Skydancer (32 page)

‘Now, what conclusions have you two drawn?'

Black raised his eyebrows questioningly, and Peter nodded that he should begin.

He explained how they believed Anderson had now delivered the real Skydancer documents to Berlin. Buxton looked unsurprised; he had already divined as much for himself. He seemed shaken, though, by the revelation of the bugging operation by Metzger's men. It added a new twist of uncertainty to their planning. John Black then also told him they had identified the scientist behind the Soviet plot.

‘Kvitzinsky's going to be thoroughly confused, that's for sure,' Peter took over. ‘The Russians will have two completely different concepts of how Skydancer works; one from observing the test firing this afternoon, and the other from the blueprints. He may choose to believe the test, or the plans, or neither.'

‘Which is just the sort of confusion we set out to create when this whole business started a week ago,' Buxton chipped in. ‘We seem to have come full-circle. Oh, you'll be glad to hear the test firing went well. I've just had a signal from Northwood confirming it. The RAF did their bit too, appearing to block the Soviet's view, but in fact dropping their “chaff” downwind to ensure the Russians had an unobstructed look.

‘But they had trouble with that bloody traitor, Simpson. Tried to hijack the flaming submarine! The
fellow definitely seems to be some kind of a nutter!'

‘We've just started looking into his background,' Black replied. ‘There seem to be some rather disturbing elements in it. Religious fanaticism, secret societies, that sort of thing. God knows how he ever passed the vetting.'

‘Somebody should be shot for that!' Buxton growled.

‘Well, we've got his girlfriend in custody,' Black continued. ‘But so far we're not sure she was working for the Russians. It's just possible she was more into anti-nuclear campaigning and civil disobedience than espionage. The other woman we arrested, Helene Venner, she's a definite Soviet agent – photographed her last week meeting the KGB resident from the Russian Embassy. We think her real name is Ilena Petrova. But Susan Parkinson probably didn't know that. She may simply have been conned by Venner.

‘And there's one more thing,' he went on. ‘Karl Metzger left the country this afternoon on the Harwich-Hook of Holland ferry. We've been keeping a close eye on him since Friday night, when one of my men spotted him meeting Anderson.'

‘What? You had someone in that pub?' Peter exclaimed.

‘Oh, yes, we were there. We'd been tailing both Anderson and you for days. You were both suspects, you know.'

‘I see.' He shifted uncomfortably. ‘But Metzger's gone, has he?' he snapped suddenly. ‘He's the man who murdered Mary Maclean, and you let him leave the country?'

‘What else could he do, Peter,' the field-marshal interrupted. ‘Deceiving the Soviets depended on Metzger thinking he still had the upper hand.'

Peter laughed bitterly.

‘The trouble is, it turns out Karl knew all along that he was being tricked. God what a mess!' He turned to the MI5 man. ‘Can you still get Metzger now he's left the country?'

John Black shrugged.

‘Maybe. We've got our Dutch friends keeping a lookout for him, but we can't make any sort of move until we know what's happened in Berlin.'

The three men sat back in thoughtful silence and drank their whisky. It was clear to all of them that it all depended on Anderson now, and the mental machinations of Oleg Kvitzinsky.

‘Right, that's it, gentlemen,' Buxton suddenly declared, rising to his feet. ‘I don't think we can get any further this evening, and the Prime Minister is insisting on a report tonight. So I suggest we meet again in the morning. Peter, we'll need you here again, rather than at Aldermaston.'

Alec Anderson had been left on his own for over two hours. The walls of the small room were drab, and a single neon tube shed a harsh, dull pink light. Occasionally footsteps could be heard outside, approaching, stopping and moving away again.

Anderson was petrified, sweating profusely; his stomach churned remorselessly. The room was quite bare; just a scratched, unpolished wooden table and two chairs. There were no decorations on the wall except an old calendar from the previous year, which heightened his growing sense of having been forgotten and abandoned.

His mind kept returning to the departure lounge at Heathrow. He had had to leave it until the last minute to get rid of the dummy blueprints that Peter Joyce had
given him. All the way out to the airport, he had been conscious of a man in a blue overcoat watching his every move. It was only when he had passed through into the departure zone of the terminal that the man had stopped tailing him, and he had felt free to get rid of the plans.

The warning on Sunday night had been specific; Karl Metzger had said that his ‘source' in MI5 had tipped him off about the false documents. If there was the slightest hint that the Skydancer papers were not genuine, one of his children would be ‘executed'. There had only been one choice: to deliver the real plans, while convincing his colleagues in Whitehall that he had handed over the false ones.

At the airport he had watched a cleaning woman shuffling around all the litter bins, emptying them into a large plastic sack. There had been no scrutiny, no interest in what the bins contained. It had seemed a sure and simple way of disposing of the blueprints without anyone knowing.

It was early evening when Anderson had landed at West Berlin's Tegel airport, and his taxi had had to struggle through rush-hour traffic to the Friedrichstrasse crossing-point, better known as Checkpoint Charlie.

He had been to Berlin once before, accompanying an army minister on a tour of the wall. He had hated the place for its atmosphere of threat and conflict, made permanent by the concrete monstrosity that divided the city.

That evening he had passed almost unnoticed through the American control point; tourists crossing into the East were two-a-penny these days. He had felt sick with fear on the walk to the Volkspolizei guardhouse, with its dim lights and suspicious-eyed sentries.

Inside the immigration hall, he had looked around
for a sign of someone waiting to take him through, but there had been no one visible. He had carefully filled in his visa form and currency declaration, and changed his regulation twenty-five West German marks into twenty-five Eastern ones, an exchange designed specifically to benefit the economy of the communist half of Germany.

His passport had been taken from him by a border guard who displayed an overt loathing of Westerners. Anderson suspected it was his primary qualification for the job. The document had been slipped through a flap in the wall, and examined by unseen officials. A few moments later a small hatch had opened up and two pairs of eyes studied him carefully. Then the passport had been returned to him and he was through.

East Berlin. As he had looked back at the concrete wall, trying to imagine the desperation of those who had died trying to escape it, a man in a smart raincoat had tapped him on the arm. A car had been waiting to take him to the headquarters of the HVA, the East German Intelligence Service.

The Skydancer blueprints had been taken from him as soon as they arrived at the slab-sided grey building, and since then he had been alone in this bare room with nothing to look at but last year's calendar.

Why on earth had they bothered to put it there? It seemed a pointless decoration. Unless there was something behind it . . .

His heart began to pound and a shiver ran through him. He realised with horror that for the past two hours every bead of sweat, every flicker of his eyelids had been minutely studied from another room.

In Moscow, General Novikov had just returned to his GRU headquarters from a gruelling meeting with his KGB counterpart at the half-moon-shaped offices on the Moscow ring-road. Novikov's operation to get the Skydancer plans was beginning to cost the KGB dearly.

Already one of their key ‘illegals' had been arrested, the woman responsible for co-ordinating the manipulation of the anti-nuclear militants in Britain. It had taken years to put Ilena Petrova into place, years of work that was now wasted.

Above all, there was now a threat to one of their longest-serving agents of all time, a man recruited at Oxford University in the 1940s. He had been the subtlest of the academic recruits, gently influencing young men to look kindly on the Soviet Union in their lives ahead.

But now, with the arrest of that young submariner, the British investigators would begin to probe, to delve into the past. It would only be a matter of time before they found the trail leading back to that small, select boarding-school attended by so many boys whose lives had later led them to positions of authority.

General Novikov had promised the KGB that his operation was nearing its end. Just a few more hours and it would all be over – successfully. The sacrifices would have been worth it; Kvitzinsky would have the blueprints he wanted, and Moscow's leaders could again feel that their future safety was as assured as was humanly possible.

Belinda Joyce had just finished watching the Nine O'Clock News when her husband arrived home. She was sitting on her own in the kitchen, looking at a small
portable television. The children were watching another programme in the living-room.

After hanging his coat in the hall, Peter walked through to the kitchen and pulled a chair over beside her.

‘I was watching the news,' she began nervously. ‘They said two women were arrested at Newbury yesterday, and that a senior scientist at Aldermaston had been suspended!'

‘They're a bit behind the times,' he replied. ‘I was reinstated this morning and the suspension's been struck from the record. They didn't name me, did they? If they did, I'll sue them!'

Belinda saw that the lines around his mouth had deepened and his eyes had lost their brightness. He looked so defeated; she'd never seen him quite like that before. Standing up, she took down a glass from the dresser behind her.

‘Would you like a drink?' she asked, indicating the wine bottle on the table.

‘Love one.'

He sipped thoughtfully at the cheap burgundy before answering her unspoken question.

‘Yes, one of those women they arrested was Helene, if that's what you're wondering,' he told her gently. ‘Apparently her real name is Ilena Petrova. She's a Russian spy.'

The look on Belinda's face was one of pain rather than surprise, which made Peter think she had expected the news.

‘Can they
really
be so sure?' she asked in the vain hope there might be some doubt.

‘They're quite sure. They've photographed her with a KGB man.'

Belinda burst into tears.

‘You don't know how hard she tried to persuade me to spy on your work – even steal some of your papers!' she sobbed. ‘It all seemed . . . innocent at the time, like a – a game. But it wasn't. God, you must think me so stupid!'

Peter put his arms round her.

‘We've both been pretty bloody foolish.'

For a few moments they were silent. They both sensed that the wounds caused by his love affair with Mary Maclean were healing. A permanent scar might remain, but it was one they would be able to live with.

Suddenly Belinda asked, ‘Who was the other woman? The other one they arrested?'

‘Someone called Susan Parkinson,' Peter replied. ‘Know her? She's supposed to be a member of ATSA.'

‘No. She must be from another branch. Are they saying she was a spy, too?'

‘They think she may just have been a protester who went too far . . .'

‘What'll happen next?' she asked anxiously. ‘Perhaps they'll arrest me, too.'

‘You shouldn't have anything to fear,' he smiled, and poured them some more wine.

‘How much longer will this nightmare last?' she asked.

Her face creased with anxiety. Suddenly Peter felt a great fondness for her. He thought of Anderson and his frantic, disastrous efforts to preserve the happiness and integrity of his family. Love, affection, security, call it what you will – it was what they were all motivated by in one way or another.

‘I don't know,' he replied eventually. ‘But I think it's all about to come to a head.'

At eleven the following morning a dark-green saloon car drew up in the courtyard of the British Military Mission in Berlin. A small red and gold plaque on its bumper designated it as belonging to the Soviet Army. Officers from the forces of the four nations that had controlled the city since the death of Adolf Hider had the right of access to each other's areas. Every day Soviet officers would drive into the West, and every day British, French and American officers would visit the East. However, for a Soviet officer to pay a call at the British headquarters was far from usual.

The Russian army captain walked into the building carrying a small brown envelope. The British major on duty looked surprised as the Soviet soldier slapped it down on his desk, stood back and saluted.

‘Captain Borodin of the Military Mission of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,' he introduced himself His voice was thin and nasal.

‘Major Howlett,' the British officer replied coolly.

‘You see, there is, mmmm . . . a British person in our section, who has been behaving unacceptably,' the Russian continued in a thick accent.

He tapped the envelope with his index finger.

‘His papers,' he explained. ‘You see . . . his passport has one name, but his driving licence has another.'

‘I see,' the major answered non-committally, slitting open the envelope and tipping the contents on to the desk. He picked up the driving licence first, which was in the name of Alec Anderson.

‘I
see
,' he said again. The name on the passport was Allenby.

‘Tell me, Captain Borodin, do you have this man under arrest?'