Shadow of Shadows

by Ted Allbeury

  British intelligence has captured one of the most valuable defectors ever, Colonel Anatoli Mikhailovich Petrov, a top KGB agent in Britain. Petrov is ready to tell all—names of Russian operatives, “safe” house addresses, even the identity of an SIS double agent—until something makes him stop talking.

  James Lawler, an SIS man who knows well the lessons of survival, accepts the task of winning Petrov’s trust. Lawler must find out what has frightened Petrov and convince him to resume talking. Two years’ worth of vital information is still missing from Petrov’s story, and the SIS will do anything to get it.

  A cynical professional spy, Petrov knows better than to put his trust in anyone, no matter how sincere he seems. Ever on the defensive, he knows that Lawler’s real assignment may be to learn his secrets and then to kill him.

  As Lawler and Petrov tentatively test each other, they discover they have more in common than their mutual experience of the lonely life of espionage. They also share a certain unluckiness in love. Lawler’s ex-girlfriend cruelly forbids him to see their child, while Petrov’s friend Siobhan gives him all the sex he wants but refuses to marry him.

  In a thrilling story of high-level intrigue that shifts from England to Berlin and back again, Lawler moves closer not only to Petrov’s full disclosure but to the shocking parallel story of what happened to George Blake, one of the most infamous real-life spies of our time.

  Ted Allbeury, a best-selling thriller writer, exceeds his earlier triumphs in this compelling novel of human beings who must overcome their instincts as professional spies to rediscover trust and love.

  TED ALLBEURY has built an impressive, worldwide reputation since he began writing in the early 1970s. The author of thirteen espionage novels, translated into many languages, he is known for his intimate knowledge of the spy world gained from service with British Counter Intelligence during World War II. He lives with his wife and children in Kent, England.

  Critical praise for Ted Allbeury’s

  The Other Side of Silence

  “In the best le Carre tradition. . . an ingenious and readable book.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Readers will find this novel hard to put down. . . Allbeury is a master of suspense.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “An intelligent and provocative novel of the darkest underside of espionage. . .The characterizations here are first rate, the story line convincing.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Ted Allbeury

  SHADOW OF SHADOWS

  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  New York

  Copyright © Ted Allbeury 1982

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Allbeury, Ted.

  Shadow of shadows.

  I. Title.

  PR6051.L52S5 1982 823’.914 82-10338

  ISBN 0-684-17628-9

  With much love to my mother-in-law

  Czeslawa Felinska

  The Light of Lights looks always on the motive, not the deed,

  The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.

  W. B. Yeats: The Countess Cathleen

  1

  As Petrov came out of the ground at Highbury he stuffed the programme into his pocket and looked around for a taxi. The crowds were still pouring out, and the traffic was virtually at a standstill. He made his way down Avenell Road, pushing his way through the crowds. At Aubert Park he saw a taxi, waved and hurried across the road. He gave the driver the address and settled back in the seat, closing his eyes. Trying not to think.

  He had thought the game would take his mind off his worries, but it had only made them worse. He wiped his hand over his face where the tears had dried on his cheeks. It was only an end-of-the-season friendly game. Arsenal v. Moscow Dynamo. But it had seemed like the old days when the blue shirts came out of the tunnel into the sunshine, kicking the ball about before the home team came on to the field. And after the kick-off he, like the rest of the crowd, had been absorbed by the football. When the band came on at half-time they’d played ‘Moscow Nights’ and ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’ and the crowd had loved it. When the final whistle blew he was delighted that his team had won 2-1. Not that it mattered, it was only a friendly. But when he heard the announcement booming over the loudspeakers – Moscow Dynamo 2, Arsenal 1 – it had been like an electric shock. Moscow Dynamo wasn’t his team. It had been, once. He had sat in the stand with Maria. A privileged spectator, because the Moscow Dynamo Club was sponsored by the KGB, and he, Anatoli Mikhailovich Petrov, was a KGB major. But whatever he was, he wasn’t that now. He was a defector to the West. A collaborator with his old enemies. Telling them all they wanted to know. And scared as hell of both sides.

  Only two days before, something had happened that had been like a clap of thunder warning of an impending storm. He had gone over the pros and cons a hundred times, but his conclusion was always the same. Neither the people in Moscow nor the people in London would have any reason to let him live once he’d finished telling them what they wanted to know. Bringing them up to date. There were faint rays of hope. The British had sent him to the Harley Street clinic for cosmetic surgery. They’d straightened out his nose, pulled back his ears and taken the bags from under his eyes. And with the beard he had grown he certainly looked different. Younger, in fact. If they were going to kill him why should they have bothered? If it was just a gesture to allay his fears why had the surgery been so thorough? And if they killed him they knew that the word would eventually filter through, and there’d be no more KGB and GRU men defecting to the West. The intelligence grape-vine worked, and the British knew that as well as he did.

  He opened his eyes and shivered, despite his heavy coat. He looked out of the taxi and wondered where he was. He knew the street-guides to London by heart but cities never looked the same on the ground. And then he saw the big statue and the roundabout. They were at Buckingham Palace and turning into Buckingham Palace Road. It wasn’t far now. He closed his eyes again. Not to block out his thoughts, but because his head ached from thinking. He had nobody to confide in. Only Silvester and the interrogator knew who he was. And then the tears came again as he realized that that was no longer true. The man had shown no sign of recognition and it had only been a fleeting glance. And they had worked together a long time ago. In the days when he was a successful operator. The man in command. He wondered if even Maria would recognize him now. As the taxi passed Victoria Station he put his head in his hands, slowly shaking his head in despair, as he remembered that scene three years before at the house near Edenbridge.

  2

  Lawler had already packed the two leather cases and he sat on the bed checking the other bits and pieces. A ticket for a Lufthansa single flight to Düsseldorf, economy class; two hundred D-marks in fifty-mark notes; two paperbacks and a green-covered Republic of Ireland passport. As he leafed through the passport his face, looking slightly bug-eyed from the flash, stared back at him from the small photograph. And the name was there, beautifully handwritten, short and crisp – Patrick Keeler, born Skibbereen, Co. Cork. Skibbereen was one of SIS’s little in-jokes, and Patrick Keeler wasn’t his real name. Otherwise the passport was genuine, or had been when an IRA man originally squeezed it out of one of the clerks at Foreign Affairs in Dublin. After SIS had picked it up in Belfast it had been sent for a bit of face-lifting in the basement at Petty France, and now it was his. At least it was for the couple of months he would be in Cologne.

  He slid the money and the passport into his jacket pocket and looked at his watch. It would be at least another fifteen minutes before the car came to take him to Gatwick. He picked up the two paperbacks. The very thin one was Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and
Wept, which he had read so many times in the past year. The thick, heavy one was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, which he had never read. The Gibbon was a sort of first-aid kit, an insurance against being caught in some benighted place with nothing to read except some hotel’s fire instructions, or a railway company’s bye-laws. Apart from its latent reading pleasure it felt good and smelled nice when he opened it. That haunting, lovely smell of printer’s ink on thin, smooth paper that is like balm to avid book-readers.

  With the comfort of the Gibbon heavy in his hands he looked around the room. Rooms, houses, gardens, places, no longer meant very much to him. Only people mattered, and this particular room was too recent an acquisition for him to have put down even the shallowest of roots. Apart from the books on the shelves there were few things in the flat that were his. The original Ansel Adams photograph of some rock formation in the Yosemite he had bought in New York. And beside the photograph, hung above the fireplace, was an oil-painting of a young girl in a long dress, her pale feet in a clear shallow brook as she sat on a daisy-strewn bank. Her long blonde hair emphasized the calm of her pre-Raphaelite face. He had bought it from a gallery in Bond Street. Alongside the hi-fi on the bottom bookshelf was a row of cassettes and a black and white photograph of a pretty blonde, set in an old-fashioned silver frame. And propped up against the cushions on the window seat was a doll, its silver blonde hair and baby clothes still pristine. He had bought it some months back when he thought Sarah was coming.

  It was at that moment that the bell rang. He thought at first that it must be the driver at the street door then, as the ringing continued, he walked over to the phone and picked it up.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Lawler?’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number.’ But he recognized Silvester’s voice.

  ‘It’s me, Jimmy, Silvester. Has the driver arrived yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When he does, send him back. I’m on my way to see you. I’ll be round in about twenty minutes.’

  ‘What’s going on, Adam?’

  ‘Nothing. A change of plan, that’s all. I’ll explain when I see you.’

  ‘What about the flight?’

  ‘Facilities are dealing with that. Don’t worry. See you.’

  Lawler stood with the receiver in his hand for a few moments before he laid it back on the cradle. Silvester was one of MI6’s Old China Hands, and was not given to panic, but there had been a faint echo of alarm in his voice. Operation Oberon in Cologne had a high priority, and he was Operation Oberon. All of it.

  He walked into the small, neat kitchen and opened one of the cupboards. Silvester would want a Scotch. He found the half-bottle of Dimple Haig, dusted it off, and put it on a tray with a glass and a jug of water. Then he put the kettle on and made himself a pot of tea.

  While the tea was brewing he looked along the row of cassettes, wondering what might soothe Silvester’s savage breast. He guessed that it would probably be Elgar or Delius. Silvester was very Brit, and TV documentaries about Britain’s rolling landscape always had ‘The Wand of Youth’ for background music as the clouds sailed over the hilltops. And nature programmes always had The Walk to the Paradise Gardens’. But he wasn’t in the mood for either of them and he put on Gliere’s Concerto for Harp.

  He left the door to the small kitchen open so that he could hear the music. It reminded him of his father, although it was his mother who was the musician. Like Gliere’s music his father wore his heart on his sleeve; not that his mother didn’t do that too, but her temperament was extrovert and flamboyant. His father was a quiet man; those who didn’t know him well concluded that it was the wife who wore the trousers in the Lawler household. But they were quite wrong. The quietness was the calm of a strength that yielded willingly to his affection and love for the Irish girl whose liveliness had kept him going in the days of struggle and uncertainty about his talent.

  James Lawler himself was thirty-seven and unmarried, although that was not for want of wishing it otherwise. Recruited to the Diplomatic Service in his final year at Cambridge, he had served for two years at the Moscow embassy as Third Secretary and his already fluent Russian had made his transfer to SIS almost inevitable. And, as so often happens, his early years in SIS were spent in places where his Russian was of little use – Brazil, Washington, Cairo and the Caribbean. Only in the last two years, in Europe, in operations against the KGB, had his Russian been usefully employed. But by now he had worked for all five of SIS’s sections concerned with anti-KGB operations in Europe and the Americas.

  As with his father, his appearance and demeanour were deceptive. A pale, lean, poet’s face and what seemed an easy-going personality gave a faintly academic air to a man who had learned early on how to survive in back-streets from Rio to Belize. He had learned from experience that you were more likely to survive if you trusted no one, and believed no one. There was no litmus paper that distinguished friend from foe or truth from lies. Just experience and intuition. The poet’s face and the amiable manner served him well.

  He was still wondering what it was all about when the doorbell rang and he went down the steep, narrow stairs to let Silvester in. Operation Oberon was nothing to do with Silvester; it had been Dyer’s baby right from the start. And there was no love lost between Silvester and Dyer.

  Silvester, in white tie and tails, stood on the pavement, one foot on the bottom step and one hand on the cast-iron finial of the railings. He looked handsome in his Brit sort of way. Big features, a square jaw, and an old-fashioned moustache that gave a nice balance to his face. As he made his way up the narrow stairs his broad shoulders seemed to fill the whole space between the walls.

  In the sitting-room Silvester stood in front of the empty fireplace, a white silk scarf with fringes draped round his neck, his big hands in his jacket pockets, the thumbs outside. He stood with his feet planted well apart like heroes stand in boys’ adventure stories. It wasn’t phoney in any way, despite the fact that so far as Lawler knew Silvester had never needed to be a hero. In five more years he’d get his knighthood, and a fine figure of a knight he would make.

  ‘A whisky, Adam?’

  ‘Excellent, Jimmy. With soda, please.’

  ‘No soda, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No matter. Ginger ale will do fine.’

  ‘No ginger ale, Adam. Sorry. How about water?’

  For a moment Silvester looked at Lawler’s face as if he might be having his leg pulled. Then, reassured, he shrugged, and said, ‘Well then. Water it shall be.’

  Lawler poured the water into Silvester’s glass and the older man stared at the mixture with pursed, judicial lips before he held up the glass.

  ‘Cheers, my boy.’

  There was a lot of genuine noblesse oblige about Silvester, and there were many who said that he would have preferred to serve out his time with his regiment rather than get mixed up in the cat’s-cradle of MI6.

  Silvester slid off his scarf and looked around for a place to sit, and chose the big club armchair. It was leather, a man’s chair, unlike the tapestry settee.

  Silvester looked at him over the top of his glass.

  ‘Got a problem, James. My prize Russian’s gone sour on me. You won’t have got wind of him. But his name’s Petrov. Anatoli Petrov.’

  Lawler shook his head. ‘No. I haven’t heard of him. What’s the problem?’

  ‘Don’t rightly know. Hints about wanting to go back. Mother Russia and all that sort of thing. Understandable, but it’s definitely not on.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Forty-two, forty-three, something like that.’

  ‘What sort of man?’

  ‘You’d better read his file and make your own judgement.’

  ‘Who’s got it?’

  ‘It’s with my secretary. I’ve told her that you might be asking for it. It’s highly classified so you’ll have to read it in my office.’

  ‘Does he say why he wants to go back?’

  Silve
ster leaned forward and put his empty glass on the coffee table. He settled back in his chair and looked at Lawler for several seconds before he spoke.

  ‘Oddly enough, he never says outright that he does want to go back. Just hints about it. Drags it into the conversation. What would we do if he wanted to go back. That sort of thing.’

  ‘And what do you say when he talks about it?’

  ‘I just try and smooth him down. I say that we should have to consider it if it ever arose. That sort of crap.’

  ‘And what’s his reaction to that?’

  ‘Seems to cool him down for a bit, but sooner or later he comes back to it.’

  ‘How do I come into it?’

  Silvester’s thick forefinger stroked his bushy moustache slowly as he looked back at Lawler.

  ‘I want you to take him over. If he’s genuinely homesick you’ll have to help him settle down. Make him feel at home here. If it’s not homesickness then find out what the hell he wants.’

  ‘Why does he matter so much?’

  Silvester shifted uneasily in his chair, reaching down for his fallen scarf, arranging it slowly and carefully on the arm of the chair. It slid back to the floor again as he turned to look at Lawler.

  ‘He’s probably the most important defector we’ve ever had. For the two years before he came over he was in Directorate “S”, responsible for all illegals in Englishspeaking countries. We’ve been de-briefing him slowly and carefully for three months. Up to a couple of weeks ago he’d been entirely co-operative. Right now we’re stuck.’

  ‘Why did you pick on me?’

  Lawler could see the relief in Silvester’s eyes as he assumed that the question implied agreement.