A Spy's Life

by Henry Porter

  ‘Yes, but you weren’t always so canny. They turned the tables on you in 1990 and went at you hammer and tongs, didn’t they, old boy? You looked a terrible mess, I can tell you. And that meant someone was pretty upset with you. What did you do to them?’

  ‘I made the point to Vigo’s friends from the Security Service, who are meant to be investigating me. They were hardly likely to beat up a major communist intelligence asset.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cuth persisted, ‘but you didn’t quite answer my question about what you might have done to them. I mean, the Czechs weren’t into that kind of thing. They slung people into prison and roughed them up a little, sure – but torture wasn’t their style.’

  ‘I have no sense of having done anything to them. I imagined they were going to ransom me, then they started interrogating me about something I couldn’t have known.’ He paused, aware of The Bird’s gaze. ‘The Russians were capable of this thing. The man in the villa was Russian.’

  ‘And, of course, you just mentioned that the fellow who was present at the massacres in Bosnia was also Russian. Are we talking about the same man?’

  ‘Obviously I considered that because Griswald said I’d be particularly interested when he nailed this fellow Lipnik.’

  ‘But still, it doesn’t explain the motive, does it? I mean the savagery of it.’ He rubbed his thighs vigorously and poured them each another glass of whisky mac. ‘I wish Macy were here. He’s good at this sort of thing. But anyway, let’s just talk about Griswald for a moment. So, Griswald fixes up this business in Berlin which eventually results in the KGB selling the East Germans’ archives to the Americans. Then you two go off to Prague with the idea of snaffling the Czech files too. You blow into town. You find the place is seething with revolutionary fervour and commence negotiations. Is that about right?’

  Harland nodded.

  ‘How much money did you take?’

  ‘Fifty thousand dollars as a down payment. Half supplied by the Americans and half by us.’

  ‘And who were your contacts in Prague?’

  ‘They were Griswald’s. I didn’t want to use the man I had dealt with over the years. Too untrustworthy, too low down the pecking order.’

  ‘And you didn’t see this Eva woman?’

  ‘No, not since ’75.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Al went off to meet his contact and the next thing I know the place we were staying at was raided and I was under arrest. I spent the first night in StB headquarters, where they didn’t seem to know what to do with me. Then I was handed over to this other lot. They took me to the villa.’

  ‘Who knew where you were?’

  ‘As far as we knew, not many, apart from our people that end and a few in Century House.’

  ‘And Griswald – what happened to him?’

  ‘He never got close to doing the deal. In fact, they took the money and left him high and dry. The Americans were pretty good about it, but Century House were not so understanding. Still, they did pay for you two to get me out.’

  The Bird smiled. ‘I think the terms of our agreement with Alan Griswald permit me to say categorically that Century House did not commission us. Now that he’s dead, I can tell you that Griswald paid for the operation. There were a lot of expenses but we returned some of the money to him – having taken our standard fee, of course. I expect you can guess what he did with the rest of the money.’

  Harland thought for a moment. ‘I should have thought of it before. He used it to buy the StB file on me.’

  ‘He certainly was a friend to you, Bobby, which makes his death all the more sad. Let’s think about those files for a second. If Vigo’s little helpers can ferret round those archives, there’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t. That’s surely your best bet, to trace Eva through her various changes of identity. At the same time you might also usefully learn who Vigo’s people are.’ He stopped and let the chair return to its four legs. ‘You know, I think we may be able to swing this for you. But it’ll take time.’

  The door opened and Macy appeared, followed by a stout woman in a blue housecoat who was holding the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner.

  ‘We maybe ought to make a move in the next ten minutes or so,’ he said. ‘They want to clean the box.’ The woman muttered something and left them.

  ‘I have just been hearing about Bobby’s troubles. They’ll make what little hair you’ve got stand on end. By the way, what’s our Nissen hut genius have to say about Bobby’s codes?’

  ‘He’s rather agitated – to put it mildly.’

  ‘Couldn’t he do anything with them?’

  ‘No, there was no difficulty. What’s bothering him is the type of code used. He wouldn’t say more than that. Apparently it’s the same encryption used to leak damaging information about agency operations in Europe. Everyone – the British, Americans, Germans, French and even the saintly Dutch – is affected. He wants to know where it came from. Apparently it’s a priority of GCHQ at the moment to find the source of this stuff.’

  ‘What’s the code say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean, nothing?’

  ‘It’s a photograph – a video still. A man in a uniform on the side of a mountain.’

  The Bird’s gaze flicked to Harland. ‘Friend Lipnik, I imagine. But I bet it’s more than just a bloody holiday snap. Griswald wouldn’t have taken the trouble to have kept the codes separate otherwise. Can we see it?’

  ‘No. As I say, he’s agitated. He suggested we meet at a pub about fifteen miles away just off the Oxford road – the Queen’s Head. Says he’ll see all three of us there in an hour.’

  ‘He wants to see Bobby?’

  ‘It seems so.’

  As they left, The Bird muttered, ‘Puts the bloody air crash into a new light, doesn’t it?’

  They set off in Cuth’s Range Rover. He mentioned that a pub on New Year’s Eve didn’t seem ideal for a quiet meeting, but when they pulled up at the Queen’s Head, an old coaching inn in a lonely spot, high on the Cotswolds, it was obvious from the empty car park that there would be little revelry to contend with.

  Macy vanished into the pub to find their man. Harland and The Bird waited in the car, watching the rain turn to sleet until he appeared at the front door and waved them in.

  ‘I’ve got some drinks coming. Our chap’s in the back.’

  They found him lodged in a tall wooden settle by the embers of a log fire. Harland had expected a desk man in his mid-fifties, a bureaucrat on the glide path to retirement. But a much younger man turned to greet them with a reluctant smile. He was in his early forties and had an alert, rather academic face. He sat with an anorak still zipped up, legs crossed, swinging one walking shoe towards the fire. On the table was a tin of tobacco and a cigarette rolling machine.

  There were no introductions. Macy brought the drinks over.

  ‘I’ve been telling them you’re worried about this material,’ said Macy quietly. ‘You want to explain the problem?’

  ‘Not really,’ said the man disagreeably, beginning to feed tobacco into a cigarette paper. He looked up at Harland. ‘Where did you get it from?’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘And how did this friend come by it?’

  ‘I’m not certain. I think he got it from a friend or two friends. What difference does it make?’

  ‘Your disc contains a family of codes that are associated with one of the biggest intelligence disasters of the post-communist era. That’s all.’

  Harland remembered Vigo’s conversation in New York when he had referred to an unusual source of intelligence that he insisted Griswald had access to. He had laboured the point and then refused to give Harland any detail.

  ‘This is not really concerned with all that,’ said Harland. ‘I’m more interested in the picture Macy says you’ve found stored in the code. It may help with an investigation that this friend is no longer able to complete.’

  ‘Believe me, the issue is not
your damned photograph. Tell me, what form did the code come to you in?’

  ‘One half came as sound, the other as a one-hundred-and-eighty-digit message.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the man. ‘Sound. And that’s where your problem is.’

  ‘Come on, loosen up,’ said Macy. ‘This is a friend of ours. Tell him what he needs to know.’

  The man put down his pint glass.

  ‘Look, this is not a question of favours, or what I owe you, or who the fuck your friend is. This is as serious as you can get.’ He paused to light the roll-up. ‘About ten months ago, maybe longer – no one is sure – our counterparts in Israel noticed that a number of radio and TV stations were subject to sustained bursts of interference. It sounded like the static caused by a prolonged electrical storm, and yet it was clear that this sound wasn’t being caused by atmospheric conditions. They investigated and saw they were dealing with a set of elaborate, yet fairly unchallenging, codes. It seemed to be the work of a talented outsider who was getting his kicks from devising a series of puzzles, knowing that the only people who would possibly investigate his sounds would be professional listeners. Some of these codes were pretty ingenious. For instance, one was based on the Periodic Table and used the relationship between the symbols of the elements and the atomic numbers. Another was constructed on the position of the English Premier League on a particular Saturday last October.’

  He took a draught of beer.

  ‘The whole thing was seen as kind of game, this individual bunging his messages into the ether using the unsuspecting services of about thirty different radio stations. Everyone in Europe has probably heard this noise at some stage over the last year, but only a very few were in a position to understand it. No one had any idea where it came from but it was obvious that whoever was doing this had developed a virus to penetrate the phone systems of practically every broadcasting station. There’s a lot of insecure equipment in a studio and somehow this joker had worked out a way of getting his hidden messages into the programmes.

  ‘Then just as he’d got everyone’s attention the messages became a lot more serious. He started talking about this and that operation – highly embarrassing for those agencies involved. He’d obviously tapped some good sources of information – people in the business who were feeding him. It was clear that a lot of his stuff was coming from renegade intelligence officers who may have used the Net to talk to him. Some of the information looked very much like the material being posted on the Net by known dissenters and troublemakers. He named agents, especially in the economic sector. For instance, a woman in the German finance ministry who was passing information to the French. There was no pattern to the messages in as much as they didn’t favour one country over the other, but they did concentrate on corrupt deals, on high-level bribery and that kind of thing.

  ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, tracking down this individual or individuals became a priority in all the big Western agencies. They wanted to close him down big time. That wish increased when it was revealed in alarming detail how the Americans and British were supposed to be using their resources to gather intelligence on European business competitors. He was particularly accurate about the activities of the NSA at Bad Aibling.’

  ‘Remind me what’s there,’ said Harland.

  ‘At Bad Aibling the Americans can hear a man’s teeth chattering in the Ukraine. It’s a listening post, about fifty miles south of Munich, a very big one which employs a fair slice of the eleven thousand US intelligence personnel still in Germany.’

  ‘I see. He’s offended everyone – but why?’

  ‘With respect, I don’t think you see at all. The discs you brought to me use some of the same codes. They’re pretty basic but I’m sure this stuff hasn’t been seen before. It’s new to me, anyway, which means there’s a direct line back through the friend who gave you this material to the individual who’s doing this. You may hold a key to the identity of the source and that makes it rather important.’

  The Bird looked at Harland. ‘That rather puts things in a new light. But perhaps they already know the identity.’

  ‘That’s not my area,’ said the man. ‘All I know is what I hear and what we filter from the air. But I do know there was a brief interruption of these messages about three weeks ago. We wondered if they had been closed down. There were a lot of people whose Christmas would be made if this fellow was deposited in a frozen river. But they started up again about a week later. Every bloody carol concert broadcast in Eastern Europe was interrupted by this interference.’

  ‘Can I look at the picture you’ve got?’

  ‘There are two. I found the second while waiting for you to arrive. But I’d rather do this somewhere else. I don’t want some colleague of mine blundering in here on a New Year’s Eve pub crawl.’

  They went outside and got into the Range Rover. The man from GCHQ unfolded a slender laptop which had been concealed in his anorak and pressed a key.

  ‘I’ll show you the second photograph first.’

  A picture of a middle-aged man appeared instantly. He was standing by a wicker table. His jacket was folded on the arm of a chair and there was a swimming pool in the background. On the table was a tray of drinks, a newspaper and some documents. The man was holding some papers and appeared to be speaking. Clearly he wasn’t aware of the camera.

  Harland craned forward from the back seat to get a better look at the screen. The man was conventionally dressed – a businessman, still wearing a tie at the poolside. He was of average height and build, with a large head that was slightly out of proportion with his body. There was a dip at the front of his trousers to allow for the beginnings of a paunch, but otherwise he looked in reasonable shape. His eyes were in shade and it was difficult to read any expression in them.

  Now Harland grasped the significance of the photograph. The folded newspaper might be German, but more important was that the front page would be dated. If this was Lipnik, it would prove he was alive after the supposed assassination. Enlarging the picture might also yield information from the documents – names, dates and the type of business he was engaged in.

  ‘I’ll give you the discs so you can take a closer look at this later.’ The man clearly wanted to be on his way. ‘But I’ll show you the other one quickly.’

  The machine hesitated before producing the second image from its memory. It unfolded from the top of the screen, first with a couple of inches of clear summer sky that lit up the interior of the Range Rover, then the top of some distant hills over which were traces of cloud. Then the whole picture materialised and Harland found himself looking at the same man, this time in khaki fatigues. He was standing in the foreground of a group of soldiers. They were gazing down into what appeared to be a ravine, for at the bottom of the picture was a very dark area, in shadow. The man was in sunlight, and despite the slightly liquid quality of the video, it was possible to make out a good deal about him. He wore a peaked cap and had his thumbs tucked into a canvas belt, from which hung a holstered pistol. He looked slimmer. Harland thought there were a few years between the two pictures.

  He glanced over the rest of the scene and then his eyes settled on one of the soldiers. He didn’t have time to know whether it was the angle of the head or the slightly diffident way the soldier stood back from the others that had attracted his attention. All he knew was that he was looking at Tomas. Tomas standing on a mountainside in the punishing summer heat of the Balkans. Tomas with a war criminal. Tomas in the uniform of a Serb soldier.

  Harland began to breathe again and sat back a little. He could still see the screen through the gap between the front seats.

  ‘Any way of bringing this up a touch?’ asked The Bird.

  The man muttered something and worked the keyboard for a few seconds. He turned the screen to face them.

  ‘Yes, I thought so.’ The Bird pointed with the nail of his little finger to the shaded part at the bottom of the picture. ‘See here? I think you’ll find those
are bodies. You can just see the light on a leg here and over here there’s someone lying on their side. I suppose they may’ve been chucked off the top into a pit. Who knows, but I think what we’re looking at is the site of the massacre. Wouldn’t you agree, Bobby?’

  Harland nodded. ‘Yes, I think you’re right.’

  17

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  At eight-thirty that evening Harland was dropped off at Oxford Station by The Bird and Macy Harp. On the short ride from the pub, The Bird had filled Macy in with an expert summary of Harland’s story. For them the story was a matter of professional curiosity – but only that. He imagined them happily chewing it over on the way back to Berkshire where their wives now prepared a New Year’s Eve party. He wondered if their horsy neighbours had any idea what The Bird and Macy got up to when not running around the country in well-tailored tweed suits. As they pulled away, The Bird told him they would be in touch as soon as they’d found a reliable guide in the Czech Republic.

  The trains were running infrequently, but at length a cross-country service pulled in. Harland boarded an empty first-class carriage and sank back in the seat, now alone with the knowledge of Tomas’s presence at the scene of the massacre. Later he would look at the photograph again and enlarge it to see if the Bird had been mistaken about the shapes at the bottom of the picture. Broken branches or boulders in a stream might be the explanation. Whatever he found, he could not ignore the fact that Tomas was in the company of Viktor Lipnik, a suspected war criminal.

  Dead tired, Harland tried to frame his thoughts unemotionally. The photograph did at least have the virtue of clarifying things. The process of reconciling two streams of events was over. There was a whole to consider now. And everything, as he had tired of telling people, sprang from Griswald. It was odd. As he learned more and more of Griswald’s activities he seemed to lose the ability to bring to mind his face. Alan Griswald had become an abstract component in the mystery. That was all.

  The important gain of the day was the information that the Americans and the British were exercised about the release of secrets about their spying activities against European powers. The probability was that Griswald had exchanged these secrets – easily gathered by someone in his position – for evidence that proved that Viktor Lipnik, far from being interred in a Balkan graveyard, was very much alive and prosperously in business. Whatever he hoped about Tomas’s presence in the video still, he also knew that it was unlikely that Griswald had taken all that trouble to acquire the picture if it did not prove Viktor Lipnik’s involvement in a war crime on a certain date. Christ, yes! There was a date on that video still. Harland had been so absorbed by the image that he had not taken it on board. At least it would prove useful in persuading Professor Reeve to provide the satellite images.