‘My God, Alec! You were taking one hell of a risk, weren’t you? Suppose the East Germans had got there first?’
‘Well, there was only one page from the set, remember. They wouldn’t have learned much from that.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’ Peter frowned.
‘Anyway, it worked. The general delivered the folder to the Defence Ministry just as I thought he would, but there was a hitch after that. I desperately needed a great public hue-and-cry to convince Karl that the hullabaloo would make it impossible to get the rest of the plans for the time being. Only, Sir Marcus Beckett decided to try to keep the whole business secret so as not to stir up the politicians. That was a potential disaster for me, so I did the only thing I could think of: I leaked the story to the press.’
‘So that was you, was it? But what was your friend Karl’s reaction to all this?’
‘He went wild, of course. He had copies made of those dreadful photographs, and had the envelopes already addressed to send off. He didn’t send them, though. I swore to him that it had all been an honest mistake, and said I would do what he wanted eventually – but that they had to give me more time. Well, that promise kept him quiet for a couple of days, but then . . . it was like a bombshell.
‘Mary Maclean was dead! Killed herself, they said, confessing to something she hadn’t done! I was terribly upset. I couldn’t believe it. But then suddenly I realised what it meant. The hue-and-cry was over. The pressure was off, and Karl could now demand that I get him the papers immediately. My excuse was removed by the death of one carefully selected victim!’
Alec caught Peter’s look of anger.
‘Yes. Karl Metzger killed Mary. He admitted it this evening. He doped her with some hypnotic drug untraceable by forensic tests, then dumped her in her bath and cut her wrists.’
Peter recoiled at this abrupt summary of her end.
‘He gave me this.’
Anderson reached his shaking hand across the desk and lightly touched the brown-paper parcel he had brought back from the pub.
‘He said it was to remind me. I don’t dare . . . Here, you open it, would you?’
Peter shook his head, struggling to control the bitter emotions welling up inside him. He had felt certain that Mary was murdered, but this confirmation was devastating. He felt his whole body begin to tremble. Just a short while ago he had stood within feet of the man who had killed her.
‘What the . . .?’ Alec started in surprise. He had now opened the parcel himself. It contained a picture, and he passed it across.
It was the photograph of Mary with her nephew and niece, the one that Peter had not been able to find in her flat.
Anderson stood up and crossed to the sideboard. He poured whisky into two glasses.
‘Here.’ He passed one across, and Peter swallowed a mouthful.
‘The bastard!’ Peter exploded. ‘The evil little bastard! He’s got to be caught. Come on! Call the police now! You’ve no choice! Mary died because of you – you and your efforts to save your own skin!’
‘It’s not just my skin! There are three people upstairs, two of them small children, who matter more than I do. Their lives will be ruined if those photographs get out!’
‘Look, if you co-operate fully with John Black, he’ll probably be able to grab Karl before he has a chance to do anything,’ Peter insisted, knowing he did not sound convincing.
‘John Black! You trust that man, do you? Have you ever asked yourself who he’s really working for?’ Anderson leaned forward intensely. ‘Karl has got someone in MI5! At the top. An informer,’ he whispered.
‘What?’
Anderson nodded meaningfully.
‘How many people know that you went over to the United States to make alterations to the test missile, Peter? I didn’t, and I’m head of the Nuclear Secretariat. It was my business to know, and I didn’t – until Karl told me!’
‘Christ! Karl told you about that? Bloody hell! That was classified top secret! Only the most senior military men, some ministers and security chiefs, and a handful of blokes at Aldermaston knew about it. Did Karl say his source was in MI5? Was he specific?’
‘Well, yes, the hint was pretty heavy.’
Peter’s thoughts were racing. If the Soviets knew that he had made changes to the Skydancer warheads, then what was to be done about the test launch? The weapons had been reprogrammed specifically to make the Russians doubt the genuineness of the plans they might have stolen – though it was now clear that they did not have the plans at all. If he turned Anderson in and got Metzger arrested, it still would not be the end of the affair for the Soviets. They would try some other way to get hold of the blueprints, he was sure of that. They would only stop trying once they had obtained what they thought were the real Skydancer plans.
Anderson, he suddenly realised, had a unique value.
‘What were Karl’s last instructions to you?’
Alec shivered. ‘He’s given me until midday Monday. I have to phone a number at twelve noon on that day to confirm I have the Skydancer papers, and to arrange a handover point. If I don’t do this, he’ll put the photographs in the afternoon post.’
‘So we have the weekend in which to think,’ Peter murmured to himself. ‘Alec, if you want me to help you, you’ve got to do precisely what I ask you. I have the beginnings of an idea which might save you and save Skydancer at the same time.’
The snow that had fallen in the past few days in Moscow had melted in a sudden thaw. The winter had receded for a while, and it felt like autumn again. Even the grey clouds that covered the city almost continually at this time of year had parted sufficiently that morning to let rays of watery sunshine cast shadows in the road.
Oleg Kvitzinsky was loading suitcases into his car. He had not expected to be able to leave the city that weekend. The GRU had told him repeatedly that the British missile secrets would be in his hands any day, and he had believed them. Suddenly, however, on the previous afternoon he had decided to ignore General Novikov’s unfulfilled promises and try to forget about the problem for a couple of days. The pressure of waiting was making him dangerously irritable.
‘Where can we put this? It mustn’t get damaged,’ Katrina called out, struggling towards him with a large pot-plant.
‘What are we taking that for?’ he demanded in exasperation.
‘For my mother. A present for my mother. It’s her anniversary, you know!’
Oleg shrugged, and wedged the pot safely in the corner of the rear seat. His wife’s family was aggravatingly conscientious about celebrating. Katrina’s father had died four years earlier, but she still insisted on marking the date of her parents’ wedding every year.
The traffic flowed steadily on the ring-road as he headed for the turning that would take them north-east towards the town of Zagorsk. Their dacha belonged to Katrina’s family, and was a large timber house with enough bedrooms to accommodate her brother’s family and her mother as well as themselves. Oleg knew it was going to be a weekend of tears mixed with happiness. It always was when Katrina’s family got together.
As they drove away from the city and into the birch-woods, the sun broke through the clouds again, gilding the white bark of the trees. He opened the window to smell the air, and patted the steering-wheel with spontaneous enthusiasm.
‘Katya, this was a good idea!’ he exclaimed.
She smiled at him and stroked his knee. She wanted him to relax this weekend, to forget the secret work about which he would never talk, and to remember the fun they used to have when he was just a computer specialist in the civilian sector, travelling all over the world. She was determined to persuade him to return to that way of life somehow.
‘Bella promised to do lunch,’ she commented, ‘and I shall cook this evening. Will you be going to see the priest?’ There was a certain frost in her voice. She had no time for religion, and it annoyed her that her husband found such solace in communicating with clerics.
‘I might,’ he st
ated firmly. ‘If there’s time.’
But he had every intention of finding time to drive into Zagorsk during the next two days to visit a small house with a hand-decorated doorway, close to the Trinity-Saint Sergei monastery. For the man who lived there was not only a priest in that town celebrated as the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox church; he had also been Oleg Kvitzinsky’s confidant for many years.
It took them a little over an hour to reach the dacha, seven kilometres outside Zagorsk on the Moscow road.
‘Look, Oleg! The children!’ Katrina suddenly pointed ahead.
As they neared the dacha, her brother’s two daughters could be seen walking by the roadside, carrying baskets full of mushrooms.
Oleg pressed his foot on the brake pedal and smiled. He would give them a lift back to the house.
Peter Joyce looked at his watch for the fifth time in as many minutes. It was after 8 a.m. He would try the number the Chief of Defence Staff had given him; the man was bound to be awake by now.
Lady Buxton answered the phone of their Pimlico townhouse, only to tell him that her husband had gone out for a walk. Peter silently cursed the way military men seemed to be obsessed with early-morning exercise. However, the field-marshal’s wife promised to get her husband to call back the moment he returned home.
‘Hiya, Dad!’
Peter’s eleven-year-old son bounced into the kitchen in his pyjamas.
‘You won’t forget I’m playing in the first eleven this afternoon, Dad? You will watch, won’t you?’
‘Oh, Mark,’ Peter groaned, smacking himself on the forehead. ‘It’s not that I’ve forgotten . . .’
‘It’s just that it slipped your memory,’ Mark cut in sarcastically.
Shoulders stiff with resentment, the boy walked past his father and began to search for some breakfast.
‘Look, it’s not that. I will try to come and see you play, but it just may not be possible in the end, that’s all. I’m sorry, old chap. You know what’s been going on the last few days,’ he explained. ‘Well, it’s not over yet.’
‘But I’ve never played in the first eleven before,’ Mark insisted, sulkily shaking corn-flakes into a bowl.
‘I’m sure Mum will come and watch you.’
‘Yeah . . .’
‘I do promise I’ll come if I can.’
Belinda was awake and sitting up in bed as he brought in the tray. The strain of the past few days had deepened the lines on her face. Peter thought she suddenly looked old.
‘Was that you on the phone?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I need to get hold of someone urgently.’
She took the mug he offered her and murmured her thanks.
‘You were very late last night,’ she ventured, sipping slowly. ‘I don’t even know what time you got back. Where did you go?’
Peter sat down on the bed.
‘I went to see the person who is at the bottom of this whole spying business. I think I know the entire story now.’
‘But you’re not going to tell me.’
‘Not yet. I can’t.’
Belinda raised an eyebrow disdainfully, and drank more tea.
‘You’re still suspended?’
‘Yes. That’s not changed.’
‘Wouldn’t this be a good time to resign?’ she suggested quietly. ‘I mean, they suspended you because they thought it was your fault the secrets went missing. Now if you have evidence that someone else was to blame, your good name will be restored. So you could resign in protest at the way you have been treated, and everybody would support you.’
‘God! That’s a bit tortuous, isn’t it? Why should I want to resign, anyway?’
‘So that you could take up a new job that didn’t involve building weapons of mass-destruction,’ she explained gently, as if addressing someone of lower-than-average intelligence.
Peter snorted with laughter. ‘You never give up, do you?’
‘Peter, I’m serious!’ she pleaded. ‘You’re a highly qualified electronics specialist. British industry must be crying out for people like you! Why not get out of this nuclear business while you can?’
Her dark eyes implored him to listen.
‘And, frankly, all this cloak-and-dagger stuff is frightening the life out of me.’
There was the hint of a tremor in her voice. Peter reached across to where her knees made a mound in the bedclothes.
‘Even if I wanted to change jobs, it’s not that easy. My knowledge of electronics has been related to nothing but nuclear weapons for the past fifteen years. It’s not the sort of knowledge needed by many companies in Britain.’
‘Where there’s a will . . .’ she murmured wistfully.
Peter turned away from her again. He did not want to have to cope with an argument that morning.
‘Look, I expect to be out most of the day. I’ve got to see the Chief of the Defence Staff, if I can get hold of him . . . It’s Mark: his football match this afternoon. I don’t think I can get there. I’m going to have to disappoint him. Can you go and watch?’
‘Of course. I was going anyway,’ she said dismissively.
The telephone rang on the bedside table, and Peter leaned across to answer it.
Field-Marshal Buxton suggested they meet in his office at the Defence Ministry. He had warned security staff on duty that Saturday to expect Peter.
‘Not sure this is quite proper, with you being suspended from duty and all that,’ the CDS stated with some discomfort when they were alone together. ‘Not sure I’m allowed to speak to you officially. Still, if necessary we can pretend this conversation never took place!’
‘I don’t think you’ll have any objections when you’ve heard what I’ve got to say.’
As Peter began to describe his visit to Alec Anderson the previous evening, the old soldier’s face was fixed in an expression of unyielding concentration. Peter talked for nearly ten minutes.
For a moment Buxton seemed to be searching for words.
‘Dammit! That’s one of the most appalling stories I’ve ever heard!’ he exclaimed at last. ‘But what have you done about it, apart from telling me? You’ve put the security people on to him, I hope?’
Peter shook his head.
‘Why not, for God’s sake? The man’s a menace, and that East German – he needs to be locked up right away.’
‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Peter urged. ‘Anderson is convinced that the East Germans have an agent in MI5! Somehow this man Karl knew that I had been over to Florida to adjust the warheads on HMS Retribution!’
‘Oh? Buxton looked startled. He well remembered how highly classified that visit had been. ‘And Anderson thinks the source was in MI5?’
Peter nodded.
‘You had your own suspicions about Mr John Black, didn’t you?’
‘I’m sure he tried to deliberately conceal the fact that photograph was missing from Mary’s flat. Perhaps it was because he knew who’d really got it.’
Buxton looked doubtful. ‘But we can’t disregard the entire security service just because of a vague suspicion over one individual!’ he exploded. ‘I mean, for God’s sake, these men have got to be apprehended right away, before they can do more damage. They might skip the country any minute. There must be plenty more information inside Anderson’s head that could be useful to the other side.’
‘Well, I had another idea,’ Peter ventured, not sure how Buxton would take it.
‘Anderson’s control is expecting him to deliver the complete Skydancer plans on Monday. Why don’t we let him think he’s doing that?’
‘Go on,’ Buxton frowned.
‘Only it won’t be the real papers that he hands over. Instead I’ll provide him with a set that’ll match the changes I made to the warheads; so when they are fired off in a few days’ time, our deception will be complete. With any luck the Soviets’ll think they have the real plans, with the warheads’ performance confirmed before their own eyes, and no matter how much they spend on devisi
ng counter-measures, they’ll all be totally irrelevant.’
‘And the man who killed that wretched girl will get off scot-free?’ Buxton spluttered.
Peter remembered what he had seen in Chiswick. Yes, he wanted revenge on the man who had done it.
‘Perhaps he won’t,’ he replied noncommittally.
‘It’ll be a political decision,’ the field-marshal said eventually. ‘Have to be. Too much at stake. Too much that could go wrong. I’ll have to talk to the PM.’
He looked at his watch. It was after midday.
‘When are you due to contact Anderson again?’
‘Sometime later today. I didn’t fix a time.’
‘Hmmmm. Best thing you can do, Peter, is to go for a walk. Let me sort things for a bit. Find a nice pub, have some lunch, and come back here at about half-past two. Perhaps I’ll have an answer by then.’
To have two hours to kill was agonising for Peter, and left him feeling uncomfortably impotent.
Following the defence chiefs suggestion, he took a walk along the Embankment to Westminster Bridge and crossed to the other side of the river. Heading east along the South Bank towards the City, he put the traffic behind him and felt invigorated by the brisk breeze and the sight of the thick, brown Thames water swirling seawards in a full ebb-tide. Pleasure boats, now unused in the winter months, strained at their moorings in the middle of the stream, and a police patrol launch nosed its way curiously amongst them.
Pulling up the collar of his fawn raincoat against the wind, he sat down on a bench overlooking the river. The South Bank walkway was deserted except for one solitary figure who had found a seat some fifty yards away. The man wearing a thick anorak pulled a folded newspaper from his pocket and began to read it.
Events had moved so rapidly in the past few days that Peter had had little chance to consider where they were leading. Now the idea of enacting a complete deception of the Soviet Union in the immediate future preoccupied him fully. But assuming the plan succeeded, what then? He assumed success would result in his suspension being rescinded, but it worried him that the Government was not committed to any nuclear weapons developments beyond the Skydancer project. Even if they wanted general research at Aldermaston to continue in the years ahead, how satisfying would his own job be without a specific advanced technology project to work on? For the first time he began to wonder whether Belinda’s urging him to quit might be worth considering.
Skydancer Page 19
