Greenfly (Commander Shaw Book 18)

by Philip McCutchan

  Greenfly: A Commander Shaw Novel

  Philip McCutchan

  © Philip McCutchan 1987

  Philip McCutchan has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1987 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  1

  I was wearing thick woollen gloves but even so my fingers, after a couple of hours or so of scanning the not-so-distant frontier, seemed frozen to the leather-covered metal of my binoculars, powerful ones and very heavy. My whole body was stiff with the cold as I lay there between the thickly-growing pines. Snow lay over the trees and everything was very still and quiet: it was lonely in the Harz Mountains, very lonely and my nerves were on edge as I waited for something to develop, waited and scanned the border below me, the wire and the minefields and the ingenious traps along the frontier with East Germany. I could see the occasional patrol carried out by the East German troops and once I believed I made out a Russian uniform, a man of the Red Army standing for a moment in the cold outside the frontier post. If the Russians were there, it wasn’t too good: something could have leaked. There was always room for leaks, far too much room. These days security had become a joke, largely. There was always a mole and you could seldom trust anybody.

  I thought of what Hans Schulz had said last night, down in Braunlage – Hans, one of our 6D2 West Germany operatives, had put me up overnight after I’d driven through from Hanover. We’d drunk beer together with his wife and son, drunk it out of old tankards with lids and glass bottoms, and he’d remarked on the latter.

  “We have them too,” I said.

  “Yes. And for the same purpose.” Hans, a big man with thick grey hair and a bushy beard, got to his feet and went over to a window. “To watch for the enemy … the sudden thrust of a knife or the lifting of a flintlock, in those old days. Now we have more to watch for, hein?”

  “Dead right,” I said, and felt more than ever uneasy because of his tone.

  “This will not be easy.”

  “I know that.”

  “The Ladybirds will kill.”

  “I know that too – of course they’ll kill, that’s what they’re there for.”

  “But I mean more than that, my friend!” Hans lumbered away from the window and stood with his back to the blazing coal fire. “They will kill their own, do you not see, if there is danger, they will kill rather than that anyone be questioned by the KGB.”

  That hadn’t in fact surprised me: back in Focal House in London, Max had said much the same thing. But in that room in Braunlage, a room lit only dimly so that the great body of Hans Schulz was outlined against the glow of the coal and the flickering flames so that he appeared like some grotesque ogre out of Germany’s past, the words sent a shiver down my spine as though Hans Schulz had peered ahead into the future and had seen its shape. The Harz Mountains that straddled the fringe of the Iron Curtain were a region of splendour but also of deep gloom. Many legends of popular Teutonic folklore had been woven around The Rosstrappe, Brocken, Teufelsmauer, Hexentanzplatz … Brocken’s summit, often shrouded in mist, was said to house the Spectre of Brocken, though in truth he might have been no more than a whorl of the mist itself.

  And the close-set pines, among which currently I lay. I had always found conifers depressing. It was just as I came to a kind of peak of depression and unease that I heard the faint sound from behind me and then, a fraction of a second later, heard the shooting start on the western side of the frontier.

  *

  I’d dropped into all this little more than a week earlier, when I’d got back from a job in Spain and was expecting to be sent on a month’s leave. Felicity Mandrake was going to spend that leave with me and to hell with what Max, who was head of 6D2 Britain, thought about it – Max could be stuffy when his field men and women got emotionally involved, but both Felicity and I reckoned we were mature enough to distinguish between duty and the other thing. Anyway, when I got to my flat I found it had been done over, and very, very thoroughly. So thoroughly that it was almost impossible to say if anything had been taken, but I didn’t believe it had after I’d done a quick check on valuables. Robbery didn’t appear to be the motive, so what was? Someone with a very deep grudge, I decided when I found my telephone hidden beneath an upturned arm chair with the receiver off the handset. I heard sounds as I picked it up and I listened: a nasal voice was giving me the time and it wasn’t British time – it was hours out. After a moment I realised I was listening to the New York Speaking Clock. At around 80p a minute at peak times, that could be rocketing my telephone bill; I shoved the receiver back on the rest pronto. It was a very dirty trick and in a flat fury I ran through my list of enemies. I couldn’t think of any personal ones likely to be so vindictive so assumed this was business, in which case Max could be persuaded to put it on expenses, or so I hoped.

  I started a search for clues.

  In 6D2, when this sort of thing happens, we don’t call in the police. We prefer not to involve them unless it becomes inevitable, and that’s the way the British Government, and all other governments who give their approval to our activities, want it too. We are international but we are undercover, ostensibly a fact-finding agency with contacts in all kinds of places high and low almost world wide, and we have background government support – we’ve often, very often, been useful to governments. They don’t like doing their own dirty work if it can be avoided, though I use the word ‘dirty’ not in any pejorative sense since we always strive for cleanliness in thought and deed – in other words, we’re on the Right Side. I made my search with due care, using gloves and a delicate touch, and I found nothing. Nothing, that was, until my telephone rang. I answered it and an unknown male voice said, “Commander Shaw?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The clock has been speaking since just before midnight six days ago.”

  “You bastard,” I said.

  “Yes.” There was something like a chortle. “Pick up the telephone, and look at its under side.” Then my caller rang off. I wasn’t going to risk activating a possible booby trap by turning the instrument upside down, but I didn’t need to: I’d put it down on a glass-topped coffee table, miraculously unbroken, when I’d rescued it from beneath the arm chair, and I had simply to look up from below. I saw a sticker, a piece of white self-adhesive plastic with a thing like a beetle on it, coloured green. Carefully I lifted the telephone and peeled off the sticker, wrapped it in a ten pound note, and put it in my pocket-book.

  Then I left the flat and headed for Focal House, fast.

  *

  “Clever,” Max said, and grinned. I felt like murder. He went on thoughtfully, “Six days. Let’s see.” He fiddled with his calculator. “At an average charge of, say, 70p a minute, it comes to a little over six thousand pounds. Someone doesn’t like you.”

  “Quite,” I said. “And I’m passing the bill to accounts.”

  “Why?” Max looked up. “You get a damn good expense account of your own, don’t you?”

  “Adequate for most things, not this.”

  “We’ll go into it later,” Max said equably. I believe he was still amused. He sat there like God, which in a sense he was to those who worked for 6D2, God of Focal House and the whole set-up in Britain, which w
as a big one. Max carried immense authority in his person and he looked like a resurrection of a World War Two admiral, direct, penetrating eyes, pugnacious jaw, beetling brows, almost a caricature of the species. He jabbed at the sticker, still lying on its ten pound note. “This convey anything?”

  I shook my head and lit a cigarette after offering one to Max, who declined: he preferred his own brand which cost a fortune. “Not to me. I know nothing of beetles.”

  “Not a beetle, Shaw, a greenfly.”

  “Really.”

  “Hemiptera-Homoptera. Bugs. Parthenogenetic reproduction – breed very fast as a result. Soft skinned, three-jointed suctorial beak, long antennae, two-jointed feet –”

  “And all that has been drawn?”

  Max said, “No. The thing’s rudimentary. But it’s interesting.” He gave me a direct look. “No connection with anything or anyone from the past – in your experience?”

  “None.”

  “Then who do you think is responsible?”

  I said, “With no evidence to go on, I suspect WUSWIPP.” The reference, as Max knew well enough, was to the outfit known as World Union of Socialist Scientific Workers for International Progress in Peace. They were certainly international but the peace part was sheer boloney: WUSWIPP were killers and fanatics for disrupting anything that held any potential at all for peaceful coexistence, to dig up an old phrase from the past. WUSWIPP and I had clashed so many times I’d lost count; and because I’d been reasonably successful against them they hated my guts. That lengthy long-distance telephone call fitted. I said as much to Max.

  “You didn’t recognise the voice, you said.”

  “Right, I didn’t. There’s no evidence in that.” Nor had I picked up an accent. The voice had been flat, toneless. “No indication of nationality though it didn’t strike me the man was speaking his own language.”

  “And no forced entry – front door and windows intact.”

  I shrugged. “It’s easy enough to use a skeleton key.”

  “In your case two skeleton keys – Yale and mortice, but I agree it’s easily done. What do you think they were after, Shaw?”

  I said I had no idea. From time to time I had taken papers home for study, but never anything with a high security classification, and while I had been away in Spain I’d left nothing documentary in the flat: my safe, of which the intruders had bust the combination, had been empty. But the fact that the safe had been opened could suggest a search for documents as I admitted to Max.

  “Exactly.” There was accusation in the tone.

  “I’ve never – ”

  “Yes, all right, Shaw. I know you’re not a damn fool.”

  “Thank you for that,” I said a little tartly. “If it was that – ”

  “They drew a blank. But it makes me think. It makes me think this: that they, whoever they were and for now let’s call them the greenflies, believed you might have had something worth getting their hands on.”

  “Such as – in particular?”

  Max spread his hands and shrugged massive shoulders. “You’re known – probably – to be one of our top field men. WUSWIPP knows that for sure. Others may know it too. Modern bushels conceal very little light.”

  “You’re not answering the question,” I said, and Max gave a grin. He said he knew he wasn’t, because he didn’t know what the answer was; but it seemed he had a theory.

  He said musingly, “Greenfly. Things eat them, prey on them.”

  “Nature,” I said. “Everything preys on something. I imagine greenfly eat some lesser species, don’t they?”

  Max said no, they didn’t. They ate plants as any gardener could testify. He said I’d better have a word with Arthur Webb, who wasn’t a gardener but the top man in 6D2 HQ London on Russian affairs, the head of the Iron Curtain desk. I asked what the connection was, but Max simply picked up his internal line and got Arthur Webb and said I’d be right down.

  *

  Max’s office suite, the last word in luxury, occupied the whole of the penthouse and looked out across the helicopter landing pad over all London and part of four counties. Arthur Webb was five floors down from the suite; I descended in the lift past accounts, medical section, labs and analysis, fingerprints, weapons’ section, finance, industrial counter-espionage … even the lift was luxury, beautifully panelled in bird’s-eye maple. 6D2 drew its ample funds from many sources, big business from all over plus grants from a number of governments who nevertheless refrained from any interference and kept themselves strictly in the background. We had all the scope we wanted and our name stood high. Of individual names none were more trusted than Arthur Webb: he was integrity personified and he had a long experience of affairs on the other side of the Iron Curtain, right back in fact to the end of World War Two. As regards Russia itself he had seen them all come and go: Stalin, Bulganin, Khruschev, Kosygin … Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov, now Gorbachev. Once, he had been on the Russian desk in the Foreign Office and since leaving the FO he had been infiltrated into Russia on a number of occasions, ostensibly trade mission ones. He was getting on now, he must have been around sixty-four and looked it: thin white hair, desiccated flesh, a stoop, exaggerated because he was a tall man, only an inch below my own height; but he was all there mentally, sharp and with-it as ever.

  He asked, when I’d sat down, “What’s all this about?”

  I said, “Greenfly, I think.”

  He looked at me sharply and said, “Ha. Start at the beginning, please, Commander.”

  Somehow, that ‘ha’ told me I wouldn’t be wasting my time. I gave him the facts briefly; he nodded at intervals, keeping his gaze on my face. I ended by saying that Max seemed to have found some significance in the depiction of the greenfly.

  Webb said, “Yes. He could be right. It’s stretching it a little, but it could connect.” He went off at a tangent. “You’ve been in Spain – am I right? How long?”

  “Three weeks, just over. The Costa del Sol job.”

  “Yes, yes. Out of touch. Things move fast these days.”

  I said, “If what you’re getting at blew up while I was in Spain, then whoever broke into my flat wouldn’t have been looking for any documents in connection with it. I know I’m not world famous, but my intruders must have known my movements.”

  “Oh, of course.” Webb brushed that aside. “What I’m getting at as you put it – it has its origins rather farther back than three weeks. I’ll be brief, Commander: there’s a person coming through.”

  “Through the Curtain?”

  “Yes. A woman. We don’t know her name. We’ve simply received word that she’s coming through within the next four days.” Webb shook his head and pulled at his chin. “I confess I don’t like it at all. There’s an amateurish ring. If only we could have handled this right through ourselves – but that wasn’t to be.” He gave me a sharp look. “She wants a pick-up.”

  “Where?”

  “Harz Mountains in West Germany. Near Braunlage.”

  I laughed. “The frontier’s not passable!”

  “Ah, but it’s been crossed quite a number of times in point of fact, though in normal circumstances I’d agree … minefields, electrified wire, booby traps, guards and patrols – they do keep ‘em in! But again that amateur aspect, you see – all those successful crossings by unorthodox means, I have to admit they’ve all been made by amateurs, ordinary people trying to get the hell out.”

  “And this time?”

  Webb said, “Oh, it’s covered. Hans Schulz, our man on the spot. He’ll assist.”

  “When is this to happen?” I asked.

  “As I said, within the next four days. We await a positive time. And if you’re going to ask what the special importance is, I’ll tell you what we know, which in fact isn’t much: the woman is coming through with information said to be vital to international peace. Because of the background, this is being taken very seriously indeed and we’re in close consultation with – with the highest level in Whitehall
.”

  “And the background?”

  Webb smiled, put his finger-tips together and rested his chin on them. He went off at another tangent. “We were going to send Layton for the pick-up. But I wonder if you’d care to go instead?”

  I said promptly, “When I’ve sorted out my flat, I’m going on leave.”

  “Why not postpone it? I can fix this with Max very easily in the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances for heaven’s sake?”

  Webb said, “The woman is one of a group calling themselves – I translate from the Russian – the Ladybirds.” He added, as he probably noted the various expressions chasing themselves across my face, “Ladybirds prey on greenfly. I thought you’d be interested. Do you see a possible connection?”

  I knew I’d lost my leave; Max would never let me off this particular hook. And come to that, I wouldn’t mind the opportunity of making that six thousand quid genuinely expense deductible.

  2

  I had a long session with Arthur Webb. I wasn’t familiar with the Harz Mountains or their contiguous areas of West Germany and he filled me in on detail. Also, he told me more about the Ladybirds: in Russia they were dissidents, always on the run from the KGB. They were liberal minded and they were mainly women, hence the cover name. The identity of the woman coming through was not known; in fact not much was known about the group as a whole, but a month or so earlier there had been a reference to them in a despatch from the British Embassy in Moscow. A woman had been shot and killed in the Naberezhnaya Morisa Toreza, outside the Embassy itself and before she had died and been dragged away she had shouted out something in English, something about wanting asylum. All this, Webb said, had been in the English press, but of course no explanation had ever come through from the Kremlin or the Soviet Embassy in London. The despatch from the Ambassador had indicated a belief that the woman had been a member of the Ladybirds, of whom his security section had picked up fragmentary reports over the last six months or so. They were being a nuisance to the Soviet authorities, who were doing their best not to admit their existence. Possibly more than a nuisance: there had been minor but expensive acts of sabotage in various parts of the Soviet Union, factories blown up, agricultural machinery damaged, that sort of thing. Killings as well: a troop convoy heading for Poland had been ambushed and assaulted with primitive petrol bombs. The soldiers had opened fire and a number of women had been shot. These facts had permeated through to the Embassy in dribs and drabs and had been referred to in earlier reports to Whitehall and these reports had now been collated and the Ladybirds noted as the possible saboteurs.