A Spy's Life

by Henry Porter

  ‘Yes, I know, but what was the other proof?’

  ‘This is difficult.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m not sure … At first everything was fine and Mr Griswald was given permission to find out what he could about Lipnik. Then he was told there were diplomatic interests involved.’ She gave the phrase an ironic edge. ‘He knew what that meant. This came from high up. Mr Griswald believed it originated in NATO headquarters or the UN – maybe his own country. He wasn’t sure. He was very upset because he knew for sure that Viktor Lipnik had taken another identity and that he was a killer.’

  ‘What was the proof?’

  ‘I don’t know. It came to him a few weeks ago. Maybe by e-mail. I am not sure. But not to his office here.’

  ‘So it might have been sent to his laptop?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You don’t know what it contained?’

  ‘No. Mr Griswald called them two halves of a dollar bill.’

  ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘At first I did not understand, but when I thought about it, I realised that the first piece of information was worthless without the second. Like two halves of a dollar. Only when you have the second half can you stick it together and spend it.’

  ‘And these came at different times and Alan stuck them together?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She paused. ‘I think Mr Griswald gave something to get the second. He talked about it vaguely with me. The morality of it. He hinted things. He said there was a higher purpose, though he had misgivings about what he was doing. There was a negotiation and he decided to give the source what he wanted. After that he got the second piece of information.’

  Harland digested this. ‘And they were in code, these e-mails?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘It’s difficult to explain. Not everything was destroyed in the crash.’

  ‘But I think you are making a mistake, Mr Harland. I believe there was one e-mail only. He received the second piece of information personally. You see, he went on a trip to the East three weeks ago. No one knew where he was. He did not tell me. He did not claim for the expenses. He said nothing about it.’

  All along Harland was thinking about the mini-disc. He was certain it contained the proof that Griswald was planning to show to Jaidi because he must have had everything he needed with him on the plane. Also he remembered Griswald tapping his pocket and saying how he would tell Harland one day because it would be particularly interesting to him.

  Then something else occurred to him. Griswald and Bézier had spent two nights in Washington. That could mean that they were seeing someone else with the evidence. Washington was close to the CIA at Langley, Virginia, and also the National Security Agency’s base at Fort Meade in Maryland. He might have been visiting either, perhaps gathering some confirmation for his material. He asked Sara Hezemanns what she thought.

  ‘That’s simple. He was seeing Professor Norman Reeve of the War and Peace Studies Forum. He used to work there, I believe.’

  ‘But he wasn’t just paying a courtesy visit?’

  ‘No, he went to get some photographs that Professor Reeve had acquired.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘They were aerial photographs of a place in Bosnia. That’s all I know. There were many taken during the civil war and also during the Kosovo war.’

  ‘What did they show?’

  ‘I cannot tell you. Mr Griswald was hoping to find something. But he did not explain this to me.’ Harland made a note to find Reeve’s number.

  ‘You implied that there had been some discussion about Alan’s death on the aeroplane. What were people saying?’

  ‘There was nothing definite. When he died, some of his work was given to other people, although most of it only he could do.’

  ‘Did they believe the plane had been sabotaged because it was carrying Griswald and Bézier?’

  ‘Some people speculated. But no one knew about Bézier.’

  ‘They knew about the other stuff, though – this proof he was carrying?’

  ‘Yes, people did understand that he had something important.’

  ‘Has the case been given to anyone else to follow up?’

  ‘No, the case was never reopened. So as far as we are concerned it was simply a private theory of Mr Griswald’s.’

  He said goodbye to Sara Hezemanns, promising to let her know what he found out. Then he sat pondering Griswald’s negotiation for the second piece of information. He knew that Griswald had given something of great value to his source, something, perhaps, that he had learned in the past with the CIA. Griswald wasn’t in the habit of sharing his thoughts with those around him. For him to have talked to Sara must have meant that he was troubled by what he was doing. Was that why Vigo was so intensely interested in Griswald’s activities? Did that explain Guy Cushing bumping into them in The Hague?

  He looked at the desk clock and decided to call Sally Griswald even though it was only 7.30 a.m. on the East Coast.

  She picked up immediately.

  ‘Can you talk?’ asked Harland, hoping she would recognise his voice.

  ‘Yes,’ she said straight away. ‘I just wondered last week whether we had a problem. Perhaps it’s best to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Yes, concerning that material, it is.’ He paused. ‘Sally, do you remember a one-legged man on the circuit in Germany and Austria? He wasn’t on our side of the business. The commercial end of things. Al made up a song about him. If you do remember his name, don’t say it.’

  Sally Griswald laughed. ‘Yes, I believe I do recall the name.’

  ‘Good, I’ve set up a hotmail address in his name. Could you have the material sent to that address in the next hour?’

  ‘I’ll get it done straight away.’

  ‘There’s one other thing. Is it possible that Al was seeing his old employer in DC? Not the CIA, but a later employer?’

  ‘Yes, they were big buddies. Al respected him and often asked for his advice. Do you have his name?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harland. ‘Can I get his number from information?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be a problem, but let me know if you can’t. He’s worth talking to. I should have thought of that before.’

  ‘I’ll call him today,’ he said, then hung up.

  For the next hour or so he checked the in-box of the hotmail account he had set up in the name of Tony Widdershins. Eventually a message arrived with two very large attachments. The message from Eric Griswald explained that he and a friend had had a stab at decoding the pulse, but it hadn’t yielded to the various algorithms that they had applied. The two attachments consisted of the original sound and a diagram, which Eric pointed out showed the patterns involved. Harland copied the two attachments.

  Then he called Norman Reeve in Washington and, after listening to a detailed message about his movements, eventually located him in Florida.

  As Reeve talked, Harland vaguely remembered reading something about him in one of the foreign affairs journals – an Austrian Jew with an anglicised name who’d survived the camps and had set up the War and Peace Studies Forum in the sixties. Reeve was cautious. There were no pictures, he said. He had not seen Griswald for over eighteen months.

  ‘What did you think about the plane crash?’ asked Harland. ‘Weren’t you in any way suspicious, knowing what Alan was investigating?’

  ‘There is always conjecture with these things,’ said Reeve. ‘What I deal with is facts, Mr Harland.’

  ‘If I was to provide you with some facts, would you help me?’

  ‘That would assume that I was in a position to help. But I’m not in a position to help, whatever you tell me.’

  ‘Can I put it this way, sir,’ said Harland. ‘If you knew of a Nazi war criminal who’d got himself another identity and escaped justice, wouldn’t you feel that it was your duty to expose the man?’

  Reeve snapped back at him. ‘Don’t you lecture me about the Holocaust, Mr
Harland.’

  ‘All I am saying is that Alan Griswald’s final investigation was exactly that. He was trying to expose someone who faked his own death and escaped prosecution for terrible crimes.’

  ‘You are obviously very inexperienced in these matters, Mr Harland. I accept that your motives may be honourable. But you just cannot telephone in the middle of my vacation and expect me to help when I have never heard of you and have no knowledge of your credentials.’

  ‘What should I do to prove myself?’

  ‘Again, this supposes that I have something to offer.’

  ‘Yes, but the plane may have been sabotaged. I was on that plane, Professor Reeve, and I survived. Alan Griswald was a good friend of mine and I want to make sure his work does not go to waste. So I’m asking you again about those pictures. I gather they were aerial photographs taken in 1995, either by satellite or U2 spy plane. Alan believed they would establish some part of his argument.’

  There was silence at the other end. ‘You say you were on the plane with Mr Griswald?’

  ‘Yes, and Luc Bézier and a number of other innocent people who were killed. This is to say nothing of the people on the other jet or the four people who were shot in London last week – two of them are dead. It’s just possible that the man that Griswald was investigating is responsible for these deaths and shootings.’ Harland knew he was on thin ice but it seemed to give Reeve some pause.

  The professor sighed. Harland fancied he could hear him sit down and shift the telephone. He began speaking.

  ‘Of course, there were many pictures taken by the US military during the Bosnian war and, no doubt, by other agencies too. A few have already been used to establish that major crimes did take place. They pinpointed the location of the crimes, of course, not the individuals involved, although this could be inferred by other knowledge.’

  ‘Telephone intercepts, wireless traffic.’

  ‘Yes, and eye-witness accounts that tally with the events picked up from the air.’

  ‘So they can conclusively prove something happened on a particular date?’

  ‘No, they prove that there was military activity in the area of a crime and that maybe some earth-moving took place contemporaneously. But they do not prove a crime.’

  Harland thought for a moment and then had an inspiration.

  ‘Is it possible that Griswald was investigating a crime which has so far gone undetected or ignored?’

  ‘You would have to ask the War Crimes Tribunal about that,’ said Reeve, returning to a defensive note.

  ‘They won’t tell me. Griswald’s casebook has all but been abandoned. I understand that they viewed his latest investigation with scepticism, or that it may have been obstructed in some way. These are the things that Benjamin Jaidi has asked me to investigate and that’s why I’m asking for your help. I’m sorry, perhaps I should have mentioned that before now.’

  From the murmurs and exhalations at the other end of the line, Harland could tell that he had piqued his interest. Then the professor said abruptly, ‘You say the Secretary-General has asked you to look into this. What precisely? The crash? Mr Griswald’s investigation? The War Crimes Tribunal’s behaviour? Which?’

  ‘All those things and one or two other matters also. There’s another aspect to this that I don’t understand. Viktor Lipnik – if he exists – receives some special protection.’

  ‘A veritable one-man crime commission, Mr Harland. I hope you’re up to it.’

  ‘So do I. Tell me what you need from me.’

  ‘A date and a target area and I’ll see if we can help.’

  ‘But surely you know the date? Griswald would have told you.’

  ‘He did tell me. But I never saw Mr Griswald before he went to New York. We had an appointment and I know he waited in Washington, but I was too ill. I’m down here recovering from pneumonia.’ He paused and wheezed a cough as if to underline this. ‘A date, Mr Harland. Give me a date and we’ll do business.’ With that the line went dead. The old buzzard was testing him. He wondered if Sally could bring any influence to bear. Maybe even Jaidi could phone him.

  His eyes moved down the list and settled on Frank Ollins’s name. But this set off an alarm at the back of his mind. He had increasingly begun to think that the protection that Viktor Lipnik received must have been provided by the Americans. Maybe the British were also involved. That would account for Vigo’s manoeuvrings. Added to this was the probability that Tomas had been tracked by some exceptionally sophisticated equipment which only the major powers possessed. Britain and America were the big listeners and, of course, the Americans would have been the people tracking Lipnik’s phone in Serbia before he was ‘assassinated’. To talk to a member of the FBI in these circumstances required lunatic trust and cunning.

  He dialled the mobile number and caught Frank Ollins in his car on the way to work. He sounded chipper and rested.

  ‘I was just wondering how things were progressing,’ said Harland.

  ‘They’re doing fine, thank you.’ From the tone it was also clear that Ollins wasn’t going to volunteer anything.

  ‘I wondered,’ said Harland nonchalantly, ‘what you meant by those questions last week? This business of how Alan Griswald held his computer just before we landed. What did you mean by that? What relevance does it have?’

  ‘Look, I have a feeling that you haven’t played straight with me, Harland.’

  ‘Oh, why?’

  ‘The more I thought about the people who attacked you in the UN building, the more I got to thinking that you had something that they wanted. I guess they probably took it from you too. Is that correct?’

  ‘The answer to that depends on your position, Ollins. We don’t know each other well. This affair gets more complicated by the minute and, frankly, I can’t afford to talk to someone who is going to share what I have with too many people.’

  ‘So you didn’t lose everything that night in the UN?’ Harland said nothing. ‘Okay, so are you suggesting a trade?’

  ‘That depends on what you have and what your position is.’

  ‘My position is this: we’re certain your plane was brought down, but as yet the Safety Board are out of the loop and it has not been disclosed to the public because it has terrifying implications. So, I want to find the people who did this. We are working on the same side.’

  Harland decided to make the leap. ‘Well, inadvertently I didn’t tell you everything I knew.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ollins. ‘Would you mind waiting while I stop the car? I don’t want to miss this.’ There was a pause. ‘Okay, what did you inadvertently forget to tell me?’

  Harland explained about the wallet and how he had discovered after leaving the hospital that it contained a music disc encoded with some kind of message between the tracks of the music.

  ‘That’s certainly interesting, and since we are working on the same side, I’ll tell you something that you’ll keep under your hat. We found the phone that you took from Griswald’s pocket and we got to reviving those little circuit boards in the phone, which incidentally is a WAP, and you know what we found? We found a stored e-mail message of precisely one hundred and eighty digits in length. That also is encrypted.’

  ‘Then we may have two halves of a dollar bill,’ said Harland. ‘I’ve learned that Griswald’s investigation received two separate messages which only work together. I happen to have the bigger half but it’s worthless without yours.’

  ‘So we’re going to make a trade, aren’t we? What do you say we send these two pieces of information by e-mail to each other at nine o’clock my time – two yours?’

  Harland said that seemed fine. He gave the Widdershins address and wrote down Ollins’s.

  Then something occurred to Ollins. ‘What happens if you decode this material before I do? You’re going to send it to me, right?’

  ‘If that’s a reciprocal arrangement, yes.’

  Ollins agreed, but Harland wasn’t ready to hang up quite yet. ‘Wha
t about those questions you were asking me? What did you mean? Obviously they had something to do with the phone because you asked whether it had been shielded by the computer.’

  ‘Now, that one isn’t for free.’

  ‘But you think that this is part of the solution as to how the plane went haywire in the last seconds of the flight?’

  ‘It’s not the cause, it’s a symptom. And that’s all I am prepared to say. Be seeing you.’

  Ten minutes later the strand of code arrived. Harland had not the first idea what to do with it and felt rather deflated. The three calls he’d made that morning had each brought him hard intelligence, but not understanding. Codes were all very well, but his interest and faith in that side of intelligence work had always been slight. They distracted from the human issues of motive and betrayal. But he did have Griswald’s secret and he had to find a way of decrypting it. His only idea was to see if The Bird knew anyone who could tackle it.

  In the next hour Harland made a few more calls, the first to Philip Smith-Canon, Tomas’s neurologist, whom he arranged to meet later in the afternoon. Then he put in a call to the Secretary-General’s office and left a message requesting that someone, preferably Jaidi himself, prevail on Reeve to help him. Lastly he got hold of The Bird, who had been riding out on The Ridgeway.

  Cuth listened with undimmed enthusiasm, but said the only hope of their being able to meet in the next twenty-four hours was if Harland was prepared to travel to Cheltenham for the New Year’s Eve race meeting the next day. Cuth had a part share in a horse which stood a better than average chance in the 2.35. Macy was in the syndicate and would be there also. They would look in at the Arkel Bar in the members’ enclosure periodically throughout the afternoon. Harland explained a few of the things he wanted to talk about in an oblique fashion and mentioned that he wanted something decrypted. Cuth told him to bring all the material. Then he inquired as to what sort of company he’d been keeping over the last few days. Harland understood that he was asking whether he was being watched. He replied that he had seen quite a few old friends since arriving in London.