by Jeremy Duns
‘What the hell’s going on here? Voers?’
‘Nothing, Captain. I was just checking up on our prisoners.’
Weale glared at him. ‘You didn’t have my permission to do so. Leave us, please.’
Voers nodded, gave an insincere smile and left the room.
Hope let out a deep breath of relief and felt the thumping in her chest gradually slow. Ben stirred on the bed, and she went to him, taking his face in her hands, reassuring him all was well.
‘Miss Charamba,’ said the captain.
She didn’t reply. The voice was solicitous, but had an unpleasant edge to it – was he about to take over where the other man had left off?
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said. ‘Let me explain the situation.’
He walked over to the bed and looked down at Ben, a friendly smile on his face.
‘Have you ever been on an aeroplane, little man?’ Ben shook his head slowly. ‘Well, you will soon. Your mother will go on board first, and then you’ll come along a bit later with some other men.’ He saw the look of fear cross the boy’s eyes. ‘Don’t worry, it’s best that way. Just do as I say and nothing bad will happen.’
He looked back at her, smiling. She nodded, stiffening as the man reached out and ran his hands through her son’s hair.
Chapter 23
Paul Dark joined the queue and bought a ticket with some of Kurkinen’s marks and boarded the ferry. The passengers were a mix of rowdy party-goers, elderly day-trippers returning home and young families. The ferry was still in the harbour, but the line of slot machines was already occupied, the players’ expressions grimly focused on the rows of spinning fruit.
Dark followed the signs to the cafeteria, a large low-ceilinged hall decorated in lemon yellow and blue with a thick green carpet and strip lighting. He dreaded to think what effect the décor would have when the passage was rocky. At the far end of the room, a low plastic wall and long stuffed leather cushions partitioned off a small playroom, and children were driving around it in bright plastic toy trucks and cars, their parents watching nervously from nearby tables.
He paid for a black coffee and a limp-looking sandwich at the counter and found a table around the corner from the playroom – he didn’t want to see other people’s children. The floor juddered for a moment, and he watched through the windows as the harbour gradually retreated from view.
He sipped the coffee, then took a deep breath and leaned back against the chair. His neck and forearm muscles still ached from the fight with Kurkinen, but his mind was now operating in two very different modes. Part of it was focused on his immediate surroundings, his eyes surveying the other passengers, looking for any discrepancies in appearance or behaviour – a professional calculating the odds. But this was almost a mechanical reflex, and beneath the surface another part of him was in freefall, nightmare images of what might be happening to Ben and Claire flashing through his synapses before he could stop them, horror and despair churning inside his guts.
He was still struggling to believe that it had really happened, that he hadn’t simply imagined it all and at any given moment he would emerge from the nightmare to find them with him again. At the same time, he had accepted reality enough to blame himself for having been so careless. All the signs had been there, and he’d missed them. He’d been trained to spot omissions in people’s stories, and there had been several in Claire’s. She’d never discussed her family, always avoided politics, changed the subject when it came to life in Zambia, and avoided other Africans in Stockholm. And yet he hadn’t noticed anything, presuming instead she had fled hardship and simply didn’t want to be reminded of it. He had been so intent on looking over his own shoulder that he hadn’t even considered looking over hers.
But none of that mattered now. Whoever she was, whatever her past, she was the woman he loved, and the mother of his child. He would do whatever it took to get them back.
The ferry would take fourteen hours to get to Stockholm. It seemed an eternity in which any number of horrific things could happen, but he’d passed the stage of panic. At least he was out and looking for them now – and he knew just where to start. As soon as he landed, he had to find out who Claire really was.
Chapter 24
Friday, 22 August 1975, London
As the train entered the tunnel, Rachel gazed through the glass, her eyes following the latticework of wires and pipes along the blackened walls. She blinked, refocusing, and saw her own reflection instead. She looked tired, she thought. Tired and rather miserable.
The train emerged at Lambeth North and she minded the gap and walked briskly up the stairs. She turned left out of the station and within a few seconds reached the entrance of the tower-block with no stated occupants and the sign reading ‘NO ENTRY. PERMIT HOLDERS ONLY.’ She fished her pass-card from her purse and held it up for the uniformed guard to see, then pushed open the doors and walked into the lobby.
She presented her card to Cyril, the night porter. He pressed a switch beneath his desk to let the guard on her floor know she was coming up, and she unlocked the lift door with her key and stepped inside.
She loathed the weekend night shift, but knew she should count her blessings. Her attempt to bring Tom Gadlow back from Kuala Lumpur to face justice nearly six years earlier had ended in his death, and she’d been hauled over the coals for it. A known traitor had slipped through the Service’s fingers, and she alone was responsible. There had been talk of her getting the sack, and for a horrible couple of weeks even that she might have somehow colluded in the murder – was she perhaps also working for the Russians, and had deliberately let Gadlow out of her sight so the assassin could kill him before he returned to London and revealed all under interrogation? The inquiry had cleared her of that, but the blame for his death was still firmly affixed to her and she had been reprimanded and returned to the same rank and pay grade as she had been on when she had joined the Service.
But she’d been lucky to survive at all. The doomsday scenario Edmund Innes had outlined to her in 1969 hadn’t quite come to pass, but the Service was now a shadow of its former self. She was one of the few survivors of what was still referred to, on the rare occasions it was referred to at all, as ‘The Purge’. The prime minister had been unimpressed by Review Section’s report into Dark and the other traitors and had decided immediate root and branch reform was needed. Dozens of officers had been discreetly ‘retired’ as a result. A Conservative government had been elected a few months later, but any hope it might take a softer line had soon been dispelled by the new prime minister’s insistence that the agency immediately inform him of all the remaining skeletons in its filing cabinets or face the possibility of a full parliamentary inquiry.
Seeing no alternative, the Service had supplied the PM and senior members of his government with information about various ‘unfortunate episodes’, but not everyone had been persuaded. The new foreign secretary had been particularly persistent in questioning Innes about his predecessor’s assassination. In the end, Sandy Harmigan had come to the rescue, taking the floor from a flustered Innes one hot Tuesday afternoon in the Cabinet Office. In a virtuoso performance, he had deflected all the foreign secretary’s complaints, saying that it had been a horrendous, unprecedented and tragic sequence of events but that he knew from agents in the field that the terrorist responsible had been killed in a clandestine operation in Rome and the group he represented ‘cauterised’. It was one of those words that tended to brook no further questioning, and Harmigan had applied his very best evocation of Dirk Bogarde’s insouciance when delivering the line.
Concern over the Service’s record had fizzled out soon after: the country was facing more pressing issues than the spooks’ ancient history. Grave errors, it was decided, had been made, but there was nothing to be gained by harping on about them and one simply slept better if one accepted that, after all, these chaps were fundamentally decent people who knew what they were doing. In this way, the Service’s deeper
secrets had been protected. The occasional lurid story had appeared in newspapers, notably pursued by the Daily Express, but were shrugged off as conspiracy theory.
Before long, though, trouble arose again. Edmund Innes had become increasingly prone to speaking his mind, and the corridors were abuzz with tales of his inappropriate outbursts. Some thought it was simply the irascibility of old age, others that it was a nervous breakdown. The nadir was said to have occurred during a JIC meeting: Innes had insinuated that Harmigan was so keen to whitewash the record on Paul Dark that he must be some sort of double himself.
Rachel found the image hard to reconcile with the quiet, polite man she’d met, but the rumour had been confirmed to her by Sandy. In late 1971, Innes had curtly announced to the staff that he was taking a sabbatical. He had retreated to his cottage in Swanwick, and Harmigan had been appointed acting Chief. Nobody was under any illusions about the ‘acting’ part of the title: Innes wasn’t coming back. Harmigan immediately created a new department to oversee delicate matters such as negotiating severance and pension packages and tightening Official Secrets Act obligations. By the time Labour regained power in the spring of 1974, questions over the Service’s future had finally faded from view.
Within the upper echelons of the agency, The Purge had been felt a necessary emergency measure: better to remain a stripped-down core than be packed up entirely. Had they not brushed the worst horrors under the carpet, so the reasoning went, several of them might have been disgraced, or even imprisoned. Harmigan was seen as not simply a war hero, but as the Service’s saviour.
He had been Rachel’s saviour, too. Despite the Gadlow fiasco he had kept her on, and with the current state of the economy that was no small matter. The previous summer, Danny had found a job with the Public Record Office and had moved into a studio flat in Chancery Lane, leaving her to pay rent on the place in Holborn alone. She was barely scraping by, but as long as she was picking up a pay cheque she counted herself fortunate.
She stepped out of the lift, nodded to the bored-looking guard and took the corridor leading to the duty room. She knocked on the door and walked in. Tombes looked up.
‘Hello.’
Keith Tombes was a 54-year-old Yorkshireman, bearded and podgy and notoriously messy – the desk next to him was a pile of scattered papers. But Rachel knew his habits masked an exceptional mind, and she had insisted that he be on her team in Review Section. Now he was back on night duty with her, not that he seemed to mind: if Tombes had ever had any ambitions, they had evaporated decades ago. Rachel lived in fear of his discovering her relationship with Sandy, because she knew he would be devastated – he was devoted to her, and had an intense dislike of Sandy, who he referred to as ‘His Lordship’.
‘Anything interesting come in?’ she asked him.
‘Not a lot.’ He fished up a piece of paper from the pile and scanned his scrawled notes. ‘Tehran sent a report on this palaver over the Americans’ profile of the Shah. The long and short is they still don’t know who leaked it to the press. Let’s see . . .’ He peered at his handwriting. ‘The South Africans have sent us a confidential briefing about the talks they’ve set up with the Rhodesians. I’ve forwarded it to the Foreign Office so their bods will have it before they go out. Oh yes, Rouse in Paris checked in. He still hasn’t heard from his asset. It’s been three days, so I suspect we might be out of pocket there. I’ve prepared a memo on it to Western Europe, so that’ll go as soon as the secretaries are in.’ He tapped a buff envelope in the out tray, then returned to his notes. ‘Oh, and Five sent over a telex from Interpol about an hour ago, via the Finns. Two dead and two missing in an apparent hostage situation on some bloody island in the Baltic. The coastguard brought a fellow into Helsinki for questioning and he managed to escape. Looks like a professional. All ports have been alerted and we’re to keep an eye out, for what it’s worth.’ He placed the paper back on the desk. ‘That’s it, my girl. Want the chit?’
Rachel shook her head, and took off her jacket. Tombes was about to walk out the door when something stirred in the back of her mind and she called out to him.
‘Hold on. Where in the Baltic, exactly?’
Chapter 25
Dark was thinking of getting another coffee when he looked up and saw a group of men walking steadily down the passage leading to the cafeteria.
There were four of them. They were well built, wearing dark blue woollen uniforms and with thick truncheons hanging from their belts. One led an Alsatian that was struggling against its leash, and as they made their way down the corridor they glanced each way, studying the faces of the passengers.
Dark’s skin bristled. Kurkinen must have recovered and got the message out. The security crew of every ferry leaving Helsinki tonight would have been provided with his description and told to comb every inch of their boats looking for him.
He didn’t like his chances. He’d lost the beard, but he was still a dark-haired, middle-aged Caucasian male, around 185 centimetres tall and weighing 80 kilograms, travelling alone. And if Kurkinen had been clever, he’d have added a description of his own clothes.
He reached for the Browning. It was still secure in his waistband, but using it would be a last resort, as there would doubtless be other crew members and weapons on board, and he was essentially trapped on the boat. But where to go? He could perhaps find a lavatory, or hide somewhere in the car deck, but he suspected that in the course of the journey these men were going to search every inch of the ferry, and rather than hiding his only real chance of avoiding them was to stay in plain sight.
He slid out of his seat and walked towards the children’s area: the low cushioned wall shielded it from view unless you were at one of the surrounding tables. The small space contained about a dozen children, running around, squabbling with each other, crying, or sitting alone preoccupied with a toy. A couple of adults were also roaming the area: a mother trying to cajole her twins into coming to have some dinner in the cafeteria, another breastfeeding her baby. One wall was taken up with a primary-coloured painting of a ferry in simple geometric shapes, a Finnish flag on its bow.
Dark glanced behind him and saw that the crew members had now entered the cafeteria, and that one of them was talking to the kitchen staff while the others were walking among the tables. The man with the Alsatian looked to be heading straight towards him.
Dark stepped into the playroom, bobbing his head as though he were a parent looking for one of his brood. A girl with plaited hair, aged nine or ten, wearing a pink skirt and striped T-shirt, approached and tapped him on the leg. She said something to him in Finnish, then pointed at a wooden shelf with rows of tiny shoes just outside the room.
Dark quickly took off his shoes. He placed them with the others and walked back into the playroom, narrowly avoiding stepping on the fingers of a crawling toddler. The girl with plaits nodded approvingly.
‘Do you speak Swedish?’ he asked her. Finland was bilingual and the boat was heading to Sweden.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Saga. But my mother said I wasn’t to talk to any grown-ups.’
‘She’s right, of course. Where is she?’
‘She went to the shop. She’ll be back in ten minutes, she said.’
On the way to the cafeteria, Dark had passed a small kiosk selling duty-free cosmetics.
‘Have you seen my son, Ben?’ he said. He hardly knew why he had said it, but he wanted to engage the girl in conversation. The crew would be looking for a man travelling alone, not a parent.
The girl looked up at him, wondering about her mother’s advice but intrigued by the question.
‘What does he look like?’ she said, finally.
‘He’s younger than you. Three years old. Curly hair.’
The girl’s saucer-like eyes appraised him. ‘You look sad,’ she said. ‘Have you lost him?’
Dark nodded, and something in him nearly cracked as the girl reached out and touched his arm in
reassurance.
‘Don’t worry. He can’t have gone very far.’
Dark managed a smile.
‘Can you help me find him?’
The girl nodded firmly.
‘Perhaps he’s in there.’ She pointed at the painting of the ship, and Dark saw that the portholes were small cubbies that had been carved into the wall for the children to explore.
‘I’ll check,’ said Dark, and dropped down to the floor. Saga laughed as he tried to crawl into the space and butted heads with a small boy in dungarees. He stretched his hand out and she pulled at it. Dark got to his feet and thanked her. He looked across and saw the man with the Alsatian standing by the entrance to the space, scanning everyone in it. Dark gave a sheepish smile, a hapless father overwhelmed by chaotic children. The man nodded and smiled back, then pulled at the leash and walked on.
Dark sat on the floor of the playroom and let his breathing return to normal.
Chapter 26
A telephone chirruped in the office at the rear of the house in the outskirts of Lusaka. On the third ring, it was picked up by the small, slim man in the black satin dressing gown reading a newspaper at his desk in the corner of the room.
‘Yes? Matthew Charamba speaking.’
‘Hello, Professor.’
The voice was strangely disembodied and metallic, and Charamba realised it had been put through some sort of machine. But even with the disguise he recognised the flat, terse accent typical of white Rhodesians.
‘Who is this? How did you get this number?’
‘You don’t know me, but I have something of yours you might wish to see returned safely. Or, rather, someone.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘As you will no doubt be aware, some of your former colleagues will soon be taking part in talks with the Rhodesians.’
