In the end, it nearly did go wrong. The Russians got suspicious and sent a swimmer over the side. But fortunately, the divers had already accomplished their mission. They discovered two propellers set in sunken recesses in the forward hull. The Sverdlov was one of the first warships that had been fitted with bow thrusters. The extra props were not only useful for dockside manoeuvres, but would help the cruiser to take evasive action under fire. Kit knew it was a significant intelligence find and was certain that British Naval Intelligence was leaning on MI6 to find out more.
Kit flicked through the SM/CLARET file. One of the CIA divers reported that Crabb wasn’t fit enough to do this sort of work: he was overweight, a slow swimmer and consumed too much oxygen. Apparently, Crabb had had some difficulty with his breathing apparatus and was forced to surface. ‘This,’ wrote the CIA man, ‘probably accounted for the crew becoming alerted.’ Kit closed the file. Poor Crabb, he thought.
In the end, Kit received a verbal reprimand for the Sverdlov affair. The reprimand wasn’t for spying on the Russian ship, but for having used ‘official cover’, American CIA trained frogmen. The real message from his bosses in Washington was: Don’t leave any fingerprints and provide tons of ‘plausible deniability’. There was a whole manual, and a very secret one, entitled ‘Embassy Directed Covert Operations in a Host Country’. During SM/ CLARET Kit had violated almost every guideline on ‘compartmentalisation’ and ‘anonymity’. His mistake had been to trust his British counterpart. Meanwhile, the Brit was wiping MI6 fingerprints off the spy mission, but leaving all of the CIA’s. It was a brilliant example of ‘dry-cleaning’. Kit felt no resentment: it was all part of the game. But next time it was going to be his turn – that’s why he had hired Driscoll.
The next file that Kit looked at was US Naval Intelligence stuff: the folder was packed with 8x10 glossy photos. Many had been snapped by adrenalin fuelled helicopter crews hovering just a few feet over Russian ships. Assholes, thought Kit. A miscalculation, a sudden gust of wind, a rotor catches a piece of rigging – and a Soviet ship’s drenched with blazing aviation fuel and dead Americans and dead Russians burning all over the decks. What happens next? Are we all crazy? Kit began reading the ship details.
The Ordzhonikidze is an Admiral Sverdlov class cruiser. She displaces 17 thousand tons and is 689 feet in length. Kit did a quick calculation – nearly ten swimming pool lengths. Could Crabb still manage it? The Ordzhonikidze carries 12 six-inch guns and 12 four-inch guns – as, thought Kit, any fool can see from the photos. The important questions are the mysteries that lie beneath her hull. What sort of sonar does she have? Had they replaced the old Tamir and Mehta systems? Could they now detect US nuclear submarines and destroy them with nuclear depth charges? What sort of torpedo tubes does she have? Are there underwater ports for sowing mines? Could these mines be nuclear? And why was the ship so fast – was the stern propeller of some new design?
Kit pushed the file aside and leaned back in his chair. The bottom of that ship, if not the Holy Grail, was still an intelligence treasure trove. He knew for certain that the Brits were going to try again: the temptation was too strong to resist. And it would have to be another unauthorised operation. The Prime Minister would never sanction it: the risks of a serious diplomatic incident were too great. Especially as the UK was leaning towards a policy of détente with the Soviet Union – and a botched spying incident would blow it. And wouldn’t, thought Kit, it serve them right. He had begun to feel good again. He had left the sickly twists of conscience behind. He was back in a professional world where there were no innocent bystanders, just willing players wearing team strips. Being hurt and hurting others was part of the game.
MI6 hadn’t approached Kit about the Ordzhonikidze. They knew they couldn’t expect a CIA cover story for a second dive. But Kit still felt annoyed about being left out. The stuff on the bottom of that ship was the bread and butter of intelligence gathering. And what were the Brits going to do with the Ordzhonikidze’s secrets? They didn’t have the resources to build countermeasures. There were only two horses in the arms race. There was no point in the op if they didn’t share the intelligence with the Americans.
Kit picked up his desk calendar and looked again at the dates. The timeframe was limited to three days and all the main players – including Crabb and his handler – were known. Kit knew that they would stay at the Sally Port Hotel again. And he knew, roughly, where Crabb would begin his swim – there were only three places in the crowded dockyard where a diver could get in the water unobserved by a ship docked on the Railway Jetty.
The only light in the office was a desk lamp, but the ghostly glow of the London night crept through a window and lurked on the carpet. Kit looked into the shadows and decided that the Driscoll op needed another twist. He opened a desk drawer, peeled off a piece of flash paper – when your contact burns it, there’s no ash – and began to write the message. When he was finished, he unscrewed a dead drop spike and popped the note into its hollow core.
Kit walked over to the bookshelf and took down his copy of USSR Biographies. The volume was only ‘confidential’, so he didn’t have to keep it in the archive vault. ‘Who the fuck,’ he said aloud, ‘was Ordzhonikidze?’ He flicked through the volume: Ordzhonikidze, Sergo 1886-1937. Kit wished he hadn’t bothered. It was depressing reading. The ship’s namesake had been a lifelong and loyal friend to Stalin. At first, Ordzhonikidze had been well rewarded and rose quickly through the ranks to govern the Ukraine. In 1936 his loyalty came under question. Rumours spread. A year later he was dead. A death certificate, stating suicide, was signed by the Health Commissar himself, Dr Kaminsky. A short time later, Kaminsky was arrested and executed. I suppose, thought Kit, you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t. And then, a dozen years later a keel is laid down in Leningrad shipyard – Stalin still very much alive – for an umpteen-gun, seventeen-thousand ton cruiser to be named the Ordzhonikidze. If, thought Kit, there is a God, I bet He’s just like that.
It was well after dark when Kit left the embassy. He found his way out through a service entrance in the back and had to dodge around ranks of stinking dustbins. He emerged into a dimly lit close called Three Kings Yard. He turned left into Upper Brook Street, also dark and deserted except for a single black taxi. Kit walked west to Park Lane where there was brightness and traffic, then turned right towards Marble Arch. He looked across the road. Speaker’s Corner was quiet – all the loonies were back on the ward. The Corner was, however, a great idea. It was a quaint heritage thing that gave simpletons the illusion that freedom of speech really did exist in 1950s England. But where, thought Kit, can I get a copy of Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover?
Or, even better, get a journalist to write about ‘The Man in the Mask’? It was Kit’s favourite scandal. Once or twice a month, a cabinet minister attended a dinner party at a very exclusive address. The podgy minister, aside from the black leather mask that hid his identity, was completely nude. He served the rest of the guests naked and ate his own dinner out of a dog’s bowl. For some time, Kit had been trying to discover the identity of the masked minister, but no luck. This was one mystery on which Establishment ranks were closed and lips were sealed. Not even his honey trap minister would talk about that one.
When Kit got to Bayswater Road there were a number of well-dressed couples laughing in haw-haw voices and trying to hail taxis. Kit walked westwards against the convivial evening flow. Hyde Park, dark and deserted, stretched out on his left. Kit suddenly felt cold, as if an icy dead hand had slipped under his shirt and caressed his spine. He turned up his collar, something wasn’t right. Kit stopped at Lancaster Gate. He looked north into the twisting labyrinth of streets. The pale Georgian terraces, scabbed and peeling, stooped in genteel seediness. He wondered if the hotel was still there – and the odd-shaped room where he had been very happy, and then very sad. The twisted memory vanished, something else wasn’t right. Kit knew that he was being followed.
Kit hadn’t seen h
is trail, he had felt him. When he was a trainee at ‘the farm’, Kit had been taught never to stare at the back of a person you were keeping under observation. There was a strange sixth sense inherited from our animal ancestors. We might not see, smell or hear the predator, but we feel that stalking eye crawling up our exposed spine to the back of our necks.
Kit walked the few remaining yards to where Elms Mews angled into Bayswater, then looked at his watch and shook his head. He was pretending that he was waiting to meet someone. Kit folded his arms and tapped his foot in pretend impatience. Meanwhile, he glanced back the way he had come. About fifty yards away, a young man of middle height was reading a bus timetable. Kit waited five more minutes, then checked his watch again. The young man was now reading a menu in a restaurant window. Why, thought Kit, don’t you just wear a flashing sign saying you’re on a surveillance op. Kit was certain that the young man was a watcher from A4 – the MI5 branch responsible for trailing suspicious foreigners around London. Kit felt the red mist descending. How fucking dare they put a tail on him? It wasn’t just a breach of diplomatic etiquette; it was a personal insult too – not so much to be under surveillance, but to have the task assigned to some incompetent office junior. OK, asshole, let’s see how you handle this one?
Kit crossed the road and set off into Kensington Gardens. The path towards the Peter Pan statue was poorly lit, but was wide and straight so his tail shouldn’t have any trouble keeping him in view. Kit listened to a cacophony of alarm calls from the various waterfowl on Long Water. The Romans, he remembered, used to keep geese as sentinels. Kit reached into his coat pocket and found the dead drop spike. He stopped, peered around as if to make sure he was unobserved; then stepped off the path and bent over as if to press the dead drop spike into the earth. Instead, he palmed the spike up his sleeve, and set off briskly towards the Serpentine. When Kit was sure he was no longer being followed, he doubled back using the thick waterside foliage as cover. As Kit suspected, his trail was on his hands and knees searching the grass with a pocket torch. The fool had fallen for one of oldest tricks in the book: faking a dead drop in order to shake a trail.
Kit sat down beneath a rhododendron and waited. He wondered how long it would take Blanco’s boy – for he was now more sure than ever he was from El Blanco’s stable – to realise he’d been duped. The CIA’s nickname for Dick White, the Head of MI5, was El Pene Blanco – or just El Blanco. In any case, Kit knew that his watcher had made a serious professional mistake. Once you’ve been assigned a surveillance target, you don’t do anything else. You stick to him like shit on a poodle. If the target leaves a briefcase of nuclear secrets in a taxi, you don’t run after the taxi – you keep trailing your man. Unbroken surveillance, ‘eyeball’, is sacred. If your target plucks a baby out of a pram and throws the child in the river, don’t jump in to save the kid. It’s just a cheap trick to shake your trail.
Kit could hear the young man getting annoyed. ‘Shit. Where the fuck is it?’ Finally, he saw the agent stand up and brush his hands and knees. Kit watched to see what the young man would do next. He put the torch in his pocket, said ‘fuck’ a few more times, then retraced his steps to the Bayswater Road. Where, thought Kit, were the rest of the surveillance team? Was he acting alone? Unbelievable, but it seemed to be the case. Now it was Kit’s turn to become a one-man surveillance tail.
It was easy. The young man was totally unaware that the tables were turned. The only thing that concerned him seemed to be the fact that he had fucked up his first important assignment. Kit saw his annoyance as he stopped to kick a dustbin when he emerged from the gardens. The agent than set off north-east towards Regent’s Park: walking eyes down, hands in pockets. He stopped at a phone box on Edgeware Road. Kit knew it was going to be a difficult conversation, having to explain to the senior duty officer that he had lost his trail. Kit watched him leaning against the steamy window glass. The call took about two minutes, the young man nodding his head as each point was confirmed. The young man then made another call. This, thought Kit, was the looking-for-sympathy-and-consolation call. Wife? Lover? Maybe his mother – he was so young.
The young man left the phone box and headed towards Marylebone. Kit liked the way Norman French lurked mispronounced in English place names. The Americans did it too – Detroit, Des Moines. All those old French priests and explorers lying unremarked beneath strange feet and unknown voices. Kit returned to the living when he saw the young man check his watch, then watched him disappear into an Underground station. There must, thought Kit, be one last train. It would, he knew, be difficult to continue trailing the young man without being recognised. The platform and train would nearly be deserted. The game was over – or was it?
Kit stayed out of sight on the street as the agent bought a ticket – then followed him into the station. He didn’t stop to buy a ticket; he wasn’t going to need one. The upper station hall was totally deserted, but the echo rumble of a train covered the sound of Kit’s footsteps as he ran towards his target. The young man was at the top of a steep escalator. The hard thump in the middle of his back must have caught him totally unawares. A reflex action made him try to grab the handrails, but the force between his shoulder blades was too powerful – it so winded him that he could not even cry out. Kit watched him tumble and somersault to the concrete floor below – once or twice reaching out, trying desperately to grab anything to break that awful fall.
Kit registered the body at the bottom of the escalator. It looked misshapen and broken. He thought he heard a moaning sound, but it might have just been hot air rising from the deep tunnels. He turned and left quickly – the shock of what he had done already making him shake and feel unsteady at the knees.
It was another late night and another half-bottle of brandy. Kit tried to justify what he had done. MI5, he reasoned, are a bunch of shits. It was their guys who had roughed up Stanley. They were the British equivalent of the FBI. As such, they were only allowed to operate within the United Kingdom itself. Their job was
counter-espionage. They ought to be following Russians around, not Americans. How long, thought Kit, had the man trailing him been in the security service? He certainly seemed awfully green. Kit remembered the odd thing again; the strange sound the young man was making just before he pushed him down the moving stairs. It was a convulsive, liquid sound that seemed to come from deep inside. Had he been ill? Suddenly, Kit realised what the strange sound had been, the young man had been crying. He had been trusted with an important mission and failed. Maybe there was an older brother who was a dead war hero – and the young man’s one dream had been to live up to that memory. Kit poured another brandy. When he was drunk he felt better about himself.
Kit corked the bottle and got into bed. It didn’t matter, he thought, MI5 were total shits. One of the first things that El Blanco did after being appointed was to establish F Branch. Their job was to infiltrate trade unions and political parties – they even spied on the Labour shadow cabinet. Kit knew this was true because he ran agents who did the same thing. One of F Branch’s big successes was burgling a senior member of the British Communist Party and photographing the names and personal details of all fifty-five thousand members. Now they just needed to press the button and round them up – then deep six them or despatch them to that inhabited anthrax island in the Hebrides.
Kit turned off the light and tried to go to sleep. It didn’t work. He felt like shit. He hated hurting people, but he kept doing it. He could see the glow of Pepita’s luminous Madonna. Sometimes, he hated being alone. He wanted to be cuddled like a child. He wanted Pepita. When Kit finally fell asleep his pillow was damp with tears.
Chapter Six
The next day Kit’s secretary passed on a strange message. Someone had rung from a phone box claiming to be Kit’s ‘spiritual adviser’ and recommending they meet ‘at the customary place’ at ‘the customary time’. At half past three, Kit left the embassy and hailed a black taxi. He thought about telling the driver to take him str
aight to the rendezvous point, but then he remembered what had happened the previous evening. He was weary of counter-surveillance games and all the other puerile spy games. But he had to continue playing them because he was trapped in a deadly adult playground from which there was no escape. Kit told the taxi driver to take him to Harrods. The store with its many entrances and exits was one of the best places in London to shake off a tail. And then from Harrods, a quick hop on the Underground to South Kensington.
Brompton Oratory is a late-Victorian Italianate monstrosity where the rich Catholics of Kensington and Chelsea confess their sins: ‘Bless me, father, for I support Apartheid and care more about my cat than the children of the black workers in my South African gold mines.’ Except, thought Kit, that they probably don’t see that as a sin. Kit crossed himself with holy water and looked around for his ‘spiritual adviser’. He spotted Vasili as the Russian came out of a confessional. Vasili crossed himself and went to a side chapel in a deserted corner of the Oratory lit only by candles. Kit watched him genuflect before a seventeenth-century altar that the Victorian architect had looted from a church in Brescia, then go to a pew where he bowed his head and muttered his penance. Kit followed and knelt in the pew directly behind. He leaned forward and whispered, ‘What did you confess?’
‘I said that I was unfaithful to my wife.’
‘Are you?’
‘Oddly enough, no.’
‘In that case, you should have confessed telling lies. Your absolution is invalid.’
The Envoy Page 10
