A Spy's Life (18 page)

Blanchard by now had pushed his chair back and was making for the door.

Harland’s temper snapped.

‘You keep me here one moment longer and tomorrow you will be answering for your actions to the Foreign Secretary and the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. I’m not pissing around. I have an authority from the Secretary-General which effectively makes me his personal ambassador. That means you hold me here at your peril.’

‘Oh, in what capacity do you represent the Secretary-General?’ asked Blanchard with laboured sarcasm. ‘The investigation of the world’s sewage treatment plants? The distribution of electrical appliances in the developing nations? Do you have proof of your role, or must we take your word on it?’

‘Just accept that it exists.’ Harland wasn’t going to give him the letter yet. Much better for them to get a call from Jaidi’s office. He prayed Harriet had got through.

‘We will see you in the morning, Mr Harland,’ said Rivers, opening the door. ‘In the meantime, I recommend that you think very carefully about your position.’

Harland sat down. A minute or two later, the two men who had picked him up at the airport came in and told him to follow them. They showed him into what looked like an army barracks bedroom a few doors along the corridor where Griffiths asked for his personal possessions. Harland handed him his wallet, passport and phone and said he had nothing else. Griffiths seemed to accept this.

He looked around the room. There was a small window, high above the bed, a table, a chair and a reading lamp. He supposed it had once been a storeroom. On the walls regular indentations indicated that shelves had risen from floor to ceiling. The room smelt as though it had been sluiced down with cleaning fluid.

He sat down in the cold, stale air and unscrewed the top of a bottle of mineral water, left on the table together with some sandwiches. He poured the contents into a paper cup, peeled the wrapper from the sandwiches, and consumed them automatically. When he’d finished he lowered himself on to the bed and shifted to his side. There was no pillow and his head was still sensitive to the touch. He wondered about Tomas’s call. Was he all part of some ludicrously Byzantine plan of Vigo’s? If he had been, they surely would have produced Tomas in some shape in the general slew of allegations. The fact that they hadn’t mentioned him made his story a lot more believable. Then quite suddenly his mind switched off. He shut his eyes and fell asleep.

At about six in the morning he was aware of the door opening. It caught him in the very deepest sleep and a few moments passed before he realised that Vigo was standing in the doorway. He rubbed his eyes as Vigo moved into the room and switched on the table lamp, angling it in Harland’s direction. Harland swore.

‘For Christ’s sake, turn that off. What the hell are you playing at?’

Vigo nudged the lamp so that the light bounced off the wall and threw an aura around him. He sat down and stretched out a leg.

So, Vigo had come to hear his confession: Vigo, the cardinal confessor.

‘I imagine that you’ve been contacted by the UN,’ said Harland.

He didn’t reply.

‘You know bloody well that you can’t keep me here. That stuff your stooges from Five threw at me was grotesque. Not a word of it will stand up in court.’

‘A matter of opinion, Bobby, a matter of opinion.’ Vigo sighed to underline the gravity of Harland’s situation. ‘You know, I always had my suspicions. There was something too good about you. You were too anxious to please, too controlled. I knew that wasn’t your character. I knew that there had to be a reason for this façade. And that reason, of course, was guilt.’

Harland propped himself up.

‘What’s eating you, Walter? I don’t want to trespass on your problems, but all this does seem rather panicky and amateurish for you. I mean, for Christ’s sake, we all talked to those termites from the East, so why on earth are you hounding me now? What’s got into you all of a sudden?’

‘Because you’re a traitor – a traitor who’s squared his conscience with a lot of sanctimonious nonsense about working for the international community. That’s why.’ He stopped and looked despairingly at Harland. ‘Do you know about the poetess Sappho? Perhaps I can tell you about her. You see, none of Sappho’s poems has survived. There are just fragments of poems which were used in the teaching of grammar. So we have some sense of Sappho’s genius and we know from contemporary accounts that she existed, but we do not have her work. That’s more or less how I think of your case, Bobby. There’s now only fragmentary evidence of your activities, but from those fragments we can deduce a great deal about your importance as an agent for the StB.’

Harland got up and straightened his jacket.

‘Sit down. I haven’t finished yet.’ The tone was surprisingly harsh. For the first time it occurred to him that Vigo would have no compunction about killing someone. Wet jobs were what the Soviets used to call assassinations. Vigo wasn’t above resorting to a wet job, he thought. But that wasn’t the point now. Vigo wanted something, something that he believed Harland had inherited from, or shared with, Griswald.

And then Vigo confirmed everything Harland was thinking.

‘Unless I see some sign of cooperation, Bobby, you are going to be put away. At the very least your career will be ruined. My own belief is that higher authorities will deem your crimes to be so serious and so persistent that there is no other course but to prosecute you.’

‘I’ve told you, I am not in a position to give you anything.’

‘Of course you are. Why would the Secretary-General ask you to investigate the crash if he wasn’t certain there was something to investigate – i.e. that you possessed some special knowledge? What is that knowledge, Bobby? Why you? What qualifies you? The only possible knowledge that you could have must derive from Griswald. Griswald, the man who accompanied you to Prague in ’89; the man you travelled with to New York; the man who was taking his big secret to the United Nations. It all goes back to Griswald, doesn’t it?’

Harland listened, fascinated by the movements of Vigo’s face in the shadows. ‘You’re losing your touch, Walter. From what you say, I gather the Secretary-General
has
called the Foreign Office. Judging by the hour of your appearance here, I guess he must have talked to the Foreign Secretary. That means you’ve been told to release me pretty damned sharp.’ He paused. ‘So, Walter, if you don’t mind, I’m going to get the hell out of here.’

He moved to the open door. Vigo put up a hand.

‘You’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re dealing with, Bobby – no idea at all.’ He shifted in his chair, then turned his face up to Harland. ‘As to this investigation into your activities, don’t for one minute think that it’s over. Your head’s in the noose and we’re not going to let go of the rope.’

Harland left him sitting in the room and walked towards some light spilling into the corridor from an office. A man he hadn’t seen before handed him his things. ‘Order me a cab,’ Harland demanded, ‘and put it on your account.’

Harriet had waited up all night for him. It was seven o’clock when he was dropped outside her house in St John’s Wood, a large neo-Georgian affair which Harriet called nouveau-Georgian. He saw her through the window, as he crossed a gravel drive which had been silenced by frost. She was asleep over the kitchen table with her head resting on folded arms. He stretched over a well-barbered box hedge and knocked gently on the window with his knuckle. She awoke, dragged herself up from the table, and gave him a despairing smile.

Their closeness was surprising: there were eight years between them and they were different in practically every way. Where Harland was tall, dark and concise in his movements, she was short, fair and animated. Harriet positively leaked energy. While his face, as he had been told often enough by Louise, gave little away, hers flickered with change, sometimes settling into a look of intense, happy concentration. She smiled when she was thinking hardest, which was perhaps why so few saw her coming. She would listen with that smile, her eyes oscillating ever so fractionally as she processed information at a ridiculous speed. And then she would dispatch her opponent with a few lines of deft logic, her expression becoming, if anything, sweeter.

She unbolted the double door and reached up to Harland to kiss his cheek.

‘Bobby,’ she said. ‘You have to stop this. I cannot take the endless anxiety surrounding your travel arrangements. You can’t seem to get off a plane like a normal person. First this terrible crash and now bloody Walter Vigo is marching you off to secret locations. God, I remember him! He married Davina Cummings. What a pompous creep! I don’t suppose he’s improved with age. Still, I gather by your appearance that the call did the trick. They seemed pretty concerned when I explained the situation.’

‘Yes, thanks, Hal. Did the boy turn up?’

‘No, he didn’t. Who the hell is he anyway? What’s this all about?’

‘It’s a long story. Wouldn’t you rather hear it all tomorrow – I mean later?’

‘No, I can’t stand the suspense any longer. I’ve waited up all night and now I want some explanation.’

‘But it’s Christmas Eve, haven’t you got things to do?’

‘Not now, I haven’t. And anyway everything is done: presents bought and wrapped; meals prepared; husband overdosed on champagne and flirtation. Look, Bobby, I want to know what’s been happening to you. I haven’t seen you for five months, for goodness’ sake. And if it hadn’t been for some providence of which you’re entirely deserving, my darling brother, I might never have seen you again. So you have to tell me everything now. Please, I can’t wait.’

They went into the kitchen. Harriet made tea and slapped some ham and cheese between a couple of pieces of bread and put them into a children’s sandwich toaster shaped like frog. Harland told her everything and the familiar tremor entered her eyes as she snatched at the story. When he told her about Tomas she gasped and put her hands to her mouth to suppress a giggle.

‘I know this is all very serious, Bobby. But you’ve got to see it’s funny. I mean, it’s like
Twelfth Night
. Lost love, people being washed up on foreign shores, relations appearing out of the blue. “What country, friend, is this? This is Illyria, lady.” That’s where you are Bobby – Illyria.’

12

A CHRISTMAS PARTY

After calling Harland, Tomas decided not to wait for him at the address. Instead, he checked into a small tourist hotel in Bayswater where the Lebanese on the front desk seemed to be glad enough of the business and didn’t ask him for an ID. A rowdy couple next door might have kept him awake, if he’d wanted to sleep, but he had a lot to do, preparing the two small computers and encoding them with information. As he worked, he wondered furiously how he had been traced to Flick’s home. It was baffling. There was no question of him ever using the telephones at her apartment and he’d never so much as touched her laptop. That side of things was watertight. He’d always made sure that he was absolutely untraceable. Yet something must have led them there – a mistake in the past six months which had been seized upon very recently and resulted in Flick’s death. His body convulsed with a shudder as he saw her again all trussed up and broken. He had thought of calling the police after he’d left, but realised that the manager of the shop was already concerned and that she would be found soon enough. He stopped working and slumped in the chair, thinking back over the past few months. Then it came to him. It must have been the parcel from Mortz.

Mortz was his contact in Stockholm – a friend, though they had never actually spoken or met. Well, perhaps they had once in a bar in Stockholm two years before, but neither of them was sure and he couldn’t put a face to Mortz, neither had he the slightest idea of his identity, his job or his age. Mortz could have been a college professor or a computer freak. Tomas inclined to the former because there was something thoughtful and restrained about his communications – a seriousness of purpose, for want of a better expression. They were very different, he could tell that, and yet they’d become friends, companions in arms, partners in the big project. He often wondered why Mortz showed such zeal for their work, and once he asked him about his motives in a rather cautious e-mail. Mortz did not reply. For a week there was silence and then he came back with new information from one of the half-dozen or so disenchanted intelligence people he’d cultivated over the Net. Things were back to normal.

Tomas composed new short bursts of information. That was his side of things. All the infiltration channels had been dreamed up by him. He started by using the phone-in programmes that are the standard fillers of airtime in radio stations the world over and during the calls played a tape of the condensed, coded message. He finessed his procedure by attacking the broadcasting computer systems with a benign virus – a vehicle which carried the messages. It was surprisingly easy – like a mosquito biting a sedated elephant. The stations, about thirty in all, were never aware of what was going on, but Mortz and he were certain that the messages were reaching their targets, causing acute discomfort and alarm in various intelligence services.

Mortz’s idea was to reveal how the agencies of five or six Western powers, which were notionally on good terms, were using their resources to spy on each other. It was, he said in one of his oblique missives, a very wasteful hypocrisy. That was the nearest he came to articulating any motive.

Tomas had to admit that he had been caught up by his own ingenuity almost as much as he relished the revenge. The information which arrived in the package – the very last means of communication that anyone would suspect – gave him a great deal more to play with. It was like an archive of their operation but there was also much that was new in the package, much that concerned him personally.

It arrived one day back in September. Mortz had told him to expect something addressed to Mr J. Fengel. There was no flat number on the parcel so it had been delivered to the house and just left on the table in the hallway. Tomas reckoned that the only way anyone would know to go to that house was if Mortz had kept a record of the address. And that meant one thing: Mortz had been tumbled and somebody had gone through his things and found it. He reckoned this must have happened within the last ten days because he’d received a couple of messages from Mortz on the Sunday before he left London for New York. Yet since then two e-mails had gone unanswered. The question was, how had they found Mortz? How had they located a man whose whereabouts Tomas didn’t even know?