The Factory

by Brian Freemantle

  Samuel Bell debriefed her on the day she was repatriated to London, haggard and pale after days of interrogation but otherwise uninjured.

  Bell let her talk for a long time before suddenly asking: ‘Where was Anthony Marshall?’

  ‘He wasn’t able to reach the bridge to warn me,’ said the girl. ‘The police moved very quickly: actually erected the barrier in front of him.’ She paused. Then she said: ‘The bridge was crowded but I was the only one picked out. They were looking just for me. I think it was a tip-off.’

  ‘I think so too,’ agreed the Director General. And now he knew the traitor who had given that tip-off to the Czechs. Apart from himself and the woman sitting before him only one other person had known of the operation: Anthony Marshall.

  Bell made his plans quite dispassionately. He was sure that Marshall was responsible for the detection of four valued agents, men who were going to spend the rest of their lives rotting in various communist jails. So Bell felt no pity for the man he had to punish. And he decided that the punishment for a crime for which he could produce no positive evidence before an English court to get a legal verdict had to be long and hard imprisonment, the same as Marshall had inflicted upon his victims.

  Bell accepted he could not move against Marshall anywhere within the communist bloc: the man was their agent so to attempt to destroy him there would, in fact, be handing him over to his true masters. For several whisky-aided days and nights Bell puzzled how to achieve what he wanted, determined against any mistake which might let Marshall go unpunished.

  When the idea came he first dismissed it, regarding it as too unpredictable. But then he remembered how fanatical the regime was in Iran and changed his mind completely, deciding that because of the fanaticism it was, in fact, entirely predictable.

  Bell personally briefed Marshall. On a passport describing himself as a salesman of machine-part spares Marshall was to enter Iran by road, crossing from Hakkari in Turkey, and drive as far as Hamadan. There he was to wait at the only hotel in the town until he was contacted by a man who in conversation would use the phrase: ‘The country is going through great change.’ From him Marshall was to learn the true extent of opposition within Iran to the ayatollahs.

  The ever-smiling, supremely confident Marshall, brightly dressed in a fawn suit with red tie and pocket handkerchief, said: ‘This is an unusual one?’

  ‘But important, if we get a hint that the regime in Tehran might be overthrown,’ said the Director General.

  The day after personally instructing the man he considered a traitor, Samuel Bell did something else personally. Anonymously he posted to the Iranian legation in London an untraceable note warning that a British businessman claiming to be a machine-parts salesman who was entering the country from Hakkari, on the Hamadan road, was really a British spy.

  It was an appalling drive. Marshall flew first to Istanbul and then to Ankara, on an internal flight, but had to drive south-east from then on. The mountain roads were rutted and broken and in places not roads at all, just dirt tracks. Before he reached Hakkari he had two punctures. At the Turkish border town he had the car checked as thoroughly as he could by a doubtful garage, guessing the roads would be as bad when he got into Iran, and allowed himself a much-needed night’s rest at a smelling, fly-infested hotel.

  The border crossing was chaotic, a disordered mass of people, animals, ancient lorries and buses milling across the road, making it almost impossible to drive. Marshall edged forward, not really able to locate a proper queue. The sun throbbed down from a heat-white sky, soaking him in perspiration, the kicked-up dust got in his throat and eyes, and his ears ached from the shouting and the sound of car horns.

  It was an hour before he even got near the border post itself, grateful that there was some order at last. Metal barriers funnelled people and vehicles into a line which slowly trickled past the uniformed inspectors. When his turn came at last Marshall handed his documents to a fat, moustached man whose uniform was black-ringed from sweat. The officer intently compared the passport photograph with Marshall himself and then demanded the hire-car documents.

  ‘Businessman?’ the officer queried.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marshall, his cover story prepared. ‘Machine parts.’

  ‘Going all the way to Tehran?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Marshall, which was true. After making the Hamadan meeting he was going to drive to the Iranian capital and fly back to London from there to avoid the hell of Turkish mountain roads again: he couldn’t understand now why he hadn’t been allowed to come in through Tehran in the first place.

  ‘Wait,’ ordered the inspector, walking back into the customs booth.

  Marshall did. The burning heat gave him an excuse constantly to mop his forehead and not appear openly nervous. He forced himself not to look towards the office, to see what checks were being made on his documents.

  It seemed a very long time before the fat man returned. He handed everything back to Marshall and said: ‘OK. Go on.’

  Marshall smiled and nodded and put the car in gear, feeling the apprehension lift. Easy, he thought: very easy. The congestion remained just inside the border but quickly, in less than a mile, he cleared the straggled line of people on foot or travelling with animals and the road opened. It was far better than Marshall had expected and he was able to maintain a fairly high speed. It was only when he overtook a line of slower-moving buses and lorries that he became aware of an army vehicle keeping pace with him and then, when he pulled out again, that it was not just one but two small trucks. Fear jumped through him but not seriously: there were a hundred reasons why they should have been on the same road as himself and be in as much of a hurry. The pursuit was too obvious to be professional and Marshall knew easily enough how to evade it. He saw the pull-in rest stop ahead, signalled and coasted the car to a stop, smiling as the army vehicles carried on by.

  After about five minutes he started off again, vaguely irritated that a lot of the slow-moving vehicles he’d overtaken already were ahead of him once more.

  Marshall was strained sideways in the car, seeking a break in the oncoming traffic, when the ambush happened. There was a corner around which he couldn’t properly see and when he rounded it he saw that the road split and that the army trucks had stopped in a waiting formation. He braked and tried to hide himself in the line but knew from the instant burst of activity by soldiers around the vehicles that he’d been spotted.

  Marshall panicked.

  He tried at first to evade them by pretending to remain on the wider road, turning sharply at the last moment on to the other highway at the split, but it only delayed them briefly. When they began chasing him both used their sirens and flashing lights, and there were shouts magnified through an electronic megaphone system that Marshall couldn’t understand but didn’t need to because the only thing they could be telling him to do was stop. But he didn’t. He went faster, but the vehicles behind kept up. The road started to break up into a dirt track, which slowed him, but he still took a corner too fast and skidded, the wheel jerking from his hands and the rear of the car sliding sideways. There was a thump where it hit some unseen obstruction, a rock he guessed, and then Marshall felt the car start to sink into soft sand. Blindly, stupidly, he leapt out and began to run, the amplified shouts to stop filling his head. There was a shot. And then another. The third hit him, high in the shoulder, so that he toppled practically in a complete cartwheel, staggering to his feet and stumbling a few more paces before the next bullet caught him in the back, killing him instantly.

  ‘The Foreign Office are making all the protests they can,’ reported Thurlow. ‘I’ve advised them that Marshall was one of ours, of course, so there is a limit to how far they can go.’

  ‘There’s no chance of the Iranians discovering that, though,’ said the Director General. ‘They can claim he was a spy for as long as they like but there isn’t the slightest proof.’

  ‘What was Marshall doing there?’ asked his deputy.
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  ‘A mission I assigned him,’ said Bell. He was shocked by the killing, never imagining that would be the outcome. He’d only ever intended the man to be imprisoned, nothing more.

  ‘Are you going to send in someone else?’

  Bell shook his head. ‘It was a one-chance opportunity,’ he said. ‘That chance has gone now. We’ve lost it.’ And we’ve lost a traitor, dreadful though the circumstances are, thought the Director General. At least the Factory would be safe in the future.

  Maurice Birch was a Factory man, a protégé of Bell’s whose idea it had been to put the man deep within the British embassy in Moscow but keep from all the other Russian-based intelligence personnel and controllers any indication of Birch’s true function. Birch worked properly as a Second Secretary and took no part whatsoever in the normal intelligence-gathering activities with other agents. Neither did he use any intelligence communication system. His liaison was with Bell direct, through the diplomatic bag. The Director General believed the man’s cover to be absolutely secure.

  It was two months after Marshall’s death that the KGB seized Maurice Birch. He was arrested on the Prospekt Mira with one of the Factory’s best Russian informants, who under brutal questioning made a full confession hopelessly incriminating the Englishman.

  ‘It’ll be a life sentence,’ guessed Thurlow when he and the Director General held a damage assessment meeting.

  ‘Yes,’ accepted Bell. His hangover was particularly bad that morning: he’d had to postpone the meeting, to be sick.

  ‘I think we have seriously to consider that the leak is internal, coming from this very building,’ insisted the deputy.

  He already had, reflected Bell. He had decided upon Marshall’s guilt and inadvertently sent the man to his death. But that had been two months before. So Marshall could not have been the person who’d identified Maurice Birch to the Russians.

  Which meant two things, accepted Bell. He’d caused an innocent man to be killed. And the traitor was still at large, somewhere within the Factory: at large and operating. That night, at Ann’s apartment, Samuel Bell got far drunker than he usually did.

  2

  The Defector

  Jane Snelgrove didn’t like defector debriefings. During the time she had worked at the Factory, almost five years now since leaving university, she had conducted four and not been completely happy with any of them. The greatest danger was that the person pleading asylum might not be a genuine defector at all, but a plant by the KGB or some other hostile intelligence organization, to mislead and misinform and by so doing create chaos within the British service. Even when they were genuine, as those she had already vetted appeared to be, there was always some misinformation because invariably they exaggerated what they had to tell, to make themselves seem more important and guarantee their acceptance. Which meant the interrogations were always frustrating and time-consuming, sorting out the truths from the half truths.

  There were small compensations, Jane reflected as she drove south through the Sussex countryside on a perfect spring morning. A debriefing at least got her out of London: defectors were never interviewed at the Factory. Always the sessions were conducted at a safe house far away from the London intelligence headquarters, a precaution against the asylum-seeker being a decoy actually sent to identify the Factory’s location. Today the debriefing was to be at Pulborough, at a vast country mansion she had not been to before. Set in fifteen acres of its own walled grounds, it was easy to patrol with dogs and guards. Additionally the grounds were seeded with electronic sensor devices and body-heat-seeking cameras.

  The gated entry from the road, which was visible to passing motorists, was monitored by only one man. Later, about fifty yards up the winding drive and out of public view, the real checks were made. There, at a proper guardhouse, all her security passes were scrutinized and verified. While Jane, who was blonde and statuesque, with the body of the athlete she had been at university, sat patiently at the wheel of her open-topped sports car she knew a television camera was upon her, comparing her features with photographs from Records.

  It was thirty minutes before she was passed through to continue up the drive. Through the trees lining the drive she saw three separate guard squads. Two were accompanied by alsatians which barked and pulled at their leashes when they saw her, and Jane was glad they were chained to their handlers. She was nervous of dogs, particularly those trained to attack.

  The house came into view at last, a square Georgian building the front of which was almost completely covered with ivy and creeper trained by attentive gardeners over the years. There had clearly been a warning of her approach from the guard post because as she swung the car around the gravelled forecourt the impressive oak doors opened and an upright, purposeful-looking man marched out. From her instruction interview with the Director General, Jane knew the man’s name was Hendrix. He was a former army major now in charge of the Pulborough house. When he came close Jane saw that the left side of his face was badly scarred from some long-ago injury and his left eye was milky white in its blindness.

  They shook hands and Hendrix said he was pleased to meet her and Jane declined the coffee he offered. She had a tendency towards impatience and was anxious to start work at once, without any social distractions.

  ‘What’s he like?’

  Hendrix shrugged. ‘Nervous, of course. But handling it well. Actually I think there’s quite a lot of conceit. He treats everyone like a servant, always telling, never asking.’

  ‘Anyone talked to him at length?’

  The ex-soldier frowned. ‘That’s your job, isn’t it?’

  ‘I meant has he wanted to talk to anyone? They often do, in their nervousness.’

  ‘Not this one,’ said Hendrix positively.

  ‘Have you told him I’m coming?’

  Hendrix smiled, stopping in the massive hallway and gesturing towards a set of double doors leading into a drawing room. ‘Just that someone was on their way from London. He’s waiting for you in there.’

  Anatoli Vasilevich Sharov was sitting in an armchair bordering a large fireplace in which a fire was laid but unlit. He appeared quite relaxed, legs splayed out before him. He was a huge, bull-chested man with a profusion of black hair. He looked up curiously when Jane entered, but did not stand.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. There was an arrogance in his voice.

  ‘You were told I was coming, weren’t you?’ said Jane. It was important, in this sort of interview, always to remain the one controlling the encounter. She spoke Russian.

  ‘You’re to be my debriefer!’ The arrogance changed to surprise. He’d instinctively responded in his own language.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘You’re a woman!’

  ‘So!’ Jane took the chair on the other side of the fireplace.

  ‘I was expecting a man: someone of authority.’

  Jane leaned towards the man. ‘Anatoli Vasilevich,’ she said warningly, ‘mine is the authority to determine whether you remain in this country. Or, alternatively, whether you are returned to the Soviet Union as someone to whom we decide not to offer sanctuary.’

  The huge man blinked at the threat, colouring slightly. ‘You make it sound as if there is a choice.’

  ‘There is,’ insisted Jane. She guessed this was going to be her most difficult defector debriefing yet.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ demanded the man pompously.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ invited Jane. It would be wrong for her to become annoyed by his attitude: she always had to remain calm as well as in control.

  The man straightened slightly in his chair, as if he were trying to increase his stature. ‘I am Anatoli Vasilevich Sharov,’ he announced. ‘My rank in the KGB is colonel. For two years I have been the rezident in charge of the Soviet intelligence-gathering apparatus at the Russian embassy in England. Before that I was in charge in Paris. I have also worked in the Moscow headquarters of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. My knowledge is v
ery wide.’

  Jane nodded but avoided appearing impressed. ‘What are you prepared to tell us?’

  ‘Everything,’ replied the man shortly.

  If Sharov were telling the truth his knowledge was considerable. She said: ‘You are married?’

  Sharov appeared to sag slightly, losing some of his confidence. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about children?’

  ‘A boy, nine.’

  ‘In Moscow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you thought of what might happen to him and his mother because of what you have done?’

  ‘Under Gorbachev things have changed in Russia.’

  ‘So you don’t think they’ll be punished?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why so sure?’

  Sharov shrugged. ‘I am, that’s all.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem to be a very satisfactory answer,’ challenged Jane.

  The man gave another shrug. ‘I have a friend,’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘A woman?’

  The man nodded. ‘Olga Zarya. She is a translator at the Soviet Trade Mission at Highgate.’

  ‘So you have abandoned your wife and child for her?’

  ‘What gives you the right to criticize?’ demanded the man angrily.

  ‘I am not criticizing,’ refuted Jane. ‘I am asking.’

  ‘My wife and I were practically apart before I was posted here. Before I met Olga.’

  ‘So why didn’t you divorce your wife and marry Olga?’

  ‘I was to be recalled to Moscow,’ disclosed Sharov. ‘Olga has another three years in London, at least. I did not want that sort of separation.’

  ‘What about her?’ questioned Jane. ‘Did she know you intended to defect?’

  ‘We spoke about it, generally.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You people will have to contact her. Bring her across to me.’

  ‘Why didn’t she run at the same time as you?’

  ‘She has a husband. She wasn’t as positive as I was.’

  It was becoming messy, thought Jane, who was absolutely dedicated to her job in intelligence, had no serious boyfriends and could not imagine anyone, male or female, making for love the sort of sacrifices Sharov appeared to be making. She attacked again: ‘Why have you defected, Anatoli Vasilevich?’