Authors: Helen MacInnes
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Espionage, #Suspense
Agent in Place
ALSO BY HELEN MacINNES
AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
Pray for a Brave Heart
Above Suspicion
Assignment in Brittany
North From Rome
Decision at Delphi
The Venetian Affair
The Salzburg Connection
Message From Málaga
While We Still Live
The Double Image
Neither Five Nor Three
Horizon
Snare of the Hunter
Agent in Place
Print edition ISBN: 9781781163351
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781164303
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: December 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
© 1976, 2012 by the Estate of Helen MacInnes. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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To Ian Douglas Highet and Eliot Chace Highet,
with all my love
Helen MacInnes
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
1
The message had come at eight o’clock that morning as he was swallowing a first cup of black coffee to clear his head and open his eyes. But before he could cross over the short stretch of floor between him and the telephone, the ringing stopped. He started back to the kitchen, had barely reached its door before he halted abruptly. The telephone rang again. Twice. And stopped ringing. He glanced at the kitchen clock. He would have one minute exactly before the third call. Now fully alert, he pulled the pan of bacon and eggs away from the heat, did not even waste another moment to turn off the electric stove, moved at double time back into the living-room, reached the telephone on his desk, sat down with a pencil in his hand and a scrap of paper before him, and was ready. The message would be in code and he had better make sure of each digit. It had been a long long time since he had been summoned in this way. An emergency? He controlled his excitement, smothered all his wondering. Punctual to the second, the telephone rang again. Quickly he picked up the receiver. “Hello,” he said—slow, casual, indifferent.
“Hello, hello, hello there.” Two small coughs, a clearing of the throat.
He knew the voice at once. Nine years since he had last heard it, but its pattern was definite: deep, full-chested, slightly husky, the kind of voice that might break into an aria from
Prince Igor
or
Boris Godounov
with each of its notes almost a chord in itself. Mischa? Yes, Mischa. Even the initial greeting was his own sign-in phrase. Nine years since last heard, but still completely Mischa, down to the two coughs and the throat-clearing.
“Yorktown Cleaners?” Mischa was saying. “Please have my blue suit ready for delivery to 10 Old Park Place by six o’clock this evening. Receipt number is 69105A. And my name—” Slowing up of this last phrase gave the cue for a cut-in.
“Sorry—you’ve got the wrong number.”
“Wrong number?” High indignation. “The receipt is here in my hand. 69105A.”
“Wrong telephone number.” Heavy patience.
“What?” The tone was now aggressive, almost accusing. Very true to life was Mischa. “Are you sure?”
“Yes!” The one-word answer was enough to let Mischa know that his prize protégé Alexis had got the message.
“Let me check—” There was a brief pause while a dogged disbeliever riffled through a couple of pages against the background noise of muted street traffic. Then Mischa spoke again from his public telephone booth, this time with sharp annoyance, “Okay, okay.” Angrily, he banged down the receiver for an added touch of humour. He had always prided himself on his keen perception of Americans’ behaviour patterns.
For a moment, there was complete silence in the little apartment. Mischa, Mischa... Eleven years since he first started training me, Alexis was thinking, and nine years since I last saw him. He was a major then—Major Vladimir Konov. What now? A full-fledged colonel in the KGB? Even higher? With another name too, no doubt: several other names, possibly, in that long and hidden career. And here I am, still using the cover-name Mischa gave me, still stuck in the role he assigned me in Washington. But, as Mischa used to misquote with a sardonic smile, “They also serve who only sit and wait.”
Alexis recovered from his delayed shock as he noticed the sunlight shafting its way into his room from a break in the row of small Georgetown houses across the narrow street. The morning had begun; a heavy day lay ahead. He moved quickly now, preparing himself for it.
From the bookcase wall he picked out the second volume of Spengler’s
Untergang des Abendlandes
—the German text scared off Alexis’s American friends: they preferred it translated into
The Decline of the West
, even if the change into English lost the full meaning of the title. It ought to have been
The Decline and Fall of the West
, which might have made them think harder into the meaning of the book. With Spengler in one hand and his precious slip of paper in the other, Alexis left the sun-streaked living-room for the colder light of his dismal little kitchen. He was still wearing pyjamas and foulard dressing-gown, but even if cold clear November skies were outside the high window, he felt hot with mounting excitement. He pushed aside orange-juice and coffee-cup, tossed the
Washington Post
on to a counter-top, turned off the electric stove, and sat down at the small table crushed into one corner where no prying neighbours’ eyes could see him, even if their kitchens practically rubbed sinks with his.
Now, he thought, opening the Spengler and searching for a loose sheet of paper inserted in its second chapter (
Origin and Landscape: Group of Higher Cultures
), now for Mischa’s message. He had understood most of it, even at nine years’ distance, but he had to be absolutely accurate. He found the loose sheet, covered with his own compressed shorthand, giving him the key to the quick scrawls he had made on the scrap of paper from his desk. He began decoding. It was all very simple—Mischa’s way of thumbing his nose at the elaborate cleverness of the Americans, with their reliance on computers and technology. (Nothing, Mischa used to say and obviously still did, nothing is going to replace the well-trained agent, well-placed, well-directed. That the man had to be bright and dedicated was something that Mischa made quite sure of, before any time was wasted in training.)
Simple, Alexis thought again as he looked at the message, but effective in all its sweet innocence. “Yorktown” was New York, of course. The “blue suit” was Alexis in person. “10” meant nothing—a number that was used for padding. “Old Park Place” obviously meant the old meeting-place in the Park in New York—Central Park, as the receipt number “69105A” indicated: cancel the 10, leaving 69 for Sixty-ninth Street, 5A for Fifth Avenue.
The delivery time of the blue suit, “six o’clock” this evening, meant six hours minus one hour and twenty minutes.
So there I’ll be, thought Alexis, strolling by the old rendezvous just inside Central Park at twenty minutes of five this evening.
He burned the scrap of notes, replaced the sheet of paper in its nesting place, and put Spengler carefully back on the shelf. Only after that did he reheat the coffee, gulp down the orange-juice, look at the still-life of congealed bacon and eggs with a shudder, and empty the greasy half-cooked mess into the garbage-can. He would tidy up on Monday—the worst thing on this job was the chores you had to do yourself: dangerous to hand out duplicate keys to anyone coming in to scrub and dust. When things got beyond him in this small apartment, he’d call for untalkative Beulah, flat feet and arthritis, too stupid to question why he asked here to clean on a day he worked at home. Now he had better shave, shower and dress. And then do some telephoning of his own: to Sandra here in Washington, begging off her swinging party tonight; to Katie in New York, letting her know that he’d be spending the week-end again at her place. And he had better take the first Metroliner possible. Or the shuttle flight? In any case, he must make sure that he would reach New York with plenty of time to spare before the meeting with Mischa.
As he came out of the shower, he was smiling broadly at a sudden memory. Imagine, he thought, just imagine Mischa remembering that old fixation of mine on a blue suit, my idea of bourgeois respectability for my grand entry into the capitalist world. I was given it, too: an ill-fitting jacket of hard serge, turning purple with age, threads whitening at the seams, the seat of the pants glossed like a mirror, a rent here, some mud there; a very convincing picture of the refugee who had managed at last to outwit the Berlin Wall. (Mischa’s sense of humour, a scarce commodity in his line of business, was as strong as his cold assessment of Western minds: the pathetic image always works, he had said.) And now I have $22,000 a year and a job in Washington, and a three-room apartment one flight up in a Georgetown house, and a closet packed with clothes. Eight suits hanging there, but not a blue one among them. He laughed, shook his head, and began planning his day in New York.”
* * *
He arrived at Penn Station with almost three hours to spare, a time to lose himself in city crowds once he had dropped his small bag at Katie’s East Side apartment. That was easily done; Katie’s place had a self-service apartment and no doorman, and he had the keys to let him into both the entrance-hall and her fifth-floor apartment. It was a fairly old building as New York went, and modest in size—ten floors, with only space enough for two apartments on each of them. The tenants paid no attention to anyone, strangers all, intent on their own troubles and pleasures. They never even noticed him on his frequent week-end visits, probably assumed he was a tenant himself. But best of all was the location of the apartment-house between two busy avenues, one travelling north, the other south, buses and plenty of taxis.
Katie herself was a gem. Made to order, and no pun intended. She was out now, as he had expected: a restless type, devoted to causes and demonstrations. She had left a note for him in her pretty-girl scrawl.
Chuck tried to reach you in Washington
.
Call him any time after five
.
Don’t forget party at Bo’s tonight
.
You are re-invited
.
See you here at seven? Kate
. Bo Browning’s party...well, that was something better avoided. Danger for him there, in all that glib talk from eager Marxists who hadn’t even read
Das Kapital
all the way through. It was hard to keep himself from proving how little they knew, or how much he could teach them.