by Joseph Hone
But now in what way did we impinge on the world, I wondered? – if we did so at all, for the world is rarely bothered by two people on bicycles rolling through a big city on a warm morning.
8
‘Did you see the two of them skipping about on those bloody bikes like lovers,’ the young Special Branch detective said. ‘I thought we were going to run them down several times.’ The unmarked police car, which had been following some way behind the two cyclists since they had left Hyde Park Square, drove past the coffee shop now and on down Wigmore Street until it came to a halt just before John Bell & Croyden’s chemists. The plain-clothes man next the driver got out onto the pavement before leaning back into the car and taking a copy of the Express from the glove compartment.
‘Back you go then,’ his colleague told him brightly. ‘And don’t eat too many Danish pastries. I’ll let them know where you are.’
‘You do that,’ the other man remarked sourly. ‘And remember – I’m supposed to be off at one o’clock. So get the next crew up here at once, okay? I don’t want to be chasing after this lot till midnight on my own.’
The driver nodded before closing the door and picking up the radio mike from beneath the dashboard. Then he called from the window: ‘Don’t worry, Jack. They’ll probably go on for lunch at the Ritz – so you can do your trench coat act with the head waiter there. And don’t forget to put it all down. Remember what they said: “No expenses spared” – there’s a fit on with these two, God knows why. They don’t look like villains to me.’
The plainclothes man wandered back up Wigmore Street, shuffling his hands through his coat pockets, like a disgruntled provincial up in town for the day, while the driver gave his call sign to headquarters and then the present location of the two cyclists: ‘Yes, the coffee shop – “Miranda’s” or something, corner of Duke and Wigmore Streets – you can’t miss it … Yes, only Jack’s with them now … and listen, he wants a replacement up here as soon as possible …’
*
Marcus gazed thinly out at the bright summer sky over St James’s Park. A telephone rang on his broad uncluttered desk and he turned.
‘Well?’ he said looking across at Basil Fielding, before picking the phone up. ‘Yes.’ he said, and the Special Branch man the other end gave him details of the present whereabouts of the two cyclists. ‘Thank you – fine. Keep with them and let me know any changes.’
‘Well,’ Fielding said, repeating the word gently, sitting opposite Marcus in a red leather chair, looking grubby but not intimidated. ‘I accept your point, naturally: I work for your department, not the Prime Minister –’
‘One might even say you worked for me, Fielding. Might one not?’ Marcus looked at Basil with acid care.
‘Of course. Though it’s fair to point out, perhaps, that we all work for the PM, since he is nominally head of Intelligence services in this country. So to that extent my dealings with him were not, technically, any contravention of my contract with you.’
‘Hair-splitting, Fielding, And non-existent hair, too. You can perfectly well see you cannot serve two masters in this matter. You must abide by the orders of those who have executive control over you, not nominal control. Fact is – and let me repeat it: for a variety of reasons we do not wish Phillips found – and if the PM wishes otherwise –’
‘As he most certainly does –’
‘Then he must employ you personally in the matter.’
‘Sir, that with respect is ridiculous: the PM has given you direct orders in the matter of Phillips; my orders from him have been entirely indirect, mere confirmation of an action he supposes you are vigorously proceeding with.’
‘He has indeed, Fielding. But we do not invariably follow such orders – not to the letter, at least, which is what you are doing. We only go through the motions on some occasions, and this is one of them. You, on the other hand, are definitely taking your coat off in this matter. And that we don’t want –’
‘I might find him?’
‘Marlow might find him. He has an awful knack that way. Amateurs often have. He found us the names of half the KGB men over here a few years back. As you know, I stopped your cash advance to Marlow yesterday. I wish now to have him stopped – from any further meddling.’
Fielding looked at Marcus, smiling wanly now – the sudden smile of an unexpected winner, a punter who has just seen his money romp home on a rank outsider. ‘I’m sure you know, as I do – from your own meeting with Marlow – that he intends to help the Phillips family in any case, whether we like it or not.’
Marcus gripped the edge of the blotter in front of him. ‘My meeting with Marlow?’
Fielding nodded and Marcus didn’t pursue the denial he had in mind. He relaxed his grip on the paper. ‘So Marlow told you?’
‘No, as a matter of fact. I happened to drop into the club myself that lunchtime – when you met him. I saw you both at the bar.’
‘What?’ Marcus began to rise and fill out like a balloon.
‘Yes. I was in the coffee room – glanced through the doorway. And there the two of you were. Oh, I’m a member,’ Fielding went on by way of easy explanation. ‘But if I may continue: I can’t see how we can now prevent Marlow, in his private capacity, from helping the family. He’s obviously doing just that already.’
Marcus drummed his chubby fingers on the table top for an instant, a brief little drum roll, as though to herald some surprising and decisive action. ‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘Marlow hasn’t begun to pick up any real threads. And that’s what I want from you now, Fielding: a firm commitment to stop him before he does. And unless I have that from you, well, your days will be numbered in the House of the Lord. I want you to make it your personal business from now on to stop him.’
Fielding looked into his lap, his hands cupped over his crotch, head to one side – a crucified figure suddenly, midway along a via dolorosa. ‘I have no alternative, do I?’ he said meekly, putting a finger to the knot of his grubby regimental tie.
‘And keep clear of the PM while you’re at it,’ Marcus added tartly.
‘Right.’ Fielding stood up. ‘Right, I’ll do my best to dissuade Marlow.’ He paused and then said offhandedly. ‘There’s really only one point. Why is Phillips not to be found? I don’t think I quite follow that.’
Marcus looked at him maliciously. ‘When were you last given a positive vetting, Fielding?’
‘Oh, four, nearly five years ago.’
‘Time you had another session then. Keep you out of any more mischief. I’ll make arrangements with the security people. And don’t worry about Marlow. I’ll have someone else attend to him. All right?’
‘Very well,’ Fielding said before turning and sloping out of the room like an underfed stable boy. But once outside in the corridor he hummed a jaunty little tune to himself, a smile touching his haggard face. ‘Every dog has his day,’ he said, half-aloud, as he stopped by the lifts and pressed a button for the ground floor.
*
An hour later Marcus was seated opposite the Prime Minister in the cabinet room of 10 Downing Street. On either side, along the middle of the broad table, strategically placed both in opposition and in a careful order of their own hierarchies, were a dozen other sharp-faced men, both military and civilian, dressed for the sober occasion in careful suits and uniforms – though without the new air-conditioning system, which still had not been made to function properly, the room was hot and oppressive in the bright sunshine which streamed through the long windows from the rose garden at the back of the building. Motes of dust rose from the carpet as a heavy woman, one of the Prime Minister’s personal secretaries, clumped across the room pushing a trolley of coffee and biscuits.
This meeting of the inner cabinet together with all the Security and Intelligence Chiefs had lasted for more than half an hour already. The Minister for Defence, next the PM, coughed once more – a harsh dry hack of a cough, a recalcitrant tickle in the bottom of his throat that had defied every lozen
ge and beaten back each breathy attack which he had made upon it since the meeting had begun.
‘I’m sorry – it’s the dust.’
The PM accepted a cup of coffee, then turned to the Secretary of the Cabinet seated two places away from him on his left, the vacant place between them kept for the Foreign Secretary who had not managed to turn up, his flight back from Rhodesia delayed by a sandstorm at Cairo airport. ‘When will they do something about the air conditioning?’ he asked the Cabinet Secretary.
‘When the service engineers’ pay demands are met,’ the older man replied.
‘Surely we can fix it ourselves?’
‘Do you mean you – or I, Prime Minister? Or both of us?’
The PM turned away and sipped his coffee. He looked towards the opposition on the other side of the table then – gazed at them, he hoped, with unconcealed distaste.
There was Marcus, deputy head of DI6, whom he had trusted completely and now doubted, and next to him, Lindsay Phillips’s replacement as head of Section Nine, a man he didn’t know at all, a young fellow from the north country called Jackson with an unpleasant Border accent, and beyond him Sir Alan Maynard who ran domestic security at DI5: and then Simon Bryant – another youngster, the PM thought – currently in charge of SIS’s Counter-Espionage section. They were all so young, the PM reminded himself once more – young men given their chance of rapid promotion through the appalling mistakes of their seniors during the past 15 years, yet who now themselves had apparently allowed the unpardonable to happen.
The PM put aside his cup and looked again at his memoranda. Then, with a last tired glance around the room for silence, he commenced his performance again.
‘I take it, then, that we none of us now are really in any doubt at all that Phillips is – or was – a major Soviet agent. And has been since the beginning of his career with the Diplomatic Service in the early thirties?’
No one dissented. A pin could have dropped.
‘Bryant,’ the PM said roughly, ‘I think you, if anyone, had doubts?’
‘Not after Petnicki’s depositions, I suppose, Prime Minister. I had doubts simply because I could not see how Phillips could have possibly survived so long: as I said before – over forty years, it’s a long time. Half a dozen other Soviet or East European defectors have come and gone with information about doubles in our services meanwhile. Krevitsky, just before the war, for example, and Volkov in Ankara in 1948, who originally put us onto Burgess and MacLean – as well as Philby. And other sources, too. But none of them mentioned Phillips.’
‘Or rather,’ the PM interjected, ‘as you put it in your notes to me, one of them – surely Krevitsky at least – did spot Phillips. And we thought it was MacLean. There were, in fact, two “upper-class, well-educated Scotsmen in the FO” who were Soviet agents – not one, as Krevitsky had thought. Isn’t that it?’
‘Yes, sir. Though of course all that was long before –’
‘Yes, Bryant, long before your time. I can see that.’ The PM glared at Marcus. ‘And before yours too, David,’ he added. ‘The fact is, once we found out about MacLean we didn’t bother about any more well-bred intellectual Scots traitors.’ Again the PM looked pointedly at Marcus. ‘What is it about the Scots, David, that they should continue to be such devious thorns in our flesh?’
Marcus was very cool. ‘I hardly think such nationalistic innuendo is called for –’
The PM held up an arm. ‘No, no, of course not. It was beneath me. My apologies.’ But he didn’t mean a word of the apology.
‘So we may confirm that point,’ the PM went on. ‘Phillips, more than Philby or any of the others, must have caused the real damage – to what exact extent it’s impossible as yet to estimate – if it ever is. But put in the simplest terms: as far as Moscow was concerned Phillips took over where Philby left off – to the extent, even, of actually taking over Philby’s old Soviet department, Section Nine. Which means that almost everything we’ve run against the Soviets after, as well as before, 1952 – up until about three months ago, in fact – has been run as a minus factor against us. Now what our allies are going to ask is how was it possible –’ The PM paused, genuinely amazed, ‘How was it conceivably possible for us to appoint another Soviet agent, to replace Philby in his own section? How – more or less certain then, as we were, that Philby was a traitor – how could we have immediately promoted another in his place? You’ll agree, it looks worse than carelessness. Finally, of course, since at the time we combed right through that left-wing Cambridge generation in all our SIS staff – how could we possibly have failed to spot Phillips?’
Marcus answered very promptly, as though waiting a prearranged cue. ‘The answer is simple: MacLean, Burgess, Philby, they were all Cambridge men. But Phillips had no connection with them whatsoever. He was up at Oxford. And his communist associations there – so far as we can tell – were non-existent.
‘But so it was with Philby,’ the PM broke in. ‘He was never a card-carrying member at Cambridge.’
Marcus blinked his eyes rapidly several times, as though literally unable to believe in the Prime Minister’s existence just at that moment. ‘The real issue,’ he said slowly, wishing to labour the point, ‘was that Phillips was checked out in every possible way after the Philby business. And several times – three times in fact – since then: an absolutely clean bill each time: you have his security clearance sheets as an appendix to my report in front of you, sir.’
The PM glanced down at his papers, fingering through them, but without really looking at them, for he knew exactly what his reply would be: he had been waiting for Marcus to give him the opportunity to make it. ‘Yes, I note your appendices. Interestingly enough –’ he looked up, closing the file in front of him, ‘Interestingly enough, of course, I note that you – you personally, David – were the last person to give Phillips a positive vetting in 1970. And as you say yourself: an absolutely clean bill of health.’
As the PM intended, a silence seemed to grow all over the room, spreading like a malign fungus. But Marcus was quite unworried by it. He looked detached, frustrated, annoyed even.
‘I did indeed,’ Marcus said at last, as if he had willingly connived in the long silence, not in the least put out by its implications. ‘Prime Minister,’ he said suddenly, leaning forward, confronting the man opposite him like a bank manager dealing with a bad overdraft, ‘A Soviet agent – if such Phillips is – placed in British Intelligence from the very beginning, a man without definable left-wing connections then, will – unless he makes a mistake or there is some quite fortuitous luck involved – be impossible to detect subsequently: that’s the nature of the game in a democracy such as ours. Phillips made no mistakes, and we had no luck with him, until this Yugoslav defector, Petnicki, arrived over here. Even then, apart from what Petnicki actually told us, there was nothing in Phillips’s record, when we went right through it, to confirm Petnicki’s statements about him –’
‘Nothing, David? Nothing, that is, apart from NATO’s new contingency plans in the event of a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia. Only Phillips – apart from yourself, the Minister for Defence and myself – was privy to those plans. “Nothing” was quite a lot, wasn’t it? And I have to explain what you call “nothing” on Friday morning to the American Secretary of State and General Haig.’
‘I see several ways round your dilemma, sir,’ Marcus said coolly. ‘You may surely say to the Americans – since Phillips has not yet turned up anywhere – that these plans may have leaked from NATO headquarters itself, or from the French, for example,’ he added with a smile. ‘We don’t, in fact – apart from Petnicki’s word – have as yet any incontrovertible evidence that Phillips actually passed these plans over to the Russians; nor do we have any absolutely firm evidence that Phillips was a Soviet agent. We merely hold strong suspicions, largely based on his sudden disappearance, once he knew of Petnicki’s arrival here.’
The PM’s response was eminently self-righteous: ‘Surprising a
s it may seem to you, I have no intention of covering up in the way you suggest, David. Our allies will have the truth as I see it: they will be rightly appalled – once more – at the performance of our Intelligence services, as am I. But I trust they will keep quiet about it. It is you, David, who is in the hot seat. I and my government would probably survive such public admissions of failure: but not you. On the other hand, if Phillips were to be found either dead or alive, we might save something from the disaster: with Phillips safely accounted for, either on trial or as a corpse, the effects of this appalling bungling could be minimised. I suggest you do everything in your power – you and the other special services,’ the PM glanced at Marcus’s companions, ‘to try and find the man – which leads, gentlemen, to your final opinions of what you think has actually happened to this little Scotsman. Sir Alan?’ The PM looked over at the head of DI5.
Maynard was over-confident. ‘It’s my view that the man has gone over to Moscow, either with pre-arranged Soviet help on that Russian trawler that left from Aberdeen. Or that he left entirely on his own: off the cuff – crossed over to the continent, either by air on that Edinburgh-Paris flight the day after, where we have a rough identification from emigration control of a man like Phillips travelling without very much luggage: or else that he left later in the week, by any one of a dozen ways. I don’t hold with any suicide theory, or with any sudden loss of memory on his part: completely untypical of the man.’
Simon Bryant, the bouncy head of Counter-Espionage, immediately came in here, without being asked, his eyes bright with righteous enthusiasm.
‘I agree, sir. The dates in the whole matter seem to me to be conclusive: Petnicki came to us from the Yugoslav Embassy in Paris on 17th March. Now, naturally – since this came very much within Phillips’s province in his own Slavs and Soviets section – he was advised of Petnicki’s arrival here and of our impending interrogation of him. This had to be done – in case, for example, Petnicki had been some kind of a leg-man in one of Phillips’s circles in Yugoslavia. Yet outside our own counter-espionage section – and apart from Chief of Service, of course –’ Bryant glanced at Marcus, ‘only Phillips was notified.’ Bryant consulted his notes. ‘That was on the 16th – the day after a personal meeting between Phillips and my deputy, Anderson, where Phillips confirmed that Petnicki had no connection with any of our own overseas intelligence circles and there was no form on him anywhere within Section Nine: Petnicki was clean – he was “real”. That established, we proceeded with our interrogation and by the end of the week – on the 21st March – Phillips, who had gone up to Scotland for the weekend, disappeared. It was the day before – the 20th, a Saturday – that Petnicki first gave us a picture of this “Scotsman” in SIS who he said he knew was working for the Soviets in Yugoslavia: late Saturday night, in fact. It took us most of Sunday morning to get Central Registry on the ball – but by lunchtime that day we had narrowed it down to Phillips and two other Scotsmen, neither of whom had anything to do with Yugoslavia. As you know, we flew two men up to Perth on Sunday afternoon to question him –’
