Authors: Jeremy Duns
‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ he said. He hesitated for a moment, other words on his lips, then hung up.
He stood in the darkness of the hallway for a few seconds, then lifted the receiver again and dialled a long-distance number. Campbell-Fraser picked up on the second ring.
‘Roy, it’s Sandy in London. I’ve just had a rather alarming call from one of my subordinates about a development in Finland. Please tell me this has nothing to do with your
little operation.’
Campbell-Fraser noted Harmigan’s phrasing – the last time he had spoken to him it had been ‘our’ operation, and there had been nothing ‘little’ about it. The
substantial costs involved in mounting the job had forced him into calling on Harmigan for help, but he had judged the opportunity too good to miss. Failure would have serious repercussions, both
from the international community and closer to home – Smith would sack him, perhaps even gaol him. But he had it in his power to secure Rhodesia’s future.
‘I was about to call you,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got off the phone with my team leader, Weale. The boyfriend got involved somehow, but it’s under control now. We have
the girl and her son—’
‘It’s the boyfriend I’m worried about right now. Didn’t you think to look into his fucking background?’
Campbell-Fraser was taken aback by the ferocity in the other man’s voice. ‘We did. He’s just some middleaged Swedish hippy. Works nights for a charity. What’s going
on?’
Harmigan sighed deeply. ‘That is
not
who he is, Roy. He’s a highly trained Soviet agent by the name of Paul Dark.’ He ran a hand through his mane of hair, thinking.
Part of him wanted to give Campbell-Fraser an almighty bollocking, but other than relieving him of his anger he knew there would be little point. Time was of the essence. ‘When you say the
situation’s under control, what do you mean, exactly? How are you proposing to exfiltrate your men? Interpol’s slapped an alert on Dark and the Swedes will be looking out for your lot
by now, too.’
‘They’re heading back on a flight in a few hours. As far as we know, none of the passports has been compromised. Weale has already called Charamba and informed him of the situation,
and I’ll take over as soon as they arrive.’
‘Good,’ said Harmigan, relieved. ‘But tell Weale to stay in Stockholm. I need him to find Dark.’
There was a moment’s pause on the other end of the line. ‘And how do you propose he does that, exactly?’
Harmigan considered the question, looking at his own reflection in the darkness of the hallway mirror. ‘The Swedes have a counter-intelligence unit,’ he said. ‘This will be
their job. I’ll let them know one of my men is in town and will come to be briefed on their operation as there’s a British national involved. What name is Weale using?’
‘Frederick Collins. But, Sandy, I don’t think this is a good idea. Why not have one of your people there handle it?’
Harmigan laughed bitterly, thinking of Maidment, the 58-year-old Etonian who ran Stockholm Station. ‘None of them has your little crew’s particular brand of . . .
expertise
,
let’s say. Anyway, I don’t want to drag my people into this. The entire point was for Service personnel to remain uninvolved precisely in case the wheels came off. Now thanks to your
team’s sloppiness a wheel
has
come off, so I think it’s perfectly reasonable you’re the ones to put it back on again.’
‘I appreciate that, but John isn’t trained to—’
‘Oh, please. He spends his life impersonating wogs in the bush – he can certainly pretend to be one of my men for a few hours. He’s British-born, if I remember. We need this
mess sorted out immediately, and he’s there. What’s your comms setup?’
Five minutes later, Harmigan replaced the receiver and walked back upstairs. Celia’s bedside light was on and she was sitting up reading a paperback, her eye-mask pushed up over her
forehead.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘You look like death warmed up.’
‘Paul Dark’s alive.’
She closed the book and placed it on her bedside table.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m going into the office to find out more – but it fits. He’s in Finland. Well, probably Sweden by now.’
‘Who’s discovered it?’
‘The night officer . . . Rachel Gold.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘The Jewess? Well, she did claim he was alive before, didn’t she?’
He sighed, knowing what was coming. ‘Yes.’
‘But then there was that business with Gadlow in Malaysia. And she’s not in the circle. Do you think you can afford to have her deal with this?’
‘Dark’s a completely different kettle of shit from Tom bloody Gadlow. Dark knew pretty much everything we have, and Gold knows more about him than anyone in the world.’
‘More than you, even?’
‘Much more. So yes, I’m going to use her on this.’
Celia Harmigan placed a hand to her mouth and yawned widely. ‘Well, it’s your agency, Sandy.’ She plumped up the pillows behind her, then squinted at him. ‘You’ve
got your shifty look on. Is there something else?’
‘Yes. Dark’s got in the way of the Charamba job.’ He explained the situation, and she listened, her face cold and thin-lipped.
‘I see. Well, you’d better make sure you get hold of him before he can cause any more mischief. I don’t want the plan ruined because of your incompetence.’
She leaned over and switched off the light, then pulled down the eye-mask and disappeared back beneath the sheets on her side of the bed.
Weale circled the telephone booth and consulted his watch again. The Commander was three minutes late with the call. It was an eternity in a situation like this, and he was
beginning to worry that something had happened. Was the operation in danger of being exposed, or had Campbell-Fraser decided to cut off all contact because it already had been? That was the
nightmare scenario, as they had to get out of the country within the next few hours – if they didn’t they’d be on the run from the Swedish authorities with no way out, and with
two hostages to keep them company . . .
The telephone rang and he grabbed at the receiver.
‘Leopard One here.’
‘Hello, Captain Weale. We met last year in London.’
It took Weale a moment to recover, but then he recognised the voice: it was the overly suave Chief from British intelligence, Harmigan. The Commander had dragged him along on a
‘fact-finding mission’ to meet him and a few others in the Service last year, but the only facts he had found were that England was still as cold and dreary as it had been when he had
left it as a child and that British intelligence was run by pompous asses.
‘Yes,’ Harmigan said, as though reading his thoughts, ‘you didn’t much like me. Well, the feeling’s mutual. I suspect you thought me a dull old stick with no idea
of the harsh realities you deal with when operating behind enemy lines.’ Weale didn’t say anything – that was precisely what he had thought. ‘You’re mistaken. I was in
your boots, or ones rather like them, not so many years ago, and I have a very good idea of what your work entails. And you have utterly fucked this operation up by not carrying out more thorough
checks on the boyfriend.’
Weale had heard enough. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ he growled, ‘but I don’t have to listen to this crap. I take my orders
from—’
‘Major Campbell-Fraser, I know.’ Harmigan laughed unpleasantly. ‘But I’m afraid you do have to listen to me, Captain. Thanks to your carelessness, we’ve had to
change plans. Campbell-Fraser gave me your number because, you see, he takes his orders from me.’ Weale drew his breath sharply, and Harmigan went on. ‘Yes, I’ve been running this
operation and now you’re going to take your orders from me directly so we don’t have any more cock-ups and jeopardise the whole thing.’
‘I don’t believe you. The Commander hates the Brits.’ As do I, he felt like adding.
‘He doesn’t usually stand for “God Save the Queen”, it’s true, but Roy and I go back a long way. And we happen to have complementary aims here, which is of course
the continuation of white rule in Rhodesia. Strange bedfellows and all that. He came to me with this operation and I provided a great deal of the money and logistics for it. You can call him to
check if you like, but we don’t have much time thanks to your errors, and if you think about it for a minute you’ll see that the only other way I’d know to call this number at
this time, or the fact you’re travelling under the name Frederick Collins, or that you’re holding Hope Charamba and her son in a flat just off the central square in Vällingby,
would be if your operation was entirely blown, in which case I doubt we’d be chatting on the telephone, don’t you?’
Weale had fallen silent.
‘Good. I’m so pleased we understand each other. Now, let me hear you speak in a British accent. You’re going to have to fool a few Swedes, and they’re not as stupid as
they look.’
Harmigan sat in his office smoking for a few minutes, then pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He walked across the carpeted corridor and took the lift down to
Rachel’s office. Papers were spread across her desk and she was reading them with an expression of intense concentration.
‘So you found the files.’
She looked up. ‘Yes, Archives dug them out for me.’
‘Good.’ He walked over to her desk and perched himself on the corner. ‘You’ll soon remember most of it, I expect. I need you to present to the JIC in . . .’ he
looked at his watch ‘. . . an hour from now. Think you can manage it?’
She nodded slowly, controlling her breathing with an effort. He had offered her no congratulations on her discovery and no apology for having ignored her suspicions nearly six years earlier. She
knew that wasn’t his way of doing things, and that her vanity wasn’t the real issue at stake, but she resented it nonetheless. He always managed to avoid giving her any professional
credit, perhaps because he felt it would alert others to their relationship or perhaps because he never thought to.
Still, he was giving her a chance. If she impressed now – and if they managed to bring Dark in – she was sure he’d find a way to promote her that nobody would question. If only
she had picked someone else to fall in love with, she thought. But then perhaps that was the whole point: the self-sabotage had itself been part of her attraction to him. In the weeks after she had
returned from Kuala Lumpur, a physical tension had built up between them. She had lain awake at night applying obscure cipher pattern theories to his most offhand remarks to try to work out if he
felt as she did or if she was simply imagining it. She had finally received her answer in a taxi-cab after a boozy Service dinner at the Garrick, when he’d wordlessly slid his hand across the
leather seat and intertwined his fingers with hers. The chaste gesture had been the starting gun for their affair.
Nearly six years later she was still deeply in love with him, even though she knew it couldn’t end well. She spent her days perpetually on stand-by, waiting for him to whisk her off to his
room at his club for a hurried half-hour of sex and whispered promises he wouldn’t keep. She’d drifted – no, she had leaped headlong – into the classic scenario: the affair
with the boss who would never leave his wife.
It was especially unlikely in his case as Celia was fabulously wealthy, having inherited a mining consortium from her first husband, David Meredith, a Service officer who had been killed in a
car crash in the late sixties and who had been one of Sandy’s best friends. As well as the very comfortable lifestyle this situation afforded Sandy – and he enjoyed the finer things in
life – his position as Chief would be in jeopardy if Celia and he were to divorce, especially if there were any indication of impropriety with a member of the Service. Her career would also
be in tatters if the affair ever came out.
At least, this was the reasoning Sandy used on her, and which she had come to accept. She’d lived with the secret of their affair for so long that it had become cover for her, an
instinctive lie she didn’t need to think about any more, like telling people she was an archivist in the Foreign Office – although that one felt increasingly close to the truth. On a
weekend visit the previous summer, her mother had found her crying in her bedroom, but hadn’t pressed her for the reasons behind it. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell her.
Mum was the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, but the English habit of avoiding all emotional matters had slowly seeped into her until it had settled. The only living soul she had confided in, and
even then without mentioning his name, was her brother, Danny. But despite his own chaotic love-life he’d been appalled she was seeing a married man and had pleaded with her to call it off.
She now pretended it was over just to avoid hearing his lectures, especially since she had once referred to Sandy in passing in another context and he’d rolled his eyes theatrically:
‘Oh, the old war hero.’ He was nearly twice her age, in fact – and yet still she hung on. Her life was taken up on the surface with work, and beneath it the questionable drama of
minuscule oscillations in her relationship with Sandy.
She closed the folder she had been reading, distracted by his presence next to her.
‘Will Bradley be there,’ she asked, ‘and if so do I need to keep anything back?’ Since the war, the head of CIA’s London Station sat in on all Joint Intelligence
Committee meetings, and Harry Bradley was the current incumbent.
‘Yes, he’ll be there, and he should know everything. In fact, let’s stress that Dark has damaged Washington as much as he has us. We need all hands on deck to catch him, so
let’s put the frighteners on.’ He gave a mirthless smile. ‘Shouldn’t be too hard.’
Hope Charamba sat in the passenger seat of the car, her jaw clenched. She was wearing a nun’s wimple and clutching a passport in the name of Sister Emily Sempewa. Next to
her, Peter Voers stared at the road ahead as he drove. Hope thought the dog collar in his shirt clashed obscenely with his brutish soldier’s face, but she knew her emotions coloured her view
of him – the customs officials would simply see two members of a Jesuit Catholic church in the outskirts of Salisbury.