Shadow of Shadows

by Ted Allbeury

  ‘We thought you were a bit like him. A bit Russian. And your Russian’s fluent.’

  Silvester had the good grace to smile as he said it, but it obviously hadn’t been meant as a joke.

  ‘In what way am I like him?’

  ‘Romantic. You know what I mean. The arts, that sort of thing. Emotional ups and downs.’ Silvester waved his big hand limply, and let it fall on the arm of the chair. ‘How long is this for?’

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  ‘Any restrictions?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t let the bugger do a flit.’

  ‘Did anything happen that might have caused him to stop co-operating?’

  ‘Nothing that I’ve been able to pin down. He was talking all we wanted, and then he started being evasive. Couldn’t remember names, that sort of thing. I got the quack to check him over and he said there was nothing wrong that he could identify. It was the same interrogator all the time. We weren’t pressuring him. We hadn’t needed to.’

  ‘What sort of private life does he have?’

  ‘He’s got a small place in Ebury Street, and a girlfriend. He’s under observation of course but he can do pretty much what he wants. He gets a regular income.’

  ‘Is the girl-friend one of ours?’

  ‘No. She’s the genuine article but I understand she plays him up. He wants to marry her but she won’t have him.’

  ‘Would you let him go back if he insists?’

  Silvester slowly shook his head without speaking. And somehow it seemed more definite than if he had said it aloud.

  ‘Is he in any danger?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s had cosmetic surgery and he’s got high-grade cover. We keep a good eye on him. Several good eyes.’

  ‘Does he know about me?’

  ‘I’ve told him that he needs a rest and that you’ll be looking after him. And I told him that you’re totally trusted and secure.’

  ‘What about his de-briefing?’

  ‘Forget it. It’s not working anymore. It’s a waste of time.’

  ‘How many people know about him?’

  ‘I do. The Chief does. Tony Reid’s been interrogating him. And one of our people in Berlin brought him over. Nobody else knows who he is or what he’s doing. The Soviets have kept quiet about him apart from the routine protests. We’ve denied all knowledge of him. And it’s got to stay like that. The KGB have been nosing around but we’re pretty sure that even they wouldn’t recognize him now. But we’re taking no chances. Everything on paper is in my own safe.’

  ‘Has what he’s told you been useful?’

  ‘Yes. But it stops short, by about two years. He’s only up to ’68 and we’re desperate for the rest. He knows it. And he knows he can afford to play games. You don’t discuss this with anyone but me. You understand?’

  ‘Yes. What’s his cover?’

  ‘He speaks reasonable English and fluent German so we’ve given him documentation as a West German journalist. A free-lance.’

  ‘What about Operation Oberon?’

  ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘The operation I was on.’

  ‘Oh, forget it,’ Silvester said dismissively.

  ‘Does Dyer know it’s off?’

  ‘He’s been told that you’ve been transferred to me until further notice.’

  ‘He doesn’t know what I’ll be doing?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And if he asks?’

  ‘You say absolutely nothing. Just refer him to me.’

  ‘How did he react when you told him that I was taken off Oberon?’

  Silvester raised his eyebrows. He didn’t like understrappers enquiring into their elders and betters’ little fights. ‘I’ve no idea, James, But none of us is indispensable.’ Lawler wasn’t sure whether the implied dispensability was directed at him or at Dyer. But he didn’t dwell on it. ‘When do you want me to start?’

  Silvester threw two keys on to the coffee table. ‘Tonight. He’s in our block of flats at the far end of Ebury Street. There’s one key for the main door, and one for his flat. Flat number 324. Both the porters are ours. Draw your cash from Cooper. Spend what you need, there’ll be no accounting within reason. Keep me informed. Cooper can always get me if I’m not at the office. Contact me any time. Night or day.’

  Lawler saw Silvester down to the door. At the bottom of the stairs Silvester turned to look at him.

  ‘How are things with Joanna?’

  ‘Much the same.’

  ‘Anything I could do?’

  Lawler shook his head. ‘No thanks. There’s nothing anyone can do.’

  Silvester sighed. ‘You know that creep’s in drugs?’

  ‘I guessed he was. But I’d never be able to prove it.’

  Silvester hesitated, and then said, ‘If you ever do want to prove it, see me.’

  And then with a wave of his arm he walked down the four stone steps looking each way for a taxi.

  Lawler walked slowly back up the stairs and tried not to look at the face in the silver frame. The bedroom door was open and he walked in. It took about twenty minutes to unpack and put his things away. He slid the pistol down into the toe of one of the black shoes in his wardrobe.

  He checked the other two bedrooms and walked back into the sitting-room. The flat seemed even more alien now that he was staying. The latest in the series of temporary places that he had used in the last seven months. He had been lucky to get it, even with Facilities’ influence. But he had a year’s lease with an option to renew, and in the spring of 1970 that was more than most tenants had. It was clean and reasonably furnished compared with the tatty pads that he had used for a month or two at a time, but its reasonableness didn’t comfort his restless mind. He didn’t want to have any time to think about his life and the shambles of his relationship with Joanna. He had been so stupid, so unforgivably stupid. Stupid to care for her in the first place. He should have let her continue her Gadarene rush alone. He closed his eyes to block out the vision of three-year-old Sarah. That had been more than stupidity. Irresponsible and unforgivable. A small and charming, pretty ghost, to haunt the edges of his mind for the rest of his days.

  He brought his thoughts back to the present. Over the years he’d had some pretty odd things to do in his time with SIS, but acting as wet-nurse and psychiatrist for a homesick KGB defector was something new. He didn’t really fancy it, it was a bit too open-ended for his liking. Too indefinite. It lacked . . . he tried to think of the word they so often used in crosswords . . . parameters. It lacked parameters.

  He looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock, with an unplanned evening ahead of him. The driver hadn’t appeared so he guessed that Facilities must have got to him before he left the garage. He’d have a look at Petrov’s file before he met him.

  At Century House the duty officer had checked with Silvester’s girl and then taken him up to her office. The file was in the safe but it took twenty minutes to get clearance for the combination.

  As he sat at the desk and opened the thin file he realized that only the basic facts concerning Petrov had been included. Maybe that was all they had. Anatoli Mikhailovich Petrov had been born on 17 October 1928 in Leningrad, and until the German artillery had smashed the area to rubble, he had lived with his parents in one of the back streets behind the Finlyansky Station. In 1940 his father, an engineer at the waterworks, had been called up to a pioneer regiment and had never been heard of since. Petrov’s mother had been killed by an aerial land-mine towards the end of 1943. The fifteen-year-old boy had lived in the Leningrad ruins with other children for six months and had then been rounded up by a Red Army patrol and sent to an orphanage in Vologda. At the end of the war he had been sent to an orphanage in Kiev. After two years at Kiev University taking English and German he had shown such promise that he was transferred to Moscow University and registered as an officer candidate for the Red Army.

  In 1949, aged twenty-one, he was sent to the KGB training schoo
l in Samarkand. Two years later he was posted to the Illegals Directorate of the First Chief Directorate. After almost three years’ individual training in Moscow Petrov had been sent to Berlin to take charge of all KGB networks into West Berlin and West Germany.

  In February 1958 he had been recalled to Moscow with the rank of major in the KGB. By 1970, as a full colonel, his responsibilities had been solely for operations in Britain.

  He had married in 1958, with special permission, a pretty Polish girl from Krakow. Despite the careful security checks into her background there had been a problem. Not in their relationship. They loved one another dearly. But as an all too often open critic of the subservience of Russians to their bureaucracy she had been a constant embarrassment, and finally an actual danger to them both. Much as he loved her he had eventually had to submit to the pressures from his seniors. And once the hint had been made that unless he divorced her she would be sent to a labour camp, he had reluctantly agreed to a divorce, and the girl had been shipped back to Warsaw.

  Despite his sacrifice his status and promotion possibilities had seemed to be irretrievably damaged. The girl’s comments on Soviet life, and her Polish independence about the petty restrictions on even the privileged elite were neither forgiven nor forgotten just because she had been removed. It was suggested that he would be moved to either Sofia or East Berlin, but in the end he had been promoted and kept in Moscow in charge of all illegals in Britain.

  He had made his first tentative approaches to SIS in West Berlin. It had taken six months of cautious negotiations before the arrangements were made for him to come over during a duty visit to Amsterdam.

  There was no photograph and no physical description.

  3

  Lawler walked to Waterloo Station, waited until someone else took the first taxi on the rank and then took the second. It dropped him in Lower Belgrave Street, opposite Victoria Station.

  It had been cold all day, colder than mid-April should be. But now the wind had dropped, and there was a faint touch of spring in the night air. Ebury Street had been ravished by architects at the Victoria Station end. The style was New Brutal, but the developers and the architects seemed to have surrendered about a third of the way up the street and the pleasant old houses had survived. He walked to the far end of the street to where the small block of flats stood isolated on its small mat of dusty, green grass.

  The porter who opened the big glass door was wearing a brown frock-coat trimmed with gold braiding, and he stopped Lawler just inside the foyer. He was almost bald, with a shiny apple face, and all the signs of an ex-NCO. Lawler showed him his ID card and the porter walked over with him to the lift and pressed the button for the fifth floor. For some reason Flat 324 was located on the fifth floor.

  As the lift gates folded back at the fifth floor Lawler saw the sign on the wall that pointed to the right for 320,322 and 324. 324 was the last flat before the steel door marked ‘Fire’.

  The corridor was carpeted, but the walls and ceiling were painted an institutional yellow with no relieving decoration.

  He stood facing the door of 324 for a moment and then pressed the button beside the door. There was a faint smell of disinfectant in the corridor.

  Nobody came to the door and he rang again. He waited, looking down at the bar of light at the bottom of the door. He knocked on the door but still nobody came. Finally he took out the two keys. The first one fitted the lock and turned, opening the door without any hindrance.

  To the right he could see a half-open door that led to a kitchen. He pushed the kitchen door fully open. The light was on, and there were crockery and utensils piled in the sink and the remains of a meal for one on the small table.

  There was a good-sized living-room and two bedrooms. A double and a single. Somebody had been very subtle in furnishing the flat. The decor, the furniture, everything, was Moscow early 1950s. A chessboard, with the pieces set out, was on a small bamboo table by one of the armchairs.

  A couple of dozen books were on the shelves on the far wall. A Russian—English dictionary, paperbacks in English of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov, John Barron’s KGB, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and half a dozen Galsworthy novels.

  There was a long, heavy, mahogany sideboard with an old-fashioned embroidered runner along its top, a bowl of fruit at the centre, and a new-looking music-centre alongside a row of records. They were mainly classical and jazz. About fifty of them. He switched on the radio. It was on the short-wave band and was tuned to Radio Moscow which was doing its version of the news in German. He switched it off and sat down on the big three-seater settee.

  It was almost an hour before the door opened. The man who came in was tall and slim, and good-looking in a hawkish sort of way. Only for a second did his eyes flicker as he saw Lawler sitting there. He was wearing a raincoat and a brown trilby hat which he raised with old-fashioned courtesy as he walked over holding out his hand.

  Unsmiling he said, ‘Mr Lawler,’ and shook hands, his dark brown eyes on Lawler’s face. ‘They gave you a key, I expect.’

  ‘Yes. But I forgot to check out your cover name.’

  Petrov smiled. ‘Not very imaginative, I’m afraid. Peters. Anton Peters. But do sit down. Please,’ and he waved Lawler back to the settee. As Petrov turned to hang up his hat and raincoat he said, with his back turned, ‘Have you helped yourself to a drink?’

  ‘No. And I haven’t been through your drawers and cupboards either.’

  Petrov swung round, his eyebrows raised, his forehead creased. Then with a half-smile he said, ‘I was taught “qui s’excuse, s’accuse”.’

  Lawler laughed. ‘You sound like Khrushchev, Anatoli.’ The Russian relaxed and grinned. ‘Are you staying here the night?’

  ‘I wondered if you’d care to move into my place – it’s not far away. There’s plenty of room and it might be easier for both of us.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘King’s Road, Chelsea.’

  ‘Very nice.’ Petrov looked down at his shoes for a few moments, then lifting his head to look at Lawler he said, ‘Am I under orders? Do I have to move?’

  ‘Of course not. But we both live alone and I thought we might be company for one another.’

  ‘You’re not married?’

  Lawler hesitated. ‘No.’

  ‘Girl-friend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Boy-friend?’

  ‘No.’

  Petrov suddenly looked tired, almost sad. His shoulders sagged and a muscle flickered below his left eye.

  ‘Not a very lively couple, are we?’

  Lawler smiled. ‘We’ll survive, Tolya. Pack your things for tonight and we’ll go out for a drink.’

  ‘I’ll have to make a phone call first.’

  ‘OK. Take your time.’

  Petrov walked over to the phone and dialled. He waited, then hung up and dialled again. He waited for several minutes and finally hung up. He sighed, and without speaking walked into the bedroom.

  As Lawler sat there alone he realized that he hadn’t been very professional. He had given no thought as to how he would deal with Petrov, or what their relationship should be. He should have ignored Silvester’s pressure and left their first meeting until he had learned a lot more about Petrov’s character and background. He should have talked to the interrogator. Instead of which he had just barged in without thought or preparation, and inside five minutes they sounded like a couple of elderly queers, bristling at one another over some suspected infidelity.

  Then Petrov was standing there, canvas bag in one hand, the other hand supporting him against the door-frame.

  ‘Vy gavarite pa-Russki?’

  ‘Da.’

  And that seemed to cheer up Petrov. He walked over for his raincoat and hat. Then he turned, looked round the room and said, ‘I’m ready.’

  They had a couple of drinks at the Markham Arms and then walked back to Lawler’s flat. They were still talking at midnight and it wasn’t until then that Law
ler seized the nettle.

  ‘Tell me about your problem, Tolya.’

  ‘What problem?’

  ‘Maybe problem is the wrong word. Silvester said that he thought you were worried about something.’

  ‘What am I supposed to be worried about?’

  ‘I don’t really know, but I want to help you if I can.’

  ‘What do you know about me?’

  ‘Very little. Your name. Your job in Moscow. That you have a girl-friend. That’s about it.’

  ‘Who told you to call me Tolya?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘So why do you use that name?’

  ‘Your full name is Anatoli. Tolya is the diminutive. It’s just more friendly.’

  ‘Why don’t you keep to my cover name, Anton?’

  Lawler shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You don’t look like an Anton to me. But I’ll use whatever name you wish.’

  Petrov looked at Lawler’s face intently for several minutes, his eyes alert like an eagle’s eyes, his mouth tight with tension. When he spoke his voice was very low as if he feared that he could be overheard.

  ‘Tell me, are they going to try and do another Behar?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Petrov sighed. ‘OK. Forget it. I think I’ll go to bed.’

  ‘How about a night-cap? A whisky, perhaps?’

  ‘Have you got hot chocolate?’

  Lawler smiled. ‘Yes. We’ll both have one. Get to bed and Til bring it to you.’

  When Lawler put the glass of chocolate on the table at the side of the bed Petrov was half-sitting, half-lying against the pillows, his eyes closed. Without opening his eyes he said, ‘What kind of a man are you, Lawler?’

  Lawler turned slowly at the door and looked at the figure in the bed. He walked back and sat on the bed at the far end.

  ‘What do you want to know, Tolya?’

  ‘Are you the one who has to kill me?’

  ‘Nobody’s going to kill you, Tolya. Why should they?’ The brown eyes looked at him as if they were trying to make a judgement. To weigh him up. Petrov sighed deeply and gripped the bed cover so tightly that his hand was trembling.

  ‘I’m scared, my friend.’