by Jeremy Duns
‘Are you going to help us or not?’
Now he took a breath. He poked a finger at his glasses, then turned to Maclean.
‘Do you trust these people? Are they telling the truth about this?’
Maclean tilted his head. ‘I don’t want to take the chance they’re not, do you?’
Anton thought about that for a moment, then stretched out his hand to shake mine.
‘Where do you need to go?’
We all breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Finland,’ I said.
‘I see. Like Lenin! Well, you will need a lot of papers for that. I take it you don’t have any at all?’ I shook my head. ‘Okay. Everyone needs to have a domestic passport, with propiska. An institutional work pass, a work book and of course kharakteristika. We will just have to hope that will be enough.’
‘You mean they might ask for more than that?’ I said.
‘Yes. Some things require a spravka, a special permit.’
‘What sort of things?’
He shrugged. ‘Staying in a hotel, going to the hospital – even entering some libraries.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘We won’t be doing any of those.’
I sounded more confident than I was.
‘All right,’ said Anton. ‘Let’s get started.’
*
Maclean left shortly afterwards – the last thing we wanted was for people to start wondering where he had got to. He agreed that if he heard anything about the situation from his colleagues he would try to return, using Anton’s door knock code again.
Once he’d gone, Sarah and I helped Anton clear some space in the living room. The bed was a folding one, and it turned out that the bookcase opened on a hinge and the bed went in it, stored upright, along with the blanket and pillows.
‘Now,’ Anton said once everything had been packed away. ‘I think it might be best if you both clean yourselves up a bit first. And let’s see if we can do something about your hand.’ I’d taken off the gloves. ‘Wait here.’
He pushed open a door to the right of the radiator and I caught a glimpse of a tiny bathroom housing a toilet and a washbasin. A few moments later he came back in with a first-aid kit. I winced as he applied antiseptic and a bandage, but thanked him for it. He motioned for Sarah to use the bathroom, and she nodded graciously and went in to wash herself. Then he turned back to me.
‘We should also change your appearance. They will have a very detailed description of you by now, I think.’
He took off his spectacles and passed them over. I placed them over my nose, and blinked at the strength of them. I removed them at once, but agreed that they were a simple and effective prop.
‘And some clothes,’ said Anton. He squeezed past a pile of books and slid out a drawer in his magical bookcase. After some rummaging around, he removed a heavily wrinkled jacket and a gaudy cheesecloth shirt. I unbuttoned Bessmertny’s shirt and put both on. Anton passed me a hairbrush, and I arranged my hair so that it fell forward.
Sarah came out of the bathroom, her face looking a lot fresher, and muffled a laugh at my appearance. Anton smiled and did some more rummaging until he had located what looked like a black transistor radio. But I saw a lens sticking out of the front, and realized that it was, in fact, a camera.
‘You have a darkroom here?’ I asked.
He smiled, pleased at the question. ‘It’s an instant camera,’ he said. ‘A copy of the Polaroid – very new, and very rare. I can’t tell you what I had to do to get hold of it. I’ve also had to make some very special modifications. It has completely changed the way I can make documents. Now, please stand over there.’
He pointed at an area of wall beside the bookcase. I moved towards it, and he fiddled about with the camera and positioned me as he wanted.
‘Can you see?’ Sarah asked him.
‘I’m fine,’ he said, but it seemed to take him quite a while to line up the shot. But once he had done it and taken the photo, he stripped off the backing sheet and we waited for the image to appear. It took about a minute. Bizarrely, instead of one image appearing, four did, precisely like passport photographs.
‘Four lenses,’ said Anton, beaming. ‘It took me almost a month to figure out how to do it.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I said. ‘What do we think, though? Will it pass muster?’
Sarah peered over and had a look. ‘It’s great,’ she said. ‘I doubt many people would recognize you from that.’
I grimaced. It wasn’t most people I was worried about, but men at a roadblock examining every vehicle, armed with a description. But I smiled at her nevertheless. ‘Let’s see how you fare, then.’
Anton looked up at me with surprise. ‘Oh, no!’ he said. ‘You misunderstand. I only have a set of papers that will fit you. I don’t have any way of making papers for your friend.’
I stared at him. ‘Well, that’s wonderful to hear. But how the hell do you think we’re going to get over the border if only one of us has papers?’
‘It’s all right, Paul,’ said Sarah quietly. ‘It’s best you get away – you know where the U-boat is, after all. I’ll find a way out somehow, don’t worry.’
‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘I’m not leaving you here for the likes of Yuri to…’ I pressed my nails into my palms. ‘There has to be a way,’ I said to Anton. ‘You must have some documents you can adapt.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re lucky I have some that will suit you. All I can suggest is that the young lady might be able to fit in the boot of my car, if she is willing. It’s a small space, but it should be possible.’
We glanced at each other, my earlier remark about putting her in the boot of Bessmertny’s car hovering between us. But it was a good offer. It wasn’t as good as papers, but a car was much safer than trying our luck with public transport.
‘I’m willing,’ Sarah said.
‘Good.’ I turned back to Anton. ‘Where’s your car and what does it look like?’
‘It’s parked on the other side of the street – a yellow Moskvitch. There are windscreen wipers in the glove compartment if you need them. And the radio has a special receiver installed. If you press the middle button, you should be able to hear what the militsiya are saying. That might come in useful.’
He took a set of keys out of his pocket and handed them over.
‘Thank you,’ I said, taking them.
‘I wish I could do more. Now I have to get to work. My equipment is in the other room, and I would ask that you not observe. Please understand that this is not because I don’t trust you…’
I nodded. He was worried that if we were caught, the authorities would torture us to discover the techniques he’d used to forge our papers. I was pretty sure they would have other things on their mind in that case but, after all, he was risking his freedom for the sake of two strangers and I didn’t expect him to abandon his own self-interest entirely.
‘How long will it take for you to prepare the documents?’ I asked him.
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps an hour?’
Christ. It seemed like an age, considering the situation I’d left behind in the bunker. But there was no way round it: without at least one set of papers, there was no way we were going to get out of the city, let alone the country.
Anton fetched a packet of stale-looking biscuits from the kitchen, poured us a couple of glasses of water and handed out two cigarettes, before retreating to the bedroom and closing the door behind him.
I lit the cigarette and gladly inhaled it. Sarah walked over to the tape recorder and found a cassette of Bach organ preludes, which she put on to replace Dylan. Something about the way she was standing, facing away from me, alerted me that something was wrong.
‘Will you really be okay in the boot of a car?’ I asked.
She nodded her head fractionally, but didn’t turn. I thought about it for a moment, and realized she was frightened. I picked up the attaché case, opened it and took out the papers, fanning them across the tab
le.
‘I looked at some of these in the café, but there’s much more of it, as you can see. A lot of it will be guff, I’m sure, but there might be something here that helps us know how they’re thinking, and might help us stop this. Care to go through it with me?’
She turned and smiled, and I realized I’d guessed correctly: it was the inaction that was making her antsy, the waiting around. We seated ourselves as comfortably as we could and began reading through the papers. I started by tackling Ivashutin’s strategy document again, reading it through from start to finish. I couldn’t decide if he really believed that the warmongering imperialists could be overcome by the noble Soviets in their overcoats storming through a radioactive Western Europe, or whether the document was empty rhetoric that nobody in the Kremlin took seriously. I hoped for all our sakes that it was the latter.
‘You might be interested in this,’ said Sarah, and I looked up. She pushed across a thick bound dossier and I picked it up. There was a red star in a black circle on the front, and the word ‘НЕЗАВИСИМЫЙ’ in faded type.
‘NEZAVISIMYJ’, meaning ‘independent’ – this was my file. I’d discovered the same dossier in a flat in Rome six months ago, but that version had been a lot thinner. This, then, must be the GRU’s master file, containing all the information they had on me.
I opened it up and was immediately confronted with several strips of film negatives. I held one up to the light and saw it was a photograph of me as a young man in SAS uniform, which must have been taken somewhere in the British Zone. It had been taken from some distance, and I was looking down at the ground, shielding my eyes from the sun with one arm raised. I started running through the rest of the strip. There was one of Anna, casually standing on the steps of the clinic, smoking a cigarette, and another with me and her in the ward, presumably taken with a camera she had hidden somewhere. There were dozens of the things. Presumably they had sent a few to Sasha in London for safekeeping, because he had shown me some in March to blackmail me into continuing to serve them.
I placed them to one side, exposing a document below. The cover page bore the title ‘APPENDIX I: RECRUITMENT OF “INDEPENDENT”’. I turned it over and found a slim pamphlet; the edges of the pages were yellowing and torn, but the type was still legible. It was dated 12 June 1945, and was in the form of a letter from Yuri to Kuznetsov, who had then been the head of the GRU.
I met with agent LOTUS on the 6th to discuss the progress of Operation JUSTICE, the latest report on which I have enclosed with this package (Operational Letter 16/H). At the same meeting, we discussed the matter of LOTUS’s son, whom we have codenamed INDEPENDENT (see Operational Letter 14/H).
I hereby propose that we try to recruit INDEPENDENT. The reason for doing so is simple: in the coming years, he is very likely to rise rapidly through the ranks of British Intelligence. The fact that he is the son of one of our agents gives us the means with which to recruit him, and if we succeed he may prove more valuable than any of the others we have recruited into the British network to date.
I already knew that I was ‘Independent’; it seemed Father’s codename had been ‘Lotus’, and that their operation to find and execute war criminals in the British Zone of Germany had been JUSTICE. There was something disturbing about the phrase ‘the British network to date’ – how many had been in that, and who were they?
INDEPENDENT is twenty years old and has already served with several British commando units. He is currently attached to the Allied Control Commission in Helsinki, where he is working under cover for the Special Operations Executive. He was placed there through the recommendation of LOTUS, and his performance so far has been exemplary – see my last report. LOTUS is opposed to the idea of recruiting his son, but is still afraid that we may use the compromising material we have regarding himself and BAIT. I feel confident he will be a completely willing participant in the operation.
‘BAIT’? Who the hell was that, and what was the material about them that had compromised Father? My stomach roiled as I realized that my father had never been an ideological traitor, but had been blackmailed into serving the Russians. And that despite Yuri’s claim that he was ‘a completely willing participant’, they had coerced him into trapping me, too.
The relationship between LOTUS and the target offers us a great advantage, but will have to be handled with care. LOTUS’s cover is that of a traditional right-wing member of the British upper classes and this, together with the internment of his wife for German sympathies, has led to a distance between himself and INDEPENDENT, who naturally has no idea of his father’s work for us. LOTUS has agreed that the best course would not be to try to mend this distance, which would almost certainly prove too difficult, but instead to exploit it.
I propose a variation of the basic honey-trap operation we have used many times previously, including with LOTUS and BAIT, but with a few innovations resulting from the nature of the situation.
I took a breath and tried to clear my head. So Father had been the target of a honey trap – and presumably ‘Bait’ was his lover. And they had played this trick ‘many times’. It looked like their recruitment plans had been a lot more systematic than I or anyone else had ever considered – almost routine.
And Father, behind that cold English mask of his, had apparently known all along that I resented him for his politics and for what he had done to Mother for hers. The stern handshake, the steely glare, the lack of any show of affection – had they all been part of his cover, then? Doubtless they were built in to his upbringing, but I was shocked that he had not only been aware of my feelings towards him but had also known how to exploit them; perhaps parents knew this sort of thing instinctively. But this was nevertheless a very different man to the one I thought I’d known. It showed a level of cynicism that made me resent him anew – but then I remembered the blackmail, and another picture emerged, of a man who was utterly desperate and trapped, and who was pressured into finding a way to recruit his son into the same situation.
I wasn’t sure if I could read on. Did I need to know precisely how they’d gone about recruiting me? I didn’t let myself answer the question: my fingers turned the page anyway.
PHASE ONE.
The operation should take place in the British Zone of Germany over the next six months, and run in conjunction with Operation JUSTICE. Agents LOTUS and KINDRED already have the list of Ukrainian traitors we suspect of hiding in the British Zone. LOTUS will contact INDEPENDENT and urgently request he come to Germany to support an operation of greatest secrecy. LOTUS has suggested invoking a direct order from Churchill, and I agree.
PHASE TWO.
LOTUS to introduce INDEPENDENT to KINDRED and inform him he is engaged in finding and liquidating war criminals. He will say they are Nazis who have killed British servicemen, rather than the scum who have killed our own agents.
I thought back to that first night in the safe house outside Lübeck, when Father had introduced me to Henry Pritchard and told me about the operation: the tiny sitting room lit by candles, Father talking about his meeting with Churchill, Pritchard standing to attention by the ramshackle wardrobe. Could I, in my wildest imaginings, have guessed that both were working for the Soviets? No, agents ‘Lotus’ and ‘Kindred’ had played their parts well – and I’d been an easy dupe.
The rest of Phase Two had taken place precisely as described: I’d helped Father trace his Nazi war criminals, unaware that they were Ukrainians who had killed Russian agents rather than British ones. And then had come the injury. Father had claimed that our final target was Gustav Meier, an SS officer who had raped and tortured members of the French Resistance, including children. All of this had been backed by forged documents he had briefly waved under my nose. Towards the end of September 1945, Father claimed to have discovered that Meier was working as a gardener near Hamburg, and we’d set off together to capture him. Naturally, it was a set-up. ‘Meier’ – even the name was included in Yuri’s plan – was in fact a Soviet agen
t codenamed STILETTO for his expertise with knives, who had been brought in especially and instructed on how to cut me.
The wound we envision would be to one of the kidneys and will be very painful, but shallow and will heal within a relatively short time.
It had been extremely painful. Even now, I found it hard to believe it had only been a surface wound, and that I hadn’t received genuine treatment for all those months. And then Phase Three: Father and Pritchard had taken me to the Red Cross hospital just outside Lübeck, where I was soon taken into the care of a nurse codenamed COMFORT – Anna.
You will recall COMFORT from earlier operations. She has now been at this hospital for several months and her professionalism is unparalleled. Once assigned to treating INDEPENDENT, she will befriend and woo him, playing on his youthful desires and ambitions to rebel against his father and the establishment he represents. Incidentally, LOTUS assures us his son is sexually normal and will succumb to her charms. If not, we will replace her with IRINA.
So Anna was a veteran of honey traps – and they even had a back-up model, just in case I didn’t fancy her! Well, Father had been right about my appetites. They’d found a beauty any red-blooded young male would have salivated over, especially if it were her job to make him do so. I wondered who her other victims had been: other Englishmen like myself? How many?
PHASE FOUR.
COMFORT will educate the target about our beliefs and aims, presenting them in a light he is most likely to appreciate. I have already briefed her extensively on how best to do this. If we are lucky, this alone may be enough, and she may be able to recruit him directly. But, judging from previous operations and the unusual biography of INDEPENDENT, it may prove a little more difficult. If that is the case, once she is certain that he has strong feelings for her, COMFORT will reveal to INDEPENDENT that she is one of our agents, under the guise of remorse and affection for him. She will also mention my cover name at the camp, and that I am her handler.
This strategy involves a certain amount of risk, but I am confident of INDEPENDENT’s reaction – namely that he will angrily rebuff her and contact LOTUS to tell him that the British ‘operation’ has been exposed.
