Spy Out the Land

by Jeremy Duns

  Three seats to Smith’s left, Roy Campbell-Fraser was frantically thinking how to deal with this development. The last time he had spoken to Matthew Charamba he had given him a deadline for noon tomorrow to accede to his demands and arrange with Nkomo that he would attend the conference. But that deadline might now be too late. Campbell-Fraser had been sure Smith would bow to the South Africans’ pressure to take part in the summit, and indeed had believed it was a done deal, but the man was even more stubborn than he had thought possible. He cleared his throat and Smith turned to him, his eyebrows raised.

  ‘Roy?’

  ‘Well, I may have something for you, Prime Minister – although I must stress that it’s highly provisional, based on talk from some of our recently captured terrs.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What have they been saying?’

  ‘That Matthew Charamba might be joining the African delegation.’

  Smith rolled his eyes. ‘Charamba? That thug’s made his position clear: he wants us to specify a precise time-frame for black rule. That is totally unacceptable. He’s just the sort of leader we can’t do business with.’

  ‘I’m aware of all that, Prime Minister, but we’re hearing that he’s now thinking of abandoning that position and coming into the negotiations to argue it would be better to postpone talk of majority rule until peaceful transition looks like a realistic prospect.’

  ‘What? That’s a complete U-turn! Why on earth would he do that?’

  Campbell-Fraser shrugged. ‘We don’t really know at the moment. This is just what we’re hearing. It might be that his inner circle have persuaded him his previous position was futile. If one were of a more cynical frame of mind, one might suspect he’s changing his strategy so he can position himself as a potential leader instead of forever being in exile.’

  ‘A power-grab, you mean, uniting all the factions?’

  ‘Perhaps. Anyway, I don’t think we care too much why he’s changed his mind, do we, as long as he turns up and argues it that way?’

  Smith pressed his forefinger against his lower lip. After a few seconds he smiled. ‘This might be very good news, Roy. Charamba has massive support among the blacks so he would be able to swing any arrangement if he came to the talks. How sure are you of these rumours?’

  ‘At the moment, I’d say we’re about eighty per cent sure. I hope to firm things up very soon.’

  Smith nodded, taking this in. ‘Excellent. Let me know the minute you hear anything further. Call my office directly.’ He looked around the table. ‘Now, do we have any other business to attend to?’

  Chapter 35

  The counter-intelligence unit of Sweden’s Säkerhetspolisen, informally known as Säpo, operated out of offices in the large police station in Bergsgatan on the quiet island of Kungsholmen. John Weale approached the concrete shed in front of the station, where a sentry asked for his name, consulted a docket and then let him past.

  He walked through the gates feeling uncharacteristically anxious. As soon as he had got off the phone with Harmigan he had broken protocol and called the Commander, who had tersely confirmed that the orders were genuine: he was to meet with Säpo and discover what they knew of Dark’s movements, then find Dark and ‘silence’ him.

  Weale had spent his life taking orders, including to kill in cold blood, but he was reluctant to do so in this case, and not just because they came from a Brit. Despite Harmigan’s blithe claims this would be a walk in the park, it was an extremely risky idea to impersonate a Service officer at the drop of a hat to another intelligence agency. Weale had meticulously prepared a legend for Frederick Collins as a British fabric salesman, not as a spook based in Sweden. His knowledge of the country was related to the operation at hand, and if anyone scratched at the surface it would fall apart. Harmigan had assured him the Swedes wouldn’t be looking for anything out of the ordinary and that if he encountered any trouble he was simply to insist on placing a direct call to his office in London, but that was scant comfort. He knew he had no choice, and Campbell-Fraser had made the operation’s importance clear: the very fate of white rule in Rhodesia was at stake. He had decided to take him at his word and act accordingly. It would make the job a hell of a lot easier.

  The marble-floored lobby of the building was deserted except for an overweight man in a brown suit and maroon shirt smoking a cigarette. He had shaggy greying hair and lonely eyes with large bags beneath them. Seeing Weale approach, he crushed his cigarette out in a nearby stand and ambled towards him.

  ‘Frederick Collins?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here to see Iwan Morelius.’

  ‘That’s me.’ He stuck out a large hand.

  Weale took it. ‘A pleasure to meet you, Iwan. I take it Sandy Harmigan has explained to you our interest in this matter?’

  Morelius nodded. ‘Broadly speaking, yes. A Soviet agent in your service, I understand.’

  ‘Formerly in our service,’ said Weale, wincing. He hoped he wasn’t overplaying it – his accent didn’t take much modifying but he had to be careful not to caricature the tight-arsedness too much and come over like Terry-Thomas. The key to cover was not to bow too much to expectation, and he’d decided that the best way to avoid tripping up was to stick fairly closely to his own personality.

  ‘I understand,’ said Morelius. ‘You come highly recommended by Sandy, incidentally. How is he these days?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Weale, his tone airy. ‘I haven’t seen him in more than a year. He still knows how to give orders over a telephone, though.’

  Morelius smiled, the bristles of his moustache falling over his lip as he did so. ‘Where is it you’re based, Mr Collins? You aren’t on the Service’s declared list here.’

  ‘Ah, yes, sorry about that – I’m not at the embassy, more of a roving man in the region.’

  The Swede nodded. ‘I see.’

  They walked to the lift, and a minute later emerged into a modern open-plan office, where Weale was introduced to a group of neat young men with side-partings and, in several cases, horn-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘They dress better than I do,’ Morelius said with a smile. He turned to the men. ‘This is Frederick Collins from British intelligence. He’s here to tell us what he knows about Herr Johansson, and in turn you will tell him what we’ve discovered.’

  Chapter 36

  Harmigan rapped on the door of Rachel Gold’s office and, without waiting for an answer, stepped inside. He closed the door and drew the blinds with a swift pull of the sash, then took her in his arms. She felt her breathing tighten as they kissed, his skin scratching against hers. Then he drew away, his eyes sparkling as she hadn’t seen them do for months.

  ‘Oh, you were glorious, my dear! Wonderful. I’ve just had a little chat with Bradley and he’s given us the go-ahead to use KH, with all the bells and whistles.’

  KH was Kinnaird House, a CIA command centre in Pall Mall that was rigged up with powerful radio receivers, computers and other state-of-the-art equipment. It had briefly been used during the Penkovsky operation, and senior members of the Service still waxed lyrical about it.

  Harmigan was holding a straw hat in one hand, which he placed on his head gingerly. ‘I’m heading over there now to get things going. Want to take the car with me?’ She didn’t reply and he looked at her, puzzled. ‘What’s wrong? Darling, this is rather a hefty promotion. And it’s well deserved, believe me. Nobody will question it.’

  She slumped into her chair and folded her arms, incredulous at his apparent ignorance of the cause of her anger.

  ‘Who’s the officer you sent to talk to the Swedes?’

  The penny dropped as Harmigan completed the sentence in his mind: . . . and why haven’t you sent me out there to work with him? This was why you should never fall in love with your subordinates, he thought. He took the hat off and tried to think how to calm her down.

  ‘A very good chap, Fred Collins. He’s one of our alongsiders in the region. I don’t want to involve the Station if I can avo
id it. Darling, you’ve read the files backwards and forwards so you know I wasn’t telling tales in there – Dark’s a very dangerous man, and will very likely try to kill anyone who gets in his way.’

  She gave him a savage look. ‘So you can’t send this delicate little flower to help find him, is that it? Come on, Sandy, you know I’d be better use on the ground in Stockholm than watching it all unfold from here.’

  He flicked at the ribbon of his hat, and she clenched her fists unseen beneath the desk. The ghost of the Gadlow operation had risen between them, as she had been afraid it would. He claimed to trust her judgement, but when it came to the crunch he didn’t trust it enough to send her out in the field again.

  Harmigan took a deep breath. ‘Dear heart, be reasonable. This might get extremely hairy, but it’s not only about that. I know you feel Dark’s your bag, but this is a team effort, remember, and I need your analytical skills here. Dark might not even be in Sweden, and even if he is he may well turn up somewhere else before long. KH is where we’ll gather all the intel, and I can’t afford to have you incommunicado on a flight to Christ knows where when the shit hits the fan. But one of our ground rules was you wouldn’t question my judgement like this.’

  An invocation of the famous ground rules. They never seemed to suit her much, she thought. But his voice had now taken on its familiar commanding air and she knew he intended to cow her with it, as he had cowed the prime minister and Bradley, and as he had previously cowed Whitehall into appointing him Chief. She knew all his tricks. He wanted her to feel like the hysterical woman making unreasonable demands, seeing attacks where there were none. Instead, his response had brought home the reality of the situation to her: it wasn’t just that he still blamed her for Gadlow, but that he blamed himself for ever thinking she might have succeeded. There would be no second chances in the field because he had decided she was inherently unsuited to it – she was only any use as an analyst, a back-room digger helping out the blokes, good old Rachel in HQ.

  She tried to calm herself. She knew there was no advantage in pursuing the complaint, either personally or professionally. He had made up his mind so she had better make the best of a bad lot, at least for the time being. She dropped her gaze and gave the tiniest of nods to show her acquiescence.

  Harmigan smiled reassuringly and placed a hand on her arm. ‘That’s my girl. You’re under a lot of pressure, of course – we all are. But let’s try to stay calm and not turn on each other and read false motives into things. Speaking of which, you said something interesting in the meeting.’

  She smiled from one corner of her mouth, giving what she knew was a good impression of coquettishness in their own private language. ‘Just the one?’

  He laughed, pleased she had snapped out of her mood. ‘Don’t fish too much! I mean that theory you floated that the kidnappers might not be left-wing terrorists but part of a feint by someone else, framing them for it. Did I follow that correctly?’

  ‘Yes. What about it?’ She studied his face for clues as to what he was after, remembering how he had contradicted her in the meeting.

  He waved a hand casually. ‘I was just wondering what had led you to believe it was a possibility.’

  ‘Nothing concrete. It was more of an instinctive reaction. It just all seems rather too neat, don’t you think? Something doesn’t quite fit. It’s a little too . . . ambitious, if you know what I mean.’

  He smiled. ‘No, I don’t. What do you mean?’

  She got up and walked around the desk, thinking it through. ‘Well, according to the Finns, Dark claimed the men who kidnapped his family were black. His girlfriend has a Zambian passport, and even though that seems to be forged it rather suggests they were Africans rather than, say, Americans.’

  ‘Yes, but what does that prove? There are plenty of African terrorist groups – pick a country, my dear.’

  ‘But African terrorists don’t usually operate in Europe like this, do they? I can’t think of a single other case, actually.’ A thought struck her, something that had been nagging at the back of her mind. ‘By the way, what was all that stuff about Dark trying to kill Wilson in Nigeria? I never saw that in his files.’

  Harmigan gave an apologetic smile. ‘Yes, I’m afraid we did have to hold that one back.’ He looked down at his shoes, Oxfords polished to a military sheen. ‘As for your other idea, well, it’s an interesting thought but let’s take care not to get side-tracked. You were right about Dark being alive, but this isn’t really time for feminine intuition. It’s terribly easy to get caught up in byzantine theories and see complexities that aren’t there, but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and is carrying Soviet weapons, it’s probably a Soviet-sponsored duck.’ He smiled again and clapped his hands together so they made a dull thud, indicating that the subject was closed. ‘Anyway, let’s bring the car round, shall we?’

  Chapter 37

  John Weale accepted the mug of coffee from Morelius’s secretary and settled into his chair. ‘Do you have any leads on where he went after escaping from custody in Finland?’

  Morelius gestured at one of his men, older than the others and with a leathery complexion and shrewd eyes.

  ‘Yes, we think he’s either on his way back here or already in the city. It could be he has an emergency cache of papers here, but even if not we believe this is where he will look for the clues as to who took his family.’

  Weale took a sip of coffee. ‘And do you have any ideas who that might be?’

  ‘Well, he told the Finns the kidnappers were black, but as I’m sure you can appreciate that isn’t especially helpful. He may have been lying, or just mistaken. And we can hardly stop every black man leaving the country, especially as they might already have done so.’

  Weale nodded. This was very good news – by his calculations Voers and the rest of the team should be boarding their plane right about now, and as the Swedes didn’t know who they were looking for there was a very good chance they would make it out.

  ‘So how do you plan to find him?’

  ‘Well, we’ve put alerts out to the police and military with complete descriptions and photographs, and all ports and airports now have armed troops on the lookout for him in line with your Chief’s recommendations to Interpol. We’ve also informed television, radio and the press, both here and across the Nordic region. They are running bulletins every hour – a dangerous killer on the loose and so on. He should be in all the evening papers, we hope front-page. In the meantime, we’re putting together a map of all known friends and associates of the girlfriend, Claire Nsoka. She worked as a picture researcher for one of the papers, so we’re interviewing people there, as well as talking to her son’s kindergarten and of course interviewing neighbours.’

  Weale was heartened. These were precisely the measures he would have implemented, and he wouldn’t have fancied his own chances against such a manhunt. ‘What about the flat? Were there any clues there?’

  Morelius turned to a colleague and rattled off instructions to him in rapid Swedish. The other man left the office and came back a minute later clutching a dusty-looking holdall in one hand and a rifle in the other.

  Weale stood and looked both of them over carefully. The holdall was empty, but presumably had been where Dark/Johansson had stored his emergency supplies. He picked up the rifle and stared down it, then weighed it in his hand.

  ‘Not a bad weapon. I can imagine he could have done some damage with this.’ He turned to the Swedes. ‘Any idea where he might have got it from?’

  ‘We’re investigating that, too,’ said Morelius. ‘It could be that he simply bought it over the counter somewhere, as it’s easy to do with cash if you have the right papers.’

  ‘How did he get his papers in the first place? I understand he had five passports on him. Presumably he used a forger – are there such people in Stockholm?’

  Morelius nodded. ‘Our colleagues in Finland noted down the details on those passports, so they are of course all on th
e alert notice. But as you say, he must have had them made somewhere. If the five were his complete collection, he may try to get another one made from whoever created those. There are very few people we know of here who are capable of such a thing.’

  Weale glanced up. ‘How few?’

  ‘Well, we already checked out most of them and turned up nothing, but there is one person we haven’t yet visited. Would you like to come along with us?’

  Weale smiled.

  Chapter 38

  The city was a horror. Young women with figure-hugging jeans and Sunsilk hair clung to men with even glossier hair and even tighter jeans as they strolled carelessly through the streets. And everywhere there were children, most of whom seemed to be small boys of around three years old.

  In the rear of the taxi, Paul Dark closed his eyes and leaned back against the headrest. He’d managed to shut down his racing mind only long enough to catch a few minutes’ sleep on the bus ride from the ferry into central Stockholm: abstract shapes redolent of despair had flitted beneath his eyelids, coalescing and hanging just out of his reach. At T-Centralen, he had changed Kurkinen’s marks into kronor, then found a telephone booth and looked up the address. When Kurkinen had questioned him, he’d urged him to investigate car dealerships and the harbour in Stockholm, but it could be that the Swedish authorities were in the midst of doing just that and if he tried the same he would simply walk straight into their cordon. But he doubted they would know where he was headed now.