A Spy's Life

by Henry Porter

  Even if by some fluke there was a copy of the StB file, Harland had always known that he would be able to defend himself against allegations of spying for the East. In every instance he could demonstrate that he fed them misleading information or intelligence, which he was certain had already reached them from other sources. As to Ana Tollund, he knew Kapek had simply cited her as a source because he was anxious to claim a part of what was deemed to be a famous StB coup against the West. Kapek was a lousy, gullible second-rater. When he didn’t know something he made it up. Harland could account for everything – every sleight of hand, dodge and manoeuvre which enabled him to keep the Czechs at arm’s length while at the same time maintaining loyalty to SIS.

  He concluded that Rivers’s dossier had been assembled from brief references to him in other files. He’d always known that he was bound to appear in Kapek’s own file, in Eva’s and in a few others. Destroying his own file hadn’t eliminated the problem, but it made it a lot less acute. It was obvious now that SIS had gained access to the StB archive which he knew still existed in Prague with orders to get as much as they could on him and as quickly as possible. The photograph must have been located in Eva’s file or some other part of the archive. Its existence was embarrassing and Harland had dreaded it being found. But now the moment had arrived he knew he could handle it.

  ‘There you have it,’ Rivers concluded after a few more sentences. ‘The A to Z of your betrayal.’

  Harland paused, then allowed a smile to spread across his face.

  ‘I suppose you expect me to roll over now and throw myself on your mercy. But, of course, you know this is all crap. For a start, not one of those accusations is backed up by independent evidence gathered by SIS or the Security Service. I don’t deny that I was enticed into an affair – a young man’s mistake that I regretted for its lack of professionalism, rather than any threat it posed. But I can show that instead of leading me to betray the service, I used it to our advantage. I even told Jimmy Kinloch at the time, so you can see it wasn’t any big secret.’

  Blanchard let out an exasperated wheeze, but Harland continued, holding Rivers’s eyes.

  ‘What you have there is a lot of gossip from a couple of bottom-feeders who were desperate to impress their masters. They had to produce fortnightly reports and because they were mediocrities they filled them with bollocks. We all knew that and moreover we used that need for a constant supply of information against them. Walter Vigo even knew about Kapek. It was he who told me how and when to use him and I distinctly remember filing reports of my contact with both Kapek and Hense, which doubtless you have got tucked away somewhere. Men like Kapek were the interface of the time. It was how we engaged the enemy. We used them while they thought they were using us.’

  ‘Yes, but few of our people were stupid enough to have their pictures taken with a known agent,’ said Rivers, rallying to regain control over the proceedings. ‘You compromised yourself and then your loyalty, Harland. I don’t think you have grasped the seriousness of your situation. You are facing a very lengthy jail sentence.’

  Harland regarded him with a combination of wonder and disdain. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Any public prosecutor would laugh at this pile of shit. Where are the covert pictures of my meetings with Kapek and Hense, eh? Where are the copies of bank statements showing that I received payments? Where’s evidence of my ideological conviction? The men and women that I have suborned in the course of working for the Czechs? The transcripts of telephone conversations? The grainy pictures of dead letter boxes?’ Harland stopped and looked at Blanchard and Rivers in turn. ‘You don’t have a thing, except a lot of fantasy scraped from the bottom of a few files in Prague. I doubt whether you can even prove that Kapek and Hense exist.’

  Blanchard blew air from one cheek into the other and revolved his wedding ring with a thumb and one chubby finger.

  ‘Oh, I assure you we have all we need,’ said Rivers. ‘We can produce Josef Kapek and Milos Hense any time we choose. You are forgetting that when Vasily Mitrokhin’s archive was smuggled out of the Soviet Union to the West, it was taken as evidence of de facto guilt. We wouldn’t have any problem gaining a conviction, Harland.’

  ‘The Mitrokhin material led to no prosecutions – a bit of cheap sensationalism in the newspapers, that’s all.’

  ‘But those people weren’t serving SIS officers. It’s an entirely different matter to unearth evidence of this behaviour in a member of SIS. We know everything, you see, and frankly we are unable to ignore such a serious crime. We even know that you attempted to destroy your own files during or after the Velvet Revolution.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, I was in hospital. I’d been beaten up by the Czechs – the very people you say I was working for! Doesn’t that strike you as utterly illogical? I mean, why would they beat me up if I had been serving them all those years? Did it not occur to you that I was held and tortured for the very reason that I had misled them? Tortured, you understand. How many SIS officers go through that?’ He was shouting now. ‘Almost immediately after being freed I received treatment for cancer – surgery and chemotherapy. So you see I was hardly in a condition to run around chasing bloody files. By the way, how do you think that’s going to look in court?’

  ‘We know about your problems, Harland,’ said Blanchard. ‘But the fact remains that you did try to destroy the evidence. Luckily, you didn’t get everything.’

  ‘Well, if you’re so bloody confident, why don’t you have me arrested and charged?’

  ‘In due course, we will. You may take that as a certainty,’ said Blanchard.

  Harland rose. ‘I’m going to leave, this is getting ridiculous.’

  ‘I am afraid that won’t be possible,’ said Rivers, also getting up. ‘We will speak in the morning when I’m sure you will view your situation more sensibly. What we want from you is a statement, an admission of your role with StB. Then we will decide what to do with you. But we do need this from you, Harland, and I would advise you to cooperate as fully as you can.’

  Blanchard by now had pushed his chair back and was making for the door.

  Harland’s temper snapped.

  ‘You keep me here one moment longer and tomorrow you will be answering for your actions to the Foreign Secretary and the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. I’m not pissing around. I have an authority from the Secretary-General which effectively makes me his personal ambassador. That means you hold me here at your peril.’

  ‘Oh, in what capacity do you represent the Secretary-General?’ asked Blanchard with laboured sarcasm. ‘The investigation of the world’s sewage treatment plants? The distribution of electrical appliances in the developing nations? Do you have proof of your role, or must we take your word on it?’

  ‘Just accept that it exists.’ Harland wasn’t going to give him the letter yet. Much better for them to get a call from Jaidi’s office. He prayed Harriet had got through.

  ‘We will see you in the morning, Mr Harland,’ said Rivers, opening the door. ‘In the meantime, I recommend that you think very carefully about your position.’

  Harland sat down. A minute or two later, the two men who had picked him up at the airport came in and told him to follow them. They showed him into what looked like an army barracks bedroom a few doors along the corridor where Griffiths asked for his personal possessions. Harland handed him his wallet, passport and phone and said he had nothing else. Griffiths seemed to accept this.

  He looked around the room. There was a small window, high above the bed, a table, a chair and a reading lamp. He supposed it had once been a storeroom. On the walls regular indentations indicated that shelves had risen from floor to ceiling. The room smelt as though it had been sluiced down with cleaning fluid.

  He sat down in the cold, stale air and unscrewed the top of a bottle of mineral water, left on the table together with some sandwiches. He poured the contents into a paper cup, peeled the wrapper from the sandwiches, and consumed them automatically. When
he’d finished he lowered himself on to the bed and shifted to his side. There was no pillow and his head was still sensitive to the touch. He wondered about Tomas’s call. Was he all part of some ludicrously Byzantine plan of Vigo’s? If he had been, they surely would have produced Tomas in some shape in the general slew of allegations. The fact that they hadn’t mentioned him made his story a lot more believable. Then quite suddenly his mind switched off. He shut his eyes and fell asleep.

  At about six in the morning he was aware of the door opening. It caught him in the very deepest sleep and a few moments passed before he realised that Vigo was standing in the doorway. He rubbed his eyes as Vigo moved into the room and switched on the table lamp, angling it in Harland’s direction. Harland swore.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, turn that off. What the hell are you playing at?’

  Vigo nudged the lamp so that the light bounced off the wall and threw an aura around him. He sat down and stretched out a leg.

  So, Vigo had come to hear his confession: Vigo, the cardinal confessor.

  ‘I imagine that you’ve been contacted by the UN,’ said Harland.

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘You know bloody well that you can’t keep me here. That stuff your stooges from Five threw at me was grotesque. Not a word of it will stand up in court.’

  ‘A matter of opinion, Bobby, a matter of opinion.’ Vigo sighed to underline the gravity of Harland’s situation. ‘You know, I always had my suspicions. There was something too good about you. You were too anxious to please, too controlled. I knew that wasn’t your character. I knew that there had to be a reason for this façade. And that reason, of course, was guilt.’

  Harland propped himself up.

  ‘What’s eating you, Walter? I don’t want to trespass on your problems, but all this does seem rather panicky and amateurish for you. I mean, for Christ’s sake, we all talked to those termites from the East, so why on earth are you hounding me now? What’s got into you all of a sudden?’

  ‘Because you’re a traitor – a traitor who’s squared his conscience with a lot of sanctimonious nonsense about working for the international community. That’s why.’ He stopped and looked despairingly at Harland. ‘Do you know about the poetess Sappho? Perhaps I can tell you about her. You see, none of Sappho’s poems has survived. There are just fragments of poems which were used in the teaching of grammar. So we have some sense of Sappho’s genius and we know from contemporary accounts that she existed, but we do not have her work. That’s more or less how I think of your case, Bobby. There’s now only fragmentary evidence of your activities, but from those fragments we can deduce a great deal about your importance as an agent for the StB.’

  Harland got up and straightened his jacket.

  ‘Sit down. I haven’t finished yet.’ The tone was surprisingly harsh. For the first time it occurred to him that Vigo would have no compunction about killing someone. Wet jobs were what the Soviets used to call assassinations. Vigo wasn’t above resorting to a wet job, he thought. But that wasn’t the point now. Vigo wanted something, something that he believed Harland had inherited from, or shared with, Griswald.

  And then Vigo confirmed everything Harland was thinking.

  ‘Unless I see some sign of cooperation, Bobby, you are going to be put away. At the very least your career will be ruined. My own belief is that higher authorities will deem your crimes to be so serious and so persistent that there is no other course but to prosecute you.’

  ‘I’ve told you, I am not in a position to give you anything.’

  ‘Of course you are. Why would the Secretary-General ask you to investigate the crash if he wasn’t certain there was something to investigate – i.e. that you possessed some special knowledge? What is that knowledge, Bobby? Why you? What qualifies you? The only possible knowledge that you could have must derive from Griswald. Griswald, the man who accompanied you to Prague in ’89; the man you travelled with to New York; the man who was taking his big secret to the United Nations. It all goes back to Griswald, doesn’t it?’

  Harland listened, fascinated by the movements of Vigo’s face in the shadows. ‘You’re losing your touch, Walter. From what you say, I gather the Secretary-General has called the Foreign Office. Judging by the hour of your appearance here, I guess he must have talked to the Foreign Secretary. That means you’ve been told to release me pretty damned sharp.’ He paused. ‘So, Walter, if you don’t mind, I’m going to get the hell out of here.’

  He moved to the open door. Vigo put up a hand.

  ‘You’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re dealing with, Bobby – no idea at all.’ He shifted in his chair, then turned his face up to Harland. ‘As to this investigation into your activities, don’t for one minute think that it’s over. Your head’s in the noose and we’re not going to let go of the rope.’

  Harland left him sitting in the room and walked towards some light spilling into the corridor from an office. A man he hadn’t seen before handed him his things. ‘Order me a cab,’ Harland demanded, ‘and put it on your account.’

  Harriet had waited up all night for him. It was seven o’clock when he was dropped outside her house in St John’s Wood, a large neo-Georgian affair which Harriet called nouveau-Georgian. He saw her through the window, as he crossed a gravel drive which had been silenced by frost. She was asleep over the kitchen table with her head resting on folded arms. He stretched over a well-barbered box hedge and knocked gently on the window with his knuckle. She awoke, dragged herself up from the table, and gave him a despairing smile.

  Their closeness was surprising: there were eight years between them and they were different in practically every way. Where Harland was tall, dark and concise in his movements, she was short, fair and animated. Harriet positively leaked energy. While his face, as he had been told often enough by Louise, gave little away, hers flickered with change, sometimes settling into a look of intense, happy concentration. She smiled when she was thinking hardest, which was perhaps why so few saw her coming. She would listen with that smile, her eyes oscillating ever so fractionally as she processed information at a ridiculous speed. And then she would dispatch her opponent with a few lines of deft logic, her expression becoming, if anything, sweeter.

  She unbolted the double door and reached up to Harland to kiss his cheek.

  ‘Bobby,’ she said. ‘You have to stop this. I cannot take the endless anxiety surrounding your travel arrangements. You can’t seem to get off a plane like a normal person. First this terrible crash and now bloody Walter Vigo is marching you off to secret locations. God, I remember him! He married Davina Cummings. What a pompous creep! I don’t suppose he’s improved with age. Still, I gather by your appearance that the call did the trick. They seemed pretty concerned when I explained the situation.’

  ‘Yes, thanks, Hal. Did the boy turn up?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. Who the hell is he anyway? What’s this all about?’

  ‘It’s a long story. Wouldn’t you rather hear it all tomorrow – I mean later?’

  ‘No, I can’t stand the suspense any longer. I’ve waited up all night and now I want some explanation.’

  ‘But it’s Christmas Eve, haven’t you got things to do?’

  ‘Not now, I haven’t. And anyway everything is done: presents bought and wrapped; meals prepared; husband overdosed on champagne and flirtation. Look, Bobby, I want to know what’s been happening to you. I haven’t seen you for five months, for goodness’ sake. And if it hadn’t been for some providence of which you’re entirely deserving, my darling brother, I might never have seen you again. So you have to tell me everything now. Please, I can’t wait.’

  They went into the kitchen. Harriet made tea and slapped some ham and cheese between a couple of pieces of bread and put them into a children’s sandwich toaster shaped like frog. Harland told her everything and the familiar tremor entered her eyes as she snatched at the story. When he told her about Tomas she gasped and put her hands to her mouth to suppress a giggl
e.

  ‘I know this is all very serious, Bobby. But you’ve got to see it’s funny. I mean, it’s like Twelfth Night. Lost love, people being washed up on foreign shores, relations appearing out of the blue. “What country, friend, is this? This is Illyria, lady.” That’s where you are Bobby – Illyria.’

  12

  A CHRISTMAS PARTY

  After calling Harland, Tomas decided not to wait for him at the address. Instead, he checked into a small tourist hotel in Bayswater where the Lebanese on the front desk seemed to be glad enough of the business and didn’t ask him for an ID. A rowdy couple next door might have kept him awake, if he’d wanted to sleep, but he had a lot to do, preparing the two small computers and encoding them with information. As he worked, he wondered furiously how he had been traced to Flick’s home. It was baffling. There was no question of him ever using the telephones at her apartment and he’d never so much as touched her laptop. That side of things was watertight. He’d always made sure that he was absolutely untraceable. Yet something must have led them there – a mistake in the past six months which had been seized upon very recently and resulted in Flick’s death. His body convulsed with a shudder as he saw her again all trussed up and broken. He had thought of calling the police after he’d left, but realised that the manager of the shop was already concerned and that she would be found soon enough. He stopped working and slumped in the chair, thinking back over the past few months. Then it came to him. It must have been the parcel from Mortz.

  Mortz was his contact in Stockholm – a friend, though they had never actually spoken or met. Well, perhaps they had once in a bar in Stockholm two years before, but neither of them was sure and he couldn’t put a face to Mortz, neither had he the slightest idea of his identity, his job or his age. Mortz could have been a college professor or a computer freak. Tomas inclined to the former because there was something thoughtful and restrained about his communications – a seriousness of purpose, for want of a better expression. They were very different, he could tell that, and yet they’d become friends, companions in arms, partners in the big project. He often wondered why Mortz showed such zeal for their work, and once he asked him about his motives in a rather cautious e-mail. Mortz did not reply. For a week there was silence and then he came back with new information from one of the half-dozen or so disenchanted intelligence people he’d cultivated over the Net. Things were back to normal.