by Jeremy Duns
Her first meeting with Innes had changed all that. She had been indoctrinated into one of the Service’s greatest secrets – that it was about to be closed down.
Rumours had been circulating for months that the agency was in crisis. There were even whispers that the previous Chief, Farraday, had died during the memorial service for his predecessor in St Paul’s, and if one stayed long enough after hours one heard talk of a sniper, an Italian terrorist group, of manhunts across Europe. It had all sounded too fantastical to be true, but there had been nothing imaginary about Innes’ grim expression.
He had been appointed Chief a few weeks earlier, but nobody believed he’d last long. He had previously been head of Western European Section and was regarded as a forensic intelligence analyst but a weak politician. Rachel had only ever seen him once before, catching a glimpse of a top hat and tails as he climbed into a limousine outside the building, like a figure from a Trollope novel. Up close, she found he had unexpectedly kind eyes, and had felt herself wanting to please him: that sense of loyalty she had sometimes experienced with very good teachers, and with her father when she was a child.
That afternoon, he had explained to her the true state of the Service’s predicament, which turned out to be far worse than even the wildest basement bar gossip. Farraday had been killed by an Italian group, but they had been sponsored by the Russians and the assassination was tied to the disappearance of Paul Dark, the former head of Soviet Section. Everyone had been told Dark was on extended leave, but the truth was he had been unmasked as a traitor that spring and gone on the run. The suspicion was he’d defected to Moscow, but nothing had been confirmed.
Rachel had listened in shock as Innes outlined the fiasco surrounding Dark. Several pieces of intelligence suggested the Sovs had recruited him as long ago as 1945, meaning that over two decades of high-level secrets could have been betrayed. Worse still, the Americans had got wind of it and were furious, threatening a permanent cessation of all intelligence-sharing unless the Service could put its house in order, and fast. It was just the latest in a long string of British spy scandals that had begun with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in the fifties and had been followed by Kim Philby and George Blake’s defections. Dark was seen as the final straw. The prime minister had swiftly responded to the Americans’ objections, threatening to shut the Service down completely and handing its responsibilities to Five until a new, ‘untainted’ agency could be formed.
This was the doomsday scenario, and Innes had been determined to stop it. He had promised to deliver the prime minister a thorough report into all the agency’s security lapses before the year was out. Innes was moving thirty officers into a small command centre in Warren Street to form a new department, Review Section. He’d asked Rachel to lead the group analysing Dark’s career, reporting directly to the head of Soviet Section, Sandy Harmigan.
Since then she had eaten, slept and breathed little but Paul Dark. Working through the files with four others, she had retraced as much of his life as possible: his racing-car driver father, his mad Swedish aristocrat of a mother, his string of girlfriends – ‘Dark’s dolly birds’, Harmigan called them – all of whom seemed to be damaged in one way or another, and all of whom seemed to have come to a sticky end. She’d worked long into the night, fuelled by a steady supply of coffee from the vending machine downstairs and St Moritz menthols from an all-night offie across the street. In her more sombre moments, she despaired at the magnitude of the task. It could take years to assess what the man had done, and even then a thousand questions might never be answered.
Guiding her through the maze of the investigation was Sandy Harmigan. He was a daily presence in the command centre, and at six foot four, with a mane of silvery hair framing a long, lean face and dressed in bespoke Harris tweed, impossible to ignore. He was a war hero, having gained an MC at Saint-Nazaire – in the latter stages of the raid, he’d carried out a solo reconnaissance mission in the port. He had then been captured and imprisoned by the Germans, but had broken out of his camp with a group of POWs. After the war he had written a memoir, Safe Conduct, which had been filmed by Hollywood with Dirk Bogarde portraying a sensationalised version of him. Rachel had read the book in her teens – it wasn’t quite as thrilling as Oreste Pinto, but it was close. Now Harmigan was the spook’s spook: in the corridors of Century House, he was discussed in hushed, almost reverent tones, and was widely regarded as Innes’ inevitable successor. Rachel had found, to her dismay, that she was falling in love with him.
But the work came first, and it had borne fruit: by August her team had pinpointed several contingency plans they felt certain Dark had betrayed to Moscow, all of which were changed accordingly. At the same time, ties had been severed with nearly a hundred agents and assets around the world. They had also discovered the true identity of Dark’s handler, Alexander Proshin, who as ‘Ivan Dimirov’ had worked as a lecturer at UCL. Unfortunately, they hadn’t got a lot further than that, as interviews with former students and tutors had turned up precious little concrete intelligence about him. He kept to himself. He liked Dave Brubeck records. He collected stamps. Proshin had become her second obsession: the man behind the curtain, the puppet-master, the great spy-handler.
Now, thanks to the document Innes had just handed her, she finally had some answers. It seemed that Paul Dark’s long run of evading justice had come to an end, and it had ironically been at the hands of Proshin. In the final paragraphs of his memorandum, Proshin described how he and his team had tracked Dark and an unnamed British woman to a small island between Finland and Sweden. A gunfight had ensued in which three had died: Colonel Proshin, the woman, and Dark. Alexander Proshin and his radio operator had flown his father’s body back to Moscow, but had left the Brits to rot on the island – ‘I decided that the birds there deserved some meat,’ was how he had chillingly put it.
Rachel closed the file and placed it on her lap.
‘Where’s it from?’
Innes nodded at Harmigan, who set his glass to one side.
‘A Russian chap approached Angus Pimm in the Moscow metro on Wednesday evening. Name of Kotov – a GRU security officer. He passed Pimm an envelope, saying it was his “first gift”. It contained microfilms of twenty documents, of which this was one.’
‘Wednesday?’ She looked between them. ‘Why are you showing it to me only now?’
Both men smiled tersely, and she blushed at her own impertinence. But Dark was hers, they knew that.
‘We were looking into it,’ said Innes gently. ‘We’ve been stung with dangles before.’
She nodded. The Soviets would sometimes send an officer to a foreign embassy claiming to want to defect. If accepted as genuine, he could feed them disinformation for months, or even years.
‘Moscow Station have interviewed Pimm extensively,’ said Innes. ‘They think Kotov’s the real thing, but as you’re the expert on Dark we wanted your view before we decide how to proceed.’
The two men were looking at her expectantly. Innes had phrased it to flatter, but she suspected they were simply looking for confirmation of what they had already decided. If she agreed Kotov was genuine, they would then have more support for their case. It would mean they could justify running Kotov, but also that they could sign off the report to the prime minister saying Dark had been killed: ‘But that was in another country, and besides, the traitor’s dead.’ She was tempted to disappoint them on principle, but that would be unprofessional. Still, they were putting her in an unpleasant situation, essentially asking her to gauge the worth of the report on sight, and devoid of any surrounding context.
‘What are the other documents Kotov handed over?’
‘Solid stuff,’ said Harmigan. ‘Most of it new to us, if not earth-shattering.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘We wanted your view on this first.’
She took a sip of the sherry. Vile, she thought – far too sweet.
‘All right. Well, it could be disinformat
ion, of course: Moscow’s found Dark alive somewhere but they want us to believe he’s dead so they’ve concocted this report and sent their man along with it to convince us. But I think that’s rather unlikely. If they knew for certain he were alive that would suggest they had him in their custody, in which case they’d get much more mileage out of him by holding a press conference, like they did with Burgess and Maclean, or at least allowing him to be spotted by Western journalists, like they did with Philby in ’63. Then there’s the mention of the woman with him. Unfortunately, that sounds very much like it’s Sarah Severn, who we know disappeared from Rome Station at the same time as Dark was there. Finally, the memorandum claims to be written by Alexander Proshin, and it seems to me that it is. We’ve already determined that this man was Dark’s handler, and I very much doubt they’d word disinformation as callously as they have here. It has the unpleasant ring of truth. The details he gives of handling Dark in London also fit with the other information we have. It seems he’s now relocated to Moscow and has become fairly senior in this directorate. You may remember my reports about his father, who used to be one of Andropov’s closest advisers and has been missing for some time. His death as described in this report and the son’s ascendency in Moscow explain a large part of what we’ve been missing.’ She took a breath and gave a brief smile. ‘So – pending further analysis, of course – my assessment is that the report is real.’
Both men looked relieved, and she wondered how to word her next sentence. Harmigan noticed her hesitation.
‘Is something wrong?’
She shifted in her seat for a moment, then took the plunge. ‘Yes. There’s another possibility. The document could be genuine, but Dark and Severn might nevertheless still be alive. It doesn’t need to be an attempt to feed us disinformation – Proshin could simply be lying on his own account.’
Innes’ head snapped up. ‘Why on earth would he do that?’
She gave a thin smile, unwilling to lecture the head of the Service. ‘There could be any number of reasons, sir. Political infighting we don’t know about, or simply to cover his own back. If he and his team lost Dark in Finland, for instance, writing a report admitting it would be tantamount to signing his own death sentence.’
Harmigan reached for his drink. Innes sighed, then offered her a polite but distant smile.
‘Thank you, Miss Gold. We’ll take this from here.’
She gave a brief nod, stood and walked out of the room.
Innes wandered to the sideboard and poured two more brandies, then headed back over to Harmigan and handed one to him.
‘Well? What if she’s right?’
Harmigan looked up at him, surprised. ‘She isn’t. She’s just become too attached to the chase. And it helps if the person you’re chasing is tangible.’
Innes took a sip from his glass, swirling the liquid in his mouth before swallowing.
‘What about her idea it could be some kind of internal intrigue we don’t know about?’
The other man let out a derisive snort. ‘Edmund, you know as well as I do you can send yourself mad applying that sort of thinking to everything.’ He nodded at the dossier on the table. ‘It’s all there in black and white.’ He tipped his head back and downed the rest of his drink, then slammed the glass down on the sideboard and made a short chopping motion with his hand. ‘Dark’s dead. Good bloody riddance.’
Chapter 4
Wednesday, 31 December 1969, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
It was approaching dusk by the time the dilapidated Nissan Cedric came to a stop outside the house in Kenny Hill.
‘This the one, lah?’
Rachel consulted her map and nodded. She paid the driver, peeling off notes from the bundle she had exchanged at the airport, and stepped out of the car. She watched as the car turned round and headed back down the hill, leaving the street empty but for her. After the cacophony of the city centre, with the beeping horns and roaring exhausts of buses and vans and motorcycles, the neighbourhood was eerily quiet.
She walked up to a set of iron gates. Beyond it, a gravel driveway led to a long white villa, its red roof tiles and black slatted windows giving it an incongruously Tudor look. She was reminded of her father’s favourite pub, The Swan in Newtown.
A small card in a pillar to the right of the gates read ‘Gadlow’, and she pressed the button beneath it. In the dim light, she watched as a man in a belted uniform and peaked cap emerged from a cabin on the other side of the gates.
‘I’m here to see the Gadlows.’
He nodded and placed a key in one of the gates to let her through, raising a hand to indicate the entrance of the house.
She thanked him. In the driveway, a small man in a safari suit was polishing the bonnet of a black Mercedes sedan with a chamois cloth. She said ‘Good evening’ and he looked up for a moment, then returned to his polishing.
Feeling slightly foolish, she approached the front door, which was a grand oak affair with a large bronze knocker. Her stomach was roiling. Was it simply nerves, she wondered, or was this part of the jet lag phenomenon she’d been warned of? When she’d left her flat in London it had been shortly after dawn. Now it was quarter to seven in the evening and she was suddenly just a few hours away from a new decade.
It had also been damp and cold in London, while here it was in the high twenties, and she could feel the beads of sweat forming on her skin, stinging her eyes and pooling in the ridge of her upper lip. She wiped it away with her hand. The humidity had hit her like a solid wall on walking out of the terminal building, and her neck still ached from having slept in an awkward position on the flight. The drive through the city had only made her feel more jumbled up. As well as the noise, the landscape had been an incoherent mixture of wide boulevards and palm trees, concrete tower blocks and ornate mosques. Billboards and signposts were often in several alphabets, including the Latin one, with many words near-phonetic spellings of the English equivalent. But you had to be in the right frame of mind to see this, and it had even taken her a few seconds to twig the sign reading ‘Teksi’ in the airport. Not a good omen for the supposed crypto queen.
She rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath. Pull yourself together – you’ve come a long way for this. She swung the bronze knocker. After a while, an elderly Chinese woman in a plain blue housedress and slippers opened the door a fraction and peered out. On seeing her, she gave a sharp nod and immediately turned and shuffled away again.
Rachel was debating whether to follow after her – and marvelling at the number of servants she had already encountered – when another figure stepped into the doorway. She was an attractive woman in her late thirties. Thirty-eight, Rachel remembered from the file. Her fair hair was swept back from her forehead and she wore a turquoise shantung silk evening gown that showed off long, tanned arms and accentuated her bust. Rachel was suddenly conscious of the wildness of her own dark curls and the pale angularity of her body beneath the cheap cotton dress she’d bought in Gamages a few days earlier.
‘Hello? May I help?’
The voice was a bright English trill, the kind that would suit a speaker at a debutante’s ball or the presenter of a children’s programme on the BBC. Rachel straightened her back and pasted on a smile.
‘Yes, hello. I’m looking for Tom Gadlow.’
‘And you are . . .?’
‘Rachel Gold. I’ve just flown in from London.’ She stuck out her hand.
There was a momentary hesitation, of the type she was used to whenever she said her name with its ‘biblical resonances’, as her brother, Danny, euphemistically referred to it. And then she felt the tips of her fingers being gently shaken.
‘Oh, yes. The office told us you were coming. I’m Eleanor, Tom’s wife. He’s out on the veranda. Do come in.’
Rachel followed Eleanor Gadlow through to a spacious living room: it was filled with several brightly coloured sofas, modern abstract oil paintings and cabinets housing glass ornaments. How much of it had been paid for
by the Sovs, she wondered. The house and servants came with the job, but the décor looked a little too flashy for a Head of Station – perhaps Gadlow had a numbered account in Zurich. Was Eleanor in on his treachery, or did she not know where the money came from?
Three weeks earlier, Rachel had been reviewing the latest batch of material passed to Moscow Station by Victor Kotov when she had discovered something extraordinary: one of the microfilm reels had contained the minutes of meetings that had taken place in the secure room of the British embassy in Bangkok in the late fifties. Over the course of nine days, she had mapped out everyone who had had access to those documents until she had narrowed the list to just one person who could have seen them all: Tom Gadlow, who had since become Head of Station in Kuala Lumpur.
It had taken her several more days to persuade Sandy Harmigan she was right about Gadlow. Although Review Section had been set up for precisely this sort of breakthrough, nobody on the Fourth Floor had welcomed the news of another double agent in the ranks. Perhaps because of her insistence that Paul Dark might still be alive, Sandy had been especially sceptical. But after several meetings, at which section heads had been brought in and charts had been set up and explained, she had convinced Sandy and the others that there could be no other possible explanation.
Once they had accepted Gadlow was guilty, the next question had been how to get him back to London for interrogation without tipping him – or the Soviets – off. Sandy had decided to send Rachel out to fetch him. It was a risk – she had little experience in the field and he was still troubled by her refusal to back down over Dark – but she had all the details fixed in her mind and, more importantly, wouldn’t get cold feet about bringing him in.
