Dirty Tricks, page 10
With no intention of committing himself Henderson thought for a moment, and then said, ‘These precision-guided weapons you say the Americans have stockpiled in Europe – missiles and such-like – do the Russians have them?’
‘It is our belief that they have nothing so sophisticated. The Americans have sustained a big technological lead there.’
‘And these neutron warheads?’ Henderson asked as he knocked out his pipe, an act which Quinn interpreted as a device to avoid looking him in the eye. ‘Do the Russians have them?’
‘Not, apparently, in meaningful numbers. They are essentially a defensive weapon against massed tank attack and, in spite of what they say, the Soviet leaders do not really believe that NATO will ever attack them. So the pressure to produce them has not been so great.’
Henderson sucked at his empty pipe for a moment before putting it in his pocket. ‘So the Warsaw Pact Forces could find themselves in for quite a shock if they attacked in mass formations expecting an easy run?’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘In that case I wonder why the President doesn’t warn the Soviet leaders on his hot-line to Moscow to deter them from attacking at all – if, by some quite incredible miscalculation, they should ever do so.’
‘I’ve wondered that myself, Sir. Perhaps the President feels that at this late stage he just wouldn’t be believed.’
Harbouring doubts himself about Quinn’s sensational information, the Prime Minister thought the comment more than reasonable. ‘You’ll keep me informed if you get any further evidence on this subject from your spy, I mean your volunteer?’ he asked.
‘I will indeed, Sir,’ Quinn said as he turned and left the room.
Was Henderson guilty or was Falconer catastrophically misinformed? Quinn pondered on the possibilities as he climbed into the back of his unobtrusive, black car discreetly parked on Horse Guards Parade and told his chauffeur-bodyguard, ‘Clarges Street, please.’
Somehow in Quinn’s practised estimation, Henderson had an indefinable air of guilt about him. It was the eyes. He had never liked Henderson’s eyes. They looked shifty. So different from the earnest, direct gaze of the previous Prime Minister, in whom his trust had been total. If he was guilty he was a damned good actor, but then most successful politicians were, they had to be to attract and hold public and Parliamentary support. The unobtrusive, able administrator who was ‘good on his arse’ and got things done never reached the top. That position was reserved for the voluble orator who was ‘good on his feet’.
How could a man of such achievement as Henderson have been drawn into the KGB net? From his long study of dossiers at his disposal, many containing transcripts of private conversations, some even from bedside telephone ‘bugs’, Quinn was convinced that in his secret life no man was totally immune to the threat of blackmail, should the KGB chance to discover a weakness and exploit it. The earlier in life the strike was made the likelier the quarry was to succumb and, once enmeshed, however trivially at first, escape became increasingly difficult as his public position improved.
From the Prime Minister’s file at Century House, Quinn knew of a few sexual misdemeanours but he could hardly be said to be an ardent womanizer, attractive though he was and ample though his opportunities might be with so many young and ambitious women MPs in his party. He seemed too ambitious himself to have prejudiced his career by having a mistress, though, having seen Winifred Henderson, he would not have blamed him had he done so.
Money was a possibility that could not entirely be discounted. Like so many Socialists who acquired power by preaching the doctrine of fair shares for all, Henderson wanted an unfair share for himself and his family. ‘Outside every “fat cat” is a Socialist trying to get in’ was Quinn’s dictum Yet the idea that Henderson was selling secrets seemed out of character. Quinn had never liked Henderson, but could not bring himself to believe that he would ever have made himself a traitor just for cash.
Stupidity? That seemed a likelier cause. While Henderson had the common political ability of covering a moderate mind with a veneer of brightness compounded of hard work, brass nerve and ready wit, he had consistently shown lack of judgement which, in Quinn’s mind, was the essence of political intelligence. So his recruitment to the Communist cause could have been completely ideological, perhaps way back when that pro-Soviet Cambridge don, who had certainly recruited others, had still been active.
Quinn looked up at the barred windows of the headquarters of ‘the other firm’, MI5, as his car swung along Curzon Street. What a coup for Century House if Falconer’s tip proved true. Obviously, MI5 had not had a whiff of it and were certainly not going to be told. It was going to be an anxious twenty-four hours before ‘Uncle Vanya’ could report back – at the earliest.
Angela was ready with a tooth-chilling dry martini as Quinn’s key turned in the door of her flat. She always knew when he had left the office and was on his way because the telephone started to ring. The flat, which faced the back of the building, provided quiet from the late-night traffic of Clarges Street and the 6 am thump-thump of the compressor in the garbage-collecting truck, even if a view of brick wall and concrete was the alternative. It had been chosen because, like Quinn’s own apartment, there was no adjoining flat providing a shared wall where a spike-microphone, thrust into the brickwork, might eavesdrop on conversations. And the Electronics Division had fitted the three rooms, and even the two bathrooms, with anti-intruder recorders, which eliminated the necessity for crude seals on door-locks and markers in jambs.
‘How did it go?’ Angela asked.
‘Pretty negatively, as I expected. He played it quite cleverly if he is a spy, though he did show a certain technical interest in the weapons towards the end.’
‘Did you record him?’
‘Of course,’ Quinn answered. He withdrew a small tape-recorder from the left pocket of his jacket, which he then took off carefully to avoid damaging the fine wires leading inside the left sleeve of his pink-striped, Turnbull and Asser, shirt to the rather ornate cuff-link which concealed a miniaturized microphone.
‘I must say the equipment has improved since the days when I used to do this regularly,’ he said. ‘But I’m not playing it back tonight, my love. I’m putting Albert Henderson out of my mind until we hear from “Uncle Vanya”.’
‘Yes, darling,’ Angela said, suppressing a smile. By a substantial effort of will her lover might avoid talking about the Prime Minister that evening, but as for putting him out of his mind that was quite impossible for a man of his restless, ferreting temperament.
‘I’ve booked a table at the Meridiana,’ she said, referring to an Italian restaurant in Chelsea.
Mayfair restaurants like the Mirabelle, round the corner, were far too expensive for the Director-General of the Secret Intelligence Service dining out with his girl-friend, as Angela understood because she dealt with his tax and paid his bills. For salary purposes he ranked only as a Deputy-Secretary of the Civil Service, and was paid accordingly with full rate of income tax and limited fringe benefits, even working meals with prime contacts having to be accounted for to the bureaucratic machine. Long gone were the days when the Director-General had a drawer full of money – a slush-fund which he could use as he wished.
As was their practice for security reasons, no ‘shop’ was talked during their meal, for directional microphones had been brought to such a pitch of technical excellence that conversation could be overheard from a quite distant table. However, Angela’s prediction was confirmed after they had tried to sleep following energetic love-making.
With considerable justification Quinn regarded himself as something of a heterosexual athlete and, when asked where he had been educated, was not joking when he replied, ‘Trinity and Magdalen, same as Oscar Wilde, but my habits are very different.’ Normally satisfaction of his requirements left him so pleasantly exhausted that he slid easily into oblivion. That night, however, he several times shouted in his sleep in the peculiar way that told his bed-mate that he was having the horrific recurrent dream which was his particular symptom of acute anxiety.
Angela was one of very few people to whom Quinn had confessed his deepest fear, her predecessor being another. He was acutely claustrophobic, and while he could control this by avoiding enclosed spaces like lifts, pretending that he preferred the stairs for the exercise they gave him, there was nothing he could do about his dreams. In a moment of particular confidence, under the mellowing influence of wine, he had revealed how this fear of close confinement had been discovered by some bullies at an English boarding-school. Their reaction had been to shut him in an oak chest while one of them hammered on the lid with his heels. He had shrieked so loudly that the bullies repeated the treatment whenever they felt in need of enlivenment. There was one boy, whom he still remembered with intense loathing, who was usually responsible for starting the hunt for him.
Was it this searing experience, Angela wondered, which was responsible for the pleasure he undoubtedly derived from pulling off some ‘dirty trick’ on others? Was his satisfaction some kind of unconscious revenge? The logical consequence should have been a determination to avoid inflicting on others what had been inflicted on him, but Angela was old enough to know that this was not the way of human nature. She had seen too many instances among her friends where a son who had been harshly brought up and hated his father for it, yet treated his own children in the same manner.
Whatever its early result on Quinn’s character, the trauma of the oak chest had later been reinforced during the Korean War when he was serving as a field agent operating from the British Embassy in Seoul. His only escape from the advancing Chinese during a hazardous operation had been to squeeze into the bomb bay of an American fighter-bomber leaving an evacuated airfield. The prospect of spending even half an hour in such a confined space had been so daunting that only the alternative of months in a cramped Communist interrogation cell had forced him into the aircraft’s belly From that time onwards the noise above him in his nightmares was sometimes that of hammering on wood, at others the droning whine of a jet-engine.
Throughout his service he believed that he had managed to conceal this character weakness from his colleagues, rightly suspecting that it could have affected his chances of promotion, if only because it might provide a lever to break him if ever he fell into the hands of enemy Counter-Intelligence. But those who slept with him for any length of time – and he disliked sleeping alone – eventually required some explanation of his night terrors.
On this particular night the noise was of hammering and the swirling faces of Henderson, ‘Uncle Vanya’, the hated Yakovlev and the shadowy, unknown features of ‘Diamond Jim’ intruded into the darkness of the coffin in which he had been buried alive.
It had been through Quinn’s phobia that Angela had gained further insight into his character. Out of the blue he had recently received a tragic letter from the bully who had been most responsible for making his school life so miserable. Now a figure of some importance in the banking world, his letter sought forgiveness.
‘My doctors have just confirmed that I shall be meeting my Maker in months, possibly in weeks, and I wish to make my peace with you, among others, whom I have offended. You may find it hard to believe, after so many years, but I have been distressed for some time – long before I became mortally ill – by the memory of the suffering I helped to inflict on you. I am hoping that, in the circumstances, you will not find it unforgivable.’
Quinn’s reaction – ‘I have no intention of even replying to the bastard and he can rot in hell’ – brought rebuke from Angela but when he gave his reason for the refusal she knew there would be no change of mind.
‘Of course I have forgiven him,’ he insisted. ‘But if he is such a bloody fool to think that I still hold it against him after all these years then to hell with him. I can’t stand fools.’
Chapter Seven
There were few basic differences between the office of Sergei Yakovlev, the chairman of the KGB, the Komitet Gosudarst-vennoi Bezopasnosti – Soviet Committee for State Security – and that of Sir Mark Quinn. Yakovlev’s looked more old-fashioned, with its high ceiling, mahogany-pannelled walls and oriental carpets. The huge desk had a different shape but it, too, was piled high with folders and reports, and its occupant also regarded paper as an enemy which could only be worn down by slow attrition.
The battery of telephones was even larger than Quinn’s, with direct lines to many Kremlin offices, to other Politburo and Party bosses and to the scores of KGB offices scattered throughout the vast country where the organization, the Party’s main instrument of power, was responsible for keeping the people ‘disciplined’.
Tall for a Russian with a flat, Slavic face, dark straight hair and somewhat bat-eared, Yakovlev was pleasant looking and, for a man in his late fifties, in good physical trim. After a lifetime actively dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist cause, but even more so to his native land, he had recently achieved the coveted membership of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s decision-making body, with the probability of still higher office. He was the first career officer of the KGB to have risen from its ranks to its political directorship, and as such was held in particular awe and respect by Counter-Intelligence services throughout the world. But he was far from happy and still further from contentment.
The higher command, and Party Secretary-General Anatoli Borisenko and Prime Minister Konstantin Volkhov in particular, were blaming him for failing to control the dissidence, the strikes and the insurrections in the satellite countries, where organizations corresponding to the KGB were supposed to take their lead from him.
At such times Zina, his secretary, who had been assigned to him ten years previously and had risen with him, was a tower of support. With her, as with nobody else, since spies from other State Departments were infiltrated even into the KGB, he felt secure in criticizing his political overlords in terms as harsh as his thoughts. She agreed wholeheartedly that leaders like Borisenko and Volkhov were criminal in the way they clung to power when so obviously overtaken by senility. They went on and on, convincing themselves that their country could not spare them. And those who had come up with them helped to keep them there, like the aged Foreign Secretary, who had even suffered a seizure in full camera view at the United Nations Assembly, and like the Defence Minister, Marshal Davorin, who, though distinguished in the war with Nazi Germany, was seventy-two.
‘It’s their blasted fault that so many people are so restless,’ Yakovlev said as he sifted his papers. ‘Our drive for influence and hegemony outside our boundaries is going magnificently. But there’s no domestic change and no signs of any. Why can’t these old men see that there must be changes – that our people are just not going to put up with austerity and restriction forever? Now there’s this crazy idea of initiating a war in Europe to unite the people! It’s lunatic!’
‘Any war is lunatic,’ Zina said, drawing Yakovlev one of his endless beakers of tea from a samovar, his only concession to old technology.
Born and reared in Kursk, her parents had both been killed there in a German air raid when she was small, and it had been her belief that the KGB’s main concern was with preventing war which had led her into its service. A jolie-laide, with rather high cheek-bones, hazel eyes, and mousey hair swept severely into a bun, she did not attract men, though some years previously there had been a fiery love-affair with a foreigner, which had ended with such searing abruptness that she had never fully recovered from it. She roused no sexual interest in Yakovlev who, as a young political thruster had married the daughter of a Party boss and, while Zina knew that the marriage could hardly be said to have been happy, he was not going to risk disrupting it when he had become a public figure with such glittering possibilities.
He would not even take up the option of infidelity which he believed had long been open to him. Zina had the habit of hitching up the tired elastic of her GUM store knickers by pinching it through her dress, but that did not excite Yakovlev, who suspected that it was intended to do so. Unlike her counterpart in MI6 she did not seem made for sex, and the bedroom adjoining the office went unused, except on the rare occasions when Yakovlev spent the night there during some emergency or crucial operation.
Behind Yakovlev’s desk was a huge map showing Moscow at the centre of a rather oddly shaped world, where Soviet interest had grown enormously during his political life and would expand much further, if he got his way, particularly in the eastward direction. But before then there was routine work to be done – as there always was in any struggle for promotion and power.
‘Who said Intelligence work was exciting?’ Yakovlev asked rhetorically, as Zina deposited a metal security-box on his desk. It was the daily KGB offering from the Resident at the Soviet Embassy in London, which had been flown out in the diplomatic bag.
He stood up, a smart but sombrely dressed figure who favoured dark grey suits, and unlocked the box with a key which he kept on a chain attached to his belt, picked out a sheaf of papers, and thumbed through them.
‘Huh, if the British are really expecting us to make a move on the Central Front they are remarkably relaxed about it,’ he remarked. ‘There are no signs of any troop movements in Britain, no mobilization, no special reinforcements from the United States, no attempts to round up any of our subversion units there. How blind can these people be?’
‘I thought you were sure that they are playing it down because they are scared of provoking us into a fight.’
‘I did say that, but in this crazy game you can never be absolutely sure, particularly with the British. They are a very strange lot, the British. They never have a straightforward line. Ah, here’s what I’m looking for. The latest dispatch from “John Bull”.’
