The Factory

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘I don’t know what to think about the man,’ said Bell. ‘If he’s who he says he is, he must know.’

  ‘Know what?’ demanded Jane, exasperated. ‘Which of the British services has been penetrated?’

  Bell shook his head, not so much in refusal as of not listening to her. ‘You did well, leaving him in there uncertain like you did. Tell him you are going to give him one more chance. Hendrix has invited us to lunch here. We’ll accept so that Sharov has some time finally to decide what he’s going to do. Warn him. Warn him that unless we get it all, we’ve no intention whatsoever of trying to reunite him with his girlfriend. Nor will we grant him asylum. We’ll make him available to his own embassy people and they can repatriate him to Moscow.’

  ‘That’s…!’ started Jane, horrified at the brutality.

  ‘… being as tough as we’ve got to be,’ insisted Bell.

  Sharov seemed a shrunken, crushed man when Jane re-entered the drawing room. He said: ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

  ‘Then hear what I’ve got to say,’ said Jane uncomfortably. Sharov’s eyes started from his head and he became very red-faced as Jane recounted what the Director General had ordered.

  When she finished the man said, aghast: ‘Why are you doing this to me? Treating me like this! I’m doing all I can. Everything. Please don’t be like this. It’s like I’m an animal.’

  It was exactly like treating him as an animal, thought Jane: a taunted, baited animal. But to what purpose? She said: ‘You’ve got until this afternoon. OK?’

  ‘I don’t know what you want!’ sobbed Sharov.

  ‘Until this afternoon,’ repeated Jane, not knowing what else to say. She didn’t know what they wanted, either.

  It was not an easy meal. Hendrix tried his best to play the considerate host and the food and wine were good, but Bell sat enclosed within himself, drinking more than he ate, deep in thought. And Jane was unsettled by the direction in which she’d had to take the interview. She completely believed now that Sharov was telling the truth and that the threat she’d been told to make was pointless bullying that could achieve nothing. Worse, it was clearly something which they would have to go back upon because although the practical assessment was not her responsibility what the Russian had so far provided was unarguably valuable. So there could be no question of refusing him asylum. She hoped she hadn’t pressed Sharov too far to prevent his realizing that, in the security of his upstairs room in which he had been locked for his midday meal.

  Jane was glad when their own meal ended.

  ‘Well,’ said Hendrix, relieved also, ‘let’s hope, now he’s had time to think, that it’ll come at last.’

  They were in the corridor outside the drawing room when the shout came from above. At first Jane couldn’t make out what it was but then she did, running after the two men who were just slightly ahead of her.

  She got to Sharov’s room before the body was cut down. He’d used his trouser belt to hang himself, looping it over some overhead pipes leading from the bathroom. The pipes had bent under his weight but stopped short of breaking.

  ‘Oh no!’ said Jane faintly.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said the Director General at once. ‘I dictated everything that was done.’

  ‘He was genuine,’ said Jane distantly. ‘All he did was love someone enough to want to run away with her. And couldn’t understand why we treated him as we did.’

  ‘And he knew a lot, too,’ said Bell, professionally hard. ‘Maybe not what I wanted to know. But a lot.’

  ‘Poor Anatoli,’ said Jane.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Bell. ‘Poor man.’

  3

  The Rescue

  For weeks Peter Whitehead hadn’t had what he considered a worthwhile assignment so he was hopeful of the summons to the Director General’s office: Samuel Bell always personally briefed field agents on the most important jobs. Whitehead, who was unmarried and one of the youngest operatives in the department, just twenty-eight years old, arrived enthusiastically early on the eighth floor of the Factory. He was greeted by Ann Perkins, who looked pointedly at her watch and said he’d have to wait. Whitehead settled in a chair opposite the woman, who was dark and very pretty and had a figure he would normally have admired more obviously, but didn’t. His polite smile was reserved, too: there were growing suggestions around the Factory that the relationship between Ann and her boss went far beyond the professional. Whitehead, who had been attached to the department for only a year, was overwhelmingly ambitious and had no intention of endangering a career by flirting with the Director General’s girlfriend.

  His permission to enter came precisely at the appointed time. Samuel Bell gestured him to a chair, which Whitehead obediently took. Whitehead – a fitness fanatic who didn’t drink, jogged most mornings and swam at least three times a week – thought the Director General looked terrible. Not ill. More neglected. His eyes were red and pouched, his skin had an odd flakiness and he appeared to have dressed without any particular care. As well as the stories about Ann Perkins there were other rumours, that Bell kept an often-used whisky bottle in a desk drawer.

  ‘It’s a mission and it’s difficult: maybe even impossible,’ announced Bell with the abrupt directness of the admiral he had once been. ‘We’ve got an agent, a woman named Tanya Kulik – codename Freedom – who thinks she’s blown. She warned us, about an hour ago.’

  ‘Where?’ demanded Whitehead.

  ‘Liepaja, in Latvia,’ disclosed Bell. ‘The independence movements in the various Soviet republics are worrying the hell out of the KGB because they threaten the very internal control that Soviet intelligence has tried to achieve since 1917. We’ve infiltrated informants – good, reliable agents – in every republic: known every move the KGB has made. It’s a marvellous spy system: one of the best we’ve ever had.’

  ‘She’s not been arrested yet?’

  Bell shook his head.

  ‘So order her to get out,’ said Whitehead simply.

  ‘She’s refused,’ replied Bell, just as simply. ‘She says she doesn’t positively know: that it might be a false alarm and she isn’t going to panic.’

  ‘Maybe she’s right.’

  ‘I can’t take that chance,’ said Bell. ‘She knows the chain, the identities of too many people throughout Russia. If she’s seized, she’ll talk. She won’t be able to resist interrogation. So I lose the entire network, not just one agent I could replace.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Go in and get her out.’

  Difficult: maybe impossible, thought Whitehead, remembering the Director General’s earlier words. He said: ‘She’s defying you. What if she won’t come with me?’

  The Director General stared at the other man for several moments. Then he said: ‘Kill her.’

  *

  Samuel Bell had killed someone: Anthony Marshall, one of his own intelligence officers. Not personally, but sent him to his death, wrongly believing him to be the traitor who had infiltrated the Factory: an operation-destroying traitor Bell believed still to be active but in the search for whom he couldn’t, now, involve internal security because of how the Marshall killing would personally reflect upon him. As the mess of his private life would reflect upon him if there were an intensive investigation.

  ‘I think people are beginning to talk about us,’ declared Ann.

  Bell’s wife was on holiday, which enabled him to stay the entire week at Ann’s apartment, not just the once or twice that was normal. He was at the drinks tray, refilling his whisky glass. He turned to her and said: ‘You sure: has someone said something direct?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘Just attitudes, really. Everyone’s very wary of me: politely cautious. And no one has made a pass or asked me to go out with them for weeks. Would you be upset, at it becoming public knowledge?’

  Bell did not immediately reply, wanting time. There was no reason why he should have been distressed, although he supposed it would slightl
y diminish the respect of his authority: boss sleeps with personal assistant. Certainly his empty marriage had been a disaster, before Ann, so there could be no criticism of her for its collapse. Instead of answering he said: ‘Would you? I’m twenty years older than you, remember?’

  ‘No,’ said the girl. ‘I wouldn’t be upset at all. I’d be quite proud, although not as proud as I’d be as your wife.’

  It was the closest she’d ever come, since their affair began, to criticizing him for letting things drift and not doing something positive: for not divorcing Pamela and marrying her. Not yet, Bell decided. The first priority was cleaning the Factory of its traitor. Maybe then he’d do something, although he wished he felt more for Ann. He said: ‘I wouldn’t be upset. I’d be proud, too.’

  Peter Whitehead did not know whether he could kill anyone: especially whether he could kill a woman. He’d been trained to do so, of course. And he accepted the professional reasoning, preventing the destruction of many by removing just one, even if the morality were more difficult. But he still didn’t know if he could do it – actually pull the trigger – when the moment came. Hopefully the moment wouldn’t come. Hopefully Tanya Kulik would accept the harm her staying would cause and flee with him to the guaranteed safety of a new life that would be provided for her in England.

  Whitehead flew to Moscow on a passport describing him as a travel writer to justify his moving around the country, which was possible for Westerners for the first time under the government of Mikhail Gorbachev. He did not, however, leave the capital immediately. The security existing at all airports made it impossible to carry a weapon into Russia, just as it was impossible for him openly to approach the British embassy on Morisa Toreza Street because there could be no official connection between himself and the British government. The gun had been sent to the embassy, however, beyond any Soviet interception in the untouchable diplomatic pouch. With it, too, was a genuine British passport containing an intelligence record photograph of Tanya. The passport was in the name of Tanya Jenkins. She was described as a university lecturer, aged thirty-four. The gun, an American-made, short-barrelled Smith and Wesson, together with the passport, was left by an embassy-based British intelligence officer beneath a cracked gravestone slab in a cemetery on Kadashovskiy Road.

  The moment of collection connected Whitehead positively with incriminating espionage and he went cautiously to the cemetery, the day after his arrival, keeping the dead-letter drop under observation for a long time to ensure it was not being watched by a Russian squad before hurriedly making the pick-up. He returned at once to the Moskva Hotel, not opening the package until he was in his locked room.

  Whitehead concentrated entirely upon the passport. Tanya Kulik was quite beautiful, open-faced, her blonde hair worn long, almost to her shoulders. Whitehead gazed at the picture, then at last at the gun lying on the bed and then back at the photograph again, hoping more fervently than before that she would agree to accompany him back to England and not force the alternative upon him.

  He left Moscow the following day. It was a long journey and he chose to make it by train because the official restrictions were easier than for internal air travel. He journeyed alert to everything around him, professionally tensed against the slightest hint that he was being watched. He did not attempt to reach Liepaja direct. Instead he went to Riga and took a room at the Metropole Hotel and spent two days moving around the city as a further precaution against surveillance.

  Early on the morning of the third day, again by train, he made the final part of the journey, arriving in Liepaja in the midafternoon. It was a depressing, grey seaport town. There was a smell of fish mixed with another, heavier odour which he guessed at being engine oil or grease. The people were hunch-shouldered and unsmiling. Autumn was still some weeks away but the sky was already overcast, adding to the impression of greyness, and a bitterly cold wind swept off the Baltic, chilling him. It would be an easy place in which to die, Whitehead thought worriedly. Or in which to be killed, he added even more worriedly.

  He booked into a hotel deep in the middle of the town, away from the colder seafront, staying only long enough to complete the formalities before going out on to the streets again, to fix the geography in his mind. He quickly found Revolutionary Highway, a broad, multi-lane thoroughfare, and obeyed the instructions given to him in London by following it towards the port, counting off the side streets as he went. He found the contact point at the first attempt.

  It was a Catholic church, not separated from its surroundings by any cemetery or grounds but practically adjoining the buildings around it: only an announcement board and the shape of its door marked it differently. The door gave easily, creaking slightly. Inside it was very dark, too dark for him immediately to see properly: there was a change of smell, of dust and age. Whitehead waited until his eyes became accustomed to the gloom. The altar was far ahead, with the stands for the flickering votive candles on either side. To the right was the line of confessional boxes through which he hoped to locate Tanya Kulik. Every alternate Tuesday, according to his London briefing, Tanya came, promptly at eleven in the morning, and used the second box from the front to make her confession. She also used the visit to collect, for passing on along the network, any Latvian nationalist intelligence that by arrangement was always taped just before her visit beneath the narrow confessional seat. Tomorrow was the collecting Tuesday. Whitehead thoroughly reconnoitred the church, professionally dismayed at there being only one public door, and found the best position from which to watch, unobserved, for Tanya’s arrival.

  Good enough, he decided. But only just. To be sure-to be absolutely safe – he needed several days to tour the area to convince himself the church wasn’t already under Soviet scrutiny. But he didn’t have several days. It was an emergency to which he had to respond accordingly: quickly, taking chances, just to get her away. Dear God, make her agree to go, he thought.

  He slept badly, his nerves tightening at the very moment of an operation beginning. It was always like this and it didn’t worry him. It was his body and his mind coming to their peak of alertness: it was protective.

  Knowing the precise location of the church, Whitehead went to it that Tuesday by another route, using smaller roads and alleys. He was in his concealing pew half an hour before Tanya was scheduled to arrive. He looked mostly at the confessional, to see anyone go in to leave something for her collection, but saw nothing.

  He was completely adjusted to the darkness when Tanya came into the church but he still missed her actual arrival. She entered from the street so softly that the door did not creak and her footsteps were so quiet she was halfway towards the confessional before he located her. There was no indication of tension or obvious nervousness, but he was aware of her bowed head, beneath its covering scarf, moving as she looked about the church. There was a momentary hesitation at the box and then she slipped inside, pulling the curtain closed after her.

  Whitehead did not wait. He went quickly to the door, checking as he did that no one had followed her in, and checked again on the street. There were three parked cars but all were empty and there was no sign of anyone lurking. He stayed close to the door and when she left she started to pass directly in front of him. He said softly: ‘Tanya. I’ve come to help you.’

  She gave a startled cry of fear and if he hadn’t snatched out to grab her arm she would have run. She gazed at him, eyes wide with fright, a terrified animal caught in a poacher’s trap. She started to tug her arm away.

  ‘Freedom!’ said Whitehead urgently. ‘Recognize the word: Freedom!’ and abruptly she stopped struggling.

  There’d been a curt message from his wife that she was extending her vacation but Samuel Bell still left Ann’s apartment, wanting time by himself in his empty north London house. In some ways it was a personal test, to see how much and how quickly he missed Ann after spending a longer than usual period with her. He also wanted to be quite alone, to think. He’d made a bad mistake at every level, tryin
g to uncover the traitor by himself. He should have initiated a proper investigation weeks ago, irrespective of the personal embarrassment it might have created for him. There was a simple answer to one personal problem, if he divorced Pamela and married Ann. Except that he was not sure he wanted to. What about the other problem? He was appropriately at the drinks cabinet, adding yet again to his whisky glass, when the question posed itself. Not an alcoholic yet, he comforted himself. Close, but not over the edge. Time he did something about it, though: cut down a little. Bell escaped the decision with drunken ease: time enough to start thinking about cutting down on the whisky when more important things were resolved. Like the traitor. And Peter Whitehead getting one of their best agents out of a Soviet province. That’s when he’d think seriously about it.

  Tanya Kulik was still scared. Reassured but still scared, blinking up at him rapidly and constantly staring around, as if she thought he was tricking her in some way and that the KGB squad would be arriving any moment.

  She did, however, do as he asked, taking him quickly away from the identifying church, along a series of alleys until they came to a shadowed, insect-buzzing café with booths in which they could sit, virtually hidden.

  Whitehead ordered coffee for both of them and then in addition calming vodka. After the drinks were served Tanya said, uneven-voiced: ‘What do you want?’

  Instead of replying Whitehead took the British passport from his pocket, still in its original wrapping, and offered it across the table. The woman looked down at it, frowning. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Your escape,’ said Whitehead simply. ‘All the stamps and visas are in order. You can travel to Moscow with me and I’ll get you safely back to London. They want to care for you there: a job, somewhere to live. It’ll all be taken care of.’

  ‘I’ve already said no.’

  Whitehead’s stomach dipped at the alternative, not believing he could carry out the Director General’s order. He said: ‘You’ve got to.’