The Dark Chronicles

by Jeremy Duns

  ‘You always were quick on the draw. Although not literally so in this case. The gun, please, now.’

  I considered trying to shoot him, but thought better of it. He looked like he would fire without hesitation – and enjoy it. I removed the Makarov from my waistband.

  ‘Careful now,’ he said. ‘We don’t want anything to go off, do we?’

  I placed it in front of me on the floor, and Smale scampered over and picked it up, then aimed it at my head.

  ‘Who’s Chief, then?’ I said. ‘Something must have gone awry for you to be out here.’

  ‘I’ll ask the questions,’ he said. ‘I must say, it is rare to find three traitors to their country in the same room.’

  ‘Are you counting yourself in that?’ said Sarah, and he swivelled to face her.

  ‘No, my dear, I was counting you. I do like your hair – David Bailey’s missing a cover shot. How disappointing that you’ve fallen for Paul’s smooth words. But then, he always had a way with women. I should warn you, though, that they usually end up dead. I’m afraid you are very misguided if you think that anything I’ve done is in any way comparable to Donald and Paul’s actions, or those of their masters. The Russians are much more unpleasant than I am – I would have thought you’d have realized that by now.’

  ‘I should never have learned English,’ Anton said suddenly, and we all turned to stare at him. ‘You British will kill me.’

  Despite ourselves, we all smiled – even Osbourne. But whatever companionship we felt in that moment evaporated quickly. Osborne’s smile was that much more chilling.

  ‘Be quiet, Anton,’ said Maclean. ‘This doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just being held at gunpoint in my own home.’

  ‘Why did you send Smale to meet me?’ I asked Osborne. ‘Not to spare my feelings, I’m sure.’

  He licked his lips, amused, or perhaps it was Anton’s complaint that had entertained him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wanted to surprise you at the embassy. Sadly, you skipped out rather early for us to bring you in. I must say it’s been quite bothersome to find you again. But luckily we’ve been trailing Donald here for quite some time, and he doesn’t have too many acquaintances who might help you escape the long arm of the Russian law.’

  So that was it. They had probably paid visits to all the defectors, but when they’d gone to Maclean’s office they found he’d left, and worked out from there where he might have taken me. Yes, quite some bother. I had to get away from them somehow, perhaps once we were outside the flat. I would have to make a move soon.

  ‘Shall we head off, then?’ I said. ‘Presumably you have a car waiting?’

  ‘Oh, we’re not going anywhere just yet,’ he smiled. ‘You asked who had taken over as Chief. Innes has the title – at the moment, anyway. There was quite a storm after your little episode in Italy. Questions were even asked in the House. Innes is a busy little man, and he figured out what Hugh, I and others have been doing.’

  ‘So you got shunted off here.’

  ‘In a nutshell. But it’s proved quite convenient, because now I can take my revenge, and at the same time use it to get myself back to London. The fact that Donald and Sarah are here as well makes it all that much more delicious.’

  ‘Another frame-up? If Innes found out what you were up to in Italy—’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be much more careful this time. He hasn’t discovered everything we were up to in Italy, anyway – we have a few surprises in store. But I suspect if I can deliver three dead traitors on a silver platter, nobody will ask too many questions.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Maclean, his voice strained but strident. ‘Because I can assure you that the Russians will be very interested indeed.’

  ‘Be quiet, Donald,’ I said. ‘Leave this to someone who knows about cloaks and daggers.’

  Osborne smiled. ‘Not such birds of a feather, after all. And I rather doubt your friends will care all that much – two burnt-out spooks and a dolly-bird, none of whom are of any use to anyone any longer. I suspect they’ll be glad to be rid of the lot of you, in fact. Something to strike off the budget.’

  ‘They might wonder who killed us, though,’ I said. ‘And ask awkward questions of the embassy.’

  He let out a gleeful little chuckle. ‘Who killed you? But don’t you see, you’re all going to kill each other: a suicide pact. Traitors, but also lovers.’

  ‘That’s absurd. Nobody would—’

  ‘Oh, you’ll be amazed what people will believe when told after the event,’ Osborne said. ‘It won’t be too hard to whisper a few things in journalists’ ears. They’ll eat it up, I’m sure. “The traitors’ love triangle” – I can see the headlines already.’

  ‘I think you’re all bluff, Osborne. You tried all that newspaper malarkey on me once before, remember. So how is Wilson these days? Still PM?’

  He grimaced, and removed his glasses. He massaged the pink indentations on either side of the bridge of his nose with his fingers for a few seconds, and then replaced them.

  ‘Wilson is still in power,’ he said, ‘for the moment, at any rate. And how kind of you to remind me about that failure of mine, and of your part in it. Well, this time I won’t be satisfied with a hired thug pulling the trigger from afar. This time I want to see you suffer myself, and I want to be the one to administer that suffering.’

  I thought back to the rubber room in London, and the bucket he had forced my head into. I didn’t want to know what was in the doctor’s bag. My stomach was churning just sitting in the same room with him.

  ‘It sounds to me like you’ve gone soft in the head,’ I said. ‘I should have been on to you years ago – there was always something off about you.’

  ‘And I, likewise, should have been on to you long ago. I had an inkling, though, back at that party of Templeton’s in Istanbul when you raped Vanessa. Do you remember?’

  I stared at him. He seemed to be serious.

  ‘You’re mad,’ I said. ‘Vanessa loved me, and did for years. It was your little jackboot Severn who tried to touch her up. You should have asked Colin Templeton; he’d have let you know.’

  ‘But I did, Paul. And he told me very clearly that he had walked in on you fondling his daughter. Severn saved her from you, as you well know. Trying to save face in front of your new girlfriend?’ He pursed his lips together as though chiding me.

  ‘I’ve no idea where you’re going with this fantasy, but it’s not convincing me in the least. I left the party with Vanessa, and you must have seen that.’

  ‘Yes, that was what upset Templeton so much.’

  ‘He asked me to leave with her.’

  ‘Not according to him.’

  ‘Either you’re lying or Templeton was. He told me quite clearly to take Vanessa home, so why he would want you to think I was… What else did he tell you about me?’

  ‘Ah, I thought you might catch up. He told me he thought you were worth keeping an eye on. In case you were like Donald here, and his friends.’

  I stared at him in horror. ‘Templeton told you he suspected me of being a traitor?’

  ‘Yes. Not quite in those words, of course. But he let it be known on several occasions, to me and a few others, that he had his doubts about your loyalty. I should have paid more attention to him.’

  I blinked, trying to clear my head. Could Osborne be telling the truth? I thought back to the night Templeton had summoned me to his house in Swanwick. If he’d thought I was a traitor why the hell would he have invited me there, without Barnes to protect him, and with no weapon of his own? I went over it again in my mind – the moment I had raised the Luger and shot him. I’d thought at the time that he had realized then that I was the double. And then the thought came. Perhaps he had. Perhaps he’d had no idea before then that I was a double, but had merely told Osborne and others he suspected my loyalty to divert suspicion… from himself.

  Burgess. Maclean. Philby. Vassall. Cairncross. Blake. Blunt. Pritchard. Father
. Me.

  And Templeton?

  Was it possible? I hadn’t been part of the Cambridge Ring, and had known nothing about any of them before they’d been discovered. Neither, by all accounts, had Blake or Vassall. I thought of a sentence in Sasha’s report: ‘This would endanger many of our agents who are active or sleeping in the West.’ What if the Soviets had recruited not three, or four, or even ten men? What if they had recruited, say, twenty? Or more? And that only a handful of them had been exposed so far. At first blush the idea seemed absurd, but what if all the assumptions to date had been wrong and the level of Soviet penetration had been greater than anyone had even dared suspect – myself included?

  Stay calm and think it through. I hadn’t known about Pritchard or Father, but they had both known about me. So if Templeton had also been a double, he must have been recruited separately from them. In the aftermath of Burgess and Maclean’s defections, both Five and the Service had twisted themselves in knots looking for further traitors. Pritchard had taken the role of an attack dog, accusing everyone in sight: at one point he had even claimed that the deputy of Five was a Soviet agent. Dossiers had been reopened; everyone had been questioned about their past. I had argued that these ‘mole hunts’ were divisive and that we were playing into the Soviets’ hands by chasing our own tails and sowing suspicion everywhere.

  And through it all, Templeton had played the middle ground perfectly: the wise old sage, the kindly buffer, the voice of reason. But behind my back, to Osborne and others, he’d been softly voicing a private anguish: can we trust Paul, do you think? I mean, I love him almost as a son, but there’s something not quite right… is there?

  Simply because it had deflected attention from him.

  And that evening in March at his house? Pritchard had presumed he was the Soviet agent codenamed RADNYA. Perhaps Templeton had, too. All three of us had been in the British Zone in 1945; perhaps all three of us had been Anna’s honey traps.

  I suddenly remembered Oliver Green. He had been a printer with Communist sympathies who had gone off to be an ambulance driver in Spain with the International Brigades. Then, in 1941, he had been arrested for possessing forged petrol coupons. When his house had been searched by the police, they had discovered a darkroom that had contained a Leica and dozens of secret military documents. This, in turn, had led to a soldier named Elliott, and eventually to a ring of fifteen British agents, all of whom were being run out of the Soviet Trade Legation.

  The Green case had always bothered me a little, because nobody ever seemed in the least concerned by it. The implications seemed to have been completely missed by the Service. Here was a significant Soviet spy ring operating in Britain in the Thirties and Forties, with over a dozen agents. Had it been missed because Green and his colleagues had been working class? Because it was too uncomfortable to think about the implications?

  Or had it been missed because many of the men looking at it had also been Soviet agents? My head reeled a little at that idea. It would involve a level of penetration that would change the whole picture of Britain’s role in the Cold War. Indeed, it discounted it. If this were true, the Soviets had surely already won.

  Or perhaps Osborne was just messing with my mind, and was trying to sow suspicions for reasons of his own. I couldn’t think of any at this stage, but that meant little with him.

  ‘You look confused,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d fooled Templeton, did you? He was never as daft as he looked, you know.’

  No. No, perhaps he hadn’t been. But this was all of little account. Osborne and Smale could be Andropov’s long-lost brothers for all I cared, but it didn’t help resolve the issue at hand.

  ‘I’m not confused,’ I said. ‘I’m worried. Perhaps we could have this conversation and you can rip off my toenails after we’ve dealt with the impending nuclear crisis?’

  He looked over at Smale, beaming. ‘So you weren’t lying! Well, well, my apologies. Lunch at the National it is.’ He turned back to me. ‘Come on, Paul, you can’t seriously expect me to believe Brezhnev’s about to launch nukes at us—’

  There was a banging at the front door. Osborne turned, and in that moment I grabbed hold of the attaché case and held it up in front of my chest. Smale fired but it went wide anyway, and a fraction of a second later the front door swung down, splitting in two as it crashed to the floor, and men swarmed into the room waving guns and shouting. I flung the attaché case open, scattering documents like confetti over the room, and grabbed Sarah by the hand. Osborne was heading towards the door and I watched as one of the KGB men took aim and the shots hit him full in the chest and he fell to the floor, the inside of his jacket spreading out beneath him like a pair of black wings.

  I launched myself into the balcony doors side-on, bracing myself for the impact. The glass smashed and crumbled over me, but I was through. Sarah came leaping through after me, and I careened into the balcony railings but used the momentum to grab hold of the ledge running along the top of them. It was shockingly cold, crusted with rime, and pain shot through my left hand as it came into contact with the wound, but I ignored it and hoisted my legs onto the ledge and climbed over, hooking my fingers around the outer edge of the shelf and letting my legs dangle below me.

  Another shot rang out from inside the flat, and Sarah screamed. Without looking down, I let go and there was a rushing of wind in my ears and nose and then an almighty bone-crunching thud as I landed on the pavement. I looked up and caught a glimpse of Sarah’s legs as her dress billowed around her and she landed next to me. It had all taken place in a matter of seconds – but we still had time on our side. A few yards away I could see a mustard-yellow Moskvitch.

  ‘Come on!’ I shouted at Sarah, and started running towards it.

  XII

  We reached the car and I scrambled with the key to unlock the boot. It was tiny. Sarah glanced at me for a moment, then climbed in, rolling herself up into the foetal position.

  ‘Okay?’

  She nodded, her chin against her knee.

  ‘Hold tight,’ I said.

  I shut the door and ran around to the driver’s seat. The temperature was around freezing, so I tried a brief burst of the starter without the accelerator, ready to catch it as soon as it took. It didn’t. I waited a couple of seconds, drumming my hand against the wheel, and tried again. Nothing. A mushroom cloud forming, all because this country couldn’t make cars that started. I gave it another go, craning my neck as I did to look up at the balcony. Gunfire was still coming from inside the flat, but God knew how long it would be before they came running for us. And… yes. Bingo.

  I pulled out and roared down the street as fast as the thing would go, the treads of one of the front tyres squealing. I pressed the button on the radio and picked up the militsiya frequency, but the exchange was about a couple of drunkards who were causing trouble near the GUM store, not us. Presumably, the lieutenant at Maclean’s building had finally wondered where we’d got to and called in, and the KGB also knew of his association with Anton. Maclean had grown complacent, careless or both, and had failed to realize he was under surveillance wherever he went, by both the British and the Russians.

  The message might not have gone out yet, but this car would be compromised before too long because Yuri would soon figure out why we’d been at Anton’s. The question was whether we could reach the first roadblock before he realized it and got a message to his men to look for anyone in a yellow Moskvitch with this registration. I hoped that the fact they’d stumbled in on two senior British diplomats holding one of their agents and a dissident at gunpoint would give them enough to disentangle for a while.

  It had certainly given me a few things to disentangle: Colin Templeton a traitor? It couldn’t be, surely. I told myself to leave it to one side for the time being, and think about it later… if there was a later.

  A lifetime of training had taught me to keep my eye on an objective until the job was done, and to suppress feelings of panic, but this was different. We�
�d escaped Osborne and Yuri, but we were still a hell of a long way from the U-boat. In fact, we were around 700 miles from it in a shitty little Soviet car, with one of us in the boot and only one set of papers. Panic surged through me. The papers. I felt for the pocket of my jacket. Yes, they were still there.

  I began heading west, keeping my speed at a reasonable limit so that I didn’t attract any attention, and my eyes peeled for patrol cars and black Volgas. The rain had stopped, but mist was forming and visibility was poor. Dark clouds were pressing down on the city, but I noted them with satisfaction: it usually didn’t get too cold when it was overcast, and the radiator in the car was bust. There was quite a lot of traffic around, and coupled with the mist it was making it heavy going. The street signs were all in Cyrillic, of course, and although my Russian was fluent, my brain was struggling to adjust to it, exacerbated by the shock of seeing Osborne and the pain still throbbing in my hand.

  I had to figure out where to head now, and reduce the objective to a series of concrete moves and counter-moves. Counter-moves, because figuring out what the opposition was planning would be crucial if we were going to stay alive much longer. What would I do now in Yuri’s shoes? From the brief flash of uniforms I’d seen in the flat, there had been both GRU and KGB officers there, so I suspected he and Andropov had had it out already, and had now agreed to join forces for both their sakes and to cooperate to their utmost to get us back. If they didn’t recapture us, both their heads would be on the block. The Volgas and the men in the flat would be just the tip of the iceberg: I knew the militsiya had already been scrambled, and we could expect large numbers of GRU and KGB men to have been deployed, as well as the railway police, civilian police volunteers and customs and border guards. If I were stopped for speeding now, it would be the end of the line.

  I wiped the sweat from my eyes and braced my shoulders, trying to suppress the fear. What if I couldn’t locate the canisters, or find a way to show them to the Russians? What if I did and they simply didn’t care, or didn’t believe me regardless? What if I were too late? Brezhnev could have cracked under the pressure. The missiles could already be in the air.