‘Thing?’
‘Philby. Is he playing us? Very probably yes. Is he clever? Again, yes. In God’s good time, might he go to the very top? Director-General? “C”? Yes. And can we prove any of this? Little you and little me? Alas, no.’
‘You’ve tried?’ Moncrieff was doing his best to follow the logic.
‘Of course I have.’
‘How?’
‘You know how. I’ve told you already. I commissioned enquiries at Archie’s place. I widened the net as far as I could. I’m still doing my best to trace the owner of that French car you woke up in. But these people are good, Tam. They know their job. They’ve made life very hard for us. As you, more than anyone else, should know.’
‘People?’
‘I have to assume Russians. From the embassy.’
‘NKVD?’
‘Indeed. Our precious allies.’
Moncrieff allowed himself another tug at the malt. At last it was beginning to silence the demons in his head.
‘And the Director?’ he murmured. ‘Our boss? Liddell?’
‘I was with him yesterday. He knows exactly what’s been happening. I’ve kept him briefed on a daily basis.’
‘Confidentially?’
‘Yes. And that was at his insistence, not mine.’
‘And?’
‘He wants the whole thing dropped. He thinks it’s a waste of time and resources. He thinks our real focus should lie elsewhere. The word he’s using is distraction. He thinks we’re shooting ourselves in both feet when our fire should be turned on the enemy.’
‘Maybe Philby is the enemy. Has he thought about that?’
‘My impression is that he hasn’t.’
‘Won’t.’
‘Exactly. He thinks we’re looking for ghosts, phantoms.’
‘And is he wrong?’
‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘I think he is.’
Over a sandwich supper, late now, they became friends again. Barton poured another malt for Moncrieff and made a pot of tea. Moncrieff was slow to accept that the nightmare of the last few weeks might at last be over but, once Barton had been through it all again, he realised that she was right. Their attempt to pin Philby down had always been extra-curricular, just the pair of them, and beyond a certain point, without someone with real weight behind them, they were helpless.
Barton agreed. She pointed out that something very similar had happened with Jane Archer and the defector Walter Krivitsky. Archer, she said, had worked very hard to make at least a circumstantial case against Philby, but the fruits of all her labours had simply been buried.
‘I was talking to Ivor Maskelyne the other day. He dropped in for a chat.’ She paused. ‘The Oxford don? That cricket match of yours at Glenalmond? The Good Samaritan who drove you up to town afterwards? He has a very low opinion of us, especially Broadway. On a good day, I get the impression he thinks we’re all a waste of resources. On a bad day, we’re a liability. If that’s true, then the likes of Philby could put us on our knees. An alarming thought, Tam.’
Moncrieff nodded. His memories of that day were beginning to slip back into focus.
‘Maskelyne said something else, too, when we were in the car coming back from Glenalmond,’ he was toying with his glass. ‘At the time I thought it was a bit rich. Now I’m not so sure.’
‘What was it? Care to tell me?’
‘Of course. You know the man. Irony is his second language. In theory he accepts we might have cuckoos in the nest, but he thinks that won’t be a problem because the Russians will never believe a word they say. You’re telling us to trust a man because of his accent? Because of his education, his connections, his old school tie? Even the English can’t be that stupid. In the car, that made me laugh. Now?’ he shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s right. And maybe Liddell’s right, too. Our game is one huge distraction, and maybe the point about war is far simpler. Find the enemy and shoot him down,’ he shot Barton a look. ‘Von Richthofen. Sound advice.’
*
In Kyiv, three days later, Wilhelm Schultz took an evening off to celebrate a modest victory. Andreas used his ever-growing network of connections across the city to lay hands on a suckling pig and a bag of potatoes and five jars of pickled cucumbers. Schultz himself paid a small fortune in Reichmarks for bottles of schnapps, local beer and Georgian champagne, and the SD’s entire strength in Kyiv – just nineteen agents – gathered at the Lenin Museum for the barbecue.
Andreas had also found a gipsy violinist, a saturnine man with a serpent tattoo and garlic breath, to add a little pep to the evening, and after all the food had gone Schultz and Bella led the revels with a spirited dance that began as a tango and ended up with a heap of bodies, helpless with laughter, on the wooden parquet floor. Getting up and brushing himself down, Schultz proposed a series of toasts. The first was to Larissa, for achieving the impossible by putting a smile on the face of Standartenführer Kalb. The second was to Dmytro, the one-time pathologist, for so nearly restoring Glivenko to his former glory. And the last was to Glivenko himself, for throwing down the gauntlet and letting the SD show how fucking good they were.
‘To The Pianist,’ he roared. ‘May the angels be kind to him.’
Bella’s was the first glass in the air. Tomorrow, she knew that Schultz was flying to Berlin. There, a grateful Führer would pin the Ritterkreuz on his broad chest for services to the ever-expanding Reich, and afterwards she guessed there’d be more carousing in the upper reaches of the Abwehr. No one in Berlin with any real knowledge of events in Kyiv had been fooled for a moment by Kalb’s claims to glory in what the Völkischer Beobachter was calling the Battle of the Bombs. The real credit belonged to the SD, and everyone knew it.
With Schultz briefly gone, Larissa and Bella would be moving out of the museum and taking up residence in the Pechersk Monastery. Andreas, whose negotiating talents appeared to be endless, had obtained rooms for each of them at the heart of the sprawling Lavra complex. The bundle of typed pages presented by Kalb had turned out to be the manuscript of Yuri’s latest novel, retrieved from the church. Larissa knew about Yuri’s fascination with the monastery’s early days and after a long talk with the priest in charge of the Pechersk library, she’d be only too glad to pick up the pen, immerse herself in a wealth of records, and spend the coming weeks and months trying to complete the book. Bella, in the meantime, would be helping in one of the monastery’s many vegetable gardens, a prospect that filled her with a quiet delight.
The barbecue was coming to an end, and Schultz stood at the door, pumping hand after hand as his team stumbled towards the darkness outside. Dmytro, who’d done such a fine job on the little Russian sapper, told Schultz he was welcome to call on his services any time. Schultz thought about the offer, then he turned to Bella.
‘Who else would you like through that bloody window?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure Andreas could get Kalb back again.’
*
The following morning, after two nights in his own bed in Archie’s Kensington Mews cottage, Moncrieff made an appearance at MI5 headquarters in St James’s Street. The invitation had come from Guy Liddell via Ursula Barton. Moncrieff mounted the stairs and accepted the proffered chair beside Liddell’s desk. Barton was there, too, a notepad on her lap.
Liddell, even quieter than usual, apologised for an early autumn cold. His voice was barely a whisper and his eyes looked rheumy. He perched behind the desk, his long fingers softly drumming some secret rhythm as he expressed the Section’s admiration and gratitude for Moncrieff’s contribution over the years. His performance in the Sudetenland before the ruinous Munich Agreement had, he murmured, been a tribute to both his courage and his fortitude. While the leadership he’d shown over the Hess debacle, sticking to his guns when everyone else in Whitehall insisted he was wrong, had won ‘B’ Section nothing but credit.
Moncrieff did his best to smile. This, he knew, was the end of his days at St James’s Street, the Director’s parting farewell, a flutter of the eyelids and the warm
est possible handshake before he dismissed Moncrieff to clear his desk and head back to the mountains. His years in MI5 were over. He’d bagged a trophy or two, won a mention in despatches, but now the time had come to call a halt. Oddly enough, instead of regret or even disappointment, he felt nothing.
He glanced at Barton, seeking some kind of confirmation, but instead – with a tiny shake of the head – she cleared her throat and took over. Moncrieff, she said, had been through a great deal over the past few weeks. Now was the time for what she called ‘gardening leave’. A ticket for the night sleeper north had already been booked. Archie Gasgoigne, happily, was also on leave for a week or two and after a conversation on the phone he’d be very happy to field Moncrieff off the train at Laurencekirk and drive him back to the Glebe House.
‘Archie?’ Moncrieff looked totally blank. ‘Laurencekirk station?’
‘Indeed, Tam,’ the Director produced a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘Six months at least, we think. On full pay, of course.’
*
Moncrieff sped north that night. He savoured two glasses of malt in the privacy of his sleeping compartment and was tucked up in his bunk before the train had passed Peterborough. For the first time since he could remember, he slept like a baby, cradled by the lazy rhythms of the wheels.’ And by the time he awoke it was broad daylight. A single glance through the window told him they were crossing the long bridge over the river at Dundee, and an hour and a half later he stepped out of the train at Laurencekirk.
Archie, as promised, was on hand to greet him. Life on the Shetland Isles was obviously treating him well. His hair was wilder than ever and with the remains of his deep summer tan he looked piratical. On the way to the car, Moncrieff brought them both to a halt.
‘How much have they told you?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
‘My people in London.’
‘Nothing. A week in the mountains? No bloody Norwegians to organise? Good company? Who’d ever say no?’
Moncrieff knew he was lying but it didn’t matter.
‘Fine,’ he said, heading for the car again. ‘Let’s keep it that way, eh?’
*
October brought the first real taste of winter. As fellow bootnecks, both Archie and Moncrieff had done their time in the hills and Moncrieff relished the chance to stride away from the house, ankle-deep in leaves and fir cones, and then head for the bareness of the mountains. Exercise, conversation and the freshness of the air did wonders for his broken rib and as the days spooled by, he began to feel the cautious return of someone he recognised.
In the evenings, he’d cook in the kitchen while Archie entertained him with stories of the Norwegian agents he was running into the fjords across the North Sea. All of them appeared to be called Knut, all of them were related, and all of them consumed vast quantities of alcohol. Archie had begun this adventure with barely a word of Norwegian but one morning Moncrieff paused on the stairs to hear him deep in conversation on the telephone with the exile from Bergen who served as his quartermaster.
‘Impressive,’ Moncrieff said when the call was over. ‘I thought Norwegian was hard to get your tongue round.’
‘It is,’ Archie grinned. ‘I make most of it up but somehow Knut always gets the drift.’
The following day, another phone call. Moncrieff thought he recognised the voice but couldn’t be sure.
‘Frank Jennings. We met at Beaulieu. Young Lenahan’s lecturer from deepest Kent.’
‘Fort Halstead?’
‘The same. You’ll pardon the intrusion. I’m after a scoundrel called Archie Gasgoigne. Any joy?’
Jennings, it turned out, was en route to Archie’s base up in the Shetlands with a collection of what he called ‘amusements’. He wanted to call by and pick Archie up en route to the ferry.
‘Tell him to come up tomorrow,’ Moncrieff said. ‘He can stay the night.’
Archie bent to the phone, then shot Moncrieff a look.
‘He’s got a lorry, a driver, and two guards.’
‘Full house, then. They can all bed down chez nous.’
Jennings arrived late the following afternoon. Archie disappeared into the back of the truck for half an hour while the Major from Fort Halstead talked him through the contents of each of the boxes. Only then did he set foot in the Glebe House.
Moncrieff was in the kitchen with the rest of the party. They had tents in the back of the truck and were more than happy to camp in a corner of the Glebe House garden. Moncrieff cooked a supper of mutton stew and after the driver and the guards had departed for the night, he arranged three armchairs around the open fire in the kitchen and broached a bottle of malt.
Jennings wanted to talk about Kyiv. There were rumours, he said, that Ilya Glivenko, the little sapper they’d hosted at Fort Halstead, had been captured and killed. If true, of course, that was the saddest news, but it was incontestable that he’d left a rich legacy in the shape of countless buildings destroyed by the caches of high explosive he’d so carefully hidden. Archie, who knew nothing about Kyiv, demanded more details. As did Moncrieff.
Jennings was in his element. The explosives, he said, were actuated by tone-modulated carrier waves in burst transmissions from a covert source. Moncrieff was lost already but Archie appeared to be familiar with the complex physics of making things go bang from a distance and wanted to know how the Germans would respond in a situation like this. This must matter, Moncrieff told himself, if your agents are running kit like this into occupied Norway. He needed to know, if only to brief his wayward Vikings.
‘This is supposition on my part,’ Jennings warned, ‘but the first thing you’d need to identify are the transmission frequencies. Once you’ve done that, you can set up special intercept operations, but you’d have to have access to lots of specialists and lots of kit. The Germans had only been in Kyiv a matter of days. All occupations have to bed down and my guess is that resources like that were thin on the ground. Under those circumstances, you’d go back to square one.’
‘Which is?’
‘Arrest and interrogation. The Russians would have left spotters on the ground in the city.’
‘Watchers?’ This from Moncrieff.
‘Indeed. Find these people, sweat them, and everything starts to unravel. Maybe that’s how Ilya came to grief. I hope to God I’m wrong.’
Archie was deep in thought. Finally, he emptied his glass and reached for the bottle.
‘So the weak spot’s the wireless transmissions. Am I right?’
‘Yes and no. Wireless plus the spotters gives you an instant result. The people on the ground tell you where next and you press the burst transmission button. It’s a bit like artillery except you’re bound to hit the target. In this respect, I have to say that the Russians have taught us a lot. But in return, I like to think we also brought something to the party.’
‘Like what?’
‘Delayed action,’ Jennings nodded towards the window. The truck was parked outside in the darkness, carefully guarded.
‘You mean the kit you showed me earlier?’ This from Archie.
‘Indeed. The key is battery life. Every battery is in the process of dying. There’s a trickle of discharge you can do nothing about. But it turns out there are steps you can take to slow the rate of discharge even further, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.’
‘For us? In Norway?’
‘Yes. And in Kyiv, as well. We sent Ilya back with lots of time-delay kit.’
‘How long?’
‘Under exceptional circumstances, three months. Six weeks?’ he smiled. ‘And we can guarantee you a very big bang.’
30
MONDAY 3 NOVEMBER 1941
The moment Larissa appeared at her door, Bella knew that something special had happened. After weeks in the monastery’s library, poring over illuminated manuscripts, letters, housekeeping records, and other fragments from the settlement’s earliest days, Larissa had picked up her pen in earnest and set fire to all this
kindling. Bella knew it was a moment she’d been putting off for weeks, wary of trespassing onto Yuri’s turf. Yes, she understood about storytelling, and about language. Yes, she could hold the readership of the city’s biggest newspaper for the time it took to digest a single article. But was she really qualified to write at the length of an entire novel? Especially when the first footsteps had been taken by someone as accomplished, and as quietly famous, as Yuri Ponomorenko?
‘So?’ Bella was still getting dressed.
‘I think it worked.’ Larissa was looking radiant. ‘Early days, I know, but it felt comfortable.’
‘Can I read it? Aren’t you going to show me?’
‘Of course not. One day, maybe, but not now.’ She stepped a little closer. ‘I saw the doctor this morning,’ she touched the plaster on her broken arm. ‘He wants to take it off next week. He thinks the bone’s healed. Good news, chérie? For us?’
Bella smiled, tightening the leather belt around her waist, and looking round for the wooden clogs she’d started to wear. Since their arrival at Pechersk she and Larissa had slept separately, in the bare stone-walled rooms the monks had assigned them. Larissa, wholly absorbed by her long hours in the library, had been distant, preoccupied, remote, and in a way Bella had been grateful. The wounds inflicted by Kalb and his bodyguard were still raw, and in any event she was in no hurry to upset the monks. She had no idea how long she’d have to rely on their protection, just as nobody had any idea whether Russia itself would be able to weather the Nazi storm. For the time being, therefore, she was content to broker a peace between winter and her more tender vegetables. Her rows of cabbages, thankfully, were in rude health. As were her beetroot and leeks.
‘Excellent news,’ Bella gave her a brief hug. ‘Fingers crossed, eh?’
‘Is that the best you can do?’
‘I’m afraid it is, yes. For the time being.’
‘But later. Once I’m mended?’
‘Later may be different. There’s no hurry. We’ve got lots of time. Let’s see.’
‘You don’t get lonely?’ Larissa couldn’t hide her disappointment. ‘Sleeping alone?’
Kyiv (Spoils of War) Page 31
