A Covenant of Spies

by Daniel Kemp

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Petr Tomsa

  I escaped the torment of nightmares during the flight. Even so, the thoughts that filled my mind certainly bordered on them as I could not see any motive for Dickie Blythe-Smith altering the place where Kudashov's wife died. Why change the place from where it actually happened, in Moscow? The reason he gave me seemed reasonable at the time; misinformation to lead Jana Kava's killer off Kudashov's back, but the more I thought about that the more absurd it became. Dickie was never empty-headed in his line of thinking, so there must be another reason. Either way, someone was lying. Among the questions that still required an answer was why now did Cilicia need rescuing? I wanted more background information on her before I listened to any answer her grandfather would give me, but it was proving very difficult for Michael Simmons to come by, no matter what data he used in whatever computer system.

  As a form of last resort I'd asked Liam Catlin to get a fingerprint sample from something she touched when at one of their sightings in Moscow. One of his lamp-burners had successfully lifted one from a cup she'd used in a coffee house last Wednesday. This was processed and sent to Group on Wednesday evening. Everything we had was thrown at it, but by the time I boarded the flight, nothing had turned up.

  * * *

  I had two names that kept staring at me from the paper of the three grids I'd drawn: Kudashov and his relative, Anatoly Vladimirovich Malikova. Neither fitted into the threads between any of the others. Kudashov in particular stood out by a country mile. Almost all the others had a connection to at least one other name than just Dickie Blythe-Smith, but Kudashov only had Dickie as a common denominator. Malikova only had a tenuous connection to Caincross through his father, and a family connection to Kudashov and Cilicia. Maybe it was the turbulence we encountered whilst halfway to India that made me think of Ryan once again. I had a sneaky feeling that Kudashov was pushing me for a mention of the codename Ryan when we met. If Kudashov and Dickie were as close as Kudashov told me they were, then I could think of no rational thinking behind why Dickie would not have told him the name as Kudashov might have benefitted from Ryan's disclosures. But there were things Dickie never told Fraser, so being the person he was, private and extremely careful, then I could understand why the Russian might not be told.

  Could the reason Kudashov seemed to be trying to prise Ryan's name from me be attributed to plain curiosity, or was there something more sinister going on? Despite there being so much to consider in this labyrinthine puzzle, one question overrode everything else: why did Dickie go to so much trouble to hide something that, if it had threatened the security of Great Britain, should have been disclosed far sooner than now?

  The flight was on time and the ambassador's car was a welcome refuge from the heat and the never-ending throng of hustling people, and the suffocating air that had nowhere to escape through the static haze that hovered over the city.

  * * *

  I met with the Russian Ambassador to India, one Vyacheslav Trubnikov, in the shaded cool gardens of the British Embassy on Saturday morning at 11 o'clock. He was punctual for the prearranged contact. As a normal rule of thumb, it is almost impossible to confirm any foreign national's birthdate, and from what used to be known as the Eastern Bloc countries, doubly difficult for obvious reasons, but with Trubnikov that rule did not apply. From an undisclosed source, his complete background was included in a paper file I found in the Foreign and Commonwealth vaults filed under the name of Macintosh. Had I needed any more confirmation that Faversham's use of the Macintosh disguise was a Dickie Blythe-Smith inspiration, then there it was and, alongside it, was an autopsy report on Miles Faversham. He had indeed died from an inherent heart condition made worse by his obesity. One of my worries had been put to bed.

  Trubnikov was born on the fourth of May 1944, but he looked a lot older than the sixty-three years he was. He was a short, stooping man, appearing comfortable with what seemed to be a deformity, although his filed description contained no reference to it. It did, however, mention his lack of height and the penetrating stare of his icy, blue eyes. He had a thick crop of lacquered grey hair, cut close to the forehead and neatly around the ears and shirt collar. There was a distinct parting on his left side with not a single strand of hair out of place. He was not overweight. Neither did he have an appetite for the traditional English elevenses of tea with a selection of biscuits. We were alone in the secluded garden, where no directional microphone could reach. I had insisted on total privacy.

  He knew who I was, as that would have been impossible to hide, and there was no reason to try. Even so, time was not an issue so I played the game of being a UK emissary, open to suggestions of how to address the imbalance of trade Russia had with India at the cost of the United Kingdom. We jostled with the problem for a while until eventually I injected some realism to the issue, introducing the subject of agent Ryan, and at once he gave me the name of a pliable government figure who was, in Trubnikov's opinion, open to bribes. I judged the time right to reminisce about days when Ryan's influence on world affairs was beneficial to Trubnikov and the United Kingdom. I asked him directly if he had regrets about his Polish colonel's death.

  “I guess you would describe your feelings as confused when we offered to eradicate your Polish indiscretion in return for your compliance with certain Soviet originated classified material, Vyacheslav, is that right?”

  He appeared sad when he agreed with my laconic summary, but offered no detailed explanation why that might be. I pressed him more on the Polish colonel and how he thought the man may have got hold of the lethal pill he used to commit suicide rather than face interrogation by the KGB for the traitorous acts he had committed against the USSR. He was very open about that.

  “It was my suggestion he got his hands on one. I never wanted him to suffer. He told me the Czechoslovakian girl he was giving secrets to gave it to him. I asked him if he would ever use it and he was emphatic that he would. He said he had seen what the secret state police had done to a young naval rating at the Kaliningrad base who had been caught passing a copy of a list of Soviet submarines he had worked on in the dockyards; that's why he wanted the pill. Innocently he told me the rating had only passed on a list of supplies the boats took on board. He never knew who the information was passed on to, but he said he'd heard two separate rifle volleys fired. One the day following the rating's arrest and the other two days later.”

  I asked Trubnikov if the colonel had said where his Czechoslovakian girl had got the pill from, and he said she had told him, “It came from her handler—a Petr Tomsa.”

  How on earth, I asked, had he remembered that name for so many years and he turned the question around, asking me if I would ever forget the name of the person who killed the one I loved. I never answered him. I just looked into those steely blue eyes and I knew what he was saying was true. It must have been Kudashov who had handed over the lethal tablet to Jana and she had passed it on to the colonel. No harm in that, but why not tell me, and why did he not give another pill to Jana?

  We chatted about how his life had changed since his days in the First Directorate working with Vladimir Putin and whether those former days the two had shared had assisted his appointment as ambassador. He thought there might be some truth in what I said. I kept on about Putin and asked if they were still close friends, to which he politely replied that he was now too far removed from the corridors of power to be of any use to British Intelligence. That patently was untrue and, to me, sounded too rehearsed to be left alone.

  The conversation turned back towards bygone days and the two odd pieces to my matrix of names: Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov and Anatoly Vladimirovich Malikova. He knew of both. One, he said, was the departmental head and the other was the grandfather of the female deputy at the Eighth Chief Directorate where they monitored and managed national, foreign, and overseas communications, cryptologic equipment, research and development into making Russia even stronger than she was now. He knew of them and their positions
because it was his department before becoming the Russian ambassador to India. It went one better than that. It was he who had selected them. He told me how Anatoly Malikova's father was a famous Russian General during WWII and it was he who won the battle at Kursk, perhaps the turning point of that war, for which he was awarded the Gold Star medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union.

  Trubnikov had met the general when he was eleven at a grand parade his father had taken him to. At the end of the parade, there was an unveiling of a commemorative memorial to the Glorious Dead of Mother Russia. The memorial was not what he remembered; it was the tall general in his bright shining ribbons and medals with the Gold Star one making him the most prominent officer he saw that day. He was given an opportunity to speak to the general, and he asked what the medals were for. The general looked at young Trubnikov and recited what battles they represented but none, he said, were important. What was important was that he and his comrades had defeated Hitler, who wanted to kill every Russian there was. He added something that had stuck in Trubnikov's memory. He said that it was intelligence rather than muscle that would defeat any enemy.

  The deputy head of the Eighth Directorate, Cilicia Kudashov, was, he said, the foremost university student of her year, majoring in the languages that earmarked her for a career with the foreign communications directorate in which she had shown herself to be invaluable. Then, from nowhere, his haunting blue eyes narrowed and he took on the appearance of a gloating parent at a passing out ceremony before he announced, “I know a secret about her grandfather, Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov, and I will sell it to you for the right price.”

  I didn't jump at his offer at first; in fact, I didn't mention it for quite some time. Of course I was interested, but I wanted to know more about the man who was walking beside me and how reliable his information might be. The source to his file had recorded his loyalty and honesty as changeable, by which I assumed he could be bracketed with the corrupt Indian trade official. I wanted confirmation for what I believed happened in Warsaw with the colonel that led to Jana's death in Gdańsk the following day. I feared the worse but, nevertheless, I needed to know if Trubnikov asked his fated lover one other thing London required passed on to Jana Kava. Unfortunately, I was right. Ryan had made it happen as I believed.

  “The first signal came to me in mid-August '82. It originated from a desk in Cologne, went via a terminal at a place called Correos, and I forwarded it on to what was coded as Gladio. It contained one word: Ready. The second one came by exactly the same route and again had one word: Gdańsk. I forwarded both on to the same recipient at this Gladio point.”

  However disillusioned I was, I had no choice but to move on to other things done under the name of Ryan that I'd discovered in the Foreign Office vaults, one of which was that last filed message under Dickie's Knighted first name as Richard. I asked Vyacheslav Trubnikov if he had ever seen a signal from Ryan with the name of Richard anywhere in it. He said no, adding with a disconsolate voice that Ryan existed in a yesterday's world no longer relevant today. I told him in no uncertain terms that, although the days of the intelligence exchange handled by Ryan had dried up, the reasons that he had so willingly agreed to meet me had not vanished with the death of any Polish army officer. He remained inextricably connected to a Soviet traitor. Information I suggested that his friend President Putin would not be aware of. The motivation for him to readily agree to meet me was on the table. Yes, he thought, London was still fully aware of the past.

  * * *

  Part of what I learned from Trubnikov was how Ryan's intelligence value to all sides was in his unwavering ability in hiding names. In not one report, stolen or given to any side, did he divulge the names from whom the reports came, or referred to. Except once.

  I, like Dickie twenty-five years before me, had made an alliance with Trubnikov, and mine was a simple trade whereas Dickie's was far more intricate. I would keep Trubnikov's secret liaison when much younger and his subsequent dealings with the GB's intelligence service confidential for eternity by wrapping it up in obscure files and hiding them under a perpetual directive, if he told me the secret he had on Kudashov for a discounted price rather than the figure he first asked for. When he saw the sense of my offer, he accepted the terms. The agreed price for the secret Trubnikov held about Nikita Kudashov was a sum of money that could be channelled from part of Sir John's designated budget into an account our Indian ambassador could manage for that purpose.

  The two of us worked out a deal of mutual benefit. One of the things I would do for him was to keep all mention of Trubnikov's help in past projects safely hidden away from discovery, and one of the things he would do in return would be to make sure the government official he recommended would be a long-term 'asset' for British trade because if not Trubnikov, or whoever came after him, would have him killed. Trade negotiations seemed remarkably easy to me.

  * * *

  The British Embassy's duty officer in the communications room was busy. He sent one message to his opposite number in Moscow, then one to Sir John Scarlett at Vauxhall with a copy of that signal, plus some separate material I needed to look at addressed to Michael Simmons, and another to the private IP memory address on a computer at Chearsley, in Buckinghamshire. The one to Fraser did not contain what Trubnikov told me was in Ryan's last communiqué, nor what he said about Nikita Sergeyovitch Kudashov.

  Before I left to catch the morning flight home, the duty officer brought me a decoded signal address that pinged on his fax machine just after six that morning. It read: Lights Out. On a more troubled flight home than the one that took me to Trubnikov, I wondered how what had happened in India was to affect all those concerned. The one I worried about the most was Fraser Ughert.

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Kallebrann

  Sir John was the first call I took as Jimmy put the car in gear and we joined the convoy waiting to escort us away from the terminal at Heathrow. He was full of thanks and congratulations at the job well done, not only in respect of future trade figures with the sub-continent, but also it was his name I'd accredited to the top of the agreement I'd left with the ambassador to sign with Trubnikov's Indian government official. Although the documentation was only in the Sunday pipeline, Sir John had already notified the Cabinet Secretary who, being more prudent by nature, advised Scarlett not to release any notice of the deal with Rolls Royce and British Aerospace worth billions of pounds until confirmation of the contracts being signed was received at the Ministry of Trade.

  Michael Simmons was the next to call from his desk in the office next to mine. He asked if I'd received the Delhi signal okay and told me Major Swan and his team had arrived safely at the naval airfield at Poole in Dorset sometime after eight o'clock that morning. Being slightly ahead of my estimated time I was hoping to join them three quarters of an hour earlier than I'd imagined.

  * * *

  The six-man SBS team the major had put together left Kallebrann, Norway, at one o'clock Sunday morning, crossing the Russian border where Norwegian engineers had repositioned the electronic beacons that covered the whole borderline without interrupting the constant signal. It was a manoeuvre practised several times on their own equipment, but this was a first on the Russians. Clothed in specialised non-reflective thermal imaging body armour, they quickly travelled through the perpetual daylight, overland to Ozero Kuets'yarvi Lake. Once there, they unloaded the three two-man submersible vessels from the SUV vehicles, riding them beneath the surface of the lake and through the river system of the Reka Kolosyoki until they reached the Zaragoza laboratory site. The SUVs returned to the Norwegian side of the border to await orders for the return.

  The journey to the periphery of the laboratories took one hour and twenty-one minutes. Another hour was spent in surveying the area. As there was no indication of an attack being planned on the complex, only four armed guards were posted as security. These were silently killed from close range before access was gained to the main building and the two tunnels. Fifty-three p
ounds of Semtex explosive were placed in strategic points around the building and tunnels, and the timers carefully set. As Major Swan's team returned and reached the pick-up point for the SUVs, the bombs they'd planted detonated with such force, it was said the blast was heard over thirty miles away at the port of Murmansk.

  The destruction of the site was photographed by a small drone developed for the use of designated special forces UK, which I authorised. The pictures came straight to me from an untraceable field relay point without passing Sir John Scarlett's desk or anyone else at The Box, or the Home Office. I had the heat image analysed and it was confirmed that the temperature generated would have destroyed any virus being developed in the laboratories.

  * * *

  Everything had gone as the major had planned. He showed me more of the before and after demolition photographs of the tunnels and laboratories. To my professional eye, it added up to an intensive research and development site which was stacked with some highly dangerous and restricted chemicals, the purpose of which the Home Office analysis had corresponded to Nikita Kudashov's claims. Although my usage of the government's secret installation at Porton Down to evaluate the two small, cylindrical glass bottles meticulously packed inside the parcel shipped by the Royal Airforce from Norway, which arrived at RAF Northolt just outside London on Saturday morning, was done through Group's mandate, the notice it triggered had not been sent straight to me to validate and then add any response. Its first posting was to the Home Office, and then it landed on the desk of Prime Minister's private secretary, who passed it on to the Cabinet Secretary, who wanted to know what purpose there was behind my need for some weird chemicals being examined.