother out of the bloody way. She's in for a smooth ride as one of ours thanks to me and I know her and, more important than anything, I have her trust. She asked for it and I delivered. There's absolutely no need to change who she answers to and deals with. I have the budget for an extension and I want to work her,” I announced, enraged, into the prolonged silence of the phone receiver.

  Eventually Faversham replied. “No disrespect, Frank, but you're out of your depth. We have a top-notch guy with an excellent history in this sort of thing on the doorstep ready to step in. We will want you to set her up with him before you leave as the two have never met. Fax me any details of the trade you and she have agreed on so we won't duplicate anything when our man takes over. Ah, just right, I think.” He was talking to someone else close by, but out of my earshot when he said that.

  “There's a violin concert at the Palac Zofin cultural centre on the Slavic Island this evening starting at 7 p.m. I hope that's nowhere near where you shoved Dalek's body over into the river, Frank. Don't want him floating up during the concert.” He laughed.

  I didn't, but I pressed and pressed and pressed him about what would happen to Jana, until eventually my threat of not leaving Czechoslovakia worked, albeit not entirely.

  “Petr will use her in the same way as you intended, Frank. Perhaps more, but no less, he's skilled in our ways. We have plans for her that I can't discuss. Her brother's disappearance can be accounted for easily enough, so we'll draft the legend and write it off to drink. If, or when, his body emerges and he's still recognisable, Jana can put the gunshot down to someone he annoyed when drunk. A simple solution, all ends tied up!”

  None of my concerns were addressed and I didn't buy into what he was waffling on about. Despite knowing I was being given the heave-ho, I wanted to go down fighting.

  “So her Control is to be Czechoslovakian?” I asked in a friendly, understanding voice with no mention of Dalek's possible StB connection or the obvious fact that whoever this 'local man Petr' was, could have disposed of Dalek in exactly the same way as I had done. If it was a boxing match, I had Faversham on the ropes, as he betrayed the yearning to gossip that many who can only listen to what filters down from the top of the ladder do if their excitement takes them further than discretion should allow.

  “Oh no! Her Control is a blue-blooded Russian. Field name of Petr Tomsa, as I said, but he's top stuff—is our Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov. He has ancestral ties to the House of Romanov no less. He was born in the same town, Kalinovka, as Khrushchev was and where the Communist Party insisted that male children took on Nikita as their given name. His patronymic name came from a Sergey Kirillovich, related to a Grand Duke of Russia, but his wife had an even closer link to the Royal Russian family than that. Even so, there you have it. That's the reason his and Khrushchev's names are almost identical. Incidentally, if you can't get on that UN flight for reasons beyond your or our control, he will be the man you must find to get you out of the country. He's accomplished in many areas, Frank.”

  At the end of that conversation I was left wondering who was on whose side? We had a retired Russian general, one-time mate of Joseph Stalin and murdered because of it, who was once the head of the secret police in Czechoslovakia with his blabbermouth son presumably installed as a StB agent, and whose daughter was only slightly sullied until I killed her brother and set her up as a source of British intelligence. They, the gods of seventh-floor reputation, demanded my prize be handled by a nigh on Russian tsar. Bewildered, I hung up.

  * * *

  I was in the sunlit, manicured gardens behind the Cabinet Office having a cigarette when Fraser called my mobile phone. He sounded unusually snappy.

  “During Operation Donor, did you see Nikita Kudashov, aka Petr Tomsa, before or not until you handed Jana Kava over, Patrick?” he asked as I was wolfing down nicotine and the Prime Minister took an equally important call from his chum, President Bush. Mine and Fraser's call was not as long as the PM's. Fraser cut it short after my reply.

  * * *

  The early Friday afternoon, pre-weekend meeting with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet ended fairly quickly, for which I was pleased, and the stroll through Horse Guards passed in an enjoyable fashion despite my ill feeling about Prague. Faversham's instructions were perfectly clear; I was to inform Jana of the meeting point and make sure she arrived. My job was then finished.

  'All has been arranged with the duty officer and the ambassador. I want you fully packed, raging to get back home, waiting inside the embassy by the time that concert starts. Okay, Frank?'

  Those were the last words I heard from Faversham. When I did eventually arrive home in London, Faversham was no longer at the counter-intelligence desk. Apparently, he'd moved sideways onto the East German desk.

  Some three or four years down the road I had some reason to ask for him and I was told he had died from a massive heart attack whilst abroad on company business. It was due to the inherent heart condition he had when joining the service from university. Being grossly overweight had apparently been the cause of a number of minor strokes in the past. From someone I heard that he was first considered for medical discharge when his six-month medical came up, but where he was at the French desk did not carry a HSL, High Stress Level rating. If that was case, I wondered why he was bumped up to the Soviet Satellite desk with the stress that must carry. Everything leads to everything, I reminded myself.

  * * *

  I had dined and now with dinner ended and alone with Hannah, after the office staff left for the weekend, and the house staff all gone home, my thoughts would still not depart from Prague of some twenty-five years ago. I didn't normally like talking of work after the day had ended, but today was different for several reasons. Hannah noticed my unease and enquired why.

  “I don't want to sound unnecessarily worried, Hannah, but things are starting to rattle around inside this brain of mine. Operation Donor won't go away.”

  “I'm not surprised it won't disappear, Patrick. The part you were telling me before you had to leave sounded exciting but dangerous. Tell me some more.”

  * * *

  Although, at times, I did think of the Kavas after leaving Prague, there were other operations I was involved in to take my mind off them, and then of course, there was Ireland, where I served a great deal of my service time, so they slipped lower in the list of priority as it were. Dalek Kava was not the first I'd killed and he wasn't to be the last. More likely than not, I would never have thought of him and his sister again had not Fraser Ughert introduced this Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov to me at lunchtime.

 
His granddaughter's name of Cilicia Kudashov was too close to the name of our anonymous benefactor we needed to thank for the wedding present of the house in Sussex. At the reception of that wedding, I opened a wrapped box where inside were the keys to the Sussex property and engraved on the lid to the box were the words From the Home of Cilicia. Nikita Kudashov had told me at lunch that his surname was an Armenian word meaning home. At our marriage service, I asked Hannah if she thought the gift had anything to do with any relative of hers, from the European dynasty of the House of Hesse, or indeed from her godparents, the Rothschild family? If the gift had come from a member of the Rothschilds, then Fraser and I were aware of a connection going back almost five years to when we were engaged dealing with Iraq and a corrupted CIA file coded Gladio B. Also a Henry Mayler, a member of a mysterious fraternity known as the Rosicrucians, who we suspected of knowing the names of eight families we had strong evidence of, who wanted to influence world affairs to their benefit and theirs alone.

  Neither my wife nor I could find the answer to our benefactor's identity when the house was gifted, and nothing had happened since in our marriage in 2002 to alter that fact. Now, with Nikita Kudashov's appearance, I was hoping that might not remain the case, but as my thoughts drifted with the fading sunlit over St James's Park, Hannah brought me back into the world of 2007, reminding me that we were due at a drinks party hosted by the German Ambassador at his country's embassy at ten o'clock that evening. As I was dressing, my private mobile phone rang—it was Fraser Ughert once again. He was as agitated as before.

  * * *

  “I don't know what happened, Patrick, but you cut me off earlier and I know you're out tonight and time is precious to you, but Molly has put me on a short lead after my visit to St Thomas' Hospital today. They told me, in front of her, to not only take things easy, but give up the pipe and the whisky. Well, I'm not doing that, laddie. No, not at all, am I doing that. But I have to admit the angina has been playing up recently. I had a bad attack a couple of weeks back. Anyhow, less of the gloom and doom. How did you recognise Kudashov at that park where you sent Jana Kava in? And do you think he recognised you at lunch today?”

  The game had started, it seemed.

  “London sent a photo of him to the embassy and I was told not to approach, just to point her in the right direction and leave it up to Kudashov to make the introductions. I parked myself up in a position to see them both with a small, retractable, pocket-size telescope I used in those days. It was London who told me of his real name and how he was using the name of Petr Tomsa in Czechoslovakia. Hannah asked me the same question and I gave her the same answer—I doubt he saw me, but I can't be one-hundred percent sure. Now what's all this about your heart? We knew it was no good a while back. Why don't you do what Molly says and put your feet up? You could take up gardening when you can't go fishing. Why associate yourself with someone out of the history books of Century House? Go easy on the pipe and save the whisky for when I'm next there. I promise it won't be long before I'm draining your supplies of the old Jura, my friend.”

  One question I deliberately never asked and that had never been addressed when Faversham instructed me to point Jana Kava towards Kudashov that Saturday night in May 1982, was how would he recognise her? Nobody told me they knew each other. At the time I remember thinking someone was playing a long game with me, keeping back intelligence that presumably I didn't warrant being told, but as things played out it was pretty obvious there was another agenda in the Prague episode of Operation Donor that neither I nor Miles Faversham knew.

  Chapter Five: Victor

  The Saturday morning following the reception at the German Embassy, Jimmy, my driver, with Frank, my principal protection officer beside him, drove me to Fraser and Molly Ughert's home in Chearsley, Buckinghamshire, a journey I knew so well. I'd left Hannah in Whitehall and asked her to make a personal call on Michael Simmons at Group, where Hannah and I had met. She was my personal assistant when I was the one in charge there and Michael was my station officer. With my elevation he was now the man in charge, the new Director General.

  I needed some information that I wanted concealed from both the Director Generals at military intelligence, MI5, and the secret intelligence service at MI6 for a while, and I knew I could trust Michael to deliver on that.

  * * *

  “Have you considered this request of Kudashov's, and if so, where do you stand on it, Patrick?” Fraser asked as he closed the door to his home, shutting out the hot midday August sun that shone in a heavenly light onto his sprawling estate, some forty miles from London. Our journey had been smooth and uneventful, save for one thing. Michael Simmons' request for a particular paper file from archives had been questioned by Sir John Scarlett, the Director General at MI6, when it had pinged up on his Assistant Director's computer screen. Michael had winged it without mentioning me, but was unable to withdraw it until it had been scrutinised by the head of the Russian counter-intelligence desk, one Sir Brian Macintosh. I was disappointed with that result, but not surprised.

  “I'm still working it through, Fraser, and in need of help,” I replied to his rugged face, with its blotched drinkers' and smokers' skin and his trademark scruffy appearance.

  “Yes, laddie, I thought that would be the case.”

  “I was under the impression that you were to stop that sanctimonious form of address now that I sit in the chair you once sat in, and I outrank a retired chairman of JIC. Patrick is fine.”

  “Oh dear! Bad night was it?” he taunted me, and although it had been a bad night, I would never admit to that being the reason for my tetchy reply. We were at the door to his office, and as he opened it, my nostrils were filled with the tainted smell of violets and rosemary without a whiff of tobacco.

  My first question was directed at my own pleasurable pursuits. “If you have given up smoking your pipe, can I still smoke my cigarettes in here, as I don't want to go upsetting Molly in any way?”

  “I hope you will smoke them, Patrick. It will cover up the smoke of my pipe and I think I will be in need of more than one refill throughout this discussion.”

  As soon as we sat, he lit his orangey yellow Meerschaum pipe and I lit one of my cigarettes, but not before pouring two large whiskies from the decanter on the oblong table in front of the unlit fireplace between the two red sofas on which we sat facing each other.

  “I was up until four this morning looking as far as I could do in such a short time into this business, and I found a folder inside which were two files, Fraser. One under the name of Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov and a separate one marked Petr Tomsa. The Tomsa one dealt exclusively with operations in Czechoslovakia and Poland, but Kudashov's file contained references all over Europe, both west and east. My first reaction was one of curiosity.

  “Maybe it was nothing, I told myself, considering Kudashov used another coded operational name I found that he'd been given, that of Ivy; however, I could find no matching case files to that name. There must have been some overlap on an operation similar to the Jana Kava one, where two of his code names cropped up, but no! On the face of it, someone was running one of them, whilst hiding the other. More time is needed for a thorough search I know; nevertheless, I'm far from happy. Until I come up with an end date to the use of the name Tomsa, it could still be going on. That's why I'm here. I came because it's all too close to that Home Of Cilicia with Henry Mayler and that inner Circle of Eight you discovered, who want to rule the world. I thought we'd finished with that as a priority five years ago.”

  “Have you expressed your concern to Hannah, Patrick?” he asked as the pipe started to emit the soapy smell of tobacco.

  “I have mentioned her family name before, but I want to keep her out of it as much as I can and I think not being able to is worrying me the most.”

  “This is going to be a little indelicate and I'm sorry to say it cannot be avoided. As you know, I've had a considerable amount of time on my hands of late with Molly's insistence on my sta
ying put inside the house. It seems to me I'm only allowed out for doctors and hospital appointments nowadays. No matter, the time has helped me in the investigation I've been conducting into that box you were presented with holding the keys to that place of yours in Sussex. It was something too intriguing to leave alone. A bad passage of history for me, what with Jack Price's illegitimate daughter being killed after she shot one of our targets, that Moshe Gabbai, on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine and the estate him being on named The Home Of Cilicia. It's all too coincidental for my liking.” His blue cagey eyes narrowed as he ended that last sentence; if he was going to add a reason, he had no time, as at that precise moment the telephone on his desk rang.

  Knowing it was Molly's usual method of asking permission to interrupt, I nervously waved at the cloud of smoke above our heads.

  “I wouldn't worry, Patrick, she knows I would disobey her with you here.”

  I wasn't sure how I was supposed to react to his statement. As there was no time to ponder on a response before Molly appeared with a large plate of sandwiches on a trolley with cups and saucers, a teapot, and a hot water kettle under a pretty, embroidered woollen cosy.

  “Perhaps tea would be better than the whisky for your heart and liver, but somehow I don't think I'll be persuading you today, Fraser,” she said with what I took as a look of admonishment directed at me as she left the room and closed the door silently behind her.

  “I think I've upset Molly by coming. You should have given me a clue about that possibility. She's the last person in the world I would want to upset and you know that,” I stated indignantly as he topped up my glass.

  Fraser and I went back too many years to remember to allow sobriety, or the very few occasions either of us had been drunk, to interfere with the thirty-five guilt-ridden odd years we'd shared. Everything is inconsequential to a single shared moment in time that has meaning. We had shared many meaningful moments, some sad, some happy. If it wasn't for the fact that the intelligence service, we had both given our lives to, demanded the capacity of memory most would be unable to imagine, then at least one lie, if not a dozen more, would have led to the friendship's destruction a long, long time before now. Lies were our best friend. They stopped us believing the truth within the lie that everything leads to everything. In the end, it's the truth that haunts the soul, not lies; they have no meaning, only consequences that in our game, have to be kept secret.