The Dark Chronicles: A Spy Trilogy

by Jeremy Duns

  His eyes didn’t flicker.

  ‘Not deliberately,’ he said. ‘You were our target.’

  I shivered. If they had suspected me of being a double, they hadn’t waited for confirmation of it – they had simply arranged my assassination anyway. But why would they… ?

  Leave it for the moment. Now you need to fight back, before it’s too late.

  ‘I planted the evidence on the Russian,’ I said. ‘I admit that much. But that doesn’t make me a double.’

  ‘Why do it, then?’

  ‘Because I wanted the glory, of course. Christ, you should see how they’re acting back in London. Haggard sent me out here to sort everything out. I couldn’t very well go back and tell him that not only had I failed to make proper contact with Barchetti but that he’d been killed. I saw this chap hanging around the gallery and he got careless, so I followed him. And I thought, well… it would be a good opportunity. I know how that must sound, but—’

  ‘Pathetic is how it sounds,’ said Severn, and my hopes lifted. Precisely what I’d hoped he would think of me. ‘So, the great Paul Dark is just a little fraud. Tell me, what other triumphs of yours have you created this way? How about that business in Nigeria – was all that bravado and planted evidence, too?’

  ‘I saved the Prime Minister, for God’s sake – there were witnesses to it!’

  ‘I don’t believe him,’ said Zimotti, and my hopes sank again. ‘It was too calculated, too fast. He knew this Soviet, and I think the man was his controller.’

  Evenly matched. Could I convince one of them to go the other way? Zimotti looked firm, but perhaps I could play Severn off against him?

  ‘Let’s find out,’ said Severn, and then uttered three words that I knew meant I would never be able to change anyone’s mind again. ‘Let’s break him.’

  *

  They left, taking the chairs with them. The chairs had been brought in from the garden, I thought, remembering Toadski’s warning in Heathrow to keep a low profile. Well, I hadn’t listened, and here I was.

  The lights began to flicker, then dim, before extinguishing completely. There was a thin buzzing sound above me as a panel moved across and covered the tiny window. I was in complete darkness. I stepped forward until I reached the wall opposite – the door had to be somewhere here. I felt along the surface, but couldn’t find it. It was completely flush. I made my way around the room, frantically running my hands across every inch of the walls I could reach. Finally, I came across the thinnest of seams – was this where they had come through? It must be. But there was nothing else there: no hinge, no handle, just the shallowest of grooves. I tried to dig into it with my hands, but I couldn’t even get my nails in.

  After several minutes searching the rest of the cell in vain for anything to get a handle on, I fell back onto the floor, exhausted from the effort. As I did, the lights flickered back on again. Had it just been a power cut? They kept flickering, and I realized that it was deliberate. The cell itself was an instrument of torture, a state-of-the-art environment that could be used to manipulate the occupant: me. I moved to one of the corners and seated myself as comfortably as I could, waiting for whatever they would throw at me next.

  It came about ten minutes later. A blast of music suddenly erupted from hidden speakers in the ceiling. The song was vaguely familiar, the singer wailing about the world being on the eve of destruction – a little joke on Severn’s part? The song became louder as it went on, until eventually I had to place my hands over my ears to try to muffle it. Then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, it was cut off. I realized I was breathing hard, and my heart rate had shot up.

  Over the next few hours they continued with this game, suddenly introducing the song – always the same song – at a very loud volume, only to cut it off again abruptly. Sometimes the song lasted several minutes, sometimes just a few seconds. The result was that the music became indistinguishable noise to me, and I began to fear its return.

  I knew they were trying to soften me up and that if I succumbed now I would never be able to get back, so I put all my effort into resisting, keeping my mind busy. I certainly had a lot to think about. The one question nagging at me above all was: why? Why had they tried to kill me? I’d cleared myself of being a traitor, and Osborne had even approved my promotion… But no, that must all have been for show, I realized, a front they had put on to lull me into complacency while they made arrangements for a sniper to take me out. They had evidently decided at some point that, traitor or not, they didn’t want to take their chances with me. I could still expose the plot they’d cooked up in Nigeria, and that alone was reason enough to have me swept out of sight.

  They must have planned some of it while I’d still been in isolation at the hospital recovering from the fever. Where would they have met, I wondered. The conference room on the third floor? The basement bar? No, both were too conspicuous. Not everyone could have been in on such a plot, and they’d have wanted to keep any meetings not just discreet, but completely off the radar. So they’d probably met at one of their homes after work – perhaps even Farraday’s. That would have been ironic. But no, Farraday couldn’t have been part of it, I realized, or he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to stand in front of me in St Paul’s. Then again, he hadn’t been the brightest of men. But no, I reckoned Osborne was the brains behind it, in which case his house in Eaton Square would have been their base. I could just picture the scene: Osborne, Innes, Dawes, perhaps Smale… the whole clutch of them drinking Scotch and smoking cigars and plotting into the night. The old guard, the robber barons, protecting the Service. I had never entered that little world, had deliberately stayed apart from it. That had been my undoing, I saw now.

  At some point in the fug and the smoke, as they had debated what to do about the fact that Wilson was still alive despite their best efforts, the conversation would have swung round to me. ‘What the hell are we going to do about Paul?’ Well, it wouldn’t have taken them long to come to their decision – I was best out of the way. They could have just given me a swift injection, of course, and nobody would have been any the wiser. ‘Yes, the fever took him. Dreadful affair. He caught it out in Nigeria.’ But someone had been more imaginative than that, had seen a way to get more mileage from me, even in death. By doing the deed in St Paul’s, in full view of two Cabinet ministers and half the Service, they would have killed two birds with one conspicuously Soviet-manufactured cartridge. I would have died a hero, a convenient martyr in the Service’s struggle against anarchists and Communists, and the ministers, spooked at seemingly having come so close to being killed themselves, would jump to treble the Service’s budget to deal with the menace. A nice fringe benefit. The Service would never come under suspicion, of course, and neither would Five. They were the investigators, so they could make certain the evidence showed just what they wished it to. And who would suspect them of plotting to kill one of their most senior officers? I hadn’t.

  They’d had to improvise, certainly, putting it all together in so short a time. Presumably the sniper had been one of Zimotti’s men, completely unconnected with Arte come Terrore. Did Arte come Terrore even exist? Yes, I reasoned. Barchetti had clearly infiltrated them, and even with their elaborate plot to kill me I doubted they had the imagination to create something quite so outlandish out of whole cloth. They had simply used Arte come Terrore as a decoy, a convenient Moscow-backed group to pin the blame on. No doubt Five had been in on it, too: that was how the sniper had been able to ‘smuggle’ his rifle into the cathedral so easily. I added Giles Fearing into the scene at Osborne’s house, his jowls wobbling with mirth as each of them had put successive ideas into the pot, stirring it until it came to a boil. I could just imagine how they had rubbed their hands with glee and patted themselves on the back when they’d come up with the thing. A bold and fitting move to counter the Nigerian disaster. Checkmate in one.

  But it wouldn’t have been easy. They’d had to find a sniper, train him, rehearse his getaway rou
te in case something went wrong. Show him the tunnel leading to Smithfield, perhaps. And, luckily for me, something had gone wrong: Farraday had moved his head at just the wrong moment.

  Worse, from the point of view of the conspirators, was that I had taken the initiative. I’d chased the sniper down, and he’d said something in Italian. They’d had to improvise anew then – Osborne biting his nails in the Rover – and they had decided to reveal their great foresight in predicting that this was the first of a wave of attacks across Europe, stemming out of a group in Italy. I thought back to the meeting in Whitehall, playing it again in my mind. Christ, Osborne had even had me call Innes to prepare their story!

  I discounted Haggard as being part of the plot – there was no feigning that depth of outrage, and his suggestion that I go to Italy to hunt down and kill those responsible for Farraday’s murder wasn’t a script they would have wanted to play: it might have made me think a little more carefully about who had tried to kill me. I cursed myself that it hadn’t; the thing had been staring me in the face. But I’d been sure that I was finally in the clear. The idea that they would try to assassinate me simply hadn’t crossed my mind.

  And, despite killing the wrong man, they’d got away with it: I hadn’t suspected their involvement for a moment, and I doubted Haggard had, either. They hadn’t intended for me to visit Rome, of course, but when Haggard had given them little choice in the matter they’d been happy enough to send me on a wild-goose chase – with Barnes watching over me to make sure I didn’t stray too far. Barchetti must have wanted to meet about something else entirely. If I hadn’t insisted on going in Severn’s place, no doubt he would have returned from the museum and fed me a suitable story that would have led me somewhere else.

  My thoughts turned to the here and now. Where had they brought me? I presumed from Zimotti’s presence that we were still in Rome, or somewhere in Italy, at any rate. But why had they not already flown me back to London to face Osborne et al? Zimotti might want a piece of me, if the hatred of Communists I’d glimpsed at dinner were any indication – but that couldn’t be the answer. There must be some other reason. It was also odd that they had waited for me to interview Pyotr first and then brought me in, instead of simply carting me off the moment I’d shown them the note. Perhaps they had wanted to see how far I’d take it. No, of course: they must have realized Pyotr was a Soviet agent, too – my handler, Zimotti had surmised. They had let me run ahead and lead them to him. Two for the price of one…

  The music suddenly shut down, bringing me back to earth. There was a noise coming from somewhere outside the cell. It was dulled by distance and the walls, but there was no mistaking it: screaming. So they had brought Pyotr here, too, and were torturing him. How long before it would be my turn? I shivered, and my stomach clutched anew.

  The record started up again, at ear-splitting volume, but after a few seconds it began repeating the same fragment over and over: ‘Destruction… destruction… destruction…’ Either the record had become stuck and there was nobody manning the machine playing it, or they had put it on a loop deliberately to drive me mad. Probably the latter. How long were they planning to keep me here? There was no bucket, no slops…

  Wake up, Paul. They’re not planning to keep you here at all. They’re going to kill you. They had tried in St Paul’s and narrowly missed. Yes, but they hadn’t been certain I was a traitor then. It made little difference. They would squeeze everything they could out of me, then finish me off with a bullet through my skull. Severn would report back to London that the deed had been done, and Osborne would no doubt furnish a plausible story for Haggard. On reflection, perhaps I hadn’t been so lucky that Farraday had moved his head.

  The music stopped again, just as abruptly as the other times. This time, though, it didn’t start up again. It was what I had been craving, but as the hours passed the silence became worse than the noise it had replaced: the room was suddenly twice as cold and lonely. I was desperately tired, and knew I needed to sleep if I had any chance at all of surviving. But the fear of being woken at any moment had blocked my brain, and all I could see around me was death, and death at my own hands: Colin Templeton’s face as he handed me the drink, sometimes interspersed with the sniper closing his eyes on the floor of the market, or with Barchetti, choking. The images played in my mind on an eternal loop, and I tunnelled ever deeper into them.

  XII

  I jerked awake, my ears ringing. As the echo faded, I realized it had been a shot.

  Had they just killed Pyotr?

  I kept listening, but there was nothing else for several minutes. And then I heard the clacking of shoes. The door opened. I struggled to catch a glimpse of how the mechanism worked, but they had turned the lights up again and it was impossible to make out.

  My eyes smarting, I squinted as Severn stepped into the cell. He was still wearing the mirrored glasses, and he had someone with him. Not Zimotti this time, but Barnes.

  I’d forgotten about Barnes.

  Severn took a pack of cigarettes from a pocket, shook one into his fingers and lit it, then slowly blew the smoke into my face. ‘How are you doing?’ he said. ‘Ready to confess yet?’

  ‘It’ll take a bit more than a few flashing lights and some pop music,’ I said. ‘Try harder.’ It was a stupid thing to say, and I don’t know why I’d reacted that way. The cigarette, perhaps.

  He smiled, almost jovially. ‘Oh, we will. We will. You’re forgetting that Reginald here worked in the camps in Kenya. He knows how to get information from a suspect, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Barnes quietly. His jaw was locked tight, and his pale blue eyes drilled into me. No sunglasses for Barnes: he wanted to look at me unvarnished. ‘We used to use a bucket, sir. Put it over their heads, then hit it with a club for a few hours. That was one trick we used to use, sir, with some of the harder-core elements.’

  They’d told him, of course – that I’d killed Templeton.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I confess. I’m a double.’

  It was a relief to say it after all these years, simply to say the words aloud. But it evidently wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Barnes suddenly lunged forward and began pummelling at me, his fists crashing into my stomach and a deep animal roar bursting from him. As I tried to shield my head and body from the blows, I caught a glimpse of his face, his mouth in a rictus, the veins at his temples throbbing, and I just held my hands up meekly and waited for it to end. Fighting back now would only make it worse. Let him tire. Let him tire.

  He didn’t tire easily.

  When it was finally over, my face felt like it had been inflated like a balloon. Through barely open eyes I saw him salute Severn and march out of the room. I prayed he wasn’t going to fetch a bucket.

  ‘Poor Dark,’ said Severn, and laughed at the weak pun on my name. ‘Got yourself into something bigger than you understood this time, didn’t you?’

  I looked up. Two versions of him floated in front of me. Part of my brain registered that this might mean a damaged retina, but the rest of it was busy trying to bring the two of them closer together, and failing.

  I let my head hang down and wondered whether I could muster the strength to hit him, possibly even to kill him. It might be worth it, just for the cigarettes. I smiled at myself. I knew I didn’t have it in me to pull it off, and what good would enraging him do? It would get it over with, perhaps. Make him kill me quicker. No. Hold out. What have they done? Music, lights, a beating up. You can handle that. Hold out. You might yet survive this, you might yet…

  Severn threw his cigarette to the floor and crushed it with the heel of his shoe. Then he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me up until I was standing. It was his turn to have some fun now. He removed his glasses and I stared into his eyes. They were cold, dead: the gunmetal had turned to stone. I could smell his cologne – Floris? – but it was covered with the sharp tang of sweat. Anger – or excitement?

  ‘I hate scum like you,’ he sneered. ‘I do
n’t know how you can live with yourself, lying to your colleagues and friends day after day, for years. How do you do that, Dark, tell me?’

  It was best not to answer that kind of question. And yes, true, I was scum. But there are grades of scum, and I was beginning to feel that he might be at least on the same grade as me.

  ‘Betrayal, deceit… What a life. You Judas.’ He spat out the word. The veins in his forehead were standing out, his throat muscles constricted. His body had released adrenalin into his system and he was beginning to experience tunnel vision, seeing red. He was seeing a Red, in fact: me. He seemed to have derived a vicarious thrill from watching Barnes beat me up, but he was no weakling himself.

  ‘Tell me about school,’ he whispered under his breath.

  I stared at him, not understanding. School?

  ‘You know about it,’ I said slowly. ‘You were there, too, remember?’

  ‘Tell me about it anyway.’

  It was then that I noticed his hand. Why hadn’t I seen it before? It was gripping something I recognized, but had never expected to see again. A cat-o’-nine tails. He lifted it and I caught a closer look: it had a thin black leather grip, opening into the plaited thongs.

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’ he said, seeing that I had begun to understand where we were heading. ‘Did you take pleasure from seeing me suffer?’ His voice rose and he loomed over me, the cat waving in his hand. ‘Oh, I know you didn’t take part in the fun yourself, but you stood by and watched readily enough, didn’t you? You didn’t do anything to stop it!’ The intensity of his rage seemed to be growing by the second. I had to calm him down before he completely lost control and killed me.

  The cat’s tails came down, and as the agony shot through me I finally understood what was happening inside the mind of Charles Severn.

  In 1942, shortly before I left to join the army, I had been made a praefect at Winchester. One of my first duties had been to sit in on the ‘Notions Examina’, the school’s initiation ceremony for new boys. Like most such ceremonies, it involved an element of humiliation: stupid games, coarse questions, name-calling. I’d experienced it myself, but had forgotten until this moment that Severn’s test had gone horribly wrong: a few of the praefects had whipped him with a cat and somehow bones had ended up broken.